Section: 3F - Gregory and the following years.
Number of quotes: 47
A History of the Arab Peoples
Albert Hourani
Book ID: 7 Page: 19
Section: 3A2A,3F
In 632 Muhammad made his last visit to Mecca, and his speech there has been recorded in the traditional writings as the final statement of his message: ‘know that every Muslim is a Muslim’s brother, and that the Muslims are brethren’; fighting between them should be avoided, and the blood shed in pagan times should not be avenged; Muslims should fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but God’.
Quote ID: 109
Time Periods: 7
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 267
Section: 3F
Out of the storm of the Gothic wars mid 500’s there emerged one strong western power - the papacy. In the hands of Pope Gregory I, himself a former praefectus urbis, the office a began to exert strong influence. A monkish priest who never learned Greek, though he spent many years on an embassy to Constantinople, he seemed to symbolize the ancient Roman virtues, and by the singular force of his personality he was able to bring some order to a ruined land. He believed in old wives’ tales, relished mysteries, wrote a vivid and interminable commentary on the Book of Job, and pronounced himself to be the arbiter of Roman destinies.
Quote ID: 334
Time Periods: 1467
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 268
Section: 1A,3F
Not until the time of Napoleon was the dream of the divine Roman empire ultimately abandoned.
Quote ID: 336
Time Periods: 147
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 270
Section: 3F
In the Middle Ages men almost seemed to breathe in Latin. If it was not the language of trade, it was the language of nearly everything else.
Quote ID: 338
Time Periods: 56
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 271
Section: 3F
The unearthing of the Laocoon group of sculptures near the baths of Trajan in 506 revived the classical presence. So, too, did the discovery of the Apollo Belvedere a few years later. Both statutes were promptly acquired by Pope Julius II. A passion for excavating, restoring, and imitating old sculpture arose; the young humanist, painter, and architect Raphael pleaded with Pope Leo X to halt the continuing despoliation of Roman edifices. The pope appointed the young man general superintendent or conservator of Roman antiquities, and there exists an unsigned letter, which appears to have been written by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione, urging the pope to preserve the relics of ancient Rome . . .
Quote ID: 340
Time Periods: 67
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: x
Section: 3F
At the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great was as influential as his imperial predecessor had been.
Quote ID: 577
Time Periods: 67
Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels
Antonio Santosuosso
Book ID: 38 Page: 72
Section: 3F
Einhard comments that Charlemagne was unaware of what had been planned. If he had known, he would have refused to enter church that day.85 Whether we believe Einhard or not, what is important is the role usurped by the pope in investing Charlemagne with the imperial crown.
Quote ID: 818
Time Periods: 7
Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels
Antonio Santosuosso
Book ID: 38 Page: 72
Section: 3F
Even if proskynesis had been performed, the actual authority of the coronation rested in the pope’s hands: the pope had become the “creator” of the emperor, and until the end of the Middle Ages emperors were crowned at St. Peter’s.86Insert Map
Insert Map
Quote ID: 819
Time Periods: 567
Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World
Patrick J. Geary
Book ID: 40 Page: 231
Section: 3F
The Rome that had sponsored Boniface was itself a new, artificial creation, as were the traditions of Latin letters and imperial destiny cultivated in Carolingian circles. And yet the transformed barbarian world so badly needed a Roman imperial tradition, even more than it had in the sixth century, that on Christmas Day in 800, Charles Martel’s grandson received the title of emperor and Augustus. The barbarian world, that creature of Rome, had become its creator.
Quote ID: 896
Time Periods: 67
Birth of Europe, The
Jacques Le Goff
Book ID: 199 Page: 32
Section: 3F
In the Frankish sovereigns, the popes sought and found a strong secular arm to protect them against their enemies, in particular the Lombards. The Frankish sovereigns’ reward for their partnership in this alliance was the consecration of Pepin and his sons.In the second stage of the alliance, the papacy seems to have had in mind an undertaking of a “European” nature: it wanted to restore the extreme Christian West as an empire centered on the Franks.
Quote ID: 4506
Time Periods: 7
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 155
Section: 3F
In the early 590 the first of these monastic popes, Gregory I the Great (died 604) ascended to the throne of Peter. His pontificate marks one of the most important turning points in the history of the medieval church.…
Gregory I’s importance lies in his clear formulation of the program that the papacy was to follow over the next two centuries. He clearly perceived that the historic destiny of the papacy lay in western Europe and that the way to assert papal leadership in European society was through an alliance with the monastic orders and the Frankish monarchy.
