ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
BOOK VI
.
CHAPTER VII.
GREGORY THE GREAT.
“King Authari dying: left no seed. Then all the Lombards,” says Paulus, “since
the queen Theudelinda pleased them well, decided that she should remain queen,
and that whosoever of the Lombards should be chosen by her as husband should
wear the royal crown. She, therefore, taking counsel with the wise men of the
realm, chose Agilulf, duke of Turin, for this double honour. For he was a
strong man and a warrior and well fitted by manly beauty, as well as by
courage, to grasp the helm of the kingdom.
“Now this Agilulf (who was also called Ago) was with the rest of the
Lombard nobles at Verona, when Theudelinda came thither amid the rejoicings of
the people to wed her first husband, Authari. And it so happened at that time
that the air was greatly disturbed, and that a certain tree in the royal garden
was struck by lightning, accompanied with a mighty thunder crash. Agilulf then,
having among his servants a certain youth with a spirit of divination, who, by
diabolical arts, could foretell things to come, was secretly told by him, “That
woman, who has just been wedded to our king, will after no long time be thy wife”.
Which, when Agilulf heard, he told the boy that he would cut off his head, if
he said anything more of that matter. “I may be killed,” quoth the boy, “but it is none the less certain that woman has come into this land to
be thy wife.”
“And now behold, after the death of Authari, Theudelinda ordered Agilulf
to come into her presence, and she herself hastened as far as the town of Laumellum to meet him. And when they had met, after some
words spoken, she ordered wine to be brought, and after she had first drunk of
it, she ordered the residue to be handed to Agilulf. Then he, receiving the cup
from the queen, reverently kissed her hand; but she with a blush and a smile
said, “He ought not to kiss my hand who has the right to kiss my lips”. So,
raising him up to her salute, she opened to him her intentions concerning her
re-marriage and the royal dignity.
“The wedding was celebrated amid great rejoicings. Agilulf, who was a
kinsman of the late King Authari, assumed the royal dignity in the beginning of
the month of November (590), and afterwards in the month of May, when all the
Lombards were gathered together into one place, he was solemnly raised to the
kingdom at Milan.”
So runs the Saga of Theudelinda and Agilulf in the pages of Paulus.
Modern criticism, which would rob history of every touch of poetry, suggests
doubts as to the accuracy of the story; but there seems no reason why it should
not be strictly true. Of course the tale as to the divining boy, coupled with
the suspicions as to the unnatural character of Authari’s death, might easily suggest that the second marriage of Theudelinda was the
climax of some dark domestic tragedy; but no contemporary writer makes this
obvious suggestion, while the high and noble character of the great queen
herself, and (as far as we can discern) of her second husband also, utterly
negatives any such suggestion.
Let us look a little more closely at this newly-wedded pair, who are to
play so important a part in the history of Lombard Italy. Agilulf, late duke of
Turin, now entering on a victorious career which is to last for a quarter of a
century, is of Thuringian extraction, though a relative of his predecessor,
Authari. He is sprung, therefore, from the great nation settled in the centre
of Germany, whose king, Hermanfrid, married Theodoric's niece, and whose state
was, about the middle of the sixth century, swallowed up by the all-devouring
Austrasian monarchy. He is a man capable in war and of manly beauty, the ideal
leader of a still semi-barbarous people.
Theudelinda, daughter of the king (or duke) of the Bavarians, is
descended on her father's side from the warlike nation of the Marcomanni, who
so often saw the legions of Imperial Rome flee before their onset, and who,
after long sojourn in the country which we now call Bohemia, entered, about the
year 500, that fair and wide land which now bears their name.
But, on the mother’s side, Theudelinda was descended from the old
Langobardic kings, for Walderada, wife of Garibald,
was daughter of Waccho, who so long ruled the nation in its Pannonian home.
Undoubtedly this alliance with the old family of the Lithingi,
together with the fame of Theudelinda's beauty and accomplishments, was a
powerful motive with Authari when he sought her hand in marriage, and the same
remembrance made the chiefs of the proud Lombard nation willing to leave the
decision as to the choice of their king in the hands of one who, though
foreign-born, was not a stranger in blood.
And in fact Theudelinda is a central figure in the history of the
Lombards. As I have said, she reached back through her mother's ancestry to the
old barbarous Langobardic kings. She virtually established a new, a Bavarian
dynasty in Italy, her descendants and those of her brother, the exiled Gundwald, occupying the Lombard throne with little
intermission to the fifth generation. And lastly, she was the main agent in
that great change of creed which at last brought the Lombard nation into line
with the other Teutonic monarchies of Western Europe, and made it
possible—though even then not easy—to establish a modus vivendi between the
Lombard kings and the successors of St. Peter.
Looking to her later history, we can hardly doubt that so fervent a
Catholic as Theudelinda sought to use her influence, even with her first
husband, to mitigate the bitterness of his Arianism. But the time was too short
for her to accomplish anything noteworthy, and so late as the spring of 590 we
find Authari putting forth an edict whereby he forbade the sons of the Lombards
to be baptized at Easter according to the Catholic rite. For this act of
oppression Pope Gregory saw a righteous retribution in the sudden death which
prevented Authari himself from witnessing the celebration of another Easter.
Over Agilulf, however, the man whom she had herself exalted to the throne,
Theudelinda exercised a more potent influence; and though it cannot be
positively stated that he ever formally renounced the creed of his forefathers,
he cultivated the friendship of the rulers of the Catholic Church, and seems to
have witnessed with complacency the baptism of Theudelinda's son by an adherent
of the Creed of Nicaea.
In this great change Theudelinda was powerfully aided by the man who was
placed in the chair of St. Peter, about the same time when Agilulf saluted his
queenly bride at Lomello; a man who more than all
other pontiffs who have received that title merited the epithet of the Great.
Gregory was born, about the year 540, of a noble Roman family, which had
already given one Pope to the Church, and many Senators to the State. His
father, Gordianus, a tall, grave- visaged Roman noble-man, who lived in a
stately palace on the Coelian Hill, held the post of Regionarius,
a civil office which seems to have represented the secular side of the duties
of the seven deacons, each one of whom administered the vast charities of the
Roman Church in one of the seven regions into which, for ecclesiastical
purposes, the City was divided.
Three of Gregory's aunts on one and the same day embraced with
enthusiasm the conventual life, now made illustrious by the fame of Benedict
and Scholastica: and though one of them, Gordiana,
fell away from that early fervour of faith, returned into the world, and even
married her steward, the other two, Aemiliana and Tharsilla,
persevered, and died in early life worn out by their pious austerities.
Gregory himself received a good education in Latin literature—the Greek
language he never mastered—and apparently had sufficient acquaintance with the
ordinary course of instruction pursued by the teachers of rhetoric to despise
and avoid their frivolous pedantry. We hear, however, very little about his
youth or early manhood, until we find him, about the year 573, filling the high
office of Prefect of the City.
The dignity of this office, which brought with it presidency of the
Senate, the right to wear a robe of Imperial purple and to be drawn through the
streets of Rome in a four-horsed chariot, has been described in an earlier
volume of this history. We have also, in following the fortunes of Sidonius and
Cassiodorus, had a glimpse of the anxious responsibilities, especially in
respect to the food-supplies of the City, which almost outweighed even its
dignity. It is probable that when Gregory held the office its duties were
lighter and its splendour less than half a century earlier. The Lombards had
now been for some years in Italy, and we can perceive that, in presence of this
continued danger, there was a tendency in the Imperial government to
circumscribe the powers of the merely civil magistrates, and to concentrate all
authority in the hands of the military chiefs. But there can be no doubt that
the Prefect of the City was still an important personage, and great therefore
must have been the marvelling of the populace in the Forum when, one day, the
news was spread abroad that the Prefect of the City was about to lay aside his
silken robe, decked with jewels, to don the coarse sackcloth of the monk, and
to minister as a pauper to his pauper brethren. This, however, was the truth.
