Et ædificabuntur in te deserta sæculorum: fundamenta generationis et generationis suscitabis: et vocaberis ædificator sepium, avertens semitas in quietem. “And the places that have been desolate for ages shall be built in thee: thou shalt raise up the foundations of generation and generation: and thou shalt be called the repairer of the fences, turning the paths into rest.” — Isaias 58:12
I. Identitas et Origines
The tenth century has a poor reputation, and it earned it. When Gerard was born, about the year 895, the Carolingian order was in ruins. The Northmen had been sailing up the Scheldt, the Somme, and the Seine for two generations, burning monasteries as they went. The kings were weak, the counts were strong, and the great abbeys of the old Frankish heartland had mostly passed into the hands of laymen. Princes held them as benefices, drew their revenues, kept their hounds in the cloister, and left a remnant of canons or monks to sing what Office they could. Historians have called it an iron age, and the monks who lived through it would not have argued.
Gerard came from the class that held the abbeys. He was born at Staves, in the county of Namur, in the old Lotharingian middle kingdom between France and Germany. His father, Stance, belonged to the high nobility of the region. His mother, Plectrude, was a sister of Stephen, Bishop of Liège. Like most young men of his rank he was trained for war, and he entered the service of the Count of Namur. Among his family’s lands was the estate of Brogne, between the Sambre and the Meuse, and on it stood a small chapel.
The Life written at Brogne says that his piety was already remarkable in camp. It also tells, in the manner of such books, of a day when he came in from hunting and went into the chapel at Brogne to pray while his companions rested. There, it says, the sweetness of prayer showed him the emptiness of everything else he loved. Whatever the particulars were, the documents agree on the result. Gerard rebuilt the chapel at Brogne as a proper church, and he began looking for clergy to serve it who would serve God there better than he could.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
About the year 917 the Count of Namur sent Gerard on an embassy to Robert, the brother of the late King Odo. Robert was the most powerful lord of western Francia and would later reign briefly as king. Gerard left his retinue lodged in Paris, and he went to stay at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, the royal monastery north of the city where the Apostle of the Gauls lay buried. What he saw there changed his life. The Life says the monks’ way of living seemed to him a life already turned toward God. When the embassy was over, and with the consent of his lord and of his uncle the bishop, he went back to Saint-Denis and asked for the habit.
The traditional account says he stayed there eleven years and was ordained priest before returning home. The documents complicate this, and honesty requires saying so. A charter of 2 June 919 shows Gerard endowing the church at Brogne, which was now dedicated to Saint Peter and to Saint Eugene. Another charter, of 923, already names him abbot of a monastic community there. The eleven years of the Life cannot be fitted between those dates as they stand. Modern scholars therefore hold that his formation at Saint-Denis was real but shorter, or was interrupted, and that the Life, written long afterward, has stretched and smoothed it. Nothing in the substance is in doubt. Gerard learned monastic life at Saint-Denis, became a monk and a priest, and returned to Brogne to make it a monastery.
He brought something with him from France: relics of Saint Eugene, honoured as a martyr at Deuil near Paris and later identified by legend with the first bishop of Toledo. He obtained them from Leutger, abbot of Deuil, and from the monks of Saint-Denis. He set them in the church at Brogne. He removed the clerics who had served it negligently and installed monks living under the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Then he did something few founders do. The new house had a superior, and Gerard withdrew from it. He took a cell near the monastery and gave himself to a stricter solitude and penance. He seems to have meant to end his life there, and he probably would have, had his holiness stayed as hidden as he wanted.
