Again - Earthly Cares

Letter 1,5 - to Theoctista, sister of the emperor. October 590.

"I have been brought back to the world in the guise of a bishop, in which I am as much a slave to earthly cares, as I remember being a slave to them in my life as a layman. For I have lost the profound joys of my peace and quiet, and I seem to have risen externally, while falling internally. Wherefore, I deplore my expulsion far from the face of my Creator. For I was trying every day to move outside the world, outside the flesh, to drive all corporeal images from my mind's eye and to regard the joys of Heaven in an incorporeal way."

Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 122.

COMMENT In this letter too, Gregory responds to congratulations becoming bishop of Rome. The letter plays out an, in Gregory's spirituality, important opposition: inner versus outer, contemplatio versus actio. His election is like a tornado, which made him fall from the pinnacle of contemplation "headlong into fears and trepidations" which go with his (in the eyes of the world) high office. He certainly knows how use language. At the end of this letter he compares himself with an ape, which by command of the emperor was called a lion, but, of course, cannot become one - Theoctista must have smiled reading this, and I do hope her brother too saw the subtle irony of the closing statement of this fine letter.