Moralia in Job 6

Argument. 1. The state of the Church. 2. And of the empire. The Lombards invade Italy. 3. Gregory becomes praetor of the City. The time of his praetorship. 4. How he conducted himself in the praetorship. 5. Frequent conversations about pious matters kindle him to the resolve of the monastic life. Which he long defers. 6. He builds seven monasteries. 7. He becomes a monk. In what place and time. 8. Under what masters. (Year 574.) 1. St. Silverius the pope being cast down, Vigilius occupied the Roman see from the year 537 until the year 554 or 555, having afterwards suffered many things at the hands of Justinian Augustus, by whose authorship he had invaded that very see.

When he had at length consented to the condemnation of the Three Chapters, in order to comply with the emperor, very many in the West seceded from his communion, especially the bishops of Illyricum and Africa, because they thought it unworthy that three bishops—Theodore of Mopsuestia, Ibas of Edessa, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus—whom the Council of Chalcedon had held as orthodox, had been condemned and reprobated by the Easterners in the synod of Constantinople, which is commonly called the fifth ecumenical. Vigilius having died in Sicily, Pelagius I succeeded. At which time the bishops of Istria, Liguria, and the Venetias, a synod being held over which Paulinus, bishop of Aquileia, presided, broke out into open schism for the cause of the Three Chapters;

and when the count Narses tried to coerce them as they were making an uproar, they struck him with the impotent thunderbolt of an empty excommunication. Death called Pelagius, buffeted by so many and so great evils of Italy, to eternal rest in the year 559. To him, however, eleven years of pontificate and ten months are assigned, in the appendix to the Chronicle of the count Marcellinus. His successor John III ruled the Church for 14 years. While this pontiff was seated, Gregory wisely conducted the praetorship of the City, as we shall say below; but in what year he began it, and whether while Justinian—who reached the year 565—was still reigning, is not clear. 2.

The victories won over the barbarians, the several provinces of the empire recovered, and the other deeds gloriously accomplished under Justinian, we have for the most part touched upon in the Life of Cassiodorus. Justinian would surely have gained immortal praise, had he learned, in ecclesiastical and theological matters, to be wise unto sobriety. But wishing to go before the bishops, he became a leader and teacher of error, whose disciple in truth he would have become had he followed them. That the emperor might utterly expel the Goths from Italy, he summoned the Lombards from Pannonia; and when the war was finished, he ordered them to return to their former seats, certain cities being added as a reward for the service rendered. But allured by the delights of Italy, when the occasion to return was afterwards given, they at once flew back.

Since we shall henceforth speak of them very often, their history must be briefly traced from its first origin. Sprung from Scandinavia — which, as being most fertile in warlike peoples, Jordanes in his work On the Getic Affairs (ch. 4) most aptly calls the workshop of races, the womb of nations — they first migrated into that part of Germany now called Pomerania, and then into Pannonia, though it was already for the most part occupied by the Huns. The Lombards, on the testimony of Paul the Deacon (On the Deeds of the Lombards, book 1, ch. 1 and 2), are named from their long beard. For in their language 'lang' means 'long,' and 'baert' means 'beard.'

The affinity of these words, as of very many others which occur here and there in Paul the Deacon, with Gothic and Germanic terms, shows the origin of the Lombards plainly enough. First they obeyed dukes, then kings. From Agelmund, who was the first, twelve are counted down to Alboin, under whose reign, invited by Narses, they invaded Italy, namely in the year 568, as is gathered from two letters of Gregory. For in the earlier one, written in the thirteenth indiction in the year 595, which is letter 21 of book 5, he says: 'We have now been passing seven and twenty years living in this city amid the swords of the Lombards.' But in the later one, written in the year 603, in the sixth indiction, which is letter 58 of book 13:

'In what manner,' he says, 'by daily swords...... behold, we are now oppressed through the length of thirty-five years' — words which wonderfully confirm our chronology. Now with how great plunderings, burnings, and slaughters they devastated almost the whole of Italy, the same Gregory teaches us in book 3 of the Dialogues, ch. 38: 'Soon,' he says, 'the savage race of the Lombards, drawn forth from the sheath of its dwelling-place, fell upon our neck; and the human race, which in this land had sprung up in excessive multitude after the manner of a thick standing crop, was cut down and withered.'

'For the cities are depopulated, the strongholds overturned, the churches burned down, the monasteries of men and of women destroyed; the estates are left desolate of men, and, bereft of every tiller, the land lies empty in a wilderness; no owner dwells in it; beasts have taken possession of the places which formerly a multitude of men held.' He bewails these same disasters in Homily 17 on the Gospels, and elsewhere. Things not unlike these are related by the other Gregory, of Tours, a contemporary witness, in book 4 of his History, ch. 58, where in particular he notes that the churches were plundered by the barbarians, and priests and bishops slain — as was indeed to be expected of a people either still given to the worship of idols or corrupted by the impieties of the Arians.

