Baring-Gould’s sources: Roman and all other Western Martyrologies; by the Greeks on March 11th. Authorities:—A life by Paulus Diaconus, another by Joannes Diaconus, 9th cent., the writings of S. Gregory, &c. The following is in part condensed from the elegant life of S. Gregory by the Count de Montalembert, in his Monks of the West.
S. Gregory the Great will be an everlasting honour to the Benedictine [monks following the Rule of St. Benedict] Order and to the Papacy. By his genius, but especially by the charm and ascendancy of his virtue, he was destined to organise the temporal power of the popes, to develop and regulate their spiritual sovereignty, to found their paternal supremacy over the new-born crowns and races which were to become the great nations of the future, and to be called France, Spain, and England. It was he indeed, who inaugurated the middle ages, modern society, and Christian civilisation.
March 12.
Issued from one of the most illustrious races of ancient Rome, the son of a rich senator, and descendant of Pope Felix III., of the Anician family, Gregory was early called to fill a dignified place, which, in the midst of the Rome of that day, the vassal of Byzantium, and subject to the ceaseless insults of the Barbarians, retained some shadow of ancient Roman grandeur. He was prætor of Rome during the first invasion of the Lombards [a Germanic people who ruled much of Italy from 568 to 774]. In the exercise of this office he gained the hearts of the Romans, while habituating himself to the management of public business, and while acquiring a taste for luxury and display of earthly grandeur, in which he still believed he might serve God without reproach. But God required him elsewhere. Gregory hesitated long, inspired by the divine breath to seek religion, but was retained, led back and fascinated to the world, by the attractions and habits of secular life. At last he yielded to the influence of his intimate and close relations with the disciples of S. Benedict [father of Western monks (d. c. 547), author of the Rule] in Monte Cassino, and obeying the grace that enlightened him, he abruptly broke every tie, devoted his wealth to the endowment of six new monasteries in Sicily, and established in his own palace in Rome, upon the Cœlian hill, a seventh, dedicated to S. Andrew, into which he introduced the Benedictine rule, and where he himself became a monk. He sold all that remained of his patrimony, to distribute it to the poor; and Rome, which had seen the young and wealthy patrician traverse its streets in robes of silk covered with jewels, saw him now, in 575, with admiration, clothed like a beggar, serving, in his own person the beggars lodged in the hospital which he had built at the gate of his paternal house, now changed into a monastery.
Once a monk, he would be nothing less than a model of monks, and practised with the utmost rigour all the austerities sanctioned by the rule, applying himself specially at the same time to the study of the Holy Scriptures. He ate only pulse, which his mother, who had become a nun since her widowhood, sent him, already soaked, in a silver porringer. This porringer was the only remnant of his ancient splendour, and did not long remain in his hands, for one day a shipwrecked sailor came several times to beg from him while he was writing in his cell, and finding no money in his purse, the Saint gave him that relic of his former wealth.
Continually engaged in prayer, reading, writing, or dictation, he persisted in pushing the severity of his fasts to such an extent, that his health succumbed. He fell so often into fainting fits, that more than once he would have sunk under them had not his brethren supported him with more substantial food. In consequence of having attempted to do more than others, he was soon obliged to relinquish the most ordinary fasts, which everybody observed. He was in despair at not being able to fast even on Easter eve, a day on which even the little children abstain, says his biographer. He remained weak and sickly all his life, and when he left his monastery, it was with health irreparably ruined.
Pope Benedict I. drew him first from the cloister in 577, to raise him to the dignity of one of the seven cardinal deacons, who presided over the seven principal divisions of Rome. Pelagius II., successor to Benedict I., chose S. Gregory to head an embassy to Constantinople to congratulate the Emperor Tiberius on his accession in A.D. 578. During his stay at the imperial court, S. Gregory refused to have any intercourse with the patriarch [the title of the bishops of the great ancient sees: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem] Eutychius, who had published an heretical treatise on the nature of the resurrection body. On his death-bed, however, Eutychius acknowledged his former errors. After six years of this honourable and laborious exile, he returned to Rome, and regained the shelter of his monastery of S. Andrea, the monks of which elected him abbot soon after his return. He enjoyed there for some time longer the delights of the life he had chosen. Tenderly cherished by his brethren, he took a paternal share in their trials and spiritual crosses, provided for their temporary and spiritual necessities, and specially rejoiced in the holy deaths of several among them. He has related the details of these in his "Dialogues," and seems to breathe in them the perfume of heaven.
