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CHAPTER 2

Gregory the Great

Between Sicut Iudaeis and Adversus ludaeos

If Augustine stood on the precipice overlooking the end of late antiquity, Pope Gregory the Great, more than any other single individual, led the Latin West into the Middle Ages. In the history of Christianity, Gregory's literary career and pontificate (590–604) mark the end of the patristic period and the entry of Roman Catholicism and its church into a patently different phase in their development. From the perspective of most medieval Christian readers of the Bible, for example, Gregory was the first of the great master-exegetes, “le premier des maîtres.”¹ In matters ecclesiological, Walter Ullmann has suggested that Gregory's ideal conception of a properly ordered Christian society, his “societas reipublicae christianae…, is the prophetic vision of medieval Europe.”² And, in the political history of the West, the complexities of Gregory's relations with Byzantium and the Germanic kingdoms of Europe depict him as having traversed a new frontier. Conscious of change and continuity in the image of Rome, and ever sensitive to the role of the church as the primary institutional heir to the Western empire, he evidently moved beyond the perception of Latin Christendom espoused by Emperor Justinian several decades before him—that is, as completely subject to Byzantine imperial control—but did not yet express that of Charlemagne two centuries later—that of a rightly distinct political entity.

Gregory's role as a trailblazer extends to our story as well. As one modern historian of the papacy has confirmed, “With respect to the Jews, as with everything else Pope Gregory touched, he is a founder of papal tradition, one of those great men who work for the future as they respond to the turmoil of the present collapse.”³ In the unfolding history of Jewish-Christian relations, Gregory blended Augustinian theology and principles of Roman law into policies that figured significantly in medieval canon law for centuries to come.⁴ At the same time, he reformulated traditional motifs of Adversus ludaeos theology in a manner that seemed to accord entirely neither with the singular features of Augustinian doctrine nor with the norms of his own administrative policy. Students of Gregory's teaching concerning the Jews have typically differentiated between the executive rulings of his papal correspondence and the doctrinal pronouncements of his biblical commentaries, as if the pope's actions diverged from his theological principles in the Jews' regard. Although I seek to harmonize the various tendencies in Gregory's outlook as much as possible, the generic distinction between correspondence and commentary provides a convenient basis for a review of his instruction.⁵

SICUT IUDAEIS

During the thirteen and one-half years of his pontificate, Gregory addressed the subject of the Jews and their communities in more than two dozen letters, which divide readily among several chief concerns. Although many scholars have reviewed the specific circumstances and legal ramifications of Gregory's decrees, we reconsider them here for their ideological underpinnings—that is, for their perceptions of the Jewish condition and purpose in Christian society.

Responding to the complaints of Jews, Gregory intervened on at least six occasions to prevent violence against Jews, their synagogues, and their religious practices. In March 591, a Jew named Joseph complained to the pope that Bishop Peter of Terracina had repeatedly expelled the Jews of that town from their places of worship. Gregory admonished the bishop that

if such is the case, we wish that your fraternity restrain himself from contention of this sort and that, as we have stated, the place which they acquired with your knowledge for their gatherings be allowed them for their meetings just as was the custom. For those who disagree with the Christian religion one must join to the unity of the faith by means of clemency, kindness, warning, and persuasion, so that those whom the charm of preaching and the foreseen terror of future judgment could have induced to believe might not be repelled by threats and fears. It is fitting, then, that they freely convene to hear the word of God from you rather than be terrified by excessive harshness.⁶

Gregory evinced determination to redress the injustice done the Jews, and several months later he appointed two other bishops to join with Peter in assuring the Jews a house of worship and putting their complaint to rest. “We forbid that these said Hebrews be oppressed or afflicted in unreasonable fashion; but, just as they are permitted by Roman law to live, so may they maintain their observances as they have learnt them without any hindrance, as justice would dictate.”⁷ Later in 591, a report from southern France elicited similar instruction to the bishops of Aries and Marseilles:

Many of the Jews dwelling in those areas have been led to the baptismal font more through the use of force than by preaching. I grant that intention of this sort is worthy of praise, and I admit that it derives from love for our Lord. But unless sufficient support of Holy Scripture follows this same intention, I fear that either nothing worthwhile will proceed from it or, additionally, that those souls which we wish to be saved might eventually— may it never happen—be lost. For, when anyone approaches the baptismal font not as a result of the sweetness of preaching but under duress, he returns to his earlier superstition, and then dies in a worse state inasmuch as he seemed to be reborn. Therefore, your Fraternity may arouse such men through frequent preaching, so that on account of the pleasantness of their instructor they might wish even more to change their old life. For thus is our intention correctly actualized, and the soul of the convert is not then driven to its erstwhile vomit.⁸

Later in the decade, when a Jewish convert to Christianity brought a crucifix into the synagogue of Cagliari, seeking to prevent Jewish worship, Gregory cited the Roman statute permitting Jews to maintain their old synagogues despite their inability to erect new ones. Even if Christian missionaries should claim to act out of zeal for the faith, they should deal with the Jews in moderation, “so that the wish [to convert] may be elicited from them, and not that they be led against their will.”⁹ In 602., similarly minded Christian zealots in Naples received more outspoken condemnation: “Those who sincerely wish to usher strangers to the Christian religion toward the proper faith should apply themselves gently, not harshly, so that antagonism might not drive far away the disposition of those whom reason, clearly presented, could attract. For whoever do otherwise, and under such a pretext seek to remove them from the accustomed practice of their rite, are proven to tend to their own concerns more than God's.”¹⁰ In 598, with words that would have critical impact on ecclesiastical policy toward the Jews centuries hence, Gregory encapsulated the rationale for these various rulings in a letter to the bishop of Palermo, against whom the Jews had also lodged a complaint with the pope. “Just as the Jews should not [Sicut ludaeis non…] have license in their synagogues to arrogate anything beyond that permitted by law, so too in those things granted them they should experience no infringement of their rights.”¹¹

