ON SAINT AGAPITUS, BISHOP OF RAVENNA IN ITALY.
ABOUT THE YEAR 340
CommentaryAgapitus Bishop, at Ravenna in Italy (S.)
[1] The Church of Ravenna venerates its first eleven Bishops, enrolled in the calendar of the Saints; all of them, as popular tradition holds, designated by the divine indication of the Holy Spirit, The first eleven Bishops of Ravenna are saints, appearing in the form of a dove above the one to be chosen; all of them depicted in the apse of the Ursiana church, which is the Cathedral of the city, in truly ancient mosaic work, and portrayed in colors in another more ancient basilica of Saint Theodore or of the Holy Spirit, but in more recent workmanship, as we ourselves beheld there in person. And indeed in this church we also saw a most ancient chair, from which the newly consecrated bishops were said to have first addressed the people: indeed there was shown there, through an opening in the vault above the choir, a small window in the place through which the Holy Spirit was believed to have been accustomed to descend visibly; and another place in a corner near the door, in which Saint Severus was said to have stood when, leaving his weaving work, he came here to see whom God would designate as Bishop by the customary miracle, and received the dove flying to him with no less his own than the people's astonishment.
[2] of these the last are Agapitus, Marcellinus, Severus, We gave the Life of this Saint Severus at the first of February, and in section 2 of the Preliminary Commentary we clearly showed that there is no reason why he should not be held to have been elected in the year 346, under the consuls Constantine IV and Constans III, as is recorded in the Life: and on the same occasion we suggested that it is far more probable that the Roman Synod under Pope Julius, at which it is established that Saint Agapitus, Bishop of Ravenna, was present, was held in the year 337, a decade before the Council of Sardica, to which the aforesaid Severus may have gone not in the last year of his life, as Rubeus maintains; but in the first year after his election, and may have survived until about the year 390. We also added that the series of the Bishops of Ravenna, as expressed in the Mosaic, is not thereby overturned, in which after Saint Liberius, to be venerated on the thirtieth of December, Saint Agapitus, who died on the eighteenth day before the Kalends of April, is placed, and after Agapitus Saint Marcellinus is placed, to be commemorated on the third of the Nones of October, and Severus follows Marcellinus.
[3] We indeed give great weight to that ancient painting, and as long as no better monuments are available, Agapitus confused by Rubeus and gratuitously duplicated from which it might be shown that some error has crept into that series, we judge that it should be followed; although for that reason the episcopate of Saint Marcellinus would have to be contracted to a few months: for what Rubeus says, that he lived long enough in the episcopate, he proves by the testimony of no more ancient author. But neither need he be compressed into so narrow a space: for could he not have governed the Church of Ravenna for five, six, or even seven full years? And have attended some Provincial Synod held at Rome after the time of Agapitus and the year 340: if indeed that was necessary: for we have nothing from which to affirm or deny it, no Acts of the Council being extant. But given these premises, no necessity compels us either to posit with Rubeus two Agapiti, one of whom was the predecessor of Saint Marcellinus, the other the successor of Saint Severus, whom I think he did not find in the Mosaic of his Cathedral; or with Ughelli three, of whom the second sat between Marcellinus and Severus, and the third was the last to be raised to the episcopate by heavenly indication, which Rubeus gratuitously accepted.
[4] We know that Rubeus in his catalogue of the Bishops of Ravenna gives Marcellinus fifty years of administered episcopate, how long each sat is uncertain and Agapitus thirty-six; whence it would follow, if the beginning of Saint Severus is placed at the year 346, that Marcellinus began to sit in the year 296, and Agapitus in 260, and therefore attended no Roman Council; much less the one which we said was celebrated in the year 337, and which Rubeus wished to place after Sardica, at the year 348: but as long as he does not state where he or the one who prepared the material for him, Giovanni Pietro Ferreto, created Bishop of Lavello in Apulia in the year 1549, obtained those years of the Bishops of Ravenna, we shall be obliged to answer him nothing. Nor if someone were to produce a catalogue three or four centuries more ancient, such as no one has cited up to now, would we therefore believe, concerning such ancient times, that such numbers were not added by arbitrary conjecture. And indeed such a catalogue, if produced, would contradict Rubeus no less in inventing a second Agapitus, than the more ancient mosaics of the Cathedral Church equally contradict both him and Ughelli. But what if the first author of those numbers wrote five, and others afterward changed it to fifty?
[5] From Rubeus moreover were drawn the lessons which were presented to us at Ravenna, when we were there, by command of the Most Illustrious Archbishop, Lessons composed in the previous century, who wonderfully favored our studies, by the Very Reverend Lord Giovanni Carlo Pasculo; along with other documents of the Saints of Ravenna taken from the archive: but since these had not yet been approved by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, by the command of the same Archbishop and Chapter, one of the Canons, a man most skilled in historical matters, the Very Reverend Lord Girolamo de Fabris, who had published a book on the Antiquities of Ravenna, was ordered to compose new lessons with more careful study, which the aforesaid Congregation recently approved for public recitation in the Divine Office, and he himself sent them to us fresh from the press, illustrated with certain notes of his own, to this effect.
[6] others now approved concerning S. Agapitus Agapitus, a Greek by birth, after Liberius the first of that name, was created Bishop of Ravenna by the sign of a dove sent from heaven: in whose time the temples of the Blessed Virgin in Cosmedin and of Saint Theodore, which was afterward called the church of the Holy Spirit, were built. He was of truly admirable simplicity and piety; and after he had most holily presided over the See of Ravenna for twenty-six years, being called to heavenly rewards, he fell asleep in the Lord on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of April, in the year two hundred and thirty-two after the birth of Christ. His body was buried in the basilica of Saint Probus near Classis: and thence translated to the Metropolitan church, it is preserved honorably deposited under the high altar.
[7] concerning the year of death, to be corrected. Thus he and from his judgment the Church of Ravenna: from
which, while adhering to the chronology established by Rubeus against his own opinion, we respectfully and amicably depart, at least regarding the year of death, until we are otherwise instructed by arguments more valid than those we have refuted. Our opinion was not unknown to Giovanni Pietro Ferreto, who, having prefaced in his catalogue of Bishops composed by him in this manner, but quite confusedly, for Rubeus, in these words: he is also said to have been buried with his predecessors in the time of Lucius Septimius Severus Pertinax Augustus and Antoninus Caracalla, when Callixtus I and Urban I occupied the Roman See, in the year of salvation 230: he proposed the more certain teaching as follows. Certain persons, however, endeavor to assert that under the Emperors Constantine and Constans Augusti, in the year 340, Agapitus was under Julius I, Bishop of Rome, and assembled in the Roman Synod with other Orthodox bishops.
[8] Record in the Martyrology. It should be noted, moreover, that Philip Ferrarius at this day in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy cites ancient Lessons of the Church of Ravenna, which it is well established never existed: for those which we said we copied there, and which he himself could have seen, are neither ancient nor were they introduced into ecclesiastical use. Cardinal Baronius entered the name of Saint Agapitus in the Calendar of the Roman Church with the title of Bishop and Confessor: in which he seems to have followed the authority of the Florentine Martyrology, printed in the year 1486: but before that was printed, his name with the same titles was inserted into two manuscript Martyrologies, one of the Medici Library at Saint Lawrence, the other of Carlo Strozzi, a Florentine Senator, and in both is added: who was the ninth to govern and flourished after Apollinaris, which applies only to the successor of Saint Liberius and the predecessor of Marcellinus, according to the series expressed in the paintings of the churches of Ravenna.