The leadership that was so badly needed by the disorganized western society of the sixth century could come initially only from the church, which had in its ranks almost all the literate men in Europe and the strongest institutions of the age. The church, however, had also suffered severely from the Germanic invasions. The bishops identified their interests with those of the lay nobility and in fact were often relatives of kings and the more powerful aristocrats; the secular clergy in general was ignorant, corrupt, and unable to deal with the problem of Christianizing a society that remained intensely heathen in spite of the formal conversion of masses of Germanic warriors to Christianity. Heathen superstitions and magic were grafted onto Latin Christianity: The religiosity of the sixth and seventh centuries was infected with devils, magic, relic worship, the importation of local nature deities into Christianity in the guise of saints, and the general debasement of the Latin faith by religious primitivism. There was no parish churchman who could go out into the countryside and counter these crudities; at most, a member of the cathedral clergy would occasionally journey out from the episcopal see to administer the sacraments. The secular clergy were neither interested in nor capable of undertaking extensive missionary work. No one even cared about attempting the formal conversion of the German tribes within the Merovingian kingdom who lived east of the Rhine, and these tribes remained heathens until the eighth century. By the beginning of the seventh century church discipline in Gaul was in a state of chaos, and the problem was the most basic one of preserving the sufficient rudiments of literacy to perpetuate the liturgy and doctrines of Latin Christianity. Many priests literally did not know what they were saying at church services, but uttered mumbo-jumbo that vaguely resembled Latin as a magical incantation to impress their near-savage parishioners.
The Latin church was preserved from extinction, and European civilization with it, by the two ecclesiastical institutions that alone had the strength and efficiency to withstand the impress of the surrounding barbarism: the regular clergy (that is, the monks) and the papacy. Of all the institutions in western Europe, only monasticism and the papacy were able to provide leadership for European society, and out of their joint efforts were eventually to come the amelioration of Germanic kingship and its transformation into an additional creative force in early medieval society. But although the papacy and Germanic kingship were ultimately to provide the most dramatic and effective direction to the people of western Europe, it was the monks who were the most continuous force for education, organization, and social amelioration between the sixth and twelfth centuries and a determining factor of the most fundamental kind in the formation of medieval civilization. How did the regular clergy, that is, the clergy living under monastic rule, come to assume these indispensable social obligations? The structure of the new civilization that was created in the early Middle Ages was determined by the answer to this question.
Monasticism is a form of religious asceticism, which, in turn, involves the disciplining, limitation, or abnegation of the material and physical aspects of human life to assure a saving relationship with a deity conceived of as a purely spiritual being. Asceticism is therefore intended to secure salvation, and this end can be achieved either by the withdrawal of the ascetic from society and its corrupting temptations and distractions or by the severe control of social life to make the environment suitable for the ascetic to continue to live in the world. The former manifestation of asceticism is called monasticism, and the latter may be termed puritanism. It is obvious that in the circumstances of the early Middle Ages, with a violent, disorganized, and fundamentally un-Christianized society, the puritan control of society to make the world safe for asceticism was out of the question. The ascetic had to withdraw from the world to ensure the triumph of his spiritual will and the salvation of his soul. But the nature of early medieval western monasticism in its ultimate form was such that this flight from the world did not succeed very well; instead, the monastery became a social institution of the utmost importance. The more outstanding monks came to render the greatest services both to the church and monarchy and to give new vitality and leadership to both institutions.
