Маргарет Олифант
The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books

Yet it is evident enough that this one resolute man, toiling in every possible way for the protection of the people round him, did put a certain heart in the city which had come through so many convulsions. Crowded with fugitives, decimated with pestilence, left for many months without any more able head than the half-hearted prætors and officials of the state and the distant exarch at Ravenna, with all of whom, according to Gregory's own witness, the exaction of taxes was the chief object – a strong and steadfast ruler in the midst of this distracted people changed in every way the disposition of affairs. For one thing he seems to have taken upon him from the beginning the care and nourishment of the poor. It had been the principle of the Church from her earliest days that almsgiving was one of the first of duties, and the care of the poor her inalienable right; but such a time of disaster made something more heroic needful than the usual doles and charities. A large proportion of the population of Rome came upon Gregory's hands to be fed and provided for. Lists of the destitute poor, of their houses and circumstances, were kept with the greatest care; and we are told that before the Pope sat down to any meal the tables for the poor outside were first supplied. How dreadful to any philanthropist now this straightforward and matter-of-fact feeding of the hungry! but it was the manner of Christianity, most understood and approved in the early ages, the one with which even the most enlightened of politicians had no fault to find. This was the first idea in every evangelical soul, but it was by no means the limit of Gregory's exertions. He had learned diplomacy as well as charity in the experiences of his past life, and every resource of his skill and knowledge were needed for the salvation of the otherwise hopeless city. In all the dignity of his spiritual office, yet with all the arts of a statesman, we can see him standing as it were before the gates of Rome, as Horatius stood on the banks of the Tiber. It is sometimes to Constantinople, sometimes to the host of the invaders, that he turns explaining, arguing, pleading on one side and another for the safety of his city and people. His letters to the Emperor and to the Empress on one hand, and those to Queen Theodolinda on the other hand, the wife of the invader – show with what persistency and earnestness he defended Rome and its people who were his special charge and flock, and who had neither ruler nor defender save himself. This was one of his ways of establishing the sway of the papacy, it is said; it was at the same time, and primarily, the stepping forth of the only man who could or would put himself at the head of a disorganised and trembling host without leader or defender. He, only he, stood fast to strike for them, to intercept destruction hanging over their heads, and it, would be a curious fact indeed in human nature if such a man performed his first duty for the sake of an unformed empire to come after hundreds of years had passed. He succeeded with the barbarians, preserving Rome from the attacks which were often threatened but never carried out; but he did little good with Maurice, who on his side had few troops to send and no general able to make a successful campaign against the Lombards. The officers and the armies of the empire were of use in exacting taxes for the imperial treasury, but not for opposing a vigorous invader or rescuing a defenceless people.

It is never pretended by any of his biographers or admirers that Gregory was a man of learning, or even interested very much in the preservation of letters, or the progress of intellectual life. Learning and philosophy were the inheritance of the Greek Church, which was the very presumptuous and arrogant rival of Rome, and the cradle of most of the heresies and all the difficult and delicate questions which had troubled the peace of the Church. He is accused, though without sufficient evidence, of burning a library of Latin poets, a thing which he might well have done, according to his ideas, without much sense of guilt. There has never been an age in which certain books have not been liable to that reformation by fire, and the principle is quite as strong now as in the sixth century, so we need not take pains to exonerate Gregory from such an imputation. He did not, like Jerome, love the literature which was full of classical images and allusions. Neither Cicero nor Plato would have tempted him to occupy himself with vain studies. "The same mouth," he says, "should not pronounce the name of Jupiter and that of Christ;" yet at the same time he expresses strong regret that letters had died out of Rome, amid all the tumults through which she had passed. Amid the jargon of barbarians heard on every side, Greek, he complains, had fallen almost out of knowledge. There were few men learned enough to settle a question of doctrine by reference to the original text of Scripture. "Those we have are good for little but to translate word by word; they are unable to grasp the sense, and it is with difficulty that we understand their translations." He does not take any credit for his own style, which indeed is anything but Ciceronian. He complains with great simplicity, at the end of his dedication to Leander of his Moralia, of the "collisions of metacism," a difficulty about the letter m which would seem to have been as troublesome as the letter h in our own day; and anticipates criticism by confessing that he has neglected the "cases of prepositions." "For I account it far from meet," he says, taking as we should say in Scotland, "the first word of flyting," and with a high hand, "to submit the words of the Divine Oracle to the rules of (the grammarian) Donatus." As who should say Lindley Murray has nothing to do with the language of a sermon. This was a great deal for a man to say, one of whose early feats in life had been the conviction and conversion by argument of Eutychius, whose heresy in respect to the body of the resurrection (a sufficiently distant and far-off subject to disturb the Church about – but such twists of impossible doctrine have always affected some minds) survived himself – but who acknowledged with his dying breath that he was wrong and Gregory right.

Doctrine, however, was not the point on which Gregory was most strong – his Dialogues, written it is said for the edification and strengthening in the faith of the Empress Theodolinda, are nothing more than pious discussions and sanctions of the miracles performed by the saints, which we fear would have a very contrary effect if published in our day. His works upon the pastoral law and the discipline of the Church are the most valuable and important of his productions; though in these also his point of view is extraordinarily different from ours, and he advises a kind and degree of toleration which is somewhat appalling to hear of. For instance, in his instructions to Augustine and his band of missionaries Gregory instructs them to interfere as little as possible with the customs, especially in the matter of religious observances, of the people among whom they were sent. They were not to put down the familiar accompaniments of their converts' native rites and ceremonies. The old temples of Woden and Thor were not to be abandoned but turned to a new and better use; even the system of sacrifice to these gods was not to be altogether set aside. "Let there be no more victims to demons," he says with curious casuistry, "but let them kill and eat giving thanks to God; for you must leave them some material enjoyments that they may so much more easily enter into the delights of the soul." On the other hand, his instructions to a bishop of Sardinia bear a curiously different character. He recommended this prelate to put a pressure more or less gentle upon the peasants there who still remained pagan, in the form of an increased rent and taxes until such time as they should become Christian. "Though, conversion does not come by force," he says with sagacious cynicism, "yet the children of these mercenary converts will receive baptism in their innocence and will be better Christians than their fathers;" an argument which certainly embodies much economic truth if not exactly the spirit of the Gospel.

Strangely different from these worldly-wise suggestions, however, are the detailed instructions for pastoral work, quoted by Bede, in Gregory's answer to the questions of Augustine, in which the artificial conscience of the confessional suddenly appears in full development, by the side of those strange counsels of a still semi-pagan age. Nothing can be more remarkable than this contrast, which exacts a more than Levitical punctilio of observance from the devout, while leaving open every door for the entrance of the profane. Though he entered with so much reluctance upon the pastoral care of the Church, no one has laid down more detailed directions for the cure of souls. It would seem to have been in reality one of the things which interested him most. His mind was in some respects that of a statesman full of the broadest sense of expediency and of the practicable, and of toleration and compromise carried to a length which fills us with dismay; while on the other it was that of a parish legislator, an investigator of personal details, to whom no trifle was unimportant, and the most fantastic stipulations of ritualistic purification of as great moment as morality itself.

In contrast however with those letters which recommended what was little more than a forced conversion, and which have been frequently cited as examples of the unscrupulousness of the early missionaries, we must here quote some of Gregory's pastoral instructions in which the true spirit of a pastor shines forth. "Nothing," he says in one of his epistles to the bishops with whom he kept up constant communications, "is so heavy a burden upon a priest as so to bend the force of his own mind in sympathy, as to change souls (cum personis supervenientibus animam mutare) with each new person who approaches him; yet this is very necessary." Nothing could be more happy in expression or fine in sentiment, and it shows how completely the monk-Pope, in cloister and on throne, understood the essential character of his great profession. Still more remarkable, as more involved in personal matters, is his advice to Augustine, who had consulted him as to the differences in worship between the Gallican churches and those of Rome.

"You know, my brother, the custom of the Roman Church in which you were bred up. But it will please me if when you have found anything, either in the Roman or Gallican or any other Church, which may be more acceptable to Almighty God, you will carefully make choice of the same, and sedulously teach the Church of the English, which as yet is new in the faith, whatsoever good thing you can gather from the several Churches. For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose therefore from every Church those things that are pious, religious and upright, and when you have as it were made them into one system, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto."

This is surely the truest and highest toleration.

The Papacy of Gregory began in trouble and distress; Rome was more disorganised, more miserable, more confused and helpless than almost ever before, although she had already passed through many a terrible crisis; and he had shrunk from the terrible task of setting her right. But when he had once undertaken that task there was neither weakness nor hesitation in the manner with which he carried it out. The public penance and humiliation to which he moved the people, the septiform litany with its chanting and weeping crowds, the ceaseless prayers and intercessions in the Church were not all, though no doubt the chief part to Gregory, of those methods by which he sustained the courage, or rather put a heart into, the broken-down population, so that for once a show of resistance was made when the Lombards threatened the city. And his anxious negotiations never ceased. The Emperor, far off and indifferent, not to say helpless, in Constantinople, had no rest from the constant remonstrances and appeals of the ever-watchful Bishop. Gregory complained and with reason that no efforts, or at least but fictitious ones, were made for the help of Rome, and that the indifference or hostility of the Emperor was more dangerous to her than the arms of the Lombards. On the other hand he addressed himself to the headquarters of the invaders, taking as his champion – as was his custom, as it has always been the custom of the Churchman – the Queen Theodolinda, who had become a Catholic and baptized her son in that faith, notwithstanding the opposition of her Arian husband, and was therefore a very fitting and natural intercessor. "What an overwhelming charge it is!" he cries to one of his correspondents, "to be at once weighted with the supervision of the bishops and clergy, of the monasteries and the entire people, and to remain all the time watchful to every undertaking of the enemy and on my guard against the robbery and injustice of our rulers." It was indeed a burden under which few men could have stood.

