The Conversion of Europe

Let one instance stand for many: Germanus of Auxerre, as presented in the biography by Constantius of Lyons composed about forty years after its subject’s death.7 Germanus, born in about 378, was a member of an aristocratic family of the Auxerrois who received a good education in Gaul and at Rome, married suitably, practised successfully as a lawyer and achieved high public office as governor of Armorica, the north-western region of Gaul. When the bishopric of Auxerre fell vacant in 418 Germanus was plucked from this entirely secular career by the Christian community of Auxerre, who insisted that he must be their next bishop. Constantius had read his Sulpicius Severus and knew how an episcopal biographer should present his subject to an admiring world. So we hear a good deal about Germanus’ austerities, virtues, miracles and so forth. Hence the story about the straw at Alise which seems to have been modelled in characteristically hagiographical fashion on a story told of Martin by Sulpicius. But we also hear from Constantius about the part played by Germanus in public affairs. He protected the people of Auxerre from a crushing burden of taxation. He restrained Goar, king of the barbarian Alans, from ravaging Armorica. He went to Britain to quell heresy and while there led a British army to victory over marauding Picts and Saxons. He interceded with the imperial court at Ravenna on behalf of the province of Armorica.

The opening up of gaps or fissures in the surface of late Roman imperial rule was perhaps the most telling symptom of the empire’s inability to cope with its traditional responsibilities. Bishops filled the gaps. Episcopal wealth became significant here. Some bishoprics – but no means all – became very rich indeed. The case of Tours is, again, instructive. Gregory of Tours chronicles a succession of legacies bestowed upon the see of Tours during the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Legacies often came from the bishops themselves. Bishop Remigius (Rémi) of Rheims left his substantial fortune to the see of Rheims and Bishop Bertram of Le Mans left an even more substantial fortune to the see of Le Mans. Wealth brought local responsibilities and opportunities as well as temptations. All the diverse services which today we would classify under the heading of ‘welfare’ came to be the responsibility of bishops – poor relief, public works, education, health care, hospitality for travellers, prison visiting, ransoming of captives, the provision of public entertainments and spectacles. They even included, in one case that we know of, banking: Bishop Masona of Mérida, in southern Spain, established a bank in about 580 for making loans to the public. These day-to-day responsibilities gave the bishop authority and power, a position of leadership in the community. In addition, of course, and above all else, the bishop possessed spiritual power: control over the administration of the sacraments of salvation, leadership in the intercessory activity of prayer and rogation, power to bind with the threat of excommunication, access to divine medicine of exorcism and healing, opportunity to sanction, encourage and organize the cult of saints and their relics.

This upward drift in the public profile of the bishop and his evermultiplying staff was a matter for the attention not just of the citizenry within the walls of the cathedral city but also of the dwellers in the rural hinterland. If official Christianity was, increasingly with the passing years, what gave cohesion and identity to a community there was some inducement to throw in your lot with it. Rural conversion, like many other varieties of conversion to Christianity (or other faiths), partook of something of the nature of joining a club.

We must make allowance too for the steady reiteration by bishops of the kind of preaching that we have already met in the homilies of Maximus of Turin. Bishops hammered away at the same old themes throughout the fifth and sixth centuries. Here, by way of example, is Caesarius, bishop of Arles from c. 500 to 543.

We have heard that some of you make vows to trees, pray to fountains, and practice diabolical augury. Because of this there is such sorrow in our hearts that we cannot receive any consolation. What is worse, there are some unfortunate and miserable people who not only are unwilling to destroy the shrines of the pagans but even are not afraid or ashamed to build up those which have been destroyed. Moreover, if anyone with a thought of God wants to burn the wood of those shrines or to tear to pieces and destroy the diabolical altars, they become angry, rave with fury, and are excited with excessive frenzy. They even go so far as to dare to strike those who out of love for God are trying to overthrow the wicked idols; perhaps they do not even hesitate to plan their death. What are these unfortunate, miserable people doing? They are deserting the light and running to darkness; they reject God and embrace the Devil. They desert life while they follow after death; by repudiating Christ they proceed to impiety. Why then did these miserable people come to church? Why did they receive the sacrament of baptism – if afterwards they intended to return to the profanation of idols?8

Caesarius was an accomplished preacher. His 238 surviving sermons were composed in the straightforward Latin of daily speech in southern Gaul, not the elaborate literary Latin then fashionable among intellectuals. They were short, direct and pithy, fashioned to reach and influence an everyday audience of everyday men and women throughout the diocese. To this end Caesarius had extracts from the corpus copied for circulation among the local clergy. He spared no effort to ensure that Christian standards of behaviour were proclaimed loudly and unambiguously before his flock.

