Pope Gregory I

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Gregory I, later honored as Saint Gregory the Great, once forced a dying monk to die alone because the man had hidden three gold pieces. After the death, Gregory had the body and the coins thrown onto a manure heap, with the words "Take your money with you to perdition." Later he had 30 Masses offered for that same monk's soul. Gregory believed that the punishment of sins can begin in this life, and his severity was never far from mercy.

  Gregory served as the 64th Bishop of Rome from the 3rd of September 590 until his death on the 12th of March 604. He longed for silence and contemplation. Instead he spent his papacy feeding a city near famine and sending missionaries far beyond Italy. Medieval people called him the Father of Christian Worship, and he wrote more than any pope before him.

  How did a Roman senator's son who preferred a monastery become the person Romans turned to for government? Why does a style of chant carry his name? And what do the words he left behind reveal about the man?

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• 2. A Family of Saints

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  Around 540, Gregory was born in Rome, which the Eastern Roman Empire had recently reconquered from the Ostrogoths. His father, Gordianus, was a patrician and senator who for a time served as Prefect of the City of Rome. Gordianus also held a church post called Regionarius, though nothing more is known about it. Gregory's mother, Silvia, and two of his paternal aunts, Trasilla and Emiliana, are honored as saints by Catholic and Orthodox churches. His great-great-grandfather had been Pope Felix III. Once Gregory was elected pope, his family became the most distinguished clerical dynasty of the period.

  The family villa stood on the Clivus Scauri on the Caelian Hill, on a street now called the Via di San Gregorio. Its northern end runs toward the Colosseum and its southern end toward the Circus Maximus. In Gregory's day the old imperial buildings nearby lay in ruins and belonged to private owners. The family also held working estates in Sicily and around Rome. Gregory later had portraits of his parents painted in fresco in the house, and John the Deacon described them 300 years afterward. Gordianus was tall and long-faced, with light eyes and a beard. Silvia was tall and round-faced, with blue eyes and a cheerful look.

  From 542 the Plague of Justinian swept through Italy, bringing famine, panic and sometimes rioting. In some regions over a third of the people died. Meanwhile the emperor Justinian I was retaking Italy from the Gothic kings, though the fighting was mostly in the north. In 546 Totila sacked Rome and destroyed most of its population. In 549 he invited the survivors to return to the empty, ruined streets. It has been suggested that Gregory's family waited out that interval on their Sicilian estates. The war was over in Rome by 552, and a Frankish invasion was beaten in 554.

  Gregory of Tours reported that "in grammar, dialectic and rhetoric... he was second to none." Like most young men of his rank, Gregory studied grammar, rhetoric, the sciences, literature and law. He also knew history, mathematics and music. His fluency with imperial law suggests he trained for a career in public life. That career moved fast, and like his father he became Prefect of Rome, the highest civil office in the city.

  When Gordianus died, Gregory turned the family villa into a monastery dedicated to Andrew the Apostle. After Gregory's own death it was renamed San Gregorio Magno al Celio. He described the contemplative life this way: "in that silence of the heart, while we keep watch within through contemplation, we are as if asleep to all things that are without." He prized the vow of poverty, and he saw the monk's calling as an "ardent quest for the vision of our Creator."

  His family had its scandals. Gregory had three paternal aunts who were nuns. The eldest two, Trasilla and Emiliana, died after seeing a vision of their ancestor Pope Felix III. The youngest soon abandoned the religious life and married the steward of her estate. Gregory answered, "many are called but few are chosen."

  Pope Pelagius II eventually ordained Gregory a deacon and asked for his help with the schism of the Three Chapters in northern Italy. That schism was not healed until well after Gregory was gone. Pelagius II had another task for his new deacon, in the imperial capital of Constantinople.

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• 3. Envoy to Constantinople

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  In 579 Pope Pelagius II named Gregory his apocrisiarius, the ambassador to the imperial court in Constantinople. Rome wanted military aid against the Lombards. The imperial army was busy in the East, and the entreaties failed.

  By 584 Pelagius II was writing to Gregory about the hardships Rome suffered under the Lombards. He asked Gregory to press Emperor Maurice for a relief force. Maurice had long since decided to limit his efforts against the Lombards to intrigue and diplomacy, setting the Franks against them. Gregory soon saw that no army would come. The emperors faced trouble with the Persians in the East and with the Avars and Slavs in the North.

  The historian Ekonomou judged that once imperial policy toward Italy was clear, Gregory had little left to do. Papal envoys who pushed too hard could become a nuisance and be shut out of the emperor's presence. Gregory had already drawn an imperial rebuke for his lengthy canonical writings on John III Scholasticus. John had held the Patriarchate of Constantinople for twelve years before Eutychius, who had been driven out by Justinian, returned to the post. Gregory then cultivated the Byzantine elite and became extremely popular with the city's upper class, especially aristocratic women. Ekonomou concluded that this did little for Rome. John the Deacon claimed that Gregory "labored diligently for the relief of Italy," but no evidence shows he achieved much of what Pelagius II wanted.

  The one clear contest came with the aged Patriarch Eutychius. Eutychius had published a treatise, now lost, on the General Resurrection. He held that the risen body "will be more subtle than air, and no longer palpable." Gregory argued from Scripture that Christ was corporeal and palpable after the Resurrection, since he could not read the untranslated Greek authorities. Western sources say the debate ended before Tiberius II, who ordered Eutychius's writings burned. Ekonomou thinks the story is exaggerated but sees the argument as the one achievement of a fruitless embassy.

  Both men then fell ill. Gregory recovered, and Eutychius died on the 5th of April 582 at the age of 70. On his deathbed Eutychius recanted his view, and Gregory dropped the matter. The quarrel left Gregory with a bitter taste for the theological speculation of the East, and that feeling stayed with him well into his papacy.

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• 4. Reach of the Papacy

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  In 585 Gregory left Constantinople and returned to his monastery on the Caelian Hill. In 590 Pelagius II died of the plague spreading through Rome, and the people elected Gregory by acclamation. Constantinople approved the choice afterward, as was normal during the Byzantine Papacy.

  Gregory would rather have stayed in the monastery. In texts of every kind, especially in his first year as pope, he bemoaned the burden of office and mourned the lost life of prayer. Among his first acts was a series of letters disavowing any ambition for the throne of Peter and praising the monks' contemplative life.

  The Holy See he inherited had not led the West effectively since the pontificate of Gelasius I. Bishops in Gaul came from the great territorial families and shared their local outlook. Bishops in Visigothic Spain had little contact with Rome. In Italy, the lands under papal administration were harassed by violent Lombard dukes and by Byzantine rivals in the Exarchate of Ravenna and in the south. Gregory regained papal authority in Spain and France, and he saw Franks, Lombards and Visigoths align with Rome in religion. He also fought the Donatist heresy, which was popular in North Africa.

  In his official documents Gregory was the first to use the title "Servant of the Servants of God" extensively. Most later popes followed the practice.

  Gregory held firm convictions about missions. He wrote to a ruler of the British: "Almighty God places good men in authority that He may impart through them the gifts of His mercy to their subjects. And this we find to be the case with the British over whom you have been appointed to rule, that through the blessings bestowed on you the blessings of heaven might be bestowed on your people also." His most famous effort was the Gregorian mission under Augustine of Canterbury, prior of Saint Andrew's, to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons. It seems Gregory never forgot the Anglo-Saxon slaves he had once seen in the Roman Forum. Paulinus of York was another missionary he sent to England. The mission succeeded, and from England missionaries later set out for the Netherlands and Germany. Gregory also urged his followers to value bathing as a bodily need.

  Gregory shaped Catholic teaching on the Jews as well. Drawing on Saint Paul, Saint Augustine of Hippo and existing Roman law, he declared that Christians should protect Jews and let them practice Judaism unharmed. In a letter to the bishop of Palermo he wrote that Jews could not claim more freedoms than Roman law allowed, and Christians could not infringe the rights Jews held. He still encouraged bishops to seek conversions, but he insisted that no Jew be forced to convert or be physically harmed. The letter opened with the words Sicut Judaeis, meaning "Just as the Jews," and later popes used it as the template for their own protective letters in the later Middle Ages.

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• 5. Steward of the Poor

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  When Gregory became pope in 590, the Lombards held most of Italy and camped nearly at the gates of Rome. Their raids had stopped the economy. The city was crowded with refugees who lived in the streets with few necessities. Government sat far away in Constantinople and seemed unable to help.

  Gregory decided not to wait any longer. His guiding idea was that the church's wealth belonged to the poor, and the church was only its steward. He wrote, "I hold the office of steward to the property of the poor." Wealthy Roman families, following his example, gave lavishly in order to atone for their sins.

