Lazarus of Aix

Lazarus of Aix was a bishop of Aix-en-Provence (the Roman city of Aquae Sextiae in southern Gaul) in the opening decades of the fifth century. Almost nothing can be established about his birth, family, or education. He enters the surviving record only as an adult cleric at a moment when imperial authority in Gaul had collapsed. In 407 the general Constantine was proclaimed emperor in Britain and crossed into Gaul; from 408 he dominated the Gallic provinces from Arles. It was during this usurpation, around 408, that Lazarus obtained the bishopric of Aix. His elevation is usually grouped with that of Heros, who was installed at Arles in place of the previous bishop. Both men were later regarded by their enemies as creatures of the Constantinian regime. Lazarus was on friendly terms with Proculus, bishop of Marseille, a powerful and controversial metropolitan who had long resisted the pretensions of Arles.

The political wheel turned in 411. Constantine III was besieged, captured, and put to death. Honorius's government and a party of Gallic bishops moved to undo the ecclesiastical arrangements of the previous four years. Heros was expelled from Arles and replaced by Patroclus, who enjoyed the support of the magister militum Constantius. Lazarus was likewise removed from Aix and did not recover the see. The two deposed bishops left Gaul and made their way to Palestine, then a center of Latin monastic and theological life around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. There they lived in exile as monks or pilgrim clerics. In 415 they composed a formal accusation against the British monk Pelagius, whose teaching on grace, free will, and original sin had already alarmed Augustine of Hippo and Jerome. Their libellus was laid before a synod of Palestinian bishops that met at Diospolis (Lydda) in December 415. Pelagius explained his positions to the satisfaction of that assembly and was acquitted. The failure of the prosecution did not end the affair in the West. When Pelagius and his disciple Caelestius later appealed to Rome, Pope Zosimus (417-418) initially received them with some sympathy and treated the testimony of Heros and Lazarus with reserve, noting that the two men were themselves deposed bishops. Only after pressure from the African episcopate and from the imperial court did Rome condemn Pelagianism.

Lazarus never returned to the cathedra of Aix. The subsequent bishops of that church are recorded independently, and there is no contemporary evidence that he attempted a restoration. Later Provençal tradition states that he came back to southern Gaul and ended his days at the monastery of Saint-Victor in Marseille, a house associated with John Cassian, and that he died there in 441. That date is repeated in numerous liturgical and hagiographic compilations, yet it is not anchored by a strictly contemporary chronicle, and the Marseille connection may have been strengthened by local piety. Historians must also distinguish this Lazarus from the medieval Provençal legend that identified the biblical Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Martha and Mary, as a missionary who landed in Gaul and became the first bishop of Marseille. The two figures were sometimes confused in later devotion, but they belong to entirely different layers of tradition.

Veneration of Lazarus of Aix remained essentially regional. He is honored as a saint in the church of Provence, without a papal canonization of the type that became standard in the later Middle Ages. A feast on 3 September is found in a number of calendars devoted to Gallic saints. No historically secure patronages, spouse, or children are attached to his name. What can be known of him with reasonable confidence is limited to his brief and contested episcopate at Aix, his deposition in 411, his exile in the Holy Land, and his role, together with Heros of Arles, in the first Palestinian round of the Pelagian controversy. That episode, however poorly it ended for the accusers at Diospolis, helped carry a Gallic voice into a debate that would soon dominate Latin theology.