The materials which are at hand for the life of Gregory the Great are, if anything, too numerous. In their original form they include all that Paul the Deacon (quoted by the Venerable Bede) and John the Deacon (quoted by everybody) have chosen to relate. And these have been so anxious to do entire justice to the great Pope that they fill their pages with miracles, wonders, and signs, as well as with the authentic facts of history. But Gregory carved for himself such a niche in the temple of fame that we are not likely to go very far astray in searching for the proper estimate of his work.

It may be safely assumed that from this pontificate dates the supremacy of the Roman see. It was Gregory whose missionary spirit opened the doors of Britain to the truth. It was he who, without asserting any superior claim, opposed successfully the encroachments of the Greek patriarchs. And it was again he who gave to the Church her sacred melodies.

He was born, says Paul the Deacon, in the city of Rome, of a father named Gordianus and a mother named Sylvia. These people were of the Anician family and were also of distinguished religious descent. Felix—fourth of the name and Pope under the title of Felix III.—was his atavus, or great-great-great-grandfather. The very name Gregorius our worthy deacon declares to be the Greek equivalent of the word “Watchful.”

The child of such a house would be well nurtured in all the learning of the time. Hence, he was trained in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics—the ancient trivium or complete course of liberal education. Naturally, too, he became an excellent scholar. And when he grew up he was called to an important post in Roman civil affairs. He became praetor of the city—a city which was subject to Byzantium and exposed to incursions of various barbarian invaders. The Lombards, indeed, attacked it during his praetorship.

At this period of his life his love for display was as remarkable as his subsequent simplicity. He delighted in rich attire and surrounded himself with the pomp and circumstance of his position. A rich man and a rich man’s son, he was thoroughly in sympathy with passing affairs, and as Rome bloomed the more vigorously above her own decay, he was himself one of those “flowers of evil” whose gaudy hues brightened the scene. But at the same time he became accustomed to the management of large affairs, and his administration secured to him the good will of his associates and subordinates. It can often be noticed that these early Fathers came to their power in the Church after having been strictly and carefully trained in the world. Hilary and Ambrose were as conspicuous examples of this foreordination as was Gregory the Great.

Not long previous to this time—for it had been about the year of Gregory’s birth—Benedict had reformed the monastic order. His work, to put it briefly, consisted in guarding the entrance to monasticism and in regulating the hours, habits, and customs of those celibates who professed such a vocation for the religious life. From his wise and systematic arrangements, which have been but little improved upon though often reinforced by “reformations,” monasticism derived that adaptation to the active and practical life of the West, which it had lacked in the preceding centuries. Indeed, he so far reacted against the contemplative idleness of the East, as to aim rather at an industrial than a learned order. But his successors corrected this defect, and gave the order the literary and educational character which has been its greatest claim to the gratitude of Christendom. Thus it came to be that the Benedictine Fathers became the order of scholars, the editors of the Fathers, of the Acta Sanctorum, and of the Histoire Litteraire de France. The permanent revenues, the fixity and quiet of these monastic lives, the slow coral-building of these unknown workers, have resulted in gathering for us all that the mediaeval historian can desire upon the religious side. And it is here that, delving amid the dust of these mountainous masses of literature, the student of Latin hymnology will find his rarest delight. For these acute scholars have literally picked up and printed, yea, and what is more to the purpose, they have indexed and classified—whatever he can wish in the way of productions in prose and verse by any known author. The old MSS. are strained through into readable type. Their contents are sorted and sifted. And he who pores over these pages will rise from them at length with a profound conviction that the scholarship of the Latin Church, and particularly the Benedictine Order, deserves well from the world of letters and merits the admiration of the Church Universal.

Into such an order as this—an order of which he was to be one of the most illustrious lights—a divine impulse was pressing Gregory. He grew more closely attached to the Benedictines of Monte Cassino. His religious relatives encouraged his evident zeal. And thus after vibrating like a bee between the odorous rose and the honey-giving clover, he settled upon the humbler and sweeter flower and let the world go by.

The Arian Lombards had encamped upon that region which we after their name now call Lombardy. The Roman bishops were already the prop of the heathen state against the semi-Christian invaders; but with Lombards, and those whose religion was only a fiction, their influence was deplorably slight. Yet as Christianity increased, according to George Herbert’s simile,

the Church became doubly influential through the skill of Gregory. He felt religion to be the source of the truest strength and thus he turned his wealth and his life into its treasury.

In the year 575 he took his great revenues and endowed six new monasteries in Sicily. Then he established a seventh, devoting it to the honor of St. Andrew; and this was at Rome, in his own palace on the Coelian hill. The populace who had seen him in silk and jewels now beheld him, a poor monk of the Benedictine Order, serving the beggars at the gate. In humility of demeanor and in simplicity of food he became a model to his fellow-monks. He attended the sick in his new hospital. He ate only the dried corn, or pulse, which his mother sent to him already moistened in a silver bowl. This bowl or porringer was the only relic of his departed splendor, and we are told that he did not keep even this, but gave it at last to a shipwrecked sailor for whom he had no money, and who begged importunately from him when he was writing in his cell.

The intensity of his devotion led him into great austerities of fasting and prayer and study of the Scriptures. He outdid the others in his abstinence from food and ended by ruining his health, so that he entered the papacy with a broken constitution. When he most needed the support of a vigorous body it was therefore denied to him.

The history of his gradual elevation is suggestive. Pope Benedict I. made him one of the seven cardinal deacons, and gave him charge of one of the seven principal divisions of the city. Pelagius II. chose him to head an embassy to Constantinople in 578 to congratulate Tiberius on his accession to the throne. For six years he remained abroad on this and similar service, and returned to Rome to be elected abbot of St. Andrew’s monastery. Here he was perfectly happy. In his Dialogues he speaks of the serene life and death of several of his brethren, and his latest biographer (Rev. J. Barmby) is never tired of relating how the great Pope perpetually looked back with regretful love to those quiet and happy days of peace with God and man.

It was then that the famous incident occurred which has made historic his missionary zeal, and has handed down three Latin puns as a proof that a man can be witty as well as earnest.

The slave market at Rome had received some new captives—alas! when was it not the scene of fresh wretchedness in those awful times? But these were of remarkable beauty and fairness of skin, and John the Deacon shall tell us of them in his own words:[6]

“Perceiving among the rest certain boys for sale, white of body, fair in form, and handsome in face, distinguished moreover by the brightness (nitore) of their hair, he asked the merchant from what country he had brought them. He answered, ‘From the island of Britain, whose inhabitants all display a similar beauty (candore) of face.’ Gregory said, ‘Are those islanders Christians or do they yet hold to their pagan errors?’ The merchant replied, ‘They are not Christians, but are entangled in their pagan delusions’ (laqueis). Then Gregory, groaning deeply, said, ‘Alas! for shame! that the prince of darkness should own those splendid faces; and that such glorious foreheads (tantaque frontis species) should express a mind vacant of the inward grace of God!’ Then he asked the name of their tribe. The merchant responded, ‘They are called Angli.’ Then he said, ‘They are well called Angli, as though they were angels (angeli) for they have angelic faces; and such as these should be fellow-citizens of the angels in heaven.’ Again, therefore, he inquired what was the name of their province. The merchant told him ‘Those provincials are called Deiri.’ Then Gregory said, ‘They are well called Deiri, for they must be snatched from wrath (de ira) and gathered to the grace of Christ. The king of that province,’ he continued, ‘how is he named?’ The merchant replied, ‘He is called Aelle.’ And Gregory, alluding to the name, said, ‘It is well that the king is called Aelle. For Alleluia in praise of the Creator must be sung in those parts.’”

Such was the commencement of that Christianizing process which eventually brought Anglo-Saxon monks to Rome for education—not that Rome was the chief source and centre from which the work of Christianizing the English was effected. That strangely organized Church, which Patrick had established in Ireland and Columcille (Columba) had propagated to Celtic Scotland, was the missionary Church of that age. Its zeal carried the faith to Scandinavia in the person of its royal converts, the two Olafs, besides Christianizing the Norsemen of Ireland and the lesser islands. Its missionaries poured southward across the lines that sundered Saxon from Celt, and co-operated mightily with the more languid efforts of the Kentish Church established by Augustine. And up to the Synod of Whitby in 664, Patrick rather than Peter was the saint who stood the highest in the esteem of English Christians.

