Caesarius

Saint Caesarius of Arles was a Gallo-Roman bishop and preacher of late antique southern Gaul, born around 470 at Chalon-sur-Saône (ancient Cabillonum) in the Burgundian kingdom. He belonged to a Christian family of local standing; his sister Caesaria later became the first abbess of the women's monastery he founded at Arles. As a young man he left home for the island monastery of Lérins, then among the most influential monastic houses in the West. There he practised a severe asceticism that injured his health, and his abbot sent him to Arles to recover. Bishop Aeonius of Arles, a kinsman, ordained him and set him over a monastery near the city.

After Aeonius died, Caesarius was chosen bishop of Arles, most probably in 502, and held the see for about forty years. Arles was a metropolitan church of high prestige, in a region that passed during his lifetime from Visigothic to Ostrogothic and finally Frankish rule. Political suspicion attached to him more than once: Visigothic authorities briefly confined him on charges of disloyalty, and he later had to appear before Theodoric the Ostrogoth at Ravenna, from which journey he returned in honour and with privileges for his church. He worked throughout these changes to ransom captives, relieve the poor, and keep the city's Christian institutions functioning.

Caesarius was above all a pastor and preacher. He insisted that bishops and clergy instruct the people in language they could understand, and a large body of his sermons—more than two hundred—has survived, many adapted from Augustine and other authorities but recast for a mixed urban and rural audience in Provence. He gathered or presided over several councils, including Agde in 506 and, most importantly, the Second Council of Orange in 529. The Orange canons on grace, directed against residual semi-Pelagian views in Gaul, were confirmed by Pope Boniface II and became a landmark of Western theology. From Rome he also obtained the pallium and other marks of metropolitan authority for Arles.

He established a monastery for women at Arles under a rule he composed for them, the Regula virginum, with his sister Caesaria as its first abbess, and he issued a shorter rule for monks. These are among the earliest substantial monastic rules written in Gaul. Caesarius died at Arles on 27 August 542 and was buried at the women's monastery, in the basilica of Saint John. Disciples composed a Life of him shortly afterwards. He was venerated as a saint from the time of his death; his feast is kept on 27 August. His sermons were widely copied and reused in the Middle Ages, and he remains a principal witness to the pastoral ideals of the sixth-century Gallic episcopate and to the Christianization of the Provençal countryside.