Although Gregory's opposition to baptizing the Jews under duress acknowledges the rightfulness of their presence in his Christian society, one finds little evidence that he deemed that presence a necessity. On the contrary, Gregory's correspondence also alludes to an additional priority of his policy, no less important: undermining that presence through the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. In his letter quoted above, Gregory did not merely command his bishops to desist from anti-Jewish violence; he directly instructed them to preach to the Jews and thus win their souls for the church.¹² He frequently prescribed that baptized Jews receive special protection and financial rewards, because “we should, with reasonable moderation, aid those whom our Redeemer deems worthy to convert from the Jewish perdition to himself.”¹³ Nor did the danger of insincere conversion, which informed Gregory's insistence that Jews not be baptized against their will, militate otherwise in this case; as he wrote to a Sicilian deacon in 594, at least the souls of subsequent generations would be protected: “We do not work pointlessly, if by easing the burdens of their financial obligation we lead them to Christ's grace, because, even if they themselves come with little faith, those who shall be born of them will already be baptized with more faith. So do we gain either them or their children. And however much we remove from their financial obligations for Christ's sake is not serious.”¹⁴ Gregory's apocalyptic expectations rendered the task of converting the Jews an urgent one, and he therefore proposed to dispense with the normally required period of the cate-chumenate for prospective proselytes, “because, owing to the impending destruction, the nature of the time demands that [the fulfillment of] their desires not be postponed at all.”¹⁵

If the exigencies of history motivated Gregory to bend ecclesiastical rules and expedite the conversion of Jews, how much the more so did he stand by the restrictive half of his Sicut ludaeis formula and endeavor to prevent encroachments of Jews and Judaism on Christianity. He objected to the sin (nefas) of the sale of sacred objects to a Jew, ordering the vessels restored,¹⁶ and he responded vehemently to reports of Judaizing among Christians; Romans who advocated refraining from work on the Jewish Sabbath Gregory labeled “preachers of Antichrist,” who, at the end of days, will observe both Saturday and Sunday as days of rest. Because the Antichrist “feigns his death and resurrection from the grave, he wishes Sunday to be kept holy; and, because he compels the people to Judaize—in order to restore the exterior observance of the law and subordinate the perfidy of the Jews to himself—he wishes Saturday to be observed.”¹⁷ At least ten of Gregory's letters prohibit Jewish ownership of Christian slaves, “so that the Christian religion, might not be defiled through its subjugation to the Jews—may it never happen.”¹⁸ Once again, the pope took care that his decrees comported with the protective provisions of Roman law, and he upheld the rights of Jews to sell slaves acquired expressly for resale and to retain Christian serfs (coloni) on their estates.¹⁹ Yet, as he explained to the kings and queen of the Franks, the ownership of Christian slaves by Jews subverted the very integrity of Christ and his church:

For what are all Christians if not the members of Christ? All of us know that you faithfully revere the head of these members; but your excellency should ponder how contradictory it is to honor the head and to permit the members to be oppressed by its enemies. We therefore request that your excellency's decree remove the evil of this abuse from her/his kingdom, so that you might better prove yourself to be a worthy devotee of Almighty God, insofar as you release his faithful from his foes.²⁰

Relative to the standards of his day, Gregory may indeed have “pursued a manifestly pro-Jewish policy,”²¹ but tolerance did have its limits. Gregory held firm on the issue of slaves, and his commitment to proselytizing among the Jews strayed from the logic of Augustinian doctrine. His attempt to forge a balanced policy notwithstanding, Gregory harbored no love for the Jews.

ADVERSUS IUDAEOS

Gregory's exegetical works, and his Moralia on Job above all, also make frequent reference to the Jews and Judaism; just as his administrative policy toward the Jews claimed to maintain the precedents of imperial and ecclesiastical legislation, so too did his theological instruction offer a patchwork of traditional patristic anti-Jewish motifs. These pertained primarily to the Jews of first-century Judea, who, blinded by the clouds of ignorance, their hearts frozen in jealousy and infidelity, victimized Jesus and his followers and were consumed by the fire of their malice as a result.²² Gregory laid particular blame on the Jewish leadership, the priests, and the Pharisees, who pressed for Jesus' execution and persecuted even those three or five thousand Jews who converted to Christianity in its aftermath.²³ Echoing Augustine, Gregory attributed the guilt of the Jews to error, rather than deliberate intention; for, as he alluded to the mystery of the incarnation in 1 Corinthians 2:8, had they known it, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”²⁴ Presented with the goods of their redemption, the promises made to their forefathers, the signs of Jesus' miracles, and the bountiful testimony of Scripture, these Jews nonetheless displayed no will to believe:

For Judea “awaited the light but did not see,” because she persisted in prophesying that the redeemer of humankind would come but did not recognize him upon his coming; and the eyes of the mind, which she opened to hope, she closed to the light's actual presence. She did not see the beginning of daybreak, inasmuch as she unreliably neglected to acknowledge the birth of the holy church, and although she believed that it was weakened by the deaths of its members, she did not know what power it was achieving.²⁵

The Jews' blindness and rejection of their own salvation proceeded from their immersion in worldly affairs and pleasures, much as the Hebrew patriarch Isaac craved the meat prepared by his son Esau and unwittingly transmitted the true, spiritual blessing of God's covenant to Jacob. The Jews could respond only to the outward significance of Jesus' miracles; they lacked the ability to understand the Bible spiritually as one must, and, crippled by their own self-reliance, they worried too much over the sins of others to tend to their own.²⁶ Throughout their wicked designs and behavior, Gregory saw the handiwork of the devil: “Armed, the enemy of old ravished the Jewish people, because he extinguished the life of faith among them with darts of fraudulent advice, so that precisely in the conviction that they cleaved to God, they may oppose his rule.”²⁷ God consequently deprived the Jews of the prophecies, miracles, and virtues they had enjoyed under the Old Testament before Jesus, transferring them all to the previously despised Gentiles, with whom he now inaugurated a new, superior covenant:

While the people of the Jews remained under the rule of the Law, and the whole Gentile world knew none of God's precepts, the former appeared to rule through their faith, and the latter lay deeply suppressed because of their disbelief. But when Judea denied the mystery of the Lord's incarnation, the Gentile world believed, and the rulers sank into disfavor, and they who had been suppressed in the guilt of their perfidy were raised in the liberty of the true faith…. For when He removed the spoils of virtue from the Jews, He housed the splendor of his gifts in the heart of the Gentiles, wherein, on account of its faith, he considered it fitting to reside. This in fact occurred when the people of the Jews accepted the words of God only according to the letter, which kills, and the Gentile world, having been converted, penetrated them with the spirit, which gives life.²⁸

Just as he did to the house of Eli and to Samuel, respectively, God disowned the Jews and adopted the Gentiles, but he also transformed the nature of his covenant: Letter gave way to spirit, law to grace, harshness to mildness, divine vengeance to salvation, and death to life. No wonder the Israelites at Sinai received their laws standing beneath the mountain, whereas Jesus preached his gospel directly from the mountain itself.²⁹

