At Rome the monuments of what was shudderingly called a pagan age were falling, year by year, into the soil which would preserve them for a more appreciative race. In Gregory's day, across the Tiber from the old quarter, there were to be seen only the mouldering crowns of the theatres and amphitheatres, the grass-girt ruins on the Capitol and on the Palatine, and the charred skeletons of thousands of patrician mansions on the more distant hills. Forty thousand Romans now trembled where a million had once boasted their eternal empire. And, as one sees in some fallen forest, a new life was springing up on the ruins. Beside the decaying Neronian Circus rose the Basilica of St. Peter's, to which strange types of pilgrims made their way under the modest colonnade leading from the river. From the heart of the old Laterani Palace towered the great Basilica of the Saviour (later of St. John) and the mansion of the new rulers of the world. The temples were still closed, and tumbling into ruins; for no one yet proposed to convert into churches those abodes of evil spirits, which one passed hurriedly at night. But on all sides churches had been built out of the fallen stones, and monks and nuns trod the dismantled fora, and new processions filed along the decaying streets. If you mounted the hills, you would see the once prosperous Campagna a poisonous marsh, sending death into the city every few years; and you would learn that such was the condition of much of Italy, where the Lombard now completed the work of Goth and Greek, and that from the gates of Constantinople to the forests of Albion this incomprehensible brood of barbarians was treading under foot what remained of Roman civilization.
The book of what we call ancient history was closed: the Middle Age was beginning. Gregory was peculiarly adapted to impress the world at this stage of transition. His father, Gordianus, had been a wealthy patrician, with large estates in Sicily and a fine mansion on the Cælian hill. De Rossi would make him a descendant of the great family of the Anicii, but the deduction is strained. Gregory's mother was a saint. He inherited vigour and administrative ability, and was reared in the most pious and most credulous spirit of the time. He was put to letters, and we are told that he excelled all others in every branch of culture. Let us say, from his works, that—probably using the writings of the Latin fathers as models—he learned to write a Latin which Jerome would almost have pronounced barbarous, but which people of the sixth century would think excellent, at times elegant. There was very little culture left in Rome in Gregory's days.[78] About the time when Gregory came into the world (540), Cassiodorus was quitting it to found a monastic community on his estate, and he had the happy idea of rescuing some elements of Roman culture from the deluge; though to him culture meant Donatus and Martianus Capella rather than the classics. He succeeded, too, in engaging the industry of the Benedictine monks, to some extent, in copying manuscripts. Culture was, happily, not suffered to die. In Rome, however, it sank very low, and, for centuries, the Latin of the Papal clerks or the Popes is generally atrocious.
Gregory, in 573, was Prefect of Rome when it was beset by the Lombards. The desolation which ensued may have finally convinced him that the end of the world approached: a belief which occurs repeatedly in his letters and sermons. In the following year, he sold his possessions, built six monasteries in Sicily, converted his Roman mansion into the monastery of St. Andrew, and, after giving the rest of his fortune to the poor, began a life of stern asceticism and meditation on the Scriptures. One day he saw some Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market, and he set off to convert these fair, blue-eyed islanders to the faith. But Pope Benedict recalled him and found an outlet for his great energy in secretarial duties at the Lateran.
Pelagius, who in 578 succeeded Benedict, sent Gregory to Constantinople, to ask imperial troops for Italy, and he remained there, caring for Papal interests, for about eight years. On its pretentious culture he looked with so much disdain that he never learned Greek,[79] while the general corruption of clerics and laymen, and the fierce dogmatic discussions, did not modify his belief in a coming dissolution. He maintained his monastic life in the Placidia Palace, and began the writing of that portentous commentary on the book of Job which is known as his Magna Moralia: a monumental illustration of his piety, his imagination, and his lack of culture, occupying about two thousand columns of Migne's quarto edition of his works. He returned to Rome about the year 586, without troops, but with the immeasurably greater treasure of an arm of St. Andrew and the head of St. Luke. Amid the plagues and famines of Italy, he returned to his terrible fasts and dark meditations, and awaited the blast of the archangel's trumpet. An anecdote, told by himself, depicts his attitude. One of his monks appropriated a few crowns, violating his vow of poverty. Gregory refused the dying man the sacraments, and buried him in a dunghill. He completed his commentary on Job, and collected endless stories of devils and angels, saints and sinners, visions and miracles; until one day, in 590, the Romans broke into the austere monastery with the news that Pelagius was dead and Gregory was to be his successor. He fled from Rome in horror, but he was the ablest man in Italy, and all united to make him Pope.
