Theopedia

Gregory the Great

Overview

Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) was bishop of Rome from 590 until his death, an author whose Book of Pastoral Rule shaped the medieval episcopate, and a figure Herman Bavinck calls “the fourth great teacher of the church” alongside Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose.1 He became pope on the death of Pelagius I and was the first to wield effective, dominant authority over other bishops, so his reign is usually counted as the start of the medieval papacy.2

Life and Ministry

Gregory held the office of bishop of Rome from 590 to 604.3 Under the burden of the episcopate, he repeatedly complained in his own letters of being “distracted above measure by foreign occupations.”4 Through his liturgical writings and church music, he introduced Roman forms of worship to the Germanic peoples of northern Europe, and, alongside Boethius and Cassiodorus, exerted substantial influence on education among them by popularizing patristic theology in a practical form.1

John Calvin holds Gregory up as an example of the older, stricter standard that required a bishop to preach in person: “not even in the time of Gregory, when the Church had almost fallen (certainly had greatly degenerated from ancient purity), would any bishop have been tolerated who abstained from preaching.”5 Calvin quotes Gregory’s own words to that effect: “The priest dies when no sound is heard from him: for he calls forth the wrath of the unseen Judge against him if he walks without the sound of preaching.”6 Commenting on Paul’s claim to be “pure from the blood of all men” (Acts 20:26), Gregory wrote of his fellow bishops, “we, who are called priests, are charged, are arraigned, are shown to be guilty, since to those sins which we have of our own we add the deaths of other men, for we commit murder as often as lukewarm and silent we see them daily going to destruction.”7

Theological Contribution

The doctrine of purgatory

Augustine had given the doctrine of purgatory “a definite form, although his views are not always consistently or confidently expressed.”8 Charles Hodge credits Gregory with fixing that vague doctrine into the shape it held for the rest of the Middle Ages:

It was, however, Gregory the Great who consolidated the vague and conflicting views circulating through the Church, and brought the doctrine into such a shape and into such connection with the discipline of the Church, as to render it the effective engine for government and income, which it has ever since remained. From this time onward through all the Middle Ages, purgatory became one of the prominent and constantly reiterated topics of public instruction.9

Loraine Boettner independently dates the doctrine’s “formal shape” to Gregory’s papacy,3 and Bavinck likewise notes that “the doctrine of purgatory had been fixed by Gregory the Great” as part of a broader shift toward viewing the Lord’s Supper as an offering for the dead.10

A practical, mystical, and synergistic bent

Bavinck describes Gregory’s theology as derivative in content but distinctive in emphasis: he “produced nothing new but appropriated and in various ways applied the ideas of earlier church teachers to life. His bent was both practical and mystical-allegorical.”1 Writing after the Synod of Orange (529) had affirmed prevenient grace without decisively settling questions of irresistible grace and particular predestination, Gregory, in Bavinck’s assessment, sanctioned “the external legal religion of the Roman Catholic Church” and, in popularizing patristic doctrine for the newly converted Germanic peoples, “promoted superstition, asceticism, and works righteousness.”1

Rejecting the title “universal bishop”

Gregory clashed with John of Constantinople, who sought the title “universal bishop” for his own see. Calvin, who quotes Gregory’s letters at length as a witness against the later papacy’s own claims, describes the controversy:

The controversy concerning the title of universal bishop arose at length in the time of Gregory, and was occasioned by the ambition of John of Constantinople. For he wished to make himself universal, a thing which no other had ever attempted. In that controversy, Gregory does not allege that he is deprived of a right which belonged to him, but he strongly insists that the appellation is profane, nay, blasphemous, nay the forerunner of Antichrist.11

Gregory pressed the point repeatedly in his own correspondence:

The whole Church falls from its state, if he who is called universal falls.12

It is very difficult to bear patiently that one who is our brother and fellow bishop should alone be called bishop, while all others are despised. But in this pride of his, what else is intimated but that the days of Antichrist are already near?13

None of my predecessors ever desired to use this profane term: for if one patriarch is called universal, it is derogatory to the name of patriarch in others.14

Every one that calls himself, or desires to be called, universal priest, is by his pride a forerunner of Antichrist, because he acts proudly in preferring himself to others.15

He grounded the objection in the church’s unity under Christ alone, not under any single bishop:

Peter was the chief member in the body, John, Andrew, and James, the heads of particular communities. All, however, are under one head members of the Church… none of them ever wished to be styled universal.16

When Eulogius of Alexandria wrote of having received an “order” from him, Gregory declined even that language: “This word order I beg you to take out of my hearing, for I know who I am, and who you are: in station you are my brethren, in character my fathers. I therefore did not order, but took care to suggest what seemed useful.”17

Historical Significance

Gregory’s own rejection of “universal bishop” as prideful and “the forerunner of Antichrist” became, for Calvin, a standing argument against the later papacy’s claim to universal jurisdiction:

Let these worthy defenders of the Roman See tell me with what face they can defend the title of universal bishop, while they see it so often anathematised by Gregory. If effect is to be given to his testimony, then they, by making their Pontiff universal, declare him to be Antichrist.18

Benedict Pictet independently corroborates Gregory’s own stance in the same terms, noting that Boniface III “aspired to the title of universal bishop, which title Gregory I. had so abhorred, as boldly to declare, that he who calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Bishop, was in his pride the forerunner of Antichrist.”19 Boniface received that title from the emperor Phocas only three years after Gregory’s death.19

Despite this personal objection, Gregory functionally established the practical dominance the medieval papacy exercised afterward. Bavinck calls him “the capstone of the ancient world, the foundation stone of the new,” crediting him with conferring on medieval Catholicism “its actual character.”2 His doctrine of purgatory, in Hodge’s judgment, became a fixture of medieval church life, taken up by “the clergy from the highest to the lowest” and “the different orders of monks” in the centuries that followed.9

Related Doctrines

Gregory’s role in shaping the doctrine of purgatory and the medieval papacy bears on Rome’s wider system, treated at Roman Catholicism. His synergistic, works-oriented piety reflects the unsettled state of the controversy over grace and free will that Pelagius had provoked and that semi-Pelagianism continued after the Synod of Orange (529). See also Augustine of Hippo, whose doctrine of the intermediate state Gregory developed into the fixed doctrine of purgatory.

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2. ↩ ↩2

  3. Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956), 91. ↩ ↩2

  4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 4, chap. 7, sec. 22, citing Gregory, Registrum 1.5, 1.7, 1.25. ↩

  5. Calvin, Institutes, 4.4.2. ↩

  6. Gregory the Great, Epistle 24, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.4.2. ↩

  7. Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel 11.26, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.4.2. ↩

  8. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 766. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:766. ↩ ↩2

  10. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  11. Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.4. ↩

  12. Gregory the Great, Registrum 4.76, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.4. ↩

  13. Gregory the Great, Registrum 4.76, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.4. ↩

  14. Gregory the Great, Registrum 4.80, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.4. ↩

  15. Gregory the Great, Registrum 7.154, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.4. ↩

  16. Gregory the Great, Registrum 4.83, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.21. ↩

  17. Gregory the Great, Registrum 7.80, quoted in Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.21. ↩

  18. Calvin, Institutes, 4.7.21. ↩

  19. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 378-79. ↩ ↩2