Those are not angels, they are Angles
Gregory and the English slaves in Rome
The story is told by Bede, writing a century later, and it has the quality of something that sounds better than history but is true in its essential character.
Gregory is walking through the Roman slave market — the forum where human beings are bought and sold in the capital of the civilized world — and he sees a group of boys for sale. They are fair-skinned, fair-haired, with faces of remarkable beauty. He asks the merchant where they are from.
Angli, says the merchant. English.
Non Angli, sed angeli, says Gregory. Not Angles, but angels. He asks what province they are from. Deira, says the merchant — a province in the north of Britain. De ira, says Gregory — snatched from the wrath. And what king rules over them? Aelle, says the merchant. Then, says Gregory, Alleluia shall be sung in their land.
The pun is terrible. The sentiment is not. Gregory sees enslaved children in a market and thinks: the gospel has not reached their people. And he makes a mental note.
When he becomes pope, the mental note becomes a mission.
“Not Angles, but angels — for they have the face of angels, and such should be the co-heirs of the angels in heaven.”
— Gregory I, as recorded by Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.1, c. 731 AD
“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher?”
Gregory saw enslaved children in a market and thought about whether the gospel had reached their homeland.
This is a strange and specific form of compassion — not just feeling pity for the children in front of him but wondering about the millions of people they came from, in a land beyond the edge of the known Christian world, who had never heard.
The missionary impulse begins exactly here: in the specific face of a specific person who belongs to a people the gospel has not yet reached, and the recognition that something needs to be done about it.
Whose face stops you? What people — near or far — do you find yourself thinking about in the way Gregory thought about the Angles? The thought may not be coincidental.