Salvian the Presbyter

Salvian was born about 400 near Trier or Cologne, in the Roman frontier country along the Rhine, and he watched it fall. Trier, one of the great imperial cities of the West, was sacked repeatedly in his lifetime.

He married a woman named Palladia, whose parents were pagans, and they had a daughter. After some years the couple agreed to separate and live in continence. Palladia's family were furious, and a letter of Salvian's survives in which he writes to his in-laws, seven years into the silence, pleading for reconciliation. It is a painfully human document.

He went south to Lérins, the island monastery off the coast of Provence that trained a whole generation of Gallic bishops, and then to Marseilles, where he was ordained priest and spent the rest of a long life. Gennadius, who knew of him, calls him the master of bishops and says he was still writing in extreme old age around 470. He probably died about 490.

His great book is On the Government of God, in eight books, written about 440.

Its question is the one the age was asking: if God rules the world, why is the Christian Roman empire being destroyed by pagan and heretical barbarians? Salvian's answer is not the comforting one. He says God does govern, is watching every hour, and is judging, and that Rome is getting what it deserves.

Then he does something almost nobody in his century dared. He compares the Romans to the barbarians in detail and finds the Romans worse. The Goths and Vandals, he writes, are chaste; Roman Christians are not. The barbarians are loyal to each other; the Romans betray each other in the courts. The Vandals took Carthage and shut the brothels, a Christian city had kept them open.

He describes the tax system as organised robbery in which the powerful shift the burden onto the poor, and reports that Roman peasants were fleeing across the frontier to live under the Goths, because slavery among barbarians was better than freedom among Romans. He says the circus and the theatre were packed while the enemy was at the gates, and that at Trier, after three sackings, the survivors asked the emperor for games.

He is not soft on the barbarians' heresy, he says plainly that they are Arians and wrong, but he insists that they sin in ignorance while Romans sin holding the Scriptures in their hands, and that this makes the Romans guiltier.

His other surviving work, To the Church, written under the pen-name Timothy, attacks Christians who leave their money to their families instead of to the poor.

Historians use Salvian carefully, he is a preacher building a case, not a statistician, and use him constantly, because no other source describes the social wreckage of fifth-century Gaul from inside with that much anger.

Sources: Salvian, De gubernatione Dei and Ad ecclesiam (English translation by Jeremiah O'Sullivan, Fathers of the Church, volume 3); Gennadius, De viris illustribus; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.