“Her appearance having been altered,” wrote Gregory, Judea still “is tortured by grief” over her plight,³⁰ and the Jews, like Eli's sons, remain in an impiety from which there is no return.³¹ Turning from the Jews of first-century Palestine to those of his own day, Gregory followed Augustine and reckoned the Jews' disbelief, which construes the loss of light as advantageous, an integral part of their punishment.³² Though contemporary Jews encounter the Christological testimonies of Scripture and receive exhortation from Christian preachers on a daily basis, they continue to insult God in their self-inflicted blindness, incurring divine wrath still further and compounding their misery.³³ And yet, as long as the Jews mingle with other peoples, their condemnation by God serves a didactic purpose; Job, Gregory explained in the Moralia, thus “trains the mind's eyes directly on the singular misfortune of the Israelite people, and, with the destruction of one people, he demonstrates what punishment awaits all those that are arrogant.”³⁴ Moreover, on numerous occasions in his writings, Gregory anticipated the final conversion of Israel, which will ultimately redress the frustrations and failures now experienced by Christian missionaries in preaching to the Jews. Just as Job finally received true consolation from his brethren, so will Christ and his church take comfort in the spiritual faith of carnal Israel:

The holy Church now is troubled by the aversion of the Hebrews and then is restored by their conversion…. That is, those who recover from the error of their earlier disbelief and forsake the perverse life on account of which they had resisted the teachers of righteousness console Christ and console the Church. Is it not an awful shame to preach futilely to hard hearts, to take the trouble to demonstrate the truth, but to find no compensation for one's efforts—in the conversion of one's listeners? Nevertheless, the ensuing progress of their listeners is a great comfort for preachers.

Why, then, did Job's brethren approach him only after all of his suffering had passed? “Truly because the Hebrews at the time of his [that is, Christ's] passion, rejecting the proclamation of the faith, refused to believe that he whom they had established by his death to be a man was God…. But at the end of time all Israelites shall join together in the faith…and go back to the protection of him whom they had fled.” Only then will the salvific efforts of Christ, prefigured by the suffering Job, be fully rewarded. Hence Gregory's resonant call to the Jewish people: “Thus let the believing Hebrews gather at the end of the world and redeem their pledges of offerings to the savior of humankind in the power of his divinity, as if to the healed Job.”³⁵

Gregory's Christian reading of Jewish history may have forecast the happy ending that Paul had envisioned, but major obstacles remained. The devil still abides among the Jews, maintained Gregory, and through the agency of Antichrist he continues to enlist their support. “The synagogue opposes its founder, not out of fear as previously, but now in outright resistance. Being transformed into the limbs of the devil and believing that the man of lies is God, the more it is raised up high against the faithful, the more it prides itself that it is the body of God.”³⁶ As Gregory noted in his correspondence,³⁷ the bonds between Antichrist and Judaism continue to undermine the integrity of Christendom,³⁸ and he expected more blatant cooperation between the two powers in advance of the final redemption. Even as Jews will flock to the church at the end of days, some of their coreligionists will continue to persecute them for doing so.³⁹ In sum, the enmity of the synagogue toward Christianity endures and intensifies. “The wounds it inflicted on the believers upon the advent of the savior are clearly less than those with which it seeks, even now, to strike the Church with the advent of the Antichrist. For it makes itself ready for that time, in order to encumber the lives of the faithful with its collected strength.”⁴⁰

THE LOGIC OF GREGORIAN ANTI-JUDAISM

Although medieval historians consistently accord Gregory an important role in the evolution of public policy toward the Jews of European Christendom, the specific characterization of his attitudes has varied considerably. Some scholars have written of Gregory's “deep-seated aversion” and his “deepest horror and loathing” for the Jews;⁴¹ others have praised his “scrupulous concern for justice and humanity,” labeling him the Jews' intransigent protector.⁴² Meanwhile, some investigators have highlighted the disparity between the Jewish policy of Gregory's papal bulls and the outlook expressed in his doctrinal-exegetical works, perhaps attributing greater significance to one or the other,⁴³ whereas others have viewed Gregory's attitude toward the Jews as essentially coherent.⁴⁴ Yet nearly all Gregorian scholars acknowledge Gregory's tremendous debt to the doctrine of Augustine, and the ensuing appraisal of Gregory proceeds from a comparison of the ideas of the two churchmen—both their specific formulations on Jews and Judaism and the more fundamental doctrinal principles in which these formulations were grounded.

On one hand, even though Gregory never cited Augustine's exegesis of Psalm 59:12, his dependence on Augustinian teaching concerning the Jews is evident. We recall that Augustine grounded the doctrine of Jewish witness, as elaborated in the De civitate Dei and elsewhere, in the historical reality of the Jews' survival and, in particular, in their subjugated status under Roman rule: “Yet the Jews who killed him [Jesus] and chose not to believe in him…, having been vanquished rather pathetically by the Romans, completely deprived of their kingdom…and scattered throughout the world…, are testimony for us through their own scriptures…. For there is a prophecy given previously in the Psalms…: ‘Slay them not.’”⁴⁵ Given the administrative context in which Gregory had to define the status of what he unquestionably still perceived as Roman Jewry, one can readily discern the logic of his translation of Augustinian theology into papal policy: If Augustine had deemed the status of the Jews under Roman rule to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it behooved Gregory, head of the Roman Church, to maintain that aspect of imperial policy and govern his subjects accordingly. Gregory claimed justification for his Jewish policy in terms of Roman legal precedent, both in the application of the Theodosian Code to the protection of synagogues and the restriction of Jewish slaveholding and in a recurring appeal to the general import of Roman legislation. Inasmuch as the Jews “are permitted by Roman law to live, so may they maintain their observances as they have learnt them without any hindrance, as justice would dictate.”⁴⁶ His principle of Sicut ludaeis invokes a similar rationale, limiting Jewish rights to that which is “permitted by law [permissum est lege]”47 Furthermore, the recurring emphasis on the public rituals of the Jews—their holy days, their celebrations, their communal worship and its venue—in Gregory's protective edicts bespeaks the Augustinian notion that the divine mandate of “Slay them not” entails the perpetuation of their Judaism, the forma Iudaeorum148 and not merely the preservation of their lives. As we have seen, Gregory acknowledged the didactic purpose of Jewish survival in a dispersed, subjugated state. He reaffirmed Augustinian instruction that the blindness of the Jews in Jesus' day resulted in their persecution of him and that such blindness, then and now, constitutes divine punishment for their sin. Gregory's aforecited rationale for preaching to contemporary Jews despite their intransigence reads much like the directive of Augustine's Tractatus adversus ludaeos: “Testimonies should be taken from the holy scriptures, whose authority is very great among them, too; if they refuse to be restored by the benefit which they offer, they can be convicted [convinci] by their blatant truth.”⁴⁹

