CCGS

Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

JECS

Journal of Early Christian Studies

SC

Sources Chrétiennes

Discussing the interpretation of contemporary, non-western cultures, Clifford Geertz warns against anthropological analyses that, instead of leaving some inexplicable aporias, fit together rather too neatly, robbing the foreign of its strangeness and making it only a product of the same thought world as its analyst.Footnote ¹ Historians, no less, constantly grapple with the same problem. Indeed, the controversy provoked by recent attempts to call into question the authenticity of Gregory the Great's Dialogues on the grounds of implausibility represent one of the most enduring features of the past two decades of Gregorian studies.Footnote ²

Since the 1980s the British scholar Francis Clark has questioned and denied the authenticity of the attribution to Pope Gregory the Great of the Dialogues on the miracles of the Italian Fathers. This is not the first time, of course, that this has happened to Gregory's text, as Clark points out. During the Reformation, Protestants such as Melanchthon, Coccius, Chemnitz, Robert Cooke and Robert Rivetus were consistently reluctant to attribute a text that seemed to exult so gratuitously in the most egregious medieval ‘hagiolatry’ to a bishop of Rome whose great pastoral sensitivity, skill as a moral theologian and sense of mission otherwise offered so much to recommend him as a genuine representative of the authentic faith of the early Christians. Francis Clark has tried to offer new evidence – all of which has been convincingly rebutted by Adalbert de Vogüé, Robert Godding and Paul Meyvaert in this Journal.Footnote ³ From the start, however, the intuitive basis of Clark's position has been little different from that of the Reformers. This is clearly revealed in his own rhetoric: ‘is it plausible to suggest that the real Gregory, whose character and spirit we know so well from the works in which he pours out his pastoral and spiritual ideals, would have considered it a worthy use of his time and talents … to devote himself to writing a book of fictional fairytales?’Footnote ⁴

Elsewhere, Clark has called the Dialogues ‘sensation-seeking yarns’, unworthy, ipso facto, of a great doctor of the Church.Footnote ⁵ It does not seem to matter that John Moorhead, for example, has pointed out that the criticisms that have been levelled against Gregory's text have been or could equally be made of Athanasius of Alexandria's Life of Antony and Sophronius of Jerusalem's Miracles of Cyrus and John and of many other theologically competent thinkers from the same period who were hagiographers besides.Footnote ⁶ Instead, Clark's basic argument is that the Dialogues, without external witness in his view before the 670s, represent a fabrication composed out of some genuinely Gregorian material left unedited in the papal scrinium combined with the florid imagination of a later author's less sophisticated mind. For Clark, the authentically Gregorian component is reflected in the exegetical rather than narrative passages in the text. Clark calls them ‘inserted Gregorian passages’ (IGPs), of which he numbers eighty.Footnote ⁷

That Gregory the Great's Dialogues is actually a forgery of the later seventh century has been rejected by most of the leading scholars in Gregorian studies, including Robert Markus and Sophia Boesch-Gajano. Marilyn Dunn for whom the Dialogues possibly represent a product of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England, is a notable exception as a historian of monasticism who accepts Clark's thesis.Footnote ⁸ All the same, Clark's proposition, based as it is upon powerful and surprisingly deep-seated notions concerning the nature of religious and intellectual culture in late antiquity, none the less retains strong persuasive force for those who are new to the field, confronting Gregory the Great's Dialogues on the miracles of the Italian Fathers for the first time.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, Clark's thesis was republished in 2003 in an abridged form that attempts to take account of some of the arguments of its original critics. It is no more convincing for it. Arguably, the underlying problem can be summarised briefly: namely, the extent to which it was or was not possible for a person of the pope's evident intellectual standing to participate in a meaningful way in the late antique cult of the Christian saints.Footnote ¹⁰

The purpose of this short note consists, therefore, in an attempt to reassure students of Gregory the Great of the authenticity of the Dialogues, in spite of modern scruples concerning the character of hagiography, by drawing attention to four surprisingly understudied miracle stories contained in one of Gregory's letters, ep. 11.xxvi.

