Germanus of Paris

Our Father among the Saints Germanus, Bishop of Paris

Bishop · Venerable · b. c. 496, near Autun in Burgundy — d. 28 May 576, at Paris

Germanus (c. 496–576) was bishop of Paris for the last twenty years of his life and the most respected churchman in the Frankish kingdoms of his generation: a Burgundian of Gallo-Roman family, abbot of St Symphorian at Autun before his elevation, and thereafter a hierarch who spent his episcopate trying to restrain the Merovingian kings from murdering one another and their subjects. He fed and ransomed the poor on a scale that emptied his own house, presided at the councils of Paris and Tours, went so far as to excommunicate a reigning king for his marriages, and was appealed to by St Radegund for protection against her husband. The great abbey he founded beside the Seine, dedicated to the Holy Cross and St Vincent, took his own name after his burial in it and is known to this day as Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He is one of the pre-schism fathers of the West received into Orthodox commemoration, and is kept on May 28 in both the Greek Great Synaxaristes and the OCA calendar.

Origins and early life

Germanus was born about the year 496 — the decade of Clovis's baptism — at a villa near Autun (Augustodunum) in Burgundy, of a Gallo-Roman family of some standing. The Vita transmits a set of domestic traditions about his childhood which the later notices repeat: he was unwanted before his birth and his mother attempted to be rid of him; and an aunt, wanting the family property for her own children, is said to have tried more than once to poison him. Whatever the value of these stories, they establish the tone in which he was remembered — a man whose whole life was spent among the violence of families, and who took the part of whoever was being destroyed by it.

He was educated at Avallon and then at Luzy, under the care of a kinsman, the priest Scapilion, in a discipline the Vita describes as severe: night vigils, long fasts, and the reading of Scripture. He was ordained priest by Agrippinus, bishop of Autun, about the age of thirty-five, and was soon after made abbot of the monastery of St Symphorian outside the walls of Autun — the shrine of the city's protomartyr. His abbacy is remembered for two things: the austerity of his own life, and an almsgiving so unmeasured that the brethren complained he was giving away the monastery's food.

Bishop of Paris

On the death of the bishop of Paris, Germanus was called from Autun and consecrated bishop of Paris, with the consent and at the wish of King Childebert I, the son of Clovis who then ruled the Paris kingdom. He did not change his manner of life: the Vita insists that he kept the monastic rule inside the episcopal house, slept little, ate almost nothing, and disposed of the revenues of the see as alms — feeding the poor of the city daily, and ransoming captives, of whom the Frankish civil wars produced a continuous supply.

Childebert, who had begun as a plunderer of churches, was by all accounts reformed by Germanus's influence, and it was under the bishop's direction that the king founded, on the left bank of the Seine outside the walls, the great basilica of the Holy Cross and St Vincent — built to house a relic of the tunic of St Vincent of Saragossa brought back from a Spanish campaign, and endowed with a monastery beside it. Childebert died before the dedication; the church was consecrated by Germanus, and it is this foundation that became, in time, the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, "St Germanus in the Meadows."

The bishop against the kings

Germanus's episcopate coincided with the worst period of Merovingian fratricide, and his reputation in the sixth century rested on his refusal to be silent about it. He sat at the Third Council of Paris (557) and the Second Council of Tours (566), and at the Fourth Council of Paris (573); through them he worked for the suppression of surviving pagan practices, for the discipline of clergy, and against the seizure of church property and the forced marriages of widows and consecrated women.

He excommunicated a reigning Frankish king — Charibert I, Chlothar's son, who had taken two sisters, one of them a consecrated nun, in succession as wives; the sentence is one of the earliest and best-attested excommunications of a Merovingian monarch. When the war between Sigebert I and Chilperic I broke out, Germanus intervened repeatedly, warning each in turn; a letter of his to Sigebert's queen Brunhilda, urging her to hold her husband back from killing his brother, was still being read centuries later. Sigebert was murdered in 575, less than a year before Germanus's own death; Gregory of Tours, who knew the story, treats the assassination as the fulfilment of the bishop's warning. The notices that say Germanus "was not very successful" in restraining the Frankish kings are stating the plain truth, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise.

It was to Germanus that St Radegund — the Thuringian princess forced into marriage with King Chlothar I, who afterwards founded the monastery of the Holy Cross at Poitiers — appealed for protection against her husband when Chlothar tried to reclaim her from the cloister. Her friend and biographer Venantius Fortunatus, the poet of the sixth-century Gallican Church, was also Germanus's admirer, and the Vita Germani is transmitted under his name.

