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238 exhaustively developed in the Medieval Church. And to meditation he added vigil and fast till his health was injured for the rest of his life. But the time, as he looked back to it again and again from the troubled world, seemed like a happy shore as seen by the storm-tossed mariner on the waves of a mighty sea. On the sea of public life indeed he was soon about to embark again.

First he was made one of the Seven Deacons who shared with the pope the governance of Rome, in charge of the seven regions of the city. For such a post few could have been so well fitted as he who had played so conspicuous a part in municipal life. This may have been in 578. In that year Benedict I died; while the city was in throes of plague and flood, and the Lombards were on the point of attack. Pelagius II, the new pope, determined to send to Constantinople, as his resident at the Emperor's court, one who knew so completely the needs and the dangers of old Rome. In the spring of 579 Gregory left Italy as the apocrisiarius of the pope. The six years, or more, during which he resided in the imperial city supplied perhaps the last and most important of the formative influences of his life. Tiberius II was emperor (578-582), Eutychius was patriarch (577-582). The papal envoy was theologian as well as statesman, and he controverted a theory of the latter that the resurrection-body would be impalpable, convincing at least the former so that he put the erroneous treatise in the fire. But while he did not neglect theology, for he also wrote while he was at Constantinople his famous Moralia, a commentary on the Book of Job, a very Corpus of Divinity in itself, containing also many wise saws and modern instances, he was more continuously and actively employed in studying the magnificent system of imperial government. In a city notorious for the luxury of the nobles and the political independence of the people, where public interest was divided between the controversies of theologians and the games of the hippodrome, he saw how the turbulent life of a fickle and arrogant population was guided, not always wisely, by ecclesiastics, and restrained with extraordinary and imperceptible tact by an army of officials who, when dynasties changed and the throne tottered, preserved the fabric of the imperial constitution through all hazards and gave for centuries the most marvellous example of constitutional organisation amid the confused revolutions of Medieval Europe. As a theologian Gregory made it his business to see and talk with heretics that he might win them to truth, contrary to the example of those among whom he lived, some of whom were "fired by mistaken zeal and imagine they are fighting heretics while indeed they are making heresies." As for his own theological controversies, if he entered upon them charitably he certainly took them seriously: John the Deacon tells that at the end of his dispute with the patriarch Eutychius he took to his bed from exhaustion. In 582 Eutychius was succeeded by a famous ascetic, John "the Faster," a Cappadocian. With him Gregory had no dispute till later days: but