Monasticism is by no means exclusively a western or medieval institution. There are Buddhist monks even today. And there were Jewish monks in Palestine before the Christian era—the radical sect of Essenes, who are believed to have been the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls; St. John the Baptist was influenced by the messianic and eschatological doctrines of this sect. John certainly practiced the most astringent kind of ascetic life, and Jesus can be said to have supported such a life as the most ideal one when he told his followers that to enter the fellowship of the kingdom of God, they ought to dissolve all bonds that bind men to the material world, even the love for their own parents. Jesus’ warning that “you cannot serve God and Mammon” and the example of his life, in which he never married and rendered obedience to his Father even to death on the cross, were inspirations to all subsequent generations of Christian ascetics to separate themselves from the world and to lead a purely spiritual life as far as is humanly possible. The heavy infusion of Platonist philosophy into Christian thought in the early centuries after Jesus, with its body-soul dualism and its denigration of the material world, engendered the common belief that the soul was most assured of salvation when the spiritual aspects of humanity were cultivated to the exclusion of the physical. Some of the more devout members of the church in the second and third centuries, who interpreted the Gospel in this heavily dualistic manner, sensed a grave danger to their souls from living in society and ran away to wild places to pursue purely spiritual exercises.
A favorite place of retreat for these holy and contemplative people was the Egyptian desert. But the fathers of the desert, once they had achieved a great reputation for sanctity, found that the world would not let them go; they were literally hounded through the Egyptian desert by admirers seeking to obtain their assistance in entreaties to the deity. Thus, almost from the beginning of Christian monasticism, the monks found themselves pursued by the world they had just abandoned in disgust and implored by society to act as its intercessor with God. The tension between the world and the monastery was in evidence from the inauguration of the ascetic movement in Christianity.
The figure of the hermit-saint was a particularly prominent and popular one in the Greek church, and Greek monasticism never entirely overcame the pattern established by its anchoritic origins. The ideal hermit type was established by Athanasius’ Life of St. Antony, the most famous of the fourth-century desert fathers. Greek anchoritism was liable to go to extremes as the populace confused holiness with extreme physical privation. Such was the case with the early fifth-century Syrian saint, Simeon Stylites, who was reputed to have spent the last thirty years of his life sitting on top of a pillar seventy feet high. The more sensitive and cultured minds in the Greek church discouraged such extreme asceticism. The great fourth-century Christian humanist and Greek church father, St. Basil, contended that the monks ought to obey the commandment to love one’s neighbor as well as God. St. Basil was the leader in the creation of a communal type of monasticism in the Greek church that gradually came to predominate over the old anchoritic form. But the Greek cenobitic form of ascetic life remained loose, and the individual monk retained most of his independence. The characteristic Greek monastery was a large community where monks lived together for convenience, but the abbot (abbas, father) had little control over them; he was merely a revered and senior religious.
The development of western monasticism also began with the anchoritic form. The failure of nerve of western society during the last century of the Roman Empire induced some who had lost their faith in civilization but not in God to assure themselves of salvation by undertaking the hermit life in caves and other wild places. Such men frequently achieved great celebrity as saintly miracle workers. The relics of St. Martin, one of these Latin anchorites, were deposited at Tours, which became a popular shrine for pilgrims and accounted largely for the wealth of the bishopric, as Gregory of Tours proudly tells us. Yet extreme anchoritic asceticism never attained the importance that it did in the East, and in the fifth and sixth centuries it gave way to various kinds of cenobitism—that is, communal monasticism—partly for climatic and partly for social reasons. It was a different matter to try to be a hermit in the cold climate of northern Europe than to survive by oneself in Egypt. Furthermore, extreme asceticism only appears as a reaction to a wealthy urbanized society. There is no point in dramatically renouncing worldly fleshpots when nearly everyone is finding it hard to get enough to eat, which was a common situation in early medieval Europe. Anchoritism became a powerful movement in western religious life only with the emergence of an urbanized society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Until then, western monasticism was distinguished for its attachment to cenobitism.
The earlier kinds of communal monasticism in western Europe closely resembled the loose structure of the Greek religious communities. It was this kind of monastery that the Greek churchman St. John Cassian established in Marseilles in the early fifth century. Cassian’s Collations, his account of conversations with the Egyptian desert fathers, is an important contribution to the development of the western monastic ideal. His work demonstrated both the sanctity of the desert fathers and the dangers that came from the isolation of the hermit life. His book, therefore, became required reading in early medieval monasteries.
