Brictio Rails Against Martin

“Again, one day, after he had sat down on that wooden seat of his, which you all know, set in the small open courtyard around his dwelling, he saw two demons sitting on the high rock that overhangs the monastery. Then he heard them call out eagerly and gleefully, ‘Come on, Brictio! Come on, Brictio!’ I believe they saw the miserable man approaching in the distance, knowing how great a frenzy of spirit they had stirred up in him. There was no delay: Brictio rushed in in a perfect fury and there, full of madness, poured out a thousand insults against Martin. For Martin had rebuked him the day before because, though he had owned nothing before he entered the clergy, having in fact been brought up in the monastery by Martin himself, he was now keeping horses and buying slaves. At that time many accused him of buying not only boys from barbarian nations but good-looking girls as well. [a]

The wretched man, stirred to bitter rage by these things and, as I believe, driven chiefly by the impulse those demons had given him, attacked Martin so fiercely that he scarcely kept from laying hands on him. The holy man, for his part, with a calm face and a peaceful mind, tried with gentle words to restrain the unhappy man’s madness. But the spirit of wickedness had such a hold on him that not even his own mind, a very shallow one at best, was under his control. With trembling lips and a changing face, pale with rage, he rolled out words of sin. He claimed that he was a holier man than Martin, who had brought him up, because from his earliest years he had grown up in the monastery among the sacred institutions of the church, while Martin, as he could not deny, had at first been tainted by a soldier’s life, and had now sunk into complete senility through his baseless superstitions and his ridiculous fancies about visions. After saying many things like this, and other things still more bitter which it is better not to repeat, he went out at last, his rage satisfied, feeling as if he had fully justified himself.

But he rushed back with quick steps the way he had gone out. The demons, I believe, had meanwhile been driven from his heart by Martin’s prayers, and he was brought back to repentance. He soon returned and threw himself at Martin’s feet, begging pardon and confessing his error; and now, restored at last to a better mind, he admitted that he had been under the influence of a demon. It was no hard matter for Martin to forgive one who pleaded with him. Then the holy man explained, both to him and to all of us, how he had seen him driven on by demons, and he declared that he was not moved by the insults heaped on him, for they had really harmed the man who spoke them. Later, when this same Brictio was often accused before him of many great crimes, Martin could not be persuaded to remove him from the office of presbyter, so that he would not be suspected of avenging an injury done to himself. He often repeated this saying: ‘If Christ put up with Judas, why should I not put up with Brictio?’”