At the end of the sixth century, Rome and significant parts of Italy had been ruled from Constantinople for over half a century. They were provinces of the Eastern Roman empire. Ever since the arrival of the armies of Justinian in Rome, in 536, the city had become the “window on the West” of the emperors of Constantinople. This was an empire of awesome dimensions. Mosaic inscriptions were placed in the great churches of Rome so as to make clear the notion of “worldwide” imperial rule which governed the policies of Justinian and his successors:
May the enemies of the Roman name be vanquished throughout the entire world by the prayers of Saint Peter.1
Yet, of all the major cities of the empire, Rome was by far the most desolate and the most exposed to danger. After the decades of inconclusive warfare which followed Justinian’s invasion of Italy, Rome was a ghost of its former self. Its population had dropped to around 50,000.2 It was a city perched on the far edge of an empire whose fate was being decided, over 1,600 miles to the east, in a relentless, losing war with the King of Kings of Persia. The sheer size of the eastern empire rendered its Italian provinces peripheral.
WESTERN EUROPE ca. 500–ca. 650
| ITALY | GAUL AND SPAIN |
| Boethius 480–524 writes Consolation of Philosophy 524 | |
| Convent of Caesaria at Arles 508 | |
| Benedict of Nursia 480–547 founds Monte Cassino 529 writes Rule ca.546 | |
| Cassiodorus 490–583 founds monastery at Vivarium (Squillace) ca.550 writes Institutes of Divine and Human Learning 562 | |
| Radegund 520–587 founds convent of the Holy Cross at Poitiers 561 | |
| Gregory the Great 540–604 papal representative in Constantinople 579 delivers Moralia in Job | |
| Conversion of Visigoths to Catholicism 589 | |
| pope 590–604 writes Regula Pastoralis 591 writes Dialogues 594 mission to Saxons in Kent 597 | |
| Isidore of Seville ca.560–636 | |
| Columbanus 543–615 arrives in Gaul 590 founds Luxeuil founds Bobbio 612 | |
| Vision of Fursey ca.630 | |
| Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Columbanus ca.640 | |
| Gertrude of Nivelles dies 659 | |
| Vision of Barontus 679 |
As we saw in our last chapter, the inhabitants of Italy found themselves triumphantly incorporated in the “Roman” empire of Justinian; and then, within a decade – after the plague of 543 and the resumption of war with Persia – they were left to their own devices. They had to defend themselves as best they could in a region worn down by decades of intermittent, vindictive warfare.
Not for the last time in its history, Italy became a “geographical expression.” It fell apart into a patchwork of intensely particular regions, each of which made its own terms with foreign invaders – East Romans or “barbarian” Lombards. The Lombards came to Italy in 568, allegedly summoned from the Danube by East Roman generals. They took over the Po valley and, by occupying Spoleto and Benevento, they gained control of the Apennines, the mountain spine of Italy. What was left to the empire were the coastal plains. On the east coast of Italy, the empire controlled Ravenna and the coastline of the Adriatic. Across the Apennines, Rome, the coastal plains of southern Italy, and Sicily were imperial territory. They looked to Constantinople.
The social and ecological divide between a coastline washed by the Mediterranean and the more rough and self-sufficient hinterland, which, as we have seen, had already begun to emerge in mid-sixth-century Italy, now coincided with a political frontier. After 580, much of the hinterland of Italy was controlled by Lombard “armies” – by local militias consisting, largely but never exclusively, of Lombard warriors. The coastal plains were held by equally localized, armed groups of self-styled “Romans,” who claimed to be loyal subjects of the distant emperor of Constantinople.
To the “Romans” who inhabited imperial territory, the Lombards were the “enemies of the Roman name” par excellence. They were regarded as “the most unspeakable nation.”3 Tales of atrocities committed by Lombard war-bands were recounted with horror by refugees from central Italy as they arrived in Rome.4 The Lombards were treated, by the occupants of the imperial territories, as savage intruders, who had terrorized the populations of Italy. In reality, each region of Italy, in embracing or rejecting the Lombards, voted with its feet for or against Justinian’s view of what a “Roman” empire should be. The areas which accepted Lombard rule were like the Sklaviniai of the Balkans. They were regions which had grown tired of empire. A strong state was not for them. Lombard garrisons were the lesser of two evils. The worse, by far, was the return of East Roman tax collectors and the imposition, on conservative provincial churches, of the doctrinaire rulings, in religious matters, of authoritarian East Roman emperors. As a result, the ideological frontier between “Roman” and “barbarian” in Italy was drawn with particular sharpness. For beneath the labels of “Roman” and “Lombard” different groups of Italians, in different regions, opted tacitly for different styles of rule, the one “imperial” and linked to the fate of a distant, eastern Mediterranean state, and the other more intensely local, rooted in the hinterland and drawing on the wealth of the Italian countryside.5
Of the two sides, the representatives of the empire were always the more explicit. They stressed the contrast between themselves and the “barbarians.” Confronting the Lombards along the estuary of the Po, an imperial viceroy, the exarch, took up residence at Ravenna. In the exquisite palace church of San Vitale, the altar was ringed by mosaics placed on the lower walls of the apse. They showed Justinian and Theodora in their full imperial majesty. They had been put up, at great expense, as soon as Ravenna fell to the imperial armies in 540. The mosaic portraits of the imperial couple and their entourage ensured that they would remain ever-present to the Catholic clergy of Ravenna who gathered at their feet, in the sanctuary around the altar. Nothing could have made more plain Justinian’s overpowering, personal commitment to maintaining the “orthodox” Catholic faith in every city of his empire.6 And the “orthodoxy” of Justinian was the basis of his claim, as Roman emperor, to universal rule. The state represented by the exarch of Ravenna was not just any state. It was spoken of by its representatives as the “Christian Commonwealth,” even as the sancta respublica, the “Holy Commonwealth.”7
For generations to come, not only the Lombards, but also the other kingdoms of the West – the Frankish kingdoms and Visigothic Spain – maintained a healthy respect for the ability of the East Roman empire to reach out to destabilize distant “barbarian” kingdoms. As late as the 660s, a clergyman sent by the pope from Rome to Britain was detained, in Francia, as an East Roman agent. He was accused of having been sent to stir up the Saxon kings against the Franks.8
Each kingdom took its own precautions to cordon off Justinian’s “Roman” empire. This was particularly the case with the Visigothic kingdom of Spain. Under Justinian, the eastern empire had established outposts in southern Spain. Greek pirates harried the Spanish coast and “Roman” troops were involved in Spanish civil wars. The effect of interventions by such “Romans” was to alienate Visigothic Arians and local Catholics alike. This happened especially among the wealthy and cultivated Catholic bishops of southern Spain (led by the bishops of Seville) where the East Roman presence had proved most troublesome. Ways were sought to deprive the “Roman” empire of its principal ideological advantage – the claim that, as a Catholic empire, it had a monopoly of orthodoxy over against “outer barbarians” such as the non-Catholic, Visigothic kings. Not surprisingly, therefore, in 589, the Visigoths accepted Catholicism under their king, Reccared. They did so on their own terms and from their own Catholic bishops. It is significant that the pope at Rome was held at arm’s length throughout the entire process of conversion. Only later was the pope informed of Reccared’s decision, for the pope was known to be a loyal “Roman” subject of the eastern emperor. Even he could be suspected of being an imperial agent.9
The conversion of the Visigoths, and the strident royal propaganda which announced the foundation of a Catholic monarchy, common to Goths and Romans, showed a new self-consciousness on the part of the western “barbarian” kingdoms. Goths and Franks now claimed to be both Catholic and “barbarian,” and proud of it. In this way, Justinian’s reconquest had acted as a catalyst far beyond Italy. The Frankish and Visigothic kings were forced to offer to their own subjects an answer to the ideological challenge presented by the mystique of a “Holy Commonwealth” – by Justinian’s East Roman ideal of an orthodox empire called by God to conquer barbarians.
