ON SAINT ISAAC THE ABBOT
at Spoleto in Umbria.
ABOUT A.D. 550.
PrefaceIsaac, Abbot, at Spoleto in Umbria (Saint)
BY D. P.
On February 3 we treated of a double class of Saints coming as strangers from Syria into Italy, confused in names and persons, although the times of each are very distant; since the first are said to have come under Diocletian and Maximian, while the latter are known to have flourished in the sixth century of the Christian era. Brought from Syria about the year 500 Of these Saint Laurentius the Illuminator was one, believed by most to have been Bishop of Spoleto, then of Sabina, and at last, having laid aside the mitre, the founder of the monastery of Farfa in Umbria. The writers cited on the said day in February at the Life of Saint Laurentius, and also in the Addenda to the same, will have Isaac, of whom we now undertake to treat, to have been the nephew of Saint Laurentius and his successor for some years in the government of the monastery of Farfa: which things, sufficiently treated there, since we cannot weaken or confirm them by any new argument, it is not fitting to repeat here; much less to weigh anew the chronology of the Life of Saint Isaac, established by Gregory of Rome, Abbot of Saint Matthew, in the manuscript Annals of the Monastery of Farfa; He lived in Umbria until about the year 550 because it is there sufficiently shown, that by no verisimilitude can such an age be given to Isaac that he should have prolonged his life to 178 years. We only say that the same opinion that was then, now also abides with us, and that the earlier times of the Goths, in which Gregory the Great in book 3 of the Dialogues, chapter 14, testifies that Isaac lived near Spoleto, must be taken from the established Kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy at the end of the fifth century; but that the last times of the same Goths, to which he says he came, refer to the aforesaid kingdom, extinguished by Narses in the year 554: which our opinion Jean Mabillon also embraced in the first Benedictine century.
[2] The Acts of Saint Isaac existed, written in the Legendary of the Church of Spoleto, Acts in the Spoleto Legendary which was divided into several volumes and is often cited by Jacobilli and the writers of Spoleto; now all the citizens of Spoleto who love the antiquities of their native land grieve that it has been lost. The most erudite of these, Bernardino Campello, when consulted by us by letter on this matter, replied to us as we were at Rome on 10 September 1661: "Would that with the volumes of the aforesaid Legendary nothing else had been lost besides the deeds of Saint Isaac, received from the book of Dialogues of Saint Gregory for it would have been a light loss, since from the Gregorian prototype his Acts are had not only whole, but needing the testimony of no other." We indeed believe that only those things were there written which Saint Gregory recounts in the cited book and chapter, and which Peter de Natalibus in his Catalogue, book 5, chapter 84, and Surius on this day, drew from it; and the aforesaid Mabillon: but these should also suffice us in this place, as most worthy of every acceptance. Yet we shall first weigh what Jacobilli has in volume 1 On the Saints of Umbria concerning the monastery founded by Isaac; and then in the manner of an Appendix we shall add what remains to be said about the writings attributed to this Saint and about his cult.
[3] Ordered by the Mother of God to send disciples to Monte Luco Adjacent to the city of Spoleto (as we ourselves have seen from the upper citadel) is a mountain of equal or greater height than the citadel, dense and shady with trees, and thence has received its name, so that it is called Mons-Luci, commonly Monte-Luco. On this, in the first years of the sixth century, Isaac, a hermit of known Spoletan sanctity, was leading a solitary life: "to whom," says Jacobilli, "one night the Virgin Mother of God appearing ordered him to build a monastery in that place, in which those should be received and clothed in monastic habit who by divine instinct should flock thither to be formed in his disciplines. The Divine one promised that the expenses should be provided by a certain virgin of Spoleto." This was Gregoria, who by Saint Isaac in his resolution
of consecrating her virginity to God assisted, conferred on him for the aforesaid purpose the ownership of that mountain. The same author adds: "And some villages and services of animals, as may be read in the manuscript Register of the Abbey of Saint Julian, today called Saint Ansanus." He seems to have founded not a cenobium but a laura But because this conflicts with the very words of Saint Gregory to be read in no. 3, we prefer to believe that if any such thing was conferred on the Brothers by Gregoria, it was accepted by them after the death of Saint Isaac. That their discipline was from the beginning cenobitic, to which with the succession of time the Rule of Saint Benedict was added, the same Jacobilli holds: to us it is far more probable that those twelve cells, which to this day are seen on the aforesaid mountain and are inhabited by hermits, are the remains and signs, not of a cenobium but of a Laura, collected there by Saint Isaac on the model of the Lauras in Palestinian Syria; and that these hermits themselves are the true and first successors of Saint Isaac: who individually now each have his own oratory, garden, and cell, and are subject to one Priest from their number, to whom at fixed hours they come daily for the sake of the sacred rites and spiritual conferences.
