| ### CHAPTER 3: ST. GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BEGINNINGS OF RESTORATION ###  |

| #### 1. ST. GREGORY, FOUNDER OF THE MIDDLE AGES |

| #### #### ST. GREGORY THE GREAT was Roman by birth and heir to one of the last surviving names of the old pre-Christian aristocracy. He was born during the first period of Justinian's war to recover Italy for the central government, and his boyhood saw the successive sieges of Rome by Goth and Roman, years of famine, plague and destruction which left-on his sensitive spirit an expectancy of doom thenceforth ineffaceable. He was a child of six when, in 546, Totila, meditating to erase from memory the very knowledge of where Rome had stood, cleared the city of its entire population and left it for six weeks abandoned to the beasts of the Campagna. He was fourteen when, the last Goth driven out, Justinian, in the Pragmatic Sanction, gave the ruined country its new constitution as a province of the empire whose centre was Constantinople. Another fourteen years and then, in 568, over the Alps from the north-east came the last and most savage of Italy's barbaric invaders: the Lombards. In ten years they wrested from the empire the greater part of the interior, and inaugurated a war of raids and sieges on the rest which was to go on with little intermission for another two centuries. #### St. Gregory, at the time of the Lombard invasion, was already well advanced in the public life which his rank and wealth opened to him. He was by now Praetor of Rome, responsible for the city's financial administration and for the police, sitting as judge in the courts and, an immense responsibility in these days of continuous warfare, charged also with the task of maintaining the city's supply of food. At the age of thirty-five the praetor became a monk, after long hesitation bred of doubts whether in such time of crisis it was not his first duty to serve the State. He sold his vast property, and from part of the proceeds founded seven monasteries. One of them was his own Roman house on the Coelian. Here he continued to live as -one of the monks, following, the thing seems certain, the rule of St. Benedict. He was allowed just f- r years of the peace he craved. Then, in 579 the newly-elected pope, Pelagius II, ordained him deacon and despatched him to Constantinople as apocrisiarius -- ambassador at the Imperial Court. There he remained for seven years, occupied with the delicate business of restraining the Byzantine habits of the cesaro-papist sovereigns whenever they threatened to invade the sphere of the papal primacy. Political affairs, too, were in his charge: the Lombard menace to Rome the insufficiency of the imperial representatives who, from Ravenna, governed Roman Italy; the plight of Rome itself where, already, the pope was de facto ruler. The city often enough was undefended, lacked troops, and, almost as often, when it had a garrison it lacked the means to pay it. Hence the Romans feared the troops within as much as they feared the Barbarian without. The responsibility for the city's welfare was already falling on the pope, who, however, before the law, was only the emperor's subject. There was abundant matter to occupy the diplomacy of the apocrisiarius. #### The contrast between the half-abandoned, ruined city from which he had come and the glory of Constantinople as Justinian had left it would matter the less to the new ambassador since, during all his stay in the splendid capital, he still contrived to live as a monk. Several of his brethren went with him from Rome and the embassy became a monastery. At Constantinople St. Gregory met the Spanish bishop, Leander of Seville, then in exile and negotiating the emperor's help for his patron, the Catholic heir to the Visigoth throne. So began one of the many great friendships of St. Gregory's life. Here too, in conferences given to his monks, he began one of the most celebrated of his works, the Commentary on Job, and in a matter of theological controversy he engaged no less a personage than the Patriarch of Constantinople himself. #### So for seven years the rich new experience continued and then the pope needed him in Rome. In January 590, four years later, Pelagius II died and the expected happened: St. Gregory was elected in his place -- the place two of his family had already filled before him, Agapitus I, and his own great-grandfather Felix III. #### The new pope revealed himself immediately as a reformer of abuses. The archdeacon -- now and for a long time yet to come the first personage in the Roman Church after the pope -- was dismissed for peculation, the deacons ordered to confine themselves to their original duty of relieving the poor and the relief service of the Roman Church was reorganised from top to bottom. The papal household, too, underwent a similar reform. The lay element disappeared. The Lateran, hitherto the palace of an ecclesiastical prince, was henceforward a house where none but clerics dwelt, where business was transacted in an ordered round of prayer. It was almost a monastery. Fees for ordinations were abolished, fees due from those who received the pallium, fees for dispensations, and special licences. Finally St. Gregory took in hand the reorganisation of the great estates in Sicily, Italy and Gaul which were the source of the Roman Church's vast wealth-the Patrimony of St. Peter. This was his own personal work, and many letters remain to show how intimately he scrutinised its personnel and their accounts, and how scrupulously he observed the principle that these revenues should be employed in unstinted almsgiving. #### One of the most distinguished of French scholars [ ] has borrowed all English idea hi which briefly to sum up the essence of St. Gregory's personality. He sees in him the "landlord" of the best type, with the tradition of unstinted service for the public welfare, a sense of