As we bring our investigation of Gregory’s leadership of the Roman Church and its people to a close, we will take a brief look at the various ways in which the figure of St. Peter defined, justified, and enabled the pontiff’s self-understanding of his stewardship of the Roman See. Since the fourth century, Roman bishops had been exploiting the cult of St. Peter to their personal advantage, whether for justifying their legitimacy against rival claimants to Peter’s throne (as in the disputed elections of 366 and 498) or asserting their doctrinal authority in international debates (such as the Christological controversies in the era of Chalcedon). In many cases, the papal escalation in rhetorical claims to ecclesiastical authority by means of Petrine rhetoric was actually precipitated by public humiliations for these bishops in one form or another.1 For Pope Gregory, however, the appropriation of Petrine themes and the implementation of the Petrine topos was often quite different than it had been for his predecessors. While it is certainly true that Gregory leveraged the cult of St. Peter—and especially the physical space of his tombs and relics—to his advantage, the ways in which he employed Peter in his ecclesiastical and political diplomacy further attest to the nuance of his thought and action. To gain a sense for Gregory’s stewardship of Peter’s authority, we will briefly examine the pontiff’s appropriation of both the physical and rhetorical aspects of the apostle’s cult.
When Damasus was elected to the See of Rome in 366, there were two sites in the suburbs of the city that had a claim to be the location of St. Peter’s tomb: a cemetery on Vatican Hill that received a Constantinian basilica2 (in effect granting imperial sanction to the site as the proper place for the commemoration of St. Peter) and a second location in the catacombs on the Via Appia (underneath the present basilica of St. Sebastian), where commemoration of St. Peter (and St. Paul) went back, at least, to the middle of the third century.3 We need not concern ourselves with the scholarly quagmire that seeks to adjudicate the antiquity of these rival sites; we simply need to note that one of Damasus’s most famous epigrams acknowledges that the catacombs on the Via Appia remained a popular pilgrimage site for St. Peter, even if it no longer possessed any of the saint’s relics.4 It is also interesting to note that during Damasus’s tenure and for a significant period afterwards, Roman bishops did not have the financial means to compete with imperial and aristocratic patrons for the embellishment of Peter’s shrine on Vatican Hill. Beginning in the later fifth century, however, Roman bishops began to possess greater resources than they previously had and started to spend lavishly at the basilica in order to link themselves more directly to Peter’s cult and his authority. Interestingly, some of the pontiffs most responsible for the expansion of the facilities at the Vatican were precisely those who came under the greatest scrutiny of rival clerical factions in Rome—Pope Symmachus offering the most obvious case in point.5
Although scholarly investigations of Gregory’s building activity at St. Peter’s has been confined almost exclusively to the domain of archeological studies, the pontiff did embark upon a series of important refurbishments of the site that were replicated in other churches in Rome and elsewhere.6 Specifically, during Gregory’s tenure as bishop of Rome the underground tomb was enhanced to accommodate a steady flow of pilgrims. Pilgrims could progress into a room adjacent to the reliquary. Looking through a window, they could see the chamber where the relics and tomb were housed, but they could not see the actual relics or tomb.7 This semicircular chamber was large enough to enable the pilgrims to pray in close proximity to remains of the saint, which naturally enabled an expansion of Petrine pilgrimage to Rome.8 What is more, during Gregory’s tenure the altar was repositioned in the church above the shrine so that it sat directly above St. Peter’s body. This not only enhanced the relationship between Peter’s cult and the Eucharistic celebration, but also allowed liturgy and pilgrimage to occur simultaneously.
