‘Ideas and Ideals’: Augustine and the Conversion

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This is the first of a series of articles describing formative movements and ideas in the history of the church. These were the crises of thought and conviction which brought us to where we are.

There were four main phases to the conversion of the English: initial success, reverse, renewed attempt and consolidation, this last followed by a shattering of the newly erected structures during the Viking raids. The winning of England for Christendom was a far from straightforward process. The story is shot through with drama, and there were several nodal points when history seemed to catch its breath, as if not sure which direction to take.

One such moment came at the very start, in 596, when Augustine, in mid journey, lost his nerve and returned to Rome. The Saxons were notoriously violent. The journey through recently converted Gaul, even with a large company of monks, held many hazards. But Gregory I was not going to give up his mission so easily. ‘It is better never to undertake a high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun,’ he admonished. Augustine set out again.

This particular high enterprise had been planned for a long time. By the closing years of the sixth century the auguries were good. Gregory had secured a safe passage for his party through Gaul from the Christian king of the Franks whose daughter, Bertha, was the wife of Ethelbert of Kent. Meanwhile the recent devastation the Lombards had wrought in Italy, with the destruction of St Benedict’s Monte Cassino a few years earlier, gave added urgency to the mission. If the foundations of western Christianity were under attack, at least its limits should be extended. Bede’s account of the fair-haired Anglians in the Roman slave market is, like so many of his stories, a vivid way of encapsulating a truth - Gregory’s determination to push the frontiers of Christendom northwards. The classical Roman idea of imperium, embodying notions of unity and civilisation, had not died, merely taken on a new form.

There was another compelling reason behind the English mission. Those parts of the British Isles dominated by Celtic tribes - and they were still the majority - were already converted, but to a brand of Christianity not always welcome to Rome. The zeal of their missionaries had disseminated a fiercely independent and austere version of the faith. In intellectual terms the Celts were still powerful force: Gregory himself had corresponded with the redoubtable Columbanus. Militarily, however, face to face with the Saxons, they increasingly faced defeat.

The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were militaristic societies, welded (and riven) by blood-feud and battle: ferocissimi Saxones Gildas had called them. Gregory’s missionaries were going to an island where competing pagan kingdoms had been honing their fighting skills for a hundred and fifty years. Among these kingdoms a supreme ruler, a brytenwalda, had come to be recognised; and at this juncture, in 597, the brytenwalda was Ethelbert of Kent.

Ethelbert’s political marriage with Bertha had been an astute move, securing him control of the English Channel. The price for it was Bertha’s freedom to practise her Christian faith (in St Martin’s, Canterbury) under the guidance of her Frankish chaplain. Ethelbert, though remaining a pagan, must have become familiar with Christianity. But he still kept a safe distance from the missionaries when they arrived, wary of their magic.

To someone like Ethelbert, who traced his descent from Woden, the god of war, Augustine’s teachings were in stark contrast to all his previous beliefs. One Jesus, a Jewish teacher and healer, was believed to be God incarnate. He had died on a cross, had been raised from the dead, and he offered a heaven to those who would follow him. A universal society, the church, was the guardian of these truths which were to govern the conduct of men and nations.

What, then, did this new religion have to offer Ethelbert (or any other pagan ruler)? Firstly, an all-powerful deity: no challenges from other gods. Secondly, the backing of a powerful spiritual centre, Rome, with its growing network of monasteries stretching across Europe. Thirdly, the immeasurable bonus of literacy and the written code of laws that would legitimise and protect your rights. Of course none of this was obvious on that spring day in Thanet. But forty monks in their homespun habits would still have made an awesome impression, likewise the classical language of their ritual, with its ancient resonances. (Bede was perhaps the first person who recommended that prayer should be translated into the vernacular so the whole congregation would learn how to be ‘full of faith’.) Lastly, it was that very faith, as opposed to the superstitions of paganism - love as opposed to fear - which was the revolutionary message of the new religion.

And it won Ethelbert over. The next step for Augustine was the setting up of an episcopal framework. Gregory’s vision was of an English church in which monk-bishops would be the pillars that supported the over-arching structure with two archbishoprics, York and Canterbury, at its apex. After Augustine was installed in Canterbury and Justus in Rochester (and more missionaries, among them Paulinus, had arrived from Rome), the conversion pushed northwards, making the most of Ethelbert’s influence which at that point stretched up to the Humber. It seems that here the problem of the Celtic tribes arose: their areas bordered the western edges of the Kentish brytenwalda.

Gregory and Augustine had discussed the Celtic question. Augustine had sent Gregory lists of questions as unexpected contingencies arose, and Gregory replied with unfailing wisdom and humanity. Wherever possible, the mission was to accommodate existing practices. Pagan temples? - purify them and continue using them, he wrote: try not to alienate the local population. Except the Celtic bishops. ‘All the bishops of Britain,’ Gregory directed, ‘we commit to your charge.’ There was to be one ecclesiastical overlord in Britain - Augustine. And Augustine, in a (calculated?) snub, failed to stand when he met the Celtic bishops. Bede makes vivid story out of this and again, whatever the embroidery over the 130-year gap, one senses its kernel of truth. Unlike Kentish idol-worshippers, Celtic Christians were not to be placated.

It was a question, in modern parlance, of line management. Roman and Celtic church law with its abbots to whom the bishops played a secondary role. Monasteries were independent units, and though each looked to the Pope as the ultimate authority no archbishop was considered necessary to interpret that authority. Differences of detail between the two churches’ style of tonsure, eucharistic ritual, the dating of Easter, the rival Gospel sources and their traditions figured largely at different times, but these were outward symbols of a struggle that was at root political.

The progress of the conversion followed the shifting of kingly supremacy, first from Ethelbert of Kent to Raedwald [pg9]of East Anglia, then north to the Northumbrians. Again we have another Bedean set piece, the marvellous scene where Edwin of Northumbria consults his witan. But Edwin had married the Kentish Ethelbert’s daughter: Paulinus’ mission was virtually a foregone conclusion. What probably none of the missionaries bargained for (and they were the second generation now) was that when their backs were turned the old gods would creep back. Raedwald put up a temple next to his altar, Mellitus was chased out of his new church of St Paul’s in London and in Kent Ethelbert’s son reverted to paganism (his grandson was to return to Christianity). To compound matters the frontiers of Christianity were being extended - but by Celtic missionaries. By the middle of the seventh century Aidan and Cedd’s mission from Iona, via Lindisfarne, had brought Celtic Christianity as far south as the Thames.

It was a moment of crisis for the Roman church. The initial conversions had been for the top people - kings and their advisers and courtiers. The next generation of rulers, and possibly people lower down the social scale, had rebelled. Only Celtic Christianity, with its directly pastoral approach, was holding its own. The synod of Whitby, held in 664, was a response to this crisis. Ostensibly (according to Bede) it was summoned to iron out problems at the Northumbrian court where king Oswy and his wife wanted guidance over when to celebrate Easter - on his Celtic date (he had been brought up in Iona) or her Roman one. Oswy’s brother Oswald had married the daughter of the Wessex king, thereby bringing Celtic Christianity to the West Saxons: Oswy didn’t need a map to see how the balance of (Christian) power lay. Was he hoping, nonetheless, for a Roman victory, was it accident (as Bede has it) that Wilfrid forward as the main defender of the Roman case while the Scottish Colman, of Lindisfarne, defended the Celtic? Colman needed an interpreter, while Wilfrid combined the adversarial skills of a barrister with the vigour of the Northumbrian aristocracy he’d been born into, and in his convictions he was ‘continental’ to his fingertips. When Oswy came down on the side of St Peter (Rome), the future shape of the church in England was sealed. Fault-lines from the pre-Whitby era were, for the moment, buried - though they would surface repeatedly throughout English history. With the mission to the South Saxons twenty years later (again Wilfrid’s work) the conversion of the English was complete.

