Moralia Secondary Paratext
The Eucharist, or the Sacrament of the Altar, is the cardinal element of Gregory’s moral theology. As the miraculous intercessor between God and mankind, the Host is for Gregory the focus of Christian life, which, when it is activated through the sacrament, mystically joins God and mankind. According to the Church Father, the Eucharist can achieve salvation even after death, and he endorsed Masses on behalf of the departed to grant temporal remission from punishment in Purgatory. In the Dialogues, Gregory recounts that he ordered Masses for the sinful monk Justus to liberate his soul, marking the origin of the Gregorian or “privileged” altar —an altar that grants plenary indulgences to the dead. As the monk’s name (meaning “just” or “fair”) implies, the episode illustrates the power of the Eucharist to heal the ancient consequences of the Fall, which appears in the Stanza’s ceiling above the figure of Gregory.
If Raphael’s imagined altar is Gregorian, as its golden dressings suggest, it not only imparts the ability to intervene between this world and the next, but also affirms the special duty of the celebrant as spiritual authority. Because of their role in perpetuating Christ’s sacrifice through the sacrament, Gregory calls priests “portals” to the “heavenly court” and “earthly images of Christ,” legitimating their post as the gatekeepers of faith and the representatives of celestial government. Following Gregory’s sacramental interpretation of Christian ecclesiastical and ecumenical hierarchies, by the Renaissance the mystical body of Christ or the Corpus Christi was extended not only to mean the Christian congregation, but even more suggestively, to refer to the papal office itself. In the Disputa, this association of the Eucharist and the papacy is made explicit: Christ’s vicar in salvation can only be Julius II, whose name is twice emblazoned on the altar cloth in the same calligraphic interlace as the real manuscript in the papal library.
The centrality of the Eucharist in Gregory’s writings deeply informed his legacy in papal Rome, a theological dimension of his reception that might also explain his elevated presence in Raphael’s fresco. Like Gregory, the Della Rovere attached deep personal meaning to the symbolism of the Host. Answering a dispute between the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Sixtus composed the treatise on the blood of Christ. During his papacy he also increased the number of privileged altars in Rome. The Sacrament of the Eucharist appears to have been equally important to Julius, since it is twice celebrated within his apartments: in the Disputa and in the Mass of Bolsena, next door in the Stanza d’Eliodoro. The repetition of eucharistic imagery in the two sale was likely inspired by the same triumphal campaign that launched the redecoration of the suite. As Julius traveled north to Bologna in 1506, he visited the cathedral of Orvieto to pay homage to the famous eucharistic relic of Bolsena. According to legend, in 1263 the consecrated wafer bled to reveal the real presence of Christ to a doubtful priest. Julius not only attributed his sensational victories in Romagna and Bologna to the Bolsena relic, but during the expeditions of 1506 and 1510-1511, he also advertised his devotion to the Corpus Christi by marching with a consecrated Host. Raphael commemorated these eucharistic victories in the Julian apartments, above all on the southern wall of the Eliodoro, where Julius participates in the miracle and conspicuously kneels in reverence. With a portrait of the pope looking poignantly toward the monstrance, the Disputa might be thought to make a similarly pious claim of eucharistic devotion.
If Raphael’s Gregory is a portrait of Julius, as it seems, it follows that the eucharistic themes claimed by the Della Rovere were also touched by the influence of his theology. Although the mystery of the Transubstantiation was only made official doctrine at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in a climate that stressed eucharistic piety, Gregory was regarded as the prototypical priest who had sustained Christ’s sacrifice through the Sacrament. Even if the patristic authors never took up discussion of the Transubstantiation per se, Gregory insisted that the Host transmutes into Christ’s flesh in the mouths of the faithful. Later readers understood him to anticipate this doctrinal direction, making him a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit through various eucharistic miracles. For instance, the Bibliotheca Iulia included a deluxe volume of the ninth-century Vita Gregorii, whose author John the Deacon credited Gregory with first proving Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist.
Among other documented objects in the Julian treasury was a tapestry featuring the Mass of Saint Gregory: as the story goes, while Gregory celebrated Mass, he experienced a vision of the Man of Sorrows, whose appearance confirmed the body of Christ in the Gifts and rendered visible Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The theological landscape of the Disputa—one of the most eloquent representations of the Transubstantiation in any medium—might be seen to evoke the sacramental rite in Gregory’s thought and teachings, and for both Gregory and Raphael, the Sacrament of the Eucharist suffuses the ordinary world with divine praesentia. In the Dialogues, Gregory explained that as the Host is consecrated, it undergoes a supernatural change that enters the congregation into communion with God: “As the celebrant speaks these words, the heavens are opened, the choirs of angels are present in the Mystery of Jesus Christ, the lowliest are joined to the highest, earth is yoked to the heavens, and there at the altar the visible and invisible are made one.” Without its literary context, this vivid passage might be mistaken for a description of Raphael’s fresco itself, where the material and spiritual worlds meet in the eucharistic wafer, here stamped with an image of the crucified Christ and toward which Julius as Gregory directs his gaze (detail, spatial).
Further Reading
Biel, Gabriel. Expositio canonis missae (Johann Otmar for Friedrich Meynberger, 1499), lect. 57.
Betz, Johannes. “Eucharistie als zentrales Mysterium.” In Mysterium Salutis: Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik, vol. 4., ed. Johannes Feiner and Magnus Löhrer, 185-313. Einsiedeln, 1973.
Hartt, Frederick. “Lignum Vitae in Medio Paradisi: The Stanza d’Eliodoro and the Sistine Ceiling.” Reprinted in The Sistine Chapel, ed. with introductions by William E. Wallace, 75-109. New York & London: Garland Publishers, 1995.
Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Straw, Carole. “Gregory’s Moral Theology: Divine Providence and Human Responsibility.” In A Companion to Gregory the Great, eds. Neil Bronwen and Matthew Dal Santo, 177-204. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
—Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence. ed. Thomas P. Campbell. New York; New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Yale University Press, 2002.