Greek Saint Martin in the Pyrenees

We are tracing the memory of the Cathars in the French Pyrenees, south of Albi and Carcassonne. Castles ruled by the nobles who supported them, which were occupied from 1209 onwards by the crusaders sent by the French king under the leadership of Simon of Montfort. Small towns whose population was put to the sword or sent to the stake by the crusaders, in part or to the last man: “The Lord will know those that are his own.” Monasteries, mainly Cistercian ones, founded by local bishops in the second half of the 12th century, during the still bloodless phase of the conflict, to convert the heretics.

The Aude River that runs from the Pyrenees to the south of Carcassonne is flanked by a string of such monasteries: St-Hilaire, St-Polycarpe, Rieunette, Alet-les-Bains. Among them I discover on the map the name of Monastère de Cantauque, which is not mentioned in the historiography of the Cathars. I mark it for a visit.

From the road winding along the Aude between the hills of the Limoux wine region, a smaller road turns off into the valley of the tributary Baris, and then an even smaller one, a mere strip, into the valley of the stream Lauzy. Finally, at the beginning of a white gravel road branching off from this, you see a sign for the Orthodox monastery of Cantauque.

An Orthodox monastery in the French Pyrenees? As the building is slowly revealed from behind the trees, the distinctly Orthodox forms become more and more visible: the Ruthenian-style triple belfry with the Non-human-hand-made Icon of Christ, the Greek columned and domed porticus, the dominant brick-red color of the walls, the arched windows. All iconic historical forms. As if the designer wanted to create a building that is definitely modern, but at the same time suggesting that its elements have been pieced together over many centuries.

The inner wall of the porticus is covered by a Deesis fresco, a half-length Pantocrator Christ with the Virgin Mary on his right, and, surprisingly, with St. Martin of Tours on his left, in the usual place of St. John the Baptist. St. Martin has been the patron saint of his native Hungary as well as of his missionary land, France, for a thousand years. Below, an inscription: The monastery of the Mother of God and of St. Martin. Through the gate you can see into the courtyard, whose walls are decorated with large, colorful Orthodox frescoes.

When we ring the doorbell, a tall smiling monk comes out. He does not tell us his name and does not ask ours, only where we come from. “Hungary? We also had a Hungarian monk, Tamás, who recently went home.” “But you have another left”, I point to St. Martin above the gate. “Yes, yes. Although he was born in Szombathely” – he prounces the difficult name correctly – “but he is also the patron saint of Gaul. And since he lived before the schism, he is venerated as a saint by Catholics and Orthodox alike. That’s why we chose him as the patron saint of our monastery, because we wanted to create a community here that is completely French, completely Orthodox and completely international.”

He guides us to their chapel, the main entrance of which is separate from the monastery, at the back of the building, since it is used not only by the monks, but also by Orthodox believers from the wider region, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians, Greeks. “They come here from about a hundred kilometers distance, about two hundred persons, or three hundred on big holidays. At those times they stand outside the chapel. We have liturgy four times a day, at six in the morning, at noon, at six pm, and late in the evening. There are always some believers, if no one else, there are those who live in our ten guest rooms: now a few Ukrainian families, two Romanians, four French and one Georgian.”

“And you, how did you find us?” “We were visiting the monasteries here, we saw this one on the map, we thought we should not miss it. Only at the crossroads did we see that it was Orthodox.” “If you knew it beforehand, would you have avoided it?” “No, we would have come here first.” We all laugh.

On the wall above the entrance to the church, the life of St. Martin is painted in Orthodox icon style. I have never seen anything like it. In the centre, Martin himself as Bishop of Tours among the geese who betrayed him by gaggling when he hid in the goose-pen to escape his election as bishop. They still get their punishment for it every November 11. Above right, Martin’s baptism, above left, his sharing his mantle with the beggar, below left, his ordination as a monk, below right, his funeral. Some scenes from his standard Western iconography (e.g. Simone Martini’s St. Martin cycle in Assisi) are missing, because they are not really meaningful in an Orthodox context: his knighthood, the renunciation of arms, and his miraculous mass.

In 2016, in preparation for the 1800th anniversary of Saint Martin’s birth, I was asked by Europa Publisher to write a book on the European cult of him. In the course of a year, I visited his most important pilgrimage sites, and wrote the starting chapter about the inauguration of St. Martin’s footprint in Pannonhalma Abbey. Life, however, fell on me and I never finished the book. Recently I have been thinking of publishing the collected material here on the blog. An unexpected contribution to this is now this visit to the Orthodox monastery of St. Martin.

The chapel was decorated by a local monk-painter in a good style, with vivid colors and an original interpretation of the traditional Orthodox iconography. The painting was finished just a week ago, perhaps we are its first visitors. In the apse is the Virgin Mary, with Christ to come in her womb, below her St. John Chrysostom, St. Athanasius, and two Cappadocian church fathers, St. Basil and St. Gregory. And on the walls of the sanctuary are four church fathers who are a surprising choice in an Orthodox context: St. Martin, St. Hilarius of Poitiers and St. John Cassianus, who are usually associated with the Latin church (although, living before the schism, they are of course also Orthodox), and St. Isaac of Nineveh, who belonged to the Syriac Nestorian church in Persia in the 7th century, that is, after the separation of the Nestorian and Orthodox churches. Their presence indicates the desire of the monastery’s founders for ecumenism, for the linking of the Western Catholic and Eastern Syriac churches with the Orthodox mainstream.

