The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

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.