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 THE GREAT 69

in the spirit of the Rule. The incalculable service thus rendered to all time is not ascribable either to monasticism's holy founder nor to his imitator, Pope Gregory. Nothing was further removed from cither's mind than the thought of rescuing the treasures of antique culture. For the Pope, the care of souls was the art of arts, and this he taught and practised as a friend of wisdom dwelling in simplicity. His Regula Pastorates was the wise, nobly proportioned basic text of pastoral action he bequeathed to the Catholic Church. The whole Middle Ages were to drink deep from all his writings, so notable for their lucidity, their warm spiritual content and their gracious and force- ful form. Yet there was also a tendency toward the primitive in the nature of this preacher standing above the ruins, and this tendency had a profound and lasting effect upon the devotions of the Church. Gregory did all he could to make men love the Invisible, but he like- wise did all he could to make the Invisible visible. In this respect he satisfied a natural human desire to give outward expression to the inner life, but he also increased the danger that the external might affect the interior life and so helped to lay the foundation for a later reversal to the opposite danger. Still more serious is the fault that lies in his legalistic, often mathematical view of what Heaven will do for men who do something for it. Nevertheless it became evident as time went on that Gregory had done the "state of the Lord" a service when he gave it a form more discernible by the senses and more op- timistic from the religious point of view than the tragic Civitas Dei of the more intellectual Augustine. The Church also owes him undy- ing gratitude for what he accomplished as the fashioner of her liturgy and the restorer of liturgical music.

As a shaper of ecclesiastical policy, Gregory cut deep and broad across the life of history. Previous Popes had summoned this experi- enced official from the retirement of the cloister to curialistic and dip- lomatic service. He spent six years in Constantinople as Papal am- bassador and here gathered information, insight into human nature and breadth of vision for the tasks he was to perform in Rome later on. Upon his return he directed the affairs of the Roman See as Sec- retary to Pope Pelagius II. Then in 590 he himself became Pope at the age of fifty. Now he experienced the truth of his own saying:; "Men listen gladly to one they love." In view of the economic col-

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