Servant of the Servants of God

St. leo the great was not the only Pope who refused the title of universal bishop. The Eastern prelates applied it successively to Hormisdas, Agapetus and Boniface II, but these Pontiffs never encouraged the novel mode of address. St. Gregory was not satisfied with merely lodging his formal protest. He assumed a title which the arrogance of Constantinople dared not copy. He was the first Pope to sign himself habitually, "Servus Servorum Dei,"  "Servant of the Servants of God."

The phrase sums up his pontificate. We reverence him, and rightly, as one of the great doctors of the Church—one of the greatest, precisely because he expressed the truths of religion in very simple language for the average man to understand. He preached and he wrote always with an eye to the needs of his audience. His book on Job was suited to the educated among the devout: he blamed a bishop who used it as the groundwork of his sermons. His own homilies were always homely, heart-to-heart talks with his flock. One feels inclined to apply to them, in all reverence, his own remark on the diction of Holy Writ: "Our Heavenly Father lisps to us, his little children, in baby language, that so He may make His meaning understood."

But it is in his letters that the holy Pope shows himself all in all to any individual member of his world-wide flock who might stand in need of his charitable ministrations. The phrase "your fellow-servant "was no mere trick of rhetoric in his letters of manumission to Thomas and Montana.

"Why do you call yourself my handmaid?" he writes to the noble matron, Rusticiana. "The burden of my episcopal office makes me the servant of all mankind, and even before I was a bishop, I was always ready to serve you . . .

Rusticiana was the widow of his kinsman, the famous Boethius. She may have caressed St. Gregory in his infancy; for she was in Rome during Totila's war, spending her great wealth lavishly to relieve the poor. But it was at Constantinople that acquaintance ripened into friendship; for she was living there with her daughter Eusebia when Gregory came as nuncio. He feared for her the glamour of the gay metropolis. In one of her letters she told him of her travels in the Holy Land.

"Believe me," he wrote in reply, "I should like to have gone with you, but I should never have hurried home as quickly as you did. I find it hard to believe that you really have visited the holy places, and yet left them so soon to come back to Constantinople. The love of that city is indeed firmly rooted in your heart, and I shrewdly suspect Your Excellency did not give your whole attention to the sacred shrines! . . . May Almighty God mercifully enlighten you with wisdom and piety, and grace to feel how fleeting are the things of time. For very soon, Death and the Judgment after death will force you to loosen your hold on worldly gaieties."

In another letter he urges her to come to Rome. The Romans still hold her in grateful memory, he writes, and a visit to the threshold of the Holy Apostles (ad limina)  will greatly benefit her soul.

"You need not fear the wars in Italy; for St. Peter wonderfully protects his city, shrunken as it is in population and bereft of military aid. We invite you out of our great love. May God grant you whatever He sees best for the good of your soul and the welfare of your household."

Rusticiana did not come to Rome. She sent instead rich gifts to adorn the basilicas.

Gregoria, his godchild perhaps, is gently dealt with, when she endeavours to entangle him in her scruples.

"In the welcome letter which Your Sweetness wrote me, you strive your utmost to accuse yourself of a crowd of sins. But I know that you love God fervently, and I know also that the lips of Eternal Truth have said of the Magdalen: 'Many sins are forgiven her, because she bath loved much.' "

Gregoria had asked the Pope for an authoritative pronouncement as to the state of her soul in the Sight of God.

"Your request is difficult and useless," he replies. "Difficult, because I do not deserve to have such a secret revealed to me; useless, because it would not be good for you to feel secure about your sins, until you have no longer eyes to weep for them. Do not wish, my sweet daughter, for an assurance that might make you negligent in the service of God. Be satisfied to remain anxious yet a little while, on earth, that so you may rejoice throughout eternity in the security of the saints."

He held in very high opinion Theoctista, the empress's sister, who was governess to the imperial children.

"Why are you so reluctant to tell me about our Serene Lady?" he writes. "Does she read studiously? Does her reading help her to compunction? You ought to watch very carefully whether she weeps for her sins out of fear or out of love. By the grace of God you have experienced both forms of compunction, and you should consider carefully, day by day how your words may best benefit our Most Serene Lady. Your company ought to do her much good amid the turmoil of business which draws her incessantly to exterior things."

"Instruct carefully the young princes whom you educate," he writes again. Let them learn well the things that will move them to love one another, and to treat their underlings with gentleness, lest any hatred commence in them now and afterwards break out openly. . . . The words of nurses will be milk if good, but poison if evil."

In another letter he refers to "a storm of calumny" which "to her no small disgust "the princess had to endure. "God often permits trials of this kind, lest excessive praise engender pride in His elect, who need these bitter draughts occasionally to keep their souls in health. Besides, there would be no scope for patience if we had nothing to endure. It needed a brother like Cain to bring out all that was good in Abel."

