Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (56 page)

The battered prestige of the Bishop of Rome was restored and then extended by the pontificate of Pope Gregory I (590-604), often known as 'the Great'. He was from the same wealthy, traditional administrative background as Ambrose two centuries before, and indeed he was Prefect of the City of Rome before becoming a monk in the city. Gregory was the first monk to become pope, although this was not monasticism as Pachomius or even Martin had known it: Gregory financed the foundation of the monastery which he entered, built on a family property within the city, and a later tradition asserted that his mother, Silvia, customarily sent him vegetables to his monastery on a silver dish.
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This Roman aristocrat showed no enthusiasm for the claims of the surviving Roman emperor. For six years Gregory had represented the Church of Rome as a diplomat (apocrisiary) at the Byzantine Court; despite or perhaps because of this, he had no great affection for or high opinion of the Greeks. When at the end of the sixth century Byzantine power in Italy was shattered by a central European people known as Lombards, Gregory certainly did not see the Lombard victory as a baffling catastrophe, as many had seen Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. On the contrary, in 592-3 he presided over a separate peace with the Lombards, ignoring the Byzantine imperial representative in Ravenna. He strongly objected to the title of Oecumenical or Universal Patriarch which the Patriarch of Constantinople had used for the past century, particularly because its justification was that the patriarch was bishop in the Universal City of Constantinople, 'Universal' because it was capital of the empire. It may have been in order to highlight the pride embodied in the Oecumenical Patriarch's title that Gregory adopted one of aggressive self-deprecation, which his successors have used ever since: 'Servant of the servants of God'.
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Gregory did have a strong sense of urgency in his papacy, for the good reason that he believed that the end of the world was imminent. It was easy to assume this, amid the political upheavals and decay of the society which had brought his family their prestige and fortune.
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If the Last Days were coming soon, it was essential that all Christians, not just monks, should prepare themselves for the end by reforming their lives; the clergy, chiefly himself, should be energetic in helping them do so. Gregory is the first writer whose work has survived who spends much time discussing how clergy should offer pastoral care and preach to laypeople: a very different clerical duty from the contemplative life of a monk, to which he had withdrawn before his election as pope. Gregory the former monk saw that this active ministry in the world might afford clergy the chance to make greater spiritual progress than in a monastery, precisely because it was so difficult to maintain contemplative serenity and an ability to expound good news amid the messiness of everyday life: 'When the mind, divided and torn, is drawn into so many and such weighty matters, when can it return to itself, so as to recollect itself in preaching and not to withdraw from rendering its ministry of preaching the word?'
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As the Church increasingly emphasized the spiritual heroism of monks, this was a valuable affirmation that parish priests had their own spiritual challenges to face.

MISSIONS IN NORTHERN EUROPE (500-600)

It may also have been Gregory's concern to bring the world to as perfect a condition as possible before the Last Days which led him in 597 to launch a mission to a former island outpost of the Roman Empire, lost to Rome two centuries before in the tumult following the sack of Rome. When the Roman legions left the island in 410, it contained the two Roman provinces of Britannia Inferior and Superior, but four hundred years of settled Roman culture there had fallen away with remarkable rapidity. Now much of it was dominated by Germanic peoples - Angles, Saxons, Jutes - who had begun to migrate there in the last years of Roman rule and who by now had given the land a very different character. Gregory's dispatch of a mission to the English in Britannia marked a crucial stage in the Western Latin Church's change of direction away from Byzantium and towards the north and west. Once the Western Church had been the poor relation of the Greek East in terms of numbers and theological sophistication. It had been tied to the fortunes of an empire in increasing disarray and was then confronted by rulers with an alien variety of Christian faith. Now it was reaching out beyond the boundaries of the Roman imperial world. The Bishops of Rome, proclaimed the successors of Peter, were giving a new significance to the ancient city: Rome was to gain an empire of the mind greater than anything which Octavian had created by force of arms in the time of Jesus Christ.

The English mission was the first in which a Bishop of Rome had made any effort to extend the existing frontiers of Christianity. It is curious and probably significant that previous major Christian missionary efforts had nearly all been undertaken by people whom the imperial Chalcedonian Church labelled as heretics - Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and the 'Arian' Ulfila to the northern 'barbarians', the Syriac Miaphysite Jacob Baradeus in the Middle East and the Syriac Dyophysites who spread Christianity into Arabia, Central Asia and (initially) to Ethiopia. The one substantial exception to this had been the initiatives of Celtic Britons, who were Catholic Christians, strongly influenced by the vigorous Catholic Church of Gaul. It was very important for the future shape of British Christian life that, like the Christians of Gaul, they decided to keep their literature and liturgy in the sacred language of the Catholic Western Church: Latin. From the late fourth century these Celtic Christians travelled beyond the frontiers of the decaying provinces of Britannia, into Hibernia (Ireland) and territories and islands to the north of Hadrian's Wall, lands where Germanic peoples had as yet made little impact. We have met one of them already, Ninian of Whithorn (see pp. 313-14), but he is a shadowy figure compared with a driven, tormented British eccentric called Patrick, who was probably a younger contemporary of Ninian's: Patrick and Ninian would both have been alive and active in Christian ministry when the great theologian Augustine was Bishop of Hippo. Patrick, unlike Ninian, is illuminated for us by his own account of his life, written in rough and confused Latin, but a wonderfully precious and rare survival.

