Chiara Mercuri's speech

 

These kind of questions (Did Sant’Egidio really exist? Which part of the tradition that we received is historical?) have been put by a scholar, Ethel Jones, at the beginning of 20th century. And she gave this answer: «No, this saint doesn’t exist; he has never existed. It all stems from a ‘querelle’, a dispute between the bishop and the abbey that lays by the mouth of the Rhone. Once upon a time, that abbey was called Saint Peter’s, later on, it was named after Sant’Egidio».

 

Why does Ethel Jones say that Sant’Egidio never existed? The 10th century is a time when a reorganization of the dioceses is in act all over Europe. What happens then? The bishops tried to restore their power over those abbeys which had become autonomous enclaves, free zones, real and actual fiefdoms. During that struggle between the bishops who wanted re-establish their power over those self-governing areas and the abbeys that wanted to maintain their autonomy, across France, the monasteries ‘invented’ traditions and Fathers, holy Founders, in whose legend the endorsement of their autonomy can be found. I use this word ‘inventing’ in the Latin meaning (inventio): rediscovering, regaining. That is what happened in Saint-Gilles’ Abbey.

 

Jones stated that writing about the life of Sant’Egidio was for claiming that Egidio, the founder of the monastery, had been to Rome in order to ask the Pope to put that particular abbey, that lays by the mouth of Rhone, under his direct jurisdiction, delivering it from the power of the local bishop.

 

What is the non-convincing aspect of Jones’ reconstruction? The fact that the tradition about Sant’Egidio presents a number of inconsistencies. In his ‘Vita’ Cesario of Arles, a Visigothic king, and Charles the Great as well are recorded, along with an Egidio’s journey to Rome, and a meeting with the Pope. All these pieces of information cannot hang together. If that tradition were really made up, as Jones says, why would one have written a legend full of inconsistencies? There were many cases in which, in order to claim the autonomy of a monastery or a church contrary to the bishop’s authority, hagiographic traditions have been created from nothing. When that happens, when a legend is created from nothing, they strive to give it a consistency.

 

To clear up any doubt, I invite you to peruse the Marco Bartoli and Francesco Tedeschi’s excellent work. You will form an opinion about the matter yourself, because the great value of this book is the fact that it is not a biography of Sant’Egidio. The Authors made a much more precious work: they deliver to us the kind of book we are looking for when we ask ourselves about the existence and the historicity of a saint and their cult: they deliver to their readers the documentary dossier in its thoroughness.

 

This is really a book for everyone because the Authors have translated all the documents. Thus, in this book there are answers for every kind of reader, even for the experts and the insiders: they can find in it all the sources, and the discussion about them and about the literature, the cult, the miracles and the tradition concerning Sant’Egidio. This book, thanks to a masterly use of print, is suitable for a multilevel reading: the reader can easily find the passages in which they are interested the most. I mean, for instance, the liturgical office, where the lines with regard to Sant’Egidio are printed in bold. Besides, the introductions are written in a straight and simple language.

 

To go back to what I was saying about Jones’ hypothesis, I am of the opinion that we need to raise the issue of the biography of Sant’Egidio in different terms. From my point of view, there is a kernel of truth that should be dated back to the 6th century. Egidio was a Greek who at a certain point decided to leave Greece to go West. Which was quite common in Christendom at that time. You should picture the early Middle Ages like a world the other way round compared to ours: the most developed and politically stable area was the East. So, if one was seeking ‘the desert’ then he had to go West. At the beginning of his life, Egidio walked the same path as Francis of Assisi: he was a rich man, educated, well-adjusted and inserted into the aristocracy of his country, but sometime he felt the desire for a solitary hermit’s life. It was normal for a young Greek in the 6th century to go West looking for solitude. In his introduction Andrea Riccardi makes us understand what the West was where Egidio settled: the Western Roman Empire, that in 200 A.D. had 67 million inhabitants, at the time of Egidio had less than half of that population. There had been a demographic collapse. Such a massive collapse in population must have had serious causes. At that time the Empire was affected by a series of wars of conquest which brought along with them pillages, plagues, famines. When there is a collapse in population the most vulnerable, such as women and children, do not find shelters. The social fabric, the state, and above all the defences, had collapsed too. So, the people were helpless, easy prey to armed bands and marauders. The defenceless people were left at the mercy of whoever.

