St. Gregory the Great, Pope (ca. 540–604)

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

Gregorius Magnus was one of the most important of the Late Antique bishops of Rome. He was a masterful political admin­istrator and a significant theologian who, if not innovative in his writing, served to arrange and codify much that was impor­tant in the Latin theological tradition, and pass it on in a condensed form that would assume immense weight for the dawning medieval West. His work codifying and sim­plifying much of St. Augustine’s compli­cated thought made it possible for Augustinianism to be passed on in a popular form, so as to become the most significant single strand of the later Latin tradition.

Gregory belonged to an aristocratic Christian family in Rome at a time when the fortunes of both Italy and the ancient city were in decline because of Justinian’s wars of re-conquest, and later (from 586 onwards) because of raids from Lombar­dian brigands from the North. His father was a Christian senator, and in 573 Gregory himself became the prefect of Rome (the highest civic office possible). Soon after­wards he announced his retirement from public life and dedicated his extensive prop­erties in Rome and Sicily to the cause of Christian asceticism, in the form of the retired life of the Sophist. His large villa on the Caelian hill, near the Colosseum, became his monastery of St. Andrew (still functioning), where he lived a life of schol­arship and prayer with companions. As a dedicated ascetic, however, he fell under ecclesiastical obedience, and soon Pope Pelagius II ordered him to resume public service for the church. Accordingly, he was ordained deacon and sent as papal ambas­sador (apocrisarius) to Constantinople, where he lived from 579 to 586, engaging in dispute with the Patriarch Eutyches. In this period Gregory began one of his greatest works, the Magna Moralia in Job, designed as an ascetical commentary on the text of Job, for the use of his monastic companions. It assumed the status of a par­adigmatic patristic book of exegesis for the later West, constantly seeking a moral end to scriptural reading.

After resuming his duties back in Italy as papal secretary at Rome, Gregory adminis­tered the church during the time of plague in the year 590, and on Pope Pelagius’ death in that same year, he was himself elected pope (much against his inclination) as Gregory I. He rallied the city with extensive penitential processions to ask for God’s mercy. Later tales spoke of a vision of an angel putting away his sword over Hadrian’s mausoleum (now Castel San Angelo) where today the statue of the same is a familiar Roman landmark. Gregory began a highly efficient administration in Rome, a symbolic end to a long decline of the Roman church and city that began with Constantine’s removal of the capital east­wards to Constantinople. He profoundly monasticized the Roman church adminis­tration, despite protests of the ordinary clergy, so beginning a long tradition along these lines that would mark western Catholicism ever afterwards. His successful leadership over Rome and its province led to his papacy becoming a symbol of how the papal office could develop in the future.

Gregory, realizing the futility of the local Byzantine imperial administration at Ravenna, independently negotiated peace with the Lombard invaders. Many later reforms (such as the liturgical changes that came to be called Gregorian chant) were retrospectively fathered on him. His writings on theological matters were chiefly pastoral, biblical, and hagiographical. His extensive biblical exegesis and theological comments were a moderated and simplified form of St. Augustine, and Gregory did more than any other (except perhaps the Latin theologian Prosper of Aquitaine) to elevate Augustine’s influence over the whole western church, giving a theological preeminence to the doctrine of grace, and adding his own views on the need for a cleansing post-death purification of souls, a view that eventually grew into the distinc­tive Roman doctrine of Purgatory. His Pastoral Rule (written largely for his own guidance soon after he assumed the papacy) was designed as a manual of instruction for a bishop. It became a standard text in west­ern church schools. In line with the central premise of the current educational system of his day, he elevates rhetoric as the chief tool of the leader. But he also adds that the bishop is above all else a pastor of souls, as well as the leader and expositor of the divine word of scripture. Gregory’s exegetical works standardized the subsequent western view of biblical exegesis as the three stages of house-building, where the foundations were the exposition of the literal and histor­ical sense of the text; followed by the roof and walls of the allegorical sense which interprets higher Christian mysteries pre­sent within the old narratives; and finally the beautiful decorations that perfect and finish off a building, in the form of moral counsels designed to elevate the lives of the hearers. His insistence that a preacher should pay attention to all three aspects of a text proved determinative for the later western Middle Ages. His Dialogues were also immensely popular. In these four books Gregory recounts the lives of Italian ascetic saints. The miraculous element abounds in them, marking an important stage in the development of the cult of the saint at a time when, both in Byzantium and the West, the fundamental idea on how to access the divine presence and favor was undergoing radical reconstruction, and local democratization. In the second book of Dialogues Gregory popularized St. Benedict, the hermit of Nursia, thus providing an enormous impetus to the spread of Benedictinism as the central exemplar for Latin monasticism. His spiri­tual writings had a similarly determinative effect on the Latin Middle Ages insofar as he emphasized the monastic life as the “per­fect” way of contemplation, far excelling the lay married state.

