Viator of Lyons

Saint Viator of Lyons, known in French as Saint Viateur, was a Christian lector of the church of Lyons in Roman Gaul in the later fourth century. Almost nothing can be established about his birth, parentage, or early years from surviving historical sources. He enters the record as a cleric attached to the cathedral of Lyons, where the office of lector involved the public reading of Scripture and, in that period, commonly also the instruction of catechumens preparing for baptism. Lyons was then one of the principal Christian centres of Gaul, with an episcopal tradition reaching back through Irenaeus and the martyrs of 177. Viator’s life is known almost entirely through his association with Saint Justus, bishop of Lyons, whom he served and later followed into voluntary exile.

The traditional account, preserved in the early hagiography of Lyons, places the turning point after the Council of Aquileia in 381, which Justus attended. A man guilty of homicide took sanctuary in the church at Lyons. Civic authorities sought his surrender and gave the bishop assurances that the prisoner would not be put to death. Relying on that pledge, Justus delivered the man, who was executed nonetheless. Regarding himself as complicit in a broken oath and in bloodshed, Justus determined to lay down his see. He left Lyons in secret and travelled to Egypt, taking Viator with him. The two settled in the desert of Scetis, west of the Nile Delta, already a major region of eremitical monasticism among the Desert Fathers. There they lived as hermits, occupied with prayer, ascetic discipline, and the manual work customary among Egyptian monks of the time.

The clergy and people of Lyons did not accept the loss of their bishop. They sent Antiochus, a priest of the Lyons church, to Egypt to find Justus and urge his return. Antiochus located Justus and Viator in the desert, but Justus refused to resume the episcopate. According to the received tradition, Justus died in Egypt not long afterward, and Viator died there as well, conventionally dated to about 389. Antiochus is reported to have remained for a time among the monks and later to have brought the bodies of both men back to Lyons. They were buried in the basilica of the Holy Maccabees, a church outside the walls that subsequently took the name of Saint-Just and became an important sanctuary of the Lyons church. The translation of the relics established a local cult in which Viator was honoured together with his bishop.

Viator was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; his sainthood rests on ancient episcopal and popular veneration at Lyons. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 21 October. In the nineteenth century the French priest Louis Querbes, founding a congregation of teaching clerics, placed the institute under Viator’s patronage, seeing in the fourth-century lector a model for catechists and educators. The Clerics of Saint Viator, or Viatorians, continue to regard him as their principal patron. Historical sources do not attribute to him a wide range of other patronages of places, trades, or illnesses. Outside Lyons and the Viatorian family he remains a comparatively obscure figure, known almost entirely through the narrative of Justus’s resignation and the Egyptian sojourn that followed.