The whole of Italy fell to the victors, if you except Rome, Ravenna, and the neighboring and coastal places. At that time the prefect of Ravenna and of all Italy was Longinus, appointed successor to Narses, who was the first to assume the name of exarch. Fleeing the fury of the Lombards, Paulinus, bishop or patriarch of Aquileia (for so Paul the Deacon calls him, book 2, ch. 10 and 25, as though he had gained this new title as the reward of the schism he had stirred up), withdrew to Grado, an island and city of Friuli, inaccessible to the enemy because they lacked ships; where, having completed the twelfth year of his episcopate, he died and had Probinus for his successor.

Alboin paid the penalty for his crimes and for that singular savagery by which he had forced his wife to drink, as from a cup, out of the skull of her father whom he himself had slain — being put to death by the arts of that very wife. Cleph, whom they afterwards chose as their king, having likewise been slain when eighteen months had elapsed, the Lombards preferred to be ruled for a decade by many dukes at once. 3. Amid so great a clash of arms and calamities of war, Gregory for some time discharged the office of praetor of the City; but at what time he entered upon this magistracy or laid it down is not easy to determine. He himself testifies (book 4, letter

2) that, while he held the praetorship of the City, he had subscribed, together with other most noble men, to the guarantee or promise which Laurentius, bishop of Milan, had sent to the Apostolic See concerning the Three Famous Chapters. Baronius asserts that this happened in the year 581, in which Laurentius was made bishop and attested his faith, on the basis of the lists of the pontiffs of Milan, which assign twelve years of pontificate to Laurentius. And since we have it well established, from letters 29, 30, and 31 of the third book, that the death of Laurentius and the ordination of Constantius, elected in his place, took place in the year 593, then, if we count twelve years of Laurentius' pontificate, its beginning must be referred to the year 581;

and, as the most learned annalist testifies, all who have treated of the affairs of the Church of Milan and have woven together the succession of its bishops from the records of that same Church agree. Accordingly Gregory had not yet at that time, having resigned the praetorship, taken refuge in the haven of a monastery. But this argument of Baronius is overturned by the index of the archbishops of Milan, published by our Mabillon from the most ancient records of that Church, according to which, after Frontus or Fronto, Laurentius sat as bishop nineteen years and seven months, and died on the twelfth of the Kalends of September (Museum Italicum, vol. 1, p. 111);

which years, says Mabillon, if you subtract from the ninety-third [i.e. 593], in which Constantius was substituted for him, you must necessarily admit the creation of Laurentius in the year 574, and consequently his guarantee sent to the Roman pontiff, to which Gregory as praetor subscribed. To this opinion, says the same Mabillon, the Bollandist associates subscribed in the Life of St. Gregory; where, however, following Baronius incautiously, they say that Gregory held the prefecture, although in all the manuscript codices, whether of the Letters or of the Life composed by John the Deacon, one reads 'praetor' and 'praetorship,' not 'prefect' and 'prefecture.' 4. The Praetor of the City was created to administer justice in the City. In his hands was all authority over public and private law;

so much so that he could establish new law and abrogate the old. In authority, as also in the pomp and insignia of dignity, he seemed almost equal to the consuls. The first who is recorded to have obtained the praetorship in the City was Furius Camillus, the most illustrious of the Romans of his age, who many times vindicated his fatherland into liberty. What Gregory accomplished in this most ample dignity he wished to remain unknown to us; yet it is conjectured, from his integrity of character, his skill in law, his maturity of judgment, his energy, his tireless force in labors and affairs, and finally from so many and so great gifts of soul with which he shone forth more than with the splendor of the purple, that he fulfilled all the parts of the best praetor:

hence that singular love with which the Roman citizens attended him, and which shone forth most of all in his election to the pontificate. And so no doubt he then taught by his own example what he afterwards wrote to Justin, praetor of Sicily: 'Let no gains draw you to injustice; let neither the threats nor the friendship of anyone turn you aside from the path of rectitude. Consider how brief life is; you who wield judicial power, think to what Judge you are one day to go. Diligently, therefore, must it be considered that we leave all our gains here, and carry with us to the judgment only the causes of those costly gains.' (Register, book 1, letter