  The church already kept basic books. Expenses went into journals called regesta, which listed amounts, recipients and circumstances. Revenue and assets went into ledgers called polyptici, and the assets themselves were the patrimonia. A central staff of notarii, led by the primicerius notariorum, kept the ledgers and issued lists of property for which each rector was responsible. Gregory built a general relief administration on this base.

  In a letter to a subordinate in Sicily, he wrote: "I asked you most of all to take care of the poor." In the same letter he ordered forty solidi for the children's shoes of a woman named Pateria, along with forty bushels of grain. He replaced administrators who would not cooperate. To pay for relief he sold off the church's investment property and worked from a cash budget recorded in the polyptici. Churchmen were paid four times a year, and each also received a golden coin.

  Money could not replace food in a city on the brink of famine. The church owned between 1300 and 1800 square miles of revenue-generating farmland, divided into large sections called patrimonia. Gregory had its goods shipped to Rome rather than sold, ordered production stepped up, and set quotas. At the bottom of the chain stood the rusticus, who farmed the land. Above him came the conductor who leased it, then an actionarius, a defensor and finally a rector. Grain, wine, cheese, meat, fish and oil soon arrived in Rome in large quantities and were given away free.

  Distributions to qualified persons were monthly. Others lived in the streets or were too ill to collect their share, so every morning Gregory sent out a small army of charitable people, mainly monks, with prepared food. It is said he would not dine until the poor were fed. When he did dine, he shared his family table with 12 indigent guests, and that table still exists. To needy people living in wealthy homes he sent meals he had cooked himself, sparing them the indignity of charity. Once he heard that a destitute man had died in a back room, and he was depressed for days. For a time he entertained the idea that he had failed in his duty and was a murderer.

  The Roman people began looking to the papacy for government and ignored the state at Constantinople. The office of urban prefect went without candidates.

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• 6. Worship and Chant

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  John the Deacon wrote that Gregory made a general revision of the Mass, "removing many things, changing a few, adding some." In his own letters Gregory says he moved the Pater Noster to follow the Roman Canon and to come just before the Fraction. That position is still kept in the Roman liturgy, while the Ambrosian Rite shows the older placement. He added material to the Hanc Igitur of the Roman Canon. He also set the nine Kyries at the start of Mass, a remnant of a litany that once stood there. Deacons were forbidden to perform the musical parts of the Mass, apart from singing the Gospel.

  Sacramentaries shaped by these reforms are called Sacramentaria Gregoriana. Roman and other Western liturgies since then have prayers that change with the feast or season.

  In the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, Gregory is credited with the main influence on the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. This is a penitential form of the Byzantine liturgy for the season of Great Lent. Its Roman equivalent, the Mass of the Presanctified, is used only on Good Friday. A Syriac version continues in the Malankara Rite, historically practiced in the Malankara Church of India. Some occasions in the Assyrian Church of the East also use it.

  The plainchant of the West was standardized in the late 9th century and attributed to Gregory, which gave Gregorian chant its name. The earliest such attribution appears in John the Deacon's biography of 873, almost three centuries after the pope died. The chant itself came from a fusion of Roman and Frankish elements in the Franco-German empire under Pepin, Charlemagne and their successors.

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• 7. Letters and Books

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  Copies of 854 of Gregory's letters have survived. Scribes in his day copied papal letters into a Registrum kept in the scrinium. By the 9th century, when John the Deacon wrote his Life of Gregory, the Registrum filled 14 papyrus rolls. Those rolls are now lost. The largest batch of surviving copies, 686 letters, was made on the order of Adrian I, who reigned from 772 to 795. Most of the other copies date from the 10th to the 15th century and are held in the Vatican Library. Gregory is the only pope between the fifth and eleventh centuries whose correspondence and writings survive in a comprehensive corpus.

  Most of the letters come from his last 13 years, 590-604, and give an accurate picture of his work. His books are larger in scale. Moralia in Job is one of the longest patristic works. It grew from talks on the Book of Job that Gregory gave to the brethren who went with him to Constantinople. He revised and completed it soon after becoming pope, and it was possibly finished as early as 591.

  Pastoral Care contrasted a bishop's role as shepherd of his flock with his standing as a noble of the church. It became the definitive statement of the nature of the episcopal office. Gregory probably began it before his election and finished it in 591.

