Legontius

CONCERNING ST. LEGONTIUS, BISHOP OF TRIER IN BELGICA PRIMA.

CIRCA A.D. 409.

Legontius, Bishop of Trier in Belgica Prima (St.)

By I. B.

[1] The thirty-fourth Bishop of Trier was St. Legontius, a hundred years younger than that Legontius whom we mentioned on February 18 as having been Bishop of Metz in the same province of Belgica Prima. Whether he came from the same family, or obtained his name from some other connection, we cannot divine. Brower in book 5 of his Annals of Trier calls him Leontius and conjectures that he was a native of Aquitaine, where the celebrated Leontii praised by Fortunatus and Sidonius flourished; but he gives no other reason for his opinion. "At the same time," he says, writing at the year 407, "Mauritius of Trier having ended his days, obtained Leontius as his successor, whom later generations call Leguntius." In the margin he annotates thus: "Commonly Leguntius, but I prefer Leontius." What he adds about his homeland and Pontian lineage I omit as uncertain. In a certain codex of the Most Serene Queen of Sweden there survives an ancient list of the Bishops of Trier, for the last one is Egilbert, called by others Engilbert, who is said to have died in the year 1001. In that list he is called Ligontius.

[2] At around the year 409, when Brower believes it occurred — what Gregory of Tours narrates from Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, an older writer, in book 2 of the History of the Franks, chapter 9 — that the city of Trier was sacked and burned by the Franks in a second incursion, the same Brower adds: "Leontius, around these times, on the nineteenth day of February, having left the earth, had increased the number of Confessors in heaven." Following Brower, Gelenius writes thus in his Fasti of Cologne on this day: "St. Leontius, Bishop of Trier, noble in birth, a Roman colonist, sprung from an ancient family, who on this day in the year of Christ 409, in the times of the Vandal invasion, increased the number of the heavenly hosts." Saussay, in his Gallican Martyrology, amplifies certain things in a more liberal style than I would trust as certain: "At Trier in Gaul, the metropolis of Belgica Prima, St. Leguntius, Bishop of that See and Confessor, who, after the fires of pagan persecution in Gaul had been extinguished and peace restored to the Church, wonderfully cultivated Christian piety in that land; and at length, renowned for conspicuous sanctity, having well multiplied the talents of the Lord, he was summoned to heaven and went to his reward; he obtained burial in the church of St. Mary of the Martyrs because he had always burned with immense zeal for the Martyrs, and had honored the memory of the Martyrs with this trophy, which he himself erected." Others also record that he was buried in the church of St. Mary of the Martyrs, but are silent about the reason. Was there, moreover, peace for the Church in Gaul when so many barbarian nations simultaneously flooded it, by whom many pious men were everywhere slaughtered? Whom the Roman magistrates otherwise no longer troubled on account of religion.

[3] The manuscript Martyrology of Trier consecrates his memory in these words only: "At Trier, St. Legontius, Bishop and Confessor." The same is found — except that they call him Leguntius instead of Legontius — in numerous manuscript and printed copies bearing the name of Usuard, and in the edition published at Paris in 1536, as well as in Hermann Greven and Molanus in the supplement to Usuard, the manuscript Florarium, Ferrarius, Canisius, and others. In the Martyrology of the Order of St. Benedict, printed in ancient type before the year 1529 together with the Rule of St. Benedict, the entry reads: "At Trier, St. Licontius, Bishop and Confessor."