As we come to the close of this examination, it is appropriate to reflect upon some of the ways in which the themes central to Gregory’s thought and practice reflect broader changes in the Christian imagination at the dawn of the Middle Ages. As we saw in part 1, Gregory’s theological vision was intrinsically an ascetic one. The implications of this were both theoretical and practical. On a theoretical level, Gregory’s ascetic commitments affected nearly every aspect of his theological vision, including his understanding of the Fall, the potential for human cooperation in the process of salvation, and the mystery of the sacraments. Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of his ascetic theology is the extent to which he recalibrated late-ancient ideas about ascetic perfection so that the summit of the Christian life was no longer to be understood in a mystical encounter of the divine that required detachment, but found rather in the ascetic who was willing to suspend temporarily his personal enjoyment of the spiritual life so as to assist others. For Gregory, Christian perfection involved a willingness to engage a polluted world in which sin was virtually inevitable. As a result, he presented a spirited theoretical justification for the practical needs of his papal administration—namely the recruitment of like-minded ascetics. And, as we saw in part 2, the intersection of Gregory’s ascetic and pastoral theology found its most pronounced expression in his articulation of the life of the spiritual director.
But it is in part 3 that we examined the fullest expression of Gregory’s ideas in action. It is noteworthy that this integration both continued and transformed earlier ideas and practices of leadership. Among other things, in Gregory’s administration of the Roman See we find a coalescing of the ancient Roman office of the praefectus urbi and the late-ancient Christian conception of episcopal stewardship.1 Like the civic authorities of previous periods, the Roman bishops of late antiquity were figures of dual authority and, thus, had two distinctive sites of responsibility, to their private households and to their city. To be sure, many late-ancient bishops drew upon classical models of leadership in their articulation of the way that clerics should respond to these dual roles—Gregory Nazianzen and Ambrose of Milan offer probably the best previous examples. But what distinguishes Gregory’s vision of leadership from those of previous theologians and, especially, of Rome’s previous civic leaders was his unprecedented vision of spiritual leadership that demanded social activity.
Indeed, the extent to which Gregory assumed civic responsibilities for the city of Rome in the absence of imperial support evinces an unprecedented blurring of the boundary between civic and ecclesial leadership. Not only was Gregory an active participant in the day-to-day administration of Roman affairs, but his theological treatises and hagiographic works reframed the very conception of Christian leadership at the dawn of the Middle Ages. And while scholarship since Jeffrey Richards has largely recognized the Romanitas/Christianitas dynamic of Gregory’s public administration, the extensive foregrounding of Gregory’s ascetic and pastoral commitments in the present study has sought a more thorough and careful analysis of the connection between the specific characteristics of his religious conviction and the examples of his stewardship of the Roman community. Whereas a previous generation of scholars had largely opted to explore either the contemplative and ascetic side of Gregory’s theology or the pragmatism of his international action, this study argues for a new interpretive paradigm by insisting that the “problem of the two Gregorys” is not a problem at all. Simply put, Gregory’s ascetic and pastoral theology informed and structured his administrative practice.
Let us conclude, then, by noting that while Gregory’s appropriation of the Petrine topos was less aggressive—albeit no less significant—than that of some of his predecessors, it is easy to lose sight of the extent to which Petrine authority was a key feature of the vision of Christian leadership in the West that Gregory bequeathed to subsequent generations. Indeed, one of the most important legacies of Gregory’s pontificate was the way in which key traditions of ancient Rome and ancient Christianity came together in the narrative of apostolic authority. This combination enabled a new trajectory for leadership for the Christian Middle Ages. That legacy is much broader than the simple exercise of papal authority over the Western Church: it also touches upon aspects of the medieval religious imagination and ritual that are as seemingly distinctive as biblical interpretation, the cult of relics, pilgrimage, and patronage. Although Gregory may have only rarely needed to justify his personal authority on the basis of his connection to St. Peter via Matthew 16, his elaboration of the cult of St. Peter in Rome and his dissemination of Petrine relics throughout Western Europe perhaps did as much to perpetuate the connection between Peter, Rome, and the Roman bishop as any of Leo’s or Gelasius’s rhetorical harangues. Indeed, Gregory’s vision of the bishop of Rome as an ascetic and apostolic steward of the ancient imperial capital is one of the most important, if subtle, of his contributions to the religious imagination of the Middle Ages.