A centuries-old Lebanese cedar stands in front of the church’s entrance. It was obviously not planted by the current monks. “Indeed not. The site of the present monastery was a nobleman’s manor. Before the French revolution, to plant a Lebanese cedar, or indeed to obtain cedar seedlings, required royal permission, and good connections with Versailles, where the seedlings came from. The local landowner seems to have had them. This cedar was planted sometime in the 1600s. It’s now coming into its own.”

We return to the courtyard of the monastery, which was once a sheepfold. In the centre is a pretty little well. The walls, now I clearly see, are decorated with scenes of the Creation, according to Orthodox and Venetian iconography. By Venetian iconography I mean that a current of Orthodox iconography – known to us from the 5th-century Cotton Genesis manuscript, used in designing the mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica – represented the six days of the Creation by interpreting the standard final phrases closing each single day – and there was evening and there was morning, the second day, etc. – so that one more day was also created. The Venetian Creation mosaics, therefore, add to each day one more angel, representing that day, so that God resting on the sevenths day is surrounded by the angels of the six previous days. The Cantaque Creation is unusual in that God and the angels of the seven days are together before the first day of the Creation, but probably only because there was a large and significant wall area to depict them together.

The Egyptian monk-painter took particular delight in the detailing of the animals – fish, birds, quadrupeds – and in strong, striking colors. Around the edge of the second wall, the second Creation story starts with the planting of the Garden of Paradise. This was painted by a Romanian nun, in a more traditional but also more rigid and less creative style.

After looking around in the courtyard, we are invited to the monastery kitchen for a coffee. The coffee is brewed for us by a French pilgrim, and the cake is served by another pilgrim. The first is with her husband, the second with her daughter. They talk at length with our monk about the various Orthodox pilgrimage sites from Russia to the Caucasus and the Holy Land to Egypt, which they have obviously visited. When it gradually turns out that I have also been to these places, and even speake their languages, I get more and more looks of recognition. I almost become a honorary Orthodox.

And then I ask the question that has been on my mind for a long time: “Permettez-moi la question. You must have been born in a Catholic family. Comment avez-vous embrassé l’orthodoxie?” it is a nice phrase: how did you embrace Orthodoxy?

And then an amazing life story begins. With a very traditional Catholic family, where the father’s mother is a protestant from Alsace, but the father rejects this branch. Nevertheless, he still has the openness to enroll his son in the local Quranic school while living in Morocco: “you don’t have to believe in it, but if you live here, you have to learn what they do”. The boy speaks Arabic since childhood, does not believe in the Quran, but memorizes it, and goes to the Jesuits for religious instruction. In high school, like everyone else, he goes through crises of faith, then after graduation he finds his faith again and goes to the Holy Land. He works in a kibbutz, learns Hebrew, then is called to a priestly vocation, enters a Catholic monastery in Jerusalem, studies theology in Paris. Returning to Jerusalem, he studies in Jewish, Christian and Arab biblical and religious institutions, learns Russian, travels in the Holy Land, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. He feels himself ever closer to the Orthodox world. In 2002, he and his fellow like-minded monks return to France, where they found an Orthodox monastery in Cantauque. “The Catholic bishops have offered us a number of empty old monasteries, but the catch (he uses the phrase “poisoned gift’) is that they have to be maintained, which for a listed building costs an incredible amount of money.”

It is strange how much this region is intertwined with the Holy Land, from where the emblematic figures of the region came: the Cathars, the Templars, the Crusaders and now the Orthodox.

In France there does not seem to be a sharp dividing line between Catholic and Orthodox, as is shown by the many icons in Catholic churches. He is also invited to teach church history at the theology faculty in Toulouse. “I taught it for years until I felt more and more that Catholic church history was tendentious. It is taught as if Western Europe had been Catholic from the beginning. Yet in the beginning there was only one church, which was both Catholic, universal, and Orthodox, true to the faith. And it was the church of Rome that departed from this direction with the Carolingian Renaissance, becoming a Rome-centered provincial church. Look at it, the Orthodox church is still doing the same liturgy, singing the same hymns as it did two thousand years ago. And the Catholic church is constantly innovating. Even the recently re-authorized liturgy of Trent is not the original, it was an innovation in its day. Even the Gregorian chants can only be reconstructed. The truly great era of the Western church was when it had not yet departed from the original common faith. When they ask me what is the raison d’être of the Orthodox church in Catholic France, I answer: we are only bringing back what the Catholic Church originally was.”

We came to the Pyrenees to visit the region of great heresy – the title of Bruno Schulz’s biography –, and over coffee in the most lively monastery there, we discover that the heretics are in fact us.