However, he would not have her remain entirely passive, especially as her orthodoxy was called in question.

"When we can still the murmurs of foolish people and bring them back to a healthy frame of mind, we certainly ought not to allow them to remain scandalized. Of your own accord, therefore, invite your leading accusers to a private interview, and anathematize in their presence those perverse opinions which they say you hold. Do not deem it degrading to give them this satisfaction, nor suffer any feelings of scorn for them to linger in your mind. I remember you are of the imperial family, but we are all brethren, created by the Power and redeemed by the Blood of the same Sovereign God. The words of detractors, as well as your own good deeds, will add to the glory of your Heavenly Crown."

The empress Constantia wrote to him in 594 to ask him for the head of St. Paul. He refused point blank.

"You require of me what I cannot and dare not do. The bodies of the Blessed Peter and Paul are glorified in their Churches by such miracles and awful prodigies that no one approaches them without great care." He instances cases of sudden death when the relics were touched even inadvertently or through motives of piety. "When the Romans give relics of the saints they do not venture to touch any part of the body; but they give instead cloths (brandea)  which have been placed on the tomb. Certain Greeks once expressed doubts of the efficacy of such relics; but, according to the tradition handed down by our ancestors, Pope Leo, of blessed memory, took shears and cut the cloth; and as he cut it blood flowed forth. In the regions round Rome, and indeed throughout the West, it is considered sacrilege to touch the bodies of saints, a sacrilege that never remains unpunished. We can scarcely believe the Greeks when they tell us they are in the habit of moving the bones of the saints.

However, as the pious wishes of my Most Serene Lady ought not to be wholly without fruit, I am sending you, as soon as possible, a portion of the chains which St. Paul wore upon his neck and hands—that is if I succeed in filing off a portion. For many persons beg for filings of these chains, and in some cases the priest detaches them quite easily, in others the file is worked a long time over the chains without the least success."

In 603 he hears that Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, has trouble with his eyesight. "I send you a small cross," writes the Pope, "with filings from the chains of the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, who love you well. Apply it to your eyes, for many miracles are wrought by this gift."

He sends similar filings in a key to Theoctista, and tells her how a Lombard, during the sack of a city, cut open the reliquary with his knife. "Forthwith the devil entered into him and constrained him to draw the knife across his own throat." So terrified were the Lombards that King Authari sent the key to the Pope, with another like it, and an account of the whole affair.

In one of his homilies on the Gospel, St. Gregory points out to his people that each one of us has received at least one talent which he must use for the honour of God and the profit of his neighbour.

"A man's talent may be some friend, plentifully endowed with the goods of this world, and it behoveth him to use his talent and to intercede with this friend on behalf of the poor.

His letters testify that he practised what he preached. Vast sums of money reached him from his friends in Constantinople to help his charities. And he thanked as gracefully as he begged. We find him writing to the emperor's physician:

"Besides rendering my account to God of the revenues of Holy Church, I have now to answer to Him for the goods of my sweet son Theodore. Pray for us that we may not spend the fruit of your labour indiscreetly, where no real need exists, and thus increase our own sins by the very alms which lessens yours."

Theodore, who had great influence over Maurice, was his good friend at Court in many a delicate predicament. But our holy Pope did not write to him merely to ask a favour or to thank for an alms.

"I have a complaint to lodge against the gentle soul of my most glorious son, the Lord Theodore. He has received from the Holy Trinity the gift of intellect, the gift of wealth, the gift of mercy and of love. And yet he is so engrossed with his work and with Court functions as to neglect to read daily in the Holy Scriptures. Now, if you were absent from Court and received a letter from our Lord the Emperor, you would not sleep, you would not eat till you had mastered its contents. The Emperor of Heaven, the Lord of angels and of men, sends you in Holy Writ His letters for the saving of your soul, and yet, my glorious son, you do not read them with all diligence. Study them, I pray you. Learn from God's Words to know God's Heart, and to yearn more ardently for the delights of heaven. For your soul will rejoice in a deeper rest hereafter, if here below you give yourself no rest in the love and praise of God. May He fill your mind with His presence and so relieve it from all care."

St. Gregory mentions in one of his letters that he knew but one prefect who retired from office with untarnished honour. He was not likely, therefore, to help his friends to posts of dignity.

