83 FRANCISCI SCORSI PROŒMIUM II. Now, of the double name of Theophanes and Gregory, some conjectures are to be set forth. In many of the most noble libraries of Europe—the Gallican, the Spanish, and especially the Vatican—the same homilies, nearly equal in number and in context, appear in two distinct manuscripts, with the name of Theophanes inscribed on one and Gregory on the other. But in this disagreement, this alone is agreed upon: that both the Cerameus and the Archbishop of Tauromenium are inscribed as *sophōtatos*, if not *rhētorikōtatos*—that is, truly most wise and most eloquent. Hence, one might suspect two bishops of Tauromenium affected by the same surname, distinguished by the same praise of wisdom and eloquence, of whom perhaps one transcribed the homilies from the other, or I must offer something else that is more certain. And indeed, Lord Octavius Caetanus seems to have held this opinion, both in the *Idea operis*, which he published as a *prodrōmos*, and in other papers which he left in manuscript; the same is true of Lord Rocchus Pirrus, Abbot of Netum, of whom we have often made mention above, in his *Notitia Ecclesiæ Tauromenitanæ*, in which, after Theophanes, he enumerates Gregory Cerameus; and before all of them, Antonius Possevinus, who, in the index of writers of the book inscribed *Apparatus sacer*, makes Gregory one person and Theophanes Cerameus another, labeling both as authors of homilies. But, in truth, to all these writers, who strenuously labored, each for himself, in publishing their work, great praise must be given for what they have accomplished, and pardon must be granted if they have erred in any way. Their task was merely to collect holy men and those distinguished by virtue in Sicily, as with Caetanus, or bishops of the same province, as with Pirrus, or ecclesiastical writers, as with Possevinus; therefore, where they found various names of saints, bishops, or writers, not having read and inspected them well enough—or indeed, not even having glanced at the sermons themselves from the first threshold—they posited their authors as being different, for I rest perfectly assured that, given their own sagacity, they would never have judged there to be two or three authors of this work had they thoroughly examined it. As for me, however, who have worked hard in translating these into Latin and explaining them with notes, and who know these sermons not just superficially but have understood them thoroughly from within, the trust, I believe, will be given to me by all men of good will if I state the opposite of what they have written and affirm that there is one and the same author. The method is the same in all, the style is altogether the same—grave and polished; piety shines forth equally in all. But perhaps someone might assume that one copied the entire sermons from the other: for there was among the Greeks of the later age an excessive license and *anaischuntia* (shamelessness) in mutual copying and compiling, a fact which Gretserus noted in volume II, *De cruce*, in the notes on Georgius Hamartolus; these things, I say, which anyone could object, I know. But regarding this work, let him who wishes suspect such a thing; I, for my part, will never be led to suspect it. For who—did Theophanes pilfer the homilies from Gregory, or did he from him? Was each a Cerameus, each an Archbishop of Tauromenium, each most wise? And yet one stole from the other? But lest we seem to deny this for no reason out of love for a work we have undertaken, certainly the prefaces themselves—many of which were taken not from any *locus communis*, but from the very time and place where they were spoken, and from the fortuitous events occurring at that moment, and are almost extemporaneous—must be believed to have happened to one and the same man, and that it is altogether impossible for them to have happened to two, and yet these sermons in their entirety, with all and singular their parts, are attributed to both. I shall touch upon some arguments for the sake of the statement: regarding the rest, which I could bring forward and which the reader can notice for himself, let anyone make a conjecture. In the homily on the son of the widow (homily VI), the author says that another preface had been proposed to him, but, having cast his eye to the right side of the choir and caught sight of the empty seat of his deceased brother, he confesses that he made his introduction regarding him and the brevity of life, changed his plan of mind, and was forced to weep. In the homily on St. Pancratius (homily LVI), he