5

Gregory the Great

Gregory became pope at the end of the sixth century (590–604). By now the Germanic peoples ruled much of the West—the Visigoths in Spain, the Lombards in northern Italy, the Franks in present-day France and further east, and the Saxons even further east, and so forth. Of these peoples all except the Franks were Arians, which for Catholics was almost as bad as being pagan. Most dangerous to Rome were the Lombards, centered in Pavia south of Milan and generally located in the part of Italy today known as Lombardy. Unlike the Huns and Vandals, the Lombards came and stayed, and they had their hearts fixed on expanding their territory. In 569 they captured Milan, the erstwhile capital of the empire, and their king took the title of Lord of Italy. They soon occupied much of northern Italy.

Since 476 there had been no emperor in the West, only an exarch (imperial representative) in Ravenna on the Adriatic coast south of present-day Venice. The exarch, weakly supported by the emperors in Constantinople because they had problems of their own at home, could muster little resistance to the Lombard threat. The Lombards had, moreover, practically cut connections between Ravenna and Rome. To add to the problem the population in the cities of Italy, and indeed throughout the empire, had declined due to plague, war, and the difficulty of provisioning them as travel and shipping became more dangerous. The population in Rome at one point dipped as low as thirty thousand but then climbed to about ninety thousand, a growth due in part to the influx of refugees. This was a far cry from the million inhabitants at Rome’s peak of prosperity. Everywhere in the empire much of the old infrastructure had been destroyed, damaged and not repaired, or was gradually eroding due to neglect.

It was into this world probably in 540 that Gregory was born of an old and wealthy patrician family. Despite all the disasters Rome had suffered for almost two centuries, families like Gregory’s had managed to survive and maintain standards that hardly seem possible under the circumstances. The family owned a beautiful palace on the Caelian hill in Rome and extensive properties outside the city. Gregory’s father, Gordian, was a senator, which suggests how the great families continued to dominate the city despite the vicissitudes it had suffered. The influence of the family becomes even more apparent in the fact that two of Gregory’s relatives had been pope. Felix III (483–492) was his great-grandfather, and Agapetus I (535–536) was a more distant relative.

The family was devout. Gregory had two or three aunts who were nuns, and his mother Sylvia, regarded as a saint, also became a nun when Gordian died. An early biographer, John the Deacon, said that Gregory was a saint brought up among saints. His family ensured that he receive an excellent and traditional Roman education in which along with training in eloquence (and probably in Gregory’s case some legal training) went the inculcation of the virtues of prudence, constancy, moderation, and magnanimity That education above all inculcated a sense of responsibility for the public weal and was aimed at producing civic leaders and statesmen. With Gregory the education took, so that as an adult he seemed an embodiment of the old Roman virtues, which he combined with Christian humility and charity. For him and his family service to the city and service to the church were intertwined.

From 572 until 574 Gregory was prefect of the city of Rome, a position roughly equivalent to mayor. He was in his early thirties at the time. He acquitted himself well, but when his father died in 574 Gregory resigned and became a monk. His brother succeeded him as prefect, which is another indication of the family’s influence and high standing in the city. Gregory converted the family palace on the Caelian into a monastery under the patronage of Saint Andrew and founded six more monasteries on family estates in Sicily. He was, obviously, a man who had ample resources at his fingertips even at this point in history when the great Roman fortunes were generally in sharp decline.

Gregory’s actions fit, however, into a pattern mentioned earlier: the propensity of wealthy Christian families in Rome to give large properties “to Saint Peter” for pious purposes. It was this pattern, exemplified here by Gregory, that by his time already made “the patrimony of Peter” extremely wealthy. The patrimony comprised vast areas of real estate in and around the city of Rome but also in other areas of the empire—in Sicily, southern Italy, Sardinia, Africa, and Gaul. The patrimony was a splendid resource for the church in its efforts to succor widows and orphans and to maintain its churches in a worthy fashion, but it also posed a temptation for the unscrupulous.

Gregory was a fervent monk, as indicated by a regime of fasting he imposed upon himself, a regime that negatively affected his health. He lived at Saint Andrew’s under an abbot or prior that he had not appointed. He later maintained that his years in the monastery were the happiest of his life. They were short-lived. He later said of his monastery days, “I sigh as one who looks back and gazes at the shore he has left behind.”

Probably in 578 Pope Benedict I ordained him a deacon and appointed him to look after the temporal administration of one of the city’s districts. In August of the next year the Lombards laid siege to Rome. The new pope, Pelagius II, was desperate for help, and he chose Gregory to be his apocrisiarius (“envoy” or “ambassador”) to the court of Emperor Tiberius in Constantinople. Even though Gregory knew no Greek and seems to have learned none while in the East, he had a background and personality that made him ideal for the mission.