If these things do not suffice to show that Gregory was the first mediæval Pope, read his Dialogues, completed a few years later; no theologian in the world to-day would accept that phantasmagoria of devils and angels and miracles. It is a precious monument of Gregory's world: the early mediæval world. There is the same morbid, brooding imagination in his commentary on the prophecies of Ezekiel, which he found congenial; and in many passages of the forty sermons in which, disdaining flowers of rhetoric and rules of grammar, he tells his people the deep-felt, awful truths of his creed.
Characteristic also is the incident which occurred during his temporary guidance of the Church—while he awaited an answer to the letter in which he had begged the Emperor to release him. A fearful epidemic raged at Rome. Without a glance at the marshes beyond, from which it came, Gregory ordered processions of all the faithful, storming the heavens with hymns and litanies. The figure over the old tomb of Hadrian (or the Castle of Sant' Angelo) at Rome tells all time how an angel appeared in the skies on that occasion, and the pestilence ceased. But the writers who are nearest to the time tell us that eighty of the processionists fell dead on the streets in an hour, and the pestilence went its slow course.
Yet when we turn from these other-worldly meditations and other-worldly plans to the eight hundred and fifty letters of the great Pope, we seem to find an entirely different man. We seem to go back some centuries, along that precarious line of the Anicii, and confront one of the abler of the old patricians. Instead of credulity, we find a business capacity which, in spite of the appalling means of communication, organizes and controls, down to minute details, an estate which is worth millions sterling and is scattered over half a continent. Instead of self-effacement, we find a man who talks to archbishops and governors of provinces as if they were acolytes of his Church, and, at least on one occasion, tells the Eastern autocrat, before whom courtiers shade their eyes, that he will not obey him. Instead of holy simplicity, we find a diplomacy which treats with hostile kings in defiance of the civil government, showers pretty compliments on the fiery Brunichildis or the brutal Phocas, and spends years in combating the pretensions of Constantinople. Instead of angelic meekness, we find a warm resentment of vilification, an occasional flash of temper which cows his opponent, a sense of dignity which rebukes his steward for sending him "a sorry nag" or a "good ass" to ride on. We have, in short, a man whose shrewd light-brown eyes miss no opportunity for intervention in that disorderly world, from Angle-land to Jerusalem; who has in every part of it spies and informers in the service of virtue and religion, and who for fourteen years does the work of three men. And all the time he is Gregory the monk, ruining his body by disdainful treatment, writing commentaries on Ezekiel: a medium-sized, swarthy man, with large bald head and straggling tawny beard, with thick red lips and Roman nose and chin, racked by indigestion and then by gout—but a prodigious worker.
To compress his work into a chapter is impossible; one can only give imperfect summaries and a few significant details. He had secretaries, of course, and we are apt to forget that the art of shorthand writing, which was perfectly developed by the Romans, had not yet been lost in the night of the Middle Ages. Yet every letter has the stamp of Gregory's personality, and we recognize a mind of wonderful range and power.
His episcopal work in Rome alone might have contented another man. Soon after his election he wrote a long letter on the duties and qualifications of a bishop, which, in the shape of a treatise entitled The Book of Pastoral Rule, inspired for centuries the better bishops of Europe. His palace was monastic in its severity. He discharged from his service, in Rome and abroad, the hosts of laymen his predecessors had employed, and replaced them with monks and clerics: incidentally turning into monks and clerics many men who did not adorn the holy state. He said mass daily, and used at times to go on horseback to some appointed chapel in the city, where the people gathered to hear his sermons on the gospels or on Ezekiel. Every shade of simony, every pretext for ordination, except religious zeal, he sternly suppressed. When he found that men were made deacons for their fine voices, he forbade deacons to sing any part of the mass except the Gospel, and he made other changes in the liturgy and encouraged the improvement of the chant. Modern criticism does not admit the Sacramentary and the Antiphonary which later ages ascribed to him, but he seems to have given such impulse to reform that the perfected liturgy and chant of a later date were attributed to him.[80]