The Life of Saint Martin · Chapter VI
The encounter with the Devil on the road, the public flogging and the poison on the Island of Gallinara
As he continued on his way, after passing through Milan, the Devil appeared to him on the road in the form of a man and asked him where he was going. When Martin answered that he was going where the Lord was calling him, the Devil warned him: “Wherever you go and whatever you attempt, the Devil will always stand in your way!” Martin answered him at once with the verse of the Psalm: “The Lord is on my side; I am not afraid of what men can do to me.” And at that very instant the enemy vanished before him.
Having at last reached his homeland, he managed to accomplish part of what he so longed for: he led his mother to leave paganism and embrace the faith, although his father stubbornly refused to change his life. Along the way, however, Martin’s example led many other people to convert.
At that time the Arian heresy had spread throughout the Empire and was dominant above all in the region of Illyricum. Almost alone, Martin stood up with enormous courage to the local bishops who defended that doctrine. He paid dearly for that outspokenness: he was harshly persecuted, beaten with rods in the public square and, in the end, driven out of the city. He then went back to Italy, but on learning that in Gaul, too, the Church was going through great difficulties because the heretics had succeeded in sending Saint Hilary into exile, he decided to establish a small monastery in Milan. Even there he had no peace: Auxentius, the chief leader of the Arians in the city, launched a ferocious persecution against him and, after subjecting him to every kind of insult and abuse, threw him out of Milan.
Thinking it wiser to wait for the storm to pass, Martin withdrew to a small island called Gallinara, in the company of a priest of great virtue. There he lived for some time feeding only on roots and wild herbs. One day, without realising it, he ended up eating hellebore, a very poisonous plant. When he felt the poison spreading through his body and realised that he was at death’s door, he began to pray with all his strength: the danger passed and the pains disappeared completely. Shortly afterwards, he learned that the emperor, repenting of his earlier decision, had authorised Saint Hilary to return from exile; Martin set off at once for Rome in the hope of catching him on his journey home.
To understand why Martin was flogged in the public square in the Balkans (the province of Illyricum, which took in Pannonia and part of present-day Croatia and Serbia) and expelled from Milan, we have to look at the greatest religious controversy of the fourth century: Arianism.
Arius, a priest of Alexandria, taught that Jesus Christ was not eternal God, equal to the Father, but rather the first and most perfect creature created by God. Although the Council of Nicaea (325) had condemned that idea, the emperor Constantius II took the side of the Arian bishops: he sent into exile the bishops faithful to Nicaea (such as Saint Hilary of Poitiers, banished to present-day Turkey in 356) and handed important sees, such as the imperial capital of Milan, to Arian bishops like Auxentius.
With no room for him in the cities controlled by the Arians, Martin sought refuge on the Island of Gallinara (Isola Gallinara), a small rocky islet off the coast of Liguria (near Albenga, in northern Italy). There he lived as a hermit eating wild roots — until the day he mistook a root for hellebore, a toxic plant capable of causing cardiac arrest.