He remained in Constantinople for six years, which was an invaluable experience for somebody like him, now almost forty years old, who had until then never lived outside Rome. In his official residence he tried as best he could to maintain a monastic regimen with the other monks he had taken with him from Saint Andrew’s, but he was of course drawn into the activities of the court, which is precisely what Pelagius intended to happen. He became godfather to the new emperor Maurice’s eldest son.

The purpose of Gregory’s mission was to persuade the emperor to send military and material help to Italy in face of the Lombard threat. He had little success, not because of lack of skill or effort but because of the straitened circumstances of the emperor. Recalled to Rome in 585 or 586, he returned to his monastery, where he was elected abbot. His major responsibility at this time, however, was acting as trusted adviser to Pelagius.

In the winter of 589 the Tiber overflowed its banks, as it often did, but this time it caused even more damage than usual, contaminating food supplies and causing general havoc. Pelagius died in the plague that ensued, in February 590. It came as no surprise that Gregory, long an important figure in the city, was elected his successor. The vote in his favor was virtually unanimous, an unusual occurrence, and he was enthusiastically supported by the laity. Appalled at the outcome, he declined and even appealed to Emperor Maurice, whom he of course knew well from his years in the capital, to withhold his approval. (Take note of the imperial prerogative in that regard that Gregory took for granted.) His protests were in vain, and finally in September he was consecrated bishop and assumed the papacy, an office he held for fourteen years.

With Gregory, unlike others who have protested their reluctance to assume high office, the dismay was genuine. He had no ambition to be pope. While he held the papacy he consistently referred to himself as “the servant of the servants of God,” and he did not use the expression lightly. Despite his reluctance, he, in accordance with the tradition in which he had been raised, fully accepted all the responsibilities of his office and proved to be perhaps the most successful and respected pope of all times.

Although he disliked administration, he had talent for it. Building on structures already traditional, he made his bishopric into an organization efficient in providing multiple services. Seven deacons, assisted by subdeacons, had responsibility for the social services required in the seven religious districts of the city. Gregory had a list of every indigent person in the city that indicated the amount of food they were allotted by the deacons every week. A story circulated that from his resources as bishop of Rome he fed some three thousand persons a day. The story could well be true, but just as consonant with his personality is the story that every day he invited a dozen poor men to dine with him. Gregory employed a large corps of notaries and secretaries, who preserved and organized the archives, drew up official letters and documents. He dictated to them almost daily. He created a council of advisers to help him in his decision-making and to keep things running smoothly when he was unavailable.

He fulfilled in an extraordinarily effective way, in other words, the duties that had long been standard for bishops as religious figures, but he also had to tend to duties now incumbent upon them as civic officials. In Rome, as in many other cities, responsibility for the physical upkeep of the city had gradually passed to the bishop, who filled the vacuum left by the erosion of the imperial administration. Gregory found himself responsible for paying accounts due for civic services, and he sometimes ironically referred to himself as “treasurer” of the state.

Out of the revenues of the patrimony he drew money to bribe the Lombards to keep their distance and, though wary, tried to influence them in positive ways. He reorganized the far-flung and extensive estates that made up the patrimony (the church was now the largest landowner in Italy) and installed rectors in them who were directly responsible to him. With the rectors he insisted on humane and effective management. He cooperated with the generals in trying to ensure Rome’s safety, sometimes paid the soldiers, and in 595 signed a treaty with the Lombards because he was more present on the scene than either the exarch or of course the emperor. He noted in a letter, “Under the pretext of being made a bishop, I have been brought back into the world, and I devote myself to secular things to a much greater extent than I recall ever having done when I was a layman.”

He had good relations with the king of the Franks and of course was delighted when he heard in 591 that Recarred, king of the Visi-goths in Spain, had converted from Arian Christianity to Catholicism. His relationship to England has long been recognized as special. According to one story, he wanted to go to England himself as a missionary, but the Romans raised such a protest that he could not do as he wanted. According to another that became almost canonical, Gregory, while still a deacon, saw on a visit to the Forum in Rome some young Anglo-Saxon slaves. When he inquired who they were and was told they were “Anglos,” he replied that they rather should be called angels, and later as pope he determined to see to the conversion of England. The story is a distortion of something that in fact happened. In 595 Gregory endorsed the purchase of Anglo-Saxon slaves in Gaul, probably in Marseille, so that they might be educated as Christians and then employed as missionaries in their homeland.

