[Sidenote: The Monothelite controversy.]
The chief opponent of Monothelitism was Maximus, whoseDisputation with Pyrrhusremains the most important survival of the controversy. It is a subtle and rational exposition of the orthodox doctrine. The original phrase,theandric energy, from which the Ecthesis of Heraclius started, seems to have been drawn from the unknown Platonist who came to be called Dionysius the Areopagite, and whose writings had a continued influence in the Middle Age. But to all reasonable thinkers the main question was decided. The truth of Christ's human nature was an essential verity of the faith, and to deny His human will would make His nature incomplete, and His goodness in any true sense impossible. The difficulty would arise again when Luther and Calvin carried further the dispute concerning the nature of the human will, but as regards her Lord the Church had come to a decision based upon her knowledge of His divine life on earth.
The Councilin Trullo(named from the {90} dome-shaped place of meeting), 691, called alsoQuini-sextan, summoned by Justinian II. (685-711), was not Oecumenical, and was disciplinary rather than dogmatic. It condemned many Roman practices, and asserted definitely that the patriarchal throne of Constantinople should enjoy the same privileges as that of Old Rome, should in all ecclesiastical matters be entitled to the same pre-eminence, and should rank as second after it. TheLiber Pontificalis, the Roman Church history of the time, states that the pope's legates gave assent to the decrees, which is unlikely. But this one was no more than the repetition of many previous statements, as emphatic in the sixth as in the seventh century. The position was simply that claimed by the patriarch John when he signed the formula of Catholic faith drawn up and proposed by Pope Hormisdas. [Sidenote: Repudiation of Roman claims.] He insisted on prefixing a repudiation of the Roman claim to supremacy over Christendom. "I hold," he declared, "the most holy Churches of the Elder and the New Rome to be one. I define the See of the Apostle Peter and this of the Imperial City to be one See." By this it is clear that he designed to assert both the unity of the Church—which, as it has always seemed to the East, was threatened by the demand of the Roman obedience—and the equality of the two great churches of the Old and the New Rome.
Justinian I. spoke of Constantinople as "head of all the churches" ("omnium ecclesiarum caput"), but it is clear that he did not regard this position as conferring any supreme or exclusive jurisdiction. It was a title of honour which he would use of other patriarchates; and that he did not consider the power {91} of the patriarchates as unalterable is seen by his attempted creation of the new jurisdiction of his own city Justiniana Prima (Tauresium), a few miles south of Sofia, over a large district. To the archbishop whom he here created he gave authority to "hold the place of the apostolic throne" within his province.[3]
[Sidenote: Independent attitude of Constantinople.]
This position, then, of the Byzantine patriarchate, as independent of the other patriarchates, and equal to that of the older Rome, but occupying in point of honour a secondary position, was recognised by Church and State alike; and it was this that the Councilin Trulloreaffirmed. In another point it was divergent from Rome—that of the marriage of the clergy. Subdeacons, deacons, and priests were forbidden to marry, but those married before ordination were equally forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to separate from their wives.
An attempt of the mad emperor Justinian II. to enforce the acceptance of the decrees by Pope Sergius I. was a complete failure. Popes were becoming much stronger in Italy than was the distant Caesar.
Rome was becoming independent of emperor and of exarch alike. In 711 the pope Constantine visited Constantinople as an honoured guest, where he was treated with diplomatic politeness, and where, possibly after they had undergone modification, he signed the {92} decrees of the Trullian Council. On this point the papal biographer is silent, but he asserts with enthusiasm the reverence of the emperor for the pope and the latter's regret when the bloody tyrant met the reward of his crimes a few weeks later. With this the ecclesiastical interest of Eastern history is for a time in the background.
[1] This is spoken of by a recent Roman Catholic writer as "la déplorable réponse de Honorius, ce monument de bonne foi surprise et de naïveté confiante." It does not support the notion of papal infallibility.
[2] Given in Baronius, A.D. 689.
[3] See Procopius,De Aedif., iv. 1 (ed. Bonn., pp. 266, 267); andNovellae, xi. (de privilegiis archiepiscopi primae Justinianae) and cxxxi. (de ecclesiasticis canonibus et privilegiis), cap. 3. It is no alteration of patriarchal powers, but rather the assertion of them. Still patriarchal jurisdictions are not regarded as unalterable—as is clear from the creation of the modern national churches of the Balkan lands.
{93}
[Sidenote: The Church in Persia.]
In the East Christianity had spread to Persia from Edessa.[1] The Parthians seem to have put no obstacle in its way, but when the Persians came into conflict with the Roman Empire, now Christian, there was long and bitter persecution. At last toleration was reached, after Sapor II., and from the beginning of the fourth century the Church in Persia was organised, and governed by many bishops; the primate took the title of Catholicos and had his see at Seleucia, and had suffragans on both sides of the Persian Gulf. In Assyria and Chaldaea the mass of the population became Christians, and Christians were spread, less thickly, over Media, Khorassan, and Persia itself. The dignity of the Persian catholicos was considerable; he might be compared with the Byzantine patriarchs, and the Church almost occupied the position of an established religion, related to the civil power. But the distance, and the constant wars between the Empire and Persia, tended inevitably to separate the Churches. From the end of the fifth century the Church in Persia, surrendered to {94} Nestorianism, had begun visibly to decay. It was controlled by the Persian kings, it was a prey to endless controversy and intrigue, and when the Persian kingdom was at war with the Empire it was in grave danger. It held councils furtively; it passed canons, and, itself heretical, condemned other and more recent heresies than its own. But often its catholicos engaged in the dynastic politics of the Persian dynasties, and Christianity, regarded as one among many religions, and tainted with the same materialism as the rest, sank into impotence and was torn by schism. Meanwhile, in the neighbourhood of the Persian realm, Christianity was spreading.
[Sidenote: Growth of the Church under Justinian.]
Many barbarous tribes during Justinian's reign were admitted to the Christian faith and fellowship. The Tzani dwelling on the border of Armenia and Pontus, "separated from the sea by precipitous mountains and vast solitudes, impassable torrent beds and yawning chasms," [2]—in a land where, Procopius tells us,[3] "it is not possible to irrigate the ground, to reap a crop, or to find a meadow anywhere; and even the trees bear no fruit, because for the most part there is no regular succession of seasons, and the land is not at one time subjected to cold and wet, and at another made fertile by the warmth of the sun, but is desolated by perpetual winter and covered by eternal snows. They changed their religion to the true faith, became Christians, and embraced a more civilised mode of life." The king of those Heruls who served in the Roman army, and a Hunnish king, Gordas, {95} became Christians. The Abasgi (or Albagrians) of the Caucasus were converted, and for the most part remained associated with the Armenians and the Iberians of Georgia,[4] "when they were compelled by the Persian king to worship idols," put themselves under the imperial protection, and they remained closely in connection with the Armenian Church till 608 when they accepted the decisions of Chalcedon. They remained independent and orthodox till their union, a century ago, with the Russian Church.
[Sidenote: Separation from the Church.]
In Armenia, similarly, had grown up a national Church, which had a catholicos, a hierarchy, a vernacular liturgy of its own. When in the middle of the fifth century the ancient kingdom was split up between the Empire and the Persians, the Armenian Church still remained apart. Its national features were strongly marked even before dogmatic differences arose. With the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies new divisions took place. The Persians gradually, between 435 and 480, accepted Nestorianism, and in 483 definitely separated from the Catholic Church, and Nisibis became a school of Nestorian theology. The Armenians survived this danger but were led into Monophysitism, and in 505 they pronounced against the Council of Chalcedon. Their theology became tainted with further heresy in the sixth century, and they are still separate from the orthodox Church of the East. Thus, at the time with which we have to deal, as we have said, Christianity east of Antioch and on the borders of Persia was under Nestorian influence. After 431 Nestorianism became gradually established {96} as the dominant creed. The Church of the East, as it was officially called, rejected the Third General Council, and was cut off from the Catholic Church. It long remained a strong body. The great schools of Nisibis, Edessa, and Baghdad were centres of religion, learning, and civilisation.
