The Interpretive Framework of Gregory's Moralia

To appreciate further Bede's use of Gregory, it is important first to clarify the interpretative context in which he approaches the nature of Job's sickness and suffering, along with its value for monastic life.Footnote ¹² Building upon the work of Carole Straw, Susan Schreiner argues that the ‘rule’ or interpretative framework through which Gregory reads Job consists of two presuppositions that we must be aware of if we are to understand Gregory's motivations.Footnote ¹³ The first is that reality exists within a hierarchical scale and ontological continuum that links the lower historical levels of existence with the highest level (God) in order to create a chain of being. The second is that an understanding or perception of the true nature of reality can only be gained by an inward ascent from the lowest to the highest level of reality, which is made possible through suffering.Footnote ¹⁴

Although Schreiner's reading of Gregory offers some important insights, it has a tendency to locate the pressures at work in Gregory's reading of Job's suffering and bodily affliction within the thought world of Neoplatonism. For Gregory, however, the book of Job is a theological reflection on the suffering of a particular man viewed within the biblical eschatology of creation, and his exegesis reflects this perspective. Indeed, as Baun affirms, his eschatological exegesis ‘lifts the book above all the unresolved questions that plague a literal reading, offering the believer a life's model, and a way of understanding, that can turn doubt into trust, lament into praise, desolation into consolation, and despair into hope’.Footnote ¹⁵ The contrast we see in the Moralia between this world and the next is not a vertical or ontological contrast between the temporal and eternal worlds of Neoplatonism, but a horizontal and historical contrast between this world and the eternal world to come, a contrast rooted in the New Testament and the eschatology of the apostle Paul.Footnote ¹⁶ This rule for reading history makes a distinction between this transient world,Footnote ¹⁷ which is passing away under the sentence of sin and death, and the world to come, where the saints of God will experience the visio Dei or beatific vision of God. The contrast between these two worlds is not metaphysical but ethical: this world is passing away, not because its transience marks it as a less real world, but because it is under God's judgment. Commenting on Job 3: 18, Gregory writes:

For Gregory, it is not the transient character of the world that brings about the deserved mortality and ethical corruption of humankind, but the fact that Adam ‘willingly deserted the footing of inborn constancy’. Given the passing character of this world and the certainty of its end in God's final judgment, Gregory's main concern is with the object of our desires in this world, rather than with a hierarchical view of reality. What is the object of our desires? Are they focused on that which is passing and subject to the bondage of corruption, or that which is eternal?

The focus of our desires lays bare what we are truly living for, whether that is this world and its passing desires, or the world to come.Footnote ¹⁹ The problem arises from the disordered desires with which the saints of God continue to struggle due to the corruption of the flesh. As a result, the object of their desires is divided, and a holy conflict arises even within the saints between their desire for the things of this passing world and their desire for the beatific vision of God in the world to come, as Gregory observes: ‘Are they not firmly bound by an inflexible chain of vexation, who, when their inflamed soul draws them with full desire into the bosom of inner peace, suffer disturbance from the flesh in the heat of the conflict?’Footnote ²⁰ For this reason, as James Palmer observes, worldliness is the real problem for Gregory, rather than the world's imminent end:

Palmer rightly recognizes that biblical eschatology forms the primary force that motivates Gregory's approach to reform through suffering and apocalyptic. At the level of Gregory's basic commitments, neither Neoplatonism nor socio-political upheaval served to motivate his worldview or the value he placed upon suffering, although this is not to deny that they were contributing factors on some level. Rather, for Gregory, suffering is inherently linked to the passing character of this world and its final judgment, which means that the value it has for reordering our desires and preparing us for the world to come cannot be separated from his views on biblical eschatology. The eschatological and apocalyptic narrative at work in the biblical ordering of time are what contribute to the Gregorian ideal of reform by serving a practical role and function in the life of the church. Commenting on Job 6: 19, Gregory therefore writes:

It is important to recognize that Gregory believed that the world in his own day was near its end.Footnote ²³ Rome was in decline and the threat of the Lombards and the Greeks meant that the fate of Rome was hanging in the balance.Footnote ²⁴ This apocalyptic conviction greatly shaped Gregory's thoughts on the worth of suffering, the nature of the church and especially the shaping of its leadership. But the framework in which Gregory understands the interrelation of these things is strictly tied neither to political strife or social upheaval nor to the precise timing of the judgment, as Palmer observes: ‘Apocalypse has also been taken seriously as part of traditions of biblical exegesis, many of which centred on ecclesiology (what the imagery said about the nature of the church) rather than on the timing and events of the Last Days specifically.’Footnote ²⁵ Citing Bernard McGinn, Palmer also notes that apocalyptic thought is a continuous presence in the early church and medieval world, and not always tied to the presence of social upheavals or widespread bodily sickness, such as the plagues during the reign of Justinian in the sixth century. This suggests that there is not a direct correspondence between social-physical crises and the appeal to apocalyptic as a way to motivate behaviour and promote reform:

