DYNAMIUS, patrician of the Gauls who is mentioned by St. Gregory of
Tours, (l. 6, c. 11,) and who was for some time steward of the patrimony
of the Roman church in Gaul, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, as
appears by a letter of that pope to him, (in which he mentions that he
sent him in a reliquary some of the filings of the chains of St. Peter,
and of the gridiron of St. Laurence,) was the author of the lives of St.
Marius and of St. Maximus of Ries. From the fragments of the former in
Bollandus, we learn that he was born at Orleans, became a monk, and
after some time was chosen abbot at La-Val-Benois, in the diocese of
Sisteron, in the reign of Gondebald, king of Burgundy, who died in 509.
St. Marius made a pilgrimage to St. Martin's, at Tours, and another to
the tomb of St. Dionysius, near Paris, where, falling sick, he dreamed
that he was restored to health by an apparition of St. Dionysius, and
awaking, found himself perfectly recovered. St. Marius, according to a
custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St. Bennet, in
imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live
a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. In one of these
retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would
soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery,
which he foretold before his death, in 555. The abbey of
La-Val-Benois[1] being demolished, the body of the saint was translated
to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honor in a famous collegiate
church which bears his name, and takes the title of Concathedral with
Sisteron. St. Marius is called in French St. May, or St. Mary, in Spain,
St. Mere, and St. Maire, and in some places, by mistake, St. Marrus. See
fragments of his life compiled by Dynamius, extant in Bollandus, with
ten preliminary observations.
Footnotes:
1. In Latin Vallis Bodonensis. Baillet and many others call it at
present Beuvons, or Beuvoux: but there is no such village. Bevons
indeed is the name of a village in Provence, one league from
Sisteron; but the ruins of the abbey La-Val-Benois are very
remarkable, in a village called St. May, in Dauphine, sixteen
leagues from Sisteron, in which diocese it is. See many mistakes of
martyrologists and geographers concerning this saint and abbey
rectified by Chatelain, p. 424.
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