The Vita Patrum and the St. Herman Press

The most concrete fruit of the modern Orthodox recovery of Gregory is an English edition of his Life of the Fathers, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett and published by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood at Platina in 1988. This file traces that remarkable thread — an ancient Frankish bishop’s lives of Gaulish ascetics taken up by an American Orthodox brotherhood as a text of living spiritual formation — and the reading of “Orthodox Gaul” that Fr. Seraphim built around it.

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

The 1988 Edition

In 1988 the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood — the monastic community at Platina, California, founded by Fr. Seraphim Rose and Fr. Herman Podmoshensky and the principal English-language voice of the “old calendar” Orthodox spiritual revival in America — published Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers, an English translation of Gregory of Tours’ Liber Vitae Patrum (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). The translation was made from the Latin and French by Fr. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett, and the volume was edited, with extensive introductory material, by Fr. Seraphim himself (ibid.; Princeton University Library catalog record; Internet Archive, Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers). Fr. Seraphim reposed in 1982, and the book appeared posthumously, completed and issued by his brotherhood; it includes an epilogue on Fr. Seraphim’s own life by his disciple Fr. Damascene (Christensen) (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition, 1988).

The volume is far more than a bare translation. Around Gregory’s twenty lives Fr. Seraphim set a substantial framing apparatus: a “Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West,” an “Introduction to Orthodox Gaul,” a life of St. Gregory of Tours himself (drawn from the medieval account attributed to Abbot Odo), additional saints’ lives from Gregory’s other works, and a concluding reflection titled (in substance) on the relevance of monastic Gaul to Orthodox Christians today (St. Herman edition, 1988, contents; “A Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West,” reproduced at chansonetoiles.com). The result is not an academic edition but a devotional and catechetical one — Gregory’s Vita Patrum presented to English-speaking Orthodox Christians as a book of the fathers to be read for spiritual profit (see Seraphim Rose).

Fr. Seraphim’s “Orthodox Gaul”

The heart of Fr. Seraphim’s framing is a thesis: that the Christian Gaul Gregory describes was Orthodox — part of the one undivided Church — and that its saints are therefore the Orthodox West’s own fathers, cut from the same cloth as the fathers of the Egyptian desert and the Christian East (Rose, “Introduction to Orthodox Gaul,” in Vita Patrum, 1988). Gregory’s hermits, recluses, and holy bishops of the Auvergne are, on this reading, not a foreign Catholic phenomenon but authentic Orthodox ascetics; the desert had come to Gaul, and Gaul had produced its own strugglers, whose lives belong on the same shelf as the Lausiac History and the sayings of the desert fathers (Rose, Vita Patrum, 1988; see The Life of the Fathers and The Desert Fathers). This is the same conviction that animated St. John of Shanghai’s recovery of the Western saints, of whom Fr. Seraphim and his brotherhood were spiritual heirs (see Western Saints Restoration; A Pre-Schism Western Father).

Fr. Seraphim pressed the point toward the present. In a concluding section on Orthodox monasticism today in the light of monastic Gaul, he argued that the experience of the ascetic strugglers of Gregory’s Gaul was directly relevant to Orthodox Christians in modern America and the West — that these were not remote curiosities but models for a living Orthodox asceticism, examples of how the Gospel had been lived out in a Western land and could be again (Rose, Vita Patrum, 1988; Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, St. Herman Press, 2003). For Fr. Seraphim, translating Gregory was thus an act of Orthodox mission and formation, not antiquarianism: he was giving the English-speaking Orthodox world its own Western fathers.

The Same Thread Across the Repository

This is the same Fr. Seraphim, and the same theological conviction, that this repository documents elsewhere in its treatment of hagiography as a source of Orthodox knowledge. Fr. Seraphim’s defense of the saints’ lives — his insistence that “what the Church receives and transmits as an authentic expression of the Orthodox spiritual life cannot be fundamentally false,” and that the Church’s reception of a holy life carries an authority that individual source-critical judgments do not override — is the theological backdrop against which his Vita Patrum project makes sense (see Saints as Theology; and the repository’s flagship treatment at the Xenia methodology). Gregory’s Vita Patrum was, for Fr. Seraphim, exactly such an authentic transmission — a genuine deposit of the Orthodox spiritual life from the pre-Schism West, to be received with the reverence due to the fathers.

It is worth holding this together with the source-critical care of Section 06 without contradiction. The two dispositions operate at different levels and are both affirmed by the repository’s methodology. Fr. Seraphim’s point is theological and ecclesial: that the Vita Patrum transmits, authentically, the Orthodox ascetic life of Gaul, and that the Church’s reception of these saints is trustworthy. The source-critical point (§3.5) is evidential: that any given miracle in Gregory’s pages reaches us on his testimony and is reported as such. These do not conflict — the second is the discipline by which individual claims are handled; the first is the confidence in which the whole is received (see Value and Limits; the Xenia methodology). One can pin each wonder to Gregory’s word and still receive the Vita Patrum, with Fr. Seraphim, as a true book of the Orthodox fathers.

A Frankish Bishop in the American Wilderness

There is something fitting, and moving, in the particular route by which Gregory reached the modern Orthodox world. His Vita Patrum was Englished not by a university press but by a monastic brotherhood in the mountains of northern California — a community that had deliberately taken up a hidden, ascetic life on the far edge of the Western world, and that saw in Gregory’s Gaulish hermits its own forebears (Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose, 2003; see Seraphim Rose). The bishop who had documented the desert transplanted to sixth-century Gaul was received, fourteen centuries later, by strugglers who understood themselves to be transplanting that same desert to twentieth-century America. The continuity Gregory believed in — the one Life of the fathers, across every land and age — was enacted in the very manner of his rediscovery. His Vita Patrum, a book of the fathers of Orthodox Gaul, became a book of formation for the fathers of Orthodox America (Rose, Vita Patrum, 1988; see The Life of the Fathers).

See Also

• The Life of the Fathers — Gregory’s Vita Patrum itself
• A Pre-Schism Western Father — Gregory’s Orthodox veneration and the recovery of the Western saints
• Seraphim Rose — the translator and editor, and his theology of hagiography
• The Xenia methodology — the repository’s flagship on ecclesial reception and source criticism
• Value and Limits — how the two dispositions fit together
• The Desert Fathers — the desert tradition Fr. Seraphim saw continued in Gaul

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. (The Orthodox English edition; Rose’s “Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West,” “Introduction to Orthodox Gaul,” the life of Gregory attributed to Abbot Odo, and the reflection on monastic Gaul and Orthodoxy today; the epilogue on Fr. Seraphim by Fr. Damascene.)
• Princeton University Library catalog and Internet Archive records for Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers (Gregory of Tours; trans. Seraphim Rose and Paul Bartlett). (For the translators, editor, publisher, and date.)
• Rose, Seraphim. “A Prologue of the Orthodox Saints of the West.” Reproduced at chansonetoiles.com. (The framing thesis of the Orthodox West.)
• Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2003. (Fr. Seraphim’s life, the brotherhood, and the Vita Patrum project.)
• METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 and §4.1, this repository; and the cross-referenced treatments in Saints as Theology and the Xenia methodology.