Italy at the end of the sixth century was a very different place from the Italy of former times. The wars which followed Justinian’s reconquest and the subsequent infiltration of the Lombards had brought to an end a very ancient world. In the first half of the sixth century, the culture and society of Italy had been dominated by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome. This aristocracy included families whose pedigrees reached back for centuries, beyond the reign of Constantine. They still met in the ancient Senate house, at the end of the Roman Forum. As we saw in chapter 6, members of these families maintained archaic pagan ceremonies as part of the folklore of their city, without any sense that such actions were inappropriate in a Christian age. They even minted their own bronze coins. These showed Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf and bore the legend Roma Invicta, “Unconquered Rome.”
For such persons, the abdication of Romulus Augustulus and the end of the Roman empire of the West, in 476, was a non-event. They still owned large parts of Italy. They collaborated with new, “barbarian” rulers, first with Odoacer (476–493) and then with Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths (493–526). As bureaucrats and ambassadors, they placed their traditional savoir faire and their vast prestige at the service of their new masters. This small group kept Italy recognizably “Roman” on their own terms.10
It was the return to Italy of the new “Roman” empire of Justinian which spelled their ruin. As politicians, landowners, and residents of large and vulnerable cities, they bore the brunt of a prolonged and peculiarly destructive war between the East Romans and tenacious Ostrogothic armies. But they were not only the victims of war. They suffered most from the empire which had claimed to deliver them. In the early sixth century, the dominance of the Roman senatorial aristocracy in Italy had been based on collaboration with an easygoing “barbarian” government which was anxious for their support. They paid few taxes. Now they found themselves subjects of a formidably well-organized state which taxed even its richest citizens as relentlessly as anyone else.
Worse than that, the old aristocracy was no longer necessary. The new “Roman” empire brought with it a new social order. The Rome-based magnates had been absentee landlords on a prodigious scale. There was little love lost between them and the petty gentry in the provinces of Italy, who envied their power and managed their scattered estates on their behalf. With the reconquest of Justinian, the aristocrats were pushed aside. They were replaced by an alliance between “emperor’s men” – East Roman officials and army officers – and the petty gentry of the provinces who had grown up in the shadow of the great senatorial families. This new class of provincial gentlemen formed the backbone of the “Roman,” that is, the imperial, order in Italy. They were military men, with little traditional culture. In this respect, they differed little from their opposite numbers, the “barbarian” Lombards and their Italian collaborators in the hinterland of Italy. After generations of unquestioned dominance by cultivated aristocrats, late sixth-century Italy, for good or ill, was a world which offered most to the small man.11
What was threatened, in this social revolution, was the very existence of a leisured class, and of the styles of culture and religion that went with such a class. Up to A.D. 550, money had been available, especially in Rome, to maintain the huge expense of aristocratic libraries. These libraries would house, copy, and circulate an ever-growing body of Christian literature. At the beginning of the century, the philosopher and theologian, Boethius (480–524) was able to work, undisturbed for years on end, in his Roman library. Light filtered through alabaster windows on to cupboards stocked with Greek and Latin books. Boethius came from one of the oldest families of Rome. A skilled translator, he made technical works of Greek philosophy available in Latin. He knew that his Italian contemporaries lacked the cosmopolitan culture which he still enjoyed. They could not read anything that was not in Latin.
When Boethius was imprisoned and faced execution for treason, in 524, he wrote a Consolation of Philosophy which would dominate the sensibility of the Christian Middle Ages precisely because it bore no sign of Christianity. Its exploration of the relationship between divine providence and human misfortune and its exaltation of the courage of the lonely sage cut deeper into what was truly universal in the human condition than could words taken from any one religious group. Although he was a devout Christian, Boethius was also a Roman. He chose an ancient wisdom, shared by all, with which to reflect on a life about to end in torture and death.12
It is a tribute to the undiminished ambitions of learned Italian Christians that, despite the increasing disruption brought about by Justinian’s wars, they attempted to take advantage of the wider horizons opened up through their incorporation into the eastern empire. The pious senator, Cassiodorus (490–583), was a striking example of the determination and flexibility of a cultivated representative of the old regime.13 As a young man, Cassiodorus had served as spokesman for the Ostrogothic kings at Ravenna, remaining at his post as late as 537, when their kingdom was already doomed. He was proud of what he had done. He made a collection of the edicts and letters of his Ostrogothic masters, called the Variae. They give a unique view of a Roman conducting “business as usual” under barbarian masters.14
Cassiodorus then spent frustrating years, as a middle-aged man, in Constantinople. He saw Italian interests progressively pushed to one side at court. Yet he still returned with high hopes to Italy. A man of increasing piety, he had assembled an impressive library of Greek and Latin Christian books, and had conceived an ambitious cultural program so as to put them to good use.
Earlier, as a Christian landowner with an eye to his own retirement, he had founded a monastery on his estate, called Vivarium (from the neighboring fishpond), outside Squillace, at the toe of Italy, near modern Catanzaro. Vivarium lay among orchards beside a happy stream. It was the center of a large estate, supported by the rents of a well-disciplined peasantry. Cassiodorus intended these local farmers to regard the monastery as a little “city of God,” radiating Christianity in a land where the countryfolk were tempted still to turn to ancient holy groves.15
Backed by the high ridges of the mountains of Calabria, Vivarium looked out over the Ionian Sea. It seemed to have its back turned on Rome and Ravenna. But the isolation of Vivarium was only apparent. The sea itself had become an imperial, “Roman” sea. The sea-routes from Rome, Sicily, and Carthage to Ravenna and Constantinople passed by the toe of Italy, close to Vivarium. Cassiodorus’ endeavors affected a wide circle of persons. He provided texts, commentaries, and judicious “updates” on issues of theology shared by Greek and Latin Christians as far apart as Constantinople and Spain.16
Cassiodorus moved his library to Vivarium in around 550. As he outlined his hopes, in the Institutes of Christian Culture (a text finalized in 562), Cassiodorus presented his monastery as a place where the classics of Latin Christian literature would be copied and circulated, where translations of Greek works would be undertaken, and where the basic skills of Latin grammar and rhetorical analysis were maintained, as a sine qua non for the understanding and the accurate copying of the Scriptures. Small textbooks were carefully prepared as “teach-yourself” volumes, designed to meet the needs of the average reader. These books made the culture of a very ancient world available to a less privileged generation, which could no longer count on having teachers available, in their locality, to explain difficult texts to them by word of mouth.
