Chapter 35. Continuation of the same subject

Tillemont begins by attacking the Acts of St. Cecilia, as well as those of Sts. Callistus and Urban, because they imply a persecution against the Christians, during the reign of Alexander Severus, who is well known to have been favorably disposed to Christianity.* This objection might have some weight, if the author of the Acts had alleged any edicts or hostile disposition of the Emperor towards the Christians ; but Alexander is not once mentioned in the Acts; the violent persecutions against the Christians are attributed solely to the personal hatred of his prefect, Turchius Almachius. The Acts of Saints Callistus and Martina are more open to criticism on this point, because Alexander Severus is personally spoken of in connection with the persecutions.

Now it is certain that, during the reign of this weak-minded prince, the Christians Buffered local persecutions from the magistrates, who were hostile to the Church, and who took advantage of the laws

• See Tillemont'fl "Memoirea pourserrir a L'HIstoire Eoolesiastique dea six premiers Bieoles*1 Tome iii. p, 679.

which the son of Julia Mammaea had not the courage to revoke. We can prove this asssertion not only by the opinion of Baronius,* but also by the express admission of Petau,f Dom Buinart^ Fleury,§ Baillet,! and, strange to say, Tillemont himself,

• See liis notes upon the Roman Martyrology of the 1st of January.

f Alexandro Imperatore pacem habuit Ecclesia. Nam et Christianis ille favisse dicitur. Verum cum eos in consilium adhiberet qui, ut juris peritissimi, ita christianis iniquissimi erant, nonnullaB Martyrum caedes extiterunt, quos inter Csecilia claruit cum Tiburtio et Valeriano. Rationarium temporum, part, i., lib. v., cap. xi.

J Alexandrum Heliogabali successorum Christianis favisse nemo potest inficiari, nisi omnes antiquos scriptores rejicere velit. Unde mirum est, tot Martyres sub ejus imperio passos a nonnuUis recenseri. An id ad Praefectos, quos sub ejus imperio saevissimos fuisse aiunt referendum est ? An forte dicendum, aliquot Martyres, qui sub Severi persecutione passi sunt, ad Alexandri tempora incaute transferri, quod et ipse Severus fuerit appellatus ? At Callixtus Papa, qui eo imperante vivere desiit, inter Martyres in Kalendario Bucheriano recensetur. Prcefatio in Acta Martyrum, §iii., page 38.

§ Although Alexander was favorable to the Christians, we can count several martyrs during his time, among others, Pope Callistus, who died the first year of his reign, A. D. 122., and his successor, St. Urban. But we may believe that the persecutions took place without the knowledge of the Emperor, by the sole authority of the magistrates, who were bitter enemies to the Christian name. Hist. Ecclesiastigue. lib. v. n° xlix.

|| However great was the peace of the Church under so good an Emperor as Alexander Severus, who permitted himself to be governed by his mother, Julia Manimaea, supposed to be a Christian, and who esteemed our Redeemer so much as to propose ranking Him among the gods and erecting a temple in His honor ; still many martyrs suffered during his reign, either in popular tumults excited by the Pagans, or through the malignity of the heathen priests and magistrates. We can assert with sufficient authority, that Callistus was of this number. Vies des Saints, tome vii. inAc 14 Octobre.

who, finding it impossible to deny the martyrdom of Pope Callistus, which assuredly took place daring the reign of Alexander Severus, agrees that several Christians may have received the crown of martyrdom at this period. He even goes so far as to explain how such persecutions took place, and in doino* so, makes use of the very arguments which we presented to the reader in the commencement of this history.*

The opinion of so many learned men as to the kind of persecution the Christians of Eome suffered under Alexander, is confirmed by the Acts of St. Cecilia, with a precision, the force of which Tillemont does not seem to have even perceived. It is evident from every circumstance mentioned in these Acts, that the Prefect Almachius, in his process against the brothers, is very reluctant to bring forward the charge of their being Christians; that his hesitation in condemning them to death is very marked ; and that he dares not sentence Cecilia to a public execution. Let these Acts be compared with those of other martyrs who suffered in consequence of edicts of persecution, and see if in the latter case the magistrates acted with so much indecision. Add to this the emperor's absence in the year 230, which was the last of Urban's