[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]
The Nestorians[5] also sent out missionaries northward among the wandering Tartar tribes and along the shores of the Caspian; southward to Persia, India and Ceylon; and eastward across the steppes of Central Asia into China. The bilingual inscription of Singanfu, in Chinese and Syriac, relates that Nestorian missionaries laboured in China as far back as A.D. 636.[6] In the sixth and seventh centuries the Church of the East could count its twenty-five metropolitans or archbishops; and the number and remoteness of their sees, stretching from Jerusalem to China, testifies to her missionary zeal. Those who dwelt nearest to Baghdad met the catholicos in yearly synod; those farthest off sent their confession of faith to him every sixth year.
[Sidenote: Prester John and his conversion.]
By the Middle Ages the Church of the East had spread over the whole of Central Asia. The curious legends of the powerful kingdom of Prester John, somewhere in the heart of Asia, grew out of the conversion, by Nestorian merchants in the eleventh century, of a certain King of Kerait, a kingdom of Tartary to the north of China. This king is said to have requested that missionaries might be sent to him from the Church {97} of his converters; and, when they were come, these missionaries baptized him, naming him John,[7] and he was ordained priest (Presbyter or Prester). Two hundred thousand people of the nation embraced Christianity; the successors to the kingdom bore the dynastic name of John, and were ordained priests. However uncertain this story is, the fact of the conversion of the princes of Kerait in Tartary is sufficiently well established. [Sidenote: Height of prosperity.] The prosperity of the Church of the East culminated in the eleventh century. The khalifs of Baghdad protected their Christian subjects, and important offices of state were often filled by them.
The Indian Church, which was believed to date back to the time of S. Thomas the Apostle, had probably its origin in Nestorian missions, and accepted Monophysite opinions.
[Sidenote: Their missions]
As we have seen, the wider field of missionary work owed much to the labours of the Nestorians. It is possible that Cosmas,[8] who had travelled far afield in the first half of the sixth century, may have been a Nestorian; but the reverence with which he speaks of the orthodox faith, and his constant use of the Catholic writers, would seem to show rather that, when he became a monk at any rate, he was orthodox. From him, however, we obtain knowledge of the wide field of Nestorian missions. Recent discoveries have largely added to our knowledge. It is clear that in the sixth century, {98} apparently before 540, Nestorian bishoprics were founded in Herat and Samarkand. Monumental inscriptions date back as far as 547. [Sidenote: in the Far East.] Merv, as early as 650, is spoken of as a "falling church" [9] amid the triumphs of Islam. China has been already mentioned, and though it is not clear that only Nestorian missions prospered in the far land, there is no doubt that their success was the most prominent. Christian communities existed near the borders of Tibet[10] in the seventh century; and in the eighth and ninth they were strong in India. Even in the eleventh century the "Nestorian worship retained a great hold over many parts of Asia, between the Euphrates and the Gobi desert." Into the later and fragmentary history of these missions it is not here the place to enter. Let it only be remembered that the labours of "those Nestorian missionaries who preached and baptized under the shadow of the wall of China, and on the shores of the Yellow Sea, the Caspian, and the Indian Ocean" [11] were made possible by the diplomatic and military triumphs which radiated from Constantinople in the sixth century, and by the Christian zeal of orthodox emperors and patriarchs.
[Sidenote: Nestorianism in Persia.]
Meanwhile in Persia the Monophysites contended for supremacy with the Nestorians, and organised themselves with considerable skill. But the Nestorians, who founded schools and developed a Christology on lines different from those on which European thought was {99} proceeding, became still more rigid in their rejection of the Catholic teaching. Maraba the catholicos (540-52) and Thomas of Edessa, his pupil, seem to have drawn very near to orthodoxy; but the controversy of the Three Chapters widened the breach. Council after council, theologian, catholicos, monastery, bishop, alike denounced Justinian; and they had the support of the pagan philosophers whom he had expelled from the schools of Athens.
In Persia monasticism and the life of hermits—though the introduction of either is difficult if not impossible to trace[12]—flourished and developed on lines of their own. For a long time there was no distinction between monastic and secular life: it was only gradually that an organised monasticism grew up out of the coenobitic life for men and for women. But from the sixth century onward the organisation of monasticism gave strength to the Church, and enabled it for some time to resist the Muhammadan invasion. The Church, mapped out into dioceses and well served by numerous clergy, and having its own canon law, its own liturgical forms, and its own theology, was able for long, in spite of the absence of all state support and in spite often of state persecution, to survive in some appearance of strength till the Muhammadan invasion. The Mussulman conquest, when once it was achieved, gave something like security to the Nestorians. Though there was a time of persecution in the ninth century, it was short. Christians as teachers, physicians, philosophers, were famous in the foundation of the learning of the palmy days of the khalifs. But the whole {100} structure fell before the invasions, in later days, of the Mongols and the Turks.
[Sidenote: The Church in Palestine.]
From the more distant parts of the Persian Empire we may pass to the land where the Church had its birth. During the period of revived power in the Empire, Palestine was at peace under Justinian's rule.
In Jerusalem itself[13] it is chiefly to be said that the emperor engaged in large restorations and some original church building after the style of his better known work. He had a severe struggle with the Samaritans, but it led to many conversions.[14]
[Sidenote: Conquest by the Persians.]
But here, as elsewhere, as time went on the encroachments of the Persians were a perpetual danger to the Christianity of the East. In 615 Jerusalem fell into their hands. The Jews, whom earlier emperors had, like Justinian, kept in subjection, had grown in the days of Heraclius to be much more powerful in Syria than the Christians, and it was they who secured Jerusalem and gave it into the hands of the Persians; and again, after the Christians had overpowered the garrison, the city was given back to them and to scenes of pillage and outrage; the churches, so splendid as early as the fourth century, and described in glowing language by Procopius in the sixth, were sacked and defiled; the clergy and the patriarch were made captive; the Holy Cross, discovered by the Empress Helena, was sent away into Persia; and "all these things," says the chronicler, "happened not in a year or a month, but within a few days." The ruined churches were, however, restored {101} before long by the alms of the faithful, and it was not long before the Christians themselves were favoured by the Persian king, and Chosroes, in consequence of a council at Jerusalem in 628, legalised, it would seem, the Monophysite heresy as the representative of Christianity. [Sidenote: Reconquest by Heraclius, 622.] The conquest of Egypt followed on that of Syria; and the union of the Coptic Church with that of the Syrian Monophysites was a result, natural and almost inevitable, of the community of suffering between them. Within a few years—his campaign began in 622—the heroic emperor Heraclius won back all that had been lost, utterly defeated the Persians, won back the Holy Rood, restored the patriarch Zacharias to Jerusalem, and returned in triumph to the imperial city. In 629 he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy City, and on September 14th—still observed as the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—he restored the Rood to the Church of the Resurrection.
[Sidenote: Conquest by the Muhammadans.]
In the year 610 Muhammad began his career as a prophet. It is no part of Church history to trace the origin of his opinions or his power, to tell how he learnt from Jews and Nestorians, or how he established a marvellous organisation on a basis of theocratic militarism. The migration from Meccah to Medinah in 622 was the beginning of his active ministry, of religious teaching carried forward by sword and fire. The capture of Meccah, the submission of Arabia, the extinction of the Christian (Monophysite) communities in the peninsula, were followed before long by the invasion of Syria and the capture of Jerusalem by the Khalif Omar in 637. The year before, Heraclius {102} had taken away the Holy Rood and the treasures of the churches to Constantinople. Two years later the Muhammadans seized Egypt, from which the Persians had not so long been driven out by the armies of the Empire. The fatal policy of the Monothelite emperors had opened the way to the triumph of Islam. Of this we shall see more, in Africa and in Southern Europe, in later days.
