Feast of St Gregory the Great

Ms.315, tome II, f.1 verso,
Bibliothèque municipale de Douai

 

Today is the feast of St Gregory the Great, easily the most important of Benedictine saints by virtue of his Life of St Benedict in book II of his Dialogues.

The Dialogues have long been a bête noir for those within the Order and outside it who reject the very idea of miracles, and hate what they deem Benedictine 'triumphalism', or acknowledgment of the importance that the Benedictine charism has played down the centuries.

Vast tomes have been produced trying to variously explain away the miraculous aspects of St Gregory's work, and to argue that the entire work was a fake.

Thankfully, these efforts have been completely demolished, but there still lingers a reluctance amongst some to acknowledge the importance of St Gregory's work for the Benedictine charism.

Was St Gregory a Benedictine?

One of the sillier lines of argument, in my view, denies that St Gregory was a Benedictine at all.

Some of the arguments for this proposition are purely legalistic, hanging off the definition of the 'Benedictine Order'. Others have pointed to the fact that St Gregory did not, as Pope, attempt to impose the Rule on monks following other legitimate monastic charisms.

Another argument goes to his understanding of the Rule as set out in the Life of St Benedict, with claims that some of the stories don't always seem to reflect in full its provisions.  Most of these clearly miss the point of the stories involved (my favourite example of this being those who claimed St Scholastica clearly wasn't really a nun given her argument with her brother over extending her visit), or misunderstand how Rules were interpreted in late antiquity (hint: not as Anglo-Saxon style black letter statute law).

But in my view the Life is itself the key testimony to St Gregory's status as a follower of St Benedict: lives of monastic saints in late antiquity were almost invariably written by their followers in order to help perpetuate their particular charism, and this seems to be no exception.  Indeed, one modern study has made a compelling case to interpret the first three books as a triptych, with Books I and III framing the Life by helping to explain and promote certain aspects of  both St Benedict's life and his particular approach to monasticism.

Generic monasticism

Part of the problem, I think, is that until very recently, researchers have not understood it in the context of some of the debates over aspects of monastic practice and theology in late antiquity.

One of the great myths perpetrated by twentieth century monastics, was I think, the idea of a generic monasticism; that rather than reflecting a particular charism, the Rule of St Benedict was simply a particularly compelling distillation of the monastic tradition.

RB 1980, for example, claimed that “the life actually lived in Western monasteries from the end of the fourth century up to the sixth seems to have been basically the same” (pg 85).

In fairness, this was certainly the view of the Rule promoted by later reformers such as St Wilfrid in England, and St Benedict of Aniane for the Carolingians.

The actual reality though, as recent research has highlighted, is very different.

Monastic diversity

There were actually huge variations in practices in late antiquity, with vigorous debates occurring on the respective merits of things like how much time was spent on the Office (ranging the liturgical minimalism of Cassian's Egyptian hermit's, who gathered only for Sunday Vespers and Matins, to monasteries maintaining a perpetual liturgy); attitudes to manual labour; on whether or not to provide hospitality, and much more.

And although monks in late antiquity certainly read a common body of texts, such as the Lives of the Desert Fathers, the works of Cassian and others, they read them through the lens of their own particular charisms, and thus interpreted them in different ways.

In this light, St Gregory's Life of St Benedict can best be interpreted both as a defense of a particular type of monasticism, and a guide on how the life was lived in practice.  Indeed, at least one early opponent of the Benedictine spirituality, Jonas of Bobbio (a promoter of Columbanian monasticism), had clearly read and directly engaged with it.

The Life's wide popularity was a huge factor in promoting the spread of the Rule, and thus cementing St Benedict's rightful title as the Father of Western monasticism.

St Gregory

St Gregory's importance though, goes beyond the Life, and includes his other writings; his actions as Pope, not least in sending the mission to Anglo-Saxon England; his contributions to the liturgy; and his own saintly life and example.

St Gregory, pray for us.