ON S. DICENTIUS OR DIZANTIUS,
BISHOP OF SAINTES, AT ARDES IN AUVERGNE.
8TH CENT.
HISTORICAL COMMENTARY.
On the cult, the age, the acts from the Office proper to the place.
Dicentius or Dizantius, Bishop of Saintes, at Ardes in Auvergne (S.)
THE AUTHOR BEING D. P.
Ardusium, commonly Ardes, is a town between Clermont, the metropolis of Auvergne, and the Episcopal city of Saint-Flour, plainly midway on the road to the South, distant from both by an almost equal space of eight leagues. Here as Patron, Acts full of confusion, with a chief and proper cult through the whole Octave, is held S. Dicentius, by a more recent and more common usage, and one more apt to the form of the French idiom, Dizantius, wholly unknown to Saussay, the founder of the Gallican Martyrology. Jacobus Branche treats of him prolixly enough, in his work on the Saints of Auvergne, alleging manuscript Acts, which, however, he shows to be of no great credit, as being those which couple with the Emperor Hadrian Pope Linus II, a stranger to all ecclesiastical history, and with these Pippin, King of the Franks, father of Charlemagne, by a whole six hundred years younger than the Emperor Hadrian. Yet he desired to have those very ones, knowing how much it matters to read even fables at their source, for forming a judgment about narrations which have no other foundation, and yet present a greater appearance of truth, while the manifest indications of too patent fiction are absent.
[2] That he might make me possessed of this my desire, the Rector of our College of Clermont about the year 1691, Gabriël Brivazac, sent one of his subjects, who should treat with the Parish-priest, and studiously inquire into those Acts. thence transferred to the Lessons, But he found that they had long since perished, after, namely, the Lessons ceased to be sought thence for the Morning Office, a proper quaternion being printed for that end, in which is contained the whole Order to be observed through the Octave. But would that they had at least transmitted this entire! For of this, perhaps now also fallen out of use, he who had been sent brought back nothing else than the last two little pages, for the Office through the Octave and on the Octave day itself; in which for the latter three, for the former two Lessons are had; but three others for the feast itself, whence the narration takes its beginning, were described to me separately with their Responsories. I should believe that the Parish-priest either could not or would not lack an entire copy, composed for the proper Office, or thought it did not concern me, not considering that at least from it I should have had the year and author of the printing, and certain other things proper to that Office; such as is that which, in the little pages sent to me, remains from the second Vespers of the feast in this manner… O most blessed Confessor of the most clement Christ the Lord, Dizantius, let us humbly ask thee, forsake us not, but ever assist with the Lord as a pious intercessor for us, that by thy help we may deserve to come to the joys of eternal life. Then follows a PROSELLUS, a term not yet read by us elsewhere, the same perhaps as in the Roman use is called the Versicle, in this manner: a fragment of which is here given; We all, therefore, with humble heart beseech that thou, holy Father, wouldst kindly hear us; that thee, etc. The Prayer, "Be propitious," as above. At Compline, as at first Vespers. Meanwhile, because for the Octave day are assigned in the first Nocturn Lessons from the occurring Scripture: in the second Nocturn the IVth, Vth, VIth Lesson concerning the Saint, the rest as on the day; I understand that to this second Nocturn pertain the three Lessons which I received in manuscript; but that through the Octave the Office is not done except under one Nocturn: for the latter there is noted the Ist Lesson from the occurring Scripture; the IInd and IIIrd Lesson concerning the Saint.