On the other hand, the role and the image of the Jews in the Gregorian corpus depart from the Augustinian model in several noteworthy respects. First, Gregory's theological-exegetical works ascribe historical importance to the Jews of Jesus' day and to the Jews of the end of time, paying minimal attention to contemporary Jewry. Although his policy as pope applied the spirit of Roman law and the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness in practice, he did not depict the Jews of his own age as significant players in the unfolding drama of Christian salvation history. Rather, Gregory looked forward to the final days of that history, when all remaining Jews would accept Christianity, and such anticipation comports well with his justification of special allowances for Jewish proselytes. A mandate for missionary preaching to the Jews likewise accompanied the prohibition against using force to convert the Jews, in the hope that, “demonstrating what we tell them with evidence from their own books, we might be able, with the help of God, to direct them into the arms of mother Church.”⁵⁰ This emphasis too one generally finds lacking in the works of Augustine, who paid lip service to the traditional apostolic longings for the conversion of the Jews but accorded little urgency or hope for success to contemporary missionary efforts.⁵¹ Lastly, Gregory elaborated much more extensively than did Augustine on the Jews' alliance with the devil and Antichrist, who had determined the direction of Jewish history in the past and would continue to do so in the future. Gregorian doctrine conveys a pronounced sense of enmity between the Jews and the faithful, emanating directly from the ongoing, insidious opposition of Satan to the designs of God. In such subversion “the Jews now excessively persist; hence, as long as they lovingly inhabit the place of their treachery, they fight against the redeemer.”⁵² Gregory's protection of Jewish rights notwithstanding, one leaves his writings with an appreciation of the Jews' historical role far more negative than that of Augustine.

In his departures from Augustinian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Gregory manifested—and, in fact, exemplified—the new, distinctive mentality of early medieval Latin Christendom described briefly at the beginning of part 2 of this book.⁵³ His was a mind-set that beheld all experience and reality as a continuous unity, an outlook that perceived reality essentially as one but, in its unredeemed state, as reflecting the divisiveness of sharp, fundamental oppositions. As Carole Straw has written so eloquently,

to understand Gregory one must begin by recognizing that he has modified the paradoxes of the mature Augustine and that the fluid boundaries of late antiquity have all but vanished. The supernatural is mingled with the world of ordinary experience, and in surprising ways. Visible and invisible, natural and supernatural, human and divine, carnal and spiritual are often directly and causally connected…. In Gregory's world, invisible reality exists alongside the visible reality it sustains and determines. The other world is at one's very elbows, though often hidden to those of carnal minds…. Gregory tends to link causally flesh and spirit, present and future worlds, displaying a certainty and predictability in their interconnection…. As the spiritual and carnal boundaries are broken for body and soul, this world and the next, so too the boundaries between the self and others weaken, and social unity is intensified. Each individual exists only as a member of the larger, transcendent body of Christ, which is political and social as well as religious…. To pursue a separate course is to subvert both self and society, to imitate the devil's delusion of self-sufficiency.⁵⁴

Paradoxically, both dualism and monism appear to characterize this Gregorian worldview, and one must distinguish carefully the different levels of reality that manifest them. Gregory's thought is rife with foundational contrasts: God and the devil, Christ and Antichrist, New Testament and Old, faithful and infidel, spiritual and carnal, heavenly and terrestrial, virtuous and sinful. Yet the dissonance endemic to these oppositions pertains to a sinful, unredeemed reality, and it functions in the divine master plan expressly to underscore the need for restoration. In other words, good and evil members of these oppositional pairs struggle fiercely in the world of Gregory's experience, but, ultimately, their combat facilitates a salvific resolution. Though plagued by the inadequacies and evils of his age, Gregory thus awaited the eschaton more eagerly than did Augustine. For him, God's world is truly an integrated one: Visible and invisible realities exist continuously, side by side, and are essentially equivalent. Political institutions, societies, and cultures all adhere to a single, grand divine scheme of things, from which their raison d'etre derives; if the Middle Ages remembered Gregory somewhat unfairly as a destroyer of classical culture, he unquestionably strove to marshal all facets of human creativity in the perfection of Christendom, attributing value to nothing that made no such contribution.⁵⁵ Even the devil works God's will in the final analysis.⁵⁶ Straw has thus perceived “a grammar of reconciliation and complementarity” at the base of Gregory's singular vision of sacramental reality:

Gregory sees carnal and spiritual realms as interrelated, connected as end-points of a continuum. Like faces of a coin, ends of a stick, or poles of a magnet, they are extremities of a single whole…. Though opposite, carnal and spiritual realms are very much united through various degrees of complementarity and reconciliation. At any one moment, only a single aspect of the relationship might appear, such as the conflict between spirit and flesh, or the sympathy of body and soul. But when opposition is overt, unity is latent.⁵⁷

Gregory found the key to reconciliation in Christ, who alone could successfully mediate the boundary between humanity and divinity, who resolves the tension of all such cosmic oppositions, and whose covenant and church integrate the various dimensions of spiritual and temporal experience into a perfect, Christian whole.

This general pattern of Gregory's thought informed his biblical hermeneutic, his philosophy of history, and his anthropology in a manner that may well help to account for his departure from Augustinian constructions of Jews and Judaism. Unlike the mature Augustine, Gregory displayed an “addiction to the allegorical interpretation of Scripture.”⁵⁸ His exegesis categorically emphasized the allegorical and moral, and it extended but minimal attention to the literal sense of Hebrew Scripture. To be sure, Gregory acknowledged the historical sense in his well-known cover letter to Leander, which accompanied the completed Moralia on Job: “It should be known that some passages we run through in a historical interpretation, some passages we analyze allegorically through typological exegesis, and some we discuss solely in their allegorical, moral sense; yet some, as we probe more meticulously, we investigate simultaneously by all three methods.” Nevertheless, Gregory's preference lay almost exclusively with figurative interpretation, as his voluminous Moralia and other exegetical works reveal, and as he admitted just several sentences later in the same letter to Leander: “Sometimes, in fact, we neglect to explain the plain words of the historical sense, so that we not arrive too slowly at the concealed meanings; and sometimes they cannot be understood in a literal sense, because, when understood according to their visible meaning only, they produce nothing edifying for their readers but only error.”⁵⁹ Such hermeneutical procedure allowed Gregory considerable latitude in his commentaries and frequently resulted in multiple, even contradictory, expositions of the same biblical figure or verse. The agitation of the earth depicted in Job 38:12–13, for example, can refer either to that of the wicked by Christ or to that of the church by Antichrist!⁶⁰ Past and future are often confused.⁶¹ Asses, the raven, and the northerly direction signify both Jews and Gentiles;⁶² the horse both right and wrong;⁶³ a hammer both the power of the devil and that of heaven;⁶⁴ oxen both stubborn Jews and resolute Christian preachers;⁶⁵ the elders of Job 12:20 both the Hebrew patriarchs who foretold of Jesus and the Jews who subsequently rejected him.⁶⁶ Whether or not one attributes such ostensive self-contradiction to Gregory's “grammar of reconciliation and complementarity,” such a hermeneutical method could accord little value to literal exegesis. If pressed for interpretative consistency, the pope might well have responded: “Unless we investigate the mysteries of the allegories in these words, those things which ensue—if considered solely within the historical narrative—are entirely worthy of disregard.”⁶⁷ In a remark often quoted by his students and detractors alike, Gregory similarly justified to Leander his lack of concern for grammar and eloquence. “I have not seen fit to preserve that style of speech which the standards of external refinement prescribe…; for I deem it entirely inappropriate to subordinate the words of the heavenly oracle to the rules of Donatus.”⁶⁸