The most thriving monasteries of the fifth and sixth centuries were those in Ireland. The Irish monasteries closely resembled the Greek in their form, and this similarity may have been the result of direct influence from the eastern Mediterranean; there is some evidence that Greek churchmen may have come to sixth-century Ireland, presumably following trade routes between Ireland and the East. The Irish monks were exceptionally well educated and zealous; they made excellent missionaries and pioneered the conversion of the heathen Anglo-Saxons and attempts to reform the church in Gaul. But the abbot in the Irish monastery had no authority over the brothers, who were free to come and go as they pleased. It was not this loose kind of cenobitic life but a much more strictly controlled and, in fact, corporate monastery that became the institutionalized form of asceticism in western Europe until the eleventh century.
By the end of the ninth century the basic rule for all western monasteries, with the exception of those in Ireland, was the one set down by St. Benedict of Nursia (died 543) for his own monastery of Monte Cassino near Naples. Western monasticism became identified with the Benedictine order, and because of the indispensable contributions of the black monks (as they were called from the color of their habits) to religion, education, government, and economy, the period from 550 to 1150 has often been called the Benedictine centuries. St. Benedict certainly did not intend to establish an institution that would provide leadership in medieval society. There is even some debate as to whether he intended his rule to be applied universally to all Latin monasteries, but assuredly he hoped that others would imitate the form of the religious life he established at Monte Cassino. He arrived at the final form of his Rule for Monks only after many years of careful consideration of the ideal religious life and some painful experiments. St. Benedict was a scion of the old Roman aristocracy, and he brought to the monastic life the Roman corporate sense of order, discipline, and authority. He turned in revulsion from the school at Rome to which his parents had sent him and fled to a wild region to become a hermit, but he found the lonely anchoritic life unsatisfactory and psychologically dangerous. He then became the abbot in a prevailing Greek kind of loose cenobitic community, but he was chagrined by the laxity and disorder he found there. Out of these experiences he derived the severe criticisms of the older forms of monasticism that he presented in the introduction to his Rule.
The purpose of the Benedictine community was to assure salvation for the souls of its members. It was a completely self-contained community, economically and politically as well as spiritually, and was not to rely upon the world for anything, except in the extreme case of the notorious corruption of the monastic community. Only when the abbot and the monks were obviously living scandalous lives was there a provision in the Benedictine Rule for outside interference; only then were the bishop or pious laymen of the neighborhood expected to intervene and restore regular life. Except for this unusual situation, the Benedictine monastery was to be a completely self-contained, self-supporting, and self-governing world. The abbot was to be elected by the monks for life, and he was to have absolute authority over the lives and souls of the brothers, who were to take unmitigated vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to the abbot for life. The abbot’s absolute authority was predicated on the hierocratic principle: He would be called to account before God for his performance as the divine minister in the monastery, and this superior obligation was the sanction for his absolute rule in the community.
The abbot had unchallenged authority to regulate the daily life of the monastery, to assign monks to various duties, and to punish them when necessary. The monks were never to leave the monastery, except under the most unusual circumstances and then only with the abbot’s permission, and they were to obey whatever order the abbot gave them, even if they considered it to be wrong; the responsibility for a wrong act would lie with the abbot, not with the monk, who was obeying the regulations set down for him by his hierocratic superior.
The monastic life envisaged by the Benedictine Rule was characterized by a communal life of absolute regularity, with the strictest discipline and unvarying routine. The Rule was not remarkable for extreme forms of asceticism. Benedict had a Roman sense of balance and a keen psychological insight into the possibilities and limitations of human nature. Mortification of the flesh was not to be the rule in his monastery. On the contrary, the abbot was responsible for preserving the health of the brothers: He was to make sure that the monks had two solid meals a day and that the sick, the young, and the old received special care. It is obvious that Benedict did not care much for the extreme forms of asceticism, such as flagellation, hair shirts, or prolonged fasting. He believed in the discipline of the physical appetites, but not in self-abnegation and self-destruction.
