medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (17. August) is the feast day of:
1) Eusebius (d. ca. 309), pope. E. succeeded pope St. Marcellus I, whose period in office is imperfectly known. According to his epitaph by pope St. Damasus I (ed. Ferrua, no. 18), our chief source of information for him, E. was willing to readmit penitent Christians who had lapsed during the Great Persecution. An opponent, Heraclius, was not willing to do this. When factional strife, some of it violent, broke out between adherents of the two camps, the de facto emperor Maxentius had both leaders exiled. E. died in Sicily and was brought back and buried in Rome's cemetery of Callistus. Absent from the _Depositio Martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354, in the slightly later view taken by Damasus he clearly was a martyr.
The Chronographer of 354's list of the bishops of Rome enters E. for today. The same source's _Depositio Episcoporum_ enters him under 26. September as do also the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, the Carolingian-period historical martyrologies, and the RM prior to 2001. The _Liber Pontificalis_ adds a few details, of which one (the finding of the True Cross during his pontificate) is inaccurate and others (that he was of Greek extraction and the son of a physician) are unverifiable.
2) Elias of Enna (d. 903 or 904). This less well known saint of the Regno was born at today's Enna (EN) in Sicily shortly after the Muslim conquest of the island had begun. His baptismal name was Joseph and he was Greek-speaking. According to his tenth-century Bios (BHG 580), when J. was twelve he was captured by Muslims who were besieging Enna and was transported to Africa, where he was sold as a slave. By divine providence, he was bought by a local Christian. Not long afterwards he was returned to Sicily and to his parents by an East Roman raiding party that had come from Syracuse. A few years later Muslims captured him again, sold him again into slavery in Africa, and again he was bought by a Christian.
This time, though, J. was sold on to another Christian, very rich, who brought him up with respect and affection. But the rich man's wife lusted after J. and when he refused her she accused him to her husband of attempting to seduce her (in the text, the parallel with Potiphar's wife is explicit). J. then left this unhappy household, began to preach theGospel, was imprisoned and escaped, and finally undertook a pilgrimage to Palestine and Egypt. In Jerusalem he entered religion, taking the name of Elias. After further travels in the East, E. returned to Sicily where he visited his mother, who now lived in Muslim-ruled Palermo.
Moving on to Taormina (the last city in Sicily still in East Roman hands), he met the monk Daniel who became his faithful companion and later the chief informant of the writer of this Bios. Foreseeing the town's Muslim capture, E. warned both the citizens and the governor but was not taken seriously. So he and Daniel left for Calabria, where E. founded a monastic settlement near today's Gioia Tauro (RC). Muslim raids caused him to move on again and he spent some years in various parts of southern Italy and in Greece, preaching the Gospel and operating miracles. He founded another monastery near today's Palmi (RC) and was living there when the emperor (who will have been Leo VI) invited him to Constantinople. The aged E. died en route at Thessalonica. David brought E.'s body back to the monastery, interring it there on the height now known as Monte Sant'Elia.
Both of E.'s monastic foundations were subsequently named for him; both became important places in the history of Greek monasticism in southern Italy. Neither remains today. But at Monte Sant'Elia one can see the very spot where, it is said, the devil appeared to E. and tried to tempt him with a bag of money. E. took the bag and flung the coins against the mountain, where they came to rest as black rocks. Students of "body print" relics (a recurring topic on this list) should not fail to note the devil's hoofprints in the final view on this page:
http://www.maridelsud.com/leggende/stromboli.htm
E.'s Bios is a monument of Italo-Greek literature. Though not as impressive as that of Nilus of Rossano a century later, it too presents a varied and engaging portrait of a holy man operating in a secular and often hostile world. One of its less effective moments that nonetheless is historically interesting is the brief sermon comparing Christianity with Islam that is put into E.'s mouth in paragraphs 23-24. The now standard edition of the Bios is that of Giovanni Rossi Taibbi, _Vita di Sant'Elia il Giovane. Testo inedito con traduzione italiana_ (Palermo: Istituto siciliano di studi bizantini e neoellenici, 1962).
3) Nicholas Politi (d. 1167). N. is a poorly documented Italo-Greek saint of the the Nebrodi range in northern Sicily and of the upper valley of the Simeto just to the south. According to his sixteenth-century Vita (BHL 6629), he fled his well-to-do home in today's Adrano (CT) to avoid an arranged marriage and, acting with divine guidance, settled down as a hermit in a hidden cave on Mount Etna. After three years of prayer and fasting N. began to fear discovery by his parents and so moved on, again with divine guidance to the vicinity of today's Alcara Li Fusi (ME). There he remained as a recluse for over thirty years, known chiefly to a few religious in the area.
When N. died his body was taken to the Basilian monastery of Santa Maria del Rogato at Alcara, where he was venerated as a saint. In 1503 his intervention was credited with rescuing the town from a drought. A campaign for papal recognition ensued and in 1507 Julius II confirmed N.'s cult at the level of Saint but permitted it only in the church in which N. reposed. At the same time N.'s feast was fixed for today, his traditional _dies natalis_.
N. is now the patron saint both of Adrano and of Alcara Li Fusi, where since the early sixteenth century his relics have been kept in the principal church of Maria Santissima Assunta and where a church at his traditional place of death (now the Eremo di San Nicoḷ Politi) is first recorded from the same century.
