Volume 2, Chapter 3

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BEGINNINGS OF RESTORATION

Section 1: ST. GREGORY, FOUNDER OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Section 2: ITALY, GAUL AND SPAIN IN THE CENTURY OF ST. GREGORY

Section 3: THE CHURCH IN ROMAN BRITAIN: THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH, 313-735

Section 4: MAHOMET AND THE RISE OF ISLAM

Section 5: SPANISH CATHOLICISM AND ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 589-711

ST. GREGORY, FOUNDER OF THE MIDDLE AGES

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT was Roman by birth and heir to one of the last surviving names of the old pre-Christian aristocracy. He was born during the first period of Justinian's war to recover Italy for the central government, and his boyhood saw the successive sieges of Rome by Goth and Roman, years of famine, plague and destruction which left-on his sensitive spirit an expectancy of doom thenceforth ineffaceable. He was a child of six when, in 546, Totila, meditating to erase from memory the very knowledge of where Rome had stood, cleared the city of its entire population and left it for six weeks abandoned to the beasts of the Campagna. He was fourteen when, the last Goth driven out, Justinian, in the Pragmatic Sanction, gave the ruined country its new constitution as a province of the empire whose centre was Constantinople. Another fourteen years and then, in 568, over the Alps from the north-east came the last and most savage of Italy's barbaric invaders: the Lombards. In ten years they wrested from the empire the greater part of the interior, and inaugurated a war of raids and sieges on the rest which was to go on with little intermission for another two centuries.

St. Gregory, at the time of the Lombard invasion, was already well advanced in the public life which his rank and wealth opened to him. He was by now Praetor of Rome, responsible for the city's financial administration and for the police, sitting as judge in the courts and, an immense responsibility in these days of continuous warfare, charged also with the task of maintaining the city's supply of food. At the age of thirty-five the praetor became a monk, after long hesitation bred of doubts whether in such time of crisis it was not his first duty to serve the State. He sold his vast property, and from part of the proceeds founded seven monasteries. One of them was his own Roman house on the Coelian. Here he continued to live as -one of the monks, following, the thing seems certain, the rule of St. Benedict. He was allowed just f- r years of the peace he craved. Then, in 579 the newly-elected pope, Pelagius II, ordained him deacon and despatched him to Constantinople as apocrisiarius -- ambassador at the Imperial Court. There he remained for seven years, occupied with the delicate business of restraining the Byzantine habits of the cesaro-papist sovereigns whenever they threatened to invade the sphere of the papal primacy. Political affairs, too, were in his charge: the Lombard menace to Rome the insufficiency of the imperial representatives who, from Ravenna, governed Roman Italy; the plight of Rome itself where, already, the pope was de facto ruler. The city often enough was undefended, lacked troops, and, almost as often, when it had a garrison it lacked the means to pay it. Hence the Romans feared the troops within as much as they feared the Barbarian without. The responsibility for the city's welfare was already falling on the pope, who, however, before the law, was only the emperor's subject. There was abundant matter to occupy the diplomacy of the apocrisiarius.

The contrast between the half-abandoned, ruined city from which he had come and the glory of Constantinople as Justinian had left it would matter the less to the new ambassador since, during all his stay in the splendid capital, he still contrived to live as a monk. Several of his brethren went with him from Rome and the embassy became a monastery. At Constantinople St. Gregory met the Spanish bishop, Leander of Seville, then in exile and negotiating the emperor's help for his patron, the Catholic heir to the Visigoth throne. So began one of the many great friendships of St. Gregory's life. Here too, in conferences given to his monks, he began one of the most celebrated of his works, the Commentary on Job, and in a matter of theological controversy he engaged no less a personage than the Patriarch of Constantinople himself.

So for seven years the rich new experience continued and then the pope needed him in Rome. In January 590, four years later, Pelagius II died and the expected happened: St. Gregory was elected in his place -- the place two of his family had already filled before him, Agapitus I, and his own great-grandfather Felix III.

The new pope revealed himself immediately as a reformer of abuses. The archdeacon -- now and for a long time yet to come the first personage in the Roman Church after the pope -- was dismissed for peculation, the deacons ordered to confine themselves to their original duty of relieving the poor and the relief service of the Roman Church was reorganised from top to bottom. The papal household, too, underwent a similar reform. The lay element disappeared. The Lateran, hitherto the palace of an ecclesiastical prince, was henceforward a house where none but clerics dwelt, where business was transacted in an ordered round of prayer. It was almost a monastery. Fees for ordinations were abolished, fees due from those who received the pallium, fees for dispensations, and special licences. Finally St. Gregory took in hand the reorganisation of the great estates in Sicily, Italy and Gaul which were the source of the Roman Church's vast wealth-the Patrimony of St. Peter. This was his own personal work, and many letters remain to show how intimately he scrutinised its personnel and their accounts, and how scrupulously he observed the principle that these revenues should be employed in unstinted almsgiving.

One of the most distinguished of French scholars [107] has borrowed all English idea hi which briefly to sum up the essence of St. Gregory's personality. He sees in him the "landlord" of the best type, with the tradition of unstinted service for the public welfare, a sense of responsibility, and care, for dependants that knows no limits. To his rulership of the Church he brought something of the technique of the old imperial administration, and all the best of the Roman tradition: fidelity to law, respect for rights, impatience of disorder, whether from insubordination o r injustice, and the courtesy of business regularity.

It is this same shrewd, kindly, fatherly spirit, practical always, never speculative, that informs all his writings. For St. Gregory wrote much, despite his well-filled days, and more directly even than St. Augustine did he, through his writings, influence the next thousand years. He is no scholar writing for scholars -- or the scholars for whom he writes would hardly have been recognised as such by the earlier writer -- but he is a great populariser of doctrine, the principal source of the forms of the popular piety and preaching of the early Middle Ages, the storehouse whence derived much of its legend and a hagiographical tradition, the creator of its liturgy, and the creator of the ideal by which it judged its spiritual rulers. As a theologian he is never, it is true, all original thinker. He has, in this respect, all the mediocrity that characterises all age of intellectual decline. He is not widely read. St. Cyprian, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine are his sources -- St. Augustine above all, not the boldly speculative St. Augustine but the preacher, the mystic and the moralist.

It is the moralist who is supreme in St. Gregory. He is indeed one of the master moralists of Catholicism, and he sums up Catholic spirituality, as a life, in a wealth of clear and adequate phrases. His Moralia is an extension of the conferences on Job begun during his stay at Constantinople. It is a free running commentary on the text as it lies before him, whence a certain prolixity that runs out into thirty-five books. The sense of each verse is expounded, the literal, the allegorical and the moral, this last in the place of honour, the literal being no more than "the bark of the tree." The Moralia is a practical guide to the spiritual life. For centuries after St. Gregory it was the classic vade mecum of spiritual directors, thanks to its wealth of teaching on, for example, the contemplative life, its nature and the signs by which an aptitude for it is discerned, thanks to its directions for fostering and safeguarding that life, and to the saint's analysis of the temptations that beset it. Job, and the exegesis, are secondary to this practical aim. Equally important in its universal and long-lived influence was the book of St. Gregory's sermons, The Homilies. These are simple familiar " talks " on the gospel, preached during Mass. There is no rhetoric, no dogmatic profundity, but much allegory -- perhaps to our modern notions fantastic at times -- and the gift of summing up a lesson in axiomatic phrase, real genius for spiritual epigrams. There is, too, an abundance of stories, stories of the saints and stories of their miracles. St. Gregory, and through his book known as the Dialogues [108] above all, is the great storyteller of the early Middle Ages, and here again he is one of that culture's primary founders.

Finally, to conclude this rough summary of the most important of his many writings, he wrote the Regula Pastoralis -- a rule for bishops as important in its way as St. Benedict's rule for monks. It is a book to train and instruct and its aim is to raise the tone of the episcopate generally, to serve as an examen de conscience for those who are bishops. How much the book was needed other sections of this chapter will perhaps show, and the remark of a friend of St. Gregory's who had read it, " You lay down that no one should be consecrated who is not trained. Where then shall we find bishops at all?" [109] The book was, from the first, an immense success. St. Gregory himself gave copies of it profusely, and it was immediately translated into Greek -- a rare honour indeed in this new age when the Romans of Constantinople were beginning to speak of Latin as a barbarian tongue. Many centuries later, as is well known, our own King Alfred had it translated into Anglo-Saxon for the benefit of a church more afflicted even than the church for which St. Gregory wrote it. All through the Middle Ages it continued to be copied and studied, and to be the basis of the spiritual formation of the medieval clergy. Had St. Gregory as pope done no more than write these three books he would still deserve his unique place among popes. But he was also, and primarily, a man of affairs, ruler and restorer of the spiritual kingdom committed to him.

It was to a troubled heritage that St. Gregory came, the care. of churches universally afflicted, some of them seemingly to death. He took up that heritage in the spirit of one for whom the future could hold little promise, convinced as he was, and by signs apparently certain, that there was not even to be a future. None the less, his charge is henceforth his life; to it he consecrates all the energy of his practical administrative genius; he consoles the failing churches of the West; and he lays there the foundations of a new church, where the ancient cultures which are his by inheritance will shortly find their chief refuge when new barbarism drives them from their own homes, a church whence these cultures will return, to be the basis of the first revival of thought once the long night of war and rapine is passed. The first of the long line of monk-popes is, in the event, the greatest of all papal administrators; the saint whom only the sense of duty held from despair, and from the temptation to flee into solitude from the chronic desolation of his age, builds the foundations on which, even yet, much of our political and social life rests. More than any other. St. Gregory is, if any man can be it, the founder of Medieval Europe.

ITALY, GAUL AND SPAIN IN THE CENTURY OF ST. GREGORY

In Italy by the time the Lombards arrived (568) the municipal regime of the empire as Diocletian rebuilt it had disappeared. In every city it was the bishop and the tribune who supported the burden of government, the ecclesiastical power and the army: at Rome the pope and the duke. From the safety of Ravenna and its lagoons the exarch ruled, in the emperor's name, what parts of Italy had escaped these Lombards: strips and patches along the coast-line, Rome, Naples, Aquileia, Apulia and Sicily, and kept the road between Ravenna and Rome. As the years went by this rule was less and less of a reality. Rome, in particular, the Lombard kings and dukes never ceased to covet. Its danger was henceforward a permanent feature of life. The emperors could not spare troops enough to clear the Lombards out of Italy, could not, very often, even defend adequately the towns the Lombards menaced. Policy and tradition, on the other hand, forbade them to negotiate with the Barbarian. They could not make war, they would not make peace. To protect Rome, and yet not betray the imperial policy, was already the great problem of papal diplomacy.

