The Gregorian Legacy

Few figures stand so squarely at the hinge of an age as Gregory. The medieval Latin West that followed him was, in great measure, his creation: he gave it the Pastoral Rule as the charter of the bishop’s office, carried the theology of Augustine and the fathers into the Middle Ages in a digestible form, secured the memory and spread of Benedictine monasticism, launched the conversion of the English and through them of much of northern Europe, and so enlarged the active, governing role of the papacy that he is rightly called a founder of the medieval papal office. The West made him one of its four great Doctors. Yet the legacy is double-edged, and an honest assessment — Orthodox and historical alike — must distinguish what is rightly Gregory’s from what later ages read into him, and weigh the man as a pivotal but human figure rather than a monument.

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

The Maker of the Medieval West

Historians regularly describe Gregory as one of the makers of the Middle Ages — the last of the Latin Fathers and the first of the medieval popes, the figure across whom the ancient Christian world passes into the medieval. The judgment is not exaggeration. His influence ran along several channels at once:

Pastoral theology. The Pastoral Rule became the standard manual of the episcopal and priestly office for the whole medieval West, read, copied, and prescribed for bishops; it taught the Middle Ages how to think about the care of souls (see The Regula Pastoralis). Its diffusion was matched by that of his exegetical and homiletic works — the Moralia in Job, the Homilies on the Gospels and on Ezekiel — which carried a digested, applicable patristic spirituality, much of it drawn from Augustine, into every medieval library (Markus 1997, 34–50; Straw 1988).
Monasticism. Through the Dialogues, and especially Book II, Gregory preserved the memory and magnified the prestige of St. Benedict of Nursia, contributing decisively to the eventual triumph of the Benedictine Rule and the monastic culture built on it (see St. Benedict of Nursia). Gregory’s own monastic foundations and his deeply monastic ideal of the bishop wove the cloister and the episcopate together for the medieval Church.
The conversion of the north. The mission to the English (see Sending Augustine of Canterbury) bore fruit far beyond Kent: the English Church it founded became, within a century or two, a missionary Church in its own right, sending Boniface and others to evangelize the Germans, so that Gregory stands at the head of the whole conversion of northern Europe.
The papal office. Gregory’s energetic exercise of the Roman see’s responsibilities — administrative, pastoral, diplomatic, and missionary — across the whole Western Church enlarged the active reach of the papacy and furnished a model of the pope as the working head of Latin Christendom. Later popes looked back to him as a pattern, and the medieval papacy claimed his authority for itself.

Doctor of the Church

For all these reasons the Latin West ranked Gregory among the four great Doctors of the Church — with Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome — the small company set at the head of its patristic inheritance, and called him simply “the Great” (see Veneration as a Great Hierarch). His authority in the medieval West was second to almost none; to cite “blessed Gregory” was to invoke a settled standard of pastoral and spiritual teaching.

A Sober Assessment

A sober assessment must hold several things together, and an Orthodox reading is well placed to do so.

First, Gregory’s greatness is real and is rightly his: the pastoral wisdom, the administrative sanctity that fed a dying city and ransomed its captives, the missionary vision, the contemplative depth, the humility that signed itself “servant of the servants of God.” None of this is inflated by later legend; it stands in his own letters and works. The East and West agree in venerating it.

Second, much that bears his name is not simply his: the chant called “Gregorian,” the full Byzantine Presanctified Liturgy, and the developed doctrine of purgatory are all, to varying degrees, the work of later ages that attached themselves to his prestige (see The Presanctified and Gregorian Tradition and Purgation, Penance, and the East). Honesty requires distinguishing the historical Gregory from these accretions — not to diminish him, but to see him truly.

Third, and most pointedly for the East–West question, the papacy Gregory founded was not the papacy that later claimed him. The man who enlarged the active role of the Roman see was also the man who denied that any bishop, himself included, could be the universal bishop, and who treated the very title as a mark of pride (see The Ecumenical Patriarch Dispute). There is a real tension here that an honest account does not paper over: Gregory both strengthened the papal office and set firm limits to its pretensions. The later development of the papal monarchy drew on the first and disregarded the second. The Orthodox reading takes Gregory at his word — as a pope who knew himself a servant and a patriarch among patriarchs — and reads the later claims as a departure from his mind (Ware 1993, 43–51; Meyendorff 1989, 296–301).

How the East Receives the Legacy

For the Orthodox Church the upshot is clear and unembarrassed. Gregory the Dialogist is a great saint and father of the undivided Church, a Latin teacher the East holds as its own, kept on 12 March, his name on the Presanctified Liturgy, his Pastoral Rule prized in Greek as in Latin. His legacy is received with gratitude where it is genuinely his — the pastoral wisdom, the sanctity, the mission, the witness against the universal-bishop title — and with discernment where later ages built on him things the East does not confess. He is, in the end, a figure who belongs to both halves of a Christendom that would divide after him, and whose own life and words testify to the one Church before the division. To venerate him rightly is to honour the whole man and the undivided age, and to let his witness — the servant of the servants of God who denied that any bishop is the universal head of the Church — stand as it is (see Veneration as a Great Hierarch).

References

Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 34–50, 206–212. (Gregory’s influence on the medieval West and the papacy.)
Straw, Carole. Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. (Gregory’s spirituality and its diffusion.)
Moorhead, John. Gregory the Great. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2005. (Assessment of Gregory’s place.)
Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993, 43–51. (The Orthodox view of the pre-Schism papacy and its later development.)
Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, 296–301. (Gregory between East and West.)