[4] Of which the remains still exist as the Hermitage of Saint Mary There is in Gabriel Pennotti, book 3, chapter 35, a long diploma of Urban III, by which he confirms to the Abbot of the monastery of Saint Julian of the Mountain of Spoleto, and his Brothers and successors, their most ample possessions and rights, and among these he enumerates "the Hermitage of Saint Mary of Monte-Luco with its appurtenances, and in the city of Spoleto the monastery of Saint Isaac with its chapels and appurtenances." If we should say that this was the Hermitage which Saint Isaac and his disciples successively inhabited, we shall seem to have followed the greater verisimilitude; although Jacobilli makes Isaac the founder of the Saint Julian monastery itself, by no other argument that the monastery of Saint Julian was added afterwards than that it was afterwards better known through its celebrity. We suspect that Urban's monastery is more recent by not a few years, and perhaps by not one century, than the hermitage itself, but that the church of Saint Isaac was first erected in the city having been founded, namely, in honor of the holy body, which the citizens of Spoleto did not wish to keep longer in the poor hermitage, if they did not rather take it to themselves immediately after his death, because of his fame of holiness and the multitude of miracles. But all this we think came into oblivion after that most ample monastery of Saint Julian was founded on Monte Luco for the monks of the Benedictine institute, and by its celebrity obscured earlier and more ancient places; whence it came about that the monks of Saint Julian, eager for greater antiquity, preferred to seek its beginnings from Saint Isaac, and to ascribe him to their own Order. Which because it could not be proved by Mabillon, he omitted in the index to add to the name of Isaac the asterisk by which he distinguished the genuine disciples of Saint Benedict from those added later.
[5] Perhaps also from the urban monastery of Saint Isaac which we mentioned, increased with possessions, the first inhabitants were brought to the mountain monastery of Saint Julian; of Saints Isaac and Giles and in the same urban monastery, not in the mountain one, the first Abbot was Saint Giles (Aegidius): under whose name (if however this is not that Saint Giles, known throughout all Europe for his celebrated cult through the Benedictine monasteries, some of whose relics had been brought here from Gaul) and under the name of Saint Isaac, Pope Honorius III in the year 1216 on the first day of September, as Jacobilli testifies, consecrated that urban church: which in the time of Urban III in the year 1185 was still called by the name of Saint Isaac alone; and now, from the relics of Saint Ansanus the Roman Martyr brought into it, it has obtained a name better known among the people; afterwards called of Saint Ansanus and with the Saint Julian monastery long since deserted, it preserves the dignity of an Abbey; nevertheless not under the Benedictine institute, but under that of the Canons Regular, to whom in the year 1502 (as the aforesaid Pennotti attests) the Saint Julian monastery was transferred by Alexander VI; and these within a few years after, at the request of the citizens, migrated to the church of Saint Ansanus. and transferred from the Benedictines to the Canons Regular Jacobilli is found to have written nothing in all the rest of his work On the Saints of Umbria about this Saint Giles (whom he makes the immediate successor of Saint Isaac), and about those who followed him: John, Ceccus, Andreuccio, Manno, William, Vannuccius, Lavarinus, Laurentius, Antimus, Balarinus (all of whom he also calls Blessed, and says were buried in the churches of Saints Julian and Ansanus); which would make them better known to us, or make more illustrious the place they governed: wherefore we also abstain from making further inquiry about them through conjectures.
LIFE
From book 3 of the Dialogues of Saint Gregory.