Addressed to the patrician Rusticiana in Constantinople, in February 601, ep. 11.xxvi is found in the official record of Gregory's correspondence as pope, the Registrum epistolarum. The similarity of subject matter found in these stories from the Register with those of the Dialogues, as well as their style as hagiographical narratives eloquently demonstrate the range of spiritual registers upon which a Christian ascetic and ‘intellectual’ of the late sixth century was able to operate. Stories from both the Register and the Dialogues are similar in turn to the miracle stories related by Gregory in his Homilies on the Gospels that have received greater attention in the debate. Among defenders of the Dialogues, Meyvaert dealt very briefly with the stories from ep. 11.xxvi, but by and large they have played only a minor role in arguments in favour of the true Gregorian authorship of the Dialogues.Footnote ¹¹ Yet, the hagiographical tales from the Register alone are enough to refute Clark's founding assumption that ‘a clear contrast’ exists between the Register's representation of Gregory and that preserved in the Dialogues. At times, Clark himself seems to recognise this. On the one hand, he apparently feels forced to write that when miracle narratives are found in the Register and Homilies, they are qualitatively different (‘religiously sensitive and sober in style’) from the ‘sensational’ stories of the Dialogues. In other places, however, Clark also speculates whether the miracle stories found in Gregory's undisputed texts could also be forgeries by the Dialogist, cunningly inserted into Gregory's authentic works to lend an unwarranted air of verisimilitude to the Dialogues.Footnote ¹² In other words, Clark remains unsure whether the miracle stories Gregory relates, quite unabashedly, in his letters are qualitatively different or not from the narratives found in the Dialogues. This paper argues that they are not: Gregory, author of the Register and Gregory, author of the Dialogues, are one and the same man.

Previous attempts to defend Gregory's authorship of the Dialogues have focused, quite rightly, on the pope's ep. 3.l to Maximianus, bishop of Syracuse, in July 593.Footnote ¹³ Here Gregory writes that certain of his ‘brothers’ in the papal household ‘compelled’ him (‘me compellunt’) to write a few things on the miracles of the Italian Fathers (‘aliqua de miraculis partum, quae in Italia facta audiuimus, … scribere’). For this reason, Gregory says, he has written to Maximianus, the former abbot of his monastery of St Andrew on Rome's Caelian Hill, asking him to send to Rome whatever he can remember concerning the miracles performed by Italian saints, and in particular those by the abbot Nonnosus of Pentumis. Since the miracles of Nonnosus reappear in the first Dialogue, the ep. 3.l to Maximianus has been taken as portraying the genesis of the Dialogues as a whole. Overall, the letter strongly gives the impression that the lives and miracles of Italian saints must at some point have formed the substance of conversations between Gregory and Maximianus – and, doubtless, by extension, among many of the members of the community of St Andrew's itself. This was, of course, nothing unusual in Gregory's contemporary setting: the sixth-century Rule of Benedict prescribes the communal telling of the Lives of the saints as an integral aspect of monastic observance.Footnote ¹⁴

On its own, ep. 3.l is the most solid evidence for Gregory's authorship of the Dialogues, since the pope does not refer to them by name anywhere else in any of his surviving works. As Adalbert de Vogüé has demonstrated, this is not in itself significant. Gregory rarely mentions any of his works. Further informants were certainly also involved before the final rendition of these conversations in the form of the written text we know as the Dialogues, and the surviving Register only preserves a fraction of Gregory's actual correspondence. Other letters of Gregory's, particularly those addressed to eastern correspondents, nevertheless confirm that the papal household was the scene of significant conversation, discussion and debate concerning a range of matters, including, as we know from ep. 11.xxvi, the miracles of the saints.Footnote ¹⁵

Nevertheless, Clark claims that the letter to Maximianus is itself a forgery inserted by the real author of the Dialogues, the probably later seventh-century ‘Dialogist’, into the official collection of Gregory's correspondence to bolster the appearance of the pope's otherwise spurious authorship of the text.Footnote ¹⁶ No positive evidence exists, however, for this theory. Hence the necessity for Clark to deny other, supporting evidence for the Dialogues in the Register. For writers like Clark, no source for Gregory's pontificate as the Register has so consistently provided evidence for the traditional impression of Gregory's obstinate ‘Latinism’, or so thoroughly nourished that view of the pope, classically presented in twentieth-century historiography by Walter Ullmann, as the rational, far-sighted and calculating Roman aristocrat, heir of the Stoicism of Cicero and Seneca. According to the same view, at least part of Gregory's ‘greatness’ derived from his proudly holding out against the ‘foreign’ domination imposed upon Italy by the ‘Byzantines’ between 535 and 554 and – through both the careful reorganisation of the administration of the papal estates and the sending of his audacious mission to the English in 597 – from laying the foundations for the medieval papacy and the distinctive culture of the ‘Western Roman Catholic’ Church of the high Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁷ Of course, both Gregory's occasionally tense relations with the emperor and the mission to the Anglo-Saxons are well represented by the correspondence preserved in the Register; but R. A. Markus has long since demonstrated the modest context in which they should be understood. Gregory was a loyal subject of the emperor in Constantinople whose world remained very much defined by the contours of the late antique Mediterranean oikumene.

