Blessed Odo

Blessed Odo, or Oudard, was a Le bienheureux Odon, ou Oudard Philosopher who became abbot of Saint-Martin of Tournai and subsequently bishop of Cambrai. native of Orléans: his father was named Gérard and his mother Cécile. His childhood and the first years of his youth are not known at all; it is only seen that they were devoted to the study of the sciences, and especially of philosophy, for which Odo had a particular attraction. He was already teaching it with distinction in the city of Toul, when the Canons of the Church of Tourna i, to w Tournai City associated with the Diocese of Noyon. hose ears the reputation of the young professor had reached, sent him a very flattering letter, begging him to come and take charge of the school founded in that city by the care of the clergy. Odo went there, and he had barely taught for a few days when he saw two hundred young men crowding around his chair to receive the public philosophy lessons he was giving. The schools were then resounding with the quarrel between the Realists and the Nominalists. "Odo," s Réalistes Philosophical doctrine taught by Odo. ays a chronicler, "did not teach philosophy according to the new professors (in voce), but in the manner of Boethius and the ancient realist doctors (in re)." During that time, another philosopher, named Raimbert, was professing the opposite doctrine in Lille. But of these two neighboring and rival schools, one did not take long to eclipse the other; Raimbert was abandoned, and Odo saw the crowd press more numerous day by day to hear him, whether in the cloister of the Chapter he taught the subtleties of dialectics, or whether in the middle of the night, seated before the door of the cathedral church, he showed his amazed disciples the constellations of the firmament, and made them understand the movement of the stars. He exercised such an ascendancy over his students that they looked upon him less as their master in matters of science than as the father and pastor of their souls. Wishing to show him their gratitude, they offered him a gold ring, with an inscription that offered a pun alluding to the homeland of the famous professor: Annulus Odonem decet aureus Aureliensem. The reputation of Odo spread more and more, and students came to him from the most distant countries, from Flanders, Burgundy, Normandy, and the other provinces of France, even from Italy and Saxony. The city of Tournai had become like a center for the studious youth who were encountered everywhere in the wake of Odo.

The master responded worthily to this eagerness of his students through the virtues he already practiced at that time. He was gentle, patient, humble, of pleasant conversation, and of a calm and attractive demeanor. Slander and flattery were equally abhorrent to him, and he avoided them with continual care. He had an extreme love for chastity, which was a great example for his many disciples. "Entirely devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, he gave himself no rest and worked incessantly. Grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, all the sciences, in a word, were familiar to him, and he delved into them all. His mind was sharp and ardent, his memory tenacious, his morals pure and beyond reproach. He was sparing of words, active in the search for truth, prudent in discussions, and prompt in the solution of questions."

It was not only by the breadth and solidity of his knowledge that Odon became famous; he became so also by his eminent virtue. When he led his disciples to church, numbering about two hundred, he walked last, the better to observe their conduct, and made them keep as exact a discipline as in the most regular monastery. None would have dared to laugh, or speak to his companion, however softly he might have done so, or look to the right or to the left; and when they were in the choir, one would have taken them, for their modesty, for monks of Cluny. This modesty was also noticeable in their clothes and hair; Odon did not allow them to use any adornment. Even less did he allow them to associate with women: otherwise he would have driven them from his school, as pests, or would have abandoned it himself.

He gave his public lessons in the cloister of the Canons. But when he taught, he did not allow any layman to enter. And he did not fear to offend by this prohibition Evrard, castellan of Tournai. He had as a maxim to fear nothing less than the unjust resentments of the great of the earth, and said, on this occasion, that it was shameful for a wise man to turn aside even slightly from the right path out of consideration for them. This regularity of conduct made him loved and honored, not only by the citizens and the Canons, but also by Bishop Radbod, who then governed Noyon and Tournai in that capacity. Some said, however, that all this came less from a principle of religion than from the genius of a philosopher; but Odon did not delay in showing the contrary.

He had been directing the school of Tournai for nearly five years when he acquired the treatise 'On Free Choice of the Will' by Saint Augu saint Augustin Cited for his definition of fraternal charity. stine. As he then had more taste for secular philosophy than for the writings of the Fathers, he threw it into a chest and preferred reading Plato. But after about two months, while explaining Boethius's work, 'The Consolation of Philosophy', to his disciples, and having reached the fourth book where free will is discussed, he remembered the book he had bought and had it brought to him. After reading two or three pages, he gradually tasted the beauty of the style and was charmed by it. Calling his disciples to share the treasure he had discovered, he confessed to them that until then he had been unaware that Saint Augustine was so eloquent and pleasant, and he immediately began to read and explain this treatise to them, to which he devoted all of that day and the next. When he reached the third book, where Saint Augustine compares the sinful soul to a slave, Odo heaved deep sighs and cried out: 'Alas! How touching this thought is! It seems to regard us as naturally as if it were written only for us. Indeed, we adorn this corrupt world with the little science we have, and after death we will not be worthy of heavenly glory, because we render no service to God, and instead of using our science for Him, we abuse it to seek the glory of the world and run after vanity.' Having spoken thus, he rose and entered the church, bursting into tears. Immediately his entire school was troubled and the Canons filled with admiration. From then on, Odo began to gradually cease his public lessons, to go to church more often, and to distribute to the poor, especially to the clerics who were in need, the money he had amassed.

Such were the beginnings of his conversion. It became so perfect that he subsequently had only horror for what he had loved illegitimately, and love for what he had hated. Abstinence, fasting, and other macerations were for him continuous exercises; and he turned the ardor he had previously had for secular sciences to the study of true philosophy. He often fasted so rigorously that he took as his only food what bread he could hold in his closed hand. So that in a short time this austerity of life made him lose his stoutness and rendered him so thin and emaciated that he was barely recognizable.

Many of Odo's students soon learned of their master's intentions and the plan he had formed to withdraw from the world to live in solitude. They immediately resolved to follow him and to embrace the religious life with him. The only question remaining was where they would retire. But while they were all deliberating on this subject, some inhabitants of Tournai, having learned by chance of the project of their learned professor and his best students, and fearing to lose such precious men, went to their bishop, Radbod II. They expressed to the prelate the sincere regret that Odo's departure caused them, and at the same time begged him to ask him, since he was disposed to embrace the religious life, to retire to the monastery of Saint-Martin. This ancient abbey, situated on a small hill a short dist ance from the city, had f monastère de Saint-Martin Abbey restored by Odo. ormerly been destroyed by the Normans, and since then it had not been rebuilt. The people of Tournai pledged to make it habitable and to adapt it to the needs of Odo and the disciples who accompanied him.

The bishop welcomed such generous offers with eagerness and communicated them to his Chapter, which felt great joy. The preparations for the departure being finished, and the work sufficiently completed, Odo and his small colony were led in procession to their new home by the bishop himself (1092). There they took the habit of Canons Regular and embraced the Rule of Saint Augustine. Odo directed his disciples, who had now become his spiritual sons, with admirable wisdom and prudence. He lived with them like a father in the midst of his children, and although, in the beginning, they had to endure all kinds of privations, the example of his patience and his perfect conformity to the will of God inspired everyone with the same sentiments. Despite the rather common scarcity of the most necessary things for life, the blessed Odo still found the means to relieve the poor. He was filled with such great charity for them that he knew not how to refuse them anything. One could even say that the kindness of his heart sometimes led him too far and, in several circumstances, exposed the future of his community; it was for this reason that his disciples begged him to entrust the temporal administration of the monastery to a provost.

The blessed Odo, from that moment on, occupied himself only with the spiritual direction of his religious, whose number was constantly increasing. Many young men, indeed, attracted by the reputation for holiness of the abbot and his disciples, generously broke with the world to come and embrace the religious life at the monastery of Saint-Martin. Among those who distinguished themselves above all by their courageous constancy, one must mention Adolphe, son of Sohier, cantor at the cathedral church of Tournai. His father, having learned that he wanted to renounce all the advantages to which he could aspire in the world, and that he had even already retired to the monastery of Saint-Martin, went there immediately with several of his friends, seized his son by the hair, overwhelmed him with insults and blows, and forced him to return home. A few days later, the young man returned to the monastery without the knowledge of his parents, who believed him to be at the cathedral. The irritated father went there again, and, after mistreating his son, brought him back to his house, where he kept him strictly confined. The virtuous Adolphe nevertheless persevered in his intentions, and God even granted his prayers that his father would suddenly change his disposition toward him. Sohier, in fact, not only consented to his son embracing the religious life in the abbey of Saint-Martin, but he also asked to be admitted there himself, as well as his brother Herman, whose heart had also been touched by grace. This extraordinary change caused a great stir in the city of Tournai and produced the most salutary impressions there.

Our Blessed one especially rejoiced at these striking testimonies of God's mercy toward his nascent community. However, he was not without anxiety because of certain relationships that his religious maintained with clerics of the city. He feared that these associations might hinder their progress in perfection. One day he conferred about this with his friend Aymeric, Abbot of the monastery of Anchin, in who Aymeric, abbé du monastère d'Anchin Abbot of Anchin and friend of Odo. m he had complete confidence and who often came to visit him. The latter then advised him to adopt the Rule of Saint Benedict, in order to place a more complete separation between his religious and the people of the world, of whatever condition they might be. This proposal was well-received by the blessed Odon, who spoke of it immediately to his religious. They also welcomed it with joy, and asked to receive, like their venerable Father, the habit of Saint Benedict from the hands of Abbot Aymeric himself.

The blessed Odon was again elected abbot by his disciples according to the ordinances of the Rule of Saint Benedict, and applied himself, with new fervor, to giving them all the examples of a holy and laborious life. "Vowed to evangelical poverty, he continued to subject his community to it. He would not admit for his church either a silver cross or any precious ornament; he refused the altars and tithes that were offered to him. All his religious were to live by the work of their hands and the produce of their cultivation. If sums of money were given to him, which happened sometimes, he employed them with generous liberality, either to ransom captives or to relieve the misery of the poor. In a year of famine that devastated the whole country, the compassionate abbot distributed to them everything that was in his house, even to the point of leaving it without his own necessities. The persons of the other sex who retreated to his monastery were found in such great numbers that, not being able to house them all comfortably together, he divided them into two groups, each of about sixty, and distributed them into two monasteries: one to which he gave as superior his sister Ermenburge, near the abbey of Saint-Martin, and the other within the enclosure of the city."

Odon, after having been for Tournai a source of light and doctrine, became there also a source of renewal in Christian piety. The example of his virtues and the exhortations he gave in public inspired there a contempt for passing things and a desire for future goods. A great number of Tournaisiens no longer looked upon their city as anything but a prison, and the cloister as an anticipated paradise. Hence so many holy divorces made by mutual consent between husband and wife, and so many salutary separations of children from fathers, and fathers from children. The pious abbot, having known how to make himself all things to all men, was like the father of all, and like the soul that gave movement to all.

Relieved of all other external care by the sagacity and vigilance of one of his students, all the time that his exercises of piety left him, he employed it either in reading or in copying good books. His example in this animated his brothers to imitate him; and the abbey of Saint-Martin, under his government, became no less famous for the cultivation of letters than for its exact discipline. There were then several skilled writers or copyists, which was a great pleasure for the learned abbot. Ordinarily, twelve of the youngest had no other work than that of transcribing the books of the Holy Scripture, the works of the Fathers, and other ecclesiastical writers, both ancient and modern. Odon succeeded thereby in forming one of the most numerous and best-conditioned libraries that was seen at that time.

After Odo had rendered all these services to the diocese of Tournai, Providence sent him to work in that of Cambr ai. For Cambrai Principal episcopal see of Saint Aubert. ten years, Gaucher, who had been its bishop, had been deposed at the Council of Clermont (1095) for simony, yet maintained his position through the protection of Emperor Henry IV. Pope Paschal empereur Henri IV Emperor and father of Itta. II, no longer able pape Pascal II Pope reigning during the episcopate of Geoffrey. to tolerate this infraction of the rules, finally wrote to Manasses, Archbishop of Reims, metropolitan of the province, ordering him to have another bishop elected as soon as possible and to consecrate him without delay. Consequently, Manasses assembled his council, to which all the abbots of his metropolis, and specifically the one of Saint-Martin, were called. It was the second day of July; Abbot Odo was elected Bishop of Cambrai and consecrated on the spot by the archbishop, assisted by his suffragans. Odo having refused to receive investiture from the hands of Emperor Henry IV, entry into his episcopal city, where the intruder Gaucher still remained, was forbidden to him, despite the wishes of a large part of the population.

The virtuous prelate, leaving to Providence the care of smoothing out the difficulties he encountered on all sides, thought only of repairing as soon as possible the evils caused by long and disastrous divisions. Entirely devoted to his duties as a pastor, he traveled through the different regions of his vast diocese to preach the word of God and fulfill the functions of his episcopal office; then he would retire to the monastery of Saint-Martin to take some rest.

When the blessed Odo was ordained bishop, he had been Abbot of Saint-Martin for nearly thirteen years, the government of which he then entrusted to Ségard, who was its prior and soon became its abbot. This monastery, whose sad state was described at the time Odo undertook to restore it, was rich and powerful when he left it; there were then more than seventy monks.

