Feast Day: March 26 Canonized: Pre-Congregation — Roman Martyrology (Martyrologium Romanum); Acta Sanctorum, March 3:565–572 Order / Vocation: Monk at Saint-Pierre de Lonrey (Diocese of Bourges); hermit near Pistoia, Italy Patron of: Pistoia · Hermits · Those who have lived dissolute lives and repented · Writers of visionary literature
"Peter then decides to send me back to earth via hell, where I see all the souls in torment, before returning to the world I had left." — Barontius, Visio Baronti Monachi Longoretensis, c. 678
The Vision That Changed a Man's Geography
He was not a young man when the vision came to him. He was middle-aged, by the reckoning of his own account — a man with three marriages, at least one son, a career in the court of the Frankish king Theuderic II, and, by his own frank admission, a comprehensive catalogue of sins which the demons he encountered in his vision proceeded to rehearse back at him in precise and unsparing detail. He had been a courtier. He had been a husband, repeatedly. He had lived with a worldly casualness that he himself did not dignify with excuses.
Then in 678, on the feast of the Annunciation — March 25 — he fell into what he describes as a coma-like state at the monastery of Saint-Pierre de Lonrey near Bourges in France, where he had retired to become a monk alongside his son. In that state he was carried by demons and angels through the air above the French countryside, escorted by the Archangel Raphael, conducted through the ascending levels of heaven, brought before Saint Peter at the golden gate to have his sins judged, and then taken down through hell — where he saw what he saw — before being returned to his body in the monastery.
He wrote it down. The Visio Baronti Monachi Longoretensis — the Vision of Barontius the monk of Lonrey — is approximately four thousand seven hundred words in length and is dated March 25, 678. It is, in the judgment of scholars who study the history of Christian afterlife literature, the oldest surviving first-person account of a vision of heaven and hell written in the medieval Western tradition. What Dante would do with magnificent poetic architecture eight centuries later, Barontius did in plain Frankish Latin: he described what he had seen with the directness of a man for whom the experience was too important for literary ornamentation.
The Court, the Marriages, the Monastery, and the Sin List
He was born into the nobility of the Berry region of France — a man of social standing, of access, of the kind of life that medieval court culture made available to the well-connected. He served Theuderic II, the Frankish king of Austrasia and Burgundy in the early seventh century, a king whose court was not noted for its moral austerity. Barontius moved in this world as a natural inhabitant. Three marriages are recorded in his own account. The mistresses who appear in the demons' testimony at the gate of heaven are not contested.
At some point — the sources do not specify whether it was a crisis, a gradual movement, or simply the kind of exhaustion that overtakes men of his type in middle age — he distributed what he had and entered the monastery of Saint-Pierre de Lonrey with his son Adalgis, who is also venerated as a saint. The monastery was in the Diocese of Bourges, in the heart of the Berry countryside he had known all his life. He became a monk. He kept his sins.
Then the vision came.
What the vision did, among other things, was open the full account of those sins to the gaze of Saint Peter — the demons presenting their evidence with the thoroughness of prosecuting attorneys, the sins of a lifetime laid out at the gate of heaven without omission. Barontius does not suggest in his account that this testimony was inaccurate. He confirms it. What he records is that Saint Peter, weighing the evidence, chose mercy — sent the demons away with a blow of his keys, decided against damnation, and sent Barontius back to earth.
He went back through hell first. He saw it. He returned to his body.
He recovered from his coma. He was asked to recount what he had experienced. He wrote it down. The account circulated through the Frankish territories and became a significant document in the transmission of afterlife theology in the early medieval West.
Italy, the Hermitage, and the Companion of Pistoia
The vision changed the remaining direction of his life. He left Lonrey and traveled south toward Italy, stopping — the accounts suggest — at Rome to visit the tomb of Saint Peter, the gatekeeper he had encountered in his vision. Then he continued south into the Apennine foothills and settled at Pistoia in Tuscany.
He built a hermitage. He was joined by Desiderius — also a former monk, also venerated as a saint — and by four other disciples who submitted themselves to his discipline. The two men, Barontius and Desiderius, are venerated together in the Roman Martyrology and their names appear in pair in all the sources. The community they formed at Pistoia was ascetic and prayerful. Disciples gathered. The austere life attracted what it always attracts: the people who recognized in it something they needed.
Barontius died first, around 725. Miracles were reported at his tomb. A monastery was built on the site in 1018, when the Bishop of Pistoia had his body formally translated to the altar. His feast falls on March 26.
He is, in the most literal possible sense, the saint for those who have arrived at holiness by a route that required significant detours. He had three marriages and a list of sins long enough to occupy the demons for an extended prosecution. He also had, in the end, a vision that showed him where the road ended and the choice that made all the difference.
Prayer to Saint Barontius
O God, who in Saint Barontius showed a sinner the weight of his own life and then, through your mercy, sent him back to amend it, grant through his intercession that those whose sins are heavy may not despair, but may believe that the gatekeeper who weighed Barontius's account can weigh theirs with the same mercy, and that the man who returned from the vision of hell still had time to become a saint. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Barontius, pray for us.
| Born | Unknown — Berry region, Frankish Gaul |
| Died | c. 725 — Pistoia, Tuscany, Italy — natural death as hermit |
| Feast Day | March 26 |
| Order / Vocation | Monk at Saint-Pierre de Lonrey (Diocese of Bourges); hermit near Pistoia, Italy |
| Canonized | Pre-Congregation — Roman Martyrology; Acta Sanctorum March 3:565–572 |
| Body | Monastery of San Bartolomeo in Pantano, Pistoia (translated 1018) |
| Patron of | Pistoia · Hermits · Penitent sinners · Visionary literature |
| Known as | Barontus · Baronce (French) · Baronto or Baronzio (Italian) |
| Key writings | Visio Baronti Monachi Longoretensis (c. 678) — the oldest surviving first-person vision of the afterlife in medieval Western Christian literature |
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