ST. GREGORY THE GREAT
Three years before St. Benedict and his sister Scholastica passed
away, there was born, in a palace on the Cœlian Hill, a child who was
christened Gregory, a name which signified “Vigilant.” His lineage was
exceedingly illustrious, his parents belonging to the great old Gens
Anicia, a family of nobles which had been respected and honoured ever
since the days of the Republic, and in which, to use the words of a
chronicler of Gregory’s time, “the men seemed all to have been born
Consuls, and the women Saints.”
Gregory’s mother was St. Silvia, and I have seen the garden, on the
quiet Cœlian Hill, where as a child he ran about at her side, asking
a thousand questions, as clever children will, while she tended her
flowers and gathered healing herbs—the “basilica” and “Madrecara” and
“erba della Madonna” still dear to Roman apothecaries, to make into
medicines for the sick poor who thronged her charitable doors. Mothers
see a long way, and while Gregory’s father was planning a great career
in the world for his only son, Silvia was praying that God would keep
him pure, and make him great in His sight. And her prayers prevailed,
as mothers’ prayers generally do, and though she had to wait a little,
she lived to see their fulfilment.
As the boy grew up he threw himself heart and soul into his father’s
plans; he studied hard, and his naturally brilliant gifts brought him
much distinction. He rejoiced in all the pleasant things that birth and
wealth had bestowed on him—good looks, popularity, rich garments, and
sparkling jewels—and no doubt was immensely pleased and flattered when,
being still quite young, he was made Proctor of Rome. That charge,
however, was a grave one at the time, as the Lombards, the most cruel
and brutal of all the savage tribes that had threatened the eternal
city, chose the period of Gregory’s proctorship to descend upon her
and make her feel the weight of their heavy hand. There were religious
troubles too, and Gregory, who, through all his busy official life in
the world, was an ardent Christian, was deeply exercised and distressed
by them. But the world was only to claim him for a little while, in his
early manhood. Then he was withdrawn from it to be prepared, through
many long years of prayer and penance and study, to step forth towards
the end of his life as its rescuer and ruler. Little by little the
inner call came, faint at first, sometimes resisted, but ever stronger,
till Gregory understood and obeyed.
His heart had gone out at once to the Benedictine monks, when, on the
destruction of Monte Cassino by the Lombards, they had sought refuge
in Rome. Some of them became his most intimate friends, and their
encouragement smoothed his path from the world to the cloister. From
the moment when he recognized and embraced his vocation, all hesitation
left him. He sold all his goods, distributed the larger part to the
poor, and, as if to atone for what the Lombards had destroyed, built
and endowed six new monasteries, placing twelve Benedictines in each,
in Sicily. That done, he converted his home on the Cœlian into a
seventh, where he gathered another community about him, of the same
learned Order. His father was dead, and his mother, on becoming a
widow, had already built a convent close by, where she had taken the
veil herself.
Gregory now devoted himself to three things, prayer, study, and
charity. For his own use—he was quickly elected Abbot of the
monastery—he reserved a small cell, where he could enjoy the solitude
he now so greatly desired, but—a delightfully human touch!—he could not
get on without his favourite cat, and one can see him in imagination,
pausing from his writing to smooth her velvety head when she sprang
upon the table and rubbed it against his cheek! I had a little cat once
who would sit motionless on a chair beside me all night while I was
writing, but the instant I laid down the pen she was on my lap or my
shoulder, talking in her own way, most intelligently and cheeringly; so
I was mightily pleased when I read about St. Gregory’s cat!
The Benedictine Rule provided for all hospitality to strangers and
the poor, but at the same time directed that the monks themselves were
not to be disturbed from prayer and study. St. Gregory, however, seems
to have received all who wished to see him, perhaps as an exercise of
patience. Now there was a poor shipwrecked sailor who seemed inclined
to abuse the privilege. He came again and again, and was never turned
away, but on the occasion of what proved to be his last visit Gregory
had not a single thing left to give him. He was looking round his rough
cell in perplexity, when a messenger appeared bringing the silver
basin full of porridge which was the only food he allowed himself,
and which his mother sent him every day. Here was what was needed!
The next moment the needy sailor man was walking away with the hot
porridge and the silver porringer. What St. Silvia said when she heard
of the incident has not been recorded—but Gregory never gave the matter
another thought until one day, long after, when the importunate sailor
appeared to him in his true character, that of an angel of light,
and told him that God had taken note of his charity, and—an alarming
prophecy for the Saint—that he would be elected Pope and do great
things for the Church.
All he asked was to be left quiet in his monastery, where he was
putting his whole heart into living the life of a model monk. In his
ardour against himself, he carried his penances too far and fasted so
rigorously that he came near to dying—an imprudence for which he paid
ever after in broken health and in being debarred from fasting at all.
He complains pitifully of having to “drag about such a big body with
so little strength,” but this was the least of the trials that awaited
him.
In the year 577, when Gregory was about thirty-seven years of age, the
reigning Pope, Benedict I, sent for him and insisted upon making him
one of the Cardinal Deacons to whom was entrusted the jurisdiction of
the seven “Regions” into which the city was divided. Gregory protested,
but had to take on the charge, and from that time forward he belonged
less to himself than to others. He was too necessary and valuable to
be spared. The next year, Pope Benedict being dead, his successor,
Pelagius II, decided to send Gregory on a very difficult and important
mission to the Emperor Tiberius Constantinus at Constantinople, where
trouble of all kinds seemed to be brewing. Although Gregory bewails
this “thrusting out from port into the storm,” one cannot but feel how
the alert fighting spirit in the man leaps to the call. The born leader
may persuade himself that he is happiest in the seclusion he thinks
good for his soul, but when the call to arms comes, every repressed
fibre of his being wakes and cries for action.
When Gregory, taking with him several of his monks, sailed away from
Italy, he little dreamed that years were to pass before he should
return. On his arrival in Constantinople the first matter to claim his
attention was the ugly new heresy started by Eutychius, who had drawn
the Emperor and many others into the path of error by declaring that
there was to be no resurrection of the flesh. Gregory was politely
received by the Emperor, and instantly requested the latter to call a
conference in which the dogma should be discussed. Tiberius consented,
and there followed the famous conference in which Gregory’s fiery
eloquence and invincible logic quashed the heresy at once. When he had
finished speaking the Emperor commanded that a fire should be lighted,
and with his own hands, and in the presence of a vast concourse,
burnt the book which Eutychius had written to propound the heresy,
and declared himself now and for ever the faithful son of the Church.
Eutychius, touched to the heart by Gregory’s arguments, accepted
defeat and rebuke as but small punishment for his fault, and when he
was dying, soon afterwards, pulled up the skin of one poor emaciated
hand with the fingers of the other, and cried to those around him, “I
confess that in this flesh we shall rise from the dead.”
Gregory proved a successful ambassador in every way. The relations
between the Church and the imperial court had been badly interrupted by
the Lombard invasion, but he welded them smoothly and firmly together.
Tiberius died while Gregory was in Constantinople, and his successor,
Maurice, was badly disposed to the Church. Gregory brought him to a
better mind and obliged him to rescind an edict he had just issued
forbidding any member of the army to embrace the monastic life.
At last, after six years of what must have been the most anxious work,
requiring all that the great man had of wisdom and firmness and tact,
he returned to Italy—to find his beloved Rome in terrible distress from
a visitation of the pestilence. Gregory at once devoted himself to the
care of the sick and dying, and one can fancy how the poor people’s
eyes lighted up when he appeared among them again. Then the good Pope
Pelagius succumbed to the disease, and at once all eyes turned to
Gregory, who was unanimously elected as his successor.
[Illustration: ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. Photo by Anderson, from
the Statue in the Church of St. Gregory, Rome.]
Gregory was honestly horrified. He refused, he pleaded, he argued, but
no one would listen to him. Then he fled. Disguised as a peasant, he
slipped away and hid himself in a secret cave in the hills, entreating
the Lord to protect him from the awful honour which his fellow-citizens
wished to thrust upon him. They meanwhile were searching for him in
every direction, and would have failed in their quest had not Heaven
put itself visibly on their side. From very far off they beheld a tall
pillar of light resting before the fugitive’s cave—they rushed to it,
dragged him forth, and made him Pope. Seeing that his fellow-citizens
would not listen to him, he wrote to the Emperor Maurice, begging him
not to confirm the election, but the Romans intercepted the letter; the
Emperor was informed of the election in the usual way, and was only
too glad to give it the imperial sanction, still required then from
Constantinople.
For once the “Vox Populi” had proved itself what it never is nowadays,
the “Vox Dei,” and for fourteen years Gregory reigned, in virtue
and wisdom and glory, for the everlasting good of the people of God.
Every gift that Heaven had bestowed upon him vindicated its unerring
designs. He accomplished in those fourteen years so many wonderful
things that cold sense almost refuses its adherence to the visible
facts. His colossal labours for the Church gave us the Gregorian chant,
the Sacramentary of the Missal and the Breviary; his correspondence,
so vast that, like Napoleon and Julius Cæsar, he is supposed to have
dictated to several secretaries at once, embraces every point that
required treating of at home and abroad. His sermons, day after day,
instructed the ignorant in the plain truths of salvation while they no
less amazed and illuminated the minds of the most learned; and through
it all his soul was never disturbed from the calm heights of union with
God, his heart never closed to a single cry from the suffering and the
weary.
The much-abbreviated list of “some of his labours,” as the Breviary
puts it, would stagger the grasp of any modern scholar or ruler. In
a few lines he is shown to us “re-establishing the Catholic Faith
in many places where it had suffered, repressing the Donatists in
Africa, the Arians in Spain, expelling the Agnostics from Alexandria,
and refusing the ‘Pallium’ (the sign of pontifical investiture) to
Syagrius, the Bishop-elect of Autun, until he had turned the ‘heretic
Neophytes’[3] out of Gaul; quelling the audacity of John, the Patriarch
of Constantinople, who had dared to call himself the ‘Head of the
Universal Church,’ and so on, preaching, writing, praying, and through
it all suffering constantly and acutely.”
There is a legend to the effect that all these pains and sicknesses
had been voluntarily accepted in order to deliver a certain soul from
purgatory. The legend is only a legend, unsupported by the authority of
the Church—but it would have been just like St. Gregory to do it!
In every public or private trouble or upheaval, as well as in every
effort to reorganize and restore, his name, his presence is dominant.
After becoming Pope he lived chiefly at the Lateran palace, then the
official Papal residence, and they still keep there the narrow pallet
that served him for a bed, and—mark this, ye modern schoolboys!—the
little rod which he had to use to keep his dark-eyed, rampageous young
choristers in order!
The men who can govern others with the most unerring wisdom are often
entirely mistaken in their appreciation of themselves. Only the other
day the local and most successful Superior of a great missionary
order in America was bewailing his fate to me. “I told the Bishop he
was making a dreadful mistake in making me the Rector,” he declared,
“it is not my work—I was not intended to govern and lead! I am a born
free-lance—I want to travel all over the country seeking out the lost
souls. I am no good at anything else!”
But the Bishop knew better; and so it was with the great crowd
of clergy and laity who designated Gregory for the Papacy. What
he accomplished during his pontificate has been well summed up
by Montalembert: “Gregory, who alone amongst men has received, by
universal consent, the double surname of Saint and Great, will be an
everlasting honour to the Benedictine order, as to the Papacy. By his
genius, but especially by the charm and ascendancy of his virtue, he
was destined to organize 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 civilization.”
The task he undertook was a gigantic one, for on the one side he had to
contend with the exactions and oppressions of the corrupt and decrepit
Byzantine Emperors who were still the nominal rulers of Rome and his
own secular masters on the other, with the great new forces let loose
on the world in the increasing vigour and supremacy of the Lombards and
other northern nations, more than half barbarous still, but, as Gregory
clearly perceived, possessed of an intelligence and vitality which only
required training and instruction to grow into great new polities which
would replace the already dead Roman Empire.
To appreciate his labours one would have to read that colossal
correspondence which has fortunately been preserved entire. Beside the
mighty matters of Church and Empire which it sets forth, there shows
all through the most tender and minute care for the lower and therefore
unprotected classes, as well as for individual souls. Slavery, in every
form, excited Gregory’s generous indignation, and his most earnest
efforts were devoted to restoring slaves to the rank of human beings.
The peasants on the great estates were serfs—practically slaves. He
decreed that their marriages should be inviolable, their property their
own, their wills valid; that wherever possible the Church revenues
should be devoted to buying the freedom of slaves, and that never, on
any plea, should Christians be sold to Jews or pagans. At the same time
he enacted that neither Jews nor pagans should be baptized by force,
and commanded that the synagogues of the Jews should be restored to
them and that they should be allowed freedom of worship.
Always humble and diffident about asking anything for himself, it is
amusing to find him severely reprimanding a Bishop who had authorized
or permitted extortionate exactions to be practised against an obscure
farmer in Sardinia, and at the same time writing meekly to the overseer
of some ecclesiastical property in Sicily—a stud farm where were kept
four hundred stallions: “You have sent me one bad horse and four asses.
I cannot ride the horse, because it is bad, nor the asses, because they
are asses. If you would assist to sustain me, send me something that I
can use!”
But after all the special bond between St. Gregory and English-speaking
peoples lies in the memorable act by which England was evangelized,
after the Faith first planted there had been annihilated by the pagan
Barbarians, Saxons, Angles, Scandinavians, to whom she fell an easy
prey when Rome withdrew its protecting legions and abandoned her to her
fate.
It is rather sweet to know that it was the fair, innocent beauty of
a group of English children, standing, dazed and frightened, in the
market to be sold, that first touched his heart to such warm pity for
their country. He was then living as the Abbot of the community he had
founded on the Cœlian Hill, and enough has been said to show how happy
he was in his quiet life there.
It must have been some unusual necessity which took him far down
into the town on a certain day and through the noisy crowded slave
market. But on seeing the children, with their blue eyes full of tears
and their long golden hair shining in the sun, everything else was
forgotten; he stopped abruptly to ask who they were.
“Angles, from the isle of Britain,” was the answer, given indifferently
enough. The keeper knew that the big, dark-faced monk was not a
slave-buyer.
“Angles! They are born to be angels!” cried Gregory, and straightway
he flew to the Pope and besought permission to go with some of his
monks to Britain, to preach the Gospel. The Pope, taken by surprise,
consented; and before he had time to think over the matter, Gregory,
with his volunteers, had put three days of travelling between himself
and Rome. Then the news leaked out, and the people rose like one
man and rushed to the Pope, who was on his way to St. Peter’s, and,
arresting his progress, burst into indignant cries: “You have offended
St. Peter! You have ruined Rome in allowing Gregory to leave us!”
Pelagius saw his mistake and sent messengers in all haste to call
Gregory back. Of course he obeyed; he never forgot England, but it
was only in the sixth year of his own pontificate (596) that he could
carry out his design, and then he could not himself take part in the
expedition. He found a noble substitute in St. Augustine, and it must
have been with a glad heart that he sent him forth, and gave him and
his forty Benedictines the final blessing, as they knelt (so we are
told) on the grassy stretch below the steps of Gregory’s own convent
on the Cœlian Hill. The grass grows there still; still the green trees
shadow the enclosure called St. Gregory’s park, through which one
approaches the church, and still the flowers bloom in Silvia’s garden
where he played as a little boy. Even modern Rome has been loath to
encroach on the place so dear to him who loved Rome so much.
I have often wondered what became of the little English children he
saw, and seeing, loved. Surely he rescued them and placed them with
kind people to be cared for. His quick notice of them reminds one of
our own Pius IX, who could never pass an English child without stopping
to bless it, and, while blessing the child, to pray for England, whom
Augustine and his companions made “the Isle of Saints” and the “Dowry
of Mary.”