Repose, relics and cultus

Germanus died at Paris on 28 May 576, about eighty years old. He was buried, at his own wish, in the chapel of St Symphorian at the western porch of his own basilica — the titular saint of the Autun monastery he had governed as abbot. In the eighth century the relics were translated into the church itself, in the presence of Pepin the Short and his son the future Charlemagne (the customary date given is 754/755); from that translation the abbey and the whole quarter of Paris took his name.

The relics of St Germanus were carried in procession through the streets of Paris in times of plague, drought and siege for some nine centuries, one of the longest-lived civic devotions of medieval Europe. The shrine was destroyed at the Revolution; the abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés survives, in part, as the oldest church in Paris.

Feast and commemoration

May 28 (church date; New Calendar civil May 28, Old Calendar civil June 10), the day of his repose, always within the Pentecostarion. In the West the day was long kept as his principal feast with the translation of 754/755 observed separately in July; in Orthodox usage only the May feast is kept. He is served from the common of a hierarch. He is the patron of one of the oldest churches of Paris and the eponym of an entire quarter of the city, and among the Orthodox of France he is honoured as a father of the local Church.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)

O holy hierarch Germanus, shepherd of the Church of Paris, thou didst feed the poor with thine own bread and ransom the captive with thine own goods, and thou didst rebuke kings without fear of their swords: intercede with Christ God that peace be given to the nations and great mercy to our souls.

Iconography

Orthodox iconography of Germanus is modern, and follows the hierarch type: an elderly bishop in phelonion and omophorion, blessing, with the Gospel-book; where a distinguishing attribute is used it is a model of the abbey church in his hand, in the western manner of depicting founders, or the broken fetters of the captives he redeemed. Western medieval art gives him the Latin bishop's habit — mitre, crozier and open book — and sometimes places a poor man or a chained prisoner at his feet.

No image has been stored for this entry, and one candidate was examined and rejected. A grisaille miniature from a Flemish Book of Hours of about 1450–1460, attributed to the illuminator Jean le Tavernier and hosted on Wikimedia Commons as File:Saintgermanusofparis.jpg, is genuinely pre-1900 and genuinely public domain, and shows a bishop-saint with mitre, crozier and open book in a tiled interior. It was rejected on identity grounds, not licence grounds: the miniature carries no inscription legible in the available reproduction, and the identification as Germanus of Paris rests on a single tertiary web gallery. Since "Saint Germain" in fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish devotional manuscripts is at least as likely to be Germanus of Auxerre — a far more popular subject in that art — storing the file would have risked attaching another saint's portrait to this entry. Germanus is therefore listed among the wanted icons until an inscribed or securely catalogued image is found.

Disputed questions

The year of his consecration to Paris. The sources are divided, and the difference is large. The critical tradition puts his consecration in or about 555, in succession to Bishop Eusebius and in the reign of Childebert I (511–558) — which gives him an episcopate of some twenty years. The OCA notice says he "was made Bishop of Paris around 536," which would double the length of his episcopate and put his election before, rather than after, the years of his abbacy at Autun. Some reference works confuse matters further by naming Charibert I as the king who consecrated him, an impossibility for 555, since Charibert did not reign until 561. This entry follows the reading that Germanus was consecrated c. 555 under Childebert I, and notes the OCA date as a divergence.
Whose excommunication? The king excommunicated for his marriages is named Charibert I in the Frankish sources; some later notices assign the sentence to Chilperic I, or place it in 568, a year after Charibert's death. The act is secure; its date and, in the derivative literature, its object are not.
Not to be confused with the other Germani of the calendar, and the confusion is a real one because all three are hierarchs: Germanus of Constantinople (May 12, †c. 740 — sixteen days before this feast), the patriarch who resigned his throne rather than subscribe the iconoclast policy of Leo III; and Germanus of Auxerre (July 31, †448), the far more frequently depicted Gallic bishop-saint who sent Palladius and Patrick to Britain and Ireland. Western images labelled simply "Saint Germanus" or "Saint Germain" belong more often to the bishop of Auxerre than to the bishop of Paris — a trap for anyone identifying iconography (see Iconography).
His Orthodox commemoration. Germanus is a pre-schism Western father, and his place in Orthodox usage rests on the reception of the saints of the old West rather than on any Byzantine cultus: he is in the Greek Great Synaxaristes for May 28 as Γερμανὸς ἐπίσκοπος Παρισίων and in the OCA calendar, but has no Byzantine propers.