United States or Turkmenistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We leave all the story aside: how Fulgentius had not the spirit to read the manuscript, but left the secret to Alexis; how Alexis, a stern old philosophical unbelieving monk as ever was, tried in vain to lift up the gravestone, but was taken with fever, and obliged to forego the discovery; and how, finally, Angel, his disciple, a youth amiable and innocent as his name, was the destined person who brought the long-buried treasure to light.
In Germany and the Netherlands the story is widely spread. At the abbey of Afflighem, Fulgentius, who was abbot towards the close of the eleventh century, received the announcement one day that a stranger monk had knocked at the gate and claimed to be one of the brethren of that cloister.
"Remember what Saint Fulgentius said: 'Et si mithetur in stagnum ignis et sulphuris qui nudum vestimento non tegit, quid passures est qui vestimento crudelis expoliat?
It was awful, but in its awfulness lay its power over the young mind. It learned to trample down that last bond which united the child to common humanity, filial reverence; the fond and mysterious attachment of the child and the mother, the inborn reverence of the son to the father. It is the highest praise of St. Fulgentius that he overcame his mother's tenderness by religious cruelty."
On questioning him about his abbot and the name of the king whom he supposed to be still reigning, Fulgentius found that both had been dead for three hundred years. The same tale is told of other monasteries. In Transylvania it is told concerning a student of the school at Kronstadt that he was to preach on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity in St.
"Who" says the protestant Casaubon "is so little versed in the writings of the fathers, as to be ignorant of the formulary used principally of the sacraments, the initiated understand what is said: it occurs at least fifty times in Chrysostom, and almost as frequently in Augustine". S. Fulgentius inserts in his answer to the deacon Ferrandus the following words of S. Augustine to the neophytes "This which you see on the altar of God you saw last night: but what it was, what it meant, and of what a great thing it contains the sacrament, you have not yet heard.
Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, Jerome, Augustine, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Fulgentius, Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, John Cassian, Martin of Tours, Salvian, Caesarius of Arles, were all monks, or as much of monks as their duties would allow them to be.
Great was the delight of the canons at their powerful postulant and his son, and great the pains taken over the latter's education. The schoolmaster laid stress upon authors such as Prudentius, Sedulius, and Fulgentius. By these means the boy not only learnt Latin, but he also tackled questions of Predestination and Grace, glosses upon St. Paul, hymns and methods of frustrating the Arian.
King Hilderich, who reigned from 523 to 530, a gentle prince and friend of the emperor Justinian, stopped the persecution and recalled the banished. Fulgentius was received back with great joy, and in February, 525, Archbishop Bonifacius held at Carthage a Council once more, at which sixty bishops were present. Africa had still able theologians.
'Here you may trace the footsteps of the Fathers; here you meet the clear-souled Aristotle and Tully of the mighty tongue; here Basil and Fulgentius shine, and Cassiodorus and John of the Golden Mouth. As Alcuin was returning from book-buying at Rome he met Charles the Great at Parma.
Word Of The Day