Caesarius of Arles

Caesarius was born about 468 at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy. At eighteen he asked his bishop for the clerical tonsure; two years later he left for Lérins, the island monastery off the coast of Provence that trained half the leadership of the Gallic church. He fasted himself into a breakdown there and was sent to Arles to recover. He never went back.

In 502 he was made bishop of Arles, and he held the see for forty years. In that time the city changed hands from Visigoths to Ostrogoths to Franks. Caesarius was arrested twice on suspicion of betraying the city to one side or the other, and exiled once; both times he was cleared.

He preached constantly, and he preached short. About two hundred and fifty of his sermons survive, which makes him the most fully preserved preacher of the early Latin West after Augustine. They are deliberately plain, aimed at farmers, soldiers, laborers, and slaves, not at the educated. He attacked drunkenness, adultery, the abuse of dependents, and the charms and auguries his people still used.

He was known to have the doors shut so the congregation could not slip out before the sermon, and he taught the laity to sing psalms and antiphons in church so they would have something in their mouths besides the tavern songs. Then he had his sermons written out and circulated to other clergy to preach as their own, so that a village priest without learning would still have something true to say.

He sold church plate, and by the accounts, even stripped silver from the sanctuary, to buy back captives taken in the wars, and once said that the God who redeemed men would not begrudge the metal.

In 529 he presided at the Council of Orange, and that is his mark on the church at large. Orange condemned the position that a man can take the first step toward God on his own strength, and affirmed that grace is prior, that even the beginning of faith is God's gift, while explicitly rejecting any notion that God predestines anyone to evil. Pope Boniface II confirmed the canons in 531, and Orange became the standing Western answer on grace for the next thousand years.

He wrote rules for monks and for nuns; his sister Caesaria led the convent he founded at Arles. He died in 542.

Sources: The Life of Caesarius of Arles, written by his disciples; the canons of the Second Council of Orange (529); Caesarius of Arles, Sermons (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 103–104); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Caesarius of Arles".