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The Agency Of Prayers And Their Benefit To The Dead: The Continuity Of The Commemoration Of The Sinful Dead, 400 - 1240, Stephanie Victoria Violette

Quidditas

According to their hagiographies, medieval saints could cure or let languish the devoted followers of their cults. Humans were at their mercy, and of course by extension at God’s mercy. For the ordinary dead, however, these roles were reversed. In Late Antiquity, Augustine of Hippo’s De cura pro mortuis gerenda reveals the belief that the living had the power to aid their deceased loved ones, as well as the anxieties theologians had about the place of commemoration within a Christian framework. Conversely, in Gregory the Great’s sixth-century Dialogues (book four) a different clerical viewpoint emerges, one much more at ease …