Lucian of Beauvais

The Holy Hieromartyr Lucian, Bishop of Beauvais, and those with him — Maximian the presbyter, Julian the deacon, Marcellinus and Saturninus

Hieromartyr · Bishop · Priest · Deacon · d. traditionally under Domitian (81–96); more probably the mid-3rd century

Commemorated 3 June — Martyrdom by beheading at Beauvais in Gaul

Lucian, first bishop of Beauvais (Bellovacum) in northern Gaul, is one of the apostolic missionaries of the Gallo-Belgic country and the only Western martyr of June 3 whom the Byzantine calendar has taken into its own books. The tradition makes him a Roman named Lucius, converted and baptised by the Apostle Peter, sent west by Pope Clement in the company of Dionysius the Areopagite to evangelise Gaul, and, with the presbyter Maximian and the deacon Julian, the apostle of the Beauvaisis, where nearly the whole country is said to have been baptised at his preaching. Under a persecution the notices place in the reign of Domitian (81–96), Maximian and Julian were beheaded, and Lucian after them; a cephalophore legend has him rise, carry his own head across a river, and lie down at the place he chose for burial, at which some five hundred pagans believed. He is commemorated on June 3, and the martyrs Marcellinus and Saturninus are named with him.

Lucius of Rome

The Passion — a Latin text of the Merovingian or Carolingian period, and the source of everything that follows — begins at Rome, and with a change of name. Lucian was a Roman, a pagan, and was called Lucius; he heard the preaching of the Apostle Peter, believed, was baptised, and took the name by which the Church knows him. After Peter's martyrdom he preached through Italy.

Then, in the ordering of the text, Pope Clement — Peter's successor in the third generation of the Roman see — ordained him bishop and sent him west with a company: Dionysius the Areopagite at its head, with the presbyter Maximian, the deacon Julian, and Marcellinus and Saturninus. Their commission was Gaul and the country beyond it.

The apostle of the Beauvaisis

The company crossed to Gaul and divided. Some went on toward Spain; Dionysius, in the tradition that made him the first bishop of Paris, went to the Seine; and Lucian turned north into Belgic Gaul with Maximian and Julian, settling at Bellovacum, the city of the Bellovaci, which is Beauvais.

The Passion dwells on his manner of life, and its detail is the ascetic detail of a monastic age rather than an apostolic one: he ate a morsel of bread and drank a little water in the day, and no more — and yet, the text is careful to add, he was cheerful with those who came to him, and not austere toward his converts. His preaching is credited with a wholesale conversion: nearly all the settlements of the Belgic country, says the notice, received the faith through him. Whatever the historical value of that claim, Beauvais has never had any other founder: Lucian is its first bishop in every list, and its cathedral and abbey both bore his name.

The martyrdoms

The persecution comes in the Passion by imperial commission: officers were sent from Rome, in the reign of Domitian, to enforce the edicts of sacrifice. Lucian's response was pastoral first — he prepared his people for suffering, which the text presents as the proper work of a bishop under a persecution — and then he withdrew with Maximian and Julian to a hill outside the city, where he went on teaching those who followed him.

There the soldiers took them. Maximian and Julian were tried, refused to deny Christ, and were beheaded. Lucian was beaten and told to be silent, and answered that he would not cease to praise Christ while he had breath; and he too was beheaded.

The sign at the place of burial

The Passion closes with the miracle that fixed the site of his cult. At his death a light from heaven was seen and the voice of the Saviour heard receiving him; and then the body rose, took up its own head, carried it across the neighbouring river, and lay down at the spot the martyr had chosen for his grave. Some five hundred of the pagan onlookers are said to have believed at the sight.

This is the cephalophore motif — the beheaded saint who carries his head to his tomb — and it is shared, not accidentally, with Dionysius of Paris, the companion with whom Lucian was sent: the two legends grew up together, and the motif belongs to the same Frankish hagiographic family. Its function in the text is topographic. It explains why the church is there and not where the man was killed.

A church was built over the grave, and into it were brought also the relics of Maximian and Julian; it became the great abbey of Saint-Lucien outside Beauvais, one of the oldest foundations of northern France, and the centre of a cult that lasted until the abbey's destruction in the French Revolution.

