VIS
484
VITALIAN
would be paid to a sovereign who favoured any place
in his dominions by taking up his abode there. The
conception is that in the tabernacle Jesus Christ, as
it were, holds His court, and is prepared to grant
audience to all who draw near to Him, though others
prefer to regard Him as a prisoner bound to this earth
and to existence in a confined space, by the fetters of
His love for mankind. In this latter ease the visits
paid to the Blessed Sacrament assumed the special
character of a work of mercy intended to console the
Sacred Heart of Jesus for the indifference and ingrati-
tude shown Him by the majority of Christians, for
whose sake He remains in the sacramental species.
It must be plain that this devotional exercise of
"visiting" the Blessed Sacrament is essentially de-
pendent upon the practice of ceremonial reservation
(q. v.). As has already been pointed out in this
latter article, the attempts formerly made to demon-
strate the existence of a custom in the early Church of
showing special and external veneration to the Sacred
Species when reserved for the sick break down upon
closer investigation. To this day in the Greek
Church no practice of genuflecting to the Blessed
Sacrament is known and in fact it may be said that,
though it is treated respectfully, as the Book of the
Gospels or the sacred vessels would be treated respect-
fully, still no cultus is shown it outside of the Liturgy.
During the first ten or twelve centuries after Christ
the attitude of the Western Church seems to have
been very similar. We may conjecture that the
faithful concentrated their attention upon the two
main purposes for which the Blessed Eucharist was
instituted, viz. to be offered in sacrifice and to become
the food of the soul in Holy Communion. It was only
by degrees that men awoke to the lawfulness of hon-
ouring the abiding presence of Christ outside the
sacred mysteries, much as we may conceive that if a
monarch chose to dress in mufti and to lay aside all
marks of rank, people might doubt as to the good
taste of showing him demonstrations of respect which
he seemed purposely to exclude. In any case the
fact is certain that we meet with no clear examples
of a desire to honour the presence of Jesus in the
Blessed Sacrament reserved upon the altar before the
twelfth century.
Perhaps one of the earliest indications of a new feeling in this regard is revealed in a direction given to the anchoresses in the "Ancren Riwle" (q. v.): "When ye are quite dressed . . . think upon God's Flesh and on His Blood which is over the high altar and fall on your knees towards it with this salutation 'Hail thou author of our Creation, etc'". So again, in one of his letters St. Thomas of Canterbury writes: "If you do not harken to me who have been wont to pray for you in an abundance of tears and with groan- ings not a few before the Majesty of the Body of Christ" (Materials, Rolls Series, V, 276). this example, perhaps, is not quite certain but we know from instances in the Holy Grail romances, that the idea of praying before the Blessed Sacrament was growing famihar about this period, i. e. the end of the twelfth century. The English mystic Richard Rolle of Hampole, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, explicitly exhorts Christians to visit the church in preference to praying in their own houses, for he .says: "In the church is most devotion to pray, for there is God ui>on the altar to hear those that pray to Him and to grant them what they ask and what is best for them" ("Works", ed. Horstman, I, 145). But in the course of the .same century the practice of visiting the Blessed Sacrament became fairly common, as we see i)arlicularlv in the case of Blessed Henry Suso and Blessed Mary de Malliaco (a. d. 1;«1-1414), who, we are told, "on solemn feasts kept vigil before llie most holy Sacrament". It was often at this period joined with an intense desire of looking upon the Bh'K,seil Sacrament exposed, a most striking exam-
ple of which will be found in the "Septililium" of
Blessed Dorothea, a holy recluse of Pomerania who
died in 1394. But the practice of compiling volumes
of devotions for visits to the Blessed Sacrament, one
of the best known of which is the "Visits" of St.
Alphonsus Liguori, was of still later date.
The information given by writers auch as Corblet. Hist, de la sainte Eucharistie (Paris, 1886) and Raible, Der Tabemakel einsl undjetzt (Freiburg, 1908), must be used with caution as the present writer has pointed out in The Month (April and Decem- ber. 1907)
Herbert Thur.stgn.
Vis Mara, Denis. See Hyderabad, Diocese of.
Vit, ViNCENZO DE, latinist, b. at Mestrina, near Padua, 10 July, 1810; d. at Domo d'Ossola, 17 .A.ug., 1892. He made his studies at Padua, was ordained priest in 1830, in 1844 became librarian of the Accade- mia dei Concordi at Rovigo and canon of the cathe- dral. He was thus advancing in the path of eccle- siastical honours, but under the influence of Rosmini he^ entered at Stresa the Institute of Charity. He began his revision of Forcellini's lexicon at Stresa. Compelled to have recourse to Ubraries, he went first to Florence in 1861, and in 1862 to Rome, where he took up his residence, returning to Northern Italy in the summer. De Vit's idea ditfered from that of Forcellini and P'urlanetto, it being his intention to include in his book all the periods and aU the varieties of Latin down to a. d. 508. He likewise gave an exact digest of the authors of the decadence and the Fathers of the Church, and accorded considerable space to inscriptions, which he also treated in special works. His work was a third larger than Furlanetto's edition, which extension compelled him to leave out proper names. The "Lexicon totius latinitatis" was completed in 1879. De Vit undertook the "Onomas- ticon", which he brought down to the beginning of the letter P. Unfortunately no one has undertaken its completion. One of the great merits of the "Lexicon", apart from its extent, is that it allows the restoration of the exact history of each word according to writers and periods. Very rarely does a text important for meaning escape de Vit's gleaning. His work will always be useful because it gives all essential information in a comparatively brief form.
He also laboured on the history of his native place, and published his researches in eight volumes: "II lago maggiore Stresa e le isole Borromeo" (Prato, 1875-78); "Memorie storiche di Borgo- manero e del suo mandamento" (1859; 2nd ed., 1880); "Adria e le sue antiche epigrafi illustrate' (Prato, 1888); "La provincia romana dell' Ossola ossia delle Alpe Atreziane" (Prato, 1892). All these works were collected in a series of "Opera varie" (11 vols., Prato, 1875-92), which also contains numerous memoirs of antiquity and lexicography, the most celebrated being "Delia distinzione tra i Brit- anni o Brittonni dell' Isola e i Britanni o Brittonni del continente", (Modena, 1807-72). According to de Vit the name Brittany was given to the Armorican Peninsula because some Britanni had established themselves there in the time of C;rsar, coming from the right bank of the Rhine. These must have been the Britons, whih- the inhabitants of the island must have been the Britanni. A confusion of names sub- sequently arose. This theory has not been admitted by scholars. Another dissertation (1873-74 and 1881), concerning the road of the invasion of the Cimri, and on the site of the battle of Marius, also aroused lively controversies.
Ferrero in Biographischcs Jahrbuch fiir AttcrtutTiskunde (Leip- lig, 1899), 26.
Paul Lejay.
Vitalian, S.mnt, Pope (657-72), date of birth unknown; <!. 27 January, 672. Nothing is known of Vitalian's life before he was raised to the Holy Sec.
