Letter 2,30 - to Abbot Eusebius, about submission to his bishop. July 592.
"Again, when he [bishop Maximian] was offering you his thanks, you ought to have met him with an act of gratitude, Because you did not act in this way, I recognize by this that we need tears and nothing else.
For it is not a great thing that we are humble before those who honor us, because even all secular people do this, but we should be especially be humble towards those who are making us suffer in some way. The psalmist says; 'See my humility in the face of my foes.' What sort of life is ours, who are unwilling to be humble even towards our fathers?
For that reason, most beloved son, I ask that all the bitterness leaves your heart, lest perhaps your end is close at hand, and the ancient enemy shuts the path to the heavenly kingdom through the iniquity of your discord."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 211.
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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