Lazarus

ON ST. LAZARUS, BISHOP OF MILAN

ABOUT THE YEAR 449.

HISTORICAL COMMENTARY.

Lazarus, Bishop of Milan (St.)

By G. H.

I. The time of the See of St. Lazarus. The infestation of the Goths. The epigram of St. Ennodius.

[1] Concerning St. Lazarus, whom some call Lazarius, scarcely anything has been handed down by the ancients in writing, apart from some couplets of St. Ennodius, Bishop of Pavia, who at the beginning of the sixth century, among other poems, St. Lazarus is reckoned among the Saints by St. Ennodius celebrated the praises of twelve Bishops of Milan in as many epigrams, and indeed in the order in which they held that See, from St. Ambrose to Theodorus. It is worthwhile to set forth the titles of each, from which glory accrues to St. Lazarus. They are as follows: On the life and deeds of St. Ambrose the Bishop. On St. Simplicianus, Bishop, his successor. On the blessed Venerius who followed. On the succession of the venerable Marolus. On Martinianus, Bishop, worshiper of God. On the venerable Glycerius the Bishop. On St. Lazarus the Bishop. On Eusebius, Bishop, friend of God. On Gerontius the Bishop. On the venerable Benignus the Bishop. On the most blessed Senator the Bishop. On Lord Theodorus, Bishop of all virtues. Thus there. And although all of these were conspicuous for such holiness of life that, with the exception of the last, Theodorus, the rest are not only celebrated by their own Milanese with an annual solemnity, but are also inscribed in the tables of the Roman Martyrology; yet that title of Saint is attributed by Ennodius only to Ambrose, Simplicianus, honored with an epigram and Lazarus: so that these appear to have excelled the rest in the reputation of sanctity. Concerning St. Lazarus, St. Ennodius sings thus in epigram 83:

Lazarus, that he might tread underfoot the summits of the cruel world, Called by heavenly voices, came forth stern into the midst. Whose countenance, seldom joyful, had marked him as the enemy of vices, Chastising faults with silent eyes. Looking upon the lapses of men, he wiped away the clouds of life: Often he gave the care of obedient service to every wound. He did not lie hidden, who performed his deeds in covered grottoes: Absent from crimes, he was everywhere a tormentor of them. For the innocent he bloomed serene with tranquil light, As a mirror casting his face against offenses.

[2] Nearly all who treat of the Bishops of his Church write that he presided over the Church of Milan for eleven years: he presided over the Church of Milan for 11 years Donatus Bossius in the Chronicle of Milan printed at Milan in the year 1492; Joannes de Deis on the successors of St. Barnabas in the Church of Milan from Vatican and Sirletian manuscripts; Petrus Galesinius in the Table of Archbishops of Milan, afterwards inserted in the Synodal Acts of St. Charles Borromeo; Franciscus Besutius in the Pontifical History of Milan; the proper Lessons of the Ambrosian Breviary published by the command of St. Charles in the year 1582 and frequently reprinted, as also the same Lessons in the proper Offices for the use of those who in that diocese use the Roman Breviary; Ferrarius in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy for the eleventh of February; Onuphrius Panvinius in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle; Josephus Ripamontius in book 6 of the Histories of the Church of Milan, whose words are these: On the Ides of April he left the Church of Milan bereft by his death, in the sixtieth year of his life and the eleventh of his pastoral watch. Others vary these numbers, extending the span of his life further but contracting the period of his pontificate. But I was not one to rashly abrogate the credibility of the most ancient writers, who adduce the testimony of Datius on this matter. Thus Ripamontius. We have treated of St. Datius on the fourteenth of January, and said that he presided from about the year 530 to the year 552, and that it is handed down that he wrote a History of his own time and the lives of his predecessors, the Bishops of Milan. Claudius Robertus, on the Archbishops of Milan in the appendix to Gallia Christiana, assigns fifteen years to the See of St. Lazarus, citing the Acts of the Church of Milan: but since in these only eleven years are recorded, we believe a typographical error to have crept in there.

