Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 329

Gregory to Maximus, the usurper in Salona. Although the other merits of anyone's life may be such that there is nothing among them which could stand in the way of priestly ordinations, yet the crime of ambition alone is condemned with the most severe strictness of the canons. We have learned, then, that either by a stolen or a feigned command of the most pious princes, while you were not worthy of the life, you burst forth to the order of the priesthood, venerable to all. This we have believed without any hesitation, because we do not have your life and age unknown, and further because we are not ignorant of the mind of the most serene lord emperor, that he is not wont to involve himself in priestly causes, lest he be burdened in anything by our sins.

There is added an unheard-of crime: that even after our interdict, which was made under your excommunication and that of those ordaining you, with presbyters, deacons, and the rest of the clergy beaten, you are said to have been led into the midst by military force. Which act we can in no way call a consecration, because it was celebrated by excommunicated men.

Since therefore, with no precedent's form, you have violated so great a dignity of the priesthood, we command that, until we shall have learned by the letters of our lord or of our responsal that you were ordained not by a surreptitious but by a true command, you and your ordainers by no means presume to handle anything of the priestly office, nor, until our rescript, to approach the worship of the sacred altar. But if you presume to act contrary to these things, may you be anathema from God, and from the blessed Peter, chief of the apostles, so that, by the consideration of your judgment, an example of your punishment may be afforded to the other catholic Churches also. In the month of May, in the twelfth indiction. Gregory to Venantius, bishop of Luni.

It has come to us by the report of many that Christian slaves are being held in servitude by the Jews dwelling in the city of Luni; which matter seemed to us the harsher, the more laborious the patience shown by your Fraternity. It behooved you indeed, out of regard for your place and with a view to the Christian religion, to leave no occasion whereby simple souls should in a manner be enslaved to Jewish superstition, not so much by persuasions as by the right of power. Wherefore we exhort your Fraternity that, according to the path of the most pious laws, it be lawful for no Jew to retain a Christian slave in his ownership. But if any are found in their keeping, let liberty be preserved to them by the help of your protection, from the sanction of the laws.

But those who are on their possessions, although they too are free by the strictness of the laws, yet because they have longer adhered to cultivating their lands, as owing, so to speak, the condition of the place, let them remain to cultivate the fields they were accustomed to, and let them furnish rents to the aforesaid men, and perform all that the laws prescribe concerning tenant-farmers or those born on the estate — beyond which nothing further of burden is to be imposed upon them. But if any of these should wish either to migrate to another place, or to retain him in his own service, let him blame himself who by his own rashness condemned the tenant-right, and by the severity of his own right the right of ownership.

In all these things, therefore, we wish you to exert yourself so diligently that you may neither, as the shepherd of a plundered flock, stand guilty, nor let a lesser zeal render your Fraternity reprehensible before us.