Pelagius II had, in 586, successfully negotiated a three years' truce. It ended in 589 and three years later the Lombard army again marched on Rome. It fell to St. Gregory to organise the defence, to find money to pay the arrears of the imperial army's wages, to appoint military governors. There followed a military demonstration in the Campagna, and the Lombards retired. Next year they returned, in greater force than ever, headed by their king. This time it was by spiritual weapons that the pope conquered, and by the offer of tribute. In an interview he bought off the Lombards with an offer of 500 gold pounds annually. His real aim was a perpetual peace throughout Italy between the emperor and the Barbarian. Meanwhile he acted as intermediary, working on behalf of the prisoners taken in the numerous raids, finding ransoms, and assisting their distressed families. All this to the mixed amusement and annoyance of the incompetent Byzantine functionaries at Ravenna, who put every obstacle in his way, even to denouncing him at court as a traitor. In the end the pope's patient diplomacy won this much of success at least that, in 598, after thirty years of war, the emperor and the Lombards signed a definitive treaty.

In matters more purely ecclesiastical St. Gregory exercises, and with refreshing vigour, all the rights of his see over the other churches of Italy. Dioceses depopulated in the long wars are united, vacant sees visited and administered by his delegates. Complaints against bishops are received and heard and decided without the intervention of any council. The Bishop of Amalfi is warned that if he will not reside in his diocese he will be interned in a monastery. The Bishop of Tarentum is suspended for causing a woman to be flogged. The Bishop of Naples is deposed.

Outside the special sphere of St. Gregory's jurisdiction as metropolitan, there lie the suffragans of the other metropolitan sees, Milan, Aquileia, Ravenna. With these bishops the pope has, still, little direct relation. It is still their own metropolitan who confirms their election and gives them episcopal consecration. On the other hand the metropolitans themselves are in close relation with the pope. When the See of Ravenna falls vacant, it is the pope who names the Bishop of Cervia to make the visitation, and the newly-elected metropolitan goes to Rome to be consecrated by the pope. In 595 neither of the candidates proposed to the pope suited him, and he named one of his own monks. With Aquileia relations were still strained. After thirty years the schism bred of the action of Pelagius I during and after the General Council of 553 still endured. [110] Nor was St. Gregory's patience ever able to end it. It survived his death, and Aquileia was only reconciled under Honorius I (625-638). If Aquileia was in schism, Milan was by this time foreign territory, in the power of the Lombards. It was as a refugee at Genoa, still imperial territory, that the successor of Laurentius (593) was consecrated. St. Gregory's delegate assisted, to confirm the election and to see that the newly-elect was consecrated by bishops of his own province as the custom there demanded. To him, as to the Metropolitan of Ravenna, St. Gregory sent the pallium.

The leading figure in the religious life of Gaul during the first part of the century of St. Gregory was St. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles. Like St. Honoratus and St. Hilary, Bishops of Arles a hundred years before, he was a monk of Lerins. Like them, too, he was a zealous missionary who by his continuous preaching and his endless journeys throughout the province where- he was metropolitan, did much to give the fervent ideals of Lerins a very wide influence indeed. He was also himself a monastic founder and the author of a very famous rule which, particularly in convents of women, carried all before it in Gaul until the coming of the rule of St. Benedict. But St. Caesarius has a greater claim to a place in history, as the agent responsible for a work of more general importance than the maintenance of the good Arlesian tradition of religious life. It was due to his decisive action that, after a century of more or less open conflict, the debates of the rival schools of Augustinians and semi-Pelagians were brought to an end. St. Caesarius is the hero of the Council of Orange of 529.

To explain this we must go back to the closing years of St. Augustine's life, when his great theories on the nature and the working of Grace, after routing the pretensions of the system of Pelagius, were beginning to be a cause of lively discussions among the Catholics of southern Gaul. To make the story clearer it is perhaps better to anticipate what the controversy ultimately showed to be true -- that although the Church recognised officially the main lines of St. Augustine's teaching as against Pelagius, there were elements in that teaching -- on predestination, for example, and on the fate of unbaptised children -- which it did not make its own. It was in part around these points that the new discussions took place (419-429); but in opposing what we may call St. Augustine's personal theories, his critics -- followers of Cassian at the beginning of the fifth century and of St. Faustus, Bishop of Riez, at the end of it -- fell foul of the implications of the official anti-Pelagian teaching. The story can hardly be told, even summarily, without the introduction of more theological matter than there is space for here. [111]

The troubles came to a head -- and Rome was brought into them at the time of the reconciliation of the Eastern churches in 519. [112] The treatise of St. Faustus, directed against the supporters of St. Prosper, who was himself a strong Augustinian, had come into the hands of those monks of Constantinople who, throughout the late schism, had been Rome's constant supporters. They read it as Pelagianism, and appealed for a decision to the Apostolic See. They also brought the book to the notice of the greatest theologian of the day, the African bishop, St. Fulgentius, then exiled for the faith to Sardinia. The pope, Hormisdas, referred his enquirers to the writings of St. Augustine and St. Prosper, and especially to the decision of the Roman Church given in the previous controversy a hundred years before. This, in the circumstances, was not enough to halt the discussions; and soon all southern Gaul was again filled with their noise

It was how that St. Caesarius, metropolitan and also, by appointment of Pope Symmachus (498-514), papal vicar for the Visigothic Kingdom, took up the matter. He drew up and sent to the pope, Felix IV, a list of nineteen propositions which purported to resume the Catholic teaching on the disputed points, and asked the pope officially to sanction it. The list was returned, with some changes: the sections that treated of predestination and of reprobation were struck out; other clauses, taken from the Sententiae of St. Prosper (which again derived from St. Augustine), were added. St. Caesarius added- to the list thus revised more matter of his own, touched up the whole, and presented the document, thus arranged, for acceptance to the bishops of his province assembled at Orange for the dedication of the basilica there (July 3, 529). They signed it; and St. Caesarius next sent the document to Rome for ratification. Felix IV was dead. It was to his successor, Boniface II, that the decree came. He approved it, January 25, 531, [113] as an adequate expression of the Church's teaching, and thus gave it all the force needed to end the controversy.

Little by little, as the decree circulated, the controversy died out. The critics of St. Augustine had to admit, as part of Catholic teaching, that, even for the first movements of man in the work of his salvation, grace was needed; and that, apart from grace-left to its own resources -- human free-will is incapable of sustained moral goodness. On the other hand, those developments which had, in part, caused the controversy -- St. Augustine's theory on the intrinsic malice of concupiscence, on the transmission of original sin from parent to child through the parental concupiscence which the act of generation involved, on the lot of unbaptised children, and some of his ideas regarding predestination-none of these were approved. [114] The Augustinian doctrine, as against Pelagius, was fully confirmed. On the other hand the controversy had brought out clearly that others of the saint's conclusions -- and some of them are extremely repugnant -- were no more than the theories of a learned theologian: and were not the Church's teaching. [115]

The Gaul of St. Caesarius, however, where Arian princes ruled, Visigoth or Ostrogoth, was soon to give place to a new condition of things once the now baptised Franks of the north made themselves masters of the whole country. By the time of St. Gregory the Great, all Gaul was Frank and Arianism had disappeared. The saint's task in Gaul was, however, hardly easier, for all that the princes with whom he had to deal were Catholics.

The first important event in the ecclesiastical history of the new Barbarian kingdom, after the baptism of Clovis, was the national council held at Orleans in 511. Clovis was by this time master of two-thirds of Gaul. He had, in a few years, destroyed the Visigothic sovereignty of the south-west and with the victory his new religion, too, had triumphed. "I cannot tolerate that Arians should rule so great a part of Gaul," he had declared; and on his way south he had prayed as a pilgrim at the shrines of St. Martin and St. Hilary. The Council of Orleans was the first event to mark the new national unity. It marked also the beginning of those close relations between Church and State that were to characterise all later French history. Clovis, apparently, had summoned the council; and to Clovis it made its report, begging him to support with his power the decisions it had made. The whole of Gaul was represented, bishops even from the districts still in the hands of the Burgundians. On the other hand there was not a single bishop from the sees of the distant north-eastern frontier -- Mainz, Treves, Cologne, Tongres, Metz, Toul, Verdun -- some of which had apparently disappeared in the century of disorder which began on that fatal day, in 407, when the great flood of marauders had destroyed the Rhine frontiers once and for all.

With Clovis the 3,000 soldiers of his guard accepted the new faith in 496. The rest of his people remained, for the moment, pagan, their conversion an additional task before the Gallo-Roman Church still occupied with the conversion of the pagan countrysides. The Catholicism of the ensuing century was necessarily a very mixed affair. St. Gregory of Tours, our chief source for the history of the Franks at this time, has left us a dark picture indeed, of a society almost wholly pagan in its morals. Cruelty, drunkenness, debauchery, sacrilege and superstition are its leading features, and Catholicism a thin, scarcely recognisable veneer. The reigning princes set the fashion, their nobles follow it, and in the train of their crimes come blood-feuds and private wars to destroy all security. To add to the causes of misery, the kingdom of Clovis is, upon his death (511), divided among his sons. Reunited in 558, it is once more divided in 561, to remain divided for another fifty years. Between the closely related kings civil war is continuous, and the pages of St. Gregory are a record of revolting cruelties.

Good men are, however, by no means lacking; there are saints even, and in every walk of life. Preachers like St. Caesarius of Arles remind these decadent and half-civilised princes and their associates that God is just and the avenger of wickedness in high places. Missionaries tour the pagan countrysides risking, often enough, their very lives, in an endeavour to make the Gospel known. For paganism dies hard, its devotees, lords as well as peasants, resist violently this new "Roman" conquest. Even so late as 626 councils are still legislating against sacrifices, and against Catholics who assist and take part in them.

One method of stabilising the spiritual conquest and of guarding against any relapse into the attractions of the old servitude is the substitution of Christian feasts for the pagan saturnalia. Shrines are built in the place where once the gods were worshipped-shrines of the martyrs and, more often still, of the champions of ascetic austerity, such heroic bishops as St. Martin, St. Hilary, St. Germanus of Auxerre. The cult of the saints spreads rapidly. Every town, every village has its patron. He is its special protector and in time of crisis he is expected to deliver his clients -- if need be, by miracle. It is the age of the miraculous. The lives of the saints are, often, little more than a catalogue of marvels; and the popular conception of sanctity, the test which gives the right to veneration, is the power of working such miracles. In the shrine there is preserved the body of the saint, or, where this is not possible, some relic: not, as yet, a part of his body, for in the West such mutilations are held in horror. " Who dares to touch the bodies of the saints dies," St. Gregory wrote to the empress when she asked of him the head of St. Paul. He sent instead part of the saint's chains. The saints are a coveted treasure. Around their earthly life a new genre of literature grows. First the neo-Manicheans, to capture the prestige of the saints for their sect, and then the Catholics, produce a whole series of romantic histories, with one or other of the saints for the hero. Soon a type is created, a fixed formula of events and characteristics, and for one life historically valuable there are a score of these colourless legends based on a common pattern. The prestige of a town, of a see, of an abbey is not infrequently measured by that of the saint it possesses. Fights over relics are not unknown, and pious thefts. A more permanent influence, possibly, is that the local chapels gain in importance and achieve a first beginning of administrative independence from the church of the episcopal city.

