Gregory the Great, in his Dialogues (3.4), narrates how *Datius (bishop of Milan, ob. 552, S00558), exorcised an evil spirit from a house in Corinth (south Balkans/Greece) while travelling to Constantinople. Written in Latin in Rome, c. 593.
Evidence ID
E00846
Type of Evidence
Literary - Hagiographical - Collections of miracles
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory the Great (pope)
Dialogues 3.4
Summary:
Datius, bishop of Milan, was travelling to Constantinople. When he arrived in Corinth, he saw a large house which he commanded be prepared for him. The inhabitants of Corinth told him an evil spirit was resident there. This only encouraged Datius to have the house readied for the night. In the night, the demon made a great noise like a group of animals and Datius answered him, identifying him as a demon. The evil spirit left and never returned.
Summary: Frances Trzeciak.
Non Liturgical ActivityMiracle during lifetime
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesDemons
Composing and translating saint-related texts
MiraclesMiracle during lifetime
Exorcism
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesDemons
Other lay individuals/ people
Ecclesiastics - bishops
Source
Gregory the Great (Pope, 590-604) wrote his Dialogues on the Lives and Miracles of the Italian Fathers (Dialogi de vita et miraculis patrum italicorum) in Rome around 593. Written in the form of a dialogue with a certain deacon Peter, the work is organised into four books, the first three being a collection of lives and miracles of various Italian saints. The longest is the Life of Benedict of Nursia, which comprises the entirety of book 2. The final book consists of an essay on the immortality of souls after death. As a whole, the work documents and explains the presence of the miraculous in the contemporary world and the ability of saints to effect miracles both before and after death. The attribution of the Dialogues to Gregory has been disputed, most recently by Francis Clark who argued that the work was created in the 680s in Rome. Others - such as Adalbert de Vogüé, Paul Meyvaert and Matthew dal Santo - have, however, strongly argued for Gregory's authorship and it is broadly accepted that Gregory was responsible for the Dialogues.For a discussion of Gregory's devotion in writing the Dialogues, see E04383, and for the role of the Dialogues as a tract justifying the nature of miracles and theorising on the immortality of souls, see E04457.
Gregory's principal aim in collecting the miracle stories of the holy men (and a very few women) of sixth-century Italy was to show the presence of God's power on earth as manifested through them, rather than to encourage the cult of these individuals., and he spends much of the book commenting on the moral and spiritual lessons to be learned from the stories he recounts. Indeed, though posthumous miracles at the graves of a few individuals are recorded (and also a few miracles aided by contact relics of dead saints), there is very little emphasis in the Dialogues on posthumous cult; some of the miraculous events that Gregory records (e.g. E04429) are not even attributed to named individuals. Consequently, very few of the holy persons in the Dialogues are 'proper' saints, with established, let alone long-term cult; we have included them all in our database, for the sake of completeness and as an illustration of the impossibility of dividing 'proper' saints from more 'ordinary' holy individuals.
Discussion
Datius (Pietri and Pietri 1999) is attested in numerous sources to have travelled twice to Constantinople during the Three Chapters controversy, once c. 542, and again c. 550 (he died in 552 during his second stay).Bibliography
Edition:Vogüé, A. de, Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, Sources chrétiennes 260 (Paris: Cerf, 1979), with full introduction and notes.
Translation:
Zimmerman, O.J., Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, Fathers of the Church 39 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1959).
Further Reading:
Clark, F.,The 'Gregorian' Dialogues and the Origins of Benedictine Monasticism (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
dal Santo, M., "The Shadow of A Doubt? A Note on the Dialogues and Registrum Epistolarum of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604)," Journal of Ecclesiatical History, 61.1, (2010), 3-17.
Meyvaert, P., "The Enigma of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues: A Reply to Francis Clark," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39 (1988), 335–81.
Pietri, Ch. and Pietri, L., Prosopographie chrétienne du bas-empire, 2 Prosopographie de l'Italie chrétienne (313-604), 2 vols (Rome 1999-2000: École française de Rome), vol. 1, 532-534, 'Datius'.
Vogüé, A. de, "Grégoire le Grand et ses Dialogues d’après deux ouvrages récents," Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 83 (1988), 281–348.
Record Created By
Frances Trzeciak
Date of Entry
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00558 | Datius, bishop of Milan, ob. 552 | Datius | Certain |
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Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
Frances Trzeciak, Cult of Saints, E00846 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E00846