The order of the monastic day, as envisaged by the Benedictine Rule, depended somewhat upon the season of the year, but taking an average over the whole year, the twenty-four hours in the daily life of the monk were to be divided into four parts. Four hours of every day were devoted to the Opus Dei (divine service), that is, communal liturgical prayer in the chapel. Four hours were provided for individual meditative prayer and the private reading of religious literature. Six hours were to be given to physical labor; the monastery was to provide its own food and to be completely self-supporting. This left ten hours for eating and sleeping, which indicates Benedict’s moderation and common sense. The black monks were to live in a constantly devout atmosphere of silence and abstraction from the world. Absolute silence was not required, but needless gossip was prohibited. At mealtimes one of the brothers would read aloud from a religious book—the Psalms, or Cassian’s Collations—while the other brothers ate in silence.
Benedict realized that some men of even pious inclinations would not be able to endure a life of such strict discipline and routine. Consequently he provided strict entrance requirements for admission to the monastic community. The candidate for monastic life was to undergo a year-long novitiate before he took his final vows, during which the abbot was to consider carefully the candidate’s temperament. St. Benedict regarded his monastery as a microcosm of society and included all classes and age groups: the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the educated and the illiterate, both priests and laymen. The Benedictine Rule allowed for the receiving of children into the monasteries as oblates to God. By no means did Benedict expect that all his monks be educated men and priests. He wanted the brothers who were illiterate or ignorant to be educated, but he certainly did not regard his monastery as a center of learning. His community was to have nothing to do with society and was to perform no services to civilization, not even to the church. This corporate selfishness was justified on the grounds that it provided a refuge where the devout could pursue the highest end of man, the pilgrimage to the City of God. The Benedictine monastery was a kind of self-contained religious spaceship.
In the three centuries after Benedict’s death the kind of monastery he created underwent important transformations and became absorbed into society as an institution of the first importance. This was neither what Benedict had wanted nor would have liked, but as David Knowles suggested, in a sense he had made this development inevitable by the effectiveness of the institution he had created. Early medieval society, so pitifully lacking in workable institutions, had to impose social obligations on the monks. Nor could western society afford to lose the services of literate men and able leaders who were found within the monastic communities; it drafted them out of their religious establishments to render services of the greatest importance. The self-contained nature of the Benedictine monastery made it an institutional unit that was eminently suited to the circumstances of the early Middle Ages. Only actual physical destruction could disperse the self-supporting and self-governed Benedictine community. In the new world that was coming into being after the Germanic invasions, social and political life was atomized, and the local units in society were the most effective ones. The estate, the village, and the province were rapidly replacing the state and the city as the centers of civilization. The Benedictine monastery fitted in completely with the tendency toward localism, and because of its efficiency and self-perpetuating nature it came to assume several important functions: educational, religious, economic, and political.
Even in Benedict’s day the Roman aristocrat and scholar Cassiodorus had envisaged monasteries as the most suitable places for the educational and literary centers of the new society. Cassiodorus tells us that he wanted to found a Christian school of higher study in Rome similar to the rabbinical schools he knew existed in the Middle East, but that under the circumstances of the time he found this to be impossible. Instead of such an institute of higher studies, what he devoted himself to was the creation of a more elementary kind of educational institution. He therefore established a large monastery with the conscious purpose of using it as a center for Christian education and scholarship, and in his Introduction to Divine and Human Readings he carefully outlined a program for the monastic school. The monks were to cultivate the Biblical-patristic tradition, but to obtain the necessary knowledge of Latin for this Christian scholarship, they were also to preserve and study certain classical texts. This educational work, Cassiodorus pointed out, presupposed that the monastery would have a good library of Christian and classical texts, and this supposition, in turn, involved the creation of a monastic scriptorium that would prepare copies of the works to be studied in the monastic school.
