A Life, for his day, the thirtieth of August — ex Martyrologio Romano
Ecce elongavi fugiens: et mansi in solitudine. “Lo, I have gone far off flying away; and I abode in the wilderness.” — Psalm 54:8
St. Fiacre has no feast in the universal calendar of 1962; the thirtieth of August belongs there to St. Rose of Lima, with a commemoration of Ss. Felix and Adauctus. But on this day the Roman Martyrology names him, and in the diocese of Meaux, where his bones lie, and through much of France and his native Ireland, his cultus has been continuous for thirteen centuries. He is admitted here on the Martyrology’s authority.
I. An island that sent its sons away
To understand Fiacre one must first understand a strange and glorious habit of the Irish Church in her first centuries. Ireland had received the faith without martyrdom; no Roman proconsul ever shed blood there. And so her monks, denied the red martyrdom, invented what their own literature calls the white martyrdom: to leave forever, for the love of God, the land and kin that an Irishman loved more than life — peregrinatio pro Christo, pilgrimage for Christ, with no shrine as its destination and no return as its end. Columbanus went to Gaul and Italy; Gall stayed by Lake Constance; Fursey came to Péronne; Kilian went to Würzburg and found the red martyrdom after all. Fiacre belongs to this company: the least documented of them, and among the most loved.
II. What is known and what is told
Honesty requires the distinction to be drawn at the outset. Of Fiacre — Fiachra in his own tongue — the securely attested facts are few: that he was an Irish monk of the seventh century; that he crossed to Gaul and was received by St. Faro, bishop of Meaux; that he lived as a hermit at Breuil in the forest of Brie, gathered disciples, served the poor and the sick, and died there about the year 670; and that his tomb became at once and remained a place of pilgrimage. His life was not written down until long after his death, and the written lives are late enough that the Bollandists handle them with tongs.
Everything else is tradition, and the tradition should be told as tradition. The legend makes him the son of a king of Ireland, and gives him for sister St. Syra, venerated at Troyes. It sends him from Ireland precisely because his holiness had made him famous, and fame was the one thing he could not endure. None of this can be verified; none of it need be despised. A people does not preserve stories for a thousand years about a man who mattered to no one.
III. Meaux, and the forest of Breuil
What stands on firmer ground is the meeting with Faro. The bishop of Meaux was himself a great man of that age — a courtier of the Merovingian kings who had left the court for the Church — and his family made a habit of sheltering Irish pilgrims; Columbanus himself had blessed the house. When Fiacre came asking not for a post but for a wilderness, Faro understood the request and granted it: a site at Breuil, some leagues from Meaux, in the wooded country of the Brie.
There Fiacre did what the Irish monks did everywhere: he cleared the ground. He felled trees, pulled roots, turned soil, and made of a piece of forest a garden — vegetables and healing herbs, and beside the garden an oratory which he dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and beside the oratory a hospice, where travelers and the poor were received, fed from the garden, and nursed with its herbs. He had fled the company of men, and the company of men followed him into the woods; and he, who had crossed the sea to be alone, fed them. In that apparent contradiction lies most of his sanctity. The solitude he guarded was interior; the door of the hospice stood open.
IV. The furrow and the accuser
Here belongs the most famous of the legends, and it is given as legend — traditio pia, cherished and unprovable. Faro, it is said, promised the hermit as much land as he could dig a trench around in a single day. Fiacre walked the bounds of the ground he needed, dragging the point of his staff behind him; and the earth opened of itself at its touch, trees toppled aside, and the furrow followed him like a living thing. A woman of the neighborhood — later ages named her La Becnaude, the shrew — saw it and ran to denounce him to the bishop as a sorcerer. Faro came, examined, and judged for the saint; and Fiacre, who had sat down on a stone to await the judgment in weariness of heart, left in the softened stone the print of his body. The stone was shown at Breuil for centuries, and the sick came to sit upon it.
The tale carried a hard appendix: that the saint, wounded by the accusation, thereafter barred women from the enclosure of his hermitage, and that the prohibition outlived him at his shrine — so that even Anne of Austria, Queen of France, when she came on pilgrimage, is said to have made her devotions without entering the old oratory. What is one to make of this? Simply what the sources allow: it is the legend’s way of remembering a real austerity of enclosure, of a kind common among the Irish solitaries, refracted through a folk-tale of injury and reserve. It is remembered here because suppressing the awkward parts of a tradition is the beginning of falsifying it.
V. The garden
It is the garden, not the furrow, that the Church has ratified by the instinct of the faithful. Fiacre is the patron of gardeners — of all who work the soil with their hands and coax food and physic out of it — and the patronage is exact. His sanctity had the shape of cultivation: slow, seasonal, unglamorous, requiring presence every day and rewarding it late. He healed the sick who came to him, with his herbs and with his prayers, and the tradition attached his name particularly to the humiliating and unheroic ailments — tumors and growths that French centuries called le fic de saint Fiacre — as if to insist that no misery is beneath a saint’s attention.
