Saint Agobard of Lyon

His learning and piety had earned him the esteem of the Archbishop of Lyon, Leidrad Leidrad Predecessor of Agobard to the see of Lyon. , who had him receive episcopal consecration and took him as coadjutor, or co-bishop, as was said at the time. Soon Leidrad resigned his office and went to peacefully end his days in the monastery of Soissons, after having designated Agobard as his successor in 843. His title of Archbishop of Lyon, recognized by his diocesans, who already regarded him as their legitimate pastor by virtue of his canonical ordination and Leidrad's designation, was ratified, say Ado and Hugh of Flavigny, "by the consent of the emperor and the General Council of the bishops of France"; which must be understood as the Council of Mainz, of which Ivo of Chartres speaks, and not that of Chalon-sur-Saône, which was only provincial. Louis the Pious had not yet restored to the Church the freedom of elections that, for nearly four centuries, princes had more or less reserved for themselves. That of Agobard gave rise to disputes in the Council. It was not found to be in conformity with the ancient canons. It was alleged that two bishops could not simultaneously occupy the same see; finally, it did not belong to a prelate to choose his own successor. The cabal was not foreign to the difficulties raised against Agobard; he triumphed nevertheless, thanks, no doubt, to his personal merits and the favor of the prince, who was naturally benevolent. The choice of Leidrad, a prelate commendable for his services, and who had left brilliant memories at court, must also have contributed to the success of the new archbishop. Moreover, examples were not lacking in antiquity to authorize what had been done for him.

One of the first cares of our Saint's pastoral solicitude was to try to bring back to the truth Felix, former bishop of Urgel, who Félix, ancien évêque d'Urgel Bishop of Urgell, promoter of the Adoptionist heresy. had been sent into perpetual exile in Lyon by Charlemagne, at the request of the Council of Frankfurt (794). This prelate, renewing the impurities of Nestorius, made Jesus Christ the Son of God by adoption, not by nature. Convicted and condemned by the Councils of Narbonne in 781; of Friuli, the same year; and of Regensburg, in 792; he retracted, but only with his lips, before Pope Adrian. Soon, in fact, he began to dogmatize again; but the Council gathered at Frankfurt, under the presidency of two legates, condemned him once more. It was even necessary to renew this condemnation in Rome, in 799, then at Urgel and at Aachen the same year, because of his obstinacy and that of his adherents. Agobard came to see him in person; and, with as much patience as learning, he refuted his doctrine, demonstrating that, if there were two natures in Jesus Christ, there was nonetheless a unity of person; that, consequently, when speaking of the Savior, one can attribute to the Divinity what is said of the humanity, and vice versa; that Mary is therefore truly the Mother of God; and finally that the union of Jesus Christ with his Church, extending to many persons, is only a purely spiritual union. Felix, pushed to the limit, confessed himself defeated once again, but died obstinate in his heresy. This is what Agobard teaches us in the treatise he composed against the doctrine of this unfortunate man, after his death, which occurred in 818.

It was above all against the Jews that our Saint had to deploy his energy and vigilance. To get an idea of the difficulties, the tribulations, and even the perils he encountered in this struggle, one must read the memorandum he entitled *De Insolentia Judæorum*, addressed to the emperor; his letter to the same prince, written and signed by two other bishops in a council at Lyon, probably the one he convened in 821; and his letters concerning the same matter to the abbots Adalard and Hilduin, to the Archbishop of Narbonne Nibride, and to the Count of Orléans, Manfred.

As proud in success as they were fawning before power, the Jews were at that time a scourge for society and a danger to the faith of Christians. Not content with enriching themselves at the expense of public and private wealth, they insulted religion every day, blasphemed what is most holy, and affected the most imperious contempt for the faithful. Thus, if they found in their butcher animals any of the defects that made them impure in their eyes, they would disdainfully set them aside to sell to the Christians, for this reason calling them *Christian beasts*. They enticed women to come and celebrate the Sabbath with them, made their workers labor on Sundays, and gave them meat to eat during Lent. Their obstinacy in selling on Sunday, rather than on Saturday, the ordinary market day, prevented many of the faithful—those in localities far from the cities—from attending Mass and the offices of the Church. Finally, in addition to the old synagogues that were tolerated, they built new ones, where they drew in Christians; some ignorant people already found that the preaching of the Jews was worth more than that of the priests of the Church. They went so far as to sell Christian slaves to the Moors of Spain. Saint Agobard cites witnesses taken from among the Jews themselves regarding this fact. At the moment he was finishing his first memorandum, a man arrived in Lyon from Córdoba whom Jews of the former city had stolen as a child twenty years earlier and sold to the Muslims. He had just escaped in the company of another Christian from the city of Arles, who had been abducted and sold in the same way. "While our investigations led us to discover his family," says Agobard, "we learned that the same Jew had thus delivered other Christian children to the infidels, and that, this very year, a child has disappeared, abducted by another Jew. Presently," he adds, "we have the certainty that numerous Christians bought by the Jews were, on their part, victims of brutalities that modesty does not permit us to describe." Our Saint makes it a point to produce witnesses to support his recriminations and to show the Jews their condemnation in the Holy Books they hold in their hands.

