S. Gorgonii Martyris — Commemoratio · Wednesday within the Fifteenth Week after Pentecost, feria IV classis (9 September)
Lætabitur iustus in Domino, et sperabit in eo: et laudabuntur omnes recti corde. “The just shall rejoice in the Lord, and shall hope in him: and all the upright in heart shall be praised.” — Psalm 63:11, Introit of the Common of one Martyr
I. Identitas et Origines
On the ninth day of September the Church of Rome has kept the memory of a martyr named Gorgonius for as long as she has kept written record of her martyrs at all. He appears in the Depositio Martyrum, the calendar preserved in the so-called Chronograph of 354, at the fifth day before the Ides of September: Gorgoni, in Lavicana — Gorgonius, on the Via Labicana. That single line is the oldest and firmest thing we possess about him, and it tells us three things: that he was a martyr, that he lay in the cemetery on the Labican road, and that by the middle of the fourth century Rome already went out to his tomb on this day.
Beyond that the record is thin, and honesty obliges us to say how thin. We do not know his birthplace, his rank, or the persecution under which he suffered. We do not know whether he was a Roman by birth or a stranger who died at Rome. The Church has never pretended otherwise: the Roman Martyrology, in its most recent recension, enters him at 9 September with no more than his name, his title of martyr, and the cemetery on the Via Labicana where he was laid.
There is, however, a second Gorgonius, and the two have been running together in the Church’s books for well over a thousand years. This other Gorgonius was an officer of the imperial household at Nicomedia, who suffered with Dorotheus and Peter under Diocletian in the year 303 and whose story is told, at first hand or nearly so, by Eusebius in the eighth book of the Ecclesiastical History and by Lactantius in De mortibus persecutorum. From at least the ninth century the Western martyrologies began to say that the body of this Nicomedian courtier had been brought to Rome and laid on the Via Labicana; the Roman Martyrology as it stood until the end of the twentieth century said the same at 9 September, and enriched the entry with the tortures related in a later Passio. The Bollandists and the historians of the Roman cemeteries, above all Father Delehaye, have shown that this identification is a conflation: the Gorgonius of the Labican road is an independent Roman martyr, older in the Roman books than any knowledge at Rome of the Nicomedian one, and the Church now keeps the two apart — the Roman at 9 September, the Nicomedian at 12 March.
This hagiography follows the Church’s present judgment. The saint of today’s commemoration is Gorgonius of the Via Labicana. But because the Nicomedian story was for so many centuries read over his feast, and because the Fathers and the liturgy alike treat the martyrs as a single company, the story of the other Gorgonius is set down below in its proper place and with its proper rank — not as a fact about the man buried on the Labican road, but as the tradition under which Rome honoured him and as a true account of what it cost to confess Christ in the year 303.
II. Vitæ Ratio et Virtutes
Of a man about whom we know nothing but his death, what can be said of his way of life? The Church answers with a principle rather than a biography. Martyrdom, says St. Thomas, is the greatest act of the virtue of fortitude, and of all human acts it is the most perfect in kind, because in it a man proves that he holds the invisible good of faith dearer than the most visible and most natural of goods, which is life (cf. Summa Theologiæ II-II, q. 124). But fortitude of that order does not appear from nowhere on the day of trial. The martyr who stands firm before the judge has been standing firm, unnoticed, for years: in small refusals, in prayers kept, in the daily preference of Christ to comfort. The Church’s rule, nemo repente fit summus, applies to sanctity as well as to sin. So of Gorgonius we may say with confidence what the Common of Martyrs says of every martyr — that he was a just man who hoped in the Lord — and we may say it precisely because the end of his life is the one thing about it we know.
Pope St. Damasus, who set his verses over so many of the martyrs’ tombs, composed one for Gorgonius. The epigram, preserved in the sylloges, says in substance that the martyr’s tomb lies beneath the great brow of the hill, and that Gorgonius, who keeps the altars of Christ, is held there. The phrase about keeping the altars is the only description of his life that antiquity has left us, and its very vagueness is instructive: a martyr’s whole life is summed up as guardianship of the altar, which is to say fidelity to the sacrifice.