"You ask me to recommend you to the emperor," he writes to a man named Andrew. "I am greatly grieved, because I always thought you had noble aspirations. I have known many men employed in the service of the State, who bitterly bewailed that they had no leisure to attend to their souls. When a man holds office under our most religious sovereign, how greatly is his mind absorbed in the pursuit of his prince's favour, and when that is gained, how greatly does he fear to lose it. It is grievous that a man should thus waste his life, longing for prosperity or trembling lest adversity befall. I advise Your Greatness to lead a peaceful and quiet life, in some pleasant, retired spot, where you may study and meditate, inflame your heart with the love of eternity, do good with the wealth at your command, and look forward with hope to heaven as your reward for doing good. I say this, my noble son, because I love you greatly. I see you drifting into a stormy sea, and I throw out my words like ropes to draw you ashore, where you may rest and appreciate the evils you have escaped and the good things you will enjoy."

Sometimes he had real sins to cope with in his letters, not merely a slackening in the pursuit of perfection.

"I am told," he writes to Clementina, "that when anyone offends you, you brood over the injury and will not forgive. If this is true I am very sorry, for I love you, and I entreat you to expel nobly this rancor from your soul. Do not allow the tares of the enemy to grow up among your wheat. Repeat the Lord's Prayer, and let not the trespass have greater weight with you than the duty of forgiveness. Conquer ill-deeds by kindness, win the offender by salutary forbearance, forgive him and he will feel ashamed, retain no feeling that may give him pain. We have sometimes to punish and to punish severely; but once the fault is corrected we have no right to withhold our friendliness from the wrong-doer."

Such was his own unvarying practice. When Maximus of Salona found his coveted bishopric no bed of roses, Gregory helped him with sympathy and fatherly advice. The Slays were harrying Istria, and its bishop was harassed by the Gentiles without and by the governors within.

"Do not grieve overmuch," wrote Gregory, "for those who come after us will see yet worse times, and think our age happy in comparison with theirs. But as far as you can, my brother, you must resist these men on behalf of the oppressed. Even if you fail in your effort, Almighty God is satisfied with the intention which He has Himself inspired. . . . Yet season your zeal with mildness, lest if you act too rigidly men should think you are puffed up with a young man's pride. When we defend the weak against the strong, the oppressed must feel sure that we are really helping them, and the oppressors, howsoever evilly inclined towards us, must find nothing to blame in our conduct."

He then gives advice on how to deal with schismatics and malcontents. "If however any of these wish to come to me with complaints of you, do nothing to hinder their journey. Trust me to give them complete satisfaction, or else be sure they will never see their country again while you are alive."

When St. Gregory was himself in the wrong he never hesitated to make generous amends. He wrote in one of his letters to Peter the Sub-deacon:

"I am greatly grieved because I rebuked Pretiosus too severely, and sent him away in bitterness and sorrow. I asked my Lord Bishop Maximianus to send him back to me, but he was very unwilling to do so. Now I do not wish to annoy the bishop; busy as he is in the work of God, he needs to be strengthened and encouraged, not thwarted. And yet Pretiosus is very sad because he cannot come to me. If you have more wisdom in your little body than I have in my big one, arrange the matter so that I may have my wish without inconvenience to my Lord Bishop. But let the matter drop if you see it worries him."

The Pope sometimes blamed his bishops for lack of zeal, but never for lack of success. He wrote to Domitian, metropolitan of Armenia, a respected kinsman of the Emperor Maurice:

"I grieve indeed that the emperor of the Persians was not converted, but I greatly rejoiced that you preached before him the Faith of Christ. For though he did not merit to reach the light of truth, yet your holiness will be rewarded for your efforts on his behalf. For the Ethiopian goes into the bath black and comes out of it black, but for all that the bath-man gets his fee."

For other instances of Gregory's delicate treatment of individual souls we must, in the words of his mediaeval biographer, John the Deacon, "refer the eye of the reader to the abundant fulness of his venerable register." Eight hundred and fifty letters have come down to us in the fourteen books of this register—one book for each year of his pontificate—yet he himself refers to seventy-seven other letters of his of which no copies have been thus recorded.

And while he thus catered constantly for the spiritual health and comfort of his many friends, the holy Pope was not unmindful of their bodily ills. When he heard that Marinianus of Ravenna was vomiting blood, he consulted the most skilful physicians in Rome.

"They all prescribe rest and silence," he wrote, "and I doubt much whether Your Fraternity can obtain either in your Church." So the archbishop is to arrange for the administration of his diocese, and come to Rome before the summer heats. "I wish to take your illness under my especial care, and secure rest for you. The doctors say that summer is the most dangerous season for one with your disease. So if you should be called away, Our Lord will take you from my arms. I am myself in very weak health. If God were to call me before you, I should like to pass away in your arms. Bring few people with you, for you are to lodge in my own house. If you feel better and defer your journey, remember that I strictly forbid you to fast oftener than five days in the year. And, beloved, do not undertake any labour beyond your strength."