[3] But the Lessons of the day itself are these: Dizantius, who among us is commonly, and in public records and old monuments, called Dicentius, was born at Saintes of noble parents, his father Dioscorus, his mother Marina. From his first years living by the laws of virtue, but they, as they are recited on the feast day, day and night he diligently devoted himself to prayer, from which he was not drawn away except by force; so that, pouring forth prayers, torn from his senses, lifted from the earth, and standing midway in the air, he contemplated divine things in heavenly love by a holy ecstasy. Although he led a life far from vices, yet he continually wore down his body by acts of penance: celebrating sacred fasts, he frequently held his flesh back from food; especially on those days on which, fed with the body and blood of Christ, he was fattened from God. The divine wisdom, which designated Dizantius a Bishop, perfected him in all the Episcopal numbers. Deep in his memory it stored him who set him over his city, his Bride, and his sheep: over the city, that he might watch for its guardianship and concord; over the Bride, that he might strive for her adornment; over the sheep, that he might attend to their pasturing: and that he might fulfill these by examples and doctrines, it made him illustrious with various endowments. Whence in him there flashed gravity with modesty, authority with simplicity, magnanimity without elation, amplitude of mind, celebrated fame, surpassing merit, unknown to himself alone for humility, but obvious and well known to all others. He profited not only his own diocesans; but all the Churches of the Gauls, to whose salvation Dizantius's salutary discourses were guides; which, though he uttered them in the vernacular tongue,
yet, when he treated of divine things, the peoples of all nations, even foreign ones, conceived and understood them in their minds. How much these pious works of Dizantius were acceptable to God, the miracles which he brought forth beyond the force of nature and plainly divinely bore witness. Lepers, taking of the remnant of his table and food, and those afflicted with various other diseases, were cured; those possessed and beset by demons were freed. The same was wrought by the water with which he washed, and by the touch of his hands and garments.
[4] Ulricus, Bishop of Saintes, having departed this life, the see was vacant for some time. An Ecclesiastical assembly was frequently held for the choosing of a Pastor, they narrate the Saint's promotion to the Episcopate but in vain, on account of the disagreement of the votes: until, God admonishing and an Angel leading, from his retreat and lodging of piety, Dizantius came to Mediolanum of the Santones Saintes. As he entered the Church, the assembly of the Ecclesiastical electors looking on, the Angel placed in his hands the Pontifical staff taken from the high altar. At that sign, with the Clergy and people approving, it was the constant opinion of all that Dizantius had been designated Bishop from heaven.
[5] Thus far those Lessons, in which there is nothing — as neither in those that follow — which cannot most conveniently be referred to the times of Pippin: referred not unfittingly to the age of King Pippin. for Ulricus the Bishop, to whom Dicentius is said to have succeeded, by his Frankish or Burgundian name shows well enough that he could not be advanced to the Episcopate before the conversion of both peoples to Christianity. But the Episcopal Catalogues in Antonius Monchiacenus Demochares, Joannes Chenu, Claudius Robertus, and the brothers Sammarthani are so arranged, with some diversity though, that between Leontius, who in the year 630 was present at the Council of Reims according to Flodoard; and Islo, who in the year 1012 assisted at the Ordination of Geraldus of Limoges, scarcely eight or nine Bishops are named; but all without any certain mark of time, several as it appears being omitted, among whom is to be numbered Freculfus, who in the year 862 subscribed to the Decree of the Synod of Pîtres, as Bishop of the Church of Saintes. One century before this one sat those who are named concordantly in all the Catalogues, Ulricus and Dicentius: and this one indeed reached even to the times of King Pippin; perhaps also was present with other Bishops at the Synod of Metz in the year 753. Others through the Octave Thus having in passing declared the more probable reckoning of the time, the knowledge of which the Author of the first Lessons had withdrawn from our eyes, by being silent about the name of the King, in which the tradition could have been more surely founded than in other characters foreign to Gaul; I proceed to the Lessons through the Octave, which are thus recited.