We, who live from printed texts and read silently, must remember what a change this must have involved for many of Cassiodorus’ contemporaries. Classical education had been a noisy business. It involved the training of the voice to speak in public. Even in its preliminary stages, Latin culture was passed on by largely oral methods. Reading aloud and memorizing texts through recitation had played as much of a role in Roman education as it still does in Islamic schools in Africa and Asia. The bustling life of the cities had included the raucous voices of schoolteachers, shouting out the intricacies of Latin grammar to their pupils, in little cubicles curtained off to one side of the forum. Now those voices had fallen silent in much of Italy. Cities could no longer pay for public teachers, nor aristocrats for private tutors. For the first time, books were that much more free to take on a life of their own. Books, and not the human voice, explained other books. We last hear of Cassiodorus at the age of 81. He had returned “to my old friends, the orthographers”: a basic textbook on Latin spelling was what his monks now needed. They came from a post-war generation, for whom the leisured erudition of the ancien régime in Italy was a thing of the past. Such persons needed the help of skilled scribes and readers, such as had gathered at Vivarium. Cassiodorus’ ideal, in his later years, was to act as the Antiquarius Domini, a “Book-Producer of the Lord.”17
With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to think of Cassiodorus’ activities as no more than a salvage operation. We all too readily imagine him gathering in what little remained of the aristocratic culture of Christian Italy, and making it available, in a brutally simplified form, to an age that was fast slipping into barbarism. To see Cassiodorus in this manner is to overlook his sincere and serene pride. He did not think of himself as standing at the end of an age. Rather, he was confident that he could draw on a rich tradition that only needed to be adapted intelligently to “modern times.”18
In his opinion, the Latin Church had possessed, for centuries, its own, complete “Library of the Fathers.” The works of the great Christian Latin authors of the fourth century – Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine – now lay in his book-cupboards, resting sideways on their shelves. Elsewhere, in more luxurious libraries than that of Vivarium (such as Rome and Seville), author portraits of these great figures looked down on the reader from above the cupboards in which their works lay. Cassiodorus intended to remind the Christians of his own day that, as Latins, they had a culture of their own of which they had every reason to be proud. As the westernmost province of the eastern empire, western Christians were encouraged, by Cassiodorus, to draw on the richness of the Greek world. He assembled a team of Greek translators to make many of the basic texts of Greek Christianity available for Latin readers. But he also insisted that the Latins had their own rich tradition. His pride in Latin Christian literature was a discreet answer to Justinian’s high-handed treatment of the pope and his neglect of the opinions of the Latin Churches.19
The activities of Cassiodorus as late as 580 show that, in the quiet world of texts, the social revolution associated with the imperial reconquest had not brought about the end of the world. A rich legacy of Latin texts had survived the dislocation of war. The issue would be how these texts would be used, by whom, and to what purpose. In this matter, the personality and peculiar spiritual trajectory of a young man who had grown up as a “Roman of Rome” in the late 550s and 560s, while Cassiodorus was setting his library to work far away in southern Italy, would prove decisive. This very Roman young man was Gregory, the future pope Gregory the Great.20
Gregory grew up in a family palace on the Caelian Hill, beside the Clivus Scauri. The house itself and the view from its terraces summed up the world in which he found himself. The house was over two centuries old.21 It abutted the reception hall of a further magnificent palace of the age of Constantine.22 The house looked out directly, across the Via Appia (the modern Via San Gregorio), to the Circus Maximus, the Palatine, and (further to the right) the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum. This was a view of the heart of classical Rome. And it was dead. In the fourth century, over 1,500 chariot races had taken place every year in the Circus Maximus. Now the great racetrack lay deserted. It had not been used for almost half a century. The gigantic palace complex on the Palatine Hill was deserted, except for the small office and chapel of an East Roman governor, nestled at its foot, beneath gigantic cliffs of ancient brickwork. In and around the Forum, the occasional crash of falling masonry showed that Rome, the Rome of the pagan past, had not been levelled by invading barbarians. It had simply been allowed to fall down through neglect.23
The view to either side, along the Aventine and the Caelian hills, told a different story. The mansions on these hills had witnessed the birth and triumph of an idea of Rome linked to the Christian aristocracy. To the left, on the Aventine Hill, two centuries previously, in the 380s, Saint Jerome had been patronized by noble ladies, before he left for the Holy Land, so as to produce what any sixth-century person, such as Cassiodorus, would have acclaimed as his chef d’oeuvre – a definitive Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate. Across the Clivus Scauri, near the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a relative of Gregory’s, pope Agapetus, had continued this tradition of learning. Agapetus installed a library containing the Fathers of the Church. In 536, he had planned, in collaboration with none other than Cassiodorus, to set up in Rome teachers of Christian literature, supported through public subscriptions. The subscriptions would doubtless have been collected from pious aristocratic families, living, like Gregory’s own family, in their ancient mansions.24 Behind the Caelian Hill, on the way to the Lateran Palace of the popes, the remarkable rotunda-church of Saint Stephen, San Stefano Rotondo (founded by a pope of the late fifth century), showed what ecclesiastical building could still do to place a Christian mark on the skyline of the ancient city.25 Beside it was a hostel of the poor, connected with the former palace of the Valerii, another Christian clan known to Saint Jerome.26 Set back a little from the deserted center of ancient Rome, this Christian Rome, patronized for over two centuries by Christian aristocrats, was far from moribund.
Later ages liked to believe that Gregory’s family came from one of the oldest senatorial houses of Rome, the Anician family to which Boethius had belonged. This may not be so. He came, in fact, from a more interesting segment of the local nobility. His family had derived their status from being members of the Roman clergy. They were defined, therefore, not simply by their pedigree but by their active piety and by their experience of clerical authority. Gregory’s grandfather had been pope Felix III (483–492). Felix had built the first church – now Santi Cosma e Damiano – to be set up in the Roman forum. The large inscription in the apse made plain that the church was Felix’s own, fully public largesse to the Roman plebs.27
But sheltered piety of an ascetic sort (which looked back to the example of Saint Jerome) was equally important in such a family. This was a style of piety which still left room for devout and well-read lay persons. In this respect, Gregory took for granted a Mediterranean-wide ascetic sensibility, which was common to both the Latin and the Greek worlds. He shared the basic assumption of all East Romans: lay persons had the same vocation to sanctity as did monks. What held lay persons back from full perfection were curae, the manifold “cares” of “the world,” associated with a life constrained by obligations to society. But the “desert” was still within reach for such persons, provided that their hearts had been touched by compunction and by a sharp yearning for God. They could flee from their cares, if only for a moment. They could set time aside so as to create new “habits of the heart.” They could learn to pray. They could seek advice and comfort from holy persons (and we saw how important such contact with holy men was for lay persons throughout the eastern empire). Above all, they should read the Scriptures on their own, as carefully (Gregory later wrote to a courtier in the palace of Constantinople) as they would read an imperial edict, “so as to learn from God’s own words to know God’s heart.”28 For Gregory, as for his East Roman contemporaries, the ascetic call to experience the presence of God was open to everyone. Lay persons were challenged to pursue such piety to the best of their ability, quite as much as were the more sheltered monks.
This was a style of piety which assumed literacy and leisure. It was also a style in which women were not only the equal of men. They were, if anything, the unspoken models of male behavior. The secluded position of upper-class women had provided a centuries-old pattern for a tranquil and devoted style of life. Men could practice such a pious style of life, while remaining “in the world,” only with the greatest difficulty. For men were that much more firmly tied to their public roles. They had to act as judges, administrators, soldiers, and landowners. Many of these roles were cruel; all were time-consuming. It was harder for men than it was for women to endure a life robbed of public profile, so as to live a semi-reclusive existence, “in” the world, as it were, but not “of” the world.
In Gregory’s own family, the alternation of public eminence in the men and reclusiveness in the women was taken for granted. Gregory’s aunts lived a life of sheltered piety in the family palace. It was a life with fluid boundaries. A sense of noblesse oblige, and not convent walls, kept the young girls apart from the “world.” They were not nuns. They were pious, leisured ladies, living in their mansions like the many other “Christ-loving” ladies described in the Greek and Syriac hagiography of the sixth century. Only the youngest aunt rebelled. She married (of all persons!) a steward of the family estates – an aspiring member of just that class of petty gentry which had been held at a distance for so long by the great families of Rome.29
As befitted a young aristocrat, Gregory became Prefect of Rome in 573. At that time, he thought that the life of a devout layman, living a pious life in “the world,” was within his powers to achieve. This was the sort of life which Boethius the philosopher had lived. It was only a little later that Gregory decided that he should renounce “the world” and become a monk. It was a decision based upon acute disquiet. He felt that he lacked the moral strength to combine a life of public “cares” with a religious vocation. He had to seek the shelter of a monastery.30
In around 575, he turned his father’s house on the Clivus Scauri on the Caelian hill into a small monastery placed under the protection of Saint Andrew. The monastery was still very much a Roman gentleman’s abode. It included a courtyard, with a nympheum (a row of niches in which fountains played) at one end, above which he placed honorific portraits of his mother and father. It was later said that his mother, Silvia, would bring the daily ration of cooked vegetables, served on the sole remaining piece of family silver, for Gregory and his monastic companions.31
Gregory knew of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the great abbot of Monte Cassino. But his monastery on the Clivus Scauri was not a rural settlement, as Benedict’s monastery had been. It was still recognizably a Roman palace. It was a center of fierce asceticism and, above all, of heavy learning. Gregory ruined his health by austerities: from then onwards his energies were sapped by constant illness. In the manner of a late Roman man of learning, he breathed in the wisdom of the past, especially through prodigious bursts of reading in the works of Saint Augustine. This was the life for which he considered himself best suited – not the life of a pious lay person “in the world,” but a secluded life, undertaken for his own good, lived without “worldly” cares, as a monk devoted to the contemplation of God.
Gregory would always present himself to others against the background of this short idyll. What had begun, for him, with a recognition of his own inability to live the life of a normal, pious nobleman had brought him (like the monks of the desert) to the edge of Paradise. But the idyll did not last. Gregory had fled to a monastery to avoid the pious layman’s exposure to worldly cares. Within a few years, he had fallen back, once again, and this time heavily and forever, into just such a life of “care.” To join the Roman clergy was to re-enter public life at its most exacting. Given the clerical traditions of his family, Gregory could not escape this call to duty. He was made a deacon of the Roman Church and sent to Constantinople as papal representative in 579.
At Constantinople, Gregory lived in the palace set apart for papal visitors, close to the seashore (near the church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus – the present-day Küçük Aya Sofia), at the foot of the hill that carried the awesome mass of the Hippodrome, the Imperial Palace, and the Hagia Sophia. This was not Old Rome, whose secular heart was empty. At New Rome, Gregory had reached the exuberant center of all earthly power.
Given the frosty climate of the court, and its lack of interest in Italian affairs, Gregory found time to continue his monastic existence. He later claimed to know no Greek. But he did so when denying authorship of works which circulated in Greek under his name. Though a Latin, Gregory, as the representative of the bishop of Rome, was expected to have a say in the theological life of the capital. In the Greek world, great churchmen were praised for possessing “elegant fingers, apt for writing on matters divine.”32 Eutychius, who was patriarch of Constantinople when Gregory arrived, had introduced himself, at once, by distributing complimentary copies of his theological treatises to leading members of Constantinopolitan society. He sent them
among the houses of the leading senators, both to men and to women … and with his book, he sent the message, “Read and learn.”33
These writings, as Eutychius’ biographer pointed out, showed that the patriarch had
lived on such familiar terms with the Great Fathers [of the Greek Church] that he breathed in the words of Basil [of Caesarea], Gregory [Nazianzen], and Dionysius [the Areopagite] no less than he breathed in the very air.34
Only an ignoramus, the biographer added, could disagree with Eutychius’ conclusions. Gregory was one such ignoramus. He rebuked the patriarch for his views on the Resurrection.35 Plainly, the 30-year-old Latin had been breathing in somewhat different Fathers than had Eutychius the Greek.
It was to a small circle of like-minded Latin friends, brought together at Constantinople by the “cares” of their respective Churches, that Gregory began to make plain what he himself had “breathed in,” during his readings on the Clivus Scauri. It was a strikingly distinctive vision of the Christian life.
From the works of Augustine Gregory had taken Augustine’s fierce longing to return to God.36 For Gregory, all of human life was an exile. Human beings had been cast out of Paradise, and yet the desire for Paradise – to stand in rapt contemplation in the presence of God – still pulled at them. It was a desire as tantalizing as the gathering of saliva in the mouth for a meal that never came,37 and as subtle as the smell of a ripe apple into which one would never bite: Gregory spoke to his hearers about the smell of ripe apples carried on beds of straw in a cargo ship as it crossed the sea, the sweet scent rising, still, above the stench of salt and bilgewater.38 Earthly cares and the heaviness of the body dragged even the most perfect away from the vision of God. Heaven, Hell, and a heaving ocean swept by the winds of temptation and earthly distraction existed in every soul.39
Yet God was always close. He was far closer, indeed, for Gregory than he had been for Augustine.40 Gregory was sure that he could see God’s hand in every detail of the material world. God’s mighty whisper filled the universe, seeking a way into every soul.41 Every temptation was intelligible, every illness and every disaster was a personal touch of his hand, even the aching sense of the absence of God was a merciful trial, a concession to human frailty which would be all the more gloriously rewarded in heaven.42
Those who first listened to Gregory at Constantinople, and who later read his works, would always feel that they had been taken across a mighty ocean.43 Every desire of the soul had been evoked, every subtle temptation and every obstacle to spiritual progress had been serenely delineated. Gregory even sketched out the ultimate temptation which Christians would experience at the end of time. He spoke to his hearers, in calm but chilling words, of the approach of Antichrist and of the utter impotence which would fall in the Last Days upon the established Church, leaving it naked and exposed, without a public role. To listen to those words in the capital of the most powerful Christian empire of the time, beneath the shadow of the Hagia Sophia, that fully public monument of Justinian’s piety, was truly, for late sixth-century persons, an exercise in thinking about the unthinkable. Yet, in the end, the desire for God would bring the souls of the elect back to Paradise, even out of that terrible world of the future – a world where the Christian religion was stripped of public support, as if the conversion of Constantine had never happened.44
It was precisely in his immense precision that Gregory revealed that two centuries had elapsed between himself and Augustine. For, when speaking of temptation, compunction, and the desires of the soul, Gregory spoke with the compassion and liberating precision of an abbot in the tradition of the Desert Fathers. At those moments, John Cassian, who had brought the expertise of the monks of Egypt to southern Gaul (as we saw in chapter 4), was closer to Gregory than was Augustine. Centuries of spiritual guidance, of colloquia, of leisurely “talk-ins” on the virtues and the vices, of innumerable conversations of monks with their spiritual guides and of anxious lay persons with their local holy men (such as we saw occurring all over the eastern Mediterranean around figures such as Barsanuphius of Gaza and Epiphanius of Thebes) gave to Gregory’s exposition a texture which was unmistakably that of its own time. Gregory reached beyond Augustine, even beyond the Latin West, to draw upon a tradition of spiritual guidance which had come to belong to the Mediterranean world as a whole. Whether expressed in Greek or in Latin, this tradition had become almost a learned folklore, a gnomic wisdom of the soul common to all spiritual guides.45
One feature, however, made Gregory starkly different. His spiritual guidance did not take the form of anecdotes or of letters of advice. Rather, he deliberately derived his insights from an extended, allegorical exegesis of an entire book of the Bible – the Book of Job. In doing this, Gregory was the heir of a long tradition of allegorical reading, in which every line, indeed every word of the Bible, if read with prayer and with “spiritual” understanding, would reveal a secret for the present day – some balm, some consolation, some warning made available here and now, thousands of years after the days of Job. This was what Gregory was convinced that his hearers needed – to see themselves by reliving, word by word, the Book of Job.
It is his choice of this particular form of allegorical exposition which has rendered Gregory distant from us. Augustine’s exploration of the journey of his own soul, in the Confessions, still speaks to modern readers. But by pouring his spiritual experience into the alien form of allegory, Gregory seems to us, by contrast, to have drained all life from it. His insistence that every movement of the heart had its exact equivalent in the involuted Latin echo of a Hebrew text appears to us not only arbitrary but fussy, fine-spun, and (most unforgivable of all for modern readers) endlessly repetitive.
Yet this is not how a sixth-century listener would have heard Gregory. To enter any book of the Bible was to listen to the voice of God which still spoke, in its insistent whisper, to every soul. There was no reason why God, who spoke in so many ways to humankind, should not also have spoken in code. In that case, every line and every word of a book known to have come from the Spirit of God must be treated as heavy with meaning. It bore a message. And the same Spirit which had written the books of the Bible lingered now, waiting to be awakened, in the heart of every pious reader.46 Devout Christians could be trusted to get the message, much as servants long familiar with their master could divine, from barely perceptible changes in his expression, what new command, what new advice he had in store for them.47 To make an allegorical exegesis of a book such as the Book of Job was to follow a guiding thread, valid for all times, all places, and all persons, placed cunningly by God in the text of a holy book, so as to help the soul in its long, winding journey back to Paradise.
Hence, for Gregory, spiritual wisdom and the exegesis of the Bible went together. In that, he belonged to the same tradition as Cassiodorus. A holy text stood at the center of his world. There is a fresco of Saint Augustine from Gregory’s time, placed in the Lateran library of the popes. It stood above the collection of Augustine’s works. It showed Augustine, Gregory’s hero, as Gregory himself wished to be seen – sitting at a reading desk, he stares into the text of an open Bible. Here was Gregory’s ideal: a man of one book only, called by God, like Gregory, “to thunder forth in Roman tongue the hidden meanings [of God’s Word].”48
Gregory entitled his commentary the Moralia in Job. By this he meant a guide for the moral life derived from contemplation of the Book of Job. In doing this, Gregory made clear that he had no wish to be known as a theologian. He was to be a moral guide. It was the stuff of the soul which concerned him, in every situation and in every turn and twist of its daily struggle with itself. In his insistence on moral issues, Gregory was a throwback. He brought into the late sixth century an ancient strand in Roman thought – the austere tradition of ethical guidance earlier associated with the Stoic sages. The examination of one’s motives, the need for consideration of one’s response to every situation, the perpetual awareness of the inner self laid out before the quiet eyes of God – all themes emphasized by Gregory – hark back to the letters of Seneca and to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.49
Gregory took this choice to act as a moral guide with good reason. Seneca had spoken to the rulers of the Roman world, urging them to rule themselves, with unflinching integrity, before they ruled others. Those gathered around Gregory in Constantinople were in a similar position. They lived, by preference, like monks; but they knew that they would soon return to positions of power in their respective Churches. The friend whom Gregory met at this time and to whom he would dedicate the written version of the Moralia in Job was one such person. Leander, Catholic bishop of Seville, had come to Constantinople as a diplomat. He was the only intimate contact which Gregory had with that proud, closed kingdom far to the west.50 Both he and Gregory needed to harden their souls, through contemplation and scrupulous self-examination, before they stepped back into the cares of rule associated with episcopal office.
In 590, Gregory’s fate was sealed: he was made pope. “Under the pretext of becoming a bishop, I have been led back into the world.”51 Until his death, in 604, Gregory saw his life as pope in terms of a single phrase from the Book of Job: Behold, the giants groan beneath the waters.52 A man who had passed, for a few years, into the contemplative stillness of monastic seclusion, Gregory found himself crushed beneath the oceanic pressures that weighed on every Catholic bishop in the sixth century. Few bishops had more cares than those who supported the massive structures of the East Roman state; and none had more care than did the bishop of Rome, perched, as he was, on the frontier between the empire, the Lombards, and the far from welcoming “barbarian” kingdoms of the west.
In the first place, the pope was the city of Rome. The pope fed the city from “the patrimony of Saint Peter.” This patrimony consisted of over 400 estates, located, for the most part, in Sicily (where they covered over one nineteenth of the entire surface of the island). Furthermore, the pope and his colleague, the bishop of Ravenna, were the bankers of the East Roman state in Italy. Only the Church possessed the treasure and the ready money with which to pay the East Roman garrisons and to advance sums of cash to a penniless administration.53 It was Gregory who had to write, ceaselessly, to remind the emperor of Constantinople and those around him that Italy existed.
It was Gregory, also, who had to deal with the Lombards. He negotiated constantly with neighboring Lombard warlords and attempted to contain their aggression by corresponding regularly with the newly created Lombard court at Pavia. With grim humor, he described himself, on one occasion, as
bishop not of the Romans, but of Lombards, [a flock] whose flag of truce is the sword and whose good will gestures take the form of atrocities.54
Though he found himself on a particularly dangerous frontier, Gregory knew that what he did in Rome was not unusual. It was only what was expected of him as the bishop of a major city of the empire. At much the same time, the patriarch of Antioch had fed the entire East Roman army as it passed through his city on its way to the Persian front. Speaking in Greek, the patriarch had reminded the assembled officers, a motley body of professionals gathered from as far apart as the Danube and the Caucasus, that they were “Romans,” and that they should behave in a manner worthy of descendants of Manlius Torquatus!55
What was harder for Gregory to deal with was sullen resentment within the city of Rome itself. His election had not been universally popular. The Roman clergy was a tight oligarchy, largely drawn from the local nobility. At a time when, as we have seen, the social structures of Italy were crumbling around them, they at least formed a traditional elite, linked to predictable careers, the reward of predictable, gentlemanly accomplishments. They had tended to admire monks, but from a safe distance. They did not wish to be ruled by one. Least of all did they wish to be ruled by a man such as Gregory, who exhibited a sharp contempt for “earthly” status and for “earthly” culture, such as only a renegade aristocrat was capable of showing.56
Gregory did not reassure them. For instance, it had long been the practice for small boys of good family to serve in the papal household at the Lateran palace before following the careers of their fathers or uncles as members of the Roman clergy. Gregory would have none of this. The long-haired darlings of the local gentry were replaced by grave monks.57 Many of the most trusted members of Gregory’s entourage were strangers to Rome. Even when they were laymen, they were bound to their master by common ties of ascetic piety.58 His writings, also, seemed to seek out a spiritual elite of kindred souls. Copies of the Moralia in Job were distributed to monasteries and to like-minded bishops who were themselves the patrons of monks.59
Gregory’s position would have been more normal in the east. There monk-bishops were welcome. In a highly factionalized state Church, whose bishops were largely recruited from the elites of the cities, the occasional contemplative, brought in from the desert, was admired as a high-minded person of guaranteed integrity. An admirer wrote of the bishop of Tella/Constantia (eastern Turkey):
he was used [every day] to raise his understanding upwards by the study of spiritual things for the space of three hours … and for three hours more, from the sixth to the ninth hour (this is, in the early afternoon), he continued in joy and peace with every man, and in interviews with those who came to him for necessary business.60
Recently returned from the East, Gregory had every reason to wish that his own life was so crisply divided, and with so little apparent tension, between the ideal of contemplation and the cares of office. He had to reassure an Italian audience, and especially the Roman clergy, who were not used to monk-bishops, that to be a monk, drawn to contemplation, did not mean that he would relax in any way his urgent concern for the souls of his congregation.
The book which Gregory wrote on this occasion proved decisive for the entire future of western Europe. For Gregory alone, of all his contemporaries, had found himself forced to write, with a rare combination of scholastic finesse and deeply personal disquiet, about the exercise of spiritual power: “Ars artium regimen animarum: The art to end all arts is the governing of souls.”61 The phrase was taken from a Greek Father, Gregory Nazianzen. It set the tone for the short treatise which Gregory published in 591, the Regula Pastoralis, the “Rule for Pastors.” Gregory took care to circulate copies of the Regula Pastoralis. It was soon known in Francia. It even appeared in Greek. It was Gregory’s tract for his times and the justification for his own peculiar, quasi-monastic style of rule.
One thing was certain in Gregory’s world – power was there to stay. Gregory lived in a world where Christianity now touched every level of life. Power, in such a world, meant attention both to the most exalted and to the most humble aspects of existence. We have seen what powers in secular life came to be exercised by bishops such as Gregory of Tours in Gaul and by Gregory’s colleagues throughout the eastern Roman empire. Bishops were expected to do anything. On the plateau of Spain, they were responsible for the rounding up of stray horses.62 In Sicily, at a slightly later time, the bishop of Palermo could even be nominated, by the local governor, as an inspector of brothels!63
The issue was how this surreal accumulation of duties could possibly be combined with the care of souls. How could the active life of a bishop remain linked to an ideal of spiritual wisdom nourished, as Gregory had nourished his friends on the Clivus Scauri and at Constantinople, on the contemplation of God and on rapt attention to his Word? Gregory thought that he had found the answer in the figure of the Apostle Paul. Paul was the ideal pastor. Here was a man, Gregory pointed out, whose activities had moved in an unbroken flow from the heights of mystical contemplation to laying down rules on the conduct of married persons, even on the correct times when they should or should not have marital intercourse. Paul the contemplative had entered the “third heaven,” “and yet, with heartfelt empathy, he surveys with care the average person’s marriage bed.”64
Condescensio, a compassionate stepping down to the level of every person in the Christian Church, was the key to Gregory’s notion of spiritual power. It was “condescension” in the best meaning of the word. It echoed the vertiginous act by which God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, had bent to earth, to touch every aspect of the human condition. Christ also had both prayed on the mountain-top and gone down into the cities to heal the sick and to comfort the down-hearted.65 Based on the models of Saint Paul and of Christ, the ideal pastor of Gregory must learn to be “intimately close to each person through compassion, and yet to hover above all through contemplation.”66 It was an ideal of spiritual guidance as intimate and as all-inclusive as that of any East Roman holy man.
It was the intimacy of the care of souls which concerned Gregory. He paid little attention in his treatise to public preaching. He gave no guidance on how to give a sermon. What interested him, above all, was face-to-face spiritual guidance. With characteristic exhaustiveness, he enumerated 39 different types of spiritual condition – and their opposites! – and recommended how each of them should be addressed.67 Sometimes the spiritual governor must besiege proud souls. He must “penetrate the souls of his subjects,” to “open a door into the heart” by “the shrewdest questioning.”68 But at other times, Gregory adds (with the magnificent inconsequentiality of a true guide of souls) a “kind word” at the right time can work miracles!69
Once again, in writing the Regula Pastoralis, Gregory drew deeply on the thought of Augustine. But he was no epigone. On the issue of spiritual power, he had thought more urgently and more consequentially than ever Augustine had done. The Regula Pastoralis had the clarity and cutting edge of an industrial diamond. Its reflections on the difficulties and the opportunities of a bishop’s life were compressed into crystalline hardness by Gregory’s reflection on his own experience.70 Gregory knew that he and his colleagues had to wield real power. He insisted that this should not dismay them: God does not reject the powerful, for He Himself is powerful (Job 36:5).71 What mattered, rather, was that this power should be wielded, with humility and unflinching self-awareness, for the good of others.
The Regula Pastoralis was Gregory’s meditation on the nature of spiritual power. Profoundly abstract, it could be read in many ways. It could be viewed as a handbook, a guide to conduct for the ideal bishop, abbot, or clergyman. As such, it placed the souls of entire congregations in the hands of a spiritual elite. They were to be the “subjects” of a new generation of “doctors of the soul.” But the Regula was written, also, as a critique of the existing episcopate. For, judged by the standards on which Gregory insisted, many a bishop was no better than a lay person. A bishop without skill in the rule of souls was not a bishop.
They have come to reign, but not through Me; princes have arisen, and I know nothing of them. (Hosea 8:4)72
The rule of souls was not a job for amateurs. Amateurs – magnates turned bishops, in Gaul; emperor’s men, in the sees of Italy and the Roman East – were what Gregory feared most. His Regula Pastoralis warned them to think twice before undertaking the unique “weight of the pastoral office.” Those who ruled in the Church must know how to rule and why they ruled – for rule they must.
