department of Church government without any human limitations. Driven on by a dream of the universal dominion of Rome and Christianity, a great orator who swayed the Romans at will, he acted as a resolute Christian monarch conscious of his divine mission. Possessed of a capacity for complex rule, an extraordinary organiser and administrator, he used all his ability to make Christianity and the Papacy the one great world power. Twice he saved Rome from the barbarians, once in 452 when Attila, King of the Huns, was persuaded to withdraw without attacking the city, and again in 455 when the Vandal leader, Genseric, was induced to spare the capital from fire and murder. He drove heresy out of Italy and suppressed it in Spain. He forced the African Christians to submit to his authority (443), regained the papal power lost in East Illyria, compelled the Gallic bishops to obey his mandates,[184:1] and even asserted his supremacy over the Eastern Church. Through a legate he presided over the fourth ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, guided its theological discussions, and was "the finisher of the true doctrine of the presence of Christ."
Pope Leo laid the greatest possible emphasis upon the fact that there is one God, one Church, one universal bishop, one faith, and one interpreter of that faith, and that the recognition of this basic fact alone could bring unity and efficiency to Christendom. He very wisely cultivated a close alliance with the state and secured from Valentinian III. the promulgation of an imperial edict in 445, which raised him to the exalted position of "spiritual director and governor" of the
Universal Church. Thus the Pope would issue his laws for the Church, just as the Emperor did for the Empire.
After Leo the Great, who died in 461, no important Pope filled the Chair of St. Peter until the time of Gregory I., called the Great (590-604). If Leo drew the outline of the mediæval Papacy, Gregory made it a living power. He issued the first declaration of independence and assumed actual jurisdiction over the whole Western Church. His high ideal was completely realised so that even Gibbon calls his pontificate the most edifying period of Church history.[185:1]
Gregory I. was born at Rome in 540 of a rich, pious, senatorial family. His great-grandfather was Pope Felix II. (483-492). His father was a wealthy lawyer and senator. His mother and two aunts were canonised. He was very well educated for that period as a "saint among the saints" as John the Deacon, his biographer, declared. In grammar, rhetoric, and logic he was second to none in Rome.[185:2] He studied law preparatory to public life and was well versed in the inspiring history of Rome and in current events. At thirty he was a distinguished senator and three years later Emperor Justin II. made him Prætor of Rome.
From his mother Gregory inherited a profound religious temperament, hence he naturally became imbued with the ascetic religious ideas of the age. The monastic crusade of the West, now at its height, found
him a willing convert. Upon his father's death, Gregory used his vast wealth for charity and for founding seven monasteries. Persuaded by his pious mother, he himself became a monk in 575. Selling all his costly furniture, fine clothes, and jewels for the poor, he turned his own house into a monastery and almost killed himself by his vigorous fasts and ascetic vigils. Soon he gained great fame as a monk, was chosen abbot, founded six monasteries in Sicily and enforced a tyrannical discipline.[186:1]
Gregory was a man of too great ability, however, to be penned up in a monastery; consequently Pope Benedict called him to his court as one of the seven deacons of Rome. In 579 he was sent, as a papal nuncio, to Constantinople to reconcile the Emperor and the Pope and to unite the Eastern and Western churches, while at the same time he was instructed to solicit military aid against the troublesome Lombards. For six years he remained at Constantinople on this mission and gained much fame as a theologian and diplomat. Although he failed to reunite the two branches of the Christian Church, he did bring about an amicable understanding between the Pope and the Emperor and got some help against the Lombards. In a discussion with the Patriarch of Constantinople over the nature of the body after resurrection, Gregory won a signal victory. During his stay in the East he wrote his renowned work Magna Moralia. In 585 he returned to Rome, resumed his duties as abbot,
became a popular preacher, and was recognised generally as the most able man in the Church.
When Pope Pelagius II. died in 590, the western part of Europe was in a very critical condition. The Teutonic barbarians had overrun the Empire from England around to Constantinople, destroying or burying nearly all that was best in the civilisation of old Rome. Justinian, to be sure, had recaptured Rome in 556, and it was to remain nominally under imperial rule until the time of Charles the Great (800), but the Emperor's hold on the West was limited and precarious. His representative, the exarch, lived mostly at Ravenna. The Pope, however, acknowledged the sovereignty of the Emperor both in theory and practice. As a result of the weakness and inactivity of the exarch, nearly all Italy lay prostrate before the fierce Lombards, and no efficient help came from the East.