Isaac, Abbot, at Spoleto in Umbria (Saint)
BHL Number: 4475
[1] In the earlier times of the Goths there was near the city of Spoleto a man of venerable life, He helps Gregoria fleeing marriage by name Isaac, who lived until the last times of the Goths; whom many of our people knew, and especially the sacred virgin Gregoria, a who now dwells in this city of Rome beside the church of Blessed Mary ever virgin. She, when in the time of her adolescence, her marriage being already arranged, had fled to the church and was seeking the way of life of a holy woman, was defended by the same man, and by the Lord's protection brought to that habit which she desired: she, because she fled a bridegroom on earth, deserved to have a Bridegroom in heaven. Many things about the same man I have learned from the venerable Father b Eleutherius, who both knew him familiarly and gave credit to his words by his life.
[2] Praying for three days, he perseveres in the church This venerable Isaac, therefore, was not born from Italy, but I shall tell those miracles of his which, dwelling in Italy, he did. When he first came from the parts of Syria to the city of Spoleto, entering the c church, he asked of its keepers that as much liberty of praying as he wanted should be granted him, and that they should not urge him to go out at the more secret hours. He frees his striker from a demon Who presently stood for prayer, and spent the whole day in prayer, which he continued the following night. On the second day also, when he had remained unwearied in prayers through the following night, he joined the third day also to the prayer. When one of the keepers, puffed up with the spirit of pride, saw this, whence he ought to have profited, thence he came to loss by defect. For he began to call this man a hypocrite, and in rustic speech to cry out that he was an impostor, who showed himself praying before the eyes of men for three days and nights. Running forthwith, he struck the man of God with a slap, so that he might go out of the church with insult, as if he were a hypocrite of the religious life. But an avenging spirit suddenly invaded him and threw him at the feet of the man of God, and began to cry out through his mouth: "Isaac casts me out." For the foreign man, by what name he was called, was not known: but his name that spirit revealed, who cried out that he could be cast out by him. Immediately the man of God leaned over the body of the vexed man, and the malignant spirit that had invaded him departed.
[3] At once throughout the whole city what had happened in the church became known. Men and women, noble and ignoble, began to run together, and in rivalry tried to snatch him to their houses. He refuses offered possessions Some were willing to offer estates for building a monastery, others money, others whatever aid they could give to the man of God suppliantly. But the servant of the Almighty Lord, accepting none of these, going out of the city found a deserted place not far off, and built there a humble dwelling for himself. As many went to him, following his example, they began to be kindled with desire of eternal life, and under his teaching gave themselves to the service of the Almighty Lord. And when his disciples frequently humbly admonished him to accept for the use of the monastery the possessions that were offered, he, the solicitous guardian of his poverty, held a firm opinion, saying: "A monk who seeks possessions on earth is not a monk." For he feared thus to lose the security of his poverty as avaricious rich men are wont to guard their perishable riches. d
[4] Taught by the prophetic spirit, thieves about to come There, therefore, by the spirit of prophecy and great miracles his life became famous to all dwelling far and wide. For one day toward evening he caused iron tools to be thrown in the garden of the monastery, which by a common name we call e "vangas" (spades). He said to his disciples: "Throw so many vangas in the garden, and return quickly." But that very night, when he had risen as usual with the Brothers to offer praises to the Lord, he commanded, saying: "Go and cook a meal for our workmen, so that it may be ready early in the morning." When morning came, he had brought the meal which he had ordered to be prepared, and entering the garden with the Brothers, found as many workmen laboring in it as he had commanded vangas to be thrown. For thieves had entered, but with their mind changed by the spirit, they had seized the vangas which they found; and from the hour when they entered until the man of the Lord came to them, they had cultivated all the spaces of that garden that had been uncultivated. To whom the man of the Lord, as soon as he entered, said: "Rejoice, brothers, He prepares for them work and wages you have labored much; now rest." To whom he immediately offered the food which he had brought, and refreshed them after the fatigue of so much labor. When they had been sufficiently refreshed, he said: "Do not do evil: as often as you want something from the garden, come to the garden's entrance, ask quietly, receive with a blessing, and cease from the wickedness of theft." He then had them at once loaded with vegetables gathered: and it came to pass, that those who had come to the garden to do harm, with the reward of their labor, both filled by him and unharmed, returned.
