Letter 1,44 - to Sub-deacon Peter. June 591.
"The commandments of God exhort us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and when they order us to love them with charity, how much more ought we to help them with subsidies for their bodily necessities, so as to relieve their shortages in these, if not in all ways, at least with a few provisions!
Since, therefore, we have seen that this Filimuth, son of a most worthy gentleman, suffers need not only through the loss of sight but also from a shortage of provisions, we have thought it necessary, as far as possibility allows it, to provide him with a decision.
Therefore, with this present order we instruct your Experience to supply him with twenty four measures of wheat each year, and twelve measures of beans also and twenty casks of wine, for the maintenance of his life."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 170.
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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