CONSIDERING THE SCOPE of the cult of the martyrs in Rome in earlier centuries, which is well documented in a series of texts known collectively as the Gesta Martyrium, Gregory’s seeming ignorance of that textual tradition has puzzled scholars for more than a century. In 598 Gregory received a request from the patriarch of Alexandria for manuscripts contained in Rome about lives of martyrs.9 Gregory responded that the Roman Church kept a record of the names and dates of a list of Roman martyrs but that there were very few actual biographies known to him about the details of the martyrs’ lives and passions. In a recent examination of Gregory’s Homilies on the Gospels (many of which were delivered on the occasion of martyr feasts), Guy Philippart has demonstrated that Gregory’s encomium for St. Felicity wove together details of the saint’s life from a myriad of known and unknown sources in a way that conformed to his particular pastoral concerns. Philippart argues that the pontiff’s sanitized presentation of St. Felicity conformed to the pseudo-Gelasian decretals, which sought to censor the biographies of many of the Roman martyrs for fear of heterodox sympathies but also sought to bring the cult of martyrs under papal supervision.10
What Philippart and other scholars have not addressed is the extent to which Gregory’s continuation of the cult of Roman martyrs, while active, was superseded by his promotion of the cult of St. Peter, the preeminent Roman martyr. To be sure, the reorganization of Roman martyr cult into a hierarchical structure centered on Peter and Paul stretched back to the fifth century. But it was through physical enhancements to the site, and especially through a series of new ritualized embellishments, that Gregory effectively transformed the cult of St. Peter in Rome from its late-ancient to its medieval form.
Among other things, Gregory is the first pontiff on record to require his administrators, particularly those deployed outside of Rome, to swear an oath of loyalty at Peter’s tomb prior to their commission. The importance of this stage in the Petrine story should not be underestimated. Not only was it a powerful symbolic mechanism by which Gregory (and subsequent popes) could demand obedience from his agents (at times he reminded them of their oaths), but employing the physical space of Peter’s tomb also represented an important expansion of the way that the Petrine discourse enabled papal control and exclusion.11 Whereas Popes Leo and Gelasius had loaded their Petrine arsenals with mostly rhetorical weapons, Gregory added the ritualistic exercise of public submission at the very locus of papal power—the tomb of St. Peter. A second, similar, way in which Gregory emphasized the connection between Peter’s authority and his own was to make those clerics who had been brought to Rome for trial to swear an oath of innocence in Gregory’s presence at the tomb of St. Peter. Even those bishops deemed innocent were forced to humble themselves in this way. Indeed, when it suited his purposes to do so, Gregory might remind a correspondent of one of these public submissions (via Peter) to papal authority.12
A further expansion of Petrine authority via the tomb of St. Peter that we have already encountered concerns the way in which Gregory began to distribute Petrine relics to various ecclesiastical and political correspondents. Although he might not have been the first pontiff to disseminate Petrine relics, he was the first to employ religious treasure as a central component of his ecclesiastical diplomacy. The particular physical qualities of the sacred material (filings of chains, inserted into a key, which were to be worn around the neck) offered a series of symbolic attributes that drew the recipient to the heroic acts of the apostle and, more importantly, to the See of Rome as the locus of St. Peter’s temporal and spiritual authority.
It is noteworthy that Gregory’s distribution of relics, in some ways, seems at odds with his other efforts to curtail the relic trade. Especially noteworthy is a letter he sent to the wife of the emperor, denying her request to send a portion of the relics of St. Paul to Constantinople on the premise that it was not the custom of the Roman Church to dismember and distribute the relics of the saints (something the Eastern Church did routinely).13 The distinction between Gregory’s practice and what he censures is a rather fine one—recall that Gregory is not sending the actual bones of Peter; he is sending filings of Peter’s chains—but one that allows Gregory to simultaneously keep sole control of Peter’s bones and yet distribute Petrine power. Indeed, we might say that Gregory’s deference for and use of Peter’s tomb and relics offers a considerable insight into the Christian understanding of religious sites and artifacts at the transition from the late-ancient to the medieval world.
We might also observe the extent to which Gregory’s appropriation of Peter’s tomb and relics fits within his broader theological and pastoral program. As we noted in part 1, Gregory—like most of his contemporaries—assumed that the saints had the potential to remain active in the world long after their deaths. Their tombs and relics especially could serve as loci for divine power. In part 2 we detailed some of the ways that Gregory, following in a long tradition of ascetic literature, employed the topos of a saintly exemplar as a way to encourage individuals to embrace more fully the life of renunciation and faith. When we bring these aspects of Gregory’s theology to bear upon his use of Peter’s cult to exert his personal authority, we see further the extent to which his ideological commitments enabled and sustained a comprehensive program of activity that could be simultaneously theologically well-intentioned and practically self-serving. Gregory was at once a sophisticated theologian and an exacting corporate executive of the Roman Church.
