Quote from Letter 4,40 to Abbot Valentinus. August 594.
It has come to our attention that women are appearing everywhere in your monastery, and, what is even more serious, your monks are making the women their consorts. As a result, they are having incautious unions with them. Therefore, in case the enemy of the human race uses this opportunity to deceive them with his cunning (Heaven forbid!), we give you this warning accordingly in the course of this order. Do not permit women to appear in your monastery hereafter, with any sort of excuse, and do not allow your monks to make them their consorts.
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 320
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment