Gregory’s Moralia explains in minute detail how and why humans have such terrible difficulty understanding that both acts of God—the misfortune and the reward—are equal manifestations of his benevolent love.70 Gregory would codify the cultivation of superior knowledge as the primary function and role of the elite Christian male.
Among Gregory’s many contributions to Western thought was the clear relationship that he described between God’s capacity to know caritas in all of its forms and the power that the Christian secular elite held within society as God’s representatives on earth. Gregory’s most pragmatic discussion of these matters came in the form of the small but highly influential treatise that he wrote on the subject of good earthly Christian leadership, the Regulae pastoralis liber.71 Gregory theorized in this book what kind of man could and should be a leader of Christian society.72 Following Christian ascetic ideology, he fully recognized the corrosive effect of the secular world on the soul, addressing the need to ward off this corrosion at all costs. But he was also deeply unsatisfied with the habit of the most devout Christians to flee to the cloister in fear. The world needed, he argued, its holiest of men to live among the people as moral guides—arbiters who could determine right moral action under God and aid souls in the achievement of salvation.
This ability to arbitrate right moral behavior, Gregory suggested, could be nurtured and developed through the proper positioning of body and mind—through, in effect, a toeing of the thin line that separated earthly and heavenly space. As the Eparchius story shows, there was still a tendency within contemporary Christian intellectual culture to associate true love of God with the special elite outsiders of the Christian community who withdrew from society. Gregory effectively merged this association with Augustinian notions of metaphoric New Testament interpretation.
A Christian pastor, says Regulae pastoralis liber, is a “neighbor” (proximus) to all in sympathy but exalted above all in contemplation. Through the “bowels” (viscera) of pietas, he transfers the sickness of others onto himself, and through “lofty speculation” (speculationis altitudinem), he aspires to see the invisible. He must neither despise the weakness of his neighbors nor forget his aspiration for higher pursuits. Like Paul in the New Testament, says Gregory, he is borne high through his contemplation of heaven, which is not visible to human eyes.73 “Behold,” he writes,
he is rooted in heavenly haunts, yet through the bowels of condescension he carefully studies the den of the carnal; and with compassion for that which, having himself been lifted up, he raises toward the spiritual, he turns the eye of his heart toward the haunts of the infirm. In contemplation he transcends heaven, and yet in his concern he does not forsake the carnal bed, because he is joined simultaneously to the highest and the lowest by the bond of caritas. By the strength of spirit within him he is vigorously snatched into the heights above, and by his pietas for others he is calmly rendered weak.74
The passage exquisitely encapsulates the ideology of worldly Christian authority that the Carolingians would adopt and transform for their own use. For Gregory, caritas is not simply “love” or “charity”; it is the very connective tissue that joins the human to both the spiritual and the material realms. Pietas is not “piety” or “pity”; it is the happy burden that anchors a human being to the earth and reminds him of his essential frailties. Caritas and pietas become metaphoric tethers in Gregory’s world—bonds that moor the elite Christian within a liminal space between worlds, rendering him simultaneously high and low, betwixt and between, and able to converse with both.
The Christian pastor had to dwell, to use another modern metaphor, on both sides of the fence that separated humanity from the Kingdom of Heaven. He had to occupy both the extreme and the center in order to do his work. Since worldly life could corrupt the soul, he needed to avoid excessive contact with it. To govern souls properly, he had to return periodically to cloistered space in order to cleanse himself of the poisons inescapably acquired through worldly leadership. He had to meditate daily on the precepts of scripture “so that the words of divine admonition might restore in him the power of solicitude and of provident circumspection toward celestial life, which the frequent enjoyment of a human way of life ceaselessly destroys.”75 Gregory states that a good pastor must take great care because in hearing the temptations and trials of others, he also opens his own mind to attack by these same temptations. “The same bathwater,” he says, “in which a multitude of people are washed is without doubt polluted itself, for while it takes on the filth of those bathing in it, it loses, as it were, the serenity of its cleanliness.”76 But this ought not deter a good pastor, for under God, “who nicely balances all things” (subtiliter cuncta pensante), the pastor is rescued from temptation by his misericordia (again, used in the Augustinian sense) for the temptation of others.77
It was a positioning of body and mind that mirrored precisely the higher knowledge that the pastor had to employ as part of his duties in saving souls. Gregory devotes the entire third book of the four that compose the Regulae pastoralis liber to pragmatic guidelines for the exhortation of the flock. As teacher (doctor), the pastor “ought to touch the hearts of his hearers out of one doctrine, but not one and the same exhortation, so that he might edify all in the one virtue of caritas”—that is, he must act with the inward disposition of New Testament love that Augustine discussed, but the form of his action must vary according to need.78 “One and the same exhortation is not good for all,” says Gregory; “for often what benefits some impedes others, because the herbs that might nourish one animal will kill another, and the gentle whistling that quiets horses can excite small dogs, and the medicine which cures one disease gives strength to another, and the bread that nourishes the fully-grown will kill infants.”79
This third book of the Regulae pastoralis liber works as a self-contained tutorial for helping the pastor understand the correct application of caritas for the benefit of the souls within his care. There is a difference between the love that he should show to the poor and the love that he should show to the rich; there is a difference between the love that he should show toward the joyful and toward the sad, toward subjects and prelates, servants and masters, the wise and the unlearned, the impudent and the bashful, those who are patient and those who are impatient, those who are whole in body and those who are infirm, even between the married and the unmarried.80 A pastor must study these differences carefully and learn them by heart so that he may best apply his art to the minds of his listeners. He is, suggests Gregory, a bit like the masterful musician who, through skill and practice, learns to pluck the different strings of the lyre with the proper force and technique and in the proper rhythm and order, so that they might create a harmonious tune.81
Indeed, the Liber demonstrates quite clearly that a pastor’s capacity as an arbiter of caritas derives not from special innate capacity but from assiduous study. It is his knowledge and higher comprehension of worldly physics, not mystical power, that separates him from his flock. Gregory was suggesting far more than the traditional compromise between the ancient ideals of the vita contemplativa and vita activa.82 He was articulating a new ideology of worldly Christian power and authority that linked ascetic principles with the capacity to bond and to connect on an emotional level with other human beings. His guiding metaphors were spatial: the elite Christian male danced a blurry line between worlds. He transcended the life of average folk in the same manner that the life of the shepherd transcends that of the sheep. And yet, he still had to remember his essential sameness with the rest of humanity. He lived in orbit around the world at the thin atmospheric edge of society—bound within its gravity but able to see and sometimes even to touch the heavenly stars above.
Conclusion
Gregory’s ideal of Christian discipleship developed from two key but somewhat paradoxical aspects of caritas: its association with ascetic world denial and its conceptualization as the very source of worldly authority. In trying to determine a compromise between its centripetal