If Clark's arguments concerning the Dialogues are representative, however, it appears that many scholars are yet to appreciate much of what is implied by this better understanding of Gregory's historical context. The enthusiasm for the saints and the strong interest in their miracles displayed in the Dialogues and suggested in the letters to Maximianus and Rusticiana in no way represents an aberration in Gregory's otherwise consistently sober, ‘Roman’ worldview. Instead, as his letter to Rusticiana clearly demonstrates, Gregory was adept at relating miracle stories outside the Dialogues, and did so, apparently as a matter of course, as an orthodox Christian leader in the late sixth century, unimpeded in his devotion either by culture, classical education or social standing. Rusticiana, likewise, Gregory's addressee in this letter, was a high-born aristocrat (patricia), well-known to Gregory from his time in Constantinople as apocrisarius between 579 and 585/7, but apparently born in Italy, and comfortable in both contemporary Latin and Greek Christian cultures. Gregory wrote to her frequently as a spiritual ‘daughter’, encouraging her piety in general and her devotion to St Peter in particular, as well as her interest from the capital on the Bosphoros in Italian affairs.Footnote ¹⁸

Indeed, that such saintly narratives should be found in a letter addressed to one of Gregory's most intimate and socially elite correspondents should caution historians against conceiving any judgement concerning the ‘popular’ mentality supposedly revealed in the Dialogues. The latter is often argued even by historians who agree that Gregory's text is authentic, who, seemingly apologetically, frequently espouse the idea that the text constitutes a kind of catechism or ‘preacher's manual’ for the simple.Footnote ¹⁹ High-brow enthusiasm for saints, relics and miracle stories is confirmed by allusions to the saints and their miracles in other examples from Gregory's Register. Of course, proving the vital role played by elites in propagating the Christian cult of saints in late antiquity is one of Peter Brown's greatest achievements and corroborated by Averil Cameron's study of the cult of icons.Footnote ²⁰ Rusticiana's existence can be identified independently of Gregory's correspondence. The noblewoman's daughter was married to a member of one of the highest-ranking aristocratic families of the sixth-century Byzantine world – the Apion family of Oxyrhynchus.Footnote ²¹ In other words, Rusticiana was no figment of the imagination of a seventh-century interpolator. Not even Clark has challenged the authenticity of Gregory's correspondence with the noblewoman.

Gregory and Rusticiana's friendship was mutually felt. Gregory often took comfort in sharing his personal and official burdens with her. This included the bed-ridden frustration induced by his frequent bouts of gout – an ailment Rusticiana came to share – and the noblewoman was among those to whom Gregory confided the strain that he felt beneath his papal duties.Footnote ²² For her part, Gregory's letters reveal that Rusticiana reciprocated Gregory's friendship. She also evidently enjoyed access to the emperor;Footnote ²³ made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (although Gregory scolds her for not fulfilling her intention to travel as far as Mount Sinai);Footnote ²⁴ and frequently sent alms to Rome for the ransoming of prisoners taken captive by the Lombards, as well as for sustenance of the monks in Gregory's monastery, St Andrew's on the Caelian.Footnote ²⁵ The point of emphasising this friendship between Gregory and the Constantinopolitan noblewoman, however, is that it should caution us against attributing a purely venal purpose to Gregory's letter to Rusticiana that discusses the miracles performed by St Andrew at his monastery in Rome. After all, it would be tempting to conclude that Gregory's inclusion of such stories was merely aimed to squeeze more money for the monastery out of a credulous aristocratic sponsor.

None the less, the context for Gregory's recounting of four miracle stories in ep. 11.xxvi to Rusticiana is thanks for a gift of hers to St Andrew's. Each of these miracles was performed by St Andrew and took place among monks at St Andrew's, as related to Gregory by both the monastery's abbot and the praepositus. Gregory's enthusiasm is ostensibly sincere and, at times, barely constrained. His words ring with wonder at the events he narrates: ‘so many are the miracles and so great the care and protection’ afforded by the Apostle Andrew for the monks of his monastery that Gregory is moved to write that ‘it is as if he [St Andrew] were himself the very abbot of the monastery’.Footnote ²⁶ Such miracle stories from St Andrew's were so numerous, in fact, that Gregory says that he has chosen to recount ‘but a few from the many’. Relating their contents briefly, drawing comparison with similar stories from the Dialogues where appropriate will flesh out Gregory's attitude towards sainthood and miracles in the two sources. These four stories occupy almost two-thirds of the contents of Gregory's letter to Rusticiana – some four pages in the Corpus Christianorum edition and, as such, among the longer letters of the Register.

