Eusebius of Gaul

Eusebius Gallicanus"Eusebius of Gaul", is not one man. It is the name a manuscript tradition attached to a collection of about seventy-six Latin sermons preached in southern Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries and gathered into one book, probably by a monastic compiler, around the end of that period. Who the Eusebius of the title was, or whether he ever existed, is unknown.

The sermons themselves are real, and they are the everyday preaching of the Gallic church at the moment when Roman rule in Gaul was ending and Visigothic, Burgundian and Frankish kingdoms were taking its place. They run through the liturgical year, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, the feasts of the martyrs, and include a set addressed to monks, and homilies for the anniversaries of local saints.

The compiler drew on the preachers of the region. Material from Faustus of Riez is heavily represented; there are pieces associated with Caesarius of Arles, Hilary of Arles, Valerian of Cimiez, and Lérins more generally. Sorting out who wrote what has occupied scholars for centuries and is not finished.

What the collection gives is something the great theological treatises do not: the ordinary sound of the church talking to ordinary people. The sermons are short. They assume a congregation of farmers, soldiers and householders, not scholars. They deal with the practical shape of a Christian life, almsgiving, fasting, honesty in business, forgiving a neighbor, staying away from the old charms and omens the countryside still trusted. They insist on grace and on effort together, in the moderate Gallic key that Lérins had made its own.

And they were used. The collection became a working preacher's resource, copied all through the Middle Ages, mined by later homiliaries, and quoted by writers who thought they were quoting a father named Eusebius. A village priest with no library could take a sermon out of it and preach it. That was exactly the point of assembling it.

A modern critical edition appeared only in the twentieth century, and study of the collection as a witness to lay Christianity in late antique Gaul has grown since.

Sources: Eusebius "Gallicanus", Collectio homiliarum (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 101, 101A, 101B); Lisa Kaaren Bailey, Christianity's Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul (2010).