Thus Christianity spread its spirit of proselytism, and St. Gregory fostered it greatly by the mild precepts he inculcated in his missionaries, and the skill with which he facilitated the transition from pagan to Catholic. He wrote to St. Augustine: “You must take care not to destroy the pagans’ temples, but only their idols; use holy water in washing out the edifice, build altars and deposit relics in them. If their temples are well built, so much the better; for it is important that these same ones pass from the cult of demons to that of the true God. When the nation sees its ancient places of worship remain, it will be more disposed to visit them through habit and to worship the true God.”
At home Gregory laboured with success to co-ordinate the powers of the church, in making recognised above everything that of the holy see. We find him bestowing the title of vicar of the Gauls upon the bishop of Arles, to correspond with Augustine archbishop of Canterbury, with the archbishop of Seville for Spain, and him of Thessalonica for Greece; and finally sending secret legates to Constantinople. In his pastoral which he wrote on the occasion of his election, and which became a general regulation throughout the West, he prescribed the bishops their duties according to the decision of several councils. To bind the hierarchy together he sought to prevent the encroachments of one bishop upon another. “I have given you Britain to direct spiritually,” he wrote to the ambitious Augustine, “and not Gaul.” He favoured the monasteries, looked with vigilance after their discipline, and reformed church singing, substituting for the Ambrosian chant, “which,” according to a contemporary, “was like the distant sound of a chariot rolling over the stones,” that Gregorian chant which bears his own name.[d]
The darkest stain on the name of Gregory is his cruel and unchristian triumph in the fall of the emperor Maurice—his base and adulatory praise of Phocas, the most odious and sanguinary tyrant who had ever seized the throne of Constantinople. It is the worst homage to religion to vindicate or even to excuse the crimes of religious men; and the apologetic palliation, or even the extenuation of their misdeeds rarely succeeds in removing, often strengthens, the unfavourable impression.
Gregory was spared the pain and shame of witnessing the utter falsehood of his pious vaticinations as to the glorious and holy reign of Phocas. In the second year of the tyrant’s reign he closed the thirteen important years of his pontificate. The ungrateful Romans paid but tardy honours to his memory. His death (March 10th, 604) was followed by a famine, which the starving multitude attributed to his wasteful dilapidation of the patrimony of the church—that patrimony which had been so carefully administered and so religiously devoted to their use. Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions. They proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the library of Gregory, and were only deterred from their barbarous ravages by the interposition of Peter the faithful archdeacon. Peter had been interlocutor of Gregory in the wild legends contained in the Dialogues.[k] The archdeacon now assured the populace of Rome that he had often seen the Holy Ghost in the visible shape of a dove hovering over the head of Gregory as he wrote. Gregory’s successor therefore hesitated, and demanded that Peter should confirm his pious fiction or fancy by an oath. He ascended the pulpit, but before he had concluded his solemn oath he fell dead. That which to a hostile audience might have been a manifest judgment against perjury, was received as a divine testimony to his truth. The Roman church has constantly permitted Gregory to be represented with the Holy Ghost, as a dove, floating over his head.
The historian of Christianity is arrested by certain characters and certain epochs, which stand as landmarks between the close of one age of religion and the commencement of another. Such a character is Gregory the Great; such an epoch his pontificate, the termination of the sixth century. Gregory, not from his station alone, but by the acknowledgment of the admiring world, was intellectually, as well as spiritually, the great model of his age. He was proficient in all the arts and sciences cultivated at that time; the vast volumes of his writings show his indefatigable powers; their popularity and their authority, his ability to clothe those thoughts and those reasonings in language which would awaken and command the general mind.
His epoch was that of the final Christianisation of the world, not in outward worship alone, not in its establishment as the imperial religion, the rise of the church upon the ruin of the temple, and the recognition of the hierarchy as an indispensable rank in the social system, but in its full possession of the whole mind of man, in letters, arts as far as arts were cultivated, habits, usages, modes of thought, and in popular superstition.
Not only was heathenism, but, excepting in the laws and municipal institutions, Romanity itself absolutely extinct. The reign of Theodoric had been an attempt to fuse together Roman, Teutonic, and Christian usages. Cassiodorus, though half a monk, aspired to be a Roman statesman, Boethius to be a heathen philosopher. The influence of the Roman schools of rhetoric is betrayed even in the writers of Gaul, such as Sidonius Apollinaris; there is an attempt to preserve some lingering cadence of Roman poetry in the Christian versifiers of that age. At the close of the sixth century all this has expired; ecclesiastical Latin is the only language of letters, or rather letters themselves are become purely ecclesiastical. The fable of Gregory’s destruction of the Palatine library is now rejected as injurious to his fame; but probably the Palatine library, if it existed, would have been so utterly neglected that Gregory would hardly have condescended to fear its influence. His aversion to such studies is not that of dread or hatred, but of religious contempt; profane letters are a disgrace to a Christian bishop; the truly religious spirit would loathe them of itself.
What, then, was this Christianity by which Gregory ruled the world? Not merely the speculative and dogmatic theology, but the popular, vital, active Christianity, which was working in the heart of man; the dominant motive of his actions, as far as they were affected by religion; the principal element of his hopes and fears as regards the invisible world and that future life which had now become part of his conscious belief.