Yet still, in the imaginings of many Christians, there seemed more to Satan than merely the absence of good. The more vividly he was evoked, the more autonomous he came to seem. His great empire of sin seemed hard to square with the sovereignty of an all-powerful and beneficent God. Why, if Christ had defeated death, was Satan’s reach still so long? How, when the very armies of heaven remained in the field against him, armed and ready for war, could mortals in a fallen world hope to stand proof against his powers? What were the prospects, if any, of overcoming the Devil for good?
Answers to these questions existed; but they had not come easily. This, of course, was no surprise. Christians knew that they were not mere spectators in the great drama of Satan’s claim on the world, but participants – and that the stakes were cosmically high. The shadows cast by this conviction were deep ones – and destined to extend far into the future.
War in Heaven
In November 589, the Tiber burst its banks. Granaries were flooded, several churches swept away on the currents, and a great school of water-snakes – the largest ‘a massive dragon the size of a tree-trunk’13 – washed up on the shore. Two months later, plague returned to Rome. Among the first to die was the pope. His death sent a chill through the city. Although nominally it was ruled by the emperor in far-off Constantinople, responsibility for Rome’s protection had effectively devolved upon its bishop. Its citizens, ravaged by plague as they were, and menaced by predatory barbarians, did not delay in electing a replacement. Their choice was unanimous. Amid the evils of a debased age, they craved a touch of class. In the spring of 590, in the great basilica that Constantine had raised over the site of Saint Peter’s tomb, a man from the very heart of the Roman establishment was consecrated as pope.
Gregory’s ancestors, so it was reported in awed tones by his admirers in Francia, had been senators. The claim, although an exaggeration, was understandable. The new pope did indeed have something of the vanished age of Roman greatness about him. He had inherited a palace on the Caelian hill, in the heart of the city, and various estates in Sicily; served as urban prefect, an office that reached back to the time of Romulus; lived for six years among the imperial elite in Constantinople. Gregory, though, had no illusions as to the scale of Rome’s decline. A city that at its peak had boasted over a million inhabitants now held barely twenty thousand. Weeds clutched at columns erected by Augustus; silt buried pediments built to honour Constantine. The vast expanse of palaces, and triumphal arches, and race-tracks, and amphitheatres, constructed over the centuries to serve as the centre of the world, now stretched abandoned, a wilderness of ruins. Even the Senate was no more. When Gregory, emerging from his consecration into the plague-ravaged streets, raised his eyes to the sky, he claimed to see arrows raining down, fired from an invisible bow. Time would see him dread that all traces of life might be expunged from the city. ‘For since the Senate failed, the people perish, and the sufferings and the groans of the few survivors are multiplied day on day. Rome, now empty, burns!’14
Yet Gregory did not despair. He never doubted that redemption from the plague was possible. ‘God is full of mercy and compassion, and it is his will that we should win his pardon through our prayers.’15 The crowds, listening to the new pope deliver this message of hope, were primed to listen. The attachment of the Roman people to their ancient religiones, to the rites and rituals that for so long had governed their city’s calendar, had been decisively broken. Only a century before, in February 495, a predecessor of Gregory’s had been scandalised by the spectacle of young men in skimpy loincloths haring through Rome, lashing the breasts of women with goat-skin thongs, just as young men had been doing every February since the time of Romulus; half a century before that, another pope had been no less shocked to see some among his flock greet the dawn by bowing to the sun. Those days, though, were past. The rhythms of the city – its days, its weeks, its years – had been rendered Christian. The very word religio had altered its meaning: for it had come to signify the life of a monk or a nun. Gregory, when he summoned his congregation to repentance, did so as a man who had converted his palace on the Caelian into a monastery, who had lived there as a monk himself, pledged to poverty and chastity, a living, breathing embodiment of religio. The Roman people, hearing their new pope urge them to repentance, did not hesitate to obey him. Day after day, they walked the streets, raising prayers and chanting psalms. Eighty dropped dead of the plague as they went in procession. Then, on the third day, an answer at last from the heavens. The plague-arrows stopped falling. The dying abated. The Roman people were spared obliteration.
Pagans, brought up on Homer, had been perfectly capable of attributing pestilence to the murderousness of an indignant and vengeful Apollo. Christians, though, knew better. Gregory never doubted that the sufferings of the times in which he lived were bred in part of human sinfulness. God, whose presence was to be felt in every breath of every breeze, in the passage of every cloud, was always close, nor was there anyone who could escape his judgement. Gregory had only to count his own faults to recognise this. ‘Every day I transgress.’16 This did not mean, though, that salvation lay beyond the reach of sinful humanity. Christ had not died in vain. Hope still remained. Gregory, when he sought to make sense of the calamities being visited on Italy, turned above all to the Book of Job. Its hero, given through no fault of his own into the hands of Satan, and plunged into abject wretchedness, had endured his sufferings with steadfast fortitude. Here, so Gregory argued, was the key to understanding the shocks of his own age. Satan was abroad again. Just as Job had been cast into the dust, so now were the blameless suffering disaster alongside sinners. ‘Cities are sacked, strongholds razed to the ground, churches destroyed, fields emptied of farmers. Swords rage incessantly against those few of us who – for now, at any rate – remain, and blows rain down on us from above.’ Gregory, after listing these tribulations, did not hesitate to declare what he believed they portended. ‘Evils long foretold. The destruction of the world.’17
That the earthly order was destined to come to an end, and the dimension of the mortal to be joined for all eternity with the divine, had long been kept from the mass of humanity. Time, so most people assumed, went in cycles. Even the Stoics, who taught that the universe was destined to be consumed by fire, never doubted that a new universe would emerge from the conflagration, as it had done before, and as it would do again. Philosophers, though, had never had any particular cause to hope for anything different. First under Alexander and his successors, and then under Rome, they had been prized, sponsored, fêted. Men to whom the status quo had been kind could view with some equanimity the prospect of its perpetual renewal. Yet not everyone had been content to view time as a ceaseless cycle. The Persians, in the wake of their conquest by Alexander, had come to believe that it was destined to have an end, and that Ahura Mazda, in a final reckoning, would triumph over the Lie once and for all. In ad 66, the yearning for a very similar consummation had fuelled the Jews in their doomed revolt against Rome. Jesus himself, only a few decades earlier, had proclaimed the Kingdom of God to be at hand. Christians, right from the beginning, had dreamed of their Saviour’s return, when the dead would be raised from their graves and all humanity be judged, and a kingdom of the just be established for ever, on earth as it was in heaven. That dream, over the course of six centuries, had never faded. When Gregory, contemplating the miseries of the world, foretold its imminent destruction, he spoke in hope as much as dread.