Gregory laid down his high office (perhaps at the expiration of his its usual
term), founded and endowed six Benedictine convents in Sicily (then from
various causes the especial asylum and Paradise of the Church), and divided all
the residue of his property among the poor, except one possession, the
ancestral palace on the Coelian Mount. This abode he turned into a monastery,
which he dedicated to St. Andrew, and into this new monastery the descendant of
so many Senators entered in mean attire, not as its abbot, but as the humblest
of its brethren.
It was apparently in the year 575 that this great change occurred in the
life of Gregory. For the next three years he remained in the monastery,
enjoying its deep repose and practising its austerities. His food consisted
chiefly of uncooked vegetables, which his mother supplied to him on a silver
dish, sole relic of the former splendours of the Coelian palace. This silver
dish itself was at last given away to one who bore the appearance of a
shipwrecked mariner, and who came for three days in succession, asking for
alms. A student of these monastic biographies already knows the sequel. Long
afterwards the self-styled shipwrecked mariner appeared again as a glorious
angel, and told his benefactor that for him was reserved the honour of sitting
in the chair of St. Peter and guiding the Church of God.
Of more interest for us, sons of the Saxons, than the conventional
stories of the faintings, the fastings,
and the macerations of the body, which, notwithstanding the wise caution of St.
Benedict, still filled too large a place in the life of a young and earnest
monk, is the story (too well known to need more than an allusion here) of the
incident which first kindled Gregory's missionary zeal on behalf of the island
of Britain. It was during his residence as a monk in the monastery of St.
Andrew that Gregory took that memorable walk through the Forum, in the course
of which he saw, exposed for sale, the fair-haired and fresh-faced Yorkshire
lads, whose angelic beauty suggested to him the mission to the Angles and the
hope of rescuing from the wrath to come the heathen inhabitants of Deira, and
teaching the subjects of King Aelle to sing Alleluia.
Gregory himself sought and obtained from Pope Benedict I leave to
undertake this great mission, and had already accomplished three days' journey
towards Britain when, during the noonday halt, a grasshopper lighted on the
page of the scriptures which he was reading. His mind at this time, perhaps
throughout his life, seems to have been singularly attuned to that pleasant
figure of speech which has been so often an ‘infirmity of noble minds,' and
which grammarians term paronomasia. “Ecce Locusta!”, said he. “Does this mean
“Loco sta?” (“Abide still in the place where thou art?”).
Know ye, my companions, that we shall not be suffered to proceed on our journey.”
And even while they were talking, before the hot and tired mules were saddled
for the next stage of the journey, messengers arrived who told them that the
Pope had withdrawn his permission, and commanded Gregory to return. For the
people of Rome, who perhaps thought that Benedict had seen without regret the
departure of a man whose sanctity overshadowed his own, gathered round the
Papal palace, and shouted with terrible voices, “Ah, Apostolic one! what hast
thou done? Thou hast offended Peter; thou hast destroyed Rome in suffering
Gregory to depart.”
Thus then Gregory returned to the great City, but not to his convent:
for Pope Benedict, whose attention had perhaps, by this very event of his
attempted flight and recall, been attracted to the great power and Deacon.'
popularity of the former Prefect, now appointed him to the office of ‘Seventh
Deacon': thus associating him with his own cares and labours. The seven deacons
of Rome, as has been already said, superintended—each one with the assistance
of a Regionarius and his staff—the distribution of
the alms of the Church to the poorer classes of the seven regions of the city.
The cares of the public ‘annona,’ which had formerly
devolved on the Imperial officers, and pre-eminently on the Prefect of the
City, were thus, in great part, if not altogether, now discharged by the
officers of the Church. We are not able exactly to state what is meant by the
expression ‘Seventh Deacon,' but if, as seems probable, it means the
Archdeacon, that office was already looked upon as a frequent stepping-stone to
the Papacy.
Soon, apparently, after Benedict I had thus called Gregory to his side,
his own pontificate was ended by his death. The choice of a successor fell not,
as yet, upon Greg0ry but upon Pelagius II, some of whose letters against the
Lombards were quoted in the last chapter. It may have been partly some jealousy
of the popularity of Gregory, but more probably a praiseworthy desire to
employ his great practical ability on behalf of the Church in a sphere where
all that ability was sorely needed, that led the new Pope to send Gregory as
his Nuncio, or (as it was then called) his Apocrisiarius to the Imperial court
of Constantinople.
The years, probably not more than six in number, during which Gregory
remained at Constantinople were important both for the Empire and the Church.
He heard a new Emperor proclaimed, and saw a new Patriarch consecrated. On the
14th of August, 582, the over- generous Emperor Tiberius was succeeded by the unconciliatory Maurice; and four months previously the aged
Eutychius had been succeeded as bishop of Constantinople by the aspiring John
the Faster, a man with whom Gregory was one day to wage a long and difficult
spiritual combat. With Eutychius his personal relations appear to have been
friendly, but with him too he had a sharp discussion, turning on the mysterious
question of the resurrection-body of the saints. Eutychius maintained that this
body will be more subtle than aether, and too rare to be perceived by our
present bodily senses. Gregory met him with the words of Christ, “Handle Me and
see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have”. Eutychius
answered that this was a body specially assumed by the Saviour in order to
reassure the doubting hearts of his disciples; a suggestion which Gregory met
by some obvious arguments against such a Docetic resurrection. Eutychius
quoted, ‘Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God', and Gregory replied
by distinguishing between two different senses of the word ‘flesh' in the New
Testament. The debate grew warm, and, as such discussions are wont to do, left
neither party convinced by the arguments of the other. The good Tiberius
visited each of the disputants separately, and tried in vain to reconcile them;
but, convinced himself by the arguments of Gregory, committed the treatise of
Eutychius to the flames. Ere any open breach had been caused, both the
Patriarch and the Nuncio fell sick. Gregory, though his health had been
thoroughly broken by his monastic austerities, recovered of this malady, a
sharp attack of fever; but Eutychius, who had the burden of seventy years upon
him, died of his sickness. On his death-bed he touched his skin, and said to the
friends who surrounded him, “I acknowledge that in this flesh I shall see God”;
an allusion to the celebrated passage in Job, which was accepted by Gregory as
a recantation of his former errors.
It was on this same book of Job that Gregory, in the intervals of his
busy diplomatic life at Constantinople, found leisure to write the voluminous
commentary which goes by the name of the Magna Moralia,
that marvellous treatise the object of which was to show that ‘the book of Job
comprehended in itself all natural, all Christian theology, and all morals. It
was at once a true and wonderful history, an allegory containing in its secret
sense the whole theory of the Christian Church and Christian sacraments, and a
moral philosophy applicable to all mankind.
For our present purpose it is not the religious but the political
results of Gregory's residence at Constantinople which are most important.
Though I am not aware that he ever gave utterance to the feeling, we can well
believe that a Roman noble, one who had seen from his childhood the triumphal
arches, the fora and the palaces of Rome, glorious even in their desolation,
viewed with some impatience the pinchbeck splendours of the new Rome by the
Bosphorus, already, it is true, near three centuries old, but still marked with
somewhat of the ineffaceable brand of a parvenu among cities.
