Gregory the Great and the mission to Europe

Servant of the servants of God

Gregory (c. 540–604), of a noble Roman family, rose to be prefect of the city, then gave his inheritance to found monasteries, turned his own house into one and became a monk. After years in Constantinople as the pope's envoy, he was chosen bishop of Rome (pope) in 590, while plague swept the city. He fed the hungry city with grain from the church's estates and, since the emperor's army could not protect it, made peace with the attacking Lombards himself.

Early in his time as bishop he wrote The Book of Pastoral Rule. He warned the unskilled not to grasp at the pastor's office, for "the government of souls is the art of arts". The glad and the sad, the poor and the rich, the young and the old cannot all be spoken to alike, he taught: the word must be fitted to each hearer. The book became the pastor's handbook for the whole Middle Ages, and its shepherd is Peter's:

Be shepherds of God’s flock that is among you, watching over them not out of compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not out of greed, but out of eagerness; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

1 Peter 5:2-3

Gregory called himself the servant of the servants of God, and the name became a title of the popes after him. His teaching and the theology of his age are the Theology course's Monks, missions and the parting of East and West; this lesson follows the events.

Monks for Kent

In 596 Gregory sent Augustine (Augustine of Canterbury), prior of his monastery in Rome, with a company of monks to the English. In 731 the English monk Bede told the story in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 1.23–26, copying Gregory's letters into it. In Gaul, afraid of a fierce people whose language they did not know, the monks asked to turn back. Gregory sent them on: better not to begin a good work, he wrote, than to give it up once begun.

In 597 the company, about forty men by Bede's account, landed in Kent. King Æthelberht, whose queen Bertha was a Frankish Christian, met them in the open air for fear of their magic. The monks came forward praying, carrying a silver cross and an image of the Saviour painted on a board, and the king let them live and preach in Canterbury. Before long he himself believed and was baptized.

In 601 Gregory wrote to Abbot Mellitus, who had set out with a second company. Do not destroy well-built temples, he said: destroy the idols, sprinkle the temples with holy water, set up altars and turn them to the worship of the true God. On the days when the people used to sacrifice oxen, let them build huts of branches around the churches and feast with thanksgiving to God. Hard hearts cannot have everything cut away at once, and whoever climbs to a height goes up step by step, not in leaps Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.30. What to keep and what to leave when the gospel meets a people's old customs is a question every missionary since has faced.

Gregory's sending of the monks was an answer to Paul's questions:

How then can they call on the One in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

Romans 10:14-15

On the Lord's sending of the seventy ahead of him, Gregory preached, "For the Lord follows His preachers, since the preaching comes first, and then the Lord enters into the tabernacle of our heart" Gregory.

Monks across the sea, and the sword

The monks of Ireland, which had received the gospel before England, crossed the sea too (see The church beyond the empire). Columba, founder of the monastery of Iona off Scotland, died in 597, the year Augustine landed. Columbanus crossed to Gaul around 590, founded monasteries and died at Bobbio in Italy.

Then English monks went to the continent. Boniface, a monk of Wessex, first crossed to Frisia in 716; commissioned by the pope, he planted churches and monasteries in what is now Germany. The Life of Boniface by the priest Willibald, written after his death, tells how at Geismar in Hesse he felled a great oak sacred to a pagan god and built a chapel from its timber. Around 754 he was killed in Frisia with his companions.

Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768, fought the Saxons for more than thirty years from 772. In the conquered lands he decreed death for anyone who refused baptism and chose to remain a pagan, and in 782 at Verden he had a great many Saxon rebels executed. On Christmas Day 800, in St Peter's in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor. But the Empress Irene already reigned as Roman emperor in Constantinople, and the East was slow to accept him: one more step on the road by which East and West grew apart.

Charlemagne also founded schools and had the Scriptures and the classics copied. Alcuin, the English scholar who led his palace school, wrote in 796 to the king and his officials, after the conquest of the Avars: faith comes from a person's will and cannot be compelled; people can be driven to baptism, but not to faith. Teach first, he urged, then baptize Alcuin, Letters. The Lord sent his disciples to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19-20). On the Day of Pardon in 2000, Pope John Paul II confessed the violence that sons and daughters of the church had used in the service of truth, and asked forgiveness Memory and Reconciliation.

Cluny, and the bishop of Rome

In 910 Duke William of Aquitaine founded a monastery at Cluny in Burgundy, with Berno as abbot. He gave it to the apostles Peter and Paul under the pope's protection, so that no lord or bishop could touch its property or the election of its abbot Foundation Charter of Cluny. In an age when lords held many churches and monasteries, Cluny kept The Rule of Saint Benedict strictly, gave much of each day to common prayer and fed the poor. Many monasteries across Europe came under Cluny's abbot, and its spirit lent strength to the church's reform in the eleventh century (see Popes, emperors and the Crusades). But as wealth gathered in the monasteries, the monks of Cîteaux began again in 1098 in search of a simpler life: the reformed church needed reform again.

Many traditions honour Gregory today. Catholics keep his feast as a Doctor of the Church and confess the pope as Peter's successor, who serves the unity of the whole church. The Eastern Orthodox honour him as Saint Gregory the Dialogist; they grant the Rome of the first millennium the first place of honour, not authority to govern the whole church. When the patriarch of Constantinople took the title Ecumenical Patriarch, Gregory objected in letters of 595 that it was proud: the Orthodox read those letters as proof that no bishop may be bishop of the whole church, Catholics as a pope defending the dignity of his fellow bishops. Protestants, holding that Christ alone is the head of the church, do not accept the pope's authority, but Anglicans and many Lutherans remember Gregory on their calendars.

Gregory's story teaches that the shepherd's place is service, not rule, and that the gospel goes to the ends of the earth on the feet of those who are sent. When it went with the sword, the church dishonoured its name: as Alcuin said, faith cannot be forced. The next lesson, The rise of Islam and the churches of the East, turns to the great change in the East in the same seventh century, and to the Church of the East's journey to China.

Practice