06 — The Dialogues
The Dialogues (Dialogi) are the work that gave Gregory his Eastern name — “the Dialogist” (ho Dialogos) — and they are, in their character, the most surprising of his writings: four books of miracle-stories about the holy men of recent Italy, cast as a conversation between Gregory and his deacon Peter, written (by the traditional account) around 593–594. Book II is wholly devoted to St. Benedict of Nursia and is the only Life of Benedict that exists; the rest gather the wonders of Italian saints, the discernment of spirits, and (in Book IV) Gregory’s teaching on the soul after death. These files treat the Dialogues and their miracle-narratives, pinned to the text, and then the sharp modern controversy — opened by Francis Clark — over whether Gregory wrote the work at all.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)
The Dialogues are at once one of the most beloved and one of the most contested of Gregory’s works. Beloved, because they preserve the Life of St. Benedict and a whole gallery of Italian holiness, and because they shaped the medieval imagination of the miraculous and the afterlife as few books did. Contested, because in the twentieth century the scholar Francis Clark argued, at length, that the Dialogues are not Gregory’s at all but a forgery composed two generations after his death — a thesis most Gregorian scholars have rejected but which forced a thorough re-examination of the work’s authenticity. This section handles both: the Dialogues as the tradition has them, with their wonders reported as the text’s own claims; and the authorship dispute, set out with named scholars on both sides and no verdict.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Life of Benedict and the Italian Saints | The character and contents of the Dialogues; Book II as the sole Life of St. Benedict; the miracle-narratives of the Italian saints and the discernment of spirits; how Gregory frames the wonders and how they are pinned to the text per METHODOLOGY §3.5. |
| The Disputed Authorship | The modern controversy: Francis Clark’s The Pseudo-Gregorian Dialogues (1987) thesis that the work is a late-seventh-century forgery; the case for it; the substantial scholarly rejection (Meyvaert, de Vogüé, Markus, and others); and how the question stands, set out both ways with no verdict. |
See Also
- The Presanctified and Gregorian Tradition — why “the Dialogist” is Gregory’s Eastern name
- Purgation, Penance, and the East — Book IV of the Dialogues and the soul after death
- St. Benedict of Nursia — whose only Life is Book II of the Dialogues
- The Church Fathers — the patristic tradition of hagiography and the discernment of spirits
References
- Gregory the Great. Dialogues. Trans. Odo John Zimmerman. Fathers of the Church 39. New York, 1959.
- Clark, Francis. The Pseudo-Gregorian Dialogues. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1987.
- de Vogüé, Adalbert, ed. Grégoire le Grand: Dialogues. Sources Chrétiennes 251, 260, 265. Paris: Cerf, 1978–1980.
- Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.