Gregory’s engagement with the Petrine tradition, of course, was much more extensive than the ritualized acts and diplomatic endeavors centering on St. Peter’s tomb and relics. The pontiff was a careful interpreter of the biblical Peter, whom he could enlist in a variety of contexts to serve a range of exegetical needs. Like Leo and Gelasius before him, Gregory could assert Roman ecclesiastical privilege (in terms of both appellate jurisdiction and censoring other bishops) whenever he needed to do so by turning to well-worn scriptural and canonical precedents rooted in the belief that Peter’s authority among the apostles transferred to the bishop of Rome’s privilege among other bishops. But unlike his papal predecessors, who almost never acknowledged the biblical Peter’s mistakes (especially his denial of Christ), Gregory routinely examined the apostle’s flaws in order to advance his pastoral and ascetic ideas. Having extensively analyzed the Petrine topos in Gregory’s career and writing elsewhere, I will confine my discussion here to a few relevant summary observations.14
First, Gregory’s biblical commentaries frequently employ Peter as a theological and pastoral resource. In Gregory’s hands, the biblical Peter serves as a model of humility and repentance precisely because of his imperfections. In the Moralia alone, Gregory reflects nearly a dozen times on Peter’s errors—the most common being the denial of Christ during the Passion, the altercation with Paul over circumcision, and the failure to interpret properly the significance of the Transfiguration—in order to encourage humility among his clerics and repentance among the laity. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no analysis of Matthew 16 (the primary scriptural reference for Petrine authority) in Gregory’s surviving Homilies on the Gospels, nor does he reflect upon the passage in any significant way in his other theological works.15 What is more, pontiff’s Book of Pastoral Rule offers scant reflection on the biblical Peter and never does so to assert Roman ecclesiastical privilege. As in the biblical commentaries, the references to Peter in the Book of Pastoral Rule are designed to reinforce humility and repentance.
Second, Gregory typically does not avail himself of the traditional staples of papal authority, rooted in the Petrine legacy, in the vast majority of his correspondence with bishops and secular rulers. This is even true for most instances in which Gregory actively asserts his authority, such as the censuring of malcontent bishops. Never, for example, in the two hundred letters sent to Sicily does Gregory appeal to the biblical justifications for Peter’s privileged status or to the link between Peter and the See of Rome when he seeks to expand Roman interests on the island. Such restraint (if we should call it that) is a contrast to Popes Leo I and Gelasius I, who consistently appealed to the authority of Peter whenever and wherever their own authority or that of the See of Rome was in question.16
Third, this is not to say that Gregory’s letters never mention St. Peter or appeal to him as a marker of Gregory’s own authority. We have already seen, for example, several ways in which the pontiff might describe a kindness offered to the See of Rome as a sign of love “for St. Peter” (such as when Constantinopolitan aristocrats send funds for the refugees in Rome or when the Merovingians grant hospitality to Gregory’s agents). Indeed, Gregory frequently inserts the name of Peter in letters when the pontiff is actually referring to himself. He similarly refers to the tomb of St. Peter when he might actually mean to imply the city of Rome more broadly.17 While these literary substitutions convey an important rhetorical connection linking Gregory and Rome to Peter’s apostolic authority and, by extension, his primacy among the apostles, these statements are typically divorced from the vitriolic assertions of Peter’s authority that mark some of Leo’s and Gelasius’s most desperate correspondence.
The lone significant exception to this occurs in the controversy over the ecumenical title. We have already examined this altercation in some detail. For the purposes of understanding Gregory’s appropriation of the Petrine topos, recall the extent to which the pontiff’s increasing frustration with the situation in the East seems to have been mirrored by his escalation of the claim to Petrine authority. Not only did he rehearse the traditional appeals to biblical and canonical precedents for Roman privilege, he also sought creative new ways to enlist potential allies under the umbrella of a common Petrine appeal that differentiated Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome (apostolic sees, according to Gregory) from Constantinople (an imperial see).
Although Gregory’s appropriation of the Petrine topos was idiosyncratic, he stood in a long line of papal actors who successfully harnessed the legacy of the apostle to his own ends. To the extent that the development and control of discourse can be seen as a key to social power, Gregory’s expansion and promotion of the Petrine discourse can be seen as one of the crucial factors of a legacy that contributed to the papacy’s ascendancy over other power structures in Western Europe in the later Middle Ages.