Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (26), writes of *Symeon the Elder (stylite of Qalat Siman, ob. 459, S00343): how he lived on a pillar, effected many cures, and refused to be seen by any woman; reportedly, a woman who sought to enter the church over his pillar disguised as a man was struck dead. Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.
Evidence ID
E02579
Type of Evidence
Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory of Tours
Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 26
Symeon the Stylite who stood on a pillar in the region of Antioch, after his conversion - 'as is read in the book of his Life (ut legitur in eius vitae libro) - allowed himself to be seen by no woman, not even his mother. And he still protects the church of his pillar from the approach of women:
Nam ferunt, quandam mulierem induta fuisse veste virili et in basilicam ingredi voluisse colomnae, tractans secum misera, agere posse per indumentum quod latere possit Altissimum, ignorans illud apostoli, quia: Deus non inridetur. Elicet ubi veniens ad templum erexit pedem, ut sanctum ingrederetur limen, protinus retrorsum ruens, cecidit et mortua est; satisque fuit populis, ne haec ultra mulier ulla praesumeret, cum in ista cerneret ultionem pessime inrogatam.
'For some say that a woman clothed herself in the garments of a man and wished to enter the church of his pillar. The poor woman thought to herself that in this clothing she would be able to do something that could be unknown to the Most High; she disregarded that [saying] of the apostle, that ‘God is not mocked’. When she came to the church and lifted her foot to cross the sacred threshold, immediately she fell backwards, toppled over, and died. This was sufficient [warning] for the people lest any other women attempt the same, since they saw that a horrible vengeance was imposed on that woman.'
Text: Krusch 1969, 314.
Translation: Van Dam 2004, 22-23.
Summary: Katarzyna Wojtalik.
Cult PlacesOral transmission of saint-related stories
MiraclesMiracle during lifetime
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesWomen
Cult building - independent (church)
Non Liturgical ActivityOral transmission of saint-related stories
Transmission, copying and reading saint-related texts
MiraclesMiracle during lifetime
Healing diseases and disabilities
Miracle after death
Punishing miracle
Miraculous protection - of church and church property
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesWomen
Other lay individuals/ people
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
Symeon the Stylite is the only eastern saint included in the Glory of the Confessors. Although Gregory refers to information derived from a Life of Symeon, this is unfortunately not reliable evidence that such a Life was circulating in the Latin West, since it is possible that he gained the information second-hand from a visitor from the East (such as the bishop mentioned in Histories 10.24).The 'church of the pillar' (basilica colomnae), that the unfortunate woman sought to enter, is the great church at Qalat Siman, built over Symeon's pillar after his death.
Bibliography
Edition:Krusch, B., Liber in gloria martyrum, in: Gregorii Turonensis Opera. 2: Miracula et opera minora (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 1.2; 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:
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.
Record Created By
Katarzyna Wojtalik
Date of Entry
31/03/2017
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00343 | Symeon the Elder, stylite of Qal‘at Sim‘ān, ob. 459 | Symeon | Certain |
|---|
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