responsibility, and care, for dependants that knows no limits. To his rulership of the Church he brought something of the technique of the old imperial administration, and all the best of the Roman tradition: fidelity to law, respect for rights, impatience of disorder, whether from insubordination o r injustice, and the courtesy of business regularity. #### It is this same shrewd, kindly, fatherly spirit, practical always, never speculative, that informs all his writings. For St. Gregory wrote much, despite his well-filled days, and more directly even than St. Augustine did he, through his writings, influence the next thousand years. He is no scholar writing for scholars -- or the scholars for whom he writes would hardly have been recognised as such by the earlier writer -- but he is a great populariser of doctrine, the principal source of the forms of the popular piety and preaching of the early Middle Ages, the storehouse whence derived much of its legend and a hagiographical tradition, the creator of its liturgy, and the creator of the ideal by which it judged its spiritual rulers. As a theologian he is never, it is true, all original thinker. He has, in this respect, all the mediocrity that characterises all age of intellectual decline. He is not widely read. St. Cyprian, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine are his sources -- St. Augustine above all, not the boldly speculative St. Augustine but the preacher, the mystic and the moralist. #### It is the moralist who is supreme in St. Gregory. He is indeed one of the master moralists of Catholicism, and he sums up Catholic spirituality, as a life, in a wealth of clear and adequate phrases. His Moralia is an extension of the conferences on Job begun during his stay at Constantinople. It is a free running commentary on the text as it lies before him, whence a certain prolixity that runs out into thirty-five books. The sense of each verse is expounded, the literal, the allegorical and the moral, this last in the place of honour, the literal being no more than "the bark of the tree." The Moralia is a practical guide to the spiritual life. For centuries after St. Gregory it was the classic vade mecum of spiritual directors, thanks to its wealth of teaching on, for example, the contemplative life, its nature and the signs by which an aptitude for it is discerned, thanks to its directions for fostering and safeguarding that life, and to the saint's analysis of the temptations that beset it. Job, and the exegesis, are secondary to this practical aim. Equally important in its universal and long-lived influence was the book of St. Gregory's sermons, The Homilies. These are simple familiar " talks " on the gospel, preached during Mass. There is no rhetoric, no dogmatic profundity, but much allegory -- perhaps to our modern notions fantastic at times -- and the gift of summing up a lesson in axiomatic phrase, real genius for spiritual epigrams. There is, too, an abundance of stories, stories of the saints and stories of their miracles. St. Gregory, and through his book known as the Dialogues [ ] above all, is the great storyteller of the early Middle Ages, and here again he is one of that culture's primary founders. #### Finally, to conclude this rough summary of the most important of his many writings, he wrote the Regula Pastoralis -- a rule for bishops as important in its way as St. Benedict's rule for monks. It is a book to train and instruct and its aim is to raise the tone of the episcopate generally, to serve as an examen de conscience for those who are bishops. How much the book was needed other sections of this chapter will perhaps show, and the remark of a friend of St. Gregory's who had read it, “ You lay down that no one should be consecrated who is not trained. Where then shall we find bishops at all?" [ ] The book was, from the first, an immense success. St. Gregory himself gave copies of it profusely, and it was immediately translated into Greek -- a rare honour indeed in this new age when the Romans of Constantinople were beginning to speak of Latin as a barbarian tongue. Many centuries later, as is well known, our own King Alfred had it translated into Anglo- Saxon for the benefit of a church more afflicted even than the church for which St. Gregory wrote it. All through the Middle Ages it continued to be copied and studied, and to be the basis of the spiritual formation of the medieval clergy. Had St. Gregory as pope done no more than write these three books he would still deserve his unique place among popes. But he was also, and primarily, a man of affairs, ruler and restorer of the spiritual kingdom committed to him. #### It was to a troubled heritage that St. Gregory came, the care. of churches universally afflicted, some of them seemingly to death. He took up that heritage in the spirit of one for whom the future could hold little promise, convinced as he was, and by signs apparently certain, that there was not even to be a future. None the less, his charge is henceforth his life; to it he consecrates all the energy of his practical administrative genius; he consoles the failing churches of the West; and he lays there the foundations of a new church, where the ancient cultures which are his by inheritance will shortly find their chief refuge when new barbarism drives them from their own homes, a church whence these cultures will return, to be the basis of the first revival of thought once the long night of war and rapine is passed. The first of the long line of monk-popes is, in the event, the greatest of all papal administrators; the saint whom only the sense of duty held from despair, and from the temptation to flee into solitude from the chronic desolation of his age, builds the foundations on which, even yet, much of our political and social life rests. More than any other. St. Gregory is, if any man can be it, the founder of Medieval Europe. ####  |