 

That’s why at that time the West was the wilderness and the wasteland, the land of the emergency. Nowadays, we would go in the reverse route: in the West, where we have a privileged life, we may feel the desire to help or spread the Gospel among those who are in need and to do so we have to cross the Mediterranean in the opposite direction. Well, it is absolutely plausible that a rich young man from the East, from the Eastern Roman Empire, which stood firm, and flourished, would try to come to the part of Europe affected by every kind of emergencies.

 

To my mind this is the kernel of truth which lies in the ‘Vita’, or legend, of Sant’Egidio. And ‘legend’ is another word that comes from Latin and means: things, or words, to be read. This is emphasized several times in the book. So, Egidio set ashore in Marseilles and began to lead a hermit’s life. He tried also to found a community that assisted sick people, lepers, destitute, needy. In his ‘Vita’ we read that he alternated between those two attitudes and that should not surprise us. Pope Francis said once: «Especially in a time such as ours, in which, faced with difficulties, there can be the temptation to isolate oneself in one’s own comfortable and safe environments and withdraw from the world»[1]. Praying is an important aspect of the life of every Christian, but there must always be dialogue with the community, and with the others. And those are the two dimensions that marked Egidio’s life.

 

If we agree that Egidio lived in the 6th century, the references to Cesario of Arles, on the one hand, and a Visigothic King called Flavio, on the other, are seamlessly consistent. That king Flavio was not identified, but Flavio means ‘blond’ and the Goths were from Scandinavia therefore that could be simply a way to call kings from northern Europe. But some connect the etymology of the word Flavio to the Latin word ‘flumen’ (river). And the river was essential for a community that had founded its mother house by the beautiful mouth of the Rhone.

 

Then, what happened in the 10th century? A legend of a saint that did not exist before was not invented, as Jones reckoned. Whereas, in the10th century, on the occasion of a ‘querelle’ that certainly broke out because the bishops tried to get hold of all the abbeys which had enjoyed total independence until that point, the life of Sant’Egidio was rewritten, as often happened to other hagiographic writings.

 

There was a time in the story of the hagiography on Francis of Assisi when an order to destroy all the previous biographies was given because a new ‘Vita’ had been written and approved, and it had to be the only one. The life of a saint is also a model that is for teaching and for catechesis. It is clear that if there were different ‘Vitae’, if there were different stories, the opportunity of a catechesis on the day of the feast of that saint would be missed.

 

So, the first biography of Sant’Egidio, the original kernel, has been destroyed, and two new episodes have been added to that kernel, wherefore it actually troubles the scholars and philologists who have investigated that tradition, which is somewhat complex, just like the hagiographic traditions all are. The first story is about Sant’Egidio who goes to Rome to ask the Pope to put the monastery under his authority: it’s plainly a story which served to claim the direct dependence of Saint-Gilles Abbey on the Pope’s authority and to get rid of the local bishop’s authority.

 

The second story tells of Charles the Great who once called Egidio because he wanted to confess an unavowable sin. You had better read the thorough dossier which in in the book. Charles the Great had an unavowable sin that wants to commend to Egidio. While Egidio was celebrating the Mass, an angel revealed him Chales the Great’s sin, and at the same time he ordered Egidio to forgive the king.

 

What has Charles the Great to do with the whole story? We can easily understand the meaning the journey to Rome. But what about Charles the Great? The fortune of the cult of Sant’Egidio is linked to the fact that the abbey was by the side of the footpath to Compostela, therefore so many pilgrims passed through. Between the 10th and the 11th centuries the ‘chansons de geste’ were developing and becoming popular, and the most popular of them all was ‘la Chanson de Roland’. And at the centre of it there is Charles the Great. We are in the point when the figure of Charles the Great is leaving history to enter myth. A great, really great philologist, Cesare Segre, unfortunately passed away few years ago, has indisputably demonstrated that the mediaeval epic grew out of hagiography, that is the lives of the saints. In the early Middle Ages, they no longer wrote: culture itself had gone down. The only ones who still kept on writing were the same who kept on studying, the clerics. And what did the clerics write about? About the saints, obviously, because that was also the only way of providing catechesis. In a time when there was no internet, there were no newspapers, no television, the only way to teach and educate the people was telling them the life of a saint on the anniversary of their death, so that it could be an example to follow. It was a way to offer many moral and cultural models. Therefore, there was the need to manufacture appealing biographies: in that case, a biography that could attract even the pilgrims heading to Santiago de Compostela. So, Charles the Great had to be part of it. The fact that he became co-protagonist of the biography of the founder of Sant-Gilles’ Abbey allowed Egidio to enter Charles the Great’s saga once and for all in the 13th century and in many others works of French or Nordic epic.

