Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 11.36) of 601, to *Augustine (first bishop of Canterbury, ob. 604 or 609, S02766), warns him against pride, after hearing reports that he has begun to perform miracles; later excerpted in the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, writing at Wearmouth-Jarrow (north-east Britain), 731. Written in Latin in Rome.
E07401
Documentary texts - Letter
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters, 11.36
Extract from a long letter warning Augustine of the danger of pride in the fact that he can effect miracles:
GREGORIUS AUGUSTINO EPISCOPO ANGLORUM
[...] Scio enim quia omnipotens deus per dilectionem tuam in gente quam eligi uoluit magna miracula ostendit.
Vnde necesse est ut de eodem dono caelesti et timendo gaudeas et gaudendo pertimescas: gaudeas uidelicet, quia anglorum animae per exteriora miracula ad interiorem gratiam pertrahuntur, pertimescas uero, ne inter signa quae fiunt infirmus animus in sui praesumptione se eleuet et, unde foras in honorem tollitur, inde per inanem gloriam intus cadat. [...] Non enim omnes electi miracula faciunt, sed tamen eorum nomina omnium in caelo tenentur ascripta. [...]
'Gregory to Augustine, bishop of the English
... For I know that almighty God has revealed great miracles through your Beloved in the nation that he wanted to be chosen. From this, it is necessary that you should rejoice with fear over that heavenly gift, and should be most fearful in rejoicing. You should rejoice, of course, because the souls of the English are being drawn to inner grace through external miracles. But you should be greatly afraid, in case among the miracles that appear, a weak mind puffs itself up into pride, and where it is raised to honour externally, there it collapses through vainglory ... Not all of those chosen work miracles, but the names of all of them are kept registered in Heaven ...'
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 926.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 2, 779-82.
Miracle during lifetime
Unspecified miracle
Miracles causing conversion
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
Ecclesiastics - Popes
Theorising on SanctityConsiderations about the nature of miracles
Source
Gregory's Register is a collection of some 854 of his letters as pope, collected into 14 books (each book representing an indictional year of his pontificate, from 1 September to 31 August) of varied length and deriving from the file-copies that were made in Rome and kept in the papal archive. The original copies survived into the 9th century, but were subsequently lost. From the late 8th century onwards, however, because of the exceptional stature that Gregory had by then attained, various collections were assembled from the original copies (the largest under Pope Hadrian I at the end of the 8th century), and these constitute the Register as we have it today.The Register does not contain all the letters that Gregory despatched as pope, since some whose text survives refer to others which are lost; but the collection we have is unique from the late antique period, and only matched in quantity and range of subjects by the registers of high-medieval popes. Recipients range from papal administrators, through prominent churchmen and aristocrats, to kings and the imperial family, and treat a wide variety of topics, from the mundane administrative affairs of the papal patrimony to deep theological and moral considerations.
For the cult of saints, there is much that is of interest in the letters, but two particular concentrations of evidence stand out. The first is a clutch of around a dozen letters that mention requests for relics from Rome, or that accompanied small personal relics as gifts to influential correspondents. The second concentration of evidence relates to the dedications of churches and other ecclesiastical institutions in southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Because the papacy owned extensive estates in these regions, and exercised particular authority there, many of Gregory's letters mention churches and other ecclesiastical institutions by the name of the saint to whom they were dedicated, thereby providing us with a rich panorama of the spread of both local and imported saintly cults.
Gregory's Register has been the subject of two substantial critical editions: the first by Ewald and Hartmann for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; the second by Dag Norberg for Corpus Christianorum. The numbering of the letters is often the same in both editions, but it can differ, because Norberg removed letters (and other passages) that appear to have been added at a later date to the original Register, assigning them instead to Appendices. We have used Norberg's numbering, which is that now generally used.
(Bryan Ward-Perkins)
Discussion
This document holds a special value as a contemporary letter to a living, miracle-working figure, one perhaps already becoming recognised as a saint. Whether we might consider it as evidence for a nascent 'cult' is less clear: but the stories which brought the news of Augustine's purported miraculous powers to Gregory may well have originated in very early cultic activity in Canterbury, while Bede's later decision to include this excerpt in his History may attest to a general recognition of Augustine as a saint by the turn of the 8th century.Bibliography
Edition and translation of Bede:Colgrave, B., and Mynors, R.A.B., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Editions of Gregory's letters:
Ewald, P., and Hartmann, L., Gregorii I papae registrium epistolarum, 2 vols (Berlin, 1881-99).
Norberg, D., S. Gregorii Magni, Registrum epistularum. 2 vols. (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140-140A; Turnhout: Brepols, 1982).
Translation of Gregory's letters:
Martyn, J.R.C., The Letters of Gregory the Great, 3 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004).
Further reading:
Mommsen, T., "Die Papstbriefe bei Beda," Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 17 (1892), 387-96.
Story, J., "Bede, Willibrord and the Letters of Pope Honorius I on the Genesis of the Archbishopric of York," English Historical Review 127 (2012), 782-818.
Benjamin Savill
19/02/2019
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S02766 | Augustine, first bishop of Canterbury, ob. 604 or 609 | Augustinus | Certain |
|---|
Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
Benjamin Savill, Cult of Saints, E07401 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E07401