The sermons of Caesarius enjoyed a wide and a long circulation. In the official Homiliary – the standard collection of sermons for regular use – of the seventh-century Spanish church, nearly half of the homilies are those of Caesarius. It is from Spain too that there survives a work which specifically addresses itself to rural mission. This is the De Correctione Rusticorum of Martin of Braga. (It is a title which is a little hard to translate. The Latin word correctio, at this date, implies reform through punishment; and while the primary meaning of rusticus is ‘countryman’, the notion of ‘rusticity’ was not just a statement about locality but had overtones about behaviour and disposition as well. On the Castigation of Country-dwellers might do.) Martin, like his great namesake, was a native of Pannonia who had received a good education and had travelled in the east. In circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery he turned up in Spain about the middle of the sixth century. By the year 572 he had become bishop of Braga, now in northern Portugal, and he died in about 580. Braga, the Roman Bracara Augusta, was the capital of its province, Gallaecia (rather more extensive to the east and south than the modern Galicia), its bishop therefore the leading churchman of the province. Martin was an ecclesiastic of rank and influence.

De Correctione Rusticorum takes the form of a letter addressed to one of Martin’s fellow bishops, Polemius of Astorga, but the writer makes it clear that it was intended for public delivery as a sermon. Martin began with a brief sketch of sacred history, firmly locating the pagan gods among the demonic ministers of the Devil when he was cast out of heaven:

The demons also persuaded men to build them temples, to place there images or statues of wicked men and to set up altars to them, on which they might pour out the blood not only of animals but even of men. Besides, many demons, expelled from heaven, also preside either in the sea or in rivers or springs or forests; men ignorant of God also worship them as gods and sacrifice to them. They call on Neptune in the sea, on Lamiae in the rivers, on Nymphs in spring, on Dianas in woods, who are all malignant demons and wicked spirits, who deceive unbelieving men, who are ignorant of the Sign of the Cross, and vex them. However, not without God’s permission do they do harm, because the rustics have angered God and do not believe with their whole heart in the faith of Christ, but are so inconstant that they apply the very names of demons to each day and speak of the days of Mars, Mercury, Jove, Venus and Saturn …

His exposition merges into a catechism, with digressions to identify various sins such as celebrating the New Year with the pagan Roman festival of the Kalends of January (that is, 1 January), and looks forward to the end of the world. He dwells on baptism as ‘a pact you made with God’ and then turns to human betrayals of that pact:

And how can any of you, who has renounced the Devil and his angels and his evil works, now return again to the worship of the Devil? For to burn candles at stones and trees and springs, and where three roads meet, what is it but the worship of the Devil? To observe divinations and auguries and the days of idols, what is it but the worship of the Devil? To observe the days of Vulcan [23 August] and the first days of each month, to adorn tables and hang up laurels, to watch the foot, to pour out fruit and wine over a log in the hearth, and to put bread in a spring, what is it but the worship of the Devil? For women to invoke Minerva in their weaving, to keep weddings for the day of Venus [Friday], to consider which day one should set out on a journey, what is it but the worship of the Devil? To mutter spells over herbs and invoke the names of demons in incantations, what is it but the worship of the Devil? And many other things which it takes too long to say. And you do all these things after renouncing the Devil, after baptism, and, returning to the worship of demons and to their evil works, you have betrayed your faith and broken the pact you made with God. You have abandoned the sign of the Cross you received in baptism, and you give heed to the signs of the Devil by little birds and sneezing and many other things. Why does no augury harm me or any other upright Christian? Because where the sign of the Cross has gone before, the sign of the Devil is nothing …9

And he concludes with a call to repentance and the replacement of these pagan practices with Christian ones. Martin of Braga was not a man, we might judge, subject to self-doubt. But his castigation makes very plain the difficulty, not indeed for him but for the modern historian, of drawing hard-and-fast boundaries between Christian and pagan, religion and superstition, piety and magic, the acceptable and the forbidden. It is a salutary reminder of the penumbral ambiguities of our subject.

