The Christian Church in These Islands before the Coming of Augustine

It is clear, for example, that when Pelagius asserted the freedom of man’s will to turn to God, he denied the Catholic doctrine of original sin, and denying that, he denied so far the need for baptism. Indeed he taught directly, it was in fact the key of his position, that when man sinned he sinned after the example which Adam had set, not because he had received the taint of sin by his descent from Adam. When pressed on this question of the need of baptism, he allowed that there was the need, but he put it on a different basis from that which his opponents took. It was not necessary for salvation, he maintained; but for those who desired to reach the full Christian heaven, a state different from that of ordinary salvation, for them it was necessary. Entrance to that higher order of the heavenly life was not to be obtained without baptism. When pressed again, on the question of the need for the operation of the grace of God, he allowed that there was that need. But he explained that when he said God’s grace must be given in order that a man might turn to God, he meant that the man must be set in a position and under conditions and with surroundings which rendered it natural and likely that he should so turn. It seems clear, further, that the Pelagian view of the position and nature of man in respect to God is inconsistent with the doctrine of the Redemption wrought by Christ. That great sacrifice is rendered unnecessary, if the views of Pelagius are accepted. Men could, so to speak, turn to God and be saved without the Atonement. It is only fair to say that the extreme view on the opposite side seems to be equally inconsistent with this vital doctrine. If it be true that each man is predestined absolutely to life or to death, whether before the fall of Adam or as the immediate consequence of that fall, it would appear that not all the Atonement of Christ can add one single soul to them that shall be saved.

My object is to speak of Church History, not of doctrine. But this Pelagian question is the most important fact in the history of the British Church; and unless these few words were said to bring out the extreme gravity of the matter in dispute, the episode would not appear to fill the important place it does in fact fill.

With Pelagius himself we have but little to do. He spent his life far from his native shores; he propounded his views in Rome and Carthage and Palestine, not in London and York and Bangor. But the history of what happened to him and his views in those distant parts is so curious – if one may say so, so comical – and the evidence it affords of the importance of the controversy is so great, that I must say a little about it. We shall find in it, I think, an explanation of the course taken by the British Church.

At Rome Pelagius met Coelestius, a Scot – that is, a native of Ireland – and Coelestius became a devoted champion of his views, publishing them in a more definite form than Pelagius himself adopted. These views were condemned at a Council held at Carthage in 412. A Council at Jerusalem in 415 heard the explanations of Pelagius and did not condemn him. A Council at Lydda in the same year fully accepted his explanations, to the great wrath of Jerome. Carthage then took the matter up again, and requested that Pelagius should be summoned to return to Rome, and the whole matter be fully inquired into there, the controversy being one affecting the West and not the East. To enable the Bishop to form an opinion on the views of Pelagius, they sent him a copy of one of his books, with the worst passages marked. Innocent, the Bishop of Rome, gladly received this request, treating it as a request for his authoritative verdict, which it was not. He replied in three letters dated January 27, 417. He began each with a strong assertion of the supreme authority of his see, and many expressions of his satisfaction that the controversy had been referred to him for final decision. The Bishop was clearly not to the manner born. These were not the sayings of unconscious dignity, of unquestionable authority. He did protest too much. The book of Pelagius forwarded to him he pronounced unhesitatingly to be blasphemous and dangerous; and he gave his judgement that Pelagius, Coelestius, and all abettors of their views, ought to be excommunicated.

Nothing could be more clear. But, unfortunately for the consistency of official infallibility, Innocent died six weeks after writing these letters, and Zosimus succeeded him. Coelestius and Pelagius between them were too much for Zosimus. Coelestius came to Rome. He argued with Zosimus that the points in dispute lay outside the limits of necessary articles of faith, and declared his adherence to the Catholic faith in all points. Pelagius did not come, but he wrote to Zosimus. Zosimus declared the letter and creed of Pelagius to be thoroughly Catholic, and free from all ambiguity; and the Pelagians to be men of unimpeachable faith, who had been wrongly defamed. Augustine appears to imply that in his opinion Zosimus had allowed himself to be deceived by the specious and subtle admissions of the heretics.

