St Odo's St Martin: the uses of a model

Abstract

The ideal of sanctity presented in Sulpicius Severus' Vita Martini included a repudiation of military life. Sulpicius was concerned to show that Martin was a true ‘man of power’ (potens), but this had nothing to do with the army. On the contrary, in Sulpicius' day, the potens was, in the political sphere, a decidedly civilian patron; in the religious sphere he was a miracle-worker. Six hundred years later the attributes of power were no longer the same. Social and political changes had worked to transform the ‘man of power’ into a warrior. The old ideal remained, however; its reactionary effects were evident in several Cluniac texts, where exemplary men were shown leaving the tumult of the battlefield for the discipline of the monastery. Yet within that same tenth-century Clumiac milieu an entirely different pattern of sointhood, that of the holy warrior, was created by St Odo, the second abbot of Cluny. It was a model quite unprecedented in the West, but it was not created new out of whole cloth. Rather, this new persona was patterned on the same old form. Its explanation seems to lay precisely in Odo's literal adherence to the old paradigm, but understood in the light of the changes which had taken place in the role of the potens.

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