The opening story of ep. 11.xxvi concerns two monks (a younger, who ‘seemed more careful’, ‘prudentior uidebatur’, and an elder monk sent along to keep watch on him) who were charged with the task of selling an unspecified item. Unknown to the younger monk, his chaperone stole part of the proceeds they received from the sale. As soon as they approached the threshold of the oratory dedicated to St Andrew on their return, the elder monk who had committed the theft was seized by a demon. When the other monks came to exorcise the demon, the thief was tormented by it until he admitted his transgression. The story ends with the monk-thief displaying his penitence by prostrating himself and apparently obtaining forgiveness from St Andrew.

Theft and the illegitimate receipt of gifts are themes of two consecutive stories from Gregory's second Dialogue, the Life of Benedict. In the first, a man hid one of two barrels of wine given to him as a donation to St Benedict's monastery. When he presented the first barrel to the saint, St Benedict warned him not to drink from the second one he had hidden. The man later found that the barrel was filled with a snake.Footnote ²⁷ In the following story, a monk sent to preach to a neighbouring community of nuns accepted the illegitimate gift of some handkerchiefs. This was miraculously known to St Benedict who immediately rebuked the monk for the trespass upon his return. Like the monk in the letter to Rusticiana, the monk demonstrated his penitence by prostrating himself on the ground.Footnote ²⁸ Clearly, the emphasis in all three stories lies on the power of the saints to detect fraud. The only significant difference is that St Andrew, being ‘dead’, was active as a saint in an oratory that presumably contained his relics, while St Benedict, still alive, could be active wherever his physical presence was found.

This is more important than it may appear since we know that in Constantinople during the 580s – a city in which Gregory lived as apocrisarius between 579 and 584/7 – others had raised questions concerning the actuality of saintly miracles performed from beyond the grave.Footnote ²⁹ For his part, Gregory appears convinced, even insistent, throughout ep. 11.xxvi that such visions were both possible and real. Gregory displayed the same attitude in the fourth Dialogue, where Gregory writes that the miracles which the saints perform at their shrines are proof of their soul's continued activity in the hereafter.Footnote ³⁰ The same belief is visible in Gregory's gloss on a passage from Job in his compendious Moralia in Iob:

In fact, Gregory's representations of the saints – whether in the Register or the Dialogues – are consistent with this statement from the indubitably Gregorian Moralia. As if to stress the saints' presence in the affairs of the living, saintly visions often take place in direct response to human actions, as for example the monks' intercession with St Andrew. In the Dialogues, such ‘simultaneity’ is a special feature of stories concerning the eucharist.Footnote ³² Whether his exegetical, epistolary or hagiographical writings are under consideration, for Gregory, death imported no caesura that might prevent the holy dead from interacting with the living. Footnote ³³ The same was not true of all Christian thinkers from late antiquity.Footnote ³⁴

The next two stories narrated by Gregory in ep. 11.xxvi have to do with the fate of monks who tried to escape from St Andrew's monastery. In the first, a monk was found by his brothers, shaking and screaming aloud, with his eyes wide open but unable to see. It was midday on the feast day of St Andrew and the rest of the brothers had been asleep. The brothers laid the troubled monk at the altar of St Andrew and prostrated themselves in prayer. Suddenly, the monk regained his senses and confessed what had happened. As he slept, an old man appeared to him in a dream and unleashed a black dog that threatened to tear the disobedient monk to pieces. All the while, the old man demanded to know why the monk desired to flee the monastery. Since the monk could not escape the dog's fangs, some monks (‘quidam monachi’) came and pleaded with the old man on his behalf. Eventually, the man ordered the dog away and the monk returned to his right mind. The monk then confessed to the brothers that he had this dream just after he had decided to run away from the monastery.