There is a lesson of some weight buried in this. The seventh century did not lack spectacular sanctity; it was an age of wonder-workers. But the Church holds up in Fiacre a man whose miracles, whatever they were, grew out of a routine: dig, plant, water, harvest, cook, bandage, pray, sleep, again. The peregrinatio that began with the grand renunciation of a homeland ended in the small fidelities of a vegetable bed. Both were the same obedience.
VI. Death and the tomb
He died at Breuil about the year 670 — the traditional day of his death is the eighteenth of August — and was buried in his own oratory. The disciples he had gathered continued the life; the hermitage became a priory, and the place itself took and keeps his name: Saint-Fiacre-en-Brie. Miracles were reported at the tomb early and steadily, and the pilgrimage that began among the peasants of the Brie grew until it drew the great of the realm.
VII. The cultus
Few saints of so thin a documentary record have had so robust an afterlife.
In 1568, with the Huguenot wars menacing the countryside, the principal relics were translated for safety from Breuil to the cathedral of Meaux, where they rest. Kings and queens of France sought his intercession; Anne of Austria made pilgrimage to his shrine in thanksgiving connected with the birth of the future Louis XIV, and the royal devotion to the hermit of the Brie continued under the great Bossuet, who as bishop of Meaux was the keeper of his relics. In Ireland his memory held at Kilfera in Kilkenny and elsewhere; in France scarcely a region lacks a church, a chapel, or a confraternity of gardeners under his name.
And then history played upon him one of her gentle jokes. In seventeenth-century Paris, an establishment on the rue Saint-Martin called the Hôtel de Saint-Fiacre, bearing his image on its sign, began hiring out small carriages; the vehicles took the name of the house, and the fiacre — the Parisian cab — carried the Irish hermit’s name through the streets of every French city for three hundred years. By this accident of signage the man who walked out of Ireland became the patron of cab drivers, and their successors behind the wheel still claim him. He would, one suspects, have found it funny; and there is a fitness in it after all, for his hospice existed precisely for people on the road.
His day in the Roman Martyrology is the thirtieth of August; the diocese of Meaux and the churches of Ireland have kept his feast on other days near it, and the pilgrimage endures.
VIII. What the life teaches
That leaving can be a vocation. Fiacre’s first act was subtraction: homeland, kindred, prospects, name. The peregrinatio teaches that detachment is not the hatred of good things but the refusal to let them be ultimate. Most of us are not called to cross a sea; all of us are called to hold what we love with an open hand.
That solitude and charity are not rivals. He went to the forest to be alone with God, and the proof that he found God there is that the poor were fed at his door. A recollection that makes a man useless to his neighbor is not recollection but self-regard. The hermit’s cell and the hospice shared a wall.
That small work, done for God, is great work. A garden is the least dramatic of enterprises and the most honest: it cannot be rushed, faked, or delegated to reputation. The Church that canonizes doctors and martyrs also holds up a man with dirt under his fingernails, and says to every gardener, cook, nurse, and driver: this, too, sanctifies.
Practice
Examine. Is there a fame, a comfort, or an attachment that has quietly become the thing you cannot leave — the possession that possesses you? Fiacre’s freedom began where that grip was broken.
Do. Tend something living this week with your own hands — a garden bed, a pot of herbs, a sickroom, a meal for someone on the road — and offer the work, silently and without announcement, for a soul in need.
Pray. From the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop:
Deus, qui nos beati Fiacrii Confessoris tui annua solemnitate laetificas: concede propitius; ut cuius natalitia colimus, etiam actiones imitemur.
“O God, who dost gladden us by the yearly solemnity of blessed Fiacre Thy Confessor: mercifully grant that, as we keep his birthday, we may also imitate his deeds.”
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, remembering that his oratory in the forest was dedicated to Our Lady; or, for those who work with their hands, the ancient practice of the oratio iaculatoria — a short aspiration repeated over the work itself: Laboremus et oremus.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path takes up the Irish peregrini — Columbanus, Gall, Fursey, Kilian, and their brethren — and the re-evangelization of the continent that their exile accomplished. The Lives of the Saints path continues tomorrow with another son of the Irish monastic world, St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, whose feast falls on the thirty-first of August.
Sancte Fiacri, hortulanorum patrone, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Roman Martyrology (30 August); the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists for August; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), s.v. “St. Fiacre”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and the diocesan traditions of Meaux. The late and legendary character of the written lives is noted in the text where it bears on particular claims.