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E02582: Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (29), describes how the deacon Cautinus had a vision of a celebration at the neglected tomb of *Austremonius/Stremonius (first bishop, and martyr of Clermont, S01255) at Issoire (central Gaul), and subsequently ordered that the tomb be properly venerated. Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.

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posted on 2017-03-18, 00:00 authored by kwojtalik

Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 29

Per sanctum enim Stremonium, qui et ipse a Romanis episcopis cum Catiano beatissimo vel reliquis quos memoravimus est directus, primum Arverna civitas verbum salutis accepit, eoque praedicante, salutare mundi redemptoremque omnium Christum, Dei filium, credere coepit. Huius autem sepulchrum apud Iciodorensim vicum habetur; ad quod cruda [priorum] rusticitas, licet sciens, quo quiesceret, nullum tamen ibi exhibebat honoris cultum. Post longinqua vero annorum curricula Cautinus, qui ipsius Arvernae urbis episcopus datus est, in diaconato suo eclesiam vici illius rexit. Igitur dum nocte quadam in lectulo cellulae suae, quae huic basilicae adhaerebat, decumberet, audivit psallentium, quasi parum resonantibus vocibus; et surgens, vidit templum magno splendente lumine. Obstupefactus aspicit intrinsecus, erat enim cellula illa in superiore contra fenestras templi, et vidit, et ecce
circa tumulum multitudo albatorum tenentium cereos et psallentium! Quod diutissime cernens, cum discessissent, statim, facto mane, iussit tumulum cancello vallari ac paleolis nitentibus obvelari, praedixitque, reverentiam loco illi inpendi. Ex hoc enim oratio super tumulum funditur, et auxilia antestitis inpetrantur.

'Clermont first received the message of salvation from St Stremonius, who also had been sent by the Roman bishops with the most blessed Catianus and the others whom I have mentioned. Because of his preaching, Clermont began to believe that Christ, the Son of God, was the salvation of the world and the redeemer of all. Stremonius’ tomb is in the village of Issoire. Coarse rusticity, even though it knew where he was buried, never offered any cult of respect there at his tomb. But after a long circuit of years, Cautinus, who was [later] given as a bishop of Clermont, governed the church of this village while he was a deacon. One night while he was lying in the bed of his cell that was attached to the church, he heard the chanting of psalms, as if from voices singing quietly. Upon getting up he saw the church shining with a bright light. He was astounded and looked inside (his cell was on an upper floor across from the windows of the church). He looked, and behold, there was a crowd of people dressed in white, holding candles, and chanting psalms around the tomb of Stremonius. He watched this spectacle for a long time. Once they departed, immediately at dawn Cautinus ordered that the tomb be surrounded with a railing and covered with white cloths. He announced that respect would be shown to that place. Thereafter prayers were offered over the tomb and the assistance of the bishop was requested.'

Text: Krusch 1969, 316. Translation: Van Dam 2004, 24, lightly modified.

History

Evidence ID

E02582

Saint Name

Stremonius, bishop of Clermont, ob. AD early 4th century : S01255

Saint Name in Source

Stremonius

Related Saint Records

https://oxford.figshare.com/articles/Austremonius_Stremonius_first_bishop_and_martyr_of_Clermont/13732552

Type of Evidence

Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts

Language

Latin

Evidence not before

587

Evidence not after

588

Activity not before

300

Activity not after

571

Place of Evidence - Region

Gaul and Frankish kingdoms

Place of Evidence - City, village, etc

Tours

Place of evidence - City name in other Language(s)

Tours Tours Tours Toronica urbs Prisciniacensim vicus Pressigny Turonorum civitas Ceratensis vicus Céré

Major author/Major anonymous work

Gregory of Tours

Cult activities - Liturgical Activity

Chant and religious singing

Cult activities - Places

Burial site of a saint - tomb/grave

Cult activities - Non Liturgical Practices and Customs

Oral transmission of saint-related stories

Cult Activities - Miracles

Apparition, vision, dream, revelation

Cult Activities - Protagonists in Cult and Narratives

Ecclesiastics - bishops Ecclesiastics - lesser clergy Crowds

Cult Activities - Relics

Bodily relic - entire body

Cult Activities - Cult Related Objects

Precious cloths

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

In the first sentence of this chapter, Gregory refers to what he had written in Histories 1.30 (E01530), of seven men being sent from Rome in the mid-third century to serve as the first bishops of seven of the cities of Gaul; as here, he named two of these as Austremonius/Stremonius of Clermont and Gatianus/Catianus of Gregory's own see of Tours.

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.