Gregory made some warm friendships with members of the Imperial family
and household. Constantina, the wife, and Theoctista, the sister, of the
Emperor; his imperial cousin Domitian, Metropolitan of Armenia; Theodore, the
Imperial physician; Narses, a general who not only bore the name, but in some
degree shared the fame, of the mightier Narses of a previous generation; these
and some others were admitted into the innermost circle of the friends of the
Roman Apocrisiarius. But with Maurice himself, though that Emperor paid him the
compliment of asking him to stand sponsor for his son, the infant Theodosius,
it would seem that his relations were not cordial. We can imagine that the
Emperor was worried by repeated applications from Rome for help in men and money
against the Lombards; applications with which he felt himself unable to comply.
We can imagine also that Gregory, in whose eyes ‘Roma caput mundi' was the one
absolutely priceless jewel of the Empire, was irritated by seeing the resources
of the State muddled away, as he deemed it, in somewhat inglorious campaigns
against the Persians and the Avars. With his undoubted genius for affairs, he
probably despised the wordy inefficiency of the Greek statesmen; with his old
Roman pride he scorned the Byzantine servility. Whatever the cause may have
been, and though undoubtedly his residence at Constantinople largely increased
his knowledge of the great game of politics, and was an invaluable preparation
for his own future political career, it seems clear that he left the Thracian
capital with no great love in his heart either for the city or the Caesar.
After he became Pope he was still outwardly the loyal subject of the Emperor,
but ‘the little rift within the lute' was already beginning to mar the harmony
of their relations. We seem able to trace here that little crack in the earth
which, two centuries later, was to widen into a mighty chasm, separating the
successor of St. Peter from the successor of Divus Augustus.
It was probably in 585 or 586 that Gregory returned to Rome, and
re-entered the monastery of St. Andrew; not now as a humble monk, but as head
of the community. We hear scarcely anything of his life during these years of
his second residence in the convent (585590), except that, during this time,
his pen seems to have been put at the service of the Pope, in the interminable
controversy with the bishops of Istria, about the condemnation of the Three
Chapters. We are also told that he inflicted signal punishment on one of his
monks who had sinned against the monastic rule that all things were to be in
common. This monk, Justus by name, had some knowledge of the art of a
physician, and had in that capacity tended Gregory himself in his frequent
illnesses. But he had, apparently by the exercise of his profession, earned
three golden solidi, which, against the rule of his order, he kept secreted in
his medicine chest. He was attacked by a mortal disease, and his brother Copiosus, a physician outside the monastery, who tended him
in his sickness, discovered his secret and reported it to the Abbot.
All beside Copiosus were ordered to absent
themselves from the sick man's cell. He died almost alone, with the brand of
ignominy upon him, in deep penitence for his sin. At his burial his body was
laid in unhallowed earth, and a monk threw the three solidi after him into his
grave, crying with a loud voice, ‘Thy money perish with thee'. But after thirty
days the heart of Abbot Gregory relented, and he ordered mass to be said
without intermission during thirty days more for the soul of Justus, who at the
end of the appointed time appeared in a dream to Copiosus,
his countenance radiant with joy, and assured him that hell’s torment was ended
and that he was now received into the communion of the blessed.
In such cares as these passed away the years of Gregory's abbotship. In
589 came the terrible inundations, at the beginning of 590 the more terrible
pestilence which ravaged Italy. On the eighth of February Pope Pelagius II
died; the clergy and people of Rome flocked to the gate of the monastery of St.
Andrew and insisted that Gregory should fill the vacant chair.
He resisted and wrote a letter to the Emperor Maurice, imploring him to
withhold that Imperial assent which in those days was deemed necessary ere the
Pope elected by the people and clergy could receive consecration. But the
Prefect of the City, who was himself, according to one account, a brother of
the Pontiff elect sent a swift messenger, who overtook the bearer of Gregory’s
letter, suppressed that document, and substituted for it the earnest petition
of the people that Gregory should be made Pope.
The answer from the Imperial court was long in arriving, and meanwhile
the pestilence raged fearfully in the City. The eyes of all the citizens were
turned towards the Abbot of St. Andrew's, who came forth from his seclusion,
and, like another John the Baptist, preached a sermon of repentance and
conversion to the people.
‘The judgments of God are upon us, dearest on the brethren. Let grief
and fear open the path of pestilence. Our hearts, for it is indeed with us as
the prophet Jeremiah said of old, “The sword reacheth unto the very soul.” Lo! the whole people is smitten with the sword of the
divine anger and a sudden mortality lays waste the city. The languor of disease
does not precede death, for death itself cuts short all its lingering pains.
Each one who is struck down is hurried off before he has had time to turn to repentance.
The dwellers in the city are not cut off one by one, but in whole companies do
they hurry to the grave. The houses are left empty: parents have to behold the
funerals of their sons, and their own heirs die before them.
“Let us then turn to Him who hath said that He willeth not the death of a sinner. Let us imitate the three days' penitence of the men
of Nineveh and beseech our merciful God to turn away His anger from us.
Therefore, dearest brethren, let us come, with contrite hearts and pure hands
and minds prepared for tears, to the Sevenfold Litany, to which I now invite
you, and the celebration of which will begin at dawn on the fourth day of the
week, according to the following order.”
Then followed the programme of the great procession, which gives us an
interesting glimpse of the ‘regions’ and churches of Rome at the close of the
sixth century:—
(1) In the church
of SS. Cosmas and Damian (in the Roman Forum) were to assemble the great body
of the clergy, with the priests of the sixth region.
(2) The abbots
and monks of Rome with the priests of the fourth region, in the church of SS.
Gervasius and Protasius, on the southern slope of the Quirinal.
(3) The abbesses
and their nuns with the priests of the first region, in the church of SS.
Marcellinus and Peter, two miles out of Rome on the eastward leading Via Labicana.
(4) All the
children, with the priests of the second region, in the church of the martyrs
John and Paul, on the Coelian Hill, very near to Gregory's own monastery.
(5) All the
laymen, with the priests of the seventh region, in the church of the
Protomartyr Stephen, that quaint round building which, with its strange and
ghastly modem frescoes representing the torments of the martyrs, still stands,
a little to the west of the Lateran.
(6) All the
widows, with the priests of the fifth region, in the church of St. Euphemia.
(7) All the
married women, with the priests of the third region, in the church of the holy
martyr Clement, that church between the Colosseum and the Lateran, the
successive stages of whose development have been recently laid bare and form
one of the most interesting monuments of Christian antiquity in Rome.
From their several places of assembly these seven troops of suppliants
were to march in solemn procession, with prayers and tears, to the great
basilica on the Esquiline, now known as S. Maria Maggiore, and there for three
days in succession (Wednesday to Friday) were to implore the pardon of the Lord
for the sins of the people.
The assembling took place at dawn, the march through the streets at the
third hour of the day, and all as they went sang loud the great penitential
hymn Kyrie Eleison. A deacon of Tours, who was present at the ceremony,
informed his bishop (the chronicler) that in one hour, while the procession was
moving through the streets, eighty men fell to the earth and gave up the ghost;
a proof of the severity of the pestilence, but also an event which raises a
doubt whether the great concourse, and the excitement of soul caused by the
Sevenfold Litany, were the best means of staying its ravages.
