Gennadius of Massilia

Gennadius was a priest at Massilia, Marseilles, in the late fifth century. He wrote a book that historians of the early church cannot do without, and he wrote it for a plain reason: someone had to keep the list going.

A century earlier Jerome had written On Illustrious Men, a catalogue of Christian authors from Peter down to his own day, with a short notice of each one's life and works. Gennadius picked it up where Jerome left off and carried it forward, adding roughly a hundred more entries covering the fifth century. The two books were copied together and travelled together through the Middle Ages as a single reference work.

For a large number of writers, his notice is the only evidence that they existed. Fastidius the British bishop is known from four lines of Gennadius and nothing else. So are others whose books are gone entirely. When a scholar today says that a lost work "is attested by Gennadius" that is often the whole of the attestation.

He worked as a cataloguer, not a critic: name, place, office, list of works, a sentence of judgment. His judgments, though, are not neutral, and that is the second thing his book records. Gennadius belonged to the school of southern Gaul that hesitated over Augustine's doctrine of predestination, the circle of Lérins, of Cassian and Faustus of Riez. His entry on Augustine credits the enormous output and then notes, pointedly, that a man who writes that much cannot avoid saying things he will have to take back. His entry on Prosper of Aquitaine, Augustine's defender, is cool. His warmth for Cassian and for Faustus is obvious.

So the book preserves both the roll of fifth-century Christian writers and a candid record of how the Augustinian question actually sat in Gaul before the Council of Orange settled it in 529.

Gennadius also wrote a compact statement of doctrine, the Book of Church Dogmas, which was widely copied, often under Augustine's name, and he mentions in his own entry that he wrote against all the heresies, against the Pelagians, and on the Apocalypse. Those works are lost.

He died about 496.

Sources: Gennadius of Massilia, De viris illustribus (printed with Jerome's in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 3); Gennadius, Liber de ecclesiasticis dogmatibus; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Gennadius of Marseilles".