Gregory the Great

A Symposium

John C. Cavadini, John C. Cavadini

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780268077075
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

A group of renowned North American scholars gathered at the University of Notre Dame in 1993 for a symposium on Pope Gregory the Great (550-604). The essays collected in this volume are arranged in the order in which they were delivered, and several additional contributions are included as well. In these essays Gregory emerges as a figure both interpreting and interpreted: interpreting the past, receiving, synthesizing, and developing the teachings of earlier writers, and, by this very process, presenting a persuasive theological and pastoral agenda which itself inspires ongoing projects of interpretation and development in later periods up to and including our own.

1

ROBERT A. MARKUS

The Jew as a Hermeneutic Device: The Inner Life of a Gregorian Topos

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

Baudelaire

“It often happens that some half-baked thought of ours, not properly worked out, is quickly discredited by the opposition it encounters when it is prematurely paraded in public, and so, in trying to take shape too precipitately, it brings about its own demise.”¹ I take this warning from Gregory’s Moralia very much to heart in offering this paper. It is tentative, and intended as a signpost indicating the direction that further work might usefully take. I want to look at one of those topoi in the Gregorian corpus that anyone who has so much as dipped into it will find familiar, even overfa-miliar, for it is not only common in Gregory but also has a very respectable patristic ancestry. So let me begin by quoting one of its many occurrences in Gregory’s writings, chosen almost at random:

What does the holy Scripture daily bring home [insinuat] to the Jewish people but the darkness they are plunged into by their error? For [the Scripture] does not so proclaim the Redeemer by means of hidden and spiritual meanings [intellectus] that His incarnation, birth, passion, resurrection and ascension to heaven are not clearly shown. Nor are they so unreasonable [irrationabiles] that they cannot see that such excellent things befit the Redeemer; but they are blind, in that although they hear of the signs which blazed forth to announce the Redeemer to their fathers, they nevertheless do not believe their reality to have come about [esse non credant]. Thus they are blind not by failing to see what has been promised, but by not believing in its realization [non credendo exhibita].²

Or, as Gregory puts it more succinctly a few paragraphs further on, speaking of the priest Heli, though they have “the letter of the law,” they do not have “the state of illumination but the affliction of blindness [non … statum luminis sed lapsum caecitatis].”³ With all this we are, alas, only too well acquainted. The outward career of this patristic topos has, over the centuries, made a heavy contribution to the sinister stereotyping of the Jew in Christian literature. But here I shall consider not its outward, historical career but its inner life in Gregory’s own imagination. So let us try to subject it to the treatment recommended by Peter Brown and strip off the patina of the obvious that encrusts human thoughts and actions.⁴ Carole Straw has done so much to make Gregory far more surprising and interesting than we ever imagined, stripped away so much of the patina that the centuries have deposited on his thought,⁵ that I hesitate in trying to chip away a bit more. But Gregory’s Jew is, I think, still rather heavily encrusted. So I will try to tease out his inner life from Gregory’s writings.

Scripture as a Forest of Symbols

In speaking of Gregory’s Jew, I want to be clearly understood to have in mind the Jew in his writings, above all in his homilies concerned with the exegesis of biblical texts, rather than the Jew in the synagogues of Italian towns or on church lands, about whom he sometimes writes to his agents or to other bishops. The two belong to different worlds: one to the world of the still highly mixed urban and rural society of the sixth century, the other to the world of discourse of a long exegetical tradition. It is this second world I shall be concerned with, but first let me qualify the sharp distinction I have just made, and note that the two worlds do in fact overlap. To take one rather commonplace example: when Gregory is writing to the bishop of Naples to advise him how to deal with the Jews in his city, he tells the bishop, among other things, that when attempts are made at proselytism, he should seek to convert Jews using their own books to prove to them what he is saying.⁶ There is a whole hermeneutic tradition behind this very practical advice, precisely the sort of discourse I am concerned with; this should warn us against too sharp a division between discourse and praxis.

The tradition is most fully articulated in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana. Several of the papers given at the memorable colloquium on that book held at the University of Notre Dame in 1991⁷ fastened onto this very point; thus I should perhaps begin with a brief reminder. Such a reminder will also serve as a pointer to the very obvious fact that Gregory’s thought moves within a thoroughly Augustinian groove. For Augustine the freedom of a Christian is the capacity to see things in their true significance. To remain confined within the range of signs (or, more precisely, of the res that act as signs of further res) without understanding their further meaning Augustine considers a form of “miserable slavery of the soul.”⁸ This slavery is a refusal to look beyond the immediate, the given, the first meaning of the sign; it is a refusal of transcendence, of seeking the meaning of its meaning. It amounts to foreclosing on the possibility of seeing a significance beyond the immediately signified, of openness to a further reality signified by the referent in its turn being taken as signifier.⁹ Jew and Gentile are equally subject to this slavery, equally capable of being delivered from it.

What distinguishes the Christian from the Jewish community is an openness to the New Testament context within which the things spoken of in the Old Testament receive a further meaning. Lack of it is what Augustine calls the “servitude” of the Jewish people. This servitude keeps the Jews confined within the world of the Old Testament’s signs taken as the ultimate res, incapable of further signification. Even so, Augustine will assert, this servitude was profitable for the Jewish people, for they were obeying God, while the bondage of the Gentiles who remained confined to the world of created things could only remain sterile. But after the advent of Christ, the Jews remained stuck among the things that now were to be seen from another perspective, as signs of new realities. This was a premature closure of their biblical discourse, short of the new realm of meaning it would enter in the light of the Incarnation.¹⁰ It is from this servitude to the sign that “Christian freedom has liberated those it found in subjection to useful signs … by raising them, through interpreting the signs to which they were subject, to the things of which those signs were the signs.”¹¹ Captivity to the sign is inability, or refusal, to pierce its opacity; not knowing, or not seeking, the range of potential further meaning it can have in a larger discourse.¹² So the Jews who refused to understand the Old Testament as interpreted in the New remained captive to the closed world of its (nonetheless useful) signs.

This is the schema that underlies Gregory’s topos, though evidently without the sophisticated semiological scaffolding that it has in Augustine.¹³ We now have a very full and meticulous account of Augustine’s hermeneutical language and theory.¹⁴ A similarly painstaking examination of Gregory’s exegetical vocabulary and principles might yield some interesting comparisons. I suspect it would reveal a total lack in his writings of anything corresponding to either Augustine’s growing interest in literal exegesis or his increasing care in the use of terms such as allegoria and figura, amply documented in that meticulous study. The affinity between the two thinkers is real and considerable, but it must not be allowed to obscure the no less fundamental differences. I must here turn aside for a moment to confess that I have always been more deeply impressed by the almost unmeasurable distance that separates the intellectual worlds inhabited by the two thinkers than by their shared ideas, only to find, when I tried to define the difference, that somehow it melted away in the process. When you scratch Gregory, the blood you draw always seems to be Augustinian. And yet somehow the absolute gap persists, and cries out for description. This is precisely the case here. The conceptual scheme on which Gregory claims to construct his biblical exegesis is clearly based on Augustine’s, and his exegetical practice is quite often reminiscent of Augustine’s; yet, reading him, one is aware that one is moving in a totally different intellectual world. The problem is to define the difference.

On Augustine’s principles as propounded in the De doctrina christiana, exegesis should proceed on two levels. The first is the understanding of the human signs, the words written by the scriptural authors, and this study is where the exegete draws on the secular disciplines of the grammarian and rhetorician. But having once understood the words, the exegete will have reached another level of signification, for the things signified by the words are themselves signs: the signa divinitus data for the salvation of men. It is notoriously the case that Augustine’s own exegetical practice is very often out of line with his stated principles.¹⁵ This makes comparison with Gregory’s practice less illuminating than it might be. As an assiduous reader of Augustine, Gregory could find encouragement for his own exegetical procedures, even at their most baroque, without becoming aware of their often sharp divergence from the hermeneutic principles laid down, but very often ignored, by Augustine.

