St. Gregory the Great founded a school of sacred music in Rome which he himself sometimes conducted as a conductor. Let us reflect of the music he left to the church.
Newsroom (26/12/2021 17:00, Gaudium Press) Saint Gregory the Great composed songs that became part of the Liturgy and had great repercussion in France, Germany, and England. One night, a dove – representing the Holy Spirit – appeared to him and dictated the musical compositions with which he enriched the Church.
Having led a life of struggle against errors and heresies, always aiming at the salvation of souls and the glory of the Holy Church, he died in 604, at the age of 64.
Here are some comments from Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira about St. Gregory the Great and Gregorian chant.
This saint “was the true founder of the Middle Ages, because […] he, in a certain way, had just closed the last glimmer of the door that separated men from pagan antiquity, and opened, on the other hand, the door to the new age that was about to be born. […]
“He was a great founder of convents, and the expansion of the cenobitic life is one of the most characteristic facts of the early Middle Ages.
“St. Gregory, on the other hand, worked for the chantry. And it’s interesting to imagine the great Pope, Doctor of the Church, eminent politician, teaching cantochon to his pupils, not with rod in hand, but with harness. The image is picturesque and would call for an illumination, or perhaps a stained glass window.
“With the founding of the cantochon he properly gave voice to the Middle Ages. For the cantochon was the great singing voice of the Middle Ages, from end to end. And it transmitted its character to the Benedictine life that St. Benedict had launched, but which had not yet taken its full stamp of firmness and definition that it acquired with him.
The people were following the saint to take him to the papacy
“In the life of St. Gregory the Great, the missionary sense is admirable, giving impetus to the missions in England and Ireland. Hence, the outflow of the great stream of missionaries who, from England and Ireland, returned to the continent where they would clear Germania and sow the seeds of the Middle Ages.
“At the same time, we see this man dealing, but in vain, with the great scourge of Christianity at that time: the Roman Empire of the East, which was increasingly tending to schism. This empire was always staggering between heresy and Catholic truth.
“And finally, as everybody knows, it collapsed. But he tried to hold up this wall of the city of Jesus Christ that threatened to fall, and here we see another example of the utter ingratitude of Byzantium before the zeal of the Popes. […]
“Thus, it can be said that all the problems of the time passed through the mind of this great man. He analyzed them, faced them, and at the same time wrote works that were pillars of medieval thought. […]
“He lived in a harsh time of disorder and even garish crimes. Yet the people who participated in the evils of the time at the same time acclaimed a saint as Pope. The saint would run away from the people, and the people would follow him, and put him in the papacy. It was a people capable of discerning a saint from one who was not a saint, and of preferring the saint over the non-saint.
Would it be the same today? Would the people go after the saint to take him to the papacy? How everything has changed…”
Strength of innocence combined with grace
Gregorian chant “is the force of innocence combined with grace, which transformed, for example, the swamps and megalithic valleys of ancient Europe into gardens sprinkled with life and color, where, amidst groves and gorgeous lakes, loom grand abbeys, imposing castles and majestic cathedrals. […]
“What is the effect of the Gregorian chant on the soul of the contemporary man who knows how to admire it? On my own soul, therefore?
“I would say that it emanates from him a form of temperature that conveys all the coziness of the warm and all the pleasant freshness of the frigid, of a cold that neither cuts nor mistreats, where a tepid breeze now and then makes one smile. It has the temperatures of life, which are beyond the algidness and heat of the mineral world.
“It is a composition of another nature, which communicates to us refreshment, light, and peace; which helps to awaken and give vigor, in our souls, to a thousand ordinances of innocence that the clash with the contemporary world – in which we find a jungle with monkeys, tigers, snakes, and wild boars, which are the subjects alien to our eternal salvation – would tend to make us forget and to numb, diverting our spiritual gaze.
Whispering Song
“Another effect the Gregorian chant has on souls is to make clear to them the place of the whisper in man’s expressiveness. It is false that to express himself fully he must do so in the highest registers of his voice and in the greatest undulations of his movements. No. There are harmonies, compositions, sanctities, so to speak, that are supersonic and would be tainted and betrayed if they were described by sound in its maximum intensity. Only the whisper is capable of expressing what is supra-sonic. This is why Gregorian is the chant of the whisper.
“And as such, moreover, it makes one feel that this is the land of exile to which we came as a result of original sin. There is in it something of ascetic penumbra, of half penitential sonorities, of souls from Purgatory passing by whispering, groaning, and chanting songs of hope.
“If we pay close attention, we will see in it the innocence that knows itself to be in a state of trial, taking every care of itself. There is something of the mortified, the vigilant, within the heavenly resourcefulness of the Gregorian, in the manner of the hood placed on the head of a young friar: it recalls the penitential aspect, it warns against the emptiness of earthly things, against the liar of man’s own excessive élans.
“So is the Gregorian. From the exultant joys of the Te Deum, to the solemn recollections of the Tantum ergo, it is music that has that incomparable quality of expressing the perfect attitude, the exact degree of light of the upright and truly innocent soul when it stands before God.”
Let us pray to St. Gregory the Great to intercede so that the Immaculate Heart of Mary may triumph as soon as possible after the purifying punishments through which the world must pass.
By Paulo Francisco Martos
Compiled by Camille Mittermeier
