Pope Saint Gregory the Great (590-604)

The last great Latin Father

Gregory died in 604, on the threshold of a new world. After him, the Latin West no longer had the same institutional Roman density, nor the same still-living ancient culture. The Catholic Encyclopedia sums up his importance by saying that the development of medieval Christianity can hardly be explained without taking his work into account.^[8]

He is a Father because he hands on Scripture, liturgy, morals, monastic life and the art of government. He is "the Great" not because he dominated through pride, but because he turned the collapse of an empire into ecclesial service. When civil institutions break apart, he does not dream of abstract power: he feeds the poor, ransoms captives, disciplines stewards, negotiates truces, writes to kings and preaches in the Roman basilicas.^[9]

The pope who organized Roman charity

Under Gregory, the Patrimony of Saint Peter (all the lands and revenues of the Roman Church) became a highly concrete relief structure. Benedict XVI mentions Sicily, wheat purchases and distributions, aid to poor priests, monks and nuns, the ransoming of captives and even the financing of truces.^[10] The bishop of Rome acted here as the guardian of a people the Empire could no longer protect.

This social action does not contradict contemplation. It manifests it. In the Pastoral Rule, Gregory warns that the pastor must neither lose interior goods amid exterior affairs, nor neglect exterior needs under the pretext of interior life.^[11] The formula sums up his pontificate: the monk-pope remains turned toward God precisely by making himself responsible for the poor.

The missionary of the new peoples

Gregory looked beyond Rome. He wrote to the Lombard queen Theodelinda, supported the conversion of the Lombards, followed Visigothic Spain and above all launched the mission to England led by Augustine of Canterbury. Benedict XVI names the Visigoths, the Franks, the Saxons, the immigrants of Britain and the Lombards as privileged recipients of his missionary drive.^[12]

The English episode is no picturesque anecdote. Through Augustine, sent in 596 and arrived in Kent in 597, Rome resumed a direct missionary initiative toward a still largely pagan Germanic people.^[13] Medieval Christian England would keep the memory of Gregory as a father in the faith.

An exceptional corpus for an ancient pope

The immediately preceding sixth-century popes are often known through a few notices, letters or mentions. Gregory changes the scale. Benedict XVI speaks of a Register of about 800 letters ("approximately 800" in the audience of 28 May 2008; "over 800 letters" in the reminder of 4 June); the Catholic Encyclopedia likewise stresses the breadth of the surviving documentation.^[14][15][16]

This mass of documents explains why Gregory can be studied at once as saint, pope, administrator, exegete, moralist, diplomat, liturgist and witness to the end of the ancient world. Yet these dimensions must not be artificially separated. In him, governing the Sicilian estates, correcting a bishop, preaching the Gospel or sending monks to England all stem from a single concern: leading souls to God in a fragile world.

A Christian senatorial family

Gregory was born in Rome around 540 into a patrician family probably related to the Anicii: Felix III (483-492) was his ancestor — probably his great-great-grandfather, whom Gregory himself calls his atavus (his ancestor, Homilies on the Gospel, II, 38, 15; Dialogues, IV, 17) — while a kinship with Agapetus I remains merely possible.^[17][18] The kinship with the Anicii is moreover proved in no way, and the Catholic Encyclopedia writes only "probably": it is a traditional attribution, not an established fact.^[19][20] His parents, Gordianus and Silvia, are venerated as saints; tradition also mentions his aunts Aemiliana and Tharsilla, consecrated to God in their home.^[21]

The very place of his childhood is telling: the Clivus Scauri, on the Caelian Hill, between the monumental grandeur of Rome and Christian memory. Gregory thus grew up at the crossroads of two inheritances: Roman administration and Christian asceticism.

Prefect of Rome (about 572-573)

His father had served the city administration; Gregory first followed the same path. Around 572-573, he became prefect of the City, the summit of his civil career: Benedict XVI gives 572, the Catholic Encyclopedia writes "about 573" and Treccani attests him in office in 573.^[22][23][24] The office was not honorary. In a diminished Rome, struck by the Gothic wars, famines and Lombard pressure, it required discipline, knowledge of men, management of resources and a sense of law.

This spell in administration explains much of his pontificate. Gregory would know how to write to stewards, curb abuses, organize wheat flows, negotiate with civil representatives and read political situations without naivety. But this competence was not enough for his soul.

The monastery of Saint Andrew on the Caelian

After his civil career, Gregory abandoned honours and turned his family house into a monastery dedicated to Saint Andrew. Benedict XVI stresses that this period of monastic life remained for him a permanent nostalgia, constantly recalled in his homilies and writings.^[25]

This nostalgia was no flight from reality. It was the inner centre that would keep action from turning into agitation. Gregory never ceased to suffer at being torn from the peace of the cloister; but he learned that charity can oblige one to leave what one loves most in order to serve souls.

The apocrisiarius of Pelagius II

Shortly after his election, Pelagius II ordained Gregory deacon and sent him to Constantinople as apocrisiarius, that is, the pope's permanent representative. Benedict XVI explains that the mission was to obtain imperial aid against the Lombards and to help overcome the last effects of the Monophysite crisis; Treccani specifies the diaconal ordination by Pelagius II in 579 with a view to this mission, in an Italy in grave crisis under Lombard pressure, and the Catholic Encyclopedia dates it to spring 579.^[26][27][28]

At Constantinople, Gregory lived with monks, pursued the monastic ideal and discovered the Byzantine world at close hand. The experience also taught him the limits of the Empire: pious, powerful, but too often too busy elsewhere to save Rome.

The Lombard dossier already present

Lombard Italy was no surprise of 590. From his apocrisiariate onward, Gregory had to plead Rome's cause before the emperor: the mission aimed at obtaining military aid in an Italy in grave crisis under Lombard pressure.^[29][30] See also the article Pope Pelagius II on this crisis of 579-590.^[31] When Gregory became pope, he knew from experience that the solution could not come from Constantinople alone.

This realism prepared his future policy: negotiating with the Lombards without abandoning the Empire, supporting Theodelinda without letting himself be hemmed in by Ravenna, seeking peace without confusing Christian peace with doctrinal capitulation.

The death of Pelagius II

At the end of 589, the Tiber overflowed. The Church's granaries were hit, the city lacked resources, then plague broke out. Pelagius II died on 7 February 590.^[32][33] Clergy, people and senate unanimously chose Gregory to succeed him.^[34]

Gregory resisted. Tradition even tells of an attempted flight. The theological fact matters more than the narrative detail: the man who would theorize the burden of government began by fearing it. He did not seek power; he consented to it as to a cross.

Chapter I, 1 of the Pastoral Rule warns: let no one without competence approach the office of government.^[35]

The procession of penance

The Rome of 590 read the plague not as a mere sanitary fact, but as a trial calling for conversion. Tradition associates Gregory with a great procession of supplication and with the vision of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword atop Hadrian's mausoleum, the future Castel Sant'Angelo.^[36] Whatever the debate over hagiographical details, the pastoral meaning remains: Gregory began his pontificate by leading the city back to penance, prayer and hope.

This gesture inaugurated a style. Rome would be saved neither by administration alone, nor by devotion alone. The pope must call upon God for help, then organize charity, diplomacy and discipline.

The poor, the captives and the wheat

Benedict XVI gives a highly concrete list: with the revenues of the Roman See, Gregory bought and distributed wheat, assisted the poor, helped poor clerics and religious, ransomed captives taken by the Lombards, and purchased truces and ceasefires.^[37]

The papacy thus became an institution of survival. It did not yet juridically replace the State, but it did what the State no longer did enough. This development prepared from afar the medieval temporal role of Rome, though the later Papal States must not be projected back onto Gregory.

Administering without staining the Bride of Christ

Gregory cared about rectitude in ecclesiastical goods. Benedict XVI notes that he demanded the Church's goods be administered with justice and mercy, that the tenants of ecclesiastical lands be protected against dishonest agents, and that unjust profits not stain the face of the Bride of Christ.^[38]

This detail is central. Gregorian charity was not vague. It ran through accounts, agents, estates, reimbursements and written instructions. A Church patrimony is just only if it truly serves the poor and does not become an instrument of oppression.

Seeing the Lombards with a pastor's eyes

Byzantine policy tended to see the Lombards as enemies to be eliminated. Gregory saw them as a people to be converted and with whom a possible coexistence had to be built. Benedict XVI insists on this point: Gregory treated them not merely as predators, but sought to establish fraternal relations with a view to future peace.^[39]

This gaze did not deny Lombard violence. It went through it. The pope knew that peace was necessary so that the faith could be preached, captives freed, lands cultivated and the poor kept from dying.