[1] SeeThe Church of the Fathers(vol. ii. of the present series), chapter xxix., for the earlier history.
[2] Bury,History of the Later Roman Empire, i. 441.
[3]Aedif., iii. 6.
[4] Joannes Biclarensis, p. 853.
[5] I quote from the admirable summary in the Reports of the Archbishop's Mission to the Assyrian Christians.
[6] See an interesting account in Williams'sMiddle Kingdom.
[7] His name was Ung; his title Khan; Ung Khan was Syriacised into Yukhanan, i.e. John.
[8] TheChristian Topographywas written between 535 and 537. Beazley,Dawn of Modern Geography, p. 279.
[9] Assemani,Bibl. Orient, iii. i. 130, 131.
[10] See Waddell,Buddhism in Tibet, pp. 421, 422.
[11] Beazley,Dawn of Modern Geography, p. 211.
[12] Cf. Budge,The Book of Governors, i. cxvi., and Labourt,Le Christianisme dans l'empire perse, 303.
[13] Cf. Procopius,Aedif.; and John Moschus,Pratum Spirituale(Migne, Patr. Groec., lxxxvii. [3]).
[14] Procopius,Aedif., v. 8.
{103}
[Sidenote: The Church in North Africa.]
In the middle of the fifth century the Christian power in North Africa fell under the domination of the Arian Vandals. S. Augustine died in 430 while the foe was at the gates of his city. In 439 Carthage fell, and Roman civilisation was extinguished. The rule of the Vandals was not only Arian but barbarous. It is not unlikely that their victory was won with the aid of the remaining Donatists and the heathen Moors. With the reign of Gaiseric some degree of toleration was allowed to the Catholic Church, but the persecution which had marked the earlier days of the Arian power now took the form of confiscation and the suppression of public worship. The Church suffered grievously, and not least in the class of persons ordained to the ministry and consecrated to the episcopate. But still the Catholics were the great majority, and it was seen that the Arian Vandals were in danger of absorption by the subtle influence of the truth. It was a last effort of Gaiseric's to deprive the Catholics of their leaders, which eventually brought about their restoration. The Bishop of Carthage and several of his clergy were put on board a ship and told to escape whither they could. They reached Naples, {104} and their piteous plight and the news they brought helped to direct the attention of the imperial power to its lost heritage. [Sidenote: The Vandal persecution.] Meanwhile the suffering Church, enjoying now a scanty toleration, now suffering a severer persecution, continued to make converts and to produce martyrs. In 477 Gaiseric died. A year before his death he had allowed the Catholics to reopen their churches and to bring back their bishops and clergy from exile. And still their missionary efforts had never been relaxed. Church life still continued; inscriptions remaining to-day preserve the epitaphs of men buried in the darkest days with Catholic rites; and in the interior ancient monasteries remained undisturbed. Hunneric, the next Vandal king, though nominally an Arian, set himself to extirpate heresies which he did not accept: Manichaeans under his sway received treatment more severe than Catholics. Indeed, the Catholics began to raise their heads under the leadership of Eugenius, who was elected in 479 to the see of Carthage, the only bishopric in the country which held metropolitan rank. The Bishop of Carthage was the spiritual head of the whole province, held a superiority over the bishops outside the limits of Proconsularis, and was, as it were, the patriarch of the African Church. For twenty-three years the see had had no pastor, and the restoration marked a distinct step towards the ending of the Vandal domination. But there was a final effort; Hunneric, unable to decoy the Catholics, determined to exterminate them; a writer of the time tells that nearly five thousand clergy were banished to the desert, where their fate was a practical martyrdom. A conference was {105} summoned in 484, at which it was endeavoured to make the Catholic clergy abate the strictness of their orthodoxy, but Eugenius stood firm. Persecution again followed. The writer already mentioned, Victor Vitensis, says, "The Vandals did not blush to set forth against us the law which formerly our Christian emperors had passed against them and other heretics for the honour of the Catholic Church, adding many things of their own as it pleased their tyrannical power." Thus evil deeds bring their necessary consequences. A bitter persecution swept over the land, and till the death of Hunneric, at the end of the year, atrocities of the most terrible kind were perpetrated. It was a brief age of martyrs, and rooted the Church more firmly in the affections of its children. It was an age, too, of saints, and Fulgentius shines out by the side of Eugenius as a pattern of Christian devotion and asceticism. In the years that followed king succeeded king, and the condition of the Church became gradually more tolerable, till under Hilderic much of the old organisation was restored and the monastic houses were established in a condition of considerable independence. When Gelimer usurped the Vandal throne, the power of Justinian was able to intervene, and in 533 Belisarius recovered North Africa for the Empire. [Sidenote: Reconquest of Africa by Belisarius, 533.] The restoration of the direct rule of the emperors was of necessity the restoration of Catholicism to dominance. But materially the Church had received blows from which she never fully recovered. Her possessions, buildings, treasures had for the most part passed from her hands: and many sees, many parishes, {106} still remained without pastors. Such was the result of "the violent captivity of a century."
[Sidenote: The revival of the North African Church.]
Justinian aimed at restoring all things to their first estate. "We would be the guardians and defenders of the ancient traditions," he wrote in 542 to the primate of Byzacene. He confirmed the Bishop of Carthage in his metropolitan dignity; he restored sees, allowed synods to meet, gave special privileges to the clergy. An era of church building set in, and fine monasteries were erected, in all the impressive solidity of the Byzantine style, even in distant parts of the Roman territory. Tebessa remains a marvellous example of the wealth and dignity which came anew to the North African Church. The literary power of the Church revived with her material prosperity: a school of writers arose again in the land of Augustine. Primasius, Facundus, Liberatus, Victor of Tonnenna, were among those who restored the activity and knowledge of the Church in history, theology, and apologetic. Over all the emperor Justinian kept his watchful eye, directing, interfering, exhorting, as seemed to him good. The controversy of the Three Chapters had its echoes in Africa, and the deacon Ferrand, a learned theologian, represented a very wide feeling when, in hisDefensio, he deprecated any condemnation of the dead theologians; and in Facundus, Bishop of Hermiane, the unhappy hesitating pope Vigilius found an adviser who, if anyone, might have given him firmness. In the result, the emperor, by the pen at least as much as the sword, overpowered resistance, and Africa accepted the decisions of Constantinople. Reparatus, Bishop of Carthage, who resisted, was deposed, Liberatus {107} preserves the record of bitter persecution, and Victor of Tonnenna, who equally refused to accept the decision against the Three Chapters, is especially bitter in his denunciation of Justinian. But the pope Pelagius was able, in 560, to announce the assent of Africa to the statements of the Fifth General Council. The Church from the death of Justinian settled down in peaceable habitations, strong in the imperial support and the affection of the people. But as, in the relaxation which set in as time went on, the power of the imperial administration decayed, the power of the popes in Africa was gradually strengthened, and the power of the bishops rose equally. But this was not all. In time relaxation set in in the Church as well as in the State. There are tales of immoral and corrupt bishops, of disobedience to authority, of a recrudescence, from 591 to 596, of Donatism. It was the pope Gregory the Great who took in hand the needed reformation. [Its relation to Gregory the Great.] His letters are full of African affairs: his keen attention, his instructions to Hilarus, the administrator of the Roman Church's possessions in Italy, his minute knowledge, his wise understanding of the many difficult problems which beset the Church, are prominent in his correspondence. It was he who reversed the conception of Justinian in regard to the Church of North Africa. The emperor had striven for orthodoxy, without the supremacy of the pope. Gregory was determined to secure the latter, and the history of North Africa affords an excellent example of how the papal power grew. It was by continual intervention, in affairs small as well as great, and by constant solicitude: it was by the use of prudent {108} and sympathetic agents, and the firm adherence to a policy of charity, orthodoxy and discretion, that the great pope enforced his views on the bishops, the Church, the imperial representatives. While he sternly rebuked all abuse of the political authority which had fallen into the hands of the bishops, he tenaciously clung to the right of hearing appeals in cases between churchmen and public officials which circumstances had placed in his hands. From a right of control he passed to a right of direct intervention; and in State as well as Church the administrators felt the power of his indomitable will. While disorganisation was spreading in the civil order the Church was growing in concentration and authority.