The tender solicitude he bore to souls was on the point of separating him from his dear monastery and from Rome. Seeing one day exhibited in the market some poor pagan children, of extraordinary beauty and fairness, who were said to be of the country of the Angles, "Not Angles," said he, "but Angels." Then hastening to the pope, he begged him to send missionaries into that great island of Britain, where the pagans sold such slaves; failing others, he offered himself for this work, surprised the pontiff into consent, and prepared instantly for his departure. But when the Romans understood his intention, the love with which they had formerly regarded him was re-awakened. They surrounded the pope as he went to S. Peter's, and intreated him to recall Gregory. The astonished pope yielded to the popular voice. He sent messengers after Gregory, who overtook him at three days' journey from Rome; and led him back forcibly to his monastery. It was not as a missionary, but as a pope, that he was to win England to the Church.
In 590, Pelagius II. died of the plague, which then depopulated Rome. Gregory was immediately elected pope by the unanimous voice of the senate, the people, and the clergy. It was in vain that he refused, and appealed to the emperor Maurice not to confirm his election. The Romans intercepted his letter; the imperial confirmation arrived. Then he disguised himself, and fleeing from Rome to seek some unknown retreat, wandered three days in the woods. He was followed, discovered, and a second time led back to Rome, but this time to reign there. He bowed his head, weeping, under the yoke imposed upon him by the Divine will and the unanimity of his fellow-citizens.
It was during the interval between his election and the imperial confirmation that, filled with a paternal anxiety for the safety of the people, he organized a great procession, with solemn litanies, to seek to avert the wrath of Almighty God. It proceeded from seven stations in the city, in as many divisions, to the Church of S. Maria-Maggiore. The first company consisted of the secular clergy, the second of the abbots and their monks, the third of the abbesses and their nuns, the fourth of children, the fifth of laymen, the sixth of widows, and the seventh of matrons: each band was led by the priests of the quarter of the city from which it came. While the procession lasted, eighty persons in it died of the plague; yet S. Gregory persevered, and the prayers of the city were heard. This was the origin of the "Greater Litanies," which were afterwards held on S. Mark's Day, and which acquired the popular name of " The Black Crosses ," from the penitential hue of the vestments and banners used therein. While the procession defiled before Gregory, he saw an angel appear upon the summit of the Mole of Hadrian, putting back his sword into its sheath, the image of which, standing upon the colossal mausoleum, has given its name to the castle of S. Angelo, and perpetuated to our day the recollection of S. Gregory's vision.
The supreme pontificate, perhaps, never fell upon a soul more disturbed and afflicted than that of this monk, who saw himself thus condemned to exchange the peace of the cloister for the cares of the government of the Church, and the special defence of the interests of Italy. Not only then, but during all his life, he did not cease to lament his fate. "I have lost," he wrote to the sister of the emperor, "the profound joys of repose. I seem to have been elevated in external things, but in spiritual I have fallen." To the patrician Narses: "I am so overcome with melancholy, that I can scarcely speak. I cannot cease considering the height of tranquillity from which I have fallen, and the height of embarrassment I have ascended." To his friend Leander: "I am so beaten by the waves of this world, that I despair of being able to guide to port this rotten old vessel with which God has charged me. I weep when I recall the peaceful shore which I have left, and sigh in perceiving afar what I now cannot attain."
The poor monk who showed so much despair when he was thrown into the political whirlpool by the unanimous voice of the Romans, could yet perceive with a bold and clear glance the dangers of the situation, and adopt a line of conduct most suitable to the emergency of the times. First of all he concerned himself with the Lombards. After nine years' exertion, in overcoming Byzantine repugnance to acknowledge any right whatever on the side of the Lombards, he concluded a peace between the two powers, which made Italy, exhausted by thirty years of war and brigandage, thrill with joy. It was of short duration; but when hostilities recommenced, he entered into direct negociations with king Agilulf, and obtained from that prince a special truce for Rome and its surrounding territory. He had besides found a powerful advocate with the Lombard king in the person of the illustrious queen Theodelinda. This princess, a Bavarian and Catholic by birth, had gained the hearts of the Lombards. The queen was always the faithful friend of the pope; she served as a medium of communication between him and her husband. Gregory, from the very beginning of his pontificate, had exhorted the Italian bishops to make special exertions for the conversion of these formidable heretics.
