Passionario

PASSIONARIO. - P. (from passionarius or passionale) or legendary is the collection of libelli devoted to the account of the life, martyrdom, translations and miracles of the saints. The two terms were used indiscriminately, one for the other. In the 12th century, however (cf. Beleth, De div. off., c. 60: PL. 202, 66), passionarius and legendarius were two distinct liturgical books and formed part of the normal endowment of a good monastic community and of the more important churches; the p. contained the passiones martyrum, the legendary, the life, death and miracles of the confessores, but only to the extent that was read on the day of their feast in the office. The distinction of the two categories (martyres-confessores) is certainly much older than Beleth, because it is already found in the 6th century, though with a different intent, in Gregory of Tours (Liber in gloria martyrum, in gloria confessorum). For liturgical use the compilers preferred a mixed genre, gathering passiones and vitae according to the natural course of the ecclesiastical year: a "hagiographic lectionary," as opposed to a "biblical lectionary" and a "homiletic lectionary."

The liturgical destination of the p. in the manuscripts is evident when the narrative is divided into paragraphs, corresponding to the lessons of the Office, marked by Roman numerals I, II, III, etc., or by the expressions finis or fac finem (ms. lat. 11750, Bibliothèque nationale de Paris). The gathering of material in the p. follows various criteria: for the most part either the order of the calendar or the rank of the eponyms (apostles, martyrs, holy virgins...). There are p. that present no order at all.

The intrinsic value of the collections varies according to their origin. The value of the authentic collections is one thing, that is, those in which the compiler is also the redactor (such as St. Gregory of Tours and Eulogius); the value is another thing when the redactor has limited himself to putting together the various hagiographic texts and copying them or having them copied; and another thing, finally, the value when the compiler is at the same time the author, at least in part, inasmuch as he himself supplied the missing passiones or vitae. For the most part the p. are anonymous.

Unlike the martyrology, the p. was meant to serve for (public) reading for the purpose of edification. In time the martyrologies, expanding their skeletal data, drew closer to the passiones from which they took narrative elements (historical martyrologies); the passiones, on the other hand, through an opposite process and with the aim of making the reading less burdensome, pruned the account of superfluous elements.

I. HISTORY

The only primitive source of reading in the liturgical synaxes was the codex Scripturarum, the Bible, from which the lector read, prout tempus fert (Justin, Apology, I, c. 65), a passage, taken up again at the point where it had been left off the previous time (lectio continua). But already in the sub-apostolic period (2nd century, up to about 175) the practice was introduced of reading other writings, such as circular letters of great heroes of the faith and, on the anniversaries of the martyrs, the account of their deeds (cf. martyrium Polycarpi, s. 155, and the Acts of the Martyrs of Lyons, a. 177).

The anniversaries multiplied when, after the 4th century, the confessores too were admitted, like the martyrs, to the honors of worship. Thus the number of panegyrics, passiones and vitae of the saints grew. Cassiodorus (d. 575) prescribed to his monks: vitas Patrum, confessiones fidelium, passiones martyrum legite constanter (De Institut. divin. litter.; PL. 70, 1147). But the text certainly refers to spiritual reading. Rome, faithful to the canon of the scriptural books, did not look favorably upon these foreign compositions, all the more so because, for the martyrs, to the acta sincera had been added literary stuffing and fantasies of uncontrolled writers, often anonymous (mostly monks or infideles seu idiotae, who not infrequently altered and falsified the historical data themselves); so much so that Gelasius I (492-96) issued the famous decree: «Gesta sanctorum martyrum... quia et eorum, qui conscripsere, nomina penitus ignorantur... ne vel levis subsannandi oriretur occasio, in sancta Romana Ecclesia non leguntur» (PL. 59, 160-61; Denz-U, n. 165). The East too was opposed (Council of Laodicea, can. 69) to the passiones, which instead found a favorable reception in Africa, in Milan and in Gaul. St. Augustine several times alludes to the reading of the Passiones in his sermons: «Modo legebatur Passio beati Cypriani» (cf. Misc. Agostiniana, I, Rome 1930, p. 67, 80; Serm., 273, c. 2: PL. 38, 1249). The practice was codified in the Council of Hippo of 393 (Mansi, IV, 924) and in the Fourth Council of Carthage of 397 (Ph. Labbé, Conc., II, Venice 1728, col. 1409). V. ATTI DEI MARTIRI.

