However much time Gregory devoted to his civic responsibilities, his principal interests lay in the promotion of a particular kind of Christian life that emphasized moral reform and was predicated upon his ascetic commitments. Although we have devoted considerable attention to Gregory’s ascetic theology and its role in his thinking about spiritual leadership, we have not yet had occasion to examine the specific ways in which he attempted to implement his theological program in the city of Rome, nor have we considered how that program may have challenged other clerical elites in the city. This is an especially pertinent avenue of investigation because, as one leading scholar has argued, the greatest threat to Gregory’s authority was not the Lombards, imperial officials, or distant bishops, but rather an independent clerical faction within the city of Rome that did not share in the pontiff’s ascetic inclinations and that had the most to lose from his reforming initiatives.1
Therefore, following a brief overview of the disparate nature of authority in the Roman Church in the period prior to Gregory’s installation, we will examine a select group of city-bound initiatives that Gregory undertook during his tenure as bishop and assess the extent to which our sources offer evidence of internal opposition to the pontiff’s ascetic program. While there is little doubt that Gregory’s program was both unprecedented and wide-ranging—two facts that may have frustrated some Roman clerics—the surviving sources offer only partial support to the scholarly contention that Gregory faced the persistent threat of an opposing clerical party waiting in the wings to usurp his authority.2
We must resist our modern notions of the ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church (wherein a city’s bishop has direct oversight of all diocesan parishes and is responsible for appointing and disciplining the clerics who serve those parishes) when we think about the relationship between the bishop of Rome and the priests who served the various churches in Rome during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. By the mid-fourth century, the city of Rome possessed a wide variety of spaces dedicated to Christian worship, including imperially funded basilicas, titular churches, martyr shrines, and private spaces within the domus, the household.3 Nearly all of those religious sites developed through lay patronage, and the clerics who served them possessed a range of theological and factional interests. While it is true that the bishops of Rome would eventually gain control of all of these spaces and the clergy who officiated at them, that process of consolidation took centuries and was uneven in its achievement.4
In times of turmoil especially, the tituli churches and even the imperial basilicas became strongholds for factionalism and sites of extreme violence.5 In some cases the divisions were based upon theological confession, but more often they lay in the unique and ever-shifting political alliances within and between the city’s aristocratic and clerical circles.6 The earliest contest for which we have ample evidence of the city’s basilicas and shrines becoming embroiled in the partisan action of clerical factions is the contested papal election between Damasus and Ursinus in 366.7 A century and a half later, during the protracted papal election between Symmachus and Laurentius from 498 to 506, Laurentius maintained control of every one of the city’s basilicas except for St. Peter’s (which lay outside of the city walls, across the Tiber), even though the secular ruler, Theodoric, had granted his support to Symmachus and multiple episcopal synods had declared Symmachus the rightful bishop.8
In a series of important essays in the 1970s, Peter Llewellyn documented the extent to which clerical factionalism had become a determinative factor for all ecclesiastic affairs within the city by the turn of the sixth century.9 Although scholars occasionally present these factions as long-running cohesive groups based entirely upon clerical class10 (e.g., the priests versus the deacons) or ideology (e.g., those in favor of pro-Eastern Christian policy and those against it11), we are probably on surer ground to understand that the various alliances between clergymen and their aristocratic supporters were forged and shifted according to a variety of factors, including imperial politics, the Ostrogothic court at Ravenna, and the individual personalities who either exacerbated or tempered hostility.12 For example, the supposed “victory” synod of 502 that was intended to authorize, once and for all, the victory of Symmachus over Laurentius was barely able to muster half of the city’s priests and deacons.13 As we will see, current scholarly assumptions about clerical factionalism in Gregory’s Rome presume the continuation of the bitter Symmachus/Laurentius divide.
Included in Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks is an otherwise undocumented account of the events surrounding Pope Gregory’s election—namely that it occurred when the city of Rome was gripped by a plague that had included Pope Pelagius II, Gregory’s predecessor, among its victims.14 At a moment when Gregory had been elected and received imperial authorization for his election, but had not yet been formally installed, the soon-to-be pontiff initiated a citywide penitential procession designed to appease God’s wrath and prepare the Christians of Rome for their impending judgment. The episode is not attested in Pope Gregory’s own works.15 Nevertheless, and even recognizing the hagiographic license with which Gregory of Tours presents the story, this account provides us with a glimpse of the ways in which Pope Gregory’s ascetic and pastoral program would have been on public display throughout his pontificate.