Zosimus did not rest satisfied with that. He wrote to the African bishops, vehemently upbraiding them with their readiness to condemn, and declaring that Pelagius and his followers had never really been estranged from Catholic truth. Far from accepting his decision or his rebukes, the Africans, who enjoyed a successful tussle with a Pope, sent a subdeacon with a long reply. Zosimus, in acknowledging their letter, wrote in extravagant terms of the dignity of his own position as the supreme judge of religious appeals, and, quaintly enough, hinted at the possibility of reconsidering his decision. The Africans did not wait. They met in synod, 214 bishops or more, and passed nine canons, anathematizing the Pelagian views. The Emperors Honorius and Theodosius banished Pelagius and Coelestius from Rome. What was Pope Zosimus to do, under these singularly trying circumstances? These men, thus banished from Rome, he had declared to be men of unimpeachable faith, wrongly defamed, never estranged from Catholic truth. He dealt with the matter in this way. He wrote a circular letter, declaring that the Popes inherit from St. Peter a divine authority equal to that of St. Peter, derived from the power which our Lord bestowed on him; so that no one can question the Pope’s decision. He then proceeded to censure, as contrary to the Catholic faith, the tenets of Pelagius and Coelestius, specially censuring some of Pelagius’s comments on St. Paul which had been laid before him since his former decision. He ordered all bishops, in the churches acknowledging his authority, to subscribe to the terms of his letter on pain of deprivation. In Italy itself, Rome’s own Italy, eighteen bishops protested against this change of front, and were deprived of their sees under the authority of the civil power.

Of course all men, however exalted their position, are liable to these sudden changes, whether pressed by external circumstances or impelled by inward conviction. And men who have themselves known what it is to be tried in any such way, on however humble a scale, are inclined rather to feel with them than sharply to condemn them; especially when, as in this case, their second thoughts are best. But if they are to be treated thus, with kindly judgement not unmixed with sympathy, they must not herald their change of view with statements that they have a divine authority, equal to that of St. Peter, and that no one can question their contradictory decisions.

To come nearer home after this long digression, which yet is not really a digression from the British point of view. The views of Pelagius had considerable success in Gaul, and gave a good deal of trouble there. In Britain their success was alarmingly great. The bishops and clergy were unable to make head against the wave of heresy. Whether there was anything, in the independence of the position claimed by Pelagius for man, which specially appealed to the nature of the Britons and their Celtic congeners; anything in the claim of each individual to be good enough in himself, if he pleases to be good enough; which harmonised with the opinion those races had – dare I say have? – of themselves; these are questions to which I cannot venture to give an answer. There the fact remains, that Pelagianism did appeal very strongly to the temperament of those who then dwelt in our land. And coupled with this is the fact, that, however orthodox the clergy and bishops might be, and however well versed in the great controversy in which in the previous century they had played their part, the subtleties of this new controversy, initiated as it was by one of their own or kindred race, springing up from their own nature and appealing to the nature of their people, were too much for them – as indeed they had been for Pope Zosimus. Agricola was the name of the man who acted as the apostle of the Pelagians in the home regions, the son, we are told, of a bishop of Pelagian views.

What our predecessors may have lacked in subtlety, they more than made up in practical common sense. If they could not grapple with the heresy themselves, they sent for those who could. They applied to their nearest ecclesiastical neighbour, the Church of Gaul, to which no doubt they looked partly as their mother and partly as their elder sister. The account of their application and the response it met with comes to us from a life of Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, the person chiefly concerned, written by special request forty years after his death by an eminent person, and published on the request of the then Bishop of Auxerre. When the application reached the heads of the Gallican Church, a numerous synod was called together, and Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, Bishop of Troyes, were appointed to visit Britain. The manner of treating the heresy had been forced upon the attention of the Gallican prelates by their own experiences. At that very time semi-Pelagianism was rife in the south of Gaul, about Marseilles, and it continued in force there for a long time, another fellow-countryman of ours, Faustus the Briton, imbuing even the famous monastery of Lérins with this modified form of the heresy. To concert measures for dealing with the south of Gaul, Prosper of Aquitaine, a monk and probably a layman, afterwards secretary to Pope Leo the Great, went to Rome about two years after this to consult the Pope, and from Celestine he no doubt heard what he repeated or embellished twenty-five years later. He tells us that the Pope took pains to keep the “Roman island” Catholic, referring of course to the long occupation of Britain by the Roman troops, at this time abandoned. In another passage, whose genuineness has been questioned, Prosper says that Celestine sent Germanus in his own stead to Britain. Prosper was certainly in a position to receive from the best-informed source an account of what was done; but the Gallican Church appears to have known nothing of this sending of Germanus by Celestine. Prosper’s inclination to magnify the importance of the Popes has been referred to already²⁹; and we may take it as certain that if such an unparalleled step as going himself or sending some one in his stead, a forecast of Gregory’s action, had been attempted or taken by the Pope, we should have heard of it in the records of Gaul or in the life of Germanus. The successor of Germanus would have known of it. That Celestine had known at the time what was going on, and that he felt and probably expressed warm approval, we may regard as certain too. I must defer, to an opportunity in my third lecture, remarks which I wish to make on what may seem an ungenerous questioning of these assertions of benefits conferred by Rome.