• But this peace did not prevent that either in consequence of some sedition among the people, or from other causes, there may have been some cases of martyrdom during the reign of Alexander Severus, as there had been during that of Philip, who passed for a Christian, and of other emperors who openly protected the Church. We have even many proofs that St. Callistus suffered martyrdom under Alexander Severus. Memoires pour nmrvir a VHistoire, Ecclesiastique, tome iii. p. 231. See als<# Ibid in tin; notes p. 681 •

27*

pontificate, and the temporary persecution of the Eoman magistrate will be easily understood. His violence was at first directed only against the plebeians ; but a patrician family becoming accidentally implicated, the magistrate feared to commit himself. We have admitted that five thousand persons fell victims in this persecution, and if the number be exaggerated, our readers must remember that we do not quote it from the Acts of St. Cecilia, but from those of Urban, which, although doubtless reliable, have not the authority of the Acts of the Eoman Virgin. The fact that the latter were compiled during the peace of the Church, is a sufficient proof of the purity of the sources whence the writer drew his story. Entirely ignorant of chronology, he does not seem to know the name of the emperor under whom the events which he relates took place ; and, nevertheless, his narrative perfectly accords with the reign of a weak-minded prince, who, although favorable to Christianity, still permitted his magistrates to enforce laws which had been suspended, but not abolished. If our writer had not had tradition to guide him, he would, like the authors of apocryphal acts, have cited in his history edicts and emperors; he would have imitated the Acts of other martyrs, instead of showing that originality, which is in perfect keeping with the condition of the Church of Eome under Alexander Severus. Tillemont probably felt this, for he seeks to throw discredit upon the Acts by pointing out circumstances contained in them, which appear to him difficult to reconcile with what we know of the period.

LIFE OF SAINT CECILIA. qoo

"We find;7 he says, "in the Acts of St. Cecilia, that the emperors had commanded that all who would not renounce Christianity should be punished ; consequently there must have been a declared persecution. The mention made in many places of several emperors is out of place at a period when but one prince was reigning.7' It is easy to explain this latter difficulty, if it can be called one.

Almachius became so involved in judiciary acts of violence against the Church, that he was forced to refer to some law, in order to authorize his prosecutions. The laws which had been promulgated against the Christians, by the predecessors of Alexander, were his only refuge. It was very natural that the Prefect should express himself in the plural when alleging the edicts of former emperors ; had he presumed to use Alexander's name, the latter might have brought him to account for abusing his name and authority in support of actions which were totally foreign to his own line of conduct. If, therefore, Almachius mentioned several emperors, he did not necessarily imply that the empire was at this time governed by several heads. This form of judiciary style is constantly found in the acts of legal tribunals, both of ancient and modern times. Tillcmont was perfectly aware of this. He lived during the reign of Louis XIV., a prince who assuredly reigned alone; did he then think that France had suddenly fallen into the hands of several monarchs, when lie met with some decree of Parliament, appealing to the edicts and ordinances of our lungs? Tillemont is not satisfied with declaring our acts a romance,

34:0 LIFE 0F SAINT CECILIA.

solely because they seem to him incompatible with the reign of Alexander Severus; he, moreover, considers the very name of Almachius, which he says is not Koman,* sufficient to invalidate the whole narration. He even adds that such is the opinion of Fathers Gamier and Sirmond, deeming that in such a cause even Jesuits may be considered reliable authority. The reply to this pretended difficulty is very easy. Without dwelling upon the possibility of some alteration having been made in Almachius) name during the two centuries which elapsed between the martyrdom of St. Cecilia and the compilation of her Acts, we will simply say that the prefect who condemned our martyrs was named Turcius Almachius, and not merely Almachius. Can Tillemont deny that Turcius is a Eoman name? The Eoman inscription given by Gruter, would be sufficient to convict him of falsehood.

