Letter 3,51 - to Priscus, patrician of the East. July 593
"But as a traveler walks now over level ground, and now over uneven ground, so certainly do we, while we remain in this life, now meet prosperity and now adversity, and finally they succeed one another in alternate periods of time, and with each in succession they become confused.
And so, while the rule of mutability corrupts everything in this world, we should neither be lifted up by prosperity nor broken by adversity. And so it suits us to strive with all our mind to reach that world, where whatever is firm endures and where prosperity is not altered by adversity.
There fore in this life it is arranged by the wonderful direction of almighty God that either adversity follows prosperity or prosperity follows adversity. For, when humiliated, we must learn whatever fault we have committed. And again, when exalted, we must retain in our mind the memory of adversity, as if an anchor of humility.
This therefore should be considered not as the anger of our Creator, but as his grace, through which we learn that the more humbly we hold on to his gifts, the more truly we preserve them."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 269.
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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