Pastoral Rule

Elsewhere in his letters we read how Gregory undertook the burden of episcopacy with a sick heart, shackled with the chain of dignity, choked with business, driven distracted with the tumult of worldly affairs, the eyes of his soul darkened with grief. "The base height of external eminence "is for him no true promotion, since it draws him from the Face of the Lord into the exile of earthly employment.

He was especially distressed when bishops wrote to congratulate him; as though their own experience in "the citadel of teaching "had failed to convince them of its perils and responsibility. John, Bishop of Ravenna, wrote in another strain, blaming the new Pope for his reluctance to dare a duty so clearly imposed upon him by the Will of God.

Gregory answered John by his book On Pastoral Rule, "a golden book," which it took him four years to write. He sent copies to his friends in different lands. St. Leander circulated it in Spain. The emperor Maurice had it translated into Greek. St. Augustine carried it into England. Exactly two centuries after its first appearance, Alcuin wrote to the Archbishop of York:

"Wherever you go, let the handbook of the holy Gregory go with you. Read it, and reread it often. It is a mirror of the pontifical life and a cure for every wound inflicted by diabolical deceit."

Alcuin's pupil, Charlemagne, ranked it with the Book of Canons; for he ordered copies of both to be given to bishops at their consecration, and a solemn promise to be exacted that they would conform their conduct, teaching and decisions to its maxims. Alfred the Great translated it as "a book most needful for men to read," and sent a copy of his version to every bishop in his dominions. It is the book of which Ozanam said, "It made the bishops who have made modern nations." A few quotations, strung together, show its scope more interestingly than a formal synopsis.

"The solidity of inward fear" is, in St. Gregory's mind, a bishop's first essential. "Those who stumble on level ground should shrink back from the verge of a precipice. Arrogance cannot teach humility, nor can one who lives perversely instruct in righteousness." True humility, on the other hand, "is averse from stubbornness, and he who abounds in virtue accepts the supreme rule enjoined him, fleeing the responsibility in his heart, and against his will obeying."

A bishop's life must serve as a pattern for his flock, with nothing to put him to the blush before them. He must be pure in heart. "The hand that would cleanse from dirt must needs itself be clean. And how dare he plead with God for others, if God's anger be not placated against himself?" He must be discreet in silence, profitable in speech. "For careless, unseasonable babbling robs good advice of its effect, and unseasonable silence leaves in error men who might have been instructed. . .

"He must be all in all to his flock, joined to the highest and lowest in bonds of charity—a charity so well ordered as to keep his heart firmly anchored in God, even when he leaves the safe haven of prayer to sympathize with his neighbours in their infirmities. All men are born equal, but sin has sunk some below the level of others. These he must discreetly correct, with a father's loving rigour that leaves no sting behind, only an increase of reverential awe. . . .

"It behooves a good ruler to desire to please men, and by sweetness of character to win them to love truth. For it is hard for a preacher who is not loved to be heard gladly, however wise may be his warnings. Nor is a bishop heard willingly, if he reproves the misdeeds of transgressors and makes no effort to supply them with the necessaries of life. The word of doctrine maketh no way into the soul of a man in want if the hand of mercy commend it not to his mind."

And lastly, a bishop must meditate daily on Holy Scripture, so that "he who is drawn to the old life by intercourse with worldlings may be continually renewed in the love of heavenly things by the breathings of contrition. For indeed it is needful, when we are flattered for the abundance of our virtues, that the soul should dwell on her own weak points. And thus the heart, broken by the remembrance of faults and omissions, may shine with increased beauty in the eyes of the God who loveth the lowly. For this cause, Almighty God is wont to leave the souls of rulers imperfect in some small measure, that the while they shine before men with wondrous virtues they may themselves be wearied with their own irksome imperfections; and that, whereas they still toil in their strife against the lower difficulties, they may not dare to vaunt themselves upon their high achievements."

On this note of humility St. Gregory ends: "Behold my good friend, thou whose rebuke has constrained me to write, behold this portrait of a fair person, which I, a foul painter, have presumed to paint. I direct others to the shore of perfection, while I myself am tossing on the waves of sin. My own weight drags me downward. But do thou stretch forth the hand of thy worthiness and hold me up by the plank of thy prayer."