  The Dialogues run to four books of miracles, signs and healings by the holy men of sixth-century Italy, most of them monks. The second book is devoted entirely to a popular life of Saint Benedict. Eastern Christianity gave Gregory the epithet Saint Gregory the Dialogist because of this work.

  The sermons include 22 Homilies on Ezekiel, preached in 592-593 while the Lombards besieged Rome. They contain some of his most profound mystical teaching, and he revised them eight years later. The Forty Homilies on the Gospels were delivered in 591 and 592 and seemingly finished by 593. A papyrus fragment of that codex survives in the British Museum. Only two of his sermons on the Song of Songs survive, and they stop at Song 1.9. A commentary on 1 Kings once credited to him is now thought to be by Peter of Cava, a 12th-century monk who used lost Gregorian material.

  Opinions of these works differ. The historian Norman Cantor found Gregory's character "ambiguous and enigmatic." On one side Cantor saw "an able and determined administrator, a skilled and clever diplomat." On the other, he wrote, Gregory appears in his writings as "a superstitious and credulous monk, hostile to learning, crudely limited as a theologian, and excessively devoted to saints, miracles, and relics." Even with so many pages, an autobiographical presentation is nearly impossible, and the growth of Gregory's mind remains speculative.

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• 8. Afterlife in Art and Memory

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  Peter the Deacon, a friend of Gregory, told of a secretary who watched through a hole in a curtain while the pope dictated his homilies on Ezekiel. Gregory fell silent for long periods, so the servant made the hole and looked through. He saw a dove sitting on Gregory's head with its beak between his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak, the pope spoke, and when it returned, he fell silent. The dove became his attribute in art, and from the tenth century the scene appears as a version of the Evangelist portrait. An eleventh-century manuscript of the Moralia in Job shows the scribe Bebo of Seeon Abbey presenting the book to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, with the author writing under divine inspiration above.

  The monks of Saint Andrew's had a portrait made after Gregory's death, and John the Deacon saw it in the 9th century. It showed a man who was rather bald, with a tawny beard like his father's and carefully curled hair at the sides. His nose was thin and slightly aquiline, his forehead high, and his hands beautiful. Ribera's oil painting of about 1614, from the Giustiniani collection and now in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome, turns those features into a caricature. It gives Gregory total baldness, an outthrust chin and a beak-like nose.

  Most artists dress Gregory in full pontifical robes with the tiara and double cross, though that was not his actual habit of dress. Earlier images are more likely to show a monastic tonsure and plain clothes. Orthodox icons show him as a bishop holding a Gospel Book and blessing with his right hand. He is recorded as permitting a square halo, a form then used for the living. The late medieval Mass of St. Gregory shows Christ as the Man of Sorrows appearing on the altar while Gregory says Mass. It was most common in the 15th and 16th centuries and, after the Protestant Reformation, became an assertion of the doctrine of the Real Presence against Protestant theology.

  The British called him Gregorius noster, meaning "our Gregory." The first full-length life of him was written at a monastery in Whitby around 713, by a monk or possibly a nun. Italy waited longer, and the first Italian life came from John the Deacon in the 9th century. In England Gregory is revered, with Augustine of Canterbury, as the apostle of the land and the source of its conversion.

  His relics are enshrined in St. Peter's Basilica. San Gregorio al Celio was largely rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries. One of its three oratories, that of Saint Silvia, is said to lie over the tomb of his mother. An ancient marble chair believed to be his is kept in the church. Ottorino Respighi gave the fourth and final part of his Church Windows, written in 1925, the title St. Gregory the Great. Gregory is honored with Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose as one of the four Great Latin Church Fathers. He was canonized by popular acclaim immediately after his death.

  His feast day moved when the calendar changed. The General Roman Calendar, revised in 1969, now marks it on the 3rd of September, the day of his episcopal consecration in 590. Before that it fell on the 12th of March, the day he died. Pope John XXIII's Code of Rubrics of 1961 had forbidden the full observance of most feasts in Lent, and the 12th of March always falls in Lent. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic churches of the Byzantine Rite still keep the 12th of March, during Great Lent, the only time the liturgy that names him as its author is used. In Żejtun, Malta, a traditional procession honors San Girgor on Easter Wednesday. Each year on his feast day, the former pupils of Downside School, known as Old Gregorians, wear their Old Gregorian ties.

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