In the Orthodox tradition Gregory is mainly known for the liturgy attributed to him of the Presanctified Gifts, now cele­brated in the course of Great Lent. This ritual is basically a communion service attached to a penitential form of Vespers, and served to allow the communion of the faithful on Wednesdays and Fridays in the course of the Great Fast, when the divine liturgy was not celebrated. The holy gifts are consecrated (presanctified) at the liturgy of the preceding Sunday. In the Orthodox tra­dition Gregory is known (from the title of his hagiographic work) as Pope St. Gregory the Dialogist.

SEE ALSO: Papacy; Vespers (Hesperinos)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Dudden, F. H. (1905) Gregory the Great, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green.

Evans, G. (1986) The Thought of Gregory the Great. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Markus, R. A. (1983) From Augustine to Gregory the Great. London: Variorum.

Richards, J. (1980) Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Straw, C. (1988) Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press.

St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Gregory the Theologian) (329–390)

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

Gregory was the son of a wealthy land­owning bishop in Nazianzus, Cappadocia (also named Gregory). His father was the second bishop of the town, following after someone who was described as a “rus­tic,” and after his consecration he built a splendid marble shrine to replace the old wooden church that had previously existed. In many ways Bishop Gregory the Elder and his more famous son demonstrate the “ascent” of the church in the Constantinian era. The younger Gregory received the finest local schooling, taught partly by his uncle, the rhetorician Amphilokios, and then (with his brother Caesarios) was sent to Alexan­dria, and finally to Athens, where he spent ten years perfecting his rhetorical style and literary education. Gregory the Theologian thus emerged as the finest Christian rhetori­cian of his day, and certainly the most learned bishop of the entire early church.

His sea journey to Athens in 348 was interrupted by a violent storm and, fearing for his life, Gregory seems to have promised himself to God’s service, a vow he fulfilled by accepting baptism at Athens and beginning his lifelong commitment to the ascetical life. It was a dedication he saw as entirely conso­nant with the commitment to celibacy required of the serious philosopher. Gregory did much to advance the theory of early Christian asceticism, but always with the stress on seclusion in the service of scholarly reflection. He regularly described Christian­ity as “Our Philosophy.” At Athens he shared lodgings with his close friend Basil of Caesa­rea, with whose later Christian career he was closely associated. Returning to Cappadocia, in 358, Gregory’s plans to live in scholarly retirement on his family estate were rudely interrupted by his father, who forcibly ordained him to the priesthood in 361. Greg­ory fled in protest to Basil’s monastic estates at Annesi, where he edited the Philocalia of Origen, a collation of texts from the great Alexandrian theologian of the 3rd century, whose reputation was increasingly being attacked. The purpose of the edition was to focus on the exegetical brilliance of the Alexandrian scholar, and deflect attention from the metaphysical speculative elements that had tarnished his ecclesiastical reputa­tion. Throughout all his later life Gregory represents a very profound, but also very skilfully moderated, form of Origenian thought.

