Germanus of Auxerre

The advocate and the governor

Germanus was born at Auxerre — Roman Autissiodurum, on the Yonne in the province of Lugdunensis Quarta — to a wealthy and established Gallo-Roman family, in the last generation before the western provinces began to come apart. The date is given as c. 378 by the older reckoning and as c. 389 by the notice the OCA follows; neither is certain.

He was educated in Gaul and completed his training at Rome, in rhetoric and law, and practised there as an advocate in the courts of the prefecture, which was the ordinary route to public office for a provincial of his class. He married a woman of senatorial rank named Eustachia. The emperor Honorius then appointed him to the command of the Gallic province of his birth — the dux of the Armorican tract, with his seat at Auxerre — so that he returned home as its governor.

Constantius records the one thing about that governorship the Church remembered against him: he hung the trophies of his hunting on a great pine tree in the middle of the city, which the bishop Amator took for a relic of paganism and had cut down while Germanus was away. It is a small story and it fixes the man before his conversion — cultivated, powerful, worldly, and touchy.

Seized for the episcopate

Amator, old and near death and warned (the Life says) in a vision, took the extraordinary step of having the governor come into the church unarmed, closed the doors on him, and tonsured and ordained him by force, naming him his successor. Amator died soon after, and in 418 Germanus was consecrated bishop of Auxerre.

What followed is the substance of his sanctity. He gave his property away to the poor and his wife's with her consent, and thereafter lived as an ascetic in the see. He ate once a day, after sunset, and then coarse barley bread, which he is said to have mixed with ashes; he drank no wine and used no oil or salt; he wore a hair shirt and one hooded cloak until it fell apart, slept on ashes strewn on boards, and travelled always on foot with a bag of relics at his neck. He founded a monastery across the Yonne from the city, which became the great abbey of Saint-Germain of Auxerre and one of the schools of the Carolingian West. He remained bishop for thirty years, and the transformation from advocate to ascetic was complete enough that Constantius, writing about 480 for men who had known him, treats it as the pivot of the whole narrative.

The first British mission, 429

By the 420s the teaching of the British monk Pelagius — that man may take the first step towards God by his own unaided will, and that grace assists rather than begins — had been condemned at Carthage and at Rome but was flourishing in Britain, which had passed out of imperial administration in 410 and where its adherents were men of property and influence.

The British Church appealed to Gaul. A synod of Gallic bishops, and behind it (as Prosper of Aquitaine records in his chronicle for 429) Pope Celestine I acting through the deacon Palladius, sent Germanus and Lupus, bishop of Troyes, across the Channel. Constantius describes a storm on the crossing stilled by Germanus with oil and prayer.

In Britain they preached in the churches, in the fields and at the crossroads, and at length met the Pelagian teachers in a public disputation at Verulamium — the Roman city beside modern St Albans — before a great crowd. The Pelagians came, in Constantius's mordant phrase, conspicuous for their wealth and their dress; the two Gallic bishops answered them out of Scripture and the Fathers and carried the assembly. Immediately afterwards Germanus went to the tomb of the martyr Alban, gave thanks there, opened the shrine and laid in it relics of the apostles and martyrs he had brought, taking away in exchange earth from the place of the martyrdom — the earliest secure notice of the cult of Britain's protomartyr. He is also said to have healed the blind ten-year-old daughter of a man of tribune's rank before the assembled crowd, which decided the matter for the onlookers more than the argument had.

The Alleluia victory

While they were still in Britain a raiding force of Saxons and Picts came against the Britons, who were unready and afraid. Germanus took charge of the army himself. It was Lent; he catechised and, at Pascha, baptised the soldiers, and led them still wet from the font into a narrow valley on the enemy's line of march. He set them in ambush, and at his signal the whole force cried "Alleluia" three times; the shout came back from the hillsides magnified, and the raiders, believing themselves surrounded by an immense host, threw down their arms and fled, many drowning in the river behind them. Not a blow was struck. The Britons took the spoil, and Bede, copying Constantius, calls it a victory won by faith and not by force.

The site is not named in the Life. Welsh tradition places it at Maes Garmon, "Germanus's field," near Mold in Flintshire, and Germanus is the Garmon of a long line of Welsh dedications; the identification is medieval and cannot be verified.

A second mission followed, traditionally in the 440s, with Severus, bishop of Trier, when the Pelagian party had revived; on that visit the leaders were arrested by the British authorities and deported.

Armorica, Ravenna, and the last journey

At home in Gaul the Bagaudae of Armorica — the peasant and provincial insurgents of the north-west — had risen, and the patrician Aëtius commissioned Goar, king of the Alans, to put the province down. Germanus went out to meet the advancing army on the road and, in the scene that fixed him in western memory, took the bridle of the king's horse in his hand and would not let go until Goar agreed to halt. Goar consented on condition that the pardon of the emperor be obtained.

So the old bishop travelled to Ravenna, the imperial capital, to plead for the rebels before Valentinian III and his mother Galla Placidia. He was received with great honour; the empress sent him a silver dish of delicacies, which he distributed to his attendants, returning her in exchange a wooden bowl of barley bread. The pardon was granted — and then annulled, the sources say, by a fresh revolt in Armorica before he could carry it home.

He fell ill at Ravenna and died there on 31 July 448, having foretold his death and asked that his body be carried back to Gaul. Galla Placidia gave the funeral, and the relics were borne in procession across the Alps to Auxerre and laid in the oratory of Saint Maurice, over which his abbey rose. They remained there, one of the chief pilgrimages of Burgundy, until the Huguenots scattered them in 1567.

Constantius, Bede, and the Irish connection

The Vita Germani of Constantius of Lyon, written about 480 at the request of Bishop Patiens, is a first-rank source: composed within a generation of the events, from the testimony of men who had accompanied him, and preserving among much else the only narrative of Britain between the departure of the legions and the Saxon settlement. Bede transcribed its British chapters almost entire into the first book of the Ecclesiastical History, which is how the Alleluia victory became part of the national memory of England.

The Irish tradition makes Germanus the teacher of Patrick, who is said to have spent years at Auxerre in his formation and to have been sent from there to Ireland; Prosper's notice that Celestine sent Palladius "to the Irish believing in Christ" in 431 belongs to the same complex of events. The Auxerre training of Patrick is not in Constantius and is not securely attested, but it is old, it is not implausible, and it is the reason Germanus is honoured in Ireland as well as in Wales and Brittany.