The History of Franks presents a transcript of part of Gregory’s rousing sermon of penitential encouragement. It also provides the specific details of an orchestrated parade of clerics and laity through the streets of Rome: the procession was to begin at a variety of religious sites throughout the city and then converge into a single march. According to the report, Gregory attempts to use the trauma of the plague as a catalyst for penitence and spiritual renewal: “May affliction open the door of conversion for us and may the punishment, which we are now suffering, dissolve the hardness of our heart.”16 But time was short, and so were the opportunities. The real fear, Gregory suggests, is not the physical death that the plague brings; rather, it is the fact that this illness strikes so quickly that its victims die before they have time to repent for their sins. How might Christians prepare for this? he asks rhetorically. They must enhance the fervor of their prayer through the merit of good works.17
To be sure, this message reflects the kind of penitential asceticism that Gregory advocates throughout his biblical commentaries, public sermons, and the Pastoral Rule. Rhetorically, the argument pivots on the theological relationship between physical and spiritual sickness. As we saw in part 1, Gregory understood physical sickness and death to be consequences of the spiritual sickness inaugurated for all of humanity through Adam and Eve. While a Christian’s moral reform will not avert the eventuality of physical death, penitence and the spiritual reorientation that accompanies ascetic discipline offer the promise of eternal life. Thus, Gregory seeks to turn the fear of plague into an opportunity for spiritual renewal. To that end, Gregory’s sermon unfolds as an enjoinder to a communal demonstration of faith in God.
For our purposes, what is significant about this episode is the extent to which the History of the Franks presents Gregory as able to marshal the entire population for this act of supplication. Indeed, we are offered many specific details of Pope Gregory’s instructions. In anticipation of the event, the city’s clerics offered three days of round-the-clock singing of the Psalms (a frequent marker of monastic spirituality). At the time of the procession, priests, abbots, and abbesses were assigned to lead specific groups of lay penitents from the city’s various districts. Then, following a specific course through the city with prayer and lamentation (mostly cries of kyrie eleison—“Lord, have mercy”), the entire Christian population converged at the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where they sang and beseeched the Lord in unison. The History of the Franks goes on to note that “the pope never stopped preaching to the people, nor did the people cease in their prayer,” despite the fact that in a single hour eighty persons fell to the ground and died from the disease.18 Obviously, our access to this event is limited by the highly sympathetic nature of the report. But the text testifies to the potential that a man such as Gregory had to harness the discourse of ascetic renunciation for a display of leadership that crossed any existing barrier between civic and ecclesiastical power.
In his study of authority and asceticism in late antiquity, Conrad Leyser latched onto this episode as an iconic event in Gregory’s career.19 For Leyser, the dramatic procession of supplicants is significant not because of its theological underpinnings or its communal character, but because it provided Gregory with an opportunity to emphasize (rather than allay) the trauma of the ravaged city and, in doing so, enabled him to upend the traditional power structures of Rome that would otherwise have opposed the pontiff’s far-reaching ascetic program.20 In the next section we will assess the extent to which Leyser is correct in assuming that Gregory’s pontificate truly “upended” the power structures in Rome as well as the underlying assumption that Gregory’s pontificate was always at risk of collapse because it had so many ready enemies among the city’s clergy. But first, let us examine some of the additional ways that Gregory enacted this ascetic program through preaching, the promotion of ascetic allies to positions of power within the clerical administration, and the removal of clerics who did not meet his standards.
Although Gregory’s surviving corpus is enormous by late-ancient standards, it is primarily from the Homilies on the Gospels that we gain the best sense for the style of his public preaching.21 In part 1 we examined two of the forty surviving homilies to elucidate Gregory’s theological commitment to asceticism and his efforts to impart those ideas to his listeners. In both cases Gregory was preaching at a particular martyr shrine rather than at the Lateran (the primary cathedral for the bishop of Rome, located inside the city’s walls) or St. Peter’s basilica (the symbolic headquarters for the papal promotion of the cult of St. Peter, located outside of the city). And it is, indeed, intriguing to see the ways in which the pontiff enlists the cycle of Roman martyr commemoration into his ascetic program.