In 1106, upon the death of Emperor Henry IV, protector of Gaucher, Henry V gave orders for this excommunicated bishop to be driven out, and Odo, the legitimate bishop, to be put in his place, which was carried out the same year. Odo maintained in the episcopate the same simplicity and poverty he had practiced before, and yet he appeared there as a shining light that illuminated the house of the Lord. He did so not only by the brilliance of his virtues, but also by the brilliance of his writings. Moreover, we know little of his episcopal life. He had some part in various pious establishments, namely that of the collegiate church of Dendermonde. He also extended his benefits to some abbeys, such as that of Saint-Denis, near Paris, and his former monastery of Saint-Martin of Tournai. He granted to the latter, at the request of Benedict, his brother, who was a monk and almoner there, the parish of Mande, to help support the alms given to the poor. Odo also collaborated with the castellan of Brussels to move to Forest the monastery of nuns that Fulgence, Abbot of Afflighem, had established near Alost, so that they might be more comfortably and safely situated. He also confirmed, in 1106, the foundation of the abbey of Jette, in Brabant; in 1107, that of the abbey of Saint-Jean of Valenciennes; in 1110, that of the abbey of Cortemberg; and in 1112, that of Bornhem. As early as 1106, he had been present at the council held in Poitiers by the legate Bruno of Segni, in favor of the crusade. Two years later, in 1108, he was part of the assembly of bishops, abbots, and others, in which the dispute between the canons of the cathedral and the monks of Saint-Martin of Tournai was settled.

After what He nry V h Henri V Emperor who exiled Odo for his refusal of the investiture. ad done to facilitate the entry of our pious Bishop into his see, one would not have expected him to trouble him there. He did so nonetheless, by demanding that he receive investiture from him, that is to say, the crosier and the ring, which he had already received from the hand of his archbishop at his ordination. Odo's refusal was punished by exile, which forced him to retire t abbaye d'Anchin Benedictine monastery located in the Diocese of Cambrai. o the Abbey of Anchin, where he occupied himself with the composition of several books of piety, as he himself informs us. This event occurred in 1110, when Henry V, having fallen out with Pope Paschal II, wi shed to return to the right of g droit de donner les investitures Conflict between the Church and the Empire over the appointment of bishops. ranting investitures. He nevertheless returned to his see, where, feeling himself struck by a dangerous illness, he abdicated the episcopate and had himself carried to Anchin.

Abbot Ségard, having learned of this, ran promptly to Anchin, accompanied by some of his brothers, to try to obtain that the holy Bishop be transported to Saint-Martin of Tournai, of which he himself had been abbot. But Alvise, Abbot of Anchin, protested that he would never suffer that a deposit which God Himself had entrusted to him be taken away.

Odo's illness lasted eight days, which he spent receiving the Sacraments and preparing himself through other good works to appear before God. Those who were present attest that he awaited his final hour with the same security as if it were another who had to die for him. He did not, however, fail to urgently request the help of the community's prayers, "because," he said, "I will not be able to sustain the judgment of God if He separates His mercy from it." Thus died this blessed Bishop, on June 19, 1113, in the eighth year of his episcopate, counting from the day of his ordination. He was buried with honor in the church of Anchin, before the crucifix, under a white marble tomb, where his figure was represented and the following inscription engraved:

Hic tegitur Præsul Odo, Qui perspectus omni mundo, Fuit exul, Deo fidelis : Fulget cœlo quasi sidus.

"Here rests Bishop Odo, famous in the world; he was an exile and faithful to God: he now shines in heaven like a star."

Odo has long been honored as blessed in several churches of the Low Countries.

## WRITINGS OF BLESSED ODO.

Besides a work entitled: On Being and the Thing, Odo had composed two other philosophical works, the Sophist and the Complexions, that is to say, conclusions or reasonings. These works are lost, as is his poem on the Trojan War. We still possess from Odo of Cambrai an Explanation of the Canon of the Mass; a work on Original Sin; a dialogue on the Incarnation; a treatise on Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit; a writing on the Canons of the Gospels; a Homily on the gospel of the wicked husbandman; some Homilies; a Poem on the first verses of the book of Genesis, or the Work of the six days; a collection of Parables; a collection of Letters; a treatise on the Canon; a treatise on the Body and Blood of the Lord; the Tetrapla of the Psalter; a Letter to Lambert, Bishop of Arras; an Introduction to Theology is also attributed to him, as well as a Treatise or Exposition of the number three.

We have composed this biography with the Lives of the Saints of Cambrai and Arras, by Abbé Destombes, and with the Literary History of France, by Dom Rivet.