REMIGIUS OF AUXERRE. - Benedictine, exegete, theologian, grammarian, b. shortly after 841, d. in Paris before 908.
A monk in the abbey of St. Germanus of Auxerre (861-62), he was a disciple of Heiric, whom he succeeded ca. 876 as director of the monastery school. In 893 he was summoned, together with his companion Huchald of St-Amand, by Fulk, archbishop of Reims, to restore the two cathedral schools of Reims, the higher and the lower; and after Fulk's death he moved to Paris, where among his pupils was Odo, the future abbot of Cluny.
Learned but hardly original, his activity was confined to compilations both in the literary and in the scriptural field. In the literary field there are commentaries on Donatus' Ars grammatica minor and maior; on Priscian's Institutio and De XII versibus Vergilii, on Phocas' Ars grammatica, on Eutyches' Ars de verbo, on Bede's De metrica arte, on the Dithica Catonis, on Juvenal's satires, on the minor poems of Sedulius and of Prudentius, on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis philologiae et Mercurii, on Terence's comedies, on the life of Persius; furthermore extracts from Valerius Maximus and an Expositio on Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae (some of these works are still unpublished: for the edition of the others, cf. Manitius, I, 504-19; II, 808-809 ff.; III, 1063 f.). In the scriptural and liturgical field, there are by him: an Expositio super Genesim and Enarrationes in Psalmos (PL 131, 52-844). The commentaries on the minor prophets, on the letters of St. Paul, on the Song of Songs and on the Apocalypse (PL 171, 9 ff.) go under the name of Haimo of Halberstadt. Among the works of Alcuin, on the other hand, belongs an Expositio de celebratione Missae (PL 101, 1246); there are also attributed to him a Tractatus de dedicatione Ecclesiae (PL 131, 845), twelve Homiliae, two Epistolae and a short treatise De Musica (PL 131, 866).
In his school R. also dealt with the question of universals and appears to have attempted a compromise between the extreme realism of Scotus Eriugena and the anti-realism of his master Heiric. At Reims he was the first to introduce dialectic, and he also investigated the problem of the origin of the universe, giving a Christian interpretation of the passage of Martianus Capella where the latter speaks of the invisible world of ideas. R. is one of those writers of the late Carolingian age who, despite their scant originality, helped to keep alive the literary culture established through the work of Charlemagne and Alcuin.