Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (13 page)

Gregory’s difficulties with the Emperor and the bishops of the East were more than matched in the West, for the authority of the papacy was fragile everywhere. Gregory longed to promote virtue, to eliminate corruption, to institute reform in all the churches of the West, but he could never simply assume he would be obeyed. Much of what he achieved, even with bishops traditionally under the direct jurisdiction of the popes, had to be done by coaxing, scolding and persuasion.

North Africa had always been an important sphere of papal influence, and had now been restored to Catholic rule for three generations, but Gregory had little success in his attempts to regulate church affairs there. He disapproved of the Catholic hierarchy’s toleration of Donatist communities, and disliked the fact that the primacy among the African bishops moved round the senior sees, making it difficult for Rome to exert consistent influence or control. Gregory tried to have this system changed, but he was obstructed at every turn. The imperial Exarch in Africa refused to allow African bishops to take ecclesiastical appeals to Rome, and the bishops themselves were jealous of their independence and kept the Pope at arm’s length. Even his unofficial vicar in Numidia, Bishop Columbus, complained that the frequency of the letters he received from Rome was making him unpopular with his colleagues.

Outside the
Imperium
, Gregory knew he had little control. He rejoiced at the conversion to Catholicism of the King of Visigothic Spain, Recarred, and wrote to congratulate him. He had no hand in the conversion, however, and made no attempt at direct control or even influence over the Spanish church, which went very much its own way. In Gaul he did attempt to work through the papal vicariate at Aries, but he concentrated his main efforts – for reform of episcopal appointments in Gaul, the abolition of simony, and Gallic support for the mission to England – on the cultivation of friendly relations with the royal family, especially the unsavoury Queen Brunhild. His correspondence with her is full of exhortation and advice, but is at least as deferential as his letters to the Emperor Maurice and his family, and he took the unprecedented step of bestowing the pallium on the Bishop of Autun, simply to please her. That she should demand the pallium for her bishop, and that Gregory should feel reluctantly obliged to concede it, illustrates both the prestige and the limitations of papal authority at the time.

And beyond Gaul there were Western churches over which Gregory had no real influence at all. Irish Christianity was a prime example of what has been called a ‘micro-Christendom’, which had evolved its own very distinctive institutions and style. Patrick and the other Irish missionaries of the fifth century had no doubt envisaged a church organised under the episcopal structure universal in the Mediterranean world, but the strongly tribal organisation of Irish society militated against this. The Irish, however, did take enthusiastically to monasticism, in a form quite unlike the orderly and regimented houses following the rule of St Benedict, and closer to the more idiosyncratic desert monasticism of the East. Irish monasteries, like the cluster of huts perched on a pinnacle of rock on the westernmost edge of Europe at Skellig Michael, had little in common with the urban decorum of monasteries like Gregory’s St Andrew on the Caelian Hill. Increasingly, the Irish church formed a series of great monastic families, based within particular kin-groups, and radiating out from the founding houses.

We should not exaggerate the differences. The Irish church used a Latin liturgy, and respected the popes as the successors of St Peter. In the seventh century Irish church disputes, like those elsewhere, might be resolved by appeal to Rome. But in Gregory’s day the Irish kept their own customs, and in particular they used an old-fashioned
method of calculating the date of Easter which put them out of step with Rome. In his last years Gregory himself would be made painfully aware of the Easter question through contact with the great Irish monastic founder, Columbanus, whose monastery at Luxeuil, which kept the Irish date for Easter, was in trouble with the bishops of Gaul. Columbanus turned to Rome to strengthen his position, naively bombarding Gregory with a series of breezy letters soliciting the support of ‘him who sits in the seat of Peter, the Apostle and bearer of the Keys’, while at the same time lecturing him on the laughable inaccuracy of the Roman method of calculating Easter. Deference to Peter did not necessarily involve obedience to his successors.

