Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 6.31) of 596, to his notary Castor in Ravenna (northern Italy), seeks testimony sworn over the relics of *Apollinaris (bishop and martyr of Ravenna, S00331) regarding the earlier practice of bishops of Ravenna in the wearing of the pallium. Written in Latin in Rome.
E06367
Literary - Letters
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 6.31
This letter continues a long-standing dispute with Ravenna over its bishop's excessive (in Rome's eyes) use of the pallium (see E06354 and E06353). Gregory instructs Castor to find older priests and laymen who can testify how bishops of Ravenna had used the pallium in times gone by:
Et ueniant ante corpus sancti Apollinaris et tacto eius sepulcro iurent, quae consuetudo ante Iohannis episcopi tempora fuerit.
‘And let them come before the body of Saint Apollinaris, and touching his sepulchre, swear as to what the custom was before the time of Bishop John.’
Gregory then provides the oath which must be sworn:
IURAMENTUM. Iuro ego per Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum, inseparabilis diuinae potentiae trinitatem, et hoc corpus beati Apollinaris martyris me pro nullius fauore personae neque commodo aliquo interueniente testari. Sed hoc scio et per memetipsum cognoui quia ante tempora Iohannis quondam episcopi Rauennas episcopus praesente apocrisiario sedis apostolicae illo atque illo et illis diebus consuetudinem utendi pallio habuit; et non cognoui quia hoc latenter uel absente apocrisiario usurpasset.
‘The oath: I swear by the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, the indivisible Trinity of divine power, and by this body of Saint Apollinaris the martyr, that I give my testimony without favouring any person or allowing any advantage to intervene. But this I know, and learned myself, that before the time of John, late bishop of Ravenna, the bishop, in the presence of the emissary of the apostolic see, on this, and that, and these days was accustomed to using the pallium. And I have not found that he usurped this privilege secretly or in the absence of an emissary.’
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 1, 404.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 2, 425-6, modified.
Burial site of a saint - tomb/grave
Non Liturgical ActivityOath
RelicsBodily relic - entire body
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
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)
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).
McCulloh, J., "The Cult of Relics in the Letters and Dialogues of Gregory the Great," Traditio 32 (1976), 145-184.
Neil, B., and Dal Santo, M. (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Frances Trzeciak
15/11/2018
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00331 | Apollinaris, bishop and martyr of Ravenna | Apollinaris | Certain |
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