Gregory was helped in his fierce precision by the fact that the Christian Church, in Italy as elsewhere, harbored a number of small but highly significant communities in which power over souls had long been exercised at its most absolute and its most searching – that is, in the monasteries. Gregory himself had lived for a time in a small monastic community – in the monastery that he had set up in his house on the Clivus Scauri. There he had exercised the powers of an abbot. He had found that it was a terrifying power. On one occasion, for instance, he had allowed a man to die alone, without the comfort of his fellows, for a single sin of avarice.73
Gregory knew the Regula, the Rule, of Benedict and wrote the only account that we have of Benedict’s life. Yet Benedict was not close to him. He was a figure of the now-distant past. He had died in around 547. Benedict’s monastery at Monte Cassino no longer existed. It had been sacked by the Lombard war-band of duke Zotto. The story of Benedict’s life came to Gregory, like the ghostly bells of a sunken city, from a world before the furious impact of the Lombards. But this did not matter. In Gregory’s opinion, to read Benedict’s Regula was to seize the essence of the man.74
The Rule of Benedict was not the only monastic “Rule” available in Rome. Many such “Rules” circulated at the time. Each was treasured as the condensed life’s wisdom of recognized masters of the art of souls. What plainly struck Gregory about Benedict, as he read Benedict’s Rule, was his rare discretio – Benedict’s unfailing sense of measure and his spiritual insight. Here was an abbot of inspired certainty of touch, who knew how to lead his tiny flock of monks through every spiritual and material emergency. And he had done this by exacting absolute obedience. Each monk was bound to his abbot and to his fellows by an awesome code that was summed up in a single phrase: obedientia sine mora, “obedience without a moment’s hesitation.”75 In the Rule of Benedict, absolute power over souls demanded absolute integrity of purpose and absolute clarity as to its final aim.
The sort of monastery which Benedict had ruled and which Gregory knew from his own experience was a small community. Italian monasteries seldom housed more than 30 monks.76 They were not large, impersonal institutions. The monks lived as close to each other as inmates in a modern prison cell. They knew each other intimately and, alas, at times they could hate each other with the same crazed intensity. They were never out of each other’s sight. At Compludo, in northwestern Spain, the prior would linger for a moment at nightfall in the cottage-like dormitory of the monastery, surveying the beds, “that, by observing each monk more closely, he may learn how to treat the character and merits of each.”77
One could have no illusion as to the skill required to govern such small, cramped groups as a true abbas, a “father.” As abbas, the abbot was truly the “father” of his monks. He was the representative among them of God the Father. His words must work their way, like God’s own leaven, into the soul of each and every monk. To do this required constant vigilance, insight and adaptability:
he must vary from one occasion to another, mixing soft words with threats, the sternness of a schoolmaster with the tenderness of a father … And let him be aware how difficult, how arduous a thing it is to govern souls and to put himself out to serve so many different temperaments.78
The Regula Pastoralis was to be Gregory’s equivalent of Benedict’s Rule. It was a Rule for Bishops. This was a daring solution. As we have seen, Christians, both in the West and in the eastern Roman empire, had come to see their bishop as a distant and majestic figure. He was the exalted representative of law and order in their city. He was a judge, an administrator, a high priest. Now Gregory placed the most intimate and penetrating model of power available to the Christian experience of his time – the abbot’s exercise of his authority over monks – at the heart of the bishop’s role. He gave episcopal power a sharply pastoral stamp.
It was the rare consequentiality of Gregory’s treatise which ensured its success in the ensuing centuries. For the Regula Pastoralis proved to be a book for all occasions. Gregory had been deliberately vague when he spoke of the person of the rector, the “ruler” of souls. He often assumed that the rector would be a bishop. But the spiritual authority of which he spoke in studiously general terms could also be exercised by an abbot, a clergymen, even by a king or a pious layman in a position of authority. Each in their own way could be seen as responsible for the care of souls.
What Gregory had unwittingly created was a Europe-wide language of power. For, by the year 600, western Europe had become a mosaic of contrasting political systems. Much as a single official language tends to become dominant more rapidly in a region characterized by a great diversity of local languages, so Gregory’s studiously undifferentiated notion of the Christian rector spread with ease throughout these different systems, as far apart as Spain and Ireland. Above all, Gregory’s pastoral language spilled over easily into thought about the responsibilities of Christian lay rulers. His heavy emphasis on the responsibilities of the ruler for the souls of his subjects was immediately adopted, by the Spanish clergy, to lend an added note of solemnity and urgency to the moralizing legislation of the Visigothic kings of Spain. It bolstered their attempt to set up a “Holy Commonwealth” of their own, in answer to the ideology of the East Roman empire.79 A little later, in a very different world, Gregory’s emphasis on the finesse and consensus-building qualities required of a Christian ruler and guide of souls seemed to do justice to the more tentative powers of Celtic chieftains in the far, non-Roman north.80
In all his writings, Gregory was assured of a lasting literary future. For he wrote with a lapidary, almost gnomic certainty. His phrases seemed like great, smooth stones, polished by constant, deeply meditated use. He was eminently repeatable.81 And in what he wrote on the duties of the Christian rector, he created the language of an entire governing elite. With the Regula Pastoralis to guide them, the kings and clergy of Latin Europe no longer needed to look to the surviving “Christian empire” of East Rome to guide them. Gregory had given them a mission to rule and code of conduct as clear and as all-embracing as any that had once inspired the governing classes of the Roman empire. “Gregory’s intervention permanently raised the ceiling of expectation for those in public office, in the medieval West and beyond.”82
But this is to anticipate. In the ancient world, rulers set the tone, not by books of political theory, but through the manner in which they themselves interacted with their subjects in highly visible situations. Here Gregory played his part to perfection. A Greek writer (John Moschus, whom we met in the last chapter) describes how John the Persian had come all the way from northern Iraq to visit Rome. There he met Gregory. When he bowed to make the customary reverential prostration, Gregory checked him: the pope was no “lord.” Then Gregory bent forward and, with his own fingers, he placed three gold coins in the monk’s hand. This was Gregory’s condescensio in action.83
Gregory’s correspondence tells the same tale. It documents a distinctive style of rule. The 866 surviving letters collected in his Regestum, his Register of Correspondence, were no more than the tip of the iceberg. Quite apart from his correspondence with the court at Constantinople and with other western rulers, Gregory, as pope, was the center of a network of patronage and administration which stretched from Marseilles and Sardinia to Sicily and Carthage. It has been calculated that as many as 20,000 letters may have been written from Rome in the years of Gregory’s pontificate. This may be too much.84 But Gregory certainly found himself constantly called upon to rule. Sixty-three percent of his letters were rescripts: they were answers to requests for a ruling on administrative and ecclesiastical matters. And not all these rescripts were form-letters. Many would have involved delegations to Rome, in which it was possible to meet Gregory and to see him in action, in the sort of solemn interviews that we know of from the story of John the Persian.