In the two centuries after the founding of Cassiodorus’ educationally oriented monastery, Benedictine communities all over western Europe similarly established schools, libraries, and scriptoria. This learned enterprise was not due so much to Cassiodorus’ influence and the impact of his educational treatise, although these were of great importance, as to social need. With the collapse of the Roman state and the deurbanization of western Europe, the state and municipal schools disappeared. The episcopal schools in the early Middle Ages were only occasionally effective institutions because they were completely dependent on the patronage of the bishops, who were rarely interested in the life of the mind. Even when a flourishing episcopal school was established, the next bishop was liable to be a semiliterate who would disband the teaching staff and sell off the library. The Benedictine monastery alone, during the early Middle Ages, had the continuity, the dedication, the library, and the substantial supply of teachers to serve as an effective educational institution. The monks had to undertake this educational task if Christian literature was to be preserved, and all over western Europe by 800 the more important Benedictine monasteries had flourishing schools, large libraries, and scriptoria for the production of manuscripts. At a conservative estimate 90 percent of the literate men between 600 and 1100 received their instruction in a monastic school.
It cannot be said that the Benedictine monasteries were ideal educational institutions. Their attitude to learning was almost entirely functional; they were interested in teaching the Latin language and the dissemination of the Biblical-patristic tradition to preserve a literate church. With few exceptions, the early medieval monastic scholars took a severely functional, Augustinian attitude toward the classical heritage. They were interested in the Latin literature only as a means of educating their students to write serviceable Latin. Such an attitude precluded the monastic school from becoming a center of creative thought. But in any case, early medieval society scarcely had the leisure for intellectual creativity; all literate men were needed for the service of church and monarchy. And although the early medieval monastic scribe usually did not have a deep aesthetic appreciation for the classical texts he was copying, he did preserve nearly all that was valuable in the Latin writings of the ancient world. The earliest manuscripts of all the surviving classical texts are the work of early medieval Benedictine monks.
Although St. Benedict had envisaged liturgical prayer as only one distinct part of the monastic day, by the early ninth century the Opus Dei had become the major function of many Benedictine monasteries, and service at the altar occupied nearly all the waking hours of the monks in such communities. This development was a consequence of the continued esteem and awe with which ascetic and saintly men were regarded by lay society. Just as the populace of Alexandria had begged St. Antony to pray in their behalf, so the much-admired Benedictine monks were made into the official intercessors with the deity on behalf of early medieval society. Kings and nobles endowed monasteries with lucrative manors in return for monastic masses for the souls of their relatives. By the ninth century many monasteries had become extremely wealthy as a consequence of this endowment of their liturgical function, and the abbots found themselves lords over large estates worked by dependent peasants. Even in this regard the Benedictines made a contribution to medieval society. Their estates were run more efficiently and intelligently than were most of the manors of the lay nobility, and they were the pioneers in whatever rudiments of agrarian science the early Middle Ages possessed. By the tenth century the black monks owned a considerable part of the best farmland in western Europe.
This development made many abbots into local powers, and they, like the lay nobility, were given political and judicial functions over the people in their domains. Because of their wealth and influence the abbots of the more important monasteries of northern Europe were also drawn into the developing feudal nexus in the ninth and tenth centuries and were required to become vassals of some king or duke and to send knights to the armies of their lords. The Benedictine abbot of the feudal era was frequently a royal vassal of the greatest importance. The abbot of Bury-St. Edmunds in the twelfth century ruled more than half the county of Norfolk. There are even a few instances of French abbots in the tenth and eleventh centuries buckling on armor and going off to fight at the head of their knightly contingent.
The political influence of the abbots also emerged as a result of the monastic monopoly of learning. Outstanding Benedictine scholars were recruited in the service of the church, and they became bishops and popes. But others staffed the chancery of a king or duke. They became royal chancellors, the advisers and confidants of rulers, and from the ninth to the middle of the twelfth century there were several instances of monastic statesmen who were in effect the chief ministers of western monarchs.
