(which never existed in fact) were to be evidence of God's providential guidance of the world.
Some thirty years after Orosius wrote, a priest of Marseilles, Salvian by name, composed a different sort of treatise, with a like object of demonstrating the righteous validity of God's providential ordering of affairs, especially in those troubled times of barbarian invasion through which the Empire then was passing. The book declared its purpose in its title—De gubernatione Dei.[1] Its tenor is further elucidated by the title bestowed upon it by a contemporary: De praesenti (Dei) judicio. It is famous for the pictures (doubtless overwrought) which it gives of the low state of morals among the Roman provincials, and of the comparative decency of the barbarians.
These examples sufficiently indicate the broad apologetic purpose in the patristic writing of history. There was another class of composition, biographical rather than historical, the object of which was to give edifying examples of the grace of God working in holy men. The reference, of course, is to the Vitae sanctorum whose number from the fourth century onward becomes legion. They set forth the marvellous virtues of anchorites and their miracles. In the East, the prime example is the Athanasian Life of Anthony; Jerome also wrote, in Latin, the lives of Anthony's fore-runner Paulus and of other saints. But for the Latin West the typical example was the Life of St. Martin of Tours, most popular of saints, by Sulpicius Severus.
To dub this class of compositions (and there are classes within classes here) uncritical, credulous, intentionally untruthful, is not warranted without a preliminary consideration of their purpose. That in general was to edify; the writer is telling a moral tale, illustrative of God's grace in the instances of holy men. But the divine grace is the real matter; the saint's life is but the example. God's grace exists; it operates in this way. As to the illustrative details of its operation, why be over-anxious as to their correctness? Only the vita must be interesting, to fix the reader's attention, and must be edifying, to improve him. These principles exerted sometimes a less, sometimes a
- ↑ Best edition that of Pauly, in Vienna Corpus scrip. eccles. (1883).
