Eucherius of Lyon

Eucherius was a Gallo-Roman aristocrat of senatorial rank, married to a woman named Galla, with two sons and two daughters. Sometime in the 410s or 420s he took his whole household out of public life and went to Lérins, the island monastery off the coast of Provence, and then further out still — to the smaller neighboring island of Lero, where he lived as a hermit while his wife and children lived nearby under the same discipline. It was a deliberate liquidation of a comfortable life. Around 434 he was made bishop of Lyon, one of the principal sees of Gaul, and held it until his death about 449. Both of his sons, Salonius and Veranus, became bishops as well. His writing was done largely for them. The Formulae of Spiritual Understanding, addressed to Veranus, is a beginner's handbook to the figurative language of the Bible: what it means when Scripture speaks of God's hand, God's eyes, God's anger; what the standard images stand for; how to read a metaphor without either flattening it or floating away on it. The Instructions, addressed to Salonius, works through hard passages and obscure names in question-and-answer form. Both are teaching tools, written to be used, and both were copied constantly through the Middle Ages precisely because they were short and clear. His best-known short work is In Praise of the Desert, written to Hilary of Arles, an argument that the wilderness is where God has always met his people — Moses at the bush, Israel at Sinai, Elijah at Horeb, John at the Jordan, Christ in the forty days — and therefore the island monastery is not a retreat from the world but a return to the ground where God speaks. He also wrote On Contempt for the World, a letter urging a kinsman to make the same break he had made. He is credited with the earliest surviving account of the Theban Legion — the story of Maurice and his soldiers, martyred at Agaunum in the Swiss Alps for refusing an order — which he says he received from an earlier bishop's testimony. The historical value of the account is debated; his is the version everything later depends on. Sources: Gennadius of Massilia, De viris illustribus, 63; Eucherius of Lyon, Formulae spiritalis intelligentiae, Instructiones and De laude eremi (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 31); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Eucherius".