Theoderic had the sense early on to invite the leading Catholic Christian clergyman of Provence, bishop Caesarius of Arles, to visit him in Ravenna. Even Caesarius’s biographers a few decades later, suspicious of Theoderic (now long dead) and claiming that Caesarius had been virtually arrested and brought to Italy to face accusations, nevertheless describe how Theoderic greeted the visitor graciously, laying aside his crown and interviewing him patiently about affairs in Gaul.
Theoderic invited Caesarius
Theoderic said he saw an angel in this bishop and showered him with gifts—only to be mildly rebuffed when Caesarius used the gifts to redeem captives from the late war who were being held in Italy. It was more likely that Theoderic invited Caesarius to Italy to honor and thus tame him, rather than attack him, but if Caesarius had been unwilling to be wooed, things might have gone badly for him. Caesarius went on to Rome, where Pope Symmachus, by now secure in his office, welcomed him with all dignity and confirmed his status as first bishop of Gaul. By the time Liberius was installed in Arles as Theoderic’s plenipotentiary, governor, and general, Theoderic, whatever his religious views, had made clear that he would enthusiastically support the Catholic churches of Gaul and thus deny Clovis any opportunity for subversion. So Theoderic wrote to one of his own generals, ordering him to restore property to the churches of Narbonne, west of the Rhone, that they had lost in the war private balkan trip.
This was Liberius’s world for the next quarter century. He represented the Roman empire (Theoderic’s branch of it, that is), commanded its military forces, showered generosity on the Christian church and so made it feel indebted to the regime, and was in every way the loyal supporter of the ruler who sent him there. In Provence, the old aristocracy had regrouped and reinvented itself, its churchmen were flourishing, and what passed as normality prevailed. When Bishop Apollinaris of Valence, from well within Clovis’s domains, paid a visit to Arles, the holy and distinguished lord bishop Caesarius greeted him and his companions. The prefect Liberius joined in along with his whole prefectural retinue, welcoming Apollinaris with festive speeches. They were certain, they said, that divine mercy had sent him. Apollinaris returned the welcome in equally kind phrases. On such a day in such a place, the Roman empire seemed to be what it had been for centuries.
Life of Caesarius
Liberius’s post was still military in its importance, and flare-ups occurred from time to time. The life of Caesarius written by three of his disciples gives us a moment in 527 when Liberius was personally in command of forces that had crossed the Durance River on patrol. Wounded by a lance in a minor skirmish, he fell from his horse and lay unconscious while the bishop was summoned. Liberius regained consciousness and began to kiss his bishop’s hand and then, by what he took to be a godly inspiration, grasped the bishop’s hooded cape, the birrus, and pressed it to his wound.
At that moment the blood stopped flowing, and he was so restored, not just to health but to strength, that he swore he would have climbed back into the saddle and ridden on if the others had let him. The story goes on to tell how Liberius’s wife, Agretia, was similarly cured of illness when Caesarius laid hands on her. Even if we are skeptical about the bishop’s magical powers, these stories offer a snapshot of the role and presence of this pious power couple in southern Gaul for a quarter century. Liberius was viceregal in authority and reputation and provided the essential link between Theoderic’s Italy and the protectorate in Spain. The last time we see Liberius in action in Gaul he is the patron and partner of Caesarius again, signing the acts of a church council held at Orange in 529 Theoderic’s visit to Rome in 500.
That council quietly rewrote the doctrines of Augustine—dead then 100 years—to make them palatable to the Gaulish church by deflating some of Augustine’s predestinarian ideas while continuing to praise the man himself. Without this deft act of homage and revision, Augustine’s chances of being reviled for heresy at some later date were perilously high.2 We needn’t imagine Liberius rootling around in the theological issues himself, but the secular guarantor of ecclesiastical authority was a very Roman role for a high official now, going back two centuries.
