Julian of Le Mans
Our Father among the Saints Julian, First Bishop of Cenomanis
Bishop · Wonderworker · d. 1st century by tradition; 3rd or 4th century in the judgement of historians
Commemorated 13 July — Commemoration of the first bishop of Le Mans
Julian is honoured as the first bishop of Cenomanis — Le Mans, on the Sarthe in what is now western France — and as the apostle of the Cenomani. The tradition received in the East makes him a disciple sent into Gaul by the Apostle Peter himself: he preached to a wholly pagan people, healed the sick, brought water from dry ground by striking it with his staff, gave sight to a blind man at the gate of the local prince, and after a fast of three days baptised the prince and his household, so that idolatry was uprooted from the country. He reposed in extreme old age, and the great cathedral of Le Mans bears his name to this day. Historians, working from the ninth-century episcopal chronicle that is the earliest witness to his life, place him some two or three centuries later than the tradition does. The Byzantine calendars keep his memory on July 13; the West keeps him on January 27.
The mission to the Cenomani
The account of Julian which the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria carry — abbreviated from the Latin — belongs to the family of apostolic foundation-legends by which the older Churches of Gaul traced their orders back to the first generation. In it, Julian is ordained bishop by Peter at Rome and sent north-west into Gaul, to the territory of the Cenomani, a Celtic people of the Loire basin whose chief town (Vindinum, later Civitas Cenomanorum, then Le Mans) stood on a bend of the Sarthe.
He came, the account says, to a people who knew nothing of Christ and worshipped at the groves and springs, and he preached to them plainly. What opened the country to him was not argument but healing: the sick who were brought to him recovered, and the report of it ran ahead of him from village to village. Two signs in particular are fixed in the tradition and in the local topography.
The first is the spring. Julian and his companions, in a waterless place where the people had no clean water, prayed and he struck the ground with his pastoral staff, and a spring rose there; the fountain shown at Le Mans as the fontaine Saint-Julien is attached to this episode, and the association of the saint with wells and springs runs through the whole later cult of the Maine country.
The second is the healing of the blind man at the prince's gate. The local ruler — called Defensor in the Latin Acts, a name which may be a title rather than a personal name — had a blind man sitting at his door; Julian restored his sight, and the ruler, who had already heard of the cures in the countryside, received him. There followed a catechesis and a fast of three days, at the end of which the prince, his household and a great number of the people were baptised. The Acts add, in the manner of the genre, that Julian's prayer restored dead children to their parents.
Having a Christian ruler, Julian built a church — the tradition sets it where the cathedral now stands — ordained clergy for the towns of the region, and organised the young Church. He is said to have "utterly abolished idolatry in the land of the Cenomani." He reposed in great old age, was buried outside the walls at a place afterwards called Saint-Julien-du-Pré, and his tomb at once became a place of healing. His relics were later brought within the city; the cathedral church of Le Mans, one of the great Romanesque and Gothic buildings of France, is dedicated to him, and the town of Saint-Julien and a wide scatter of parish dedications across Maine and Anjou carry his name.
Veneration and later cultus
Julian's cult in the West is old, continuous, and strong. He appears in the Latin martyrologies; the church of Le Mans kept his memory on January 27, with additional feasts for the translations of his relics; and the Norman conquest carried his dedication to England, where the twelfth-century Angevin kings — Le Mans was the burial-place of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the birthplace of Henry II — spread it further. He was invoked for hospitality and for safe lodging on a journey, and in the medieval West "St Julian's inn" was a proverbial phrase for a welcome at the end of a hard day's travelling.
His entry into the Byzantine calendar is the more interesting fact for this corpus. A Gallic bishop with no Eastern connection whatever is not the kind of saint the Greek synaxaria ordinarily receive; his presence there on July 13 reflects the pre-schism communion of the Churches and the circulation of Latin passionary material in Greek and Slavonic translation. The Russian Menaion carries him as Свт. Иулиана, епископа Кеноманийского, and the OCA and Antiochian calendars keep him on the same day.
Feast and commemoration
July 13 (church date; New Calendar civil July 13; Old Calendar civil July 26) in Greek, Slavonic, Antiochian and OCA usage, kept with the summer Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel and Stephen of Mar Sabbas. In the West his principal feast is January 27, with local commemorations of the translations of his relics; the divergence of dates is a plain instance of a saint received into a second calendar at a date the first does not know, and neither day has priority over the other. He has no proper office in the Greek Menaion and is served from the common of a hierarch.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to thy gentleness: take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy hierarch Julian, guide our life in peace.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Sent to a people that knew not God, thou didst open to them the fountain of the faith, O holy Julian, and by thy staff didst bring forth water from the dry ground and light to the eyes of the blind; wherefore the land of the Cenomani, made a garden by thy labours, crieth out to thee: Rejoice, O father and first shepherd.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Julian is written as a hierarch of the apostolic age: in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book in the left, the beard full and grey, the face aged — the standard hierarch type, since the East has no independent iconographic memory of him. Where he is given an attribute it is the pastoral staff with which he struck the ground, and in the Western imagery of Le Mans he is regularly shown with a spring gushing at his feet, or baptising the kneeling prince, or with the blind man at the gate. The great cycles of his legend are in the sculpture and glass of his own cathedral, which is a twelfth- to fifteenth-century building; those are Western Gothic works, not icons, and they belong to the history of his cult rather than to Orthodox iconography.
No pre-1900 Eastern icon of Julian of Le Mans has been located for this collection. A search of Wikimedia Commons for images under his name returns the architecture and glass of the cathedral of Saint-Julien and nothing that is an icon of the saint; the cathedral photographs are modern photographers' work of a three-dimensional building and would in any case be the photographers' copyright, not public domain by age. He is therefore entered in the the list of icons still being sought list.
Disputed questions
- Date. The tradition, followed by the Byzantine synaxaria, makes Julian a disciple of the Apostle Peter and so places him in the first century. The earliest surviving witness to his life, however, is the Actus Pontificum Cenomannis in Urbe Degentium, the episcopal chronicle of Le Mans compiled in the ninth century, some seven hundred years after the events; it is a document with a known interest in magnifying the antiquity and the property-claims of its see, and modern historians of the Gallican Churches generally place the first bishop of Le Mans in the third or fourth century, in the same movement of mission that brought Gatianus to Tours and Dionysius to Paris. This entry records the traditional date in century because the liturgical commemoration and the synaxarion notice rest on it, and states the historical judgement here; the corpus does not resolve the question.
- Julian and Simon the Leper. A branch of the Le Mans tradition, and with it a number of Eastern retellings, identify Julian with Simon the Leper of Bethany (Mark 14:3; Matthew 26:6), supposing that he took the name Julian at baptism and was afterwards sent to Gaul. The identification appears in no early source, sits ill with the chronology of even the traditional account, and is best understood as a later attempt to give an apostolic founder a scriptural face. It is recorded here because the OCA notice and several synaxaria mention it, not because it is credible.
- Which Cenomanis? Some notices gloss Cenomanis as being in northern Italy, near Cremona — a confusion with the Cenomani of Cisalpine Gaul, a branch of the same Celtic people who settled around Brixia and Verona. The see is Le Mans in Gaul; the Italian gloss is an error of the transmission and should not be followed.
- Not to be confused with any of the several martyrs named Julian on the Eastern calendar — Julian of Emesa, Julian of Anazarbus, Julian of Mesopotamia, Julian of Galatia, Julian and Basilissa, or Julian and Caesarius of Terracina. Julian of Le Mans is not a martyr: he reposed in peace.