GREGORY THE GREAT (590-604 A.D.)

[1Sidenote: [42-590 A.D.]]

2The papal monarchy thus rose insensibly upon the episcopal aristocracy. From the first, the word of the successor of St. Peter as bishop of the Eternal City had a high degree of authority. The title of “pope,” attributed in theory to every bishop, was finally reserved for him of Rome alone, a change already manifest under Leo the Great, but not completely brought about until the time of Gregory VII. The bishop of Rome had possessed since the days of the Roman Empire valuable property in the capital and throughout Italy. He had even acquired some across the Alps, for example, in the province of Arles, where he charged the bishop of that city with administering it. Besides this he occupied in Rome itself, that is to say in the most famous city in the world, that great estate which had been assigned to the bishops by the municipal régime in the last days of the empire.

3St. Leo (440-461) gave much prestige to his office by the great rôle he played in public affairs and his successful intercession with Attila. He obtained from Valentinian III a decree in which the emperor invited “the entire church to recognise its head in order that peace might forever be preserved”; and at the same period we see him restoring a Gallican bishop to the see from which he had been driven, and transferring the metropolitan seat from Arles to Vienne.

4Under the Ostrogoths the church of Rome, treated elsewhere with leniency, could make no progress. But when their power had fallen (553) and Rome came once more under the authority of the emperor of Constantinople, the great distance of her new master opened up a brighter future. The Lombard invasion brought into the church’s territory a large number of refugees, and the Roman population recovered some of its old energy in the double hatred for barbarians and Arians. As for the exarch whom the eastern emperor had charged with the government of his Italian provinces and invested with direct authority over the dukes and military counts of Naples, Rome, Genoa, etc., this official could scarcely make his authority felt in the western half of Italy, relegated as he was to Ravenna, and separated from Rome by the Lombard dominion which included Spoleto.

5[Sidenote: [590-604 A.D.]]

6It was at this juncture favourable, though dangerous in some respects, that Gregory I appeared (590-604). Descended from the noble Anicia family, Gregory added to distinction of birth every advantage of body and mind. While under thirty he was prefect of Rome, but at the end of several months he abandoned honours and thoughts of worldly things, and sought the retirement of the cloister. But his reputation did not permit him the obscurity he desired. Sent to Constantinople about 570 as secretary and later as apocrisiary (a sort of grand almoner) by Pope Pelagius II, he rendered valuable service to the holy see in its relations with the empire and in its struggles with the Lombards. In 590 the clergy, the senate, and the people raised him with one voice to the supreme pontificate, as successor to Pelagius; but as all elections had to be confirmed by the emperor at Constantinople, Gregory wrote in supplication that his might not be sanctioned. The letter was intercepted, and Maurice’s orders of ratification soon arrived. Gregory hid; he was discovered and brought back to Rome.

7Pope in spite of himself, he used all his talent and power to fortify the papacy,[85] propagate Christianity, and improve the discipline and organisation of the church. Although he pleaded that the episcopacy, and especially his own, “was the office of a shepherd of souls and not of a temporal prince,” he did not neglect the temporal power of the holy see. It happened, since the emperor was so little in touch with Italian affairs, that the soldiers charged with defending Rome against the Lombards had received no pay. Gregory paid them, took upon himself the work of defence, and armed the clerics. When Agilulf, whose aggression had provoked these preparations, was compelled to withdraw, Gregory treated with him in the name of Rome, in spite of protests from the exarch.

8Feeling thus strengthened in his position, he undertook to propagate Christianity and orthodoxy both within and without the limits of the ancient Roman Empire. Within its boundaries there were still some pagans in Sicily, Sardinia, even at Terracina (Tarracina) at the very gates of Rome, and doubtless also in some parts of Gaul, since there exists a decree of Childebert’s dated 554, with the title _For the Abolition of the Remainder of Idolatry_. There were Arians very close to Rome, the Lombards. By the intervention of Queen Theudelinda, Gregory succeeded in having the heir to the Lombard throne, Adalwald, raised in Catholicism. Since 587 the Visigoths in Spain under Recared had been converted.

9As for Great Britain, it was still entirely pagan, and Gregory sent thither the monk Augustine and forty Roman missionaries (596). They landed on the island of Thanet, and going from there sought Ethelbert, king of Kent, who permitted them to preach their doctrines at Canterbury. From this point Christianity spread rapidly towards the north and west, until by 627 it was firmly established in Northumberland. St. Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, had been named primate of England by Gregory the Great, with whom he kept up a constant correspondence that is still in existence.

10Ireland, “the isle of saints,” had already been converted, and now monks were leaving it to win over the barbarians. At this period St. Columban, the monk who denounced Brunehild’s crimes with such boldness, set out to preach the Gospel to the mountaineers of Helvetia, and founded in their midst abbeys surrounded by fertile fields. After him St. Rupert travelled far into Bavaria and established the diocese of Salzburg.

