Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome by George E. Demacopoulos (review)

Pope Gregory the Great has warranted an explosion of historical attention in the past three decades. Recent scholarship has focused on questions of continuity—was Gregory a late-antique leader or a medieval one? A Roman bishop or Byzantine patriarch? A classical scholar or Christian exegete? A spiritual teacher or pragmatic ecclesiastical manager? This volume is a welcome addition to the mix and represents George Demacopoulos’s third major publication on Gregory. In his well-received Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church (Notre Dame, 1977), Gregory’s activity as spiritual guide of clergy in the Pastoral Rule was the fifth model under consideration. Demacopoulos’s second major book, The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, 2013), offered a critical rereading of claims for papal primacy by three bishops of Rome: Leo the Great (440–61), Gelasius (492–96), and Gregory (590–604).

The most recent volume appraises the questions posed above as false binaries (p. 11), in much the same way as did the authors of the recent Brill publication, A Companion to Gregory the Great, edited by Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo (Leiden, 2013), to which Demacopoulos made a valuable contribution. Eschewing a traditional narrative history (as in, for example, Barbara Müller, Führung im Denken und Handeln Gregors des Grossen [Tübingen, 2009]), Demacopoulos opts here for a historical theological approach that garners evidence equally from Gregory’s vast register of letters (the largest surviving from late antiquity) and his pastoral, homiletic, exegetical, and hagiographical works. This gives a rich and variegated picture of the administrative rigors of the Roman episcopacy at the end of the sixth century and beginning of the seventh, as well as reflecting the more existential problems that Rome’s dwindling power raised for its church, its inhabitants, and its leaders. Demacopoulos approaches these problems with sympathy and nuance, and provides an excellent account of three aspects of Gregory’s pontificate: his ascetic, pastoral, and civic roles. In part 1, Gregory’s own brand of asceticism, which valued public service rather than detached spiritual progress, is shown as central to his theology. In part 2, Demacopoulos demonstrates that

Gregory’s pastoral theology was inextricably linked to an ascetic outlook that both measured the worthiness of a potential candidate for spiritual leadership in terms of his ascetic credentials and encouraged a type of spiritual instruction that emphasized moral reform through ascetic means.

(p. 81)

It is argued in the third part, not unexpectedly, that Gregory’s ascetic formation and pastoral concerns informed every aspect of his response to the civic problems of Rome (p. 157).

The introduction (pp. 1–11) presents a useful overview of the history of scholarship, from the opposing camps of Erich Caspar and Walter Ullmann, to more recent debates in European and North American scholarship. Perhaps the only shortcoming for this reader was the infrequency of lengthy quotations from Gregory’s own writings. Short snippets abound such as in the discussion of Gregory’s use of ascetic idioms in his exegetical treatments of the Fall (p. 22). This is a handy synthesis but was a little surprising, given that Demacopoulos professes to employ the tools of discourse analysis, where literary context, precedents and rhetorical devices are all brought under the historical microscope. It is an approach to the text that can be very illuminating and would have been strengthened by more citations of the Latin in translation.

This is only a minor quibble, however, and need not detract from the enjoyment and profit to be gained from a well-presented and tightly argued account of a multi-faceted bishop, whose legacy still has much to contribute to discussions of best practice in spiritual leadership, not least in the current Roman ecclesiological context.