Illness and the Vow at St. Illidius

Born Georgius Florentius, Gregory turned toward the clergy — on his own account — through a near-fatal illness of his youth and a vow made at the tomb of St. Illidius at Clermont, healed only when he promised to enter the Church. This file follows that formative episode, the taking of the name Gregory, and the road to the diaconate — the shrine-cure at the very root of the vocation of the man who would fill eight books with such cures.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)

Georgius Florentius

The saint we know as Gregory was baptized Georgius Florentius — Georgius after a maternal ancestor, Florentius after his father (Gregory of Tours, Vita Patrum 8.1 and the family notices; Wood, Gregory of Tours, Headstart History, 1994; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993, intro.). He was born around 538 at Clermont in the Auvergne, into the senatorial-episcopal clan described in the companion file (see The Episcopal Aristocracy). His father Florentius died while Gregory was still young, and the boy was raised among clerical relatives — under his uncle Gallus, bishop of Clermont, and educated by the priest (later bishop) Avitus (Gregory, Vita Patrum 2; Hist. V.49; James, trans., Life of the Fathers, Liverpool, 1991).

Gregory would later take the name Gregory in religion, after his revered maternal great-grandfather St. Gregory of Langres — the count-turned-bishop whose life he recorded (Gregory, Vita Patrum 7; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). The name-change marked his entry into the sacred vocation and his claim on the sanctity of his lineage; the historian and hagiographer of the Franks bore, deliberately, a holy bishop’s name.

The Cult of St. Illidius at Clermont

The saint at the center of Gregory’s own conversion-story was St. Illidius (French Allyre), an early bishop of Clermont who had died around 384/385 and was buried in the church that bore his name outside the city — Saint-Allyre, a monastery and shrine that became a center of healing (Gregory, Vita Patrum 2, “St. Illidius”; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991; The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, record E00024, on Gregory’s Life of Illidius). Illidius was the patron saint of Clermont — the Arverna of Gregory’s youth — and his tomb was believed to be a place where the sick were cured, exactly the kind of shrine-cult that Gregory would spend his life documenting (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993). Gregory’s own account of Illidius in the Vita Patrum is, significantly, the earliest attestation of the saint’s cult, and it records the miracle that touched Gregory himself (Gregory, Vita Patrum 2; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991).

The Illness and the Vow

Gregory tells the story as his own. As a young man he fell gravely ill — a fever so severe that his life was despaired of (Gregory, Vita Patrum 2; De virtutibus sancti Iuliani and the Glory of the Confessors for related early illnesses; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991). He had himself carried to the tomb of St. Illidius and prayed for healing. On his own telling, a first visit brought only temporary relief; the illness returned, and on a second approach to the shrine he made a vow — that if the saint would cure him, he would enter the service of the Church as a cleric. He was healed, and he kept the vow (Gregory, Vita Patrum 2; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991; Cult of Saints database E00024). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this cure is reported as Gregory’s own testimony to the power of St. Illidius — the account of the man himself of the event he understood as the origin of his vocation — not as an independently established medical fact.

The episode is doubly important. Biographically, it is the hinge that turned a sick aristocratic boy toward the clergy and thus, eventually, toward the episcopate: as one modern study puts it, the vow at the shrine of Illidius “was the first step on his way to becoming a bishop” (Cult of Saints database E00024, on the Life of Illidius). Theologically and historiographically, it is the seed of everything Gregory would later write: the man who owed his own life and calling to a saint’s tomb-cure would go on to compile the largest single collection of such cures to survive from late antique Gaul, and he wrote of them not as a distant collector but as a beneficiary (see The Eight Books of Miracles). His conviction that the saints are present and powerful at their relics was not a literary convention but the ground of his own biography (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; Brown, The Cult of the Saints, Chicago, 1981).

Martin and the Second Cure

The pattern repeated with the saint who would dominate his life. Gregory records that on another occasion, in 563, he was cured of illness — together with one of his clerics — after keeping vigil at the church of St. Martin in Tours, an episode he set down in the Miracles of St. Martin (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini 1.32–33; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; Cult of Saints database E02924). Before he ever became bishop of Tours, that is, Gregory had bound his own health and gratitude to Martin’s shrine; the devotion that would define his episcopate was rooted in personal experience of the saint’s power (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; see The Shrine at Tours). These early cures are, again, reported as Gregory’s own testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

From Deacon to the Threshold of Tours

Having kept his vow, Gregory advanced through the clerical grades. He was ordained deacon around 563, in the church of Clermont and its region, and served in the ecclesiastical world of the Auvergne and, increasingly, at the shrine of Martin at Tours, to which he was drawn by devotion and by family connection (Gregory, Hist. V.49 and the autobiographical notices; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). His mother Armentaria, who had moved to family estates in Burgundy, remained a formative presence, and Gregory records her counsel and her own experiences of the saints (Gregory, Gloria martyrum and Vita Patrum, family notices; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991).

When the see of Tours fell vacant on the death of his kinsman Bishop Eufronius in 573, Gregory — a deacon of proven devotion, of the right family, and already bound to Martin’s shrine — was chosen and consecrated bishop (Gregory, Hist. IV.15, V.49; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994; see The Kings and the See). The road that ended at the throne of Martin had begun at the tomb of Illidius, with a sick boy’s vow — a fact Gregory never forgot, and which he placed, deliberately, at the head of his book on the holy fathers of Gaul.

References

Gregory of Tours. Life of the Fathers (Liber Vitae Patrum). Trans. Edward James. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2nd ed. 1991. (VP 2, St. Illidius, the illness and the vow, and Gregory’s education under Avitus; VP 7, St. Gregory of Langres, the namesake; VP 8, the family of Lyon.)
Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (V.49, autobiographical defense and lineage; IV.15, the succession to Eufronius at Tours.)
Gregory of Tours. The Miracles of the Bishop St. Martin (De virtutibus sancti Martini). Trans. Raymond Van Dam, in Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (VM 1.32–33, Gregory’s cure at Martin’s church in 563.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Gregory’s biography and the shrine-cures; the cult of Illidius at Clermont.)
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The theology of the healing shrine that Gregory’s own cure exemplifies.)
Wood, Ian. Gregory of Tours. Bangor: Headstart History, 1994. (The name Georgius Florentius; the taking of the name Gregory; the diaconate and the road to Tours.)
The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, University of Oxford (records E00024, on Gregory’s Life of Illidius and the vow; E02924, on the cure at Martin’s church in 563). (Cited for the attestation and dating of the episodes.)