Gregory was born at Rome about the year 540, into a wealthy senatorial family with great estates in Sicily and a mansion on the Caelian Hill. His father Gordianus was a patrician; his mother Silvia is honoured as a saint, and two of his father's sisters, Tarsilla and Aemiliana, are venerated as saints as well, so that John the Deacon could describe Gregory's upbringing as that of a saint among saints. Portraits of Gordianus and Silvia were later painted at Gregory's order in the atrium of the monastery of Saint Andrew.
His boyhood was passed in a broken world. Between 546 and 552 Rome was taken by the Goths under Totila, abandoned, garrisoned, besieged, and taken again. To these disasters the biographers trace the note of sadness that runs through Gregory's writings and his vivid expectation that the world was hastening to its end. Gregory of Tours records that in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic he was reckoned second to none in Rome, and he certainly received a legal training; but the deepest school was his own home, where he loved to meditate on the Scriptures and listen to the talk of his elders, so that he was devoted to God from his youth.
His birth and gifts marked him for public life, and about the year 573, when he was little more than thirty, he held the office of prefect of the city of Rome, the highest civil dignity there. Yet grace was at work. After long prayer and inward struggle he abandoned everything, most probably in 574. His Sicilian estates were given up to found six monasteries; his own house on the Caelian became a seventh under the patronage of Saint Andrew, and there he himself took the monastic habit. "He who had been wont to go about the city clad in the trabea and aglow with silk and jewels," wrote Gregory of Tours, "now clad in a worthless garment served the altar of the Lord." For about three years he lived hidden in that monastery, and he always looked back on this as the happiest time of his life. His austerities in those years were so severe that they are thought to have ruined the health from which he suffered ever afterwards.
In 578 the Pope drew him out of his seclusion, ordaining him, much against his will, one of the seven regionary deacons of Rome. The Lombards were pressing towards the city, and help seemed to lie only with the Emperor at Byzantium. Pelagius II therefore sent Gregory, about the spring of 579, as apocrisiarius, his permanent representative at the imperial court, where he remained some six years. Nothing was less congenial to him than the brilliance and worldliness of Constantinople, and he defended himself by keeping the monastic life as far as he could, with several brethren from Saint Andrew's who had followed him. With them he prayed and studied the Scriptures, and at the request of Saint Leander of Seville, whom he met there, he composed his great series of lectures on the Book of Job, the "Moralia." He also engaged the Patriarch Eutychius, who had taught that the risen bodies of the elect would be impalpable and lighter than air; Gregory urged against him the palpable risen body of Christ, and the emperor, hearing both, decided for Gregory and ordered the patriarch's book burned. Both disputants fell ill from the strain; Gregory recovered, while Eutychius died, retracting his error on his deathbed. Curiously, after six years in the city Gregory never mastered Greek. He obtained no military help for Rome, but he learned the lesson that shaped his pontificate: from Byzantium nothing more was to be hoped, and if Italy were to be saved it must be by vigorous action on the spot.
Recalled in 585 or 586, he returned with the greatest joy to Saint Andrew's, and soon became its abbot. The house flourished under him and produced monks who later won renown; many scenes from these years are preserved in his "Dialogues." He lectured his monks on the Heptateuch, the Books of Kings, the Prophets, Proverbs, and the Canticle of Canticles, and he revised and published the "Moralia" begun in the East. To this time belongs the famous meeting with the fair-haired Angles in the Roman Forum, which so kindled his heart that he obtained leave from Pelagius II to go himself to Britain as a missionary. The people of Rome, however, would not part with him; messengers overtook the little band on the third day of their journey and brought them back, Gregory yielding at once, since he had received what seemed to him a sign from heaven that the enterprise must be laid aside. He remained the chief adviser and virtual secretary of Pelagius II, and in that capacity wrote about 586 the long letter urging the schismatic bishops of Istria to return to communion.
The year 589 brought disaster: unprecedented floods swept away farms and houses, the Tiber destroyed buildings including the Church's granaries with all their corn, and pestilence followed. Rome became a city of the dead, its streets deserted except for the wagons carrying corpses to burial pits beyond the walls. In February 590 Pelagius II himself died of the plague. Clergy and people with one voice elected Gregory, Abbot of Saint Andrew's. He shrank from the burden, refused their prayers, and wrote personally to the Emperor Maurice begging him not to confirm the election; but the prefect of the city suppressed the letter and sent the formal record of the election instead. While the answer was awaited, Gregory helped govern the vacant see and summoned the people to a great sevenfold penitential procession, the seven regions of the city setting out separately and converging on the Basilica of the Blessed Virgin, all begging pardon and the lifting of the pestilence. When at last the imperial confirmation came after six months, the saint was terrified and thought of flight; he was seized, carried to the Basilica of Saint Peter, and consecrated pope on 3 September 590, the day the Church keeps his memory. To the end of his life he never ceased to grieve over his elevation.
