Transivimus per ignem et aquam: et eduxisti nos in refrigerium. “We have passed through fire and water, and thou hast brought us out into a refreshment.” — Psalm 65:12
I. Identitas et Origines
There are three Placiduses on this page, and the reader is owed an honest account of each before any of them is praised.
The first is the boy whom St. Gregory the Great describes in the second book of his Dialogues, the Life of St. Benedict. This Placidus is a historical person, and his witness is of the first rank (Tier 1). Gregory relates (Dial. II.3) that when the fame of Benedict’s monasteries at Subiaco had spread, devout nobles of Rome began to bring him their sons to be raised for God. Equitius gave his son Maurus; Tertullus, a man of patrician rank, gave his son Placidus. Gregory distinguishes the two with a schoolmaster’s eye: Maurus, the elder, was already of settled good character and soon became his master’s helper, while Placidus was still a child in temperament as in years. Tradition places his birth around 515 and his oblation around 522 (Tier 2: reasonable, but resting on later reckoning rather than on Gregory).
The second is a martyr, or rather a band of martyrs. The oldest Latin martyrologies, in the family that bears St. Jerome’s name, record on the fifth of October a Placidus and a Eutychius with some thirty companions (Tier 2: the commemoration is ancient; the manuscripts disagree on the number, and nothing reliable survives of their era or circumstances). These were very probably martyrs of the age of the pagan persecutions, and the place of their passion is itself uncertain.
The third is the hero of a long and vivid passio which joins the first two together: Benedict’s disciple, grown to manhood, sent to Sicily, martyred at Messina with his brothers Eutychius and Victorinus, his sister Flavia, Donatus, Faustus, the deacon Firmatus, and some thirty monks. This narrative circulated under the name of one Gordianus, a supposed eyewitness and fellow-monk. Critical scholarship since the Bollandists has attributed it to Peter the Deacon, librarian of Monte Cassino in the twelfth century, a gifted and prolific writer and also a notorious fabricator of documents (Tier 3: traditio pia, retained for its devotional and liturgical history, not asserted as fact).
The Church’s commemoration today honours the martyrs whom she has prayed for under these names since antiquity. Who, precisely, they were is known perfectly to God and imperfectly to us. This entry will not pretend otherwise; nor will it pretend that the imperfection empties the feast.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
Of the historical Placidus we possess one great scene, and it is one of the best-loved pages in all monastic literature (Dial. II.7; Tier 1).
One day, while Benedict was in his cell, the boy Placidus went down to the lake to draw water. He let the vessel down carelessly, it filled, and its weight pulled him in after it. The current carried him out from the shore about the distance of an arrow’s flight. Benedict, within his cell, knew it at once, and called out: “Brother Maurus, run! The boy who went for water has fallen into the lake and the water is carrying him off.” Maurus asked for the blessing, received it, and ran at his abbot’s command. He reached the place where the child was struggling, seized him by the hair, and drew him back to the bank, and only when he set foot on dry land did he look back and realize that he had been running on the water.
Then followed what Gregory plainly regards as the greater marvel. Maurus told the abbot what had happened, and Benedict refused the credit: it was the merit of Maurus’s obedience, he said, not his own. Maurus refused it in turn: he had only obeyed a command, and had not known what he was doing; the power was the abbot’s. The two were still contending in humility when the child settled the matter. “When I was being drawn out of the water,” said Placidus, “I saw over my head my abbot’s sheepskin, and it seemed to me that it was he who was pulling me out.”
What virtues does the historical record allow us to name in him? Not, in this scene, heroic ones. He was a child who did a chore badly and nearly drowned for it. His part in his own rescue was to be rescued, and afterwards to say truthfully what he had seen. Yet the Church has never thought that small. The virtue of the oblate is docility, the willingness to be formed; and the virtue of the witness is that he reports what was given rather than what flatters. Placidus claimed nothing for himself. He neither embellished his peril nor took a share of the miracle. He testified to his father’s care, and the testimony ended a contest of humility in which neither of his elders would have yielded on his own.
Later Cassinese tradition holds that Placidus accompanied Benedict when he left Subiaco for Monte Cassino around 529 and was formed there in the full observance of the Rule (Tier 3: plausible, but Gregory is silent on it).
