ON BLESSED GREGORY, ABBOT
OF NONANTOLA,
In Italy.
In the year 933.
CommentaryGregory, Abbot, of Nonantola (S.)
BY THE AUTHOR P. B.
Concerning the most celebrated monastery of Nonantola in the diocese of Modena, once of the Order of St. Benedict, now, from about the year 1513, Cistercian, we spoke in March, volume 1, page 265, where we treated of St. Anselm, its first abbot, whose Life too, not then yet received, The cult from the Martyrologies. we gave in the appendix of the same volume, page 900. This place too Gregory, the sixteenth abbot from Anselm, illustrated not a little by his own virtues; whom Wion thus reports in his sacred Fasti on this day: In the territory of Modena, in the monastery of Nonantola, the deposition of St. Gregory the abbot, renowned for holiness. He cites thereupon the Calendar of Nonantola, and a manuscript chronicle on parchment, which note his birthday on this day. Wion the other Martyrologists of the same Order follow, Dorganius, Menard, Bucelinus; nay, also Ferrarius, both in the general Catalogue, where he briefly commemorates him; and in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy, where he adorns him with a eulogy composed, as he notes below, from the monuments and Chronicle of the same monastery; which, he says, he administered with such prudence and holiness, that he was even renowned for miracles, etc. To the eulogy he subjoins this annotation: Whether he is celebrated in the ecclesiastical Office at Nonantola, is hitherto unknown to me. Yet we have seen him described in the tables of the abbots with the mark of holiness. Which observation indeed doubtless moved him constantly to ascribe the title of Saint to Gregory, which both before and after him the Benedictines whom I have just enumerated were wont to do. Yet I am mistaken, unless Mabillon, led by the same observation, preferred to call him Blessed rather than Saint in the Acts of the Saints of the Benedictine Order, century 5, page 114.
[2] But he there complains, and we with him, that he could obtain nothing of his Acts besides this, The Acts, so far as they are known: which in Ughelli, Italia Sacra, volume 5, among the bishops of Treviso, is read in an old, but faulty, catalogue of the abbots of Nonantola in these words: The sixteenth (after St. Anselm), Gregory the abbot, (was) nineteen years. He is ordained in the year of the Lord 914. He died on the III of the Nones of August. He left the abbacy, and went away to the little place of Solaria, and began to live there happily. And there succeeded in his place, the seventeenth, Ingelbert, the venerable levite, in the seventeenth year of his (Gregory's) ordination, in the year of the Lord 929: and when he had been ordained abbot, he was consecrated by lord
Peter, archbishop of Ravenna, on the V of the Kalends of April, in the 2nd indiction. And afterward in that same aforesaid little place of Solaria the aforementioned abbot Gregory dwelt three years, and six months, four days; and then returned to his monastery; and under the government of abbot Ingelbert lived most honorably. Afterward, the whole congregation of St. Sylvester (who was the tutelary patron of the abbey of Nonantola) standing by, he rendered his spirit to God in the year of the Lord 933, on the III of the Nones of August, in the 6th indiction. We have no other notice of him, except that he seems even to have besought Cosmas of Matera, a poet scarcely worthy enough of the iron age in which he is believed to have lived, to compose in verse the Acts of Sts. Theopompus and Synesius; which he then inscribed here to Gregory Ligo, a monk of Nonantola, that is, to ours (as Mabillon judges). See them, if you please, in Ughelli, Italia Sacra, of the old edition, volume 2, column 139.
[3] Observe, in the text above the chronology is not accurate enough, since the seventeenth year of Gregory's ordination is joined with the year of Christ 929: an anachronism in them corrected. for since this ordination, according to the same instrument, happened in the year 914, and indeed after the Kalends of October, on which Peter, Gregory's predecessor, ceased to live; his seventeenth year could not have begun before October of the year 930: there is therefore a manifest anachronism either in the year of ordination 914, or in the joining of his seventeenth year with 929. Wion saw this, I suppose, and, who follows him, Ferrarius; and both wished to emend it, by placing the ordination in the year 912. Not rightly: for first, thus the chronology of the preceding Peter is overturned, who, ordained in the year of the Lord 911, presided three years, three months, eleven days. Secondly, thus blessed Gregory cannot be said to have been abbot nineteen years; but either more or fewer: more, if his years be counted from his ordination up to his death (as they are openly counted in that Chronicle); but fewer, if they be computed from his ordination up to his withdrawal from office to the little place of Solaria. We judge, therefore, that the fault is in the year of ordination 17, and that 15 or 16 should be put back, both of which concur with the year of Christ 929; the former indeed up to October; and thence to the end the latter: and in this way all the other things which we have already said easily consist.