He also found there the condemnation of the superstitious doctrines they had substituted for the word of God. Thus, he missed no opportunity to combat them, to distance the faithful from any commerce with them, and to demand from the princes the repression of their insolence and their atrocities.

Such ardent zeal against a numerous and influential sect in Lyon could not fail to bring persecutions upon the holy bishop. One day the storm broke. Louis the Pious, through an excess of condescension, had yielded to the solicitations of certain officers won over by the Jews and had granted letters in their favor. One of the officers of whom we speak, a man named Evrard, one of those called *missi dominici*—a sort of inspector charged with overseeing the execution of imperial ordinances—arrived in Lyon carrying a letter from the emperor to the archbishop and another to the count of the city, ordering the latter to oppose the pretensions of the zealous prelate. These letters are so little in keeping with the piety of Louis that Agobard declares to him that, despite the seal and the signature, he refused to believe them authentic. The bishop's attitude excites the fury of the Jews, already encouraged by the tyrannical proceedings of Evrard against the populations they exploited. The latter says openly that the emperor has withdrawn his esteem from Agobard. In the midst of this, two other officers arrive, carrying titles and documents to which one cannot refuse credence. Great joy among the Jews! Frightened by their threats, some Christians abandon the city, others hide, some are arrested, and all are in consternation. The Jews, the officers are heard to say, are not as odious to the prince as is claimed; several are honored by his friendship; there are some who are worth more than Christians...

At the height of the storm, the archbishop was at the Abbey of Nantua, occupied with settling a dispute between the monks. Evrard takes advantage of this to openly place himself at the head of the Jews, who look upon him as their master, *magister eorum*, according to Agobard's expression. In vain does the prelate have it represented to him, by priests he sends, that he has done nothing against the authority of the prince; the *missi dominici* will hear nothing of it, and the prelate's envoys judge it prudent to show themselves no more.

Such are the facts of which our Saint complains to the emperor himself, and then to Archbishop Nibride, his friend. An excellent opportunity presented itself one day to plead the cause of the Church in the presence of the prince. An assembly of prelates and lords was convened at court; but, due to an effect of his excessive timidity, words failed the holy Archbishop. He did not even hear what the emperor said to him, except for the authorization he gave him to withdraw. It is he himself who recounts this with his usual modesty. He therefore returned to his residence, disconcerted and confused. Reflecting on the means to repair this failure and to entrust the interests of religion to firm defenders, he drafted a new memorandum which he addressed to the principal personages of the court; these were Adalard, Count Wala, his brother, and the Abbot of Saint-Riquier. He asks that the emperor put back into force the edicts of his predecessors; that the slaves of the Jews be free to request baptism, pledging to pay their masters the price of their ransom, as canon law requires in this circumstance, the Church forbidding that any of its children be the slave of a Jew. Agobard also makes new requests to the prince through the intermediary of Hilduin, Abbot of Saint-Denis, successor to the Abbot of Corbie in the functions of archchaplain. Count Wala, who had embraced the religious life under the guidance of Adalard, his brother, had just been placed at the head of this latter monastery. Agobard also wrote to him regarding this affair, knowing that, in the cloister, he continued to exercise a useful influence over the emperor. Despite all these solicitations, we do not see that the weak monarch ever revoked the measures taken in favor of the Jews, nor granted their slaves the freedom to receive baptism without the consent of their masters.