[3] But there is a greater discrepancy among the authors assigning these eleven years of his episcopate to the era of Christ. St. Lazarus was not ordained in the year 449 Bossius asserts that he was made Bishop in the year of our Lord four hundred and forty-nine, and that the blessed Eusebius succeeded him in the year 461. In favor of this opinion of Bossius are the things related concerning St. Lazarus in the Milanese Breviary with these words: Attila, King of the Goths, was devastating Italy most savagely when Lazarus, nor did Attila devastate Milan during his episcopate a citizen of Milan, was made Bishop from the position of Primicerius of this Church. He held that pastoral office for eleven years, during which time he endured all examples of barbarous violence: yet he never relaxed his spirit from any pastoral care, constantly imploring the help of the divine majesty to come to the aid of himself and his people. Thus there. But Attila was not King of the Goths but of the Huns, who, snatched beyond expectation from the battle joined against the Gauls on the Catalaunian plains in the year 451, poured his army into Italy, and having captured and razed Aquileia to the ground, devastated Milan, Pavia, and other towns: but as he advanced upon Rome, moved by the embassy of Pope St. Leo, he withdrew from Italy to Pannonia in the year 452. At which time the blessed Eugenius, or rather Eusebius, the successor of St. Lazarus, was governing the see of the city of Milan, as Leander Albertus writes in his description of Italy under Transpadane Lombardy: but under his successor St. Eusebius which is more certainly established from the epistles of Pope St. Leo and of St. Eusebius. Leo sent to Constantinople his fellow Bishops Abundius and Asterius, and the Priests Basilius and Senator, through whom the Emperor Theodosius might graciously recognize the form of his faith, as the epistle 33 addressed to him on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of August indicates, who from the Synod held in the year 451 wrote to Pope St. Leo under the consuls Valentinian VII and Abienus, that is, the year 450: in which year and month the Emperor Theodosius died on the fourth day before the Kalends of August: and Marcian received the empire, so willing St. Pulcheria Augusta, to whom Pope Leo had also written and commended the envoys. When the Legates returned from Constantinople to Rome in the year 451, Pope St. Leo thanked the Emperor for the services he had diligently rendered on behalf of the Catholic faith, in a letter dated the seventh (some say the fifth) day before the Ides of June, under the consul Adelphius, in which he recalls the return of the Legates. Among these was St. Abundius, Bishop of Como, of whom the Roman Martyrology treats on the second of April, who together with Senator the Priest was soon sent to St. Eusebius, Bishop of Milan, with letters from the same St. Leo: by whose command he convoked the Bishops subject to the Church of Milan, and convened a provincial Synod, and by a letter sent back to St. Leo, he consented and subscribed, together with other Bishops, to the assertion of his faith, which he had directed to the East: the opening of which letter is this: To the Lord, the holy and most blessed Father Leo, Eusebius, Bishop of Milan. With the return, by the Lord's grace, of our brethren, whom the solicitous and provident beatitude of your Holiness had directed to the East for the cause of the faith, and having read through the letters which your Holiness had dispatched through them, I was relieved with all exultation in Christ ... reviewing the epistle of your Blessedness in the council of the Priests of the Lord, which the holy brother and our fellow Bishop Abundantius and my fellow Priest Senator had brought. These matters will be related more fully in the Life of St. Eusebius on the twelfth of August and of St. Abundius on the second of April, where Baronius notes that by a copyist's error Abundantius was written in this epistle in place of Abundius. Pope St. Leo held office from the eighteenth of May in the year 440 to the year 461, and is venerated on the eleventh of April.

