Veneration as a Great Hierarch

The Orthodox Church venerates Gregory as St. Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome — a saint of the undivided Church, kept on 12 March, the day of his death, and honoured across the Orthodox world. He is reckoned among the great hierarchs and teachers, his name read over the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts; in the Slavic tradition especially he is a beloved figure of Great Lent. In the West the same man is “St. Gregory the Great,” one of the four traditional Latin Doctors of the Church alongside Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome. That the East venerates as its own a Roman pope — and the very pope whose office became the chief point of later division — is the central fact this collection holds up: it requires distinguishing the pre-Schism Gregory from the later papacy, while receiving the saint whole.

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

St. Gregory the Dialogist in the Orthodox Calendar

Gregory died on 12 March 604, and that date is his feast in the Orthodox Church, where he is commemorated as “our father among the saints Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome” (Greek Gregorios ho Dialogos, papas Rōmēs). The Orthodox liturgical books appoint hymns in his honour on that day, and — because 12 March falls in Great Lent — his memory is woven into the lenten services; in the Byzantine tradition his name is attached to the Presanctified Liturgy served on the Lenten weekdays (see The Presanctified and Gregorian Tradition). He is venerated throughout the Orthodox world — Greek, Slavic, Antiochian, and the rest — as a holy hierarch, a teacher, and a wonderworker, and his place is secure among the Latin fathers whom the East has received without reservation, alongside Leo the Great, Ambrose, and others (see St. Leo the Great, St. Ambrose of Milan).

His standing among the “great hierarchs” is a function of his stature in the undivided Church: a Roman pope of holy life and immense learning, the apostle of the English, the author of the Pastoral Rule the Greek Church itself translated and prized (see The Regula Pastoralis), the servant of the poor of Rome, and the teacher whose Dialogues gave him his Eastern name. The East honours him not in spite of his being a Roman pope but as one of the great bishops of the one Church before the division.

“Gregory the Great,” Doctor of the Church

In the Latin West the same Gregory is “Gregory the Great” (Gregorius Magnus) — a title given to only a handful of popes — and one of the four great Doctors of the Church of the Western tradition, the company of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory that medieval and later Catholicism set at the head of its Latin patristic inheritance. His immense influence on the medieval Western Church — its liturgy, its pastoral theology, its monasticism, its very conception of the papal office — earned him this rank (see The Gregorian Legacy). In the Roman calendar his feast was long kept on 12 March, the day of his death, and was later moved (in the 1969 reform) to 3 September, the day of his episcopal consecration; the Orthodox East keeps the older, traditional 12 March.

A Roman Pope the East Calls Its Own

The veneration of Gregory by the Orthodox Church is the frame within which this whole collection must be read. It is a striking fact: the East venerates as a saint and great hierarch a Pope of Rome — and not merely any pope, but one whose dealings with the title “universal bishop” lie at the root of the later quarrel over the papacy itself (see The Ecumenical Patriarch Dispute). The Orthodox reception of Gregory rests on a distinction that is fundamental to the Orthodox reading of all the early Roman popes: the distinction between the pre-Schism papacy — the Roman see as one of the great patriarchates of the undivided Church, holding a primacy of honour among equals — and the later medieval papal monarchy, with its claims to universal supremacy and infallible jurisdiction that the East regards as the great innovation dividing the Churches (Ware 1993, 27–28, 43–51; Meyendorff 1989, 296–301).

Gregory belongs wholly to the first and not at all to the second. He was a loyal subject of the Christian emperor; he denied that any bishop, himself included, could be the universal bishop; he governed Rome as a patriarch among the patriarchs, in communion and frequent correspondence with the East; his theology was the common theology of the fathers. The East therefore receives him not as a “Catholic” pope in the later sense but as an Orthodox father who happened to occupy the Roman see in the days when that see was Orthodox — when, in the Eastern understanding, Rome still held the faith of the undivided Church. To venerate Gregory the Dialogist is, for an Orthodox Christian, to honour the Rome that was, and to mark the difference between it and the Rome that, in the Eastern reading, later parted from the common tradition (Ware 1993, 43–51; on the divergence, see Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism).

The Saint Received Whole

None of this makes the Orthodox veneration of Gregory grudging or partial. The East does not venerate a “half” of Gregory, keeping the pastor and discarding the pope. It venerates the whole man — the Roman bishop, the administrator, the missionary, the writer, the contemplative — precisely as a holy father of the one Church, and it reads even the contested points (the Presanctified attribution, the eschatology of Book IV, the primacy dispute) in the light of his sanctity rather than against it. Where the later West and the East have read Gregory differently, the discipline of this guide has been to name the difference honestly; but the saint himself the Orthodox Church holds without reserve, on 12 March, as Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome, a great hierarch of the undivided Church (see The Gregorian Legacy).

See Also

References

  • Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993, 27–28, 43–51. (Roman primacy in the undivided Church and the Orthodox view of the pre-Schism papacy.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, 296–301. (Gregory and the Eastern Church.)
  • Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (Gregory’s standing East and West; the date and feast.)
  • The Lenten Triodion and the Orthodox menaia for 12 March. (The commemoration of St. Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome.)