The vigilant pastor also had to ward off another danger that threatened the faith of the people. The discussions that had set the East on fire regarding the veneration of images were already dividing minds in France. The generally held idea at the time was that God had given the empire to the French nation as a reward for its faithfulness in honoring the images of the Saints, and it was believed that universal supremacy would return to the Greeks the day they returned, on this point, to the doctrine and practice of the Church. Thus, some out of political prejudice, others for lack of understanding the terms of the Second Council of Nicaea, rejected this council. This is what Agobard did, believing that it ordered the adoration of images. The treatise he composed on this question seems to refuse images any kind of cult, while in reality he only refuses them that of latria or adoration. Cave criticizes this book with the utmost severity; but other more enlightened writers, such as Masson, Baluze, Raynaud, Mabillon, and Le Cointe, give it a favorable interpretation. Relying, indeed, on the doctrine of the Fathers, and on that of Saint Augustine in particular, Agobard condemns only the exaggerations of his contemporaries. It should not be surprising, however, that on a religious question mixed with patriotism, the holy Archbishop, carried away by his attachment to his faith and his country, let slip some inaccurate and slightly exaggerated expressions.

He showed the same ardor in defending the truth against popular prejudices. He wrote against the opinion that attributed the formation of hail and storms to sorcerers, and against the superstitious practices and pagan sacrifices still in use to ward off the epidemic diseases of the time. These diseases had strange characteristics. People were seen suddenly seized with epileptic convulsions that made them believe they were possessed by the devil. Others had limbs as if devoured by an internal fire, covered with tumors and ulcers. Bartholomew, who had replaced Bibride in the year 818 on the archiepiscopal see of Narbonne, had asked our Saint what he thought of these extraordinary facts. Agobard replied that he saw in them only phenomena resulting from natural causes, which God alone disposes of as He pleases, through the ministry of Angels, to test the just and punish the wicked.

He rose up above all with force against duels and judicial proofs called judgments of God, as contrary to the spirit of union and peace that must animate Christians. The law still in force throughout Burgundy, of which Lyon was a part, was cited. 'This law,' he replied, 'comes neither from Moses nor from the Gospel, but from an impious king, an enemy of Jesus Christ, the Arian Gundobad'; and he recalls the words of Saint Avitus of Vienne to this prince: 'Why l'arien Gondebaud Uncle of Clotilde, King of the Burgundians, murderer of Chilperic. ,' said Gundobad, 'between States, between nations, even between individuals, when causes are submitted to the judgment of God by the fate of arms, is victory on the side of justice?' — 'If States or peoples,' replied Avitus, 'truly submitted themselves to the judgment of God, they should remember this word of the Psalmist: Scatter, O Lord, the nations that delight in war; they would not forget this other word: Vengeance is mine; I will take it upon myself to give each what he deserves. Does the justice from above need spears and swords to settle disputes? Often we see the party that supports or claims the right succumb in combat, and the party of injustice triumph through violence or cunning.' Saint Agobard concluded by begging the most gracious emperor, in the name of religion and humanity, to abolish these detestable customs, against which he addressed a second memorandum to the same prince.

Consulted by his colleagues in the episcopate as the light of his century, our Saint sometimes had to refute the objections or errors of some. Thus he corrected erroneous opinions and prejudices against him in Fredegisus, Bishop of Orleans. His letter to this prelate will remain a model of the urbanity and courtesy that should always be maintained in any discussion.

Agobard brought the same zeal to the maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline. In the month of August 822, Louis the Pious had convened a great assembly of prelates and nobility at Attigny. Two venerable men shone in the midst of this august company by the brilliance of their rank, virtues, and learning: one was Adalard, the other Helisachar, of whom we have already spoken. Both proposed to work for the reform of the Church. Agobard welcomed this proposal with enthusiasm, pleaded in favor of the Church, and led all minds to concert their efforts to rebuild the ruins of the new Jerusalem. Taking advantage of this great question, he protested against the laymen who were holders or usurpers of the Church's temporal goods. "In vain," he said, "do they allege reasons of state and the necessities of the time; God, for whom the future is present, had well foreseen these necessities when He inspired His Church to establish these rules for all time. What Charles Martel, Pepin, and Charlemagne thought they had to do against these laws does not in any way bind their successor. A violation of the canons is an attack against God Himself." He insisted that the Emperor remedy this sacrilegious abuse and that the Assembly open an inquiry against the usurpers. Helisachar and Adalard applauded the speaker; at their request, an assembly was scheduled at Compiègne, where this important matter between the nobility and the clergy would be settled. Agobard's zeal had displeased too many people not to stir up a new storm against him: it was terrible, especially in Provence and Septimania (Lower Languedoc), to the point that he had to write his apology once again.