Martin’s tract, like the sermons of Caesarius, circulated widely: we shall meet it again. Admonition of this sort by individuals was reinforced by the collective voice of bishops assembled in church councils, formally condemning non-Christian practices and commending Christian ones. The sheer amount of attention devoted by the ecclesiastical authorities of this period to the quality of Christian observance is cumulatively impressive. Martin of Braga’s views on the sinfulness of celebrating the Kalends of January were echoed by the bishops assembled at Tours in 567, by a diocesan synod held at Auxerre in the latter part of the sixth century, and by the Spanish bishops gathered for the fourth council of Toledo in 633. All sorts of divination and soothsaying and augury-reading were repeatedly condemned. By way of example, consider one type of practitioner referred to in our texts as an ariolus (plural arioli). Isidore of Seville, whose great work, The Etymologies, was the nearest thing to an encyclopaedia that the early Middle Ages produced, informs us that ‘arioli are so called because they utter impious prayer at the altars [aras] of idols, and offer deadly sacrifices, and accept instructions from the swarms of demons.’ Caesarius of Arles and Martin of Braga told their hearers to shun the ariolus. So did the civil law: no one should consult an ariolus, ruled the Theodosian Code promulgated in 438. But people plainly did. Gregory of Tours tells a story that is apposite here.10 A young man named Aquilinus was out hunting with his father when he experienced some sort of seizure; he had a violent fit of trembling and then fell down in a coma. His kinsfolk recognized this as the work of the Devil and feared that a spell had been laid on him by an enemy. So they called in arioli, ‘as is the way of country people’ (ut mos rusticorum habet), who tied on ligatures and administered medicines; but in vain. Only then did the family take the boy to the shrine of St Martin at Tours where – need we say? – he was cured. This is a most interesting story. The ariolus in this context is the person of first recourse when the inexplicable disaster has occurred and foul play is suspected. We may call him, if we so desire, a witch doctor, but need to recognize that this is a loaded and therefore limiting term. There is no suggestion that the kinsfolk of Aquilinus were anything but Christian, yet it is to the ariolus that they first turn. Gregory reports this without apparent surprise or explicit condemnation, though there is implicit lamentation over their ‘rusticity’. But it wasn’t only rustics who resorted to arioli. In Spain at least it would appear that the clergy were not above doing so. The bishops assembled at Toledo in 633 – under the presidency of Isidore, no less – forbade bishops, priests, deacons or anyone whomsoever in clerical orders to consult arioli or other types of magician, augur, diviner or soothsayer. What intriguing complications are hinted at by this decree: further suggestions of frontiers obscurely blurred.

Now from the prohibitive to the positive: let us take, from manifold possibilities, sabbath observance and the sign of the cross. Church councils repeatedly enjoined the observance of Sunday by abstinence from labour: at Orléans in 538, at Mâcon in 585, at Narbonne in 589. So too did Martin of Braga in De Correctione Rusticorum. Moralists were at hand with gruesome tales of what might happen to transgressors. Gregory of Tours told a story of a man who, while on his way to church one Sunday, saw that animals had strayed into his field and done damage to his crops. He took up an axe to do some fencing to block the gap through which the beasts had strayed. His arm was instantly paralysed and remained so until it received massage treatment from the holy man Senoch. In another tale he told of a girl who combed her hair on a Sunday; the teeth of the comb rammed themselves into her palm, causing her great pain, until she prayed at the tomb of St Gregory of Langres.

