Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman monk who did not want the papacy, and who left the West its handbook for pastors, its mission to England, and its humblest name for authority. + Picture a man dictating letters from a bed he cannot easily leave, in a city whose aqueducts have failed and whose grain stores were ruined by the last flood. Outside the walls there is a Lombard army. Inside them the plague has already killed the previous pope. That is roughly the position Gregory was in when he wrote the books the Middle Ages would read for the next thousand years, and knowing it changes how they sound. None of this was composed in a quiet library. He matters, for a Christian reader, because he is the hinge. Behind him lie Augustine, the Roman empire in the West, and the world of the church fathers. Ahead of him lie monasteries, missions, and the slow construction of Christian Europe. He is the last of the four teachers the Latin church calls its great doctors, with Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, and the first monk to be made pope. When someone asks how the faith of the Mediterranean became the faith of the northern peoples, a large part of the answer runs through decisions this one man made from that bed. The signature fact is the paperwork. More than eight hundred and fifty of his letters survive, copied into a register kept by his own office, and they are gloriously ordinary: grain shipments, a runaway slave, a bishop who has been careless with money, a landlord squeezing his tenants. Nothing else survives from that century on anything like that scale. Three centuries later a king of England, Alfred, thought Gregory’s book for pastors so necessary that he translated it into English himself and sent a copy to every bishop in his kingdom.

(●) c. 540 AD: Born on the Caelian Hill into a Roman senatorial family, in a city that had been fought over for a generation. + Gregory was born in Rome around 540. No record gives the year. The figure is a convention worked backward from the age at which he held the city prefecture, the senior civil magistracy of Rome, so every date derived from it carries the same softness, and the c. in front of it is doing real work. His father Gordianus was a wealthy man of the senatorial class, the old landowning families who had governed Rome for centuries and still supplied most of its officials, and he held an office in the Roman church besides; his mother Silvia is honoured as a saint in her own right. The family house stood on the Caelian Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, looking out over the valley of the Circus Maximus. Gregory himself claimed a pope among his forebears: in the Dialogues, the four books of conversations about the holy men of Italy that he wrote as pope, he calls Pope Felix his ancestor, telling how Felix appeared in a vision to his aunt Tarsilla and called her to a dwelling of light. The Rome he was born into was not the Rome of the emperors. The emperor Justinian, ruling from Constantinople, had been sending armies to take Italy back from the Ostrogoths, the Germanic people who then held the peninsula, since 535, and the war did not end until Gregory was about fourteen. The city was besieged, taken and retaken; Procopius, the Greek historian who travelled with the imperial army, describes the Gothic king Totila marching the whole population out and leaving Rome without a soul in it. The aqueducts that had once watered a population of something near a million were cut in the siege of 537. What survived was a much smaller town living inside enormous ruins, and Gregory grew up walking past monuments to a world that had ended.

(●) c. 573 AD: He rose to prefect of the city, then gave the family estates away and turned the mansion into a monastery. + The prefect of the city (praefectus urbi) was the senior civil magistrate of Rome: the courts, the grain supply, and order in the streets were his. In a shrunken city it was still the highest honour a Roman layman could hold, and Gregory held it in his early thirties. Then his father died, and he did something his class did not do. He founded six monasteries on the family land in Sicily, and turned the house on the Caelian Hill into a seventh, dedicated to the apostle Andrew. He entered it himself, and not as its abbot, the monk who governs the house and whose word the rest obey; he went in as one of the monks, taking orders from somebody else under his own family’s roof. He fasted in those years with the enthusiasm of a convert and wrecked his digestion permanently. For the rest of his life his letters mention a stomach that will not hold food, a body that cannot stand for long, days lost to pain. And yet he looked back on that stretch as the best time he ever had. The Dialogues open with him remembering it: a mind that used to rise above everything that changes, dragged back down now into the business of other people’s affairs. He was not being modest. He genuinely wanted the cloister and kept being taken out of it.

(●) 579 AD: Sent to Constantinople as the pope’s ambassador, he argued with a patriarch about whether a risen body can be touched. + Pope Pelagius II needed troops. The Lombards, a Germanic people who had come into Italy in 568, were taking the peninsula piece by piece, and the only army that could stop them belonged to the emperor in Constantinople. So Pelagius sent Gregory east in 579 as apocrisiarius, the pope’s permanent representative at the imperial court: an ambassador in residence rather than a messenger. He stayed about six years, and he never got the troops. He did not go alone or go native. He brought monks from Saint Andrew’s with him and kept the monastery’s hours inside the richest court in the world, and by his own account he never became comfortable in Greek. At his companions’ request he began expounding the book of Job to them in the evenings, and those talks grew into the Moralia, the enormous commentary on Job that he was still revising as pope fifteen years later (T4). The episode that made his name there was a fight about the resurrection. Eutychius was the patriarch of Constantinople, which is to say the chief bishop of the eastern capital and one of the handful of senior bishops of the ancient church, ranking with those of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. He had written that the risen bodies of the saints would be impalpable, finer than air, past all touching. Gregory answered with the risen Christ in Luke’s Gospel: "Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:39). The emperor Tiberius heard both men privately, decided for Gregory, and ordered the book burned. Both of them fell ill from the strain of it. Gregory tells the end of it himself in the Moralia (XIV.56): while he lay burning with fever, Eutychius, dying, took hold of the skin of his own hand in front of the people around the bed and said that in this flesh we shall all rise again.

(●) 590 AD: Plague killed the pope, and Rome elected the monk who wrote to the emperor asking him to refuse. + In November 589 the Tiber rose and wrecked the granaries. Grain rotted, and plague came behind it, as it usually did. Pelagius II died of it in February 590, and the clergy, senate and people of Rome chose Gregory to replace him. He did not want it, and he said so in writing. He sent a letter to the emperor Maurice, whose son he had stood godfather to, begging him not to confirm the election. A second Gregory tells what happened to it: Gregory of Tours, a bishop in Gaul who was writing his history of the Franks within a few years of these events, says that Germanus the prefect of the city caught the messenger, tore the letter up, and forwarded the city’s vote instead. He was consecrated on 3 September 590. In the months between, with no pope and the plague still working, he called the whole city out to walk and pray. Seven groups set out from seven churches, the clergy, the monks, the nuns, the children, the laypeople, the widows and the married women, and converged on the basilica of Saint Mary Major, chanting as they went while people dropped dead in the ranks around them. Gregory of Tours records the sermon and the seven starting churches in the tenth book of his history, on the report of a deacon who was in Rome at the time. The famous sequel, in which the archangel Michael appears sheathing his sword over the tomb of Hadrian and so gives the Castel Sant’Angelo its name, is a later addition. A shrine of Saint Michael stood on that tomb by the ninth century, but nobody writes the vision down until centuries after the procession.

(●) 593 AD: With a Lombard army at the walls he stopped preaching mid-book, and then ran the city because nobody else would. + In 593 the Lombard king Agilulf brought an army to the walls of Rome. Gregory was working through the prophet Ezekiel with his congregation at the time, and he stopped. He told them he could not go on expounding a prophet while the city in front of him was being destroyed, and he never took the prophet up again. Eight years later, when the brethren pressed him to, he had the record fetched out, the one the notaries had taken down in shorthand while he preached, corrected it, and let the twenty-two homilies go into the world in two books, still stopping where he had stopped. What he did instead reads like a city manager’s diary. The emperor’s governor for Italy, called the exarch, sat safe in Ravenna and would not move, so Gregory paid the soldiers, ransomed prisoners out of Lombard hands, and turned the church’s farms into a food supply. Those farms were the patrimony of Peter, the estates the Roman church had been left by generations of donors, and they lay scattered across Sicily, southern Italy, Africa and Gaul. The letters he sent their managers are startlingly specific: use honest weights, do not squeeze the peasants for arrears, do not let a bailiff take a bribe, feed the sick first. A later biographer says he kept a book with the names of Rome’s poor written down in it, and nothing in the letters makes that hard to believe. He also made terms with the Lombards himself when the emperor’s men would not. He had already settled a separate peace with Ariulf, the Lombard duke of Spoleto, and in May 595 he warned Ravenna that he would deal with Agilulf on his own if the exarch went on refusing. Maurice answered with a letter, now lost, that called him a fool and something close to a traitor. Gregory’s reply survives, because his office kept a register, a year by year copy of everything that went out over his name (Register V.40), and it is not the letter of a man who thinks he was wrong. The general truce came only at the end of the decade, made at last by a new exarch, and Gregory wrote to thank both Agilulf and his Catholic queen Theodelinda for it.

(●) 596 AD: He sent about forty monks from his own house to the English, at the far edge of the known world. + In 596 Gregory sent Augustine, the prior of his own monastery of Saint Andrew and so its second in command under the abbot, with a company of about forty monks, to the Angles in Britain. They got as far as Provence, in southern Gaul, heard what was said to be waiting for them, and lost their nerve. Augustine came back to Rome to ask leave to abandon the journey. Gregory sent him straight out again with a letter telling the company that it would have been better never to begin a good work than to turn back from one already begun. They landed in Kent in 597. King Aethelberht’s queen, Bertha, was a Frankish Christian who had brought a bishop with her, so the ground was not entirely cold. The king gave them Canterbury to work from and was in time baptized himself. What is striking is how closely Gregory kept up with them afterward. Augustine wrote back with the practical questions of a man starting from nothing: how the offerings should be divided, which marriages within a family should be allowed, what to do when the Roman and the Gallican churches, meaning the churches of Gaul, keep different customs and a convert asks which to follow. Gregory’s replies survive because Bede, the Northumbrian monk who wrote the history of the English church more than a century afterward, copied them into it. They are patient and unfussy: take whatever is good, wherever you find it, and gather it for the young church. The letter of 601 telling the missionaries to leave the English temples standing belongs to this correspondence (T5). Bede also passes on a story he is careful to label a tradition handed down from his elders, not a record he found: that Gregory had once seen fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman market, asked where they came from, was told they were Angles, and answered that they had the faces of angels. Whatever its history, it is how the English themselves remembered why he sent anyone at all.

(●) 604 AD: He died worn out and in constant pain, still dictating, and the West began calling him the Great. + The last years were bad. Gout took his ability to walk; the old stomach trouble never let go. He wrote to friends about it without any heroics at all: he cannot rise, he can hardly bear the noise of visitors, death would be a kindness. He kept working anyway, and the register of letters runs to within weeks of the end. He died on 12 March 604 and was buried at Saint Peter’s. Bede copied his epitaph into the Ecclesiastical History. Its boast is that whatever he taught in word he fulfilled in deed, and that he brought the Angles to Christ and won armies for the faith out of a new people; and it ends by telling him to rejoice in that triumph, consul of God. The title came afterward. The Latin church counts him one of its four great doctors, alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, and one of the very few popes it has called Great. The Eastern churches keep his feast too, and know him by a different name: Gregory the Dialogist, after the book Pope Zachary put into Greek for them a century and a half later.

What He Taught

(T1) The care of souls is the hardest craft there is, and most people take it up untrained. + Nobody hands a scalpel to a man who has never studied anatomy. Nobody lets an untrained pilot land an aircraft full of passengers. Where a mistake costs a life we are careful to the point of fussiness about who is allowed to touch the controls, and we do not think this is snobbery. Gregory’s complaint is that the church had made an exception for the one job where the stakes are highest. His book on it began as an answer to a personal question. John, the bishop of Ravenna, had written asking why Gregory had fought so hard to avoid being made pope, and the answer came back as a four-part treatise: who ought to take charge of souls, how the man in charge must live, how he must teach, and how he must keep himself from thinking well of himself at the end of it. The phrase he reaches for is ars artium, the art of arts. In Latin an ars is a skilled craft, the thing a carpenter or a physician spends years learning, and Gregory is saying that the government of souls is the craft that all the other crafts are only practice for. His reason is not that pastors need diplomas. It is that a pastor is handling something he cannot see, in people he does not understand, with consequences he will not live long enough to watch, and that men walk into this with less preparation than they would want in the man rewiring their house.

(Q) "No one presumes to teach an art till he has first, with intent meditation, learned it. What rashness is it, then, for the unskilful to assume pastoral authority, since the government of souls is the art of arts!" + Source: Gregory the Great, Book of Pastoral Rule I.1 (Barmby translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The opening sentences of the book, written to a bishop who had asked him why he had tried so hard to refuse office.