[6] Dizantius, leading a heavenly life, illustrious for miracles, they contain his exile living wholly to God, wholly to the people, never failed to watch by word and work over the salvation of his people of Saintes. Yet the people of hardened heart, after the manner of the rabid and frenzied, not only did not bear the medicines which the holy Pastor wholesomely applied to the curing of their vices, but afflicted him with dire revilings, and loaded him by word and deed with injuries; from which no small disgrace redounded against God, against Religion, and against the Church. That he might avoid this, the holy Pastor (God being first called to counsel by fervent prayer), driven out by his own people through those depraved machinations, and long vexed in his own city and diocese, betook himself to Caesarodunum of the Turones Tours as to a place of refuge, and his withdrawal to Tours, namely to the place where the Great Martin had wrought so many divine works; and to the church which, under the title of S. Peter, the holy Bishop of Tours had built; where in oratorial retreat the holy Dizantius poured forth perennial prayers to God. In that sacred exercise, while Dizantius once more fervently devoted himself to contemplation, it was revealed to him by divine inspiration that ruins and calamitous disasters were impending over his diocese, and disasters imminent there revealed to him, and over all the provinces of the Gauls and of Germany. When he had related this to the Bishops then existing at Metz; all with one mind, trusting much in his piety, earnestly asked him, for the averting of that evil, to undertake a pilgrimage to the thresholds of the Apostles at Rome: that by the prayers of the holy Peter and Paul he might obtain for sinners grace and a place and a time of penance.
[7] In great honor did all the Bishops who knew him hold Dizantius, especially the Bishop of Metz; for he had seen him performing various works beyond nature: among which that famous one is narrated, that by the touch alone of his finger placed underneath he restored the broken table of the altar in the basilica of holy Stephen. Dizantius, assenting to the will of the Bishop of Metz and of the other Bishops who were then at Metz, that, to avert them, he made a pilgrimage to Rome. sets out on the journey and goes straight to Rome. On the way, at his prayer, a new spring is said to have flowed (from which, water being drawn, he extinguished his thirst with a cup brought by an Angelic hand), as the Acts of the blessed man and the tradition of this Church of Ardes relate. When Dizantius also entered Rome, the bronze of the bells, although not driven by the hand of man, and the cymbals, are said to have sounded of their own accord; and there was seen by many of the Roman citizens, standing over the city, a marvelously radiant and unusual star: by which signs God signified the sanctity of his servant, and that he was an imitator of Christ, both earth and heaven bore witness: and the ministry exhibited by the Angels made manifest the Angelic purity and chastity, hidden in him by Christian lowliness and holily lurking. These things within the Octave: The rest for the Octave day, but on the Octave day the Invitatory, Antiphons, Psalms, Verses, Responsories as on the day, without the Prosellus. In the first Nocturn Lessons from the current Scripture; but in the second are prescribed those continuing this such-as-it-is history of his life: When S. Dizantius came to Rome, the Acts have, at Rome he religiously surveyed the sacred basilicas of the City, praying there earnestly, and frequently suffered ecstasy. And in the church of the Prince of the Apostles, his mind being called away from the senses, his body lifted three feet in height from the earth, while weeping he prays more ardently for the people; he received an answer from S. Peter, that on account of the increasingly grievous crimes of the peoples for whom he prayed, the Decree of divine vengeance was confirmed, and that to Metz and Tours alone was pardon granted by the prayers of holy Stephen, on account of the kindly reception of Dizantius, driven from his own Diocese, entering into their cities; and on his return, and as a sign of the truth of this heavenly utterance, he received from the hand of Peter a key divinely fabricated. Returning from Rome, falling among hostile forces, he was committed to prison; but, his sanctity being shown by a ray of light, which after the manner of a column frequently rested upon his head, he was in a short time led out of custody. Once, when the servant was wearied by the long journey and the burning rays of the sun, lying on the ground, God refreshed him, an eagle being sent, which with one of its wings shaded the holy man after the manner of a parasol, and with the other cooled him as with a fan.