The bishop of this sixth-century Gaul is not merely a pastor of souls but the chief personage in the social life of his see city and of all its neighbouring territory. He has the immense prestige that falls to the one surviving institution of the imperial regime, to which men look back, already, with an almost religious veneration. The bishop is a royal officer. Almost always he is of good family; and not impossibly the same see has been held in his family for generations. So it was with St. Gregory of Tours, who wrote that all the bishops of Tours save five were of his family. It is the bishop who stands between the people and the exactions of the king's lay representative, the count. Often the temporal administration is in his hands and he makes himself responsible for public works, for dykes, canals, fortifications. He undertakes the burden of finding ransoms for the innumerable victims of the endless wars, and systematically, with registers, poor-house and hospitals, he provides for the destitute. Especially is he the protector of widows and orphans and, from 585,' [116] no judgement can be given in any suit that relates to them without the bishop's intervention. Another thoughtful council even forbids bishops to harbour fierce dogs lest they scare away the poor seeking alms and comfort. The church itself was a sanctuary, in which the criminal was safe from the unlawful violence of the mob or of the royal officers. Only on their swearing to give him a fair trial would the bishop hand him over. The serfs again, if they were the property of the Church, were to be treated with especial consideration, [117] and the development began which ended in assimilating the serf to the cleric and placing him wholly under the jurisdiction of the bishop's court. Others gladly made themselves the bishop's men by recommendation, free men as well as serfs, and transferred to him their domain. Hence the subjects and dependants of the bishop could often be numbered by tens of thousands.

The churches were inevitably increasing in wealth. Generous giving was the great virtue of the time -- whether in expiation, or from devotion or from interest. The custom of tithes too, though not yet of obligation, was slowly spreading. By the time of St. Gregory the Great, the Church was easily the greatest proprietor in Gaul. Its vast personnel was, by royal concession, immune from the numerous customs and tolls, as it moved about the country on business; and the church lands enjoyed a like freedom. They enjoyed, too, as the lands of all the great lords were beginning to enjoy, and again by royal grant, immunity from the action of the king's officers. On the domain of his church the bishop was ruler, judging and taxing his people; and his own personal subjection to the king was the only link between them and the crown. The property of the Church was inalienable-because it was the property of the poor; of which the bishop [118] was only the administrator. This inalienability, partial at first, had been absolute since the intervention of Pope Symmachus in 513.

The bishops themselves enjoyed complete immunity from the royal jurisdiction. As bishops, only bishops could judge them. They made the like claim for their clergy, but, at first, with only partial success. The conflict between the two tendencies went on throughout the sixth century. Finally, in the great council of 614, a compromise was arranged. Civil suits between clerics were to be decided by the bishop. If one of the parties was a layman, a mixed tribunal should judge. In criminal cases if the accused cleric was subdeacon, deacon or priest, the bishop was to judge him: if he was only in minor orders, the count.

This system of immunity and privilege was of course always at the mercy of the half-civilised Barbarian upon whose good will it was built. "It is the conqueror who commands. I obey," said St. Remy, the bishop who baptised Clovis, in explanation of some departure from the canons; and the great council of 511, in which that far reaching conversion produced its first effects, laid the foundation of that dependence on the State which was to characterise ever afterwards the Catholicism of the French.

No layman, it was there enacted, should be ordained or consecrated without the king's consent. Where Clovis had -- and of course successfully -- suggested candidates for the vacant sees, his still more brutal sons imposed them. Gradually laymen, their own brutal warriors, came to be named, and to be consecrated even, without that year's novitiate which the canons prescribed for such cases. The councils protested, but in vain. Saints were never lacking in the hierarchy. More than one paid with his life for his bold reproof of wickedness in high places. But bad bishops abounded; and the pages of Gregory of Tours are filled with the record of these drunkards, debauchees and brigands, monsters of cruelty and avarice, politicians and intriguers.

There was no centralisation of the Church in Gaul, no one primatial see. The old predominance of Arles had never matured. The century of invasion, and its division of Gaul into three mutually hostile kingdoms, had broken up the first attempt at any unity of ecclesiastical administration. The councils apart, each bishop was a law unto himself. Rome was far away, and, by now, in a foreign country where a heretic ruled. Communications were more difficult than ever.

None the less the churches increased, and religious life within their boundaries. New sees had been established in the fifth century, and in the hundred years between Clovis and St. Gregory still more were added. The development of chapels outside the episcopal city, begun already in the fourth century and then so rudely interrupted by the invasion, was renewed. There were, for example, the private chapels established by the lords of the great estates for their population of Catholic dependants, and there were the new chapels erected as memorials to the saints. These last were at first regarded as the property of the local see and what revenues they possessed went to the bishop. From 511 the clergy who served them were allowed to keep two-thirds of the casual offerings they received. From 527 a permanent funded revenue was guaranteed to them and finally, at the Council of Orleans, 538, the principle was fixed that the clergy of such rural churches live on their revenues. The bishop, of course, retained all his authority, though he is warned not to abuse it, by, for example, robbing the church of its movables during a vacancy. A more serious menace than the chance of such a bishop was the permanent lay patron of the chapel built for the great estates. He was often an obstacle to the development of clerical discipline. Often he kept the revenues, and even the offerings, and in some cases the parish, by recommendation, made him its rector.

These rural clergy were simply trained. The Council of Vaison, 529, urges the priest to house and supervise those who wished to be priests. If they are not free men, the lord's consent is necessary. If they are married they must promise to live henceforth in continency, though, as yet, there is no obligation to separate from their wives. The scholastic training is the very minimum. The priest must be able to read, must know something of the chant, of Holy Scripture, and how to baptise. To safeguard his good name the councils lay down a minute code of observances in all that relates to his business with the other sex. That there were abuses and disorders in this primitive organisation is certain-as it is certain that such disorders cause more comment, and leave more trace, than the humdrum virtue of the rest. The brutality of the time finds its habitual reflection in the clerical scandals that are recurrent. Drunkenness, incontinence, scandals from the renewal of married life after ordination, theft and murder -- all these occur in the indictment. That these rural clergy were, personally, poor enough may be gathered from such counsels as that of St. Caesarius that the priest should supplement his income by manual work. St. Caesarius, himself a tireless preacher and missionary, would have the priest supplement his first primitive schooling. He should, for example, read through the whole Bible four times a year. He should also preach to his people -- an office so far reserved to the bishop and to supply the less competent with the means, the saint compiled a whole series of homilies.

To this live and turbulent Church so large-hearted a man as St. Gregory the Great could not be indifferent. His first opportunity came in 593 when Childebert II, King of Austrasia, [119] became, by the death of his uncle, King of Burgundy too. Childebert, now the most powerful of the Frankish kings, wrote to St. Gregory asking him to restore the vicariate at Arles. The pope readily consented. It would be a means of extending his direct influence on affairs in Gaul and of introducing the much needed reforms. In his reply he goes to the root of the troubles when he asks the king never again to appoint a layman to the episcopate, and warns him that such practices imperil his salvation.

The hope of royal assistance in the work of reform died, however, almost as soon as it was born. By 594 Childebert was no more. His kingdom was divided between his baby sons, Theodebert II and Thierry II, and their grandmother Brunhilda ruled as regent -- a valiant woman truly, who shrank from no extremity of violence and treachery to repel that with which the baby princes' inheritance was attacked by their next of kin. For the next few years this task was her sole occupation. The outlook for religious revival was decidedly poor and the stream of exhortations from Rome fell on deaf ears. The aged queen did indeed pause in the midst of her strife with her rival fury, Fredegonda, to assist the mission of St. Augustine 011 its way to England, but that was the limit of what St. Gregory's patience and piety achieved. His aim was a national council, and he even selected his legate -- one of his own monks. Brunhilda, needing the pope's assistance in a negotiation with Constantinople, listened with a show of interest and consented. This was in 599, but though St. Gregory lived until 604 the plan never went any further. When the council finally met, St. Gregory had been ten years in his grave and a new religious force had entered Gaul and the Catholic life of the continent. This was the mission of the monks from Ireland, and its pioneer was St. Columbanus.

St. Columbanus, the incarnation of Irish monasticisms's uncompromising austerity, was a man sixty years of age when, with a dozen companions, he left his monastery of Bangor in self- inflicted penitential exile. Providence guided the band to Gaul, and in 591 they appeared at the court of Gontran, King of Burgundy. Monasticism was, of course, by no means unknown in Gaul. The pioneer work of St. Martin, of St. Caesarius and the saints of Lerins had flourished exceedingly. Monasteries of men and of women were numbered by the hundred, and monastic saints among the Franks themselves -- St. Radegonde of Poitiers for example (for whom Fortunatus wrote the Vexilla Regis) -- were known and revered and a real force in religious life. But the Irish monks were almost a new revelation.

The king treated them kindly, edified by the miracle of their surviving such austerities, and gave them site after site in the wild abandoned mountain country of the Vosges. There they founded successively the monasteries of Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines. Presently this deserted corner of Gaul became a centre of the most amazing spiritual revival. The new monks were the most zealous of apostles, the most terrifying of preachers. They knew no other desire than to win souls from sin, and presently disciples flocked in by the hundred. Presently too their troubles began, for trouble was inevitable once these saints turned to save the souls of the kings and their courts. Their blunt rebuke of the customary sexual licentiousness lost them their first patron. Next there was trouble with the local bishops. Monasteries in Gaul, as universally throughout the continental churches since the Council of Chalcedon, 451, were subject to the local bishop. The Irish monks brought with them a very different tradition. Also they brought their own local customs in such matters as the date of the feast of Easter, which was the centre of the year's liturgical cycle.

The disputes ended with the condemnation of St. Columbanus by a synod of bishops (600). Whereupon he wrote the famous letter to St. Gregory in which, among other matters, with the blunt direct speech characteristic of his whole activity he rebuked the pope for his approval of the General Council of 553. No one escaped this new, hardy, undiplomatic, if not too well informed, sincerity, whether the kings for their animality, the bishops for their servile connivance at the royal sins, the very pope himself for his orthodoxy! The day came when kings and bishops united and the fearless monk, after twenty years of labour in Burgundy, was driven forth. For three years he wandered -- Paris, the west of France (Neustria), the Rhine valley, Mainz, Zurich, Bregenz-sowing monasteries as he passed, and finally came to Bobbio where, under Lombard protection, he founded the most famous of all his abbeys, and there in 615 he died, an old man of eighty-five. His vigorous missionary spirit survived in all his abbeys, and in the century which followed they continued to be centres from which, year by year, missionaries pushed out ever further into the hitherto untroubled Paganism of the German lands.