Gregory appears to have neglected no movement of the foe, to have noted every exaction and treachery from Constantinople, to have remembered every bishop in the furthest-off regions, and to have directed to each in turn his expostulations, his entreaties, his reproofs. We have been told in our own day of the overwhelming weight of business (attributed to facilities of post and daily communications) which almost crushes an English archbishop, although that dignitary besides the care of the Church has but such an amount of concern in public matters as a conscientious adviser must have. But Gregory was responsible for everything, the lives and so far as was possible the liberties of his city and people, their daily bread, their safety, their very existence, besides that cure of souls which was his special occupation. The mass of correspondence, which beside all his other work he managed to get through, forgetting nothing, is enough to put any modern writer of hasty notes and curt business letters to shame. On this point there may be said a word of apology for the much-harassed Pope in respect to that one moment in his history, in which his conduct cannot be defended by his warmest admirer. His prayers and appeals were treated with contempt at Constantinople, a contempt involving not his own person alone, but Rome and the Church, for which the Emperor Maurice did not even pretend to care. And when that Emperor was suddenly swept away, it is natural enough that a sensation of relief, a touch of hope in the new man who, notwithstanding the treachery and cruelty of the first step in his career, might turn out better than his predecessor, should have gleamed across the mind of a distant, and perhaps at first imperfectly informed spectator, whose interests were so closely concerned. The complacency with which Gregory wrote to Phocas, the amazing terms he used to that murderer and tyrant, will always be the darkest stain on his reputation. Under Maurice the ministers of the empire had been more oppressive than the invaders. Perhaps under Phocas better things might be hoped for. It is all that can be said for this unfortunate moment of his career; but it is something nevertheless.

It was not till 597, when he had occupied his bishopric for seven years, that Gregory succeeded in carrying out the long-cherished scheme of the mission to England, which had been for many years so near his heart. It is said that he himself had purchased some of the captive boys who caught his eye in the streets, and trained them in the Christian doctrine and faith, in order that they might act as interpreters and commend the missionaries to their people, an expedient which has been so largely followed (and of course boasted of as an original thought) in recent missions. These boys would by this time have attained the age of manhood, and perhaps this determined the moment at which Augustine and his companions were sent forth. They were solemnly consecrated in the chapel of the convent on the Cœlian hill, Gregory's beloved home, to which he always returned with so much affection, and to which they also belonged, monks of the same house. Their names are inscribed in the porch of the present church after that of their master, with designations strangely familiar to our British ears – S. Augustine, Apostle of England; S. Lawrence, Archbishop of Canterbury; S. Mellitus, of London and Canterbury; S. Justus, of Rochester; S. Paulinus, of York, appear in the record, the first teachers and ecclesiastical dignitaries of Saxon England. The church in which this consecration took place exists no longer; the present building, its third or fourth successor, dates only from the eighteenth century, and is dedicated to S. Gregory himself; but the little piazza now visited by so many pilgrims is unchanged, and it was from this small square, so minute a point amid the historic places of Rome, that the missionary party set forth, Augustine and his brethren kneeling below, while the Pope, standing at the head of the steps, gave them his parting blessing. No doubt the young Angles, with their golden locks of childhood matured into russet tones, who had filled Gregory's mind with so many thoughts, were in the group, behind the black-robed Benedictine brothers whose guides and interpreters they were to be.