Yet it would be unfair to rob Gregory and Augustine of the honor of having begun the work, and begun it on a higher and more permanent level than was possible to the Irish Church. After all, Rome stood for a wider conception of Church and social order and a broader Christian culture. It is to her victory that we owe Bede and the great Churchmen, who adapted the learning and lore of the Latin world to the needs of English Christendom. And so in Augustine’s mission we may see the apostolic succession, in a broader sense of the word than the technical, carried to England, to be transmitted in turn to America. England acknowledged the gift in the establishment of the tax called “Peter’s Pence” for the care and support of pilgrims to Rome, and the support of clerics, who went to study in the Saxon school established in Rome. To this we may trace, perhaps, the spread of hymn-writing from Rome to England, whose results are gathered into the Missals and Breviaries of Sarum, York, and Hereford, and that elaborate compilation, “The Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” which Rev. J. Stevenson edited for the Surtees Society.

The mission of Augustine led to far-reaching consequences. One was that the higher classes of Great Britain turned toward Rome as the centre of the world, and one of the remoter consequences of this missionary expedition was the recognition of the papal supremacy. But in his highest flight of authority Gregory the First never assumed nor felt the consciousness of power which caused Gregory the Second to write to Leo, the Isaurian: “All the lands of the West have their eyes directed upon our humility; by them we are considered as a God upon earth.” No, nor did he press his claims as did his other successor, Gregory VII., some times known as Hildebrand.

Indeed, Gregory I. in his desire to save these beautiful captives offered himself to Pope Pelagius as a missionary, and even obtained his consent to the expedition. But we are informed that the people surrounded the pontiff on his way to St. Peter’s and begged him to recall their favorite. So that Gregory had gone but three days’ journey before he was overtaken and brought back, almost forcibly, to his monastic home. The scheme of saving Britain was thus deferred but not given up; and when the cardinal-deacon became Pope it was again revived, and with success.

In the year 590 Pelagius II. died of the plague. His chair was no sooner empty than Gregory was seen to be the choice of everyone—senate and people and clergy. He was accordingly elected, and then—for such was the feeling in those days—he resisted the honor with all his might. Like Ambrose he fled from the city; he disguised himself; he even wandered in the woods. But it was one of the old principles that the more the elect refused the more their calling and election were to be made sure to them. And therefore, he was found at last, after a thorough search, and was led, literally in tears, back to Rome. He had begged the Emperor Maurice not to confirm this appointment, but it was to no effect that he pleaded for release. His quiet, peaceful days were over, and he was placed at the helm of the ship of the Church to steer her, and the commonwealth which was her freight, through floods of barbarians and into safer seas. I am using his own figure: “I am so beaten by the waves of this world,” he wrote, to his friend Leander, “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 cannot now attain.”

He took his seat in the midst of the plague. Eighty persons in the processions which he organized at seven points in the city to pray at the church of Santa Maria-Maggiore for its cessation, died of the disease during their very progress. Each procession met the others at this church of St. Mary. One consisted of secular clergy; another of abbots and monks; a third of abbesses and nuns; a fourth of children; a fifth of laymen; a sixth of widows, and a seventh of matrons. And thus arose the story about the angel whom Gregory believed that he saw above the summit of the Mole of Hadrian, and who there stood and sheathed his sword. This legend gave to that structure the name of the Castello di San Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel.

The Lombards were Gregory’s first care. He corresponded with Theodolinda, their queen, and she became his constant friend and his advocate with the king. He finally obtained from King Agilulf (her second husband) a special truce for Rome and its neighboring territory—a most delightful relief from the terrors of the last thirty years.

Moreover, he directed his attention—as Hormisdas had done before him—to the struggle which was never at rest between the Greek and Roman churches. The Patriarch of Constantinople was determined to assert his own superior claims to the veneration of the faithful. Hormisdas had avowed—but never vindicated—the supremacy of the Pope. But his title of Papa was the result of mere adulation and never of general consent. And the patriarch happened to be at this time the strong-willed John the Faster—an austere and pugnacious man. It was natural therefore that he should claim the title of Universal Bishop, and it was equally natural that Gregory, without demanding anything especial for himself, should resist John.

