GREGORY I., THE GREAT, a father and saint of the Roman Catholic Church, was born in the city of Rome about the middle of the 6th century. His father Gordianus was a senator of the same family as that to which Pope Felix III. had belonged, and his mother Sylvia was famed for her surpassing virtues. At a comparatively early age Gregory was appointed by the Emperor Justin II. to the important charge of pretor of Rome; but he voluntarily relinquished this office, and withdrew altogether from the world into a monastery at Rome, one of seven he had founded. 'He lavished on the poor all his costly robes, his silk, his gold, his jewels, his furniture, and not even assuming to himself the abbacy of his convent, but beginning with the lowest monastic duties, he devoted himself altogether to God.' This was probably about 575. It was while here that he saw one day some fair-haired Anglo-Saxon youths in the slave-market—'non Angli sed angeli'—and was seized with a longing to devote himself to the conversion of their country to Christ. He set forth on his journey, but the clamour of the Romans at his loss led the pope Benedict to compel his return, and eventually to enrol him in the secular ministry by ordaining him one of the seven Regionary Deacons of Rome. Benedict's successor, Pelagius II., sent Gregory as nuncio to Constantinople, to implore the emperor's aid against the Lombards. He resided three years in Constantinople, during which time he commenced, and perhaps completed, his Moralia, an exposition of Job. On his return to Rome he resumed his place as abbot of his monastery, and on the death of Pelagius, in a plague which laid waste the city, was unanimously called by the clergy, the senate, and the people to succeed him. He used every means to evade the dignity, even petitioning the Emperor Maurice to withhold his consent, but was forced to yield, and was consecrated September 3, 590.
Few pontiffs have equalled, hardly one has surpassed, Gregory I. as the administrator of the multiplied concerns of the vast charge thus assigned to him. 'Nothing,' says Dean Milman, 'seems too great, nothing too insignificant, for his earnest personal solicitude; from the most minute point in the ritual, or regulations about the papal farms in Sicily, he passes to the conversion of Britain, the extirpation of simony among the clergy of Gaul, negotiations with the armed conquerors of Italy, and the revolutions of the Eastern Empire.' There is no department of ecclesiastical administration in which he has not left marks of his energy and his greatness. To him the Roman Church is indebted for the complete and consistent organisation of her public services and the details of her ritual, for the regulation and systematisation of her sacred chants. The mission to England, which he was not permitted to undertake in person, was entrusted by him, with all the zeal of a personal obligation, to Augustine; and, under his auspices, Britain was brought within the pale of Christendom. Under him also the Gothic kingdom of Spain, long Arian, was reconciled with the church. Nor was his zeal for the reformation of the clergy, and the purifying of the morality of the church, inferior to his ardour for its diffusion. His letters, which are numerous and most interesting, are full of evidences of the universality of his vigilance. On the occasion of the threatened invasion of Rome by the Lombards he showed himself in act and in influence, if not as yet in avowed authority, a temporal sovereign. Against the memory of his administration of Rome a charge was formerly made, that in his zeal against paganism he destroyed the ancient temples and other buildings of the pagan city. But Gibbon confesses that the evidence is 'recent and uncertain;' and, indeed, the only authority to which Gibbon himself refers, Platina, simply mentions the charge in order to repudiate it. Though Gregory had a contempt for mere letters, and thought the oracles of God were above the rules of grammar, it is not true that he burned the Palatine Library in his hatred of pagan literature. As regards the general government of the church, Gregory reprobated very strongly the assumption by John, patriarch of Constantinople, of the title of Ecumenical or Universal Bishop, the more especially as the object of John in assuming this title was to justify an exercise of jurisdiction outside of the limits of his own patriarchate. In his writings, too, the details of the whole dogmatical system of the modern church are very fully developed. His Letters, and, still more, his Dialogues abound with miraculous and legendary narratives, which, however uncritical in their character, are most interesting as illustrating the manners and habits of thought of that age. With all his zeal for the diffusion of Christianity, Gregory was most gentle in his treatment of heathens and Jews, and he used all his efforts to repress slave-dealing and to mitigate the severity of slavery. He died March 12, 604. Besides his Moralia he left homilies on Ezekiel and on the Gospels, the Regula (or Cura Pastoralis), and the Sacramentarium and Antiphonarium. In exegesis he is a fearless allegorist. The best editions of his works are the Benedictine (4 vols. folio, 1705) and that in Migne's Patrologia (vols. lxxv.-lxxix.).
See the studies by Lau (1845) and Pfahler (1852); Rev. J. Barmby's little book in the 'Fathers for English Readers' (1879); Kellett, Gregory the Great (1889); the monograph by Abbot Snow, O.S.B. (1892); and Zöpffel's article in Herzog-Plitt's Real-Encyklopädie.