2.) In order that Gregory might comply with custom and with his dignity, he was accustomed, clad in silk and glittering with sparkling gems, to go forth through the City in the trabea (the robe of state), says the other Gregory, of Tours, from whom Paul the Deacon borrowed these very words (no. 2). But beneath these worldly pomps he was soldiering not for the world but for Christ; without doubt to be numbered among those kings and consuls of the earth who, as Job says, 'build for themselves solitudes' (Job 3:14). In expounding this passage, our Gregory (Morals, book 4, nos. 58 and 51) seems to have depicted himself as he was while sitting as praetor:

'To build solitudes,' he says, 'is indeed to drive out from the secret place of the heart the tumult of earthly desires, and with a single intent to pant after the love of the inmost quiet of the eternal fatherland. And rightly are those who construct solitudes for themselves also called consuls (counsellors): because they so build within themselves the solitude of the mind that nevertheless, in that wherein they excel, they by no means cease to take counsel for others through charity.' And in book 30, no. 52: 'If anyone is pressed by crowds of people, and yet suffers in his heart no tumult of worldly cares, he is not in the City, but enjoys the quiet of solitude.' 5. Of him Paul the Deacon writes thus:

'He, in the years of youth, in which an age of this kind is wont to enter upon the ways of the world, began to be devoted to God and with all his longings to pant after the fatherland of the heavenly life.' He had scarcely reached his twentieth year when, through frequent conversations with the blessed Constantine — a disciple of St. Benedict and his successor in the government of the monastery of Cassino, who is recorded to have died about the year 560 — he had already learned perfectly almost all that he wrote about the same St. Benedict throughout book 2 of the Dialogues, as Gregory himself has left attested in the preface of that same book of the Dialogues; whence you may understand what were the studies of this most noble youth. On the same subject, namely concerning St.

Benedict's life, he was also accustomed to converse frequently with Valentinian, who for many years presided over the Lateran monastery; with Simplicius, who governed the congregation of St. Benedict as the third after him; and with Honoratus, who was in charge of the monastery of Subiaco; and even then he seemed to be enkindled toward the purpose of a stricter and more perfect life. But he long deferred fulfilling the desire he had conceived of the monastic life, thinking himself useful to his fellow-citizens, and judging it better to be covered by a secular habit — under which he persuaded himself that he was soldiering for the world only in appearance — than to change his outward dress.

Afterwards, however, the devout praetor — since he had often been accustomed to explore and scrutinize the innermost feelings of his soul — at last perceived, enlightened by heavenly light, that he was bound by an ingrained habit of the secular life and ensnared by the allurements of the world, that he was weaving delays in the very act of forsaking them, and that he was held in the world not only in body, as he had falsely thought, but by the very affection of his mind. And so, anxiously fleeing all things, he sought the haven of a monastery, and, forsaking what belongs to the world, escaped naked from the shipwreck of this life, as he himself writes to Leander in the letter which we have placed at the very beginning, before the books of the Morals. 6. But before he sent word of farewell to the world,

out of his own property he gathered together six monasteries in Sicily, as the writer of those times, Gregory of Tours (book 10, ch. 1), says, and established a seventh within the walls of the city of Rome; and to these, assigning as great a store of lands as would suffice to furnish daily sustenance, he sold the rest and disbursed it all as a support and to the poor. Here let the studious reader observe in passing that the intention of the munificent and pious founder was not that the monks should be compelled to seek their sustenance by their own labor. And indeed, in all the letters in which he treats of establishing monasteries, he wishes sufficient revenues to be assigned to them for the necessaries of life. Those six Sicilian monasteries Mabillon, following Rocchus Pirrus, enumerates in the Annals

(Benedictine Annals, book 6, p. 164), and thereafter he often treats of them. The wealth necessary for building these and endowing them with sufficient estates, and the free power of using it, Gregory had obtained by the death of his parents, if Paul the Deacon is to be believed. But John the Deacon, on the contrary, writes (book 1, no. 9) that his mother Silvia furnished vegetables to him when he was already a monk. The passage of Paul, therefore, is to be understood of his father Gordianus alone. The seventh monastery, which he built in his very paternal house, was the famous monastery of St. Andrew at the Clivus Scauri, in which he himself embraced the monastic life, emulating Eucherius, Paulinus, Cassiodorus, and very many other men of patrician and senatorial nobility.

This ascetery, after it had long been occupied by Benedictine monks, had in the time of John the Deacon passed to Greek monks, perhaps by the favor of Stephen III, who also granted to the Greeks another monastery built by himself and dedicated to St. Dionysius the Areopagite; but that sanctuary of St. Andrew was at length restored by Gregory XIII to those following the Benedictine rule, and given to the Camaldolese. We have said enough of Gregory consecrating his own possessions to God; let us now behold him offering his very self wholly by the profession of the monastic life. (Cf. John the Deacon, book 6, no. 82.) 7.