Take, for example, Gregory’s exegesis of chapter 14 in the first Book of Kings (that is, 1 Sam.). Turning aside from the bloody battle with the Philistines that is the subject of the narrative he is commenting, he quickly rises into the thinner air of his chosen theme: “because we are describing the course of a spiritual battle, we must continue what has gone before in what is to follow.”¹⁶ And continuing what has gone before is just what Gregory goes on to do, giving up the pretence of following the sequence of the text; it is no longer the text but the dynamic of his chosen theme that sets the hermeneutical framework. He is not often so explicit as this, but any reader of, for instance, his Moralia will be familiar with those sustained treatises on themes near to his heart that Gregory will every now and then indulge in. Grover Zinn has compared¹⁷ these “carefully crafted” passages of teaching—most importantly on the life of asceticism and prayer—to jewels set in their exegetical contexts. As he observes, it is tempting to remove these jewels from their settings, ignoring the genre and thereby doing violence to the peculiar quality of the interplay of Gregory’s thought with the biblical text that provides its matrix.

Gregory’s “constructs” (to use Zinn’s aptly chosen word) are “the result of a process of interpreting a sacred text for the edification … of Gregory’s audience of listeners and readers.”¹⁸ Zinn’s chosen case studies provide fine examples of how Gregory made selective use of multiple texts as “pegs” for his spiritual interpretations. Behind the appearance of arbitrary contrivance there is, very often, a carefully orchestrated complex of testimonia, further scriptural texts, that “serve a vital purpose of shaping, directing, and/or confirming Gregory’s perception of the meaning” of the text being commented on.¹⁹ Gregory’s commentary has its own rich and complex logic, but it is not that of the modern, or indeed the ancient, scriptural commentator. Whatever the exegetical cost, it is the continuity of the subject matter that dominates the sequence of the exposition. The treatise may have its origin in the text, but once it takes off from that diving board, the periodic returns to the text, under the guise of “figurative” exposition (I refrain, for the present purpose, from the finer distinctions Gregory makes between the different sorts of figurative exposition), are no more than polite obeisances toward the convention of the form. The text is mercilessly atomized and tortured to support a treatise disguised as commentary. This is not without good rhetorical warrant and precedent, but it is exegetical free-wheeling, all the same. Only very rarely does Gregory acknowledge that he is indulging in a digression—as he does in the notorious case of the thirty-fourth of his homilies on the Gospels. There he expounds the lost-and-found stories of Luke 15.1–10. Half-way through a rather fine sermon on repentance, a sermon well anchored in his text, he breaks off, with rather less than minimal support in his text, to expound the hierarchies of angels and their ministries, only to catch himself to admit, nine chapters later, just before the final vignette of the little story about penitence with which the sermon ends, that he has digressed.²⁰ Gregory’s homiletic exposition can, and often does, follow a path in its flight that manages to combine the logic of his text with that of his own thought; but the failure of the two to coincide must be so familiar to all readers of Gregory’s homilies that I will refrain from mutiplying examples.²¹

The modern reader may yearn for the captivity to the letter from which Gregory felt himself delivered,²² but we shall do better to try to follow him in his flight. He makes no secret of his destination: “those who seek the purity of the contemplative life are to be shown not the ordinary things about the sacred Scripture [non communia de sacro eloquio], but rather the higher and more sublime things, so that the more they are delighted by the superior goods [nobiliora] they hear about, the more ardently they might raise themselves to the heights by seeing.”²³ The text is a springboard for the contemplative, a flight from hearing to seeing. For Gregory, rising to its spiritual sense is a kind of homecoming. The Scriptures are a pleasant, cool forest: “Whenever we enter it by discussing it with understanding [intelligendo discutimus], what else are we doing than entering its refreshing shade to shelter from the heat of this world? There, reading, we munch the green shoots of its thoughts; expounding them we ruminate.”²⁴

This is not like Augustine. We risk obliterating the gulf that separates the two writers’ views on interpreting the Scriptures if we stop at the true observation that both of them see the Bible as a world of symbols that point beyond themselves to some realm beyond the letter. Gregory wanders about at his ease in the cool, green shade of the Scriptures—understood, of course, spiritually—in a world more real than that from which it provides a shelter. Here he is at home, he knows his way about its familiar paths, delighting in the flowers he ca...