On November 30th of 591 or 592, Gregory delivered a brief homily to those who had assembled for the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle. The Lectionary reading for the feast, appropriately enough, was Matthew 4:18–22 (Christ’s call for the four fishermen, Andrew, Peter, James, and John, to follow him). For Gregory, the meaning of the passage was clear: the saints, when called, abandon their desires in order to follow Christ. Using charity as a measuring stick for conviction, Gregory was distressed that people in his own time appeared to lack apostolic zeal, which left them unable to follow Christ truly. Anticipating those who might claim that they have no possessions to abandon, Gregory instructs his listeners that they need to sacrifice desire itself.1 How does one know if he has abandoned the desires of the world? Gregory asks rhetorically. We know it, he says, if we fear not for ourselves but for our neighbor; if we seek not our own gain, but the prosperity of those around us; if we desire the sufferings of our enemies to become our own; and if we offer our own souls as a sacrifice to God.2 Gregory concludes the homily with a turn, again, to the virtue of St. Andrew and enjoins his audience to begin the process of withdrawal from the world. Through ascetic discipline, he promises, they will advance “step by step,” as they progress from the abandonment of desire for another’s goods (i.e., greed) to the abandonment of desire for one’s own goods (i.e., charity), which ultimately leads to a willingness to suffer for others.3
While Gregory describes a linear progression from the abandonment of desire to the willingness to suffer for others, it is characteristic of his homilies that he would present action, motivation, and the grace that fuels them both as a mysteriously integrated and mutually implicated collection of forces. While Gregory could not control the mystical flow of divine grace, he could hope to inspire his audience to see that willfully serving others was the best way to answer the call of Christ.
On another occasion early in his pontificate, Gregory found himself preaching a similar message at the shrine of an unnamed martyr.4 The Lectionary passage for that day was John 15:12–16, a pericope of some Trinitarian significance but one from which Gregory chose to emphasize the relationship between the denial of self and the love of neighbor.5 The “ancient enemy,” Gregory warns, uses our envy and greed to drive a wedge between us and our neighbor. Whereas Christians should sacrifice all that they have, even for their enemies, most Christians resist their enemies because they fear the loss of possessions through enemies.6 To overcome this, Gregory reasons, Christians must learn to abandon their selfishness: only then will the desire for earthly things be transformed into a burning desire for the things of the Lord; only then will Christians be able to imitate the saints.7 Gregory concludes the homily by noting that although it is unlikely that his listeners will have the opportunity to suffer martyrdom like the saint for whom they have assembled, they should nonetheless conquer their souls, because such a sacrifice is pleasing to God. For Gregory, this sacrifice is a struggle or contest (certamen) of the heart.8 This is a “spiritual” contest, one that is won by forgiving enemies and those who have wronged us, but that also requires an indifference to material possession in the sense that only those who are indifferent to material loss can gladly forgive those who have taken from them.
I have chosen to begin my analysis of Gregory’s theology of asceticism with a snapshot of these two public homilies because they evince well the core presumptions underlying his commitment to the ascetic life. For Gregory, cultivation of ascetic practices was one of the most basic consequences—moral applications, if you will—of a Christian’s faith in Christ. While these particular examples emphasize the rejection of material possessions, Gregory’s ascetic register incorporated all of the typical forms of early Christian renunciation (including the regulation of food, the divestiture of money and family, and the rejection of sexual desire). Thus, Gregory reasoned, a moral or ascetic commitment was expected of everyone who believed that Christ was God.
To be clear, the term asceticism is largely a modern scholarly tag for a set of personal commitments that were often linked to specific physical and spiritual regimens. When I speak of Gregory’s “asceticism,” his “ascetic register,” or his “ascetic idiom,” I hope to convey the particular aspects of Gregory’s ascetic thinking. In general terms, many early Christians believed that their faith in God required them to limit those pursuits that led to temporal ends or fleeting pleasure (e.g., the acquisition of money, luxurious food, comfort, or fame). These adherents sought to rechannel their energies toward endeavors that they hoped would bring spiritual growth (e.g., fasting, charity, sexual renunciation, and humility). And, to be sure, both the renunciatory and aspirational dimensions of ascetic discipline could be physical or contemplative, and often they were some combination of the two. By the time of Gregory’s writing, ascetic writers had developed a sophisticated intellectual, hermeneutical, and physical apparatus for connecting what we might loosely call an “ascetic commitment” to their practice of Christianity. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate the ways in which Gregory’s ascetic theology drew from these general tendencies but was also unique in key respects.