If the Nicomedian tradition is admitted at the level proper to it, it supplies the portrait the Roman record lacks. Eusebius says that Dorotheus and Gorgonius held posts of trust in the imperial palace and were honoured by their master beyond the common run of servants; that when the persecution broke out they were among the first to be seized, because they were among the most conspicuous; and that they went to their death with a certain Peter, whom the historian describes as of the same household. Lactantius, who was living at Nicomedia at the time, names the two as chamberlains of great influence who were put to death. The virtue here is of a particular and difficult kind: not the courage of the poor man who has little to lose, but the courage of the man who has everything the world can give and lays it down without a word. Whichever Gorgonius lies on the Via Labicana, the Church has for a thousand years read this lesson over his tomb, and it is not a false one.
III. Testimonium et Passio
For the Roman Gorgonius the passion is unrecorded. Delehaye’s suggestion, which most historians accept, is that he suffered in the great persecution of 303–305, since the cemetery inter duas lauros — “between the two laurels,” on the imperial estate along the Via Labicana — received the bodies of several martyrs of that time, among them Saints Peter and Marcellinus and the soldier Tiburtius. But this is inference from neighbourhood, not evidence, and it is held loosely.
For the Nicomedian Gorgonius the passion is told twice, at two very different levels of trust.
The first level is that of the historians. Eusebius, writing within living memory, relates that in the first year of the persecution the servants of the palace were made an example: Peter was scourged, then tortured with salt and vinegar on his wounds, then burned slowly on a fire, and so died; and that Dorotheus and Gorgonius, with many others of the household, after various contests were strangled. He adds — and this is the detail that later linked the story to a translation of relics — that their bodies were cast into the sea, lest the Christians should venerate them, and that Christians nevertheless recovered them. Lactantius confirms the deaths of the two chamberlains in a single sentence.
The second level is that of the Passio, a later composition of the kind the Bollandists have taught us to read with respect and without credulity. It gathers up the tortures Eusebius assigns to Peter, distributes them among Dorotheus and Gorgonius, adds the gridiron, and gives the emperor a speaking part. This is the account that entered the old Roman Martyrology at 9 September and that the older lives of the saints repeat. It is retained here as traditio pia: not asserted as history, but not despised either, since it bears witness to what the Church has always believed a martyr’s constancy to be, and it was under this account that generations of the faithful honoured the saint of this day.
IV. Mors et Cultus
However he died, Gorgonius was laid in the cemetery ad duas lauros on the Via Labicana, in a hillside gallery that Damasus’s verses describe. The cemetery was among the most venerated in Rome: over it Constantine built the basilica of Saints Peter and Marcellinus, and beside it the mausoleum of his mother, St. Helena, whose porphyry sarcophagus now stands in the Vatican. Gorgonius’s tomb was a station on the pilgrim’s road. The seventh-century itineraries written for northern visitors to the Roman shrines direct the traveller along the Labican road to the martyrs of the two laurels and name Gorgonius among them, sometimes in a church of his own.
Rome sang a Mass for him. The old Roman sacramentaries — the books that stand behind our Missal — provide a set of prayers for the natale of Gorgonius on this day, and the Collect that the 1962 Missale Romanum still assigns to his commemoration descends from them. This is a point worth pausing on. Whatever the uncertainty about the man, the liturgical cultus of Gorgonius at Rome on 9 September is continuous and documented from the fourth century to the present, which is more than can be said of many saints about whom we know a great deal.
In the eighth century the body left Rome. St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, the reformer of the Frankish clergy and the friend of Pepin and Charlemagne, obtained from Pope Paul I in the year 765 the bodies of three Roman martyrs for the monasteries he had founded or reformed in Lorraine: Nabor and Nazarius went to Lorsch, and Gorgonius went to Gorze. The translation is recorded in the annals of the time and is not in doubt. At Gorze the martyr became the patron of a great abbey, and from Gorze portions of his relics passed to churches across France and the Rhineland. The cathedral of Minden in Westphalia was placed under his patronage and claimed a share of his body. At the French Revolution the shrine at Gorze was plundered and the greater part of the relics was lost, so that the martyr who had been twice buried in honour — once in the Labican hill and once beneath an altar in Lorraine — was at the last scattered, like the ashes of so many of his brethren in the persecutions.
