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For those who think administrators are no more than "empty suits," with nothing to teach us spiritually, the early medieval Pope Gregory I ("the Great") is the great counter-example. Gregory (ca. 540-604) was a contemplative mystic at heart who struggled all of his days with the conflict between busyness and intimacy with Christ. And this struggle gave him great pastoral sympathy for a group of people who had become "second-class citizens" in Christendom: married layfolk. His meditations on the busy life—the life he associated both with Jesus' friend Martha and Jacob's wife Leah—led him to formulate a spiritual theology that blasted monastic elitism and freed busy laypeople to enjoy the contemplative life.

Raised in a family both pious and politically powerful, Gregory was still young when he was made prefect of Rome—that city's highest civic office. Though he had always read and meditated on Scripture, and at least a part of him had desired a closer relationship with God, his elevation to this position seemed to trigger a kind of revelation. Pressed down with the cares of the prefecture, he made a momentous decision: "I fled all this with anxiety. … Having left behind what belongs to the world … I escaped naked from the shipwreck of this life." In short, Gregory took oaths of obedience, poverty, and celibacy and became a monk. He would follow the ancient contemplative path to intimacy with God.

It is hard for many modern Christians to appreciate what being a monk meant to Gregory. We have very little sense of what went on in those early monasteries—of why anyone would want to spend their lives in one to begin with. In particular, we struggle with the meaning of the contemplative life.

Gregory learned a form of the contemplative life that drew from the gospels and the "father of monasticism," Antony of Egypt. It was also deeply influenced by Plato, Plotinus, and other Greek philosophers. In their pursuit of truth, these men had desired above all to see God—the ultimate Form behind the appearances of the world. To attain that "beatific vision," they had been willing to undergo intense discipline. Contemplation in the Greek and early Christian mode requires a certain distancing from the preoccupations of material life. As both Plato and Jesus taught, humans have a tendency to chase after temporary goods as if they were ultimate goods—a dangerous tendency that could easily lead a person to "gain the world but lose his soul." To see God, one must discipline oneself by turning away from such temporary goods of the world as sex, money, and (at least occasionally, during seasons of moderate fasting) food.

These things are still good, as Genesis teaches. But the person seeking God must make every effort to turn his eyes from such lesser things and toward the greater good, the pearl of great price, God himself. Few Christians in the ancient world, whether they enjoyed the monastic life or not, doubted that these efforts were worth it.

For three years, a period he later remembered as the happiest in his life, Gregory separated himself from worldly cares and pursued the contemplative path in his beloved monastery. But it was not to last. Pope Benedict I recognized a masterful administrator when he saw one, and he drew Gregory into various duties. Then, in the winter of 589-590, plague and famine struck (on top of the cyclical warfare that ravaged the disintegrating Roman Empire throughout Gregory's life), and Pope Benedict died.

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