In his focused and detailed examination of the writings of Gregory of Tours (538-594), Allen E. Jones aims “to show how Gregory developed a sound, practical theology, which underpins his hagiographical and historical writings” (16). Rather than relying on predecessors like Augustine, Gregory appears to have forged a unique approach to his writings and pastoral work based on his own experiences, the teachings and examples of his own well-connected family, and an environment brimming with a sense of the proximity of death and the saints. Jones notes that the last four decades have witnessed a robust period of research on Gregory and notes specifically the work of Giselle de Nie, Ian Wood, Raymond Van Dam, and Martin Heinzelmann, each focusing on a specific aspect of this subject as communicator, political insider, devotee of saints’ cults, and sophisticated historiographer. Questions, nevertheless, remain about Gregory’s relationship to contemporary rulers, about how representative of his society at large Gregory’s thought is, and about the nature of Gregory’s theology. Jones attempts to close these gaps.
His book is divided into two parts, the former focused on the significance of death in Gregory’s thought, with the latter focused on the role played by the afterlife. Underpinning both parts is Gregory’s intense devotion to the saints, his cultivation of their legacies, and his promotion of their cults, pilgrimages, and relics. He wrote both the De virtutibus S. Martini episcopi and the De passione et virtutibus S. Iuliani martyris chronicling the lives of two local Gallic saints, Martin of Tours and Julian of Briouche. But he also composed the twenty hagiographies included in the Vita Patrum, where he preserves the lives of a variety of holy people from early medieval Gaul, including abbots, bishops, recluses, and one nun. To his hagiographical list must also be added his De gloria confessorum, De gloria martyrum, De miraculis Beati Andreae Apostoli, and Passio sanctorum martyrum septem dormientium apud Ephesum. From Gregory’s hagiographical and historical works--notably his Decem libri historiarum--Jones formulates an intellectual biography of Gregory and relates it to his practical pastoral agenda.
Chapter 1, “Peering into the Invisible World,” details how Gregory’s early life was impacted by death, which he often treated in his writing as a personification with willful agency. His earliest days were colored by his family’s reactions to the passing of close and noted relatives, like his maternal great-grandfather Gregory of Langres, or their reactions to the approach of the Justinianic plague, which turned them, sometimes guided by dreams and visions, to vigils, masses, pilgrimage, and prayer. Jones reports several family illnesses, including Gregory’s own, which were relieved or cured through these types of suffrages. At an early age, when faced by death himself, Gregory vowed to become a cleric.
In Chapter 2, “Maturing Spiritually in a Perilous World,” Jones follows the impact of death, often referred to as a sentient being, on a young Gregory in his teens. While close relatives continued to die, he was also surrounded by Merovingian civil warfare from the time of Theudebald’s death in 555 until 561 when the kingdom was divided into four by Chlothar’s sons. In 563, another illness threatened Gregory, and he wrote how he clearly expected “Death” to come for him. He traveled 260 kilometers to Tours on pilgrimage, where he was cured and became a deacon. Civil war and plague visited the Auvergne again and more died, including several bishops, leading to wrangling for episcopal positions among various factions.
During this period, influences on Gregory expanded out from family members, like his uncle Bishop Gallus of Clermont (d. 551), to his tutor Avitus, also bishop of Clermont (571-594). The latter had a profound impact on Gregory, leading him to the study of sacred literature: scripture, biblical stories, sermons, and liturgical readings. He is credited with promoting Gregory’s development into a “learned and earnest ecclesiastic” (66). Jones also traces Gregory’s spiritual indoctrination into divination, saintly interventions (staged and otherwise), exorcisms, and knowledge attained from dreams and visions as well as from celestial phenomena and extraordinary natural occurrences. He also discusses Gregory’s embrace of typological interpretation, which he incorporated into his Historia and the prefaces to the lives in the Vita Patrum.
Gregory became bishop of Tours in 573 after the death of yet another relative, Eufronius of Tours, but before Gregory even entered his city, he was again stricken with an illness. St. Martin of Tours miraculously cured him, solidifying his connection to the cathedra and people of Tours. In chapter 3, “Pastoring from the Pulpit and the Page,” Jones lays out Gregory’s development of a saint-based pastoral agenda. As bishop, author, and pastor, and against a background of continuing conflict among the Merovingians, Gregory developed compositional strategies that would combine history and hagiography, beginning with his vow to record the life of St. Martin followed by other vitae and miracula. Unfortunately, Gregory’s sermons do not survive, and all of Gregory’s surviving writings date from after he assumed his episcopacy. This chapter details much of what we can glean from his writings about his pastoral thought with its focus on saving souls on Judgment Day. Although prominent penitential techniques encompassed fasting, almsgiving, lamentation, vigils, and prayer, including the daily recitation of the Pater noster, Gregory showed no particular preference among them but placed the saints and their miracles at the center of his agenda, including vows to the saints, pilgrimages to their tombs, and veneration of their relics. The patronage of holy people, some of them still living, was the key to the individual’s struggle for salvation. Sinners needed “to condition themselves to pray, weep, give alms, fast, attend vigils, and also to invoke the saints with firm conviction in order to receive divine grace” (136). Jones here places Gregory within the context of Gallic reception of the Augustinian theology of grace as God’s unmerited gift: “Gregory stressed a human condition of sinfulness, which could be overcome by grace, ultimately resulting in salvation” (115).
In Part 2, Jones switches from an examination of death to looking at the role played by the afterlife in the works of Gregory. Chapter 4, “Discerning the Denizens of Heaven and Hell,” examines Gregory’s proclivity to detect the otherworld fate of individuals and communicate them to the living, noting that this was “a practice that was exceedingly rare among late ancient writers” (146). The status of the blessed could be revealed by apparitions, miracles, and sensual evidence of beatitude, such as the odor of sanctity. They were often presented in happy circumstances surrounded by choirs of angels and welcoming saints. The fate of the damned, on the other hand, was usually signaled by a violent death, often characterized by fire, smoke, fever, and blackened limbs. Gregory is shown to use a particular vocabulary to communicate either salvation (migrare and transire) or damnation (interire, iudicium dei, and ultio divina). As a warning to the living, he specifically identifies ten individuals consigned to hell, but, not unusual for this period, he provides little detail about their infernal destination. Jones notes three developing ideas of this period referenced by Gregory: the Particular Judgment immediately after death, bodily resurrection at the Last Judgment, and purgation in the afterlife. His writings indicate that he subscribed to the former two but not the latter as he exhorted his audience to embrace virtue in order to enjoy the glory of the saved and to shun sin to avoid the fate of the damned.
With chapter 5, “Fathoming the Fates of the Merovingians,” Jones addresses the question of Gregory’s relationship to contemporary rulers. He focuses on the Historia, where Gregory “scrutinized the actions of the Frankish royal family members and estimated the eternal condition of their souls” (201). After treating St. Martin, Gregory compiled selected lessons for current and future Frankish rulers based on their predecessors, punctuating the narrative with the manner of their deaths as befitting their lives, either good or bad, and as indicative of their fates in the otherworld. These models of behavior were to be embraced or avoided both for the good of the realm and for their own immortal souls, cautioning them especially “against the discord inherent in civil warfare, which he declared was already destroying them along with their subjects, and which would eventually result in the loss of their realms” (273). This narrative strategy is similar to one found in Gregory’s Vision of Sunniulf (Historia 1:33) where lax abbots are warned through the lesson of Sunniulf, abbot at Randan, who had a vision of the otherworld where those who failed to appropriately discipline their flocks fell into a flaming river from a narrow bridge.
Jones’s concluding chapter notes the wealth of influences on Gregory’s theological thought but stresses that much of his historical and spiritual material and its pastoral message derives from his personal experiences, his contemporaries--both family members and mentors--and authors mentioned specifically in his work.
This well-written volume provides a detailed overview of particular and significant aspects of Gregory’s thought on saints and their relationship to death, judgment, heaven, and hell within the context of the thought of his contemporaries during a time when many of these ideas were in developing stages. Jones highlights Gregory’s existential situation and contemporary horizontal influences and their roles in his developing theology as important complements to the usual inherited intellectual tradition. The author generously cites his own contemporaries, clearly attributing many insights to a number of prominent scholars working today. This book will be a welcome addition to the flourishing fields of late antique studies and of Merovingian Gaul, as well as to the library of new work on a most interesting figure, Gregory of Tours.