Traditionally, the human race was composed of three ‘peoples’ or ‘kinds’ (genera): in the second and third centuries Christians were seen by their pagan contemporaries as the ‘third race’. Jews, long familiar to them, were the second, while they themselves – Romans – were, naturally, the first. This schematisation was turned on its head in the course of the christianisation of the Empire. From the Christian point of view, there were still three ‘religions’, that of the Christians, of the Jews, and of the ‘pagans’. This classification risked creating the illusion that ‘paganism’ was a religion, like Christianity or Judaism; in fact it was simply the rest, those who were neither Christians nor Jews. The Christian community, as we have seen, was now itself seen as composed of an elite of superiors and ascetics and, below them, the ordinary lay Christians. It was surrounded by Jews and by pagans. At the heart of the Christian community were its spiritual elite: the monks.

MONKS AND MONASTERIES

Of all the holy men in sixth-century Italy, Benedict was the one Gregory most admired. He devoted the whole of the second Book of the Dialogues to him. There he remarked that Benedict had composed ‘a Rule for monks, outstanding in its discernment’ (discretio). For Gregory, that true artist in the ‘art of arts, the governing of souls’, discretio was the key to the spiritual life.