Saint Honoratus

Honoratus came from a noble family of consular rank settled in northern Gaul, and he was born about 350, though the place and even the year are uncertain. As a young man he gave up the pagan gods and was baptized, and he brought his elder brother Venantius to the faith. The two brothers gave their goods to the poor and withdrew to a family estate to live as monks.

About 368, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, they sailed from Marseille with an older hermit, Caprasius, to learn from the monks of the East. Venantius died suddenly at Methone in Greece, and the others came back through Italy and Rome to Provence. Tradition says that Honoratus then lived for a time as a hermit in a cave in the Esterel hills behind Cannes.

Between 400 and 410, with the blessing of Leontius, bishop of Fréjus, he settled with Caprasius and a few companions on the smaller of the Lérins islands, a wild place full of snakes and without fresh water. Disciples gathered around him, and he founded a community of monks who lived in common, while some of them lived apart as hermits. By 427 John Cassian, who dedicated several of his Conferences to Honoratus, called it an immense monastery. No writing of Honoratus survives, and the abbey connects its first rule, the Rule of the Four Fathers, with these early years.

Lérins formed many bishops of Gaul, among them Hilary of Arles, Eucherius of Lyon, Lupus of Troyes and, later, Caesarius of Arles, and tradition says that Saint Patrick spent some years there. In 426, after the murder of Bishop Patroclus, the people of Arles called Honoratus to be their bishop. He restored order in that Church and died at Arles in January 429, in the arms of his disciple and kinsman Hilary, who succeeded him and wrote a sermon on his life. The abbey of Lérins places his election about 428 and his death in 430.

He was buried at Arles. Butler’s Lives of the Saints records that his body was carried to Lérins in 1391 and that his tomb at Arles, under the high altar of the church of his name, was shown empty. The church of Saint-Honorat at the Alyscamps, the ancient cemetery of Arles, dates from the twelfth century and marks the start of the Way of Saint James from Arles; the Alyscamps are part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. The island has long borne his name, Île Saint-Honorat, and in the Middle Ages pilgrims went there in his honor. The abbey of Lérins, home today to a community of twenty-one monks, is the mother house of the Cistercian Congregation of the Immaculate Conception, whose houses include Sénanque in Provence and Rougemont in Quebec. His feast is kept on January 16.

Honoratus is shown as a bishop, sometimes standing above the island of Lérins, or drawing water from a rock with his miter beside him. His disciple Hilary wrote that he turned wild beasts into men, and it was told that the monks rid the island of its snakes. At Arles the avenue of tombs that leads to the church of Saint-Honorat was laid out by the Minim friars in the eighteenth century, and Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin came to paint it in 1888.

• Île Saint-Honorat, abbey of LérinsThe island off Cannes where he founded his monastery, reached by boat from Cannes, with a Cistercian abbey whose church is open to visitors who wish to pray with the monks.
• Arles, the AlyscampsThe ancient cemetery and its twelfth-century church of Saint-Honorat, the church of his name where his tomb was shown, open daily for most of the year.

On our ways: Arles.

• Via MagdalenaeThe Magdalene Way, seven days