Geoffroy Babion

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Geoffroy Babion, also known as Geoffroy du Loroux, was a French teacher, preacher and writer who became archbishop of Bordeaux from 1136 to 1158. He was born around 1075.

Early in the 1100s he taught and preached, serving as the schoolmaster of Angers Cathedral from 1103 to 1106. He later founded several small eremitic communities on the island of Saint-Pierre in the Gironde, at Sablonceaux and at Fontaine-le-Comte.

In 1131 Bernard of Clairvaux urged him in a letter to leave his quiet life and join the fight against the antipope Anacletus II.

A collection of Babion’s sermons, known as Dicite pusillanimes, survives in many manuscripts from the 12th to 15th centuries. His reputation suffered later due to some historical errors: a Pseudo-Augustinian sermon Ad fratres in eremo was wrongly attributed to him, and his sermons were sometimes confused with the works of Hildebert of Lavardin. He was also occasionally confused with the later poet Peter Babion.

Babion became archbishop of Bordeaux in August 1136. As bishop he pursued reforms in line with Gregory VII, which brought him into conflict with the cathedral chapter and led to a temporary exile from 1140 to 1145. From 1147 to 1149, while Louis VII was away on the Second Crusade, he supported the regent Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis against rebellious Bordeaux citizens. He served as apostolic legate from 1153 to 1158.

He favored the Cistercians, helping establish the abbeys of La Grâce-Dieu (1136) and Notre-Dame de Bonlieu (1141), and presided over the founding of La Faise in 1137 (which became Cistercian in 1147). He also supported canons regular. His own three eremitic foundations followed the Augustinian rule, and after 1145 he founded another at Pleine-Selve. He aided other monasteries as well, including Fontevraud, La Couronne, Fontdouce, Orbestier, L’Absie and Nid-au-Merle.

Geoffroy Babion died on 18 July 1158. His death is noted in the necrologies of Fontevraud Abbey and Bordeaux Cathedral, and in an epitaph by Robert of Torigni.