[Sidenote: The Monothelite controversy.]
But the Monothelite controversy went far to shatter the power which the labour of Gregory had built up, and with it the Christianity of Northern Africa. The orthodox felt less and less bound to emperors who supported heresy, and the Arab invasion drew near without the people perceiving the full extent of their danger. Fortunatus, Bishop of Carthage, declared himself a Monothelite, but in every other province besides his the Church formally repudiated the heresy. In 646 Fortunatus was deposed and Victor succeeded him; and this is almost the last recorded incident in the history of the North African Church. As the Arab invader advanced, refugees from Syria and Egypt poured into the land, and, since many of them were heretical, added to the religious diffusions of the country. The abbat Maximus upheld the banner of orthodoxy against all comers. The victory which he won over the heresiarch Pyrrhus in 645, followed by the declarations of {109} provincial synods in 646, was the last expression of African orthodoxy.
John, the Jacobite bishop of Nikiu, whose contemporary account of the Saracen conquest is of the first value, declares that "everyone said that the expulsion of the Romans and the victory of the Mussulmans were brought about by the tyranny of the emperor Heraclius and the troubles which he made the orthodox suffer." A general discontent with the Byzantine government arose, and Rome, which was more in sympathy with the people, was unable to help them. In 646 the patrician Gregory, the imperial governor, orthodox and a protector of the Church, declared that the Monothelite Constans II. had forfeited the throne, and assumed for himself the title of emperor. Within a year he was defeated and slain by the Saracens at Sbeitla, and Byzantine Africa was placed at the mercy of the Muhammadan invader. The Copts long resisted, but their resistance was overcome in the autumn of 646. Alexandria fell a second time and finally into the hands of the Arabs.
[Sidenote: The conquest by the Muhammadans.]
For fifty years the Byzantine power maintained a foothold, precarious and nominal. Inch by inch, and with intervals of repose and even of reconquest,—as when John the Patrician, under Leo the Isaurian, recaptured Carthage,—the infidels advanced, and the Berber tribes of the interior pressed, too, upon the Christians. Carthage was again taken by the Muhammadans in 698: the native tribes joined the invaders, and by 708 Roman Africa was wholly in their hands. Toleration was at first allowed; but from 717 the Christians had only the choice of banishment and {110} apostasy. Still many held out: Christian villages remained, Christian communities, as late as the fourteenth century; and even now it is said that in some parts Christian customs survive. The Church at Carthage existed certainly in some organised form till the eleventh century, and it was not till 1583 that the Church of Tunis was utterly destroyed.
Meanwhile events in other parts of Africa had run a different course. The patriarchate of Alexandria had a long and distinguished history, and from it had spread missions far into the south.
[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]
The Monophysite controversy led to the founding of the Jacobite sect. Secret consecrations at Constantinople by bishops in prison during Justinian's severe rule sent a bishop to Hira for the Arabian Christians in Persia, and another to the borders of Edessa, who founded the Jacobites and with the assistance of Egyptian Monophysite bishops continued the episcopal succession. In Egypt there arose the division between the Melkites, who followed the imperial orders and accepted the decisions of the Councils, and the Copts, who dissented. The Monophysites of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, with temporary and superficial differences, remained practically at one. National differences confirmed their divergence from the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. Thus while in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere the Church was still powerfully represented, though side by side with strong sectarian organisations, there were, when the followers of Muhammad came to add to the confusion, three nationalistic and heretical bodies, separate from the Church—those of Persia and Armenia and Ethiopia. Of the last something must now be said.
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[Sidenote: The Abyssinian Church.]
South of Egyptian territory, properly so called, lay the Ethiopians, vassals of Egypt, tracing in a dim fashion their Christianity back to one of those queens who bore the title ofCandace. These wild and warring tribes kept up continual conflict, and among the Blemmyes men still worshipped Isis in the temple of Philae. In 548 began the conversion of the Nobadae of the Soudan, of whose reception into the Christian fold the great Monophysite missionary, John of Ephesus, gives an account. Churches were built, and one inscription at least survives with the name of a Christian king. Beyond them the Alodaei learnt the faith from the same preacher, Longinus. Nubia, or Mugurrah, was also visited by Christian missionaries at the same time. Under Justinian, the temple of Philae was turned into a church, and the Blemmyes became Christian. Christian remains long existed, even down to the neighbourhood of Khartoum; and it was long before the Muhammadan conquerors swept all the worship of Christ away. Further south Christianity spread on both sides of the Red Sea. In Arabia Felix was the kingdom of the Homerites or Himyarites, whose chief city was Safar, and at different times they were ruled by the same king as the land of Axum, "the farthest Ind" of the Greek chronicler Theophanes. After the dispersion, Jewish colonies settled in Arabia, and in the fourth century Christianity followed. At the end of the fifth century a bishop is found among the Homerites, and a Trinitarian inscription is dated 542-3. About the same time the Church in Abyssinia, founded in the time of S. Athanasius, received the national religion of the country through the conversion of the Negus at the end {112} of the fifth century. While the land of Safar at times relapsed into heathenism and massacred Christians, the Abyssinians remained firm in the faith. Procopius tells that Ellesthaeos, an Ethiopian king, during the reign of Justin I., invaded the land of the Homerites to avenge their persecutions and to suppress the Jewish predominance and set up a Christian king. With him and his successors Justinian entered into treaties, as also with the kings of Axum or Abyssinia. While the Muhammadan conquest swept away the Christianity of the Arabians and drove those who clung to it northward to the banks of the Euphrates, the Church in Abyssinia, which had accepted Monophysitism, remained independent, just as its mother church of Egypt obtained toleration. It still continues separate, Monophysite, and in communion with the Coptic Church of Egypt.
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[Sidenote: Christianity in Britain.]
When Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his brother monks to preach to the Teutonic tribes which had made Britain their home, there were already two Churches in the island. There was the Church of the Brythons, gradually separated by the advance of the Saxons into the Churches of Cumbria or Strathclyde, Wales, and West Wales or Cornwall. These stood apart from the English for a long time, were late in accepting the Catholic customs of the West, and had no influence on the progress of English Christianity. And there was the Church founded in North Britain by Celtic missionaries from Ireland. In Ireland there seems little doubt that Christianity was known by the end of the fourth century. In the fifth century the progress was extraordinarily rapid. S. Patrick "organised the Christianity which already existed; he converted kingdoms which were still pagan, especially in the west; and he brought Ireland into connection with the Church of the Empire, and made it formally part of Universal Christendom." [1]
The subsequent history of the Church in Ireland forms a fit introduction to that of the Church in {114} England, in spite of the separation between them. Irish Christianity did not long preserve its close union with Western Europe. The popes, as well as the emperors, were too weak to interfere in the distant islands. The Irish relapsed into the use of what is called the Celtic Easter, and to other practices which were usual before Patrick's day and which served to cut them off from the newly-converted Teutons, as well as from the Latin world in general. [Sidenote: Death of S. Patrick, 461.] Patrick died in 461. In 563 Columba, trained in the great schools which had sprung up in the Irish monasteries, crossed to what is now called Scotland to confirm the faith of the Irish settlers and to convert the heathen Picts. The organisation of the Church to which he belonged was essentially tribal and monastic. [Sidenote: The Celtic Church.] Though S. Patrick had probably consecrated diocesan bishops in large numbers, the Church soon became "predominantly monastic." Tribal feeling was so strong that the Church, too, assimilated itself to the tribal idea, and the Church's monasteries were her tribes. In a land where there were no cities monasteries took their place, and the bishops naturally came to dwell in them, and so to seem less prominent in their episcopal than in their monastic aspect. The monks became the chief power in Christian Ireland; and in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries there were many bishops without dioceses, and it seems probable that their rank, though not their function, was less important than that of the abbats, the heads of the tribal monasticism.
