Gregory the Great

Bishop of Rome · 540–604

Gregory was the first pope to have been a monk, and he is often called the first of the medieval popes. He is ranked with Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine as one of the four great teachers of the Latin church. He sent the first papal mission to England, under Augustine of Canterbury, in 597.1

Gregory refused the title “universal bishop” when the patriarch of Constantinople claimed it, preferring to call himself “Servant of the servants of God.” Yet he took every opportunity to extend the power of his own office, including its civil power, and he held that the Roman bishop was Peter’s successor and head over the church.2 He enforced clerical celibacy, and his Pastoral Care, a book of instruction for bishops, became a manual for holy life throughout the Middle Ages.3

Gregory respected Augustine but read him through John Cassian. He taught a strong principle of merit:

He teaches almost juristically that God ‘inquires into the life of men simply by the quantity of merits.’4 Robert S. Frankson Gregory the Great

His Legacy

Gregory’s Augustinianism, softened by Cassian, became the theology of the medieval church: penance, ascetic self-denial, the merits of the saints, and purgatory, for which the Catechism of the Catholic Church still cites his Dialogues. It was this version of Augustine that Luther met in the monastery and finally rejected.5

Medieval Theologians

Notes

  1. Michael J. Vlach, “Historical Theology I: A.D. 100–1600” (course notes, TH 507, The Master’s Seminary, Fall 2007), “Gregory the Great”; Sam Storms, Studies in Roman Catholicism (n.p., n.d.), on Gregory. Summarized. ↩
  2. Storms, Studies in Roman Catholicism; James G. McCarthy, The Gospel According to Rome (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1995), on Gregory and John IV. Summarized. ↩
  3. Mark Galli and Ted Olsen, eds., 131 Christians Everyone Should Know (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2000), “Gregory the Great.” Summarized. ↩
  4. Robert S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ in Its Ecclesiastical Development, vol. 1 (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.), 139. ↩
  5. Vlach, “Historical Theology I,” “Salvation / Grace”; Gregg R. Allison, Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), citing Catechism of the Catholic Church 1031 and Gregory, Dialogues 4.39. ↩