05 — The Pastoral Rule
The Regula Pastoralis — the Pastoral Rule or Book of Pastoral Care — is Gregory’s masterpiece and the most influential treatise on the bishop’s and pastor’s office ever written in the Christian West. He composed it at the very start of his pontificate, partly in answer to those who reproached him for fleeing the burden of office, and it sets out who should and should not be a pastor, how the pastor must live, and — in its longest part — how he must adapt his teaching to the endless variety of human souls. Its influence was immediate and immense: the Emperor Maurice had it translated into Greek in Gregory’s own lifetime, the English Church revered it, and Alfred the Great rendered it into Anglo-Saxon. These files treat the Rule itself and its central art — the cura animarum, the care of souls.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)
The Pastoral Rule is the place where Gregory’s two lives — the contemplative and the active — meet and are reconciled. It is the book of a monk who has been made a bishop, written to show how the burden of pastoral office may be borne without losing the soul, and how the pastor may serve others without ceasing to seek God. Its enduring power lies in its psychological realism: Gregory knew that souls are not all alike, that the same word heals one and wounds another, and that the pastor must be, above all, a discerner of persons. This section examines the structure and teaching of the Rule and then, more closely, the art of the care of souls that is its core — an art the East recognizes at once as its own tradition of spiritual fatherhood.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Regula Pastoralis | The composition and structure of the Pastoral Rule (its four parts); its occasion in Gregory’s reluctance; its teaching on who is fit to rule, on the union of action and contemplation in the pastor’s life; and its extraordinary diffusion — the Greek translation under Maurice, the English reverence, Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon version. |
| The Art of Souls | The cura animarum: Part III of the Rule, the long catalogue of how the one teaching must be varied according to the hearer — the rich and the poor, the joyful and the sad, the meek and the choleric — and the kinship of this discernment with the Eastern tradition of spiritual fatherhood. |
See Also
- From Prefect to Monk — the contemplation-and-action tension the Rule resolves
- Election 590 — the reluctance that occasioned the book
- The Responsa and Method — the same pastoral discernment applied to the English mission
- The Church Fathers — the patristic tradition of pastoral writing East and West
References
- Gregory the Great. Pastoral Care (Regula Pastoralis). Trans. Henry Davis. Ancient Christian Writers 11. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950.
- Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Straw, Carole. Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
- Moorhead, John. Gregory the Great. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2005.