The virtues the tradition remembers in him are what we would expect of a reformer, together with one we would not. The expected ones are a strict and unbending fidelity to the Rule, austerity in his own person, and tireless travel. The unexpected one is gentleness. Accounts of him stress the sweetness of his temper. It is hard to reform a decayed house without breaking the men in it, and harder still to do it eighteen times. The evidence suggests that Gerard could insist on everything without becoming hated for it, and a man manages that only if it is plain that he wants nothing for himself.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
He was called out of his cell by the Bishop of Cambrai, who asked him to take over the ancient Abbey of Saint-Ghislain in Hainault. The abbey dated from the seventh century. The Northmen had plundered it, laymen had taken possession of it, and a community of canons now occupied it whose life gave no edification to anyone. Gerard did there what he had done at Brogne. He replaced the canons with monks, restored the observance of the Rule in full, and stayed only until the house could stand on its own.
That became the pattern of the next twenty years. The decisive patron was Arnulf I, Count of Flanders, called the Great, a man devout and violent in about equal measure. The Life relates that Arnulf was tormented by the stone and sought the abbot of Brogne, and that through Gerard’s prayers he was healed. In gratitude Arnulf offered him whatever he wished. Gerard refused gifts for himself and accepted only what could go to the poor and to the monks. Arnulf then put the great Flemish abbeys in his hands, beginning with Saint Peter’s on Mont-Blandin at Ghent, where the count’s parents were buried, and Saint Bavo’s in the same city. Saint-Bertin and Saint-Amand followed, and so did Saint-Remi at Reims. His disciples then carried the reform beyond his own reach, to Saint-Riquier and, in Normandy, to Saint-Wandrille, to Saint-Ouen at Rouen, and to Mont-Saint-Michel. The tradition credits him with the restoration of eighteen abbeys between the Meuse, the Somme, and the sea.
The method matters as much as the number. In several houses Gerard took the title of abbot only until regular life had been re-established. After that he handed the government back to the community and went on to the next. He did not build an order, and he did not make Brogne the head of a federation of dependent houses. He restored each monastery to itself and to its Rule, and then he left. The ideal behind this was older than Cluny, which had been founded a few years before he took the habit. It was the ideal of Saint Benedict of Aniane, the reformer of Louis the Pious, who had sought to bring every monastery of the Frankish realm back to one observance of the one Rule. Gerard did not innovate. He restored, and the Roman Martyrology praises him for exactly that: he brought many monasteries back to their original observance.
Here a true account has to name the cost, because the reform was not painless and the saint did not pretend it was. A reform that depends on the prince’s sword is exposed to the prince’s will. Arnulf reserved to himself the right to confirm the abbot whom the monks of Mont-Blandin elected. The good done in Flanders was real, and it was also done under a count’s protection and on a count’s terms. Not every monk wanted to be reformed, either. The chronicle of Saint-Bertin records that when the new observance was introduced there in 944, a number of the brethren preferred exile to the Rule. They crossed the sea to England rather than submit. Expelling the canons from Brogne and Saint-Ghislain may have been just, but it was still an expulsion. Gerard’s holiness does not consist in those hard measures having cost nothing. It consists in his having taken nothing for himself from them. He gathered abbeys and kept none of them.
In 953, worn by age and illness, he resigned Mont-Blandin and put abbots or vicars in charge of the other houses he still held. He went home to Brogne. Even then he made one more journey, to Rome, to obtain a papal privilege securing the liberties of the abbey he had founded. On his return he made a last round of the monasteries he had restored, as a father visits his sons before he dies.
IV. Mors et Cultus
He died at Brogne on the third of October, 959, aged about sixty-four, in the house where the work had begun.
His cult grew up immediately and locally, as such cults did before the canonization process was reserved to Rome. In 1131 his body was solemnly elevated, the form canonization then took, and it has been kept at Brogne ever since. The village took his name; the place that was Brogne is now Saint-Gérard, in the province of Namur. The abbey continued for more than eight centuries, until the upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century, and his relics are still honoured in the place he chose.
His life was written down at Brogne, but late, roughly a century after his death. That distance explains both its value and its limits. It preserves the memory of the community he founded, and it has also reshaped that memory into the pattern of a saint’s Life. The charters correct it in places. They never contradict the man it describes.
The Roman Martyrology names him on the third of October as the founder and first abbot of Brogne, who renewed monastic discipline in Flanders and Lotharingia.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Gerard left no writings, and we have no letters, sermons, or rule of his own composing. His spiritual teaching is the Rule of Saint Benedict, which he restored house by house. The passages that best explain him are three short sentences from it.
On the abbot. In the chapter on the ordering of the abbot, Saint Benedict writes that the abbot must know sibi oportere prodesse magis quam præesse, that it is his duty to profit his brethren rather than to preside over them (Regula, c. 64). Gerard’s habit of taking the government of a house only until it could govern itself again is this sentence put into practice. He held office as a servant holds a lamp: for the sake of those who need the light, and only as long as they need it.
On correction. The same chapter tells the abbot oderit vitia, diligat fratres, to hate the vices and love the brethren. Every reformer is tempted to merge the two, to hate the lax monk along with his laxity, or to love the brother so much that the vice is tolerated. The sweetness of temper the tradition ascribes to Gerard is not softness. It is the separation Benedict commands, kept up through twenty years of very hard work.
On the first thing. Among the instruments of good works Benedict lists nihil amori Christi præponere, to prefer nothing to the love of Christ (Regula, c. 4). The abbeys of Gerard’s century had been ruined because something had been preferred to that love: revenue, a lord’s convenience, a canon’s comfort. Reform meant restoring that order of preference, and nothing else.
VI. Oratio
From the Common of Abbots (Os iusti):
Intercessio nos, quæsumus, Domine, beati Gerardi Abbatis commendet: ut, quod nostris meritis non valemus, eius patrocinio assequamur. Per Dominum nostrum.
“May the intercession of blessed Gerard the Abbot commend us to Thee, we beseech Thee, O Lord: that what we cannot obtain by our own merits, we may obtain by his patronage. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiratio
Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus. “That in all things God may be glorified.” — 1 Peter 4:11; Regula S. Benedicti, c. 57
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Gerard belongs to a decade that the Church later recognized as one of her great turning points, though nobody living through it could have known that. Cluny was founded in 910. Gerard’s work at Brogne began in the years around 919. The reform of Gorze in Lorraine began in 933. These were three separate fountains, none dependent on the others, all rising in the same decayed country within a quarter century. Out of them came the monasticism of the eleventh century, and out of that came the reform that bears the name of Gregory VII. The Church History path takes up this tenth-century renewal and the struggle against lay control of churches that grew from it.
The Lives of the Saints path continues with the monastic restorers: Benedict of Aniane before Gerard, Odo of Cluny beside him, Dunstan and Ethelwold in England after him. All of them laboured to bring the house of God back to its first order.
For those who wish to read the Rule as Gerard read it, the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats the Regula as a school of the Lord’s service for those living in the world: the ordering of the day, stability, obedience, and the preferring of nothing to the work of God.
Practice
Examine. Where in my life has something been allowed to occupy a place that belongs to God, as the abbeys of Gerard’s century were occupied by men who drew their revenues and left their purpose to decay? Name the thing concretely: an hour, a habit, a possession, a loyalty.
Do. Restore one thing to its proper use this week. It might be a prayer time that has been taken over by other things, a Sunday that has turned into an ordinary day, or a room in the house meant for prayer that now holds clutter. Do not found anything new. Repair what you already have.
Pray. The Collect above, or the Litany of the Saints, pausing at Sancte Benedicte and at the invocation of all holy monks and hermits.
Devote. Read the Prologue to the Rule of Saint Benedict slowly, in one sitting, as Gerard would have heard it read in the chapter house at Saint-Denis: Ausculta, o fili, præcepta magistri. “Hearken, O son, to the precepts of the master.”
Sources consulted: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), s.v. “St. Gérard, Abbot of Brogne”; the New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Gerard of Brogne, St.”; the Vita Gerardi abbatis Broniensis*, ed. in* Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores XV; and modern critical studies of the Vita and the Brogne charters.
Sancte Gerarde, restaurator domus Dei, ora pro nobis.