Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 8.28) of 598, to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria (Lower Egypt), tells him the Roman Church has no full record of the martyrs' passions, but does have record of their places and days of martyrdom. Written in Latin in Rome.
E06382
Literary - Letters
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 8.28
The opening of the letter (the second half being about the transport of wooden beams to Alexandria):
Vtilis semper est docti uiri allocutio, quia aut discit audiens quod nescire sese nouerat aut cognoscit, quod est amplius, id quod se nescisse nesciebat. Qua in re ex audientium numero ego nunc factus sum, cui sanctissima uestra beatitudo scribere studuit ut cunctorum martyrum gesta, quae piae memoriae Constantini temporibus ab Eusebio Caesariense collecta sunt, transmittere debeamus. Sed haec neque si sic collecta sint neque si sint ante uestrae beatitudinis scripta cognoui. Ago ergo gratias, quia sanctissimae doctrinae uestrae scriptis eruditus coepi scire quod nesciebat. Praeter illa enim quae in eiusdem Eusebii libris de gestis sanctorum martyrum continentur nulla in archiuo huius nostrae ecclesiae uel in romanae urbis bibliothecis esse cognoui, nisi pauca quaedam in unius codicis uolumine collecta. Nos autem paene omnium martyrum distinctis per dies singulos passionibus collecta in uno codice nomina habemus atque cotidianis diebus in eorum ueneratione missarum sollemnia agimus. Non tamen in eodem uolumine quis qualiter sit passus indicatur, sed tantummodo nomen, locus et dies passionis ponitur. Vnde fit ut multi ex diuersis terris atque prouinciis per dies, ut praedixi, singulos cognoscantur martyrio coronati. Sed haec habere uos beatissimos credimus. Ea uero quae transmitti uoluistis quaerentes quidem non inuenimus, sed adhuc non inuenientes quaerimus et, si potuerint inueniri, transmittimus.
‘An address by a man of learning is always valuable, because the listener either learns what he knew he did not know, or gets to know, which is better, that which he did not know that he did not know. In this matter, I have now been made one of your listeners, as your most holy Beatitude took pains to write to me, that I should send over the acts of all the martyrs, which were collected by Eusebius of Caesarea, in the times of Constantine, of pious memory. But before the writing of your Beatitude, I did not know if they had been collected in this way, or even if they existed. And so, I give thanks, because, taught by the writings of your most holy learning, I have begun to know what I used not to know. For beside what is contained in the books of the same Eusebius, on the acts of holy martyrs, I have not learnt of any in the archives of this Church of ours, or in the libraries of the city of Rome, except for a few examples collected in a volume of a single manuscript. But we have the names of almost all the martyrs collected in one manuscript, with their passions allotted to particular days, and we celebrate solemn Mass in venerating them on each such day. However in the same volume, there is no mention of who suffered and how he did so, but simply his name, and the place and day of his passion are put down. From this, it is clear that many from diverse lands and provinces are known to have been crowned with martyrdom, as I said before, on their particular days. But we believe that you have these. However, as for what you wanted to be sent over to you, we looked for it certainly, but did not find it. But we are still looking for it without finding it. If it can be found, we shall send it to you.’
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 549-50.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 2, 52-3, lightly modified.
Saint’s feast
Non Liturgical ActivityTransmission, copying and reading saint-related texts
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)
Discussion
This is an important text for the information it gives us about the knowledge of the martyrs available in a major ecclesiastical city, in this case Rome. Gregory has a martyrology, that lists the date in the year and the place of each martyr's passion, but no major collection of their written Martyrdoms.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).
Frances Trzeciak
30/11/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00060 | Martyrs, unnamed or name lost | Certain |
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