If any particular persons among the monks could be convicted of having attempted to palm any false writing or lie on the world, the obligations of their profession would render their crime the more odious and enormous. But to make this a charge upon that venerable order of men in any age, is a most unjust and a notorious slander. Melchior Cano, who complains of interpolations which have crept into some parts of sacred biography, justifies the monks from the infamous imputation which some, through ignorance or malice, affect to cast upon them;[19] and Mabillon has vindicated them more at large.[20] On their diligence and scrupulosity in general, in correctly copying the manuscripts, see Dom. Coutant,[21] and the authors of the new {054} French Diplomatique.[22] In the Penitentia of St. Theodore the Studite, a penance is prescribed for a monk who had made any mistake in copying a manuscript. In 1196, in the general chapter of the Cistercians, it was ordered that the church of Lyons and the monastery of Cluni should be consulted about the true reading of a passage in a book to be copied. Anciently, books were chiefly copied and preserved in monasteries, which for several ages were the depositories of learning. Mr. Gurdon[23] and Bishop Tanner[24] take notice, that in England the great abbeys were even the repositories of the laws, edicts of kings, and acts of parliament. The history of Wales was compiled and kept through every age, by public authority, in the monastery of Ystratflur for South Wales, where the princes and noblemen of that country were interred; and in the abbey of Conwey for North Wales, which was the burying-place of the princes of that part. Conringius,[25] a German Protestant, writes, "In the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries there is scarce to be found, in the whole Western church, the name of a person who had written a book, but what dwelt, or at least was educated in a monastery." Before universities were erected, monasteries, and often the palaces of bishops, were the seminaries of the clergy, the nurseries for the education of young noblemen, and the great schools of all the sciences. To the libraries and industry of the monks we are principally indebted for the works of the ancients which we possess. Grateful for this benefit, we ought not to condemn them because, by a fatality incident to human things, some works are come down to us interpolated or imperfect.[26]
Accidental causes have given frequent occasions to mistakes, which, when we consider, we cannot be surprised if sometimes good men have been deceived by false memoirs. As to authors of wilful forgeries, we have no name harsh enough to express, nor punishment equal to their crime. But the integrity even of Geoffry of Monmouth is no longer impeached, since it hath been proved that in his British history he was not the author of the fables which he published upon the credit of other vouchers.
Nevertheless, upon these, and the like accounts, history calls aloud for the discernment of criticism. And many learned men, especially of the monastic order, have, for our assistance, with no less industry than success, separated in ancient writings the sterling from the counterfeit, and by collating manuscripts, and by clearing difficult points, have rendered the path in this kind of literature smooth and secure. The merit of original authors hath been weighed; we have the advantage of most correct editions of their works; rash and groundless alterations of some modern critics, and the blunders of careless copiers or editors are redressed; interpolations foisted into the original writings are retrenched; and a mark hath been set on memoirs of inferior authority. Moreover, the value of ancient manuscripts, being known, ample repositories of such monuments have been made, curious lists of which are communicated to the public, that any persons may know and have recourse to them. It must also be added, that the laborious task of making the researches necessary for this complicated work, hath been rendered lighter by the care with which several judicious and learned men have compiled the lives of many particular saints. Thus have Mabillon and {055} Bulteau writ the lives of the saints of the order of St. Benedict; the elegant Touron of that of St. Dominick; Le Nain, of the Cistercian order; Tillemont, the Maurist Benedictin monks, and Orsi, these of the principal fathers of the church, &c.[27] The genuine acts of the primitive martyrs, the most valuable monument of ecclesiastical history, have been carefully published by Ruinart. Some of them are presidial acts, i.e. extracted from the court registers; others were written from the relations of eye-witnesses of undoubted veracity. To this treasure an accession, which the learned Orsi and others doubt not to call of equal value, hath been lately made by the publication of the genuine acts of the martyrs of the East, or of Persia, and of the West, or Palestine, in two volumes, folio, at Rome. Those of the East were written chiefly by St. Maruthus, a neighboring bishop of Mesopotamia: the others seem to contain the entire work of Eusebius on the martyrs of Palestine, which he abridged in the eighth book of his history. Both parts were found in a Chaldaic manuscript, in a monastery of Upper Egypt, and purchased by Stephen Evodius Assemani, archbishop of Apamea, and his uncle Joseph Simonius Assemani, first prefect of the Vatican library, at the charges of pope Clement XII., who had sent the former into the East on that errand. The manuscripts are deposited in the Vatican library. Joseph Assemani is known in the republic of letters by his invaluable Oriental library, his Italicæ Historiæ Scriptores, his Kalendaria Ecclesiæ Universæ notis Ilustrata, &c., and Stephen, by his share in the publication of the works of St. Ephrem, and by the Acta Martyrum Orientalium et Occidentalium. The learned Jesuits at Antwerp, Bollandus and his continuators, have given us the Acta Sanctorum, enriched with curious remarks and dissertations, in forty-one large volumes in folio, to the 5th day of September. To mention other monuments and writers here made use of, would be tedious and superfluous. The authorities produced throughout the work speak for themselves: the veracity of writers who cannot pretend to pass for inspired, ought to be supported by competent vouchers.
