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Volume 33, Number 1 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
January 2005 |
Who Wrote the Dialogues of St. Gregory?
A Report on a Controversy
by Terrence Kardong, O.S.B.
To judge from its title, this article does not offer much promise of coherence. If St. Gregory did not write the Dialogues of St. Gregory, then who did? The question may resemble the old chestnut about “Who is buried in Grant's Tomb,” but it is in fact not nonsense. For in the last twenty years a British scholar named Francis Clark has carried out a relentless and effective attack on the Gregorian authorship of the Dialogues. I think he has proven his point.
Although Clark's work is massive and complicated, this article is intended to provide a simplified sketch of its main points to an audience that may not have kept up with the controversy. As might be expected, Clark has met with determined opposition in his revision of the received wisdom. Because of our goal of simplification, we will not detail the opposition, but not mentioning it would leave a false impression.
Our plan of work involves the following: First, we will supply a few notes on the
early history of the controversy; Second, we will discuss the internal textual evidence
of the non-
The Early History of the Controversy
According to the standard accounts found in almost all books on Benedictine history,
the saint himself died about 547 A.D. at Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples.
As he foresaw in a vision, his abbey was destroyed by the Lombards about 580, and
the monks fled to Rome for shelter. Soon after that in 593, Pope St. Gregory the
First, himself a monk, took it upon himself to write the Life of St. Benedict. Although
this vita is a free-
Again following the standard account, the immense prestige of St. Gregory in the
Latin Church gave the Dialogues and the Rule of St. Benedict, which it promotes,
such a cachet that the Benedictine movement quickly spread north over Europe. This
triumphant progress culminated in the imperial monastic Synod of Aachen in 816-
This is the early history of the Benedictines that has been taught in our novitiates and in our popular pamphlets for hundreds of years. It is almost certainly being repeated at this very moment somewhere, but it is the purpose of this article to make it harder to repeat it much longer. Perhaps some readers are probably already shaking their heads in sad dismay over the perverse need of the professors to debunk all our favorite stories.
Admittedly, St. Gregory's Dialogue II is a beloved text and one is wary of tampering with it. But it should be remembered that even though few modern monastics ever read them in their entirety, the Dialogues contain much more than the Life of St. Benedict. In fact, they present dozens and dozens of Italian saints, many of whom are prodigious miracle workers. Moreover, Dialogue IV is a rather astonishing grab bag of stories about the next world and its inhabitants in which ghosts abound. It is an extremely bizarre collection of stories to illustrate Christian eschatology.
A long time ago, in the 16th century, a church historian named Melchior Cano put
forth the opinion that St. Gregory the Great could hardly have written this material.
Cano knew that Gregory was a sober, well-
It was not long before Cano was joined by Protestant historians such as Ulrich Cocceius, who shared his distaste for the Dialogues. But in the 19th century, Protestant church historians like Adolph Harnack took a different tack. They agreed that the Dialogues are full of superstition, but they did not try to deny Gregorian authorship. They were happy to discredit him as well, calling him the “Father of Superstition.” In fact, Gregory became infamous in certain circles as the “Father of Vulgar Catholicism,” in other words, the Middle Ages.
In response to this barrage, Catholic defenders of the Gregorian authorship of the Dialogues pointed out that whatever we might think of the book, Gregory has to be its author since it was attributed to him by outside references very soon after its publication. Much of the work of the defenders consisted in uncovering witnesses from the seventh century following Gregory's death in 604, and cobbling them together into a solid bulwark. Many of these documents are impressive, but Clark contends that they are, every one of them, forgeries, purposely created to secure Gregory's name to the Dialogues.
What then is the real provenance of the Dialogues according to Clark? In his opinion, the document was concocted about 680 A.D. in the papal archives (scrinium)in Rome. It was probably written by an official who wished to exalt the local Italian saints and to counteract the Byzantine spiritual influence that was very strong in Rome in the seventh century. Further, the Dialogues have nothing good to say about the Lombards, who were the current political power at that time.
One problem that might be raised against the alleged anti-
Before we proceed to provide some of the details of Clark's argument, it should be noted that the British savant does not contend that the Dialogues are merely a useless piece of deception. They are a deception, but they have their own value as a religious narrative. Indeed, Adalbert de Vogüé, the staunchest opponent of Clark's thesis, has written a brilliant analysis of the Dialogues in which he shows that the author is perfectly capable of telling a nuanced and spiritually penetrating story.
The Internal Evidence
Anyone attempting to argue against the Gregorian authorship of the Dialogues on the
grounds of style runs into a curious fact that the Dialogues do not have a unified
style. Instead, they are an amalgam of passages that can only be called “demotic,”
that is, folk-
Since the very form of the Dialogues alternates between story and commentary by Gregory and his deacon, Peter, scholars have tried to use that as the basis of the language split. But it does not work, since we find both high and low discourse in both sectors. Others have claimed that someone as sophisticated as Gregory could easily write on two levels. After all, modern novelists can do so. Why not he? Again, it is not so simple as that. For there are linguistic indicators such as little connecting words, the obiter dicta, that can hardly be consciously manipulated by an author. The strong suspicion is that the document was written by two different people and one of them was not Gregory.
