Interpreting the Life and Thought of Gregory the Great

Introduction Pope Gregory I, known among Western Christians as St. Gregory the Great and by Eastern Christians as St. Gregory the Dialogist, was born around the year 540 to an aristocratic family well connected to the Roman Church. Gregory s great-great-grandfather was likely Pope Felix III (bishop of Rome from 483 492), and Pope Agapetus (bishop of Rome from 533 536) was presumably a distant uncle. 1 Three of Greg - ory s aunts (on his father s side) are known to have been estate-dwelling ascetics. 2 Gregory s father, Gordianus, held the administrative rank of defensor in the Church of Rome, which would typically mean that he served as a property and legal manager for a portion of the Church s extensive landholdings. 3 Gregory s family was wealthy, and he possessed all of the advantages of an aristocratic youth, including a palatial estate on the Caelian Hill and the best education available at that time. 4 Unfortunately, Gregory tells us little about his youth or the specifics of his studies. 5 At the time of his birth, Italy and the city of Rome were shadows of their former selves. For most of his childhood, the Roman armies of the East waged a destructive war against the Ostrogoths for supremacy of the Italian peninsula. Between 546 and 547 alone, control of the city of Rome switched three times between imperial and Gothic hands. 6 We 1

2 Gregory the Great know nothing about how Gregory s family responded to the calamity of the initial siege of the capital in 546, when famine is said to have ensnared even the wealthiest of the city s districts. One of Gregory s earlytwentieth-century biographers, F. Homes Dudden, speculated that the family may have retreated to the relative safety of its Sicilian estates to escape the devastation of the siege, but no evidence survives to support that idea. 7 However Gregory s family weathered the crisis, the Gothic wars dramatically hastened an already steep decline for the once mighty capital of the Roman Empire. 8 By the time that Gregory reached adolescence, a great percentage of the city of Rome, including many of its greatest monuments, was abandoned. 9 Indeed, it is not too hard to imagine why Gregory s writings are, at times, so apocalyptic in character he was living in a nearly deserted city. 10 Although Justinian s armies finally routed the Goths and established a permanent stronghold of Eastern Roman influence at Ravenna in the 550s, by 568 another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, crossed the Alps into Italy. That migration, and the wars that resulted from it, only furthered the desperation of the local populations and increased the political complexities for Rome s civil and religious leaders. 11 It was onto this shifting stage that Gregory stepped when he entered public life so auspiciously in 573 as the praefectus urbi (prefect of the city). In former times, the urban prefect would have been the head of the Senate, with both legal and civil jurisdiction over the city and everything within one hundred miles of it. 12 By Gregory s tenure, the authority of the prefecture s office was likely diminished, but there is little denying that Gregory would have been seen as one of the leading men in the city, responsible for public works, finance, supply lines, and military defenses. It is often noted that Gregory held this post for only a single year before abandoning public service to pursue the contemplative life of monasticism. It is not often described, however, just how traumatic that year would have been. First, it was during this year that Lombards threatened the city for the first time, temporarily suspending all communication with Ravenna and Constantinople. 13 Second, Pope John III (bishop of Rome from 561 574) died, leaving an uncommonly long vacancy until the election of Benedict the following year. 14 And, third, the famous Byzantine general Narses, who was responsible for protecting the city, also died. However unpopular the tax-happy Narses might have been among the

