E02690: Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (72), tells of the cemetery at Autun (central Gaul) where the holy dead are heard singing psalms; two men saw these souls in the adjacent church of *Stephen (the First Martyr, S00030) and were warned by one of them to leave the town; the one who didn't do so died. Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.
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posted on 2017-04-12, 00:00authored bykwojtalik
Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 72
Cimiterium igitur apud Agustidunensim urbem Gallica lingua vocitavit, eo quod ibi fuerint multorum hominum cadavera funerata; inter qua quod sint quorundam fidelium dignarumque Deo animarum sepulchra, frequens occulti psallentii mysterium docet, cum plerumque multis apparent, in ipso vocum praeconio reddentes omnipotenti Deo gratiarum debitam actionem. Nam audivi, quod duo ex incolis loci, dum loca sancta orandi gratia circuire disponerent, audiunt in basilica sancti Stephani, quae huic coniungitur cimitirio, psallentium sonum. Admirantesque dulcedinem modoli, adpropinquant ad ostium templi, autumantes, a quibusdam religiosis vigilias celebrari. Ingredientes autem et orationi diutissime incumbentes, consurgunt, psallentii chorum conspiciunt, nihilque lucere per templum, nisi propria claritate cuncta prospiciunt splendere; de personis vero nullum prorsus agnoscunt. Denique attoniti, stupore perculsi, unus de psallentibus accedit ad eos, dicens: 'Exsecrabilem rem fecistis, ut nobis arcana orationum Deo reddentibus adesse praesumeretis. Discedite ergo et a domibus vestris abscedite, alioquin ab hoc mundo migrabitis'. Ex quibus unus discedens abiit, alter vero, qui in loco remansit, post multos dies a saeculo conmigravit.
'In Autun there is a cemetery - this is the Gallic name for such a place, because the bodies of many men have been buried there. The mystery of psalms being chanted in private is a constant indication that among these [graves] there are the tombs of certain souls that were faithful and worthy of God. As they give the thanks that they owe to omnipotent God in the proclamation of their voices, they have often appeared to many people. For I heard that while two of the inhabitants of this region were preparing to visit the holy shrines for prayer, they heard the chanting of psalms in the church of Saint Stephen that was next to this cemetery. They admired the sweetness of the melody and went to the door of the church, thinking that vigils were being celebrated by some monks. They entered and for a long time knelt in prayer. When they got up, they saw a chorus of people chanting psalms. They noted that although there were no lights in the church everything gleamed in its own brightness. Yet they recognized absolutely none of the people. They were stunned and struck by astonishment. Then one of the people chanting psalms came to them and said: ‘You have done an accursed deed when you dare to be present as we offer the secrets of our prayers to God. Therefore depart and leave your homes; otherwise you will migrate from this world.’ One of these two men departed and left, but the other, who stayed in that place, migrated from this world after many days.'
Text: Krusch 1969, 340-341. Translation: Van Dam 2004, 53, lightly modified.
History
Evidence ID
E02690
Saint Name
Stephen, the First Martyr : S00030
Unnamed saints (or name lost) : S00518
Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts
Language
Latin
Evidence not before
587
Evidence not after
588
Activity not before
415
Activity not after
588
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 - cemetery/catacomb
Cult activities - Non Liturgical Practices and Customs
Visiting graves and shrines
Cult Activities - Miracles
Miracle after death
Punishing miracle
Apparition, vision, dream, revelation
Cult Activities - Protagonists in Cult and Narratives
Other lay individuals/ people
Cult Activities - Relics
Bodily relic - entire body
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
It is puzzling that Gregory attributes the entirely Greek word 'cimiterium' to the Gallic (Celtic) tongue; it is possible that there is a lacuna in the text.
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.