[4] According to the account published from manuscripts by Joannes de Deis, Lazarus was made Bishop before the time of Pope St. Leo: which is narrated as follows, St. Lazarus was ordained before the year 440, or the pontificate of St. Leo though not without errors: Lazarus, son of Lazarus, a citizen (read: son of Lazarus, a Milanese citizen), was placed over the Church of Milan by Sixtus III at the time when Attila, King of the Goths, invaded Italy: he was afflicted with many troubles by the Goths themselves ... Having presided over that Church for eleven years, illustrious for the praise of a most holy life, he fell asleep in the Lord under Pope Leo I. St. Sixtus, or Xystus III, presided over the Church from the year 432 to the twenty-eighth of March of the year 440: from whose death to the time when Italy was devastated by Attila, nearly twelve years intervene. Hence the name of Attila has been better removed in the table of Archbishops included among the Synodal Acts, where the following is read: St. Lazarus, he lived amid the barbarity of the Goths son of Lazarus, Boccardius, created Primicerius of the Church of Milan by Glycerius, after his death Archbishop, amid the utmost barbarity of the Goths, piously governed the Clergy and people committed to him ... He rested in the Lord on the day before the Ides of March under Pope Leo I: he sat for eleven years. This barbarity of the Goths began in the year of Christ 410, when the city of Rome was overwhelmed like a whirlwind by Ataulf, King of the Goths, who received from the Emperor Honorius, so that he would withdraw from Italy with his Goths, settlements in Gallia Narbonensis in the year 412. To his successor Wallia, Aquitania II and Toulouse were given in the year 419, and the seat of the Gothic kingdom was established. Wallia's successor Theoderic, not content with the Aquitanian kingdom, first attempted to besiege Arles, then Narbonne; from the former siege he was repelled by Aetius, from the latter by Count Litorius. But Litorius, while striving to surpass the glory of Aetius, perhaps under Theoderic, King of the Visigoths? fighting rashly with Theoderic, suffered a great defeat, was captured and killed, under the consuls Theodosius XVII and Festus, as Prosper attests in his Chronicle, that is, in the year 439. Theoderic, at last having made peace with the Romans, fell fighting against Attila on the Catalaunian plains. What the condition of the city of Milan was in those times, Ripamontius depicts thus: Now the remnants of the barbarians were giving Italy some room to breathe, having lost their leader, then having changed him, with their forces diminished, and ravaging more in the manner of bandits than of just war. Yet there remained in the cities that savagery and barbarity which a most ferocious people could have introduced by commerce and intercourse of so many years. In that disturbance and flood of affairs, a native pastor was given to the Milanese people, Lazarus. That office, which otherwise had almost always been sought by great men on account of the greatness of the affairs and the Church, zealous and solicitous for the salvation of his people now every most prudent man was fleeing: because there was no room for action, and the brutalized character of the citizens eliminated every method of governance. Nor was Lazarus slower in spirit than the rest in weighing matters according to their importance: but amid the common fear his solicitude was greater, and although one must either languish amid the tumults and dissensions, or perish by dissensions and tumults, yet the care and safety of the citizens were in his eyes. And so, being called, he took up the Church eagerly, with a better outcome than he had hoped. Thus Ripamontius, without any designation of a precise time.