The original authors are chiefly our guides. The stream runs clear and pure from the source, which in a long course often contracts a foreign mixture; but the lucubrations of many judicious modern critics have cast a great light upon ancient historians: these, therefore, have been also consulted and compared, and their labors freely made use of.
Footnotes: 1. Cicero, l. 2, de Orat. c. 9. 2. Voss. Ars Hist. cap. 5. 3. Voltaire's Annals of the Empire of Germany. 4. Some call in question the existence of certain saints, as SS. Bacchus, Quirinus, Mercurius, Nilammon, Hippolytus, &c., because these names are of pagan original. But that Christians often retained those names is evident, not only from the oldest Martyrologies, but from Eusebius, Theodoret, and other ancient writers, who often mention Christians named Apollonius and Apollinerius, from Apollo &c., and St. Paul speaks of a disciple called Hermes, or Mercurius; and had another named Dionysius, or Bacchus. Dr. Geddes and others object to the existence of St. Almnachius, St. George, St. Wenefred, &c., but we shall find their honor supported in this work by irrefregable authorities. Longinus not only signifies a spear, but was a Roman name, and that of a soldier and martyr, on the 15th of March: whether he be the person who opened the side of Christ with a spear or no, is a point of less importance. Mr. Addison and Dr. Middleton thought they had hit on a great discovery when they transformed Mount Soracte into St. Orestes. But that mountain is commonly called, not St. Orestes, but San Sylvestro, together with the monastery on its summit. Moreover, we find both in the Roman Martyrology and Greek Menæa two saints of the name of Orestes recorded, the one on the 9th of November, the other on the 19th of December, who both suffered under Dioclesian, one in Armenia, the other in Cappadocia. The latter is also named by St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his oration on St. Basil. If, by slips of copiers, mistakes have happened to some names, of accidental circumstances; or if certain private persons should be convicted of having been any time deceived in some saint, this would not affect the credit of authentic general Martyrologies. 5. Mrs. Dacier, Mr. Rowe. 6. This made Theodorus Gaza say, that if learning must suffer a general shipwreck, and he had only his choice left him of preserving one author, Plutarch should be the man. 7. With this fault the famous king of Prussia, who is perfectly acquainted with the affairs of the North, charged the florid author of the history of Charles XII. of Sweden. Nor could this historian, as it is said, give any other answer to the complaint of the Hamburghers, that he had notoriously slandered them with regard to their conduct towards the citizens of Altena, than that his fiction was plausible and ingenious, founded in their mutual jealousy, according to the maxim of dramatic writers, Feign with probability. Of this cast, indeed, though we have many modern examples, we know, perhaps, none among the authors of antiquity. 8. Thirty thousand various readings were found by Mr. Mills in the Greek New Testament; Dr. Bentley reckoned twenty thousand in Terence, and twice as many as there are verses in the poet Manilius. Even the most valuable Vatican and Alexandrian manuscripts of the Bible abound in faults of the copiers; and editions of works made from single manuscripts are always very defective.—witness those of Cornelius Nepos, and the Greek Hesychius. Patrick Young, (called in Latin, Patricius Junius,) when keeper of the king's library at London, scrupled not to erase and alter several words in the most valuable Alexandrian Greek manuscript copy of the Bible, as is visible to this day. What wonder, then, (how intolerable such liberties are,) if the like has been sometimes done by others in books of less note, with a presumption like that of Dr. Bentley in his amendments of Horace. 9. Prelim Dissert. on St. Matthew. 10. Sine probabilibus autoribus, Conc. t. 7, 954. 11. Can. 62. 12. Règies de la Critique, t. 2, p. 12, 20, et Diss. 3, p. 134. 