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E02705: Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (78), tells how *Remigius (bishop of Reims, ob. c. 533, S00456) from his grave punished a man with death, who had unjustly occupied a field given to the church of Reims (north-east Gaul). Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.

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posted on 2017-04-14, 00:00 authored by kwojtalik

Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 78

During his episcopacy, Remigius, the bishop of Reims, revived a dead girl, cured ill people and was an avenger (ultor) against invaders of church property. Not far from his basilica there was a field that had been given to the church. One of the citizens scorned the man who had donated this field and occupied it. He was reprimanded by the bishop and the abbot, but always refused to surrender the field.

Denique causa extitit et non devotio, ut Remensim urbem adiret; properat ad sancti basilicam. Arguitur iterum ab abbate pro pervasione campi; sed nihil dignum rationi respondit. Explicitisque negotiis, ascenso equo, ad domum redire disponit; sed obstat nisu eius sacerdotis iniuria. Nam sauciatus a sanguine, diruit in terram; obligatur lingua, quae locuta fuerat, campum tolli; clauduntur oculi, qui concupierant; manus contrahuntur, quae adprehenderant. Tunc balbutiens et vix sermonem explicare potens, ait: 'Deferte me ad basilicam sancti et quantumcumque super me est auri ad sepulchrum eius proiecite. Peccavi enim auferendo res eius'. Aspiciens autem dator campi hunc cum muneribus venientem, ait: 'Ne aspicias, quaeso, sanctae Dei, munera eius, quae numquam accipere consuisti; ne sis, deprecor, adiutor eius, qui, inflammante concupiscentia, rerum tuarum nequam possessor exsistit'. Nec distulit sanctus audire vocem pauperis sui. Nam homo ille, licet dedisset munera, rediens tamen domum, amisit spiritum, recepitque eclesia res suas.

'Then business, not piety, took him [the man who had seized the field] to Reims. He hurried to the church of the saint. Again the abbot denounced him for seizing the field; but he replied with nothing worthy of rational thinking. When his business was completed, he mounted his horse and prepared to return home. But the wrong done to the bishop was an obstacle to his intention. For the man had an apoplectic stroke and fell to the ground. His tongue that had suggested that the field be taken was bound, his eyes that had coveted it were closed, and his hands that had seized the field were contracted. Stuttering and was barely able to speak, he said: ‘Carry me to the church of the saint and throw on his tomb however much gold I have. For I have sinned by stealing his property.’ The man who had donated the field saw him coming with his gifts and said: ‘Saint of God, I ask you, do not look at his gifts that you never used to accept. I pray you, do not assist this man who under the influence of his burning lust was the wicked possessor of your properties.’ The saint did not delay in hearing the voice of the poor man. For although that other man presented gifts, upon returning home he gave up his spirit and the church recovered its properties.'

The chapter concludes with a second miracle of Remigius: his saving of Reims from plague ($E02706).

Text: Krusch 1969, 344-345. Translation: Van Dam 2004, 58, modified.

History

Evidence ID

E02705

Saint Name

Remigius, bishop of Reims : S00456

Saint Name in Source

Remigius

Related Saint Records

https://oxford.figshare.com/articles/Remigius_bishop_of_Reims_ob_c_533/13738684

Type of Evidence

Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts

Language

Latin

Evidence not before

587

Evidence not after

588

Activity not before

532

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 - Places

Cult building - independent (church)

Cult activities - Non Liturgical Practices and Customs

Bequests, donations, gifts and offerings

Cult Activities - Miracles

Miracle during lifetime Power over life and death Healing diseases and disabilities Punishing miracle Miracle after death

Cult Activities - Protagonists in Cult and Narratives

Children Ecclesiastics - bishops Ecclesiastics - abbots 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)

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.