At the beginning of the 5th century, in the monastery of virgins founded in Palestine by St. Melania the Younger, three lessons are found in the liturgical Office, taken, as was customary in the East, from the Old and New Testaments. But in the last night Office recited by the Saint in honor of St. Stephen, on the night of 25-26 Dec. 439, she added two more lessons; one recounted the martyrdom of the Saint, the other the finding of his relics: «quia consuetudo erat ei per vigilias sanctorum quinque legere lectiones» (M. Rampolla del Tindaro, S. Melania iuniore, Rome 1905, p. 265). Since neither in the East nor in Rome was the reading of the Acts of the martyrs admitted in the psalmody, Melania must therefore have learned the practice in Africa, in 415.

For Milan, in the sermons of St. Ambrose the Passiones of St. Agnes, St. Cecilia, etc., are extensively used, while for Gaul a text of Arnobius the Younger (mid-5th century) bears witness: «cotidie legitur in ecclesia in conspectu Dei, quanta mala fecerunt Christo, apostolis et martyribus» (PL. 53, 494), which Morin interprets without doubt in the sense of the passiones (Rev. bénéd., 28 [1911], p. 173). The Gelasian rigidity seems to have been limited to the Eucharistic synaxis; in the Office there was greater leniency. A trace of this is found in the Rule of St. Benedict (cap. 14): «In sanctorum festivitatibus... lectiones ad ipsum diem pertinentes dicantur». It is likely that such lessons were gathered in a special volume, an incipient p. to which St. Gregory the Great may have been referring when in 598, to Eulogius of Alexandria who asked him for «cunctorum martyrum gesta», he replied that the Archive of the Roman Church knew only «pauca quaedam in unius codicis volumine collecta» (cf. A. Dufourcq, Le passionnaire occidental du VIIe siècle, in Mélanges d'arch. et d'hist. de l'Ecole franç. de Rome, 26 [1906], pp. 27-65).

The initial intransigence was gradually attenuated to the point of tolerance and then of official recognition with the spread of the cult of the saints. Until the 9th century the passio was read only in the church where the Saint was venerated. Adrian I (772-95) extended it also to St. Peter's, when their Office was celebrated there (it is the period of the great translations and of the diffusion of relics). This is attested by the Ordo XII (between the end of the 8th century and the first half of the 9th), cf. M. Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen-âge, II, Louvain 1948, p. 466): «Passiones sanctorum vel gesta ipsorum usque ad Adriani tempora tantummodo ibi legebantur ubi ecclesia ipsius sancti vel titulus erat. Ipse vero tempore suo renovare iussit et in Ecclesia Sancti Petri legendas esse instituit». The pontifical favor facilitated their diffusion and increase, to the point of constituting in the divine Office a threat to the lectio divina itself.

The reading took place in choir, but when it was very lengthy it was continued in refectorio, as the ms. lat. 798 of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris glosses (V. Leroquais [v. bibl.], p. 11), or it was distributed over the days of the week (if the feast had an octave).

II. CLASSIFICATION

Among the p. some are particular or local, that is, they contain the passiones of the martyrs of a region or diocese or venerated in a church; others are general or universal, whether as a class of saints or as a place of veneration. Types of particular p. are, for example, for Egypt the Vitae Patrum, for Gaul the Vitae of St. Gregory of Tours, for Italy the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, for Spain the Memoriale sanctorum of Eulogius of Cordoba, for Ireland the Codex Salmanticensis, for England the Sanctilogium Angliae of John of Tynemouth, for Brabant the Hagiologium Brabantinorum. The universality of the p. depends on the number of saints, on the limits of time, etc.

The two oldest manuscripts of p. date from the 7th century and are found: one, the Codex Velseri, in the Library of Munich (lat. 3514), the other in the municipal Library of Montpellier (ms. 55). More numerous are the manuscripts of the 8th century. From the 9th century onward the p. multiplied everywhere and became ever more voluminous. In the 12th century the parts were extracted from them, already marked in the codices with distinct paragraphs, destined for reading in the Divine Office. Indeed the first types of breviaries were already taking shape, and the p. became the most frequent source of the historical lessons of the proprium sanctorum.

From the anonymous and legendary p. have been taken, and there still remain in the Office, the texts of lessons and responsories of several ancient martyrs, such as St. Agatha, St. Cecilia, St. Lucy, St. Clement, St. Lawrence, of whom no authentic acts are possessed. Toward the middle of the 13th century, finally, a last type of "abbreviated" legendaries became widespread, destined to procure for private devotion an edifying reading. It seems that in this the Dominicans were particularly distinguished.

Annibale Bugnini