medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, February 19, 2011, at 11:08 pm, Terri Morgan sent:
> Leo of Catania / Leo the Thaumaturge (7th or 8th cent.) From 591 to 604,
> Gregory the Great wrote a number of letters to a bishop of Catania of
> this
> name and also referred to him in letters directed to others. In one of
> the
> latter, Leo is said to act severely against ill doers, possibly magicians
> (_maleficos_). This Leo is perhaps the historic referent of the otherwise
> legendary saint Leo, bishop of Catania in the eighth century. An early
> ninth-century Italo-Greek Bios
The adjective "seemingly", which I used in the version of this notice redacted here, has dropped out from before "early ninth-century", making this dating appear more solid than it really is. As noted in later versions (2009, 2010) Leo is the hero of a Bios surviving in a polished longer version thought to have been written somewhere in the Greek East (BHG 981b; variously dated to the eighth or ninth century and from the location of its surviving witness sometimes called the Moscow version) and of a shorter and, in its surviving witnesses, somewhat truncated Italo-Greek version (BHG 981; dated to the late eighth or earlier ninth century). The dates of both versions are conjectural. BHG 981 seems to be closer in content and in arrangement to their now lost ancestor.
> makes Leo an overseer of church
> property at
> Ravenna who in the absence of acceptable local candidates was chosen
> to fill
> the see of Catania, who struggled mightily with an evil thaumaturge named
> Heliodorus (whom he eventually had burned alive), and who cured a
> woman of a
> hitherto incurable bloody flux. Most of this Bios concerns the
> struggle with
> Heliodorus (a.k.a. Liodorus), in which Leo operates holy magic to overcome
> the achievements of his diabolically inspired opponent. In the Latin
> version, which is a bit fuller, L. also destroys a pagan cult statue
> surviving from the days of the emperor Decius.
> Leo's cult travelled to Constantinople (in Byzantine synaxaries he's
> remembered on February 21) and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world.
> Heliodorus has survived at Catania in the name (U Liotru) of the mostly
> basalt late antique elephant which in the Middle Ages stood over one
> of the
> city gates and led Arabic-speakers to refer to Catania as Medina el-fil
> ('City of the Elephant'). The city's official symbol since 1239, in the
> eighteenth century it was made part of a sculptural confection
> adorning a
> fountain in the Piazza Duomo.
For those who like elephants, some views of U Liotru:
http://tinyurl.com/cz4adj
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT06.jpg
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT05.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/69la3kj
> Leo’s nickname "thamaturge" comes from the posthumous miracles
> worked at
> his tomb.
This last paragraph comes from Phyllis Jestice's notice of Leo of Catania in 2002 <http://tinyurl.com/6zcntfh>, where "thamaturge" is of course a typo for "thaumaturge". I wonder how accurate this statement about the rationale for his appellation "the thaumaturge" really is (Phyllis dropped it when she repeated the notice in 2006). Usually, someone is called that because of _thaumata_ (marvels) operated or said to have been operated in his own lifetime, e.g. St. Gregory the Thaumaturge, bp. of Neocaesarea. Leo's Bios has him operating while living a number of marvels (mostly against an opponent who is also a thaumaturge). Since we don't know anything about Leo's cult prior to the Bios, it seems odd to ignore those marvels and to seek another explanation whose evidentiary basis is very unlikely to be earlier.
Best,
John Dillon
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