Valerian of Cimiez

Valerian was bishop of Cimiez, Cemenelum, a Roman town on the hill above what is now Nice, on the coast of southern Gaul, in the middle of the fifth century. He is first recorded in 439 and last in 455, and he probably died around 460.

He belonged to the circle of Lérins, the island monastery off that coast that supplied bishops to the whole province and produced Vincent of Lérins, Faustus of Riez, Hilary of Arles, and others. Valerian signs the acts of the Council of Riez in 439, the Council of Vaison in 442, and a council at Arles in 455. He also subscribed a letter of the Gallic bishops to Pope Leo the Great. That is essentially the whole documentary record of his life.

Gaul in his years was in pieces. The Visigoths held Aquitaine, the Burgundians the Rhone valley, and Roman administration was thinning out. Valerian's coastline was comparatively sheltered, and his preaching is that of a settled town with a wealthy class in it.

Twenty of his homilies survive, along with one letter, addressed to a community of monks, on the good of discipline.

The sermons are unusual in the period for what they are not. They are not doctrinal. They do not argue about grace or Christ's natures, though he lived in the middle of both quarrels. They are about conduct, and they are aimed squarely at his congregation's daily life.

He preaches on the good of discipline, on greed and the use of money, on almsgiving, on the tongue, three separate sermons on the damage done by careless speech and slander. He preaches on the duty of hospitality, and on the treatment of the poor. He tells the rich that their surplus is not theirs. He preaches on martyrdom, on patience under injury, on the vanity of the world, on the four Gospels, and on the sign of the cross. The tone is direct and unliterary; he is not showing off, he is telling people what to do.

That plainness is what gives the sermons their historical value. They show what a Gallic bishop thought was actually wrong in his town, not the errors of theologians, but the money, the gossip, the shut doors, during the decades when the western empire was ending. Historians of late Roman society read Valerian for exactly that.

His works came down under his name in medieval manuscripts and were first printed in the seventeenth century. He is honoured as a saint in the diocese of Nice.

Sources: Valerian of Cimiez, Homilies and Letter to the Monks (Migne, Patrologia Latina 52; English translation in Fathers of the Church, volume 17); the acts of the Councils of Riez (439), Vaison (442), and Arles (455); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.