Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (12 page)

Gregory was to look back on the next few years, given over to prayer and reflection on scripture, as the happiest of his life. He was a dedicated monk, and was to destroy his health, and his stomach lining, by excessive fasting. His
Dialogues
, a set of miracle-encrusted lives of the early Italian monks, in particular the father of Western monasticism, St Benedict, was to become one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages (and the only work of Gregory’s to find a Greek as well as a Latin readership). But above all, it was the contemplative dimension of monastic life he valued, and which as pope he missed:

He was not left long in his retreat. In the crisis years of the late
sixth century men of his abilities and experience could not be spared. He was ordained deacon against his will by Pope Benedict I (575–9), and placed in charge of the city’s seventh district, with responsibility for administration and charitable relief. In August 579 the city was besieged by the Lombards, and a new pope, Pelagius II (579–90), was elected. Desperate for military help and relief for the beleaguered city, Pelagius sent Gregory as apocrisiary to Constantinople, to plead with the Emperor Tiberius. He was to remain there for seven years.

Even as deacon of the seventh region Gregory had continued to live in his monastery, and he took a group of monks from St Andrew’s with him to Constantinople, turning the Roman embassy in Constantinople into a replica of his monastic home on the Caelian. He devoted himself to the spiritual life of this community, lecturing regularly to them on the Book of Job. But he also pursued his diplomatic duties with vigour, winning the trust of the royal family and becoming godfather to the eldest son of the new Emperor Maurice, debating theology with the Patriarch, and establishing a network of personal contacts which would stand him in good stead as pope. He remained, however, resolutely a Roman, refusing to learn Greek, suspicious of Eastern theology and liturgy, troubled by and disapproving of the Westerners in Constantinople who had gone native. As pope he would refuse to answer a letter from a woman-friend settled in Constantinople because she had written in Greek instead of her native Latin. Rome was the Eternal City, the dwelling-place of the Apostle – ‘How anyone can be seduced by Constantinople,’ he wrote, ‘and how anyone can forget Rome, I do not know.’
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The only aspect of Greek civilisation he seems to have valued was the retsina for which he formed a taste while Apocrisiary, and which he had specially shipped to Rome when he became pope.

Gregory was eventually recalled to assist Pope Pelagius II in attempts to resolve the Istrian schism, and so was in Rome during the dreadful winter of 589, when the Tiber rose and breached the city’s war-damaged walls, flooding and demolishing churches and granaries, and decimating the winter food-supplies. In the ensuing plague Pope Pelagius was one of the first victims, and Gregory was at once elected by clergy and people to succeed him.

Gregory was a devout man, an unselfconscious participant in the unsophisticated popular Christianity of the West in his own day. The
piety revealed in his
Dialogues
is colourful, receptive to miracles and marvels, readily moved to awe. Yet there was nothing fanciful about him: he had all the Roman virtues – practicality, realism, a passion for order. Despite his love of contemplation, he was no abstract thinker. He distrusted learning for its own sake, and he praised St Benedict for being ‘skilfully ignorant and wisely unlearned’.
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As pope, he was to need every shred of this practicality. Most of his letters survive, and they provide a window into the overwhelming scale and range of the tasks that confronted him, and the titanic energy with which, despite wretched health, he tackled them.

In the first place, he had to defend the city from the Lombards. Rome was now a military dukedom, with an imperial commander, based in the palace on the Capitol, nominally in charge. In practice, imperial resources were often diverted elsewhere – as Gregory complained bitterly to the Emperor Maurice, ‘Rome is abandoned, that Perugia might be held.’
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Gregory continued the policy begun by his predecessor, Pelagius II, of buying temporary truces from the Lombards ‘without any cost to the republic’ – that is, with bribes raised from the Church’s own resources. He also found himself often obliged to pay the wages of the imperial troops or to provision the Roman garrison. He negotiated treaties, ransomed refugees and provided for their relief.

In many places, the Lombard advance drove out the Catholic clergy, and Gregory had to try to cobble together pastoral provision for the laity left behind. In imperial Italy, he used his primatial powers to try to secure decent episcopal appointments, imposing Roman clerics, when he could get away with it, in preference to unsuitable local candidates. He regulated the lives of existing monastic communities and encouraged new foundations. He tried to ensure that those in charge of the Church’s lands and properties were good employers and used the revenues for the benefit of the needy. One cluster of letters show him disciplining a slack bishop who had tried to get rid of an overzealous archdeacon by forcibly ordaining him priest. Another shows him trying to rationalise the livestock holdings on the Church’s properties in Sicily. In Rome itself he had a detailed register drawn up of every poor person in the city, where they lived, what their names and ages were, and allocated a weekly ration of corn, wine, cheese and oil to each. Food from the Pope’s own table was sent to genteel folk fallen on hard times, an exquisitely tactful
way of turning a charitable dole into a mark of respect. Twelve poor people ate with the Pope each day.

All this cost money, and one of the most remarkable features of Gregory’s activity was his reorganisation and deployment of the patrimony of the Roman Church. The Church was by now the largest single landowner in the West, its property built up from imperial bounty in the Constantinian era, and then from the donations and legacies of great families like Gregory’s own. The papacy had lands scattered in at least fifteen different regions, from Gaul to Africa, from the Balkans to Calabria. The rich Sicilian holdings were by far the most important – most of Gregory’s own family properties were there – and Sicily had been untouched by invasion. This proved the salvation of Rome, for the papacy now took on the Roman state’s traditional role of feeding the people. Gregory overhauled the whole working of these Church lands, replacing unsatisfactory ‘rectors’ – the chief officers of the patrimonies, who were often slack or corrupt local bishops or lay adminstrators – with hand-picked members of the Roman clergy and specially sworn lay assistants. He closely scrutinised their activities, and endlessly exhorted them to diligence and efficiency, scrupulous honesty, generosity to the poor, and fair dealing with tenants and employees.

There was more to this than money. The patrimonial organisation provided Gregory with a network of patronage, persuasion and liaison with the local churches and civic administration which enormously strengthened his grip over the churches of Italy and beyond. The channels of influence which they gave the Pope were exploited to maximum effect. The rector of the Ravenna patrimony functioned as papal ambassador to the Exarch, and kept a watchful eye on the Archbishop, who chafed at his subjugation to Rome and was angling for independent patriarchal status. This network, and the revenues which sustained it, laid the foundations for the role and influence of the medieval papacy.

Much of this activity was looked at askance in Constantinople. The Emperor resented Gregory’s independent negotiations with the Lombards, and considered that he had no business making truces with the enemies of the empire. Gregory revered the empire as the one legitimate secular authority in Christendom, and he saw himself in civic matters as its servant – ‘for the love of the empire, we have
lost silver and gold, slaves and raiment’. But he in his turn resented armchair criticism levelled from the comfort and safety of Constantinople at those like himself who ‘suffer in this place among the swords of the Lombards’, and who were forced to watch ‘Romans tied by the neck like dogs, to be taken to Gaul for sale’.
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Moreover, though he detested the ‘unspeakable Lombards’, he also thought of them not merely as the enemies of the Emperor and of Italy, to be bought or fought off, but as his pastoral responsibility, human beings with souls to be saved. The marriage of two successive Lombard kings to the Bavarian Catholic Princess Theodelinda gave the Pope a toehold in the Lombard court which he exploited to the full, showering Theodelinda with gifts, and being rewarded by the Catholic baptism of her son, Prince Adoloald. It was the first step in a process which would ultimately lead to Lombard renunciation of Arianism.

Gregory was also perfectly prepared to do battle with imperial officials in the localities when he thought they were oppressing the poor or infringing the rights of the Church. The authority of empire was rooted in responsibility. ‘There is this difference between the kings of the barbarian nations and the Roman emperor,’ he told Maurice, ‘that the former have slaves for their subjects, the latter free men. And therefore, in all your acts, your first object should be the maintenance of justice, your second to preserve a perfect liberty.’
¹¹
By the same token, he was ready to resist the Emperor when he encroached on matters of the spirit. In 593 Maurice issued an edict forbidding any serving soldiers to resign from the army in order to enter monastic life. In an empire at bay against armed enemies, it was not an unreasonable measure, but Gregory, who had himself abandoned public service to become a monk, would have none of it. He dutifully circulated the edict, but he wrote a blistering rebuke to Maurice, accusing him of abusing his power and locking up the way to heaven, reminding him of his humble origins and charging him with ingratitude to the God who had raised him to be emperor, before whose judgement seat, he pointed out, Maurice would soon have to stand. It is not a timid letter.
¹²

Gregory was generally deferential in his dealings with the Emperor, but he was insistent on the primacy of the Roman Church. He told Maurice in 595 that ‘the care of the whole Church has been committed to the blessed Peter, Prince of the
Apostles. Behold he received the keys of the kingdom of heaven; to him was given the power of binding and loosing, to him the care and principate of the whole Church was committed.’ The issue of the primacy of Rome and its relation to Constantinople came to a head over the employment of the conventional title ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’ by Gregory’s former friend, John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople. Gregory’s predecessor, Pelagius II, had taken exception to the Patriarch’s use of the word ‘Ecumenical’, understanding it to mean ‘universal’ and seeing in it a challenge to the universal authority of the Pope. This was in fact a misapprehension. The title meant no more than ‘imperial’, and to begin with at least there was no larger agenda in its use. But Gregory remembered and revived Pelagius’ objections, perhaps because they had been first raised by his ancestor, Pope Felix. He denounced John’s continued use of the phrase, and tried to pressure members of the imperial family and the administration in Constantinople to put a stop to it. He also wrote to the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, suggesting that, as bishops of the other two ‘Petrine’ sees, they shared in the Petrine office. They too were being insulted, moreover, since ‘if one Patriarch is called Universal, the name of Patriarch in the rest is derogated’.
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Gregory cared greatly about order, but there was more at stake in this debate about the ‘Universal Patriarchate’ than petty worries about prestige. For him, precedence in the Church, and especially the papal primacy, was based on humility and service. His favourite title for his own office was
Servus servorum dei
(servant of the servants of God). One of his most influential writings was his treatise on episcopacy,
Pastoral Care
: in it he portrayed the bishop as one who prepares for rule by ruling himself in humility. The bishop must be a man of meditation, steeped in scripture, devoted to preaching, teaching, admonition, one who seeks ‘to subdue himself rather than his brethren’, ‘a minister, not a master’.
¹⁴

By contrast, he seems to have seen in the Constantinopolitan title an alternative, worldly understanding of ecclesiastical power, an attempt by the devil or Antichrist to corrupt the Church in the last days. In a devastatingly undiplomatic phrase, he told the Emperor that this demonic pride was one of the reasons why so many of the patriarchs of Constantinople had ‘fallen into the whirlpool of heresy’.
¹⁵
His fellow patriarchs could not understand his concern.
Anastasius of Antioch sternly warned him against pride, while Eulogius of Alexandria, politely bewildered, promised never to call the Patriarch of Constantinople ‘Universal Patriarch’, in a letter in which he addressed Gregory as ‘Universal Pope’. Like some later historians, Eulogius clearly thought that behind Gregory’s rhetoric of humility and equality was a less attractive concern for his own dignity. Gregory was mortified: