Martin the Confessor of Rome
Our Father among the Saints Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome
Confessor · Bishop · d. 655
Commemorated 13 April — Repose in exile at Cherson after his confession against the Monothelites
Martin (†655) was Pope of Rome and the great Western confessor of the seventh century's struggle against the Monothelite heresy — the teaching that Christ has but one will. He gathered the Lateran Council of 649, which condemned Monothelitism and its imperial formularies; for defying the emperor Constans II he was seized in Rome, carried a prisoner to Constantinople, publicly humiliated and condemned, and exiled to Cherson in the Crimea, where, worn out by ill-usage and want, he died in 655. He is honoured as a confessor — the last of the popes venerated as a martyr — and, with St Maximus the Confessor, is the pillar of Orthodoxy in that controversy.
Deacon and pope
Martin was born near Todi in Umbria, and served in the Roman Church as a deacon of learning and ability; he was sent as apocrisiarius (papal legate) to Constantinople, and so knew at first hand the court and the theological quarrels of the East. On the death of Pope Theodore he was chosen Bishop of Rome in 649, and was consecrated without waiting for the imperial confirmation then customary — a mark, from the first, of his independence of the heretical court.
The Lateran Council of 649
The emperors had promoted Monothelitism — the doctrine that in the incarnate Christ there is only one, divine will — as a compromise to win back the Monophysites; and to enforce silence on the question the emperor Constans II had published the Typos. Martin would not be silent. Within months of his consecration he convened at the Lateran a great council of some hundred and five bishops, which set out the Orthodox faith of two natural wills and two natural operations in the one Christ, and anathematised the Monothelite teachers — Sergius, Pyrrhus and Paul of Constantinople, and Cyrus of Alexandria — together with the imperial Ecthesis and Typos that had shielded them. St Maximus the Confessor, then in Rome, was the theological mind of the council; Martin was its authority and its courage.
Arrest, trial and exile
The emperor answered with force. His exarch failed in a first attempt to seize the pope; then the exarch Theodore Calliopas entered Rome, and in 653 took Martin — who was ill — from the Lateran basilica, and carried him by sea, through a long and cruel voyage with a stop at Naxos, to Constantinople. There he was left lying in prison and paraded before the crowd; tried not for heresy, which none could charge him with, but on a trumped-up accusation of treason — of conspiring with the Saracens against the empire — he was condemned, stripped of his episcopal dress, dragged in chains through the city, and sentenced to death. The dying Patriarch Paul is said to have begged the emperor to spare him, and the sentence was commuted to exile.
Martin was banished to Cherson (Chersonesus) on the shore of the Crimea, a place of famine and want, far from every friend. His last letters, which survive, are among the most moving documents of the confessors: he laments not his sufferings but the ingratitude of the Roman church that had let him go, and commends himself to God. Broken by hardship, hunger and disease, he reposed on the 16th of September 655 — though the Church keeps his principal memory on April 13. He is reckoned the last Bishop of Rome honoured by the Church as a martyr-confessor, and both East and West venerate him.
Feast and commemoration
April 13 (church date; Old Calendar civil April 26). Martin is venerated throughout the Orthodox world as a confessor of the faith against Monothelitism, and is named with Maximus the Confessor as a defender of the two wills of Christ.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
O God of our fathers, ever dealing with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy holy confessor Martin, Bishop of Rome, direct our lives in peace.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 8
The Church honours thee ever as a bright and shining beacon, O all-blessed Martin; for thou didst suffer for the faith, and, contending for the two wills of Christ our God, thou wast crowned an exile far from thy see. Intercede that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Martin is painted as a pope-bishop of the West, in the phelonion and omophorion (the Byzantine icon does not distinguish the papal from the episcopal habit), an aged, greying hierarch blessing and holding the Gospel or a scroll; the scene of his exile, or his stand before the emperor, may accompany him. No pre-1900 public-domain icon of him alone has been secured for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Confessor or martyr? Martin died in exile of privation and illness, not by execution; strictly he is a confessor. Yet because his death was the direct fruit of his confession and his ill-usage, both the Greek and Latin traditions often style him hieromartyr / martyr. This repository classes him confessor (and bishop), noting the wider usage.
- Date of repose vs feast. His death fell in September; the Byzantine calendar fixes his commemoration on April 13, the Latin on various days. The April date is followed here.