Quote ID: 4685
Time Periods: 67
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 158
Section: 3F
Pope Gregory was first of all conscious of the fact that he was a member of the episcopate, and in his Book of Pastoral Care he delineated for his episcopal colleagues their duties as pastors of the Christian flock, contrasting these duties with the privileges they enjoyed as ecclesiastical princes and nobles, which tended to be their primary concern.…
He did not contribute anything new to the evolution of papal ideology, but he carefully summarized the Gelasian doctrine and Leo I’s Petrine theory. This view of papal office was summed up in the term servus servorum Dei, “servant of the servants of God,” which he used as an official appellation and that still appears as a subtitle on papal documents.
…
The hierocratic principle found its biblical support in Christ’s statement in the Gospel of Mark: “Whoever is the chief is the servant of all”- that is, he who has the most responsibility has the most power. Since the pope was responsible before for his ministry as the leader of the Christian church, he required unlimited authority to carry out the divine work entrusted to him.
Pastor John notes: John’s Note: Clever!
Quote ID: 4686
Time Periods: 567
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 159
Section: 3F
To achieve the creation of a European civilization, Gregory saw with a prophetic clarity that the papacy would somehow have to ally itself with the Frankish monarchy.
Quote ID: 4687
Time Periods: 67
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 159
Section: 3F
Gregory’s letters to the Merovingian king had no consequences in his own day. It was not until the eighth century that the Frankish rulers were sufficiently intelligent to understand the possibilities for the growth of their own power in an alliance with the papacy. The surprising consequence of Gregory’s missionary work was the bringing into existence of a group of churchmen who, in the eighth century, fomented the Frankish-papal alliance on which the new European civilization was to be founded.
Quote ID: 4688
Time Periods: 67
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 160
Section: 3F
In the half century after Gregory’s death the Latin monks, advancing northward from Canterbury, and the Celtic missionaries at work in the north contended for the adherence of the English people. Finally, in 664, a synod of the English churchmen decided to bring the whole country under Roman rule.
Quote ID: 4689
Time Periods: 7
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 222
Section: 3F
Early eleventh-century ideals of church and kingship were given monumental form in the style of architecture that modern art historians have chosen to call Romanesque.
Quote ID: 4690
Time Periods: 7
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 222
Section: 3F
The Romanesque churches were chapels for the lay and sacerdotal hierarchies, whereas the later Gothic churches were designed to bring in the masses for public worship. Second, the Romanesque churches were ecclesiastical fortresses; they were built by the same architects and artisans who erected the feudal fortresses of the eleventh century. The Romanesque church was God’s fortress, and it reflects a view of Jesus as head of the feudal hierarchy and the prototype of theocratic kings.
Quote ID: 4691
Time Periods: 7
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 265
Section: 3F
Gregory the Great showed the same shrewdness during the conversion of the Angles. He ordered the idols to be taken from the existing British temples, holy water sprinkled over the shrines to purify them, then altars built and relics put in place “so that the Angles have to change from the worship of the demons to that of the true God” without having to change their place of worship.
Quote ID: 4965
Time Periods: 6
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 302
Section: 3F
The new world that was emerging in the west was symbolised by Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome 590-604, “the harbinger,” as Judith Herrin puts it, “of a purely Latin and clerical culture of the medieval west.” He became pope (the term was now in use with specific reference to the bishop of Rome) in 590.
Quote ID: 4991
Time Periods: 67
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 302/303
Section: 3F
Gregory was not an original thinker; he relied heavily on his forerunners in the western theological tradition--Augustine (and hence Paul), Ambrose and, in monastic affairs, Cassian. He distrusted secular learning, and for him the deadliest of the seven deadly sins was pride, by which he meant intellectual independence. “The wise, ” he said, “should be advised to cease from their knowledge,” to be “wise in ignorance, wisely untaught.”
Quote ID: 4992
Time Periods: 67
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 303
Section: 3F
It is in Gregory that one finds an early definition of purgatory, a halfway house where sins are purified before the sinner progress to heaven.
