Dialogues

Introduction [includes Frontmatter]

THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH A NEW TRANSLATION VOLUME 39 THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH A NEW TRANSLATION Robert P. Russell, O.S.A. Villanova University Robert Sider Dickinson College EDITORIAL BOARD Hermigild Dressler, O.F.M. Quincy College Editorial Director Thomas P. Halton The Catholic University ofAmerica Sister M. Josephine Brennan, l.H.M. Marywood College Richard Talaska Editorial Assistant FORMER EDITORIAL DIRECTORS Ludwig Schopp, Roy J. Deferrari, Bernard M. Peebles SAINT GREGORY THE GREAT DIALOGUES Tra,nslated by aDO JOHN ZIMMERMAN, O. S. B. THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS Washington, D.C. NIHIL OBSTAT: IMPRIMATUR: June I, 1959 JOHN A. GOODWINE, D.D. Censor Deputatus ~ FRANCIS J. SPELLMAN Archbishop of New York Copyright © 1959, by THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS, INC. All rights reserved Second Printing 1983 First paperback reprint 2002 ISBN 0-8132-1322-3 INTRODUCTION [11REGORY THE GREAT (540?-604) is one of the strong . men whom God raises up periodically to guide His w Church and her members through periods of crises. His social and intellectual background and his spiritual formation prepared him well for the work awaiting him as supreme shepherd of God's flock. When he was about thirty-five years old, he resigned from the high political office held, as Prefect of Rome, to enter religious life. He founded six monasteries on his estates in Sicily and turned his own home on the Caelian Hill in Rome into the Monastery of St. Andrew. Then, after distributing the rest of his wealth among the poor, he entered St. Andrew's as an ordinary monk and lived there under the Rule of St. Benedict, which he was later to praise for its discretion. In 578 Pope Benedict I ordained him one of the seven deacons of Rome, and the next year Pope Pelagius II sent him as nuncio to the imperial court at Constantinople, where he remained for six years. Shortly after his return to Rome, be became abbot of St. Andrew's and five years later, when Pelagius II died, the clergy and people of Rome elected him Pope. v vi SAINT GREGORY During a pontificate (590-604) which kept him very active in administering the temporalities of the Church, he was ever deeply concerned with the temporal and eternal welfare of his people. He had them in mind in particular when he wrote the Dialogues, the first three books of which contain accounts of the lives and miracles of various Italian saints, and the fourth an essay on the immortality of the soul. It is clear from the general preface in Book 1 that St. Gregory's chief reason for writing the Dialogues was to honor the memory of the saints of Italy and to edify and instruct his fellow countrymen. He wanted them to realize that they were living in a land of saints and that great miracles were as numerous among the Fathers of Italy as they had been among the Fathers of the Desert and elsewhere. The book was also written to comfort and encourage the people of Italy during one of the most disheartening periods of their history. The wars between the Emperor Justinian and the barbarian Goths for the mastery of the country had left much of it a wilderness. Men and women had to live in constant dread of the savage Lombard hordes that swept down into Italy in 568 and were still slaying and pillaging wherever they turned. Floods and plagues and a long series of famines added to the general gloom. Many even felt that the final destruction of the world was at hand. After reading in the first three books of Dialogues about the many striking miracles performed in their very midst, they would no longer question God's unfailing protection of His people. Then in Book 4 St. Gregory endeavored to strengthen their faith in the unseen hereafter by proving that the soul does not perish with the body and can look forward to eternal happiness. Gregory presented his material in the form of a dialogue, a literary device quite common among the pagan classical authors as well as among the Fathers of the Church. The INTRODUCTION Vll discussions take place between the author and his deacon Peter, and, as in the case of...