11Thus Christianity spread its spirit of proselytism, and St. Gregory fostered it greatly by the mild precepts he inculcated in his missionaries, and the skill with which he facilitated the transition from pagan to Catholic. He wrote to St. Augustine: “You must take care not to destroy the pagans’ temples, but only their idols; use holy water in washing out the edifice, build altars and deposit relics in them. If their temples are well built, so much the better; for it is important that these same ones pass from the cult of demons to that of the true God. When the nation sees its ancient places of worship remain, it will be more disposed to visit them through habit and to worship the true God.”

12At home Gregory laboured with success to co-ordinate the powers of the church, in making recognised above everything that of the holy see. We find him bestowing the title of vicar of the Gauls upon the bishop of Arles, to correspond with Augustine archbishop of Canterbury, with the archbishop of Seville for Spain, and him of Thessalonica for Greece; and finally sending secret legates to Constantinople. In his pastoral which he wrote on the occasion of his election, and which became a general regulation throughout the West, he prescribed the bishops their duties according to the decision of several councils. To bind the hierarchy together he sought to prevent the encroachments of one bishop upon another. “I have given you Britain to direct spiritually,” he wrote to the ambitious Augustine, “and not Gaul.” He favoured the monasteries, looked with vigilance after their discipline, and reformed church singing, substituting for the Ambrosian chant, “which,” according to a contemporary, “was like the distant sound of a chariot rolling over the stones,” that Gregorian chant which bears his own name.[d]

13The darkest stain on the name of Gregory is his cruel and unchristian triumph in the fall of the emperor Maurice--his base and adulatory praise of Phocas, the most odious and sanguinary tyrant who had ever seized the throne of Constantinople. It is the worst homage to religion to vindicate or even to excuse the crimes of religious men; and the apologetic palliation, or even the extenuation of their misdeeds rarely succeeds in removing, often strengthens, the unfavourable impression.

14Gregory was spared the pain and shame of witnessing the utter falsehood of his pious vaticinations as to the glorious and holy reign of Phocas. In the second year of the tyrant’s reign he closed the thirteen important years of his pontificate. The ungrateful Romans paid but tardy honours to his memory. His death (March 10th, 604) was followed by a famine, which the starving multitude attributed to his wasteful dilapidation of the patrimony of the church--that patrimony which had been so carefully administered and so religiously devoted to their use. Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions.

15They proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the library of Gregory, and were only deterred from their barbarous ravages by the interposition of Peter the faithful archdeacon. Peter had been interlocutor of Gregory in the wild legends contained in the _Dialogues_.[k] The archdeacon now assured the populace of Rome that he had often seen the Holy Ghost in the visible shape of a dove hovering over the head of Gregory as he wrote. Gregory’s successor therefore hesitated, and demanded that Peter should confirm his pious fiction or fancy by an oath. He ascended the pulpit, but before he had concluded his solemn oath he fell dead. That which to a hostile audience might have been a manifest judgment against perjury, was received as a divine testimony to his truth.

16The Roman church has constantly permitted Gregory to be represented with the Holy Ghost, as a dove, floating over his head.

17The historian of Christianity is arrested by certain characters and certain epochs, which stand as landmarks between the close of one age of religion and the commencement of another. Such a character is Gregory the Great; such an epoch his pontificate, the termination of the sixth century. Gregory, not from his station alone, but by the acknowledgment of the admiring world, was intellectually, as well as spiritually, the great model of his age. He was proficient in all the arts and sciences cultivated at that time; the vast volumes of his writings show his indefatigable powers; their popularity and their authority, his ability to clothe those thoughts and those reasonings in language which would awaken and command the general mind.

18His epoch was that of the final Christianisation of the world, not in outward worship alone, not in its establishment as the imperial religion, the rise of the church upon the ruin of the temple, and the recognition of the hierarchy as an indispensable rank in the social system, but in its full possession of the whole mind of man, in letters, arts as far as arts were cultivated, habits, usages, modes of thought, and in popular superstition.

19Not only was heathenism, but, excepting in the laws and municipal institutions, Romanity itself absolutely extinct. The reign of Theodoric had been an attempt to fuse together Roman, Teutonic, and Christian usages. Cassiodorus, though half a monk, aspired to be a Roman statesman, Boethius to be a heathen philosopher. The influence of the Roman schools of rhetoric is betrayed even in the writers of Gaul, such as Sidonius Apollinaris; there is an attempt to preserve some lingering cadence of Roman poetry in the Christian versifiers of that age. At the close of the sixth century all this has expired; ecclesiastical Latin is the only language of letters, or rather letters themselves are become purely ecclesiastical. The fable of Gregory’s destruction of the Palatine library is now rejected as injurious to his fame; but probably the Palatine library, if it existed, would have been so utterly neglected that Gregory would hardly have condescended to fear its influence. His aversion to such studies is not that of dread or hatred, but of religious contempt; profane letters are a disgrace to a Christian bishop; the truly religious spirit would loathe them of itself.

20What, then, was this Christianity by which Gregory ruled the world? Not merely the speculative and dogmatic theology, but the popular, vital, active Christianity, which was working in the heart of man; the dominant motive of his actions, as far as they were affected by religion; the principal element of his hopes and fears as regards the invisible world and that future life which had now become part of his conscious belief.