Venantius of Gaul
Our Venerable Father Venantius of Gaul, who reposed at Methone in Achaia
Venerable · d. c. 374
Commemorated 30 May — Repose in peace at Methone in the Peloponnese
Venantius was a young nobleman of Gaul, the elder brother of Honoratus, the founder of the great island monastery of Lérins, who with his brother and their spiritual father Caprasius abandoned rank and inheritance and sailed from Marseilles for the East, meaning to see the holy places of Palestine and to live under the ascetics of Syria and Egypt. He died on the voyage, at Methone in the Peloponnese, before reaching the desert he had set out for; his brother turned back and founded Lérins instead. He is one of the very few saints of the Latin West whom the Greek synaxarion receives in its own right, keeping him on May 30 as "Venandios" who was born in Gaul and "fell asleep in peace in Greece."
The two brothers of Gaul
Venantius and Honoratus were sons of a distinguished and still pagan family of northern Gaul — consular rank, by the account of Hilary of Arles, who wrote the Life of Honoratus within a few years of his subject's death and is the sole substantial source for both brothers. Both were converted young, and the conversion was of the radical sort: they wished not merely to be baptised but to leave the world altogether. Their father resisted with everything a Roman father had, offering marriages and public careers, and setting temptation deliberately in their way.
Venantius was the elder, and Hilary presents him as the more headlong of the two — the brother in whom the desire for the ascetic life burned hottest, and who carried Honoratus along with him. They found a guide in Caprasius, an ascetic already living apart, and under his direction the three of them sold what they could dispose of, gave it away, and left Gaul.
The voyage East, and death at Methone
They took ship at Marseilles. The plan, which Hilary records without embarrassment as the plan of very young men, was to reach the holy places of Palestine and then to put themselves under the great lauras of Syria and Egypt — the destinations of every serious Western ascetic of that generation, as they had been for Jerome and would be for Cassian and Rufinus.
They never arrived. Somewhere on the Greek passage Venantius fell ill, and he died at Methone — Methoni, the Latin Modon, on the south-western tip of the Peloponnese, a standard port of call on the sea-route from the West to the Levant. It is a death in transit, and it left his companions with a decision. Caprasius and Honoratus turned back. Some years later Honoratus settled on the barren island of Lerinum off the coast near Cannes and made of it Lérins, the mother house of Gallic monasticism and the school of Vincent of Lérins, of Hilary of Arles, of Eucherius and of a generation of Western bishops; Honoratus himself ended as archbishop of Arles and is commemorated on January 16.
The Church therefore honours Venantius for an ascetic life that was all intention and no achievement — a man who gave up everything, set out, and died on the way. Hilary's own verdict, which the tradition has kept, is that the reward is given for the purpose and the renunciation and not for the arrival, and that Venantius obtained in a foreign harbour what he had gone to the desert to find.
Reception in the Greek calendar
What makes Venantius unusual in this corpus is not his Life but his calendar. The great majority of the pre-schism Western saints of any given day stand outside the Byzantine books and are met only in the Latin martyrologies. Venantius is in the Greek synaxaristes for May 30 in his own right, under the hellenised name Βενάνδιος, with the notice that he was born in Gaul, lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, and "fell asleep in peace in Greece." The reason is almost certainly the place of his death: a Western pilgrim who died and was buried on Greek soil acquired a local Greek memory, and Methone was a well-frequented harbour of the Romania. He is thus a Latin saint held by the East on Eastern grounds — which is why this collection authors him rather than deferring him with the other Western commemorations of the day.
Feast and commemoration
May 30 (church date; New Calendar civil May 30, Old Calendar civil June 12), kept both in the Greek synaxaria as Ὅσιος Βενάνδιος and in the Roman Martyrology. He does not appear on the OCA day-page or in the Russian calendar for the day. No proper service is appointed in the Greek books; the common of an ascetic father is sung. His brother Honoratus of Arles is commemorated on January 16 and their guide Caprasius on June 1 in the Western calendars.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (from the common of an ascetic father)
Thou didst leave thy house and thy kindred and the rank of this world, and didst take ship to seek the deserts of the Fathers; and the Lord, receiving thy purpose for the deed, gave thee thy rest in a strange harbour. O venerable Venantius, pray that we too may set out and not turn back.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
There is no received iconography of Venantius, East or West. The Greek convention for a Western ascetic father received into the synaxarion without an image tradition would give him as a young monastic — beardless or lightly bearded, since he died young — in dark mantle and cowl, holding a scroll or a cross, inscribed Ο ΟΣΙΟΣ ΒΕΝΑΝΔΙΟΣ. Any narrative treatment would take its subject from the one scene the sources give: the ship at Marseilles, or the death in the harbour of Methone with Caprasius and Honoratus beside him. Images found under the name Venantius in Western art belong overwhelmingly to the boy martyr of Camerino, who is painted in armour or with a martyr's palm and falling from a cliff, and must not be used here.
No pre-1900 image of this saint has been identified for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The date of his death. The Latin tradition following Hilary, as digested by the Bollandists and by Butler, puts the brothers' departure from Marseilles "about 368," which yields a death for Venantius in the early 370s; the calendars accordingly give 374, and this entry follows them. The chronology is nevertheless difficult, since Honoratus did not found Lérins until about the turn of the century and died in 429/430; modern scholarship therefore tends to place the eastern voyage nearer 395–400, which would move Venantius's death into the very end of the fourth century. The Greek notice, which spans "the fourth and fifth centuries," is compatible with either. The traditional date is recorded here with the difficulty stated.
- Which brother was the elder. Hilary calls Venantius the elder and the leader in the ascetic project; a minority of later retellings reverse the pair, making Honoratus the elder because he is the greater saint. The primary source is followed.
- Not to be confused with Venantius of Camerino (the boy martyr of Camerino in Italy, commemorated May 18), nor with Venantius Fortunatus (the sixth-century poet and bishop of Poitiers, †c. 600), nor with Venantius of Tours, all of whom bear the same and rather common Gallic and Italian name.
- No relics, no cultus at Lérins. Nothing is transmitted about his burial at Methone or about any translation of his remains, and Lérins — which kept the memory of Honoratus with great care — appears to have had no shrine of his brother. His entire cultus is calendrical.