In 429, then, the Gallican prelates came to Britain. They had a very rough crossing, and a story, rejected with scorn by quite modern writers, is told of a miracle wrought by Germanus. He stilled the storm by pouring oil upon the sea in the name of the Trinity. We now know that if they had oil on board, and knew how to use it, the stilling of the waves was done; without miracle, but with not the less earnest trust in the watchful care of God³⁰.

It was on this journey to Britain that Germanus and Lupus saw at Nanterre a little girl aged seven, and prophesied great things of her. Her name was Genofeva, and she became the famous Ste. Geneviève. In these days when people coquet with the principles of revolution and shut their eyes to its realities, it may be well to add that her coffin of silver and gold was sold in 1793, and her body burned on the Place de Grève, by public decree.

When they got to work in Britain, they proceeded on a definite plan. Some sixty or seventy years before, Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers, dealing in Gaul with the great heresy which preceded this, had found it of great service to go about from place to place and collect in different parts small assemblies of the bishops, for free discussion and mutual explanation. He found that misunderstandings were in this way, better than in any other, got rid of, and differences of opinion were reduced to a minimum. Germanus and Lupus dealt with the people of Britain as their predecessor had dealt with the bishops of Gaul. They went all over, discussing the great question with the people whom they found. They preached in the churches, they addressed the people on the highroads, they sought for them in the fields, and followed them up bypaths. It is clear that the visitors from Gaul could speak to the people, both in town and in country, in their own tongue, or in a tongue well understood by them. No doubt the native speech of Gaul and that of Britain were still so closely akin that no serious difficulty was felt in this respect. They met with success so great that the leaders on the other side were forced to take action. They felt, so the biographer tells us, not that his is likely to be convincing evidence as to their feelings, that they must run the risk of defeat rather than seem by silence to give up the cause. They undertook to dispute with the Gallicans in public. The biographer is not an impartial chronicler. The Pelagians came to the disputation with many outward signs of pomp and wealth, richly dressed, and attended by a crowd of supporters. Why should the biographer thus indicate that the Pelagian heresy was specially rife among great and wealthy and popular people? Perhaps it may be the case, that, with imperfectly civilised people, a position of wealth and distinction tends to make men less humble in their view of the need of the grace of God. Besides the principals, we are told that immense numbers of people came to hear the dispute, bringing with them their wives and children; coming, in the important phrase of the biographer, to play the part of spectator and judge. That is the first note we have of the function of the laity in religious disputes in this land of ours. It is a pregnant hint. The disputants were now face to face. On one side divine authority, on the other human presumption; on one side faith, on the other perfidy; on one side Christ, on the other Pelagius. The description is Constantius’s, not mine. The bishops set the Pelagians to begin, and a weary business the Pelagians made of it. Then their turn came. They poured forth torrents of eloquence, apostolical and evangelical thunders. They quoted the scriptures. The opponents had nothing to say. The people, to whose arbitration it was put, scarce could keep their hands off them; the decision was given by acclamation, against the Pelagians.

Where did this take place? Certainly not far from Verulam, for Constantius goes on to say that the bishops hastened to the shrine of St. Alban, which at the request of Germanus was opened, that he might deposit there some relics which he had brought with him. He took away, in exchange, some earth from the actual spot of the martyrdom. Presumably the disputation took place somewhere near London, on the road to St. Albans; perhaps at Verulam itself.