(T2) One sermon does not fit every hearer. + Gregory’s picture for this is a stringed instrument. A player holds one quill, the small pick used to pluck the strings, and every string is struck with it; but the stroke has to change from string to string or what comes out is noise rather than a chord. One instrument, one hand, many different touches. The third and longest part of the Pastoral Rule runs to forty chapters, thirty-six of them that principle applied. He works through paired opposites and says how each side must be addressed: the poor and the rich, the joyful and the sad, the meek and the hot-tempered, the healthy and the sick, the married and the celibate, those whose sins are public and those who sin quietly. Each pair comes with a warning attached, because the medicine for one hearer is poison to the other. Preach humility hard at a man already crushed by shame and you finish him off. Preach the breadth of God’s mercy to a man who is not troubled about his sin at all and you have comforted him in it. This is not a technique for holding an audience. It rests on a claim about persons: souls are not interchangeable, and a preacher who has not troubled to find out who is actually sitting in front of him has not started the work yet, however sound his doctrine.

(Q) "one and the same exhortation does not suit all, inasmuch as neither are all bound together by similarity of character." + Source: Book of Pastoral Rule III, Prologue (Barmby translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The sentence that opens the longest part of the book. A few lines later comes the image behind it: the strings give back a harmony because they are struck with one quill, but not with one kind of stroke.

(T3) Authority is a weight carried on behalf of other people, and a man who forgets that has lost the point of it. + Look at how he signed his letters. Gregory styled himself servus servorum Dei, the servant of the servants of God. The phrase already existed in Christian speech, but he was the first pope to use it of himself as a matter of course. His successors took it up unevenly at first and then, from the ninth century, as the ordinary thing; fourteen centuries later it is still how a pope signs a solemn document. He adopted it in the middle of a quarrel about a title. John, the patriarch of Constantinople, was being addressed as ecumenical or universal patriarch, and Gregory read that word as a claim to be the one bishop of whom every other bishop was a deputy. He fought it for years, in letters to John, to the emperor, and to the other patriarchs, and he refused the same title flatly when the bishop of Alexandria offered it to him as a courtesy. Christians have argued ever since about how much that refusal proves, and both sides of that argument quote these letters. What nobody disputes is the standard Gregory thought he was appealing to, which is the one Jesus set for his own followers when they were jockeying for rank: "whoever would be great among you must be your servant" (Mark 10:43). The Pastoral Rule works the same ground from another angle. A pastor, Gregory says, has to be two things at once that pull against each other: close enough to every person in his care to feel what they feel, and lifted high enough in prayer to see where they are actually going. Lean on one alone and you get the two familiar failures. There is the leader who is everybody’s friend and leads nobody anywhere, and there is the leader who is far above the fray and does not know a single name.

(Q) "The ruler should be a near neighbour to every one in sympathy, and exalted above all in contemplation." + Source: Book of Pastoral Rule II.5 (Barmby translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). From the part of the book on how a pastor must live. Gregory’s example is Paul, who is caught up into the third heaven and then sits down to write about quarrels in people’s households.

(T4) Scripture is a river where a lamb can wade and an elephant has to swim. + Anyone who has waded a river knows the experience the image is built on. You cross at the shallows with the water at your knees, walk twenty yards downstream, and the same river is over your head. It is not two rivers. It is one river, and the difference is where you stand in it. Gregory used exactly that picture in the letter he sent with the finished Moralia to his friend Leander, bishop of Seville, in 595. The Moralia is a commentary on the book of Job in thirty-five books, one of the longest works any Latin father produced, begun as evening talks to his monks in Constantinople and finished after he became pope. In that dedicatory letter he also sets out how he reads. First the history: what actually happened, taken as it stands. Then the allegory, which in this tradition means a passage read as a picture of Christ and his church, the way the fathers read the ark or the Passover lamb. Then the moral sense: what this passage asks of the reader now, today. He does not offer these as three rival readings from which one picks a favourite. He builds them in that order, with the history as the foundation the others stand on. Christians have divided since over how far the second storey may be built out, and the divide is old. The Reformers pressed hard for the plain sense and thought allegory had run wild in the medieval schools; Catholic and Orthodox readers have generally taken Gregory’s spiritual senses as a disciplined method rather than a licence. What hardly anyone disputes is the point of his image. The same text can feed a beginner on the day of his conversion and still be too deep for a scholar at the end of a lifetime, and Gregory thought that was the design rather than a defect.