With this solemn act of intercession ordered by the chosen of the
people, the imagination of much later ages coupled a beautiful legend, which
changed the name of one of the best- known monuments of ancient Rome. In the
course of the three days' procession, so it was said, Gregory was about to
march with the seven groups of chanting penitents over the bridge of Hadrian,
in order to worship at the tomb of St. Peter, when, lifting up his eyes, he saw
standing on the top of the mighty Mausoleum of Hadrian the Archangel Michael
with a flaming sword, which was in the act of returning to its sheath; thereby
showing that the penitential Litany was accepted in Heaven, and that the
pestilence was about to cease.
From this story the Mausoleum received the name of the Angel’s Castle,
which it bore already in the tenth century. In later days Pope Benedict XIV
fixed the legend for ever in the memories of all pilgrims to Rome, by erecting
that statue of St. Michael which has now stood for a century and a half on the
summit of The Castle of Sant Angelo.
It seems that seven months elapsed before the Imperial assent to the
consecration of the new Pope arrived in Rome. Possibly the wretched state of
the City and 0f Italy, distracted both by pestilence and by the ravages of the
Lombards, caused delays to the messengers, alike in going and returning. But
the assent came at length; probably about the end of August: and Gregory began
to prepare for flight, in order to avert the dreaded honour. Legend said that
he was carried forth from one of the City gates in a basket of merchandise, and
that he hid himself in some solitude of the Campagna, but that his hiding-
place was revealed by a light from heaven. His contemporary and namesake,
Gregory of Tours, knows nothing of all this. He says simply—and this is no doubt
the true account of the matter—that “while he was preparing for flight and
concealment, he was taken prisoner, dragged to the basilica of St. Peter, and
having there been consecrated to the Pontifical office, was given as a Pope to
the City.”
The letters of Gregory I, for some time after his elevation to the
Papacy, are full of lamentations over this disastrous change in his life. ‘It
is an old and terribly shaken ship,' he writes to the Patriarch of
Constantinople, ‘the command whereof has been entrusted to my weak and unworthy
hands. At every seam the waves are entering, and the rotten planks, shaken by
daily and fierce tempests, creak out the word “shipwreck.” “I pray you, in the
Almighty’s name, stretch out the hand of your prayers to help me.”
To Theoctista, sister of the Emperor, he writes: “Under the colourable
pretext of bishopric, I am in truth brought back into secular life; for in this
office I am in bondage to so many worldly cares, that in no part of my career
as a layman can I remember to have been in equal slavery. I have lost the deep
joys of my old quietness, and while I seem to have risen into a higher station,
internally I am in a state of collapse. Thus must I bewail that I am driven far
from the face of my Creator. I was endeavouring each day to put myself outside
of the world, outside of the flesh, to banish all the phantasms of the body
from the eyes of the mind, and to look with disembodied gaze on the joys of
heaven. Not in words only, but in my inmost soul did I pant for the countenance
of God, saying with the Psalmist, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek”. Naught
desiring in this world, naught fearing, I seemed to myself to stand, as it
were, at the summit of all things, so that I could almost believe that in me
was fulfilled the Lord's promise to His prophet, “I will cause thee to ride
upon the high places of the earth”. Then suddenly, being caught by the
whirlwind of temptation, I have been dashed down from this high pinnacle, and
plunged into all sorts of fears and terrors, since, though I have no fear for
myself, for those committed to my charge I do greatly tremble.”
Then the Pope goes on, in that vein of mystical commentary which was the
fashion of the age, to explain that a contemplative life was the Rachel of his
tenderest affections, barren, it might be, of visible result, but lovely beyond
telling in his eyes. Homely, blear-eyed Leah, the life of activity and affairs,
was doubtless more fruitful in offspring, but she possessed none of his love.
Yet now that the veil of night was removed, it was to this bride, unlovely and
unloved, that he found himself hopelessly united.
After many more reflections of this kind, he ends a long and interesting
letter with a grotesque piece of self-disparagement. “Behold! the most serene
Emperor has ordered an ape to become a lion. A lion indeed it may be called at
the Imperial command, but a lion it cannot become.”
In reading these many similar utterances of the greatest Pope who ever
sat in the chair of St. Peter, we are forced to ask ourselves, ‘Is this
passionate reiteration of the formula Nolo episcopari quite sincere? Gregory could not but know
and feel that he had capacities for the great office of the Popedom, such as no
other man then living upon the earth possessed. He belonged to the Imperial
race of Rome, and showed forth its noblest qualities, as scarce any Roman had
done since Trajan died. Is it possible that he was wholly indifferent to the
master passion of his countrymen, Ambition? Must we not rather believe that
even in the days of his Prefecture he had perceived that the office of Pope was
the only one which brought with it real power, or which was worthy of a Roman's
acceptance? And the successive stages of ‘the Great Renunciation' which
followed, the laying aside of the purple robe, the conversion of the paternal
palace into a monastery, the fastings, the
austerities, the self-humiliations,—were they not all parts of a subtle and unavowed canvass for that splendid prize?
As in the cases of Mohammed, of Savonarola, and of Cromwell, this easy
hypothesis of conscious hypocrisy seems to me to be a quite inadequate solution
of the problem. Rather is the solution to be found in a frank recognition of
that dual nature which many men who have played a great part on the stage of
the world have evidently possessed. There were two men, not one, within the
visible enwrapping of this great Aristocrat Bishop. One man, seeing keenly the
follies and vanities of the world, longing after the joys of Heaven, disliking
the petty routine of daily business, and cherishing ardent aspirations after
that clear vision of the Most High which was thought to be the peculiar guerdon
of a life of contemplation :—this man was happy in the cloisters of the
Coelian, and had no desire to quit their grateful shade. Another man,
inhabiting the same fleshly tabernacle, and thinking through the same brain,
saw, as has been said, that none of the offices of the effete and decaying
Empire, neither Exarchate, Prefecture, nor Duchy, was, for real power over the
wills and inclinations of men, to be compared with the Bishopric of Rome. He
saw that the holder of this office had an opportunity of conferring
incalculable benefits on powerful races and vast kingdoms of men, and of
winning for the half-ruined city by the Tiber a wider and more enduring empire
than had been swayed by Titus or by Aurelius. This man, full of a noble
ambition, longed to be Pope, and was, perhaps, dimly conscious that the
austerities, the generosities, the humiliations of his other self were all
bringing him nearer to that splendid goal. But when the goal was reached,
satiety began to reign in his soul, and to poison all the joys of possession.
Though the strong and vigorous intellect at once set itself to grapple with the
difficulties of the situation and overcame them with brilliant success, the
body, enfeebled by monastic austerities and tortured by gout, longed for the
ordered life and the inviolable repose of the cloister; and the soul, weary of
the sordid cares of the administration of the vast Papal Patrimony, yearned for
the mystic joys and the serene contemplative happiness which had once been
hers. In short, to use his own metaphor, the man was truly wedded to two wives.
The Rachel of ascetic holiness was his best beloved, but the Leah of practical
beneficence had also a share of his affections, and it was through her progeny,
through such facts as the conversion of England, the remodelling of the
liturgy, the spiritual conquest of the Lombards, that Gregory most powerfully
influenced the world.
