9
October. 1662 Book of Common Prayer: Denys, Martyr & 3rd Century
Missionary Bishop of Paris
Editors.
“Saint Denis.” Encyclopedia Britannica. N.d. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157713/Saint-Denis. Accessed 27 May 2014.
Saint Denis,
Denis also spelled Denys, Latin Dionysius (born , Rome?—died 258?, Paris; feast day: Western church, October 9; Eastern
church, October 3), allegedly first bishop of Paris, a martyr and a patron saint of France.
According to St.
Gregory of Tours’s 6th-century Historia Francorum, Denis was one of seven bishops sent to Gaul to convert the people in the
reign of the Roman emperor Decius. Little is known of his life; it is believed
that he was martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor
Decius in 251 or Valerian in 258. In the 7th century his relics, which had been
founded shortly before by the Merovingian king Dagobert I, were moved to the
abbey of St. Denis, near Paris. In the 9th century, Hilduin, abbot of St.
Denis, translated the mystical works of Pseudo-Dionysius, which had been sent
to the emperor Louis I the Pious by the Byzantine emperor Michael II. The abbot
identified the Parisian Denis with Pseudo-Dionysius,
who was believed to have been the Athenian
disciple of St. Paul the Apostle but was most likely a Syrian monk of the
5th or 6th century. In the 12th century, Peter Abelard was forced to flee the
monastery and France itself when he sought to demonstrate that the Parisian
Denis and the Athenian Denis were not the same person.
A legend recorded
in the 9th century recounts that Denis was beheaded on Montmartre and that his
decapitated corpse carried his head to the area northeast of Paris where the
Benedictine abbey of St. Denis was founded. Denis is often portrayed in art as
a decapitated (though evidently living) figure.
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