Letter 1,7 - to Bishop Anastasius. October 590.
"I have received your Grace's letters as a tired man receives rest, a sick man health, a thirsty man a spring, and a hot one shade. For those words did not seem to have been expressed through a carnal tongue, but each word so revealed the spiritual love which you bore, it was just as if your mind were speaking all on its own. But what followed was very harsh, as your love ordered me to bear earthly burdens. Whom you loved spiritually before, loving afterwards with a temporal love, in my opinion, you forced me right down to the ground, with the burden placed on top of me, so that totally losing rectitude of mind, and giving away the clarity of contemplation, I can say, not through the spirit of the prophet but through my own experience: 'I have been in every way cast down and humiliated' (Ps 118:107)."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 126.
About Me & About the Project
- Arnold Smeets
- BIO - I am a theologian. Radio broadcaster at Dutch Public Broadcast Organisation KRO-NCRV and Senior Research Fellow at CPO (Centre for Patristic Studies), the Netherlands. In 2007 I took my degree cum laude at the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Tilburg on a semiotic analysis of three letters of Pope Gregory the Great (Ad Leandrum, concerning his own conversion, and Ep. xi,37 and Ep. xi,56, two instructions on the mission of the English). PROJECT - Every few days I'll blog a paragraph and twitter a line from one of Gregory the Great's Letters. Passages from the letters are quoted with kind permission of the publishers, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada.
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