The chief monument of Gregory's life of practical statesmanship is the
Epistles, composed by him during the fourteen years of his pontificate,
arranged in fourteen books corresponding to those years, and filling nearly 500
closely printed pages. Though the writer despised all rhetorical artifices, and
even allowed himself to speak disrespectfully of the rules of the grammarians,
he wrote in a vigorous style, and his generally correct, if not polished,
Latinity was utterly unlike the grammatical chaos which we find in the writings
of his namesake of Tours. It is probably the very fact that he did not care to
write rhetorically, which makes his letters so much pleasanter reading than the prolixities of Cassiodorus or the pompous obscurities
of Ennodius. He does not, like the scholars of the Renaissance period, labour
to give all his sentences a hexameter ending, but they are often instinct with
manly and simple eloquence. Thus there is in them no affected imitation of
Cicero, but often a true echo of Caesar.
These fourteen books of the Epistles of Gregory are a vast quarry, out
of which the student of early mediaeval history may hew almost endless
material. While the letters of the heathen Prefect, Symmachus, give us little
beside hollow compliments and literary inanities, almost every letter of
Gregory affords some information as to the politics, the morals, or the
economics of his age. In this respect it would be hardly too much to say that Gregorii Epistolae are only surpassed, and not far surpassed, by the two great Codes of Theodosius
and Justinian. It is of course impossible in a single chapter of this book to
give any proper idea of a correspondence, for an adequate description of which
two volumes like the present would not more than suffice; but a few samples
culled almost at random throughout the mighty collection may give some faint
idea of the world-wide activity of the Second Founder of the Papacy.
If not the most anxious of the new Pope's duties, of one of the most
troublesome to a man who had any longings after contemplative repose, must have
been the care of the vast estates which went by the name of the Patrimony of
St. Peter. These estates, the proofs of the liberality of the faithful during
four or five centuries, had probably been much increased during the last two
hundred years by the financial burdens and military perils to which the
landowners in outlying districts found themselves exposed. When the demands of
the Imperial tax-gatherer were trenching more and more closely on the narrow
margin of profit left to the owner of the soil; when the barbarian henchmen of
Alaric or Alboin were burning the villas and liberating the slaves in Picenum or Campania, the pleasures of possession began to
be outweighed by its anxieties, and the devout landowner felt a strong
inducement to make over his threatened domains to the Church and to save his
soul by retirement into a monastery, or his body by flight to Constantinople.
Notwithstanding all the troubles of the times, the Church had armour of defence
both against the tax-gatherer and the barbarian, such as no lay proprietor
possessed, and we may well believe that of all the real estate thus surrendered
to the Bishops of Rome, they succeeded in retaining by far the largest portion.
The Patrimony of St. Peter (we may well marvel what would have been the
feelings of the simple- hearted fisherman of Bethsaida, could he have surveyed
the lordly lands which were said to be his inheritance) was largest and richest
in the island of Sicily; but it also embraced considerable estates in Rome and
its environs, in the country of the Sabines, in Picenum,
in the neighbourhood of Ravenna, in Campania, Apulia and Bruttii,
in Gaul and Illyricum, and in the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. The precise extent
of all these widely scattered possessions can only be approximately stated, but
a careful German enquirer1 estimates it at 1800 square miles. These wide
domains, it must be remembered, were not ruled, but owned, as an English
nobleman owns his estate, and the revenue accruing therefrom is calculated at
£300,000 a year.
The care of this magnificent property, though administered by able and
generally by conscientious stewards, was evidently a heavy burden on the
shoulders of an ascetic Pope, to whom great revenues and large estates could,
in themselves, bring no pleasure.
In the first eighteen months of his pontificate Gregory wrote fourteen
letters (some of them extremely long ones, touching on a great variety of
topics) to the subdeacon Peter, the steward whom he had set over the Apostolic
Patrimony in Sicily, in succession, but not in immediate succession, to a
layman, Antoninus the defensor. Antoninus, it
seems, had in several instances pushed the claims of the Roman Church both
against its neighbours and its serfs (coloni)
beyond what justice and humanity warranted. The new Pope shows in his letters a
praiseworthy anxiety that all these wrongs shall be redressed by his
representative. Peter, however, as far as we can judge from the letters
addressed to him, though an honest man and a personal friend of Gregory's,
seems to have been somewhat weak, forgetful and procrastinating. A few passages
selected from the fourteen letters just mentioned will help the reader to
imagine their general tenour.
“It has come to my ears that during the past ten years, from the times
of Antoninus the defensor, many persons have
suffered violence and wrong at the hands of the Roman Church, and that men
openly complain that their borders have been invaded, their slaves enticed
away, their moveable property taken from them by the strong hand with no
pretence of judicial process. Pray, in all these things, let your Experience
exercise the most strenuous vigilance, and let this letter be your warrant for
the restoration of whatever you may find to have been violently taken away or
wrongfully detained in the Church's name during these ten years: that he who
has suffered wrong may not be forced to come to us, undertaking the toil of so
long a journey, when, after all, the truth of his story cannot be so well
tested here as there. Considering, then, the awfulness of the coming Judgment,
restore all things that have been sinfully taken away, being assured that you
will bring me in a more profitable return if you accumulate the reward of a
good conscience than if you bring back great riches.
“We are informed also that many complain of the loss of slaves, saying
that any runaway slave who professes himself to be under ecclesiastical law is
at once claimed and kept by the Church’s bailiffs (rectores),
who, without any judicial decision in their favour, back up the slave's
assertions by violence. All this displeases me as much as it is abhorrent to
the spirit of justice and truth. Wherefore I desire that your Experience should
shake off all sloth and correct all misdeeds of this kind which you may
discover. Let any slaves now in the Church's power, who were taken away without
a judge's order, be restored before any proceedings are taken; and if any such
do lawfully belong to the Holy Church, let the right to them be asserted
against their alleged owners in a regular and orderly action.
“Amend all these abuses with firmness, for you will thus approve
yourself a true soldier of the blessed Apostle Peter, if in causes where he is
concerned, you do anxiously maintain truth, without suspicion of partiality
even towards Peter himself. But if, on the other hand, you see some piece of
property which you think justly belongs to the Church, beware of defending our
right even to this with the strong hand; especially since we have published a
decree, forbidding, under the penalty of our anathema, the affixing of notices of
claim to any property, either urban or rural, by our Church. Whatever
reasonably belongs to the poor ought to be defended by reason, lest otherwise
our unrighteous action in a good cause should make even our just claims seem
unjust in the sight of Almighty God. May the noble laymen and the glorious
Praetor love you for your humility and not abhor you for your pride. So act
that your humility may not make you slack, nor your authority rigid; but that
the righteousness of your purpose may give a seasoning to your humility, and
your humility may impart mildness even to your righteousness.”
In another letter, Gregory says that he has been informed that the monks
of a city in the south of Italy dispersed by barbaric violence (probably some
raid made by the Lombards of the Duchy of Benevento), are wandering over Sicily
without a ruler, without any care as to the health of their souls, without the
habit of their order. These vagabond monks are all to be collected into the
monastery of St. Theodore at Messina, and there placed under proper discipline.
In another long and extremely interesting, but difficult letter, Gregory
describes the various unjust exactions to which the peasants on the farms of
the Sicilian Patrimony had been subjected, and orders the immediate reformation
of these abuses. These peasants (called rustici Ecdesiae) had to pay a corn-rent to the Church,
that is the equivalent in golden solidi of a certain number of pecks of corn;
and Gregory enjoins that they shall not have the value of the peck oppressively
beaten down in times of plenty. Thus, if there were a bountiful harvest, the
Church under Gregory's liberal management of her estates would leave to her
tenants the whole of the profit which the favourable year had brought them. It
would certainly seem, however, as if an unvarying price fixed for the modius must
have borne hardly upon the rustic in years of scarcity.
