Saint Gregory the Great, role model for popes

Synthèse :

Gregory was born in Rome around 540. He came from a wealthy patrician and Christian family: his father, Gordianus, served as a senator and for a time was the Prefect of the City of Rome; he also held the position of regionarius in the Church. His mother, Sylvia, and two of his aunts, Trasilla and Emiliana, were honoured as saints. Felix III, pope from 483 to 492, was his great-great-grandfather.

The Pragmatic Sanction, issued by Justinian at the request of Pope Vigilius in 554, at the end of the Gothic War, brought Italy back under the direct rule of the Empire and produced a cultural revival. It was in this context that the young Gregory grew up. Gregory of Tours, in his History of the Franks (X, 1), reports that as a student Gregory excelled in grammar, rhetoric, the sciences, literature, and law and that "in grammar, dialectic and rhetoric  (the trivium)... he was second to none".

Appointed prefect of Rome in 572, Gregory was highly skilled at managing property at the service of the state. It was also an opportunity for him to learn about the workings of public administration. He also reorganised the Church's properties in the Italian peninsula, which had been under threat since the beginning of the 5th century.

In 574-575, Gregory transformed his family home on Mount Caelius into a monastery and placed himself under the direction of the monk Valentinus, whom he appointed abbot. This was the seventh monastery he built and endowed: six others had already been established in Sicily thanks to the property inherited from his father. Gregory kept nothing for himself: the rest of his fortune was distributed to the poor (History of the Franks, ibid.). It is likely that Gregory chose the rule of Saint Benedict to govern the foundation: the Dialogues (III) show that he held it in high esteem.

Pope Pelagius II sent him to the imperial court in Constantinople as an apocrisiary (ambassador): there he explained to the emperor the dangers of the Lombard invasion of Italy. He remained in Constantinople with a few brothers from his monastery until 586. On his return to Rome, Pope Pelagius appointed him as deacon for the seventh region of Rome (The City was divided into seven districts): Gregory assisted the pontiff until the plague, which was about to strike the city hard, took Pelagius's life in 590. The clergy and people then acclaimed Gregory as the successor to Pope Pelagius. But Gregory did not want to leave the humility of the monastic state.

Events, according to Gregory of Tours, decided otherwise: "He made every effort to avoid this honour, lest, by acquiring such a dignity, he fall back into the vanities of the world, which he had rejected. He therefore wrote to the emperor Maurice, whose son he had baptised in the sacred font, imploring him and asking him with many prayers not to give the people their consent to elevate him to the honours of this rank; but Germanus, prefect of the city of Rome, anticipated Gregory's messenger and, having stopped him, tore up the letters, and sent the emperor the deed of appointment made by the people. Maurice, who loved the deacon Gregory, thanked God for this opportunity to elevate him to dignity, and sent his state letter of recommendation to have him crowned " (History of the Franks, ibid.).

In the meantime, Gregory tried to coordinate relief efforts after the Tiber flooded Rome, destroying the city's grain houses and killing animals. As deacon of one of Rome's ecclesiastical regions, he was responsible for the material aspects of worship in the basilica of the region to which he belonged, as well as raising money for the poor. Now, the seventh ecclesiastical region corresponded to the fourteenth civil region inherited from Augustus' administrative division of the city - the one located trans Tiberim, beyond the river. Judging that only prayer could overcome the disaster, Gregory organised religious processions in each of the regions to pray for God's mercy and help. For three days, choirs went through the streets every three hours, chanting "Kyrie eleison" ("Lord, have mercy!") and calling the people to prayer in the churches.

After six months' vacancy of the episcopal see, Gregory, who had sought to keep a low profile and avoid been elected, was nevertheless led to St Peter's Basilica to receive the consecration on 3 September 590.

The new pontiff set about an administrative reform that prioritised rural populations. He reorganised the assets of the churches of the West, in particular that of Saint Peter, made up of possessions scattered throughout Italy, which the Lombard occupation had dismembered and ruined. This rigorous management enabled him to help the sick and needy in Rome during the famines that raged from 589 to 594, then in 600 and again in 604: he distributed bread, wine and meat, housed refugees driven out by the Lombards, who were moving south, and bought back prisoners. After the Lombards invaded the peninsula, the bishop of Rome had usually assumed the duties of the emperor, since the latter, busy defending the borders of Syria and the Danube, sent very few troops and subsidies to help defend Italy.

Saint Gregory was also at the origin of a reform movement that bore his name and would be extended and imposed on Charlemagne's Christian Europe by the emperor's adviser and friend, the monk Alcuin of York. Gregory's aim was twofold: to bring the clergy back to regular morals, which would in turn encourage the reform of morals throughout society; and to propose standards in both the theological and liturgical fields.

In order to bring about a reform of morals, in 590 Gregory sent John IV, archbishop of Ravenna, a treatise describing the duties of the shepherd of souls: the Pastoral Rule. In four books, the Pope explained that the care of souls is the art of all arts, and that the shepherd of souls should prefer no other. Wasn't this the purpose of his vocation? He needed (and needs) three virtues: discretion, compassion and humility; in this way, everyone, shepherd and sheep alike, will reach the port of salvation that is Paradise. The Pope also enjoined preachers to adapt their sermons to the audience. The Pastoral Rule was translated into Greek by the Patriarch of Antioch at the request of Maurice, Byzantine emperor from 582 to 602. In the 8th century, Alcuin, head of the Palatine School of Aachen - the largest school in the empire - would present the work as a manual for bishops and preachers. Saint Augustine of Canterbury took it with him when Gregory sent him to evangelise England in 597.

Gregory also wrote the Dialogues in 593-594, which he initially intended for monks. However, everyone could benefit from them: the monastic life Gregory had experienced in the Abbey of Saint Andrew, on Mount Caelius in Rome, was for him the model on which clerics - laymen and kings alike - could base their own. In this work, Gregory condemns simony (the buying and selling of spiritual goods) and Nicolaism (the failure of religious and clerics to observe chastity). He refused to allow the laity to interfere in the government of the Church, and insisted on respect for the hierarchy. The human soul is immortal, and to see God after the death of the body is its good: so the Pope urged, through numerous examples of holy people, to work towards this goal on this earth. The Rule of Saint Benedict was a valuable aid in this since it teaches how to live uprightly. Saint Gregory's authority was significant in the subsequent spread of monasteries founded under this rule in the 7th century in Visigothic Spain, Frankish Gaul and Great Britain. The Dialogues were copied, read and applied throughout the Middle Ages.

Saint Gregory also published commentaries on Sacred Scripture. The Book of Job enabled him to present his readers with numerous moral developments. He began his Exposition on Job in Constantinople in 579, when he represented Popes Benedict I and Pelagius II at the imperial court. At the time, these were simply talks for the brothers in his community, written on the spot, and which he supplemented with parts that he dictated. These elements were taken up again and organised in Rome; the work was completed in 595. The Homilies on the Gospel contain the sermons he preached during the first two years of his pontificate (590-592). In addition to the moral teaching that was so dear to him, there was a mystical exposition of the sacred text, in a simple and popular form intended to be received by everyone. In the Homilies on Ezekiel, around 593, he extensively expounds the spiritual meaning of the sacred text: it is this latter meaning that takes precedence because, while it is verified because it is based on the literal meaning - and it is only on this condition that it is admissible - it points to Heaven. Is this not the intention of the sacred author? Other commentaries by the holy pope were written using the same method. Unfortunately, they have been lost.

His works are part of a Christian pedagogy that aimed to teach grammar, dialectics and rhetoric (the trivium of the liberal arts that teaches how to speak clearly, eloquently, and persuasively) by drawing its examples not from secular works, but from the texts of Sacred Scripture. In his Confessions (I, XIII, 20), Saint Augustine lamented the fact that he had learned syntax from the Latin poets of antiquity, whose stories were no more than fables, rather than from the truth of Revelation, which is the written word of God: the pontifical office that Saint Gregory received enabled him to lay the theoretical foundations of a teaching system that Alcuin would later establish in practice throughout the Carolingian Empire.

