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The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity


from its origins to circa AD 700, across the entire Christian world


Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (62), tells of an unnamed *Archdeacon of Lyon (S02846), summoned to Rome, who there expels an evil spirit from the daughter of the emperor Leo; the emperor sent magnificent gold gifts to the church of Lyon (south-east Gaul), but their carrier substituted objects of silver; the carrier and his goldsmith accomplice come to a bad end. Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.

Evidence ID

E02675

Type of Evidence

Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts

Major author/Major anonymous work

Gregory of Tours

Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 62

Summary:

The daughter of the emperor Leo was possessed by an evil spirit. She was brought to the holy shrines and the evil spirit threatened that it wouldn't leave the girl until the [unnamed] 'archdeacon of Lyon' came. Messengers to Lyon were sent and asked the man to came to Rome. He initially declared himself unworthy, but, after being admonished by his bishop, he went to heal the girl. He came to the church of *Peter the Apostle (S00036) in Rome. He kept vigils, prayed and fasted there for three days. On the fourth day he expelled the evil spirit from the girl's body. Because of this the emperor offered him three hundred pounds of gold, but the archdeacon rejected the gift and requested a benefit for the entire city of Lyon. The emperor conceded to the city an exemption from tax and distributed the gold to the poor.

After the death of the archdeacon, the emperor decided to enrich the church of Lyon with a cover (
capsa) for the gospels, a paten and a chalice, all made from pure gold decorated with precious gems. The messenger, who was carrying the gifts to Lyon, visited a goldsmith in the Alps and proposed a fraud. The goldsmith made a similar paten and chalice from silver that looked like pure gold. The messenger arrived in Lyon with these false objects, and then returned to the goldsmith. But, while they were seated together, an earthquake brought the building down on them, opened a fissure in the earth, and they, with their money 'fell alive and screaming into Hell' (descenderuntque viventes ac vociferantes in tartarum). Gregory had himself very often seen the precious objects in the church of Lyon.

Gregory concludes this long chapter with a warning:

Sit hoc populis documentum, ut nullus res eclesiae aut appetere aut fraudare nitatur; nam videbit Dei iudicium super se velociter inminere.

'May this be a warning to people, that no-one try to steal or defraud the possessions of the church; for they will see the judgement of God rapidly come down on them.'



Text: Krusch 1969, 334-335.
Summary Katarzyna Wojtalik.

Cult Places

Cult building - independent (church)

Non Liturgical Activity

Visiting graves and shrines
Prayer/supplication/invocation
Vigils
Fast
Bequests, donations, gifts and offerings

Miracles

Miracle during lifetime
Exorcism
Punishing miracle

Protagonists in Cult and Narratives

Women
Monarchs and their family
Ecclesiastics - bishops

Cult Related Objects

Chalices, censers and other liturgical vessels

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

The residence of the emperor Leo in this story is firmly set in Rome; but the only emperor Leo of our period, Leo I (457-474), ruled from Constantinople.

The story was presumably one told at Lyon in relation to a particularly splendid gospel-cover, chalice and paten.

We have included this unnamed miracle-effecting archdeacon of Lyon as a 'saint', because for Gregory he seems to have been a 'Confessor'. But there is no evidence that he ever attracted cult, and, even in Gregory's story, he is mainly a hook on which to hang a moral tale about the punishment that descends on those who seek to rob the church.


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, Bryan Ward-Perkins

Date of Entry

08/04/2017

Related Saint Records
IDNameName in SourceIdentity
S00036Peter, the ApostlePeterCertain
S02846Archdeacon of Lyon, in times of the emperor LeoCertain


Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
Katarzyna Wojtalik, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Cult of Saints, E02675 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E02675