The iniquitous oppressions of the farmers of the ecclesiastical revenue,
some of whom insisted on the peasants supplying 25 sextarii to the modius instead of the normal 16, were rigorously suppressed, a margin of
2 sextarii only (or 18 to the modius) being left to
allow for shrinkage or short measurement. The unjust weights which, according
to the report of a previous administrator, were found to be in use in some
parts of the Patrimony, were to be at once broken, and new and righteous
weights made in their stead. To prevent the recurrence of any similar exactions
after Pope Gregory's death, each tenant was to receive a document called his libellus securitatis, in which
the exact sum that might be legally claimed from him was to be clearly set
forth.
Besides these and many other ordinances of a general kind for the
regulation of the estate, a great number of cases of individual hardship were
dealt with in this letter, which gave orders for their relief.
Both Antoninus the defensor, and a
certain Theodosius (who was perhaps a subordinate in the Patrimonial
Estate-office), seem to have died in debt to the Church. The legacies left by
Antoninus were to be in part discharged by Peter out of his sequestered
property. From the goods of Theodosius a return was to be made to the
unfortunate peasants who had been forced to pay their taxes to the Imperial
government twice over, Theodosius having collected the money from them and then
made default in his payments to the treasury. “If, after repayment of the sum
required for this purpose, amounting to 507 solidi, there are still left, as
you reckon, 40 solidi, they may be handed over to the daughter of Theodosius,
that she may redeem her property which is in pawn. And we wish also that her
father’s drinking-cup be restored to her.”
Almost every word of this long and carefully-written letter, of some
forty paragraphs, is in favour of a wise and generous liberality towards the
tenants, the servants and the debtors of St. Peter. Yet that the Pope could, on
occasion, use sharpness is clearly seen, not only by the command, twice or
thrice repeated, “Lay aside all sluggishness,” and fulfil this or that
commission, but also by the following caustic Paragraph about an order which
Gregory had given with reference to a member of his own family, and which Peter
had apparently forgotten
“We must express our great thanks to your Anxiety, since I desired, in
respect to my brother's affairs, that you should retransmit his money [hither],
which injunction you have treated with as complete forgetfulness as if it had
proceeded from the meanest of your slaves. Now then, let—I will not say your
Experience, but—your Negligence set about obeying my commands. Anything of his
which you may find to have been lodged with Antoninus, retransmit [hither] with
all speed.”
At last the long letter, the fruit probably of many days of toil, ends
thus:
“Carefully read over all these commands and lay aside that too fondly
indulged habit of negligence. Cause my writings which I have addressed to the
rustics to be read to them on every farm; that they may know how they ought to
defend themselves by our authority against the violence of their superiors, and
let authentic copies be given to every one of them. See that you keep all these
precepts in their integrity, for I, who write them for the preservation of
justice, am thereby freed from responsibility, and you, if you neglect my
words, remain bound. Consider the terrible Judge who is coming, and let that
consideration cause you to tremble now before His Advent, lest you should then
fear, and have no plea to urge in your behalf, when before His presence Heaven
and Earth shall tremble. You have heard what I wish: see that you perform it.”
In other letters of this series Gregory gives orders that the son of a
certain Godischalcus being blind and poor, shall
receive annually 24 pecks of wheat, 12 pecks of beans, and 20 decimatae (?) of wine, at the charge of the Patrimony:
while Pastor, a man apparently of somewhat higher rank, formerly on the staff
of the Magister Militum, who is also afflicted with
blindness, having a wife and two servants, is to receive annually 300 pecks of
wheat and 300 of beans out of the same revenues.
Joanna, the wife of Cyriacus, a woman who was converted from Judaism to
Christianity after her betrothal, has been subjected to some annoyance in the
courts of law, probably by her Jewish relatives, from whom she is to be
protected in future. The possessions of the Church of Tauromenium (beautiful Taormina), which border on the Patrimony of St. Peter, are said to
have been unjustly invaded by the bailiffs of the Roman Church, and it is
ordered that these wrongs shall be redressed.
The correspondence closes with another long letter, the receipt of
which, we may be sure, caused some bitter heart-stabs to the procrastinating
sub-deacon. After directing that the Jewish tenants on the Church's farms, if
they are willing to become Christians, shall receive some mitigation of their
pecuniary burdens, the Pope passes on to ordinary landlord's business: “Let the
cows that are too old to calve, and the bulls which appear to be useless, be
sold, so that at least their price may serve some good purpose. I wish all
those herds of horses which we keep in very useless style, to be disposed of,
and only 400 of the younger mares to be kept for breeding. Of these, one is to
be sent to the tenant of each farm, who is each year to make some return on its
behalf, for it is a very hard thing that we should be paying 60 solidi a year
to our stud-grooms, and not receiving 60 denarii from our stud.”
Towards the end of the letter, the Pope says, “You have moreover sent us
one wretched horse and five good asses. The horse I cannot ride, because it is
a wretch, nor the asses, good as they are, because they are asses. I pray you,
if you are disposed to serve me, to bring with you something worthy of my
acceptance.”
The reason why the Pope tells Peter to bring the horse with him is
because he has already, in an earlier part of the letter, summoned him to Rome.
Gregory himself is sick, but he desires the sub-deacon to come to him with all
speed before St. Cyprian's day, that he may escape the equinoctial storms. He
wishes to consult with Peter whether it will be better that he should return to
Sicily or that some one else shall be appointed in his place. Several sentences
reveal the Pontiff's deep dissatisfaction with his subordinate.
“If you have an atom of sense, you will be able to arrange this matter
so as to perform my will without displeasing the bishop of Syracuse. I wrote to
you to pay the legacies of Antoninus. I cannot think why your Experience has
delayed the execution of my orders. I desire you to attend to these payments at
once, that you may not, when you come to visit me, leave behind you the groans
of the poor.”
“Abbot Martinianus tells me that the storehous1 in the Praetoritan monastery is not yet half finished. Wherefore,
what can I do but praise the zeal of your Experience? Even now, being thus
warned, rouse yourself and show what you can do towards the construction of
that monastery.”
“I am further informed that you have ascertained that some [moveable]
things and many farms [in our possession] belong of right to other owners, but
that, owing to the entreaties of certain persons or your fear of them, you
hesitate to restore these things to their lawful owners. But if you were truly
a Christian, you would fear the judgment of God more than the voices of men.
Give your mind to this business, about which I have incessantly warned you. If
you fail to fulfil it, my words will rise up as witnesses against you at the
last day.”
Such being the mood of mind to which eighteen months of Peter's
administration had brought his master, it is not surprising that his official
career soon came to an end. The letter from which these extracts have been
taken, virtually contained his dismissal, and we have no more epistles of
Gregory addressed to Peter the sub-deacon of Sicily.