Indeed, the two homilies just reviewed do more than illuminate Gregory’s asceticizing hermeneutic (a characteristic that was typical of many exegetes of the period); they also demonstrate what was distinctive about Gregory’s theology of asceticism: its social dimension. Gregory, perhaps more than any other Latin author of the Patristic Era, consistently argued that the true ascetic was the one who cared so little about himself that he would willingly suspend his own enjoyment of the contemplative life to be of service to others. Indeed, within Gregory’s enormous corpus we find an embroidery of many ascetic threads, all of which advocate an asceticism for others.
As we delve deeper in the “logic” of asceticism in Gregory’s thought, it is important to analyze the extent to which Gregory’s understanding of the ability of a Christian to have knowledge of God and to comprehend the revelation of God through the Scriptures was intrinsically linked to the pontiff’s own “asceticized” reading of the Scriptures.9 In her masterful Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity, Elizabeth Clark elucidates the many ways in which late-ancient authors successfully “recontextualized” the words and verses of the Bible to endorse an ascetic reading of Scripture that was in line with and reinforced their own predispositions for the life of renunciation.10 “Professing to remain faithful to the biblical passages at hand, ascetically inclined church fathers nonetheless produced new meaning that made the entire Bible speak to the practical as well as theological concerns of Christian renunciants.”11 Though Pope Gregory lay beyond the chronological scope of Clark’s study, the pontiff’s inclination to interpret Scripture, history, and theology through the medium of his own ascetic commitments is readily discernable.12 And it is through this medium that his epistemological and hermeneutical perspectives converge.
Indeed, Gregory argues that the knowledge of God derives, primarily, from a study of the Scriptures. The Scriptures contain “divine speech”13 and provide “food and drink” for the soul.14 Not only are they the foundation of Christian beliefs, they also serve as the inspiration for a life in Christ.15 Although some of the truths contained in the Scriptures are beyond human comprehension,16 all Christians who strive for knowledge of God are able to gain something from the Bible. But Gregory’s theological topography (like that of other Christian intellectuals of the period) is hierarchical and axiological—meaning that some Christians are able to understand the Scriptures better than others. According to Gregory, those Christians who couple an exceptional degree of ascetic progress with authentic humility are more equipped than others to discern the mysteries of the sacred texts and their source (i.e., God). Establishing these points in his commentary on the prophet Ezekiel, he notes, “Many things were written simplistically so that the youthful might be nourished, whereas other things surely were concealed in obscure notions (obscurioribus sententiis) that occupy [the minds of] the strong because things that are comprehended after great effort are the more gratifying.”17
For Gregory, it is through discernment (discretio) that one obtains the mystical insight to interpret Scripture properly.18 The connection between discretio and knowledge of God lies in the belief that this “spiritual” insight is a basic requirement for the accurate interpretation of Scripture, which is, in turn, the primary conduit for true knowledge.19 Making this precise point in his homilies on Ezekiel, he argues that discretio is vital to acquiring knowledge from Scripture because it guarantees a proper interpretation; if left to our own interpretive abilities, we will believe that we are reading Scripture spiritually when, in fact, we are being deceived by our carnal impulses, which lead to a false reading.20 Elsewhere, Gregory warns that a carnal life prevents the reader of Scripture from accessing its divine truths.21 Conversely, we may infer that it is through ascetic accomplishment that one is most able to acquire the gift of discernment.22
Although Gregory does offer several positive statements about the ability—even the necessity—of the mind’s activity in the acquisition of knowledge,23 those statements are rarely isolated in Gregory’s corpus from a discussion of the knowledge that is mediated through Scripture. Moreover, by describing cognition as something contingent upon both humility and grace, Gregory’s characterization of the mind’s acquisition of knowledge simply mirrors his treatment of discernment, which is, in itself, a kind of discussion about mental activity.24 Underpinning these epistemological statements is Gregory’s conviction that the acquisition of knowledge, whatever the source, is preconditioned by a life that is both renunciatory (i.e., engaged in physical ascetic acts) and contemplative.25 But once knowledge is obtained, another form of balance—the balance between the active life and the contemplative—conditions the retention and dissemination of knowledge.26 In other words, what is attained through contemplation or through a study of the Scriptures is not pursued for its own sake, nor is it to be kept to oneself. Rather, Gregory believes that the spiritually advanced receive knowledge of God for the benefit of others and themselves. As we will see, properly balancing the two (i.e., self and neighbor), allows the spiritual director to fulfill the commandment to love both God (contemplative) and neighbor (active).27
In the twentieth century, scholars were keen to differentiate Gregory’s biblical commentaries from the Dialogues because of their supposed difference in genre, content, and sophistication. And while it is true that these texts emphasize different literary styles, the discrepancies between them may be overblown.28 Note, for example, that Gregory’s famous dictum (from the Moralia) that there are three distinct modes for the interpretation of Scripture (i.e., the historical, the allegorical, and the moral) never seems to have compromised his inclination to employ all three methods to derive ascetic inspiration—inspiration that was ultimately in line with the moral prescriptions of the Dialogues.29 Indeed, the pontiff’s asceticizing hermeneutic seems to enable the primary goal of his didactic practice, which is to lead his audience to a moral and practical application of the biblical text—an application that is almost always expressed through an ascetic register.
Even a cursory reading of Gregory’s biblical commentaries will yield a dizzying number of examples that evince the ascetic character of his interpretive strategies. His repeated discussions of Adam’s Fall, for example, almost always occur within an ascetic idiom. Whether he describes the Fall as act of “gluttony” or an act of “pride,” or whether he interprets the prelapsarian state as one of “perfect contemplation” that ultimately gave way to a postlapsarian imprisonment of “external concerns,” there is no denying that Gregory’s interpretive imagination exists within the ascetic’s horizon, the ascetic discourse.30 Other examples, of course, abound.31 In his Commentary on Ezekiel, the warm and cold winds are interpreted to represent virtue and vice;32 so too do the steps of the gate (see Ezek. 40:6).33 He interprets Ezekiel 1:23 (“every one with two wings covered his body”) as a call to an ascetic discipline of the body and Ezekiel 4:2 (“build a siege wall against it”) as representing the spiritual director who instructs his disciples to guard against vice.34 In the Moralia, Job’s sons are routinely castigated for their gluttonous behavior,35 his wife is accused of seeing the world through carnal rather than spiritual eyes,36 and the animal sacrifice of the Jewish priesthood is allegorized to represent various acts of ascetic repentance.37 One of Gregory’s best-known interpretative maneuvers, of course, is to interpret the animals of Scripture in allegorical and/or morally instructive ways, including (rather famously) the rhinoceros, whose horn is the quintessential symbol of pride.38
For Gregory, the intersection of ascetic practice and scriptural meditation occurs in multiple and overlapping ways. His personal ascetic training and his supervision of ascetic communities (both before and after his election as bishop of Rome) predispose him to seek and find ascetic messages within the biblical text. Those “mystical messages,” in turn, fuel his belief in the necessity of ascetic commitment, and they provide the basis upon which he structures his pastoral teaching. Even passages that appear to have little obvious ascetic content are spun, in Gregory’s hands, into an appeal for renunciatory practice, and they are communicated in an ascetic idiom.39
Perhaps one of the most discernable ways in which we can document the growing influence of ascetic communities on the broader Church in the late-ancient period is through traceable shifts in linguistic patterns and theological categories. Within the ascetic communities of late antiquity (particularly those of the Egyptian desert), there was a particular emphasis on the internalization of the spiritual battle. The legislative enjoinders found in Scripture (e.g., do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery) presented a moral imperative, but through the process of intensive self-reflection, ascetic activists began to identify sin where it had gone unnoticed before. For example, they scrutinized the vices (i.e., inner depravations that led to spiritual or physical sin) and developed catalogs of spiritual antidotes (i.e., the virtues) for their control and eventual eradication.40 In this discourse of virtue and vice, fasting prevented gluttony, charity corrected greed, and humility guarded against pride.41
Whereas Ambrose and Augustine had typically employed the four cardinal virtues according to the classical Greco-Roman models (i.e., prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice), Gregory’s corpus reveals a near universal appropriation of the ascetic idiom for describing virtue and vice.42 In fact, Gregory is probably the Latin theologian most responsible for mediating the concept of the seven vices (later known as the seven deadly sins) to the Middle Ages.43 The asceticizing discussion of virtue and vice permeates every genre of Gregory’s writing. In the Dialogues, for example, the miracles of saints are said to spring from preexistent virtue. Similarly, the didactic value in describing these miracles along with other acts of the Italian saints serves as an active promotion of ascetic virtues (especially fasting, almsgiving, chastity, and humility). In the Pastoral Rule, the ascetic register for virtue and vice becomes a primary filter by which a candidate for the priesthood is described as being either qualified or unqualified for office.44 And the promotion of virtue and the correction of vice dominates book 3 of the same treatise, which is intended to serve as the foundation for the spiritual leadership offered by Gregory’s priestly readers.