The heterogeneous and onerous social obligations undertaken by the Benedictine monasteries only two centuries after Benedict’s death could not but affect the internal life and composition of the religious communities. By 800 most monasteries were no longer self-sustaining units, nor did the black monks perform physical labor. The monks were supported by the labor of serfs on their estates, while they devoted themselves to educational and liturgical work. Nor did the membership of the ninth-century Benedictine community represent any longer a cross section of society: The monks were drawn almost exclusively from the class of the nobility, and the Benedictine abbots, by the tenth century, were usually men of the highest aristocratic and frequently princely origin. The Benedictine convents for women, which had begun to be founded soon after Benedict’s day, became particularly homogeneous in their social composition. The nuns of the ninth and tenth centuries were all high-born ladies, and it was almost impossible to be admitted to these convents without being a widowed or maiden relative of an important lord. Although the majority of the monks remained in their monasteries and abided by their vows, the ablest Benedictine monks from the eighth century on frequently left their communities to become missionaries, churchmen, and royal secretaries. This was not the monastery as created by St. Benedict, but it was an institution that was an extremely effective ameliorative force in early medieval society. Monasticism, which had begun as a flight into the desert from the civilized world, became in early medieval Europe not only an integral part of society, but a saving force of the greatest significance in the disorganized civilization that followed the Germanic invasions.
The contribution of Benedictine monasticism to the leadership of the early medieval church may be gauged by the fact that several of the most outstanding popes from the middle of the sixth century to the twelfth century were black monks. In the year 590 the first of these monastic popes, Gregory I the Great (died 604) ascended to the throne of Peter. His pontificate marks one of the most important turning points in the history of the medieval church, not because Gregory was able suddenly to overcome the disastrous impact of the Germanic invasions upon the culture and discipline of the Latin church; it was to take five centuries to achieve this end and complete the Christianization of Europe. Gregory I’s importance lies in his clear formulation of the program that the papacy was to follow over the next two centuries. He clearly perceived that the historic destiny of the papacy lay in western Europe and that the way to assert papal leadership in European society was through an alliance with the monastic orders and the Frankish monarchy.
Immediately after Gregory’s election as pope he sent out letters announcing that he had not wanted the throne of Peter and that he would have preferred to have lived the contemplative life of the monk. Although such modest statements became traditional with later popes, even with those who had campaigned for the office for many years, in Gregory’s case it was a sincere avowal. He knew that the church at his accession was in a very bad way and that the problems involved in asserting papal leadership in western Europe were almost insuperable. He compared the Latin church of his day to a ship that “creaked shipwreck.” Actually the papacy had exercised no effective leadership since the pontificate of Gelasius I almost a century before. The sixth-century popes had done nothing to deal with the consequences of the transformation of European government and society that followed the Germanic invasions. The bishops in Gaul had completely identified their interests with the Merovingian dynasty and then with the provincial aristocracy. In the outlook of even the best of them, Gregory of Tours, there had been a tremendous shrinking of vision, in comparison with the worldview of Ambrose and Augustine, toward a narrow parochialism.
The situation of the church in Visigothic Spain was not much more promising. The Visigoths had abandoned their Arianism for Catholic Christianity, and the Spanish bishops closely identified themselves with the Visigothic monarchy. In so doing, they had associated the destiny of the Spanish church with a decrepit institution whose sole strength was derived from the moral support given it by the church. This support was not to be enough to save Visigothic Spain from Moslem conquest in the early eighth century.
The situation of the Roman church itself at Gregory’s accession was most precarious. The pope was beset by enemies on all sides. To the north of Rome the primitive Lombards persisted in their devotion to tribal Arianism, while in Ravenna and to the south of Rome the forces of the Byzantine emperor were a constant threat to the security of the pope. The alliance between Rome and Byzantium that had brought about the destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom in the first half of the sixth century had long since collapsed, and in view of the mutually exclusive claims to be the vicar of God on Earth made by the pope and the emperor, the best relations that could exist between them was an uneasy peace. The one bright spot in this picture of the church at the beginning of the last decade of the sixth century was Ireland, but Gregory could not rejoice over the high cultural level of the Celtic monks. Since the Irish church had not been created under Roman direction, the Celtic churchmen not only had peculiar practices that differed from the Latin church, but they seemed to adopt an indifferent attitude toward the Petrine doctrine. This was at least the conclusion that Gregory had to adopt when he received letters from the great Irish missionary in Gaul, St. Columban, haranguing the pope in a severe and not altogether respectful tone on the proper management of ecclesiastical affairs. When Gregory became pope, the Irish missionaries already were penetrating northern England, inaugurating the conversion of the heathen English and, in Gregory’s eyes, threatening to foment a schism between the Latin and the Celtic churches.
