The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
In appreciating a man’s opinions and his mental clarity or murkiness, one should consider his temperament and the temper of his time. Gregory was constrained as well as driven by temperamental yearnings and aversions, aggravated by the humour of the century that produced Benedict of Nursia and was contemplating gloomily the Empire’s ruin and decay, now more acutely borne in upon the consciousness of thoughtful people than in the age of Augustine. His temper drew from prevailing moods, and in turn impressed its spiritual incisiveness upon the influences which it absorbed; and his writings, so expressive of his own temperament and all that fed it, were to work mightily upon the minds and moods of men to come.
Born of a distinguished Roman family about the year 540, he was some thirty-five years old when Cassiodorus died. His education was the best that Rome could give. In spite of disclaimer on his part, rhetorical training shows in the antithetic power of his style; for example, in that resounding sentence in the dedicatory letter prefixed to his Moralia, wherein he would seem to be casting grammar to the winds. Although quoted until threadbare, it is so illustrative as to justify citation: “Nam sicut hujus quoque epistolae tenor enunciat, non metacismi collisionem fugio, non barbarismi confusionem devito, situs motusque et praepositionum casus servare contemno, quia indignum vehementer existimo, ut verba coelestis oraculi restringam sub regulis Donati.”[110] By no means will he flee the concussion of the oft-repeated M, or avoid the confusing barbarism; he will despise the laws of place and case, because he deems it utterly unfit to confine the words of the heavenly oracle beneath the rules of Donatus. By all of which Gregory means that he proposes to write freely, according to the needs of his subject, and to disregard the artificial rules of the somewhat emptied rhetoric, let us say, of Cassiodorus’s epistles.
In his early manhood naturally he was called to take part in affairs, and was made Praetor urbanus. But soon the prevalent feeling of the difficulty of serving God in the world drove him to retirement. His father’s palace on the Coelian hill he changed to a convent, upon the site of which now stands the Church of San Gregorio Magno; and there he became a monk. Passionately he loved the monk’s life, for which he was to long in vain through most of the years to come. Soon he was dragged forth from the companionship of “Mary” to serve with “Martha.” The toiling papacy could not allow a man of his abilities to remain hidden. He was harnessed to its active service, and sent as the papal representative to the Imperial Court at Constantinople; whence he returned, after several years, in 585. Re-entering his monastery on the Coelian, he became its abbot; but was drawn out again, and made pope by acclamation and insistency in the year 590. There is no need to speak of the efficient and ceaseless activity of this pontiff, whose body was never free from pain, nor his soul released from longing for seclusion which only the grave was to bring.
Gregory’s mind was less antique, and more barbarous and mediaeval than Augustine’s, whose doctrine he reproduced with garbling changes of tone and emphasis. In the century and a half between the two, the Roman institutions had broken down, decadence had advanced, and the patristic mind had passed from indifference to the laws of physical phenomena to something like sheer barbaric ignorance of the same. Whatever in Ambrose, Jerome, or Augustine represented conviction or opinion, has in Gregory become mental habit, spontaneity of acceptance, matter of course. The miraculous is with him a frame of mind; and the allegorical method of understanding Scripture is no longer intended, not to say wilful, as with Augustine, but has become persistent unconscious habit. Augustine desired to know God and the Soul, and the true Christian doctrine with whatever made for its substantiation. He is conscious of closing his mind to everything irrelevant to this. Gregory’s nature has settled itself within this scheme of Christian knowledge which Augustine framed. He has no intellectual inclinations reaching out beyond. He is not conscious of closing his mind to extraneous knowledge. His mental habits and temperament are so perfectly adjusted to the confines of this circle, that all beyond has ceased to exist for him.
So with Gregory the patristic limitation of intellectual interest, indifference to physical phenomena, and acceptance of the miraculous are no longer merely thoughts and opinions consciously entertained; they make part of his nature. There was nothing novel in his views regarding knowledge, sacred and profane. But there is a turbid force of temperament in his expressions. In consequence, his vehement words to Bishop Desiderius of Vienne[111] have been so taken as to make the great pope a barbarizing idiot. He exclaims with horror at the report that the bishop is occupying himself teaching grammar; he is shocked that an episcopal mouth should be singing praises of Jove, which are unfit for a lay brother to utter. But Gregory is not decrying here, any more than in the sentence quoted from the letter prefixed to his Moralia, a decent command of Latin. He is merely declaring with temperamental vehemence that to teach grammar and poetry is not the proper function of a bishop—the bishop in this case of a most important see. Gregory had no more taste for secular studies than Tertullian four centuries before him. For both, however, letters had their handmaidenly function, which they performed effectively in the instances of these two great rhetoricians.[112]
It is needless to say that the entire literary labour of Gregory was religious. His works, as in time, so in quality, are midway between those of Ambrose and Augustine and those of the Carolingian rearrangers of patristic opinion. Gregory, who laboured chiefly as a commentator upon Scripture, was not highly original in his thoughts, yet was no mere excerpter of patristic interpretations, like Rabanus Maurus or Walafrid Strabo, who belong to the ninth century.[113] In studying Scripture, he thought and interpreted in allegories. But he was also a man experienced in life’s exigencies, and his religious admonishings were wise and searching. His prodigious Commentary upon Job has with reason been called Gregory’s Moralia.[114] And as the moral advice and exhortation sprang from Gregory the bishop, so the allegorical interpretations largely were his own, or at least not borrowed and applied mechanically.
Gregory represents the patristic mind passing into a more barbarous stage. He delighted in miracles, and wrote his famous Dialogues on the Lives and Miracles of the Italian Saints[115] to solace the cares of his pontificate. The work exhibits a naïve acceptance of every kind of miracle, and presents the supple mediaeval devil in all his deceitful metamorphoses.[116]
Quite in accord with Gregory’s interest in these stories is his elaboration of certain points of doctrine, for example, the worship of the saints, whose intercession and supererogatory righteousness may be turned by prayer and worship to the devotee’s benefit. Thus he comments upon the eighth verse of the twenty-fourth chapter of Job:
“They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rocks as a shelter. The showers of the mountains are the words of the doctors. Concerning which mountains it is said with the voice of the Church: ‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.’ The showers of the mountains water these, for the streams of the holy fathers saturate. We receive the ‘shelter’ as a covering of good works, by which one is covered so that before the eyes of omnipotent God the filthiness of his perversity is concealed. Wherefore it is written, ‘Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered’ (Ps. xxxii. 1). And under the name of stones whom do we understand except the strong men of the Church? To whom it is said through the first shepherd: ‘Ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house’ (1 Peter ii. 5). So those who confide in no work of their own, run to the protection of the holy martyrs, and press with tears to their sacred bodies, pleading to obtain pardon through their intercession.”[117]
Another point of Gregorian emphasis: no delict is remitted without punishment.[118] To complement which principle, Gregory develops the doctrine of penance in its three elements, contritio, conversio mentis, satisfactio. Our whole life should be one long penitence and penance, and baptism of tears; for our first baptism cannot wash out later sins, and cannot be repeated. In the fourth book of the Dialogi he develops his cognate doctrine of Purgatory,[119] and amplifies upon the situation and character of hell. These things are implicit in Augustine and existed before him: with Gregory they have become explicit, elaborated, and insisted on with recurrent emphasis. Thus Augustinianism is altered in form and barbarized.[120]
Gregory is throughout prefigurative of the Middle Ages, which he likewise prefigures in his greatness as a sovereign bishop and a man of ecclesiastical affairs. He is energetic and wise and temperate. The practical wisdom of the