Clearly the old man is St Andrew, employing a ‘demon’ (the dog) to punish the recalcitrant, while the ‘quidam monachi’ that appear in the monk's dream are the brothers, interceding with the Apostle through their prayers at his shrine.Footnote ³⁵ It is a very clear demonstration of St Andrew's involvement in the life of the monastery and of the pious majority's ability to intercede with him. It strongly resembles in spirit a story in the second Dialogue where a monk who attempted to leave one of St Benedict's foundations was confronted on his way by a dragon. Like the monk in Gregory's letter to Rusticiana, the runaway shook and screamed until his brothers came to his rescue. In the story from the Dialogues, Gregory then commented that the vision of the dragon was revealed by the prayers of St Benedict himself, who wished thus to reveal to the monk the invisible ‘dragon’ (demon) that he had previously followed blindly.Footnote ³⁶ In the fourth Dialogue, Gregory further explains that visions of dragons are portents of post-mortem punishment. Returning to the letter to Rusticiana, however, St Andrew's relenting demonstrated that the monk in question was one of the lucky ones afforded such a vision in time to atone for his sins.Footnote ³⁷ That this reprieve was obtained by means of the brothers' intercession with the Apostle reinforces the efficaciousness of such prayer to the saints as well as the power exercised by saints from beyond the grave. This is an important point to bear in mind when reading Gregory's Dialogues. In the third Dialogue, Gregory narrated two stories concerning the appearance of St Peter to sacristans in a church dedicated to the Prince of the Apostles in Rome.Footnote ³⁸ Remarkably, the first vision left the first sacristan physically ill and the second filled with miraculous power to heal a crippled woman. When Gregory's interlocutor, the Deacon Peter, specifically questioned the pope about the power such spiritual visions possess over material substances, Gregory categorically affirmed the truth of this.

The third story in ep. 11.xxvi concerns another monk who secretly wished to abandon the monastery. While he was considering this, he tried to enter the monastery's oratory – a place already strongly associated with St Andrew's presence in the preceding two stories. The monk was immediately possessed by a demon. When the demon let him go, he quit the oratory. Whenever he tried to re-enter, however, he was again possessed. After this had happened several times, the monk confessed that he was guilty of wishing to abandon the monastery. In response, the brothers devoted themselves to three days of prayer. The monk was subsequently healed of his perverse desire and the evil spirit never came over him again. According to Gregory, the same monk used to say that, whenever he was tormented, he saw St Andrew scolding him.

The final story in Gregory's letter to Rusticiana narrates the adventures of two monks who actually succeeded in their initial attempt to escape, having decided to make their way to Jerusalem. They hid in concealed crypts by the Porta Flamminia, but their absence was discovered at vespers. The remaining brothers hunted across Rome on horseback for the runaway duo, thinking to overtake them along either the Via Latina or the Via Appia. Presumably thanks to St Andrew, they miraculously realised (‘subito eis consilium ortum est’) that they would find the brothers along the Via Salaria. In fact, their horses stopped stock still right in front of the crypts in which the absconders were hidden. Since the monks knew that this had to be a miracle (again, presumably performed by St Andrew), they descended into the crypts. Inside they found their escaped and terrified companions who, according to Gregory, were greatly improved by the miracle. Indeed, Gregory affirms that he wrote to tell Rusticiana of these miracles so that she would understand precisely whose oratory her alms sustained: that of St Andrew the Apostle himself.

The ‘freezing’ of the horses outside the caves is a motif found in many collections of monastic stories from late antiquity. It occurs strikingly in Gregory's first Dialogue where the mounts that carried a Gothic war band refused to move until a stolen horse was returned to its owner, a holy man named Libertinus.Footnote ³⁹ In the third Dialogue the theme returns in a slightly different form when a would-be sheep-rustler is frozen to the ground until daybreak when his theft can be detected.Footnote ⁴⁰ So it is not surprising to find this motif repeated here in one of Gregory's letters.

Considering Gregory's letter to Rusticiana more globally, it is worth noting that, despite having been composed eight years after the Dialogues, ep. 11.xxvi is nevertheless of a piece with Gregory's customary procedure there of retelling miracle stories that were originally recounted to him by others. In ep. 11.xxvi the original source of these hagiographical tales is again an abbot of St Andrew's. This corroborates the situation described by the pope in ep. 3.l where Maximianus as abbot of St Andrew's was asked to provide Gregory with saintly stories. The impression is again given that discussions between Gregory and his intimates concerning the miracles of the saints were frequent.

Yet, as important as they are, ep. 3.l and ep. 11.xxvi are not the only support that the Register gives for Gregory's interest in the cult of the saints. In fact, the Register is replete with references to Gregory's gifts of relics to various correspondents.Footnote ⁴¹ Of these, two are justly well-known: Gregory's refusal of the Empress Constantina's request that he send to her at Constantinople the head of St Paul; Gregory's gift to Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, of a cross containing relics from the chains of St Peter, to cure him of temporary blindness of the eyes.Footnote ⁴² In the first, Gregory claimed that he could not send the Apostle's head to Constantinople precisely because of his fear of incurring St Paul's wrath. In the second, Gregory expresses no doubt whatsoever that St Peter's relics did not actually posses the miraculous power which they were purported to have.

