Saint Germanus of Auxerre (378-448)

The governor turned bishop

Few saints offer so violent a contrast between their first life and their second. Before becoming bishop, Germanus was no obscure monk or provincial cleric: he was a high official of the Empire, one of the six duces governing the civil dioceses of Gaul, an advocate versed in Roman law, a great landowner, a man of the world and a famed hunter^[8][9]. His conversion was not a slow pious maturation, but a brutal rupture, imposed almost by force by a clear-sighted bishop. This passage from palace to hairshirt is what makes his figure so original.

The "hammer of the Pelagians"

The second trait that defines Germanus is his role as champion of orthodoxy against the heresy of Pelagius. At the beginning of the fifth century, Roman Britain — the great island, present-day England — was plagued by Pelagianism, the doctrine that denied the necessity of grace and exalted the powers of the human will alone. It was Germanus whom the Church of Gaul, then Rome, chose to cross the Channel and restore the Catholic faith there^[10][11]. His two British expeditions, recounted by Bede the Venerable, made him in Christian memory the great adversary of Pelagius and one of the evangelizers of the island.

The maker of saints

A third trait, quieter but decisive: Germanus was a discerner of vocations. On his way to Britain, he stops at Nanterre, picks out a little girl named Genevieve in the crowd, foretells her future holiness and consecrates her to God^[12][13]. The tradition of Auxerre also links him to the formation of Saint Patrick, future apostle of Ireland. Germanus is therefore not only a great bishop: he is a master of saints, a man who knows how to recognize nascent grace and seal it.

The sources of his life

We know Germanus through sources of rare quality for a fifth-century saint. The principal one is the Vita sancti Germani, written around 480 by Constantius of Lyon, at the request of Bishop Patient of Lyon and Censurius of Auxerre: a biography composed barely a generation after the saint's death, from still-living testimony^[14]. To this Life is added the independent and older testimony of Prosper of Aquitaine, whose Chronicle notes as early as the year 429 the sending of Germanus to Britain by Pope Celestine I^[15]. Finally, nearly three centuries later, Bede the Venerable devotes five chapters of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (book I, ch. 17-21) to the British missions of Germanus — it is he who fixed forever the account of the Alleluia Victory^[16].

Bede does not name Constantius in these chapters: it is modern scholarship that established that he closely follows there the Life of Germanus by Constantius of Lyon^[17].

The convergence of these three witnesses — a nearby Gallic biographer, a contemporary chronicler, a later but careful English historian — gives the figure of Germanus an exceptional documentary foundation.

Born into the high Gallo-Roman aristocracy

Germanus was born around 378 (sources hesitate between 378 and 380) at Auxerre, ancient Autessiodurum, in Lyonnaise Gaul^[18][19]. His parents, Rusticus and Germanilla, belonged to "one of the noblest families of Gaul at the end of the fourth century"^[20]. In other words, he was born on the side of power, wealth and culture: the Roman Gaul of that time was still a land of villas, estates and great careers, even though the Western Empire was already faltering under the pressure of the Germanic peoples.

Rome: rhetoric and law

Like every young aristocrat destined for a great career, Germanus received the best education of his time: he attended the renowned schools of Arles and Lyon, then went to Rome, where he studied rhetoric and civil law^[21]. The capital made him an accomplished jurist: he "pleaded before the tribunal of the prefect for several years, with great success"^[22]. It was also in Rome that he married Eustachia, a woman of high rank, esteemed in imperial circles^[23][24].

Advocate, husband, governor

The emperor, noticing his talents, sent him back to Gaul and raised him to one of the highest civil offices: he made him "one of the six dukes charged with the government of the provinces of Gaul"^[25]. Germanus thus became a dux, a military and civil governor, residing at Auxerre, his native city, whose territory he administered. He had everything of a great lord of late Antiquity: birth, wealth, eloquence, power, a nobly born wife — and a passion for hunting, which would, by an unexpected detour, precipitate the turning point of his life.

The pear tree of trophies and Bishop Amator

In the centre of Auxerre stood a great pear tree (according to other traditions, a tree once devoted to pagan worship). Germanus, a hunter proud of his kills, hung on it the heads and spoils of the beasts he had slain — a custom the city's bishop, Amator, judged dangerous: a remnant of superstition, an occasion of vainglory, and a scandal for Christians^[26][27]. In the governor's absence, Amator had the tree cut down and the trophies burned.

Furious, Germanus threatened the bishop with reprisals. But Amator, an inspired old man, had sensed that this fiery governor was God's chosen to succeed him. On the counsel — so tradition says — of an inner light, and armed with the prefect's authorization, he took the initiative.