The saints were to be prepared whether judgment was upon them today or tomorrow, which suggests that the precise timing of the end, while a topic for continuing speculation,Footnote ²⁷ did not form the primary motivation for Gregory's interest in the world's end as a means of behavioural reform.

Bede's Use of Gregory on Sickness and Suffering

How did Bede appropriate these Gregorian Joban ideals, and in what ways do they shed light upon his understanding of the value of bodily sickness and affliction in this life? A useful lens for exploring these questions can be found in Bede's reworking of the earlier account of Cuthbert's life. Bede's prose reworking of the Life of St Cuthbert in 721, while a notable improvement on the style of an earlier anonymous Life, also included the addition of ten new chapters of material.Footnote ²⁸ Cuthbert's enduring popularity from the Middle Ages to the present serves as an example of Bede's ‘superior narrative gifts, his theological depth, and his ability to portray so arrestingly Gregory's idea of sanctity’, as Foley puts it, providing a portrait of Cuthbert as one who embodies the Gregorian ideal of suffering unto death for the sake of union with Christ.Footnote ²⁹ To this end, Bede's Life adds considerable detail in order to produce a longer account of Cuthbert's illness and death,Footnote ³⁰ sharing ‘verbal reminiscences’ with Gregory's Dialogues, a work that Bede held especially dear.Footnote ³¹ Living during a time when persecution of the saints was largely a past reality, Bede looked to the Dialogues for models of martyrdom and saintly suffering which he could appropriate in his account of Cuthbert's life. In Bede's ‘longer, grimmer, and more agonising account’, we are presented with a struggling Cuthbert who stood firm against both physical and mental assault in the form of bodily affliction and demons.Footnote ³² What is surprising about Bede's account is the sheer quantity of examples of bodily ailments to which Bede alludes, ‘ailments which are not miraculously cured, but typically end in death’.Footnote ³³

In his helpful study of Bede's prose Life, W. Trent Foley argues that Bede took over Gregory's theological reading of bodily affliction, noting that the Latin phrase longa aegritudo used in Gregory's Dialogues to describe the paralysed man named Servulus is used three times by Bede in the prose Life to describe prolonged bodily illness, leading to death in two cases (Hereberht and Eadberht).Footnote ³⁴ This verbal link with Gregory's account of Servulus, as well as Gregory's description of Servulus's suffering unto death, appears to be the model on which Bede drew to present the deaths of Hereberht and Eadberht in his prose Life, both of whom are identified with Cuthbert in their deaths.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, while Bede does not explicitly refer to Gregory's Moralia or the book of Job in his prose Life, the influence of Gregory's Dialogues in Bede's prose Life serves to mediate Gregory's Joban ideals of suffering in the form of the concept of longa aegritudo (prolonged illness), especially its theological application to illness, affliction and sanctity.Footnote ³⁶

These observations shed light upon the Gregorian ideal of sainthood and its influence on Bede. However, they do not explore the interpretative rationale that links the prose Life with Gregory's Moralia via the Dialogues. Neither the biblical figure of Job nor Cuthbert the martyr suffered for suffering's sake. Instead, their suffering serves as an embodiment of Christ's suffering unto death,Footnote ³⁷ for it is the union of head (Christ) and body (Church) that gives theological and practical value to physical illness and suffering unto death in this life. The text of Colossians 1: 24 was often cited in Gregory's Moralia to justify this understanding of the relation between Christ's suffering and that of the Church.Footnote ³⁸ This suffering unto death may be the result of external physical persecution or of bodily illness: according to Gregory both are to be viewed as forms of martyrdom. In the Dialogues he argues that the Gospels assure us that martyrdom is possible without external or public suffering, for there are two kinds of martyrdom: outward and one inward. Citing the examples of James and John in Matthew 20, Gregory reasons that although James was put to death, John was also made to drink from the cup of the Lord's suffering, even though he did not die as the result of persecution.Footnote ³⁹ In this way Gregory reinterprets the earlier history of the deaths of martyrs, most of which were external and public, in order to appropriate that history for the monasticism of his day, along with its ideals. As Felice Lifshitz has argued, Bede later receives this history of martyrdom in the form of lists and transforms it into a narrative to serve as ‘the liturgical pendant’ to his Historia ecclesiastica.Footnote ⁴⁰

