Gregory Of Tours Historiae

GREGORY OF TOURS’ CHRISTIAN TELEOLOGY IN HIS HISTORIAE

In the Middle Ages, the historians wrote with a specific purpose and vision in mind. The Mediaeval West wanted a distinctively Christian society, and the historians during this time wrote down the res gesta with the intent of fostering this society, by either attempting to persuade their readers to pursue certain courses of action in their daily life by representative examples of behavior to follow, or they recorded historical happenings with a sense of the spiritual, showing that God was behind the faithful, aiding them in their successes. In Gregory of Tours’ Historiae, (Gregory’s approach to writing history is meant to teach by example and urge Christians in staying faithful).
This is Gregory’s reason for writing his Historiae at a basic level, but once one looks past his modest motive for writing the Historiae, one sees that his history is world history in the biggest sense, for it starts at the beginning of the world, with Adam and Eve, working its way through all the important events of the Old Testament, centering on Christ’s Incarnation, and then moving along to the events of the New Testament with the Apostles, the martyrs, and then progressing to his own times, the saints lives then, and the happenings among the Franks. Harrington and Pucci comment on how “Gregory’s narrative is organized around the pinciples of Christian teleology, an order affirmed in the presence of so much sacred material at the start of the Histories.”(pg.149) Truly, with starting out at the creation of the world, one sees Gregory using the sacred theme, but he does not only starts out with it, but continues with it through all his stories, even in his narratives on the Franks that shows his Christian teleolgy and explains his approach to writing history as a way to encourgae the Christians of his
153) Gregory wants his readers to persevere in their faith and he presents for their reading what the Church holds as true because it is for the good of the faithfuls’ souls. From a historians standards today, it seems strange to include all the events of the Bible, which to their secular approach may only be plausible and not necessaruly true, but to Gregory and other Medieval historians, in Ray’s words, “the Bible inculcated a vision of reality that intermingled divine and human agendas and denied to historians astrictly secular measure of all things.” (pg. 640) On account of the Western common Christian vision, it was important to show how the divine and human aspects to an event