Confessor Aubert

Saint Aubert (also rendered Autbert or Aubertus) was bishop of Avranches in Neustria, in what is now Normandy, during the early eighth century. No contemporary record preserves his parentage, birthplace, or year of birth, and nothing reliable is known of his education or early career before he occupied the see of Avranches. He is remembered in the Latin West as a confessor—that is, a saint who was not a martyr—and above all as the founder of the oratory on the tidal island then called Mont Tombe, which became the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. The principal narrative of that foundation survives in later medieval texts, notably the Revelatio ecclesiae sancti Michaelis, written well after his lifetime; modern historians therefore treat the visionary details as hagiographical tradition while accepting that a Bishop Aubert of Avranches was associated with the origins of the sanctuary in this period.

According to that tradition, in 708 the Archangel Michael appeared to Aubert in a dream and commanded him to build a shrine in the archangel’s honour on Mont Tombe, a rocky islet in the bay between Normandy and Brittany. Aubert hesitated, uncertain whether the vision was genuine. The archangel appeared a second time and then a third; on the third occasion he is said to have pressed a finger into the bishop’s skull, leaving a hole as a tangible sign. Aubert then undertook the work. He is reported to have sent two clerics to the cave sanctuary of Saint Michael on Monte Gargano in Italy to obtain relics and to study the form of the cult there. An oratory was dedicated on 16 October 709. Aubert established a small community of twelve canons to serve the shrine. In later centuries the site passed to Benedictine monks and became one of the major pilgrimage centres of medieval Europe, but that development lies after Aubert’s own lifetime.

Aubert continued as bishop of Avranches after the foundation. The year of his death is given in later tradition as about 720; it is not fixed by a surviving contemporary annal or epitaph. He was buried, according to the same tradition, at the sanctuary he had founded on Mont Tombe. In subsequent centuries relics identified as his were kept at Mont-Saint-Michel; a skull showing a circular perforation, long associated with the legend of the archangel’s touch, has been preserved at the Basilica of Saint-Gervais in Avranches. His cult remained essentially local and diocesan. The feast of Saint Aubert is kept on 10 September. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; veneration arose by popular and episcopal cultus, as was usual for a bishop-saint of the early Middle Ages.

Historical caution is required. Almost every picturesque detail of Aubert’s life—the threefold vision, the hole in the skull, the embassy to Monte Gargano, even the precise dedication date—comes from texts composed generations after the events they describe. What can be said with more confidence is that the see of Avranches existed in this period, that a bishop named Aubert is linked in the region’s ecclesiastical memory with the first Christian sanctuary on Mont Tombe around the beginning of the eighth century, and that his memory as founder and confessor was maintained at Avranches and at Mont-Saint-Michel throughout the Middle Ages. Beyond that, the sources do not permit a fuller biography.