In all his works and in all his speeches, our Saint professed a true cult for sacred antiquity. Whether it concerned the morals of the clergy, the rules of the liturgy, or the chant—on which he wrote two treatises, one on psalmody and the other on the correction of the Antiphonary—all his efforts were aimed at returning to the sound traditions of the past. Young heads among the Romans, neoterici romani, affected disdain for the canons of the Church of France or the ordinances of our bishops, as long as they had not vetted them. Agobard reminded them of the example of their predecessors "who showed themselves," he said, "less difficult, and professed the highest esteem for the councils and synods of our nation." He cared deeply about the preservation of local customs, unless they were in opposition to the faith, and could not suffer the mania of introducing new compositions into public prayer, such as motets or chants in the vernacular, which he called psalmos plebeios.

He loved to discuss these matters with his clergy, particularly with his cantors. These had been established by Leidrad, his predecessor, and several masters had already emerged from their school. It is to them primarily that his memoir on the correction of the Antiphonary is addressed. In several places in this book, the text of the Scriptures had been altered; in others, the words seemed to him childish or not in conformity with faith and piety. His criticism on this point may seem exaggerated; thus, some of his corrections were not taken into account after him, as Baluze remarks.

When the example of Rome was cited to him, he replied with the words of Saint Gregory: "It is not because of the place where it is found that one should love a thing; but one should love the place because of the good things one finds there." He recalled the example of the same Pope who had been forced to impose certain reforms in Rome itself under pain of anathema.

What will always be read with profit are the passages where he sets forth the doctrine of the Fathers on the interior and exterior dispositions with which one must perform sacred chants. He did not want musical studies to absorb every moment, to the detriment of more important studies. Indeed, one saw cantors who, from their childhood to an advanced age, had not opened a book suitable for forming them in piety and the knowledge of our dogmas and the Holy Scriptures; and these people, full of foolish vanity, dared to introduce into the Church inept compositions of a profane character, and often even tainted with heresy. He also rose up, with Saint Jerome, against those who, taking the holy place for a theater, came there to make a parade of their voices and their persons. "The ancients," he said, "who lacked neither the fruitfulness nourished by the Holy Books nor the talent for execution, preferred to repeat the same pieces rather than tire the cantors and overload their minds with superfluous novelties."

Agobard was justly proud of his church of Lyon in this respect: he did not allow its chants or customs to be criticized. For having dared to do so, Amalarius drew upon himself two replies in rather unsparing terms. This disciple of Alcuin, a cleric of the church of Metz and chorepiscopus of that of Lyon, had composed, while in Rome in 831, a w ork in f Amalaire Liturgist criticized by Agobard. our books on the Divine Offices, according to the instructions of the ministers of the Church of Saint Peter. However severe the holy Archbishop was against this work, his criticism only concerned locutions or secondary ideas that could be taken in a good light.

These questions did not make Saint Agobard lose sight of the great idea that was the dream of his entire life: unity in the empire as in the Church. The most powerful means of extending and maintaining religious unity was, in his eyes, political unity. Whether he spoke to the clergy or to the faithful, it was unity that he preached; whether he addressed the princes of the councils, it was unity that he demanded. He regarded the diversity of laws as contrary to the perfect unanimity that must unite the faithful as well as the members of the same body. He would have liked to see uniform legislation throughout the empire. If it pleased the emperor, our master, he said, to establish the law of the Franks among the Burgundians, the latter would become more illustrious, and this country would be delivered from many miseries. Agobard had the ordinary fate of men of genius; he had the sorrow of seeing himself misunderstood and reduced to groaning uselessly over the evils of his homeland. It does not appear, in fact, that the weak emperor took more account of his advice regarding the laws of Gundobad than regarding the pretensions and excesses of the Jews.

The worthy prelate especially deplored the partition of the empire. As early as 817, in the general assembly of Aachen, Louis th Lothaire Emperor and son of Louis the Pious, sovereign of Everard in Italy. e Pious had divided his states between his three sons, Lothair, Pepin, and Louis, and associated the first with the throne. In 824, he had this constitution confirmed and sworn to by all the nobles gathered at Nijmegen, and he gave Lothair the kingdom of Italy, vacant by the death of King Bernard. In the year 823, Lothair, accompanied by Wala, who had become a monk, came to Rome on the order of his father and at the invitation of the Pope to be crowned king and proclaimed Augustus emperor at Saint Peter's on Easter Day. Agobard, with the Sovereign Pontiff, had recognized this new order of things, and, like all the other prelates, he had sworn to be its faithful observer and defender. This was enough to lead him later to embrace the party of Lothair against his father, when he saw the latter proceed to several successive reshufflings of his sons' states, despite his first and solemn engagements, yielding in this to the whim of a woman. This woman was Judith of Bavaria, whom he had married in second nuptials after the death of Empress Irmengard. She had given him, in 829, a son who later reigned under the name of Charles the Bald, and she could not bear for this child to be without an appanage. A new partition of the empire, in which the states of Lothair and his brothers were dismembered, came to cap the general discontent. For a long time, the most scandalous rumors had circulated about Judith and Bernard, Count of Septimania and Barcelona, and they were blamed for the disorder that reigned at court and in public affairs. Agobard echoed these murmurs in the apology for the princes that he published after the fall of their father. The latter, after having abandoned and resumed authority, came to no longer have Lothair's name written next to his own at the head of imperial acts, and war broke out again between Louis and his sons. In 833, Agobard wrote to the old monarch to warn him of the dangers that particularly threatened his soul. He reproached him for changing in this way, arbitrarily and without consulting God or His representatives, what God seemed to have inspired in him after the most insistent prayers. We deplore, he added, the evils that have occurred this year

on this occasion, and we greatly fear that God may be angered against you. For we cannot hide from you that there is much murmuring about these various and contrary oaths, and that they are openly blamed.

The example of Pope Gregory IV maintained Agobard in his loyalty to Lothair. This young prince, seeing war break out between his father and his brothers, brought the Sovereign Pontiff with him to Germany so that he might try to work for a reconciliation. At the same time, Agobard wrote to Louis the Pious to exhort him to receive the Pope as he should and to yield to his advice. The intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff were distorted; the French prelates, faithful to the emperor, even forgot the respect due to the papacy and maintained the prejudices of their master. Gregory IV rebuked them with just severity and even reproached them for having violated their oaths, following the example of Louis. The episode of the Field of Lies is well known. The Pope, poorly received and seeing the uselessness of his efforts, returned to the princes' camp. The following night, the old emperor, abandoned by all his partisans, surrendered to the mercy of his children. On the advice of the Pope and everyone else, he was declared deposed and led into a monastery by Lothair. At the request of the latter, the bishops, among whom was Agobard, gathered at Compiègne under the presidency of Ebbo, Archbishop of Reims, decided that the ex-emperor would be subjected to public penance. It was imposed upon him with great ceremony in the church of Notre-Dame de Soissons, after they had, by dint of insistence, torn from him the admission of the faults of his life. It was a return to a past already expiated in the assembly of Attigny. Each of the prelates who took part in this act of excessive rigor drew up and delivered to Lothair a summary account of what happened in this circumstance; and, from these particular accounts, a sort of report was composed. We have the account of Agobard and the collective account that he signed with the others. We see, from these documents, that the bishops did not intend to depose the emperor, as has been said, but solely to exhort him to repair the faults of his life by accepting the practices of public penance. The unfortunate Louis was more incapable than guilty. He was pitied; and soon a reaction occurred in his favor. Lothair's brothers, indignant, rose up to deliver their father; the latter resumed the insignia of imperial dignity. Lothair hastened to return to Italy, defeated his father's generals who attacked him, and took and burned Châlons. The armies were about to meet again in Maine. The wise and generous Wala intervened, as he had already done, to stop the shedding of blood, and, more fortunate this time, he reconciled the father with his sons.

Agobard, during this war, had fled to Italy with Saint Bernard, Bishop of Vienne, and most of the other partisans of Lothair. The assembly of Thionville, gathered in the month of February 835, condemned the act of Compiègne and deposed the bishops who had taken part in it. Ebbo alone appeared and was not treated with more consideration than he had shown for the emperor; thus, the Pope refused to sanction a deposition irregularly pronounced. In another assembly, held the following summer at Stremiac, in the vicinity of Lyon, the question of the vacant sees of Lyon and Vienne was treated again, but without concluding anything: Agobard and Bernard still refused to appear.