Of course, not only the receipt, but also the expenditure, of the large
income derived from the Papal Patrimony imposed severe labour on so
conscientious a steward of his wealth as Pope Gregory. Hints of his
discriminating liberality to the poor have reached us in the few letters
already quoted. The description of his public benefactions given by Joannes Diaconus, though written nearly three centuries after his
death, seems vouched for in a way that entitles it to credit:—
“He turned into money the revenues of all the patrimonia and farms, according to the ledger of [Pope] Gelasius, of whom he seems to have
been a most studious follower: and then, having collected all the officials of
the Church, the palace, the monasteries, the lesser churches, the cemeteries,
the deaconriess, the reception-houses for strangers,
in the city and suburbs, he decided from the ledger (in accordance with which,
distribution is still made) how many solidi, out of the above-named receipts in
gold and silver, should be given to each person four times in the year, namely,
at Easter, on the birthday of the Apostles, on the birthday of St. Andrew, and
his own birthday. At the first dawn of the day of the Lord's resurrection, in
the basilica of Pope Vigilius, near to which he dwelt, he gave to all bishops,
presbyters, deacons, and other dignitaries of the Church, an aureus a-piece,
after bestowing on them the kiss of peace.
“On the first day of each week, he distributed to the poor generally,
the same kinds of produce which were collected from the rents. Thus corn in its
season, and in their several seasons, wine, cheese, pulse, bacon or other
wholesome flesh, fish and oil, were most discreetly distributed by that father
of the family of God. But pigments and other delicate articles of commerce were
courteously offered by him to the nobles of the City, so that the Church came
to be regarded as the warehouse of the whole community.
“To three thousand maids of God (whom the Greeks call monastriae) he gave 15 lbs. of gold for bed-furniture1 and
bestowed upon them for their daily stipends 80 lbs. annually.'
“Moreover, every day, by means of charioteers appointed to the office,
he sent out cooked rations to all the sick and infirm poor throughout the
streets and lanes of the City. To those who had seen better days he would send
a dish from his own table, to be delivered at their doors with his Apostolic
blessing.”
The biographer then goes on to tell us of Gregory’s grief on learning
that a poor man in one of the common lodging-houses of Rome had died of hunger.
He blamed himself as if he had killed the man with his own hands, and for some
days he would not permit himself to celebrate mass.
“There exists to this day,” Joannes continues, “in the most holy
muniment room of the Lateran Palace, a very great paper volume, compiled in his
times, wherein the circumstances of all persons of either sex, of all ages and
professions, whether at Rome or in the suburbs, in the neighbouring towns, or even
in the far-off cities of the coast, are described in detail, with their names,
ages, and the remunerationes which they
received.”
Certainly in all these philanthropic engagements there was abundance of
work, abundance of drudging and wearisome routine, to fill up the hours of a
studious and meditative Pope. Leah's progeny came with quick-thronging steps,
with loud and importunate voices, to call the Paterfamilias Dei away from
communion with the Rachel in whom his soul delighted.
In addition to the cares of the largest landowner in Italy and the
greatest almsgiver in Rome, there were those cares which came upon Gregory as
the Metropolitan Bishop of the West. In reading his correspondence we realize
how thoroughly monarchical the constitution of the great Latin Patriarchate had
now become. For generations the tendency of events had been in this direction,
and when a man of Gregory's saintly character and intellectual force entered
the Lateran Palace, the transformation was complete. The chair of St. Peter was
now indeed a throne. Though desirous to preserve the dignity of his brother
bishops unimpaired, Gregory would assert, upon occasion, almost with severity,
the right of the Bishop of Rome to the unquestioning obedience of all the
bishops of the West, and even to receive appeals from the East and to reverse
the judgments of the Patriarch of Constantinople himself. So wide a spiritual
Empire necessarily brought a vast accession of care to him who ruled it,
especially when the ruler was such a man as Gregory, in Africa.
In Africa he organized a system of firm and quiet ecclesiastical
pressure, which, with the frequently invoked assistance of the secular arm, at
length extinguished the schism of the Donatists—a schism which had lasted for
three centuries and which the Catholic Church in Africa vanquished, only just
in time to enjoy the honours of victory before she and her rivals were swept
together into destruction by the followers of Mohammed.
In Sardinia Gregory stirred up the clergy to undertake the conversion of
the idolatrous Barbaricini, and set himself to
control the vagaries of the bishop of Cagliari, the white-haired Januarius, who
crowned the eccentricities of a lifetime by going forth into his neighbours'
corn-fields, and ploughing them on the Lord's Day, both before and immediately
after his celebration of mass.
In France, by his correspondence with his somewhat in lethargic vicar,
Vergilius, bishop of Arles, he laboured, with more zeal than success, to
correct that barbarization of the Gallican Church, of which the pages of
‘Gregory of Tours' furnish so terrible a picture, to uproot the simony which
was destroying the Church's life, to induce the bishops to resume their almost
abandoned custom of assembling in national and provincial councils for the
reform of abuses, and to combat the disorders which were making the Frankish
monastery, and yet more the Frankish nunnery, a scandal to Christendom.
With Visigothic Spain, which (as has been related), after nearly two
centuries of uncompromising Arianism, had entered the Catholic fold three years
before Gregory's elevation to the Papacy, the correspondence is somewhat less
active than might have been expected, from the splendour of such a conquest and
from the ties of old friendship which bound the Pope to the most conspicuous
actor in the drama, Leander the Metropolitan of Seville. In a letter, written
just after his consecration, Gregory, while expressing his joy at the
conversion of his ‘most glorious son Recared' to the Catholic faith, entreats
Leander to warn his nephew against the snares of the devil, which, in his case,
will probably take the shape of temptations to spiritual pride. The correspondence
then seems to languish. Perhaps Recared expected a more enthusiastic welcome
from the pontiff. Perhaps he was engaged in suppressing some revolt of the
discontented Arians. At any rate the first letter from the Visigothic king to
the Pope is assigned to so late a date as the ninth year of Gregory's
pontificate. In this letter, written in somewhat halting and barbarous Latin
(possibly the consciousness of these defects had something to do with the
King's silence), Recared excuses himself for having so long delayed to express
his reverence to the head of the Christian priesthood. Hindered for three years
by the cares of his kingdom, he had at last chosen certain abbots and charged
them to bear his gifts to St. Peter. But when already within sight of the shores
of Italy they were overtaken by the violence of the sea, thrown back on the
rocks near Marseilles, and barely escaped with life. Now at last Recared sends
another messenger, with a golden chalice studded with gems for the Apostolic
treasury, and the expression of his profound reverence for the Pope, whom he
has already learned to love through his conversations with his uncle Leander.
Apparently this letter was accompanied or followed by a communication of a more
political nature.
King Recared desired to establish a modus vivendi with the Emperor, who
had acquired (as we have seen) a footing on both sides of the Peninsula, and,
with this loathe view, asked for a sight of the treaty between Justinian Empire
and an earlier Visigothic king, a copy of which he believed to be stored in the
archives of the Holy See. The request gives us a glimpse into the still
lingering barbarism of the court of Toledo, which, for a document so vitally
affecting its own interests, had to depend on the presumed superior accuracy of
the Papal chancery, though that body had really no immediate concern in the
affair. In this case, however, Gregory replied that the archives of the See had
suffered so severely from fire in the time of Justinian, that scarcely a single
paper of that time was still extant.
As some compensation for this disappointment, and an indication of
good-will, “we send you,” says the Pontiff, “a little key from the most holy
body of the blessed Apostle Peter, in which is enclosed some iron from his
chains, so that the same metal which bound his neck to the cross of his
martyrdom may loose you from all your sins. The bearer of these presents will
also offer you a crucifix, wherein is some of the wood of our Lord's cross, and
some hairs of the blessed John the Baptist: so that by means of this cross you
may also have the consolations of Christ, through the intercession of his
Forerunner.”