The British Church was thus saved from enemies within; but enemies without soon had it by the throat. There were no Roman troops to guard the northern wall, to guard the Saxon shore. The Roman troops had gone, and with them the flower of the British youth³¹. From north and east the barbarians poured in upon the Britons, pell mell. Gildas, crying bitter tears, and using bitter ink, in his Welsh monastery, tells us of the weakness and the follies of the British and their kings, of the cruelties of the barbarous folk. We see in his pages the smoke of burned churches, the blood of murdered Christians. Matthew of Westminster tells us that the churches that were burned had the happier fate. In thirty cases churches were saved and made into heathen temples, the altars polluted with pagan sacrifice. But the Saxons and Angles made way so slowly that it is certain they met with a much sturdier opposition than Gildas credits his countrymen with. Strive as they would, however, and did, the Britons gradually gave way. Thus, and thus only, can we fill the dreary void in British history, which we know as the first hundred and fifty years of the Making of England.

This brings us very near to the end of our period. Not of our subject; for in my concluding lecture I have to deal – with sad scantness – with the Christian Church in other parts of these islands, before and at the coming of Augustine.

In the twenty years immediately preceding the arrival of Augustine, the long line of British Bishops of London came to an end. It has been a subject of remark, and of moralising, that Theonus, the last bishop, lost heart and fled just when the chance was coming for which it is presumed that he had been waiting, the actual beginning of the conversion of the English. But remarks of this character are misplaced; they disregard – or are ignorant of – the political facts of the time. Theonus of London was a British bishop in a British city. London had not fallen. Most difficult of access in the then state of land and water, of marsh and mud, whether from north or south or east or west, it held out to the last. The earliest date that can be assigned to its fall is about the year 568, and a date so early as that is only given to account for Ethelbert’s being able to take his army from Kent to Wimbledon without interruption from London. But for that, and there may be other explanations of it, it is quite possible to put the taking of London by the East Saxons a few years later. But it is not necessary for our purpose. The date of the flight of Theonus has been said to be 586. It is probable that this is about the date of Ethelbert’s vigorous action northwards, by which he made himself over-lord of his East Saxon neighbours and of London their most recent conquest, which they appear not to have occupied for some years after its fall. The political and administrative changes, due to this expansion of the power of Kent, may well have made ruined London no longer a possible place of residence, and of work, for a Christian Briton so prominent in position and office as the Bishop of London must always have been. It seems probable that Matthew of Westminster was not far wrong when he wrote that in 586 Theonus took with him the relics of the saints, and such of the ordained clergy as had survived the perils, and retired to Wales. Others, he says, fled further, to the continental Britain. Thadioc of York, he adds, went at the same time. In some parts, as for instance about Glastonbury, the British Christians remained undisturbed by the English for sixty or seventy years longer³².

A year or two ago, when we set up the list of Bishops of London in the south aisle here, there was at first an inclination in some quarters to criticise the decision at which we arrived as to the bishops of the British period. But the explanations kindly given by those who approved our action soon put a stop to that. There is a list of Archbishops of London before Augustine’s time, beginning about the year 180 and ending with Theonus, whose date may be put about 580. In those four centuries, sixteen names are given, a number clearly insufficient for 400 years. The names are specially insufficient in the later part of the time, only four being given between 314 and 580. This is rather in favour of the four names being real; for it is evident that if people were inventing names, they might as well have invented twenty, while they were about it, instead of only four, for 260 years³³.

The traditions of York do not supply any long list of bishops, continuous or not. Eborius, at Arles in 314, is the first named. And there are only three others, each of whom has a date with Matthew of Westminster, Sampson 507, Piran 522, Thadioc 586. York probably fell as early as the date assigned to Sampson; who, by the way, was created Archbishop of York by the forgers of the twelfth century, to back up an ecclesiastical claim on the continent.

The decision at which we arrived in respect of the London list was to give one name only, that of Restitutus, putting a row of dots above him and below him, to shew that there were British bishops before him, probably very few, and British bishops after him, certainly many. Restitutus signed the decrees of the Council of Arles, as Bishop of London, in the year 314. That is sure ground; and in a list of bishops, set up officially in the Cathedral Church, nothing less solid than sure ground should be taken.