In this controversy—and in those others where his works bear testimony to his literary and political skill—we see Gregory at his best. He is not deficient in satire; occasionally he indulges in playful humor; but he never forgets principle nor flinches from the prosecution of his cause. It cannot be said of him that he proposes to overrule the civil authorities, but he unquestionably tells them some exceedingly plain truths. To the Emperor Maurice he wrote remonstrating against his refusal to allow a soldier to become a monk: “To this by me, the last of His servants and yours, will Christ reply, ‘From a notary I made thee a count of the body-guard; from a count of the body-guard I made thee a Caesar; from a Caesar I made thee an emperor; nay, more, I have made thee also a father of emperors; I have committed My priests into thy hand; and dost thou withdraw thy soldiers from My service?’ Answer thy servant, most pious lord, I pray thee, and say how thou wilt reply to thy Lord in the judgment, when He comes and thus speaks.” In this style he alternately appealed and remonstrated in his dealing with the powers that be.

To John the Faster, however, he administered gall and honey—sometimes separately and sometimes mixed together. “Your holy Fraternity,” he says, on one occasion, “has replied to me, as appears from the signature of the letter, that you were ignorant of what I had written about. At which reply I was mightily astonished, pondering with myself in silence, if what you say is true, what can be worse than that such things should be done against God’s servants and he who is over them should be ignorant?” Two monks had in fact been beaten with cudgels for heresy and finally resorted to Rome in defiance of John, where Gregory pardoned and restored them. The Pope continues: “But, if your holiness did know both what subject I wrote about and what had been done, either against John, the Presbyter, or against Athanasius, monk of Isauria and a presbyter, and have written to me, ‘I know not,’ what can I reply to this, since Scripture says, ‘The mouth that lies slays the soul?’ I ask, most holy brother, has all that great abstinence of yours come to this, that you would, by denial, conceal from your brother what you know to have been done?”

If we are, in spite of this plainness, disposed to be severe upon Gregory’s subservience to the civil power of the Byzantine Court, we shall find an instance in his behavior toward Phocas. This man had murdered the Emperor Maurice, gouty and helpless as he was; and had previously put his six sons to death before his eyes. The good old emperor died like a hero, repeating the words of the psalm, “Thou, O Lord, art just, and all Thy judgments are right.” And we need only to turn to Gregory’s writings to prove that the dead man was his friend and had done him many a kindness.

Notwithstanding these gracious and excellent memories of the late emperor, the Senate and people had hailed the advent of Phocas with rapturous delight. His image and that of his wife had been sent to Rome, and now, with the uproar rising to his windows, Gregory descended to the common level of detestable approbation, and caused these images to be carried into the oratory of the Lateran palace. “This,” says one of his biographers, “is the only stain upon the life of Gregory. We do not attempt either to conceal it or to excuse it.” True, Maurice had been a vexatious old man, and his piety, while it was undeniable, was nevertheless somewhat acrid. But the Bishop of Rome should have had sufficient strength at least to repress any tumultuous joy over an act of murderous ambition and hateful selfishness. This, however, is the weakness of many a prelate. In the hour of trial he bends like a reed to the blast, when we should expect him to be an oak, and trust to his roots to grapple him safely down to the firm earth of principle. This great blot, conceded by all candid historians, remains upon his memory.

It is a better picture for us to view when, forsaking his trust in the mercy of barbarians or the senility of despotic power, Gregory looked outward to the new nations and sought to furnish the Roman Church with fresh vigor and vital help from this unwasted source of strength. He corresponded with Childebert II., the unfortunate young King of Austrasia, the son of the notorious but intellectual Brunehilda. With him and with the French bishops he labored to secure the destruction of “simony,” by which was meant the bargain and sale of ecclesiastical positions. He also strove to prevent laymen from being elevated to the episcopate, though he should have remembered that Hilary of Poitiers was a notable argument against his fears.

He also attended to the religious matters of Spain. This province had ceased to be Arian in 587 with the accession of Recared; and with it and with Istria he was entirely successful in his methods of unity and peace. He also overcame the Donatist party in Africa, who had for years been ordaining their own bishops side by side with the regular succession, and sometimes in actual alternation with them.

To crown all, he organized a mission to the distant island of the fair-faced Angli in 596, the very date at which the young Childebert perished by poison in the twenty-sixth year of his age. Then it was that Augustine, after one recoil which showed that he was not quite up to the mark of Gregory’s zeal, finally set out in earnest with forty companions. The month was July. The mission was almost an embassy. It went through the intervening kingdoms endorsed to and by their kings. And it went to cheer the little feeble remnant of the Celtic Christians who had escaped the Saxon sword, and to draw from the Venerable Bede his grateful tribute to the man who had already well deserved the title of great. “For,” says Bede, “if Gregory be not to others an apostle, he is one to us, for the seal of his apostleship are we in the Lord.”