(Q) "It is, as it were, a kind of river, if I may so liken it, which is both shallow and deep, wherein both the lamb may find a footing, and the elephant float at large." + Source: Moralia in Job, dedicatory Epistle to Leander 4 (Library of Fathers translation, Oxford, 1844). Gregory is explaining to Leander why one book can hold a new believer and still stretch a trained mind past its limit.

(T5) A people coming to Christ does not have to burn everything it loves. + Walk around Rome and you keep meeting churches that were something else first: a senate house, a bath, a pagan temple with its columns still standing in the wall. Gregory told his missionaries in England to do that on purpose. In 601 he wrote to Mellitus, who was on his way to join Augustine in Kent, and revised the instructions he had sent earlier. Do not pull the temples down. Destroy the idols inside them, sprinkle the buildings with holy water, set up altars and put relics in them, and let the people go on coming to a place their feet already know. The yearly feasts where they had killed oxen in sacrifice should not simply be abolished either. Keep the day, keep the meal, and let the oxen be killed and eaten in thanksgiving to God on the feast of a martyr or the dedication of the church. The reasoning underneath is pastoral realism rather than a compromise about truth. Hard hearts cannot be stripped of everything at once, Gregory says, and a man climbing to a high place goes up by steps rather than by leaps. So the line falls where the worship falls. The idols go, and they go completely. The building, the day and the meal stay, and change hands. The same instinct shows up where it cost him something. In 591 two bishops in southern Gaul, at Arles and at Marseilles, had Jews baptized under compulsion. Gregory wrote to them and told them no. Their zeal was not the problem, the method was: a man brought to the font by force rather than by preaching goes back to what he was, and is worse off than before he was touched. He wrote repeatedly, over years, that Jews were to keep their synagogues and their standing under Roman law. It is the same conviction seen from the other side. A conversion nobody was persuaded into is not a conversion.

(Q) "it is undoubtedly impossible to cut away everything at once from hard hearts, since one who strives to ascend to the highest place must needs rise by steps or paces, and not by leaps." + Source: Register of Letters XI.76, to Mellitus, 601 (Barmby translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers); preserved also in Bede, Ecclesiastical History I.30. Gregory’s reason for leaving the English temples standing and letting the old feast days keep their place in the calendar, sent after the missionaries were already at work in Kent.

(Q) "in the shipwreck of this present life sustain me, I beseech you, by the plank of your prayer, that, since my own weight sinks me down, the hand of your merit may raise me up." + Source: Book of Pastoral Rule IV (Barmby translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The closing sentence of the book that taught the Latin West how to be a pastor. Gregory has just compared himself to an ill-favoured painter portraying a handsome man, and admitted that he is describing a life he has not managed to live.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Bishops across the West were handed his Pastoral Rule and told to learn it. + A book written to answer one bishop in Ravenna became the job description of a continent, and it moved fast. Anastasius, the patriarch of Antioch, had it turned into Greek while Gregory was still alive. In the Frankish kingdoms it became a matter of law. The councils that Charlemagne, king of the Franks and by then emperor in the West, summoned in 813, at Mainz, Reims, Tours and Chalon, ordered bishops to study it alongside the New Testament and the canons of the fathers, which is roughly the company Gregory would have wanted for it. Hincmar of Reims, writing later in the same century, says a bishop was handed the book along with the book of canons at his consecration, in front of the altar. England took it furthest. In the 890s King Alfred translated it into Old English himself, with a preface mourning how few men south of the Thames could still read Latin at all, and sent a copy to every bishop’s see in his kingdom, each with an æstel worth fifty gold mancuses. An æstel is a pointer for keeping your place on the line, and a mancus was a gold coin reckoned at thirty silver pennies, so a king with a Viking war on his hands spent fifty gold coins on the bookmark that went with each copy. It is one of the founding texts of English prose, and it exists because a Wessex king thought Gregory’s handbook was the thing his clergy could least afford to be without.

