The Life of Benedict and the Italian Saints

The Dialogues are four books of narratives about the holy men of recent Italy, framed as a conversation in which Gregory answers the questions of his deacon Peter. Book I gathers wonders of various Italian holy men; Book II is given wholly to St. Benedict of Nursia and is the only Life of Benedict in existence; Book III returns to other saints and bishops; and Book IV treats the immortality of the soul and the state of souls after death. The miracle-narratives — prophecies, healings, raisings, victories over demons — are the substance of the work, and they are reported here as the Dialogues’ own claims, pinned to the text per the methodology, not certified as historical fact. The work gave Gregory his Eastern name, “the Dialogist.”

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

The Work and Its Frame

The Dialogues (Dialogi de vita et miraculis patrum Italicorum, “Dialogues on the life and miracles of the Italian fathers”) are, by the traditional account, a work of Gregory’s earlier years as pope, written around 593–594 (Markus 1997, 51–67; Zimmerman 1959, introduction). They take the literary form of a dialogue between Gregory and his deacon Peter: Peter, grieving that Italy in its ruin seems barren of the holiness found in the lives of the Egyptian and Eastern fathers, asks whether there have been holy men of power in Italy too, and Gregory answers with a flowing series of stories drawn, he says, from reliable witnesses (Gregory, Dialogues 1, prologue; trans. Zimmerman 1959). The whole work is thus a defence of the proposition that the sanctity and miracles of the desert have their counterpart in recent Italy — that grace is not extinct in the ruined West.

The Dialogues are unlike the rest of Gregory’s writings in tone and genre — popular, narrative, miraculous, where the Pastoral Rule and the Moralia are reflective and exegetical — and this very contrast is part of what later fueled the dispute over their authorship (see The Disputed Authorship). But in the tradition received by both East and West they are Gregory’s, and they earned him the name by which the Orthodox East knows him: ho Dialogos, “the Dialogist” (see The Presanctified and Gregorian Tradition).

Book II: The Life of St. Benedict

By far the most consequential part of the Dialogues is Book II, which is devoted entirely to St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480 – c. 547), the father of Western monasticism and author of the Rule that bears his name. This book is the sole source for the life of Benedict: there exists no other ancient Life, and everything later ages knew of Benedict’s biography — his retreat to the cave at Subiaco, the founding of the twelve monasteries, the move to Monte Cassino and the destruction of the idol of Apollo there, his sister Scholastica, his prophecy of his own death — derives from this one book (Gregory, Dialogues 2; Markus 1997, 68–72; on Benedict, see St. Benedict of Nursia).

Gregory’s Benedict is a figure of prophecy and power. Book II recounts his miracles in a deliberate sequence: he mends a broken sieve by prayer; he is fed by the monk Romanus lowering bread on a rope to his cave; he resists a violent temptation by rolling in briars; he detects, by prophetic insight, the deceptions of monks and the secret faults of brethren; he makes water spring from rock, recovers an iron blade from a lake, makes a disciple walk on water, raises a dead child, and foresees the future — including the destruction of his own monastery (Gregory, Dialogues 2.1–38; trans. Zimmerman 1959). The climactic vision, in which Benedict sees “the whole world gathered together as it were under one ray of the sun,” Gregory uses to teach how small all creation is to the soul that beholds the Creator (Gregory, Dialogues 2.35). Gregory closes by noting that Benedict “wrote a Rule for monks, remarkable for its discretion and clarity of language” (Dialogues 2.36) — the one explicit ancient testimony to the Rule of St. Benedict and its tie to this Benedict.

These narratives are the wonders of the Dialogues’ own telling. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5 they are reported here as the claims of the text — what Gregory (in the received tradition) sets down on the report of his witnesses — and not as independently established events. [Disputed: because Book II is the only source for Benedict's life and miracles, the historicity of its individual wonders cannot be checked against any other ancient witness; scholars treat it as hagiography in the patristic mode — theological narrative shaped to display sanctity — while debating how much sober biography underlies it (Markus 1997, 68–72; de Vogüé 1978–1980). The authorship dispute (see the companion file) bears directly on how the book is read].

The Other Books and the Discernment of Spirits

Books I and III gather the wonders of a wide company of Italian holy men — bishops, abbots, hermits, and humble laymen — many otherwise unknown. Recurring through them is Gregory’s deep interest in the discernment of spirits (discretio): the testing of visions and wonders, the distinction between the works of God and the deceits of the devil, and the marks of true as against false sanctity. Gregory is no credulous collector; he repeatedly has Peter raise objections and difficulties, and he draws from each story a moral or doctrinal lesson, so that the Dialogues function as a kind of catechesis in the spiritual life through narrative (Gregory, Dialogues 1, 3; Straw 1988; Markus 1997, 51–67).

Book IV turns from the saints to the last things: the immortality of the soul, the particular judgment, the state of souls after death, the value of prayer and the Eucharist offered for the departed, and the purification of certain souls after death. Because Book IV is the chief text for Gregory’s eschatology — and the place where his teaching has been read both toward and against the later Latin doctrine of purgatory — it is treated in its own place (see Purgation, Penance, and the East). It is enough to note here that the Dialogues end not with wonders but with death and what lies beyond it, and that this eschatological Book IV is among the most influential and most contested parts of the whole work.

The Place of the Dialogues in Gregory’s Witness

The Dialogues shaped the medieval West’s imagination of holiness and the afterlife more than almost any other book, and they carried Benedict’s memory down the centuries. For the Christian East they gave Gregory his very name and made him, in the popular mind, a wonder-working teacher of the saints. Whatever the outcome of the modern dispute over their authorship, the Dialogues are inseparable from the figure the Church has venerated as Gregory the Dialogist — and they preserve, in Book II, a treasure the whole Church holds: the only portrait of St. Benedict of Nursia (see St. Benedict of Nursia).

See Also

• The Disputed Authorship — the modern controversy over whether Gregory wrote the Dialogues
• Purgation, Penance, and the East — Book IV, the soul after death, and the East
• The Presanctified and Gregorian Tradition — why the Dialogues make Gregory “the Dialogist”
• St. Benedict of Nursia — whose only Life is Book II of the Dialogues
• The Church Fathers — hagiography and the discernment of spirits in the patristic tradition

References

• Gregory the Great. Dialogues, Books I–IV (Book II, the Life of St. Benedict; the world-in-a-sunbeam vision at 2.35; the notice of Benedict’s Rule at 2.36). Trans. Odo John Zimmerman. Fathers of the Church 39. New York, 1959.
• de Vogüé, Adalbert, ed. Grégoire le Grand: Dialogues. Sources Chrétiennes 251, 260, 265. Paris: Cerf, 1978–1980. (Critical edition and commentary, defending Gregorian authorship.)
• Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 51–72. (The Dialogues and the Life of Benedict.)
• Straw, Carole. Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. (Discernment and the spiritual world of the Dialogues.)