Similar “heavenly” considerations dictated Gregory's perspective on terrestrial history. Much as he devalued the nonfigurative, historical sense of Scripture, so did he exclude the Augustinian saeculum from his own understanding of human experience and society. Gregory did retain the Augustinian notion of a “pilgrim people” in this world, the chosen “who, considering this life a sort of exile for themselves, yearn with all of their hearts for their supernal homeland,” as opposed to those “who set their hearts on earthly pleasures.”⁶⁹ But one fails to find in the Gregorian corpus evidence of overlap or ambiguity in the relationship between the two communities; one encounters none of the recognition of independent, albeit limited, value in worldly achievements and institutions that is so impressive in Augustinian thought.⁷⁰ Conversely, Gregory saw no reason to distinguish between the history of salvation and that of earthly politics and society. Unhesitatingly he identified the church with the body of Christ and its members with his. Gregory's “historical consciousness was shaped by a sense of the crumbling away of the secular institutions and the profane traditions rooted in Rome's ancient past.”⁷¹ For him, the divine economy of salvation was plainly apparent in the affairs of this world: He discarded the fundamental Augustinian distinction between Christianitas and Romanitas, and, in the words of another recent biographer, his “unending search for a reconciliation of these differing concepts constitutes the restless core of his being.”⁷² Retreating from the anti-apocalyptic orientation of Augustinian eschatology, Gregory had little doubt that this quest would soon reach its end. Recent events included the conversion of the Gentiles, the decline of classical culture, the downfall of pagan Rome, the victory of Catholicism, and (the consolidation of papal authority in the West, on one hand, and the trials of the Germanic and Byzantine invasions, on the other. What could be more suggestive of the last days, of the final struggle between Christ and Antichrist, than such a blend of encouragement and tribulation in the affairs of this world? And what, in turn, could constitute a more pressing reason to propagate the faith? Among the chief goals of Gregory's pontificate “was purely and simply to win as many souls as possible for Christ before the end of the world.”⁷³ Unlike Augustine's historical account of the heavenly city, which effectively stopped with the establishment of Christianity and thereby sought to defuse an apocalyptic reading of current events, the spotlight of Gregory's historical concern—as opposed to his predominantly allegorical interest in the old dispensation— fell precisely on the first and second comings of Christ and on the teleological progression from the one to the other.

Finally, Gregory's excision of the saeculum from his reading of Christian history struck a corresponding note in his anthropology. As Pierre DauberciesIf⁷⁴ and others have shown, Gregorian doctrine abandons the body-soul dualism of earlier patristic literature; and it also departs from the older Augustine's restoration of natural goodness to the human body—the Augustine who taught that sinful carnality assuredly afflicts the flesh but resides primarily in the soul. Signaling a new tendency in medieval Christian doctrine, Gregory recast the conflict between spiritual and carnal as that between heavenly and terrestrial. Created by God, both body and soul may be intrinsically good. Yet vice misleads them both to seek fulfillment in the perishable goods and pleasures of this world, regarding whose value—even when subordinated to higher, spiritual priorities—Gregory was emphatically pessimistic. For instance, Gregory acknowledged the sacramentality of marriage and the essential innocence of marital intercourse. “There ought to be legitimate coupling of the flesh for the sake of progeny, not pleasure; and bodily intercourse should be for the purpose of begetting children, not the satisfaction of vices.” Nonetheless, as Gregory had forewarned in the same paragraph, “even that licit intercourse of spouses cannot transpire without the pleasure of the flesh…[which] very pleasure cannot possibly be without sin.”⁷⁵ Unlike Augustine, given the continuous, all-embracing unity of his spiritual cosmology, Gregory could not make peace with a Christian modus vivendi that smacked of imperfection or mediocrity. In our present case,

sexual expression betrays the fidelity one owes God in both body and soul, for participation in God embraces the whole human personality. The body of the Christian enjoys a kind of physical unity in his stability in the body of Christ—so much so that the Christian himself, Christ's spouse, commits a form of adultery and disloyalty in possessing earthly loves…. Sexuality inevitably leads one toward the self-centered individualism of the family, with its web of ties to the secular world, its numerous burdens and anxieties. In contrast, the religious community possesses the tranquillity needed to realize man's highest vocations: contemplation, charity, and continence.⁷⁶

Pope Gregory accordingly called for rigorous regulation of human sexuality in particular and for the constant combat of body and soul against the lures of all worldly passion in general. Not without cause does Western history remember Gregory as the early medieval theologian of monasticism par excellence. In his view, monastic discipline extends the best, perhaps the sole, possibility for subduing worldly commitment, facilitating the truly spiritual, contemplative life, and reaping the supernal rewards of Christianity.⁷⁷

The foregoing discussion of doctrinal differences between Augustine and Gregory should by no means obscure the profound influence of the one upon the other⁷⁸, even in the matter of the Jews, but it should allow us to mitigate the seeming dissonance between the protection of Jews and Judaism in Gregory's correspondence and the insistently anti-Jewish instruction of his biblical commentaries. At the outset, one must take issue with the specific formulation of such presumed disparity: As ruler of Rome and head of its church, Gregory did not pursue a policy of protecting the Jews per se; rather, he pursued a policy that balanced privilege and restriction. If comparison with other churchmen and rulers has led historians to highlight his moderation in this regard, perhaps even to argue that it exceeded the limits permitted in imperial legislation, such an appraisal does not fairly estimate the sense of Gregory's ideas. His guideline of Sicut ludaeis reiterated the need to restrict the Jews even before it mandated their protection. As noted previously, Gregory deemed the status of the Jews in Roman law to be the translation of received Christian doctrine into public policy. Having narrowed the distance—and obliterated any presumed contradiction—between imperial and ecclesiastical history, the pope sought to maintain what he perceived to be an underlying Christian sense of right and equity in Roman law. Hence his appeals to treat both Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity “as justice would dictate [annuente iustitia]” and not to oppress the Jews—like any other rightful component of Roman society—“in unreasonable fashion [contra rationis ordinem].”⁷⁹