This is an association full of interest for every Englishman, and has attracted many pilgrims from the nation whose faith has undergone so many vicissitudes, and in which the Pope's authority has been as vehemently decried in one age as strongly upheld in another; but whatever our opinions on that point may be, there can be nothing here but affectionate and grateful remembrance of the man of God who had so long cherished the scheme, which thus at length with fatherly benedictions and joy at heart, he was able to carry out. He himself would fain have gone on this mission many years before; but the care of all the Churches, and the tribulations of a distracted world, had made that for ever impossible, and he was now growing old, in feeble health, and with but a few years of work before him. The hearts of the missionaries were not so strong as that of this great Servant of the servants of God who sent them away with his blessing. Terrors of the sea and terrors of the wilds, the long journey and the savage tribes at the end of it, were in their hearts. When they had got nearly over their journey and were resting a little to recover their health among the Gauls, – fierce enough indeed, but still with sanctuaries of peace and holy brethren among them – before crossing the terrible channel, Augustine wrote beseeching letters, begging to be recalled. But let us hope that at the moment of dedication these terrors had scarcely yet got hold upon them. And to Gregory the occasion was one of unmingled satisfaction and joy. The Pope did not in those days wear the white robes which distinguish his dignity now. Gregory was presumably indifferent to such signs and tokens; for in the portrait of him which still exists in the description given of it by John the Deacon, he wears a dress scarcely distinguishable from the ordinary dress of a layman. But as he stood upon the steps in front of the church, separated from all the attendants, and raised his hands in blessing, the scene is one that any painter might covet, and which to many a visitor from these distant islands of the seas will make the little Piazza di San Gregorio more interesting in its simplicity than any other spot in storied Rome.

It would occupy too much time to quote here his long and careful letters to the bishops of the West generally – from Sicily which always seems to have been the object of his special care, to those in Gaul and his missionaries in England. That he assumed an unquestioned authority over them is clear, an authority which had more or less been exercised by the Bishop of Rome for many generations before him: and that he was unfeignedly indignant at the pretensions of John of Constantinople to be called Universal Bishop is also certain. These facts however by no means prove that a great scheme of papal authority was the chief thing in his mind, underlying all his undertakings. When the historians speak of Gregory as spreading the supremacy of the Church of Rome by his missions, notably by that mission to England of which I have just spoken, they forget that the salvation of the souls lying in darkness is a motive which has moved men in every age to the greatest sacrifices, and that we have no reason in the world to believe that it was not the faith of Christ rather than the supremacy of Rome which was Gregory's object. The Apostles themselves might be said in the same way to have been spreading their own supremacy when they obeyed the injunction of their Master to go over the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature. The one sovereignty was actually implied in the other – but it requires a very robust faith in a preconceived dogma, and a very small understanding of human nature, to be able to believe that when the meditative monk paused in his walk, with compassion and interest, to look at the angelic boys, and punned tenderly with tears in his eyes over their names and nation and king, the idea immediately sprang up in his mind not that Allelujah should be sung in the dominions of King Alle, but that this wild country lost in the midst of the seas should be brought under a spiritual sceptre not yet designed.

Gregory thought as the Apostles thought, that the days of the world were numbered, and that his own generation might see its records closed. That is an idea which never has stopped any worthy man in undertakings for the good of the world – but it was a belief better established, and much more according to all the theories and dogmas of the age, than a plan of universal dominion for the Church such as is attributed to him. He did his duty most energetically and strenuously in every direction – never afraid of being supposed to interfere, using the prestige of the Apostolical See freely for every ecclesiastical purpose. And he became prince in Rome, an absolute sovereign by stress of circumstance and because every other rule and authority had failed. Whether these practical necessities vaguely formed themselves into visions of spiritual empire before the end of his life it is impossible to tell: as it is equally impossible to tell what dreams of happiness or grandeur may enter into any poor man's brain. But so large and world-embracing a plan seldom springs fully formed into any mind, and in his words he never claimed, nay, vehemently denied and repudiated, any pretension of the kind. It is curious how difficult it is to get the world to believe that a man placed in a position of great responsibility, at the head of any institution, is first of all actuated by the desire of doing his work, whatever the ulterior results may be.

Gregory's activity was boundless, though his health was weak, and his sufferings many. Fastings in his youth and neglect at all times told early upon his constitution. The dinner of herbs which his mother sent him daily, and which is sometimes described as uncooked – salad to wit, which enters so largely into the sustenance of the Italian poor – is a kind of fare which does not suit a delicate digestion; but he spared himself nothing on this account, though he had reached such a pitch of weakness that he was at last, as he bitterly laments, unable to fast at all, even on Easter Eve, when even little children abstain from food. Beside all the labours which I have already noted, there remains one detail which has done perhaps more to make the common world familiar with his name than all the rest; and that is the reformation in music which he accomplished among all his other labours. Church music is the only branch of the art of which we have any authentic record which dates so far back, and the Gregorian chant still exists among us, with that special tone of wailing mingled with its solemn measures which is characteristic of all primitive music.