[5] At another time certain pilgrims came to him, asking for mercy; He restores their own garments to those feigning nakedness clothed with torn rags, so that they almost seemed naked. When they asked garments of him, the man of the Lord silently heard their words; who silently at once called one of his disciples, and commanded him, saying: "Go, and in such and such a wood, in such and such a place, look for a hollow tree, and bring the garments you find in it." When the disciple had gone, he sought the tree, as he had been bidden, and found the garments, and secretly brought them to his master. These the man of God received, showed and gave to the naked and petitioning pilgrims, saying: "Come, because you are naked: behold, take and clothe yourselves." They, looking at these, recognized what they had laid there, and were dismayed with great shame: and those who had fraudulently been seeking others' garments, confounded, received their own.
[6] At another time a certain man, commending himself to his prayers, He reveals a hidden theft sent him by a boy two baskets full of food: one of which the boy himself took by stealth and hid on the road, but one he brought to the man of God, and related the petition of the one who by the present had commended himself to him. The man of the Lord kindly receiving it admonished the same boy, saying: "We give thanks; but see, the basket which you have placed on the road, do not incautiously presume to touch, because a serpent has entered into it. Be, therefore,
careful, lest if you should wish incautiously to take it, you be struck by the serpent." At which words the boy, greatly confused, rejoiced indeed that he had escaped death; but was made sad for a little while, because although he had escaped a salutary penalty, yet he bore his shame. Who, returning to the basket, cautiously and carefully looked; but a serpent, as the man of God had foretold, was already holding it. f Thus, although he was incomparably endowed with the virtue of abstinence, contempt of passing things, the spirit of prophecy, and intention in prayer, there was one thing in him which seemed reprehensible: because sometimes such joy was in him that, with so many virtues, unless it were known he was full of them, it would in no way be believed. g
ANNOTATIONS.
APPENDIX.
Isaac, Abbot, at Spoleto in Umbria (Saint)
BY D. P.
[7] Not only in examples of virtues and marks of miracles, but also in writings Isaac flourished: Sermons published under the name of this Isaac of which there is a notable monument, namely a volume of sixty-three different sermons, weighty in sentences, eloquent in words, on the perfection of contemplation, on the solitary life, on the order of the monastic life, afterwards printed at Venice in the year 1506. Thus Jacobilli, to whom, because the book itself is not at hand (giving more certain testimony perhaps of the age of its author through the Fathers who might be found cited), we assent not without fear: for Gesner asserts in his bibliotheca perhaps they are of Isaac of Antioch that the ascetic sermons of a certain Isaac exist in Greek in the Vatican at Rome, which he thinks are of that Presbyter of Antioch, whom, as having died under Leo and Marcian, Gennadius mentions in chapter 66 on Ecclesiastical Writers. We altogether believe that those Greek sermons are at least not of this Isaac of whom we treat; no probability shining forth either that himself, a Syrian, wrote in Greek in Umbria, or that anyone took care to make Greek the sermons written in Latin in the same place: but about those which are said to have been printed at Venice in Latin, we fear they are plainly of another, and that our Spoletan stranger was entirely unlettered.
[8] It is a very uncertain matter and full of danger of error, to define the author of any work from the name alone, which was common to very many. Other sermons, praised by Trithemius There is in the great Bibliotheca of the Fathers of Margarin Bigne, among the ascetic writings of the sixth century, one work with this beginning: "The soul which loves God"; with the title "One book of Saint Isaac the Presbyter of Antioch, On Contempt of the World," divided into 45 chapters. Of the same work, divided as it were into twelve books under as many different titles, Trithemius makes mention, and places the beginnings of the individual books, those words precisely which immediately follow the invocation of the most holy Trinity: which because it was the custom that such books be concluded, therefore it appears evident that the division is more genuine and more according to the mind of the author himself which Trithemius presents; and that he did very wrongly who preferred to write those twelve different books under one and the same title, very incongruous with their arguments. This work, although unknown to Gennadius, Trithemius, and Possevinus following Trithemius, did not doubt to attribute to that Antiochene, who flourished under Theodosius the Younger, although the style in no part has the taste of a Greek or Syrian origin. They are of neither of these Bigne on the contrary, in a little preface to the aforesaid work, says that he does not doubt that this holy Father Isaac "is he whom Gregory the Great asserts to have come from the parts of Syria to the city of Spoleto, relating about him moreover many things, and first (which renders the argument of this book as close as possible): that a monk who seeks possessions on earth is not a monk."
