GREGORY THE GREAT.* IN these days, when of the making
of indifferent books there is no end, it is a pleasant task to welcome a work of the first rank. A prolonged study of these two volumes dealing with the greatest figure of the sixth century, and one of the most dominating minds that Christendom has produced, can lead to no other opinion. There can be little doubt that Mr. Homes Dudden has composed a work which, by reason of its literary merit, its vitalising power over the past, its successful relation of ancient springs of action to living and universal movements, and its strictly scientific use of difficult and often obscure material, will remain the standard work on the spiritual significance of the sixth century in the West. It is a singular fact that no exhaustive work dealing with the life and times of the only Pope in the Calendar of Saints has hitherto appeared in this country. Mr. Dudden no doubt owes something to Dean Milman, to Dr. Hodgkin and Mr. F. W. Kellett, to Dean Church, Dr. Gasquet, and Mr. Barmby, Something, too, he owes to the late Mr. T. H. Halcomb, some- time Fellow of Lincoln College, who had projected a similar work, and whose manuscript notes were placed at Mr. Dudden's disposal. He is more indebted to the patient researches of great French and German scholars such as Duchesne, Ewald (who in his monograph, Die atesle Biographic Oregon; L, proved that the manuscript preserved in the Monastery of St. Gall presents the oldest Life of the Pope), von Hartmann Grisa,r, and others who have cleared up many obscurities. Mr. Dudden has, however, from first to last worked from the original sources as illuminated by modem scholarship and research. Occasionally he has relied on second-hand authorities, with the usual loss of power. We are, for instance, told that a translation of Gregory's Dialogues was "made into Anglo- Saxon (by Bishop Waerferth of Worcester)." A modern writer is given as the authority for this statement. Surely it would have been wiser to have directly referred to chap. 77 of Asser's Life of King Alfred, to have stated that the translation was made at King Alfred's suggestion, and to have spelt this Mercian name Werfrith as given by Amer.
• Gregory the Great: his Place in History and Thought. By F. Homes Dudden, B.D., Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. 2 vols. London : Lougmann and Co. [30s. net.]
In this place we may as well indicate one or two other flaws. With reference to the coming of St. Augustine, St. Paulinus, and others to England, we might have expected, in addition to the reference to Beda's Historia Ecclesiastica (I., 25), the further and more important reference (V., 24). The references to Gregory in Waurin's Chronicle and other mediaeval histories might well have been given in so exhaustive a work. We should also have been glad of a fuller discussion as to the year of Gregory's death. Beda gives the date as 605 A.D., and Mr. Dudden summarily dismisses this statement in favour of the year 604, on the ground that Beda had previously in the year 590 been a year out in his chronology. The fourth continuator of the Liber Pontzficalis, writing somewhat earlier
than Beda; the author of the S. Gallen Life, who was a
contemporary of Beda ; and the later biographers, Paul the Deacon and John the Deacon, all give the year 604. But Mr. Dudden entirely overlooks The Norman Annals, which are probably quite independent of the Historia, and yet place the date of Gregory's death in the year given by Beda,- namely, 605.
Again, Mr. Dudden has not told us all that might, and, indeed, should, have been told with respect to the books which Gregory sent to England by Augustine or some other messenger. He is probably (but not certainly) right in dismissing Elmham's list of nine volumes, com- piled about the year 1414, as too late to be of value, and we agree that it is very doubtful whether 'either of the famous manuscripts of the Gospels at the Bodleian and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, can by any possibility be identified with the Gregorian gifts. But Mr. Dudden should have told us that very high authority is tempted to identify with Augustine's Psalter the Manuscript Cotton, Vesp. A. 1, in the British Museum, and should have quoted the statement of Archbishop Egbert, made within a century of Augustine's death, that Gregory sent to England an antiphoner and a missal-book. It is claimed that the text of the latter and a portion of the text of the former still exist in a manuscript at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Again, we think that the evidence which appears to prove the fact of slave traffic between England and Italy in Christian times should have been set out in confirmation of the story of Gregory and the English slaves at Rome (see Haddon and Stubbs, Councils, III., 381). We cannot but give Robert of Brrinne's version of the incident :— " Anglys ' they seyde, so het they alle. 'Angle !' he saide, 'a name of grace ! For angeles ar they lyke of face And well oughte swylk be heires of hevene."
We mention these matters since they are of peculiar interest to English admirers of the great Pope.
Such criticisms are, however, mere motes in the sunlight. We have no doubt that the great length of this work is fully justified, for "a work of reference on the Gregorian age" nanst of necessity leave no aspect of the age out of sight. The elaborate treatment of "Gregory's life before his Pontifi- cate" enables the author to give a vivid description of the dying civilisation of Rome in the days of Gordianus, the patrician father of the future Pope :— "Growing up amid the relics of a greatness that had passed, daily reminded by the beautiful broken marbles of the vanity of things, he was accustomed to look on the world with sorrowful eyes. The thrill, the vigour, and the joy of life were not for him. Rather he saw a symbol of the world in that vast, desolated palace of the Caesars—a place once re-echoing with the sound of music and the laughter of breathing throngs, but now a sombre, spirit-haunted realm of silence and decay. Beneath this sadden- ing shadow Gregory grew up. He never attained a perfect sanity of view. From his birth he was sick—a victim of the malady of the Middle Ages."
