insisted on with recurrent emphasis. Thus Augustinianism is altered in form and barbarized.[1]
Gregory is throughout prefigurative of the Middle Ages, which he likewise prefigures in his greatness as a sovereign bishop and a man of ecclesiastical affairs. He is energetic and wise and temperate. The practical wisdom of the Catholic Church is in him and in his rightly famed book of Pastoral Rule. The temperance and wisdom of his letters of instructions to Augustine of Canterbury are admirable. The practical exigency seemed always to have the effect of tempering any extreme opinion which apart from it he might have expressed; as one sees, for example, in those letters to this apostle to the English, or in his letter to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, who had been too violent as to paintings and images. Gregory's stand is moderate and reasonable. Likewise he opposes the use of force to convert the Jews, although insisting firmly that no Jew may hold a Christian slave.[2]
There has been occasion to remark that decadence tends to join hands with barbarism on a common intellectual level. Had Boëthius lived in a greater epoch, he might not have been an adapter of an elementary arithmetic and geometry, and his best years would not have been devoted to the translation and illustration of logical treatises. Undoubtedly his labours were needed by the times in which he lived and by the centuries which followed them in spirit as well as chronologically. He was the principal purveyor of the strictly speaking intellectual grist of the early Middle Ages; and it was most apt that the great scholastic controversy as to universals should have drawn its initial text from his translation of Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle.[3] Gregory, on the other hand, was a purveyor of theology, the subject to which logic chiefly was to be applied. He purveyed matter very much to the mediaeval taste; for example, his wise practical admonishments; his
- ↑ A better Augustinianism speaks in Gregory's letter to Theoctista (Ep. vii. 26), in which he says that there are two kinds of "compunction, the one which fears eternal punishments, the other which sighs for the heavenly rewards, as the soul thirsting after God is stung first by fear and then by love."
- ↑ Ep. iv. 21; vi. 32; ix. 6.
- ↑ See post, Chapter 36., i.