[9] but of a more recent Latin author We, reading it more attentively, first scarcely doubt but that some writer of the middle age, and indeed a Latin, was the author of the aforesaid work: who in chapter 17 names "the Religious and the Idiots" in more than one place, in a meaning proper only to Latin writers: and the words cited at the beginning of chapter 3 from Gregory, "It is good to deliver Theology for God's sake, but it is better that one should cleanse himself for God's sake"; if anyone could show to be of Gregory the Great, as they seem to be (for we have no leisure for this single investigation to turn over all the books of both Gregories, of Nyssa and of Rome), it would without doubt make our opinion certain, and at the same time prove that not only than that Antiochene Presbyter of whom above, who perhaps lived in the 10th century but also than our Isaac at Spoleto, the author of the book is younger. The same author, when he confirms his doctrine by examples taken from the book On the Sayings of the Holy Fathers, rendered into Latin by Pelagius and John the Deacons, and published among the books On the Lives of the Fathers by Rosweyde as the fifth, and specifically that which is chapter 19, about Abbot Saint Sisoes, his disciple, out of supreme simplicity or rather of continual elevation of mind abstracted from sensible things, asked whether he had eaten or not, which is in the said book §38; from this also a conjecture could be made of a much later age of the author, if it were more certain to us, than is certain, about the time when that book was rendered into Latin. For John, antonomastically known by the name of Deacon, flourished in the ninth century; but Pelagius we have not found, unless older than Gregory the Great himself.
[10] These things about uncertain matters may suffice: we pass to the cult, which at Spoleto was always constant, as the title of the monastery consecrated under his name so many centuries ago makes indubitable; and with equal certainty, if they survived, the Legendaria and Martyrologies of the Church of Spoleto would confirm. Among foreigners we have found his first mention in the Vallicelliana Library at Rome, in a Calendar prefixed to a MS of the works of Saint Isidore, of antiquity not to be contemned, in which on this 11 April was noted the name of Saint Isaac of Spoleto. Name of Isaac the Syrian in the calendars In the MS Florarium of Saints, not so ancient, is read, "Likewise of Isaac the monk and Confessor." To the Martyrology of Usuard, published at Cologne by the Carthusian Fathers in the year 1521, a long eulogy contrary to the custom is added in these words: "Of Isaac the monk and Confessor, who, as Saint Gregory reports, in the third book of Dialogues, chapter 14, coming from Syria to the city of Spoleto, having built a humble dwelling there, was incomparably endowed with the virtue of abstinence, the contempt of passing things, the spirit of prophecy, and intention in prayer. There was one thing reprehensible in him, that sometimes such joy was in him that he could not be believed to be full of those many virtues unless it were known." The same things word for word Molanus has in the additions alone of the year 1568; also among the Benedictines in others he does not even place his name. Following Molanus in the recognition of the Roman Martyrology, Baronius, Canisius in the German, Ferrari in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy, Wion, Menardus, and other Benedictines from the authority of Trithemius, ascribe Saint Isaac to the illustrious men of the Order of Saint Benedict, although he was contemporary with Saint Benedict himself, and perhaps older by not a few years.
[11] Cult at Spoleto Jacobilli writes that his feast is celebrated under the rite of a double in the city and diocese of Spoleto; but that the body is preserved in the aforementioned church of Saint Ansanus, formerly called by his name, above the high altar, in a marble ark, with this epigraph: "THE BONES OF ISAAC THE SYRIAN ARE HERE." But that on both sides on the wall these words may also be read: "RELICS OF THE SAINTS," this he interprets according to common opinion, to be a testimony that there are buried many disciples of Blessed Isaac. Moreover the cult of this Saint Isaac, I know not by what occasion, was propagated even into Germany: since in the Bamberg Breviary, which we have, printed in the year 1575, and at Bamberg there is found also on this day an Office to be performed of him with three Lessons, concerning the Life from the Dialogues of Saint Gregory, and with this proper Prayer: "Votive to us, O Lord, we beseech thee, may the Natal day of thy blessed Confessor Isaac always take us up, who may both pour into us the joy of his glorification, and render us acceptable to thee."