Gregory's Pontificate forms the great centre, of course, of the work. More than four hundred closely printed pages testify to the enormous activities of this period. Here Mr. Dudden fully examines Gregory's work in laying the foundations of Papal Rome,—work unwillingly undertaken, but carried out with unswerving certitude of purpose. Nolo episcopari, he could say with truth, and yet accept the great office in the noble spirit that he depicts in the famous Liber Pastoralis Curae which he issued in 590, the first year of his Pontificate. It seems certain that Gregory felt that its duties were within his gifts, despite many physical disabilities. The vast oppor- tunities that his restless, but constructive and dauntless, mind saw rising from the ruins of the Western Empire did
not daunt him. A new Rome, scarcely less Imperial than the Rome that his ancestors had known, was the ideal of the man who shaped the marble with which Hildebrand built. Mr. Dudden has therefore rightly described the fourteen years of the Pontificate, with its intolerable labours, in elaborate detail. The third book is of less length and of less importance, though its value is considerable, since it describes fully the theological outlook of the Fourth Father of the Latin Church. Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine outshone their fellow, yet probably their immediate influence could not com- pare with that of the statesman Gregory, thinly disguised by the robes of theological thought. We have no space here in which to discuss St. Gregory's literary labours, so admirably dealt with by Mr. Dudden. He finally dissipates, we think, Gregory's claim to be the founder of church music of the Gregorian type. We must make some comment on Mr. Dud. den's literary manner. It fails to some extent to sustain the great and justifiable length of the work. The prose is not sufficiently certain or settled. It has at times the grand style, but it is uneven. The great roll that the subject demands fails too often, with the result of anticlimax. Gibbon never forgot the necessity of homogeneity of style. Mr. Dudden has aimed at making his work an organic literary whole, and for the brilliant attempt we are more than thankful. But we should have been glad if he had given another year to mould- ing and remoulding the literary structure, so that he could have felt, and could have made the world feel, that not a sentence could be added or taken away without injuring the work.
The personality of Gregory is very complex. He lived in an age which tested greatness, and his greatness was of such a calibre that it enabled him to build a new Rome amid the very ashes of the old. He stood between a subtle but moribund civilisation and a barbarian world. It was his function to reconcile such apparently irreconcilable social forces by the creation of an Imperial Christianity that could contain them both, that could revitalise the old and bring the new into quiet channels. Whether the task was worth performing is a question for moralists. Whether the Rome of the Middle Ages, with its rank corruption and its Imperial power, was justified by the extension of Roman Christianity through Europe is a question we are fortunately not required to answer. Gregory is largely responsible for both results, and it must be admitted that in laying the basis of these results he adopted political methods scarcely worthy of a great Christian. Too often he stooped to conquer, and it was not Christian humility that bent his back. He could be unjust even without reason. Totila, the noble Goth, had no good qualities in the eyes of the Fourth Latin Father. His treat- ment of the monk Justus, who was refused the last consola- tions of the Church for an acknowledged but small breach of the vow of poverty, was certainly savage and inhuman, though it w as highly politic. We may suspect that the apparent grossness of his superstition with respect to relics was also a matter of policy. The famous "Venantius Letters," covering the period 591 to 691, fill the reader with astonishment. Venantius was a patrician of Syracuse who became a monk, and later, abandoning his mistaken vocation, married the Lady Italica and gave himself up to a careless literary life. On becoming Pope, Gregory meekly and in vain besought Venantius to retire from the world. After the death of Italica in 601 the Pope made a further unsuccessful effort to draw Venantius back to the monastic state. After his death Gregory patronised his two daughters with almost fatherly affection. Mr. Dudden takes a harsh view of Gregory's con- duct. He thinks that it was the power of Venantius which dictated an attitude of such tender solicitude. The letters, however, read as if personal affection were at the root of the matter, and not expediency. But expediency certainly played a degrading part in the great Pope's character. The letters that Gregory wrote to Phocas, the murderer and successor of the Emperor Maurice, are absolutely sickening. There is however, reason to think that the Pope was not fully acquainted with what had happened when he wrote, and that Byzantine verbiage explains much that is repellent. More- over, he was himself tormented with the dire sickness that in a few months ended his Pontificate. The gross homage to expediency which tainted Gregory's political life has been excused on the ground that it would not have been possible to have recreated Rome without such means. Again, we doubt whether Rome was worth recreating with such a tradition of Byzantine policy substituted for the counsels of perfection. Moreover, Gregory was great enough to have done without such methods. His wisdom is repeatedly shown in his elaborate care of all the Churches, of all the vast estates of his own Church;• in his careful clemency towards milder forms of heresy; in his broad outlook on the principles that should govern the extension of the kingdom of Christ. As we have said, Gregory is a complex figure: untiring, strong, defiant if need be, subtle, haughty, yet in a manner Apostolic ; a Christian at heart, a Roman in action, but a Byzantine in intellect.
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