In his missionary interests he passed far outside Italy. The most conspicuous example is the conversion of the English, which he had in earlier years been most anxious himself to undertake, and which was begun in 597 under his direction by Augustine; but it is not the only one. In Northern Italy, in Africa and Gaul, Gregory was active in seeking the conversion of pagans and heretics, and in endeavouring by gentle measures to lead the Jews to Christ.
[Sidenote: His relations on monasticism.]
More important still in the history of the papacy was Gregory's work in spreading, organising, and systematising monasticism. He insisted on the strict observance of the rule of S. Benedict. Not only did he reform, but he very greatly strengthened, the monasticism of Italy. Conspicuously did his privilegia, granting or recognising a considerable freedom from episcopal control, start the monks on a new advance. While not exempting them from the rule of bishops, he made it possible for future popes to win support for themselves by granting such exemptions.
But Gregory's fame does not lie wholly in any of these spheres of activity. Great as a ruler and an {70} organiser, he was known also to later ages, as to his own, for his theological writings. He was not only a practical ruler and practical minister of Christ; he was also a leader in Christian learning—the last, as men have come to call him, of the four great Latin doctors.
[Sidenote: His relations to learning.]
The work of Gregory the Great was here as elsewhere far-reaching, but rather an organising than a formative one. Classical studies, in which he had been trained, he put aside; and when he did his utmost to spread monasteries over the length and breadth of Italy, it was not at all of learning in a secular sense, but wholly of religion that he thought. Thus his own theology is primarily a biblical theology. The Bible was to him the word of God. Like the author of the Imitatio Christi in later days, he did not care to argue as to the authorship of the different books but to profit by what was in them. He was a great expositor, a great preacher, and that always with a practical aim. As he said, "We hear the doctrine words of God if we act on them." [Sidenote: His doctrine of the church.] In his more general theological writings he sums up, with the precision of a master, not any new doctrines or advances in speculation, but the theology of the Church of his age. And he is able thus to emphasise the crying need of unity in words which state the claim of the Church for the conversion of the pagans and heretics of his day: "Sancta autem universalis ecclesia praedicat Deum veraciter nisi intra se coli non posse, asserens quod omnes qui extra ipsam sunt minime salvabuntur." Outside this there was no hope of spiritual health. And this doctrine he based {71} on the unity of Christ's life with that of the Church: "Our Redeemer showed that He is one person with the Church, which He took to be His own"; and thus it was that "The Churches of the true faith set in all parts of the world make one Catholic Church, in which all the faithful who are right minded toward God live in concord." Thus he was, in theology as in ecclesiastical politics, a concentrating and clarifying force; and when, on March 12th, 604, he passed to his rest, he had laid firm the foundations of the medieval papacy, and in hardly less degree those of the theological system of the medieval Church.
[1] Paulus Diaconus, iii, 26, ed. Waitz, pp. 105-7.
[2] Diehl, op. cit., gives a list, p. 256.
[3] Joannes Biclarensis, Chronicon (Migne, Patr. Lat., lxxii. 868).
[4] See below, p. 76.