St. Gregory had met with little success in Gaul. In Spain, however, his lifetime saw the great change of the conversion of the royal family to Catholicism. Ever since their first occupation of Spain, in the early fifth century, the Visigoths had clung to their own old-fashioned heresy, the vague Arianism of the Council of Rimini (359). Of their relations with their Catholic subjects during the fifth century we know very little, except that Euric (485), towards its end, for political reasons, persecuted them more or less. With the end of that century, and the Visigothic conquest of the north-east of Spain, Catholicism began to know peace once more. The custom of provincial councils was revived, and once again relations with Rome were renewed. These councils make hardly any reference to the Arians or to their Arian sovereign. Their one positive achievement is the development of the primacy of Toledo, and the establishment of a single liturgical observance.

In 552 the empire once more reappeared, after a hundred and fifty years, called in by rebels. Justinian's armies, fresh from the reconquest of Italy and Africa, regained a great part of the provinces of Baetica and Carthagena and henceforward, almost until the Mahometans swept all into a common oblivion, a Byzantine Spain continued to exist along with the Visigothic kingdom. One result of the reconquest was to link, in the minds of the Visigothic kings, Catholicism -- the religion of Justinian-with treason, and to add to their existing grievances against the Church. These grievances were largely domestic, and arose from mixed marriages; for by this time the Visigoths were the only survivors of the once large group of Arian royalties. The daughters were married to Frankish princes, and on their marriage they went over to Catholicism. The sons married Frankish wives, and the new Spanish princesses remained Catholic, despite a certain persecution. The French wife of Hermenegild, for example, was forcibly re-baptised by an Arian to please her Arian mother-in-law.

It was not among the Visigoths that Catholicism made its first gains, but among their neighbours to the west and north-west, the Suevi, settled in Galicia since the time of the great invasion of 407. The hero of the conversion of the Suevi is St. Martin of Braga, and the first preparation for the change was the miraculous cure of the king's heir through devotion to St. Martin of Tours. This was about 550, and it was about the same time that St. Martin came to the Suevi. He was a monk and an oriental, a learned man and a writer, bishop, first of all of Dumio and then in 570 of Braga. By 560 the king had become a Catholic, and the remainder of his court soon followed. In 561 the bishops of the kingdom met in council at Braga at the king's command. What remains of their deliberations is the last evidence of the survival of Priscillianism. Of Arianism, curiously enough, there is no mention at all.

St. Martin died in 580, by which time the conversion of the Visigoths, too, was in operation -- a story whose centre is a family tragedy. Their king, at this moment, was Leovigild (567- 586), an administrator and lawgiver, and a mighty warrior who, before he died, was to destroy the kingdom of the Suevi and make the Visigoths supreme in Spain. His eldest son was the husband of that Frankish princess, Ingonda, whose forcible re-baptism has been mentioned. To ease the family situation Hermenegild was sent, in command, to Seville. There he met the Catholic bishop, St. Leander, and himself became a Catholic. The next act in the drama was a civil war in which Hermenegild, allied to the Suevi and to the Byzantines, attacked his father. Leovigild, in reply, adopted a new policy of religious uniformity -- on an Arian basis of course -- and for the next five years (579-584) waged a war of repression. Ingonda was banished and took refuge at Constantinople. Leander accompanied her, and at the capital met St. Gregory. It is from Leander's story, given to St. Gregory, that this account of the matter derives. Galicia was annexed, the Suevi monarchy destroyed, and Hermenegild murdered. [120]

Two years later (586) Leovigild died. His younger son, Reccared, succeeded. He recalled Leander, and the bishop was henceforth his chief adviser. The new king wished to embrace the faith in which his brother had died, but he also wished for national unity, and before he made his submission he spent two years in an endeavour to win over his co-religionists. The national Council of Toledo in 589 was the scene of this solemn reconciliation. The king and his nobles and the Arian bishops -- eight in all -- made their submission. Two liturgical details of this council's proceedings are of interest. The Filioque made its first appearance in the so- called Nicene Creed, and the Creed was ordered henceforth to be sung at Mass "as is the custom in the East."

In this unexpected spiritual conquest St. Gregory had had no share. He was not, even, at the time pope. It was largely the work of his friend St. Leander and it was several years before the official reports of what had happened reached Rome. Of St. Gregory's relations as pope with Visigothic Spain little survives. We have his joyful letter to Leander acknowledging the news of the Council of Toledo, and a reply to the homage of the newly converted Reccared and his thanks for Reccared's present of a chalice to St. Peter. In return he sent the king relics of St. Peter's chains and of the wood of the true Cross. To Leander he sent the pallium, sparing him, the pope gracefully says, the usual admonition to live worthy of this new dignity, "since your good deeds outstrip my words."

THE CHURCH IN ROMAN BRITAIN: THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH, 313-735

St. Gregory's labours for the Church in Gaul had borne little fruit. Owing to the increasing difficulty of communications, Spain was becoming more and more remote. In the third of the lands which had once formed the Roman West, the saint was, however, able to lay the foundations of the most papal of all extra-Roman Churches. This was in Britain, henceforward to be known as England, from the name of one of the barbarian tribes who now occupied it. The saint, in the same time that he began this far reaching work, also gave the Benedictine rule its first great mission, for it was to these monks, from his own monastery at Rome, that he entrusted the task. England, the most papal in its origin of all the Christian conquests, was also the first great stronghold of Benedictine monasticism.

One of the most important of St. Gregory's works, from the point of view of his influence on the Catholicism of the whole Middle Ages, is undoubtedly The Dialogues. Its original object was to gather up the traditions of the saints of St. Gregory's own country, or, more exactly, to preserve the tradition of the miracles they had wrought. It was written after his election to the papacy, in the years 593-594, and his own title for it was The Miracles of the Italian Fathers. This is not the place to discuss the alleged credulity of St. Gregory as displayed in this collection, where he is so careful to give his reader the provenance of his information. It is the matter of the second book which is our concern, for this is the primary source of what we know of the life of the great monk who wrote the Benedictine rule. The pope, Gregory the Great, writing as pope the first life of St. Benedict, a panegyric of the thaumaturge and saint, giving thereby an extrinsic prestige to what of itself possessed incomparable value, laid the foundation of the later Benedictine conquest of western Europe. Whatever truth the conjecture may hold that St. Benedict wrote his rule at the bidding of a pope, it is true beyond all doubt that the later commendation of the first monk- pope was the beginning of the rule's opportunity. And the first scene of that opportunity was England.

At the moment when England came into St. Gregory's thoughts it had ceased to be a province of the empire for a matter of nearly two centuries. Of what went on in the island in those centuries, of the details of the slow, hardly-won success of the pirates from Frisia, Jutland and the north German coast, of the breakdown of the system of Roman administration, of the relations between the newcomers and the more civilised peoples who resisted them, we know almost nothing at all. These centuries are truly, to us at least, the Dark Ages.

Of the Church as it existed in the island in the last century of the imperial regime, that is, between Constantine's conversion in 312 and the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons in 410, we do not know much. There were bishops at London, Lincoln, York and Caerleon, for their presence is recorded at the Councils of Arles (314) and Rimini (359). Like the rest of the episcopate of the Western Church, their ecclesiastical life moved in subordination to the Roman Church, and with the majority of their brethren they fell victims to the manoeuvres of the Arian emperor, Constantius II. These few details, and the names of three martyrs, put to death in the time of Diocletian -- St. Alban at Verulam, SS. Aaron and Julius at Caerleon -- are all that has survived in literary record.

Relations with the central government of the empire ceased in the reign of Honorius (410) and the next glimpse of the religious condition of the country is the anti-Pelagian mission of St. Germanus of Auxerre (429), at which time, it has been reasonably conjectured, the whole country was Catholic. Twenty years later came the first settlement, in the county of Kent, of the Barbarians who, for a century and a half already, had been the scourge of this most exposed province. With these invasions a period of wars began that lasted for a hundred years and more. The material achievement of the Roman rule was largely destroyed, and with it a great part of the Christian fabric too. St. Gildas, writing a century and more after the events he describes, hands on a tradition of churches destroyed, of priests massacred, of loot and sacrilege, and of a wholesale flight of the survivors.

The century in which the troubles of this British Catholicism began, troubles from Pelagianism, troubles from the invasions, was apparently the century in which the monastic life was first introduced, and it is with visits of St. Germanus of Auxerre (429 and 447) that the event is generally associated. He is said to have founded the first monastery, for all that he himself was never a monk, and to have ordained St. Illtyd -- the first great abbot of the British Church. Illtyd was the master, possibly, of St. Gildas and of St. David -- the first of whom was the greatest influence in that monastic transformation which is the leading feature of the Irish Church's history in the next century. Another great name in British monasticism is that of St. Cadoc. His first master was an Irishman, but in the monastery which he himself later founded, at Llancarvan, there was formed the first of the great monastic founders of Ireland, St. Finian of Clonard. Such evidence as we possess of the interaction between the monasteries of Britain and Ireland throughout the sixth century goes to show that, despite the barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the life of the Church was by no means wholly destroyed. Monasteries, clergy and bishops undoubtedly survived and flourished in the parts of the island still defended against the Barbarians. Even so late as 615 -- a hundred and sixty years after the appearance of " Hengist and Horsa " -- the great monastery of Bangor, near Chester, numbered a community of some 2,000 monks. Even in the parts of the island where the invaders ruled, there were still traces of what had been -- the Roman church, for example, which St. Augustine found at Canterbury.

While in the east of what is to-day England the religion of Roman Britain had been practically destroyed, and while in the west it survived and, apparently, became more and more monastic in its organisation, in the north of the island Catholicism won new victories over the Celtic peoples hitherto pagan. The workers, here again, were monks and from Ireland. Voluntary exile was, with the Irish, a peculiar and favourite penitential discipline, the crowning exercise indeed of the ascetic life. As with St. Columbanus it led to the evangelisation of eastern France, of Switzerland, Bavaria and northern Italy, so, earlier in the same century, it had driven others to the north. It was, for example, from Irish solitaries that the Orkneys and the more distant Faroe Islands first learnt of the Gospel. The stories of St. Brendan's voyages are another testimony to the existence, and the popularity, of the practice.

One of these pioneers, and one of the greatest, if we are to measure by his personality and the ultimate results of his achievement, was St. Columba -- or to use his own native monastic name, St. Columcille. He was a man close on forty years of age when, about 563, after a richly varied religious training at Moville and Clonard, and after founding the great monasteries of Derry and Durrow, he left Ireland for ever, "desirous to be a wanderer for Christ." He was a scholar as well as a saint, "of an excellent nature, polished in speech, holy in deed," and with his twelve companions founded his new monastery in the little island of I, seventy miles from Ireland and a mile or so from the great island of Mull in the modern county of Argyll. The kingdom of Dal Riada in which Iona lay (for, thanks to a scribe's mistake, it is thus that we call the island) was an Irish conquest and the people were nominally Christian. To the north lay the fierce pagan Picts; to the south, in Galloway, other Picts converted once by St. Ninian but who had long since lapsed into paganism. Iona was a centre from which other monasteries were formed and the monks undertook their apostolic work. For thirty-four years St. Columcille trudged and laboured, converting the king of the Picts and many of his people.

