Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 70

But after not much time, the affair of the Goths requiring it, the most blessed man Agapitus also, pontiff of this holy Roman Church, whom by God's dispensation I serve, went to the emperor Justinian. As he was still journeying, on a certain day, now in the parts of Greece, there was offered to him, to be healed, a man mute and lame, who could neither utter any words nor ever rise from the ground. And when his kinsfolk had offered him, weeping, the man of the Lord anxiously inquired whether they had faith in his healing. And when they said that, in the power of faith, by the authority of Peter, they held a firm hope of his salvation, forthwith the venerable man gave himself to prayer, and, beginning the solemnities of the Mass, offered sacrifice in the sight of Almighty God.

When this was accomplished, coming forth from the altar, he took the lame man's hand, and, with the people standing by and looking on, he at once raised him from the ground upon his own feet. And when he put the Lord's Body into his mouth, that tongue, so long mute, was loosed to speak. All, marvelling, began to weep for joy, and awe and reverence straightway invaded their minds, when they beheld what Agapitus had been able to do in the power of the Lord, by the help of Peter. In the time of the same emperor also, when Datius, bishop of the city of Milan, driven forth for the cause of the faith, was journeying to the city of Constantinople, he came to Corinth.

When he sought a spacious house for lodging, one that might hold his whole retinue, and could scarcely find one, he beheld from afar a house of fitting size, and ordered it to be prepared for him for lodging. And when the inhabitants of that place said that no one could remain in it, because for many years now the devil had dwelt in it, and it had for that reason remained empty, the venerable man Datius answered, saying: "For this very reason we ought to lodge in that house, if an evil spirit has invaded it and has driven human habitation from it." He therefore ordered it to be prepared for himself in it, and, secure and about to endure the combats of the ancient enemy, he entered in.

And so in the silence of the dead of night, while the man of God was resting, the ancient enemy began, with immense voices and great clamours, to imitate the roaring of lions, the bleating of flocks, the braying of asses, the hissing of serpents, and the grunting of swine and the squeaking of shrew-mice. Then suddenly Datius, roused by the voices of so many beasts, arose, greatly angered, and began to cry out against the ancient enemy with a loud voice, saying: "It has befallen you fittingly, wretch! You are that one who said: 'I will set my throne toward the North, and I will be like the Most High' (Isa. 14:14); behold, through your pride you have been made like swine and shrew-mice; and you who unworthily wished to imitate God, behold, as you deserve, you imitate beasts."

At which voice, so to speak, the malignant spirit blushed at its own abasement. Or did it not blush, seeing that it did not thereafter enter that same house to display the monstrous things it had been wont to show? And so afterward it became a dwelling of the faithful, because, when one truly faithful entered it, the lying and unfaithful spirit forthwith departed from it. But it is now fitting that we be silent about earlier things, and come to those which have been done in our own days.