Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

and some we discuss solely in their allegorical, moral sense; yet some, as we probe more meticulously, we investigate simultaneously by all three methods.” Nevertheless, Gregory's preference lay almost exclusively with figurative interpretation, as his voluminous Moralia and other exegetical works reveal, and as he admitted just several sentences later in the same letter to Leander: “Sometimes, in fact, we neglect to explain the plain words of the historical sense, so that we not arrive too slowly at the concealed meanings; and sometimes they cannot be understood in a literal sense, because, when understood according to their visible meaning only, they produce nothing edifying for their readers but only error.”⁵⁹ Such hermeneutical procedure allowed Gregory considerable latitude in his commentaries and frequently resulted in multiple, even contradictory, expositions of the same biblical figure or verse. The agitation of the earth depicted in Job 38:12–13, for example, can refer either to that of the wicked by Christ or to that of the church by Antichrist!⁶⁰ Past and future are often confused.⁶¹ Asses, the raven, and the northerly direction signify both Jews and Gentiles;⁶² the horse both right and wrong;⁶³ a hammer both the power of the devil and that of heaven;⁶⁴ oxen both stubborn Jews and resolute Christian preachers;⁶⁵ the elders of Job 12:20 both the Hebrew patriarchs who foretold of Jesus and the Jews who subsequently rejected him.⁶⁶ Whether or not one attributes such ostensive self-contradiction to Gregory's “grammar of reconciliation and complementarity,” such a hermeneutical method could accord little value to literal exegesis. If pressed for interpretative consistency, the pope might well have responded: “Unless we investigate the mysteries of the allegories in these words, those things which ensue—if considered solely within the historical narrative—are entirely worthy of disregard.”⁶⁷ In a remark often quoted by his students and detractors alike, Gregory similarly justified to Leander his lack of concern for grammar and eloquence. “I have not seen fit to preserve that style of speech which the standards of external refinement prescribe…; for I deem it entirely inappropriate to subordinate the words of the heavenly oracle to the rules of Donatus.”⁶⁸

      Similar “heavenly” considerations dictated Gregory's perspective on terrestrial history. Much as he devalued the nonfigurative, historical sense of Scripture, so did he exclude the Augustinian saeculum from his own understanding of human experience and society. Gregory did retain the Augustinian notion of a “pilgrim people” in this world, the chosen “who, considering this life a sort of exile for themselves, yearn with all of their hearts for their supernal homeland,” as opposed to those “who set their hearts on earthly pleasures.”⁶⁹ But one fails to find in the Gregorian corpus evidence of overlap or ambiguity in the relationship between the two communities; one encounters none of the recognition of independent, albeit limited, value in worldly achievements and institutions that is so impressive in Augustinian thought.⁷⁰ Conversely, Gregory saw no reason to distinguish between the history of salvation and that of earthly politics and society. Unhesitatingly he identified the church with the body of Christ and its members with his. Gregory's “historical consciousness was shaped by a sense of the crumbling away of the secular institutions and the profane traditions rooted in Rome's ancient past.”⁷¹ For him, the divine economy of salvation was plainly apparent in the affairs of this world: He discarded the fundamental Augustinian distinction between Christianitas and Romanitas, and, in the words of another recent biographer, his “unending search for a reconciliation of these differing concepts constitutes the restless core of his being.”⁷² Retreating from the anti-apocalyptic orientation of Augustinian eschatology, Gregory had little doubt that this quest would soon reach its end. Recent events included the conversion of the Gentiles, the decline of classical culture, the downfall of pagan Rome, the victory of Catholicism, and (the consolidation of papal authority in the West, on one hand, and the trials of the Germanic and Byzantine invasions, on the other. What could be more suggestive of the last days, of the final struggle between Christ and Antichrist, than such a blend of encouragement and tribulation in the affairs of this world? And what, in turn, could constitute a more pressing reason to propagate the faith? Among the chief goals of Gregory's pontificate “was purely and simply to win as many souls as possible for Christ before the end of the world.”⁷³ Unlike Augustine's historical account of the heavenly city, which effectively stopped with the establishment of Christianity and thereby sought to defuse an apocalyptic reading of current events, the spotlight of Gregory's historical concern—as opposed to his predominantly allegorical interest in the old dispensation— fell precisely on the first and second comings of Christ and on the teleological progression from the one to the other.