Confronting so many challenges, there is no indication that Gregory had a single objective, a master plan. He responded to the material and spiritual needs of his world as he saw them, and was too concerned with the resulting avalanche of practicalities to have leisure for anything more. Almost two-thirds of his surviving letters are rescripts, replies to problems or queries posed by others, rather than initiatives sought by Gregory himself. In talking about his role as pope, he reverts again and again to the language of a mind coerced by circumstance.

The mission to Anglo-Saxon England, however, was one initiative by Gregory which cannot be explained in terms of response to the demands of others. It was to have the most momentous consequences for the papacy. No pope had ever before thought in terms of missionary outreach to the world beyond the empire. Celestine I (422–32) had indeed despatched a bishop named Palladius ‘to the Irish who believe in Christ’, but as the phrase suggests he was not thinking of a mission to pagans, and nothing very much happened as a result. The conversion of Ireland when it came was initiated as a private venture by the captured son of a Romano-British cleric: Patrick had no papal mandate.

Just why Gregory should have decided to evangelise England we do not know. The earliest biography, written in England a century after his death, tells how, while still a deacon, he saw handsome, fair-haired Anglo-Saxon boys in Rome. When told they were Angles, he replied, ‘They are
angels
of God,’ and immediately formed a desire to convert the nation from which they had come. The story is quite plausible in itself, and Gregory’s interest in this people ‘worshipping stocks and stones … at the edge of the world’ may well have been
aroused by seeing English slaves in the Roman market. Certainly by 595 he was instructing the Rector of the papal patrimony in Gaul to buy up seventeen or eighteen year-old English slave-boys, to be trained as monks in the Roman monasteries. He may already have been looking for interpreters for a mission to England.

One year later he despatched his mission, a party of Roman monks led by Augustine, prefect of Gregory’s own monastery of St Andrew. They landed, forty strong, at Thanet, in Kent, which had probably been targeted because its king, Ethelbert, was married to a Christian, the daughter of the King of Paris. Though Gregory always spoke of England as the end of the universe, he had not forgotten that it had once been part of the empire. He hoped that in due course Augustine would establish two archbishoprics, each with twelve suffragan or subordinate bishops, in the old centres of Roman rule in Britain, London and York.

Some historians have seen the mission to England as a clear example of papalism, a pre-emptive strike by Gregory to prevent the evangelisation of the Anglo-Saxons by the Romano-British or the Irish, and to ensure that the English adopted Roman and not Irish customs and obedience. Conflict between Irish and Roman usage would indeed come to loom large in the early history of the English church. The eventual triumph of the Roman system, at the Synod of Whitby in 664, would form a major theme of Bede’s great
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, written more than a century after Gregory’s death. But none of this was even on the horizon in 597, and Gregory was in any case not a man to fret unduly about uniformity in ecclesiastical customs. He told his friend Leander of Seville, who had enquired about the correct method of baptising, that ‘where there is one faith, a diversity of usage does no harm to the Church’.
¹⁷
When Augustine, who did worry about such things, asked him whether he should use Roman or Gallican customs in the Mass in England , Gregory urged him to adopt whatever customs seemed likely to be helpful to the infant church in England, regardless of their source: ‘My brother, you know the customs of the Roman Church in which, of course, you were brought up. But … things are not to be loved for the sake of a place, but places are to be loved for the sake of their good things.’
¹⁸

In all probability we must attribute the English mission simply to Gregory’s desire for ‘an increase of the faithful’. He sought the spread
of Catholic Christianity to the barbarian kingdoms of Britain as he had seen it spread in his own lifetime among the barbarians of Spain and Gaul, and as he hoped to see it spread among the Lombards. Whatever Gregory’s motives, however, the Roman mission to England was to have an impact far beyond the bounds of Britain. The English church came to venerate the memory of Gregory as its founding father. The first biography of Gregory was composed not in Rome but in England, and his great treatise
On the Pastoral Office
and his letters were treasured there as precious sources of inspiration and guidance. A stream of Anglo-Saxon churchmen and kings made their way to Rome, to ‘the localities sanctified by the bodies of the Apostles and martyrs’. They brought back with them a strengthened reverence for Roman ways, and for the Roman Bishop.