(†) The Moralia taught the Middle Ages how to read, and the Dialogues gave them Benedict. + The Moralia was copied more heavily than almost any other commentary of the early Middle Ages, and generations of preachers quarried it for material. Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas both cite Gregory constantly. Its thirty-first book contains the list that hardened into the seven deadly sins of Western Christianity, with pride as the queen and vainglory, envy, anger, sadness, avarice, gluttony and lust as her generals. The seven terraces Dante climbs in the fourteenth century are that list still, with pride brought down among the seven and sloth standing where Gregory had put sadness. The Dialogues did something simpler and larger. The second of its four books is the earliest life of Benedict of Nursia, written about half a century after his death, and every later portrait of the man whose Rule shaped Western monasticism goes back through it and adds nothing independent of it. Without that book, the founder of the West’s common life would be a name attached to a document. The authorship of that book has been challenged, and honesty requires saying so. In 1987 Francis Clark argued at length that the Dialogues were not written by Gregory at all but assembled later by somebody else in his name. The case has been examined carefully and has not persuaded most specialists, who continue to treat the work as his, so it stands as a real minority position rather than a settled result.

(†) England claimed him as its own apostle, and the church he planted there went back to convert Germany. + Bede devotes the opening chapter of his second book to Gregory and says the English may and ought by right to call him their apostle, since he made a nation given up to idols into a church of Christ. That is a large claim about a man who never set foot in Britain, and the English meant it. The earliest surviving life of Gregory was not written in Rome. It was written at Whitby, in the north of England, around the beginning of the eighth century, by a monk whose name nobody knows. Then the gift went back the way it came. The English church Gregory had started produced Willibrord, who crossed the North Sea to preach in Frisia, the coastland of what is now the Netherlands and northwest Germany. It produced Boniface, a Devon monk who spent his life among the Germans and was killed at eighty on a last mission to those same Frisians. It produced Alcuin, who ran the schools of Charlemagne’s court and set the standard of learning the Frankish clergy were held to. A decision taken in 596 in a sickroom in Rome is a fair part of the reason northern Europe is Christian at all.

(†) He congratulated the emperor who had his predecessor murdered, and he taught a fire that purges the dead. + Two things Gregory himself wrote have troubled readers who admire him, and neither can be tidied away. - The letters to Phocas. In November 602 the army on the Danube mutinied and a centurion named Phocas was crowned. The emperor Maurice was made to watch his sons killed and was then killed himself. Gregory had had years of friction with Maurice, and Italy had good reason to feel abandoned by his government. Even so, when word reached Rome, Gregory wrote to Phocas and to the new empress Leontia in terms of open celebration (Register XIII.31 and XIII.38), opening with glory to God in the highest, who changes the times and transfers kingdoms. How much he knew of the murders when he wrote is genuinely unclear, since news travelled slowly and arrived shaped by whoever carried it. But Scripture supplies the other pattern, and he knew it as well as anyone: Nathan walked into David’s house and said, "You are the man!" (2 Samuel 12:7), and John the Baptist told Herod to his face that his marriage was unlawful (Mark 6:18). Congratulation is not what a churchman owes a new throne. - The fire that purges. In the fourth book of the Dialogues Gregory taught that lighter sins are burned away by a fire after death and before the judgment. He argued it from the Lord’s saying that a word against the Spirit will not be forgiven "either in this age or in the age to come" (Matthew 12:32), reasoning that the second half of the phrase implies some sins are dealt with there; and from Paul’s builder, who "will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15). He also told of thirty days of Masses offered for a dead monk. Western Christians divided over this later and are divided still. Catholic theology developed it into the doctrine of purgatory. The Reformers rejected it, reading Paul’s fire as the testing of a man’s work on the last day rather than a place souls pass through, and Christ’s saying as a warning about one unforgivable sin rather than a map of the next world. The Eastern churches pray for their dead without Gregory’s fire. The way he offers it matters, though. He holds it and thinks it must be believed, and he argues for it from two texts and a handful of stories he had been told, which is a different thing from handing on a settled article he had received from the apostles. There is a third and smaller thing, and it is the same book. The Dialogues are full of wonders Gregory received on trust from people who told him about them, and readers of every tradition, Catholic scholars among them, have found him credulous there in a way he simply is not in the Moralia or the letters. The man who audited grain weights in Sicily did not audit these.