The Life of the Fathers

Gregory’s Liber Vitae Patrum — the “Book of the Life of the Fathers” — gathers twenty lives of the holy men of sixth-century Gaul: bishops, abbots, hermits, and recluses, several of them Gregory’s own kinsmen. It is the work in which Gregory shows the desert transplanted to the Auvergne, ascetic sanctity flourishing in the Latin West, and — as its Orthodox translator Fr. Seraphim Rose would insist — the Christian West’s own fathers, cut from the same cloth as the fathers of the Egyptian desert.

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

Twenty Lives of Gallic Saints

The Liber Vitae Patrum is distinct from Gregory’s other hagiographic books. Where the Glory of the Martyrs, the Glory of the Confessors, and the Miracles collect brief episodes of wonder at many shrines, the Vita Patrum offers full biographies — twenty chapters, each a life of a single holy man (or, in one case, a holy pair) of recent Gaul, most of them from Gregory’s own region and century (Gregory of Tours, Life of the Fathers, trans. Edward James, Liverpool, 2nd ed. 1991). The subjects are bishops, abbots, hermits, and recluses of the Auvergne, Burgundy, and neighboring lands: men such as St. Illidius of Clermont, whose tomb had healed the young Gregory; St. Gregory of Langres, his great-grandfather; St. Gallus of Clermont, his uncle; St. Nicetius of Lyon, his kinsman; the hermit St. Friardus; the recluse St. Lupicinus; and others (Gregory, Vita Patrum 1–20; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991; see The Episcopal Aristocracy).

The prominence of Gregory’s own relatives among the “fathers” is striking and deliberate. Several of the twenty lives are of his kin, written from family memory, so that the book is at once a hagiography of holy Gaul and, in part, a hagiography of Gregory’s own house (James, Life of the Fathers, 1991, introduction; Wood, Gregory of Tours, Headstart History, 1994). This is not vanity but Gregory’s conviction, expressed structurally: that sanctity ran in the episcopal families of Gaul, and that the holy dead of his own lineage stood in the same company as the great ascetics (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001).

The Desert in Gaul

The very title Vita Patrum — “Life of the Fathers” — deliberately echoes the Vitae Patrum tradition of the Egyptian desert, the lives and sayings of the fathers of Scetis and the Thebaid that had reached the West and shaped its monasticism (James, Life of the Fathers, 1991, introduction; see The Desert Fathers). Gregory presents his Gallic holy men as continuators of that tradition — men who fasted, kept vigil, withdrew to cells and islands, wrestled with demons, and worked wonders, exactly as the Egyptian fathers had done (Gregory, Vita Patrum, passim; James, 1991). The monasticism he depicts was real: sixth-century Gaul had a flourishing ascetic life, shaped by the earlier examples of St. Martin at Marmoutier and of the monastic centers of Lérins and the Rhône valley, and carried forward by the hermits and abbots whose lives Gregory records (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley, 1985; see St. John Cassian, whose Conferences and Institutes transmitted the desert to Gaul).

In the Vita Patrum Gregory is doing for the ascetics of Gaul what the Miracles of St. Martin does for the shrine-cult: documenting the presence and power of holiness in his own land and time. The book is thus both a monument of Western monastic hagiography and a witness that the ideals of the desert had taken root in the Latin West — that Gaul had its own fathers (James, Life of the Fathers, 1991; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

The Theology of Sanctity

The lives are unified by a theology of holiness that Gregory states in his prologues. He raises the classic hagiographic question — whether one should speak of the “life” (singular) or the “lives” (plural) of the saints — and answers, in a much-discussed passage, that it is better to speak of the Life of the fathers, because though the saints are many, the life of holiness by which they live is one: the one life of Christ at work in them all (Gregory, Vita Patrum, prologue; James, Life of the Fathers, 1991, introduction, on the “grammar of sanctity”). This is not a grammatical quibble but a theological claim: the diversity of the saints manifests a single sanctity, the life of God shared among his friends. The saints differ in their circumstances — bishop, hermit, recluse — but are one in the holiness that is Christ living in them (Gregory, Vita Patrum, prologue; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

Each life, then, is an instance of the one Life: a demonstration that the sanctity of the Gospel and the desert was available and actual in sixth-century Gaul. The miracles Gregory records — healings, exorcisms, prophecies, wonders at the tombs — are, as throughout his corpus, reported as the testimony of the tradition and of Gregory himself to the virtus of these holy men (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993).

The Orthodox Reception

It is the Vita Patrum, above all Gregory’s other works, that carried his name into the Orthodox revival of the twentieth century. In 1988 the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood published an English translation, Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers, translated from the Latin and French by Fr. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett and edited by Fr. Seraphim, with his own extensive introductory material — a “Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West,” an “Introduction to Orthodox Gaul,” and a reflection on the relevance of the monastic Gaul Gregory describes to Orthodox Christians in the modern West (Gregory of Tours, Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers, trans. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett, ed. Seraphim Rose, Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1988). For Fr. Seraphim, Gregory’s Gallic fathers were not curiosities of a foreign confession but the Orthodox West’s own desert fathers, saints of the undivided Church whose ascetic witness spoke directly to the recovery of authentic Orthodoxy in America and Europe (see The Vita Patrum and St. Herman Press; Seraphim Rose).

That an ancient Frankish bishop’s lives of Gaulish ascetics should be taken up, fourteen centuries later, by an American Orthodox brotherhood as a text of living spiritual formation is a remarkable testimony to the continuity Gregory himself believed in — the one Life of the fathers, East and West, before and after the schism (see A Pre-Schism Western Father). The Vita Patrum is, on this reading, not merely a source for sixth-century Gaul but a living link in the Orthodox tradition of the veneration of the saints.

References

Gregory of Tours. Life of the Fathers (Liber Vitae Patrum). Trans. Edward James. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Translated Texts for Historians, 2nd ed. 1991. (The twenty lives; the prologue on the one “Life” of the fathers; the lives of Illidius, Gregory of Langres, Gallus, Nicetius, and the hermits.)
Gregory of Tours. Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers. Trans. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett; ed. Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1988. (The Orthodox English edition; Rose’s “Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West” and “Introduction to Orthodox Gaul.”)
Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The theology of sanctity; the family among the fathers.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The miracle-reports of the Vita Patrum as testimony.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (Monastic and ascetic Gaul.)
Wood, Ian. Gregory of Tours. Bangor: Headstart History, 1994. (The Vita Patrum and Gregory’s kin.)