Finally, the emperors, by common agreement, recalled the two prelates to their dioceses. The holy Archbishop of Lyon returned to his cathedral on the first Sunday of Lent. Before returning to his seat, he publicly received absolution from ecclesiastical censures, thus repairing the fault he had committed, the only one for which he was ever reproached, a purely political fault, where he was carried away by considerations of the highest order and the purest intentions.

Having returned to the good graces of Louis the Pious, Agobard accompanied him during the winter of 840 to Poitiers, where the insurrectional movements of the peoples of Aquitaine and the frequent invasions of the Normans demanded his presence. Soon the old emperor learned that Louis, King of Bavaria, indignant at a new division of the empire, had taken up arms on the banks of the Rhine. He departed after charging Agobard with a very difficult mission of appeasement and reorganization in Aquitaine. The holy prelate, on the following June 6, whil e in Sa Saintes City in Aquitaine where Psalmodius initially retired. intes, crowned with a death precious before God twenty-seven years of episcopate and a life entirely spent in the service of God and the fatherland.

The Church of Lyon, as we have said, has awarded him the cult of the saints. When Feller says that Saint Agobard is honored especially in Saintonge, it is permissible to believe that he was ill-informed. Be that as it may, his name deserves not to be forgotten in a region that he sanctified by the final moments and the sacrifice of his life.

## WRITINGS OF SAINT AGOBARD.

As a bishop and as a politician, Agobard played an important role; as a theologian and canonist, his writings alone would suffice to immortalize his memory. Their discovery was made in 1606 by Papire Masson, who published the first edition. Baluze published the second in 1666. It is this one that Abbé Migne reproduced at the beginning of volume CIV of his Complete Course of Patrology.

We have from Saint Agobard:

Three theological writings, namely: a refutation of the Nestorian heresy, renewed in Lyon by Felix of Urgell; a treatise on the cult of images, one of the lively concerns of the Gallican Church at that time; a series of questions without connection in response to attacks directed against one of his works.

Four writings to combat various abuses and superstitions, namely: a letter to Louis the Pious against the Burgundian law authorizing the judicial duel; an instruction against the judicial ordeals called judgments of God; the refutation of an absurd belief regarding hail and storms; a response to the Archbishop of Narbonne, who had consulted him on some very singular pathological cases.

Five writings on the pernicious influence of Judaism in Lyon, namely: two letters to high-ranking figures of the imperial court; two letters to the emperor himself; a letter to Nebridius of Narbonne. There are curious proofs here of the surprising power that the Jews enjoyed within Christian society.

Three writings on discipline, namely: a treatise on the use of ecclesiastical goods; another on the dignity and rights of the priesthood; a last one, which is a letter containing advice to his clerics and monks on the manner of exercising the sacred ministry.

Three writings on the liturgy: a first entitled On the Divine Psalmody; a second, more extensive, on almost the same subject, entitled On the Correction of the Antiphonary; a last one, which is directed against Amalarius, the author of the book of Ecclesiastical Offices.

Five writings that relate to politics: a letter to a count of the palace on the sad situation of public affairs; a first letter to Louis the Pious, to remind him of the fidelity due to constitutional engagements; a second letter to the same, to represent to him the deference due by the powers of the century to the authority of the sovereign Pontiff; a manifesto to the peoples of the empire on the deposition of Louis the Pious; an account of the public penance imposed on this prince.

Finally, three writings of a diverse nature: the first is a discourse or sermon preached by the archbishop to his people; the second is the preface to a moral and ascetic pamphlet; the last is this short poem that he composed on the occasion of the translation of the relics of Saint Cyprian.

Abbé Th. Grastlier, honorary canon, chancellor of the bishopric of La Rochelle and Saintes. — Cf. Chavallard: The Life and Writings of Saint Agobard; d'Allumés gives a place to Saint Agobard in his Bibliotheca Patrum (Venice, 1765-61). Cave, an Anglican doctor, in his Literary History of Ecclesiastical Authors; Dupin, in his Universal Library of Ecclesiastical Authors, give an overview of his writings. Each editor has added a short notice on his life. Feller has devoted an article to him in his Universal Biography. The chronicles of the 9th century, all those who have written the general history of the Church (Rohrbacher, Universal History of the Church, vol. XI, p. 429 et seq.), or the particular history of the church of France (Gallia christiana), have made mention of the illustrious archbishop.