The saint in exile

Other contemporary hagiographers had less difficult jobs than Ermentarius. Philibert’s exile was unusual in the fact that it was permanent—an unexpectedly “genuine” translation. With the benefit of hindsight, other authors knew that their saints would (and had) returned to their original homes, and were therefore free to frame the question of presence and movement in different ways, lamenting the saint’s departure and exploring its ramifications more openly than Ermentarius could. The saint could be represented as gone, but still present.³² This tension is reflected in Aimoin’s account of the departure of Germanus’ relics from St-Germain-des-Pres (Paris) in 846, compiled several decades after the events took place.³³ Aimoin described the Viking incursions and the necessity of removing most saints’ relics from

The effects of forced relic movement 35 the area (with the exception of St. Dionysius [Denis], specially protected by Charles the Bald) before telling his readers that Germanus’ relics were removed to the subordinate church of Combes. Unlike Ermentarius, Aimoin freely described an atmosphere of mourning and lamentation. His tropes inverted the motif of the joyous welcoming crowd typically invoked at the arrival of a relic; instead of the crowd celebrating a relic’s arrival, “old men and young men, boys and children, no one was able to hold himself back from tears.”³⁴

However, Aimoin immediately followed this image of grief with a series of three miracles meant to establish the departure of Germanus’ relics as permitted, foretold, and temporary. The first reported that a candle miraculously re-illuminated as the saint was being exhumed; a clear sign of divine approval of the action despite the sad circumstances. In the second, a team of monks returning before dawn saw a bright light emanating from the church where the relics had been placed, indicating the saint’s presence was linked to his holy bones. Most revealing, however, was the third miracle. It reported a vision that had supposedly taken place two years prior to the relics’ removal and predicted it.³⁵ In his sleep, a monk had seen Germanus rise bodily from his tomb and start preparing as if for a journey. The dreamer asked the saint what he was doing; Germanus replied that he would be leaving this place. To the monk’s expressed concern at this planned departure, Germanus responded “with a sad expression” that the monks would also be leaving! Reassuringly, though, he went on to explain that they would all return. Aimoin concluded by noting that this was a true vision, because (as he knew when compiling his account) all of this would happen as foretold. This narrative meant that, with the gift of hindsight, the story of the relics’ send-off could be framed with the assurance that the saint knew about and had planned on the journey long in advance, the assertion that he was sad to leave his home, and the guarantee that both saint and monks would return. Aimoin could thus safely dramatize the pain and sadness of the relics’ departure.

While Germanus’ relics were at Combes, the monastery was pillaged and partially dismantled for building supplies, which might have been taken as a sign that the saint’s sphere of action had left with the relics. Yet Aimoin was clear: the departure of his relics did not mean the total absence of the saint’s power. Rather, “with God’s pity, the power of the most holy father was not absent from that place,” as demonstrated by a series of unpleasant miracles punishing the raiding groups who had despoiled the abandoned monastery, conveniently reported later to the monks.³⁶ In fact, Aimoin claimed, the Viking Ragnar said that of all the timid Franks, “he had encountered no one to resist him, except the old dead man Germanus.”³⁷ While highly unreliable as a factual account of Ragnar’s perceptions or the nature of on-the-ground resistance, the story suggests the desire on Aimoin’s part to partially uncouple the saint’s power from a narrow focus on the location of his relics. Germanus, however ineffectual his protection may have seemed at the time, was still a heavenly defender of his monastery. And yet, a final miracle indicated the very real perceived effects of the relics’ departure. After the majority of the monks had come back to St-Germain but before the relics had returned, the custodians were sleeping in the church when they heard a commotion coming from the altar of St. Stephen.³⁸ Upon inspection, they found no one and realized that they had heard the voices of the demons who had been squatting in the church during the absence of the saint, lamenting that with the imminent return of the relics, their fun was soon to come to an end. Once the relics were returned, naturally, nothing of the kind was ever heard again. The soon-to-be-evicted demons pose an interesting counterpoint to the miraculous punishments of the Vikings: had Germanus stayed at home, or not?