[5] Onuphrius Panvinius in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle for the year 426 says: Lazarus, not appointed in the year 426 a citizen and the nineteenth Bishop of Milan, eleven years. Then for the year 437 he records this: Eusebius, a citizen and the twentieth Bishop of Milan, twenty-seven years. nor did he die in the year 437 Besutius, borrowing these years from Onuphrius, from the Milanese Breviary and the account of Joannes de Deis, attaches King Attila of the Goths to the pontificate of St. Leo I, under whom he reports that he died: as if all those things were confined within the years 426 and 437, which are sufficiently refuted by what has been said above. Ferrarius in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy writes that St. Lazarus governed the Church of Milan most holily amid the greatest barbarity of the Goths, that he was afflicted with many calamities, and that, having sat for eleven years, he fell asleep in the Lord on the day before the Ides of March under Pope Leo I, about the year of salvation 449 (which by an inverted number was incorrectly printed as 494). Thus Ferrarius: which we do not disapprove. but rather in the year 449 Certainly this year of his death is the one which Donatus Bossius erroneously attributed to his ordination. But he appears to have been elected Bishop about the year 437 or the following, at which time Onuphrius and Besutius place his departure from life. His predecessors were Saints Martinianus and Glycerius: the former we celebrated on the second of January, and said that he died not improbably about the year 431; we shall treat of the latter on the twentieth of September. Since King Theoderic won a victory over Litorius and the Roman army in the year 439, it may be believed that St. Lazarus, especially at the beginning of his episcopate, experienced the fury of the Goths under the said Theoderic the Visigoth: whom later generations appear to have believed to be the same as the most celebrated Theoderic, King of the Ostrogoths, who, having killed King Odoacer, reigned in Italy from the year 493 and occupied the province of Marseilles and the Maritime Alps after defeating Alaric, King of the Visigoths, through Clovis. When they then noticed that this Theoderic had lived long after St. Lazarus, having struck out the name of Theoderic, they ascribed Attila, by whom Milan had previously been devastated, confusing the Huns with the Goths as if they were one and the same people. By this reckoning, therefore, St. Lazarus was placed over the Church of Milan by Pope St. Sixtus III, afflicted with many troubles by the Goths and their King Theoderic, and fell asleep in peace under Pope St. Leo I, about the year of Christ 449.

II. The three-day Litanies instituted by St. Lazarus. A monastery built. His veneration.

[6] The first work of the new pontificate, says Ripamontius concerning St. Lazarus, was the supplications which are held annually at the principal churches of the city for three days. He instituted three-day Litanies It is worth knowing the origins of this ceremony, its complete description and arrangement. And he then describes Vienna, a city of Germany on the Danube, now the seat of the Emperors, as if St. Mamertus had lived there, who was Bishop of the Viennese in Gaul and flourished somewhat later than St. Lazarus, about the years 460 and 470, as we said on the fifth of February in the Life of St. Avitus, also Bishop of Vienne, section 1: and we shall prove more fully on the eleventh of May, the feast day of St. Mamertus. Meanwhile, according to Ripamontius, St. Lazarus, following the example of St. Mamertus, before St. Mamertus, Bishop of Vienne when he saw that the entire city, through its monstrous vices and every kind of foulness and turbulence, resembled an assembly of demons, and that the minds of mortals were almost possessed by furies and curses, employed a similar plan in a different situation, and prescribed this formula for propitiating God, which we call by the Greek name Litany. That is, that the Deity, implored by the prayers of a few, could exert its power to heal the minds of all, and that by the mercy of divine goodness and by a hidden impulse, the Milanese

people might be brought back to their ancient institutions and discipline. The clergy went about the churches, and the salutary rite continues to this day. Thus Ripamontius, who extends the manner of this prayer, as he asserts it was described by Lazarus himself, over several pages, and then adds: These prayers and these churches and their arrangement Lazarus described in this manner for the Clergy and people of Milan, he prescribed the form of the supplications and he took care that the complete formula, transcribed into many copies so that it might be ready at hand for as many as possible, should be distributed among the colleges and orders, and also through the neighborhoods and districts. Afterwards Archbishop Stephanus Nardinus (who flourished about the year 1470), when the manuscript codex was now yielding to age from the erosion of the characters, afterwards by Stephanus Nardinus and was found exceedingly rarely, restored it to piety and posterity in printed form, such as we now have. Thus he, who, after relating how the custom of these same supplications was renewed and confirmed by St. Charles Borromeo, and renewed by St. Charles Borromeo subjoins: I have related the origin of the supplications as begun by Mamertus of Vienne, received by Lazarus of Milan, ennobled and restored by Nardinus and Borromeo, in this manner. However, I am not unaware that some dissent and refer the beginnings of this custom to Lazarus himself. And rightly so, since St. Lazarus departed this life before St. Mamertus was ordained Bishop of Vienne: nor do we follow with Ripamontius the common report which many embrace, but rather that which, upon careful examination of the matter, reason compels us to embrace. Other writers recall these same supplications, concerning which the following is related in the Milanese Breviary: He instituted three-day Litanies, which are celebrated annually among the rites of this Church. Since they were instituted especially to repel the assault of the barbarians, frequent mention is therefore made there of guarding the walls and gates of the city against hostile attacks.

