Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 3.37) of 593, to Libertinus, praetor of Sicily, seeks the punishment of a Jew who has set up an altar to *Helias/Elijah (Old Testament prophet, S00239), and tricked many Christians into praying there. Written in Latin in Rome.
Evidence ID
E06344
Type of Evidence
Literary - Letters
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 3.37
Extract from the letter:
Ab ipso administrationis exordio deus uos in causae suae uoluit uindicta procedere et hanc uobis mercedem propitius cum laude seruauit. Fertur siquidem quod Nasas, quidam sceleratissimus Iudaeorum, sub nomine beati Heliae altare punienda temeritate construxerit multosque illic Christianorum ad adorandum sacrilega seductione deceperit.
‘From the very beginning of your administration, God has wanted you to proceed in the defence of his cause, and has graciously reserved this reward for you with his praise. For indeed it is said that Nasas, one of the most wicked of the Jews, has built an altar in the name of Saint Helias, with a temerity that must be punished, and has tricked many Christians there into prayer by means of a sacrilegious seduction.’
Gregory continues by insisting that Libertinus inflict corporal punishment on Nasas.
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 1, 182-3.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 1, 260.
Cult PlacesJews
Theorising on Sanctity
Altar
Rejection, Condemnation, SceptisismCondemnation/rejection of a specific cultic activity
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesJews
Ecclesiastics - bishops
Officials
Theorising on SanctityConsiderations about the validity of cult forms
Source
Gregory's Register is a collection of some 854 of his letters as pope, collected into 14 books (each book representing an indictional year of his pontificate, from 1 September to 31 August) of varied length and deriving from the file-copies that were made in Rome and kept in the papal archive. The original copies survived into the 9th century, but were subsequently lost. From the late 8th century onwards, however, because of the exceptional stature that Gregory had by then attained, various collections were assembled from the original copies (the largest under Pope Hadrian I at the end of the 8th century), and these constitute the Register as we have it today.The Register does not contain all the letters that Gregory despatched as pope, since some whose text survives refer to others which are lost; but the collection we have is unique from the late antique period, and only matched in quantity and range of subjects by the registers of high-medieval popes. Recipients range from papal administrators, through prominent churchmen and aristocrats, to kings and the imperial family, and treat a wide variety of topics, from the mundane administrative affairs of the papal patrimony to deep theological and moral considerations.
For the cult of saints, there is much that is of interest in the letters, but two particular concentrations of evidence stand out. The first is a clutch of around a dozen letters that mention requests for relics from Rome, or that accompanied small personal relics as gifts to influential correspondents. The second concentration of evidence relates to the dedications of churches and other ecclesiastical institutions in southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Because the papacy owned extensive estates in these regions, and exercised particular authority there, many of Gregory's letters mention churches and other ecclesiastical institutions by the name of the saint to whom they were dedicated, thereby providing us with a rich panorama of the spread of both local and imported saintly cults.
Gregory's Register has been the subject of two substantial critical editions: the first by Ewald and Hartmann for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; the second by Dag Norberg for Corpus Christianorum. The numbering of the letters is often the same in both editions, but it can differ, because Norberg removed letters (and other passages) that appear to have been added at a later date to the original Register, assigning them instead to Appendices. We have used Norberg's numbering, which is that now generally used.
(Bryan Ward-Perkins)
Discussion
What precisely is going on here is unclear. Gregory seeks harsh punishment from the secular authorities of Sicily on a Jew who has set up an altar somewhere on the island to the Prophet Elijah, and persuaded many Christians to pray there. Was it in his home? Did he perhaps claim to have relics of the prophet? Is this an indication that, at a level below the church hierarchy, Jews and Christians worshipped together? The text raises these intriguing questions, but does not answer them.Bibliography
Edition:Ewald, P. and L.M. Hartmann (eds), Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum, 2 vols. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae I and II, Berlin 1891 and 1899).
Norberg, D., S. Gregorii Magni, Registrum epistularum. 2 vols. (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140-140A; Turnhout: Brepols, 1982).
English translation:
Martyn, J.R.C., The Letters of Gregory the Great, 3 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004).
Further Reading:
Dal Santo, M., Debating the Saints' Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
Neil, B., and Dal Santo, M. (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Record Created By
Frances Trzeciak
Date of Entry
30/09/2018
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00217 | Elijah/Elias, Old Testament prophet | Helias | Certain |
|---|
Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
Frances Trzeciak, Cult of Saints, E06344 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E06344