The Guardian of Paris

For fifteen centuries Genevieve has been the guardian in the memory of Paris — the mother and defender to whom the city belonged, whose hold on its identity survived the Merovingian dynasty that fostered her cult, the medieval devotion that carried her through its streets, and the Revolution that burned her relics. This file considers the durability of that memory and sets it within the Orthodox veneration of the pre-Schism Western saints.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Gallo-Roman Gaul)

The Durability of the Memory

The most remarkable fact about Genevieve is not any single episode of her Vita but the sheer durability of her hold on Paris. From her burial on the hill about 502/512 to the present, she has been the city’s saint without interruption — through the Merovingian and Carolingian centuries, when the abbey and shrine on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève anchored her cult; through the high and later Middle Ages, when the great processions of her châsse made her the recourse of the whole city in every disaster; through the ancien régime, when a king vowed her a vast new church; through the Revolution, which turned that church into the Panthéon and burned her relics; and into the modern age, when a reduced but real cult continues at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, Brill, 1998, on the continuity of the cult across these ages; see The Processions of the Châsse, Patroness of Paris, The Relics and the Revolution).

The hill still bears her name; the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève remains a place of the city; and even the Panthéon, the monument of the Republic that displaced her, cannot erase that the ground it stands on was hers. Few saints have so thoroughly written themselves into the identity of a great city, and fewer still have kept that place across so complete a series of political and religious ruptures. This durability is, in the end, the strongest historical testimony to what Genevieve was: not the reliability of her miracle-stories, which the source-criticism cannot certify, but the depth and persistence of a veneration that fifteen centuries and a revolution could not dislodge (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998; Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris, 1986).

The Guardian’s Image

Across these centuries the image of Genevieve deepened into a fixed type: the young consecrated woman, often a shepherdess, with the candle the devil could not put out and the angel relit, the coin of her childhood consecration at her throat, sometimes with the keys of the city or with her flock — the very picture of watchful, humble guardianship (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the iconography; see The Blessing of Saint Germanus). The image gathers the meaning of her deeds: the woman who watched over Paris by prayer as a shepherd over the flock, whose small light could not be extinguished by the powers of darkness, and who stood between the city and every peril. It is an image of vigilance — the guardian awake through the night while the city sleeps — and it is the form in which Paris remembered its mother.

That the later French tradition amplified this into a national image — Genevieve as the spiritual patroness of France at its Christian birth — is a development of the modern age and should be read as such (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998; see What Can Be Known). But the core of the image is ancient and true to the Vita: the consecrated virgin who kept watch over her city and defended it by prayer.

Genevieve and the Orthodox Veneration of the Western Saints

Genevieve belongs to the age of the undivided Church, and her enduring memory takes on a particular significance in the Orthodox reclamation of the saints of the pre-Schism West. The Orthodox Church, holding that the sanctity of the West before the schism is part of its own inheritance, venerates the ancient Western saints — the martyrs, bishops, monastics, and holy women of Latin Christendom before 1054 — as genuine saints of the one Church, and keeps their feasts (on the principle and practice of the Orthodox veneration of pre-Schism Western saints, see Holy Tradition; the reclamation is especially associated with the Western-rite and diaspora communities and with the broader twentieth-century Orthodox rediscovery of the ancient West). Genevieve stands in this company as one of its most luminous figures: a consecrated virgin and city-guardian of fifth-century Gaul, contemporary of the last generation of Roman Christendom in the West and of the first Catholic Franks.

She is honoured, in this Orthodox reception, alongside the other fellow pre-Schism Western saints of this repository — St. Martin of Tours, the apostle of Gaul whose cult formed her Vita; St. John Cassian, who carried the wisdom of the desert to Gallic Marseilles in her own generation; and the great saints of the Celtic world, St. Columba of Iona and St. Patrick of Ireland (see St. Martin of Tours; St. John Cassian; St. Columba of Iona; St. Patrick of Ireland). Together they are the founding saints of Latin Christendom whom the Orthodox Church claims as its own; and Genevieve, the guardian of Paris, is among the greatest of them — a holy woman whose watch over her city the Church has kept fifteen hundred years (see The Guardian of Paris — this file — with Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The continuity of the cult; the iconography; the modern amplification.)
  • Heinzelmann, Martin, and Joseph-Claude Poulin. Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris: études critiques. Paris: Champion, 1986. (The early cult and its firmness.)
  • McNamara, Jo Ann, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, trans. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. “Genovefa, Virgin of Paris.”