W. Robert Godfrey

And while Gregory doesn't have a formal doctrine of purgatory, that will develop as the centuries go on in the Middle Ages.

We're beginning to see in Gregory some notion that sin is such a great problem in this life, we probably can't completely take care of it.

and there's hope that it can be taken care of by suffering beyond this life.

Gregory could talk about grace and mean it, but Gregory once said, "'That which is a gift of the omnipotent God becomes our merit.'"

So God gives us grace, but that grace in it becomes our merit by which He judges us.

And so we get the beginnings of this increasingly complicated notion of how grace and merit, God's work and our work are really related to one another, and we see that in Gregory.

And so for him, the sacraments of the church become the key way in which we begin to experience, receive, and have some hope in the grace of God.

Now while we can say a number of negative things about Gregory and think we must, we also have to remember some positive things about Gregory.

And one of the intriguing positive things is to look at his very influential book called The Book of Pastoral Rule.

Here he's talking principally to bishops who are the pastors of their diocese, but he's looking at the church as a whole and what the function of the clergy is as a whole.

And what's interesting when we read this book is that the focus is primarily upon preaching.

So when Gregory thinks of the pastor's role in the life of the church in the year 600, it's still primarily a role of preaching.

And if we go back a little more than a century to John Chrysostom, the great preacher but also patriarch of the church in Constantinople, when he wrote his book on the priesthood, that was a book almost entirely on preaching.

And so when we look at the conviction of the ancient church, the early medieval church, as to what the principal role of the clerical leadership of the life of the church ought to be, it was still a conviction it ought to be preaching.

Preaching might not have...

quite lived up to our standards theologically, but there was still this sense that was the work.

That will be progressively lost as the Middle Ages wears on.

Partly it will be lost because of an ever declining level of education in the common parish clergy.

There will still be very educated people in the church, but the clergy as a whole, the priests as a whole, will see a real decline in their education as the Middle Ages wears on, and

If you're not very well educated, you still may be able to memorize the Latin canon of the Mass so you can recite it at the altar, but you won't be much of a preacher if you're not well educated.