Introduction 3 aristocrats of Rome, his death left Gregory alone to address the multifaceted needs of the city s inhabitants. 15 We know nothing of how Gregory actually dealt with the problems he faced; we have only a brief comment, made years later, in which Gregory emphasized the spiritual burden that this period placed upon his soul. 16 But as we will see, Gregory s experience of civic leadership, however brief, helps to explain both the competence for public administration and the commitment to service that would become hallmarks of his tenure as Roman bishop. Despite the immense pressure that public service would have placed upon the young Gregory, there is little reason to believe that he chose monasticism as a means to escape responsibility. Indeed, Gregory s commitment to the ascetic life seems to have been absolute. He donated his family s patrimony, endowed six monasteries in Sicily, and transformed his Roman estate into a seventh, St. Andrew s, which he entered as a nov ice under the instruction of Valentius, the abbot. 17 According to his medieval biographers, the future bishop subjected himself to an unusually rigorous asceticism, likely causing the frequent ill health he suffered later in life. 18 As chapter 1 will demonstrate, Gregory s entire outlook was formed by a particular vision of the ascetic life that he no doubt began to develop during this period. In 579, at the start of his pontificate, Pope Pelagius II (bishop of Rome from 579 590) recalled Gregory from his monastic retreat, ordained him to the diaconate, and appointed him apocrisiarius (i.e., papal representative to the emperor in Constantinople). 19 Given the intricate and overlapping concerns of the See of Rome with the city of Rome, Gregory s responsibilities in the Eastern capital included religious, political, military, and economic interests. Gregory spent nearly seven years in Constantinople in this capacity, but the emperor s preoccupations with Eastern affairs left Gregory free to devote a good deal of his time to study and the supervision of a small community of Latin ascetics from St. Andrew s who had accompanied him to Constantinople. 20 It was in this environment that Gregory began what would become his voluminous Moralia in Iob, which runs a dizzying eighteen hundred pages in the modern critical edition. The experience also provided Gregory with important contacts and a behind-the-scenes look at the imperial court and the Church of Constantinople, both of which would prove valuable in Gregory s future negoti - ations with the civil and ecclesiastical leaders of the East. 21

4 Gregory the Great In 585 Gregory returned to Rome and St. Andrews, where he may have assumed the role of abbot. In 590 he was selected to be Pelagius s successor as bishop of Rome. Unlike so many episcopal elections in Rome and elsewhere, Gregory s rise to the throne of Peter seems to have been uncontested. Indeed, as Peter Kaufman wryly noted, the only person who seems to have been upset about the appointment was Gregory himself. 22 The lone contemporary account is that of Gregory of Tours, who devotes a few lines to the election, emphasizing (in hagiographic fashion) Gregory s many attempts to avoid the papal office. 23 Gregory the Great served as bishop of Rome from September of 590 until his death in March of 604. In some respects, he may have been the most accomplished pontiff of the entire late-ancient period. Some of his achievements include the daily feeding of Rome s indigent, the refurbishing of the city s defenses, the introduction of monastics to the papal administration (he was himself the first monk-pope), and the reintroduction of Roman Christianity to England. 24 Added to these pragmatic endeavors are the pontiff s important theological, exegetical, and hagiographic works, which likely did more to shape the theological landscape of the Latin West in the Middle Ages than those of any other author, save Augustine. To be sure, Gregory s accomplishments required a determination and assertiveness that belie the irenic presentation of Gregory s medieval biographers, who characterized him as a gentle-minded contemplative. Perhaps what is so fascinating about Gregory s thought and activity is that his achievements in many ways came despite a deep theological and ideological pull toward the seclusion of ascetic detachment. Indeed, if there is any single axiom that explains Gregory as both theologian and papal actor, it is that he felt ever conflicted between his inclination for ascetic ideals (namely humility and retreat) and a Ciceronian-like compulsion to public service. Interpreting the Life and Thought of Gregory the Great Modern assessments of Gregory s life and thought are, of course, confined by the availability of the historical sources. In many ways, we are fortunate to have access to so many of Gregory s writings biblical commentaries, sermons, hagiographic works, a treatise on pastoral care,

