Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (3), recounts how *Eusebius (bishop of Vercelli, ob. 371, S01219), from his grave in Vercelli (northern Italy) cures people and casts out demons, particularly on his feast day, when the possessed smash the lamps and are cured by the falling oil. Gregory's mother placed relics of Eusebius in the oratory of her house in Gaul, which saved her and the building from fire. Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.
Evidence ID
E02453
Type of Evidence
Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory of Tours
Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 3
Eusebius vero Vercellensis episcopus magnum huic Helario adiutorium contra hereses fuit, qui vivere se post tumulos praesentibus virtutibus manifestat. Nam in die natalis sui cum multi infirmi salventur, inergumini tomen rotatu valido per totam eclesiam debachantes et nimio confitentes torqueri cruciatu, elevati in aera, lignos, qui ad officium luminis succenduntur, manu verberantes effrangunt. De quo perfusi liquore, ilico, discedente daemone, personae purgantur, scitque tunc populus, tot infirmos esse mundatos, quot videret lignos effractos. Sed et omnia, quae sub ditione basilicae eius habentur ita pia protectione conservat, ne exinde quicquam auferatur ab aliquo. Nam videas inter hostes iniquos greges pecorum iumentorumque et ovium nec penitus a quoquam adtingi, cum vox sonuerit: 'Confessoris sunt haec Eusebi'.
'Bishop Eusebius of Vercelli was a great supporter of Hilary against heresies. He shows that he is still alive after his burial by his current miracles. For although many ill people are cured on his anniversary day, possessed by a demon people dance throughout the entire church in violent spins and believe that they are afflicted with powerful torments. They leap in the air and with their hands strike and break the lamps that are burning as lights. Once they are soaked with the oil from a lamp, immediately the demon leaves and the people are cleansed. Then the congregation knows that the number of ill people who have been healed matches the number of lamps that it sees are broken. The saint guards everything that his church owns with such a devout protection, lest someone steal something from it. For you might see that even among unjust enemies no one touches the herds of cattle, horses, and sheep when the voice has sounded: 'These belong to the confessor Eusebius.'
Gregory's mother places relics of Eusebius in the oratory of her house (Huius sancti reliquias mater mea in oratorio domus suae locavit). On one occasion, sparks from the fire jump to the rafters and threaten to burn down the house, but disaster is averted, which Gregory attributes to the proximity of the relics.
Text: Krusch 1969, 300-301.
Translation: Van Dam 2004, 4-5.
FestivalsCult building - independent (church)
MiraclesMiracle after death
RelicsBodily relic - unspecified
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesOther lay individuals/ people
Cult Related Objects
Saint’s feast
Cult PlacesCult building - independent (church)
Cult building - dependent (chapel, baptistery, etc.)
MiraclesMiracle after death
Healing diseases and disabilities
Exorcism
Miraculous protection - of church and church property
Miraculous protection - of people and their property
Power over elements (fire, earthquakes, floods, weather)
RelicsBodily relic - unspecified
Transfer, translation and deposition of relics
Privately owned relics
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesOther lay individuals/ people
Women
Cult Related ObjectsOil lamps/candles
Source
Gregory, of a prominent Clermont family with extensive ecclesiastical connections, was bishop of Tours from 573 until his death (probably in 594). He was the most prolific hagiographer of all Late Antiquity. He wrote four books on the miracles of Martin of Tours, one on those of Julian of Brioude, and two on the miracles of other saints (the Glory of the Martyrs and Glory of the Confessors), as well as a collection of twenty short Lives of sixth-century Gallic saints (the Life of the Fathers). He also included a mass of material on saints in his long and detailed Histories, and produced two independent short works: a Latin version of the Acts of Andrew and a Latin translation of the story of The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.Gregory probably wrote the greater part of the Glory of the Confessors (Liber in Gloria Confessorum) between late 587 and mid-588, since in ch. 6 he tells us that he has already written three books on the miracles of Martin (and the last datable miracle in Book 3 of his Miracles of Martin occurred in November 587), while in ch. 93 he tells us that Charimeris, who became bishop of Verdun in 588, was 'now' a royal referendary (so not yet a bishop). It is, however, likely that Gregory was collecting and recording these stories throughout his life, and for our purposes precise dating is not of great importance, since Gregory's views on the role of saints and the correct ways to venerate them do not seem to have changed during his writing life. (On the dating of the work, see Van Dam 2004, xii; Shaw 2016, 105.)
The last two chapters (109 and 110), in which divine punishment falls on avaricious merchants in a manner that is not focused on a particular 'confessor', do not sit comfortably with the rest of the work, and, even more tellingly, near the end there are three chapters with headings but no content (105, 106 and 107, E02777). Consequently Krusch suggested (and this hypothesis has been widely accepted) that the work was left in an incomplete state, its final completion and editing being prevented by Gregory's death.
As Gregory himself makes clear in his Preface (where he lists his eight works of hagiography), the Glory of the Confessors (just like his Glory of the Martyrs) is not about the lives of his saints, but is a collection of their miracle-stories: 'This, the eighth [book], we have written on the miracles of Confessors' (Octavum hunc scribimus de miraculis confessorum). Occasionally we do learn something about the lives of the men and women that he includes, but for the most part we are just given their name and, sometimes, religious status ('bishop', 'abbot', 'hermit', or whatever) and a description of a miracle (or miracles) that Gregory attributes to them. The large majority of these miracles are posthumous (in Life of the Fathers 2.2 Gregory expresses a preference for posthumous miracles, over miracles in life, as reliable indicators of sanctity - see E00023).
