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Updated: May 11, 2025
Covered with the ruins of an ancient Roman city, and swarming with serpents, it was colonized again, in A.D. 410, by a young man of rank named Honoratus, who gathered round him a crowd of disciples, converted the desert isle into a garden of flowers and herbs, and made the sea-girt sanctuary of Lerins one of the most important spots of the then world.
Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first penetrated into the West.
I collected all the evidence I could on the spot, and also in the Lerins monastery, where the tradition is preserved.
Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred years.
Hilary was celebrated for his graceful eloquence, his unwearied zeal, his tender sympathy with all forms of suffering, his ascendency over a crowd, and by the numerous conversions which he worked. But, indeed Lerins was a hive whence swarmed forth the teachers and apostles of Southern Gaul.
Lerins, the site of his monastery, is one of the small islands off the south coast of France. He first states what the principle is he would maintain, and the circumstances under which he maintains it; and if his principle is reasonable and valuable in itself, so does it come to us with great weight under the circumstances which he tells us led him to his exposition of it:
He was in no haste to arrive, and even though "born with a ready-made consolation for anything," as M. Lerins sometimes reproachfully said to him, he dreaded the moment when his prison doors should close behind him, and he was disposed to enjoy yet a few hours of his dear liberty. "We are about to part," said he to himself; "let us at least take time to say farewell."
Of places inaccessible to which pilgrims toil, some are the sources of rivers, like Gangotri, whence springs the Ganges: others are islands, such as the Îles de Lérins off Cannes, Iona and Lindisfarne, or many off the West coast of Ireland: or distant headlands, like the Spanish Finisterre, or Rameshwaram, the extreme southern cape of the Indian peninsula.
The Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the marauders who surrounded them.
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