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
The passio gives Placidus a public mission (Tier 3 throughout this paragraph). His father Tertullus, it says, had made over to Monte Cassino great estates in Sicily, and Benedict sent Placidus, then about twenty-one, to secure them for the monks. On the road south he worked many miracles: he healed the sick, gave sight to a blind man, and cast out demons, so that he came to Messina already famous for sanctity. There, by the harbour, he built a monastery in honour of St. John the Baptist and governed some thirty monks under the Rule, living with great austerity. The reader should know that the deed of gift on which this story depends survives only in the Cassinese tradition shaped by Peter the Deacon, and is itself regarded as doubtful; the story served, among other purposes, to underwrite Monte Cassino’s claims to Sicilian property.
The apostolate that history does guarantee is quieter and has lasted longer. Placidus and Maurus are the first oblates of the Benedictine tradition whom we know by name, and the Rule itself legislates for boys like them: in its fifty-ninth chapter St. Benedict prescribes how a noble father shall offer his son to the monastery, wrapping the petition and the child’s hand together in the altar cloth at the Offertory, so that the boy is presented to God with the oblation of the Mass (Regula, cap. 59; Tier 1). For fourteen centuries Placidus and Maurus have stood as the patrons of novices and monastic schools, the image of what a child given to God may become: Maurus the obedient youth who ran on water, Placidus the child who was carried by it and lived to tell the truth about it.
IV. Mors et Cultus
The passio (Tier 3, given in full as traditio pia). Some years after the founding at Messina, Placidus’s two brothers, Eutychius and Victorinus, and his young sister Flavia came from Rome to visit him. While they were there, a pagan pirate named Manucha, coming from across the sea, descended on the coast, sacked the monastery, and seized the monks and their guests. The deacon Donatus was beheaded at once. The rest were imprisoned and tormented to make them deny Christ. Flavia was hung by her feet and scourged, and remained constant. Placidus reproached the tyrant with the vanity of his idols; Manucha ordered his mouth beaten with stones and his tongue cut out at the root, and the legend relates that the martyr went on speaking clearly and praising God. At last Placidus, his brothers, his sister, and some thirty of his monks were led to the seashore near Messina and beheaded. The passio dates their crowning to the fifth of October, and the later books variously give the year as 539, 541, or 546.
The critique. The Bollandists and the historians who followed them have identified the narrative’s problems plainly. It appears six centuries after the events it claims to describe. Its putative author is unknown to any earlier witness. Its account of seaborne raiders reads the Saracen piracy of a later age back into the sixth century. And its martyrs bear the names of the Placidus, Eutychius, and companions whom the ancient martyrologies already commemorated on the fifth of October. The most economical explanation is that the Monte Cassino writer fused Benedict’s disciple with that older band of martyrs, and supplied the rest from imagination and from the conventions of the genre. This is not an innovation of modern scepticism: Butler, writing in the eighteenth century with every sympathy for the Benedictine tradition, already noted that many learned men took the martyrs of this day for ancient victims of the pagan emperors.
The relics. In August of 1588, building works beneath the old church of San Giovanni at Messina uncovered a large number of burials, which the citizens identified, by the marks of violent death and by local tradition, as Placidus and his companions. Sixtus V approved their cultus by a bull of the same year, and the feast thereafter entered the universal calendar (Tier 2: the discovery and the papal acts are documented; the identification of the bodies is a judgment of the sixteenth century). The older apologetic, repeated in Dom Guéranger and in the lessons of the Monastic Breviary, held that the discovery “confirmed” the Acts. It confirmed something real, an ancient Christian cemetery with a long local cult, but it could not confirm the details of a twelfth-century narrative, and the claim should not be repeated.
The liturgical standing. In the 1962 Missale Romanum the day is kept as a commemoration of Saints Placidus and his Companions, Martyrs, with its own Collect. The reformed calendar of 1969 removed the commemoration from the General Calendar; the post-conciliar books keep Placidus’s memory chiefly as Benedict’s disciple, and the Benedictine family honours him apart from the Messina narrative. These later arrangements are noted here for orientation only.