Elsewhere in his work (in the preface to his Life of Illidius, in Life of the Fathers), Gregory provides a definition of a 'confessor': someone who had taken up 'various crosses of abstinence' (diversas abstinentiae cruces) to live the Christian life. But here in Glory of the Confessors, the category is in practice much more broadly drawn, to include any individual able to effect a miracle, who wasn't a martyr; in many cases Gregory knew nothing about the life of the confessor, only about one or more miracles, for the most part posthumous and at the tomb. For Gregory, anyone with an attested miracle (he would, presumably, have said 'reliably attested') was a 'confessor' and could be included in this work. Consequently, a remarkable number of extremely shadowy figures feature. To take a few examples: a man buried in a tomb in Clermont, from which scrapings of dust cured people (ch. 35, E02595); a chaste but loving couple of Clermont, whose sarcophagi miraculously moved to be next to each other (ch. 31, E02583); and three priests of the village of Aire-sur-l'Ardour, whose graves were slowly rising out of the ground (ch. 51, E02640). In all of these cases, and several more besides, Gregory could not even put reliable names to the confessors concerned. Gregory's interest was not in the people, but in the miraculous that manifested itself around holy individuals: for instance, in ch.96 (E02755) he tells the story of a hermit whose only recorded miracle was his ability to cook his food over a blazing fire in a wooden pot; Gregory uses the story as an example of how God makes even the elements of nature obey the needs of the holy.
Only occasionally does Gregory name his informants. But it is clear that many of his stories derived from his own observations in Clermont and Tours, and from what he heard from visitors to Tours, and on his own travels; Gregory had visited large numbers of the shrines he described, had venerated many of these saints' relics, and had even been a participant at a few of the events described.
Because Gregory was so inclusive in those he ranked as 'confessors', his text is rich in evidence of cults emerging around some very obscure figures, as long as people (including Gregory) believed they had miraculous powers from their graves. In many cases these cults were probably short-lived; but in a few cases they appear to have become at least semi-institutionalised: for instance, two otherwise wholly unknown virgins, buried on a hill in the Touraine, persuaded a man to build a stone oratory over their graves, and also persuaded the then bishop of Tours to come and bless it (ch. 18, E02561), and a young girl of the Paris region, about whom nothing but her name and pious epitaph were known, acquired a considerable reputation as a healer (particularly of toothache), and again a stone oratory over her grave (ch. 103, E02767).
Unlike the Glory of the Martyrs, which includes many martyrs from beyond Gaul, almost all the saintly figures in Glory of the Confessors are Gallic: the sole exceptions are, from Syria, Symeon the Stylite (ch. 26, E02579), and, from Italy, Eusebius of Vercelli and Paulinus of Nola (chs. 3 and 108, E02453 and E02778). Within Gaul, after miracles involving angels, Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Vercelli (chs. 1-3), the confessors are bunched together by their city-territory, in other words where they were buried (which in almost all cases is also where the recorded miracles occurred). There is no logic to the order in which Gregory presented these cities, beyond the fact that he placed the two cities he knew most about, Tours (chs. 4-25) and Clermont (chs. 29-35) very close to the start. At the end of the book, from ch. 90, saints appear from city-territories that have already been covered earlier in the work (chs. 90 and 100, Bourges; ch. 96, Autun; chs. 101-102, Limoges; ch. 103, Paris; ch. 104, Poitiers) – the most likely explanation is that these are saints that Gregory added after he had written the greater part of the book.
There are some digressions in the book, as we would expect in a work by the discursive Gregory – for instance, a miracle story of Martin set in Visigothic Spain (ch. 12) leads Gregory into two stories on the spiritual powerlessness of Arian priests (chs. 13 and 14) – but there are fewer digressions than in Gregory's parallel work, the Glory of the Martyrs.
There is a good general discussion of Glory of the Confessors in Van Dam 2004, ix-xxi, and of Gregory's hagiography more widely in Shaw 2015.
(Bryan Ward-Perkins)
Discussion
Armentaria, the mother of Gregory of Tours, features frequently in his writings, often in a context of devotion to saints, as here. She was still alive in 587, and the date of her death is unknown. It is not known where this house with its oratory, a good example of the private ownership of relics, was located, perhaps Clermont. For Armentaria's life, see Pietri and Heijmans 2013.Bibliography
Edition:Krusch B., Gregorii Turonensis Opera: Liber in gloria confessorum (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum I.2; 2nd ed.; Hannover 1969).
Translation:
Van Dam, R., Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs (Translated Texts for Historians 4; 2nd ed., Liverpool, 2004).
Further reading:
Pietri, L. and Heijmans, M., Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, 4 Prosopographie de la Gaule chrétienne (314-614), 2 vols. (Paris 2013), vol. 1, 201-203, 'Armentaria 2'.
Shaw, R., "Chronology, Composition, and Authorial Conception in the Miracula", in: A.C. Murray (ed.), A Companion to Gregory of Tours (Leiden-Boston 2015), 102-140..
Vieillard-Troiekouroff, M., Les monuments religieux de la Gaule d'après les œuvres de Grégoire de Tours (Paris, 1976).
Record Created By
Katarzyna Wojtalik
Date of Entry
31/03/2017
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S01219 | Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, ob. 371 | Eusebius | Certain |
|---|
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