Theodelinda, Agilulf and the truce

Gregory corresponded with Queen Theodelinda, the Catholic Bavarian princess married to the Lombard king Agilulf. He sent her relics, congratulations and gifts, notably at the birth and baptism of her son Adaloald.^[40] Through her, he supported Catholic progress within a people long marked by Arianism.

The negotiation led to a truce of about three years, from 598 to 601, then to a more stable armistice in 603.^[41] The result was not the total conversion of the Lombards, but a historic breach: peace became a condition of mission.

Augustine of Canterbury

In 596, Gregory sent Augustine, prior of the monastery of Saint Andrew, with a group of monks to the Angles. Bede recounts that the mission arrived in Kent in 597, at the court of King Æthelberht, whose wife Bertha was already a Frankish Christian.^[42]

The choice was bold. The papacy sent not imperial administrators, but monks. Nascent England thus received the Gospel in a highly recognizable Gregorian form: Roman obedience, monastic life, pastoral prudence, gradual adaptation.

Adapting without betraying

Gregory's letters to Augustine and to Mellitus, preserved by Bede, show a remarkable missionary method. Pagan temples could be purified and turned into churches; certain customs could be straightened rather than destroyed at once; but idolatry had to be abandoned.^[43]

This pedagogy was not relativist. It assumed that Christ must truly reign. But it understood that peoples convert by stages, by receiving signs, places and feasts purified by faith.

Governing makes one tremble

The Pastoral Rule, written at the start of the pontificate, is Gregory's most programmatic treatise. Benedict XVI recalls that it describes the ideal bishop, master and guide of the flock, and that it was swiftly translated into Greek and Anglo-Saxon.^[44]

Gregory begins with a warning: those who are not called must not lightly seek the office, and those who have received it must tremble before God.^[45] Pastoral power is therefore no honour; it is a debt.

To keep silent when one must speak is a fault

In the second part, Gregory writes that the pastor must be discreet in silence and profitable in speech. Cowardly silence leaves in error those who could have been instructed.^[46] The pastor is a herald; if he does not preach, his silence becomes abdication.

Gregory writes there that the language of reproof is a key that uncovers fault, for in rebuking it often reveals to the culprit an evil of which he was himself unaware.^[47]

Compassion and contemplation

The finest formula of the Rule unites the two poles of Gregorian life: to be close to all through compassion, raised above all through contemplation.^[48] This sentence explains why Gregory could be at once monk and pope, man of action and spiritual doctor.

The bad pastor chooses a single pole: either he flees into a spirituality that abandons the weak, or he disperses himself in exterior affairs and loses God. The good pastor descends toward miseries in order to rise better toward God, then returns from God to miseries.

The Moralia in Job

The Moralia in Job form one of the great moral syntheses of the Latin Middle Ages. Benedict XVI explains that in them Gregory reads Scripture according to its literal, allegorical and moral dimensions, giving clear prevalence to the moral sense.^[49]

The work proposes an ideal of unity: knowing and doing, speaking and living, knowledge and action. For Gregory, understanding the Word of God is useless unless it leads to action.^[50]

"On the other hand, when it is a question of the Word of God understanding it means nothing if it does not lead to action." — Benedict XVI, catechesis of 4 June 2008^[51]

The Homilies

The forty Homilies on the Gospel show Gregory preaching to the people in the basilicas where the liturgical stations were celebrated. Benedict XVI specifies that the first was delivered at Saint Peter's during Advent 590, a few months after his election, and the last at Saint Lawrence on the second Sunday after Pentecost 593.^[52]

Gregory did not preach to produce learned commentary. He wanted to awaken the soul. Expectation of Christ's return, vigilance, good works and conversion run through his preaching.^[53]

The Dialogues and Saint Benedict

The Dialogues answer a spiritual objection: are the times too evil for holiness to flourish still? Gregory answers with accounts of recent Italian saints. Book II is devoted entirely to Saint Benedict of Nursia, of whom he is the sole substantial ancient witness.^[54]

"Holiness is always possible, even in difficult times." — Benedict XVI, catechesis of 4 June 2008^[55]