"Four scales," says Mr. Helmore in The Dictionary of Music, "traditionally ascribed to St. Ambrose, existed before the time of St. Gregory. These, known as the Authentic Modes, and since the thirteenth century named after the ancient Greek scales from which they were supposed to be derived, are as follows: 1, Dorian; 2, Phrygian; 3, Lydian; 4, Mixo-Lydian. To the four Authentic St. Gregory added four Plagal, i. e. collateral or relative Modes. Each is a fourth below its corresponding original, and is called by the same name with the prefix hypo (ὑπὸ, below), as follows: 5, Hypo-Dorium; 6, Hypo-Phrygian; 7, Hypo-Lydian; 8, Hypo-Mixo-Lydian… Handel's 'Hanover' among modern tunes, which ranges from F to F has its finale on B♭. 'Should auld acquaintance be forgot' is also a specimen of a tune in a Plagal Mode descending about a fourth below its final, and rising above it only six notes, closing upon the final of its tone."

This may be a little too learned for the ordinary reader, but it is interesting to find how far the influence of the busy old Pope, who had a finger in every pie, could go. There is a very curious commentary by John the Deacon, Gregory's later biographer, upon this new musical system and its adoption throughout Europe, which makes a good pendant to the scientific description. The Italians seem then as now to have had a poor opinion of German modes of singing.

"This music was learned easily by the Germans and Gauls, but they could not retain it because of making additions of their own, and also because of their barbarous nature. Their Alpine bodies resounding to their depths with the thunders of their voices, do not properly give forth the sweetness of the modulation, the savage roughness of their bibulous throat when it attempts to give forth a delicate strain, producing rather harsh sounds with a natural crash, as of waggons sounding confusedly over the scales."

This is not flattering; but one can imagine something very like it coming from the lips of an Italian Maestro in our own day. The tradition goes that Gregory himself instructed the choristers, for whom he had established schools endowed each with its little property, one in the precincts of St. Peter's, the other in those of St. John Lateran, where his own residence was. And a couch is still shown on which he lay while giving or superintending their lessons, and even the whip with which he is said to have threatened the singers when they made false notes. The last is little in accord with the Pope's character, and we can scarcely imagine the twang through the air of any whip in Gregory's hand: but it is probably as true as other more agreeable circumstances of the legend. One can scarcely believe however that amid his multitudinous occupations he could have had time for more than a flying visit to the schools, however they might interest him.

Nor did he limit his exertions on behalf of ritual to the arrangement of the music. We are told that the Missal of Pope Gelasius then used in the Church was revised by him, and that he took away much, altered some things and added a little, among other things a confession of faith or Credo of his own writing, which is something between the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds. The Ordinary of the Mass remains now, another authority tells us, very much as it came from his hands. Thus his immediate authority and the impress of his mind remain on things which are still in daily use.

And there could be no more familiar or characteristic figure in Rome than that of this monk-Pope threading everywhere those familiar streets, in which there were more ruins, and those all fresh and terrible in their suggestions of life destroyed – than now: the gentle spectator full of meditation, who lingered among the group of slaves, and saw and loved and smiled at the Saxon boys: who passed by Trajan's Forum which we all know so well, that field of broken pillars, not then railed off and trim in all the orderliness of an outdoor museum, but wild in the neglect of nature: and heard the story of the Emperor, and loved him too, and poured out his soul to God for the great heathen, so that the gates of Hades were rolled back and the soul set free – strange parable of brotherly kindness as the dominant principle of heart and life. We can follow him through all the lists of the poor laid up in his Scrivii, like the catalogues of books enclosed in caskets, in an old-fashioned library – with careful enumeration of every half-ruined tenement and degraded palace where the miserable had found shelter: or passing among the crowds who received their portions before, not after, the Pope in the precincts of the great basilica; or "modulating," with a voice broken by age and weakness, the new tones of his music which the "bibulous throats" of the barbarian converts turned into thunder, and of which even his own choristers, careless as is their use, would make discords, till the whip of the Master trembled in the air, adding the sting of a sharper sound to the long-drawn notes of the monotone, and compelling every heedless tenor and frivolous soprano to attention. These are his simpler aspects, the lower life of the great Benedictine, the picture of the Pope as he endeared himself to the popular imagination, round which all manner of tender legends grew. His aspect is less familiar yet not less true as he sits at the head of affairs, dictating or writing with his own hand those innumerable letters which treat of every subject under heaven, from the safety of Rome to the cross which is to be hung round a royal infant's neck, or the amethyst ring for the finger of a little princess; from the pretensions of John of Constantinople, that would-be head of the Church, down to the ass sent by the blundering intendant from Sicily. Nothing was too great, nothing too little for his care. He had to manage the mint and cummin without leaving graver matters undone.