Fourteen years remained to him, and into them he crowded the work of several lifetimes, though he suffered almost continually from indigestion, recurring fevers, and, in the second half of his pontificate, from gout. "He never rested," wrote Paul the Deacon. At the very outset he published the "Book of Pastoral Rule," setting out the bishop's office as that of a physician of souls; it became the textbook of the Western episcopate for centuries, and what he taught in it he practised. As pope he still lived like a monk, banishing the lay pages and attendants from the Lateran palace and putting clerics in their place. With no imperial commander left in Rome, even military matters fell to him. He fed the multitudes of refugees driven in by the Lombards, using the ecclesiastical districts with their offices of alms and the corn of the Sicilian patrimony. He preached constantly, in simple, scriptural, story-filled homilies that drew immense crowds, and he instituted the "stations," meeting clergy and people at an appointed church and going in procession to another, where Mass was offered and he preached. In July 595 he held his first synod at Saint Peter's, which passed six decrees on ecclesiastical discipline. To his care belong also lasting modifications of the Roman liturgy, and tradition has forever joined his name to the Church's sacramentary and to her chant.
As administrator of the patrimony of Saint Peter, whose estates lay in Campania, Sicily, Africa, and elsewhere, he showed a skill that astonished agents accustomed to easier masters. He appointed clerics rather than laymen as rectors, gave them ecclesiastical commissions as well, and yet never let them act on their own authority. Nothing was too small for his notice, from measures of corn and false weights to the complaint of the humblest tenant, and his one aim was a scrupulously righteous administration, since as bishop he held all this in trust for God and for the poor. Under him the revenues rose and the tenants were content. The only reproach ever made against him is that his boundless charities emptied his treasury; but he held that the goods of the Church were the property of the poor, for whom he could never do enough.
He governed the Churches of Italy and the islands with vigilance, providing for Catholics in Lombard territory, appointing vicars, insisting on local synods, examining candidates for bishoprics and rejecting the unfit, enforcing clerical celibacy, defending clerics from lay tribunals, deposing scandalous ministers, and demanding the honest use of church revenues; his reform of the disordered Church of Sardinia under the aged Januarius of Cagliari fills many letters. In dealing with all the Western Churches he acted on the conviction that the See of Rome held authority over them, while respecting the canonical rights of metropolitans. Of the Apostolic See he wrote plainly that it "is the head of all Churches," and of himself that he had been "set up in command of the Church." For this reason he could not tolerate the title of Ecumenical Bishop assumed by John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople; the controversy lasted until Gregory's death, though with the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria his relations were most cordial.
In temporal affairs he stood almost alone. The exarch Romanus sat idle at Ravenna while Ariulf of Spoleto appeared before the walls of Rome and Arichis of Benevento marched on Naples. Gregory appointed a tribune to command Naples on his own authority, provided munitions, instructed generals, sent ambassadors, and in 592 concluded a peace with the Lombards himself. When Agilulf besieged Rome in 593 the pope's homilies on Ezechiel still mirror the terror of the city; the siege was raised, Gregory calling himself with bitter humour "the paymaster of the Lombards." On Queen Theodelinde, a Catholic and his friend, he set his hopes for a lasting settlement. When his threat to treat separately with Agilulf was reported to Constantinople, the Emperor Maurice sent him a furious letter calling him traitor and fool; Gregory's reply, preserved among his epistles, is a model of fearless directness from a subject to an emperor. Peace was at last signed in 599 through the more friendly exarch Callinicus. Whatever the theory, in fact Gregory had become the first power in Italy, and from his day the peoples of the peninsula looked to the pope for guidance.
His missionary zeal never cooled. Unable to go himself to Britain, he sent Saint Augustine and his companions, and thereby earned the title of Apostle of the English. He laboured to root out paganism in Gaul, Donatism in Africa, and the schism of the Three Chapters in North Italy and Istria, trying persuasion, exhortation, and warning before any compulsion. He was also a protector of the Jews, expressly forbidding their compulsory baptism and insisting on their legal liberty in civil affairs and in the worship of the synagogue, while holding them to the limits the imperial law set. The first monk to become pope, he strengthened and propagated the Rule of Saint Benedict, urged the wealthy to found monasteries, corrected abuses, lengthened the novitiate to two years, fixed sixty as the age for an abbess, and, while upholding the bishop's spiritual jurisdiction, defended monasteries from episcopal oppression by issuing privileges of exemption.
His last years were filled with suffering of every kind, his body racked with pain and his serious mind weighed down with foreboding, until his "sole consolation was the hope that death would come quickly." The end came on 12 March 604, and on the same day his body was laid to rest in the portico of Saint Peter's Basilica before the sacristy; his relics were moved several times, most recently by Paul V in 1606. Venerable Bede records the epitaph on his tomb with its famous phrase naming him the consul of God. The people canonized him by acclamation at once. In art he is shown in full pontifical robes with the tiara and the double cross, and his emblem is the dove. He is honoured as one of the great Doctors of the Church, and his "Moralia," "Pastoral Rule," "Dialogues," homilies on Ezechiel and on the Gospels, and vast correspondence remain the treasure of the Church he served.
He was not a speculative philosopher nor an innovator in doctrine; he was a Roman lawyer, a monk, a missionary, a preacher, above all a physician of souls and a leader of men, who gathered the teaching of the Fathers into a harmonious whole and gave it to the Middle Ages. Sick, unwilling, and never at rest, he fed the hungry, corrected the powerful, humbled himself before God, and loved the far-off English enough to send them the Gospel.
May Saint Gregory the Great intercede for us, and may we imitate today his charity toward the poor, spending ourselves without counting the cost for those whose goods God has entrusted to our care.