His constancy and courage were called forth in contest with the Greeks, with that Eastern Empire which was represented by functionaries whose odious exactions had quite as great a share in the despair of the people as the ravages of the Barbarians, and whose malice was more dreadful than the swords of the Lombards. His entire life was a struggle with the patriarch of Constantinople, who aimed at supplanting the Roman pontiff, as well as with the emperor, who would have dominated Italy without defending her, and ruled the Church as if she were a department of the State. Among so many conflicts, we shall dwell only on that one which arose between him and John the Faster, patriarch of Constantinople. Relying on the support of most of the Eastern bishops, this patriarch took to himself the title of Universal Bishop. Gregory stood up with vigour against this pretension. He did not draw back before the emperor, who openly sided with the patriarch of his capital, nor before the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria, who sided with the Byzantine patriarch. "What!" wrote Gregory to the emperor, "S. Peter, who received the keys of heaven and earth, the power of binding and loosing, the charge and primacy of the whole Church, was never called the Universal Apostle; and yet my pious brother John would name himself Universal Bishop!" For himself he says, "I desire to increase in virtue and not in words. I do not consider myself honoured in that which dishonours my brethren. It is the honour of the universal Church that is my honour. Away with these words which inflate vanity and wound charity. The holy council of Chalcedon and other fathers have offered this title to my predecessors, but none of them have ever used it, that they might guard their own honour in the sight of God, by seeking here below the honour of all the priesthood." This weighty difference, the prohibition addressed by the emperor to soldiers against their becoming monks, and the contest which arose between the pope and the emperor touching the irregular election to the metropolitan [the archbishop who heads a group of dioceses] see of Salona [a bishop’s “see” is his diocese, named from his seat (Latin sedes)], contributed to render almost permanent the misunderstanding between them. These perpetual contests with the Byzantine court may explain, without excusing, the conduct of Gregory at the death of the Emperor Maurice. This prince, infected, like all his predecessors, with a mania for interfering in ecclesiastical affairs, was very superior to most of them. Gregory himself has more than once done justice to his faith and piety, to his zeal for the Church, and respect for her canons. After twenty years of an undistinguished reign, a military revolt broke out, which placed Phocas upon the throne. This wretch not only murdered the emperor Maurice, gouty, and incapable of defending himself, but also his six sons, whom he caused to be put to death under the eyes of their father, without even sparing the youngest, who was still at the breast, and whom his nurse would have saved by putting her own child in his place; but Maurice, who was too noble to allow of such a sacrifice, disclosed the pious deception to the murderers. He died like a Christian hero, repeating the words of the psalm, "Thou, O Lord, art just, and all Thy judgments are right." This massacre did not satisfy Phocas, who sacrificed the empress and her three daughters, the brother of Maurice, and a multitude of others in his train. The monster then sent his own image and that of his wife to Rome, where the senate and people received them with rejoicings. Gregory unfortunately joined in these mean acclamations. He carried these images of his new masters, bathed in innocent blood, into the oratory of the Lateran [St. John Lateran, the pope’s cathedral in Rome] palace. Afterwards, he addressed extraordinary congratulations to Phocas, not in the surprise of the first moment, but seven months after the crime. This is the only stain upon the life of Gregory. We do not attempt either to conceal or to excuse it. It can scarcely be explained by recalling all the vexations he had suffered from Maurice, annoyances of which he always complained energetically, though he did not fail to do justice to the undeniable piety of the old emperor. Perhaps Gregory adopted this means to secure the help of Phocas against the new incursions of the Lombards, or to mollify beforehand the already threatening intentions of the tyrant. It must also be remembered that these flatteries were in some sort the official language of these times; they resulted from the general debasement of public manners, and from the tone of the language invariably used then at each change of reign. His motives were undoubtedly pure. Notwithstanding, a stain remains upon his memory, and a shadow upon the history of the Church, which is so consoling and full of light in this age of storm and darkness. But among the greatest and holiest of mortals, virtue, like human wisdom, always falls short in some respect.
Long crushed between the Lombards and Byzantines, between the unsoftened ferocity of the barbarians and the vexatious decrepitude of despotism, Gregory, with that instinctive perception of future events which God sometimes grants to pure souls, sought elsewhere a support for the Roman Church. His eyes were directed to the new races, who were scarcely less ferocious than the Lombards, but who did not, like them, weigh upon Italy and Rome, and who already exhibited elements of strength and continuance. It is impossible to do more here than touch on these noble enterprises. He entered into correspondence with Childebert, the Gallo-Frank king, and with the French bishops, to obtain the rectification of abuses and the purification of the Gallican church from simony, and the nomination of laymen to the episcopal office, two vices which consumed the vitals of Christianity in France. Spain had become Arian [followers of Arius, who taught that the Son is a created being, not fully God] under the Visigoths, but the Catholic faith had triumphed with the accession of Recared, in 587. S. Leander, bishop of Seville, was the principal author of the conversion of the Visigoths. Gregory wrote to him and to other bishops of Spain. They consulted him, and he gave them his advice. He wrote, and gave councils full of wisdom to the king Recared, himself. He brought back to the unity of the Church the schismatical bishops of Istria, and wholly suppressed the Donatist schism in Africa. But one of the most striking points in the life of S. Gregory is his zeal for the conversion of England.
Amid the labours of his exalted position, S. Gregory never remitted his anxiety for the evangelization of that distant isle. In July, A.D. 596, he dispatched S. Augustine (May 26th), with forty companions, on that mission to which we owe so much, that, with every feeling of love and veneration for the remnant of Celtic Christianity which had then escaped the sword of Pagan Saxondom, we may yet say, with the Venerable Bede [English monk and historian (d. 735)], "If Gregory be not to others an apostle, he is one to us, for the seal of his apostleship are we in the Lord."
The services which he rendered to the Liturgy are well known. Completing and putting in order the work of his predecessors, he gave its definite form to the holy sacrifice of the Mass, in that celebrated Sacramentary which remains the most august monument of Liturgical science. It may be said also that he created, and, by anticipation, saved, Christian art, by fixing, long before the persecution of the Iconoclasts, the true doctrine respecting the veneration of images, in that fine letter to the bishop of Marseilles, in which he reproves him for having, in the excess of his zeal against idolatry, broken the statues of the saints, and reminds him that through all antiquity the history of the saints has been pictorically represented, and that painting is to the ignorant what letters are to those who can read.
But his name is specially associated, in the history of Catholic worship, with that branch of religious art which is identified with worship itself, and which is of the utmost moment to the piety as to the innocent joy of the Christian people. The name of Gregorian Chant reminds us of his solicitude for collecting the ancient melodies of the Church, in order to subject them to rules of harmony, and to arrange them according to the requirements of divine worship. He had the glory of giving to Ecclesiastical music that sweet and solemn character which has descended through ages, and to which we must always return after the most prolonged aberrations of frivolity and innovation. He made out himself, in his Antiphonary, the collection of ancient and new chants; he composed the text and melodies of several hymns, which are still used in the Church; he established at Rome the celebrated school of sacred music, to which Gaul [roughly modern France and Belgium], Germany, and England came in turns, trying with more or less success to assimilate their voices to the purity of Italian modulations. And when Gregory was too ill to leave his little chamber and his couch, he gathered about him the boys of the choir, and continued their instructions.
The gout made the last years of his life a kind of martyrdom. The cry of pain rings in many of his letters. "For nearly two years," he wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria, "I have been imprisoned to my bed by such pangs of gout, that I can scarcely rise for two or three hours on great holidays to celebrate solemn mass. And the intensity of the pain compels me immediately to lie down again, that I may be able to endure my torture, by giving free course to my groans. My illness will neither leave me nor kill me. I entreat your holiness to pray for me, that I may be soon delivered, and receive that freedom which you know, and which is the glory of the children of God."
Up to his last moments he continued with unwearied activity to dictate his correspondence, and to concern himself with the interests of the Church. He died on the 12th March, 604, aged nearly fifty-five, in the thirteenth year of his pontificate. He was buried in S. Peter's; and in the epitaph engraved on his tomb, it is said that, "after having conformed all his actions to his doctrine, the consul of God went to enjoy eternal triumph."
S. Hildefonsus, Archbishop of Toledo, in the seventh century, writes thus of him—"He surpassed Antony in holiness, Cyprian in eloquence, and Augustine in wisdom." Yet so great was his humility, that he subscribed himself, "Servant of the servants of God"—a style which his successors in the chair of S. Peter have retained till this day. He was buried in the basilica of S. Peter. His pallium [a woolen band the pope gives to archbishops as a sign of their authority], reliquary, and girdle were preserved as precious memorials.
He had, like so many other great hearts, to struggle with ingratitude, not only during his life, but after his death. Rome was afflicted with a great famine under his successor, Sabinian, who put an end to the charities which Gregory had granted to the poor, on the plea that there was nothing remaining in the treasury of the Church. The enemies of the deceased pope then excited the people against him, calling him prodigal and a waster of the Roman patrimony; and that ungrateful people, whom he had loved and helped so much, began to burn his writings, as if to annihilate or dishonour his memory. But one of the monks, who had followed him from the monastery to the palace, his friend the deacon Peter, interposed. He represented to the incendiaries that these writings were already spread through the entire world, and that it was, besides, sacrilege to burn the work of a holy doctor, upon whom he swore he had himself seen the heavenly dove fluttering. And as if to confirm his oath, after having ended his address, he breathed forth his last sigh, a valiant witness of truth and friendship, and is commemorated by the Church on the same day with S. Gregory.
In the year 826, the body of this holy pontiff was brought into France, and placed in the celebrated monastery of S. Medard, in Soissons. The head was given to archbishop Agesil, and deposited in the abbey of S. Pierre-le-Vif, at Sens, and a bone was given to Rome at the request of pope Urban VIII., in 1628.
In art, S. Gregory is represented as a pope, with a dove hovering over him, or at his ear, and with music in his hand: a frequent subject with Mediæval sculptors and painters was his Mass. According to the legend, as he was about to communicate a woman, and said, "The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve thy body and soul unto Eternal Life," he saw her smile, wherefore he refused to give her the host, and questioning her, found that she doubted how what her senses told her was bread could be the flesh of Christ. Then S. Gregory prayed that her eyes might be opened, and instantly the Host was visibly changed into Christ enduring His passion.
March 12.
