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The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity


from its origins to circa AD 700, across the entire Christian world


Gregory the Great in two papal letters and a memorandum (Register 9.178, 9.179, and Appendix 5) of 598/599, requires and describes the oath that Maximus, bishop of Salona, had to swear, in order to absolve himself of excommunication, at the grave of *Apollinaris (bishop and martyr of Ravenna, S00331) at Classe (by Ravenna, northern Italy). Written in Latin in Rome.

Evidence ID

E06384

Type of Evidence

Literary - Letters

Major author/Major anonymous work

Gregory the Great (pope)

Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters

Extracts:

9.178
[...] si isdem Maximus coram uobis et praedicto cartulario nostro de haeresi praestito se sacramento purgauerit atque de aliis ante corpus sancti Apolloinaris, sicut scripsimus, tantummodo requisitus liberum se esse responderit [...]

'... if the same Maximus purges himself of his simoniacal heresy in the presence of you and of our aforesaid secretary, discharging an oath, and replies before the body of Saint Apollinaris that he is free of the other charges, when asked to do so, as we have written ...'


9.179
Proinde si Maximus Salonitanus praestito sacramento firmauerit simoniaca se haeresi non teneri atque de aliis ante corpus sancti Apollinaris tantummodo requisitus innoxium se esse responderit [...]

'Therefore, if Maximus of Salona takes an oath to confirm that he is innocent of simoniacal heresy, and when asked about other matters before the body of Saint Apollinaris, replies that he is innocent ... '


Appendix 5
Tunc duxit eos ad sanctum corpus beati Apollinaris et iuravit se de omnia quae adversus eum dicta de mulieribus uel esacismate simoniaco fuerant mixtum se non esse.

‘Then he [Maximus] led them to the sacred body of Saint Apollinaris, and swore that he had not been involved in all the charges brought against him, about women and the simoniacal schism.’


Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 735-6, 1097.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 2, 654, 531.

Cult Places

Burial site of a saint - tomb/grave

Non Liturgical Activity

Oath

Relics

Oath made on a relic
Bodily relic - entire body

Protagonists in Cult and Narratives

Ecclesiastics - bishops
Ecclesiastics - lesser clergy

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 ninth century, but were subsequently lost; from the late eighth century onwards, however, because of the exceptional stature that Gregory had by then attained, various collections of his letters were assembled from the original copies (the largest under Pope Hadrian I at the end of the eighth 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 in some of those whose text survives there are references to other letters, wholly 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 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.

In this case, confusingly, the memorandum describing the execution of the oath is included in Martyn’s translation as
Letter 8.36 (using the MGH's numbering), even though in Norberg’s edition, which Martyn generally follows, it is Appendix 5 (Norberg, vol. 2, 1096-7).


Discussion




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).


Record Created By

Frances Trzeciak

Date of Entry

30/11/2020

Related Saint Records
IDNameName in SourceIdentity
S00331Apollinaris, bishop and martyr of RavennaApollinarisCertain


Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
Frances Trzeciak, Cult of Saints, E06384 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E06384