Gregory the Great, Saint Benedict and Saint Aequitius: the birth of rural Christianity

Today we talk about Gregory the Great's Dialogues, focusing on the renewed importance that monasticism had in the West in dialogue with local communities after the decline of the cities in the VI century, with a particular bias for Italy. The peninsula, devastated by the Gothic war and the Longobard invasion, was in a very difficult situation in which the urban fabric had fallen and rural life had acquired a fundamental importance in a subsistence economy. The Dialogues represent an extraordinary demonstration of intelligence and civilization, which leads the pontiff to positively evaluate the role of the monks, from Benedict to Aequitius, who are represented by Gregory as an alternative model to that of the diocesan clergy and parishes: a message aimed at to win the favor of the Italic populations, in the face of the decline of urban religious models, which in large part could no longer be compared, even to their levels of culture, education and lifestyle which also Gregory represented, in the face of peasant ones. An ingenious model, which without giving up the papal spiritual primacy and cultural heritage of the highest classical culture, senses the change from the Late Ancient to the Early Middle Ages, thus starting the bases for a Christianization of the countryside through these hagiographic models, winning over the rural communites from Italy to Europe (see the Benedictine order).

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