Quote ID: 4993
Time Periods: 67
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 313
Section: 3F
Gregory the Great consolidated a rationale of papal supremacy that once again stressed the bishop of Rome’s precedence in both west and east. Inevitably much tidying up of Christianity’s turbulent past needed to be done to give it ideological coherence. The doctrines of orthodox Christianity, it was now said, had been known throughout the ages. Even the patriarchs, who had lived before the time of Moses, “knew that one Almighty God is the Holy Trinity,” though Gregory admitted that “they did not preach very much publicly about the Trinity whom they knew.”
Quote ID: 4998
Time Periods: 67
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 313/314
Section: 3F
As orthodox doctrine was now presented as though it had been settled and accepted from the beginning of time, heretics were consequently accused of “bringing forth as something new which is not contained in the old books of the ancient fathers.” So, whatever inspection of the historical record might suggest, it became impossible to see Christian doctrine as the product of a process of evolution.
Quote ID: 4999
Time Periods: 567
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 314
Section: 2D1,3F
Isolated in the west and free of the imperial presence, Gregory was free to proclaim papal supremacy. When new disputes arose, it was to be the pope, as successor of Peter, who would have the final say, even if a council had made its own decisions: “Without the authority of consent of the apostolic see Rome, ” said Gregory, “none of the matters transacted by council have any binding force.” The supremacy of the pope in all matters of doctrine was now fully asserted.
Quote ID: 5000
Time Periods: 67
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 109
Section: 3F
Pope Gregory XIII was to echo their attitude faithfully in 1575 when he permitted bullfighting in Spain except on the Church’s holy days.
Quote ID: 5428
Time Periods: 7
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 141
Section: 3F
The vast and increasing endowments of great and fixed religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries. They were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline would, in their violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism.
Quote ID: 2276
Time Periods: 56
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 442
Section: 3F
But with the disappearance of widespread literacy, laymen soon ceased to be able to do so, and the intellectual world of the early medieval Church became a solidly clerical one. This would not have happened, had laymen remained as educated as clerics.
Quote ID: 5619
Time Periods: 56
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 144
Section: 3F
Pope Gregory’s reorganization in Rome was key to Rome’s survival. “In place of the ancient pattern of civic philanthropy, based on the generosity of local benefactors, senators philosophers, and pagan holy men, Christian charity now dominated the same spheres of welfare, hospitality, poor relief, medical aid, and even education. . . . “private wealth was increasingly channeled to Christian rather than city authorities, and a new system of distribution developed based on donations. . . . The resources of St Peter’s far outstripped any other in the West. The farsighted arrangements of Pope Gregory I permitted the city to make a successful move from ancient political capital to ecclesiastical center.”
Quote ID: 5684
Time Periods: 67
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 151
Section: 3F
In 540, Gregory (Pope Gregory the Great) was born into a city (Rome) that was “full of ruins and empty buildings, temples, baths, and theaters no longer used.” He was born into a family of senatorial rank and had an appreciation for the city’s civic past and St Peter’s power. His background was similar to Ambrose. His civic career was brief, because of limited possibilities. By the time he was middle aged, the senate was not even meeting any more.
Quote ID: 5692
Time Periods: 6
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 152
Section: 3F
as papal legate to Constantinople (580-586), Gregory was standing on an established rung of the ladder to the papacy itself.
Quote ID: 5694
Time Periods: 6
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 164
Section: 3F
priesthood was for sale.
Quote ID: 5695
Time Periods: 7
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 171
Section: 3F
In dealing with the newly converted Anglo-Saxons, Gregory recommended “preaching, missionary work, threats, bribes, and finally direct force.”Pastor John notes: John’s Note: This Christian way gives new meaning to Jesus’s words, “Compel them to come in.”
Quote ID: 5696
Time Periods: 67
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 182
Section: 3F
Gregory “was the harbinger of a purely Latin and clerical culture of the medieval West”.
Quote ID: 5697
Time Periods: 67
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 62
Section: 3F
It has been said of Leo I that he ‘carried the Papacy as far theocratically as it could go’,{2} and certainly we have reached here in theory the ultimate papal position, ‘To deny the Pope is to deny Peter: to deny Peter is to deny Christ’.
