Sicilian aristocrat

Thirteen centuries after Gregory, a Sicilian aristocrat who might well be a character out of Gregory’s letters told a not very miraculous story of his own great-grandfather. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (II Gattopardo) was written in the ruins of a great ancient family, in a time just after World War II when Sicily had seen all the depredations and few of the benefits of modernity. Lampedusa tells the story of the arrival of modernity, seen through the grim lucidity of the last dynastic prince of an old family, who greets the coming of Garibaldi and Garibaldi’s men with rueful intelligence. He knows that his nephew and heir is a wastrel and consigns him in marriage to the arms of a domineering upstart woman of transient beauty, recognizing what he cannot accept or change. Lampedusa’s prince harbors in his character the last of the polymathic sprezzatura of the Renaissance man, combining learning, libido, and a keen sense of the working of worldly power.

The disarray and political disunity

Gregory was like and unlike the prince, as fully sensible to the disasters that had visited his world, but with a lugubrious optimism that gave rise both to his grim determination to act and to his glad embrace of the miraculous and the untrue. The disarray and political disunity into which Italy had fallen in Gregory’s century would not begin to be healed until the revolutions of the nineteenth century, and it may reasonably be argued that the unification of Italy was not finally manifested until the power blackout of 2003—taken as the first genuinely national common experience shared by all of Italy and Sicily since the wars of Justinian.

Long after being recognized as a great administrator, spiritual leader, and writer, Gregory at his death was not universally mourned. He had imposed a monk’s spiritual discipline on the clergy and administration of the wealthy Roman church that many found unsettling. His immediate successors were at pains to forget him and his ascetic zeal, in favor of a more comfortable stewardship of church affairs. The influence of his writings tipped the balance in favor of Gregory’s memory, with the help of his mission to England. His reputation was always high among the heirs of his converting monks, and British and Irish readers ensured the preservation and dissemination of his works and his early biographies. All life is a temptation, as he kept quoting Job, and Gregory surmounted that temptation only in leaving this life.

In the end, Gregory the Great was wrong to anticipate the end of the world. It had already arrived.