It is in the biblical commentaries, however, that we find the most exhaustive discussions of the asceticized categories of virtue and vice. The most explicit listing of the seven vices, all of which spring from their “mother” (i.e., pride), is in book 31 of the Moralia.45 This particular discussion develops as an extended metaphor on war and battle and is drawn from Job 39:25. Other occasions offer extended analyses of one or more particular vices and the need for their eradication.46 Gregory is especially concerned that his readers understand the extent to which the vices are interconnected—a vice that is left untreated will almost certainly be the source of others.47 Although he is far less interested than Evagrius had been to show that the devil or his demons are the tempting force behind the vices, the idea is certainly not alien to his thinking.48 Here Gregory follows Cassian in understanding the demons as more of an external than an internal threat.49
Gregory’s emphasis on the virtues and vices no doubt derives from the fact that they offered an effective means of bridging the gap between the spiritual and physical worlds and of communicating the necessity of constant introspection in a ready-made taxonomy of good and bad behavior. As we will explore in chapter 7, Gregory believed that every Christian was spiritually unique—everyone had distinct spiritual talents and challenges.50 The spiritual director was charged with discerning these idiosyncrasies in his disciples and setting them upon a proper path to spiritual correction through the encouragement of ascetic discipline. Thus, the language of virtue and vice made simple both the diagnosis of sin and the prescription for reform.
Among the things to which Gregory was keen to alert potential directors was the fact that vices could very often masquerade as virtue51 and that virtue unaccompanied by humility is no virtue at all.52 Of course, there was more to the appropriation of ascetic language than simple fearmongering—Gregory repeatedly held up the saints as examples of virtuous living and encouraged his audiences to imitate their modes of renunciation.53 Indeed, the meditation on the lives of the saints (the biblical heroes, the martyrs, and the ascetics of the Dialogues) offers an important vehicle for Christians to cultivate virtue.54 Although no saint is in possession of every virtue, every saint is in possession of the most important virtue—humility.
Among the many things that one learns from reading Gregory’s exhaustive correspondence is that he was deeply suspicious of those in power, whether civil or ecclesiastical. More often than not, the pontiff’s expressed concern related to what he perceived to be an inherent link between the exercise of authority and the acquisition of pride.55 It is noteworthy, in fact, that the occasions on which Gregory was most willing to confront the Roman emperor Maurice were precisely those occasions on which he believed that Maurice had enabled others (especially clerics) to act with pride.56 So, too, the pontiff’s strongest words against the Merovingian rulers related to his critique of simony in their realms, which in Gregory’s theological reckoning was an unlawful disruption of the rightful structure of the Church and always born of pride.57
Gregory’s concern with pride and his promotion of humility, however, ran much deeper than a simple platform for critiquing his ecclesiastical and secular rivals. Indeed, the pontiff understood the entire cycle of humanity’s fall and redemption to be located within the pride/humility paradigm. Gregory begins book 31 of the Moralia with a summary of this view, identifying Satan’s temptation of Adam in the Garden of Eden as the manifestation of pride and Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection as the ultimate personification of humility.58 It is through pride, Gregory reasons, that we distance ourselves from God, and it is through humility that we escape sin. One might say that the balanced antitheses of pride and humility, and good and evil, are at the heart of Gregory’s theological outlook.59
Gregory’s ideas about pride and humility, of course, have long been noticed by scholars.60 Claude Dagens stressed the place of humility in Gregory’s understanding of the virtues.61 Conrad Leyser has more recently made a great deal of what he calls Gregory’s “rhetoric of vulnerability.”62 While Leyser is certainly right to note the shifting parameters of late-ancient discourse (which between the periods of Augustine and Gregory came to emphasize the Christian virtue of humility and the extent to which a “rhetoric of humility” could serve to activate or retain authority), there is good reason to believe that Gregory’s theological outlook was in large part shaped by an ascetic framework that understood humility to be the quintessential Christian virtue. In other words, just as it would be foolhardy to believe that Gregory had nothing to gain from his frequent protestations of weakness and vulnerability (one of Leyser’s primary points), so too would it be wrong to presume that such protestations were made without some theological commitment (Leyser’s analysis does not engage humility as a theological conviction). But to evaluate this clearly one needs to see the balance between Gregory’s ascetic theology and his theology of humility, particularly as the two converged to produce an ascetic vision that emphasized service to others as the climax of the spiritual and ascetic life.
