The Life of Saint Martin · Dedicatory Letter
The Author’s Letter to his friend Desiderius on the Life of Saint Martin
Severus sends warm greetings to his dear brother Desiderius.
My brother and great friend: I had decided to keep in a drawer, shut away within the four walls of my own house, this little book I wrote on the life of Saint Martin. Being insecure by nature, I wanted to spare myself people’s criticism. I was afraid — and I still think this is what will happen — that my unpolished writing would displease readers and that everyone would reproach me for having had the nerve to take on a subject that deserved writers of quite another talent. But you pressed me so hard that I could not bring myself to say no. After all, what would I not do for our friendship, even at the risk of my reputation?
So I have handed this little book over to you, trusting in your promise that you will not show it to anyone else. Even so, I confess my fear that you will be the one to open the door to the world for it — and once it is out, there is no way of calling it back.
If that happens and you see that some people are beginning to read it, please ask them to give more weight to the events than to the style, and to be patient if some less elegant sentence jars on their ear; after all, the Kingdom of God rests not on the art of fine speaking but on faith. Let them remember, too, that the salvation of the world was announced not by great orators but by fishermen — although God, had He thought it served any purpose, could perfectly well have done it through orators as well.
The truth is that when I decided to set to work, feeling it would be unforgivable to let the qualities of so extraordinary a man fall into oblivion, I promised myself not to be ashamed if some grammatical mistake slipped through. I was never a great expert in the art of letters and, even the little I once studied, I have forgotten for lack of practice after so many years.
Still, to spare me the nuisance of having to justify myself, if you do want to publish the book, erase my name. You need only scrape the signature off the first leaf so that the page falls silent — or rather, and this is all that matters: let the book speak only of the story it tells and keep quiet about the name of the man who wrote it.
Let us not be taken in by Sulpicius Severus’s literary modesty! When he apologises for his “unpolished writing” and for possible “grammatical mistakes” (soloecismi), he is using a classic technique of Roman oratory called captatio benevolentiae — the art of winning the reader’s sympathy by feigning humility. In reality, Sulpicius was one of the most cultured jurists and authors of Roman Gaul, so much so that the humanists of the Renaissance called him the “Christian Sallust” for the quality of his Latin.
There was, however, a very real debate behind these words: at the end of the fourth century, the Roman elite trained in the classical schools looked down on the texts of the Bible because they were written in a plain, direct Latin, a long way from the sophisticated prose of Cicero. By recalling that the Gospel was announced “not by great orators but by fishermen”, Sulpicius argues that historical and spiritual truth counts for far more than literary brilliance.
Notice, too, the practical detail at the close of the letter: “you need only scrape the signature off the first leaf” (titulum fronti erade). In Late Antiquity there was as yet no printing press; publishing a book meant sending a parchment manuscript to a well-connected friend — here Desiderius, another Christian aristocrat from Aquitaine — so that the copyists of his household could make new copies. Since parchment (treated animal skin) was expensive and very tough, erasing the author’s name was done literally by scraping off the dry ink with a blade or a pumice stone. Of course, Desiderius scraped off no name at all: he spread the book far and wide, and the work became the first great bestseller of Western Christian literature!