Devotion to the cross was stimulated by the discovery of the. True Cross early in the fourth century, attributed to the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine. Having been rare before, from the fourth century the cross began to be a frequent motif in Christian art – for example, on gravestones. We have already seen Martin deflect a falling tree simply by making the sign of the cross. It was presented by Gregory of Tours as an unfailing source of help for the pious in any emergency. The hermit Caluppa was once cornered in his cave in the Auvergne by two dragons: he put them to flight with the sign of the cross (though one of them farted defiantly as it lumbered out of the cave’s mouth). When the holy abbot Portianus was forced to have a drink with the evil Sigivald he made the sign of the cross, the cup shattered and a snake slithered out of the spilt wine. Gregory also tells us an interesting story of some sceptics. It occurs in his account of the recluse Friardus.

He passed his whole life praising God, in prayer and in vigils. He took from the earth with his own hands what he needed for his subsistence, and although he excelled others by his hard work he never ceased to pray. And so for his neighbours and for strangers, for such is the way of country people [rusticorum], he was the object of much ridicule. One day he was in a field cutting corn and tying it into sheaves along with the other harvesters, and a swarm of those annoying and fierce flies which are commonly called wasps came by. They bitterly attacked the harvesters, pricking them with their stings, and surrounding them on all sides, and so the men avoided the place where the nest was. And they mocked the blessed Friardus, saying to him slyly, ‘May it occur to the blessed man, the religious man, who never ceases to pray, who always makes the sign of the cross on his ears and eyes, who always carries the standard of salvation with him wherever he goes, that he harvest near the nest and tame it with his prayer.’ The holy man took these words as a slur upon divine power, and he fell to the ground in prayer to his Lord. Then he approached the wasps and made the sign of the cross over them, saying ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.’ As this prayer left his mouth the wasps all hurried to hide themselves inside the hole from which they had come, and Friardus cut the stalks by the nest without harm, in the sight of all.11

Friardus lived on an island in the estuary of the Loire not far from Nantes. Yet it is clear from what Gregory tells us of him that he had contact with the local people and influence upon them. It is also clear that there were perhaps surprisingly many such drop-outs from conventional society in the Gaul of Gregory’s day. Was this also the case in other western provinces of the former empire, which produced no Gregory of Tours to enlighten and enliven us? Cross the Pyrenees into Spain and consider the case of Emilian. We know a fair amount about him because his life was written by Braulio, pupil of Isidore and bishop of Saragossa, in about 635; Braulio’s brother Fronimian was abbot of the monastery which had grown up on the site of Emilian’s hermitage.12 Emilian was a shepherd in the Rioja who was fired by a vision to devote his life to God. He sought out a hermit named Felix who lived near Haro for instruction. Having learned all that he could from Felix, Emilian returned to the Rioja and settled as a hermit at Berceo. Troubled by the multitude of people who flocked to him, Emilian retired (like Antony retreating further into the Egyptian desert) into the mountainous recesses of the Sierra de la Demanda. But his holiness could not be hidden. The local bishop, Didymus of Tarazona, sought him out, desiring to make him a priest. (Reading between the lines one may suspect a case of friction between bishop and hermit, not without parallels in this and other periods. Did the bishop want to regularize the position of this highly unconventional figure?) With reluctance Emilian agreed to be ordained to minister in the church of Berceo. We learn that he had clerics (in the plural) under him there, so we may infer that this was a small community of clergy with responsibility for a wide area round about, like the communities which served Martin’s churches in Touraine. He was an exemplary priest – ‘unlike those in our own times’, comments Braulio. Indeed in some respects he was too good, or perhaps he did not hit it off with his clergy, or perhaps he was just hopeless at administration. Whatever the reason, his clerics accused him before the bishop of squandering the possessions of his church (in charitable giving, as Braulio insists). The bishop relieved him of his cure and Emilian retired to his hermitage for the remainder of his long life. He died in 573.