What, then, is being honoured? Something true. There were martyrs of Christ named Placidus and Eutychius who died with their companions and whose dies natalis the Church has kept on this day since the earliest martyrologies. There was a boy named Placidus, drawn from the lake at Subiaco by the obedience of Maurus and the prayer of Benedict, whose holiness the Church has always acknowledged. The Collect of the day asks to rejoice in the fellowship of “Thy holy Martyrs Placidus and his Companions,” and that petition is addressed to the One who knows exactly whom it names. “The Lord knoweth who are his” (2 Tim. 2:19). The Church’s prayer does not depend on the reliability of Peter the Deacon.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The rescued child. In the lake at Subiaco, the child contributes nothing to his own salvation but his need. He does not swim to shore; he is carried. Here, in a single picture, is the doctrine of grace that the Church holds against every Pelagian ambition: we are drawn out of the water by another’s hand. Yet the picture does not abolish cooperation. Maurus must run, and runs only because he asked a blessing and obeyed without delay. St. Benedict requires exactly this in the Rule: obedience “without delay,” the hand leaving unfinished whatever it held, so that the command and the deed come almost together (Regula, cap. 5). And St. Thomas teaches that obedience is the virtue by which the will is offered to God, and so ranks above every other moral virtue that offers Him only external goods or the body (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 104). Maurus walked on water because he did not stop to measure it.
The contest of humility. Gregory’s story has two miracles, and the second is a miracle of the will. Each man who could have claimed the deed assigned it to the other. Neither was performing a ritual modesty; each was telling the truth as he saw it, and the truth was that the power was God’s, working through an abbot’s prayer and a disciple’s obedience together. The witness who ended the dispute was the one who had the least standing to speak. In a community where the merits of obedience and authority are honestly confessed to one another, God is the only one who receives the glory.
The honesty of the Church’s memory. The Church calls the day of a martyr’s death his natalitia, his birthday. She has kept the birthday of these martyrs for more than fifteen hundred years without a reliable account of their lives, and she has never felt the need of one to pray to them. The lesson cuts in two directions. Against the sceptic, it shows that the cultus of the saints rests on the communion of saints and on the Church’s living memory, not on the literary quality of a passio. Against the credulous, it shows that fidelity to that memory never requires defending a forgery. The Church’s tradition is strong enough to bear the truth about its own documents, and is honoured, not threatened, by it.
VI. Oratio
The Collect of the commemoration:
Deus, qui nos concedis sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Placidi et Sociorum eius natalitia colere: da nobis in aeterna beatitudine de eorum societate gaudere. Per Dominum.
“O God, who grantest us to celebrate the birthday of Thy holy Martyrs Placidus and his Companions: grant us to rejoice in their fellowship in everlasting blessedness. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiratio
Anima nostra sicut passer erepta est de laqueo venantium: laqueus contritus est, et nos liberati sumus. “Our soul hath been delivered as a sparrow out of the snare of the fowlers. The snare is broken, and we are delivered.” — Psalm 123:7
The whole psalm belongs to this day. Its fourth and fifth verses — “Perhaps the water had swallowed us up. Our soul hath passed through a torrent” — are the lake at Subiaco; its sixth, “Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us to be a prey to their teeth,” is the shore at Messina, in whichever century the martyrs died there; and its last, Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini, is said by Benedictines at the opening of their Chapter every day.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
The Lives of the Saints path continues with the other figures of Gregory’s second Dialogue: St. Benedict himself (21 March), his sister St. Scholastica (10 February), and St. Maurus (15 January), the obedient disciple who ran on the water. The Church History path takes up the scriptorium of Monte Cassino in the twelfth century, the career of Peter the Deacon, and the slow work by which the Bollandists and Baronius’s revisers learned to sift genuine witness from pious invention. The Spiritual Practices path treats obedience in the Rule of St. Benedict, chapters five and seven, as a discipline available to those who live outside the cloister.
Practice
Examine. Where am I contending for credit, whether openly or in the quiet ledger of my own mind? Is there a good thing done in my family, my parish, or my work whose merit I would rather assign to myself than to another’s obedience or another’s prayer?
Do. Obey one legitimate command today without delay, the moment it is given, leaving unfinished whatever you were holding. Then, if anyone thanks you, give the credit truthfully where it belongs.
Pray. The Collect of the day; and, before any work begun today, the Benedictine versicle: Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini. — Qui fecit caelum et terram.
Devote. Psalm 123, said slowly, for anyone you know who is in deep water; or the Fifth Joyful Mystery, the Child found in the Temple, for all children given to God and for those who teach them.
Sancte Placide, cum Sociis tuis, ora pro nobis.