The saint did not live otherwise than as he wrote. As soon as he became Pope, he called to his side from St. Andrew's Maximianus the abbot, and Marinianus, Augustine the prior, and Meletus, the two first in training for the sees of Syracuse and Ravenna, the others for the English apostolate. With these and others of his old community he continued, as far as possible, the monastic routine: meals in common, set times for prayer and study and interchange of ideas. He admitted also to his household some learned and holy Roman priests, on whose advice and intimacy he set a high value. Among the inferior clerics we note Emilianus, the shorthand writer, who took down his homilies; Claudius the scribe, who preserved his writings for the Church, and Peter, the trusty business man whom he has immortalized in his Dialogues. All the domestics in the pontifical palace wore the tonsure, and all had to converse in cultured Latin.

At the synod held in 595, the year he published his book On Pastoral Rule, St. Gregory was in a position to insert among the decrees, "Certain persons shall be selected from among the clergy or the monks to attend upon the Pontiff in his bedchamber, so that the life of the ruler may be witnessed in all its privacy by men who can take example, and profit by the sight of his progress in virtue."

Life in the Lateran palace was of the simplest. The Pope's liveries were monastic in cut and texture. His own robes of state were such as he deemed suitable to a successor of the Apostles. John the Deacon tells of his pallium, woven of white wool with no marks of the needle in it, of his pectoral of thin silver, hung from the neck by a piece of poor cloth, of his narrow belt only a thumb's-width broad.

"Although we do not care for presents," he once wrote to a bishop, "we have thankfully received the costly garments, embroidered with palm-branches, which Your Fraternity has sent us. But that you may be at no loss, we have sold them for a fair price, which we forward to Your Fraternity."

Yet, when he appeared in public, there was nothing sordid or undignified, nothing to excite remark or ridicule.

"You have sent me one sorry horse and five excellent asses," he wrote to the agent of his estates in Sicily. "The horse I cannot ride, because it will not bear my weight; and the asses, good as they are, I cannot ride, because they are asses."

He kept a frugal table, but on this we need not dwell. A man of his gouty habit was, of necessity, abstemious. The thin, sour wine, the usual drink of monks and peasants, was in his case wholly unsuited. He had to send to Alexandria for a special resinous wine, called cognidium, and this was to him no small humiliation.

But however simple the fare provided, his staff of cooks and scullions were kept busy. For St. Gregory entertained twelve poor men to dinner every day, and often ate with them himself. Moreover he never sat down to table without sending cartloads of cooked provisions to the sick and infirm throughout the streets and lanes of all the city districts. Families reduced in circumstances and ashamed to beg, received a dish from his own table, delivered at their doors; and he wished them to welcome it more as a mark of honour than as an alms.

"An offering from the goods of Blessed Peter the Apostle," he wrote, "should always be received as a great blessing."

And again: "We have ordered Adrian, our business man, to pay ten solidi  a year to the monastery you have built in Catania. Do not be offended. It is not a personal present from me to you, but a gift from St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles."

He answered one Julian who asked for help: "I opened your letter with pleasure and I folded it up with grief. For it showed me that you have kept hidden from me something I should long ere this have known. You must have little love for a magi with whom you are so bashful. It is a great help to me when you give me opportunities to do a kindness. Your bashfulness is all the more blameworthy, because you know I have nothing of my own. I only administer, as bishop, the property of the poor."

In his dealings with another section of the poor of Christ, St. Gregory deemed it a more blessed thing to give than to receive. There were three thousand "handmaids of God" in Rome, to whom he gave eighty pounds a year and fifteen pounds in gold to buy blankets. He wrote concerning them to the royal lady Theoctista:

"Their life is so noble, so given to tears and abstinence, that I believe, but for them, not one of us in Rome could have survived so many years amid the swords of the Lombards."

The long series of wars had left the Pope the one rich man in Rome. All the wealthy patrician families had died out, or removed to Constantinople or sunk to poverty. The city was crowded, moreover, with refugees. Even in its palmy days it was never a trade centre, and had no staple manufactures. The citizens looked to the Government for bread as well as for games. The emperors were still supposed to allot corn from the State granaries; but the Egyptian tribute had, by degrees, been diverted to Constantinople, and the imperial officials in Sicily were broken reeds to lean upon. The Popes had to shoulder the burden themselves, or see the people perish with hunger.

"If the supply from Sicily again falls short," St. Gregory warned the Praetor of that island, "it will be the death, not of one person only, but of all our citizens."

And, as his letter produced no effect, he wrote to the manager of his own estates there: "With fifty pounds of gold, buy corn and store it in Sicily, in places where it will not spoil, so that in February we may send ships across to fetch it. But in case we fail to send them, provide the ships yourself, and with God's help send us the corn in February."

His experience as prefect of the city and as regionary deacon now stood St. Gregory in good stead. The Popes, his predecessors, had well organized the distribution of relief. Each charitable institute and each regionary office had to keep accounts very carefully. Thus there was no waste or overlapping, when on the first of every month he distributed to the poor that part of the Church revenue which was paid in kind.

