08 — Orthodox Veneration
Gregory as a saint of the undivided Church: his feast on 17 November, his standing as a pre-Schism Western father whose relic-and-shrine piety is thoroughly Orthodox in sensibility, his place in the modern Orthodox recovery of the Western saints associated with St. John of Shanghai, and the striking thread by which his Life of the Fathers was translated for the Orthodox West by Fr. Seraphim Rose.
Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)
Gregory died more than four centuries before the schism of 1054, a bishop of the one undivided Church, and he is received in Orthodoxy as such. This section makes the confessional case (METHODOLOGY §4.1): that Gregory’s world — of saints present at their tombs, of healing relics, of the virtus of the holy dead — is not a “medieval Catholic” aberration but authentic Orthodox Christianity, and that his rediscovery by Orthodox Christians in the twentieth century, above all through the labors surrounding St. John of Shanghai and Fr. Seraphim Rose, restored him to a calendar that is properly his own.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| a-pre-schism-western-father.md | The feast of 17 November; Gregory as a saint of the undivided Church; the Orthodoxy of his relic-and-shrine sensibility (Brown, Van Dam); and the recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints associated with St. John of Shanghai. |
| the-vita-patrum-and-st-herman-press.md | The Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett and published by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (Platina, 1988); Rose’s “Orthodox Gaul” and the reading of Gregory’s ascetics as the Orthodox West’s own desert fathers. |
See Also
- The Life of the Fathers — the text at the center of the Orthodox reception
- Western Saints Restoration (St. John of Shanghai) — the twentieth-century recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints
- Seraphim Rose — translator and editor of the Orthodox Vita Patrum
- St. Martin of Tours and St. Genevieve of Paris — the Gaulish saints who share Gregory’s calendar and cult
References
- 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.
- Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
- Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.