Pastoral Practice: Books 3 and 4 of the Regula Pastoralis by Saint Gregory the Great

Pastoral Practice: Books 3 and 4 of the Regula Pastoralis by Saint Gregory the Great. An English Version by John Lienenweber. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998. xiii + 146 pp. $13.00 (paper).

Among the patrisitic writings, there are three treatments of the pastoral office that have been of almost continuous popularity and importance down through the ages. Two are Greek, the De fuga of Gregory of Nazianzus (otherwise known as the Second Theological Oration) and the De sacerdotio of John Chrysostom, and one is Latin, the Regula pastoralis of Gregory the Great. Indeed Gregory the Great mentions his own debt to Gregory of Nazianzus at the beginning of Book 3 of his own Regula.

Anglicans have loved these books particularly. Chrysostom's On the Priesthood, in Graham Neville's revision of T. A. Moxon's translation, is still in print and is on every seminary reading list. The late Michael Ramsey, in his own little classic, The Christian Priest Today, mentioned that he read Gregory's Regula in the period just before his own consecration as a bishop, and so he reminded us of Gregory's work.

Ramsey was right about the Regula when he remarked that "while its practical counsels are remote from our own time it recalls a great ideal" (The Christian Priest Today, Cowley Publications, revised edition 1987, p. 95). What is still evident to the reader of this work and Gregory's other writings is the wide range of Gregory's mind and his deep concern for the well-being of the Christian community.

Lienenweber has given us a translation (because of some justifiable liberties he has taken, he prefers to call it an "English version") of Books 3 and 4 of Gregory's immensely influential treatment of the role of the bishop. This version is designed to be of broader interest to all who exercise pastoral ministry today. In this he has done an admirable job. The English reads well and smoothly, and Lienenweber has succeeded in making a text that is 1400 years old accessible to those without any other knowledge of the ancient world.

Quod igitur generaliter simul potuit dici de cunctis, hoc necesse est est specialiter sentiri de singulis. "What can be said generally of everyone must be understood of each in particular" (p. 104), writes Gregory, and this is one of the rare skills of the pastoral ministry. Gregory never lets us forget that we are complicated, that our needs are various and important, and that our capacity for self-delusion is great. In spite of the centuries that separate us from Gregory, we are struck not so much by the differences of the situations that Gregory treats, or his way of examining them, as we are by all the things about people here that one recognizes all too clearly. Gregory's Regula may no longer give us rules, but it may still train the mind in subtlety and carefulness.

This is the first English translation of Gregory's Regula since Henry Davis's translation for the series Ancient Christian Writers, first published in 1950. A new translation, based on the much better text established by Floribert Rommel in the series Sources chretiennes in 1992, has been much needed, and it is this reviewer's hope that, when Lienenweber comes to revise this translation, he will include a similarly elegant version of Books 1 and 2 as well, and so make the book complete.

This book is dedicated to the Presiding Bishop, which is both a fitting and a touching tribute, particularly in light both of Bishop Griswold's debt to classical spirituality and of remarkable pastoral sensitivity that he continues to display in the oversight of a diverse and complicated Church.

PETER EATON

St James Rectory

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2001
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