Illidius of Clermont
Our Father among the Saints Illidius, Bishop of Clermont in Auvergne
Bishop · d. c. 385
Commemorated 5 June — Repose at Trier; the body returned to Clermont
Illidius (†c. 385) — Allyre in French — was the fourth bishop of Clermont in Auvergne, one of the earliest hierarchs of central Gaul of whom anything is known. His one recorded deed is a wonder: summoned to Trier to the daughter of the emperor, who was tormented by an unclean spirit, he healed her by prayer and fasting, and asked in return not gifts for himself but relief for his church. He died at Trier, and his body was brought home to Clermont, where his tomb became one of the great healing shrines of Gaul — Gregory of Tours, who wrote his memory down, was himself cured there as a boy. He is commemorated on June 5.
Bishop of the Arverni
Illidius held the see of Clermont (Augustonemetum, the city of the Arverni) in the second half of the fourth century, the fourth in its episcopal list after Austremonius the founder, Urbicus and Legonius, and immediately before Nepotianus. The Christianity of Auvergne was then perhaps a century old and still a minority religion in a heavily pagan countryside, and Illidius belongs to the generation that turned a mission into a diocese. Nothing of his origins, and almost nothing of his administration, is transmitted.
The emperor's daughter at Trier
What is transmitted is one episode, told by Gregory of Tours in the Book of the Glory of the Confessors. The daughter of the emperor — Gregory's account is set at Trier, then the imperial residence of the West — was afflicted by an unclean spirit, and no physician could help her. The reputation of the bishop of the Arverni had reached the court, and Illidius was summoned. He came, and by prayer and fasting — Gregory is explicit that he used no other means — the girl was delivered.
The emperor pressed rewards on him. Illidius, in the account, declined anything for himself, and asked instead a favour for his city and his church: a remission of the tribute owed by Clermont, or a privilege for the Christians of Auvergne. He then fell ill at Trier, and died there, about the year 385.
His body was not left in the imperial city. It was carried back to Clermont and buried there, in what became the church of St Allyre outside the walls, over a spring in the marshy ground south of the city.
The tomb and its miracles
The shrine at Clermont became one of the busiest in Gaul. Gregory of Tours — himself of an Auvergnat senatorial family and a kinsman of several bishops of Clermont — records that the sick were healed there, that fevers and quartan agues were driven off, and that the possessed were delivered. He adds a piece of personal testimony that has kept the saint's name alive: as a boy Gregory was tormented by a violent fever (in some readings a toothache), and his mother's household could do nothing for him; he was taken to, or prayed at, the tomb of St Illidius, and was cured — and he vowed on the strength of it to enter the Church's service. In that sense Illidius has a claim to having produced the greatest historian of Merovingian Gaul.
The church of St Allyre at Clermont was rebuilt repeatedly, sacked in the Wars of Religion, and largely destroyed at the Revolution; the saint's name survives in the quarter and in the mineralised spring beside it, whose petrifying waters were a local wonder in their own right.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18), with a secondary Western observance on July 7 for the translation of the relics. In Byzantine usage the day belongs principally to Dorotheus of Tyre, and Illidius, like Boniface of Mainz on the same day, is kept as one of the saints of the undivided West. Clermont-Ferrand honours him as one of its own bishops and patrons.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O holy father Illidius, thou didst shepherd the church of the Arverni in the days of its youth, and being called to the palace of the emperor thou didst drive out the unclean spirit by fasting and prayer, asking no reward but mercy for thy people. Wherefore, as thou didst heal the sick at thy tomb, heal now our souls.
Original translation from the Latin
Iconography
Illidius is written as a hierarch of the fourth century: in phelonion and omophorion in Byzantine-style icons, or in the Latin chasuble with mitre and crozier in Western art, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel book or a scroll in the left, with a short greying beard. Two proper subjects belong to him. The first is the exorcism at Trier: the bishop standing over a girl in rich dress, the demon issuing from her mouth as a small dark figure, and the emperor and his court looking on — the composition used for the healing of the daughter of the emperor in mediaeval Latin cycles. The second is the healing at the tomb, with the sick laid about a stone sarcophagus. In the local imagery of Clermont he is associated with the petrifying spring beside his church, and may be shown with water at his feet.
No pre-1900 image of Illidius has been located for this collection, and no dedicated search of Wikimedia Commons was possible for him within the resources of this session. He is a candidate for a later icon search among the Latin manuscript and Auvergnat sources, which are likely to hold something. As a June commemoration he cannot appear in the Menologion of Basil II.
Disputed questions
- Which emperor. Gregory does not name him. The date places the episode in the reign of Gratian or of the usurper Magnus Maximus, both of whom held court at Trier in the relevant years; Maximus is the more usual identification, and some accounts make the healed girl the daughter of Maximus, others of Gratian. The point cannot be settled.
- Date of repose. About 385 is the received figure, inferred from the episcopal list and the Trier chronology; no year is transmitted.
- Feast day. June 5 in the Latin martyrologies and in the Orthodox enumerations of the day that include the Western saints; July 7 is also found, as the day of a translation of the relics, and some French local usage keeps him then.
- Orthodox commemoration. Illidius belongs to the undivided Church, dying six centuries before the schism, and appears on June 5 in Orthodox lists of the day that include the pre-schism saints of the West (OrthodoxWiki). He is not in the Greek Menaion, the Moscow Patriarchate's calendar for the day, or the OCA's June 5 synaxarion, and the commemoration is recorded here as a local Western one, kept in Western-rite and local Orthodox usage in France and the diaspora rather than universally. This is a short entry because the record is short, not because the commemoration is doubtful.
- Not to be confused with the other early bishops of Clermont — Austremonius (Stremonius, the apostle of Auvergne), Urbicus, Nepotianus, and the great Sidonius Apollinaris of the following century.