Maximus of Turin

Maximus was bishop of Turin, a garrison city in the foothills of the Alps on the road from Gaul into Italy. Roughly a hundred of his sermons survive, and they are the reason he is remembered.

The dates are genuinely disputed, and the honest thing is to say so. Gennadius of Marseilles, writing his catalogue of Christian authors in the late fifth century, says Maximus of Turin died in the reign of Honorius and Theodosius the Younger, that is, before 423. But a bishop named Maximus of Turin signs the acts of a Roman synod in 465. Some scholars conclude that one man lived a long time; most now think there were two bishops of Turin named Maximus, and that the sermon collection belongs to the earlier one, who was bishop around the year 400 and died in the first quarter of the fifth century.

The sermons themselves show the world he preached in. Northern Italy was being raided; Turin sat on the invasion road. He preaches while barbarians are in the district, and he tells his congregation not to hoard, not to flee and abandon the poor, and to redeem captives with their money. He rebukes landowners who let pagan sacrifices continue on their estates because it kept the tenants happy, and tells them they are answerable for what happens on their land. He preaches against New Year's revels, against the popular panic during eclipses, against Christians who go to the games and then go to Mass.

He is a plain preacher with a good eye. The sermons are short, many would take under ten minutes to deliver, and built on a single image held up and turned: the church as a ship, the cross as a mast, Peter walking on the water, the fisherman's net, the shepherd carrying the sheep on his shoulders because the sheep cannot walk home. He preaches the seasons of the church year, and his Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter sermons are among the earliest full sets in Latin.

He belongs, with Ambrose of Milan and Chromatius of Aquileia, to the generation that gave the Latin West its ordinary Sunday preaching. Ambrose is the greater name; Maximus is the one who shows what a smaller city heard.

His works were long confused with other men's, and the collection printed under his name in the Middle Ages included sermons by several authors. Modern editors have sorted most of it out. The Roman church honours him as a saint and keeps his feast on 25 June.

Sources: Maximus of Turin, Sermons (ed. Almut Mutzenbecher, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 23; English translation by Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 50); Gennadius, De viris illustribus; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.