Moreover, Tillemont himself, in his study of the Martyrs of Italy, met with the name of Turcius and quietly registered it. He relates that in 274, the Emperor Aurelian sent a magistrate, named Turcius, to Sutri in Tuscany, f with orders to persecute the Christians ; and he even positively asserts that the name of Turcius was quite common in ancient times, several persons, named Turcius Asterius, having been elevated to the first offices of the Empire.;}: Moreover, he mentions that in 303, during the persecution of Diocletian, a Proconsul Turcius prosecuted the

• Memoires, tome iii., page 690.

f Memoires tome iv. p. 352.

X Memoires dan.i les notes p. 682.

Christians in Perugia.* It matters little, however, whether the name of Almachius was the exact surname of the prefect, or whether it is a corruption of the true surname, we have used it simply because it is more popular. Tillemont, after attempting to prove that Cecilia did not live during the reign of Alexander, and after trying to obliterate even the name of the judge to whom she owed her crown of martyrdom, takes the trouble to find her a place in the chronology of the saints. Now, as he refused to accept the epoch determined by the Acts, he found it necessary to choose between two dates. In order to avoid embarrassment he adopted both, neither being the one received by the Church. The following are his proofs: " Usuard and several others, for instance Ado, place St. Cecilia under the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus who reigned conjointly, from 176 to 180. The Greeks place her under Diocletian."*

The reader may now choose between these two equally reliable dates. It is indeed true that Usuard and St. Ado place St. Cecilia under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus ; but the historian of Port Royal does not add that they also mention her during Urban's pontilicate, that in their martyrology of the 14th of April, they note the martyrdom of St. Tiburtius, Maximus, and Cecilia, under the same Pontiff, from whose hands they aflirm the two former received Baptism, and that on the 25th of May, in the notice on St. Urban, they relate the interviews between this Pope and Cecilia. Usuard and Ado have therefore erred in placing Cecilia under Marcus Aurelius and

• Memo in 8, Tome v. p, 1 L9<

3^2 LIFE 0F SAINT CECILIA.

Commodus ; this mistake may perhaps beaccounted for by the name of Alexander Severus, which was in full, Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander. The liturgists of the ninth century had not the facility we have of knowing the different imperial names, which are now found upon bronzes and medals. Moreover, on any other occasion, Tillemont would not have considered their opinion of any value ; he only quotes it here because it helps to prove his assertions. As to the Greeks, who did not know the Acts of St. Cecilia before the ninth century, and who refer her martyrdom to the persecution of Diocletian, this is the only occasion upon which Tillemont quotes their books which are proverbial for their extreme imperfection and open in many points to criticism. In this case, they are evidently wrong, since they relate the interviews between Cecilia and Pope Urban who governed the Church fifty years before Diocletian.

We frequently find this arbitrary use of the rules of criticism in Tillemont's work. The reader has already seen the Hymn we copied from the Gothic Breviary ; it is a perfect abridgment of our Acts, and by its antiquity, of sufficient importance to confirm them Tillemont does not deign to notice it, whereas he mentions in the following terms a Hymn of the same liturgy, which embodies the Acts of St. Marciana. " We have a hymn to St. Marciana, taken from the Gothic or Mozarabic Breviary of Toledo, and from the Acts given by Bollandus. We cannot assert that these Acts are original, since they seem to have been written several years after the death of the Saint, and contain some particulars which give us reason to doubt their truth. However, the Hymn found in the Breviary of Toledo, is sufficiently ancient and beautiful to authorize us in receiving the Acts."* The Acts of St. Marciana are not certainly wanting in authority; nevertheless they are far from aaving been so universally received as those of St. Cecilia ; the details in them were never so publicly known ; nor are they confirmed by such striking monuments ; and still Tillemont is very liberal to them, and disdainfully rejects the others.

