Monastery of Luxeuil

The monastery of Luxeuil (Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul) was founded towards 590 by Saint Colomban and the king of Austrasie Sigebert. This Monastère allowed the rebirth of Luxovium , Roman thermal city, today Luxeuil-the-Baths, chief town of canton of the Haute-Saône.

Ruined by the Buckwheats in 732, it is restored by Charlemagne like Abbaye of Bénédictins.

The Scriptorium is particularly active starting from the middle of the 7th century, and it is probably in Luxeuil that towards 670 the first calligraphic writing is created in small letters, with a marginal ornamentation borrowed from the decorative grammar of the Ireland. The most famous Manuscrit is the Lectionnaire de Luxeuil (a Lectionnaire of the end of the 7th century).

History

The monastery was founded towards 585 – 590 by the missionary Irish Holy Colomban. Columban and its disciples had initially built commun runs with the locality Annegray , on the commune of Voivre (Haute-Saône). In search of a place more favourable with the permanent establishment of its community, Columban chose the ruins of a borough Gallo-Roman: Luxovium , to 12 km from there, whose fortifications were still visible. This small town, devastated by Attila in 451, lay then lost in the middle of the wood which, for one century, had covered the places, but at the bottom of a valley, the Thermes (“built with a not very ordinary care” according to Jonas de Bobbio, first biographer of Columban) were always upright: this memory is preserved in the name of the city, Luxeuil-the-Baths. Jonas de Bobbio gives a precise description of the building: “ There, of the stone statues, that the pagan ones adored according to their poor wretch belief, was drawn up in the middle of the vegetation ”. Thanks to the gifts of a dignitary of the court of Childebert II, the monks built instead of the ruins a Christian abbey, like a challenge with the former pagan beliefs.

Under the intellectual and spiritual impulse of the Irish monks, the abbey of Luxeuil, devoted to Saint Pierre, quickly became one of the most important monasteries and most dynamic of all Gaulle. The community was so numerous that, the choruses being able to take the relai one of the other for the office, the Laus perennis , imported in Luxeuil since the monastery of Agaunum, resounded day and night.

If the main part of the first rites observed with Luxeuil resulted from the Celtic monastic traditions, that they are or not the work of Columban, they were gradually supplanted by the Règle of saint Benoît, more formal. This obedience, which was essential then in all the Christian Occident, enacted precise rules on the choice of the abbot, on the relations of the abbot with the monks composing the community, as on the various loads which could be deputy with monks within the monasteries. In 603, a synod showed Columban to celebrate Easter according to the Celtic liturgical calendar; actually, it is probable that they are its severity and the inflexible character of the rule that it had imposed, which were worth to him to be quoted to appear before the king of Burgondes.

Columban was Exil E of Luxeuil on order of Thierry II and the Douairière Brunehaut. Its successor with the head of the abbey was Saint Eustace de Luxeuil, person in charge of the Seminar, a school become famous under the direction of Eustace himself then of his successor Saint Gaubert. The radiation of the school as well as the moral authority of the abbey of Luxeuil contributed largely to the conversion of the Burgondes. Luxeuil missionna three delegations: one worms of the ruins which were between Milan and Genoa, with Bobbio, where Columban proposed like new abbot; two others with Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and Remiremont. Among the famous monks who attended the abbey of Luxeuil, it is necessary to mention Conon, abbot of Lérins, which there prepared the reform of its monastery, Saint Wandrille and Saint Philibert, founders respective of the abbeys of Fontenelle and Jumièges in Normandy, which contemplated there the rule which was to become that of the monasteries of the tradition of Luxeuil.

In 731 the Vandals, during their equipped through the west with Gaulle, seized Luxeuil and massacred the essence of the community. The rare survivors undertook to repair the buildings, but the monastery and the small village which had been established with the entour did not resist the attack of the Normands to the IXe century, and was again plundered several times. Thereafter, while the eighteenth abbot, Holy Ansegisus, reformed the monastery, Louis the Piles reaffirmed his charter, ordered the repair of the church and the cloister, and contributed to the reinforcement of the discipline.

Starting from the XVe century, the institution of abbots commendataires supported the decline of the observance of the rule. Charles Quint then restricted the capacity of the abbots of Luxeuil.

But in 1634, the load of commendatory abbot was removed, and Luxeuil amalgamated with the congregation of Saint-Valve. To believe a report of the " of it; Commission of Réguliers" , written in 1768, the community seems to be become again flourishing, and regulates it respected.

The monks were driven out after the Révolution of 1789. Sold like national Goods, the buildings of the monastery disappeared essentially under the current city, except for the vault of XIVe century, with superb the Gothic architecture, and of the cloister and the conventual dependences which, until the Loi on associations and with the law of Separation of the Church and the State in 1905, were used as seminar for the Archevêché of Besancon, and were maintained in state. The vault itself had been used during decades of church diocésaine at the city as Luxeuil-the-Baths.

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