That reverence extended to all things Roman – building-styles, liturgy, even the tones to which the psalms were chanted in the Roman basilicas. But it focused itself on the person of the Pope, the inheritor, as even Columbanus had acknowledged, of the keys of Peter. Gregory was accustomed to send to select bishops and royalty, as marks of great favour, tiny reliquaries made in the form of a key, and containing a few filings from the chains of St Peter. These keys, which some of Gregory’s successors also bestowed, were a potent symbol of the Pope’s power to bind and loose. The imaginative power of the symbol was revealed at the Synod of Whitby in 664. King Oswiu, having heard the arguments for and against the Roman and Irish dating of Easter, ruled, with a smile, in favour of the Roman practice, because the keys of the kingdom had been given to St Peter, not to Irish leaders like St Columba of Iona. So, he declared, ‘since he is the doorkeeper, I will not contradict him; but I intend to obey his commandments in everything to the best of my ability, otherwise when I come to the gates of the kingdom, there may be no one to open them, because he who holds the keys has turned his back on me’.
¹⁹

In the two centuries after the death of Gregory, English clergy – Willibrord, Boniface, Alcuin – would play a crucial role in the conversion and settling of Christianity in northern Europe. They would take with them the love and reverence for Roman books, Roman custom and the Roman Bishop which Gregory’s English initiative had planted. For the newly Christian people of the barbarian north, the authority of the papacy would be understood, not as the contested precedence of the senior Patriarch in the ancient seat of
Empire, but as the charism of the key-bearer. Rome was the place where Peter had been buried, where he still dwelt, and where he spoke through the living voice of his successor. There was to be found the pattern of authentic Christian teaching and Christian worship, and the source of apostolic blessing and forgiveness. In turning north to the English, Gregory had unwittingly initiated a new phase in the development of the papacy.

III T
HE
B
YZANTINE
C
APTIVITY OF THE
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APACY

Gregory was unquestionably the greatest Pope of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and arguably the greatest Pope ever. His memory was venerated, as we have seen, in the Anglo-Saxon world and the churches with whom the Anglo-Saxons had contact, as ‘the teacher of the English,’ ‘our Gregory.’ A tenth-century Irish life of the Pope even claimed him as a Kerry-man, who had taught most of the Irish saints and who was finally buried on Aran.

In Rome itself, however, there were many who wished to forget or even to repudiate his legacy. His biography in the official papal chronicle, the
Liber Pontificalis
, is sketchy to the point of insult, and there are other signs of dissatisfaction with the direction in which he had taken the Roman Church. Gregory was the first monk to become pope. Determined to transform the Church by a spirit of monastic zeal and humility, he had chosen monks to fill key offices and lead key enterprises, like the mission to England. On his death, the Roman clergy’s outraged
esprit de corps
and concern for career structure reasserted itself. Gregory’s successor, Sabinian (604–6) was commended in the
Liber Pontificalis
for ‘filling the Church with clergy’, meaning that he had promoted city clergy in preference to monks. Sabinian’s epitaph praises him for having worked his way up the ladder of promotion, an implied criticism of Gregory’s rapid rise in a time of crisis. It would be seventy years before another monk was made pope, and successive papal elections swung back and forth between pro- and anti-Gregorian candidates.

These divisions in the Roman Church were highlighted by the rapid turnover of popes in the first half of the seventh century: there were ten elections between Gregory’s death in 604 and Martin Is accession in 649. Recurrent elections had the effect of drawing attention to another striking feature of the period, the subordination
of the papacy to the emperors at Constantinople. Many popes had already served as papal apocrisiary in Constantinople. Since the reconquest, it had been mandatory for the Pope-elect to seek confirmation of his appointment from the Emperor before he could be consecrated. The result was long and burdensome delay. Pope Sabinian had to wait six months for the imperial mandate, Boniface III (607) almost a year, Boniface IV (608–15) ten months, Boniface V (619–25) thirteen months. Some of these delays were due to the difficulties of travel and the elaborate bureaucracy of Constantinople, others to the preoccupations of the emperors with the growing crisis in the East.