CONCERNING S. GREGORY THE WONDERWORKER AT CONSTANTINOPLE. From the Menaea and Synaxaria of the Greeks.
AROUND THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.
CommentaryGregory the Wonderworker at Constantinople (S.)
[1] This Saint was made venerable to the Church of Constantinople not so much by the virtues of his life, lived with God alone as witness, as by the miracles that followed his death, as is attested both by the Menaea printed at Venice for this day, and by the manuscript Synaxarion of the Parisian College for the eleventh day, Why he is called Neophanēs, and by the other Mazarine manuscript, also in manuscript at Paris, for the twenty-fourth day of this same month: in all of which his commemoration is indicated in these words: "On the same day, the memory of our holy Father Gregory the Neophanēs and Wonderworker." For by a most commonly received usage among the Greeks, all who thus became famous through Martyrdom or miracles, when other persons of the same name were most widely known to the public, are called neoi or neophanes for the sake of distinction; the Latins would say "the Younger." Thus the Ambrosian manuscript calls the forty-two Martyrs who suffered under the Saracens neophanes, lest they be confused with the Forty of Sebaste: and assigned to the twelfth century? thus John Moschus called Mary, the niece of Abraham the Hermit, "the New," to distinguish her from the Egyptian Mary known to all: as others previously cited and to be cited may be passed over. This one, therefore, is called the Younger, to distinguish him from the great Martyr George. And indeed he must have been much younger, whose memory was so recent when these things were written that it seemed superfluous, as in a matter of the present, to add another chronological marker: whence we find him neither in the older Synaxaria or Menologia of the Emperor Basil nor in the Ambrosian ones, but only in those manuscripts which are judged not to exceed an age of five hundred years, and therefore we have considered that he may be assigned to the eleventh century. His eulogy reads as follows.
[2] "This man, having left his wife, children, and kinsmen, entered the narrow way, Coming as a pilgrim to Constantinople, and submitted to the most gentle yoke of God, traversing regions, towns, and wilderness; in which, having led the most austere life and having been divinely warned of his approaching dissolution, he came to Constantinople and, entering the venerable church of S. John the Theologian, which is in the Dihippion, rested in peace on the seventh day after his arrival there. And when those who were to bury him had come, and there, dying, he is found girded with iron, and had discovered an iron of great weight so applied to his body that it appeared grievously affected by its rubbing, they raised a cry together, saying: 'Lord, have mercy.' For which reason he was placed in a marble casket of the same church, pouring forth miracles of healing upon those who approach with faith: nor are there lacking those who, and shines with miracles, having experienced his aid and still being among the living, present themselves to all as witnesses of the prodigies worked upon them." Dihippion: our Raderus in the manuscripts rendered it as the "region of equestrian Jupiter"; another as "the church of John the Evangelist at the Chariots" in the church of S. John the Evangelist in the Dihippion; but just as we have found no region of this name designated by anyone at Constantinople, so neither have we found an author who called a two-horse chariot a dihippion. In Suidas, however, we read that dihippasia are equestrian, not chariot, contests; and we recognize the compound formation, such as in all others formed from the particle di, signifying doubling, as in dimorphos, two-formed. Therefore, if we must proceed by conjectures, we would reckon that these contests were so called because in them Desultores -- riders most famous in the Roman circus, called Amphippoi by Aelian -- rode on two unsaddled horses tied together, and leapt from one to the other as occasion required. For further testimonies on this matter from Homer, Propertius, and others, one may read Lipsius, book 3 on Roman Military Service, dialogue 8, and will marvel from Florus that Teutobocchus, King of the Teutons, was accustomed to leap over even four or six horses: it suffices us, from these, to render plausible that a place designated for such exercise or contest is indicated here, in which that church of S. John was situated.