Building upon the work of Antoine Chavasse, scholars are now able to identify ten cultic sites in Rome, mostly dedicated to Roman martyrs, at which Gregory preached many of these Gospel homilies.22 As Leyser aptly notes, in most cases Gregory’s sermons either ignore the life of the martyr altogether (focusing instead on the Gospel passage assigned for the day), or recalibrate the saint as a model of ascetic encouragement.23
Homily 37, delivered at the basilica of St. Sebastian, offers a fine case in point. Gregory’s interpretation of the Lectionary reading for the day (Lk. 14:16–33) employs a series of rhetorical bursts designed to emphasize an ascetic reading of the biblical passage.24 Throughout, he covers a great number of ascetic themes, including the abandonment of family, the temptations of physical desire, and the need to forsake material goods. He also recognizes the problem of false asceticism, bemoaning those who display the signs of renunciation but do so for the sake of vainglory rather than a genuine willingness to embrace the Christian life. Near its conclusion, the homily includes a lengthy aside about an ascetic bishop, Cassius of Narni (a figure who was included in book 4 of the Dialogues) so that Gregory can offer a saintly example by which his listeners might adopt the ascetic teaching of the Gospel passage.25 What the homily does not include is any mention of St. Sebastian, the popular Roman martyr in whose honor the laity had assembled.
What is so intriguing about this omission of St. Sebastian in Homily 37 is that Gregory was at other instances engaged in the promotion of Sebastian’s cult.26 Despite the pontiff’s frequent distribution of relics from the Roman martyrs and his repeated efforts to promote the cults of other Italian saints, his public preaching at the shrines of the martyrs appears to emphasize a particular kind of moral behavior and ascetic discipline that aligned with his own theological and pastoral commitments. As Leyser argues, this reflects a significant change of course with respect to the way that martyrs were enlisted by the bishops of Rome for the continued promotion of Christianity in the city. In sum, Gregory’s Homilies on the Gospels demonstrate that he has co-opted the Roman martyr cults into a sophisticated promotion of his own program of ascetic and moral reform.
Shifting from Gregory’s preaching of asceticism to his promotion of ascetics to positions of authority, we should acknowledge that nearly every modern assessment of Gregory’s activity as bishop recognizes that the pontiff sought to elevate his own men (mostly monks from St. Andrews) to episcopal sees throughout the Western Church. We will detail the most important examples (including Maximian in Syracuse, Marinianus in Ravenna, and Constantius in Milan) in the next chapter.27 But there is also reason to consider the types of men that formed Gregory’s inner circle of nonepiscopal advisors and how that group, which would have been visible to observers within the city, might have both projected and carried out the pontiff’s ascetic program.
According to John the Deacon, Gregory’s earliest Roman biographer, the pontiff removed all laymen and chose only the “most prudent clerics” as his advisors, enabling the Roman Church to recreate the ascetic community of the era of the apostles.28 In his detailed investigation of Gregory’s administration, Jeffrey Richards connected the pro-monastic gloss provided by John the Deacon to an actual group of ascetically inclined individuals who formed Gregory’s inner circle.29 Although the pontiff performed relatively few ordinations (the Liber Pontificalis claims just five deacons during Gregory’s fourteen-year tenure), Richards confirmed a monastic pedigree for three of them.30 It is likely that Gregory’s most trusted notaries (men entrusted with a range of administrative, judicial, and diplomatic efforts) were also men of ascetic inclination.
The administrative move that was likely the most significant, however, was the creation of two new posts that formed the core of Gregory’s administrative team: a vicedominus and a primicerius defensorum. For Richards these moves were designed to recalibrate the power structures within the Church’s administration. Specifically, Richards believes that they were designed to deprive preexisting career clerics of some of their authority.31 While that may be true, it is noteworthy that the two candidates that Gregory chose to promote to these powerful positions were members of the already existing diaconal establishment.
As another example of the way that Gregory’s ascetic program took shape in the city of Rome, let us look at the most intriguing illustration of Gregory’s effort to integrate monastic spirituality, martyr cult, and clerical leadership in the city of Rome.32 According to Epistulae 4.18, the basilica of St. Pancras had fallen into neglect due to the lack of pastoral attention provided by its priests.33 After much consideration, Gregory tells us, he decided to remove the priests and attach a community of monks to the basilica in order that the Eucharistic service might continue and the Church thrive.
