From Prefect to Monk

Gregory was born around 540 into one of Rome’s last great senatorial families, wealthy, devout, and already studded with saints — his mother Silvia and two paternal aunts were venerated, and an ancestor may have been a pope. Trained in the law and administration of his class, he rose to be praefectus urbi, the urban prefect of Rome, the highest civil office in the city. Then, around 574, he renounced it all: he turned his family mansion on the Caelian Hill into the monastery of St. Andrew, founded six more on his Sicilian estates, gave the rest to the poor, and became a monk. The years in the cloister he would later remember as the happiest of his life.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)

A Senatorial Family

Gregory came from the gens Anicia milieu of the old Roman aristocracy — a family that combined senatorial rank, great landed wealth, and a deep Christian piety. His father, Gordianus, held the office of regionarius and owned estates in Sicily and a mansion on the Caelian Hill in Rome; his mother, Silvia, is venerated as a saint, as are two of his paternal aunts, Tharsilla and Aemiliana, whose ascetic lives Gregory himself recalled with reverence (Gregory, Homilies on the Gospels 38; Dialogues 4.17; Moorhead 2005, 1–7). Later tradition held that Gregory was descended from an earlier Roman pope — Felix III (pope 483–492) — and Gregory does refer to a pope Felix as his ancestor (atavus) in the Dialogues (Dialogues 4.17; trans. Zimmerman 1959) [Disputed: Gregory names "Felix, my ancestor, bishop of this Roman see" — modern scholars generally identify him with Pope Felix III, though the exact line of descent is not fully recoverable (Richards 1980, 18–19; Markus 1997, 9)].

This background matters. Gregory was formed in the administrative and legal culture of the Roman governing class, and his command of practical affairs — estate management, law, finance, diplomacy — would make him one of the most effective administrators ever to hold the papacy. He was, by the testimony of his admirers, master of the secular learning of his day, though he himself professed indifference to it and, famously, may have disclaimed knowledge of Greek even after years in Constantinople (see The Papal Envoy to the East).

Urban Prefect of Rome

In or around 573 Gregory reached the summit of the secular career open to a Roman of his rank: he became praefectus urbi, the urban prefect of Rome, the chief civil magistrate of the city, responsible for its administration, its grain supply, its courts, and its public order (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks 10.1; John the Deacon, Vita Gregorii 1.4; Markus 1997, 9; Richards 1980, 23–26). In a Rome stripped of so many of its old institutions, the prefecture was one of the few great offices still standing, and to hold it at little more than thirty was a mark of the family’s standing and of Gregory’s own ability. The experience of governing the city’s material life — feeding it, judging it, defending its order — was a direct rehearsal for the work he would later do as its bishop.

The Conversion to Monastic Life

Yet at the height of this career Gregory turned away from it. Around 574–575, after the death of his father, he resolved to abandon the secular life entirely for the monastic. He converted the family mansion on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St. Andrew the Apostle (the house later known as San Gregorio Magno al Celio), and he founded six further monasteries on the family’s estates in Sicily, devoting the bulk of the family wealth to these foundations and to the poor (John the Deacon, Vita Gregorii 1.5–6; Dialogues 4.17; Markus 1997, 9–11; Richards 1980, 26–31). He himself entered St. Andrew’s as a simple monk under its first abbot.

Gregory’s monasticism was Western and Latin, formed in the ascetic tradition of Italy and shaped by the writings of the desert and of figures like John Cassian; whether his houses already followed the Rule of St. Benedict in any formal sense is not certain, and scholars caution against reading the later, fully “Benedictine” monasticism back into Gregory’s day [Disputed: older accounts make Gregory's monastery straightforwardly Benedictine, but Markus (1997, 11, 68–72) and others stress that no source says so and that sixth-century Roman monasticism drew on a range of ascetic models; Gregory's *Dialogues* Book II is itself a major reason later ages associated him so closely with Benedict (see [The Life of Benedict and the Italian Saints](../06-the-dialogues/the-life-of-benedict-and-the-italian-saints.md))].

The Monastery as Lost Paradise

Whatever its rule, the monastic interlude marked Gregory permanently. He governed for only a few years before the Church pressed him back into active service — ordained one of the seven deacons of Rome, then sent as papal envoy to Constantinople, then recalled to be abbot of St. Andrew’s, and finally elected pope. Through all of it he looked back on the contemplative quiet of the cloister as a paradise he had lost. In the famous opening of the Pastoral Rule’s sequel and in his letters and prefaces he laments being dragged from the still harbour of contemplation onto the tossing sea of pastoral care; the preface to the Moralia in Job and the dialogue-frame of the Dialogues both open with this note of a contemplative grieving for the life of prayer he has had to surrender (Gregory, Moralia, dedicatory letter to Leander; Dialogues 1, prologue; trans. Zimmerman 1959; Straw 1988, 8–27).

The character of Gregory’s monastic spirituality is worth marking, because it shaped everything that followed. His was an austere, deeply scriptural asceticism, formed on the Latin fathers — above all Augustine, whom he revered — and on the literature of the desert that had reached the West through John Cassian and others; its hallmark was compunctio, the compunction of heart that weeps for sin and longs for God, and a vivid sense of the soul’s pilgrimage through a passing world toward its true home. Gregory did not understand the contemplative life as a flight from responsibility but as the school in which the soul learns to see God, and he held that the deepest contemplation overflows, of necessity, into love of neighbour and care for others. This conviction — that contemplation and active charity are not rivals but a single movement of the soul — is why he could later govern a city and a Church without ceasing to be a monk at heart. The cloister did not merely precede his public life; it formed the man who would carry its silence into the noise of the world.

This tension — between the contemplative ideal and the burden of active rule, between the desire for stillness and the demands of souls — is the master-theme of Gregory’s whole life and of his greatest book. The man who would write the Pastoral Rule, the West’s classic on the bishop’s office (see The Regula Pastoralis), wrote it as one who had tasted the sweetness of the cloister and been called out of it, and who therefore knew from the inside the cost of pastoral office. The prefect who became a monk, and the monk who was made a pope, is the same man throughout: a contemplative compelled to govern, who turned the skills of a Roman administrator to the service of souls.

See Also

References

  • Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (Family, prefecture, monastic foundation, and the question of the Rule.)
  • Richards, Jeffrey. Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. (The senatorial background, the prefecture, and the conversion.)
  • Moorhead, John. Gregory the Great. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2005. (Family and early life.)
  • Straw, Carole. Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. (The contemplation-and-action tension as the key to Gregory.)
  • Gregory the Great. Dialogues 4.17 (the ancestor Felix; his aunts) and Homilies on the Gospels 38. Trans. Odo John Zimmerman, Fathers of the Church 39, 1959; NPNF II/12.
  • John the Deacon (Iohannes Hymonides). Vita Gregorii Magni. (Ninth-century life; the monastic foundation and the prefecture.)