Feast and commemoration

June 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 16), in the Slavonic and OCA calendars, which head the day "the hieromartyrs Lucian the bishop, Maximian the presbyter, Julian the deacon, Marcellinus and Saturninus, in Belgium (81–96)" — the Belgium of the notice being Gallia Belgica, the Roman province, not the modern kingdom. The commemoration entered the Slavonic books through the Menologion of St Demetrius of Rostov, which drew the Western martyrs of the Acta into the Russian reading-cycle; it is on that account that Lucian appears in Russian and OCA usage while other Western saints of June 3 (Kevin of Glendalough, Clotilde of the Franks, Meriasek) are found only in modern lists. He has no place in the Greek or Antiochian Menaia, and no Byzantine office; the common of a hieromartyr serves.

In the West he is kept on January 8 by the Roman Martyrology, and locally at Beauvais, whose diocese counts him first among its bishops and whose abbey of Saint-Lucien held his relics until 1789.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)

As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Lucian: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

Orthodox iconography of Lucian is modern and scarce, and follows the ordinary hierarch-martyr type: an older bishop in phelonion and omophorion, blessing and holding the Gospel, with the martyr's cross; the companions, when shown, are ranged beside him in the vestments of their orders, Maximian as a priest and Julian in the deacon's sticharion and orarion with a censer.

Western art gave him, from the twelfth century onward, the attribute that the Passion supplies: he is a cephalophore, painted or carved holding his own mitred head in his hands, sometimes with the severed neck bare and the hands cradling the head at the breast — the type familiar from Denis of Paris, and used at Beauvais in stone, glass and seal. Any Orthodox icon of him will normally decline the motif, since the Byzantine tradition does not paint saints carrying their heads.

No pre-1900 image of him has been stored here. The medieval material of Beauvais is Western sculpture and glass rather than icon-painting, and no Byzantine or Slavonic image of this Lucian — as distinct from Lucian of Antioch, whose miniatures are plentiful — has been identified. The risk of mis-captioning an image of the Antiochene Lucian is the specific reason none is stored.

Disputed questions

The date: first century or third? The Passion and every calendar derived from it place him under Domitian (81–96) and make him a convert of the Apostle Peter sent out by Pope Clement. This is almost certainly a back-projection. The historical evangelisation of the Beauvaisis belongs to the third century, and modern hagiography places Lucian, like the whole Dionysius-of-Paris cycle to which his Passion attaches him, in the persecutions of the mid-third century — the reign of Decius or of Valerian — with the martyrdom perhaps under Diocletian at the latest. (Some catalogues indeed style Lucian, Maximian and Julian "missionaries martyred in Gaul in the Diocletianic persecution.") The apostolic dating is the work of ninth-century Frankish writers eager to give the churches of Gaul apostolic founders, and it is the same impulse that turned the Areopagite of Acts 17 into the first bishop of Paris. The frontmatter here retains century 1 because that is the dating the calendars carry and by which the entry will be looked up, but the third-century placing is the better history and is recorded as such.
Sent by Peter, or by Clement? The Passion has him converted by Peter and sent by Clement, and these are made consecutive; but Clement's episcopate (c. 88–99) falls a full generation after Peter's death, and if the mission is Clement's then the Petrine baptism must belong to a much younger man than the aged missionary of the story. The seam in the narrative is visible.
Was he a bishop? The Byzantine calendars style him hieromartyr and the Western ones episcopus et martyr, first bishop of Beauvais. The episcopal lists of Beauvais begin with him, but they were compiled long after; some scholars hold him to have been a missionary presbyter whose see was constructed for him afterwards. The entry follows the calendars.
The cephalophory. Universally recognised as a hagiographic topos and not as a transmitted fact; it is shared with Dionysius of Paris, Denis's companions Rusticus and Eleutherius, and a long series of Frankish martyrs. It is recorded here as part of the tradition, and as the reason the tomb is where it is.
Marcellinus and Saturninus. The Byzantine notices name them "with him," and this entry keeps them in the official_name accordingly; but in the Passion they belong to the missionary company sent from Rome and are not said to have died at Beauvais with Lucian, Maximian and Julian. Their presence in the June 3 commemoration comes from the list of the mission, not from the passion narrative.
Not to be confused with Lucian of Antioch, the presbyter and martyr of the Antiochene school (†312, kept October 15), nor with Lucian of the Kiev Caves (†1243), nor with Lucillian, the aged convert martyred at Byzantium, whose feast is the same day, June 3 — the pairing on one page of Loukillianos and Lucianus is the likeliest confusion of all, and the two are wholly distinct persons of different centuries and countries. Nor is the Julian of this company Julian of Galatia or any of the other martyrs of that very common name.