The forced ordination (418)

Taking advantage of a ceremony at which Germanus was present in church, Amator had the doors closed, seized the governor, imposed the tonsure on him and ordained him deacon, almost by force, announcing to him that he would be his successor on the see of Auxerre^[28][29]. The event, which astonishes us today, belongs to an ancient practice: eminent men were sometimes imposed upon for the episcopate despite themselves, as had been done for Saint Martin at Tours or for Saint Augustine at Hippo.

What is striking is Germanus's response. Far from taking revenge, he welcomed this violence as a call from God:

"A wonderful change was instantly wrought in Germanus: he at once converted with his whole soul to the perfection of the Christian life." — Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Germanus of Auxerre^[30]

Shortly after Amator's death, Germanus was elected and consecrated Bishop of Auxerre on 7 July 418, by acclamation of the people and clergy^[31][32][33]. The Duke of Gaul had become a shepherd of souls.

The stripping

Germanus's conversion did not remain an inward sentiment: it at once took the form of a real stripping. He gave his goods to the poor^[34], renounced the pleasures of his station, and resolved henceforth to live as a monk under a bishop's habit^[35][36]. With his wife Eustachia, he agreed to live in perfect continence, treating her no longer as a wife but as a sister — a classic gesture of the great converts of late Antiquity, who wished to consecrate even their married life to God.

An austerity of a Desert Father

The asceticism Germanus imposed on himself during the thirty years of his episcopate is, on his biographer's testimony, of extreme rigour — worthy of the Desert Fathers. Constantius of Lyon left its detail:

Constantius of Lyon describes, in substance, his rule thus: no wheaten bread, no wine, no vinegar, no oil, no seasoned vegetables, not even salt — only, in the evening, barley ground by his own hands; and, winter as summer, neither cold nor hunger made him yield^[37].

He slept on ashes, covered with a hairshirt, without undressing; he always carried relics on him in a pouch at his neck; he fasted without respite^[38][39]. This penance was no flight: it nourished, as with the great ascetics, a prodigious strength of soul, which enabled him to face storms, heresiarchs, barbarian armies and imperial powers without ever bending.

The monastery on the bank of the Yonne

Faithful to the monastic ideal that Saint Martin of Tours had acclimatized in Gaul, Germanus founded, on the bank of the Yonne facing Auxerre, a monastery which he dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian^[40]. There he wanted, as Martin had at Marmoutier, a community of prayer and poverty close to his episcopal city. It is in that oratory — that of Saint Maurice — that he would later ask to rest, and around his tomb would arise the great Abbey of Saint-Germain of Auxerre, one of the major monastic centres of the early Middle Ages.

Pelagianism, the British heresy

At the beginning of the fifth century, Roman Britain was troubled by Pelagianism. This doctrine, stemming from the British monk Pelagius, denied that human nature was wounded by original sin and maintained that man could, by his own powers alone, without the inward help of grace^[41], attain righteousness and salvation. It undermined the Gospel itself: if man saves himself alone, the Cross becomes superfluous. Condemned at Carthage and Rome — Saint Augustine was its great adversary — Pelagianism had found in Great Britain a favourable ground, where its partisans won over the crowds^[42][43].

The council of Gaul and Pope Celestine

Worried, the British Catholics asked the Church of Gaul for help. A council of the Gallic bishops appointed Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes to cross the sea and refute the error^[44][45]. The chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine, a contemporary witness, adds a capital detail: it was Pope Celestine I himself who, on the advice of the deacon Palladius, sent Germanus "in his place" (vice sua), giving the mission Roman authority:

"Agricola the Pelagian, son of the Pelagian bishop Severianus, corrupted the Churches of Britain by the insinuation of his doctrine. But, at the suggestion of the deacon Palladius, Pope Celestine sent Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, as his representative; and, having overthrown the heretics, he brought the Britons back to the Catholic faith." — Prosper of Aquitaine, Chronicle, year 429^[46]

The calmed storm

The crossing was a first trial. In the middle of the Channel, a raging storm — which tradition attributed to the fury of the demons seeking to prevent the mission — nearly swallowed the ship. Germanus, awakened, "in the name of the Trinity, took a little water and sprinkled it on the waves", and the sea calmed at once^[47]. The episode, recounted by Bede, is the first in a series of signs that accompany the two saints in Britain.

The great public disputation

Once arrived on the island, Germanus and Lupus preached first "not only in the churches, but at the crossroads, in the fields and lanes", and the Catholic crowd was strengthened^[48]. The Pelagian leaders, "splendidly dressed, surrounded by a troop of flatterers", finally agreed to a public disputation. According to Bede, Germanus's eloquence — the former advocate of Rome rediscovering his art — "poured forth like a torrent" and reduced the heretics to silence; the crowd, which judged them, nearly laid hands on them and acknowledged the victory of the Catholics^[49].

"The holy prelates overwhelmed them with such a torrent of eloquence, supported by the testimonies of the Apostles and the Gospels, that […] the people, who were judge, could barely restrain their hands." — after Bede the Venerable, Ecclesiastical History, I, 17^[50]

The healing of the blind girl

To confirm the truth by a sign, there was presented to Germanus the blind daughter, about ten years old, of a man of tribunician rank. The Pelagian leaders, first summoned to heal her, refused. Germanus then, after a prayer, applied to the child's eyes the relics he wore at his neck, and "at once she recovered her sight", to the amazement of all present^[51]. The controversy was sealed by miracle: orthodoxy was not only more eloquent, it was alive.

The tomb of Saint Alban

Before leaving the island, Germanus and Lupus went on pilgrimage to the tomb of the British protomartyr Saint Alban, at Verulamium (present-day St Albans). Germanus deposited there relics of apostles and martyrs and, according to Bede, carried away dust from the place of martyrdom — earth still stained, it was said, with Alban's blood — to bring back to Gaul^[52]. The gesture links the two saints to the oldest martyr of Britain and inscribes their mission in the communion of saints.

Picts and Saxons

While Germanus was completing his mission, Britain was attacked by a coalition of Picts (from the north) and Saxons (from the sea). The Britons, disorganized and terrified, resorted to the two bishops. It was the season of Lent, and many soldiers, still catechumens, asked for and received baptism during the campaign. Germanus, the former Duke of Gaul, rediscovered for the occasion his talents as a war leader — but to fight a battle of an unheard-of kind^[53].

"Alleluia!" shouted three times

Germanus placed his freshly baptized army in a narrow valley, ringed with heights, on the enemy's path. When the Picts and Saxons advanced, he ordered all to repeat exactly his cry. At the chosen moment, he intoned in a loud voice: "Alleluia!" — and the whole army took it up three times. The cry, echoed by the mountains, swelled into an immense crash^[54].

"Germanus proclaims that he himself will be their leader in battle. He chooses nimble men […] and, as the enemy approached, all, with one voice, repeated the cry he had raised: 'Alleluia!' The echo of the mountains multiplied this cry." — after Bede the Venerable, Ecclesiastical History, I, 20^[55]

A victory without a drop of blood

The effect was devastating. Believing the very rocks and sky to be collapsing upon them, the barbarians were seized with indescribable panic and fled in disorder, throwing away their weapons; many drowned in a river across their retreat. The Britons won the victory without fighting, gathering the spoils of the routed enemy^[56].

"They fled in all directions, throwing away their weapons, believing that the very rocks and sky were falling upon them; and their terror was such that they could not run fast enough." — Bede the Venerable, Ecclesiastical History, I, 20 (trans. after the Sherley-Price ed.)^[57]

This Alleluia Victory, dated around 429-430, is one of the most famous narratives of English Christian historiography. It says, in one striking scene, what Germanus believed: faith, not the sword, is the Christian's weapon; the name of God, shouted with one heart by a baptized people, suffices to rout the powers of this world.

One of the most lasting fruits of Germanus's first mission was not a battle, but a meeting. On their way to the Channel, in 429, Germanus and Lupus stopped at Nanterre, near Paris. The population welcomed them; and in the crowd, Germanus noticed a little girl of about seven, named Genevieve^[58][59].

The saint, tradition says, at once discerned in her an extraordinary vocation. He called her, blessed her, prophesied before her parents that she would be great before God, and consecrated her to the Lord, giving her a copper medal marked with the cross which she was to wear in memory of this promise^[60]. Genevieve would become the patroness of Paris, she whose prayer, in 451, turned aside — according to tradition — the march of Attila and his Huns. Germanus's gesture at Nanterre is thus the hidden beginning of another great French holiness.

"He foretold to the parents the future of their child, and consecrated her to God." — after the tradition reported by the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Germanus of Auxerre^[61]

The tradition of Auxerre also associates Germanus with the formation of Saint Patrick, the future apostle of Ireland, who is said to have stayed and studied at Auxerre before his mission — a plausible but more uncertain link than the Nanterre meeting, and one historians discuss^[62].

Pelagianism, once laid low, revived in Britain a few years later. Germanus, already aged, agreed to leave again — this time with Severus, Bishop of Trier, a disciple of Saint Lupus^[63][64]. The second expedition, around 447, confirmed the old bishop's authority: the Pelagian leaders were again reduced to silence and exiled from the island, and the Catholic faith firmly established for good.

This perseverance says much about the man. Germanus never considered a cause won so long as the truth remained threatened. Twice he crossed the Channel, at the peril of storms and weariness, for a people who were not his own — not from love of travel, but from charity for the faith.

Total renunciation

All of Germanus's holiness was born of a renunciation. He had everything — birth, fortune, power, the glory of arms and of the bar — and he abandoned everything at once, at the call of a bishop who forced his hand. His life illustrates that word of the Gospel: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself"^[65]. The radicality of his asceticism is no quirk: it is the measure of what he had left, and the proof that a great lord can become a great poor man of God.

The bishop-monk, heir of Saint Martin

Germanus continues in Gaul the figure invented by Saint Martin of Tours: the bishop-monk, who never separates the government of the Church from prayer and penance. Like Martin, he founds a monastery at the gates of his city; like Martin, he keeps under the mitre the rough habit and the heart of the solitary; like Martin, he joins to contemplation a tireless missionary action. The two men frame, half a century apart, the golden age of the Gallic episcopate.

Charity unto power

Germanus's spirituality was never a flight from the world. An ascetic, he remained a shepherd; poor, he remained the advocate of his people. He intervened unceasingly for the oppressed, went to plead at the imperial court to obtain tax relief for Auxerre, and ended by dying, as we shall see, in the course of an embassy of charity for rebels whom men wished to punish^[66]. His holiness is not that of a man who withdraws, but of a man who descends unceasingly toward those who suffer, while keeping the heart of a monk.

The embassy of the Armoricans

The Armoricans — the inhabitants of continental Brittany, present-day north-west France — had risen against imperial authority, and the general Aetius had launched barbarian troops against them (the Alans of Goar). To spare a neighbouring people a massacre, the old bishop undertook the journey to Italy to plead their cause before the court of Ravenna, capital of the Western Empire, where the emperor Valentinian III and his mother Galla Placidia reigned^[67][68].

Death at Ravenna

Germanus was received at Ravenna with great honours: Galla Placidia and the court venerated him as a living saint. He obtained promises of clemency — but had no time to see their effect. Exhausted by the journey and austerities, he fell ill and died at Ravenna on 31 July 448 (the date of 450 sometimes given results from a confusion in certain copies)^[69][70][71]. The court mourned him as a prince of the Church.

The return of the body and the Abbey of Saint-Germain

According to his last wishes, his body was brought back to Auxerre — a long and solemn funeral procession across the Alps and Gaul — and buried in the oratory of Saint Maurice which he had had built. Around this tomb arose one of the most famous abbeys of the early Middle Ages, the Abbey of Saint-Germain of Auxerre, whose Carolingian crypt, adorned with frescoes among the oldest in the West, still survives today^[72][73].

A European radiance

The cult of Saint Germanus was immense and early. Patron of Auxerre, he was venerated throughout Gaul, in Britain and as far as Italy. A great many churches bear his name, dedicated to the Bishop of Auxerre in France as in England, where the memory of the Alleluia Victory kept his remembrance alive^[84][85]. His liturgical feast is fixed on 31 July, the day of his death^[86].

(Note: the famous Parisian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés takes its name from the sixth-century Bishop of Paris — not to be confused with the Bishop of Auxerre.)

Germanus belongs to those saints prior to the Roman canonization procedures, instituted much later: his cult, like that of Martin or Hilary, rests on an immemorial veneration confirmed by the Church, and his holiness was recognized in his very lifetime by the crowds of Gaul, Britain and Ravenna.

Sixteen centuries after his death, the figure of Germanus keeps a singular power of challenge. He shows first that no situation is too brilliant to be left: duke, advocate, landowner, fulfilled husband, he abandoned everything for God. In an age that measures a life by success and power, Germanus recalls that true greatness begins where one consents to lose everything.

He then teaches firmness in the truth. Against Pelagianism — that ever-reborn temptation to believe that man saves himself by his own powers, without grace — Germanus twice crossed the sea. The heresy he fought is not dead: it reappears whenever salvation is reduced to a moral effort and it is forgotten that "apart from me you can do nothing"^[87]. Germanus is the saint of necessary grace.

He finally recalls that holiness is active charity to the end. He did not die in the peace of his monastery, but on the roads of Italy, at the imperial court, pleading for rebels whom men wished to punish. His last step was a step of mercy — the advocate of Rome become, even unto death, the advocate of the poor before the powerful.

"A wonderful change was instantly wrought in Germanus." — These words of his biographer say everything: a single instant of grace sufficed to make of a Duke of Gaul one of the greatest saints of the West.

• Saint Martin of Tours — the model of the missionary bishop-monk of Gaul, whose figure Germanus continues half a century later.
• Saint Genevieve — the patroness of Paris, whom Germanus discerned and consecrated as a child at Nanterre in 429.
• Saint Patrick — the apostle of Ireland, whom the tradition of Auxerre links to the formation received from Germanus.
• Saint Germanus of Constantinople — the Byzantine namesake (patriarch, defender of images), not to be confused with the Bishop of Auxerre.