To be sure, the turn of events at St. Pancras offers clear evidence of a key component of Gregory’s spiritual and pastoral strategies, analyzed in part 2, namely that he believed accomplished ascetics were in the best position to offer quality spiritual leadership. But what is so important about this particular example is the extent to which Gregory is folding the monastic and lay communities into a single body of Christians in the city of Rome. In other words, Gregory did not intend for this monastic “takeover” of St. Pancras to mean that basilica now belonged to the monks, and lay Christians in the neighborhood would have to look elsewhere to fulfill their sacramental needs. No, Gregory’s plan was to establish a monastic outpost at St. Pancras for the explicit purpose of improving the lay community’s access to the religious life. Indeed, Gregory’s concern for the continuation of Eucharistic services at the site is explicit.34 There may be no better example of the pontiff’s holistic vision for the integration of ascetic spirituality into the practice of Christianity for lay believers.
What, we might ask, happened to the priests of St. Pancras that Gregory removed? Were they reassigned to another facility? Were they permanently dismissed? Perhaps even more importantly, what does this event say about Gregory’s broader actions in Rome? Is St. Pancras the sole surviving example of a widespread priestly purge, or is it simply an isolated case of clerical incompetence that the pontiff addressed according to his administrative intuitions? Although answers to these questions are not easily forthcoming, it has become a historiographical commonplace since Gregory’s Carolingian biographers to speak of a wholesale monastic “takeover” of the institutions of the Roman Church.35
As we have noted, many scholars understand Gregory’s ascetic push to have played out across a city already deeply divided by clerical factions. But on what basis were those factions constituted during his pontificate? And how, exactly, did those factions pose a threat to Gregory’s pontificate or his ascetic and moral initiatives?
One way of thinking about clerical factionalism in Rome during the late sixth century is to presume that the clerical colleges that were organized around professional ranks (deacons, priests, notaries, and defensores) were the basis of institutional turf wars.36 Several papal historians, including Peter Llewellyn and Jeffrey Richards, have emphasized the extent to which these groups possessed a strong corporate consciousness and jealously guarded their administrative domains.37 Another way to conceptualize possible factionalism in the Roman Church during Gregory’s tenure is to presume the existence of fiercely guarded clerical rivalries that were affiliated according to groupings of clergy associated with individual churches—be they the tituli churches or the basilicas.38 Viewed from this perspective, Gregory’s removal of the priests of St. Pancras was more than an isolated act of clerical discipline; it also allotted control of the relics of St. Pancras to the new monastic community, thereby depriving the priestly community of the titulus of St. Chrysogonus of one of its prized religious treasures.39
Yet another way in which scholars conceptualize clerical factionalism during Gregory’s pontificate, at least implicitly, is by suggesting that the Symmachian and Laurentian factions remained a constitutive element for clerical partisanship more than eighty years after the official resolution of the schism. For example, in his Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great, Leyser contends that the Laurentian schism provides the primary context for understanding the fractious relationship between the ascetic Gregorians and their opponents in the Roman clergy.40 Leyser is certainly correct to remind us that the Symmachian/Laurentian divide offers a powerful example of extreme, violent partisanship among the Roman clergy. But there is little direct evidence that those precise dividing lines continued to exist during Gregory’s papacy. Even if specific papal biographies or texts such as the Liber Pontificalis perpetuated the aftereffects of those partisan battles, evidence of pro-Symmachian and pro-Laurentian factions during Gregory’s pontificate is lacking.41
However we might wish to conceptualize the possibility of clerical factions opposed to Gregory’s asceticizing initiatives, the question remains: what evidence is there of actual opposition to them? And should we understand Gregory’s harnessing of the rhetoric of ascetic authority as a deliberate counteroffensive to that opposition?42 Even though the idea of a Gregorian counterinitiative is plausible, there is little direct evidence of a contemporaneous anti-Gregorian clerical faction. In fact, there is little explicit evidence of organized resistance to any of his ascetic programs during his lifetime. So why do most accounts presume both to have been in existence?
