Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 117

For a man of venerable life, by name Valentio—who afterward, as you know, presided over me and my monastery in this Roman city—had earlier governed his own monastery in the province of Valeria. When the raging Lombards had come into it, as I learned from his own account, they hanged two of his monks on the branches of a single tree, who, thus hanged, died on that same day. But when evening came, the spirits of both of them began to chant psalms there with clear and open voices, so that even those very men who had killed them, when they heard the voices of the chanters, were exceedingly amazed and terrified. These voices, indeed, all the captives too who were there heard, and afterward stood forth as witnesses of their psalmody.

But almighty God willed these voices of spirits to reach the ears of bodies for this reason: that whoever are living in the flesh might learn that, if they are zealous to serve God, they live more truly after the death of the flesh. From certain religious men also who attested it, while still placed in the monastery I came to know that in this time of the Lombards, near here in this province which is called Sura, there was a certain Father of a monastery, of venerable life, Suranus by name, who to the captives who came and were fleeing from the plundering of the Lombards, bestowed all that he seemed to have in the monastery.

And when in almsgiving he had consumed his own garments and all those of the brethren, and the storeroom, he spent whatever he could have in the garden. But when all his goods had been spent, the Lombards suddenly came to him, seized him, and began to demand gold. When he told them that he had absolutely nothing, he was led by them to a neighbouring mountain, on which stood a forest of immense size. There a certain captive, fleeing, was hiding in a hollow tree, where one of the Lombards, drawing his sword, slew the aforesaid venerable man. As his body fell to the ground, the whole mountain and forest were at once shaken, as if the earth, which had trembled, were saying that it could not bear the weight of his holiness.