Those Gluttonous Gauls: Gluttony as a Critique of Extreme Fasting in the Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus

Sulpicius Severus included a humorous theme about the susceptibility of Gauls to gluttony in his Dialogues , a work primarily intended to defend Sulpicius’s monastic hero Martin of Tours. Sulpicius wrote his Dialogues in southern Gaul in the aftermath of the execution of the ascetic bishop Priscillian of Avila, who was accused of sorcery and heresy. Fears of “Priscillianism” lingered into the fifth century in southern Gaul. As Priscillian was well known for his extreme fasting, Sulpicius promoted moderate fasting to distinguish Martin of Tours’s monastic movement, of which Sulpicius was a part, from that of Priscillian. However, Sulpicius’s moderate position on fasting stood in contradistinction to the extreme fasting reported in the lives of Egyptian monks and supported by Jerome. Nonetheless, it behooved Sulpicius to support the orthodoxy of Egyptian monks, whose examples Sulpicius used to critique the Gallic clergy, and of Jerome, whose positions on sexuality in ascetic practice aligned with Sulpicius’s. Therefore, to avoid directly critiquing Egyptian monastic practice and Jerome, Sulpicius turned to the self-deprecating ethnographic motif of Gauls being prone to gluttony, or at least being unable to fast as severely as people from other places. This humorous theme allowed Sulpicius to at once distance his ascetic practice from that of Priscillian in his local context and to affirm the orthodoxy of Jerome and other eastern monks. As such, Sulpicius’s subtle push for moderate fasting practices within his Dialogues ranks among the earliest calls for ascetic moderation to originate from within an ascetic movement in the Latin West.