Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

788 26. holy men
of parvenus of any kind, spiritual or social – combined with a sincere monastic
fear of vainglory. Elatio might ensue from any display of miraculous
powers, thereby turning the quiet ‘temple of the heart’ into a ‘place of merchandise’.
Self-interested drives might creep into the heart of a monk, once
he had the reputation of a wonder-worker to maintain in the face of a notoriously
exacting audience of clients (V. Lupicini, V. Patr. Jur. ii.15, 114).
Only when dead and in the peace of God’s paradise could those dramatic
manifestations of spiritual power and effective patronage, that had been
latent in the soul of the living holy man, blaze forth for the good of all,
because freed by death from the all-too-human stain of vanity (V. Lupicini,
V. Patr. Jur. ii.16, 117).
When, in the 580s, Gregory of Tours began to look back to find memories
of the holy men of his region, his failure to record more than a few
such persons reflected a complicated situation. On the one hand, as a
Gallo-Roman bishop, he had a strong interest in asserting the pre-eminent
importance of the shrine of his own city, that of St Martin of Tours. But,
loyal though he was to the cults of his adopted city and of his family,
Gregory had no insuperable aversion to other forms of Christian sanctity.
Local memory may have let him down. Though holy men and women had
doubtless played decisive roles, in their own lifetime, in extending the reach
of Christianity far beyond the cities into the countryside of Gaul, Spain
and the Rhine estuary, 18 they did not attract memories that were as enduring
as those associated, in Gregory’s mind and, one suspects, in the circles
within which he moved, with the urban tombs of the few great, long-dead
bishops. It was around these tombs that the faithful tended to swarm, ‘like
happy bees around their hive’, leaving on them a patina of expectations of
posthumous acts of power, as they begged the custodian priest for
pieces of wax . ..alittle dust . . . a few threads of the tomb-covering, all carrying
off for some specific purpose the same grace of health.
(Greg. Tur. Vita Patrum viii.6)
One need only compare the Lives of the Fathers of Gregory of Tours with
the Life of Euthymius of Cyril of Scythopolis, written in 556, to realize the
extent of the lacuna brought about by the absence, in Gaul, of enduring
‘fixatives’ for the memory of holy living persons. In the monastic communities
of the Judaean desert, memory itself could stand still for over a
century. The miracles that Cyril witnessed in 544 at the tomb of Euthymius,
who had been buried in 473, in the underground cave that had served him
as a cell, took place as long after Euthymius’ death as did any which
Gregory witnessed among the tombs of Gaul. But the links between the
generations were stronger in a world of great monasteries than they were
18 See esp. Hillgarth (1987), which corrects Brown (1981) 18–127, and Delaplace (1992).
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