One more picture of St. Gregory must close this humble sketch of his
great life. As already related, after he had been elected Pope he
sent a letter to the Emperor Maurice, imploring him not to confirm the
decision of the people. And just then, as if jealous of all the good
work that was going forward, the Powers of Evil let loose a terrible
outbreak of the pestilence in Rome. They could not touch the spiritual
city—Rome invisible, the Sanctuary of the Faith—but the material
one seemed to be delivered into their hands, and terrible were its
sufferings. Poverty and neglect, and the ruin of ceaseless wars, had
made it vulnerable at every point; the pestilence had swept it again
and again, but this was the most frightful visitation of all. Gregory
and his monks, and many other charitable persons devoted themselves
to the sick and dying; the lazarets and hospitals were crowded—every
day with new sufferers as the dead were carried out; but it became
impossible to bury the dead fast enough. Neither prayer nor effort
seemed of any avail, and dull despair settled on all hearts. Apparently
this was to be the end.
Then Gregory instituted the first of those great processions which,
in moments of stress, have moved across the pages of history ever
since, aweing us a little by the whole-hearted faith and trust of our
ancestors in the mercy of Heaven. Gregory decreed that all, clergy
and laity, who could stand on their feet should put on the garments
of penitence and follow him through the stricken streets to pray at
the tomb of St. Peter. And all who could obeyed like one man. What a
sight that must have been when the Saint, “the strong, dark-faced man
of heavy build,” led his afflicted people from the “Mother of Churches”
at the Lateran Gate, down past all the ruined pomp of the Palatine and
the Colosseum and the Forum towards the river and the great Basilica of
Constantine beyond! How the response of the Major Litanies must have
thundered up from all those breaking hearts to the “skies of brass”
that hung over Rome! The ever-repeated “Te rogamus, audi nos!” and
“Libera nos, Domine,” even now bring tears to one’s eyes with their
almost despairing simplicity; _then_ they were the last appeals of a
crushed and ruined race for one more chance to repent and atone for its
heaped misdeeds.
And the chance was granted. As the endless procession moved along
towards St. Peter’s its leader paused before the Mausoleum of Hadrian,
that huge monument of pagan ambition, and raised his eyes and heart in
supplication, offering we know not what of his own life and destiny for
his people’s sins.
Suddenly he stood transfigured. The chanting ceased; all eyes followed
Gregory’s gaze, all ears were strained to catch the heavenly melody
that floated, high and clear, fresh as the song of birds at dawn, over
the sorrowing city.
“Regina Cœli, laetare,
Quia quem meruisti portare,
Resurrexit, sicut, dixit!”
It was the chant of the Resurrection!
“Alleluia, Alleluia!” came the sequel in one burst from that great
multitude, as the angels’ voices grew fainter and were lost in the
depths overhead. And then, on hearts bursting now with relief and joy
there fell the awe that mortals feel in the presence of the Heavenly
Ones, for there, on the summit of the towering fortress, stood the
radiant archangel—and he was sheathing his flaming sword.
The pestilence was over. Once more God had had mercy on his people.
And, since the angels’ song was addressed to the Queen of Heaven, we
know that it was she whose prayers had stayed the arm that had clung
round her neck in Bethlehem.
St. Gregory passed to his reward on March 12, 604, having reigned
nearly fourteen years. The mourning city chose Sabinianus of Volterra
to succeed him, but only three years had elapsed when Sabinianus in
his turn made place for a Boniface (III) who lived but one year after
his election, and then came another Boniface, a Saint, a strong man of
the Abruzzi, and in his reign the world found out that though imperial
Rome was indeed dead, the Rome that Gregory and Benedict and their
fellow-workers had planted on her grave during that century of apparent
eclipse had taken root below and shot out branches above, and had
become as a mighty tree affording guidance, shelter, and sustenance to
the whole Christian world.
Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special mission to fulfil,
one that coloured all his acts and sheds its individual lustre on his
memory. No doubt or hesitation seems to accompany the acceptance and
fulfilment of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place the seal of visible
Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the Faith for all time.
To it was Boniface, the fourth of that name, who decreed and carried
out the triumph of which I spoke in a preceding chapter. But it is a
big subject and it must have a chapter to itself.