The miracles and wonders worked through the holy Emilian before and after his death show him as a spiritual force in Riojan society. Here is an example. Strange goings-on were reported from the household of the senator Honorius. (It is far from clear what the term ‘senator’ might signify in sixth-century Spain, but Braulio, a good classical scholar, surely intends us to understand a man of high social rank. Emilian, like Martin, was cultivated by the aristocracy.) At his dinner parties, the plates and dishes would be found piled with the bones or even with the dung of animals; and while the household slept items of clothing were mysteriously abstracted from their resting places and hung from the ceilings. More was at stake than just a little local difficulty with the servants. Honorius called Emilian in to exorcize what was evidently an evil spirit. And Emilian succeeded, though the spirit hurled a rock at him before it was vanquished. Honorius’ gratitude was tangible. Emilian always did his best to feed the crowds of visitors who flocked to his refuge. On one occasion supplies of food were exhausted. Hardly had Emilian ceased to pray for assistance when suddenly carts loaded with food appeared at the door. They had been sent by Honorius.

Several more examples could be cited. There was the slave-girl of the senator Sicorius whose blindness he cured, the exorcism he performed on one of the slaves of Count Eugenius, the evil spirit which had taken possession of both the senator Nepotian and his wife Proseria cast out by him, the woman named Barbara who had travelled all the way from Amaya to seek a cure for her paralysis, the monk Armentarius whose swollen stomach was cured when Emilian made the sign of the cross over it – and so on. We need not linger over these. There is also one interesting case of scepticism. When Emilian foretold the conquest of Cantabria by the king of Spain and summoned all the local nobility – an interesting sidelight on his local influence – to warn them and upbraid them for their sins, one senator, by name Abundantius, said that Emilian was a delirious old fool. But he got his come-uppance; King Leovigild killed him shortly afterwards.

Emilian’s hermitage grew after his death into one of the most famous monastic houses of medieval Spain, San Millán de la Cogolla, ‘Saint Emilian of the Cowl’ (though there is no reason to suppose that Emilian was ever a monk). Others who sought a solitary ascetic life were compelled almost at once to organize their disciples into monastic communities. Take the case of Romanus, who settled at Condat on the edge of the Jura mountains of eastern Gaul in about 435. Here, in a region quite as inhospitable as Emilian’s Sierra de la Demanda, Romanus intended to live the solitary life of a hermit. But he was joined first by his brother Lupicinus, then by a trickle of other disciples which soon turned into a flood. Among them came that Eugendus, the son of the priest of Izernore, whose childhood vision of the monastic life is movingly described in the Vita Patrum Iurensium (The Life of the Jura Fathers), a work composed in about 515 which is our main source of information about these communities.13 We also learn that there were plentiful lay hangers-on who had to be fed – just as at Emilian’s hermitage. It was impossible for ascetics to cut themselves off altogether from the world. Indeed, it was a condition of their influence that they did not entirely cut themselves off from it. We see Lupicinus interceding with the secular authorities, like Germanus a generation earlier, on behalf of the unjustly oppressed poor. The monks of the Jura were bound to the world by economic need: at one point we catch a glimpse of them travelling all the way to the Mediterranean to buy salt. And they were sought out by petitioners. Solicited on behalf of a girl possessed by a demon, Eugendus dictated a letter to the evil spirit – we are given the text of it – commanding it to leave her; and it did, even before the letter was delivered. The lady Syagria, a member of the leading aristocratic dynasty of Lyons, gravely ill, was cured by eating a letter from Eugendus. Note the sequel: the whole city of Lyons rejoiced with her and her family.

Episcopal initiatives in spiritual and social welfare, preaching, legislation, the example of ascetic renunciation, the demonstrably superior power of Christian over other sorts of magic, miraculous cures worked by holy men: all have something to hint to us about how it was thought that rural conversion might best be effected. I am inclined to give most weight to the full-hearted commitment of the aristocracy to this task. Maximus of Turin and John Chrysostom had surely been correct in their prescriptions: get the landowners to build churches into which they can coax or bribe or lash their tenantry, and then bit by bit something – but what? – will start to happen. Two centuries later Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was still thinking along these lines in the admonition he sent to Sardinian landowners to stamp out pockets of heathenism among their peasants. And if they show themselves reluctant to come to God, he wrote, jack their rents up until they do! Pope Gregory, the first pontiff to use the humble title ‘servant of the servants of God’, was quite capable of adopting the commanding tones of the great Roman aristocrat that by upbringing he was.