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By Root 3178 0

of Ravenna. Once, by way of exception, we find a letter to the bishop of Syracuse, in which Gregory defends himself instead of finding fault with others. The question at issue is a weighty one, namely whether 'Alleluia' should be said at a certain point in the mass. Gregory's usage, he says, is not adopted from subservience to the Byzantines, as the bishop of Syracuse suggests, but is derived from St James via the blessed Jerome. Those who thought he was being unduly subservient to Greek usage were therefore in error. (A similar question was one of the causes of the schism of the Old Believers in Russia.)

There are a number of letters to barbarian sovereigns, male and female. Brunichild, queen of the Franks, wanted the pallium conferred on a certain French bishop, and Gregory was willing to grant her request; but unfortunately the emissary she sent was a schismatic. To Agilulph king of the Lombards he writes congratulating him on having made peace. 'For, if unhappily peace had not been made, what else could have ensued but, with sin and danger on both sides, the shedding of the blood of miserable peasants whose labour profits both?' At the same time he writes to Agilulph's wife, Queen Theodelinda, telling her to influence her husband to persist in good courses. He writes again to Brunichild to find fault with two things in her kingdom: that laymen are promoted at once to be bishops, without a probationary time as ordinary priests; and that Jews are allowed to have Christian slaves. To Theodoric and Theodebert, kings of the Franks, he writes saying that, owing to the exemplary piety of the Franks, he would like to utter only pleasant things, but he cannot refrain from pointing out the prevalence of simony in their kingdom. He writes again about a wrong done to the Bishop of Turin. One letter to a barbarian sovereign is wholly complimentary; it is to Richard, king of the Visigoths, who had been an Arian, but became a Catholic in 587. For this the Pope rewards him by sending him 'a small key from the most sacred body of the blessed apostle Peter to convey his blessing, containing iron from his chains, that what had bound his neck for martyrdom may loose yours from all sins.' I hope His Majesty was pleased with this present.

The Bishop of Antioch is instructed as to the heretical synod of Ephesus, and informed that 'it has come to our ears that in the Churches of the East no one attains to a sacred order except by giving bribes'—a matter which the bishop is to rectify wherever it is in his power to do so. The Bishop of Marseilles is reproached for breaking certain images which were being adored: it is true that adoration of images is wrong, but images, nevertheless, are useful and should be treated with respect. Two bishops of Gaul are reproached because a lady who had become a nun was afterwards forced to marry. 'If this be so, … you shall have the office of hirelings, and not the merit of shepherds.'

The above are a few of the letters of a single year. It is no wonder that he found no time for contemplation, as he laments in one of the letters of this year (cxxi).

Gregory was no friend to secular learning. To Desiderius, Bishop of Vienne in France, he writes:

'It came to our ears, what we cannot mention without shame, that thy Fraternity is [i.e. thou art] in the habit of expounding grammar to certain persons. This thing we took so much amiss, and so strongly disapproved it, that we changed what had been said before into groaning and sadness, since the praises of Christ cannot find room in one mouth with the praises of Jupiter…. In proportion as it is execrable for such a thing to be related of a priest, it ought to be ascertained by strict and veracious evidence whether or not it be so.'

This hostility to pagan learning survived in the Church for at least four centuries, till the time of Gerbert (Sylvester II). It was only from the eleventh century onward that the Church became friendly to learning.

Gregory's attitude to the emperor is much more deferential than his attitude to barbarian kings. Writing to a correspondent