The Roman Church in the Seventh Century: the Legacy of Gregory I

Abstract

The posthumous reputation of Gregory the Great presents a sharp but possibly insufficiently appreciated contrast. On the one hand, there is the Anglo-Saxon historical tradition which, through the Carolingian world and the eleventh-century reformers, has prevailed to the present day. The Gregory of Aldhelm of Malmesbury and of the Anonymous of Whitby, is ‘the teacher of the English’, ‘our own St. Gregory’, ‘this apostolic saint of ours’ who ‘on the Day of Judgement … will bring us, the English nation whom he has taught, to present us to the Lord’. By the English mission he had brought the English into the community of Christian nations and was seen as the initiator of the new missionary apostolate which Bede's contemporaries were consciously perpetuating on the Continent; as the source for the life of St. Benedict he was of major interest to those who had made peculiarly their own Benedict's monasticism. He is in a sense the immediate founder of all things; in an age which was losing the perspective of the secular as its historical horizons shrank, he was a principal link in a new chain of authority and legitimacy which extended back to St. Peter. His legend and prestige as a founding authority spreads and assumes diverse forms in unlikely places.

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