Gregory by no means fully overcame any of these problems that the church faced at the time of his accession, but he set down the policy that his successors were to follow in struggling to resolve them, and he set in motion the chain of events that began the amelioration of the Latin church and European society. Gregory is the only pope between the fifth and the eleventh centuries whose correspondence and other writings have extensively survived, and we have sufficient documentation to write his biography and assess his character. He need not be for us a faceless man, as is the case with nearly all other early medieval churchmen. His character strikes us as an ambiguous and enigmatic one. On the one hand, he was an able and determined administrator, a skilled and clever diplomat, a leader of the greatest sophistication and vision; but on the other hand, he appears in his writings as a superstitious and credulous monk, hostile to learning, crudely limited as a theologian, and excessively devoted to saints, miracles, and relics.
This apparent ambiguity can be explained only in terms of Gregory’s background and milieu. Late sixth-century Italy reveals the catastrophic effects of the long Gothic war and Lombard invasion. Its culture was marked by the decline of cities and literacy, the progressive ruralization of the economy, and the advance of ignorance and superstitution. Gregory came from an old Roman family, and he had received a good classical education, but his primary concern as he grew to manhood was the salvation of his soul by a flight from the world. He founded a monastery in which he lived as a humble monk, and while he greatly admired St. Benedict, whose biography he wrote, his own attitude to monastic life lacked Benedict’s moderation and respect for human nature. As a monk Gregory gave himself over to severe austerities that permanently affected his health, and even as pope his outlook exhibited traces of fanaticism and a lack of common sense side by side with the traditional efficiency and effective governance of the Roman aristocrat. At one time Gregory heard that a bishop in Gaul had established a school for the study of liberal arts. Instead of congratulating the Frankish churchman on his effort to improve literacy, the pope castigated him for engaging in a frivolous enterprise! A similar limitation of vision is revealed in Gregory’s neglect to learn Greek while he was a papal ambassador for several years in Constantinople. Gregory’s personal culture reveals the disastrous consequences of the vicissitudes through which Italy had passed during the sixth century; in his writings there are traces of the pettiness, parochialism, and self-defeating intransigence that mark the work of his contemporary, Bishop Gregory of Tours. Fortunately, Gregory the Great was not allowed to pursue his inclination to become an obscure and ignorant monk. The church needed a man of his education, intelligence, sincerity, and political experience. He was recruited out of the monastery into the papal service, becoming a prototype for many Benedictine monks in the following centuries who undertook similar careers, and against his will was elevated to the throne of Peter. His work as pope falls into three parts: his contribution to the papal office, his attitude to monarchy, and his use of monastic missionaries in the service of the church.
Pope Gregory was first of all conscious of the fact that he was a member of the episcopate, and in his Book of Pastoral Care he delineated for his episcopal colleagues their duties as pastors of the Christian flock, contrasting these duties with the privileges they enjoyed as ecclesiastical princes and nobles, which tended to be their primary concern. It cannot be said that Gregory’s treatise on the episcopal office persuaded his colleagues to take a more zealous attitude toward their offices, but at least it served for later centuries as a definitive statement of the nature of the episcopal office. Gregory, however, was conscious that he was more than just a bishop; as bishop of Rome he was the vicar of Christ on Earth. He did not contribute anything new to the evolution of papal ideology, but he carefully summarized the Gelasian doctrine and Leo I’s Petrine theory. This view of papal office was summed up in the term servus servorum Dei, “servant of the servants of God,” which he used as an official appellation and that still appears as a subtitle on papal documents. Gregory thereby expresses the papal authority in terms of the hierocratic principle that St. Benedict had already used to justify the absolute authority of the abbot over the souls of the monks in his monastery. The hierocratic principle found its biblical support in Christ’s statement in the Gospel of Mark: “Whoever is the chief is the servant of all”—that is, he who has the most responsibility has the most power. Since the pope was responsible before God for his ministry as the leader of the Christian church, he required unlimited authority to carry out the divine work entrusted to him.
