Caesarius of Arles
Our Father among the Saints Caesarius, Bishop of Arles in Gaul
Bishop · Venerable · b. c. 468–470, at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy — d. 27 August 542, at Arles
Commemorated 27 August — Repose at Arles after forty years in the episcopate
Caesarius, bishop of Arles for forty years (502–542), is the last great figure of Latin Gaul before it becomes Frankish: a monk of Lérins turned metropolitan, presiding bishop of council after council, papal vicar for Gaul and Spain, author of the first western monastic rule written for women, and above all a preacher — some two hundred and fifty of his sermons survive, the largest surviving body of Latin preaching after Augustine, written in a deliberately plain style for congregations that were still half pagan. He twice fell under suspicion of treason and was twice exiled by barbarian kings; he twice stripped his church of its silver to ransom captives. He presided at the Council of Orange in 529, which settled the western doctrine of grace. He reposed on 27 August 542, the day on which he is commemorated.
Chalon, Lérins, and Arles
Caesarius was born about 468–470 at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, of a provincial-Roman family of some standing. At about eighteen he asked the bishop of Chalon, Sylvester, for the tonsure, and after two years went south to the island monastery of Lérins, then the great school of Gallic monasticism and the nursery of half the bishops of Provence. He was made cellarer, and his severity in the office — he was as hard on the monastery's stores as on himself — brought him into conflict with the brethren; his own asceticism broke his health, and he was sent to Arles to recover.
At Arles he was taken up by the bishop, Aeonius, a fellow-townsman and perhaps a kinsman, who ordained him deacon and priest and set him over a monastery on an island in the Rhône. There was also a brief and famously reluctant period of study in rhetoric under the African teacher Julianus Pomerius; Caesarius broke it off, on the account of his biographers, after a dream that rebuked him for feeding on secular letters. The instinct is characteristic: everything he later wrote is deliberately unliterary.
On the death of Aeonius he was made bishop of Arles in 502, at about thirty-three, and held the see until his death forty years later.
Metropolitan and legate
Arles was the metropolitan see of a province that changed masters three times in Caesarius' lifetime — Visigothic, then Ostrogothic, then Frankish — and he governed the Church through all of it. In 513 Pope Symmachus sent him the pallium, the first bishop north of the Alps to receive it, and constituted him papal vicar for Gaul and Spain, which made him the ordinary channel between Rome and the western churches for thirty years.
He presided at a remarkable series of councils:
- Agde (506), held under the Visigothic king Alaric II — the first general council of the Gallic Church for a generation, and a comprehensive body of disciplinary canons.
- Arles (524), Carpentras (527), Vaison (529) — the last of which ordered that presbyters, and not only bishops, should preach, including in country parishes, and that where a priest was prevented by illness the deacon should read a homily of the fathers. It is one of the most consequential small decisions in the history of western pastoral care, and it is Caesarius' own conviction turned into law.
- Orange (529) — the decisive western council on grace and free will. Against the Provençal monastic tradition (later labelled semi-Pelagian) which held that the first movement towards God comes from the human will, Orange affirmed the priority of grace in the very beginning of faith, while explicitly rejecting any predestination to evil. Its canons, largely drawn by Caesarius from Augustinian florilegia, were confirmed by Pope Boniface II in 531 and became the settled Latin doctrine.
Exiles and the ransom of captives
Twice he was denounced to the ruling power as plotting to hand Arles over to an enemy. Under the Visigoth Alaric II he was carried off to Bordeaux and released when the accusation collapsed; under the Ostrogoth Theodoric he was summoned to Ravenna, and the king, on seeing him, rose and uncovered, acquitted him, and sent him away with a great silver dish and money. Caesarius sold the dish and spent the money on redeeming prisoners, and by his biographers' account did the same on a larger scale after the siege of Arles by Franks and Burgundians in 508: he emptied the treasury, sold the plate, and stripped the silver ornaments from the sanctuary itself, saying — the retort is preserved — that he could not see how anyone could object to the melting down of vessels in order to redeem those for whom Christ had given His blood. Captives were housed in the great basilica and fed at the church's expense.
