St. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) was Bishop of Rome from 590-604. The son of St. Silvia and Gordianus, a Roman patrician, he was appointed urban prefect of Rome in 573 and entered monastic life the following year. Upon his father’s death, he converted the family’s Roman villa on the Caelian Hill into the Monastery of St. Andrew, where today there is still a monastery and the Church of St. Gregory on the Caelian Hill. At that same monastery he set the precedent for the Gregorian series of Masses: the practice of having thirty Masses offered for a deceased person. In 579, Pope Pelagius II made him a deacon and sent him as papal ambassador to the imperial court in Constantinople. In 590, a few years after his return to Rome, Gregory was elected Pope. One of his most important actions as Bishop of Rome was to appoint the prior of the Monastery of St. Andrew, Augustine of Canterbury, as the head of a mission to convert the English. Through his writings, he exerted an immense influence of spirituality and ministry in the Latin Church throughout the Middle Ages and was recognised as a Doctor of the Church.
In part one of this interview, Dr. Thomas Humphries explained his pick of the five best books by St. Gregory the Great. In this second part, he looks at the best biographies of the saint and discusses his own work.
Dr. Thomas Humphries, a native of Arkansas, is Professor in the College of Arts and Science at Saint Leo University, Florida. a native of Arkansas and a life-long Roman Catholic. He holds a mandatum from the diocese of St. Petersburg and enjoys giving regular theological reflections outside of the classroom with student faith communities, parishes, and monasteries. He also volunteers with the local fire department as Chaplain and holds the rank of District Chief. He is a licensed Florida EMT and NREMT. He is the author of Ascetic Pneumatology from John Cassian to Gregory the Great (Oxford University Press) and Who is Chosen? (Wipf and Stock).
- Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought
by F. Holmes Dudden - Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection
by Carole Straw - Gregory the Great and His World
by R.A. Markus
What led you to study the Church Fathers in general and St. Gregory the Great in particular?
I was at Catholic University of America, studying for a masters and a PhD. There were so many things that I wanted to study. In a systematics class, we were studying theological anthropology: grace, free will, predestination, union with God, and so on. I was also reading some theologians from this century and the last. What I noticed is that all the good modern theologians were arguing about what the ancient theologians meant. In other words, we are not the first generation to ask these profound questions about the Trinity or what it means to be created in the image of God. I realised that if I wanted to engage contemporary theologians meaningfully and deeply, then I needed to learn the Fathers. They set the terms of the conversation. I wanted to study them to answer the questions that were burning in my own heart and still are.
I also encountered my own limits. I thought that I could do this right away. It turns out that you can't. You need to study a lot of languages, history, and philosophy. It took me a long time to do that. So, I devoted five years of my life to being formed as a historical theologian, specialising in the early centuries. Now you cannot do it equally well in all languages. I chose Latin, a language that I had started learning in high school and which, as a Roman Catholic, is in many this a native language. That is how I got specifically into Latin patristics and Gregory.
A little bit of God leaves you wanting more.
You have written on St. Gregory in your book Aesthetic Pneumatology. In brief, what are the theme and main findings of your study?
Part of writing a dissertation and your first book is showing that you belong to the academic community. You need to find something to sink into. I was very interested in desire, its meaning, how it manifests itself in our own lives, and its connection to God. Gregory is one of the theologians who has thought a lot about desire.
A helpful observation that often shows up in the Moralia in Iob—and probably in the Gospel Homilies too—is that there are different kinds of desire. Some desires are over when you get what you want. Take the desire for a drink. You are thirsty, drink, and then you are not thirsty anymore. But there are other desires, where a little leads to wanting more and more. Now, some of those desires are problematic. Take my desire for doughnuts and bacon. If I eat one piece of bacon, I want all the bacon in the house. If I eat one doughnut, I need to eat the rest of them. These problematic physical desires point toward spiritual desire and our desire for God. The desire for God can never be sated. You are never full. A little bit of God leaves you wanting more. So, you just fall headlong in love, and you just keep falling and going after God. That is an experience, Gregory says, of ecstasy: of standing outside yourself. You move outside yourself and get away from your problems, hangups, sins, your limitations, and you exceed them. For a Catholic, whenever you exceed yourself or go outside yourself, then God says, “Come, stand inside me. Come, belong to me. Be my adopted son or daughter. Belong to my family.” So, there is this process of transformation. This does not mean that that all my desires are bad. It means that many of them are misunderstood and that we need a school of desire. I has read some of what Bernard of Clairvaux says about that question, and thought that I would maybe write the dissertation on him. But a lot of that work has been done and done quite well. So, I kept kind of circling around. Gregory. I had also been trained in Augustine by my advisor, Lewis Ayres, and, because I had been around Benedictine monasteries, in Cassian. I started doing the work of a historian and realised that, as a monk, Gregory combines a lot of Cassian and of Augustine, a different kind of monk and a bishop. That demarcated a period. Cassian and Augustine are contemporaries. They are at the beginning of that cycle. Gregory is at the end. Every one of them agrees that the process of transformation, the movement from fear to love, from vice to virtue, from this life to the next, is premised fundamentally on the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. To study that that transformation in virtue, that ascetical practice, is to study Trinitarian theology, the work of God in our lives.
1.
As for additional readings, you recommend three biographies on St. Gregory the Great: Dudden’s was published at the beginning of the 20th century; those of R.A Markus and Carol Straw were written towards its end. What is the respective strength of each one?
Dudden is the foundation. Markus and Straw both say in their own way that they are not trying to redo his work. Maybe, it is something that cannot be redone. It is a comprehensive, large work that walks you through every point in Gregory's life. For people who like history, modern biographies of ancient figures, and detailed surveys of the intellectual controversies, this is the place to go.
2.
Straw offers a more systematic approach to Gregory. She recognises that there are tensions in Gregory. She takes him apart and puts him back together in a way that he did not. If you want to know what Gregory has to say about faith, you can use the index to the Moralia, pull out all thee passages on it, and then organise them. Effectively, this is what Straw has done for several topics. She gives a wonderful presentation of Gregory’s thought-world. It is a very good introduction to Gregory. She titles it perfection and imperfection. She recognises that Gregory is at the cusp of everything: of historical periods; of this life and the next; of the active life and contemplation.
3.
Markus does something else. He is a modern historian of the first rank and is interested in defining those historical periods. So, there is a lot of subtle work on what separates Gregory from the era before him and the one after him. In other words, what is Gregory’s unique value? If you are just reading Church history and secular history, Gregory is a watershed figure. If you like history in that way, you are going to see a lot there.
Markus is also attuned to education and formation. It is important for us to think about this, especially in the American context. We are seeing ever more explosive conversations about the education of our children and the role of the school, the principal, and government in forming then. We are not the first generation to ask this question and Markus is sensitive to the debate on this during the fifth to seventh centuries. Gregory has a lot of subtle things to say about which texts we should use to learn. Maybe it is better to learn your grammar by reading the Book of Genesis. Maybe, for stories about heroes, it is better to have a pope talk about the most recent generation of holy men and women. During historical transitions, there is a lot of thinking about education and formation. Markus is attuned to that. As a historian, Markus’s arguments about what goes together and what is distinct are right.
The Pastoral Rule is much like a book of psychology.
“What Benedict’s Rule was to the monks of the Middle Ages, the Pastoral Rule of Gregory the Great was to clergy of the world.” This is the common scholarly assessment of Gregory's influential work on the ministry of the ordained. You did not include the Pastoral Rulein your top five books, presumably because it regards the priestly life. Does it contain any valuable teachings for the laity?
It does. I went back and forth on whether to mark it highly or in the list of five books. If you have had a class with me, you know that do not make such decisions. I just assign all the books and then we read and discuss them. But you have to find a place to start. For me, the Pastoral Rule or the book of Pastoral Care is not the place to start with Gregory. That may not be the case for many others.
The Pastoral Rule is much like a book of psychology. It is a bit like How to Win Friends and Influence People or a book on how to have a goal-oriented life. Gregory says, “Look! You are going to find five kinds of people when it comes to this issue. Some are going to be angry about this; some are going to be angry about that. Here is how you deal with each of them.” It is a manual about dealing with various normal human struggles. It is also a manual of persuasion. It gives practical advice on, for example, how you should approach someone who is struggling with an idea. It is very valuable.
The difficulty I have when reading it is that I am not as mature as Gregory. I do not always know the person to whom I am speaking and, for that reason, I get lost. I would read it as a manual and say, “Okay! You are type one; you are type two; you are type three.” But then I am no longer in conversation with someone. I am trying to apply the Pastoral Ruleas a manual. Maybe when I am more mature, it would strike as me more fluid. On the other hand, if you don't read it as a manual on how to talk to someone else—ostensibly, it is on how to preach to other people and on how to be a good leader—but as a review of conscience and on how to lead oneself, then it operates as a very dense reflection on your own life. That is a marvellous thing to have from a pope, saint, and doctor of the Church.
What are your current or future research projects?
I was happy to hear you mention lectio divina. I have been thinking a lot about that in terms of the wisdom that the Benedictine tradition, as a whole, has to offer, particularly in higher education. I work as a professor, teaching undergrads and graduate students. Some of them are very interested in ministry and the Church, and some are not. How do we translate the lessons of lectio divina into other realms. There is a lot of wisdom that can be learnt, though we must always remember that lectio divina proper can only be done with Sacred Scripture. Sacred Scripture is that body of Revelation in written form, that that goes hand in hand with tradition. I have been working on a couple of articles that try to apply the lessons of the lectio to teaching or leading a seminar, even if you are reflecting on Scripture.
One of my long-term interests is Cassian and some of his texts. I have been translating and preparing an edition of his On the Incarnation, which is concerned with the Pelagian and Nestorian controversies. There is a lot of good historical work and fun intellectual work to be done there, but it is dense work to work. I have some colleagues that are great help with that.
For some time now, I have also been rethinking some themes of Ascetic Pneumatology and trying to come to terms with them in a way that that does not require a million footnotes: translating to myself what that work meant. I am coming to terms with what I call Trinitarian spirituality. I am not the only one that thinks this.
If we truly believe that the fundamental mystery of the universe is the God who is lover, beloved Son, and then the Love by which the Father loves the Son, God loves us, and we our neighbours, that has got to have real meaning for how we lead our life. The doctrine of the Trinity gets lived in a particularly Christian morality and spirituality. Following Augustine, if we think of the Spirit as the gift of God realise that a gift belongs with a giver and a receiver. Well, then we start to think about the Father giving to the Son, or God giving us the whole pattern of the Word become flesh and his crucifixion for us.That is a Trinitarian and Christological pattern that has import for morality and spirituality. In other words, we cannot separate our Trinitarian theology from anything else. I have been working on a project that tries to present that in my own life: my own realisations about myself; my limits; what it means to think something through; what it means to love someone; how that is in the image of the God who is Trinity. Hopefully, that is going to be a book of spirituality and doctrinal theology where people can recognise that God is present in our lives and wants so much more for us than we even want for ourselves. But we stall when we separate and parcel out these different things. We make this something to talk about on Sunday and this something to talk about on Friday. Instead, we need to integrate all of it and live that genuinely Trinitarian, Catholic life.
