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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.
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