Alongside Roman law, Gregory also inherited from his predecessors long-established theological and exegetical traditions of Adversus ludaeos, most of which he incorporated unquestioningly into his own writings. And yet, as we have seen, the very monistic impulse that collapsed the barriers between Romanitas and Christianitas in his Catholic worldview—thus impelling him to enforce the statutory protection of the Jews—detracted in his thought from the doctrinal considerations that had undergirded Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness. Augustine had accorded the Jews a distinct, constructive testimonial function in a properly ordered Christian society, precisely because of those intermediate categories, imperfect but valuable nonetheless, that distinguished his biblical hermeneutic, his reading of terrestrial history, and his anthropology. Gregory, however, true to his postclassical “grammar of reconciliation and complementarity,” devalued the literal meaning of Holy Scripture, rejected the secular neutrality of historical events, and saw little redeeming social worth in the sexuality of the human body. From his exegetical vantage point, the Jews surely pursued and embodied the literal sense of the Bible, denying the reciprocity and continuity between Old Testament and New, thwarting the interests of the church.⁸⁰ Now that Christianity had spread as far as England, what pagans still required Jewish testimony to validate the scriptural evidence for Christianity?⁸¹ Gregory's reading of history similarly depreciated the Jewish contribution to Christendom. Set against his allegorical interest in the old dispensation, his historical concern focused on the new, Christian order, that which mediated the distance between this world and the other, extending from Christ's first appearance on earth until the second. Whereas Augustine likened the periods in a human life to the divisions of all of terrestrial history, Gregory posited the correspondence of the ages of a human being to those of the post-crucifixion church!⁸² This historical perspective invariably defined the Jew as obstructing the ministry of the incarnate Christ, even to the point of violent persecution and deicide. Christians are members of Christ, Jews of Antichrist.⁸³ Moreover, inasmuch as the church's victory over paganism and heresy, coupled with its having outlived the empire, suggested that the end of history was near, the conversion of the Jews loomed large and urgent as a final obstacle to be surmounted in advance of the second coming.⁸⁴ Finally, from the anti-terrestrial orientation of Gregorian anthropology, Judaism and Christianity could well appear antithetical. For the Jews, well recognized in late antiquity for their commitment to a life of marriage and sexual reproduction,⁸⁵ exemplified an ungodly dedication to the pursuits and pleasures of the material world. If Augustine in his later years proved less eager to designate the Jewish people as carnal, Gregory did so repeatedly and without reservation. In the days of Jesus, “the disbelieving people perceived the body of the Lord carnally [infidelis populus carnem Domini carnaliter intellexit], because they believed him to be completely human.”⁸⁶ So too in his own day, Gregory identified the Jews with Antichrist, and thus with the members of the body of the beast (membra carnium eius) of Job 41:14: “All the wicked, who do not arise in desire to understand their spiritual homeland, are the flesh [carnes] of this Leviathan.”⁸⁷

Whereas the Jew had provided exegetical and historical continuity in Augustinian thought, he now signified disunity and discontinuity in Gregory's Christian scheme of things. This pope's meticulous, perhaps obsessive concern for proper order, coupled with his veneration of tradition, perpetuated and institutionalized the right of Jews to live as Jews in Christendom. Yet the Jew of Christendom, whose survival Augustine had considered effectively harmless and instructive, endures as the enemy in Gregorian doctrine. The demeaning but otherwise restrained Augustinian descriptions of the Jews as book-bearing slaves, desks, librarians, and “guardians of our books” (capsarii, scriniaria, librarii, custodes librorum nostrorum) simply do not appear in Gregory's writings. His Jews serve the interests of Antichrist and the devil. To perfect Christian unity, the church must work vigorously to convert them, albeit while observing the practical dictates of “Slay them not.”

Augustine had constructed the Jew as a fossilized relic of antiquity, a Jew who, in fact, had never existed. Doctrinal and hermeneutical factors may have caused Pope Gregory the Great to retreat from the logic of these Augustinian constructions, but hardly in order to abandon the policy they had spawned. Ambivalence and contradiction continued to characterize constructions of Jews and Judaism in Christian theology; the constructions themselves, embedded in the dictates of Christian theology and hermeneutics, continued to enjoy a life of their own.

1. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de l'écriture, Théologie 41–42, 59 (Paris, 1959–64), I, 2:537–48 (quotation on 538). See also René Wasselynck, “L'Influence del' exégèse de S. Grégoire le Grand sur les commentaires bibliques médiévaux (vii^e-xii^e s.),” RTAM 32 (1965), 157–204.

2. Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (New York, 1962), p. 37.

3. Edward A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages New York, 1965), P. 35.

4. Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal lewry Policy, 1555–1593, Moreshet:Studies in Jewish History, Literature and Thought 5 (New York, 1976), p. xix and n. 12; Walter Pakter, Medreval Canon Law and the Jews, Münchener Universitätsschriften—Juristiche Fakulät—Abhandlungen zur Rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung68 (Ebelsbach, Germany 1g88), pp. 62 n.75, 91ff.; and Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels chrétiens et les luifs au Moyen Age (Paris, rggo), pp. 137ff. (esp. withn. 4). For a revisionist view of Gregory's Jewish policy, to be cited agaln below, see ErnstBaltrusch, “Gregor der Grosse und sein Verhältnis zum römischen Recht am Beispiel seiner Politik gegenüber den Juden,” Histortsche Zeitschrift 2591994), 39–58.

5. Previous treatments of Gregory and the Jews include Solomon Katz, “Pope Gregory the Great and the Jews,” JQR, n.s. 24 (1933–34), III-36; James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (London, 1934), pp. 210–21; Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, zd ed. (New York, 195–83), j:zgff., zqzff.; and Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis, Minn., 1977), pp 35–39.

6. Gregory, Epistulae 1.34, CCSL 140:42 (Shlomo Simonsohn, ed., ASJD, 492–1404, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies: Studies and Texts 94 [Toronto, 19881, p. 3). Here and throughout, I have followed the numeration of Dag Norberg, ed., Sancti Gregorii Magni Registrum Epistularum, CCSL 140–14oA; discrepancies from the numeration of the MGH are noted in 140 A:1182–83.