Introduction 5 and more than eight hundred letters survive. With the availability of so much material, it is easy for interpreters to make the mistake of thinking that we have access to everything and that we can know a great deal more about his career than we actually can. At least one estimate suggests that there may have been as many as twenty thousand papyrus letters in the corpus before it was transposed to vellum by Carolingian editors at the end of the eighth century. 25 It is impossible to know what may have been contained in the missing letters. It is equally difficult to ascertain the reasons why certain letters were preserved and others jettisoned. But we should be ever aware that editorial erasure could be a powerful tool in the shaping of ecclesiastical memory. In short, we must be cognizant of the fact that what remains of Gregory s corpus is very much a construction of Gregory s Carolingian editors. 26 It is also important to recall that the production of the earliest biographies of Gregory, such as they exist, might also have been born from an attempt to create and control a particular papal narrative. It is remarkable, in fact, that no Roman biography of Gregory, apart from a brief and apathetic entry in the Liber Pontificalis, survives from before the latter part of the eighth century. 27 And while it is likely that Gregory s medieval biographers, Paul the Deacon (d. ca. 799) and John the Deacon (d. prior to 882), may have had access to sources that no longer survive, it is equally true that they were motivated to present Gregory and his papacy in a way that accommodated the partisan concerns of their respective eras, particularly as they related to the spread of papal authority. Among modern studies, Erich Caspar s monumental Geschichte des Papsttums (Berlin, 1930 1933) remains a pivotal moment in papal historiography because it offers a means for studying the papacy and individual pontiffs that was self-consciously divorced from the apologetic studies of the papacy that had preceded it. Caspar traces the development of the papal ideal and its corresponding ideology in the early Church. Significantly, he shows only marginal interest in Gregory because he interprets him as having done little to advance either the papacy or its ideology. But Caspar s focus on the development of the papal institution has since blossomed into a cottage industry among medieval historians, some of whom read Gregory as having been instrumental in the development of an independent and powerful institution. Of these, Walter Ullmann stands out for arguing, among other things, that Gregory s famous mission to Kent

6 Gregory the Great was precipitated by a desire to free the papacy and the Western Church from the shackles of Byzantium and its Caesaro-papist emperors. Although that thesis has been definitively refuted by Robert Markus and others, when we compare it to Caspar s interpretation we are presented with a startling range of possible interpretations of where Gregory fits in the narrative of the papal history. Gregory s modern biographers have offered similarly divergent accounts, albeit through different means. The discrepancy of these studies is in large part dictated by whether or not one privileges his exegetical and hagiographic works or his voluminous and pragmatic correspondence. Among those studies that emphasize the exegetical works, Carole Straw s Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley, 1988) provides an important constructive analysis of Gregory s thought at the close of the twentieth century. Straw explains the apparent inconsistencies in Gregory s thinking as a deliberate mental comprehension of dialectical opposites being complementary forces on a single continuum. 28 She aptly points to several readily apparent binaries in Gregory s corpus, including his spirituality versus his pragmatism, his intellectual exegesis versus his promotion of populist saint-cult, his desire for retirement versus his commitment to service, and especially his ability to find perfection in an imperfect and fallen world. But it is the spiritual versus carnal binary that most illumines Gregory s integration and serves as the primary axiom for her investigation. For Straw, the only way to make sense of these binaries is to comprehend the mental processes and the various configurations of ideas that structure his thought, but to do so one must combine the skills of a literary critic, anthropologist, and historian. 29 It is, perhaps, telling that she does not include theologian in the list of aca - demic skills, despite her occasional foray into what would otherwise be considered Gregory s theological outlook. 30 Claude Dagens s 1977 biography was one of the first modern attempts to detail Gregory s theology, although it is a very different sort of analysis than typical studies of early Christian theologians. 31 Indeed, Dagens offers an uncommon degree of direct citation of Greg ory s works, which he intends to transform into an appreciation for the experience of the Christian life rather than an assessment of Gregory s ideas per se. In part, this might derive from Dagens s presumption that Gregory s dogmatic

Introduction 7 theology was largely derivative of Augustine. 32 Dagens emphasizes, instead, a different kind of theology one that seeks to understand the values and pastoral possibilities that Christianity offers to its practitioners. Despite its length, Dagens s study offers a relatively limited assessment of the range of Gregory s interests, and even those aspects of his thought that are emphasized (such as his moral and pastoral concerns) are not especially differentiated from those of other ascetically inclined bishops of the period. The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen a marked increase in the number of theological assessments of Gregory s work among European scholars. Of these, Katharina Greschat s study of Gregory s Mor alia stands out as a fine example of a newfound appreciation for Gregory s exegetical sophistication. 33 On Greschat s reading, the life of Job is interpreted by Gregory as a kind of allegorical bridge between his Christological commitments and his pastoral concerns thus, Greg - ory s preach ers, like Christ himself, must inspire their followers to commit themselves fully to God but must simultaneously assist those around them. Like many scholars before her, Greschat s interpretation of Greg - ory s theological vision is largely confined by an Augustinian spectrum, but she nevertheless provides detailed assessments of the Moralia and rightly appreciates its author s emphasis on spiritual leadership. Rade Kisić has more recently offered an account of Gregory s eschatology, linking it both to the pontiff s ascetic inclinations and to his ultimate pastoral concerns. 34 For Kisić, Gregory s eschatological vision is ultimately positive because of the eschatological hope made possible by the resurrection of Christ. In part, this optimistic reading of Gregory s theology fuels an interpretation of Gregory as a bridge between East and West. While that position is not original in itself, the emphasis on eschatology allows Kisić to argue his thesis in a fresh way. The common revisionist theme in Greschat, Kisić, and other recent studies of Gregory s theology is that the pontiff was a more creative and sophisticated thinker than most twentieth-century scholarly assessments had acknowledged. 35 Gregory was creative, Greshat or Straw would argue, even when he remained within an Augustinian framework. But what binds all of these assessments of Gregory s theology is a clear favoritism for Gregory s exegetical and hagiographic works. We learn very little about

8 Gregory the Great Gregory s activity as bishop, public administrator, or diplomat, or how that activity may have been motivated by his theological commitments. Thus, the present study is differentiated from these previous assessments of Gregory s thought in two principal ways. First, it situates Gregory s as - cetic commitments and the uniqueness of his ascetic theology as the baseline for his other theological investments. Second, it seeks to build upon the analysis of Gregory s thought by seeking ways to understand how his theological commitments are revealed in his pastoral, administrative, and diplomatic activities. JEFFREY RICHARDS S BIOGRAPHY, Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (Routlege, 1980) offers something of a polar extreme to these theological assessments in the sense that it pursues a political and administrative account of Gregory s career, drawing primarily on the bishop s extensive correspondence and largely ignoring his exegetical and hagiographic works. To be sure, Richards s account is a thorough appraisal of the geopolitical forces at work in Gregory s world and nicely addresses the significance of Gregory s interaction with the Lombards and Merovingians. Throughout, Richards shows a particular interest in Gregory s contribution to the development of the papacy as a political and economic institution that would continue to develop in the Middle Ages, but does so without much of the anachronism that characterizes Ullmann s assessment. Perhaps the first serious attempt to offer a comprehensive study of Greg ory s life and thought since Dudden was that of Robert Markus, whose 1997 biography reflects a lifetime s study of Gregory. 36 Although most at home in his examination of the pontiff s correspondence and the political and administrative aspects of his career, Markus does acknowledge Gregory s commitments to ascetic idealism and rightly understands the pastoral motivations that governed much of Gregory s decisionmaking process. Indeed, for Markus, Gregory is nothing if not a pragmatic and efficient administrator of the Roman See whose dedication to his cause prompted his expansion of Rome s influence into Gaul, Kent, and elsewhere. It is one of the great achievements of Markus s biography that he views Gregory as a loyal son of the empire, even if that empire was now centered in Constantinople, and Gregory did not always see eye to eye with the emperor.

Introduction 9 If one were to critique Markus s account, one might find the most fault with his assessment that Gregory was a derivative thinker, someone who drew his ideas from Augustine and John Cassian and, apart from attempting a synthesis of the two, showed few signs of theological creativity or innovation. Indeed, it will be one of the central efforts of this volume to demonstrate that Gregory was, in fact, a unique and nuanced theologian, whose subtlety is often missed by scholars who wrongly assume that theological originality must be of a dogmatic nature or who fail to see the ways in which his particular theological commitments to asceticism and pastoral ministry informed his approach to administrative and diplomatic tasks. More recently, Barbara Müller s 2009 biography, Führung im Denken und Handeln Gregors des Grossen, provides a thorough account of Greg - ory s view of leadership (Führung) based upon an analysis of his career and writing. Her study progresses according to a diachronic narrative of Gregory s life but does so in such a way as to reflect in detail upon several of his texts. Müller is determined to show that context always framed Gregory s actions and his state of mind as he wrote and preached. Although most of Gregory s major works (as well as the Libellus responsionum 37 ) receive a dedicated chapter, Müller largely ignores his famous Moralia in Iob, 38 which Gregory had initially delivered as a series of homi - lies during his stay in Constantinople. It is perhaps surprising that she chose to exclude the Moralia, both because it is widely regarded as his most sophisticated theological work and because Gregory has so much to say about leadership within the text. 39 Indeed, one could argue that a great portion of the treatise is an extended digression about the way in which spiritual directors are to provide effective leadership to those in their care. 40 There are a number of common pursuits between Müller s analysis of Gregory s concept of leadership and certain components of the present study. The reader will notice rather quickly, however, that there also exist significant differences in both method and interpretation. Whereas Mül - ler follows a strict chronological narrative that examines only the ideas of individual treatises as they fit into the sequence of Gregory s biography, I start with an assessment of his theological and pastoral ideals before beginning to interpret his actions in light of those commitments. This simple difference of approach leads to some surprising differences in

