By the time he became a bishop Gregory of Tours had become accomplished at casting his perceptive physical eyes upon a variety of visible phenomena to uncover their invisible meaning. The this-worldly occurrences on which he focused included irregular celestial events, bizarre natural incidents pertaining to weather, flora and fauna, and perhaps especially the onset of people's maladies along with their disappearances. To Gregory all of these spectacles potentially constituted evidence of the divine mood or the unseen operations of God and His saints. Another earthly experience on which Gregory fixated an intensive gaze was death. Like the Apostle Paul, the bishop generally perceived death as the price for human sin. With the author of Revelation he distinguished physical death, to which all humans are subject, from the eternal penalty of second death. As was covered in Part I of this book, helping readers to avoid the latter fate was a principal reason why Gregory began to write. This chapter will analyze how Gregory deduced the otherworldly whereabouts of many deceased souls and communicated his knowledge to readers. It will briefly consider his practice, common enough among late ancient hagiographers, of narrating about celestial ascensions of many deceased saints and other righteous souls. More focus will be given to Gregory's proclivity to detect individuals’ eternal condemnation and the methods used to pass that information along to readers, a practice that was exceedingly rare among late ancient writers. In the process of revealing how Gregory discerned people's fates, the chapter will continue to bring to light particular aspects of our author's soteriological and pastoral objectives.

The Saved

In the course of depicting many saints performing miracles in order to convince readers of the broad availability of holy virtutes across society, Gregory frequently remarked about saints’ souls progressing to, or occupying a place in, paradise. His process for reasoning how a holy soul resided in heaven was similar to that by which he established whether a deceased person was in fact a saint; he relied on postmortem miracles to demonstrate the unseen truth of a dead individual's status in the hereafter.