The spiritual conquest of Spain was glorious, but it had been achieved
before Gregory mounted the Papal throne. The conquest of England was all his
own work, his own daring thought translated into action. In 596 he sent forth
Augustine, Abbot of his own beloved monastery of St. Andrew, on his memorable
mission, armed with letters of introduction to all the chief prelates of Gaul,
requesting them to speed the missionaries on their way. But whatever might be
the outward professions of respect and obedience tendered by these eminent
ecclesiastics, so weak was their faith, and so alarming the picture which they
drew of the savage temper of our Saxon forefathers, that the timid monks,
accustomed as they were to the stormless atmosphere of the convent, shrank from
encountering the perils before them, and Augustine actually returned to Rome to
beseech permission to abandon the difficult enterprise.
Then it was that Gregory’s singleness of purpose and inflexibility of
will saved the endangered project, and he who had once, in obedience to a Pope,
left the path to Britain untrodden, now, as Pope, claimed the obedience of
Augustine, sent him forth again on his great mission, and forced upon the timid
Abbot of St. Andrew’s the glory of being the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
The success of that mission, the conversion of Ethelbert and the larger
part of his nobles and people to Christianity, are events which lie beyond our
present province, and are too well known to need more than a passing allusion
here. All that we are here concerned with is the fresh burden of toil, fruitful
and triumphant, but still toil, which the conduct of this great enterprise must
have brought upon the pain-racked Pope. In 601 he sent out a second mission
under Mellitus, to reinforce Augustine and his fellow-labourers. These also had
to be sped upon their difficult way; letters of commendation had to be written
for them to the Gaulish bishops, and protection had to be claimed from the
Frankish kings. In the same year a letter was sent to Augustine, in which, at
great length, Gregory replied to eleven questions which the English missionary
had addressed to him as to the government of the new province won from
heathenism. The questions travelled over a wide range of subjects, touching on
the division of the Church revenues, the punishment of sacrilege, the degrees
of affinity within which marriage was prohibited, the consecration of bishops,
the ceremonial defilements which operated as a bar to holy communion, and so
forth. Gregory's answers were upon the whole wise and statesmanlike, especially
in reference to varying ecclesiastical usages. ‘Your Brotherhood knows already
the custom of the Roman Church in which you remember that you were nourished.
But my pleasure is that you should carefully select, not only from the Roman,
but also from the Gallican, or any other Church, whatsoever you can find that
is pleasing to Almighty God, and in the Church of the Angles, which is still
new to the faith, implant all that you have thus collected from various
Churches. For we ought not to value a thing because of the place from which it
has sprung, but value places according to the things which they produce. From
the several Churches, therefore, select all customs which are godly, religious,
just, and, weaving them all into one wreath, crown with them the souls of the
Angles.
Besides that which came upon Gregory daily, the care of all the
Churches, he laboured also at that reformation (if it were in truth a
reformation) of the music of the Church, which has perpetuated his fame in some
quarters where his other great deeds are little remembered. He remodelled the
Roman Liturgy, composing a new Sacramentarium and Antiphonarius, and giving to the service of the Mass nearly
the same form which it bears at the present day in the Roman ritual. He
established and endowed two schools of singers, one at the Lateran, the other
under the steps of the basilica of St. Peter at which the pupils were taught
the Gregorian ‘plain song’ which now superseded the Ambrosian chants, and the
musical scale divided into octaves, which superseded the eighteen tones or five
tetrachords of the Greeks. Three centuries after his death, men still looked
with veneration upon the memorials of Gregory's musical enthusiasm which were
preserved in the Lateran Palace, not only the authentic copy of his Antiphonarius, but the bed on which he reclined when,
racked with gout and dyspeptic pains, he still persisted in giving his lessons
to the choir, and the rod with which he corrected the youthful singers, when
they failed to render a passage in one of his chants correctly.
As diligently as he laboured to cultivate the musical sense of his
people, even so diligently did he reorganize his own household at the Lateran
on the strictest monastic and Roman models. All the lay servants who had
ministered to the pride and luxury of former pontiffs were banished from his
palace. None but monks and clergy were to be found in attendance on the visible
head of the Church. The Pope led, with these, his brethren in religion, that
life in common which was the characteristic of the convent, and we may fairly
infer that he, though lord of such mighty resources, submitted himself to that
stem prohibition against private property which he had enforced so rigidly
against the unfortunate Justus.
This change applied not merely to the personal attendants of the
Pontiff. He first, apparently, inaugurated that strict rule that the Church's
possessions should be governed by churchmen, which prevailed with few
exceptions down to the fall of the temporal power of the Popes in our own day. “No
layman could administer any part of the Church's patrimony, but all
ecclesiastical charges were held by ecclesiastical men, laymen being relegated
to the profession of arms or the occupations of agriculture.”
And not only was the lay element excluded from even the outer courts of
the Church’s service; the descendants 0f so many Roman Senators also barred his
doors against the all-pervading influence of the barbarians. “None,” says his
biographer, “of those who were in the Pope's service, from the lowest to the
highest, ever showed anything barbarous either in speech or attire, but the
purest Latinity of speech, and the constant use of the toga of the Quirites or the trabea [of the old Consuls] preserved, as
it were, an inviolate Latium in the dwelling of the Latin Pope.”
From his palace in the ancient domain of the Senator Lateranus,
the gift of Constantine to the Roman See, Gregory doubtless often wandered to
his own ancestral home on the slope of the Coelian Hill, scarcely more than
half a mile distant, that palace which had become the monastery of St. Andrew.
There are still shown his marble chair and a recess in the wall, in which, if
the inscription speak truly, the great Pope often passed the night. There
undoubtedly, for centuries after his death, were visible the contemporary
portraits, in fresco, of himself and his parents, with which the liberality of
Gregory had adorned the walls of the convent. Near the fountain in the
courtyard were two doors, on one of which St. Peter, in a sitting posture, was
represented as holding out an encouraging right hand to the regionarius,
Gordian, father of Gregory. Gordian was depicted as tall of stature, with
somewhat solemn face but penetrating eyes, with short hair and scanty beard.
His feet were shod with the military caliga, and over his dalmatic was thrown a
mantle (planeta) of a chestnut colour.
Silvia, the mother of Gregory, was painted as also tall, but with a
round and cheerful face, beautiful notwithstanding the wrinkles of age, and
with the large grey eye of genius. On her head she wore the turban of a Roman
matron, and over her milk-coloured tunic a white veil flowed in ample folds
from her shoulders to her feet. With two fingers of her right hand she made the
sign of the cross, while her left hand held the Psalter, open at the words, “My
soul liveth and it shall praise thee, and thy
judgments shall help me.” A scroll in the background of the picture, running
from the right shoulder to the left, bore the words, GREGORIUS SILVIAE MATRI
FECIT.
In an apse behind the monks' cellarium (cupboard) was the likeness of
Gregory himself, designed by the same artist—a namesake of his own—who had
painted the portraits of his parents. A face which combined in comely
proportions the length of his father's, and the roundness of his mother's,
countenance; a high and noble forehead crowned with two little curls bending
towards the right; a head, bald above but with a wisp of nearly black hair,
brushed back behind his ears; dark and small eyes, and a slightly aquiline
nose; fresh-coloured cheeks, which became even high-coloured towards the close
of his life; moderate stature and a goodly figure: long taper fingers which
seemed well adapted to handle the pen of the writer;— such was the guise in
which, 270 years after his death, John the Deacon beheld the mightiest of the
Popes, the converter to Christianity of our Saxon forefathers.