It will perhaps seem incongruous to someone that a devout man sought retirement and a tranquil station for himself in his very fatherland, in the very city that had obeyed his commands. But in truth there was in all Italy no place safer from the arms and incursions of the barbarians, and therefore more suited to quiet, than the city of Rome — the holy apostles defending it, as the most holy Father often asserts in his letters, and beating back the onset of the Lombards. And that we may assign, as far as is allowed, at what time and at what age Gregory put on the monk's habit, we surmise that this was done a little after the subscribing of Laurentius' guarantee, of which above at no. 3 — that is, in the year 575, when he was five years short of forty.

Indeed the very many things which he relates about himself while living in the monastery, or which we know from other sources that he did — and which are to be recounted by us in order below — by no means allow us to come down to the opinion of Baronius, who reckons that he scarcely stayed in the monastery for a full two years. But the foundation of this opinion totters — nay, is utterly undermined — once nineteen years of pontificate have been vindicated to Laurentius. For by no other reasoning did that man, most skilled in ecclesiastical history, so contract the time during which St. Gregory lived in the monastery, than that he believed the episcopate of Laurentius in the Church of Milan to have been of only twelve years, and to have begun in the year

581, in which year he asserts that the guarantee issued by him [Laurentius] was subscribed by Gregory while still praetor. Even if no account were taken of the ancient record cited by Mabillon concerning the time of Laurentius' episcopate, surely Gregory himself is to be believed, testifying so often that he lived long in the monastery — as in book 5, letter 48: 'Marinianus, whom you have learned to have long associated with me in the monastery'; and in book 3 of the Dialogues, ch. 33, concerning Eleutherius: 'He long associated with me in this city, in my monastery.' The chronology of the most learned annalist is overturned also from another quarter, by John the Deacon — nay, by Gregory himself. That the Dialogues were written by him in the year 593 or 594 we proved in the preface prefixed to them, no. 18; and in those Dialogues, chapter

chapter 47 of book 4, relating the happy death of certain monks whom he had had as fellow-inmates in the monastery — as John the Deacon expressly teaches (book 1, no. 19), and as is not obscurely gathered from Gregory's words — he asserts that the death of Merulus had occurred fourteen years before; therefore either in the year 579 or 580, and consequently Gregory was not praetor at Rome in the year 581. Having weighed these reasons, the most eminent Cardinal Noris abandons the chronology of Baronius in his historical dissertation on the Fifth Synod, § 3, and confirms our opinion. And to prove that St. Gregory tarried long in the monastery, he adduces this passage from the Dialogues, book 3, ch. 33, where he says of Eleutherius the abbot: 'He long associated with me in the city, in my monastery.' 8.

The same most eminent writer of the Annals gathers (at the year 581, no. 8), from book 4 of the Dialogues, ch. 21, that St. Gregory had as his instructor in the monastic life the abbot Valentius or Valentio, whom Maximian succeeded, and Maximian, Pretiosus; after whom Probus presided over the monastery of St. Andrew. And so from the catalogue of the abbots of this monastery he expunges Hilarion, whom John the Deacon hands down as Gregory's first father and teacher in the monastic disciplines — unless we say that Hilarion is none other than Valentio, of whom mention is made in the aforesaid passage of book 4 of the Dialogues.

Now Baronius asserts that Gregory did not soldier under the abbot Maximian, because he was not permitted to live long in the monastery — against the manifest testimony of John the Deacon (book 1, no. 6), which we shall support below. Nor should it be concealed that the most learned writer is further mistaken when he asserts, from book 4 of the Dialogues, ch. 55, that Pretiosus was abbot of St. Andrew, where Pretiosus is called not abbot but provost (praepositus). Nor again do we read in chapter 21 of the same book that Valentius was Gregory's instructor in the monastic life, since the holy Doctor says only of him: 'Valentius, who afterwards, in this Roman city, presided, as you know, over my monastery also.' As concerns Probus, among those [abbots] of St.

Andrew's abbots commemorated by Baronius, it is probable that he presided over another ascetery of St. Andrew, as we have already noted above in the note to no. 6. And so the series of the abbots of St. Andrew ought to be restored thus: Hilarion, Valentius, Maximian (who was presiding over the monastery of St. Andrew at the time when Gregory was made legate), Gregory himself (who, returning from his legation, governed his own monastery, as we shall see below), and finally Peter, during whose incumbency the holy Doctor wrote his Dialogues. But let us now come to settling the more serious dispute raised against us by Baronius, concerning the monastic institute which Gregory followed.