10 Gregory the Great conclusion, particularly as they relate to the uniqueness of Gregory s ascetic theology and the extent to which it informed his approach to certain pastoral and diplomatic decisions. Indeed, I will argue that an adequate understanding of Gregory s activity in Rome and his diplomacy abroad requires a thorough understanding of his theological commitments and that those commitments are best understood within an ascetic and pastoral framework. Through a careful reading of the Moralia and other theological texts, I argue that Gregory s ascetic theology predisposed him to approach leadership in general and spiritual direction more specifically from a particular (and largely unique) vantage point. I then interpret his theory of pastoral theology as well as his specific responses to the crises of his day from that assessment of his ascetic commitments. For example, whereas Müller s discussion of the Book of Pastoral Rule is situated at a precise moment in Gregory s biography and seeks a plausible interpretation of key words that he employs, my investigation of the Pastoral Rule is routinely supplemented with direct comparisons to the ascetic and pastoral commitments that Gregory first articulated in his musings on leadership in the Moralia. By interpreting the Pastoral Rule in light of the Moralia (and other treatises from his early tenure as bishop), I hope to offer a more holistic view of the connection between Gregory s ascetic theology and his strategies for spiritual leadership. What is more, whereas Müller s study never strays far from a traditional narrative history, the present investigation routinely incorporates discourse and other forms of literary analysis to demonstrate the sophistication of Gregory s thought and the subtle ways in which he was able to pursue multiple ends through various endeavors. 41 Gregory was a man compelled by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, he believed that the Christian confession of faith demanded humility not merely a rhetoric of humility or a nod to a passé pro - testation against self-interest, but an authentic, convicting, and lifelong commitment that could only be sustained through ascetic detachment. On the other hand, Gregory simultaneously felt a deep draw to the ser - vice of others. Capable men, in Gregory s eyes, do not forsake civic responsibility to wall themselves off in a monastery; no, the faithful must hear the call to serve. Whereas the sources for Gregory s impulse for Christian humility are rather easy to surmise it came largely from his

Introduction 11 ascetic reading the impulse to public service cannot be as easily isolated. As we will see, threads of theological and classical sources, as well as a variety of experiences, were woven into the tapestry of Gregory s thinking in the years prior to his election as Roman bishop. It is the thesis of this book that Gregory s ascetic and pastoral theology both informed and structured his administration of the Roman Church. To that end, I have divided the present volume into three parts so as to provide a more integrated assessment of Gregory s thought and life than currently exists. Part 1 examines the particular characteristics of his ascetic theology and then traces some of the consequences of his ascetic commitments to other aspects of his thought. It is remarkable, given the depth of Gregory s ascetic reflection and the degree to which it was unique among his contemporaries, that no extensive study of Greg - ory s ascetic theology exists. Part 2 explores the various dimensions of his pastoral theology, showing the extent to which it can be understood as the culmination of his ascetic vision and his sense of responsibility as a public servant. Part 3 then traces some of the most important diplomatic crises and administrative initiatives of his tenure as Roman bishop, including the expansion of Roman influence throughout Italy and Gaul and his various efforts to improve the quality of Christian life among the Germanic tribes. Throughout, I will resist the temptation to divide Greg - ory s world or his response to it between the customary binaries of East and West, Greek and Latin, or imperial and Germanic. In doing so I follow the lead of the recent collection of essays for Brill s A Companion to Gregory the Great, edited by Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo. 42 As we will see, Gregory s administration of the Roman Church, his diplomatic efforts among the northern tribes, and his negotiations with Eastern rulers were often directly integrated and always tangentially connected. It is hoped that the extensive foregrounding of the pontiff s theo - logical commitments will illuminate in new ways the means by which he responded to the world of his day.