A Pre-Schism Western Father

Gregory died in 594, a bishop of the one undivided Church, more than four centuries before the schism of 1054; he is venerated as a saint on 17 November, and his whole world — of saints present at their tombs, of healing relics, of the virtus of the holy dead — is thoroughly Orthodox in sensibility. This file makes that confessional case and sets Gregory within the modern Orthodox recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints associated with St. John of Shanghai.

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

The Feast of 17 November

Gregory reposed on 17 November 594 — some sources give the year as 593 or 594, and this collection reports the range — and 17 November has remained his feast (Britannica, “Saint Gregory of Tours”; Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Gregory of Tours,” giving death “17 Nov., in 593 or 594”). [Disputed: the precise year of Gregory's death. Standard references place it in 594, but some give 593; the *Catholic Encyclopedia* records "593 or 594." The day, 17 November, and his age (about 56) are secure; the year is given here as a narrow range, c. 593/594.] He was buried at Tours, in the basilica of St. Martin whose shrine he had served — a fitting rest for the bishop who had made himself the chronicler of Martin’s power (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993). His cult as a saint followed, and he is commemorated on 17 November in the Western calendars and, in the Orthodox recovery of the pre-Schism West, on the same day.

That Gregory is a saint at all is worth stating plainly against a common modern habit of reading him merely as a “source.” He was venerated after his death as a holy bishop, an heir of Martin, a man whose own life had begun with a shrine-cure and whose devotion to the saints was total. The historian and the saint are the same man (see Illness and the Vow).

A Saint of the Undivided Church

Gregory belongs, without qualification, to the undivided Church. He lived and died in the sixth century, in full communion with both Rome and Constantinople, holding the Nicene faith he professed at the head of his Histories against the Arianism of the Goths (Gregory, Hist. I, prol.; see Purpose, Transmission, and the Misnomer). He is a father of the one Church before its Eastern and Western halves were sundered — a status he shares with the other Gaulish and Latin saints of this repository, from Martin and Genevieve to Hilary of Poitiers and John Cassian (see St. Martin of Tours; St. Hilary of Poitiers; St. John Cassian). Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, this collection receives him as such: not as a “medieval Catholic” figure to be viewed across a confessional divide, but as an Orthodox saint of the West whose sanctity the Church confesses.

His exact contemporary, Pope Gregory the Great — Gregory the Dialogist — is likewise received in the East as a pre-Schism Roman father and a Great Hierarch (see St. Gregory the Dialogist). The two Gregorys, sharing a name and a decade, stand together as witnesses that the sixth-century Latin West was Orthodox ground, and that its saints are the Orthodox Church’s own.

The Orthodoxy of the Relic-and-Shrine World

The deepest reason Gregory reads as Orthodox is not chronological but substantive: the whole religious world he inhabited and documented is the world of Orthodox piety. Gregory’s Christianity is centered on the saints — present at their relics, active in healing and protection, honored at their tombs, invoked as intercessors and patrons (Brown, The Cult of the Saints, Chicago, 1981; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; see The Eight Books of Miracles). The theology of praesentia and virtus that Peter Brown and Raymond Van Dam reconstruct from Gregory’s pages — the holy dead not absent but present, the relic a point where heaven touches earth, the shrine a place of cure and sanctuary — is precisely the theology of the veneration of saints and relics that the Orthodox Church has held unbroken from antiquity to today (Brown, 1981; and see Holy Tradition on the veneration of the saints).

To an Orthodox reader, then, Gregory’s eight books of miracles are not the record of an alien “medieval” superstition but a familiar and beloved landscape: pilgrimage to the tombs of the saints, oil and dust and water sanctified by contact with relics, healings and exorcisms sought through the intercession of the holy ones, the saint as the true patron of the city. This is the piety of Orthodox Christians before shrines and relics in every age. Gregory documents, in sixth-century Gaul, the same faith an Orthodox pilgrim brings to the relics of a saint today (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 1981; see A Pre-Schism Western Father — the Vita Patrum thread).

The Recovery of the Western Saints

For centuries after the schism, the saints of the pre-Schism West — Gregory among them — fell out of the working consciousness of the Orthodox East, venerated only locally in the lands where they had lived and largely absent from Eastern calendars. Their recovery for Orthodoxy in the twentieth century is associated above all with St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco (Maximovitch, 1896–1966), who as Archbishop of Western Europe (1951–1962) governed the very lands where these saints had lived and made their restoration a charge upon his clergy (see Western Saints Restoration). St. John held, as a matter of principle, that “the Christian West before the schism is part of the Orthodox patrimony and its saints are the Church’s own,” and he “carefully researched the lives of ancient Western saints,” insisting that his priests learn the local pre-Schism saints, find their relics, and serve them liturgically (rocorstudies.org and related sources, quoted in Western Saints Restoration). His labors turned Orthodox attention to Gaul specifically — “Archbishop St. John’s work with the Orthodox Church of France had originally evoked the fathers’ interest in ancient Gaul” (Archpriest Andrew Phillips, orthochristian.com/91953.html, quoted in the St. John collection).

Gregory of Tours stands near the center of this recovered Gaulish patrimony — not only as one of its saints but as the chief source for the lives of the others. The holy men of the Vita Patrum, the martyrs and confessors of the Glory books, Martin at Tours, the ascetics of the Auvergne: it is very largely through Gregory that the Orthodox recovery of the saints of Gaul has any material to work with at all (see The Life of the Fathers). To recover the Western saints is, in no small part, to read Gregory — which is why the most concrete fruit of that recovery was an Orthodox edition of Gregory’s own Life of the Fathers (see The Vita Patrum and St. Herman Press).

The Company of the Gaulish Saints

Gregory’s Orthodox veneration is thus best understood in company. He belongs with the cluster of Gaulish and Frankish saints this repository treats — St. Martin of Tours, his predecessor and the object of his greatest devotion; St. Genevieve of Paris, whom he independently attests; St. Hilary of Poitiers and St. John Cassian, fathers of the Gallic church and its monasticism; St. Radegund, at whose funeral he presided — all of them saints of the one undivided Church, recovered together for Orthodox veneration in the twentieth century (see St. Martin of Tours; St. Genevieve of Paris; St. Hilary of Poitiers). Among them Gregory has a peculiar dignity: he is the one who wrote the others down. The father of Western hagiography is himself venerated as one of the fathers he described — the chronicler of the saints of Gaul become a saint of Gaul in his own right.

References

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (I, prol., the Nicene confession.)
“Saint Gregory of Tours.” Encyclopædia Britannica. (Life, death, feast of 17 November.)
“St. Gregory of Tours.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, newadvent.org. (Death “17 Nov., in 593 or 594”; the year-range.)
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The theology of praesentia and the relic-cult in Gregory’s world.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Gregory’s shrine-piety; his burial at Tours.)
Phillips, Andrew (Archpriest), “On the Revival of the Veneration of Local Western Saints in the Orthodox Church,” orthochristian.com/91953.html; and ROCOR sources on St. John of Shanghai’s recovery of the Western saints (as cited in the St. John of Shanghai collection).