We do know of at least one highly placed cleric who would have considered himself an enemy of Gregory: Laurentius, the archdeacon. The position of archdeacon was perhaps the single most influential post in the Roman Church other than pope. During the fifth and sixth centuries the office was often the final stepping-stone to a papal election. But when Gregory—as a junior deacon—was elected pontiff in 590, he essentially leapfrogged the heir apparent, Archdeacon Laurentius. Then, only one year into his office, Gregory summarily dismissed Laurentius from office on the grounds that Laurentius was guilty of “pride” and “evil deeds.”43 The apparent power play between Gregory and Laurentius is tantalizing. This is especially true because the only extant account also notes that the removal of Laurentius and the elevation of Honoratus as his replacement was done in the presence of the entire body of the city’s clergy (priests, deacons, notaries, and subdeacons) in the Lateran basilica.44 Perhaps it is not surprising that several scholars have assumed this episode reflects evidence of a conflict between Gregory’s ascetic supporters and an anti-Gregorian clerical establishment.
But here again the historian is confronted with a problem. Was this an isolated case requiring Gregory’s judicial action, or does it reflect a widespread pattern of clerical disenfranchisement? What is more, on what basis are we supposed to speculate about the reaction of other clerics to this move? Did Laurentius’s removal fuel a fire of anti-Gregorian factionalism, or was this event largely forgotten in the months and years that followed? For Richards, the removal of Laurentius reflects more than a sui generis case of pastoral jurisprudence; it suggests a deliberate and thorough attempt by Gregory to remake the very power structures of the Roman clergy.45 And it is precisely this project of ascetic remaking that Leyser, Llewellyn, and Richards believe to lie at the heart of a cohesive anti-Gregorian clerical faction. While both of those scholarly assumptions could reflect the historical situation in Rome during Gregory’s pontificate, there is no direct evidence in the extant sources for either a wide-scale purge of the clerical establishment or a cohesive anti-Gregorian group.
In fact, we have only three examples in all of the contemporaneous sources that speak to the pontiff’s efforts to remove staff in the city of Rome: (1) the removal of the priests at St. Pancras, (2) the removal of the archdeacon Laurentius, and (3) the decision to bar laymen from serving as attendants in the papal cubiculum (bedchamber).46 The two examples with the greatest potential to reflect clerical factionalism (i.e., St. Pancras and Laurentius) are both handled in the Gregorian sources as independent instances of clerical maleficence to which Gregory responds with his customary moral policing.
As it turns out, the scholarly contention that an anti-Gregorian clerical block consisting of the city’s clerical establishment posed a real and persistent threat to Gregory’s authority relies on a series of assumptions that is supported, almost exclusively, in post-Gregorian sources. Both Llewellyn and Richards argue that the string of pontiffs who succeeded Gregory—Sabinian, Boniface III, Boniface IV, Deusdedit, and Boniface V—reflect a seesaw battle between pro- and antimonastic sympathizers.47 While there would appear to be little doubt that Gregory’s legacy and, especially, his introduction of monastically trained personnel to the papal administration were a source of controversy for succeeding generations of Roman churchmen as they grasped for religious explanations for the further decline in the political and economic situation of Italy, this seventh-century evidence simply cannot demonstrate the existence of a cohesive anti-Gregorian or antimonastic party during the pontiff’s actual tenure in office. It would appear, instead, that we are on steadier ground to see those expressions of inner-Roman clerical partisanship to be a debate about the value of Gregory’s ideas and legacy rather than evidence of a contemporaneous and organized opposition to it.
We might even push this observation of historical anachronism a bit further still by considering whether or not John the Deacon’s highly sympathetic account of Gregorian monastic innovation was not itself largely designed to respond the debates about the legitimacy of monastic qualifications for the Roman clergy of his own time. Such a reconsideration does not require us to look skeptically upon Gregory’s ascetic commitments (there is ample, independently attested evidence for that), but it might give the historian pause before he or she uses John’s testimony as an accurate witness to the presence of pro- and anti-ascetic clerical parties in Gregory’s Rome, which was nearly three hundred years prior to his own writing.
AS WE TURN now to consider how Gregory’s theological commitments guided his actions and diplomatic posture in locales beyond the city of Rome, it is important to remember that his efforts to spur moral and ascetic reform abroad were almost certainly shaped by his experiments and experience with the same efforts at home. In this sense, Leyser’s insight about the potential for the discourse of renunciation to engender real authority helps us to understand the means by which Gregory leveraged his own ascetic credentials to advance a potentially controversial program of ascetic renewal. But our assessment of Gregory’s exercise of authority should not neglect the theological and pastoral concepts that served as the foundations of that program. For in doing so, we might lose sight of the fact that Gregory’s initiatives were more than a mechanism by which he could assert and maintain his authority over a potentially divided city: they were the practical outcome of his entire theological project.