Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 787
of the emergence and function of a holy person. Let us pass from west to
east, looking largely at the hagiography of the late sixth century, in order to
establish the distinctive features of what folklorists have called the ‘oikotype’,
the ‘home type’, the ‘locally standardized species’ of accounts that
both justified and delimited the activities of holy persons in differing
Christian environments. 14
The hagiography of Gaul – not only the works of Gregory of Tours but
also earlier sources such as the Lives of the Fathers of the Jura 15 – suggest a
reticence in the face of living holy men which is, at first sight, surprising in
a world that consciously looked back to the classic study of a holy man in
action, written by an exact contemporary – the Life of Martin by Sulpicius
Severus. But it is easy to forget that, with Sulpicius, the memory of Martin
lingered for more than a generation as the special preserve of a profoundly
alienated segment of the Christian aristocracy of Gaul. 16 Martin’s miracles
were presented by Sulpicius himself as the desperate last gestures of a
prophet in a darkening world. They were performed, in part, to counter the
appeal of Antichrist, who, so Martin informed his disciples, had been born
in the east and was already a boy of eight (Sulp. Sev. Dial. ii.14).
A mood of ambivalence about the claims of living holy persons settled
heavily on the Christianity of Gaul. It went back to the cause célèbre of
Priscillian, who had, after all, been known to have prayed successfully for
rain, and yet had ended his life executed as a common sorcerer. 17 The uncertain
light of the imagined approach of Antichrist heightened the need for
caution. All too many wonder-working ‘prophets’ came to enjoy a Christlike
veneration in Gaul and Spain in the course of the fifth and sixth century.
They turned out to be ‘pseudo-prophets’, troubling heralds of Antichrist’s
presence in the world (Sulp. Sev., V. Mart. 24; Greg.Tur.Hist. x.25). In the
panic that accompanied the Hunnish invasion of 451, St Genovefa narrowly
escaped being stoned by the citizens of Paris as one such ‘pseudo-prophet’
(V. Genovefae 12, ed. Krusch, MGH, Script. rer. Mer. 3 (1896) 219).
At the same time, devout aristocrats who admired those monks who followed
in the footsteps of Martin, such as were the late-fifth-century
hermits of the Jura, tended to keep memories of the holy ‘in the family’, as
it were, through intense but inward-looking networks of spiritual friendship.
The senatorial lady Syagria, for instance, kept the letters of St
Eugendus locked away in a cupboard ‘to kiss in lieu of the right hand of the
blessed man’, biting on them with her teeth in urgent search for healing (V.
Eugendi, V. Patr. Jur. iii.12, ed. Martine (1968) 145–6).
One suspects that in Gaul exacting social codes of diffidence among
pious aristocrats – oligarchic codes, partly moulded by envy and by a dislike
14 Fentress and Wickham (1992) 74. 15 Ed. Martine (1968). 16 Stancliffe (1983) 265–312.
17 Chadwick (1976).
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