This author, not satisfied with trying to invalidate the chronology of our Acts, also attacks them in their topographical bearing. We will cite the words of this celebrated critic. "It is very singular," he says, "that both the Greeks and Latins mention St. Cecilia as being a Roman, even the Martyrologies attributed to St. Jerome ; whereas Fortunatus, who is probably our most ancient author upon these subjects, places her in Sicily :

CJECILIAM SICULA PKOFERT, SELEUCIA TECLAM.

" Neither he, nor any one else, says that she was a native of Sicily, for we see, from St. Thecla and others, that Fortunatus only mentions that island as the place of her death. It is probable, therefore, that she was martyred there, and that her body having been carried to Rome in the early ages, some have called her a Roman, from this circumstance, as in the case of St. Sabina, who died at Umbria ; others believed that she lived and died in Rome, and conse-

• Memoircs, tome v. page 2G3.

34-i LIFE OF SAINT CECILIA.

quently composed her Acts upon this supposition, probably transforming a Governor and a Bishop of Sicily into a Prefect of Eome and a Pope. It is certain that this would be easy for those who have not received the love of truth.rf

Conformably to the doctrines of Port Koyal, which the author exposes with so much naivete, a writer is truthful or deceitful in his narrations, not according to his own free will, but according to whether he has or has not received the love of truth. Such doctrines should render those who believe in them, indulgent to false writers, and historical imposters; they should not reject them with too much disdain ; but should wait patiently for the love of truth to descend into them, and render them sincere and faithful, without their own co-operation. We who are Catholics and believe man to be endowed with personal responsibility, find it difficult to recognize in Tillemont that love of truth which he refuses to the compiler of St. Cecilia's Acts, and we do not hesitate to call him to an account for it. He agrees that all the authors who mention St. Cecilia call her a Roman, and yet all these venerable names are effaced by that of a single individual, Fortunatus, Bishop of Poictiers. And what do we find in his writings, so conclusive as to overthrow the testimony of ages ? One single line of poetry ! And that line, defective in quantity, which naturally leads us to suppose the copyist in fault, at least in some degree. On the authority of this one line, Tillemont would have us believe that St. Cecilia died in Sicily, because,

• Memoirs, tome iii. page 690.

forsooth, " Fortunatus is probably the most ancient author who speaks of the holy martyr !" This probably is, to Tillemont's mind, sufficiently weighty to counterbalance the Martyrology attributed to St. Jerome; the Leonian, Gelasian, Ambrosian and Galilean Sacramentaries ; the Papal Chronicle of Felix IV., and all the historical monuments of St. Cecilia, founded upon the Acts, and prior to Fortunatus.

But even supposing the famous line to be original, does Tillemont know of what Cecilia, Fortunatus speaks ? It is very certain that the Bishop does not say. Many learned Sicilians, among others Octavio Gaetano, who have written the lives of the Saints of Sicily, have frankly acknowledged that they could not find the slightest vestige of a St. Cecilia, born or martyred on that island ; or even of one whose relics had been brought there. It is therefore natural to think that, if Fortunatus composed this line, he erred ; or perhaps he confounded one island of the Mediterranean with another. There was a St. Cecilia martyred at Cagliari in Sardinia;* the similarity of name may have led to this mistake. However this may be, the spirit of system alone, could transform into an oracle these unexplained words of an author who wrote at a distance from the theatre of events, and whose words had passed unnoticed for more than a thousand years.

But Tillemont not only prefers this solitary line of poetry, to the unanimous testimony of Roman authors, both anterior and posterior to Fortunatus; but, with it for his guide, he proceeds to relate Ce-

• Macedo. Dc Divia tuUlaribm orbit christian^ pftge 215.

cilia's history. He cannot deny that hei body is at Eome ; but he explains this circumstance by an imaginary translation of her relics, which was never heard of before. That the Saint suffered in Sicily, he deems incontestably proved by Fortunatus' words. It is equally certain that her body is now in Eome. Therefore it must have been carried thither. This is Tillemont's proposition. Now for his proof. St. Sabina, who suffered martyrdom in Umbria, was transported to the capital of the Christian Avorld.* Wherefore, Cecilia's body may also have been translated thither. Such is the logic of this relentless critic of Cecilia's Acts.