Building upon Gregory's account of martyrdom, Cuthbert's longa aegritudo is characterized by Bede as a sickness unto death in which God's elect experience the inward death of martyrdom.Footnote ⁴¹ Prolonged suffering even to the point of death is a means through which a believer shares in the experience of Christ's incarnation and death on the cross, and thus to be martyred is to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Martyrdom is thus caught up in the mystery of Christ's death and the end of the world. Because Christ ascended to heaven after his death, foreshadowing the union of heaven and earth through his suffering unto death, the death of his saints also anticipates the union of heaven and earth at the end of time.Footnote ⁴² Like Gregory before him, Bede interprets suffering and martyrdom in the biblical framework of eschatology and apocalyptic.Footnote ⁴³ However, according to Ann Matter, the early church espoused the ‘radical assumption of the imminent end evident in the Apocalypse’, while Bede's world and the Carolingian world that followed tended to read the Apocalypse as an allegory of the church in the present world: ‘All the Apocalypse commentaries from the Carolingian world thus show the continuing assumption of the text as an allegory of the Church, and a continuing process of filtering specific interpretations from earlier commentaries to support that assumption.’Footnote ⁴⁴ If ‘apocalyptic’ is understood to mean a concern with the imminent end of the world, rather than the shape of ecclesial life in the present world, then on Matter's reading of things it would be better to describe early medieval readings of Revelation as anagogic rather than apocalyptic. This helps us distinguish between the concern of Gregory and Bede to understand the nature of the Church in light of history's end (ecclesiological symbolism), and apocalyptic concerns with the timing of that end (apocalyptic symbolism). While these apocalyptic concerns were always present to some degree in the early medieval world, they become dominant only after Gregory and Bede.Footnote ⁴⁵

These observations provide insight into the reason why the biblical account of Job's sickness and suffering was valued by both Gregory and Bede. On the practical level of human existence in this world, suffering is the means through which the contemplative values of the world to come are united with the active values of this present world. The actualization of this union through suffering, read in the light of the world's end, is thus a microcosm or anagogic figure of the final joining of heaven and earth at Christ's return,Footnote ⁴⁶ as suggested by Matter's study of early medieval exegesis of the Apocalypse. The concern of Gregory and Bede with bodily sickness and the world's end thus arose out of a distinctly ecclesiological concern, namely, the integration of the active and contemplative life, a union which ‘pulls’ the contemplative values of heaven into the midst of this passing world. This is perhaps why both Gregory and Bede found in the book of Job a helpful model for reforming monasticism and shaping pastoral leadership in the church. The providential trial and suffering God brought upon Job, the man of action and good works (Job 1: 1–5), forced him to contemplate and reflect theologically on what those good works said about the nature of his piety. Was Job serving God for gain, as his accuser asserted? It was in his suffering that Job was forced to reflect on his actions and what they said about the nature of his service and obedience to God, and in this way he serves as a model of the active contemplative life by promoting their integration.Footnote ⁴⁷ In its usefulness for integrating the contemplative and active spheres of existence in the life of the church, suffering anticipates in this life the ‘expectation of the final joining of the spiritual and physical churches’ made possible by Christ's passion on the cross.Footnote ⁴⁸

Bede's own model for illustrating this union finds expression in his Life of St Cuthbert. For Bede, Cuthbert was virtually a textbook example of Gregory's Joban ideals in practice, and also on a par with Benedict of Nursia, one of Gregory's heroes in the Dialogues.Footnote ⁴⁹ Like Gregory before him, Bede held strongly to the belief that monastic spirituality is to be an active spirituality. Through the model of Cuthbert's episcopate, Bede sought to stress the importance of teaching and leading by example rather than by word alone. Both action and contemplation are needed, which required Bede to interpret Cuthbert's own spirituality along these same lines: ‘In his prose Life of Cuthbert, for example, he removed many of the details from the earlier anonymous life depicting Cuthbert as a contemplative and instead stressed his role as an active and prayerful preacher.’Footnote ⁵⁰ The means for this reinterpretation of Cuthbert, along with the editorial activity it produced, are found in Gregory's concept of longa aegritudo and Bede's shared concern to shape the church's episcopal leadership in light of biblical eschatology.