Copies of the letters that were sent out were selected, each year, by Gregory himself. They were transcribed into a large papyrus volume. The letters, as we have them in the Regestum, were, in many ways, Gregory’s own memoirs of his years as pope. They document a master of souls in action. The word “subtle” recurs frequently, in innumerable contexts. Precision, finesse, studied courtesy, mediated in the localities by chosen representatives of exclusively clerical or monastic background close to Gregory’s own views, were the signs of a new broom in the Lateran Palace. So, also, was the occasional letter of rebuke for those who failed to live up to the code laid down in the Regula Pastoralis. The bishop of Salona (Solun, near Split) was the proud ruler of a “Roman” imperial enclave on the Dalmatian coast. He was a bishop of the old style. He justified his lavish banquets by an appeal to the hospitality of Abraham. Gregory was not amused.
In no way do you give attention to reading the Scriptures, in no way are you vigilant to offer exhortation, rather, you ignore even the common norms of an ecclesiastical way of life.85
On his epitaph, Gregory was acclaimed as consul Dei, “God’s consul.” But such reminders of continuity with the Roman past were largely wished upon him. For all his links with Rome, Gregory did not think of himself as a “last Roman.” He saw himself, rather, as a praedicator, a man called to give warning at the end of time. The ruins of Rome play such a poignant role in his writings because they were a statement of the obvious. They spoke plainly, and to everyone, of the swift and hidden race of history toward its end. More prosperous societies might delude themselves that God’s time stood still for their benefit. The crash of falling masonry in Rome, and, indeed, the entire state of post-Lombard Italy, formed “an open book” for all to read. “Once the world held us by its delights. Now it is so full of disasters that the world itself seems to be summoning us to God.”86 What mattered now was praedicatio, the gathering into the Christian Church of what remained of the human race, so as to face the dread Judgment Seat of Christ.
It was a thought calculated to greatly concentrate the mind. For Gregory, the age of praedicatio was not an age of panic. It was, rather, an age of unexpected excitements. Like soft dawn light creeping beneath a door, Gregory saw, in his own age, a subdued recrudescence of the miraculous powers which had once accompanied the first advance of the Apostles. In 594, his Dialogues – a collection of miracles discussed in a series of conversations between himself and his friend, Peter – announced to the Christian world that, in recent times, Gregory’s native Italy had been filled with vibrant holy men and women. They had been sent by God, in the last days of the world, to warn mankind.87
The Dialogues make plain that, for Gregory, a praedicator did not have to be a bishop, or even a “preacher” in the strict sense. Often holiness spoke for itself. Preaching to the Roman people, Gregory would begin with his usual allegorical flights of exegesis. These were what one expected of a learned bishop in a great see. Often read aloud by Gregory’s secretary when he himself was too tired to preach, they were as opaque, but as elevating in their own way, as an organ recital. But then Gregory would suddenly descend from the heights. He would end with a simple tale of a miracle. This showed his listeners how close to heaven they already stood without knowing it. Servulus, a poor man known to them all, had died in the courtyard of the church of San Clemente. Did they know that he had heard the angels singing around him as he died?88 The pious count Theophanius died at Civitavecchia. Did they know that, on being opened, his sarcophagus had wafted “a fragrant odor, as if his decaying flesh were swarming with spices rather than worms”?89 A hurricane had blown down some buildings. If God could so move “a gentle breath of air” to such violence, what do they think the wind of his anger would be like, when he came to judge sinners on the Last Day?90
In the Dialogues, Gregory looked out all over Italy for signs, for flashes from the other world, as it were, that would wake up sluggish Christians before it was too late. Fortunately, bishops were not the only ones who could give warning. Old abbot Florentius, perched in the woods above Subiaco with a pet bear who always knew the correct hours for prayer, had, in his time, drawn a whole countryside to Christ as effectively as did any sermonizer.91 Driven by his ideal of the preacher as moral guide and warner of the last days, Gregory’s Christianity, as it appears in his Dialogues and in his Homilies on the Gospels, “was a missionary religion, in its flexibility, adaptability and understanding of fundamental human problems.”92
Miracles of praedicatio had, indeed, begun to happen on a truly “missionary” scale around him. In 589 (just after Gregory returned to Rome from Constantinople) the entire political elite of the last, non-Catholic, Arian kingdom of the West, the Visigoths of Spain, adopted Catholicism. An entire “nation” joined the Church. As we saw, Gregory was studiously excluded from this development. But it confirmed his best suspicions of his age:
This is the change which the right hand of the Most High hath wrought.
It was [he wrote, to the Visigothic king, Reccared, who had sent a belated, somewhat parsimonious gift of shirts for the poor at St. Peter’s] a new miracle in our time. My feelings are roused against myself, because I have been so sluggish … while, to gain the heavenly fatherland, kings are working for the gathering-in of souls.93
Gregory had not long to wait. It is a grim comment on the conditions of early medieval Europe that slave-traders were among the most effective, if unwitting, missionaries of the age. They brought about the forcible transfer of whole populations. In 593, Gregory had watched the peasants of the Roman Campagna, “tied by the neck like dogs,” driven in herds to the north by Lombard raiders, to sell to Frankish dealers from across the Alps.94 In 595, similar dealers brought to the markets of Gaul parties of Angli, tribesmen from the Saxon kingdoms of Britain.95 They were a timely reminder, for Gregory, of pagan nations to whom the Gospel had yet to be preached, before the end of the world could come.
The appearance of these sad figures may have coincided with a delegation from the king of Kent, Ethelbert, who had already married a Frankish Christian wife. Here was a “nation” that might be “gathered in.” Gregory was not a man to be outdone by a Visigothic king. He himself would provide the praedicatio for this strange kingdom. In 597, an exceptionally large party, headed by a monk from Gregory’s own monastery (named, significantly, Augustine), received permission from Ethelbert to settle in the royal center of his kingdom, in the ruins of a Roman town that was later called Canterbury.
The fate of Gregory’s mission, when it arrived in Kent, will be described in chapter 15. But there is no doubt as to the high drama of the mission as viewed by Gregory himself from Rome and as presented by him to his colleagues. In July 598, he wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria:
While the people of the English, placed in a corner of the world, remained until now in the false worship of stocks and stones, I resolved … to send … a monk of my monastery to preach to that people … And even now letters have reached us … that both he and those who were sent with him shine with such miracles that the miracles of the Apostles seem to live again in the signs that they exhibit.96
Ten thousand Angli, he added, had been baptized at Christmas. It was, altogether, an amazing happening, worthy of the end of time.
Gregory died in 604. He had come to expect the unexpected. But even he could hardly have foreseen how unusual the future might yet be. Within a century, a new Christianity had emerged in northern Europe. The first attempt to write a Life of Gregory was made in a monastery perched on the edge of the North Sea, close to Hadrian’s Wall.97 Streanaeshalch (modern Whitby, in Yorkshire) may have been a former pagan grove. Now it was a monastery in which an abbess ruled male monks. It had been founded for a lady of royal Anglian blood, who bore the name of a Valkyrie, abbess Hild. We have come a long way, within a century, from the Caelian Hill in Rome. In the next chapters we will trace the profound changes which made possible the emergence of a new Christianity of the north in the generations after the death of Gregory I.