In the seventh century again the Irish Church came back into closer association with the Church throughout {115} Europe. This union was due very largely to the influence of learning, and still more to the influence of missionary zeal. "From Iceland to the Danube or the Apennines, among Frank or Burgundian or Lombard, the Irish energy seemed omnipotent and inexhaustible." [2] Into Ireland it would seem that classical culture was introduced by the first Christian teachers, and that from the first it was intended to serve as a preparation for religious teaching.[3] It would seem that it was from Brittany that it spread to Ireland. [Sidenote: The influences outside Ireland] The schools of Ireland became famous. Books as diverse as the Antiphonary of Bangor and Adamnan's Life of Columba show that the teaching in its different ways was a sound and a liberal one.
In England the Irish tradition and influence spread. If the Celtic school of Bangor perished in the stress of the bitter wars between English and Welsh, Malmesbury, which trained S. Aldhelm, showed that the Irish love of letters was capable of transplantation into a land now most prominently Teutonic. But the Roman influence and the influence of the East were still more effective. [Sidenote: in learning,] Benedict Biscop brought back with him to Northumbria the traditions and rules of Italian art and learning, and Theodore of Tarsus brought a wider influence, which was Greek as well as Latin. He himself founded a school at Canterbury, and taught it; and in distant times Dunstan, at Glastonbury and at Canterbury, was his worthy successor. In the north Bede was at {116} Jarrow a writer of great power and wide scope, and the school of York was a nursery of classic studies which produced the great scholar Alcuin. Thus the community of scholarship brings the Churches together.
[Sidenote: in missionary work.]
More prominent was the zeal for the conversion of the heathen. The work of Columban and of S. Gall had its origin in the Irish schools, and there was no more fruitful influence on the Europe of the Dark Age. The work of Columba and his followers was to begin in the north of Britain what Roman missionaries undertook in the south. For more than thirty years Columba, who landed in Iona in 563, taught the Picts and Scots. His Life by his disciple Adamnan is one of the most beautiful memorials of medieval saintliness that we possess. The monastery which he founded lasted till the eighth century. His school did a famous work in North Britain in the seventh; King Oswald of Northumbria was trained there, and S. Aidan, his fellow-helper, the typical saint of Northumbria. From the same source came Melrose, the great Scottish monastery, and S. Chad, the apostle of the Middle English.
[Sidenote: Scotland.]
A century of intermittent strife swept over the northern lands. Scotland became Christian slowly and with little connection with the south. Heathen onslaughts ravaged the Christian lands, and yet, in spite of all, monasteries for men and women sprang up in the north. The influence of S. Aidan (died 651) was continued by S. Cuthbert and S. Hilda, typical parents of monks and nuns. In 664 (Synod of Whitby) at last came union with the Church of the English, who appealed to the authority of Rome and {117} of S. Peter in favour of their customs, and the Northumbrian king, Oswin, ratified the union of the Celtic and the English Churches. Early in the eighth century other Celtic Churches came into the agreement; only Cornwall held out for two centuries more.
[Sidenote: The mission of St. Augustine, 597.]
The English Church, which thus came to represent the Christianity of the whole island, was founded from Rome by S. Augustine in Kent in 597. It was from the first an active missionary body. It gradually won its way over the whole island, conquering and assimilating the alien influences which were at first opposed to it. So when a storm of heathen persecution swept over England and Scotland at the end of the eighth century, when "the ravaging of heathen men lamentably destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne," when the monks of Iona were given to martyrdom, when English prelates and kings gave their lives to hold the land for Christ, the Church still endured, with material loss but with, for the time at least, enhanced glory and virtue. Three names stand out conspicuously from the seventh and ninth centuries. [Sidenote: Theodore of Tarsus, 668.] Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 693, was the great organiser of the English Church. A scholar, a teacher, a statesman, he knit the different tribes of English, Saxon, Jute, together in the unity of faith and discipline. Church councils sprang up under him to rule, and Church laws to guide men in the way. He kept up a close connection with the Western Church, but he did not surrender independence to a papal supremacy. Wilfrith of Ripon, his contemporary, was great also as a teacher and as a missionary beyond the seas, {118} and among the Saxons of South Britain. The seventh century was the age in which the foundations of the English Church were laid on firm bases.
[Sidenote: Bede.]
Hardly less important, though in a different way, was the work of the monk Baeda, the father of English history. He was a man who knew the history and the theology of the Western Church, and who taught by his writings and his life. His influence on the development of the Church in the north, both by his great history, his religious treatises, and his influence on Egbert, Archbishop of York, is incalculable.
[Sidenote: Alfred.]
The age of Alfred, who died in 899, was equally important. It witnessed a more distinct union with the Church of Wales, whose glories go back to the time of S. David in the fifth century. It confirmed a strong union between Church and State in England, and it witnessed a revival of Christian learning in which Alfred himself and a Welshman, Asser, whom he made bishop of an English see, were the leaders. Alfred was a bright example of what Christianity could do for mankind. Warrior, scholar, saint, pattern king whose heart was given to his people, he bore himself nobly before the world as one who loved and worshipped the Master Christ. Under his sway the Church rose again to instruct and guide the people, and when he died he left the English land a united Christian nation. The Danes, who after years of predatory invasion were become settlers over a large part of England, were brought into the Church; and the British Church in Cornwall was brought nearer to unity with the English, a union which was complete from 931.
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[Sidenote: Conversion of the north.]
While in the extreme north, Ross, Cromarty, Sutherland, and Caithness, the Church remained missionary rather than parochial, in the Scotland of the south monasticism became prominent again under a new order called, in Goidelic, "Culdees" (servants of God). In the midlands years of disturbance caused much of the organisation of the Church to disappear, bishoprics to cease, monasteries to be destroyed. After the Danish wars the work of reconstruction was an urgent need, and a great prelate came to lead it.
[Sidenote: Dunstan, 924-88.]
Dunstan (924-88) was a West Saxon who was taught at Glastonbury by Irish priests, and who rose, through his friendship with leaders in Church and State, by the holiness of his life, and by the experience that he won when in exile in Flanders, to be head of the English Church. As archbishop he was "a true shepherd." He gave up all the preferments he had before enjoyed, only visiting Glastonbury occasionally for a time of repose. His friends, Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, with King Eadgar's help, did their utmost to introduce the strict rule of S. Benedict into the monasteries, replacing the clergy of the cathedral churches (secular canons) by monks. Dunstan sympathised, but he did not actively support their action. Abroad there was strong feeling against clerical marriage, and there were many canons passed against it. The danger of the Church falling into the hands of an hereditary class of officials was a real one; but it does not seem to have been much felt in England. Dunstan paid far more heed to the clergy's books than their wives.
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[Sidenote: His work as archbishop and reformer.]
He made rules, and encouraged schools for the training of priests. He ordered priests to learn handicrafts that they might teach them to others. He ordered that a sermon should be preached in each church every Sunday. His zeal for moral reform was seen in many canons passed against the abuses of the age, and he did not hesitate to enforce them against the highest in the land. When the pope ordered him to absolve a great lord whom he had excommunicated for an unlawful marriage, he refused to obey.