 

I definitely believe that in the ‘Vita’ of Egidio there are some interpolations and later addictions. However, an episode about Charles the Great can be found in every story about the foundation of every French abbey. At that time, all the Abbeys were producing writings in order to claim their independence and autonomy both from episcopal and temporal powers. At Saint Denis the same thing happened: André Vauchez knows this very well. The abbey of Saint Denis wanted to keep its autonomy from the episcopal power, then, through a writing, claimed the antiquity of the monastery and its autonomy which was received thanks to a gift beyond belief: relics brought from the East by Charles the Great.

 

In the life of Egidio too we have a prodigious acquisition of relics, that is to say the cypress doors that the Pope had given to Egidio as a gift when he went to Rome to ask for the acknowledgment of his community. Those two doors were abandoned to the waters of the river Tiber, then, along the river and across the Mediterranean Sea they miraculously landed at Marseilles. Through this part of the legend, they have tried to create a further bond between the monastery on the mouth of Rhone and the Papacy. Meanwhile Trastevere was becoming the city of the Pope: beyond the Tiber. The power was moving there. At the beginning, the See was in San Giovanni in Laterano. Later on, it slowly moved on the other bank of the Tiber: beyond the Tiber, that is Trastevere.

 

To go back to the ‘Vita’ of Egidio, Jones is surely right when she says that the legend was meant to claim the strong link between Saint-Gilles’ Abbey and the Papacy and so it had to include such a miracle: in the pilgrims’ minds it was always recalled at the sight of the doors, which had been set up and became a sort of precious relic of the shrine, and seal of the special bond with Rome. Pilgrims used to enjoy ‘windows’, open on their path, which created connections in their minds, in their imagination, among the great sanctuaries of Christendom. That is the raison d'être of the recalling of the bond with Rome.

 

Just one last point: the introduction by Andrea Riccardi makes this book more precious by engraving the mark of the Community of Sant’Egidio. This work is entirely scientific, even though the Authors have made a great effort in translating the material and making it enjoyable for everyone. So, it is a book, I like to stress, useful both for insiders and for those who want to approach the memory of Sant’Egidio. What links the book to the Community of Sant’Egidio? In his introduction Andrea Riccardi writes that in the end that name was incidental, just as any name is, which nobody choices, but it is given them. But we should remember that in the Middle Ages ‘nomen est omen’, the name is the person. So, the name represents and incapsulates our vocation and our destiny. As Riccardi nicely conveys in his words, this saint who was at the height of his cult in the 10th century at the end of Middle Ages disappears, the monastery falls into disrepair, and his memory is almost effaced. Whereas today there is a community with his same name. Is it just a chance?

 

Anyway, we start from there and those values come back to life and condition us, for a name influences, at least because we ask ourselves where it comes from, what is its meaning, what is its etymology. Even asking ourselves about those basic things takes us back on a path that was marked by Egidio and now it has new life and new meanings. And that is what the Community of Sant’Egidio gives voice to, also at international level.

 

[1] Message of the Holy Father Francis to the Participants in the Italian Conference of Secular Institutes, 23 October 2017

 

What impresses the most is the fact that all those miracles have a weak relationship with the site where the relics of Sant’Egidio are, that is Saint-Gilles Abbey, at the mouth of the Rhone, on the border between Languedoc and Provence. The miracles occurred all over Christendom. And the strangest thing is that more than half of them happened in Germanic countries (52 percent), other European countries follow, and France is at the bottom of the list. The pilgrims’ behaviour is another peculiar aspect of the devotion to the Saint: they did not go to the Shrine to touch the relics or stay in the vicinity of the tomb for a novena. They thanked the Saint for being healed even at some distance from the shrine. A miracle at a distance was something really new because up to then worshipping the relics was essential. One needed to touch the tomb or the relic of a saint in order to be healed. In the tales about Sant’Egidio that wasn’t the case: some of them were set in Poland or Germany and certainly there were no contacts with the relics. That kind of miracle spread all over Christendom in the last centuries of the Middle Ages: here we meet such miracles for the first time. Thus, it is a phenomenon which deserves reporting.

