Saint Eugendus of Condat

Condat was founded by two brothers. ²⁵ Butler says Romanus, at thirty-five, spent some time in the monastery of Ainay at Lyons, then took the Institutes and Conferences of Cassian with him into the forests of the Jura, between France and Switzerland, and settled at Condat, where two rivers meet. ² His brother Lupicinus followed him, and others followed them both. ²⁵ Johann Peter Kirsch, in the encyclopedia's article on the saints named Romanus, puts his birth about 400; Georges Goyau, writing on the diocese of Saint-Claude, dates the brothers' withdrawal to between 425 and 430. ⁵⁶

They founded several houses: Condat, Lauconne, and La Balme, where, Goyau says, their sister Yole gathered her nuns. ⁵⁶ Butler says the brothers governed the monks together "in great harmony, though Lupicinus was more inclined to severity of the two." ² The lives of the three first abbots, and of Eugendus with them, were written by an anonymous monk of Condat of their own century. ²⁵

Eugendus was born about 449 at Izernore, according to Gabriel Meier in the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia; Jean Marilier, writing for Santi e Beati, gives 449 or 450. ¹⁴ His father, who had become a priest, taught him to read and write. ¹⁴ At seven he was given to Romanus and Lupicinus to be brought up at Condat, and, Meier says, "thenceforth he never left the monastery." ¹

He imitated the two founders so closely, Meier writes, "that it was difficult to tell which of the two he resembled more." ¹ He read the Greek and Latin authors and knew the Scriptures well, and Butler calls him "a great promoter of the sacred studies in his monastery." ¹²

He would not be ordained. ¹² Meier puts it down to humility, and Marilier says, in translation, that he refused it for fear of the pride "to which even the holiest dignities expose one." ¹⁴ No importunity, Butler says, could make him consent. ²

Butler describes the life he led. His clothing was sackcloth, the same in summer and winter, and he took one small meal a day, usually after sunset. ² He was "so dead to himself, as to seem incapable of betraying the least emotion of anger," and Butler adds, "His countenance was always cheerful; yet he never laughed." ² His prayer was almost continual, and a pious word was enough, Butler says, to throw him into raptures, even at table. ²

Lupicinus was succeeded by Minausius, who made Eugendus his coadjutor. ¹⁴ Butler dates that to 480. ² When Minausius died, about 496 by Meier's account and in 496 by Marilier's, Eugendus became abbot. ¹⁴ Marilier says the senior monks opposed him at first as inexperienced, until his wisdom, and the reputation for miracles that brought people to him for advice, silenced the criticism. ⁴ Meier says he "always remained the humble religious that he had been before." ¹

The monastery Romanus had built of wood burned down, and Eugendus rebuilt it in stone. ¹² He used the rebuilding to change the way the monks lived. Until then, Meier says, "the brethren had lived in separate cells after the fashion of the Eastern ascetics," and Marilier describes the change as one from a semi-eremitical lavra of the Eastern kind to a monastery living a full common life. ¹⁴ He also built a church in honor of the Apostles Peter, Paul and Andrew, and enriched it with relics. ¹²

Meier thinks the rule of Tarnate served as a model, and says the community "now took on more of the active character of the Western brethren." ¹ Goyau dates the written rule of Condat to between 510 and 515, and says the great monastery of Agaunum adopted it. ⁶ Marilier says Eugendus founded a school at Condat under Viventiolus, later bishop of Lyons, and counts him among those who brought personal reading into the monastic life and reading aloud at meals. ⁴⁶ Meier calls Condat in those years "a school of virtue and knowledge amid the surrounding darkness, an oasis in the desert." ¹

When he felt his end approaching, he had the priest of the community anoint his breast, took leave of his brethren, and died five days later. ¹² Meier and Marilier give the day as January 1, 510. ¹⁴ Butler, who says "about the year 510," gives his age as sixty-one. ²

A few years later his successor, Saint Viventiolus, built a church over his tomb, and pilgrims came to it. ¹ The town that grew up around the abbey took his name, Saint-Oyand de Joux, and kept it into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ¹ Saint-Claude, after a later abbot whose tomb drew still more pilgrims, gradually replaced it from the thirteenth century; Goyau says the change followed the discovery of Claudius's body in 1160. ¹²⁶ Butler adds that Eugendus's white leather girdle was later credited by Father Chifflet with cures, and he repeats a story of one in 1601. ²

No source used here names Saint Eugendus patron of anything. ¹²⁴ The abbey of Condat, and the town of Saint-Claude that grew around it, are what he left. ¹⁶

Saint Eugendus's feast is January 1, the day of his death. ¹⁴ The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, commemorates him that day, and says, in translation, that "having lived in the monastery from childhood, he devoted himself with great zeal to the promotion of the monastic life." ³

Meier, writing in 1909, says the feast "was at first transferred to 2 Jan.; in the Dioceses of Besançon and Saint Claude it is now celebrated on 4 Jan." ¹

He went into the monastery at seven and never left it, and the sources make that his whole biography. ¹ He read widely and wanted others to read, and stayed a monk without orders all his life. ¹²⁴

He was made abbot over men older than he was, who said he was not fit for it, and he outlasted the criticism. ⁴ When fire took the old buildings, he built them again so that the monks would live together rather than apart. ¹⁴

Butler's portrait is of a man always cheerful who never laughed, whose prayer hardly stopped, and who asked at the end only to be anointed and to say goodbye. ²¹