Regardless of the implications of absence, the ritual power and glory available as part of the relics’ return were clear. Translation practices offered no model for lamentable departure and exile, but they were full of precedent for how to celebrate an arrival. Germanus’ return was as emotional as his departure: “the tears of grief at [the saint’s] transmigration were no more plentiful than the tears of joy at his return.”³⁹ A girl was healed as the reliquary passed over her, a candle carried before the reliquary extinguished by the wind was reignited, and a wooden cross was erected on the site to commemorate the miracle.⁴⁰ The returning relics were met by an entry procession led by the abbot. As a further sign that this event effectively offered the monks the opportunity to reenact the saint’s translation, the relics were not immediately replaced; rather, they rested on the altar of St. Stephen until the saint’s translation day, when they were once again reinterred in his sarcophagus. A final dream made clear that the saint’s travels were over and there could be no further ambiguities regarding his presence. In this new vision, one of the monks saw the saint dressed in military armor standing in front of the altar of St. Stephen. The saint, apparently feeling somewhat belatedly pugnacious, advanced on the monks and demanded to know where the Vikings—“violators of that temple, dissipators of the fatherland, who had compelled his body and those of other saints to be dug up”—had gone off to.⁴¹ Upon learning that they had fled, he sat down and ordered them to help him take off his armor.

This concluding image of rest after a job accomplished may seem strange, given that the saint’s relics were moved again roughly a decade later (857/8) in response to a second assault, a fact which Aimoin knew.⁴² This second journey, perhaps as a result of the attention given the departure and return in 845, was treated as less as an extraordinary occurrence and more as a repeat performance; the term Aimoin uses for this second journey is not transmigratio, but peregrinatio (pilgrimage) of monks and relics alike. The relics were moved multiple times on this trip: first to Combes, then to Ac-manto, and finally to Nogent-sur-Marne before they were returned by boat to Paris in 863. The saint’s power manifested on this trip through miracles of healing in each place visited, beginning with the healing of a monk named

Adalarius, who insisted on helping carry the relics to Combes and by the end of the journey had discarded his crutches.⁴³

Yet while the saint performed healing miracles on the road, the monastery itself suffered again. During this raid, more than just buildings were damaged—a group of monks and servants were killed while celebrating Easter services. This apparent second failure on the part of the saint to protect the monastery seems explicable only if the saint’s power had left the monastery along with his relics. Accordingly, the hymn supposedly sung when Germanus’ relics returned—copied into the text by Aimoin— emphasized that the saint had not been present for these events, and that his return would restore his power to the physical location he had been forced to temporarily abandon:

Come now, come, return, best and good pastor

Seek your own sheep, and restore peace

Do not allow further sadness regarding the carried-away relics.

Paris deplored that you went away, lord,

Bewailed and moaned that she was without glory

Which she will celebrate having recovered now in your presence

[praesentia].

Oh! That which your servants the monks cried for and lamented Exceedingly, along with your entire crowd of people,

When you were an exile from your place, most holy one!

What speech was able to tell of their heart’s wailing,

And similarly, to set free the most bitter tears

Because the priest of piety had been wickedly driven out.

However, the final lines also claimed that he had not abandoned his people and had in fact remained both powerful and accessible:

Who if he withdrew from the rough ferocity of the pagans,

[Departed] neither from the place or the vengeful flames; he was still near,

Present in dangers, on account of the worthy prayers of [his]

. 44 servants.

It is difficult to understand how a saint who had done nothing to stop the murder of people devoted to him could be praised as “present in dangers,” even if this line refers to the power of the saint accessed through prayer in absentia rather than through the proximity of his relics. Much as Victricius of Rouen had attempted to explain five centuries earlier how the arrival of physical relics both mattered and did not matter, the hymn argues that Germanus’ presence and power were both tied to his relics (such that he could leave as an exile, and return) and not tied to his relics (such that he was always “present” for his servants). Germanus could, at least according to the monks who were his professional curators, be simultaneously present and not present, powerful despite his flight from danger, in need of welcome even though he had never truly left—an omnipresent exile. One has to wonder if there were at least a few among those celebrating the return of the relics who privately wondered about these claims and the value of welcoming back a fair-weather protector.