Background
He was born at Izernore. He was instructed in reading and writing by his father, who had become a priest, and at the age of seven was given to Saint Romanus and Saint Lupicinus to be educated at Condat Abbey.
He was born at Izernore. He was instructed in reading and writing by his father, who had become a priest, and at the age of seven was given to Saint Romanus and Saint Lupicinus to be educated at Condat Abbey.
Thenceforth he never left the monastery. Eugendus acquired much learning, read the Greek and Latin authors, and was well versed in the Scriptures. He led a life of great austerity, including being said to have never laughed, supposedly in respect to a passage in the Rule of Street Benedict not to take pleasure in unrestrained or raucous laughter (despite the fact that Street Benedict was born thirty years after him and would scarcely have been known at the time of Eugendus" death).
He also refused ever to be ordained a priest.
Abbot Minausius made him his coadjutor, and after the former"s death (about 496) Eugendus became his successor. He built an abbey church in honour of the holy Apostles Peter, Paul, and Andrew, and enriched it with precious relics.
The church was the predecessor of the rebuilt abbey church that is now Saint-Claude Cathedral
Condat began to flourish as a place of refuge for all those who suffered from the misfortunes and afflictions of those eventful times, a school of virtue and knowledge amid the surrounding darkness, an oasis in the desert. A few years after his death, his successor, Saint Viventiolus, erected a shrine over his tomb in the abbey church, to which numerous pilgrims travelled.
The village that grew round Condat Abbey came to be called, after the saint, Saint-Oyand de Joux, a name it retained as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the abbey"s former name of Condat passed into oblivion.
The abbey was secularised in 1742. The feast of Saint Eugendus was at first transferred to 2 January. In the dioceses of Besançon and Saint-Claude it is now celebrated on 4 January.