Dating this text and Patrick's career is difficult, but it seems to fit into the first half of the fifth century, a generation after the death of Martin of Tours, a time when the Western Church was still much divided by the Pelagian controversy (see pp. 315-17): conflicts resound through what remains of Patrick's writing. Grandson of a priest, he tells us the name of his home town, 'Bannavemtaberniae', the identity of which has provoked much debate, but it was probably one of the little settlements along Hadrian's Wall.
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As a teenager, he was captured and enslaved by raiders from Ireland, and after wanderings to Gaul and a return to his own people, he felt compelled to go back to Ireland to act as bishop, gathering up what remained from the mission of a previous bishop, Palladius. Both this and a subsequent letter reveal that Patrick faced a good deal of distressing opposition alike in Britain, southern Scotland and Ireland, much of which was from fellow Christians, but this opposition is left behind in subsequent legend. Patrick was to become Apostle to Ireland and eventually, through the worldwide wanderings of the Irish, a saint inspiring veneration throughout the modern Catholic Church - but his posthumous sway was to extend even further, since his years as a slave across the seas (and his reputation for having expelled snakes from Ireland) inspired countless Africans who also found themselves victims of enslavement by Europeans (see p. 714 and Plate 61).
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Patrick and his successors as bishops in Ireland faced a society very different even from the fragmented state of mainland Europe after the empire had disintegrated. The island had no central authority, or (importantly) any memory of one, and instead there was a large collection of groupings (
tuatha
) headed by dynastic leaders. Their power over kin and clients was based both on their ability to provide defence against other dynastic leaders and to intercede with supernatural powers for the prosperity of crops and cattle. To call these leaders kings may be misleading, since there could have been anything between 150 and 200 of them in the island at any one time. No Christian episcopate had previously had to cope with anything like this since the Church had first formed its alliance with the powerful. In puzzling out how the situation might become fruitful, the bishops realized that the Church could be rooted in Irish society by founding monasteries and nunneries.
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Patrick already spoke with pride of the 'sons and daughters of Scottic [Irish] chieftains . . . seen to become monks and virgins of Christ'.
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That association with chieftains proved a way of providing for monastic foundations: in the state of Irish legal custom, it would have been impossible to provide for independent estates for monastic maintenance, as was the norm in the former empire, so monasteries became part of the joint estate of great families. As a result, there grew a network of Christian communities intimately involved in the life of each local dynastic grouping, fostering Christian life throughout the island all the more powerfully because monasteries were so enmeshed in the pride and pre-Christian traditions of each
tuath
. There was nothing fixed or enduring about many
tuatha
, and reflecting the itinerant character of much of Irish society, the Church developed the peculiar phenomenon of roving ecclesiastical families, in whom priesthood and care of churches descended from one generation to another; they carried with them in their migrations the stories of their founding saints, spreading the same cult to widely separated parts of the island.
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A surprising number of early Christian buildings can still be seen in the west of Ireland and its remote Atlantic islands, mostly monastic sites: drystone-built, straggly collections of cells and halls within enclosures, like the homes of the leaders who had provided for them. Also pleasingly numerous in survival and staggering in their extravagant beauty and sophistication are the art objects which served the sacred life of these communities: manuscripts illuminated and written in a beautiful and individual Latin script, bronze bells, metal crosiers, lovingly preserved despite the violent and destructive later history of Ireland because they became relics associated with early saints, just as important as their bones. Celtic Christian culture made a great deal of such sacred objects in its devotion. The inquisitive and gossipy historian Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century made special mention of this emphasis, saying that in Scotland, Ireland and Wales people were more afraid of breaking oaths taken on bells, crosiers and the like than they were of breaking oaths taken on Gospel books.
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Spiritually, Celtic monastic life was as intense as anything in the deserts of Egypt or the Middle East. Half-starved monks crouched against the gales high in the rocky cliffs of the Skellig Islands, and the terrifying beauty of the waters in front of them made them see the sun dance for joy over the Atlantic Ocean, as it celebrated the Lord's Resurrection on Easter Day (see Plate 8). They were actually capable of having contacts with Syrian or Egyptian Christians, at least through books which had started life at the furthest margins of the Byzantine Empire and had been brought west. It has been plausibly proposed that the astonishing intricacy of figural paintings to be found in such Celtic sacred manuscripts as the Gospel text known as
The Book of Durrow
(see Plate 23), and similar figures in Celtic sculpture of the same period, derive from the travels to Scotland and Ireland of a long-lost copy of a Syriac manuscript of the Gospel Harmony called the
Diatessaron
. Before these late-sixth-century artworks, there was very little attempt in Celtic art to portray the human figure; the sudden appearance suggests some external stimulus. Another copy of this same
Diatessaron
text, illuminated in the Syrian monastic enclave of Tur 'Abdin, has ended up in Florence, and despite dating from several centuries later than
The Book of Durrow
, it has a series of figures posed in precisely the same idiosyncratic way as some of
Durrow
's key illustrations. Other features of Celtic Christian art, even that most emblematic of motifs the Celtic cross, can be shown to have precedents in the art of Coptic Christianity.
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These unpredictable links between the Middle East and furthest western Europe produced a Celtic theology which resonated at whatever distance with the tradition of Origen and Evagrius. Celtic monasteries took the same line as their fellow monks John Cassian and Vincent of Lerins in the struggle against Augustine of Hippo over grace (see pp. 315-17): they wanted to emphasize the importance of humans striving as best they could towards perfection. One Irish commentator writing in the margin of his manuscript of Jerome's
Preface to the Psalms
summed up the optimism behind their spiritual battles in those bleak windswept cells: 'It is in the nature of every man to do good and to avoid doing evil'.
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Out of this theology of moral struggle came a distinctive Irish devotional practice which was to become a major feature of the whole Western Church. The Irish clergy developed a series of 'tariff books' for their own use. These were based on the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance was appropriate for what sin: tariffs of forgiveness. They saw the spiritual life as a constant series of little setbacks, laboriously compensated for before the next little lapse. They used their tariff books to help layfolk who were oppressed by guilt and shame.

When missionaries from Ireland and Scotland started spreading their faith in northern and central Europe in the seventh century, they brought tariff books with them; these were the first 'penitentials' or manuals of penance for clergy to use with their flocks. The idea was hugely popular - who would not jump at the chance of being able to do something concrete and specified, however hard, in order to lift a burden of guilt? It became the basis of the medieval Western Church's centuries-long system of penance: a practice whereby everyone repeatedly confessed their sins to a priest, who then consulted his book or his memory and awarded the necessary penance. Despite its success and acceptance into the Church's pastoral practice, the whole system directly contradicted Augustine's theology of grace, and that was to become an issue which helped permanently to split the Western Church in the sixteenth century Reformation, as we will see.
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