The above reasoning, however, is opposed by a grave difficulty, which Port Eoyal did not perceive in the exultation of its triumph. The body of St. Sabina was indeed brought to Eome ; but it was for the purpose of being honorably placed in a church built under the invocation of the saint, upon Mount Aventine. St. John Chrysostom was also transferred from Constantinople, to St. Peter's in Eome; St. Jerome from Bethlehem to St. Mary Major; and many other foreign saints to the different churches of the same city ; but besides the fact of history having preserved the memory of all these translations, altars and Basilicas awaited these sacred remains. St. Cecilia, on the contrary, arrives, and no one is aware of her coming ; this great martyr, to whom Sicily with regret confesses itself a stranger, comes nevertheless, from that island, and the Eoman Church which coveted her relics, thinks them of so little im-

• Memoires, tome iii . page 690.

portance, that she buries them in the depths of a crypt on the Appian Way. She inscribes Cecilia's name in the Canon of her Mass, and yet clandestinely conceals her sacred body, brought from such a distance, in a vault, where Tillemont is forced to acknowledge, Paschal found it in the beginning of the ninth century, together with Sts. Tiburtius, Valerian, and Maximus, who were, it is to be presumed, brought from Sicily with the holy virgin.

Is not this nonsensical? Is it not humiliating to see Catholics carried away by such reasoning, in spite of the most convincing proofs of its falsehood ?

But Tillemont does not stop here. Since he has received the love of truth more than any one who lived during the twelve centuries when Cecilia was supposed to be a Eoman virgin, we naturally expect him to explain to us how it was that Urban was transformed from a Sicilian bishop into a Pope, and Turcius Almachius, from a governor of Sicily, into a Roman prefect. But Tillemont contents himself with asserting this transformation; he does not condescend to prove it. We must then conclude that the compiler of the Acts is an impostor, and that Port Eoyal is an infallible judge of places and persons no matter how ancient. Nothing remains now but to assign the date of this famous translation upon which the system depends. It must have taken place before the end of the fifth century, since Tillemont says that, during the, Pontificate of Pope Sym« machus, there was a ehureh of St. Cecilia in Rome.* Otherwise it would he Impossible to explain why the

• Memoirs, tOH16 iii . ]>:t;'«' 690, saint "had not been placed in her church. There was however, remarks Tillemont, time enough to bring her relics to Rome, between the cessation of the persecutions and the pontificate of Symmachus, and the fact of no one having heard of this Translation, does not prevent its having taken place. It is astounding to find so intelligent and learned a man as Tillemont ignorant of the fact that the very existence of a Church of St. Cecilia in Rome, is a sufficient proof that she lived in that city ; yet Tillemont must have known that at the period of which he was writing, the canonical rules forbade the erecting of churches in honor of saints, except in those places where their relics reposed, or which had been sanctified by their lives and sufferings. Now, in the time of Pope Symmachus, the virgin's body was reposing in the Catacombs; the trans-Tiberian Basilica was, therefore a monument which commemorated her residence in Eome, and also, as we learn from her Acts, and from tradition, marked the place of her martyrdom. It was, therefore, useless to imagine the translation of Cecilia's body, together with those of her companions, from the isle of Sicily to the Catacombs of Rome, unless the origin of this church was first accounted for. We are perfectly willing to agree that the bodies of foreign martyrs were brought to Rome after the persecution, and deposited in the Catacombs, provided it be proved that previous to this time, no church in Rome had been dedicated to them. But we have lost sufficient time over these Jansenistic fancies. Their boldness and cunning will not surprise those who are acquainted with the subterfuges of this wily sect ; but the above remarks may prevent others less informed, from being deceived by the plausible statements of the Jansenist authors, who for more than a century, have monopolized, in France, the compilation of works upon the history of Christianity.