To be sure, Gregory was not the first ascetic theologian to esteem humility. Evagrius of Pontus and John Cassian offer the two most obvious antecedents, both of whom either directly or indirectly helped to shape Gregory’s outlook.63 And there are countless examples in Gregory’s corpus of his endorsement of humility and warning against pride,64 which, in his theological understanding, is the most powerful obstacle to holiness and the acquisition of divine knowledge.65 But two things distinguish Gregory’s treatment of humility from that of most other theologians of the late-ancient period: his eagerness to mine the “weaknesses” of the saints to draw out their ultimate goodness, and the way in which Gregory reconfigures the link between asceticism and humility so that the most successful ascetics are the ones who care so little for themselves that they suspend their own contemplation for the sake of others.
In the opening pages of book 2 of the Moralia, Gregory offers a theoretical explanation for why the Scriptures reveal the weaknesses of the saints. This is true, Gregory reasons, not only so that we may “learn what we ought to fear” (i.e., anything that is a hardship for the saints will certainly be a hardship for us) but also so that we may learn of the great power of humility through the examples of the saints.66 Indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics of Gregory’s exegetical interests to mine the failures, sins, and shortcomings of the saints. The most obvious examples, of course, are King David, St. Peter, and St. Mary Magdalene (whom Gregory famously conflates with the unnamed woman caught in adultery [Jn. 8:1–11]).67 Gregory was unique among the late-ancient bishops of Rome in his willingness the hold up the errors, sins, and shortcomings of St. Peter.68 But Gregory was also willing to mine the errors of other, less obviously flawed saints (including Paul, Benedict, and even Job) so as to provide a saintly exemplar for the power of humility.69 And it was more than the saintly exemplars whom God allowed to fall into sin; Gregory believed that all of the “elect” fall into certain sins so that they can personally learn humility and so that others can be inspired by the power of their repentance through humility.70
Whereas the most influential ascetic writers of the late-ancient period had not been involved with the selection and supervision of a large network of clerics, Gregory’s unique contributions to the development of ascetic theology were likely shaped by that responsibility. It is thus important to understand the extent to which his discussions of humility fit within a complex matrix of ascetic and administrative concerns. Indeed, Gregory in many ways refocused the theology of humility by emphasizing its social possibilities. Whereas Evagrius, Cassian, and others stressed humility as an exercise in self-abasement through the recognition of personal sin and fault, Gregory encouraged his readers to learn that humility could be cultivated through denying oneself spiritual joys, particularly the joys of contemplation and retreat.71 Indeed, unlike ascetic collections such as the Apophthegmata Patrum, which were filled with ideological quips about humility as an antidote to pride, Gregory looked beyond such sentiments in his search for a balance between authentic humility and effective leadership.
For example, in the ninth homily of his Commentary on Ezekiel, Gregory explores the complex relationship between authority, pride, retreat, and humility. He cautions that just as it is likely that the one in authority will be susceptible to pride, so too will the one who resists a position of leadership fail to obtain humility because he has acted out of fear of responsibility rather than true humility in refusing to serve others. “Therefore, freedom and pride, humility and fear must always be differentiated so that fear does not mask itself as humility nor pride pretend to be freedom.”72 For Gregory, the more one comes to know God, the less one thinks of himself, and, as a consequence, the more capable one is to offer effective leadership to others.73
The notion that ascetics should put themselves in the service of others was not a Gregorian invention—Basil of Caesarea famously encouraged his monks into active social ministry.74 Even Cassian, who is sometimes understood to have promoted a sectarian view of the monastic life that had little interest in the outside world, can be interpreted as having endorsed a tentative outreach in the last installment of his Conferences.75 But in Gregory’s hands the very summit of ascetic perfection is redefined. Whereas both Basil and Cassian understood the goal of the ascetic life to be a mystical union with God that was ultimately achieved through a state of contemplative apatheia, Gregory argued that the apex of the spiritual life was to be found in the sacrifice that corresponded to service for others.
