This is the last (I hope) in an ongoing series of posts about the lamest of the many miracles chronicled in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. The fourth book has, unlike the other three, an overarching argument, which is the soul is real and persists after death. Gregory proves that point partly with apodictic arguments (“Angels are invisible, and everyone believes in those, so why can’t the soul be invisible too? That’s faith!”) but mostly with ghost stories. If anyone is a ghost, hears a ghost, sees a ghost, smells a ghost, etc., that’s good evidence that the soul can exist outside the body.
There’s an interesting inconsistency between that position and the one held by earlier theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, and John Cassian, all of whom tell us that we shouldn’t talk to ghosts because they’re demons in disguise. The difference may mark Gregory’s comparative lack of theological accuity or, more likely, a drift away from mortalist theories of the afterlife to something more like the modern view.
Whatever the explanation is, Gregory’s use of ghost stories as proofs gives him plenty of chances to share more of the goofy miracles that are his stock in trade. My favorite of these has to do with a certain Stefanus, escorted to heaven from his deathbed by an array of saints and martyrs (ghosts!) But that’s not a privilege just anyone gets. Stefanus is extra-holy. We know this because (once upon a time), somebody burned down his haystack and he didn’t even get mad. It’s a miracle!
In light of what I’ve already written about the importance of hunger for the moral universe of the Dialogues, this is actually less dumb than it sounds. In Gregory’s world, food is hard to come by, so someone who can let it go without getting upset has really learned not to value worldly goods. The thing is, that kind of asceticism isn’t itself particularly valued elsewhere in the Dialogues: most of Gregory’s saintly types recognize the value of worldly goods all too well, which is why they give to the poor and needy rather than hoarding for themselves. I think that Stefanus belongs to an older character type, the Roman Stoic, for whom externals really are indifferent. Stefanus’ quip when he hears that his crops have been burned – “You think it’s bad for me? Well, think about the other guy!” – tends to confirm this guess: a key part of stoic anger-management therapy is learning to feel pity for people you otherwise would have gotten mad at. The evil deeds of your enemy are symptomatic of an ulcer in the soul that’s far more painful that whatever (purely external) losses you may have suffered.
The last book of the Dialogues brings a lot more lay-types onto the scene. As such, in this book there’s a wider diversity of character than in the three proceeding: we’re no longer stuck with Gregory’s relatively uniform and even monotonous models of holiness. In this context, what Stefanus shows us is that Gregory’s sense of virtue might be little more big-tent than we’d thought. Intriguingly, it also suggests that at least a fragment of stoic ethics could, in the person of an Italian landholder, survive the end of philosophical education as such in the 6th century. The story forces us to ask: how much of ancient philosophy ends up getting mulched under and composted into the folk wisdom of the Middle Ages?