St. Gregory the Great
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Gregory the Great. He was born to a great patrician family in Rome and initially followed the pattern of life expected of him by becoming a public official. At around the age of thirty he became prefect of Rome. But he desired to renounce the world and pursue a religious vocation. He turned his own house on the Clivus Scauri into a monastery, which he placed under the patronage of St. Andrew. This proved to be the happiest period of his life, but he was not allowed to remain in obscurity for long. He was ordained deacon and then sent as papal apocrisarius or ambassador to the Byzantine court. In 586 he was recalled to Rome by Pope Pelagius II. He returned to his monastery as abbot. It was during this period that the famous incident later reported by St. Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English people occurred. One day St. Gregory was walking through the market where he saw some fair haired boys. He inquired their nationality and was informed that they were Angles. He responded that they were not Angles but angels. From that time onwards he resolved that the Gospel should be spread among them.
In January 590 Pelagius died of the plague and St. Gregory was chosen as his successor. He was the first monk to be Bishop of Rome and continued to live austerely and simply. He wrote a famous treatise on the pastoral office of the bishop in which he set out his ideals of his role as a physician of souls whose chief duties were preaching and the enforcement of discipline. Much of his correspondence is devoted to practical matters such as encouraging the good treatment of those employed on the papal estates. He also had to deal with the aggressions of the Lombards. He was able to realise his vision of sending missionaries to England under the leadership of St. Augustine, a monk from his own monastery of St. Andrew. He had many conflicts with both the Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople. He rebuked the latter for taking upon himself the title Ecumenical Patriarch, which he sought savoured of arrogance. He preferred to see himself as servus servorum dei, the servant of the servants of God. He died in 604.
Rome and Italy in the time of St. Gregory were in the midst of a seemingly interminable series of crises. Rome had once seen itself as the capital of a great empire and the centre of the civilised world. But by the end of the sixth century it had degenerated into a plague infested provincial town. The Western Roman Empire had fallen in the fifth century and in Italy Ostrogoths had replaced Roman emperors as rulers. In the sixth century, under the Emperor Justinian, the Roman Empire in the East had attempted to reconquer what had been lost in the West in the previous century. The reconquest of Italy had some success and the Empire had re-asserted control from the Ostrogoths, though there were now problems with the Lombards. But the conflicts and violence of these continuing wars for supremacy had led Rome and Italy into a state of exhaustion. There were terrible plagues. It was one such pestilence that had led to the death of St. Gregory’s predecessor as Bishop of Rome. There was a power vacuum in the city, and, since the Empire was now centered in Constantinople in the East and the imperial exarchate was in Ravenna in north Italy rather than in Rome, it fell to St. Gregory to take on the responsibility for maintaining what remained of civil society in Rome, as well as the spiritual welfare of his flock. To St. Gregory himself, as a child of the ancient Roman senatorial aristocracy, it seemed like the world itself was coming to an end. The people had brought terrible calamities on themselves. The only hope for redemption lay in relying on divine grace and trust in the merciful deliverance of the goodness of God.
Despite his bleak pessimism about the current situation he was a man of energy and vision. He did not simply react to existing problems, but also initiated a mission to England that would have a decisive impact on the future of the Church. In St. Gregory’s time the Roman rite was essentially that of the city of Rome. Other areas of Italy followed their own liturgical usages, France followed the Gallican rite and Spain the Mozarabic. When St. Augustine asked St. Gregory the liturgy he was to use in England he was advised to be as flexible as possible and to do what seemed most fitting in the local situation. But in practice St. Augustine’s mission used the rite which they had been familiar with in Rome. Though in England, they still aimed to be “Roman of the city”. The result of this was that England came to adopt the Roman rite rather than the Gallican or another liturgy. Later English missionaries such as St. Willibrord and St. Boniface spread the Gospel to the Netherlands and Germany and also the use of the Roman rite. Later Charlemagne decided to make the Roman rather than the Gallican rite the liturgy of his realm. He was assisted in this process by an Englishman Alcuin of York, who adapted the Roman rite to make it more acceptable to those familiar with the Gallican. It was this form, the Roman rite with the incorporation of many elements of the Gallican rite, that became the liturgy of the Western Church.
It is important to emphasise that the process by which the liturgy of the Church of Rome became that of the Western Church as a whole was not primarily due to the initiative of the Popes themselves (St. Gregory had in fact advised St. Augustine to be flexible), but was rather the result of the work of missionaries from Rome to England and later from England to Germany. It was an evolved customary usage, rather than a papal mandate. It is for this reason that the classical form of the liturgy has stood the test of time over many centuries. Good liturgies are not so much written as develop gradually over time. They are the fruit of the prayers of the plebs sancta dei. the holy common people of God.
St. Gregory was not an original thinker. He discouraged theological and philosophical speculation and focused instead on practical matters. The age required men who were wise rather than learned to address the problems that they faced. St. Gregory has sometimes not unjustly been called the first medieval man. Though himself a product of a classical civilisation he saw that it had degenerated to such an extent that it was beyond hope of recovery. The future lay with furthering the process of Christianisation among the tribal kingdoms who had replaced the collapsed Empire in the West. The Church provided the means of continuity between two worlds, one lost and another waiting to be born.
There is much that we can learn from St. Gregory’s vision today. The age of Enlightenment has now faded in western societies and we seem to be in a period of cultural collapse not unlike that faced by St. Gregory. We lurch from one crisis to another, there are wars and rumours of wars, pestilences and radical changes to the climate. But we lack any overarching vision to lead us out of the situation.
We are not as wise and enlightened as we like to think. We still need, just as much as in the age of St. Gregory to pray, to confess our sins and shortcomings, that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves and need to rely on divine grace to enable us to think, will and do that which is good. Perhaps if we started to do this, we would see our contemporary problems in a more balanced perspective and might even be in a better position to address some of them. After all, as G. K. Chesterton once put it, it is not the case that the Church will drag us back to the Dark Ages. The Church is the only thing that got us out of them.
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