Part 4 (2/2)

[10] M. Roger, _L'Enseignement des lettres cla.s.siques d'Ausone a Alcuin_, p. 100.

[11] W. P. Ker, _The Dark Ages_, p. 125.

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CHAPTER V

THE PONTIFICATE OF GREGORY THE GREAT

[Sidenote: Gregory the Great.]

About 540 was born in Rome, of a n.o.ble family, the great Pope Gregory, whose work was to place the papacy at the head of Italian politics, and to lay the lines on which papal action for many centuries was to be based. When he was a child it might well have seemed that Italy under a strong Gothic rule would submit to the Arian teaching which the State supported. Theodoric endeavoured to make an united Italy; but the Church knew that there could be no compromise on the doctrine of the perfect G.o.dhead of the Lord Jesus, and her att.i.tude preserved Italy both for Catholicism and for the Empire. Gregory was taught as a Catholic, but he was taught also in cla.s.sical grammar, composition, rhetoric, and the writings of the great Romans--pre-Christian, as well as of later days. He began his life's work as a Roman official, and by the year 573 he is found as prefect of the city. A year later, it would seem, he became a monk, giving up all his property, all his signs of rank and wealth, all his power and place. Soon, if not at once, he came to serve under the rule of S. Benedict, whose life he afterwards wrote, in the monastery dedicated to S. Andrew on the Caelian hill.

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[Sidenote: The Lombard invasion, 568.]

It was the time when Italy was again at the feet of the barbarians.

The Lombards, the last of the Teutonic nations to settle in the West, established at Pavia a kingdom which lasted for two centuries (568-774), and which again rent away much of the fair Italian lands from the unity of the Empire, leaving the Exarchate at Ravenna in a state half isolated and wholly perilous.

[Sidenote: The effect on Italy.]

Gradually the onward sweep of the new barbarians, who called themselves Arians, but were not strongly bound by any creed, swept away all power save their own and the pope's. The destruction of Monte Ca.s.sino was typical of one side of their work--the turning aside from Rome at Gregory's intercession of another. The Empire struggled to retain its hold on Italy and to govern the Western world from Ravenna, with instructions from the New Rome; but it failed. The papacy studied to be quiet. And the close of the sixth century showed that power would return in the end to the city which had founded the Empire, and to the Church which was now claiming to teach and to unite the nations.

A period of papal insignificance was gradually ended by the progress of new ideals for the papacy. This came about in three ways.

[Sidenote: The popes and the exarchate.]

1. It was the aim of each pope to set up his power against that of the imperial exarchate, by which Italy was ruled after its reconquest by Belisarius and Na.r.s.es. Gradually, step by step, the popes claimed cognisance of secular matters, intervened in politics, and stood forth as a leaders in Italian affairs. The imperial administration saw the danger, and, from time to time, made definite {62} opposition to the papal pretensions. It endeavoured to restore the unity of the Church, to secure the universal condemnation of the Three Chapters, but under sanction of Ravenna rather than of Rome. Thus the exarch Smaragdus, in 587, led Severus, patriarch of Aquileia, before the Ravennate prelates to make submission;[1] and later the emperor Maurice interfered to present the pope compelling the patriarch to submission. But these endeavours were futile; and the great Gregory, statesman and administrator of the first order, made the papacy the most important political power in the western provinces of the Empire. In 599 this was apparent in Gregory's negotiation with the Lombard king, Agilulf.

[Sidenote: The Benedictines in South Italy.]

2. The papal influence was increased, and the Greek power diminished, by the direct replacement of Eastern monks by Benedictines.[2] The monasteries founded by Greeks during the imperial restoration, no longer replenished from Constantinople, fell into the hands of the great papal force founded by the greatest saint, and marshalled by the greatest administrator of the century.

[Sidenote: Missions from Rome.]

3. And, lastly, the power of the papacy was at once evidenced and increased by the revival of its missionary energy. What Pelagius II.

had stayed, Gregory the Great accomplished--conversion of England by the mission of Augustine. Spain, too, was won from Arianism by a personal friend of Gregory's, though without Roman intervention;[3] and within Italy itself the {63} pope began the great work of the conversion of the Lombards to the Catholic faith, with the full teaching both of the Tome of Leo and of the Fifth General Council.

Gregory sent the Acts of the Council to be taught to the little child Adalwald, the Lombard king.

Thus in each of these three directions the progress of papal power is connected with the influence of Gregory the Great. It is of his papacy therefore that we must speak as the critical point in the upward movement. Between 574 and 590 Gregory gained experience in many ways.

To a strict monastic training he added, in 579, the employment of papal apocrisiarius (or envoy) at the imperial court at Constantinople. Here he became intimate with the chief ecclesiastics, with Anastasius, who had been deposed from the patriarchal see of Antioch, and who came to regard him as ”the very mouth and lantern of the Lord,” with Leander of Seville, who had come to lay the needs of the Catholic cause in Spain before the emperors,[4] and with the imperial family. [Sidenote: Gregory as abbat.] About 586 he returned to Rome, and became abbat of the monastery in which he had formerly served. It was there that he completed his commentary, or _moralia_, on the book of Job, which he had delivered as lectures at Constantinople, an epitome of Christian theology and morals. It was then that he saw the bright lads from Deira, who first turned his thoughts to the conversion of England.[5]

The controversy of the Three Chapters was still lingering on in Italy, and it was Gregory who was given the task of inducing the Istrian {64} bishops to accept the decisions of the Fifth General Council.

[Sidenote: Gregory elected Pope, 590.] So skilful did he prove himself as a controversialist, as an administrator, and as an adviser of Pelagius, that he was elected with enthusiasm to succeed that pope in 590.

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