ON ST. PEREGRINUS, PRESBYTER,
AT LYONS IN GAUL.
UNDER THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRD CENTURY.
CommentaryPeregrinus, presbyter, at Lyons in Gaul (St.)
BY THE AUTHOR P. B.
[1] As obscure as now is, so illustrious once was the memory of St. Peregrinus among the people of Lyons. St. Ado testifies it in his Martyrology at this day in these few indeed, Ancient cult from the Martyrologies. but grave words: "On the same day, at Lyons, of holy Peregrinus, presbyter; whose blessedness the glory of miracles testifies": which same eulogy Usuard, Notker, and finally also the Roman Fasti borrowed from Ado. The pseudo-Bede diminishes it, when he says: "At Lyons, of holy Peregrinus, presbyter"; omitting the rest: but a little more generous Saussay says: "On the same day, at Lyons, of holy Peregrinus, presbyter and confessor, a man of great virtues; whose testimonies of virtue are the frequent miracles which are recorded to have been done at his memory in the church of St. Just; where after the end of a most holy life he received honorable burial." Other more recent ones everywhere I do not delay over.
[2] But that Saussay asserts that he received burial in the church of St. Just, His body, long laid away in the church of St. Just, Severt in the Archbishops of Lyons, edited at Lyons in the year 1628, number 2, §10, forbids being understood of his first burial: because in the ancient parchments of Île Barbe (it is situated not far from Lyons in the middle of the Saône, and once memorable for a distinguished monastery) these things are read: "The body too of holy Peregrinus, confessor, rests there (at Île Barbe): who, in the time of blessed Irenaeus escaping the persecution of Lyons, went away to Île Barbe, leading an eremitic or monastic life there." But Claude le Laboureur, once Provost of the same Island, in a French work which he brought to light at Lyons in the year 1665, and entitled The Ruins of the royal abbey of Île Barbe near Lyons, chapter 2, §1, accuses Severt of excessive credulity, who gave credit to those parchments; "For the manuscript," he says, "alleged is apocryphal, although drawn out from our archives, into which one of our monks had inserted it with a good many other trifles of the kind, destitute of all authority." Which he undertakes there to prove; that passage, however, concerning the first burial of the Saint, which we gave from Severt, he neither produces nor so far touches separately.
[3] But whether that manuscript in this matter at least merits some credit, dispersed by Calvinist sacrilege in 1562. or none; this is nevertheless certain, that the body of St. Peregrinus was long laid away in the church of St. Just, and there was found, among others, by eight theologians, partly from the Order of St. Dominic, partly from that of St. Francis, who, according to Severt, both elsewhere and especially at number 97, §2, by commission of William of Valence, archbishop of Vienne, inspected the sacred pledges of that church in the year 1287: for thus has, on the testimony of the same Severt, number 18, the Inventory then legitimately made by them: "Likewise under the altar of the Blessed Virgin of the same church was found the body of blessed Peregrinus, presbyter and confessor, with a certain charter written in Greek." This instrument our Raynaud too, however elsewhere not rarely severe, in his Hagiology of Lyons, page 31, where he treats of St. Arigius, calls "a writing of most just authority and credit"; nor do we know that anyone judged otherwise concerning this. But the church of St. Just, of which here is discourse, is not that modern one which is now seen erected within the city of Lyons since the year 1574; but another, formerly placed in a higher suburb of the same city, and by the Calvinists in the year 1562, from the month of May until September, sacrilegiously profaned, plundered, and utterly overthrown; from whose ruins only some fragments of the sacred relics, as snatched from a shipwreck, were then carried to the new church of St. Just in the city; whether also something of the relics of St. Peregrinus, we do not know. Consult Severt, number 2, §9.
[4] St. Peregrinus is wrongly confused with St. Barbarinus. Hence collapses the conjecture of those who, in Pierre Bullioud in his observations on the Life of St. Treverius or Trivierius, page 38 and following, thought that our Peregrinus is the same as St. Barbarinus, that one, if I mistake not, of whom we treated on the 2nd of June: for we have already seen that the body of Peregrinus was laid away (and why not the whole, or at least the greater part?) in the church of St. Just, and there examined in the year 1287, or the following, as some wish; but that it was thence translated elsewhere we nowhere read. It is established meanwhile from the Bull of William de Sura, archbishop of Lyons, of the year 1337, in Severt, number 23, §6, that the body of St. Barbarinus was then kept in the church of St. Nicetius. Diverse therefore is this one from that. Although what need is there of reasoning against men who prop what they assert by no argument at all? It helps also here to observe in passing the error of Saussay, by which, treating at the 11th of November of St. Veranus, he reckons St. Barbarinus among the bishops of Lyons, and this from the Bull already cited of William de Sura; when nothing similar is affirmed either there or elsewhere.
[5] The Saint seems to have lived under the emperor Severus. Of the Acts of St. Peregrinus, if ever there were any, nothing remains. What Guillaume Paradin, History of Lyons, book 2, chapter 106, says, that in the most cruel persecution of the people of Lyons under M. Aurelius Antoninus certain Christians fled to Île Barbe, then not yet begun to be inhabited, and horrid everywhere with woods and thickets, as to a hiding-place opportune for the time, and that one of them was St. Peregrinus, who spent his life there most holily; this, I say, Paradin confirms by no testimony; whereas nevertheless his sole authority in many things so wavers that Raynaud in this place did not hesitate to hurl at him that Aristotelian saying: "Those who are caught sparing the truth, obtain this, that credit is denied without surety even to those who bring forward true things."
[6] when, fleeing the persecution, he withdrew to Île Barbe; Something similar Severt asserts from the manuscript of which we spoke above at number 2; and indeed he builds this further from it, that in Île Barbe St. Peregrinus led not just any life, but an eremitic or monastic one; which in what sense I would admit, I shall signify below: yet he does not say with Paradin that it happened under Marcus Aurelius, or, as he himself speaks, under Antoninus Verus, but later in the second persecution of the people of Lyons under Septimius Severus, as will be plain to one comparing the text cited by him at number 2, §10, with those which precede it in the same instrument at number 1, §5. To Severt adheres Claude le Laboureur, and so far approves his manuscript in the praised work, chapters 1 and 2, §6 in both places; and the same is affirmed in the ancient Catalogue of the abbots of the same Island, which he here prefixes to his treatise, in these words: "Irenaeus, bishop of the people of Lyons, in the time of the emperor Severus was martyred with almost all the people of his city. At the same time a certain man named Peregrinus went away to Île Barbe, leading an eremitic or monastic life there: this man escaped the persecution." To which Catalogue that author, who prefaces himself most alien from fables, attributes so much that at chapter 3, §1 he suffers no one to doubt of its credit, and does not cease to defend it throughout the course of his whole work. He does not deny meanwhile that it was written in the fifteenth century, and indeed toward its end; or at least there first ends.
[7] We, although we could wish for a less recent witness of a most ancient matter, yet he was not properly a monk or hermit there. have nevertheless nothing by which we can either reject his authority or even call it into doubt; especially since the ancient tradition of the people of Lyons and the consensus of native writers seem to patronize it. We judge therefore that this holy Presbyter lived in the 3rd century, at least at the beginning: for how long he prolonged his life, we have seen no one who teaches. Nay, Raynaud himself, although he denies that the age of Peregrinus is clear to him, signifies that he inclined to this opinion, by another argument too, when in the Hagiology of Lyons, page 77, making mention of the Greek epigraph found on his tomb, he subjoins: "Whether it (the epigraph) can be any conjecture of his age, namely that he flourished at Lyons, or came thither in those first times, in which frequent Asians and Greeks passed hither, I do not define." For the rest, not undeservedly he refutes what he had read in Bullioud, who in his observations on the Life of St. Treverius, page 39, gathers from the Severtian manuscript that our Saint instituted in Île Barbe a monastic norm of living, and prescribed laws to his followers; and so was the founder of an Order and an abbot; whereas that manuscript by no means builds this; and, if it did build it, it would so far be to be rejected: since St. Jerome more than once acknowledges Paul and Antony, younger than Peregrinus, to be the first leaders of this institution. Wherefore by the eremitic or monastic life which the instruments cited above concede to Peregrinus, I understand such a one; which in some way, say by the poverty of habitation, food, and dress, and by fixed times of prayer, and by assiduous contemplation of heavenly things, in some manner adumbrated, in a place then uncultivated, that kind of living which hermits and monks afterward professed.