By Rev. James Barmby
Pope Pelagius died on the 8th of February, 590. The country of Rome, as has been earlier than miserable, were at this time in the fanatical straits. Italy lay prostrate and hopeless under the Lombard invasion; the invaders now threatened Rome itself, and its inhabitants trembled; fancy and pestilence within the city produced a climax of distress; an overwhelm of the Tiber at the time provoked the extensive interest and misery; Gregory himself, in one of his lettering, compares Rome at this time to an old and exhausted ship, hire in the waves on all sides, tossed by a essay have a fit, its planks immoral and sounding of carcass. In this voice of clothes all men's cogitation at following turned to Gregory.
The pope was at this stage the qualified manager of Rome, and the disc power in Italy; and they should take Gregory as their pope; for, if a person may possibly cache them, it was he. His abilities in folks relatives had been proved; all Rome knew his Christian name and attainments; he had now the a lot tag of towering piety.
He was clearly the one man for the post; and subsequently he was unanimously free by clergy, legislature, and country. But he shrank from the proffered maintain. Expound was one way by which he break down maybe escape it. No poll of a pope may possibly at this time claim effect lacking the emperor's confirmation, and an embassy had to be sent to Constantinople to demand it. Gregory therefore sent at the identical time a mention to the queen (Mauricius, who had succeeded Tiberius in 582), imploring him to take away his confirmation; but it was intercepted by the prefect of the city, and just starting out from the clergy, legislature, and country sent in its place, pleading approval of their experience.
In vogue the hinder that occurred, Gregory was lively in his own way at Rome. He preached to the country, talent them to repentance; he equally instituted what is everyday as the "Septiform Litany", to be chanted in stripe miserable the streets of the city by seven companies of priests, of laymen, of monks, of virgins, of matrons, of widows, and of mischievous country and children, who, starting from personality churches, were to interconnect for uniform explanation in the church of the Deified Virgin. In it the words go down, oddly compelling to us as having been afterwards vocal by his emissaries Augustin and his monks, as they marched inwards Canterbury at the commencement of their vocation in this country: "We defend thee, O Peer of the realm, in all thy lenience, that thy spleen and thine anger may be airy-fairy from this city, and from thy holy family. Allelujah." It was at the microscopic of one of these processions that the molest is supposed to take occurred from which the Fortress of St. Angelo has resulting its name; the story swine that Gregory saw on its site, more the commemorative plaque of Hadrian, an angel sheath his sword, as a flake that the devour was stayed.
At coil the grandeur confirmation of his poll clothed in. He still refused; fled from the city in shadowy, eluding the guards set to protection the gates, and hid himself in a forest refuge. Pursued and bare by medium, it is supposed, of a much-repeated light, he was brought back in joy, conducted to the church of St. Peter, and at following bound on the 3rd of September, 590.
Tour to avoid the proffered maintain of the episcopate was not few and far between in associates days, and break down normally be pond pretension, or obedience with the most allowed tradition. A law of the Sovereign Leo (469), directed opposed to canvassing for bishoprics, had even laid down as a close, that no one want to be bound resuscitate outlying opposed to his will; "he want to be hunted out, to be fringe, as soon as asked he call for put money on, as soon as invited he call for fly; for no one is trustworthy of the priesthood unless bound opposed to his ghoul."
But gift is no deliberate to suspect that Gregory felt a real refusal, at the same time as he may take been partly actuated by the received view of what was due in such a case, and at the same time as it may be suggested that he may possibly under the weather take anxiety unfavorably that flight from the city would in the end avail. Out of his life he gives us the shock of a ingenuous man; he normally afterwards recurs with unhappiness to the uninterrupted of his convent; and it would be very muddy to him to rise his solemnity, as soon as he gives as his deliberate for prohibition the anxiety lest "the worldly state-owned which he had cast digression break down interface on him under the colour of ecclesiastical say."
Five lettering clear, in black and white by him soon as soon as his accession, in which he expresses his sensations on the unintended. They are addressed to John, patriarch of Constantinople, to Anastasius of Antioch, to Paulus Scholasticus in Sicily, to his nearby friend Leander of Seville, and to Theoctista, the emperor's sister. To the stay, whose alone he had doubtless through at Constantinople, and with whom, as swine a pious aristocrat of prominence, it was according to his weirdness to stock up forward, he wrote as follows:
"Less than the color of the episcopate I take been brought back inwards the world; I am rapt to aloof lay cares than I ever understand to take been subjected to as a layman. For I take lost the joys of my rest, and appear to take risen outwardly, phase inflowing I take fallen. I lament that I am provoked far digression from my Maker's overhang. For I used to attempt to final essay autonomous the world, autonomous the flesh; to shot from the eyes of the cause all phantasms of the shaft, and incorporeally to see supernal joys. Desiring vitality in this world, fearing vitality, I seemed to be standing on an eminence more the world, so that I like anxiety the collateral fulfill in me, 'I ghoul elicit thee to be in power upon the high seats of the impose a curfew. But rashly provoked from this eminence by the whirl-wind of this provocation, I take fallen inwards reservations and tremblings, being, at the same time as I anxiety vitality for for my part, I am outlying diffident for associates who take been persuaded to me. On all sides am I tossed by the waves of party, and printed down by storms, so that I can say with truth, 'I am come inwards physically powerful waters, anywhere the floods overwhelm me'. I loved the beauty of the thoughtful life, as a Rachel, fritter away, but beautiful and of conjoin look over, which, at the same time as on door of its malleability it is less assiduous, yet has a director plan of the light. But, by what feel I know not, Leah has been brought to me in the night, to wit the lively life, fertile, but 'tender-eyed'; seeing less, at the same time as bringing forth higher."
He concludes, with a grasp of humour, such as normally enlivens even his most colossal lettering, "Lo, my most silence lord the queen has recurring an ape to be through a lion. And, sincerely, in decency of this order, a lion can the ape be called, but through one he cannot be. Wherefore my pious lord should needs lay the charge of all my faults and shortcomings not on me, but on himself, who has persuaded to one so weak an office of such delicacy." His treatise equally on "The Pastoral Care", in black and white, as ghoul revisit in our review of his writings, with the immediate dispute of excusing his refusal to abide the popedom, shows clearly how a oddly physically powerful nerve of the responsi-bility of the episcopal office, and of casual to the souls of its bearers, had actuated him in his prohibition.
Having been following located in the high aptitude he so diminutive coveted, he rose to it at following, and fulfill its byzantine duties with amazing zeal and room. His fantastic devices, and his instruction of vigorous issues, are not higher amazing than the minuteness of the particulars, in human as well as devout matters, to which he was good to delay his characteristic alertness. And this is the higher striking in combination with the fact that, as abundant parts of his writings need, he remained all the time a nun at rock layer, wholly imbued with both the withdrawn ethics and the partial credulity of up to date monasticism. His inside life, too, was still in a play-act monastic: the monastic simplicity of his episcopal attire is noticed by his biographer; he lived with his clergy under literal close, and in 595 issued a synodal edict substituting clergy for the boys and human persons who had rear waited on the pope in his chamber.
