Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (58 page)

By the tenth century, out of the diversity of these Christianized Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged one of the most coherent political units in Europe, a single monarchy of England, with a precociously centralized government which eventually fell like a ripe plum into the grateful hands of Norman carpetbaggers in 1066. The ideology of this remarkable kingdom was fuelled by the way in which Bede had depicted a single race called the English; his book, after all, was called 'The Ecclesiastical History of the
gens Anglorum
' - 'people of the
Angli
'. Bede gave this 'people' a pride in their common and special identity, paradoxically based on their common loyalty to Rome. Pope Gregory I rather than Augustine is the hero of Bede's tale of the conversion of the English. Bede called not Augustine but Gregory the 'Apostle' of the English; and he was not creating this image, but reflecting a continuous veneration in England for Gregory.
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In Bede's own day, the rest of western Europe would have considered this Gregory-mania a case of English eccentricity, for Gregory had actually ended his papacy under something of a cloud, unmourned by the people of Rome. The first life of Gregory was written by an Englishman in the early eighth century in the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby, and it was two centuries after Gregory's death before Rome caught up with his cult, enshrining the Pope alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as one of the 'Big Four' theologians of the earlier West, the four Latin Doctors.
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It may be that the popularity of pictures of the Latin Doctors in medieval English churches - a favourite and of course appropriate subject for portrayal on pulpits - stemmed from the thought that one of the Doctors was Pope Gregory, who could be considered an honorary Englishman.

This 'Englishness' can be considered one of the most lasting and unexpected consequences of Augustine's mission, and the way that Bede told its story: the English achieved a political unity which, by contrast, the equally fervently Christian Irish never envisaged or sought for themselves until much later. Bede's narrative reflected the fact that the Church in England had already secured its unity under Roman obedience before the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms united. The crucial decade was the 670s, when a couple of councils of English bishops made decisions for the whole Church in the various kingdoms of England, first at Hertford in 673 and then at Hatfield in Yorkshire in 679.
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Hertford gave shape and discipline to the English Church, beginning to set up a single system of written law for it to operate under, at a time when no king in England contemplated such an idea. At Hatfield, the bishops supported the Pope's condemnation of the continuing Byzantine efforts to conciliate Miaphysites, and also gave their assent to the 'double procession' of the Spirit from Father and Son, that proposition of Augustine's which so infuriated the Byzantine Church.

A paradoxical feature of these vigorous Anglo-Saxon affirmations of Western Latin theology was that the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding over the councils was a brilliant Greek, a scholar named Theodore who, like the Apostle Paul, came from Tarsus. Maybe Pope Vitalian had sent him to England because he was worried that Theodore might be disruptive in Rome, but it was still a remarkable reminder that England's links to a wider world were overwhelmingly thanks to the Church. One of Theodore's most important and energetic colleagues was the Abbot of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, Hadrian, sent to England by the Pope more or less to keep an eye on the archbishop; Hadrian was just as exotic as Theodore, since he was a refugee from the now beleaguered Church in North Africa.
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No one could accuse the English Church of being provincial. Because it maintained a loyalty to Rome untypical in the rest of Europe, that sense of difference enhanced a precocious belief among the English in their special destiny among their neighbours, both in the same islands and among the people of Europe. Thanks to Bede, and to the leadership of Archbishop Theodore, they could see themselves as a covenanted people like ancient Israel, a beacon for the Christian world.

