Waldebert of Luxeuil

Waldebert , also Walbert , Gaubert or Waldebertus (* around 595 ; † May 2, 670 in the Luxeuil Monastery ) was the third abbot of the Luxeuil Monastery and is venerated as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church .

Life

origin

Waldebert came from the Gallo-Roman family of the Waltriche , who were wealthy in northern Burgundy , especially in the area around Besançon , and rose to become one of the most influential families in the Franconian Empire in the following two centuries , especially during the rule of the Carolingians .

The prevailing in the past identifying forest Eberts, the son of burgundo- Austrasian comes the pagus Meaux , Chagnerich as well as a brother of the holy Burgundofara could by Erich tax collector as a misinterpretation of the Vita Faronis by Jonas of Bobbio refuted.

Life

Waldebert's life story is passed down in parts through the Vita sancti Waldeberti abbatis Luxoviensis by Adso von Montier-en-Der , which he wrote around the year 950 as a monk of the Luxeuil monastery.

According to Adsos, Waldebert embarked on a military career at a young age - it can be assumed that he served in the unit of the Burgundian army, which his relative Chramnelenus commanded as Dux of the areas on both sides of the Jura .

Hermitage of St. Waldebert: interior view of the grotto

Around the year 620 he retired from military service and from then on devoted his life to the Christian faith. He donated his fortune and all lands in his possession to the Abbey of Luxeuil - in this monastery founded by Columban , to which his family had been closely connected from the beginning, he finally entered as a simple monk. He handed over his armor and weapons to Abbot Eustasius at the monastery gate , who is also a relative - for centuries these mementos of Waldebert's worldly life were exhibited in the abbey church of the monastery.

Connected to the Christian ideal of strict asceticism, Waldebert asked Eustasius for permission to leave the monastery community and to settle as a hermit in the nearby woods. Near what is now the parish of Saint-Valbert , he withdrew to a cave next to a spring, where he practiced meditation and prayer for years.

When Saint Burgundofara turned to Eustasius with the request to build a male monastery in addition to the women's abbey Eboriacum , Waldebert was appointed by the abbot of Luxeuil with this task due to the reputation he enjoyed in the monastic circles of the Franconian Empire as a result of his saintly life entrusted. Shortly after his return to the hermitage in 629, Abbot Eustasius died and Waldebert was elected as his successor by the monks of the Luxeuil monastery.

In the more than 40 years of his activity as administrator of the monastery, Waldebert not only succeeded in increasing the monastic prosperity and land ownership considerably (among other things, he achieved the independence of the Luxeuil monastery from episcopal control during the pontificate of Pope John IV ), but equally to shape the abbey religiously and politically into the most respected contemporary institution of its kind under the rule of the Merovingians . Until the beginning of the 8th century , the monastery school he expanded dominated the training of all religious dignitaries of the Franconian sub-empires. Starting from Luxeuil, there was a movement to found monasteries in the rural regions throughout the Franconian Empire, which, in contrast to the cities that had already been Christianized under Roman rule, were largely still based on pagan traditions. With the help of the extensive relationships of Archbishop Donatus von Besançon , who is related to Waldebert , a movement supported by the Franconian nobility emerged, which founded around 300 new monasteries in the Franconian Empire in the 7th century - at the end of the wave of founding Luxeuil had more than 30 branch monasteries and the abbot himself ran it overseeing the beginnings of Notre-Dame de Laon Abbey and Münstergranfeld Monastery .

Around 670, the Luxeuil Lectionary probably first used minuscules in a monastic manuscript .

Waldebert died on May 2, 670 and was buried in a wooden sarcophagus in the church of St. Martin, the monastery church of Luxeuil . Both his tomb and the hermitage in Saint-Valbert were important pilgrimage sites in the region until the French Revolution .

Ecclesiastical significance

On the occasion of the establishment of the men's monastery in Eboriacum, there was a momentous break in the development of the Iro-Frankish monastery, which exclusively followed the teachings of St. Columban. The introduction of the Regula cuiusdam Patris ad virgines , in which the Benedictine rule predominates to three quarters, for the Abbey of Ebroiacum is generally attributed to Waldebert. Based on this development, the Regula Benedicti finally became generally binding in the monasteries of the West. Unlike the somewhat later Regula Donati of his relative Donatus von Besançon, no textual details have been preserved from Waldebert's mixed rule.

Adoration

The day of remembrance for Waldebert is celebrated by the Catholic Church on May 2nd ; in the Archdiocese of Besançon it is also commemorated on May 22nd

literature

• Andreas Merkt:  Waldebert (Walbert, Gaubert). In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 13, Bautz, Herzberg 1998, ISBN 3-88309-072-7 , Sp. 191-193.
• Eugen Ewig : The Merovingians and the Franconian Empire. 4th supplemented edition, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-017044-9 , pp. 133f, 154.
• Patrick J. Geary: The Merovingians. Europe before Charlemagne. CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-49426-9 , p. 174.
• Yaniv Fox: Power and Religion in Merovingian Gaul: Columbanian Monasticism and the Formation of the Frankish Aristocracy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-58764-9 , p. 43.
• Hans J. Hummer: Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe - Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-85441-2 , p. 435.
• Alexander O'Hara (Ed.): Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe . In: Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018, ISBN 978-0-190-85796-7 , p. 217.
• Marilyn Dunn: The Emergence of Monasticism. From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages. Blackwell, Oxford 2003, ISBN 978-1-405-10641-2 , pp. 175-177.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erich Zöllner: The origin of the Agilulfinger. In: Communications from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, 1951 p. 248
2. ↑ Simon Schröder: The early monasticism and Benedict of Nursia. , epubli, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-7375-0456-0 , pp. 67-68.