7. Gregory, Epistulae 2.45, CCSL 140:137 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, p. 7); cf. Codex theodosianus 16.8.9, in Amnon Linder, ed., The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation(Detroit, Mich., 1987), pp 189–91.

8. Gregory, Epistulae 1.45, CCSL 140:59 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404 pp. 4–5).

9. Ibid. 9.196, CCSL 140 A:750–52 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 19–20), Cf. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, pp. 287–89, 398–402; and see also Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, pp. 153–56 n. 5, and Jean Juster, Les Iuifs dans l’Empire romain: Leur condrtion juridique, économique et sociale(Paris, 1914), 1:3 53–390.

10. Gregory, Epistulae 13.13, CCSL 140 A:1013–14(Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 23–24).

11. Ibid. 8.25, CCSL 140 A:546–47 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp 15–16). On the subsequent history of the Sicut ludaeis bull and formula, see Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull Sicut Judaeis,” in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, ed. Meir Ben-Horin et al. (Leiden, Netherlands, 1962), pp. 243–80; and Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts 109 (Toronto, 1991), pp. 39–94.

12. Gregory, Epistulae 1.34, 1.45, 13.13, cited above, in nn. 6, 8, 10. On Gregory's conversionist policy toward the Jews, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens dunsle monde occidental, 430–1096 (Paris, 1960), pp. 95–99, 141–42; and Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, pp. 240–41. Even Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, p. 27, acknowledges the anti-Jewish character of this policy.

13. Gregory, Eplstulae 4.31, CCSL 140:251 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 10–11).

14. Ibid. 5.7, CCSL 140:273–74 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 11–12).

15. Ibid. 8.23, CCSL 140 A:543–44 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 14–15).

16. Ibid. 1.66.

17. Ibid. 13.1, CCSL 140 A:991–93 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 22–23); cf.also 3.37. I am grateful to Bernard McGinn for confirming the originality of this Gregorian description of the Antichrist.

18. Ibid. 3.37, CCSL 140:182–83 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp 8–9); see also 2.45, 4.9, 4.21, 6.29–30, 7.21, 8.21, 9.105, 9.214, 9.216. On Gregory's slave policy, see Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens, pp. 202–6, 328–29; Pakter, Medieval Canon Law, pp.91ff.; and Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, pp. 160–62.

19. See the discussion of Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, pp. 36–37, 156 nn. 58–60, about whether Gregory neglected the more stringent provisions of Justinian's legislation, enforcing only the more lenient statutes of the Codex theododianus; and cf. Juster, Les Juifs duns 1'Empire romain, 2:71–77, and Blumenkranz, juifs et Chrétiens, p.328f. See also below, n. 46.

20. Gregory, Epistulae 9.214, 9.216, CCSL 140 A:774–75, 779 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 20–21).

21. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, p. 38.

22. Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 1.2.1O-13, 1.12.1; M oralia in Job18.31.50–18.32.51, 27.27.51–27.28.52, 29.28.55.

23. Gregory, Moralia 9.28.44, see also 2.30.49–2.36.59, 30.9.32; cf. Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, p. 294, who claims that Gregory blamed only the Pharisees for the crime of deicide.

24. Gregory, Moralia 9.28.44.

25. Ibid. 4.11.21, CCSL 143:178; see also 6.19.34, 14.53.62, and Homilra in Euangelia2.22.3.

26. Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 1.6.2–6, 1.10.16; Moralia10.29.48, 11.19.30, 14.29.34, 14.39.47, 20.15.40, 27.14.26, 30.1.2–3, 33.28.49, 33.33.57. Gregory's comparison of the Jews to Isaac echoes the Augustinian motif cited above, chapter 1, n. 21.

27. Gregory, Moralia 6.4.5, CCSL 143:287, alluding to the armatus of Job 5:5 see also 1.36.51, 6.1.1, 9.28.44, 18.30.47, 27.26.49, 29.30.58, 30.25.72.

28. Ibid. 11.16.25, CCSL 143 A:600–601.

29. Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 1.1 2.6; Expositiones in librum primum Regum 3.5; Moralia 2.2.2, 2.36.59, 7.8.8–11, 11.41.55, 18.38.59–18.39.61, 21.2.5, 22.18.44.

30. Gregory, Moralia 9.33.49, CCSL 14g:qgo.

31. Gregory, Expositiones in librum primum Regum3.5; Homiliae in Hiezechihelem1.2.10–13, 1.12.6; Moralia 9.5.5, 27.14.26, 27.28.52, 33.3.7.

32. Gregory, Expositiones in librum primum Regum 2.49; Moralia 9.6.6.

33. Gregory, Expositiones in librum primum Regum 3.5; Moralia 6.21.36–6.22.37, 18.30.47.

34. Gregory, Moralia 9.5.5, CCSL 143:458–59; cf. praef. 5.12.

35. Ibid. 35.14.24–34 (quotation from 27, CCSL 143 B:1791–92); see also praef.10.20, 9.8.9, 19.12.19, 20.22.48, 27.14.26, 29.2.4, 30.9.32.

36. Ibid. 31.23.42, CCSL 143 B:1578.

37. See above, n. 17.

38. Gregory, Moralia 25.16.34, 27.26.49–50, 33.33.57, 34.4.8.

39. Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 1.12.7.

40. Gregory, Moralia 31.22.41, CCSL 143B:1578; see the lengthy description of the future works of Antichrist in books 33–34.

41. Katz, “Pope Gregory the Great,” p. 119; Parkes, Conflict, p. 219.

42. Robert A. Markus, “Gregory the Great and a Papal Missionary Strategy,”in The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, ed. G. J. Cuming, SCH 6 (Cambridge, England, 197o), p. 30; and Dahan, Les Intellectuels chrétiens, p. 138.

43. Parkes, Conflict, pp. 219–21; Baron, Social and Religious History, 3:24z n. 33.

44. Kenneth R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church: Papal Policy toward the Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Antisemittsm through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford, 1988), pp. 74–76; and Rosemary R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism(New York, 1974), p. 200.

45. See above, chapter 1, nn. 22, 24.

46. As quoted above, n. 7. This appears to be the only instance where Gregory qualified leges with the adjective romanae. Usually he wrote of Roman statutes simply as leges; see Thesaurus Sancti Gregorii Magni, Series A (formae), comp. Justin Mossay and Bernard Coulie, Corpus Christianorum-Thesaurus Patrum Latinorum, (Turnhout, Belgium, 1986), microfiche pp. 10106–7, 10114. Both Bachrach, Early Medieval JewishPollcy, pp. 35–38, and Baltrusch, “Gregor der Grosse,”have argued persuasively that Gregory's protection of the Jews actually exceeded the limits of both the Codex theodosianus and Justinian's Corpus iuris civilis, in fact contravening their restrictive statutes. In emphasizing that the leges of which he wrote were in fact romanae, might Gregory have recognized the uncertainty of the justification for his ruling of Sicut Iudaeis?

