Gregory the Dialogist

Gregory was born in Rome about 540, into an old senatorial family with money and land. The Rome he grew up in was a wreck. Plague came through in waves. The Lombards were burning their way down the peninsula. A city that had once held a million people was down to a few tens of thousands, camped among ruins it could no longer repair.

About 573 he became prefect of the city, the highest civil office left in Rome. Then he walked away from it. He turned the family mansion on the Caelian Hill into a monastery of St. Andrew and used the family estates in Sicily to found six more. He later said those were the happiest years of his life.

He was pulled back out. For roughly six years he served as the pope's representative at the imperial court in Constantinople, learning how empires actually work. He came home to Rome, and in 590 plague killed Pope Pelagius II. The city elected Gregory. He tried to refuse. He called the office a burden and began signing his letters servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God. Popes still use the title.

He governed like a man who expected no help. He fed Rome out of the church's own estates, kept careful accounts of grain and the poor who received it, and negotiated peace with the Lombard king Agilulf when the emperor in Constantinople would not.

In 596 he sent the monk Augustine and about forty companions to convert the English. Bede preserved the story behind it: Gregory seeing fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman market and asking who they were. Angles, he was told. Not Angles but angels, he answered.

He wrote the Pastoral Rule, a short and practical book on how a pastor should live and how differently he must speak to the proud man and the frightened one. It became the standard handbook for bishops for a thousand years; King Alfred had it put into English. His Moralia on Job, thirty-five books long, was the most-copied commentary of the early Middle Ages. His Dialogues, four books of stories about Italian holy men, including the only life we have of Benedict, gave him his Eastern name. In Greek churches he is Gregory the Dialogist, and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is called by his name.

He was ill for most of his working life: gout, and a stomach complaint that often kept him off his feet. He wrote about it plainly in his letters. He died on 12 March 604.

Sources: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People; Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule and Dialogues; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).