As a priest, Gregory was no longer free to devote himself to the life of scholarly detachment that he had imagined for him­self, and soon returned to assist in the administration of his local church alongside his father, whose increasing age and illness placed large demands on his son. His letters from this time give us the only window we possess on the life and condi­tions of St. Basil and St. Macrina’s monastic foundation on the family estates. In 363 Gregory led the literary attack against Julian the Apostate’s imperial policy of barring Christian professors from educational posts (Invectives Against Julian). In 364 he negotiated Basil’s reconciliation with his estranged bishop, and eventually in 370 assisted him to attain the archiepiscopal throne at Caesarea. Thereafter began their long alienation. Basil (in his many fights) accused him of pusillanimity, and Gregory regarded Basil as having become too high and mighty. In 372 Basil and Gregory’s father conspired, against his will, to appoint him as bishop of Sasima, and accordingly Gregory found himself placed as a suffragan bishop of Basil’s in a rather miserable frontier town, at the center of a lively row with the neighboring metropolitan over church revenues. When he realized that he was supposed to galvanize street armies and thrash the followers of the rival metro­politan, he simply refused to occupy the see, leaving caustic (although funny) des­criptions about it. He resumed duties of assisting his father as suffragan bishop of Nazianzus instead (quite oblivious to canons regulating episcopal successions), and began his series of episcopal homilies, all of which were taken down by scribes and edited at the end of his life for publication as a basic dossier of “sermons on every occasion” for a Christian bishop. In this guise they enjoyed an immense influence throughout the Byzantine centuries. His collected writings have been compared with the works of Demosthenes. In their purity and refinement of doctrine they have been rarely equalled. In the consum­mate power of their rhetoric, never.

From the outset Gregory stood for the Nicene cause of the Homoousion (the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father), and advanced it to the classic Neo-Nicene position of demanding that the Homoousion of the Holy Spirit (with the Father, and thus with the Son) should also be recognized. He thereby became one of the church’s primary theological articu­lators of the classical doctrine of the Co-equal Trinity. He constantly pressured Basil to make his own position clear and led him, eventually, to break with his erstwhile mentor Eustathius of Sebaste and instead to declare openly for the deity of the Spirit of God, which he did in his famous classic On the Holy Spirit. On his father’s death in 374 Gregory retired to monastic seclusion, but was summoned, after Valens’ death gave new hope for a Nicene revival, by the hierarchs of the Council of Antioch (379) to assume the task of missionary apologist at Constantinople, where he had high-ranking family in residence. He began, in 379, a series of lectures in Constantinople on the Nicene faith (the Five Theological Orations), and was recognized by the lead­ing Nicene theologians, Meletius of Antioch, Eusebius of Samosata, and Peter of Alexandria (though not by Pope Damasus), as the true Nicene bishop of the city. When Theodosius took the capital in 380 his appointment was confirmed when the incumbent Arian bishop Demophilos was exiled. In 381 the Council of Constantinople was held in the city to establish the Nicene faith as standard in the eastern empire, and when its presi­dent, Meletius, died, Gregory was immedi­ately elected in his place. His mild and reasoned leadership, and also probably his prosecution of the doctrine of the Homoousion of the Spirit, soon brought the council into crisis, for Theodosius was anxious that the party of 30 Pneumatomachian bishops (who admitted the inferior deity of, but denied the title “God” to, the Spirit) should be reconciled and Gregory was anxious that they should not. After they left the conciliar delibera­tions, refusing to admit any change to the pneumatological clauses of the creed, there were then calls for Gregory to initiate penal moves against dissidents. His res­ponse was that they ought to be forgiven as the gospel demanded, and that a mild treatment would be more likely to result in their return than any prosecution. This eirenic attitude lost him many friends at a time when scores were ready to be settled with Arians who had long been using state pressure against the Nicenes. Unable to convince the majority of the wisdom of his approach, Gregory bowed to increasing calls for his resignation, and decided to retire. He came back to his estates at Nazianzus and composed a large body of apologetic and theological poetry which gives crucial information on the con­troversies of the time. In his final years he focused chiefly on poetry (some of it very good) and prepared his orations for publication.

In the Byzantine era Gregory was the most studied of all the early Christian writers. His theological works against Apollinaris (espe­cially Letter 101 to Cledonius) were cited as authorities at the Council of Chalcedon (451), where he was posthumously awarded the title “Gregory the Theologian» His writing on the Trinity was never rivaled in patristic times, and he is the chief archi­tect of the church’s understanding of how the divine unity coexists in three co-equal hypostases, as the essential dynamic of the salvation of the world.

SEE ALSO: Cappadocian Fathers; Council of Constantinople I (381); St. Basil of Caesarea (Basil the Great) (330–379)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

McGuckin, J. A. (2001) St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Norris, F. W. (1991) Faith Gives Fullness to Reason: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus – Text and Commentary. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Ruether, R. (1969) Gregory of Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Winslow, D. F. (1979) The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation.