Greg Thiessen | Columbia Bible College (original) (raw)
Metzger Collection Manager, Assistant Registrar, and Instructor
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Gregory the Great has often been implicated with allowing for a syncretism between Christianity a... more Gregory the Great has often been implicated with allowing for a syncretism between Christianity and paganism and opening the door to long-standing superstition. The seriousness of this charge is heightened by the wide influence that Gregory has had over the Middle Ages. Two documents have been at the centre of these accusations, his letter to Mellitus and his Dialogues. Both works display a willingness on Gregory’s part to adapt to the needs of his audience. The letter to Mellitus advises the missionaries he had sent to England to appropriate some familiar pagan elements into Christian worship in order to make for simpler conversions. Similarly, the Dialogues draw on a vast number of phenomenal miracles to capture attention and convince his audience of the spiritual realm.
While the adaptations in both cases would appeal to contexts of paganism and worldliness, I argue that Gregory does not fit the criticisms of over-accommodation with which scholars have charged him. Instead, he displays a pastoral flexibility that not only ensured the temporary nature of his accommodations, but also worked toward his unadapted ideal of Christian holiness. This ideal takes on a particularly monastic character and opposes the paganism and worldliness to which Gregory’s adaptations had appealed. While this thesis introduces Gregory’s principle of adaptation in the letter to Mellitus and follows it through his other pastoral writings, it will concentrate on his Dialogues. As a hagiographical work, the Dialogues simultaneously display the appealing “miraculous accommodation” and the targeted “otherworldly holiness” in the lives of the saints.
Gregory the Great has often been implicated with allowing for a syncretism between Christianity a... more Gregory the Great has often been implicated with allowing for a syncretism between Christianity and paganism and opening the door to long-standing superstition. The seriousness of this charge is heightened by the wide influence that Gregory has had over the Middle Ages. Two documents have been at the centre of these accusations, his letter to Mellitus and his Dialogues. Both works display a willingness on Gregory’s part to adapt to the needs of his audience. The letter to Mellitus advises the missionaries he had sent to England to appropriate some familiar pagan elements into Christian worship in order to make for simpler conversions. Similarly, the Dialogues draw on a vast number of phenomenal miracles to capture attention and convince his audience of the spiritual realm.
While the adaptations in both cases would appeal to contexts of paganism and worldliness, I argue that Gregory does not fit the criticisms of over-accommodation with which scholars have charged him. Instead, he displays a pastoral flexibility that not only ensured the temporary nature of his accommodations, but also worked toward his unadapted ideal of Christian holiness. This ideal takes on a particularly monastic character and opposes the paganism and worldliness to which Gregory’s adaptations had appealed. While this thesis introduces Gregory’s principle of adaptation in the letter to Mellitus and follows it through his other pastoral writings, it will concentrate on his Dialogues. As a hagiographical work, the Dialogues simultaneously display the appealing “miraculous accommodation” and the targeted “otherworldly holiness” in the lives of the saints.