Though Bede never explicitly made the connection, it would not be difficult to conceive of a single political unit called England as well as a religious entity. Israel was most at one with God in its covenanted status when it was united, and at its most glorious when that unity was under single monarchs, David and Solomon. Bede caused the English to meditate on Solomon in another of his works beside his
History
. For centuries his extended allegorical commentary on Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem enjoyed more popularity, and he might have been surprised and a little put out to learn that it is his
History
which is now chiefly remembered. Why was Solomon's Temple so important to Bede? Because it stood for him as one image in a pair of opposites, the other being the Tower of Babel. The Tower represented human pride, and pride led to a confusion of tongues. The Temple represented obedience to God's will, and it led to the healing of the terrible divisions of Babel. It foreshadowed the unity of tongues which Bede cheerfully anticipated coming very soon in history, in the Church of the Resurrection: that cosmic unity at the end of time might first be foreshadowed in England.
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Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Christians between them made the Atlantic Isles in the seventh and eighth centuries a prodigious powerhouse of Christian activity. Their energies flowed together in the islands themselves, in the founding of a network of new churches and monasteries, but they also followed the sea routes which Columbanus had pioneered into mainland Europe, conscious that they had received Christianity by mission and were determined to do the same for others. Their activities coincided with and were aided by an expansion of Frankish power north and east, into what are now the Low Countries and the territories of Germany commonly known as Saxony; they increasingly received more encouragement from the bishops of the Frankish Church and from local secular rulers than Columbanus had done. For Anglo-Saxons, the mission to Low Countries areas like Frisia was to people with a consciousness of a common ancestry, close trade links and variants on a language which would still be comprehensible either side of the North Sea; even beyond the Low Countries in Saxony, they came as cousins. They were given a cue by that most flamboyant of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon prelates, Bishop Wilfrid, who had a lucky break in that his very successful campaign of preaching in Frisia coincided with one of the best fishing catches in the North Sea for years. Then in the next generation there was Boniface, a monk of southern England who put to shame the bishops of Francia with his prodigious energy in extending the frontiers of the faith, and who was at the end both Archbishop of Mainz and a much-celebrated martyr for the Church, hacked to death in 754 by those same close relatives of the English in Frisia.
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These conversions sponsored by missionaries from Ninian through Patrick and Augustine far into central Europe were not conversions in the sense often demanded by evangelists in the twenty-first century, accepting Christ as personal Saviour in a great individual spiritual turnaround. In the medieval West, there were only one or two recorded examples of such experiences, taking their cue from the New Testament's description of what happened to the Apostle Paul. So Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century and Anselm of Canterbury in the twelfth do indeed write about spiritual struggles which sound like those of Paul on the Damascus Road: they talk of dramatic new decisions, realigning their whole personality. In the Reformation, Protestants picked up the same tradition, and since then personal conversion based on assent to an itemized package of doctrine has become almost a compulsory experience in some versions of Christianity. Yet from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, one of the most successful periods in the expansion of the faith, when all Europe became Christian, people rarely talked about conversion in that sense. If they did, they generally meant something very different: they had already been Christians, but now they were becoming a monk or a nun.
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How, then, did the Western Church convert Europe piece by piece between the thousand years which separated Constantine I from the conversion of Lithuania in 1386? At the time, those who described the experience normally used more passive and more collective language than the word 'conversion': a people or a community 'accepted' or 'submitted to' the Christian God and his representatives on earth. This was language which came naturally: groups mattered more than single people, and within groups there was no such thing as social equality. Most people expected to spend their lives being given orders and showing deference, so when someone ordered dramatic change, it was a question of obeying rather than making a personal choice. Once they had obeyed, the religion which they met was as much a matter of conforming to a new set of forms of worship in their community as of embracing a new set of personal beliefs. Christian missionaries were just as much at home with worldly as with supernatural power. They expected people to be unequal, that was what God wanted, and inequality was there to be used for God's glory. Mass rallies were not their style; most evangelists were what we would call gentry or nobility, and they normally went straight to the top when preaching the faith. That way they could harvest a whole kingdom, at least as long as local rulers did not have second thoughts or take a better offer.

Above all, Christians everywhere had a big advantage in being associated with the ancient power that obsessed all Europe: imperial Rome. The Latin-speaking Church became a curator of
Romanitas
, Romanness. That was a paradox, since Jesus had been crucified by a Roman provincial governor and Peter by an emperor, but the cultural alliance stuck. By Bede's account, when discrepant methods of calculating Easter in the Atlantic Isles were debated at the Synod of Whitby in 664, King Oswy of Bernicia decided in favour of the Roman method over the Celtic because Peter was the guardian of the gates of Heaven and Columba of Iona was not.
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Everyone wanted to be Roman: the memory of the empire stood for wealth, wine, central heating and filing systems, and its two languages, Latin and Greek, could link Armagh to Alexandria. But, as King Oswy's judgement showed, there was more to mission than simple material matters. People hungered for meaning; they were terrified of their own frailty. Famously, Bede told a story that when Oswy's father-in-law, King Edwin of Deira and Bernicia, was weighing up whether or not to become Christian in the 620s, one of his advisers reminded his master of the baffling brevity and inconsequentiality of human life: he compared it to a sparrow which swoops in suddenly through one door into the warm, brightly lit, noisy royal hall and then flies straight out through the other door, back to the darkness and storms outside.
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Bede probably made the speech up, as historians did at the time, but he made it up because he thought that his readers would think it plausible. The troubled people of Europe sought not only good drains and elegant tableware, but a glimpse of the light which would make sense of their own brief flights out of the darkness. The missionaries of Christianity talked to them of love and forgiveness shaping the purposes of God, and there is no reason to believe that ordinary folk were too obtuse to perceive that this could be good news.

As the Anglo-Saxons travelled east into mainland Europe, so did their devotion to the papacy and their memory of how Augustine had brought them their faith. Even though Rome had done little of substance since Gregory to launch missions into new lands, the Anglo-Saxon missionaries were very fond of quoting the sections of Gregory's letters to Augustine which discussed ways of converting the heathen, and in that they set a pattern which still persists.
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Celtic missionaries were less enthralled than the English by the mystique of Rome - they were hardly unique in western Europe in that - but they still cherished Latin as the language of the Church, and it is noticeable how many of the newly founded churches across Saxony were dedicated to St Peter.
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The eighth and ninth centuries were a period in which the papacy was intent on asserting its dignity and special place in God's purpose, a mood not unconnected with the reality of its fragile position between two potentially threatening secular powers in Italy, Lombards to the north and Byzantines to the south.

Matters might have turned out differently, for in the seventh century, after a certain
froideur
in the era of Gregory the Great, papal contacts with Byzantium could be regarded as consolidating: eleven out of eighteen popes in the period 650-750 had a Greek or Eastern background.
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There was still a sense among ordinary Christians and ordinary clergy that they were part of a single Mediterranean-wide Church. One proof positive of that is the way that, during the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, fragments of Greek liturgical hymns and psalms were incorporated into various western Mediterranean worship traditions, often without even translating them into Latin, in a variety of settings, from Spain to Italy - Rome itself, Milan, Benevento.
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One long-standing cause of theological alarm in Rome was neutralized in 680-81, when Constantinople hosted yet another major council of the Church (reckoned as the sixth held there). It finally reaffirmed the imperial Church's commitment to the decisions of Chalcedon against any attempt to placate Miaphysites in the empire, ending the so-called 'Monothelete' controversy (see pp. 441-2). Roman representatives joined Eastern bishops in condemning as heretical four Patriarchs of Constantinople and, more reluctantly, one former Roman pope, Honorius; his name was discreetly inserted in the middle of the list of patriarchs to minimize Roman embarrassment.
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Yet the Roman delegates at Constantinople would not have forgotten that the Monothelete clashes also produced one of the most appalling abuses of Byzantine power in 649, when Pope Martin I was arrested by imperial officials for presiding over a council in Rome opposing the Emperor's Monothelete theology. He died in remote exile in the Crimea in wretched circumstances, which have led him to be recognized as the last pope to die as a martyr - this time, uniquely at the hands of a Christian emperor. Such frictions meant that popes were alert for any signs of fresh doctrinal deviance in the East, and the eighth century soon brought them new alarms as the growing hostility to the devotional use of images - iconophobia and then iconoclasm - were promoted by successive Byzantine emperors from Leo III onwards (see pp. 442-56). It was not merely the issue itself which worried Rome, but the way in which these iconoclast emperors were prepared to order major changes in the everyday life of the Church, including in the Byzantine sphere of influence in Italy. That had implications for the authority of Peter's successor.