Virgilius of Arles

Virgilius of Arles, also known as Virgil or Virgile d'Arles, was Archbishop of Arles in southern Gaul during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Almost nothing can be established with certainty about his birth, family, or early years. Later medieval accounts, including an eighth-century vita, mix plausible monastic biography with legendary material and cannot be treated as strictly historical. He is generally believed to have been a monk of the Abbey of Lérins, the island monastery off the Provençal coast that had been a formative center of Gallic monastic culture since the fifth century. Some identifications link him with a Virgilius who served as abbot of Saint-Symphorien at Autun before his promotion to Arles, a connection suggested in part by the correspondence of Pope Gregory the Great, though that identification is not beyond dispute.

He occupied the see of Arles from about 588 until his death. Arles was then a metropolitan church of high standing in Gaul and a frequent point of contact between the Frankish episcopate and Rome. Pope Gregory I granted Virgilius the pallium and named him apostolic vicar in the Gauls, thereby recognizing a special Roman mandate in the region. Surviving papal letters to Virgilius deal with pastoral and disciplinary matters, among them Gregory's insistence that Jews not be compelled to baptism by force. According to a tradition that became standard in Catholic hagiography, Virgilius consecrated Augustine of Canterbury as bishop when the Roman missionary and his companions passed through Gaul on their way to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms around 597. Bede's narrative names the consecrating bishop differently, and modern historians have noted the discrepancy, but the association with Virgilius remains the usual identification in the cult of the saint.

As metropolitan of Arles, Virgilius stood in a line of bishops who had claimed a leading role in the Gallic church since late antiquity, a role sometimes contested by other sees such as Vienne. The city itself remained an important urban and ecclesiastical center in Provence under Merovingian rule. Beyond Gregory's letters, few contemporary documents illuminate Virgilius's government of the diocese or his relations with Frankish kings. The eighth-century life that later circulated in his honor reflects the desire of the local church to furnish its bishop with a full monastic and miraculous dossier, a common hagiographic pattern rather than a source of independent fact.

Virgilius died about the year 610, almost certainly at Arles. Veneration of him as a saint is ancient and local; the Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 5 March. He is not to be confused with Virgil of Salzburg, the eighth-century Irish scholar-bishop. Because so much of the narrative tradition is late or legendary, a cautious account must rest primarily on the Gregorian correspondence, the notices of the martyrologies, and the known chronology of the see of Arles.