47. Cf. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews,” p. 74, and Alienated Minorrty, pp. 23–24.

48. See above, chapter 1, n. 36.

49. See above, chapter 1, n. 49.

50. Gregory, Epistulae 13.13, CCSL 140 A:10.

51. See the citations adduced by Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins (Basel, 1946), pp. 110–12.

52. Gregory, Expositiones in librum primum Regum 1.92, CCSL 144:107–8; cf. Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticistn, Art, and Literature(Seattle, Wash., 1981), p. 79.

53. Although I quote at length in the ensuing discussion from the most recent extensivestudy of Gregorian theology, Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection(Berkeley, Calif., 1988), readers should also recognize my debt to the contributions of other authors. These include Claude Dagens, Saint Greégoire le Grand: Cultureet expe'rience chrétiennes (Paris, 1977); Jeffrey Richards, consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London, 1980); William D. McReady, Signs of Sanctity: Miracles in the Thought of Gregory the Great, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studi-Studies and Texts 91 (Toronto, 1989); Robert A. Markus, “The Sacred and the Secular: From Augustine to Gregory the Great,” Journal of Theological Studres, n.s. 36 (1985), 84–96, and The End of Ancient Chréstianity (Cambridge, England, 1990); and Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, N.J., 1987), chap. 4.

54. Straw, Gregory, pp. 9–11.

55. Tilrnann Buddensieg, “Gregory the Great, the Destroyer of Pagan Idols: The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Architecture,” journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), 44–65. Among others, seealso Richards, Consul of God, chap. 4; Marc Reydellet, La Royauté duns la litétraturelatine de Sidone Apollinaire à Isidore de Séville,Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome 243 (Rome, 1981), chap. 9; Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West from the Sixth through the Eighth Century, trans. John J. Contreni(Columbia, S.C., 1976), pp. 145–57; and Dagens, Saint Grégoire, esp. chaps. 1–2, 7.

56. Gregory, Moralia 2.29.48, 6.18.3 I.

57. Straw, Gregory, p. 18.

58. Paul Meyvaert, “Gregory the Great and the Theme of Authority,” Spode House Review 3 (December 1966), 5. In addition to the works cited in notes 53–55 above, seealso Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, “A Confluence of Imagery: Exegesis and Christology Accordingto Gregory the Great,” in Gr égoire le Grand, ed. Jacques Fontaine et al., Colloquesinternationaux du C.N.R.S. (Paris, 1986), pp. 327–35; de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 21:53–98; and Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, jd ed.(Oxford, 1983), pp 32–35.

59. Gregory, Moralia, epist. ad Leandrum 3, CCSL 143:4; cf. the helpful comments of Jean Laporte, “Une Théologie systématique chez Grégoire,” in Grégoire le Grand, ed. Jacques Fontaine et al., Colloques internationaux du C.N.R.S. (Paris, 1986), p. 235.

60. Gregory, Moralia 29.2.4–29.3.5.

61. Ibid. 34.7.12, for instance.

62. Ibid. 1.16.23–24, 2.1.6, 27.43.71, 29.26.52, 30.9.28–34.

63. Ibid. 31.23.42.

64. Ibid. 34.12.23.

65. Ibid. 1.16.23–24, 35.16.36–39.

66. Ibid. 11.15.24.

67. Ibid. 18.40.61, CCSL 143 A:927–28.

68. Ibid., epist. ad Leandrum 5, CCSL 143:7.

69. Ibid, 18.30.47–48, CCSL 143 A:g16–17.

70. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, passim.

71. Markus, “Sacred and the Secular,” p. 93.

72. Richards, Consul of God, p. 69.

73. Ibid., p. 54; and see the more thorough discussion of Dagens, Saint Grégoire,chaps. 7–9.

74. Pierre Daubercies, La Condition charnelle: Recherches positives pour la théologied'une realite terrestre (Paris, 1958), and “La Théologie de la condition charnelle chez les maitres de haut Moyen Âge,” RTAM 30 (1963), 5–54.

75. Gregory, Epistulae 11.56a.8, MGH, Epistulae 2:340–41. On the importance of this letter in ecclesiastical tradition, see Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550-IIJO (Toronto, 1984), pp 35–36, 65.

76. Straw, Gregory, p. 134. On Augustine's defense of “Christian mediocrity,” see, above all, Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, passim.

77. In this regard, see also Robert Gillet, “Spiritualité et place du moine dans I'église selon Saint Grégoire le Grand,” in Théologie de la vie monastique, Théologie 49 (Paris, 1961), pp. 313–51; Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, gd ed., trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1982), pp. 25–36;and Matthew Baasten, Pride According to Gregory the Great: A Study of the Moralia,Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 7 (Lewiston, N.Y., 1986).

78. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago, 1971–89), 1:35off.

79. See above, n. 7; for Gregory's other uses of these two phrases, cf. Thesaurus Sancti Gregorii Magni, microfiche pp. 1177, 15840.

80. De Lubac's magisterial study of the Exeègéseméddieéual (21:53–128) proceeds almost directly, with minimal interruption, from the allegorical exegetical “‘barbarie’ desaint Grégoire” to the characteristically Jewish “bovinus intellectus” perceived by high medieval Christian theologians, which I discuss in part 3 of this book.

81. Cf. Gregory, Homilia in Euangelia 2.72.4–5: Now that Christianity is no longer persecuted and has spread throughout the world, the emphasis of Christian preaching must fall on the quality of the confession of faith, so that Christians will truly be the members of Christ. See also Moralia 34.4.8.

82. Ibid. 19.12.19, CCSL 143 A:970–71: “Sicut uniuscuiusque hominis, sic sanctae Ecclesiae aetas describitur. Parvula quippe tunc erat…. Adulta vero Ecclesia dicitur…. Universae quippe Ecclesiae…adolescentulae vocantur…. Cum in diebus illis Ecclesia, quasi quodam senio debilitata….”

83. See above, nn. 20, 36–38.

84. See the comments of Dagens, Saint Grigoire, pp. 352ff.

85. Cf. above, chapter 1, n. 118.

86. Gregory, Moralia 14.44.51, CCSL 143 A:729. Other references to the carnality of the Jews include Moralra 7.8.8; Expositiones in librum primum Regum 3.41, 3.473.63, 3.66, 5.99; and Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 2.9.2, 2.10.8.

87. Gregory, Moralia 34.4.8, CCSL 143 B:1738–39.