The new conquest was organised after the monastic fashion then beginning to sweep all before it in Columcille's native land. The head of the vast whole, of the confederation of monasteries, the priests, the bishops, was -- to the surprise of St. Bede -- the Abbot of Iona, who was himself only a priest. Gradually from the isles of the west the new force spread to the south-west, the Galloway of St. Ninian, and to the eastern lowlands. Nearly forty years after the death of Columcille it crossed the frontier of the Celtic culture, and made its first contacts with the victorious Barbarians from the German coasts.

St. Gregory's first recorded interest in the religious conditions of the distant island of Britain goes back to the years between his return from Constantinople and his election as pope (586-590), and it relates not to the desolated church of the Britons, but to their heathen conquerors. It is the well-known story of his sight of the English captives in the Roman slave market. He designed to be himself their apostle, but popular opposition, recognising in him Rome's coming salvation, compelled the pope of the day to recall him. Five years after his election as pope he had another scheme. The official in charge of the papal estates in Gaul was commissioned to buy young English slaves and to send them to Rome, there to be formed in the monasteries as missionaries and teachers. A second letter of the pope, of July, 596, to Brunhilda, makes known that the English themselves had asked for teachers and that, since the neighbouring bishops were utterly unconcerned, the pope himself would find a means.

By the time this letter was written, the band of chosen missionaries had already left Rome. Its leader was the superior of St. Gregory's own monastic house on the Coelian -- Augustine. As the monks made their way into southern Gaul they heard terrifying reports of the savagery of the English, and, discouraged, they halted while Augustine went back to Rome for new instructions. St. Gregory consoled him, gave him new courage, letters to several of the Gallic bishops, to the kings of Austrasia and Burgundy and to Brunhilda their grandmother, and sent him north once more. From the Franks they were given interpreters, and finally, towards Easter, 597, they landed in Kent at Ebbsfleet. Here the king's wife was a Catholic, a Frankish princess and Brunhilda's niece. She already had her priests and a church.

The king, Ethelbert, received the newcomers very hospitably and listened to their preaching. By Christmas of that same year, thanks to the preaching of the missionaries and to the miracles wrought at their prayers, the converts were to be numbered by the tens of thousands. Augustine was by this time a bishop, and soon a second party of missionaries arrived from Rome, while the pope, for whom this marvellous conversion was the great joy of his life, strove to interest in it the Frankish bishops too. In 601 he sent to Augustine the pallium, a new custom to mark the especial favour of the Roman See to subordinate bishops, and with it the plan of the new church's organisation. There were to be two provinces. The first should have the metropolitan see at London (Augustine had fixed his see at the Kentish capital Canterbury) and twelve suffragans. A bishop was to be placed also at York, and as the people were converted, York, too, was to become a metropolitan see with twelve suffragans. Augustine, for his lifetime, was to rule both provinces. Slowly, very slowly, the pope's great scheme began to take shape. London and Rochester received their bishops in 604, but Augustine remained at Canterbury. It is interesting to notice that the government set up by the pope is the normal system of metropolitan and suffragans. There is no provision for a special vicar of the Apostolic See such as St. Gregory had recently hoped to establish in France. Nor is any place whatever given to the royal authority. From the very beginning this English Church, the direct creation of the pope, is free of the State.

St. Augustine of Canterbury lived only three years to enjoy his new pre-eminence. He died in 604, but not before he had attempted, and failed, to win for the mission the co-operation of the other bishops of the north and west, the successors of St. David and St. Ninian. How they regarded the heathens who had despoiled them, massacred their priests and sacrilegiously destroyed the holy places, we can only guess. How far had they refused to attempt their conversion, how far did they still mistrust the foes only recently so savage? St. Bede, an Englishman undoubtedly, saw in the slaughter of the monks of Bangor, in 613, the justice of God on a church that refused to spread the light. The Irish chronicler gives us the Celtic view when he speaks sorrowfully of the same event as "the massacre of the saints." Ethelbert's protection covered the new missionaries to the very confines of the conquest, and it was in the west, probably near Chepstow, that the celebrated conference between the two hierarchies took place. At first no one of the British bishops would consent to appear. The priests they sent to represent them saw little in the Roman apostle but the bishop who invited them to bless, and spiritually enrich, their bitterest enemies. Even a miracle did not move them. At a later conference, seven British bishops took part and with them the Abbot of Bangor and some of the most learned of his monks. The discussion was long and heated. The Britons reproached the Romans for their patronage of the English and, through the Abbot of Bangor, swore yet again that they would never preach the faith to the cruel and treacherous race who had deprived their ancestors of their native land. By comparison with this strongly worded declaration, the disputes on such liturgical differences as the date at which Easter should be kept, the shape of the clerical tonsure, the details of the rite of baptism, had little importance. Henceforward, for the best part of two centuries, the two hierarchies ignored each other, with what disastrous results who shall say?

The Britons refused to share in the toil: they could not rejoice in the success it brought; and for the first few years the success was great indeed. Ethelbert's nephew was king in Essex. Augustine consecrated Mellitus as Bishop of London, and soon, with the church of St. Paul for its centre, a movement of conversion was working strongly throughout that kingdom, too. St. Augustine's own successor was Laurence, another monk from the Coelian. One of his difficulties, too, was the hostility of the British. It showed itself in an aggravated form when an Irish bishop, or abbot, passing through Canterbury refused to acknowledge the archbishop or even to lodge or to take a meal with him. Nor did a letter from the new hierarchy to the bishops of Ireland and Scotland have any effect.

Meanwhile the king of East Anglia, too, had become a Catholic -- for political reasons apparently, for on the death of Ethelbert (616) he returned to his idols, compromising with his newer faith by erecting a Christian altar side by side with the one to the pagan gods. Ethelbert's own successor, his son, was a pagan and so, too, were the sons of the king of Essex who had died in the same year. A general restoration of paganism seemed inevitable. The Bishops of London and Rochester abandoned the seemingly hopeless task and fled to Gaul. The archbishop was preparing to follow them when, in a vision, St. Peter appeared to him, upbraided him, and scourged him so severely that the next morning he could show his pagan sovereign the bruises in testimony of the miracle. Apparently this, for Eadbald, was the turning point. He asked for baptism and for the rest of his life remained loyal to the Faith. Kent was assured if Essex had fallen away. The work of St. Augustine, threatened for a moment with extinction, was saved. It was scarcely more than saved, for outside Kent it had ceased to be, and from Kent it had for the moment ceased to spread.

It was from Kent, nevertheless, that the next development came, through the marriage of the King of Kent's sister to the pagan King of Northumbria, Edwin, who now (624) occupied that position of preponderance among the seven kings which had been Ethelbert's in 597. With the new Queen of Northumbria there travelled to the north yet another of the Roman monks, Paulinus, newly consecrated a bishop. York was at last to have its bishop as St. Gregory, years before, had designed. For the moment, however, the new bishop's flock numbered no more than the new queen and her attendants. The king received him courteously and there the matter ended. Victory in battle which Edwin believed to be the result of the bishop's prayers, and the king's recognition in Paulinus of the man whom, years before, he had been mysteriously warned would appear in his life to be his guide, won him over. At the Christmas of 625 the king was baptised and with him many of his nobles and the high priests of the old religion. For eight years Paulinus and his priests were free to labour and, with the king's patronage and the prestige of his example, to reap a rich reward. But in 633 Edwin fell. An unnatural alliance of the Christian British king of North Wales and the pagan Saxon king of Mercia, Penda, was too much for him. He was defeated and slain at the battle of Hatfield Chase near Doncaster, and his army annihilated. His widow fled to Kent, with her children and Paulinus, while the British king laid waste Northumbria. Once more a political revolution had destroyed in a day the religious work of years. Restoration was however to follow, and speedily, but its agents were not the monks from Rome. It was from the north that the new missionaries came. They were monks of Iona.

The family to which Edwin belonged was one of two rivals with claims to the Northumbrian throne. He had himself spent his youth in exile, and his death and the flight of his family were the signal for the return of the prince whose father Edwin had overthrown in 616. This prince was Oswald. He, too, was a Catholic, converted in his exile by the monks of Iona to whom now he offered a new field of work that stretched from the Forth to the Humber. The greatest figure of this new apostolate is that of the lovable St. Aidan, who established the monastic centre from which he worked his vast diocese, not in York, Edwin's old capital, but on the tiny island of Lindisfarne, two miles from the rock fortress of Bamburgh where Oswald resided.

The work of Edwin and Paulinus was resumed, the preaching, the baptisms, the pious foundations and then, after another brief nine years, disaster came upon the nascent Church as it had come upon that of Paulinus. In 642 Oswald, too, fell a victim to the ruthless Penda. At the Maserfield he was slain and his army defeated. But Oswald's work did not die with him. His brother Oswin, who succeeded, shared his faith and assisted St. Aidan as Oswald had done. Oswin, however, reigned only in Bernicia, the northern half of Oswald's kingdom. The south had fallen to a kinsman of Edwin. Another nine years and the strained relations between the two ended in war, and once again St. Aidan's patron was slain (651). The saint's grief overwhelmed him and eleven days later he died.

In the twenty-six years since the coming of St. Paulinus, Northumbria had been converted. Of the remaining Barbarians, the West Saxons had been won over by a third mission from Rome, led by the bishop Birinus whom Pope Honorius I (625-638) had himself consecrated. Mercia was the last of the kingdoms to be opened to the mission -- thanks to the intractable Penda. But in 655 Penda was slain in battle. His successor was already baptised, and in the next few years the people of the Midlands, too, were brought into the Church. A native clergy was already in being. The first bishop of English stock -- Ithma of Rochester -- was consecrated in 644, and in 655 the first English Archbishop of Canterbury, Frithonas, a West Saxon who took the name of Deusdedit.

Thus, in a fashion very different from that he had planned, slowly, and with many vicissitudes, the hopes of St. Gregory were realised, within a lifetime from the first hardy expedition of 597. South of the Thames the conquest was due to the monks sent directly from Rome; in the north, the midlands, and the east it had been largely the work of the monks of Iona. It only remained to secure uniformity of religious practice where, indisputably, there was unity of belief, and to centralise the supervision of the different sees. This done, there would be a Church of the English people. Its founder in this sense was a monk of yet a third school of monasticism, the Greek Theodore of Tarsus whom, like Augustine in 597 and Birinus in 635, the pope consecrated and despatched to England. He arrived in 668 to find the most delicate part of the work -- liturgical uniformity -- already arranged.