As to the British Bishops of London being styled archbishops, there is no evidence for it. Our famous Dean Ralph (a. d. 1181), no mean historian, left on record his view that there were three archbishoprics³⁴ in Britain – London, York, and Caerleon – which last, he said, corresponded to St. David’s. Whether Gregory had some information that has since been lost, respecting the ecclesiastical arrangements which had existed here, we cannot say; but it is a curious coincidence, explicable perhaps by the mere importance of the two places, that he directed Augustine to make arrangements for a metropolitan at London, with twelve suffragans, and a metropolitan at York with twelve suffragans. The complete arrangements, as set out by Gregory when he sent an additional supply of missionaries to Augustine, of whom Mellitus was one, were as follows. Augustine was told to ordain in various places twelve bishops, to be subject to his control, so that London should for the future be a metropolitan see; and it appears that Gregory contemplated Augustine’s occupying as a matter of course the position of Bishop of London³⁵. He was to ordain and send to York a suitable bishop, who should in like manner ordain twelve bishops and become the metropolitan. The northern metropolitan was to be under Augustine’s jurisdiction; but after Augustine’s death he was to be independent of London, and for the future the metropolitan who was senior in consecration was to have precedence³⁶. This takes no account of the bishops existing in what we call Wales and Cornwall. Gregory specially declared that those bishops, then at least seven in number, were subject to Augustine. It is impossible that these seven were to be included among the twelve suffragans of London, for with Rochester and Canterbury that would leave only three bishops for the whole of the rest of the south of England. That the tradition of British times, and a part of the scheme actually laid down by Gregory, should be carried out in our time, would be I think an excellent thing. An Archbishop of London, with some half-dozen suffragans, with dioceses and diocesan rank, in districts of this great wilderness of houses, would be a solution of some very difficult problems.

There were two names in the traditional list which it was thought we might at least have included along with Restitutus. One was that of the last on the list, Theonus. But the evidence for him, though quite sufficient for ordinary purposes, was not of the highest order. The other was that of Fastidius, the last but two on the list. His date – for he was a real and well-known man – was much earlier than that position would indicate, for he was described, among illustrious men, by a writer who lived a full century before Theonus, the last on the list. This writer, Gennadius of Marseilles, informs us that Fastidius was a British bishop. One important manuscript has, in place of this, “Fastidius a Briton,” as if his being a bishop was not certain. In any case there is nothing to connect him with the bishopric of London, or with London, beyond the natural assignment to the most important position of a man not specially assigned by the earliest historian. His date is probably about 430 to 450.

This Fastidius is the only writer of the British Church, besides Pelagius if we can properly reckon him as one, whose work has come down to us. I do not know that the early British Christians produced any writers other than Fastidius and Pelagius. Had their records not been destroyed, it might well have been that many a manuscript work of British bishops would have remained till the middle ages and been now in print. Fastidius and Gildas are sufficient evidence of the literary tendencies of the British mind. Indeed, we may credit the Britons of the time of Gildas with having been laborious students, those, at least, who were settled in Wales. Their Celtic cousins had a passion for writing.

We find Gennadius of Marseilles testifying to the soundness of the doctrine of Fastidius, and its worthiness of God. But who shall testify to the soundness of Gennadius? He was a semi-Pelagian; and so it appears was Fastidius, for whose soundness he vouches. Fastidius distinctly quotes from Pelagius, though without mentioning him by name. He uses the phrase which is the keynote of Pelagianism, man sinned “after the example of Adam;” and he describes the manner in which saints should pray, in words which cannot be independent of Pelagius’s words on that subject.

Apart from their heretical tendency, the works or work of Fastidius may be taken as containing excellent teaching. He naturally presses most the practical side, the necessity of a good life. “Our Lord said,” he shrewdly reminds the reader, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments; He did not say keep faith only. For if faith is all that is required, it is too much to say that the commandments must be kept. Far be it from me to suppose, that my Lord said too much on any point.” One interesting allusion to the state of the country in his time, the Christian settlements here and there in the midst of a heathen population, it may be the Romano-Briton among the unmixed Britons, occurs in a passage full of practical teaching: – “It is the will of God that His people should be holy, and free from all stain of unrighteousness; so righteous, so merciful, so pure, so unspotted from the world, so single-hearted, that the heathen should find in them no fault, but should say in wonder, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, and the people whom He hath chosen for His own inheritance.”