 

The pilgrims who gather at Saint-Gilles were different from the many who visited other shrines in the same age: they were blind, deaf, paralyzed, possessed… We often find them in other books about miracles. In the case of Sant’Egidio, we find miracles of liberation from captivity above all: there are often merchants, knights, lords, who are taken captive and after that they are freed again, thanks to the intercession of Sant’Egidio. One is able even to survive a hanging because the rope snaps. In that sense, Saint-Gilles was a shrine that anticipated a new form of devotion.

 

We may say that it could have been a strategy of communication as well. Telling stories about Germans or Poles was a way to urge all the peoples of Christendom to go to Saint-Gilles. But there is another lead to follow: the special link between Saint-Gilles, on the one hand, and the Holy See and Rome, on the other hand, during the 11th and the 12th centuries. In a ‘Vita’ (life, biography) it is said that Egidio bought new gates for his monastery in Rome, then, after some time, they miraculously reached Provence after crossing the Mediterranean Sea. This story shows the strong bond between Saint-Gilles and Rome. That is corroborated by the fact that Petrus Guilelmi, author of the first part of the Liber miraculorum (Book of Miracles) and librarian of the abbey, was the one who copied out the last version of the Liber pontificalis of the Roman Church in 1142. That was the text in which the main events of every Roman Pontificate were recorded and told, from the 4th-5th centuries on. The narrative goes on until 12th century. So, the last version, the most comprehensive, was copied out by Petrus Guilelmi, librarian of Saint-Gilles. Moreover, Pope Urbano II was the one who blessed the huge Saint-Gilles Romanesque Basilica, whose ruins, with the façade, can be seen even today. The fact that the Pope expressly went there for the dedication of the Basilica means a great deal: it means that there was a very strong bond between the Papacy and the Abbey.

 

In 12th century the Papacy tried to restore order in the worship of the saints: soon after, new rules for the causes of canonization were enacted starting from the scrutiny of the hagiographic sources. The Roman Curia was very careful with that aspect and tended to accept only the miracles that were connected to a religious life. The miracles of Sant’Egidio are of that kind. Some are about the survival of people after a captivity or a fall into the river Rhine. The typical case is when Sant’Egidio tells the person who benefited from a miracle: «You see? Now you have been healed, but from now on try not to sin any more».

 

In that collection of miracles, it is meaningful that the Author mentions a passage of St Gregory the Great who, apropos of St Benedict, says that the saints perform their greatest miracles far from their tombs, to reward the faith of those who invoke them. The greater the distance the more the faith is praiseworthy and the grace is great. In this context the miracles we are talking about, which are really unique.

 

Another possible explanation of such uniqueness would be found in the presence of a heretical movement in Southern France in 12th century. Those dissidents blamed the priests and the Church for spreading unbelievable and untenable stories. Perhaps that was why the monks of Saint-Gilles wanted to show the people that the miracles of their saint, Egidio, weren’t a matter of magical healing, nor a matter of touching his tomb.

 

It's also fair to emphasize that Saint-Gilles Abbey was one of the most important sites of the peace movement in 12th century. In Middle Ages there were peace movements, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes promoted by bishops or monasteries, to stop the violence of the nobles, within the countries, among the peasants or the common people. Saint-Gilles was the place where the first ‘Truce of God’ was signed in 1042. So, it’s no accident that there is so much talk of peace in the tales about the miracles of Sant’Egidio. And the ancient Author describe the sanctity of Sant’Egidio as a whole along with prayer, care for the poor, and peace. Which is a compound we can use to describe the Community of Sant’Egidio even today.

 

In the tales about the miracles there is talk about prayer on peace. The text of St Paul’s 2 Corinthians (12:10) is quoted: «When I am weak, then I am strong». It is also interesting that this quotation does not occur frequently in a treatise about miracles.

 

Besides we should emphasize that Sant’Egidio is a saint of the undivided Church. We do not know when he actually lived: the chronology is very uncertain. Anyway, at the latest estimation, he lived in the 8th century: he should have died around 720 A.D. Therefore, is a saint of the undivided Church, of the Church before the separation between Rome and Constantinople.

 

This ‘Vita’ and these miracles are one of the greatest products of the Medieval imagination. With Egidio we have a model of a saint who left the town to go be a hermit, in a remote place near to the margin of Christendom: he left a famous, cultivated city, Athens, a centre of learning. So, it seems that Egidio was of Greek origin. And the place where he went, the Rhone Delta, close to the Camargue, was a desert at that time, a peripheral and dangerous area, always under the threat of Saracen invasion. That too can be considered a unique feature. And, again, that feature matches with some of the ideals of the Community of Sant’Egidio today.