[8] Having returned from Rome, when he had set forth to the Bishop of Metz, and to the others at whose request he had undertaken the pilgrimage, those things which had happened to him there and on the way; he returns again to Mediolanum of the Santones, to exhort his people of Saintes to penance. the Santones provoked in vain to penance, When he arrived there, with the utmost contention of voice and mind that he could, he admonished them to resist the angry God by particular penance, and, touched with the highest sorrow, to bend him to mercy. But on the wayside, on the thorns, and on the rocks fell the divine admonitions of Dizantius, and by the contracted hardness of the inveterate people they are in no wise bent by his fatherly exhortations; nay, fixing their mind in evil, they compelled the blessed Pontiff, with the holy pledges of his Relics, to betake himself again as it were to a refuge to Caesarodunum of the Turones Tours; where he consecrated the remainder of his life to heavenly Philosophy; so inclined to the meditation of divine things, that in performing a work of piety he always showed himself prompt and strenuous; thus bearing mortification in his body, that he had his mind fixed on God almost continually, his death at Tours, even to the end of his life; which, as he was offering the Sacred Mysteries, an Angel, standing at the right of the altar, announced to him.
[9] From the Mass Dizantius prepared himself for the passage into the heavenly life; which, when the people learned, in great numbers they ran to his cell: which standing by, his eyes lifted to heaven, full of merits he happily fell asleep. and the Translation of his body by S. Ardrierius: An indication of his sanctity was that, immediately after his passage, a silken veil was let down and spread by an Angelic hand over the venerable body. There were also a sure proof of him the frequent miracles which he brought forth at Tours. Some time after, by the holy Confessor Ardrierius, the sacred Relics were thence translated into the Church of Ardes; where in a reliquary they are religiously preserved, at which most frequent miracles plainly happen by divine power. From continual and acute fevers, and from other diseases, the sick are cured; infants tottering for weakness are wholly healed either by the touch of the reliquary, or by the washing of the spring water, which is called S. Dizantius's. With various other works also does God make Dizantius illustrious, who is wonderful in his Saint.
[10] After these things is added the following Rubric: In the same Church of Ardes a solemn Office is held of S. Ardrierius, his cult on the 3rd of March. on the third day of March; and the feast of the Translation is celebrated on the second Sunday of October. All things are said from the common of one Confessor Pontiff. Jacobus Branche adds the reason, because on such a day, by command of the Bishop of Clermont, his head, together with several other sacred Relics, was translated into a silver chest and carried into the sacristy: while the bones of both Saints are kept on either horn of the altar, raised high within walnut chests adorned with silver and gold. Meanwhile there is no one who can say who or what sort that Ardrierius was: but the rite of treating him as a Confessor Pontiff may persuade us that he was a Chorbishop, one of those who held, for the Bishop, a vicarious care of the diocese divided among themselves, as now the Deans whom they call of Christianity hold, residing in the chief towns, among which Ardes was reckoned. Branche adds that, not far from the town, in a certain pleasant meadow toward the South, where one goes to the next town commonly called Blesse, there is a spring sacred to S. Dizantius; to which infants weak and destitute of the faculty of walking are brought to be washed, The Spring of S. Dizantius. with the best success. From the manuscript Acts which he found at the Church of Ardes, in a beautiful Gothic, that is Teutonic, character, such as was greatly in use two or three centuries ago, the use of the Roman character being abolished everywhere also throughout the Gauls, the same Branche relates these things passed over in the Lessons: that the Church of Saintes was vacant for seven years, until, after seventy-two fruitless assemblies of the Clergy over the election, Dicentius was offered to them by an Angel: Acts how rashly pieced together, that he duly baptized the Arian Barbas, whom, when the Arian Bishop Deuterius was baptizing him with the form of words changed according to the rite of his sect, the water had vanished from the baptistery; and that, as he was celebrating Mass at Vaison, there flowed down from the ceiling three crystalline drops, which, collected in the paten, flowed together into one gem; which, when they wished to insert it into a cross adorned with several other gems, all these flowed away, that one alone holding its place.