Francis Clark thinks he has found the solution to this conundrum, and it may indeed be the key to his whole thesis. He claims that the real author had full access to the archives where Gregory's papers were stored; that made it possible for him to excerpt many passages from the authentic papers and insert them into his narrative. This in itself is clever, but even more clever is the fact that he only copied these from unpublished Gregorian papers. And so someone who knows Gregory's style very well recognizes that these passages are authentic, but they are not found anywhere in the published work.
In order to prove his point, Clark has published 81 of these IGPs (inserted Gregorian passages) in his mammoth first work on the subject. He went on to analyze every one of them, showing how they differ from their surroundings in the Dialogues. Since these IGPs amount to about 25% of the total, no one can complain that Gregory is absent from the text. I think that it is extremely significant that de Vogüé has publicly refused to examine these passages.
Why would anyone go to lengths to fabricate a pious document? Apparently, such activity was quite common in the seventh century, and it was not considered in any way disreputable. In fact, the papal archives was a veritable publishing house, providing “authentic” documents for pious petitioners from all over Europe. Just as people in the early medieval ages greatly coveted the bones of the martyrs from the Roman catacombs, so too they cherished hagiography loaded with miracle stories.
Actually, the high frequency of miracles in the Dialogues has always been something of a bone of contention. The modern reader typically feels uneasy in such an atmosphere, but it is well known that the Middle Ages reveled in miracle stories. What is not so well known is that Pope Gregory himself did not. Clark says that in his authentic writings, Gregory displays not the slightest interest in signs and wonders. Gregory may have been the “Father of the Middle Ages,” but that does not mean he loved miracles.
It so happens that Gregory was not alone in his discomfort with legendary hagiography.
Shortly after his time, the so-
How can Clark be so sure that the Dialogue was written by an official of the papal archives? Simply because so much of the document is written in the style of a functionary and not a great writer like Gregory. As Vogüé himself complained, parts of the Dialogues very much resemble the typical curial style, especially with its officious and excessive internal referencing: “As we said in the above paragraph.” In the same vein, the Dialogist grossly overuses syntactical connectors, but Gregory himself, in his indisputably authentic writings, does not fall into this stylistic morass.
In addition to this, we might mention that the curial style included a lavish use of ecclesiastical titles, to the point that it becomes a burden for the reader. As for Gregory, even though he is Pope, he does not seem to be much concerned with these titles. Vogüé claims that the Gregorian papal letters also feature a heavy usage of such titles, but Clark is quick to rejoin that this is not surprising since the curial secretaries (and not the Pope himself) wrote many of those letters.
There are other signs as well that the Dialogues were produced by someone thoroughly
imbued with the spiritual sensibility of the seventh century, not the sixth. For
example, there is the great emphasis on witnesses to the stories. As with so many
of the pious lives (called gesta) of the period, the Dialogues are constantly citing
well-
Not only that, the spiritual world that the Dialogues creates is quite different
from the one that St. Gregory himself knew and cared about. When reading the Dialogues,
one sometimes gets the impression that the wonder-
Yet this was allegedly written by the Pope, and this particular pope, Gregory, was an extremely well organized pope. His collection of official letters shows that he was very careful to observe the proper canonical boundaries and also quite jealous of his own prerogatives. To have Gregory writing admiringly of an Equitius, who preached without license from his bishop, is to stretch the credulity of the informed reader.
As a final example of the kind of material that exists in the Dialogues, but which would have probably driven Pope Gregory to distraction, we must mention the eschatology of Dialogue IV, the most problematical section of the document. Indeed, it is of barely marginal orthodoxy, even though it has had unwarranted influence on later Catholic spirituality. For example, Dialogue IV teaches the efficacy of “Gregorian Masses.” Allegedly, 30 Masses offered on 30 consecutive days is more efficacious than 30 offered at random. But only if there is no break in the series. If there is, one must start over. And of course, all this will cost you a bit more than the ordinary tariff.
But probably the worst aspect of Dialogue IV is the fact that the dead keep returning from the next world to report on their experience. Now, the official Church may claim to know a few things about the nature of the Last Things and the next world, but she never says that anyone has come back to tell the story. Yet Dialogue IV is full of ghosts and goblins, more fit for Halloween than Butler's Lives of the Saints. As for Gregory, he never, never displays this kind of na‹ve credulity elsewhere. It is virtually incompatible with his fine theological mind and sensibility.
External Evidence
One of the favorite documents clung to by the defenders of Gregory's authorship of
the Dialogues is the so-
As for Clark, he thinks he must reject it as spurious. The reason is simply this: Sicily was one of the most important provinces of the Holy See, and Bishop Maximian was the virtual governor of the island. In 593, Pope Gregory was desperate for grain to feed the starving refugees that flooded the capitol ahead of the Lombard invasion. How could he even think of asking the Bishop of Siracusa to come to Rome to swap pious stories?