13. See Mabillon, Disquis. de Cursu Gallic. §1. 14. Tert. l. de Bapt. c. 17. 15. Catal. Vir Illustr. c. 7. 16. See Nat. Alexander, Collet, Henno, &c., in Decalogum de Mendacio. 17. Grot. l. de Antichr. t. 3, Op. Theolog. 18. Gerson, ep. ad Morel. 19. De Loc. Theol. l. 11, c. 5. 20. Diplomat. l. 3, c. 3. 21. Coutant, Vindic. veter. Cod. Confirm. p. 32, 550, &c. 22. Diplom. t. 4, p. 452, &c. 23. Gurdon, Hist. of Parliament, t. 1. 24. Pref. to Notitia Monastica, in folio. 25. Dissert. 3, de Antiq. Acad. 26. How easy was the mistake of a copyist or bookseller, who ascribed the works of some modern Austin to the great doctor of that name? or who, finding several sermons of St. Cæsarius annexed in the same copy to those of St. Austin, imagined them all to belong to one title? Several disciples published, under the names of St. Austin, St. Gregory, or St. Zeno, sermons or comments which they had heard from their mouths: by the same means we have three different editions of the confession of St. Ephrem. We have already seen many works falsely published under the name of Boerhaave, which never came from his pen; as, The Method of Studying Physic, Materia Medica, Praxis Medica, and a spurious edition of his Chemistry, which seem all to come from the pens of his scholars. 27. Among the compilers of the lives of saints, some wanted the discernment of criticism. Simeon Metaphrastes, patrician, first secretary and chancellor to the emperors Leo the Wise, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in 912, (of whose collection one hundred and twenty-two lives are still extant,) sometimes altered the style of his authors where it appeared flat or barbarous, and sometimes inserted later additions and interpolations, often not sufficiently warranted, though not by him forged; for Psellus, in his panegyric, furnishes us with many proofs of his piety. See Cave, (Hist. Litér. t. 2, p. 88,) who, with other judicious critics, entertains a much more favorable opinion of Metaphrastes than Baillet. See Metaphrastes vindicated by Leo Allatius. (Diatr. de Nilis, p. 24.) James de Voragine, of the order of St. Dominick, and archbishop of Genoa, author of the Golden Legend, in 1290, wrote still with less judgment, and, in imitation of Livy, often made the martyrs speak his own language. Lippoman, bishop of Verona in 1550, and Laurence Surius, a Carthusian monk of Cologne in 1570, sometimes wanted the necessary helps for discernment in the choice of materials. The same is to be said of Ribadeneira, except in the lives of saints who lived near his own time, though a person otherwise well qualified for a writer of sacred biography. Several who have augmented his works in France, Spain, or Italy, labored under the same misfortune and often gathered together whatever the drag-net of time had amassed. John Capgrave, an Austin friar, some time confessor to the duke of Gloucester, who died at Lynn in Norfolk, in 1484, compiled the legend of the saints of England, from a more ancient collection, the Sanctilogium of John of Tinmouth, a monk of St. Alban's, in 1366, of which a very fair manuscript copy was, before the last fire, extant in the Cottonian library. By the melting of the glue and warping of the leaves, this book is no longer legible unless some such method be used as that which is employed in unfolding the parched and mouldering manuscripts found in the ruins of Herculaneum.
On the other hand, some French critics in sacred biography have tinctured their works with a false and pernicious leaven, and, under the name of criticism, established skepticism.
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CONTENTS.
JANUARY.
1.
THE Circumcision of our Lord………………… 59
St. Fulgentius, Bishop and Confessor…………. 63
St. Odilo, or Olon, Sixth Abbot of Cluni……… 69
St. Almachus, or Telemachus, Martyr………….. 71
St. Eugendus, Abbot………………………… 71
St. Fanchea, or Faine, Virgin, of Ireland…….. 72
St. Mochua, or Moncain, alias Claunus, Abbot
in Ireland………………………………. 72
St. Mochua, alias Cronan, of Bella, Abbot in
Ireland…………………………………. 72