This point is decisive for Ignispedia. Gregory does not write as if ancient miracles were embarrassing. He reports them as signs of God, ordered to edification and to doctrine on the soul, purgatory, hell, miracles and the future life.^[56] In modern times, the Gregorian authorship of the Dialogues was contested (the thesis of Francis Clark, 1987); this extreme thesis has been refuted and the work has been fully reintegrated into the Gregorian corpus.^[57]

Servant of the servants of God

Gregory opposed the title of "ecumenical" patriarch attributed to Constantinople. Benedict XVI specifies that this opposition did not aim to deny the legitimate authority of the patriarchs, but to protect the fraternal unity of the Church and to defend humility as the fundamental virtue of every bishop.^[58]

The Gregorian answer was not to adopt a greater title. It was to take a lower one: servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God.^[59]

"He knew how to make himself the 'servant of the servants'." — Benedict XVI, catechesis of 4 June 2008^[60]

A primacy of service, not of self-effacement

This humility did not diminish Roman primacy. Gregory governed, judged, sent, corrected, administered, evangelized. He wrote to bishops, kings, stewards, patriarchs and civil agents. But he wanted the exercise of authority to remain crucified by the humility of Christ.

The objection deserves to be taken in its strongest form: since Gregory refused John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople, the title of "ecumenical" bishop claimed at the synod of 588, then no see can claim primacy over the others — and the papacy of later centuries contradicted its own model by claiming universal jurisdiction.^[61]

But Gregory did not reject the office; he refused its prideful caricature. The same pope who protested against the title "ecumenical" claimed for the Apostolic See, in his own letters, a primacy not of honour but of supreme authority over the universal Church: the Apostolic See is "the head of all the Churches", the Church of Constantinople itself is subject to it, and it is to Rome that appeal is made even against other patriarchs.^[62] What he refused was a title that seemed to absorb the other bishops and break fraternal unity; what he exercised at the same time was an effective Roman solicitude over the whole Church as he knew it. Hence the title he chose: not a name greater than Constantinople's, but a lower name — servant of the servants of God — which says how primacy must be exercised.^[63]

What is certain

Tradition strongly associates Gregory with the Roman liturgy and "Gregorian" chant. The historical core and later medieval developments must however be distinguished. Gregory certainly exercised a liturgical influence; but the repertory of so-called Gregorian chant took shape over several centuries and cannot naively be attributed, note by note, to the pope of 590-604.^[64]

This precision does not diminish his greatness. It merely avoids turning a spiritual paternity into immediate material fabrication. The medieval Roman liturgy recognized itself in Gregory because it found in him order, sobriety, the primacy of the Word, a sense of eschatology and service of the Church.

The pope of liturgical preaching

More certain is his importance as a liturgical preacher. The homilies are set in the basilicas, the stations, the liturgical year. Gregory commented on the Gospel there for a specific people, in Rome, amid crises.^[65]

Liturgy was therefore no ceremonial set apart from life. It became the school where Rome learned to pass through famines, invasions, plague and death in expectation of Christ.

A pillar of the Christian West

Gregory influenced England through Augustine and Bede, Ireland and Gaul through the diffusion of his works, moral theology through the Moralia, pastoral care through the Rule, Benedictine holiness through the Dialogues, the medieval papacy through his model of government.^[66]

He is also a highly topical saint because he never separated contemplation from responsibility. He shows that a world in crisis does not dispense with interior depth; it demands it. The more unstable the time, the more the pastor must be a man of prayer, true speech, concrete justice and hope.

The model of a pastor in a time of ruin

Benedict XVI concludes that Gregory, in a desperate period of devastation, knew how to create peace and give hope because he was a man immersed in God and close to the poor of his time.^[67] This sentence sums up his holiness.

"He was a man immersed in God: his desire for God was always alive in the depths of his soul and precisely because of this he was always close to his neighbour, to the needy people of his time." — Benedict XVI, catechesis of 28 May 2008^[68]

• Pope Pelagius II — the predecessor who made Gregory a deacon and sent him to Constantinople.
• Pope Saint Leo the Great — the other great ancient pope, doctrinal and diplomat.
• Benedictine monasticism — for understanding the place of the Dialogues and of Saint Benedict.
• The Papal States — for situating the long history of temporal power, of which Gregory foreshadows certain traits without yet founding it.
• The Doctors of the Church — Gregory as Latin doctor and spiritual master.