Quote ID: 6489
Time Periods: 5
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 66
Section: 3F
Succeeding to the papacy at a time when all Italy was in utter confusion and despair, he found himself at the head of the only stable institution in a changing world’.{1}In this local government and in Gregory’s equally careful administration of the lands belonging to his church, the ‘patrimony of St. Peter’, all over Italy, historians have seen the origins of the Papal States, and through both the Roman bishop, like other bishops, is becoming, of necessity, a temporal power. ‘Head of a strong central organization, unquestioned arbiter of justice, armed with the Keys of Peter and the old majesty of Rome, he [Gregory] is an almost superhuman figure.
Quote ID: 6492
Time Periods: 67
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 67
Section: 3F
Footnote 2 Gregory’s original plan, of two equal metropolitan archbishops at London and York (a clear extension of former Roman civil government in Britain) ......
Quote ID: 6493
Time Periods: 67
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 71
Section: 3F
There was the iconoclastic controversy instigated by the Emperor Leo III in 726 as an attack upon the worship of images. When the Pope would not conform, the estates of St. Peter in southern Italy and Sicily were confiscated and, worse, archbishoprics and provinces hitherto under the jurisdiction of the Roman bishop in Greece and again in southern Italy and Sicily were withdrawn, and placed under the patriarch of Constantinople. By these means, Rome in effect ‘was cut off from the imperial church, of which it had hitherto regarded itself as the head’,{1} and in effect also was ejected from the ‘Roman’ Empire.
Quote ID: 6495
Time Periods: 7
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 39/40
Section: 3F
Gregory the Great (540-604) is the man responsible for shaping the medieval Mass. {12} Gregory was an incredibly superstitious man whose thinking was influenced by magical paganistic concepts. He embodied the medieval mind, which was a cross between heathenism, magic, and Christianity. It is no accident that Durant calls Gregory “the first completely medieval man.” {13}
Quote ID: 3522
Time Periods: 67
Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 265 Page: 290
Section: 3F
Not so Muhammad. In 610, at the age of 40, the visions began to come. They came from the One God (in Arabic: Allah), “the Lord of the Worlds.” For the next 20 years, the messages came irregularly, in sudden, shattering moments, up to his death in 632. In them, so Muhammad believed, the same God who had spoken to Moses and to Jesus, and to many thousands of humbler prophets, now spoke again, once and for all, to himself. Vivid sequences of these words from God were carefully memorized by Muhammad’s followers. They were passed on by skilled reciters throughout the Arabic-speaking world. For these were nothing less than snatches of the voice of God himself speaking to the Arabs through Muhammad. They were not written down until after 660, in very different circumstances from the time of their first delivery. When written out, they came to form the single book known to us as the Qur’an.
Quote ID: 6724
Time Periods: 7
Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 265 Page: 291
Section: 3F
Jesus had not been God and had never claimed to be treated as if he was God:And behold (at the Last Judgment) God will say: “O Jesus, son of Mary, Didst thou say unto men: Worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of God? He will say: “Glory to Thee. Never could I have said what I had no right to say.” ( Qur’ an verse: 119)
Quote ID: 6725
Time Periods: 567
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 87
Section: 3A1,3F
Gregory was of an illustrious Roman family, perhaps connected with the Anicii, that for a century had served the city well in both civil and ecclesiastical office. His grandfather, Pope Felix III who had died in 492, was himself the son of priest Felix of the present SS. Nero et Achilleo, who had converted the temple of Romulus on the Via Sacra into a church dedicated to the Arabian doctors SS. Comas and Damian - the first Christian building in the old city, and the first dedication to non Roman saints.
Quote ID: 4294
Time Periods: 567
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 91
Section: 3F
Gregory returned to Rome in the spring of 586, to his monastery on the Coelian, and there, while acting as Pelagius’s secretary, conceived the design of converting the northern world into a new unity under Rome, the unity of the Church.
Quote ID: 4297
Time Periods: 6
Secret Archives of the Vatican, The
Maria Luisa Ambrosini & With Mary Willis
Book ID: 269 Page: 64
Section: 3F
The young patrician Gregory was the son of a noble house that had already given two popes, and would give three saints, to the Church. He had begun a brilliant career in the hierarchy of the empire; promoted from one office to another he finally became Prefect of the City. But his life, like Rome’s, was shadowed by the Lombard invasion.
Quote ID: 6795
Time Periods: 67
Secret Archives of the Vatican, The
Maria Luisa Ambrosini & With Mary Willis
Book ID: 269 Page: 65
Section: 3F
Gregory and his family, like many Christians of these years, thought that the world was coming to an end. “I do not know what is happening in other parts of this world: what I know is that in this land in which we live, the end of the world has announced itself openly.”. . . .
Gregory left politics, tore off the pallium of silk and gold, the high boots of red leather with moon-shaped buckles. He became a monk and retired into a part of his palace – emptied now of furniture, of comfort, and of servants – and there he prayed and fasted to expiate the sins of the consuls that had conquered the world. His old father, the lord of Gordiano, giving his vast fortune to the Church and the poor, became a priest, and his mother, Lady Sylvia, entered a convent.
Pastor John notes: John’s note: to escape?
. . . .
For five years they waited for the last day. Instead there arrived news of the massacres carried out by the king of the Lombards, and of the death of relatives and friends, as the great Italian families were systematically destroyed.
. . . .
He was routed out from the religious life by the death of Pope Pelagius in the plague, and his election by acclamation as Pope Gregory I.
It was a time of flood: the Tiber was even washing away the Church’s granaries where wheat to feed the poor was kept. It was a time of plague: Gregory commented that one could see the celestial arrows striking the Romans. It was a time of war: the absence of the emperor left a power vacuum that only the Church could fill, and the new pope, both a priest and a ruler, was caught in the pacifist dilemma. He met the situation by holding a march, not of protest but of penitence. The secular city was to disown herself, to be born again as a holy city.
Quote ID: 6796
Time Periods: 67
Secret Archives of the Vatican, The
Maria Luisa Ambrosini & With Mary Willis
Book ID: 269 Page: 66
Section: 3F
As they neared Saint Peter’s, tradition says that the Archangel Michael appeared above Hadrian’s tomb, sheathing his sword to show that the plague was over. Thus the great tomb, with its memories of Hadrian and the boy, became the Castle of the Angel – Castel Sant’Angelo – that would later hold the most precious of the archives.. . . .
“Rome has been abandoned to save Perugia. With my own eyes I saw Italians with ropes around their necks like dogs, taken away by the Lombards to be sold as slaves in France.”
. . . .
The popes were the most important owners of land and mines in Italy. Sardinia was practically a papal property. So was Sicily, a grain-producing area not yet eroded by the destruction of its forests. The coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, with its silver and iron mines, was largely in the hands of the Church.
Quote ID: 6797
Time Periods: 67
Secret Archives of the Vatican, The
Maria Luisa Ambrosini & With Mary Willis
Book ID: 269 Page: 67
Section: 3F
There are also letters to the barbarians. The Lombard civilization was flourishing, and Gregory hoped to bring the Lombards, already Arian, into the Roman Church. Their queen was Theodolinda, a Catholic, beloved by her people, and a woman certain of her power and charm: widowed, she had chosen a husband by saying to one of her warrior nobles, “You need not kiss my hand when you can kiss my mouth.” Gregory writes to Theodolinda on her decision to educate the Crown Prince Adulovald as a Roman Catholic: “You have given your son the armor of the Catholic faith.” In this letter he mentions gifts that he is sending to Adulovald – a golden cross to wear around his neck, containing a splinter of the Cross of Christ, along with a small box of Persian wood containing a New Testament, and for the little princesses, three rings. “I ask you as a favor to give the children these little gifts with your own hands, so that our love towards them may be presented by Your Excellency.”
Quote ID: 6798
Time Periods: 67
Secret Archives of the Vatican, The
Maria Luisa Ambrosini & With Mary Willis
Book ID: 269 Page: 71
Section: 3F
Gregory also planned to build up a corps of young English clergy (the “native preachers” of modern missionary work) to take the place of Roman and French missionaries and avoid eventual nationalistic conflict. His method of recruiting them was very direct: he wrote to the presbyter Candidus, “Going as you are to administer the patrimony of the Roman church in Gaul, we desire that with money you receive from it you buy English boys seventeen or eighteen years of age, so that they can offer themselves to God in the monasteries. But since these little slaves that you will find may be pagans, I want you to send a priest along with them, so that if, during the journey, they should get sick, he can christen them before they die.”
Quote ID: 6800
Time Periods: 67
End of quotes