In the traditional Roman calendar his feast stands at 9 September as a commemoration: the Mass of the day is that of the preceding Sunday, and Gorgonius is remembered in the Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion. The reformed calendar of 1969 removed him from the General Calendar on the ground that nothing certain was known of him beyond his name and his tomb, while leaving him in the Roman Martyrology. The reader will judge whether an unbroken cultus of sixteen centuries at the very heart of the Roman Church is well described as “nothing certain.”
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The martyr left no writings, and the Church’s teaching about him is contained in what she says over his tomb and at his altar.
The epigram of Damasus. The Pope’s verses do two things that the whole later cultus depends on. They locate the tomb precisely, so that the faithful may find it; and they describe the martyr as one who guards the altars of Christ. The Damasian epigrams as a whole are the earliest Roman theology of the martyrs in verse, and their constant theme is that the martyr has not died but has been transferred to a place from which he continues to protect the Church. That Gorgonius is made a keeper of altars means that his intercession is bound up with the sacrifice offered at them.
Eusebius on the palace martyrs. Whether or not the Nicomedian Gorgonius is ours, the Church has read his story on this day for a millennium, and the historian’s reflection on it belongs to the feast. Eusebius observes that the emperor’s own servants were chosen for the first and most public example, and he treats their constancy as a demonstration that the faith had penetrated to the very centre of imperial power and could not be dislodged from it by the men who held that power. The lesson is that the Church is not the religion of one class.
St. Augustine on the martyrs’ feasts. Augustine repeatedly teaches that the Church does not offer sacrifice to the martyrs but for their memory, at their tombs, to the God who crowned them; that the martyr is honoured by imitation and not by mere celebration; and that the feast of a martyr whose deeds we do not know is not therefore empty, because what we celebrate is the victory, and the victory is Christ’s in him (cf. De civitate Dei VIII, 27; Sermones on the martyrs). This is the precise answer to the difficulty of a feast like today’s. We do not need the martyr’s biography in order to honour his crown.
VI. Oratio
The Collect of the commemoration, from the 1962 Missale Romanum:
Sanctus tuus, Domine, Gorgonius sua nos intercessione lætificet: et pia faciat sollemnitate gaudere. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“May Thy holy Martyr Gorgonius, O Lord, gladden us by his intercession, and make us to rejoice in this his sacred solemnity. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
The prayer asks for nothing but joy — twice. It does not ask that we be spared what he suffered; it asks that the memory of his suffering make us glad. That is the whole theology of a martyr’s feast in a single sentence.
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Gorgoni, qui altaria Christi servasti, serva nos in fide. “Saint Gorgonius, who didst keep the altars of Christ, keep us in the faith.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII, 6, for the palace martyrs of Nicomedia; Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, ch. 15, for the independent witness. For the Roman Gorgonius: the Depositio Martyrum of the Chronograph of 354; the Damasian epigram in Ferrua’s edition of the Epigrammata Damasiana; and the entry in the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum for September, with the corrective studies of Hippolyte Delehaye on the Roman martyrs of the Via Labicana. For the translation to Gorze, the sources for the episcopate of St. Chrodegang of Metz, and for the later cultus, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “Gorgonius, Saint,” which still presents the conflated account and should be read alongside the modern correction.
Practice
Examine. Would I be recognized as a Christian if the only record of my life were the manner of my death? Gorgonius is remembered for one act. Ask what one act of yours, taken alone, would say of you.
Do. Visit, if you can, the tomb or the relic of a martyr — most old churches in Catholic countries have one under the altar, and many in the New World have relics in their altar stones. Kneel there and remember that the Mass is offered on the bones of witnesses. If no such place is near, read the Canon slowly and pause at the Nobis quoque peccatoribus, where the martyrs are named.
Pray. The Collect above; and, for the many martyrs whose names alone survive, the Te Deum‘s verse: Te martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus — “The white-robed army of martyrs praise Thee.”
Devote. Devotion to the relics of the saints, which the Church has always defended and which the martyrs’ cemeteries of Rome first taught. The Council of Trent’s decree on the veneration of relics (Session XXV) is short and worth reading in full on a day like this.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path treats the Roman cemeteries and the Damasian restoration of the martyrs’ tombs, and the Diocletianic persecution in which both men named Gorgonius suffered. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the theology of the martyrs’ feasts and of relics beneath the altar, and the Carolingian translations that carried Rome’s saints across the Alps.
Sancte Gorgoni, ora pro nobis.