To my mind, Merovingian Gaul constitutes one of the most fascinating times and places in Western history (I won’t distinguish between church and secular history since the two were inextricably intertwined at the time). Sinners and saints together strode across the stage of the Gallic theater that was left in the wake of the collapsing Roman Empire. The much-maligned (by today’s feminist ideologues) Pope Gregory the Great, convinced that the end-times were near, strove to maintain a voice of pastoral care and sanity while having to deal with such characters as the redoubtable Queen Brunechildis, who eventually met her grisly end by being (here I quote from Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks) “tied to the feet of wild horses and torn apart limb from limb. Finally she died. Her final grave was the fire. Her bones were burnt.” Power struggles were chronically the order of the day, as the Mayors of the Palace gradually wrested the real power from an increasingly effete line of kings.
If this sounds like something out of a Wagnerian
opera, it actually is. Brunechildis, Sigebert, and others from that wild and wooly
era found their way, filtered through the lenses of poetic oral tradition and
legend, into Twilight of the Gods,
the fourth opera in Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
If there were sinners, there were also saints. The
most notable of these was St. Martin of Tours (d. 397), the former soldier who
left the Roman army when he could no longer reconcile it with his Christian
faith. His great desire was to gather like-minded people around him and form a
hermitage, but that was not to be. By popular acclaim he was made Bishop of
Tours. This was an honor he didn’t want. Legend has it that Martin, on hearing
that people were coming to make him bishop, hid in a barn full of geese, but
the geese cackled and gave him away. Whether or not this was true, the story is
given as the reason the people of southern Sweden, specifically in the province
of Skåne, celebrate Martinmas every November 11 with a dinner in which roast
goose is the main feature – Martinsgås.
This was the era of fascination with miracles, and
stories of Martin’s sanctity as demonstrated through the many miracles he
worked abound. Many of these found their way into the Life of St. Martin by Martin’s contemporary biographer
(hagiographer, one could say) Sulpicius Severus (ca. 355–420), whose writings
are collected in this new volume in the Ancient Christian Writers series, Sulpicius Severus: The Complete Works.
Born into an upper-class family in Aquitaine, Sulpicius
was educated in the literary arts and appears to have been an excellent
student. He later married. His wife apparently died fairly young of unknown
causes, but his mother-in-law provided for him an estate that enabled him to
pursue his literary endeavors. After his wife’s death he decided to live an ascetic
life. It was at this time that Sulpicius began to produce the works included in
this book. In 396 he made his literary debut with the Life of Martin.
Sulpicius was a prolific letter-writer, but only
three of his letters are extant, all of which appear in this volume. He maintained a regular correspondence with
his friend the bishop Paulinus of Nola, but only letters from Paulinus to
Sulpicius survive.
Around 402 Sulpicius published his Chronicles, two books that relate the
history of the world from Creation to his own time. The Chronicles differ markedly from the Life of Martin in that, whereas the Life assumes a hagiographical tone by recounting Martin’s many
miracles, the Chronicles are straightforward
historical narrative in which Sulpicius seems to have gone out of his way to
avoid mentioning the biblical miracles.
In his final work, however, Sulpicius boldly resumed
his defense of Martin. Probably published around 406, the Dialogues are the most sophisticated of his literary works. Sulpicius
contrasts Martin, a truly apostolic shepherd of his flock, with the other
clergy of Gaul, careerists bent on acquiring wealth and power. (Does this sound
familiar?)
Sulpicius’ writings in this Ancient Christian
Writers volume are masterfully introduced and translated by Richard J.
Goodrich, lecturer in later Roman and early church history at Gonzaga
University, who also gave us St. Jerome:Commentary on Ecclesiastes in the same series. In my experience editing this
type of book, it’s a praiseworthy achievement when the translator/commentator produces
a volume that breaks down the time barriers by offering not only a translation
that reads smoothly and accessibly for a twenty-first-century audience but also
an introduction that entices you to keep on going.