Behind this suspicious case is the highly dubious claim made by Dialogue I that Gregory wrote this work in 593. That was the very year when the Lombards were at the walls of Rome for months, and threatening to put the whole population to the sword. We know Gregory had to break off his sermon series on the Book of Ezechiel because of the crisis; how could he find the leisure to compose pious legends? It is simply preposterous, says Clark. He adds that virtually none of his serious writing was done during his tumultuous papacy; most of it was done before 590 A.D.
But then how did the “Letter to Maximian” find its way into the authentic Gregorian Registrum (III.50)? Easily enough, for the same person who fabricated the Dialogues had daily access to the records. He would have had no trouble inserting a phony letter into the great Pope's files. Stranger things went on regularly in early medieval archives.
Clark claims, too, that the forger of the Dialogues was quite conscious of the need to create some kind of paper trail all through the seventh century. He could see that the most useful background for his creation would be an unbroken chain of “witnesses” spanning the gap from Gregory to his own time in the last couple of decades of the seventh century. Many of these “witnesses” are fragmentary and not so obvious, but cumulatively they are impressive. Yet the relentless Clark continues to go through them one by one, showing their uselessness as solid proof.
Although Clark's main work concerns the question of the Dialogues and their authenticity, it is not possible to study that matter without encountering the issue of the spread of the Rule of Benedict. Without the impetus of Dialogue II, which praises it so lavishly, how did the Rule spread so quickly? As a matter of fact it did not.
Instead of a rapid northward osmosis of the observance, there is a rather shocking
blank before c. 700 A.D. in which we find hardly any trace of a monastery in Europe
following the famous RB. True, there is one solitary reference to RB being followed
in southwestern France about 630-
What about Gregory's great love for the RB? What about his experience as a Benedictine monk at St. Andrew's on the Coelian Hill? Unfounded legends, said Kassius Hallinger 50 years ago. When one makes a close scrutiny of Gregory's papal directives to monasteries here and there, it often appears that he knew virtually nothing about the RB. Take, for example, the question of the prior. In RB 65, Benedict rails against the very idea of the abbot and the prior being appointed by the same person (bishop). And yet, that is exactly what Gregory does over and over in his administrative directives.
Hallinger also paid close attention to the cult of St. Benedict, and what he found was no more comforting. For it appears nowhere before about 725 A.D. This is something that can be fairly easily traced, because many churches have liturgical books and they are regularly updated. To judge from these books, Benedict was not commemorated anywhere before the time of Pope Gregory II (not the first). It is probably not coincidental that this same Pope arranged for the refounding of Monte Cassino about 720.
In fact, the phoenix-
One of the events that may be connected with this sudden efflorescence of devotion to St. Benedict can also be considered as a prime example of the mentality of the times. The monks of the Abbey of Fleury in France have long claimed that they possess the bones of St. Benedict. According to the story, an expedition of them traveled to Italy in the late seventh century and carried off the bones from their neglected grave at Monte Cassino. On their side, the monks of Monte Cassino categorically deny that any such theft ever took place.
Since both places are prominent pilgrimage centers to this day, this dispute will
never be settled. But from the standpoint of modern historical science as presented
by P. Geary, this pious theft almost certainly never took place at all. Geary points
out that the phenomenon of the theft of relics was very common in the 7-
The legend of the “translation” of the bones of St. Benedict fits neatly into the pattern we have been studying in this article. Just as someone fabricated the Life of St. Benedict (and many other lives) in the Dialogues in order to supply for popular piety what was lacking, so too the French monks sought to close the gap between their time and place and the saint himself. In both cases, there was an uncomfortable vacuum which needed filling. For that matter, a lot of what passes for early Benedictine history is largely an effort to describe what we do not know or sometimes what did not exist.
Conclusion
What are we to make of all this? Is it just another case where we feel robbed of our familiar, beloved, religious certainties? To paraphrase one of the Egyptian hermits when he was told that God does not have a proper face that one can gaze on: “They have taken away my God and I no longer know how to pray.” If Clark is right, then have they taken away St. Benedict so that we can no longer pray to him?
In a sense, yes, that is true. The overall effect of the work of scholars like Clark and Hallinger and Geary is to deny us direct access to our patron saint. They have shown quite conclusively that there is a serious gap between the saint and the subsequent history of the Benedictines. We do not have a reliable biography and there is no real continuity of cultus or history to be built on. These are facts, and for some they are undoubtedly hard facts.
Yet they are not all there is to go on. None of this undermines the value of our precious foundational document, the Rule of St. Benedict. Granted, a Rule is not like a Life for personal information. Nevertheless, it is still possible to learn quite a bit about an author, even the author of a monastic Rule, from what he has produced. Sometimes one even wonders if this kind of indirect witness is not better than a more evocative direct witness?
Throughout Benedictine history, it was thought that the great Pope Gregory was one
of the first devotees of St. Benedict. But when one reflected upon his portrait of
the saint, one wondered whether the spirituality found there was that of Benedict
or rather of Gregory himself? Now we have to add a second layer of healthy incredulity
to that doubt. If Francis Clark is right, our only hagiographical portrait of Benedict
comes to us through seventh-
This article first appeared in Cistercian Studies Quarterly. It was also given as a talk to the Oblates of Assumption Abbey at their fall retreat last year.