The liturgical differences between the Roman monks who came with St. Augustine and the British bishops have been noticed. As the double conversion of the English proceeded it could only be a matter of time before the age-long controversy began to divide the newly-converted. In Northumbria especially was the question acute where Roman and Celtic missionaries had both worked. Bernicia was entirely Celtic in its observance, Deira partly Celtic, partly Roman. The chief point of difference was the date at which Easter should be celebrated, and since the whole cycle of religious life depended on this, and since with this first generation of converts religious life was the foundation of social life, the question was by no means a mere matter of archaeology. Like the Irish Church from which they had originally come, and the still older British Church, the Celtic missionaries in England calculated the date of Easter according to a system devised in the early fourth century, which was, at that time, the system used also by the Roman Church. It was a faulty system and in 447 it was considerably modified. Ten years later the Roman Church gave it up entirely, and adopted the new system of Victorius of Aquitaine. This system it was which the mission of 597 brought to England, and which St. Augustine sought to impose on the British bishops. How they refused it has been told, and also how the Irish and Scottish Churches still held out for the older system in the time of Laurence, St. Augustine's successor. But twenty years later the situation had changed. Thanks to the intervention of Pope Honorius I, the southern Irish had, in 628, adopted the system of Victorius. The northern Irish, however, still stood firm, despite an admonition from Rome in 640. Nevertheless, even among the northern Irish, there were critics of this conservatism, and they began to make themselves heard in the foundations beyond the sea. The dispute soon spread to Iona, and thence to the Northumbrian foundation at Lindisfarne. In the time of St. Aidan's successor, Finan, it became especially bitter when one of the monks, an Irishman, returned from Rome with a new enthusiasm for the Roman practice. The question then was eminently actual, awaiting only the arrival of a strong personality whose insistence should force an open conflict and decision. That personage now appeared, an Englishman, Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon, and Bishop of York to be.

St. Wilfrid, at this time (664), was perhaps thirty years of age. He was of noble birth, handsome, educated, and he had travelled as few men of his time. He had lived as a monk at Lindisfarne, had been initiated into the clerical order at Lyons, and had gone thence to Rome along with a fellow noble turned monk, the scholarly Benet Biscop. At Rome his doubts on the Easter question were solved and he learnt, not merely that the Celts in Northumbria were in the wrong, but that the Roman Church had introduced yet further improvements into the elaborate system of calculation. He also, at Rome, made his first acquaintance with the rule of St. Benedict -- which since the flight of St. Paulinus thirty years before had disappeared from Northumbria. Wilfrid returned to Deira, to become a power at Court. It was possibly his influence that moved the king to suggest to the monks at Ripon that they should adopt the Roman use and when, refusing, they returned to Melrose, the king gave the abbey to Wilfrid.

A year or two later, in 664, a conference was called to settle the whole question. It met at St. Hilda's abbey of Whitby. The two Northumbrian kings took part, Wilfrid of course, and, among the bishops who shared his views, Tuda, a southern Irishman then labouring in Northumbria, and Agilbert of Dorchester who had recently ordained St. Wilfrid. The Roman chaplain of the Bernician queen assisted and, venerable relic of a bygone time, the deacon James who had first come to Northumbria with Paulinus forty years before. On the other side were Oswy, the King of Bernicia, and St. Colman of Lindisfarne. The debate was decided as soon as the king learnt which was the system of the successor of St. Peter. He demanded if both parties agreed that it was to Peter that Christ had given the keys of heaven. Here they all agreed. Then said the king, "I cannot decide against him who holds the keys of heaven, or when I appear at the gate he may not open it to me." The majority submitted to the decision, but St. Colman with many of his monks, Northumbrians as well as Irish, made his way back to Iona and thence to his native land, to Inishboffin, a tiny island off the coast of Mayo. There ten years later he died.

Whitby settled the dispute once and for all as far as it had affected the English. It was from an English abbey in Northumbria, Jarrow, that, in the next generation, the northern Irish were won over to the Roman calendar (688-704), the Picts (710) and even Iona itself (716). The British Church, too, ultimately came in: Cornwall about 705, thanks to St. Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, and Wales from about 768.

Within a year or so of the Synod of Whitby Tuda, the Irish champion of the Roman uses, was dead of the plague. Wilfrid was named in his place as Bishop of York and, declining to receive consecration from any prelate less Roman than himself, crossed to Gaul for the ceremony. It took place at Compiegne. Meanwhile Deira, Wilfrid's country, had passed again to the King of Bernicia, and since it had no bishop he named one of the Celtic monks, Chad, Abbot of Lastingham. Chad, who since the great synod had adopted the Roman uses, was himself in a difficulty to find a consecrator. Canterbury, to which he first went, was vacant and Agilbert of Dorchester was abroad (he had just assisted at the consecration of Wilfrid). It was the Bishop of Winchester who in the end performed the rite -- a bishop whom Agilbert would probably not recognise, since the diocese of Winchester had been carved out of Dorchester by the royal order and without Agilbert's consent. Worse still, as later events were to show, the assistant bishops at St. Chad's consecration were from the British hierarchy of the west. Chad returned to rule his see, and some time afterwards Wilfrid too returned, and finding himself thus dispossessed returned to his abbey of Ripon. Then, in 669, there arrived from Rome the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, the direct nominee of Pope Vitalian.

The new archbishop was reputed one of the most learned men of his time. With him he brought the abbot Hadrian, an African, and Benet Biscop, books, equipment, a plan of organisation, and a live tradition of culture. With Theodore of Tarsus the English Church passes very definitely out of its pioneer stage. His school of Canterbury was to be one of the springs whence flowed the culture of the next two hundred years. Hadrian was its chief, and thanks to the Greek archbishop and this African, the school was delivered from the intellectual sterility that lay over so much of the West. Its intellectual life was real, its mastery of the ancient tongues more complete. Latin was taught as a dead language by the ancient rules, and in the coming centuries English-trained scholars were to return to the continent and re-instruct the semi-barbarised descendants of Caesar and Cicero in the language of their ancestors.

The new primate's first task was to end the chaos in the hierarchy Chad was asked to resign York, and Wilfrid was restored. Then, for Theodore recognised the man's saintliness, he appointed Chad to be the bishop of the Mercians, with a see fixed at Lichfield. In 673 the Church held at Hertford its first national synod. The bishops were henceforth to confine their zeal within geographical limits. The free and easy Celtic system was to go. The clergy were to be strictly subject to their proper diocesan bishop, the monks to their abbots. Neither monk nor cleric was, for the future, to wander about as his taste and zeal suggested.

In that same year a second see was formed in East Anglia, and the Bishops of London and Rochester were deposed for various misdemeanours or disobedience to the archbishop. Next came the creation of five new sees in the midlands -- Worcester, Leicester, Stow, Dorchester and Hereford. In the north Benet Biscop founded the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, under the Benedictine rule, and they speedily became the centres of a new intellectual life for the north as Canterbury for the south. Lindisfarne was by this "romanised," and ruled by the monk Cuthbert whose sanctity was later to make the northern see so famous. At York Wilfrid, with all his great energy, was introducing a systematic organisation into his vast territory and, inevitably, making enemies. One of these was his sovereign and when, with the king's assistance but without Wilfrid's consent, Theodore divided the diocese of York, the Bishop of York resisted. He appealed to the pope, and Theodore, once he had left for Rome, judged him to have resigned, and consecrated another bishop in his place. Dogged by the hired assassins of the Northumbrian king, Wilfrid made his way to the papal court. There he assisted at the synod preparatory to the General Council of 680. He won his case, but on his return the king first threw him into prison and then exiled him. Not for seven years was he free to return to York. He used the years of exile to convert the people of Sussex -- the one kingdom that still remained pagan.

Four years after Wilfrid's return Theodore died (September 19, 690), an old man now, close on ninety. Of whatever unity English Catholicism possessed, of its scholarship and culture this learned Greek is the undoubted founder. To none of its saints is our country more indebted. That he treated his subordinates with undue rigour cannot be denied and although, before the end, he made his peace with Wilfrid, the mischief lasted. No more than Theodore himself was the prelate he had planted at York disposed to obey the Roman decision. A second appeal from Wilfrid to the Apostolic See, decided in his favour as was the first, was likewise ignored. A third, eleven years later, led to a lengthy investigation, and mandatory letters from the pope -- John VI to the different kings and bishops and to the new Archbishop of Canterbury ordering Wilfrid's reinstatement. This finally took place, after violent discussions, at a great council of Northumbrian notables at which the archbishop assisted. Five years later Wilfrid died (709). He had been born in the terrible time which saw the death of Edwin and, as it seemed, the definitive ending of the missionary achievement of St. Paulinus. Now, not only Northumbria, but the whole of the English conquest was Catholic, and not only Catholic but united in discipline as well as in belief, organised on the systematic Roman model. To that work of conversion, and of disciplinary unity, and especially to the extension of the prestige of the Roman See, Wilfrid had contributed more than most. He has a claim to stand here as the peer of Theodore who had done so much to thwart the even way of his episcopal life.

There is hardly a better way of realising how much the initiative of St. Gregory the Great did for the heathen conquerors of England than by a consideration of the life and achievement of the Venerable Bede. Here, in an Englishman, born within seventy years of the great pope's death, and within twenty years of the defeat of the last pagan offensive, we are face to face with the greatest scholar of his age, and an original genius from whom much of our historical studies derive. The mere fact of St. Bede is witness to the power of the new monasticism as an agent of culture as well as religious devotion.

St. Bede was born at Wearmouth or Jarrow in 673. His parents died while he was very young and from childhood to his death he lived in the great monastery of SS. Peter and Paul lately founded by St. Benet Biscop -- in St. Bede's time the latest product of the direct action of the Roman See in English affairs. He was a boy in the school, he became a monk. In 692 he was ordained deacon, in 703 priest, and in 735 he died, after a life of uninterrupted prayer and study. St. Bede's works, which fill five of Migne's closely printed tomes, are universal in their content. Like St. Isidore of Seville, almost a century earlier, one of St. Bede's achievements was to salvage and to store all he could find of the culture of antiquity and of the earlier Christian centuries. He writes on the theory of poetry, on modes of reckoning time, on the nature of things, something of philosophy, something of science; He is -- and in his own view it is the central point of all his studies -- a keen student of Holy Writ, and a careful commentator. We have forty-nine Or his sermons on the Gospels, and a smaller number of his letters. Also he wrote verse, and though most of this has perished a hymn has survived in honour of St. Audrey, one of the innumerable crowned saints who are the peculiar distinction of this early age of Anglo-Saxon Catholicism. Bede was an omnivorous reader. With the Fathers -- particularly St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great -- with Cicero and Virgil too, he is thoroughly at home. As a theologian he does little more than hand on the tradition to the coming generation. For speculation he had, apparently, little taste. Philosophy had, by this time, almost disappeared from the equipment of the theologian, and Bede could say, truly enough if somewhat harshly, that there is no school of philosophy which has not been charged with lying by some other equally imbecile school. There is in the reference, and in others, something like a general impatience with merely human reasoning about things divine.

But for all his immense importance as perhaps the most gifted of the band that salvaged so much from the wreck of the ancient world, St. Bede's ultimate importance is of another order. For, besides his innumerable theological and scholastic works, he wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The character of this work, its literary grace, the even critical fairness of the treatment, make St. Bede the superior of any other historian for centuries yet to come. It is the one production of his century that is still alive, the only thing between St. Augustine and the twelfth century that is to-day more than an important piece of archaeology. Of itself it sets St. Bede in a class with the very greatest of the pioneers of scholarship. The scholarship with which, through Theodore, Abbot Hadrian and Benet Biscop, Rome in 668 endowed the English Church, was already producing something greater than its founders. The heritage was secure for yet another generation, for it was a living thing and no sterile pedagogy that Bede in turn handed down to Egbert of York, to Alcuin and through Alcuin to Carolingian Europe and the whole Church.

MAHOMET AND THE RISE OF ISLAM

At the time when St. Gregory, still laboriously striving to protect his people from the barbarian Lombards, was finding the great consolation of his life in the first success of the mission in England, a new power was preparing that was to show itself, within fifty years, the greatest scourge the Church had yet known -- the religion of Mahomet, Islam. Not for the next generation merely, but for the next thousand years it was to be an ever present menace, a factor which would influence every aspect of Catholic development and life.

The scene of the new world-religion's origin was the peninsula of Arabia, a curiously neglected no-man's-land where the Roman and Persian empires fought through tributary kingdoms and "spheres of influence." The centre was desert and the bulk of its inhabitants warlike nomad tribes, whose chief source of living was pillage of the caravans that came and went, continually, from Egypt and the west to Persia and India. Along the coast there were towns and a settled, traders' civilisation; to the south an organised Arab state. The religion of these tribes was polytheistic, and of all the sanctuaries the most famous was at Mecca, the chief of the trading cities and the centre of an annual religious festival to which Arabs came from the whole peninsula. Here was worshipped, with bloody sacrifices, a smooth black stone-the Kaaba. It was a brutal and degrading cult. It was not, however, the only religion known to the Arabs. In all the cities there were Jewish colonies, and the vassal states to the north had many Christians among their subjects. The southern kingdom was for a hundred and fifty years a battle ground between Jewish and Christian influences, and the kings were now Jewish, now Christian, in belief. Along the Persian Gulf there were five bishoprics. Few of these Christians were, however, Catholics. They were mostly exiles, either by compulsion or choice, from the Roman laws against heresy and religious dissent, and they brought to Arabia the fundamentally impaired Christianity of Nestorianism or Monophysitism, according to which Christ Our Lori was not really divine or not really human.

A further source through which the Arabs had some knowledge of Christian ideas was the professional story-teller who wandered from place to place, charming his audience with, for example, picturesque and detailed descriptions of Paradise and Hell. But, of the Christians themselves, it was the solitary ascetics of the desert who most influenced the Arabs -- the hermits, and the strange figures of the column-dwelling saints of whom St. Simon Stylites may serve as the type. There are many traces in Arab poetry of the admiration which these feats of austerity and self- forgetfulness aroused -- admiration, too, for the ideals and beliefs which formed such heroes.

The Arabia of Mahomet was the vast central region where the native paganism dominated. It was strongly "nationalist", for it had never known foreign domination. On the other hand it had never known unity, for the tribes were continually at war, and in the cities the rivalry of the clans brought about a like continual unrest.

Mahomet was born at Mecca, about 570-580, and educated by his uncle, a wealthy trader and a personage of importance in the life of his clan. The nephew followed the family career, and his business journeyings took him to the West and to Christian Syria. He was already far removed from the primitive Arab cult, when, about 610, he announced to his family the vision that called him to be the herald of Allah -- the supreme God of his native religion, too long overshadowed by the goddesses worshipped conjointly with him. Mahomet was now one of the many " Hanifs" -- Arabs, that is to say, who, in their search for a purer religion, had evolved a belief that there is but one God; they refused to worship the Kaaba, had a certain knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, and practised the beginnings of a religious morality. It was Mahomet's first innovation that he was a Hanif who aimed at converting others.

His first teaching was very simple. There is only one God, and Mahomet is his prophet. God will one day judge all men, and according to their conduct will reward or punish them everlastingly. A ritual of prayer and ablutions is prescribed, honest dealing and almsgiving are recommended. More significantly still, the wickedness of the clan which dominates Mecca -- its commercial dishonesty, its oppression of the poor -- is unsparingly denounced.

The first followers were the Prophet's own kinsfolk, and then a great number of the down-and-outs and the slaves. The natural result followed. There was a persecution of the sect and its members fled. A second revelation to Mahomet now most opportunely made known that the goddess whom his persecutors worshipped had great power with Allah. The Prophet was revealing himself as a political genius too. Soon he was back in Mecca and peace reigned once more. It did not endure for long, and by 620 Mahomet was again an exile. Two years later he had found at Medina not merely a refuge, but, thanks to the political circumstances of the place and to his own genius, honour and acceptance as a civic leader. The bitter rivalry of Jew and Arab, and of the Arabs among themselves, was ended by a compromise which Mahomet proposed. All in Medina were to have equal rights. There was but one enemy -- the wealthy clan which had driven Mahomet from Mecca. They were Allah's enemies too and to destroy them was a first religious duty.

Mahomet was now Medina's supreme judge, and the commander-in-chief of its forces. He set himself to organise the temporary alliance and to prepare it for the coming war. The religious reformer disappears for the moment behind the statesman, the organiser, and the warrior. The religious observance is modified. The almsgiving is directed to replenish the war chest, food taboos of a Jewish character are introduced, and Abraham, reverenced hitherto as the Father of all the truly religious, of Mohammedan, Christian and Jew alike, is now discovered to be the father of the Arab alone. He is Mahomet's precursor, and Mahomet's mission is to purify Abraham's religion from its Jewish and Christian accretions. More than ever is it necessary to capture Mecca, for Mecca -- the one common centre for Arab life, with its superstition and idolatry -- is Abraham's institution. The new religion is now an exclusive, independent thing; and its immediate aim is the capture of Mecca. This it achieves, in alliance with paganism, by the Holy War -- in other words by treachery and massacre, with, in addition to the necessary lure of pillage, the promise of eternal felicity, since the Holy War is of all duties the one most pleasing to Allah. By 630 Mahomet had succeeded. He was master of Mecca and of all central Arabia, strong enough now to disembarrass himself of his allies, pagans and Jews alike. Some he exiled, others he massacred. In 633-the year of the defeat of Edwin of York at Hatfield -- he died.

That Mahomet sincerely believed in his mission to destroy idolatry is certain, and it is equally certain that his idealism declined in proportion to his success. Success, indeed, revealed him as the prince of opportunists, a spirit for whom morality had no meaning. Trickery, pious trickery, theft and murder beyond what even the paganism of his origin allowed -- all these were, when useful, lawful means. His revelations and their teachings are contained in the Koran, a collection made after his death by his secretary and officially published in 660. There is also the sacred book of his sayings -- Hadith -- more than a million of them by the ninth century, very few of which go back to the Prophet. The chief sources of the religion are the Old Testament and the Talmud, and there are traces, too, of a considerable knowledge of the apocryphal gospels. The leading doctrines remain what they were originally -- that God is but one, that Mahomet is his prophet, and that there is for all men judgement by Allah, reward or retribution. There have been other messengers of Allah before Mahomet, the greatest of whom is Jesus Christ, Who, for Mahomet, is everything but God and second only to Mahomet himself. As Mahomet expressly rejects the doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejects that of the Redemption, giving the crucifixion a Docetist explanation. His doctrine of the end of creation, of judgement, heaven and hell, is derived from Christian sources, with every metaphorical expression now given its most literal meaning. Heaven is a place of never-ceasing pleasure, where every human desire, even the most lowly, finds limitless opportunity for its fullest satisfaction. A prominent feature of the believer's religious duty is the Holy War to destroy the infidel. "Kill all pagans wherever found." It is not a war to convert, or to impose the new religion on others, but, in the event, becomes a simple canonisation of natural bloodthirstiness and the instinct for pillage. It is the most meritorious of good works, death in battle is better than martyrdom; and in this primitive religion where neither asceticism nor mysticism find any encouragement, "The Holy War is Islam's monasticism."

Within ten years of Mahomet's death, his invention had not only overrun the whole of his own country but had conquered the Persian Empire and robbed Rome of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Something must be said to explain some of the circumstances which made it possible for a system so lacking in any appeal but the most lowly to achieve so surprising a success. Islam, to begin with, had made a nation of the scattered mutually hostile Arab tribes. The strong clan spirit survived, but the clan was now the nation and the aggressiveness directed outside Arabia. All the traditional ideals of vengeance remained at its service, given a higher value, even blessed as a virtue, in the new system. Outside Arabia the prospects for a new military venture were more inviting than for centuries. Rome and Persia, the two neighbours, before whose alternate supremacy the middle east had been so long powerless, were, each of them, at the time of Mahomet's death, exhausted from a long thirty years' war. In the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire -- Egypt, Palestine and Syria -- the mass of the population had for nearly two hundred years, ever since the General Council of Chalcedon in 451, been waging an intermittent war on the government for religious reasons. They had long since ceased to be loyal to the sovereigns who stood to them chiefly as persecutors. Finally, in this moment of Arabia's opportunity, when in Islam the East had at last produced its reply to the Hellenism dominant since Alexander, there was given to the Arabs a military leader of genius, Omar. Omar's adherence to Mahomet had been one of the turning points of the prophet's later development. He was the embodiment of the reforming spirit of Islam, a man who lived hardly, and used himself hardly for the cause, the proverbial fighting Puritan. On Mahomet's death he succeeded to his place.

Palestine and Persia were simultaneously invaded in 634. In each country the Arabs advanced steadily from victory to victory. Persia was conquered in two years, and in 636 the last Roman army in Syria defeated too. After a thousand years of Hellenism and seven hundred years of Roman rule Syria was again in the hands of the East. That same year Damascus fell, in 638 Jerusalem, in 640 Cesarea, Ascalon and the coast. To the Monophysite inhabitants -- who, despite all that they had suffered, did not play the traitor -- the revolution was no tragedy. It was simply " deliverance from the cruelty of the Romans." Egypt was invaded in 639. In 640 Heliopolis was taken, to become, as Cairo, one of the greatest centres of Islam. Here, too, the Monophysites went over to the new rulers. Alexandria fell the next year and, to add to the confusion, Heraclius died -- the emperor who, thirty years earlier, had saved the State after a similar catastrophe. The succession was disputed, and meanwhile in 642 the- Romans evacuated Egypt. With the armies and the officials there went, too, the little that remained of the country's Catholicism.

There, for a space, the movement halted, after annihilating the power of Persia, and reducing the empire of Rome by a good two- thirds. In its richest provinces there was now installed this new, aggressive, hostile thing; and of the native population there were none who wished the Romans back. If the movement halted, it was only because internal troubles, and a civil war, had begun to occupy its leaders.

SPANISH CATHOLICISM AND ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 589-711

The hundred years that follow St. Gregory's great effort, the years between his death and the appearance of the next outstanding European personality, Charles Martel, are years that see an interesting diversity of development in the Catholicism of the new Western realms -- Italy, Gaul, Spain, England and Ireland now begin their national history.

In Spain, from the moment of the conversion of the Arians (589) the Church had a unique position in the national life. It was, very evidently, the only source from which unity could come. So far there had been in Spain two laws, one for the conquering Visigoths, the other for the "Romans." The Church, on the other hand, had never made any distinction between the two races. The kings, henceforth, regularly employed the clergy in the service of the administration. The church councils, now held regularly, and meeting year by year in all the great cities turn by turn, were attended also by the royal officials. Civil business was transacted there as well as ecclesiastical. They became national councils in a very real sense, and a final court of appeal. The Church, with its permanent, stable, objective law and teaching, was all the more important since the monarchy of the Visigoths was elective -- a political weakness whose ultimate effect was to leave Spain an easy prey to such an organised despotism as the Arabs were, at this time, developing. Church and State in Spain tended to become one thing. It was the king who summoned these national councils, and the decrees passed by the bishops about religious matters became thereby the law of the land. The Church of Visigothic Spain, not unnaturally, was one of the first to produce a body of canon law, the famous collection Hispana. The Spanish Church was well organised. The sees and the metropolitans, too, were grouped round the primatial see of Toledo, and the primacy of Toledo was a reality. It was, for example, the primate who, in concert with the king, nominated all the other bishops.

Relations with Rome, if always good, were very interrupted. Spain was more and more at the end of the world. The route by land lay through the territory of the Lombards and Franks and little ordered security, while the sea route, since the Arab advance, was no less dangerous. Certainly the mention of Rome in the affairs of Spain is rare during all this time (604-715). Only eight letters survive of whatever correspondence passed from Rome to Spain. There is one of Honorius I urging the bishops to show greater eagerness in religious matters, and not to be dumb dogs who never bark. There are the letters of Leo II communicating the decisions of the General Council of 680, and two letters of Benedict II (684-685). To Pope Honorius the Council of Toledo, in 638, sent an official reply protesting the virtue of the bishops. To Benedict II's first letter, also, a Council of Toledo (the fourteenth) sent a reply which the Primate of Toledo, Julian, composed. The pope found his letter -- an acceptance of the condemnation of Monothelism -- unorthodox in its expressions and desired him to correct his words. This Julian did -- with none too good a grace.

The isolation of the Spanish Church, the long severance of relations with Rome, the civil importance of the bishops, the royal interference in their nomination, were, it has been suggested, beginning to tell. A new spirit of national self- sufficiency was developing.

The greatest figure of this Spanish Catholicism of the seventh century is the Bishop of Seville, St. Isidore. He was the brother, as well as the successor, of St. Gregory's friend St. Leander who had played so important a part in the troubles that preceded the great reunion of 589. Leander died in 600 and for the next thirty- six years Isidore ruled in his stead. He had been a monk before his appointment and, as a bishop, he composed a monastic rule. One of its characteristics is a most rigorous insistence on the obligation of the enclosure. The monastery is to have but one door and it is to be well guarded. The monks are to renew annually their vow of poverty. The abbot, three times a week, is to preach them a homily, and the monastic day opens with a distribution of manuscripts for the community to study. This last prescription is what we should expect from St. Isidore, for he was the one scholar of his age. To his contemporaries he seemed the equal of any of the Fathers, as the early writers now begin to be styled, and if he never makes any show of original thought, and quotes very often only at second-hand, it is certain that his erudition was really very great. Never had the authority of the Fathers, as a witness to tradition, stood higher, and-it was in the collection, from their writings, of texts to illustrate and prove particular doctrines that St. Isidore excelled. The philosophical presentation of Catholicism he ignored entirely. Like every Latin writer of the previous two centuries he makes St. Augustine's teaching on the Trinity his own, though he makes no mention of the work of Boethius that was to influence in centuries to come the great medieval scholastics. It is St. Gregory he follows in his teaching that the origin of the human soul is unknown, but that it is in no way corporeal. He accepts the teaching of the council of 529 that grace is necessary for man's very first movements towards God, and that his free will is of itself incapable of sustained and lasting moral good. In the other great controversy which survived from St. Augustine's intervention, he follows St. Augustine faithfully. Predestination is absolute, and independent of God's foreknowledge of merits and faults, Who is "just to those whom He rejects, merciful to those whom He chooses." Children who die unbaptised expiate in hell the guilt of original sin -- another Augustinian influence without even St. Augustine's apologetic adjective that makes the prospect almost inviting. It is St. Augustine again whom he follows in his explanation of man as redeemed from the power of the devil by the devil's abuse of his power over humanity in the death of Christ. The Church is not an assembly of saints. It does not cease to be the Church because some of its children show themselves evil livers. Whoever deserts the Church turns his back on salvation.

The close union of Church and State in St. Isidore's time leaves a very evident trace in his teaching that " as the heavenly kingdom advances by means of the kingdoms of this world, so those who, placed within the Church, conspire against its faith and discipline should be crushed by the power of the State." St. Isidore's explanation of the sacraments is Augustinian in its distinction between the rite and the grace it produces. But he adheres to a much older theory when he attributes the effect of the sacrament to the blessing previously given to the matter used in its administration. It is to the fact that the baptismal water has been duly blessed that the baptised owes his baptism. Only thus does the divine force latent in the sacrament operate. In the debated question as to the validity of heretical baptism St. Isidore, like St. Gregory and St. Leo before him, follows St. Augustine and the constant practice of the Roman Church -- the sacrament is not to be repeated, for although the heretic who receives it is not thereby cleansed from sin, he is none the less baptised. Such heretics when converted to Catholicism were, in the Spain of St. Isidore, admitted to the Church in the rite of Confirmation. Confirmation, otherwise given immediately after baptism, is an imposition of hands followed by an anointing of the forehead with chrism. [121] Its usual minister is the bishop. Should a priest administer Confirmation the chrism he uses must have been blessed by a bishop. St. Isidore's teaching on the Holy Eucharist is slightly influenced by the Eastern theory that the bread and wine are changed in the Mass, not by the words of consecration, but at the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit's action which follows. As to the use of the Holy Eucharist, St. Augustine, in the heat of the Pelagian discussion, had taught that even children must receive It as a condition of salvation. St. Isidore, who does not follow him here, follows him in his insistence that It may be received even daily provided that the recipient is free from serious sin and motivated by religious devotion and humility. The Holy Eucharist is, again, a sacrifice that Christ Himself has instituted and St. Gregory's doctrine of the power of the sacrifice to atone for the sins of the dead finds an echo, too, in the Spanish bishop.

Christian marriage, since it is a figure of the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church, is itself indissoluble. It was to be blessed by the priest and religious considerations had their role in the matrimonial relations.

St. Isidore, in whose writings the Middle Ages found an encyclopaedia of human knowledge, is certainly not one of the greatest names in theological history. In the general history of the Church, however, he is more important, for he is one of the chief links between the golden age of the Fathers and that of the medieval scholastics; and he is almost the last writer for four centuries to merit the name of theologian at all. His work has this additional importance, for us, that it mirrors the belief and life of the Church on the eve of the next catastrophe to overwhelm it.

The history of Catholicism in Spain after the century which followed the reunion of 589 is not well known to us. If it produced an Isidore of Seville, it had never a Gregory of Tours nor a Bede. There are the scanty records of Roman intervention, there are the canons of the innumerable councils, and that is almost all. The picture we construct from such materials can hardly be complete. For whatever it is worth, it shows us a Church which is in many respects a department of the State. The kings named the bishops, and, in time of crisis, the bishops lent all their religious prestige to the kings. In this sense they were patriotic enough, though we are hardly in a position to decide whether they would not have done better for the Church and for Spain by throwing their influence against the continuance of the elective monarchy. The same evils afflicted the Spanish hierarchy that are to be noted in seventh-century Gaul -- personal loose living and, above all, simony. One result of the closer connection with the State -- the closest to obtain in any of those barbarian kingdoms -- was the almost complete failure of the bishops to act independently of the king, save occasionally in political matters. We find bishops who share in plots and rebellions: we find none who come to their death through an apostolic fearlessness that rebukes the royal sins to the sinner's face. Here the Spanish episcopate apparently falls below the standard of the bishops of Gaul. The bishops suffered as the whole of the Church suffered, and the nation too, from the country's isolation. There was never a Columbanus nor an Augustine to stimulate with the vitality of difference the sluggish evenness of national piety. Nor did the Benedictine rule penetrate into Spain, in all the two centuries that lay between St. Benedict and the Arab conquest. Nation and Church stagnated together, and as they had lived so they fell. To blame the Spanish Church for the national unpreparedness is to reverse the logic of facts, for the Spanish Church was very largely what the Spanish kings had made it. It was thanks to them that it had become part of the nation, dependent on the nation, and therefore powerless to renew its life. One thing alone could have saved Spanish Catholicism and through it the nation -- effective intervention from outside. By the end of the seventh century, with Spain, Europe and the Papacy as they were then organised, this was out of the question. And it is questionable whether Spain would have welcomed it. The significant fact remains, that the first of these barbarian Christianities to fall was the state-ridden Church of what had been the least barbarian of all the western provinces of the old empire.

Endnotes

107: BATIFFOL, St. Gregoire e le Grand, p. 225 [back]

108: cf. infra, p. 95-96 [back]

109: Licinianus of Carthagena; cf BATIFFOL, op. cit., 94 [back]

110: cf. Vol. I, pp. 282-5 [back]

111: There is a good, clear and documented account in TIXERONT, Histoire des Dogmes III ch. viii (pp. 274-312), cf. also FRITZ, Orange (II Concile d') in D.T.C. XI, cc. 1087-1103 [back]

112: For the history of this reconciliation and of the schism of Acacius which preceded it, cf. Vol. I, pp. 266-271 [back]

113: For the text of the decree of Orange cf. DENZINGER nos. 174-200 [back]

114: cf. TIXERONT, Histoire des Dogmes III, 310-12, also II, 504- 512. [back]

115: For a documented account of the history of these theological controversies between the death of St. Augustine and the Council of Orange (430-529) cf. G. DE OLINVAL, La consolidation du dogme catholique in F. & M. IV (1939), 120-128, 397-419, which does not, however, replace TIXERONT, Op. Cit. [back]

116: Council of Macon [back]

117: Council of Eauze, 551 [back]

118: Council of Agde, 506 [back]

119: Metz was his capital [back]

120: For a brief discussion of the historical difficulties which this account of the matter raises cf. DUCHESNE, L'Eglise au VIme, p. 570. [back]

121: TIXERONT, op. cit. III, 374. [back]