LITMIR.BIZ

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God. He sought out a hermit named Felix who lived near Haro for instruction. Having learned all that he could from Felix, Emilian returned to the Rioja and settled as a hermit at Berceo. Troubled by the multitude of people who flocked to him, Emilian retired (like Antony retreating further into the Egyptian desert) into the mountainous recesses of the Sierra de la Demanda. But his holiness could not be hidden. The local bishop, Didymus of Tarazona, sought him out, desiring to make him a priest. (Reading between the lines one may suspect a case of friction between bishop and hermit, not without parallels in this and other periods. Did the bishop want to regularize the position of this highly unconventional figure?) With reluctance Emilian agreed to be ordained to minister in the church of Berceo. We learn that he had clerics (in the plural) under him there, so we may infer that this was a small community of clergy with responsibility for a wide area round about, like the communities which served Martin’s churches in Touraine. He was an exemplary priest – ‘unlike those in our own times’, comments Braulio. Indeed in some respects he was too good, or perhaps he did not hit it off with his clergy, or perhaps he was just hopeless at administration. Whatever the reason, his clerics accused him before the bishop of squandering the possessions of his church (in charitable giving, as Braulio insists). The bishop relieved him of his cure and Emilian retired to his hermitage for the remainder of his long life. He died in 573.

      The miracles and wonders worked through the holy Emilian before and after his death show him as a spiritual force in Riojan society. Here is an example. Strange goings-on were reported from the household of the senator Honorius. (It is far from clear what the term ‘senator’ might signify in sixth-century Spain, but Braulio, a good classical scholar, surely intends us to understand a man of high social rank. Emilian, like Martin, was cultivated by the aristocracy.) At his dinner parties, the plates and dishes would be found piled with the bones or even with the dung of animals; and while the household slept items of clothing were mysteriously abstracted from their resting places and hung from the ceilings. More was at stake than just a little local difficulty with the servants. Honorius called Emilian in to exorcize what was evidently an evil spirit. And Emilian succeeded, though the spirit hurled a rock at him before it was vanquished. Honorius’ gratitude was tangible. Emilian always did his best to feed the crowds of visitors who flocked to his refuge. On one occasion supplies of food were exhausted. Hardly had Emilian ceased to pray for assistance when suddenly carts loaded with food appeared at the door. They had been sent by Honorius.

      Several more examples could be cited. There was the slave-girl of the senator Sicorius whose blindness he cured, the exorcism he performed on one of the slaves of Count Eugenius, the evil spirit which had taken possession of both the senator Nepotian and his wife Proseria cast out by him, the woman named Barbara who had travelled all the way from Amaya to seek a cure for her paralysis, the monk Armentarius whose swollen stomach was cured when Emilian made the sign of the cross over it – and so on. We need not linger over these. There is also one interesting case of scepticism. When Emilian foretold the conquest of Cantabria by the king of Spain and summoned all the local nobility – an interesting sidelight on his local influence – to warn them and upbraid them for their sins, one senator, by name Abundantius, said that Emilian was a delirious old fool. But he got his come-uppance; King Leovigild killed him shortly afterwards.

      Emilian’s hermitage grew after his death into one of the most famous monastic houses of medieval Spain, San Millán de la Cogolla, ‘Saint Emilian of the Cowl’ (though there is no reason to suppose that Emilian was ever a monk). Others who sought a solitary ascetic life were compelled almost at once to organize their disciples into monastic communities. Take the case of Romanus, who settled at Condat on the edge of the Jura mountains of eastern Gaul in about 435. Here, in a region quite as inhospitable as Emilian’s Sierra de la Demanda, Romanus intended to live the solitary life of a hermit. But he was joined first by his brother Lupicinus, then by a trickle of other disciples which soon turned into a flood. Among them came that Eugendus, the son of the priest of Izernore, whose childhood vision of the monastic life is movingly described in the Vita Patrum Iurensium (The Life of the Jura Fathers), a work composed in about 515 which is our main source of information about these communities.¹³ We also learn that there were plentiful lay hangers-on who had to be fed – just as at Emilian’s hermitage. It was impossible for ascetics to cut themselves off altogether from the world. Indeed, it was a condition of their influence that they did not entirely cut themselves off from it. We see Lupicinus interceding with the secular authorities, like Germanus a generation earlier, on behalf of the unjustly oppressed poor. The monks of the Jura were bound to the world by economic need: at one point we catch a glimpse of them travelling all the way to the Mediterranean to buy salt. And they were sought out by petitioners. Solicited on behalf of a girl possessed by a demon, Eugendus dictated a letter to the evil spirit – we are given the text of it – commanding it to leave her; and it did, even before the letter was delivered. The lady Syagria, a member of the leading aristocratic dynasty of Lyons, gravely ill, was cured by eating a letter from Eugendus. Note the sequel: the whole city of Lyons rejoiced with her and her family.

      Episcopal initiatives in spiritual and social welfare, preaching, legislation, the example of ascetic renunciation, the demonstrably superior power of Christian over other sorts of magic, miraculous cures worked by holy men: all have something to hint to us about how it was thought that rural conversion might best be effected. I am inclined to give most weight to the full-hearted commitment of the aristocracy to this task. Maximus of Turin and John Chrysostom had surely been correct in their prescriptions: get the landowners to build churches into which they can coax or bribe or lash their tenantry, and then bit by bit something – but what? – will start to happen. Two centuries later Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was still thinking along these lines in the admonition he sent to Sardinian landowners to stamp out pockets of heathenism among their peasants. And if they show themselves reluctant to come to God, he wrote, jack their rents up until they do! Pope Gregory, the first pontiff to use the humble title ‘servant of the servants of God’, was quite capable of adopting the commanding tones of the great Roman aristocrat that by upbringing he was.

      Here are two last sixth-century examples of the way in which locally prominent families could encourage and shape an emerging Christian character in the societies which looked to them for leadership. Samson was a native of Demetia, a kingdom of south Wales, who ended his life as a bishop in Gaul (later tradition would claim at Dol in Brittany). He was a part of that migration of British people from their own islands to the mainland of Gaul which transformed the province of Armorica into Brittany in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Samson is a somewhat shadowy figure, but his historical existence is attested to by the appearance of his name among a list of bishops who attended a church council held at Paris, probably in 561 or 562. It is assumed that his life fell within the first three-quarters of the sixth century. There exists a Vita Samsonis by an anonymous author which is difficult to date. The case for composition within about a century of its subject’s death is reasonably strong (though far from unassailable). The text will be used here, with caution, as a reliable source of evidence for at least the general outlines of Samson’s life.¹⁴

      Samson was another, like Romanus or Emilian, taken by desire for the ascetic life. After receiving instruction from St Illtud at his monastery in Glamorgan, Samson sought a more arduous regime at a community recently founded on Caldey Island off the coast of what would later be called Pembrokeshire. Shortly after this, in the course of a visit to his family, Samson’s example seems to have persuaded most of its members to opt for the monastic life. As a family they took the plunge together: his mother and father, his five brothers, his paternal uncle with his wife and their three sons, and his aunt on the mother’s side. The family was a prominent one, ‘noble and distinguished as the world reckons these things’, in the words of Samson’s biographer. After the family’s conversion to monasticism they devoted all their property to the service of God; and there was plenty of it, ‘for they were the owners of many estates’. We know that they also built churches, because we are told that after he had become a bishop Samson consecrated them. Samson founded a monastery vaguely described as ‘near the river Severn’. He is said – in a section of the text which may be a later interpolation – to have travelled in Ireland, where he was given another monastery whose

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