Sickness and Suffering in Bede's Portrayal of Cuthbert and Wilfrid

Bede's account of bodily sickness in the Life of Cuthbert allows him to bring together the active and contemplative life made possible through suffering, the glue that holds together word and deed in the life of the church. In this way, Cuthbert's life becomes the ideal embodiment of Gregory's teachings, over against Bede's near contemporary, Bishop Wilfrid, whose active life as a bishop lacked the needed inner dimension of ‘suffering unto death’ required for the proper integration of word and deed. Wilfrid functioned as an example of a bishop whose primary function was that of an administrator, rather than as a child and servant of the word who, through bodily illness and suffering, has learned how to integrate contemplation and action. Like Wilfrid, Cuthbert suffered persecution from worldly church leaders. But in addition to suffering persecution from Celtic schismatics and wicked monks, Cuthbert and his fellow brethren were also subject to prolonged bodily affliction.Footnote ⁵¹ By the theological standards Bede inherited from Gregory, this distinguished him from Wilfrid.Footnote ⁵²

Bede depicted Cuthbert's relationship with Bishop Wilfrid as somewhat less than cordial.Footnote ⁵³ Others suggest that Bede's ‘frosty’ demeanour towards Wilfrid in his Historia Ecclesiastica is the product of our own modern reading.Footnote ⁵⁴ In light of the arguments put forth here, a more plausible explanation is that Bede's portrait of Wilfrid stems from his Gregorian ideals of what a bishop should be. It is not that Bede has a personal dislike for Wilfrid, or that we are committing the faux pas of a Whig historian by reading our own modern notions into the actions of an early medieval scholar and saint. Instead, the spiritual distance one senses between Cuthbert and Wilfrid in Bede's writings is a matter of the spiritual and moral compass Bede inherited from Gregory. Just as the Gregorian ideal calls for the integration of contemplative and active spirituality, so also it requires the integration of official and personal sanctity. Foley suggests that the scarcity of miracles attributed to Wilfrid's ministry in the Historia Ecclesiastica is due to the fact that for Bede, Wilfrid's piety was largely an ‘official’ sanctity, arising from the execution of his public duties as bishop, while Cuthbert's sanctity was not merely official, but also personal.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Bede's eyes, Wilfrid failed to live up to the integrated piety of the Gregorian ideal found in bishops such as Cuthbert. The lack of this integration in the life of Wilfrid, at least when measured according to the Gregorian ideal Bede inherited from Gregory, helps explain the relative lack of miraculous attestation in Bede's account of Wilfrid's episcopate when compared to that of Cuthbert. Yet this does not make Wilfrid a bad bishop. He is merely not the ideal bishop.Footnote ⁵⁶

That the ideal for bishops forged by Gregory and inherited by Bede was not limited to the early mediaeval church is evident from Katherine Harvey's study of the thirteenth-century bishop Richard of Chichester.Footnote ⁵⁷ Harvey's essay suggests that the genre of the Vita continued to serve as a model for sanctity well into the high Middle Ages, citing the thirteenth-century author Ralph Bocking's Life of St Richard, Bishop of Chichester as a notable case in point. While she does not mention Bede's writings on Cuthbert, his Vita sancti Cuthberti and Bocking's Vita Sancti Ricardi share in common the idea that the sanctity which arises from performing the duties of the office of bishop (official sanctity) is not enough to qualify a bishop to serve as a model of episcopal sanctity for future generations. In order for a particular bishop to qualify as a model and have a Vita written about them, a bishop must also possess personal sanctity. Someone can be a bishop who faithfully executes the duties of one's episcopal office in a way that is commendable, but in order to qualify as a ‘Saint-Bishop’ and not merely a good bishop, he also needs personal piety.Footnote ⁵⁸

Harvey also discusses the way in which this personal sanctity was achieved in Richard's life through his cultivation of proper attitudes toward food, drink and sleep. These mostly took the form of abstinence of some kind, for example, fasting from food and drink, as well as denying oneself sleep. Because these practices were integral to the idea of masculinity in Richard's day, they defined what the idea of a ‘perfect man’ consists in, namely, one who is able to control his body and its desires.Footnote ⁵⁹ These practices demonstrated personal sanctity by showing that a man had mastery of his body and its desires. This aspect of sanctity had to be present, as well as the aspect of official sanctity. The two realms of the official and the personal must be integrated, hence the title of Harvey's essay: ‘Perfect Bishop, Perfect Man.’