medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (4. December) is the feast day of:
1) Felix of Bologna (d. 430/31). Paulinus of Milan says in his _Vita Ambrosii_ that F. was a deacon of that city who now (ca. 422) is bishop of Bologna. He is characterized as a saint both in the twelfth-century _Vita sancti Petronii_ and in the so-called Elenco renano, the oldest list of the bishops of Bologna. Bologna celebrates F. liturgically on 3. October. Today is his day of commemoration in the RM.
The only visuals associated with F. that I could find on the Web are views of the Porta San Felice, one of ten survivors of the original twelve city gates in Bologna's final, thirteenth-/fourteenth-century city wall and located at the point where the Via Emilia entered the city (the continuation into the city centre is now called the Via San Felice). The cardinal who returned papal overlordship to Bologna in 1327 made his ceremonial entry through this gate. Views:
http://tinyurl.com/34rvpr
http://tinyurl.com/y5r7zu
http://www.atc.bo.it/cliente/gallery/big/P7070586.jpg
2) John of Damascus (d. ca. 750). J. was the Arabic-speaking son of a financial officer of the Ummayad caliphate whom he followed in the family business in Damascus until hostility to Christians on the part of a new caliph caused him to move by the year 700 to the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem. There he deepened his understanding of Christian theology and wrote his _Pege gnoseos_ ('Fount of [spiritual] knowledge') and other dogmatic and apologetic works. J. was ordained priest by Jerusalem's patriarch John V (706-735); numerous sermons and panegyrics survive under his name, not all of which are his.
J.'s iconophile positions caused him to be condemned at the Synod of Hiereia in 754; the Second Council of Nicaea (787) affirmed his orthodoxy. He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1890. Two excerpts from an English-language translation of J.'s anti-iconoclast writings are here:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/johndam-icons.html
3) Sualo (d. 794). We know about the Englishman S. (also known as Solus and as Sola) from his Vita (BHL 7926) by Ermanric of Ellwangen, written between 839 and 842. According to Ermanric, who later became bishop of Passau, S. followed Boniface to Germany, was ordained priest by him, and became a solitary (no pun intended) in the diocese of Eichstätt in a place that became known as Cella Solonis ('Solo's Cell') and to which title was given him by none other than Charlemagne himself. Ermanric adds that Sts. Willibald and Winnebald gave property to S. after Boniface's death and that after S.'s death all of his property was given by Charlemagne to the abbey of Fulda. The latter's necrology records S.'s passing on 3. December.
Notable among the miracles attributed to S. by Ermanric is a plainly allegorical one in which at his bidding an ass on which he had been riding attacks and kills a wolf that was threatening sheep grazing in a pasture with no shepherds present.
Cella Solonis is now Solnhofen (Kr. Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen) in Bavaria. Perhaps better known as the town that Archaeopteryx made famous, it preserves the remains of a ninth-century church (the so-called Solabasilika) built over four predecessors going back to middle of the seventh century (the third church is thought to have been S.'s oratory). A multi-page, German-language introduction to the site is here:
http://www.solnhofen.de/sehenswertes/basilika/sola_a.htm
And the Wikipedia.de page on Solnhofen has more to say on it:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solnhofen
along with this view:
http://tinyurl.com/35grx2
and this plan:
http://tinyurl.com/3cbvaz
The Solabasilika contains a fifteenth-century tomb (opened in 1828 and found to be empty):
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Sola-Basilika.jpg
http://www.solnhofen.de/sehenswertes/sola_er/sola_5.htm
Remains of four earlier tombs have been found at the site; one of these may have been the one into which S.'s allegedly intact remains were deposited by Fulda's prior at Cella Solonis shortly before the writing of S.'s Vita.
In view of the time of year of S.'s feast, it may be well to recall, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, that one Sualo doth not a summer make.
Best,
John Dillon
(Felix of Bologna lightly revised from last year's post)
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