says that he had almost come after the feast, although he had hastened his journey to celebrate that day with his people; but although he arrived exhausted and infirm from the journey, he nevertheless did not want to be absent from the sermon. In the homily on the Centurion (homily XLIV), he makes mention of a judicial controversy offered to him at the very moment of delivering the sermon, so that he was almost hindered from the assembly by the devil's fraud. In the homily on the words "The lamp of the body is the eye" (homily XL), he gravely rebukes a deacon for having allowed himself to be overcome by sleep during the sermon and drags out a longer peroration regarding sleep on the spot, and with that concludes the sermon. 84 These and six hundred other things, which are said not only in the proem and perorations but in the very course of speech according to the needs of the occasion, based on time, place, person, and other circumstances, altogether prove that these sermons could not have belonged to several people, since it is among the *adunata* (impossibilities) for the same things to happen to two people at a different time. Furthermore, the author's meanings and explanations agree with themselves, and what is said in one is repeated in another; and he refers himself to himself, not rarely citing what we have annotated in the notes of the individual homilies as concordances: and these clearly demonstrate that this work came forth from one craftsman and one workshop. Since, therefore, this must be posited as more certain than certainty, I judge that this author was of two names, and that he was called both Theophanes and Gregory, but always Cerameus, which is sufficiently evident from the consensus of the manuscript codices, and that he was the same man, holding this one surname but a double name as Archbishop of Tauromenium, and that one name was given to him from the cradle, the other imposed after he had assumed the monastic habit or the office of bishop. That such a change of name, together with a changed state of life, was customary among the Greeks, we have an example not only from the age of our Theophanes but even among the most ancient Fathers. St. Gregory, Bishop of Neocæsarea, to whom the surname *Thaumaturgos* was given from his admirable deeds, was formerly Theodore and later called Gregory; which almost everyone testifies to:
those who have written about him. A St. Jerome, in his *Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers*, says thus regarding Theodore: "Theodore, who was later called Gregory, Bishop of Neocæsarea in Pontus, etc." Eusebius Pamphili of Cæsarea, in his *Ecclesiastical History*, writes: "Gregory, who was previously called Theodore, of the disciples of Origen, undertook the government of the Churches of Pontus together with his brother Athenodorus." Suidas says the same thing, with expressions almost identical to those mentioned above. I shall pass over the Latins, who, being known by two or more names, are read cited now by one, now by the other. Quintus Florentius Septimius Tertullianus; Cyprian added the other name, Cæcilius, from Cæcilius the presbyter, by whom he was washed in baptism; Fulgentius was also called Pluciades. I say that I omit these and others; I shall draw arguments again only from our Theophanes or the centuries following him among the Greeks. B It is established by Nicetas David in his *Life of St. Ignatius* that the Patriarch of Constantinople, St. Ignatius, was called Nicetas before he entered the monastic life, and at the threshold of the religious life he changed that name to Ignatius: *Νικήτας δὲ ἀποκείρεται μὲν, καὶ αὐτὸς Ἰγνάτιος μετωνομάζεται.* “Nicetas is indeed shorn, and he himself is renamed Ignatius.” A little later, when he begins to write about him as a monk: *Νικήτας, ὁ καὶ Ἰγνάτιος, οἷά τις εὐγενέστατος ὄρπηξ ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ τοῦ Θεοῦ φυτευθείς.* “Nicetas, who is also Ignatius, planted like some most noble shoot in the house of God.” I possess another example of the same time, taken from the same Nicetas David, who testifies the same thing regarding St. Ignatius’s own brother, Theophylact: *Τούτων Θεοφύλακτος μὲν ὁ πάντων πρωτότοκος ἅμα τοῖς πατράσιν αὐτοῦ, καὶ βασιλεῦσι τότε κειράμενος εἰς Εὐστράτιον μετωνομάσθη.