[11] But as this is rashly taken from Gregory of Tours, in the book on the glory of the Martyrs, chapter 13, where it is said to have happened to a certain unnamed Priest,
while Gausericus the Arian was besieging the city, then from elsewhere, about the year (if I am not mistaken) 406; but it is gratuitously presumed to have happened again to Dicentius as he was offering Mass: that thing which was done at Constantinople and reported by Baronius in the year 506 from Theodorus Lector, whence Nicephorus Callistus also took it, book 16, chapter 35; that thing, I say, done at Constantinople, is equally ineptly transferred to the same S. Dicentius. The rest concerning his designation to the Episcopate, made by an Angel who in the presence of all delivered to him the staff; concerning the disaster revealed to him as imminent over the Gauls, and the pilgrimage undertaken to Rome to deprecate it; the captivity of him returning, taken by the barbarians, the eagle overshadowing him, the key received from S. Peter, the spring elicited, the stone of the altar restored at Metz, and several other things, then from the apocryphal Life of S. Servatius. were borrowed from the Life of S. Servatius, Bishop of Maastricht; that one, namely, which the Presbyter Jucundus adorned and extended into a truly great bulk; but with so little credit, or rather none, that Henschenius, the illustrator of his Acts and Miracles, judged it ought to be wholly cut away from this work. Meanwhile by this new example it appears how truly I have elsewhere pronounced, that there was no century in which there were not some who thought it convenient and lawful to adapt the deeds, whether true or feigned, of some Saint little known among them to another better known to them and lacking proper Acts; but this for the most part so little cautiously, that for true and certain things they chose uncertain ones, and such as deserved to be called into suspicion of fiction in their very origin.
[12] If Dicentius was present at some assembly of the Gallican Bishops, celebrated at Metz; Dizantius could have been present at a Synod of Metz, that is not foreign to the time of Pippin, in whose 2nd year, of Christ 753, is known the Synod of that name, whose Decrees also are extant. But then the Bishop there was, already for ten years, S. Chrodegandus, whose Acts Henschenius illustrated at the 6th of March. If the Life of Dicentius, as Branche seems to assert, names a Victor, such as will not easily be shown to have been there, but not under Bishop Victor. unless he be believed assumed in the year 346 by a similar unhistorical fiction, by which Linus the Roman Pontiff was; and if Demochares found someone second of that name, he found it in some corrupt copy of Sigebert at the year 453, where the more correct copies name "the Author." But this, whether Author or Victor, again is far from the time of the Lombard irruption into Italy; and yet the Acts say that Dicentius, returning from Rome, fell into their hands, which ought to have happened about the year 500.
[14] But how insipid it is, to keep the Bishops gathered at Metz for whatever cause or time, detained there until Dicentius should have gone to and returned from Rome, about to pray for the averting of the disaster imminent over the Gauls; whence he received so much, not even before that Tours and Metz alone would escape immune. There is not leisure to weigh more things: what has been said suffices that it may be known, that in the whole Acts, and the Lessons taken thence, there is scarcely anything which is not borrowed from elsewhere; and that it only remains that we suppose there was, among the people of Tours, an obscure memory of the time at which Dicentius, Bishop of Saintes, was among them and died, Pippin reigning; but, the body being translated to Ardes and growing illustrious with miracles, that there began to be a thought of inquiring into and writing the Acts of his Life, perhaps in the 10th or 12th century. Wherefore I do not think I must labor to define at what time the disaster happened which Dicentius tried to deprecate. but after the incursions of the Saracens. If, however, it were necessary by conjectures to designate some one; I should look to the irruptions of the Saracens, and especially that which happened, Charles Martel, Pippin's father, holding the Principate; when those in the year 732 penetrated as far as Poitiers and Sens; and so could also have laid waste Saintes, but passed over Tours harmless, and did not touch even from afar the borders of the people of Metz. But if that irruption was revealed to Dicentius, it was done much earlier than when the Bishops assembled at Metz for the Synod known to us. For which, if you wish that another, unknown to us, was convened there in the time of Pippin of Herstal; you are compelled to put back to the beginnings of his Episcopate all those things which seem in the Acts to be referred to its end.