Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (57 page)

The fact that this remote corner of Europe could have such a profound influence on the whole Church is testimony to the restless energy of Celtic Christians, for whom the sea was a series of trackways to their neighbours and cultures far beyond. They treasured a legend of St Brendan sailing to discover new lands to the west, which has long generated Irish pride in its anticipation of Christopher Columbus, and is certainly testimony to the openness of Celtic society to such a possibility. In the later sixth century one of the greatest of their monastic leaders, Columba or Colmcille ('Dove of the Church'), not only founded the monasteries of Durrow and Derry in central and northern Ireland, but also built an island monastery far to the north on the island of Iona, which remains one of the best-known sacred places in the Atlantic Isles; he frequently crossed the sea between his various foundations.
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But adventurous as Columba was, he was still moving within a Gaelic Celtic world. One of his younger contemporaries, also Columba (but conventionally and conveniently distinguished from the elder as Columbanus), found a new and more challenging image for his travels: he would follow the biblical example of Abraham and travel to strange peoples to do the will of his God.

Columbanus's first journeys (probably in the 580s) were into Christian Gaul, where his foundation of monasteries was met with less than wholehearted gratitude by the existing episcopate. One liturgical issue which was to prove a recurrent source of annoyance between Celtic and non-Celtic Catholics was their disagreement about the date for celebrating Easter, that earliest and most important of Christian festivals. The tensions prompted Columbanus's move east, to what is now Switzerland, and they also indicate that he was not primarily undertaking missions to pagans: his journeys might be best seen as a campaign of renewal addressed to the wider and older Christian world which had originally fostered Irish Christianity. He could do this, of course, because of that foundational Celtic Christian decision to keep Latin as the language of its public worship and its Bible. Naturally where Columbanus found non-Christian customs still prevailing, he did something about it, having before him the model of the great Martin, who had demonstrated the power of the Christian God against all inferior competitors. The stories of his feats probably provided a handy distraction for his biographers from his confrontations with Frankish bishops. One of Columbanus's finest exploits was in Bregenz, where he was infuriated by the sight of an enormous barrel of beer being prepared by people in honour of their fierce god Woden. Columbanus had nothing against alcohol, but he did not want to see all that beer wasted on a false god, so he made a pre-emptive strike by blowing hard on the giant barrel. It exploded and Woden lost his beer. The crowds present were highly impressed that Columbanus's God could be so emphatically destructive and the mission benefited accordingly. From Switzerland Columbanus moved even further into the heartland of Western Christianity, into northern Italy, where he died in 615 at his newly built monastery at Bobbio.
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Columbanus had set a pattern of mission from Ireland and Scotland, and other Celtic monks extended his initiative still further by taking Christianity beyond the ghost of the imperial frontier into northern Europe. But now another mission had been launched in the opposite direction, from Rome itself, by Pope Gregory I. In 597, the year that Abbot Columba died far away in Iona, a party of monks and priests set out from Rome on the Pope's command; they were bound for the Atlantic Isles under the leadership of a monk from Gregory's monastery of St Andrew, called Augustine. There is a certain air of haste and improvisation about this mission to the Anglo-Saxons, which suggests that Pope Gregory may have been fired by a sudden enthusiasm for England. When the missionaries set out, not one of them spoke any variant of Anglo-Saxon, and Gregory's rather lame advice was to pick up some Frankish interpreters to help out in contacting the prospective flock.
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The Anglo-Saxons preserved a self-congratulory anecdote which is probably still the best-known memory of Gregory's interest in England: he was struck by the beauty of some English slave-boys in the market at Rome. On enquiring where they were from and being told that they were
Angli
, he commented that the name was appropriate to those who had angelic faces, and he elaborated that cheerful thought in a garland of further devout Latin puns. Traditionally Gregory's remarks have been summed up in a misquotation which is nevertheless apt: '
Non Angli sed angeli
', 'Not Angles, but angels'. This delightful tale would be a good motivation for the Pope's impulsiveness, so at base it might be true.
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9. Christian western Europe in the seventh century

Clearly Gregory had not learned much about the island to which his mission was launched. He envisaged his new Church rebuilding the structures of the old imperial provinces of Britannia Inferior and Superior, so there would be metropolitan bishops in the former colonial capitals of Londinium (London) and Eboracum (York), each with an apostolic flock of twelve bishops: all very tidy, and two hundred years out of date, given that England was now divided up among a series of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and that London was at a low ebb. Instead, the new Bishop Augustine recognized reality and established himself in the extreme south-east in Kent, the nearest kingdom to mainland Europe, where pagan King Ethelbert had married a Frankish Christian princess called Bertha, and where there was still a lively sense of the importance of the Roman past. The Kentish royal capital was a former Roman city now called Canterbury. When political power later shifted away from Kent, successive Anglo-Saxon bishops and archbishops in Augustine's line found advantages in being slightly at a distance from imperious monarchs in Wessex or Mercia, and stayed in Canterbury. Only much later did twelfth-century Angevin monarchs turn a revived city of London into their capital, also developing a palace immediately to its west in Westminster. The Archbishops of Canterbury then experimented with exploiting the possibilities of a newly acquired property in the heart of London itself, on the site of what is now the parish church of St Mary-le-Bow, but they soon changed tack. They thought it wise to develop a minor estate of theirs at Lambeth, which was a quick barge journey across the River Thames from Westminster, and the new palace there became their true centre of operations, rather than Canterbury itself. One late-twelfth-century archbishop even tried to fulfil Gregory's plan and move his cathedral to Lambeth, a scheme foiled only by his death on crusade.
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We are lucky to know a great deal about Augustine's English mission because of the brilliant and engaging
Ecclesiastical History
of Bede, a Northumbrian monk who lived a century after Augustine's mission (
c
. 672-735). Bede was the greatest historian of his age in all Europe, perhaps the greatest for many centuries either side of his own time. He was admirably honest in sorting out his varied sources; very often one can tell where he has got his material. Monks at Canterbury, for instance, supplied him with a great many formal documents, which lie at the core of his stories of Gregory and Augustine. He frequently tells us specifically the status and source of his information, and one can picture him on his eager quest for what would now be called oral history - 'The priest Deda . . . a most reliable authority . . . told me that one of the oldest inhabitants had described to him . . .', etc.
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Bede is the equal of Thucydides in this respect, and a good deal less credulous than Herodotus (see pp. 35-6).

Despite his enthusiasm for Gregory's mission, Bede is honest enough to reveal that Augustine was not coming to a land empty of Christians. There was already a bishop in Canterbury, a Frankish chaplain of Queen Bertha's, and a functioning church, dedicated either by Franks or by earlier British Christians to St Martin of Tours. It is moving when visiting Canterbury to see part of its fabric still standing, incorporated in a modest medieval church building on the edge of the ancient city. It is worth realizing that bishops were not then treated like troubleshooters or roving ambassadors; they were there because a flock was there to be led.
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Nor is it likely that Bishop Liudhard ministered simply to a tiny expat Frankish colony, for one curious fact must strike anyone reading the letters of Gregory to Augustine preserved by Bede. Certain purple passages on the subject of conversion are always quoted from them, but in reality a large proportion of Gregory's attention is taken up with discussing sex - to be more specific, ritual impurity. Gregory argued at great length against people who had been perplexing Augustine because of their strong opinions about what constituted sexual uncleanness among their contemporaries. These rigorists wanted to borrow Old Testament exclusions from participation in the Temple liturgy and apply them to pregnant women and the sexual relations of married couples.

Clearly such troublesome people were Christians, since non-Christians would have no interest in and presumably no knowledge of the Old Testament. The Roman missionaries were facing difficulties because they were coming up against a significant body of well-informed local Christians with different standards from themselves.
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Only a few decades before the arrival of Augustine, the balance of power through lowland England had still been not with Saxon warlords but with Celtic British. Certainly the British population had not been wiped out or driven to the far west, as historians have often in the past assumed, but had stayed put, while proving rather more able and willing to learn Anglo-Saxon than the Anglo-Saxons were capable of learning Celtic languages (
plus ca change
).
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Many of these Britons would be Christian to some degree: Christianity did not come as a startling novelty to the inhabitants of lowland England in 597. So what was different about Augustine's mission? Chiefly, but crucially, its emphasis on Roman obedience.

OBEDIENT ANGLO-SAXONS AND OTHER CONVERTS (600-800)

Augustine's missionary party tried to turn Canterbury into Rome and Kent into Italy. They built a monastery in Canterbury dedicated to Rome's premier saints, Peter and Paul, and that monastery (later rededicated to the missionary Augustine) stood outside the Roman walls of the Kentish capital, just like Rome's basilicas of St Peter and St Paul; Clovis had done the same thing outside Paris (see p. 325). The cathedral church which they also founded out of the ruins of a Roman church was dedicated as Christ Church, in direct imitation of the Lateran cathedral in Rome, a fact now obscured because the Bishop of Rome's cathedral has since been rededicated to St John. Even when the mission founded a second Kentish diocese at Rochester, the Roman theme continued: Rochester cathedral was dedicated to St Andrew after the basilica and monastery on the Caelian Hill, from which Augustine himself had come - especially significant because St Andrew's was the monastery which Pope Gregory had founded on his own family estate.
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Nor was this reminiscence of Rome mere sentiment. Gregory sent Augustine a special liturgical stole, the
pallium
, a piece of official ecclesiastical dress borrowed from the garments worn by imperial officials. The gift was therefore a sign of subordination: Archbishops of Canterbury should receive their power from Rome ever after. In an interesting historical oversight, their coat of arms is still based on the Y-shape of the pallium, despite the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.
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It took the next century from 597 to ensure Christianity's full sweep throughout the kingdoms occupying the former Britannia. Some kings were still non-Christian in the 680s and there were some notable changes of mind on the way. Nevertheless, Christianity finally gained a monopoly status which it had never enjoyed in Roman Britannia. Anglo-Saxon kings must have been influenced by the fact that Christianity was the religion of the Franks, who under the Merovingian successors of Clovis had emerged as the most powerful and admired of all the political units founded by Germanic migrants.
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The Church could also be sensitive to the pride of newly Christianized rulers and noblemen, enabling them to marry new to old. In many places it allowed people to go on expressing their grief at death by filling graves with prized possessions of the dead, despite the fact that these would be put to shame by the gadgets available in the Christian Heaven. Even the great Christian holy man of northern England Cuthbert of Lindisfarne was given his grave goods to take with him; fragments of them removed from his burial place in Durham Cathedral can still be seen.
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The Church encouraged royal families to extend their genealogies further beyond the Germanic god Woden, not to leave him out, but to go all the way back to biblical Adam. Bishops outshone non-Christian religious leaders with their splendid hospitality, the traditional mode of asserting one's social status. Wilfrid, an aristocratic Abbot of Ripon and Bishop of York, definitely no Puritan, threw a three-day party for high society in the 660s after dedicating what is now Ripon Cathedral: no doubt the occasion was a satisfying mixture of solid Anglo-Saxon cheer and delicate Roman canapes, if anyone was capable of remembering afterwards.
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