* “Of these, Theophylact, the firstborn of all, having been shorn together with his fathers and emperors (he calls Michael Rhangabe and Procopia, the parents of both, emperors, of whom he had spoken above), was renamed Eustratius.” C From later times, an example exists in Gregory Scholarios, a man most wise among the Greeks, who was previously called Gennadius and who changed his name when assumed to the patriarchate of C.P., as Bellarmine writes in his work *De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis*, whose four orations concerning peace for the Council of Florence are read in the collection of the same. Many other examples of this Greek custom could be provided, but those I have adduced are sufficient to make our conjecture probable: that our Theophanes, either upon adopting the monastic habit or upon being raised to the dignity of bishop, exchanged one name for another, and that Theophanes and Gregory are the name of one and the same writer, even though by those who transcribed his homilies—so that they might endure for posterity—he is called now by one name, now by the other; yet the surname and title of *Cerameus* and Archbishop of Tauromenium are always and most constantly affixed to both names. D Indeed, it is certain to me, and must be to anyone who knows the custom of the Greeks, and certainly of those times, not to elect bishops from any but the monks—a fact which we said above was done in the case of St. Ignatius the Patriarch according to Nicetas David—but even Photius himself, who from a layman suddenly leaped into the patriarchal throne, having forcibly driven out St. Ignatius himself, so that he might nevertheless seem to have been made bishop legitimately and according to rite: *Πρώτῃ ἡμέρᾳ*, says the same Nicetas, *μοναχὸς ἀντὶ λαϊκοῦ, τῇ δευτέρᾳ δὲ ἀναγνώστης, καὶ ὑποδιάκονος τῇ ἑξῆς, εἶτα διάκονος, εἶτα πρεσβύτερος, ἔπειτα τῇ ἕκτῃ καὶ αὐτὸς τῷ ἱερατικῷ προσβάς θρόνῳ*, etc. “On the first day, a monk instead of a layman; on the second, a reader; and the next, a subdeacon; then deacon, then presbyter; then on the sixth, he himself ascends the sacred tribunal,” etc. I have, moreover, a letter of that same Photius written into Sicily, the inscription of which is *Σικελῷ μοναχόντι* (“to the monk in Sicily”), which I will show by the reason of the times and many conjectures to be our own Theophanes, and I shall provide it below in the following paragraph. The Greeks retain this custom even today: to elect bishops from the body of monks and to change their name upon the profession of monastic life; this I received attested by testimony from their own lips. They have, however, added to the ancient custom a new observation, that both names, both the old and the new, must begin with the same letter. But that this was not the custom of earlier times is established by the example of St. Ignatius himself, whose names, Nicetas and Ignatius, were the former given and the latter assumed. Octavius Caetanus noted this as well in his collected papers, which I have read. Therefore, our conjecture will not be weakened by this recent observation of the Greeks, or at any rate not by a constant custom, if the names of Gregory and Theophanes do not have the same initial letter. Regarding the third name to which the homilies are inscribed, namely Philip Ceramita, I shall now say a few things. First of all, I have not read this name in any manuscript codex of those that I have so far discovered to exist in the libraries of Europe, to which primary trust should be given; nor, indeed, in printed books of authors, except in the *Idea* of Octavius Caetanus and in the list of these homilies in manuscript which he left behind. Although these are entirely the same as those which are ascribed now to Theophanes, now to Gregory in other manuscript copies, they favor Philip Ceramita as the author in a certain manuscript book which was offered to Octavius Caetanus at Messina when it was [brought] by a certain Meletius, an Athenian monk of the order of St. Basil, on the Holy Mountain, who had arrived there from the East. But since this inscription is supported by no other authority and no testimony than this book, I think that this Philip was the collector of these homilies, or used them in later centuries, and thus the name of the collector and transcriber passed into that of the true author; for it often happens that when later collectors of works inscribe their own name in what they have collected, it is thereafter commonly put forth as if it were the author's. Thus the *Lives of the Pontiffs* are said to be by Anastasius the Librarian, which, however, having been written by others, he himself reduced into a volume. Thus the *Lives of the Fathers* [are attributed to] P. Heribert Rosweyde of our Society, which he himself brought together from many and various writers into one body.