The Life of Saint Martin · Chapter XVII
The former proconsul Tetradius and Martin’s fingers in the mouth of a possessed man
At about the same time, a slave of Tetradius, a former proconsul and a figure of great political weight, fell into a violent state of possession that made him suffer horribly. They came to ask Martin to lay his hands on him and cure him, and he told them to bring the young man to him. Only no one could get him out of the room where he was shut up: he hurled himself about with such fury, trying to bite whoever opened the door, that nobody dared to go near him.
Tetradius then went in person to throw himself on his knees at Martin’s feet, begging him to come to his house himself to help the young man. Martin answered that he could not enter the house of a pagan — for Tetradius, at that time, still followed the traditional Roman religion. The former proconsul promised him there and then that, if the evil spirit left that slave, he himself would become a Christian. So Martin went to the house, laid his hand on the young man’s head and freed him at once from that torment. Seeing this with his own eyes, Tetradius kept his word: he believed in the Lord Jesus, enrolled at once as a catechumen, was baptised shortly afterwards and for the rest of his life felt immense gratitude and esteem for Martin, whom he regarded as the one responsible for his salvation.
In those same days and in the same city, as he was entering the house of another gentleman, Martin stopped dead right at the door and warned that he could see a hideous demon in the inner courtyard. No sooner had he ordered it to be gone than the spirit entered the body of a servant who was at the back of the house, in the kitchen. The poor man went completely out of his mind and began screaming, grinding his teeth and violently biting everyone who came in front of him. Chaos took hold of the whole house: the other servants panicked and everyone fled into the street.
Martin went straight up to the raging man and began by ordering him to keep still. As the man went on grinding his teeth and opened his mouth wide, threatening to tear him apart with his bite, Martin put his own fingers into his mouth and challenged him: “If you have so much power, bite them!” As though a red-hot iron had been pressed to his throat, the possessed man at once drew his jaws back as far as he could, so as not even to graze Martin’s fingers. And since the divine punishments were forcing him to leave that body, but he could no longer go out through the mouth, the unclean spirit ended up expelled in a violent discharge of the bowels, leaving a filthy trail on the floor.
There are two very curious details in this chapter:
1. Tetradius, a vir proconsularis: To have “proconsular” status meant belonging to the top of the Roman Senate and having already governed a great province of the Empire. By refusing at first to enter the house of a pagan (recalling Jesus’s initial dialogue with the Canaanite woman or with the centurion in the Gospels), Martin leads that proud aristocrat to take a personal step of faith — and all this to save a mere household slave!
2. The raw realism of the second exorcism: Anyone reading this chapter today is often surprised by the very graphic ending of the episode! To the religious mentality of the fourth century, since the bishop’s consecrated fingers had been inside the servant’s mouth, the evil spirit could no longer leave by a passage that had been blessed — and so Sulpicius tells us, without beating about the bush, that it had to leave “from below”, by way of a violent intestinal crisis (fluxu ventris).