      Finally, Gregory's excision of the saeculum from his reading of Christian history struck a corresponding note in his anthropology. As Pierre DauberciesIf⁷⁴ and others have shown, Gregorian doctrine abandons the body-soul dualism of earlier patristic literature; and it also departs from the older Augustine's restoration of natural goodness to the human body—the Augustine who taught that sinful carnality assuredly afflicts the flesh but resides primarily in the soul. Signaling a new tendency in medieval Christian doctrine, Gregory recast the conflict between spiritual and carnal as that between heavenly and terrestrial. Created by God, both body and soul may be intrinsically good. Yet vice misleads them both to seek fulfillment in the perishable goods and pleasures of this world, regarding whose value—even when subordinated to higher, spiritual priorities—Gregory was emphatically pessimistic. For instance, Gregory acknowledged the sacramentality of marriage and the essential innocence of marital intercourse. “There ought to be legitimate coupling of the flesh for the sake of progeny, not pleasure; and bodily intercourse should be for the purpose of begetting children, not the satisfaction of vices.” Nonetheless, as Gregory had forewarned in the same paragraph, “even that licit intercourse of spouses cannot transpire without the pleasure of the flesh…[which] very pleasure cannot possibly be without sin.”⁷⁵ Unlike Augustine, given the continuous, all-embracing unity of his spiritual cosmology, Gregory could not make peace with a Christian modus vivendi that smacked of imperfection or mediocrity. In our present case,

      sexual expression betrays the fidelity one owes God in both body and soul, for participation in God embraces the whole human personality. The body of the Christian enjoys a kind of physical unity in his stability in the body of Christ—so much so that the Christian himself, Christ's spouse, commits a form of adultery and disloyalty in possessing earthly loves…. Sexuality inevitably leads one toward the self-centered individualism of the family, with its web of ties to the secular world, its numerous burdens and anxieties. In contrast, the religious community possesses the tranquillity needed to realize man's highest vocations: contemplation, charity, and continence.⁷⁶

      Pope Gregory accordingly called for rigorous regulation of human sexuality in particular and for the constant combat of body and soul against the lures of all worldly passion in general. Not without cause does Western history remember Gregory as the early medieval theologian of monasticism par excellence. In his view, monastic discipline extends the best, perhaps the sole, possibility for subduing worldly commitment, facilitating the truly spiritual, contemplative life, and reaping the supernal rewards of Christianity.⁷⁷

      The foregoing discussion of doctrinal differences between Augustine and Gregory should by no means obscure the profound influence of the one upon the other⁷⁸, even in the matter of the Jews, but it should allow us to mitigate the seeming dissonance between the protection of Jews and Judaism in Gregory's correspondence and the insistently anti-Jewish instruction of his biblical commentaries. At the outset, one must take issue with the specific formulation of such presumed disparity: As ruler of Rome and head of its church, Gregory did not pursue a policy of protecting the Jews per se; rather, he pursued a policy that balanced privilege and restriction. If comparison with other churchmen and rulers has led historians to highlight his moderation in this regard, perhaps even to argue that it exceeded the limits permitted in imperial legislation, such an appraisal does not fairly estimate the sense of Gregory's ideas. His guideline of Sicut ludaeis reiterated the need to restrict the Jews even before it mandated their protection. As noted previously, Gregory deemed the status of the Jews in Roman law to be the translation of received Christian doctrine into public policy. Having narrowed the distance—and obliterated any presumed contradiction—between imperial and ecclesiastical history, the pope sought to maintain what he perceived to be an underlying