The Lives of the Saints, Volume II (of 16): February. Baring-Gould Sabine

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ pardon and all-prevailing intercession, and this she promised him. The following night she re-appeared, and assured him that Christ had forgiven him at her prayer. With a cry of joy he awoke; and on his breast lay the deed which had made over his soul to Satan, obtained from the evil one by the mercy of the holy Mother of God.

      The next day was Sunday. He rose, spent some time in acts of thanksgiving, and then went to church, where the divine liturgy was being celebrated. After the reading of the Gospel, he flung himself at the bishop's feet, and requested permission to make his confession in public. Then he related the circumstances of his fall, and showed the contract signed with his blood to the assembled multitude. Having finished his confession, he prostrated himself before the bishop, and asked for absolution. The deed was torn and burned before the people. He was reconciled, and received the blessed Sacrament; after which he returned to his house in a fever, and died at the expiration of three days. The story is probably a mere religious romance.

S. MODAN, AB(7TH CENT.)

      [Aberdeen Breviary: – from which almost all that is known of his life is gathered.]

      S. Modan was first monk, and then abbot of Mailros, in Scotland, and preached the faith in Stirling and at Falkirk. When old he retired among the mountains of Dumbarton, and there died. His body was kept till the change of religion, with honour, in the church of Rosneath.

B. HRABANUS MAURUS, B. C(A.D. 856.)

      [From his life by Rodolph the priest, monk of Fulda, d. 865; and various writers of a later period.]

      Rabanus, or Hrabanus Maurus, was one of the most illustrious writers of the 9th century. He was born at Mainz, in the year 788. When very young he was sent to the monastery of Fulda, where he was brought up. From thence he was sent to Tours, where he studied for some time under the famous Alcuin. He returned afterwards to Germany, into his monastery, where he was entrusted with the government of the novices, was afterwards ordained priest in the year 814, and at last chosen abbot of Fulda, in 822. After he had managed this charge twenty years, he voluntarily quitted it, to satisfy the monks, who complained that his studies so engrossed his time that the affairs of the monastery were neglected. He retired to Mount S. Peter, and was shortly after chosen archbishop of Mainz or Mayence, in the year 847. He held a council in the same year for the reformation of discipline; and died in 856.

      As a mystical interpreter to Holy Scripture, his commentaries will ever be read. He was a voluminous writer on various subjects, sacred and profane, and was certainly one of the most learned men of his day.

S. NICOLAS OF THE STUDIUM, C(A.D. 868.)

      [Greek Menæa for this day. Authorities: – Life by a contemporary monk in his monastery.]

      This glorious confessor was born in Crete, and was the son of pious parents, who educated him from earliest infancy in the fear of God. At the age of ten he was sent to Constantinople, to see his kinsman Theophanes. He found him a monk of the order of the Sleepless Ones,16 in the monastery called the Studium. He entered the same order, and fulfilled his monastic duties with regularity and devotion. Having set a brilliant example, he was deemed worthy to be invested with the priesthood. Then broke out the furious persecution of the Iconoclasts, about which a few words must be said in this place.17

      When God was made Man, He was put at once into the most intimate relation with men; and just as it is lawful for any son to have a portrait of his father or mother, so did it become lawful and reasonable that he should have a picture of that God-Man, who is dearer to him than father or mother. The picture served as a constant reminder, an evidence for the Incarnation. It is a sermon declaring God to be made Man. But the Arians, who denied the divinity of our Lord, were most hostile to sacred representations of Christ, and with reason, for these pictures were a testimony against them. At first the Arian attack on the foundation doctrine of the Incarnation was open. But, when the theological statement of that mystery was made so plain that there was no opposing it by counter statement, Arianism adopted other tactics, and appeared as Iconoclasm, or war against sacred pictures. He who disbelieved, or only coldly acquiesced in the Incarnation of God, saw that this chief corner-stone of Christianity could only be uprooted by chilling the ardour of Christian affection. And no better method of chilling that affection could be devised, than the obliteration of representations of Christ, His acts, His passion, and of His mother, and His Saints; then there was some prospect of religious acceptance of this dogma sinking into cold intellectual apprehension, and thence it could be dislodged without difficulty. After the reconciliation of large congregations of Gnostics and Arians with the Catholic Church, they maintained that icy worship which had preceded their separation, they adored God as a Spirit, but actually, though they had ceased to do so formally, overlooked His manhood. These reconciled bodies afforded a fund of passive prejudice and aversion of small account so long as Catholic princes were on the throne, but which, in the fortune of a soldier, might produce serious results to the Church.

      Of such adventurers, the most fortunate was the Emperor Leo III., who, from the mountains of Isauria, ascended to the throne of the East. He was ignorant of sacred and profane letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with a hatred of images; and he held it to be the duty of a prince to impose on his subjects the dictates of his own conscience. In the reformation of religion, his first steps were moderate and cautious; he assembled a great council of senators and bishops, and enacted, with their consent, that all the images should be removed from the sanctuary and altar to a proper height in the churches, where they might be visible to the eyes, and inaccessible to the devotion of the people. But it was impossible on either side to check the rapid though adverse impulses of veneration and abhorrence: in their lofty position, the sacred images still edified their votaries, and exasperated their enemies. He was himself provoked by resistance and invective; and his own party accused him of an imperfect discharge of his duty, and urged for his imitation the example of the Jewish king, who had broken without scruple the brazen serpent of the temple. By a second edict, he proscribed the existence, as well as the use of sacred pictures; images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, were demolished, or a smooth surface of plaster was spread over the walls of the edifice. The sect of the Iconoclasts was supported by the zeal and despotism of six emperors, and this topic involved the East and West in an angry conflict of one hundred and twenty years. It was the design of Leo the Isaurian to pronounce the condemnation of images as an article of faith, and by the authority of a General Council; but the convocation of such an assembly was reserved for his son Constantine Copronymus. This council was attended by three hundred and thirty-eight bishops of Europe and Anatolia, but not by those of the Western Church, African Church, or that of Palestine. It was, in fact, an assembly of those prelates who were weak enough to assist, fearing condemnation and exile if they did not submit, ambitious enough to follow the caprice of the reigning emperor, in hopes of emolument, and also of those who heartily concurred with his semi-Arianism. After a serious deliberation of six months, the prelates subscribed such a decree as the emperor desired, condemning all visible symbols of Christ,18 except the Eucharist, as blasphemous and heretical; and denouncing veneration for images as the idolatry of Paganism. "As if," says a Catholic writer of the time, "there were not this great difference between the Christian image and the heathen idol, that the latter is the thing worshipped, whereas the former is the representation of the person adored."

      The first hostilities of Leo had been directed against a lofty Christ on the vestibule, and above the gate, of the palace, placed there to exhibit to all men that the emperors had bowed before the King of kings. A ladder had been placed for the assault, but it was shaken by a crowd of women and zealots, and for their opposing the execution of the mandate, severe and savage reprisals were taken. The execution of the imperial mandates were resisted by frequent tumults in Constantinople and the provinces, which were quelled by the military, and much blood flowed.

      In the cruel persecution that ensued, the monks, ever the champions of the Incarnate God, suffered most severely. СКАЧАТЬ