Early in the tenth century an illustration of the position occupied by the English Church in relation to Rome, and of the learning of its clergy and their style of preaching, is afforded by the writings of Aelfric, who described himself in his early years as "a monk and a mass-priest," and was later on abbat of Eynsham. Of his work, besides educational treatises, eighty sermons, chiefly translated from the Latin, remain. In them he shows clearly that the claims of the papacy with regard to S. Peter were not accepted by all in England, and he taught the spiritual, not corporal, presence of the Lord's Body in the Holy Communion. The English Church differed also from Rome in the fact that many of the clergy were married, and though this was not regarded as lawful, they were not separated from their wives. But in all essential matters the English Church remained in union with the foreign Churches and retained her ancient reputation for unbroken orthodoxy. This reputation was increased by the fame of S. Dunstan, whose sojourn abroad had served to link English churchmen again to their brothers over sea.
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The last years of the great archbishop were given to prayer and study, and to the arts of music and handicraft which he had practised in his youth. He set himself to train the young, to succour the needy, and to make peace among all men. He died on May 19th, 988, and with him the new energy he had infused into the Church seemed to pass away. [Sidenote: The Danish invasions.] New Danish invasions turned men's thoughts other ways, but still monasteries made progress. The Benedictine rule was accepted over Southern England, and in the north the see of Durham rose replacing the older northern see, when it became the resting-place of the bones of the great missionary, S. Cuthbert. The Danish invasions were not so barbarous now as in earlier days. Some of the Danes were Christians, and it was at Andover that Olaf Trigvason, King of Norway, was confirmed by Bishop Aelfeah, calling King Aethelred father. He went back to Norway a Christian devoted to the conversion of his people.[4]
The English Church at the beginning of the eleventh century was in full communion with the Western Church, but was practically to a large extent apart from papal influence. Church and State walked hand in hand, and the relations between sovereign and archbishop resembled those of the New rather than the Old Rome. The missionary energy which had in former years sent forth Wilfrith and Winfrith was now for the time exhausted. England needed a new religious revival. It came later, at the time of a political conquest.
Meanwhile the Irish Church was regaining its learning and its missionary zeal: both were expressed in {122} theconsuetudo peregrinandiwith which the Irish monks were credited in the ninth century. But from the time of the Danish invasions the Irish Church, and the Welsh also, suffered severely. Heathen settlements in Ireland were only gradually converted, as that of Dublin in 943. The disturbed state of their home encouraged Irish monks to cross the seas. Action and reaction led Ireland more close than ever to the Roman papacy.
[1] Bury,Life of S. Patrick, pp. 212-13.
[2] R. L. Poole,Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, p. 10.
[3] Cf. Roger,L'Enseignement des lettres classiques, p. 236.
[4] See ch. xi.
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[Sidenote: Cyril and Methodius, 868.]
The ninth century was a great age of conversion, and the work is very largely associated with two great names in the development of civilisation and learning, those of two brothers, born in Thessalonica, probably between 820 and 830—Constantine (who changed his name to Cyril when he was consecrated bishop by Hadrian II. in 868) and Methodius. Their lives show the connection still existing between Rome and the East in Church matters, and illustrate the zeal for educational work which was so conspicuous a feature in the converting energy of the Church of Constantinople. Cyril was not only a priest and a missionary, he was a "philosopher." Methodius, it is said, had been a civil administrator. Both were scholars and linguists, and the influence which they exercised upon the Slavs is incalculably great. In missions always it is the personal influence which is the most striking. But the time is needed as well as the man. So much we see again and again, however cursorily we study the evangelising work of this age.
In missions the ninth century carried out what the eighth neglected or was unable to accomplish. The {124} wars against the Finnish Bulgarians from 755 onwards brought the Church as well as the State into grave danger, or rather were defensive of each. [Sidenote: The conversion of the Bulgarians.] In the eighth century there were several isolated conversions, including a whole family of boïars from whom sprang the recluse, saint Joannicius; but there was no general movement. The Bulgarians remained enemies of Christianity and destroyers of all Roman civilisation: S. Theodore of the Studium declared that it was criminal sacrilege to exchange hostages with them. But gradually the geographical nearness brought closer connection; barbarians enlisted in the Roman armies; at last illustrious prisoners in Constantinople were the cause of light being brought to their own land. Boris, the Bulgarian king, obtained teachers from the New Rome, and applied also to Pope Nicolas I. (858-67) for instruction. In 864 the Bulgarians accepted the faith, and the contest for patriarchal rights over them was hotly pressed between Nicolas and Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (857-86). In the end, after receiving answers from the pope to 106 questions, and after being treated with too little consideration by Hadrian II. (867-72), Boris decided to accept an archbishop from Constantinople in 870, and ten bishoprics were founded.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Slavs.]
But the great work of Cyril and Methodius was not directly concerned with the Bulgarian conversion. In Pannonia and Moravia and Croatia they were the great missionaries to the Slavs. Cyril invented a Slavonic alphabet, and was able to preach to the Slavs everywhere in their own tongue; and in Serbia a flourishing Church sprang {125} up which retained the Slavonic rite. Early in the tenth century many Slavonian priests were ordained by the Bishop of Nona, himself a Slav by birth. But these districts were weakened by incessant strife, and their contests with the East were often fomented by the popes. Their Christianity was distinctly Byzantine; but they were never able to be a real strength to the emperor or the Orthodox Church.
[Sidenote: Poland.]
Poland, on the other hand, and later, received its Christianity from a Latin source. There may have been earlier Greek influences through the Slavonic Christians to the south-east; but it was not till 965 that the king, Mieczyslaw, was converted, when he married a Bohemian princess. He became a member of the Empire and the vassal of Otto I. The bishopric of Posen was founded in 968, and the gospel was preached by S. Adalbert, already Bishop of Prague. S. Adalbert, who for a short time held the see of Gnesen, passed on to preach to the heathen Prussians, by whom he was martyred in 997. Otto III. visited the Christian king in A.D. 1000, and gave him a relic, the lance of S. Maurice, still preserved at Cracow. The ecclesiastical organisation of the country was then consolidated; Gnesen was made the metropolitan see, and Polish and Pomeranian dioceses were placed under it. The Latin Church was dominant over Polish Christianity.
[Sidenote: The Prussians and S. Adalbert.]
But the pagan Prussians regarded S. Adalbert as a political emissary and a sorcerer who destroyed their crops, and killed him without hesitation; Bruno, whom Silvester II. sent to succeed him, perished within a year, and the attempt to Christianise the Prussians was {126} abandoned for nearly two centuries. Similar was the course of events among the Wends. It is not till the tenth century that we know anything of endeavours for their conversion, and then they were due to the all-embracing energy of Otto I. Henry I. had borne the royal arms in victory over the lands watered by the Elbe, the Oder, and the Saale; and now his successor began the establishment of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, under the see of Magdeburg. Boso, Bishop of Merseburg, set himself to learn and preach in the Slav tongue, but it seems that the German clergy who were introduced were unsuccessful as missionaries, and won the reputation of greedy political agitators. At the end of the tenth century a torrent of pagan fury swept over the land, destroyed the churches, and stamped the growing Christianity under foot.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Russia.]
The beginnings of Russian Christianity may possibly be found, as the patriarch Photius asserted, before the results of the defeat of the barbarians by John Zimisces. But it was not till nearly a century later that anything notable occurred. Olga, a "ruler of Russia," visited Constantinople in 957 and was baptized. Yet the Greek missionaries made but slow progress. It was not till Vladimir married the sister of the emperor Basil in 989, and restored the city of Cherson,—in which Cyril more than a century before had been a missionary,—where he was baptized, to the Empire, that the evangelisation of Russia really began. Vladimir deliberately chose the Greek in preference to the Roman form of Christianity, and acted, it would seem, with some semblance of national consent. The baptism of the people of {127} Kiev in the waters of the Dnyepr, as one flock, "some standing in the water up to their necks, others up to their breasts, holding their young children in their arms," was typical of the national acceptance of Christ. Everywhere churches and schools were built and the Slavonic Scriptures taught the people; at Kiev was built the Church of S. Sophia by Greek masons, in commemoration of the debt to the great Church of the New Rome. [Sidenote: S. Vladimir, 989.] Vladimir became the apostle of his people. The Church pressed forward eagerly, forward over the vast expanse covered by the Russian power, and, not without martyrdoms and tales of heroic adventure, won its way triumphantly to Russian hearts.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Czechs.]
The early days of Christianity in Moravia and Bohemia are wrapped in obscurity. In 801 Charles the Great endeavoured a forcible conversion of the former country, but with no more than transitory success. Yet in 836 a church was consecrated at Neutra by the Archbishop of Salzburg. A little later than this we hear of the beginnings of Christian faith among the Czechs. Early Bohemian history, when it emerges from an obscurity lighted by legend, is full of romantic incident. There are passages again and again in its records which for weirdness and ferocity remind us of a grim story of Meinhold's. Paganism lingered there with some of its ancient power, when it had perished, at least outwardly, in all neighbouring lands. In the eleventh century Bohemian heathens still went on pilgrimages to the temple at Arcona on the isle of Eugen, till the practice was stopped by Bretislav II. Still a beginning had been made. In {128} 845 fourteen Bohemian nobles, who had taken refuge at the court of Louis the German, were baptized at Regensburg; but the conversion of the country was to come from the East. Cyril and Methodius, sent by the emperor Michael III. from Constantinople, converted the Moravians, and from them the gospel was handed on to the Czechs. It was Methodius, on whom the pope had conferred the title of Archbishop of Moravia, who baptized the Bohemian prince Borivoj. For the history of Bohemian Christianity the earliest authority is Kristián, brother of Duke Boleslav II., inThe Life of S. Ludmilla and the Martyrdom of S. Wenceslas. [Sidenote: S. Wenceslas.] This is an extremely valuable book, not only as a biography—hagiological, like so much valuable early material for history, yet truthful—and as a record of manners in the tenth century, but as containing the account of the conversion of Moravia to Christianity, which shows that the conversion came first from the East, and the Church long retained a special connection with the Eastern peoples, Bulgarians and Greeks. The account of the murder of S. Wenceslas is of great interest as showing how close was the connection of religion with family and dynastic feuds. S. Ludmilla was murdered in 927 by the orders of her daughter-in-law, who remained a pagan; a year later,[1] her saintly grandson Wenceslas was slain by the men of his evil brother Boleslav. "Holy Wenceslas, who was soon to be a victim for the sake of Christ, rose early, wishing, according to his holy habit, to hurry to the church, that he might remain there for some time in solitary prayer before the congregation arrived; {129} and wishing as a good shepherd to hear matins together with his flock, and join in their song, he soon fell into the snares that had been laid," and it was outside the church that he was slain.
[Sidenote: Restoration of Christianity in Bohemia.]
It was not till the invasion of the country by the armies of Otto I. in 938 that Christianity was restored even to full toleration, and only when Otto came himself in 950 that it was secured. Boleslav II., the nephew of S. Wenceslas, was named the Pious; and Prague, in 973, was separated from Regensburg and became a bishopric. While among the Moravians the Slavonic rite introduced by Methodius was still largely used, in Bohemia the Roman rite was followed. Voytech (Adalbert), a Czech, was the second bishop, and to him, in spite of failures and difficulties, the conversion of Bohemia was largely due. He died a martyr (as we have said), while preaching to the heathen Prussians, and for a time darkness again settled over the history of the Czechs.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Danes]
Meanwhile the current of conversion had spread northwards. It was in 822 that Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, was sent to Denmark in consequence of a political embassy to Louis the Pious, emperor from 814 to 840. Harold, the Danish king, had asked aid. The emperor gave him also a Christian teacher; and in 826 the king and his wife were baptized. Other missionaries went northwards, but before long the Danes drove out both their king Harold and his teacher Ansgar. From Denmark, however, the mission spread to Sweden, and in 831 an archbishopric was established at Hamburg to direct all the northern {130} missions, and Ansgar was invested with the pallium by Pope Gregory IV. The missions had a chequered career. [Sidenote: and of Sweden.] Hamburg was seized and pillaged by the Northmen in 845, and the Swedish mission was for a time destroyed. In 849 a new revival took place, when Ansgar was given the see of Bremen in addition to that of Hamburg; and before long he won over the king of the Jutes and his people of Schleswig. In 853 Ansgar returned to Sweden, where he was favourably received by the king Olaf. The tale of his vast missionary labours, from which he was rightly called the "Apostle of the north," is told with spirit and feeling by Adam of Bremen, who wrote in the eleventh century, as well as by the biographer who commemorated him on his death. He not only preached, but he "redeemed captives, nourished those who were in tribulation, taught his household. As an apostle without, a monk within, he was never idle." When it was said that his prayers wrought miracles of healing, he said, "If I could but think myself worthy of such a favour from the Lord, I would pray Him to grant me but one miracle—that out of me, by His grace; He would make a good man." [Sidenote: S. Ansgar.] S. Ansgar is, in his work as in his training, a parallel to S. Boniface. Like him one of the finest fruits of monasticism, which first taught in solitude and then sent out to work actively in the world, he was brought up at Corbie. For nearly thirty-five years he laboured incessantly among the peoples of the north, and at the very end of his life he gallantly went among heathen chiefs to rebuke them for buying and selling slaves. He died in 865, and S. Rimbert, {131} his disciple and biographer, was his successor in his sees.
[Sidenote: Norway.]
Gradually, and in different ways, Christianity spread in the far north. Haakon, the son of Harold Haarfager of Norway, was sent to be foster-son to Aethelstan of England, who "had him baptized and brought up in the right faith," and he became a great king under the name of Haakon the Good. From England he brought over teachers, and he built churches; and then at last he addressed all the leaders of his people and besought them "all, young and old, rich and poor, women as well as men, that they should all allow themselves to be baptized, and should believe in one God, and in Christ the Son of Mary, and refrain from all sacrifices and heathen gods, and should keep holy the seventh day, and abstain from all work on it, and keep a fast on the seventh day." [2] But it was long before his people obeyed him. Rebellion and dynastic war followed in rapid succession; and he died of a wound from a chance arrow that struck him as he pursued his defeated foes. The first Christian king of Norway died in a land which was still heathen. But the seed was sown in the hearts of the men who had seen the brave, strong, chivalrous life of him who owned Christ for Lord.
[Sidenote: Olaf Trigvason.]
In Denmark the conversion begun in the ninth century was long delayed, and it was not till Otto I. conquered the Danes and sent Bishop Poppo who instructed King Harold and his army so that they were baptized, that the land {132} became definitely a Christian kingdom. From Denmark the gospel spread again to Norway; but it was not till near the end of the tenth century that Olaf Trigvason was baptized by a hermit on one of the Scilly Isles, and then in his short reign devoted himself to converting his people, often forcibly, as a choice between death and baptism. To Iceland and Greenland too Olaf sent missionaries. He died at last, like a true Wiking hero, in a sea fight; and it was not until the next century and the days of Olaf the Saint that the faith of Christ conquered the North.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Iceland.]