In 596 he sent to England an unprecedented mission of forty monks headed by Augustine, his successor as abbot of Saint Andrew’s. He did this, it seems, in response to requests from the Catholic queen of Frankish origins or from her husband, King Ethelbert of Kent. In one of his letters he said that “the people of the Angles, that is, its leaders, wish to become Christians.” Ethelbert converted, and shortly thereafter, it is said, ten thousand of his subjects did the same. On the way to England Augustine had been consecrated a bishop, and once in England he founded, with Ethelbert’s assistance, Christ Church, the cathedral in Canterbury.

Five years later Gregory dispatched another corps of missionaries led by Melitus, who later became bishop of London, and Paulinus, later bishop of York, and he made Augustine archbishop of the English. The newly established church was to be independent of the Gallic church and the papal vicariate of Arles, but it was to be united with the Celtic British churches, a solution that eventually led to problems over whose customs were to prevail. Despite future troubles, Augustine’s mission has to be counted as a remarkable success for him and for the pope who sent him. The venture was unprecedented. Never before had a pope sent out a delegation of missionaries to convert a pagan people.

Like Damasus and Leo before him and every pope since, Gregory was a staunch defender of the special prerogatives of the Apostolic See and quick to respond to any infringements of them. He was challenged on that score even in the West, where the bishops of North Africa proved particularly recalcitrant. In the East he was able to maintain a certain measure of Rome’s claim to act as the appellate court in disputed ecclesiastical cases. He felt compelled to challenge the bishop of Constantinople’s application to himself of the term “universal [or ecumenical] patriarch,” which he thought implied an authority over the churches identical with Rome’s. Emperor Maurice chided him over making such a fuss over the words, but Gregory saw implications that Maurice did not and resented his interference. Maurice, for his part, resented Gregory’s dealings with the Lombards, enemies of the empire, and let his feelings be known. If there is a blot on Gregory’s record, it is the satisfaction with which in 602 he greeted the news that Maurice had been murdered and his throne usurped.

Gregory continued to promote monastic life. When in 593 Maurice issued an edict forbidding soldiers to resign in order to enter a monastery, so desperate were the needs of the military, Gregory sent him a stinging criticism. Even though in his own monastery he did not adopt the Rule of Saint Benedict, he was a great admirer of “the founder of Western monasticism.” He is almost certainly the author of a collection of stories about Benedict, as well as some other saints, called the Dialogues. The fanciful nature of many of the stories, coming from such a respected and well-educated person, has generated considerable discussion through the centuries. It is important to remember in that regard that hagiographical accounts like these already had a tradition as a catechetical genre meant to edify and instruct children and illiterate adults through entertaining stories. This does not mean that Gregory doubted the truth of the stories.

Gregory was a voluminous writer. While like Leo not an original thinker, he was an effective communicator, which meant his works were carefully studied and came to be esteemed to the point that, along with Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, he, as earlier mentioned, ranks as one of the four original doctors of the Latin Church. Included in the corpus of his writings are the 850 letters that survive, which is only a small percentage of his original correspondence. Even as they stand they reveal the remarkable scope of his interests and concerns. For most of them Gregory dictated the subject matter and the general approach to be taken, but highly trained notaries/secretaries put them into the technical and legally precise language the papal chancery had by this time adopted as its own.

He wrote his Pastoral Care in 591, shortly after he had assumed office. In it he set forth his ideal of the bishop. Preaching plays such a major role in the book that it can be considered a treatise on preaching, the only one on this central Christian ministry composed in Latin antiquity beside Saint Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. Both these works were read avidly in the Middle Ages until they were displaced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the great outpouring on the subject by the manuals called the Ars Praedicandi (the Art of Preaching). Gregory’s book had the special distinction of being translated into Greek, quite a compliment at a time when Greek-speaking Christians looked down on their Latin counterparts as only half-educated. It was later translated into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred himself.

Both Gregory and Augustine assumed that preaching is based immediately on the text of Scripture and to a large extent is nothing other than a practical commentary on it. This means that it is sometimes difficult to pronounce whether one of Gregory’s books is a Scriptural commentary or a collection of homilies on a book of the Bible. This is true of Gregory’s extant works: forty short Homilies on the Gospels, twenty-two longer Homilies on Ezechiel, a Commentary on 1 Samuel, and two homilies on the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon). His Moralia, among his most popular works, is a mystical rumination on the book of Job. Although Gregorian chant bears his name, it seems almost certainly to be a somewhat later development. Its precise origins and early history are still not clear.

Since his early monastery days Gregory suffered from ill health, and by the end of his life he was so afflicted with gout that he could not walk. When he lay dying Rome, once again under siege, was in the midst of severe famine, for which the desperate population blamed the man who had done everything he could during his lifetime to alleviate such suffering. He was buried in Saint Peter’s, with the fitting epitaph, “The Consul of God.”