Elsewhere in the Register, in a letter addressed to ‘an illustrious woman’, Gregory provides a brief overview of his views of the benefits entailed in the devoted veneration of the saints. When Gregory excused his delay in fulfilling the woman's request for relics, he wrote that,

In other words, Gregory's belated sending of the requested relics could only increase this individual's longing for heaven and the benefit the lady would derive from the relics once received. Her subsequent thanks to God for the saints' relics would inspire her all the more to obey his law and progress in Christian holiness. Indeed, her model, in this life and the next, would be the very saints whose relics she venerated. Here as elsewhere, the Register consistently gives the impression that Gregory participated in the cult of saintly relics with sincerity and enthusiasm.

The upshot of Gregory's obvious belief in the contemporary reality of saintly miracles is that Clark's other main piece of evidence from the Register, Gregory's ep. 11.xxxvi to Augustine of Canterbury – in which the pope warned Augustine against being too proud of the miracles that he has performed during his ministry in Kent – is just that. It is a warning against the very real spiritual danger which Gregory believes confronts equally real Christian thaumaturges.Footnote ⁴⁴ In no way can the letter be reasonably understood (as Clark would have it) as suggesting hostility or scepticism on Gregory's behalf towards saints or the miraculous powers attributed to them.Footnote ⁴⁵ A story by one of Gregory the Great's contemporaries, Bishop Gregory of Tours, succinctly illustrates the potentially ambivalent orthodox sixth-century attitudes towards hagiographical miracles, attitudes induced precisely because saintly miracles were assumed to occur. When a cartload of grain was saved from destruction by rain by the prayers of a godly novice (whose prayers caused the cloud to split in half so that it rained on either side of the cart without wetting the grain itself), his abbot quickly had him seized and beaten, admonishing him, ‘It is for you, my son, … to grow more and more humble in the fear of God, not to puff yourself up with prodigies and miracles.’Footnote ⁴⁶ By comparison, Gregory the Great's warning to Augustine is mild indeed. None the less, the sentiment shared by the two Catholic bishops was the same: it was because miracles were real and actually performed by living saints that the pious soul must conscientiously guard against the equally real danger that performing miracles posed to it.

Of course, the analysis cannot be left there, as if the Dialogues and the Register did nothing but confirm a simplified version of the ‘triumphalist’ view of the cult of the saints in late antiquity that has guided modern historiography ever since the publication of Peter Brown's justly ground-breaking ‘Holy Man’ article in 1971.Footnote ⁴⁷ It seems, in fact, that historians of Christianity in the late and post-Roman worlds are yet to take the full measure of Gregory's Dialogues, and other texts like them. The doubts that may have engendered Gregory's production of the Dialogues have been a remarkably neglected aspect of the text.Footnote ⁴⁸ For, from the Deacon Peter's uncertainty concerning the existence of the holy Fathers of Italy to his statement concerning the number ‘within the fold of the Church who doubt the existence of the soul after death’, the Dialogues are, in fact, structurally framed by doubt.Footnote ⁴⁹ The second and fourth of them, in particular, seem to promise fruitful comparison with Eustratius of Constantinople's defence of the miraculous powers of the saints and the efficacy of prayers and oblations offered for the dead.Footnote ⁵⁰ These, like the criticisms levelled against the cult of the saints by a Vigilantius of Calagurris, or the scepticism denounced by a Theodoret of Cyrrhus concerning the propriety of the cult of the martyrs' relics during the century before Gregory the Great's lifetime, remain to be integrated into a global view of the confrontation of differing religious and cultural traditions in late antiquity.Footnote ⁵¹ In other words, Gregory clearly evinced no doubt in the saints' miracles, but other members of his society possibly did.

Rather than representing an unselfconscious contribution to the cult of saints in late antiquity, Gregory the Great's Dialogues perhaps bear witness to the questions that consistently accompanied the cult of the saints and their relics as it developed in the Mediterranean world from the fourth century.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, Gregory's Dialogues will remain an enigma until this – the complex, often contested nature of Christian religious belief and practice at the end of antiquity – and not modern notions concerning what Gregory should or should not have believed – returns to the centre of the historical debate.