Paterius

Almost everything we know about Paterius comes from the edges of somebody else's story. He was a notary in the papal chancery under Gregory the Great, later a secundicerius, roughly the second-ranking clerk in the Roman church, and Gregory eventually made him a bishop. He died around 606, within a couple of years of Gregory himself. Where he was born, how old he was, and what he looked like are not recorded anywhere.

What he did is recorded, and it mattered.

Gregory was a compulsive commentator. He explained Scripture in his Moralia on Job, in his homilies on Ezekiel and the Gospels, in his letters, in his Dialogues, in sermons taken down while he preached. But the explanations were scattered across thousands of pages of unrelated books. If you wanted to know what Gregory had said about a particular verse of Genesis, you had to already know where he had said it.

Paterius solved that. He went through his master's works and pulled out the comments verse by verse, book by book, and arranged them in the order of the Bible rather than the order Gregory happened to write them. The result was the Liber testimoniorum, the Book of Testimonies, a running commentary on Scripture assembled entirely out of Gregory's own sentences, with nothing of Paterius's own opinion added.

That is a strange kind of authorship. He wrote a book by refusing to write one. But it made Gregory usable. For the next several centuries, when a monk in Gaul or Spain or England wanted Gregory on a text, what he reached for was often Paterius. The compilation was copied, extended by later hands, quarried by the makers of the medieval glosses, and printed among Gregory's works when printing came.

The surviving manuscripts are tangled. Later editors added material Paterius never collected, and scholars still argue about which parts of the Liber testimoniorum are his and which were bolted on afterward. That, too, is part of his story: the man who preserved someone else's voice ended up with his own book half-rewritten by strangers.

He belongs on this wall for a plain reason. Not every servant of Scripture is an original mind. Some are archivists. The Middle Ages read Gregory the Great in enormous quantity, and a large share of that reading passed through the patient indexing of a papal clerk whose first name we do not even have.

Sources: Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job; J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 79 (the Liber testimoniorum); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).