St. Gregory might thus exhort, but he struggled gallantly through his own work, despite the ill-health on which we have enlarged elsewhere. Many letters, especially in his later years, were dictated from the bed where he lay, writhing in agony and groaning to alleviate his pain. In one of his last letters he wrote to Queen Theodolind:

"The gout has gripped us. We are so weak that we can scarcely speak, much less dictate on business matters. We call to witness your own messengers, the bearers of this. For when they arrived they found us sick; and now they depart, leaving us in the greatest danger and crisis of life."

We have no details as to the death-bed of this holy Pope. It was, we learn from his epitaph, on the 12th of March, 604, in the sixty-fifth year of his age and the fourteenth of his pontificate, that "the Consul of God went to enjoy everlasting triumph." His funeral was simple, as he himself had arranged a Pope's funeral should always be. In death at least, he decreed, all pomp should cease.

"Whereas the faithful venerate us, unworthy though we be, with the reverence due to the Blessed Apostle Peter, we ought always to consider our infirmity and studiously to decline the burden of this reverence. . . . From the love of the faithful the custom has arisen of paying an undeserved honour to the rulers of his see. 'When their bodies are carried to the tomb, they are covered with dalmatics, and these dalmatics the people tear to shreds and divide among themselves devoutly as something sacred. Yea, although there be in the city many coverings from the sacred bodies of the Apostles and martyrs, men take from the bodies of sinners these shreds which they store up with feelings of deep reverence."

That year the vines in Italy were killed by frost, and mice and rust destroyed the crops of corn. "It was right and seemly," is the comment of Paul the Deacon, "that men should hunger and go athirst, seeing that the death of Gregory deprived the faithful of spiritual food and drink." There was dearth in Rome, and now that he was not there to organize, the relief measures did not cope with the distress.

One legend tells us how St. Gregory appeared in vision to the reigning Pope, Sabinian, and rebuked him sharply for withdrawing the doles which he himself had been wont to distribute by means of his monasteries, guest-houses, deaconries and hospitals. According to another legend, the fickle populace blamed the dead Pope, not the living one, for the suffering in Rome. The treasury of the Holy See was empty, they declared, because Gregory, "for the glory of his own praise," had squandered the Roman revenues in indiscreet hospitality, and scattered money broadcast in largesse throughout the world.

And so mob law decreed that his memory should not live, and bonfires were kindled to burn his writings. At last Peter, his friend and confidential secretary, succeeded in gaining a hearing. He told how the saint sat behind a curtain while dictating to him his homilies on Ezekiel. As Gregory kept silence for long intervals, his servant made a hole in the curtain with his pen, and peeping through the slit he saw the Pope, his hands lifted in prayer and a snow-white dove perching on his head. "Whenever the Blessed Gregory hesitated, the dove applied its beak to his ear. The Pope found out that his secretary had peeped, and strictly enjoined him to keep the matter secret. 'The day you make it known,' he told him, 'you shall die a sudden death.'"

Peter offered to swear on the Holy Gospels that what he said was true. If he lived till the morrow he would burn the books with his own hands. If he died as foretold, the Romans promised they would not injure a single book. "Amid the words of his true confession he breathed forth his spirit," a valiant witness, to truth and friendship.

Legends of the saints are usually meant to point a moral. A man's life was well worth losing to preserve to the Church the works of St. Gregory—in very truth "the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." His writings retain their hold upon Christian readers, however cynically such men as Gibbon may sneer at them as "innocent of any classic taste in literature." Our own Alfred translated his Pastoral Rule, and made use of it in working out our English code of laws. St. Teresa loved his Moralia  from the Book of Job: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bernard nearly knew it by heart. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of his Letters  to the student who aims at an accurate insight into the sixth century with clear ideas as to the role of the papacy in feudal Europe. The Protestant reader finds in his Dialogues  already full-grown and rampant that popery which he has been taught to believe a superstitious overgrowth of the Middle Ages. For Gregory entertains Peter with stories "of monks and nuns and anchorets, of monastic poverty, of vows of chastity which it was sacrilege to break even for marriage, of clerical celibacy, of the invocation of saints, of pilgrimages and shrines and relics and miracles, of the Sign of the Cross, and of Holy Water, of purgatory, of 'sacrifices of Masses' for the living and of trentals for the dead, of the Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, of the primacy of the Roman See, and of the superiority of the successor of St. Peter above all bishops."

In this appreciation of the Dialogues, from the pen of Father Coleridge, S.J., we may append the terse panegyric pronounced by Bossuet upon the achievements of St. Gregory:

"This great Pope subdued the Lombards, saved Rome and Italy though the emperors gave him no help, repressed the upstart pride of the patriarchs of Constantinople, enlightened the whole Church by his teaching, governed both East and West with vigour and humility, and gave to the world a perfect pattern of pastoral rule."