Preaching and the rule for women
Some 250 sermons survive under his name, the largest such corpus in Latin after Augustine's, and their character is their point. They are short, deliberately plain, made to be delivered standing and to be understood by farmers; he had them copied and sent out to other bishops and to priests in the country to be read aloud, which is why so many survive and why so many circulated later under Augustine's name. Their recurring targets are the things a sixth-century Gallic pastor actually faced: surviving pagan practice — vows at springs and trees, auguries, the New Year masquerades, amulets bought from wise women — together with drunkenness, the neglect of the poor, and the reluctance of the laity to read or hear Scripture. He told his people that they should devote as much time to reading the Scriptures as they spent on their fields.
For his sister Caesaria he founded and, in 534, gave its final form to the Regula virginum, the first monastic rule in the West written expressly for women. Its central provision is strict enclosure — the nuns were not to leave and outsiders were not to enter — combined with a real internal autonomy: the community elected its own abbess, owned its property corporately, and was not to be at the disposal of the bishop's successors. Its influence on later western women's monasticism, direct and indirect, was very large.
He died on 27 August 542, in his forties year as bishop, and was buried in the monastery of St John at Arles, where his sister's community kept his memory. A Vita was written soon afterwards by his disciples — Cyprian of Toulon and others — which is the source of most of what is told above.
Feast and commemoration
August 27 (church date; New Calendar civil August 27, Old Calendar civil September 9) — his dies natalis, the actual day of his death in 542, which is unusual among the day's saints in being a securely documented date. In the West he is honoured at Arles, where his relics and his episcopal cathedra and pallium were long preserved, and where the church of Saint-Césaire keeps his name. In Orthodox use he is a secondary commemoration on a day dominated by Poemen the Great.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
A rule of faith and an image of gentleness thou wast shown to be to thy flock, O father Caesarius; thou didst break the bread of the word for the simple, and didst sell the vessels of the altar to redeem the captive. Wherefore thou hast gained by humility the things on high, and by poverty the things that are rich: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
There is no Byzantine iconographic type for Caesarius. In modern Orthodox images of the western fathers he is given the standard hierarch's form — phelonion, omophorion, Gospel book, short grey beard — with the pallium sometimes indicated in acknowledgement of his legatine dignity. In western art he appears from the Middle Ages onward in the vestments of a Latin bishop with mitre and crozier; the surviving crozier at Maurs, an ivory spiral said to be his, and the reliquary in Saint-Trophime at Arles are the objects most often reproduced, and the scene occasionally painted is the bishop at the bedside of the prefect of Ravenna, or distributing the church plate to ransom prisoners.
No pre-1900 image has been stored. The Arles candidates located are either photographs of nineteenth-century church paintings and windows, released under a licence held by the photographer rather than covering the underlying work in any way that helps, or objects (reliquary, crozier) rather than portraits; and a Latin devotional print is not an icon of the saint in the sense this collection stores.
Disputed questions
- Was Orange 529 anti-monastic? The council's targets are usually described as "semi-Pelagian," a sixteenth-century label for the position of John Cassian and the Lérins tradition, in which Caesarius had himself been formed. Modern scholarship generally avoids the term as anachronistic and polemical. What Orange actually did was affirm the necessity of prevenient grace while refusing the harder Augustinian conclusions — an outcome not far from the Eastern understanding of synergy, and it is worth noting that the East, which never fought this controversy, commemorates Caesarius without difficulty.
- The Athanasian Creed. The Quicumque vult has often been assigned to southern Gaul in Caesarius' generation and sometimes to Caesarius himself or his circle. The attribution is unproved and remains a scholarly hypothesis.
- The sermons. A substantial number of sermons transmitted under Augustine's name are now recognised as Caesarius'; the reverse is also true, and the boundaries of the corpus, established chiefly by Germain Morin's edition, are still adjusted at the margins.
- Eastern commemoration. Caesarius is a pre-schism western father, and his presence in Orthodox calendars is by way of the modern restoration of the western saints of the undivided Church; he is listed on August 27 in the OCA calendar and in OrthodoxWiki, but has no Byzantine office and does not appear in the Greek or Antiochian menaia. This is stated plainly rather than glossed.