[7] Joannes de Deis reports from manuscripts that St. Lazarus was the first of all the Archbishops to assign a monastery in the city of Milan to the disciples of the blessed Augustine. These matters are narrated by Ripamontius as follows: he builds a monastery for the disciples of St. Augustine Lazarus was not only a restorer of ceremonies, but also a master of stricter discipline and almost a second founder of the Augustinian Order. That order had begun to totter and gradually to relax the most holy institutions of its Father: and it was more the case that the Brethren daily adopted something from popular luxury than that they themselves imparted anything salutary or fruitful to the people. Therefore he went to meet the growing evil, and first indeed assigned them a church which they might frequent with psalmody and the rest of divine worship, then established a domicile, so that they might live not dispersed and wandering but gathered into one seat, where now the most ancient church of the Crowned Virgin stands. Besutius also treats of the same reformed order, and traces its origin among the Milanese to St. Simplicianus, a familiar of St. Augustine, of whom we shall treat on the sixteenth of August. Gabriel Pennottus in the History of the Order of Canons, part 2, chapter 26, enumerates various monasteries also built at Milan according to the rule of St. Augustine. Thomas Herrera in the Augustinian Alphabet, page 103, asserts that it is not established whether the Augustinian institution, whatever it may have been, continued in that monastery until recent times; or rather, which is more credible, that it faded with the passage of time and flourished again in another age under the Brethren of the same religious order. Whatever the case, we must treat below of the monastery of the Incoronata. Where on page 126 he says that the Milanese monastery of the Order of Hermit Friars of St. Augustine was built from the foundations in the year 1448 outside the Porta Cumana, at Santa Maria Incoronata, with a church dedicated to St. Nicholas of Tolentino.

[8] Ripamontius reports that St. Lazarus departed from life to the rewards of his labors on the Ides of April, which we do not read in other authors, he died not on 13 April, but on 14 March who record that he fell asleep in the Lord on the day before the Ides of March. So Galesinius in the Table of Archbishops afterwards inserted in the Synodal Acts, and in his Martyrology for that day, says: At Milan, St. Lazarus, Bishop and Confessor, who presided over the Church of Milan for eleven years, illustrious for the praise of a most holy life. On the same fourteenth of March he is also recorded by Ferrarius in the general Catalogue of Saints and the Catalogue of Saints of Italy. Joannes de Deis asserts that his feast is celebrated by the Church of Milan on the day before the Ides of March, in the reading of the Martyrology perhaps, but not with an Ecclesiastical Office, since no feasts of Saints are celebrated in the Church of Milan during Lent. Hence the feast day of St. Lazarus with solemn worship is observed in that Church on the eleventh of February, with an office taken from the Common of Confessor Bishops with a proper reading from his deeds. he is venerated on 11 February On the same eleventh of February he is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology with these words: At Milan, St. Lazarus, Bishop. Ferrarius celebrates him with a more extended eulogy, in which, however, nothing beyond what has already been said is contained.

[9] The deeds reported in the Milanese Breviary relate that the body of St. Lazarus was honorably buried in the Basilica of the Apostles, as also Galesinius in the Table of Archbishops. buried in the Church of the Apostles, now of St. Nazarius Besutius adds that this Basilica of the Apostles was afterwards dedicated to St. Nazarius: and so Bossius is rightly understood when he records that his body lies at St. Nazarius. Joannes de Deis writes that he was placed beside his Fathers, namely Martinianus and Glycerius, who were likewise Archbishops. Of these, however, St. Martinianus is recorded as buried in the Basilica of St. Stephen the Protomartyr: while St. Glycerius was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles.