CHAPTER VII.

GREGORY THE GREAT.

THE sixth century of Christianity was drawing towards its close. Anarchy threatened the whole West Close of sixth of Europe; it had already almost enveloped Italy century. in ruin and desolation. Italy had been a Gothic kingdom, it was now a province of the Eastern Empire. Rome had been a provincial city of Theodoric's kingdom, it was now a provincial, at least only the second, city in the monarchy of Justinian. But the Byzantine government, though it had overthrown the Gothic kingdom, had exhausted itself in the strife. The eunuch Narses had drained by his avarice that wealth which had begun to recover under the vigour of his peaceful administration. But Narses, according to the popular belief, had revenged himself upon the groaning province, which had appealed to Constantinople against his oppressive rule, and upon the jealous Emperor who had feared his greatness. He had summoned the Lombards to cross the Alps. The Lombard death of Narses had left his successor, the Exarch invasion. of Ravenna, only the dignity of a sovereignty which he was too weak to exercise for any useful purpose of government. Already the Lombards occupied great part of the north of Italy, and were extending their desolating inroads towards the south. The terrors of the defenceless province cowered before, no doubt exaggerated, the barbarity of these new invaders. The Catholics and the Romans had leagued with the East to throw off the Gothic yoke; they were not even to rest under the more oppressive rule of their new masters; they were to be the prey, the victims, the slaves of a new race of barbarians. The Goths had been to a great degree civilised and Romanised before their conquest of Italy; their enlightened rulers had endeavoured to subdue them to the arts of peace, at

least to a less destructive system of warfare. The Lombards were still obstinate barbarians; the Christianity which they had partially embraced was Arianism; and it had in no degree, if justly described, mitigated the ferocity of their manners. They had no awe of religious men, no reverence for religious places; they burned churches, laid waste monasteries, slew ecclesiastics, and violated consecrated virgins with no more dread or remorse than ordinary buildings or profane enemies. So profound was the terror of the Lombard invasion, that the despairing Italians, even the highest ecclesiastics, beheld it as an undoubted sign of the coming day of judgment. The great writer of the times describes the depopulated cities, the ruined castles, the churches burned, the monasteries of males and females destroyed, the farms wasted and left without cultivation, the whole land a solitude, and wild beasts wandering over fields once occupied by multitudes of human beings. He draws the inevitable conclusion; "what is happening in other parts of the world we know not, but in this the end of all things not merely announces itself as approaching, but shows itself as actually begun." This terror of the Lombards seemed to survive and to settle down into an unmitigated detestation. Throughout the legends of the piety and the miracles wrought by bishops and monks in every part of Italy, the most cruel and remorseless persecutor is always a Lombard. And this hatred was not in the least softened when the popes, rising to greater power, became to a certain extent the defenders of Italy: it led them joyfully to hail the appearance of the more warlike and orthodox Franks, whom first the Emperor Maurice, and afterwards the popes, summoned finally to crush the sinking kingdom of the Lombards. The internecine and inextinguishable hatred of the Church, and probably of the Roman provincials, to the Lombards, had many powerful workings on the fortunes of Italy and of the popedom.

с

On the ravages in Italy by these conflicts, Greg. Epist. v. 21, xiii. 38.

d"Finem suum mundus jam non nunciat, sed ostendit."-Greg. Mag. Dial. iii. sub fine: compare ii. 29, vii. ii. 192. Gregory was fully persuaded of

the approaching Day of Judgment. The world gave manifest sigus of its old age. Hom. v. on Matt. c. 10.

See the Dialogues of Gregory, passim, and frequent notices in the Epistles.

The Byzantine conquest had not only crushed the independence of reviving Italy, prevented the quiet infusion of Gothic blood and of Gothic institutions into the frame of society; it had almost succeeded in trampling down the ecclesiastical dignity of Rome. There are few popes whose reigns have been so inglorious as those of the immediate successors of that unhappy Vigilius, who closed his disastrous and dishonourable life at a distance from his see, Pelagius I., Benedict, Pelagius II. They rose at the command, must obsequiously obey the mandates, not of the Emperor, but of the Emperor's representative, the Exarch of Ravenna. They must endure, even if under solemn but unregarded protests, the pretensions of the bishop of the Emperor's capital, to equality, perhaps to superiority. Western bishops seem to take advantage of their weakness, and supported, as they expect to be, 560. by Imperial Constantinople, defy their patriarch.

A.D. 553 to

Times of emergency call forth great men-men at least, if not great in relation to the true intellectual, moral, and spiritual dignity of man, great in relation to the state and to the necessities of their age; engrossed by the powerful and dominant principles of their time, and bringing to the advancement of those principles surpassing energies of character, inflexible resolution, the full conviction of the wisdom, justice, and holiness of their cause in religious affairs, of the direct and undeniable sanction of God. Such was Gregory I., to whom his own age and posterity have assigned the appellation of the Great.

Now was the crisis in which the Papacy, the only power which lay not entirely and absolutely prostrate before the disasters of the times-which had an inherent strength, and might resume its majesty the power which was most imperatively required to preserve that which was to survive out of the crumbling wreck of Roman civilisation, must reawaken its obscured and suspended life. To Western Christianity was absolutely necessary a centre, standing alone, strong in traditionary reverence, and in acknowledged claims to supremacy. Even the perfect organisation of the Christian hierarchy might in all human probability have fallen to pieces in perpetual conflict: it might have

degenerated into a half secular feudal caste, with hereditary benefices more and more entirely subservient to the civil power, a priesthood of each nation or each tribe, and gradually sinking to the intellectual or religious level of the nation or tribe. On the rise of a power both controlling and conservative, hung, humanly speaking, the life and death of Christianity-of Christianity as a permanent, aggressive, expansive, and, to a certain extent, uniform system. There must be a counterbalance to barbaric force, to the unavoidable anarchy of Teutonism, with its tribal, or at the utmost national independence, forming a host of small, conflicting, antagonistic kingdoms. All Europe had been what England was under the Octarchy, what Germany was when her emperors were weak; and even her emperors she owed to Rome, to the Church, to Christianity. Providence might have otherwise ordained it, but it is impossible for man to imagine by what other organising or consolidating force the commonwealth of the Western nations could have grown up to a discordant, indeed, and conflicting league, but still to a league, with that unity and conformity of manners, usages, laws, religion, which have made their rivalries, oppugnancies, and even their long ceaseless wars, on the whole to issue in the noblest, highest, most intellectual form of civilisation known to man. It is inconceivable that Teutonic Europe, or Europe so deeply interpenetrated with Teutonism, could have been condensed or compelled into a vast Asiatic despotism, or succession of despotisms. Immense and interminable as have been the evils and miseries of the conflict between the southern and northern, the Teutonic and Roman, the hierarchical and civil elements of our social system, out of these conflicts has at length arisen the balance and harmony of the great states which constitute European Christendom, and are now peopling other continents with kindred and derivative institutions. It is impossible to conceive what had been the confusion, the lawlessness, the chaotic state of the middle ages, without the mediaval Papacy; and of the mediaval Papacy the real father is Gregory the Great. In all his predecessors there was much of the uncertainty and indefiniteness of a new dominion. Christianity had converted the Western world-it had by

this time transmuted it: in all except the Roman law, it was one with it. Even Leo the Great had something of the Roman dictator. Gregory is the Roman altogether merged in the Christian bishop. It is a Christian dominion, of which he lays the foundations in the Eternal City, not the old Rome associating Christian influence to her ancient title of sovereignty.

Birth and

Gregory.

Gregory united in himself every qualification and endowment which could command the veneration and attachment of Rome and of his age. In his descent of descent he blended civil and ecclesiastical nobility. He was of a senatorial family: his father bore the imperial name of Gordian, his mother that of Sylvia. A pope (Felix II.) was his ancestor in the fourth degree-the pope who had built the church of SS. Cosmos and Damianus, close to the temple of Romulus. Two sainted virgins, Thirsilla and Sylvia, were his aunts. To his noble descent was added considerable wealth; and all that wealth, directly he became master of it by the death of his father, was at once devoted to religious uses. He founded and endowed, perhaps from Sicilian estates, six monasteries in that island; a seventh, in Rome, he chose for his own retreat; and having lavished on the poor all his costly robes, his silk, his gold, his jewels, his furniture, he violently wrenched himself from the secular life (in which he had already attained to the dignity of prætor of the city), and not even assuming the abbacy of his convent, but beginning with the lowest monastic duties, he devoted himself altogether to God. His whole time was passed in prayer, reading, writing, and dictation. The fame of his unprecedented abstinence and boundless charity spread abroad,

Homil. 38, in Evang. Dialog. Epist. iv. 16; Joh. Diac. in Vit. The date of his birth is uncertain; it was about the year 540.-Lau., Gregor. I. der Grosse, page 10.

He describes his secular state, Præfat. ad Job. "Diu longeque conversionis gratiam distuli, et postquam cœlesti sum desiderio affectus, seculari habitu contegi melius putavi. . . . Cumque adhuc me cogeret animus præsenti mundo quasi specie tenus deservire, cœperunt

multa contra me ex ejusdem mundi curâ succrescere, ut in eo jam non specie, sed quod est gravius, mente retinerer."

The date of Gregory's monkhood is again uncertain - probably not earlier than 573, nor later than 577.-Lau, p.

21.

i Greg. Tur. x. 1. According to Jaffè, the Register of Gregory's Letters not only marks the year (the indiction), but the month of their date.