There seems no doubt that Christianity in Iceland began by missionary enterprise from Irish monks. From time to time anchorites sought refuge in thatultima Thule, "that they might pray to God in peace"; but whether they did any direct work of conversion is doubtful. The actual conversion came undoubtedly from Norway. A Christian queen lived in Iceland at the end of the ninth century, the wife of the Norse Olaf who was king in Dublin; but little if any impression was made on the heathenism of the people. Nearly a century later an Icelander called Thorwald Kothransson brought a Christian bishop Frederic from Saxony, who wrought some conversions and left a body of baptized Christians behind him. In the year 1000 came a priest Thormod and several chiefs back from the Norse court of Olaf, and in a meeting of the Althing—the great assembly of the people—preached to them the One God in Trinity. The whole people became Christian, and the few heathen {133} customs that still lingered, as it were by permission, after the great baptism, soon fell away like raindrops in the bright sun. Among the last news that came to Olaf Trigvason was that his distant people had fulfilled the wish of his heart.
[1] According to the chronicle of Kristián.
[2] The Saturday fast was still observed in many parts of Christendom.
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[Sidenote: The Lombards in Italy.]
The acceptance of Christianity and of Catholicism by the barbarian tribes which conquered Europe was a slow process. The conversion of the Lombards, for example, whom we have seen as Arians, sometimes tolerant, sometimes persecuting, was gradual. The Church always held its own, in faith though not in possessions, in Italy; and from the pontificate of Gregory the Great the moral force of the Catholic Society began to win the Lombards to its fold. It was proved again and again that heresy was not a unifying power. The Catholic Church held together its disciples in the Catholic creed. It is possible that Agilulf, the husband of the famous Catholic queen Theodelind, himself became a Catholic before he died. Paul the Deacon says that he "both held the Catholic faith and bestowed many possessions on the Church of Christ, and restored the bishops, who were in a depressed and abject condition, to the honour of their wonted dignity." Whatever may be the meaning of this, it certainly expresses the fact that before the middle of the seventh century the Lombards were passing almost insensibly into the Catholic fold, and Italy had practically become united in one faith though far from united in one government.
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[Sidenote: The Church in the Frankish kingdoms.]
With Germany it was different. As the Merwing kingdoms decayed, the Eastern one, Austrasia, with its capital, Metz, was but a poor bulwark against heathen tribes on its borders, which were yet, it might seem at times, little more barbarous than itself. The kingdom of Austrasia stretched eastwards from Rheims "spreading across the Rhine an unknown distance into Germany, claiming the allegiance of Thuringians, Alamanni and Bavarians, fitfully controlling the restless Saxons, touching with warlike weapons and sometimes vainly striving with the terrible Avars." [1] Kings of the Bavarian line came to rule in Northern Italy, but Bavaria was little touched by Christian faith. At last when the descendants of Arnulf[2] came as kings over a now again united Frankish monarchy, when Charles Martel made one power of Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, the time for a new advance seemed to have come. Theodelind, the Catholic queen of the Lombards, was herself of Bavarian birth, but a century after her time the people of her native land, it seems, were still heathen. They were apart from the Roman civilisation and the Catholic tradition: conversion, to touch them, must be a direct and aggressive movement.
At the end of the seventh century S. Rupert began the work. He settled his episcopal throne at Salzburg. He was followed by Emmeran, and by Corbinian. Slowly the work proceeded, hindered by violence on the part of dukes and saints, favoured by popes and making a beginning for Roman missionary interest in the distant borders of the Empire under the Germans.
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But it was not to these Frankish missionaries, or to Roman envoys, that the most important work was due. It was due to an outburst of converting zeal on the part of the newly converted race who had made Britain the land of the English.
[Sidenote: Saint Boniface.]
Of all the great missionaries of the eighth century perhaps the greatest was Winfrith of Crediton, an Englishman who became the father of German Christianity and the precursor of the great religious and intellectual movement of the days of Charles the Great. He followed the Northumbrian Willibrord who for twenty-six years had laboured in Frisia, and supported by the commission of Gregory II. he set forth in 719 to preach to the fierce heathens of Germany. He was instructed to use the Roman rite and to report to Rome any difficulties he might encounter. He began to labour in Thuringia, a land where Irish missionaries had already been at work, and where he recalled the Christians from evil ways into which they had lapsed. He passed on through Neustria and thence to Frisia, where for three years he "laboured much in Christ, converting not a few, destroying the heathen shrines and building Christian oratories," aiding the venerable Willibrord in the work he had so long carried on. But he felt the call to labour in lands as yet untouched, and so he determined to go to the Germans. As he passed up the Rhine he drew to him the boy Gregory afterwards famous as abbat of Utrecht, and at last he settled in the forests of Hessen and built a monastery at Amöneburg. From his old friends in England he received sound advice as to the treatment of heathen customs and the gentle methods of conversion which befit the gospel of {137} Christ. [Sidenote: His mission from Rome, 723.] From Rome he received affectionate support; and in 722 he was summoned to receive a new mission from the pope himself. On S. Andrew's Day, 723,[3] after a solemn profession of faith in the Holy Trinity and of obedience to the Roman See—the first ever taken by one outside the Roman patriarchate—he was consecrated bishop. He set out with letters from the pope to Christians of Thuringia and to the duke Charles. Charles Martel accepted the trust and gave to Winfrith (who had assumed the name of Boniface) the pledge of his protection. The missionary's first act on his return to Hessen was to destroy the ancient oak at Geismar, the object of devotion to the worshippers of the Germanic gods; and the act was followed by many conversions of those who saw that heathenism could not resent the attack upon its sacred things. Still there were difficulties. Those who had learned from the old Celtic mission were not ready to accept the Roman customs. Gregory II. wrote in 724, exhorting him to perseverance: "Let not threats alarm thee, nor terrors cast thee down, but stayed in confidence on God proclaim the word of truth." The work grew: monasteries and churches arose: many English helpers came over: the favour of Charles Martel was a protection. As the Benedictines opened out new lands, ploughed, built, studied, taught, religion and education spread before him. [Sidenote: Boniface archbishop, 732.] In 732 Boniface was made archbishop, received a pallium from Rome, and was encouraged by the new pope Gregory III. to organise the Church which he had founded and {138} to spread forth his arms into the land of the Bavarians. There Christianity had already made some way under Frankish missionaries: it needed organisation from the hand of a master. He "exercised himself diligently," says his biographer Willibald, "in preaching, and went round inspecting many churches." In 738 he paid his last visit to Rome, where he stayed nearly a year and was treated with extraordinary respect and affection. On his return he divided Bavaria into the four dioceses of Salzburg, Regensburg, Freising, and Passau, and later on he founded other sees also, including Würzburg. It was his next aim to do something to reform the lax morals of the Frankish Church, which had sunk to a low ebb under the Merwings. The Austrasian Synod, which bears in some respects a close resemblance to the almost contemporary English Synod of Clovesho (747), of 742 dealt boldly with these matters. Other councils followed in which Boniface took a leading part, and which made a striking reformation. [Sidenote: His missionary work and martyrdom.] His equally important work was to complete the conquest of the general spirit of Western Christendom, which looked to Rome for leadership, over the Celtic missionaries, noble missionaries and martyrs who yet lacked the instinct of cohesion and solidarity. A long series of letters, to the popes, to bishops, princes and persons of importance, shows the breadth of his interests and the nature of his activity. To "four peoples," he says, he had preached the gospel, the Hessians, Thuringians, Franks and Bavarians, not to all for the first time but as a reformer and one who removed heathen influences from the Church. As Archbishop of Mainz he was untiring even in advanced age: in politics as well as in {139} religion he was a leader of men. It was he who anointed Pippin at Soissons in 751 and thus gave the Church's sanction to the new Karling line. He determined to end his days as a missionary to the heathen. In 755 he went with a band of priests and monks once more to the wild Frisians, and at Dokkum by the northern sea he met his death at the hands of the heathen whom he came to win to Christ. The day, ever remembered, was June 5, 755.