Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 789
among the more hesitant Christian communities of Gaul. Memory was
supported by the intense and stable relationship of spiritual fathers to their
disciples: John the Hesychast, the spiritual father of Cyril, had himself been
the spiritual son of Sabas, who had, in turn, been directed, in his choice of
monastery, by none other than Euthymius. In the monastic foundations of
the area, every rock, cave and wadi told its own, unmoving story of former
ascetic occupants. As a result, Cyril, writing at the end of the reign of
Justinian, was able to reach back into the very first decades of the fifth
century (Cyr. Scyth. V. Euthymii 60).
When Gregory the Great wrote his Dialogues in Rome in 593/4 (a decade
later, that is, than Gregory of Tours’ Libri Miraculorum), he also found
himself confronted with mere shards of local memory. Lombard invasions
in the past twenty years had destroyed many of the sites that had once been
associated with holy men. Benedict’s Monte Cassino had been sacked; the
sieve that hung in the church at Nursia as testimony to his first miracle had
disappeared; Lombard raids had effectively wiped out the ecclesiastical
organization of many of the cities of Campania and the Apennines that
had boasted holy ascetics in more sheltered times. Though he claimed to
write about the ‘modern fathers’ of Italy, Gregory looked back, in much of
his Dialogues, across the chasm of the Lombard invasion to the stormy days
of Totila’s last stand against the Byzantine armies in 546–51 and even,
further still, into the peaceful last decades of unchallenged Ostrogothic
rule. 19 The days were long past when good bishop Boniface of Ferentis had
provided a pair of Goths travelling to the court at Ravenna with a miraculously
inexhaustible bottle of wine, and when the holy man Florentius sat
quietly in the hills above Nursia, with a pet bear who knew the time of day
(Greg. Dial. i.9.4; iii.15.4). All this must have seemed poignantly distant to
the beleaguered pope of the 590s.
Effectively wrenched, by warfare and emigration, from their local
context, the memories that came to Gregory could be organized, by him,
according to an ‘oikotype‘ that existed, largely, in his own, resolutely
Augustinian mind. The Dialogues took the form of a spiritual conversation
between Gregory and his loyal friend, the Roman deacon Peter. No other
writer of the age was in such a position, or had such a firm intention, to
pass local narratives through a theological filter of so fine a mesh. 20
With Gregory, miracles were far more than an occasion for vainglory –
as they were also for Gregory of Tours – sensitive though he was to that
aspect of the problem. They were signa, signals sent from a distant God
through human agents on whom he had conferred the strictly temporary
grace of the ability to work wonders and to see, with his own eyes, the
hidden things of his providence. For Gregory, to be holy was to cling to
19 A fact well seen by Cracco (1992). 20 McCready (1989).
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