When we remember, also, his secular services in saving Rome from sack and pillage, we cannot but perceive that he was laying, broad and deep, the foundations of that temporal authority which the Pope of Rome was soon to claim. The revenues of the Roman bishop were growing enormously. He had in Sicily and elsewhere his agents and stewards (defensores). He was rapidly arising to a position of almost independent dignity. His deference to kings was only that of Christian courtesy and love. In another man some of this might have been disfigured by self-seeking and moral obliquity of purpose. In Gregory we find, throughout his career, a noble integrity which was certainly austere enough, but which was in the main pure and free from spot. His weakness was that of overconciliation, of which the case of Phocas is a flagrant example. But his strength was in his just judgment and in his masterful manipulation of the materials before him.

In his way, too, he saved Christian art as well as Christian music. He condemns the Bishop of Marseilles (Massilia) for having broken some statues of the saints. And while his remonstrance may perhaps be quoted in favor of image-worship, it certainly cannot be quoted for that blind iconoclasm which would destroy pagan beauty before the shrine of Christian ugliness. In the association of his name with the Gregorian chant he did almost as great a kindness to the Church as did Ambrose when he brought to her services the Greek hymns of the East.

He was a sick man while he labored at these matters of devotion and duty. Rheumatic gout attacked him and crippled his joints. We must add to this that he was not without enemies, and not without many a little sting and thrust of vicious tongues and pens. But he endured to the end, and he probably was sincere when he wrote himself down as Servus servorum—though there have been other popes since his day to follow the custom, and who were the “servants of servants” only according to the “devil’s darling sin, the pride that apes humility.”

Thirteen years he held the keys of St. Peter. Busy until the last moment, he wrote or dictated the correspondence which was required. But the disease which was upon him steadily increased until, on March 12th, 604, he was released from suffering and from care. His portrait shows him as a man with high and wrinkled forehead; a thin beard around the cheeks and chin; large, deep-set eyes; straight and manly nose, and a singular lock—almost like that in the conventional portrait of Father Time—upon his brow. There are a great many doctors of divinity who do not a little resemble him to-day. It is a good face, but a somewhat stern and severe one—of the sort to make credible the story that he had a special whip for his choristers, and used it when it was needed.

His works fill several volumes in the Patrologia. His Morals, a commentary upon Job, is the very best of his books; but he was probably ignorant of both Hebrew and Greek, and hence his comments on Scripture are rather more homiletical and practical than scholarly. The Pastoral Rule was translated into Saxon by King Alfred, who admired its practical wisdom, and sent a copy to every bishop in his kingdom; under Charles the Great also it was much esteemed in France. His Letters are the great mine of information upon his personal opinions and methods. The Dialogues were addressed to Theodolinda, and in these we find some superstition; and indeed a fondness for saints’ miracles and a weakness for relics were characteristic of his otherwise sensible conduct. He wrote but nine hymns which are authentically traceable to his pen. They are the Primo dierum omnium; the Nocte surgentes vigilemus; the Ecce jam noctis; the Lucis Creator optime; the Clarum decus jejunii; the Audi benigne Conditor; the Magno salutis gaudio, the Jam Christus astra ascenderat, and the Rex Christe, factor omnium. With a lesser degree of probability he has been named as the author of the Aeterne Rex altissime; the En more docti mystico; the Lignum crucis mirabile; the Noctis tempus jam praeterit; the Nunc tempus acceptabile; and the Summi largitor praemii.

Of these the Rex Christe, factor omnium delighted Luther so much that he declared it in his impetuous way “the best hymn ever written”—an opinion which he would find few nowadays to endorse. Gregory disliked pagan literature and cultivated the style and prosody of Ambrose. It is possible, therefore, that among the Ambrosian hymns there may be those which he has written and which are credited to an earlier date. But the cause of hymnology suffers little by the loss. He was not a poet; but as the man who made the papacy a thing and not a name—as the man who evangelized Britain—and as the man who gave the Gregorian tones to the praises of the Church, he will be held in kindly and lasting remembrance. There was in him a vein of peculiar sarcasm as well as of deep earnestness and of great sagacity, yet his literary merits are not to be weighed against those words and actions written viewlessly on the air, but which still effectually vibrate through the polity of the Roman Catholic Church.