Fate now placed Theodore of Tarsus, St Paul’s only city in Canterbury, in 669 (he was the third choice for the archbishopric). Theodore had brought in Byzantium to strengthen the English Church. Eastern Christianity had many similarities with Celtic; some of the practices Theodore introduced (like private confession) were common to both. He was a man of enlightened, organising genius and, even at the age of sixty-six, huge energy. He toured the country, creating new dioceses and appointing new bishops (there were three when he began, fifteen when he died twenty years later). At the synod of Hertford, the first attended by all bishops, his canons set up a unified structure for the whole church which was later complemented when he prescribed detailed rules of conduct for religious houses in his Penitentials. (In one of the latter he recommended that judgement of those accused of capital offences against monks and clerics should fall to bishops, a legal point whose later variants would tear church and monarchy apart - but that was in the future: at this stage king and primate lived for the most part in happy symbiosis, each benefitting from the other’s strength.)

Theodore’s achievement, mirrored by the mission of his northern contemporary, Cuthbert, who combined Roman allegiance with Celtic practices, was the catalyst for a unique cultural flowering which followed. It was not an accident that Kent was in its vanguard: lucrative trading links and exposure to continental cultural influences made it far and away the richest kingdom. The school Theodore founded at Christ Church Canterbury became the cultural pace-setter for the whole country. It had a uniquely broad curriculum which included classical studies, Roman law, maths and music. Other foundations followed. At Wearmouth and Jarrow Benedict Biscop built up the library which Bede later used. The outstanding relic of this time, the Lindisfarne Gospels, bears witness to the rich cross-cultural flowering of this golden age.

But such relics are rare: the ‘golden age’ lasted barely a century. The background to it was the ever-shifting military balance of power - Northumbria to Mercia, Mercia to Wessex. The Church might have achieved a measure of unity, but at a political level the country was still a patchwork of warring kingdoms which was one of the reasons among many for the Viking raids that began at the end of the eighth century. It was no coincidence that the first major raid was on Lindisfarne. The monasteries were honeypots to the marauders. Kent, with its wealthy abbeys at Reculver, Minster and Canterbury and its accessibility (the sea-frontier was suddenly a hazard) was an obvious target: the Danish armies also found Thanet and Sheppey convenient wintering quarters. Canterbury was sacked twice during the ninth century by Mercia and again in 1011. Archbishop, Aeltheah (St Alphege) was captured and murdered and the raiding army had to be paid off with 48,000 pounds of silver. According to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, all Canterbury’s churchmen and women were seized and no one can say how great a part of the inhabitants was lost.

The effect on church life was devastating. The careful structure that had been so painstakingly built up completely cracked. Demoralisation in the monasteries showed in the gradual dispersal of monastic lands, while the destruction of buildings and libraries virtually eradicated the centres of learning.

This is the sad end of the first phase of the Christianisation of England. Regeneration was to come, with the monastic revival of monastic life. And we, with hindsight, know that the radical notions that erupted in Kent in 597 were to shape lives and institutions, and be continuing elements in our national consciousness, up to the present day. But contemporaries who prayed for delivery from the fury of the Norsemen had only their faith to sustain them.

One example of such faith can be seen in the gift of an eighth-century book, the illuminated Codex Aureus, donated to Christ Church Canterbury some hundred years later by certain ealdorman Alfred and his wife Werburg. They had bought the Codex back from one of the Viking armies (who had stolen it or been paid off with it) ‘because we were not willing that these holy books should remain any longer in heathen hands’, says their dedication in Old English; and they’d given it to Christ Church.

How much did it cost, one wonders, how did they negotiate the deal? In these details, which we will never know, lie all the realities of life two centuries before the Conquest. The details we do know, however, tell us that it was thanks to the Alfreds and the Werburghs - as well as the Wilfrids and the Cuthberts and the Theodores - that Gregory I’s high enterprise, in spite of all vicissitudes, succeeded.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle transl. and edit.
G.N. Garmonsway, Everyman 1953

Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Penguin Classics 1990

Peter Berresford Ellis Celt and Saxon, the Struggle for Britain
Constable 1993

Simon Coates The Role of Bishops in the Early Anglo-Saxon Church
History, April 1996

Richard Eales & Richard Gameson Vikings, Monks and the Millennium
Canterbury Archaeological Society 2000

Richard Gem (editor) St Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury
English Heritage 1997

R.H. Hodgkin A History of the Anglo-Saxons
Oxford 1935

Eric John Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England
Manchester University Press 1996

C.H. Lawrence Medieval Monasticism
Longman, 3rd edition 2001

F.M. Stenton Anglo-Saxon England
Oxford 1943