It was one thing to state the papal ideology, but it was a different matter to assert papal leadership in western Europe. Gregory saw that the first necessity was for the pope to secure his position in Italy itself, and he labored to expand the territory under papal rule beyond the confines of Rome and to build up the “patrimony of St. Peter,” the papal state. He was also conscious of the need for a steady income to effect his administrative work in the church, and many of his letters are devoted to telling his agents how to manage effectively the papal estates in southern Italy.
Even if the pope achieved an independent and secure position in Italy, he had to establish a relationship with the territorial churches in the Germanic countries if he was actually to assert his position as the leader of Christendom. Gregory was far more conscious of this fact than was any other previous pope, and herein lies a claim that may be made for him as the real founder of the medieval papacy. He realized that Europe was not just a matter of geography but a distinct culture and spirit contiguous with Latin Christianity, with whose destiny the papacy was ultimately to identify itself. Gregory was respectful toward the emperor in Constantinople, but not because he thought that the bishop of Rome had any longer something to hope for from the Roman emperor; he was merely concerned with maintaining the uneasy peace with Constantinople and leaving the papacy free to pursue its aims in western Europe.
To achieve the creation of a European civilization, Gregory saw with a prophetic clarity that the papacy would somehow have to ally itself with the Frankish monarchy, which, while it was a most unpromising institution in Gregory’s day, would inevitably dominate the political future of Europe. Because the Frankish kings ruled, at least nominally, the heartland of Europe and because their kingdom was by far the largest and wealthiest in Latin Christendom,. leadership in European society would have to come from the Frankish monarchy working under the direction of the church and revivified by this association. Gregory could not see how it could come in any other way. It was because of his understanding of this fundamental fact in European life that Gregory wrote highly deferential letters to the Merovingian king, Childebert II. Gregory was not blind to the gross inadequacies of the Frankish kings, but he envisioned an alliance between the papacy and the Merovingian dynasty that would transform Germanic kingship into an effective and ameliorative institution.
Gregory’s letters to the Merovingian king had no consequences in his own day. It was not until the eighth century that the Frankish rulers were sufficiently intelligent to understand the possibilities for the growth of their own power in an alliance with the papacy. The surprising consequence of Gregory’s missionary work was the bringing into existence of a group of churchmen who, in the eighth century, fomented the Frankish-papal alliance on which the new European civilization was to be founded. Shortly after his accession, as a consequence of the challenge from the Celtic church, Gregory felt the need for the conversion of England. As a monk who had been recruited into the service of the church, it was natural for him to employ Benedictine monks as his missionaries to England. He instructed the leader of this mission, Augustine, to begin his work in the kingdom of Kent in southeastern England because its ruler was known to have married a Frankish Christian princess. At the time of Gregory’s death Augustine’s mission had achieved its initial success with the conversion of the king of Kent and his nobles and the establishment of the first Latin church at Canterbury (literally, “Kent town”).
In the half century after Gregory’s death the Latin monks, advancing northward from Canterbury, and the Celtic missionaries at work in the north contended for the adherence of the English people. Finally, in 664, a synod of the English churchmen decided to bring the whole country under Roman rule. This decision not only precluded the schism in the western church that Gregory had struggled to avert; it had much more important consequences. The English Benedictines had the most flourishing schools in late seventh-century Europe, and in the eighth century they sent out missionaries to the Continent, inaugurating the transformation of the Frankish church and monarchy. It was an English Benedictine who, in the middle of the eighth century, played a leading role in establishing the Frankish-papal alliance that Gregory regarded as the necessary foundation for achieving a new European civilization.