The Episcopal Aristocracy of Gaul

Gregory was born into one of the great Gallo-Roman senatorial families of Gaul — a clan so thick with bishops that he could claim all but five of his eighteen predecessors at Tours as kinsmen. This file traces that lineage: his great-grandfather St. Gregory of Langres, his uncle St. Gallus of Clermont, his uncle Nicetius of Lyon, the martyr-ancestor Vettius Epagathus, and the world of a family for whom the episcopate was almost an inheritance.

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

A Senatorial Family of Clermont

Gregory was born around 538, at Clermont (Roman Arverna, in the Auvergne), into the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy — the old landed, Latin-speaking, classically educated elite that had governed Roman Gaul and now largely governed its church (Gregory of Tours, Vita Patrum, prologue and the lives of his kinsmen; Wood, Gregory of Tours, Headstart History, 1994; Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley, 1985). His family held estates in the Auvergne and in Burgundy and belonged to the interlocking network of great families that supplied the bishops of central and south-eastern Gaul. Gregory is unusually forthcoming about his own ancestry, because for him it was not vanity but theology: his relatives were holy men, and their sanctity was part of the argument of his books (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001; see The Life of the Fathers).

On his father’s side Gregory claimed descent from Vettius Epagathus, one of the martyrs of Lyon in the persecution of 177 whose story is preserved in the letter of the churches of Lyon and Vienne (Gregory, Hist. I.29 and the martyr-tradition of Lyon; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). Whether or not the genealogy can be verified across the intervening centuries, the claim locates Gregory’s self-understanding precisely: he saw himself as the heir of the confessors and martyrs of Gaul, a member of a family whose Christianity reached back to the age of the persecutions.

The Bishops of the Family

The density of bishops in Gregory’s kindred is remarkable even by the standards of the Gallo-Roman episcopate. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side was St. Gregory of Langres (Gregorius, ob. c. 539/540), who had been comes (count) of Autun before becoming bishop of Langres — a layman-magistrate turned holy bishop, of whom Gregory wrote a life in the Vita Patrum (Gregory, Vita Patrum 7, “St. Gregory of Langres”; Edward James, trans., Life of the Fathers, Liverpool, 2nd ed. 1991). It was after this great-grandfather that Gregory himself was renamed Gregory (see Illness and the Vow). His uncle was St. Gallus of Clermont (Gallus, bishop of Clermont, ob. 551), his father’s brother, who raised the young Gregory after his father’s early death and whose life Gregory also recorded (Gregory, Vita Patrum 6, “St. Gallus”; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991).

The lineage of bishops extended further. Through his mother Armentaria, Gregory was connected to the episcopate of Lyon: his great-uncle (his mother’s uncle) Nicetius of Lyon (St. Nizier, bishop of Lyon, ob. 573) was a bishop whose life Gregory wrote and whose sanctity he vigorously championed (Gregory, Vita Patrum 8, “St. Nicetius of Lyon”; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991). Other kinsmen appear across his works as bishops, abbots, and holy men of the Auvergne and the Rhône valley. The family was, in effect, a dynasty of the sacred office — one of a handful of great clans among whom the sees of central and eastern Gaul were passed and shared (Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994; Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985).

“All But Five” — Kinship with the Bishops of Tours

Gregory makes the point explicit and famous in the Histories. Recounting his own trial in 580, and defending his standing before the assembled bishops and the king, he sets out his lineage and claims a startling continuity with the see he held: of the eighteen bishops who had occupied the throne of Tours before him, all but five, he says, were connected to him by ties of family (Gregory, Hist. V.49; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974). He had, moreover, succeeded to Tours after his kinsman Eufronius, and his elevation continued a pattern by which the see had repeatedly passed within the same aristocratic network (Gregory, Hist. IV.15, V.49; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994).

The claim is not merely genealogical boasting. It served, in the context of the trial, to establish Gregory’s legitimacy and rootedness against his accusers; and it expressed his conviction that he stood in an unbroken succession of holy predecessors reaching back through the bishops of Tours to St. Martin himself (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Breukelaar, Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul, Göttingen, 1994). To be bishop of Tours was, for Gregory, to be both the heir of Martin and the heir of his own sanctified family — the two lines of succession, spiritual and familial, converging in his person (Heinzelmann, 2001).

Formation in a Holy Household

Gregory’s formation was shaped by this world of holy kinsmen. After the early death of his father, Florentius, he was raised in the households of clerical relatives — under his uncle Gallus of Clermont and, for his education, under the priest Avitus of Clermont (later bishop of that city), from whom Gregory says he learned the Scriptures rather than the pagan poets (Gregory, Vita Patrum 2, on Avitus; Hist. V.49; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). His education was ecclesiastical and biblical, steeped in the lives of the saints and the round of the liturgy, rather than in the classical rhetorical training that had formed earlier Gallo-Roman aristocrats — a fact he would later invoke in his apologies for his “rustic” Latin (see The Rustic Latin).

This upbringing among sanctified relatives is the key to Gregory’s whole outlook. He did not need to seek out models of holiness; he had grown up among them, in a family that understood the episcopate as a sacred vocation and the veneration of the saints as the center of life. When he came to write the Vita Patrum, several of its subjects were his own kin, and he could write of them as one who had known the family memory of their holiness at first hand (Gregory, Vita Patrum, prologue and lives 6–8; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991; see The Life of the Fathers). The episcopal aristocracy of Gaul was not, for Gregory, an abstraction of social history; it was his own household, and its saints were his relatives.

See Also

References

  • Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (V.49, the trial defense, the “all but five” claim and Gregory’s lineage; IV.15 the succession at Tours; I.29 the Lyon martyrs.)
  • Gregory of Tours. Life of the Fathers (Liber Vitae Patrum). Trans. Edward James. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Translated Texts for Historians, 2nd ed. 1991. (Lives of St. Gregory of Langres [VP 7], St. Gallus of Clermont [VP 6], St. Nicetius of Lyon [VP 8], and Avitus [VP 2]; Gregory’s relatives.)
  • Wood, Ian. Gregory of Tours. Bangor: Headstart History, 1994. (Gregory’s family, ancestry, and formation; the episcopal network of Gaul.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The Gallo-Roman senatorial episcopate and its family monopolies.)
  • Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (Gregory’s family as part of his theological and historiographical program; the double succession to Martin and to his kin.)
  • Breukelaar, Adriaan H. B. Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994. (Lineage and legitimacy in Gregory’s self-presentation.)