"Corn throughout the year, and in their several seasons wine, cheese, vegetables, bacon, fish and oil were doled out most discreetly by this father of Our Lord's household. But pigments and other more delicate articles of commerce he offered as tokens of esteem to citizens of rank."

As for the money-rents of his estates and the patrimonies  of the Roman Church, these he divided among the different charities four times a year: at Easter, on the Feast of St. Peter in June, on the anniversary of his own consecration in September, and on St. Andrew's Day, the patronal feast of his monastery. In this quarterly distribution he was mainly guided by the register of Pope Gelasius. But he had a register of his own compiled as well. "On it were set down the names of all persons of either sex, of all ages and professions, both in Rome and in the suburbs, in the neighbouring towns, and even in the distant cities on the coast, together with details about their families, their circumstances, and the payments which they received. When a poor man was found dead of starvation in one of the back streets of Rome, the pope abstained from saying Mass."

With so much misery around him for which to cater, St. Gregory had no funds at his disposal to lay out on bricks and mortar. He had done his church building when Abbot of St. Andrew's. His only architectural venture as Pope was the hospice for pilgrims at Jerusalem, which he built and equipped, and sent out Abbot Probus to organize on the lines of the hospices which other Popes had founded in Rome. His zeal for the beauty of God's House had to content itself with the care he took to reduce to system the rites of public worship, sifting prudently the material at his disposal, and adding of his own.

This remark applies equally to the Sacramentary and Antiphonary which bear his name, and to the Schools for Choristers which he set up in his own palace, and in the basement of St. Peter's.

The Roman patricians gladly sent their sons to these schools, but the best of the pupils were recruited from the destitute orphans who, as the phrase went, depended on the "fosterage of St. Peter "for their chance in life. St. Gregory often sought relief from his cares and bodily pain by presiding at the singing lessons in the Lateran palace. For centuries the very couch was shown on which he reclined, and the rod with which he beat time and kept the unruly boys in order.

Slowly under his guidance the Gregorian Chant was evolved, "full, sonorous, sweet, behooving." This was gradually to supersede all over the West the elaborate Ambrosian harmonies which had so charmed and alarmed St. Austin in the early days of his conversion at Milan. Pope Leo IV wrote in 85o to rebuke an abbot slow to adopt it, and therefore "differing not only from the Roman See, but from almost all who in the Latin tongue sing the praises of the Eternal King." About the same date John the Deacon wrote amusingly of "the light-minded clowns "in the Black Forest who could not readily "accommodate the thunder of their voices "to the sustained sweetness and modulation of the Gregorian Chant.

"When the barbarous roughness of bibulous throats tries to produce soft singing with inflexions and accents, it makes their voices grate like the rumbling of waggons coming down hill. Those who listen are not soothed, but exasperated and provoked to clamorous interruption."

But John the Deacon's ear and taste had been trained at the Pope's own school in the Lateran palace.

According to the letter of Leo IV, St. Gregory had congregational singing in view when "he invented plain chant, so that by artificially modulated sound he might attract to Church services not only the clergy but also the uncultured." Another motive, which he himself avows, is that the deacons may devote themselves to their proper functions, preaching and the distribution of alms, instead of "spending over much time on the modulation of their voice." And so he ordains in a synodal decree (595):

"The sacred ministers at the altar shall not sing during Mass. The deacons may read the Gospel, but the psalms and other lessons shall be rendered by sub-deacons and those in Minor Orders." He will have at the altar none of "those careless ministers whose singing delights the people, but whose conduct irritates God."

The Antiphonary, which bears his name, contains the musical portions of the liturgy arranged for singing by alternate choirs. At least eight of the hymns are attributed to St. Gregory himself, including the two still in use at Sunday Vespers, Audi Benigne Conditor  and Lucis Creator Optime.

St. Gregory's Antiphonary was mainly compiled by him from material which existed two hundred and seventy years before his time, but which he reduced to system and rendered easier to sing. His Sacramentary, on the other hand, contains much that was afterwards introduced into the liturgy, the Mass for his own feast, for instance, and the Blessing of Ashes on Ash Wednesday. For Lent with him began on Quadragesima Sunday. He remarks in one of his homilies how its thirty-six fasting days form a tithe of the year.

