(A.D. 557.)
[Gallican Martyrology. His translation is commemorated in the Roman,
on September 15th. Authority:--An ancient life of uncertain date and
unknown authorship.]
S. Lubin, (Leobinus), was the son of poor parents near Poitiers, and
was born in the reign of Clovis I. (the latter half of the 5th cent.)
His boyhood was spent in ploughing the fields and feeding cattle.
But he had a great desire to learn to read, and having made the
acquaintance of a good monk, he persuaded him to ink the letters of
the alphabet on his leather girdle, so that he might carry them about
with him when he went after the cattle, and learn them by heart. His
intelligence opening, he was sent to a monastery of that country,
but whether it was Ligugé or Nouaille is not certain, and was made
cellarer, and required to ring the hours. These duties gave him little
leisure for pursuing his studies; he therefore curtailed his hours of
sleep, and as his lamp troubled the sleep of the brethren, he hung a
curtain over his window to screen the light from them. After having
spent eight years in this monastery, the desire came upon him to visit
S. Avitus, who lived as a hermit in Perche, (July 17th.) Having gone
into this country, he met first with S. Calais, who had not then left
S. Avitus, to settle in Maine, (July 1st); this great master of the
spiritual life advised Lubin not to attach himself to the service of
any church or chapel, as it would be the means of drawing him into the
world, and interfere with the exercise of his religious rule, and not
to seek a small monastery, for in such every one wants to be master. S.
Avitus counselled Lubin to spend some time longer in a monastery before
he retired into the desert. He therefore took the road to Lerins, but
a monk of that abbey whom he met assuring him that it was unhealthy,
he turned aside with the monk, and went to Javoux, where S. Hilary,
the bishop of that place,[48] received them into his community. But he
did not long remain there, thanks to his new acquaintance from Lerins,
who seems to have been nowhere content, and they went together to
Ile-Barbe, near Lyons. After a while the vagabond monk wanted to make
another change, and draw Lubin away with him, but Lubin shook himself
free of this restless spirit, and remained five years in Ile-Barbe.
[48] The seat was afterwards transferred to Mende.
During a war which broke out between the Franks and Burgundians, ending
in the defeat of the latter by the sons of Clovis, in 525, the abbey
of Ile-Barbe was invaded by the soldiers greedy of plunder. They found
it deserted by all the monks, who had escaped, save S. Lubin and an
old man. The old man, on being asked where the treasures of the church
were concealed, meanly said that S. Lubin knew better than he; and
the soldiers cruelly tormented the saint by winding whipcord tightly
round his head, and then running a stick under it behind the head,
and turning the stick so as to tighten the cord till it sank into the
temples. This was a favourite torture with the barbarians, when they
wanted to extract the secret of hidden treasures from prisoners. They
also tied his feet, and let him, head down into the river, but were
unable to extract from him the information they desired, and of which
he may have been ignorant. Thinking him dead, the soldiers threw him
on the bank and left him. He recovered, and made his way into Perche
to S. Avitus, and served as cellarer in his monastery. On the death
of S. Avitus, 430, he and two others retired into the wilderness of
Charbonnièrs, on the extremities of the forest of Montmirail, which
separates Beauce from Maine. There they built three little cells, and
spent five years in solitude. But miracles proclaimed the sanctity
of S. Lubin; by his intercession a fire which had broken out in the
forest, and threatened to consume it, was arrested. Hearing this,
Ætherius, bishop of Chartres, ordained him deacon, and made him abbot
of the monastery of Brou, in Perche; he afterwards ordained him priest
to give him more authority over his monks.
S. Aubin, bishop of Angers, being on his way to visit S. Cæsarius of
Arles, persuaded S. Lubin to accompany him (536). When they came into
Provence, Lubin yearned to retire into the peaceful retreat of Lerins,
and escape the burden of the charge of his monastery, but S. Aubin
sharply rebuked him, and made him see that he had no right to resign
without sufficient cause a burden laid on him by God. In 544, Ætherius
died, and Lubin was elected to the see of Chartres by the almost
unanimous voice of the clergy and laity. The saint on his ordination
introduced various reforms into the see. S. Lubin assisted in the fifth
council of Orleans, in 549, and in the second of Paris, 551. He died
in 587, and was buried in the church of S. Martin-du-Val, where his
body was religiously preserved till the Calvinists sacked the church in
the 16th century, when they burnt his bones, and cast the ashes to the
winds. His skull was, however, preserved, but it also was lost at the
Revolution.