Here's a view of the Eremo di San Nicoḷ Politi at Alcara Li Fusi, whither N.'s relics are brought in procession annually on the occasion of his feast:
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/119/119-10-38-55-5443.jpg
Outside of Adrano one can visit a cave on the slopes of Monte Turchio (the nearest volcanic cone on the Etna massif) called the Grotta del Santo and pray there at a little altar dedicated to N.
4) Donatus of Ripacandida (d. 1198, supposedly). This less well known and rather problematic saint of the Regno has a cult that while attested only from the sixteenth century onward appears to be medieval in origin. His earliest recorded image is said to date from 1501 and to have been preserved at the monastery of Sant'Onofrio at Petina (SA) in what is now southern Campania. His earliest Vita is that by Montevergine's prior, Felice Renda, published in 1581 along with the same author's not entirely trustworthy Vitae of Sts. William of Vercelli and Amatus of Nusco.
According to this account, D. was a youth of today's Ripacandida (PZ) in Basilicata who entered the community of Montevergine in the late twelfth century, was put to work tending animals and vineyards at its monastery of Massadiruta, came to be known by the locals as a person of great virtue, and who after a few years died at the age of nineteen. Another few years later (said to be in 1202), citizens of Ripacandida went to the monastery to retrieve D.'s body but shortly after leaving that place with it were forced by the people of today's Auletta (SA) to yield one of his arms to them.
Renda's story, which has resemblances to the Vita of St. Conus of Diano (3. June), may derive both the saint's name and his youth from an earlier south Italian cult of a St. Donatus who in recent times has been identified with D. of Arezzo (7. August) but who in contradistinction to that D.'s ordinary construction is instead thought of as very youthful (hence the boy-bishop or teenaged bishop D. in modern representations of D. of Arezzo at e.g. Ripacandida and Montesano [LE] on the Salentine peninsula in Apulia). The cult of that Donatus at Ripacandida, whose church is dedicated to him, is at least as old as 1152. If today's D. did exist historically, he will thus have been named for his town's patron saint. A church of Sant'Onofrio de Massa at today's Petina (SA), close to Auletta, was given to Montevergine in 1192 and by December 1208 the abbey had a grange there.
Since at least the eighteenth century Auletta has had an arm relic said to be of D. (it also has arm relics of two other saints popular in the region, Vitus and Blaise/Biaggio). It does seem likely that by the end of the fifteenth century there was a cult of a youthful St. D. both there and at the nearby monastery of Sant'Onofrio (now of Santi Onofrio e Donato) at Petina. The Ripacandida connection appears to have been Renda's invention. In the eighteenth century Montevergine persuaded the Congregation of Rites to confirm D.'s cult _ab immemorabili_. Permitted, with a Mass and Office, first for the Benedictine community of Montevergine (of course including the monastery at Petina), it was soon extended to Auletta and later to Ripacandida and to the dioceses of Rapolla and of Melfi. At Ripacandida our D. is called San Donatello to distinguish him from its patron, D. of Arezzo.
Curiously, our D.'s cult also exists at Civita di Bagnoregio (VT) in northern Lazio, though he may not have been the original dedicatee of the once "romanesque" chiesa di San Donato in this recently revived tourist destination situated in D. of Arezzo's "home" territory. Here's a view of that church (partly rebuilt very early in the sixteenth century):
http://tinyurl.com/55xnto
D. is Auletta's patron saint. His arm reliquary there is housed in that town's much rebuilt chiesa di San Nicola de Mira. In the absence of a view of that treasure, herewith a distance view of Auletta and a view of its recent (1963) cappella di San Donato, erected in gratitude for the saint's having saved the local populace from the bombings of World War II (it's close to a railway tunnel in which fleeing citizens set up a temporary shrine to D.).
http://tinyurl.com/5ttquv
http://tinyurl.com/589pzl
5) Clare of Montefalco (d. 1308). C. (also C. of the Cross), a contemplative, visionary, and reported ecstatic, has an immediately posthumous Vita (by Berengario di Donadio, a.k.a. B. de Sant'Africano; BHL 1818, 1818b) commissioned by the vicar of the bishop of Spoleto. From this we learn that even as a child in her home town, today's Montefalco (PG) in Umbria, she was very devout and lived very ascetically. An older sister, Giovanna, was a secular Franciscan tertiary and at the age of six C. was permitted to join her community. In 1290, when C. will have been in her early twenties, these women were permitted by the bishop of Spoleto to enter religion as Augustinian sisters; in the following year Giovanna died and C. was elected to succeed her as abbess. She had a special devotion to Christ's cross, which she is said to have seen implanted in her heart by Christ in a vision.
After C.'s death her body was opened and her heart was removed; signs of Christ's passion were reported to have been found on it. A canonization process was begun in 1316. In 1624 her cult was confirmed, with a Mass and Office, for the Augustinians and for the diocese of Spoleto. C. entered the RM in 1673; in 1881 she was papally canonized. C.'s reputedly incorrupt remains repose in the seventeenth-century church dedicated to her at Montefalco, part of whose predecessor of 1430 survives as its cappella della Santa Croce. This being the eighth centenary of C.'s death, perhaps we will see on the Web some decent views of that chapel's fifteenth-century frescoes. A black-and-white reproduction of one of them is here:
http://tinyurl.com/5o3p4p
Some view's of C. relics are here (but, as often, the church is misidentified):
http://tinyurl.com/5cgmjc
Best,
John Dillon
(Pope St. Eusebius, Elias of Enna, and Nicholas Politi lightly revised from older posts)
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