Duchesne defines the Sacramentary as "The Pope's book, containing the prayers which the Pope has to use at the ceremonies over which it is his custom to preside," St. Gregory based his Sacramentary on that of Pope Gelasius, omitting a good deal, and adding a little of his own. In the Ordinary of the Mass, he formally sanctioned the Kyrie, inserted in the Hanc Igitur  the words, "diesque nostros in tua pace disponas: atque ab aeterna damnatione nos eripi, et in electorum tuorum jubeas grege numerari,"  and altered the position of the Pater Noster, "so that we may say over His very Body and Blood the prayer which our Redeemer Himself composed." He forbade sub-deacons to wear the chasuble. He enjoined a more frequent use of Alleluia.

St. Gregory's Sacramentary also settled at which of the churches within and without the city walls the Pope was to celebrate Mass on the chief festivals of the year, on the Ember Days, and on every day in Lent. For he had noticed how the procession on St. Mark's Day had impressed the people, and so he revived the good old custom of the Stations  which had fallen into disuse amid the troubles of the times. At a specified church the Pope was met by the clergy and the people, and they all went together—he on horseback, they on foot—singing and praying through the streets to the church of the Station. Here he was received with lights and incense and elaborate ritual; and Mass at once began, during which he received from the faithful offerings of bread and wine, and administered Holy Communion.

A picture in St. Peter's still commemorates an incident at one of these Stations. St. Gregory noticed a woman of senatorial rank who smiled as he pronounced over her the usual formula before Holy Communion: "The Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ preserve thy soul." Quickly withdrawing his hand, he placed the Sacred Host upon the altar, and called upon the matron, before all the people, to account for her unseemly mirth.

"I smiled," she replied, "because I knew that I had made with my own hands this morning the Bread which you offered me as the Body of Our Lord."

Without a word St. Gregory knelt before the altar and bowed his head in prayer. And while he prayed and the people prayed with him, the Sacred Host appeared as Flesh before the eyes of the whole assembly. "And by showing It to the woman he recalled her to the grace of belief."

At these Stations the Pope usually preached, applying the Gospel incidents and precepts to the ordinary circumstances of a Christian life. Allegorical allusions abound in these sermons, according with the taste of the times, and appealing to the more cultured among his hearers. But there was always a fund of homely anecdote as well, to interest the unlearned, "and persuade them by gentle imitation to mount to higher things."

One whole section of his book On Pastoral Rule  deals with the difficulty of preaching to a mixed audience:

"For a gentle whistling which stilleth horses, setteth dogs astir, and the medicine which abateth one disease giveth force to another, and babes are killed by the bread which sustaineth the life of men. . . . The preacher has to teach humility to the proud without increasing the terrors of the timid, to exhort the miserly to spend without encouraging the spendthrift to squander. He must understand that he is not to strain the mind of the hearer beyond its strength, lest the string of the soul break if stretched beyond what it can endure. All deep things ought to be covered over where there are many hearers. . . . The Truth by His own Mouth commands the faithful and wise steward, whom the Lord setteth over His household to give them their measure of corn in season."

The preacher must, like St. Paul, be all things to all men, a debtor to the wise and to the unwise.

"The wise, for the most part, are converted by force of argument, the unwise more usually by examples. To the one class, doubtless, it is profitable to fall beaten in their own disputations. For the other it ofttimes suffices to know the praiseworthy deeds of others."

Forty of St. Gregory's homilies have come down to us, taken down in shorthand even while he spoke, or dictated by him and read in his presence when he was too ill to preach. All forty were carefully revised in his own hand, and an authentic transcript deposited in the Roman archives. For unauthorized versions had gone abroad among the Churches, and he would not hold himself responsible for the action of "those starving men who will not wait until their food be cooked," but took down his sermons hastily, and circulated them without his leave "to be eaten half raw."

This was in the year 593. Towards the end of his life he revised in like manner his twenty-two discourses on the Book of Ezekiel. This series was preached while Agilulf, King of the Lombards, was laying waste the land round Rome, and it is interesting to the historian from its many references to current events. We content ourselves with one short quotation:

"When in the monastery I was able to keep my tongue from idle talk and fix my mind on prayer. But since the pastoral burden presses upon the shoulders of my heart, my soul lives abroad amid conflicting cares and cannot concentrate upon itself. For I have to superintend the business of churches and of monasteries, and to deliberate upon the conduct and actions of individuals. Sometimes I have to take thought for the citizens, sometimes to groan over the incursions of the enemy, sometimes to defend from prowling wolves the flock committed to my care. Sometimes I have to keep to their duty those who ought to assist us, sometimes I must suffer plunderers with evenness of mind, sometimes for the sake of charity I must resist them.

"How then can I be expected to prepare myself for preaching with the reverent composure that befits the Word of God?"