Dialogues

Sometime also for the comfort of the soul that departeth, there appeareth unto it the author himself of life, and rewarder of all virtue: for proof whereof I will here report that which I remember also to have spoken of in mine Homilies, concerning mine aunt Tarsilla: who, in the company of two others of her sisters, had for continuance in prayer, gravity of life, singularity in abstinence, arrived to the top of perfection. To this woman, Felix, my great-grandfather, sometime Bishop of this see of Rome, appeared in vision, and shewed her the habitation of everlasting light, speaking thus: "Come with me, and I will entertain you in this dwelling place of light." Shortly after, taken with an ague, she was brought to the last cast: and as when noble men and women lie a dying, many do visit them for the comfort of their friends: so divers both men and women, at the time of her departure, were come, which stood round about her bed: at what time she, suddenly casting her eyes upward, beheld our Saviour coming: whereupon, looking earnestly upon him, she cried out to them that were present: "Away, away: my Saviour Jesus is come": and so, fixing her eyes upon him, whom she beheld, her holy soul departed this life: and such a wonderful fragrant smell ensued, that the sweetness thereof gave evident testimony that the author of all sweetness was there present. Afterward, when her dead body, according to the manner, was made ready to be washed, they found that, with long custom of prayer, the skin of her arms and knees was, like a camel's, become hard: and so her dead body gave sufficient testimony, what her living spirit had continually practised.

[4:21] Chapter XVI. p. 198. The story of Tharsilla, or Tarsilla, is told at greater length in the Homilies (Lib. II. Homilia 38). Tharsilla, Gordiana, and Emiliana were the three sisters of St. Gregory's father, Gordianus; one, Gordiana, returned to the world and married. The Pope Felix, whom St. Gregory describes as atavus meus, was probably the third Pope of that name, who was Bishop of Rome from 483 to 492, famous for his struggle with the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople. He was a married man before taking priest's orders, but his exact relationship with St. Gregory is uncertain. This story curiously suggests the apparition of St. Gregory himself to the dying Santa Fina, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio at San Gimignano.