The notion of ‘right order’ is important everywhere in Gregory's thinking, about the universe at large and within it the community of the Church and the secular community of the State, and also about the right ordering of things within the souls of men. This rectus ordo has to do with fittingness, the Tightness of that which is in the place or position where it belongs, which is both right and orderly. ‘Good order’ (bonus ordo) in living is to move from action to contemplation and back again, so that actions are done more perfectly in the light of contemplation and contemplation is more perfect because it is founded on good works (Ez. ii.ii. 11, p. 232.260). One ‘door’ faces another in a man when he comes by the right way (recto itinere) from outside to inside (Ez.ii.v.8–20, p. 281).

These two themes, of order and of a duality of inward and outward, contemplative and active, give both a secure frame of reference and also a lively tension to everything Gregory says about the Church. Gregory, more consciously perhaps than anyone before him, tried to make a unity out of two notions, the first of which he did a good deal to develop in his writing on monasticism: that a man's relation with God might be interior and secret, a journey of his private soul; and that man's relation with God was in the Church, as a member of the Body of Christ.