Finally, Gregory was also a liturgical reformer. His Book of the Sacraments organised the Sacramentary of Pope Gelasius, which set out the liturgy of the Mass and the sacraments, in a different way. The original version has been lost, and the text we know today is the one that Pope Adrian I sent to Charlemagne, around 785-786. The Gregorian Antiphonary,  a book of choral music to be sung antiphonally in services, is traditionally attributed to him. John the Deacon (d. c. 882) ascribed to Gregory I the compilation of the books of music used by the schola cantorum established at Rome, by that same pope. Gregorian chant, the central tradition of Western plainchant, while not invented by Gregory the Great, developed in the 9th and 10th centuries probably because of his vision and efforts in promoting this form of sacred singing used in liturgical worship.

His negotiations with the Arian Lombard king Agilulf were facilitated by the help of Agilulf's Catholic wife, Theodelinda of Bavaria. The latter gradually converted her husband to the faith of the Council of Nicaea (i.e. the Catholic faith), and eventually the king had his young son Adaloald baptised in 603. Some Lombard lords followed his example. Monza Cathedral preserves a cross made of rock crystal and gold that Gregory, then a deacon, presented to the queen.

In Gaul, Gregory deplored the practice of simony, which was undermining the dioceses. He first urged Brunehaut and her son Childebert, then Thierry II and Theudebert, her grandsons, to suppress these abuses in agreement with the bishops. He hoped that the Franks of Gaul would assist in evangelising the Germans, since the emperor Maurice had abandoned them to their paganism.

It was through English missionaries that Gregory succeeded - posthumously. The kingdom of the Angles was pagan, due to the Saxons who inhabited it, when the future Saint Augustine of Canterbury arrived there in 596 with forty monks from the monastery of Mount Caelius. They had been sent by Pope Gregory to restore Catholicism. Carried out with tact, prudence, selflessness, and a great supernatural spirit, the undertaking succeeded beyond all expectations , since 120 years later, under Pope Gregory II, Wynfrid of Wessex, better known as Saint Boniface of Mainz, set about evangelising Germania beyond the Rhine before leaving, once the dioceses had been founded, to proclaim Christ the Saviour in Friesland.

It is therefore not surprising that the first biographer of Saint Gregory, probably between 704 and 714, was an Englishman, a monk from the great abbey of Whitby in Northumbria, nor that Paul the Deacon, who wrote the second Life, was inspired by the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Saint Bede the Venerable, a monk from the abbey of Jarrow in Northumbria (near the present-day town of Sunderland). Alfred, king of Wessex (in the far south of present-day England) from 871 until his death and, from 886, "king of the Anglo-Saxons", who worked to revive teaching and education after the ruin left in his country by the Danish invasions, translated the Pastoral Rule into the vernacular (West Saxon) and commissioned Werferth, Bishop of Worcester, to translate the Dialogues. It is interesting to note the parallels between the cultural revival of this period in England and that sought by the Emperor Justinian after his reconquest of Italy from the Ostrogoths, and that Saint Gregory played a role in both.

Aller plus loin :

In the Eye of the Storm: A Biography of Gregory the Great by Sigrid Grabner,  Ignatius Press; First Edition (November 30, 2021)

En savoir plus :

• St. Gregory the Great: Biography, Selected Epistles and Teachings on the Pastoral Rule by Kyler M. Kauth, Independently published (January 21, 2024)

• St Gregory the Great: Dialogues (Fathers of the Church) by Gregory the Great (Author), Odo John Zimmerman (Translator), The Catholic University of America Press (July 13, 2002)

• The Book of Pastoral Rule: St. Gregory the Great (Popular Patristics Series) by Pope Gregory I (Author), George E. Demacopoulos (Translator),  St Vladimirs Seminary Pr (January 5, 2007)

• Saint Gregory the Great Collection: 3 Books, Aeterna Press (October 6, 2016) - 544 p

• The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary by Terrence G. Kardong OSB,  Liturgical Press (March 1, 2009)