Gregory’s emphasis on a balance between contemplation and active ministry has, of course, been noted by several scholars.76 Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this aspect of Gregory’s thought belongs to Carole Straw, who understood the pontiff’s repeated encouragement of “active contemplation” as a kind of third way, a “mixed life” reciprocally balanced between the lives of contemplation and action.77 This concept is central to Straw’s thesis that Gregory found perfection in the balancing of binary ideals. While her analysis of symmetry in Gregory’s thinking is quite helpful, I propose a slightly different means of interpretation. Namely, I would like to suggest that if we reflect upon Gregory’s active contemplative life within the context of late-ancient ascetic theology more broadly, we find that the pontiff is advocating for a nuanced vision of ascetic perfection. And, as part 3 of this volume will demonstrate, it was precisely that nuanced vision that informed and structured Gregory’s administration of the Roman See.78
The contemplative life was important—even fundamentally necessary—in Gregory’s eyes. But Gregory distinguished himself from other late-ancient ascetics, even those committed to the service to others, with the idea that no one could achieve perfection in the stillness of contemplation alone. One had to be willing to suspend those spiritual joys for the sake of others, even if doing so meant losing some measure of contemplative progress.79 In his fifth homily in the Commentary on Ezekiel, Gregory chastises those ascetics who are so selfish in their contemplative efforts that they refuse to be a light to others. “The man who leads a good life in secret but is of little assistance for the advancement of others is like a coal” (i.e., a source of energy that remains cold).80 In the seventh homily in the same collection, he notes that the “perfect” are those who not only weep for their own sins but also stretch out the wings of their virtues for others.81 In book 6 of the Moralia he goes so far as to argue that there is no advantage to ascetic discipline if the practitioner is unwilling to have compassion for his neighbors.82 And then, in book 7, he maintains that the love of God that is isolated from love of neighbor is an impoverishment of the spiritual life.83 These are but a few examples that exist in Gregory’s lengthy biblical commentaries.
It is in Dialogues, however, that we find the most comprehensive and orchestrated presentation of Gregory’s argument for the importance of service to others. For example, in book 3 of that text we find a story of two brothers who enter monastic life together. One of the brothers becomes the abbot of the community; the other pursues a more eremitic form of asceticism. The abbot is said to lack the spiritual capacity to perform miracles, whereas the recluse is graced with the ability to perform them regularly. But, in the end, it is not the one who performed miracles in isolation but the one who served others who is shown to be the monk of consistent virtue. And the way in which this manifests itself in the story is that the recluse is unable to properly deal with the sins of others, which leads him to fall victim to pride and anger. His brother, by contrast, proves to be a model of patience, humility, and sanctity.84
It is the account of St. Benedict in the Dialogues, of course, that most effectively communicates Gregory’s vision of an asceticism for others. Indeed, when we compare Gregory’s Life of Benedict to the literary accounts of other famous late-ancient ascetics (e.g., Athanasius’s account of Anthony, Theodoric’s account of Symeon the Stylite, or Sulpicius Severus’s account of Martin of Tours), we find that the story of Benedict is unique in its emphases. Whereas the other accounts place the narrative arc on the acquisition of ascetic skill and the contest against demonic forces that stand in its way, Gregory’s Life of Benedict begins with its hero acquiring ascetic virtue without need of a mentor.85 Thus, the narrative development does not lie in Benedict’s asceticism; rather, it lies in his challenge to offer effective spiritual direction to others. Indeed, the vast majority of Benedict’s miracles are not ascetic feats or personal conflicts against demonic forces but events in the supervision of unruly monks who continuously challenge his authority. Through discernment and pastoral condescension, Benedict leads his disciples in the face of insubordination, attempted assassinations, and demonic attack. Like the heroes of other late-ancient Christian biographies, Benedict encounters the devil and his demons repeatedly. But unlike the dark forces that challenge St. Anthony or St. Martin, Benedict’s spiritual foes typically pose a pastoral rather than an ascetic challenge. Indeed, when compared to those early hagiographies, Gregory’s Life of Benedict redefines both the purpose of ascetic purgation and the summit of monastic perfection in terms of spiritual supervision.86
In part 2 we will explore the dynamics of Gregory’s understanding of spiritual direction in greater detail. In the present context, what is most important is the extent to which he understood service to others as an important component of his ascetic theology. Like many of the great ascetic writers of the late-ancient world, Gregory viewed all of theology through the prism of his own ascetic experience. His ascetic convictions predisposed him to understand the relationship between God and humanity in a particular way (both what could be known of God and what kind of behavior was expected of humans). Those same convictions also predisposed him to read Scripture in a certain fashion and to have that reading reinforce his advocacy of specific ascetic behaviors. As we will see in the chapters that follow, Gregory’s ascetic vision, even in its particularities, was so sweeping that it provided the foundation for nearly all of his other theological commitments. This was perhaps nowhere more obvious than in his interpretation of the Fall of Adam and Redemption through Christ.