The Conversion of Europe

It has not always been discordant. As a young man Augustine enjoyed a brilliant career as an academic in Milan. (He was living in Milan when he heard the story of the encounter at Trier quoted above.) At that date Milan was the political and intellectual capital of the western half of the empire. Its bishop, the great St Ambrose (d. 397), was the most prominent western advocate of the views of Eusebius (though not without some qualifications). Ambrose exerted considerable influence on Augustine, who was attracted to the Eusebian perspective. Significantly, it was only when Augustine abandoned this glossy metropolitan life in 395 and returned to his native Africa to become a small-town bishop – living in obedience to a monastic rule with his diocesan clergy – that misgivings began to arise in his mind. But they were not formulated in any coherent fashion until he composed the work for which he is most famous, De Civitate Dei (The City of God), between 413 and 425. This is a book so big, so complex, so alive, so rich in ideas, so brimming with passion, that it is difficult to summarize it in any manner which does it justice. It is commonly said that the work was occasioned by the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410: an attempt to answer the pagans who claimed that Rome had been sacked in punishment for her abandonment of the gods who had always previously protected her. But Augustine’s book was intended, or at any rate turned out to be, a great deal more than this. In its final form it was an extended meditation on the meaning of history, on the place of man and society and the state in the divine scheme of things, and on the nature of the Christian community within the world. In the course of it Augustine came out with views sharply at variance with the Eusebian accommodation.

For our purposes the most important point about Augustine’s social thought is that he detached the state – any state, but in particular, of course, the Roman state – from the Christian community. Under his hands the Roman empire became theologically neutral, drained of the positive moral charge with which Eusebius had invested it. For Augustine the empire was just one set of political arrangements among many. It was necessary for the purpose of ensuring certain limited ends such as the maintenance of peace and order, the administration of human justice or defence against aggression from outside its frontiers: necessary, but in no sense special or privileged. This was to strike at the root of the Eusebian position. The empire was not part of a divine providential scheme; not the vehicle for the furtherance of God’s purposes. Its emperor was not messianic, not quasi-divine; he no longer walked with God. Its institutions were ordinary institutions, human, fallible, random, limited and messy. Its history was not the unfolding of a plan for the harmonious ordering of the world under a God-directed emperor, but instead a squalid tale of lust for domination, of war and suffering, of oppression and corruption. Worldly empires would blow away like smoke; and, as Augustine dismissively observed, ‘smoke has no weight’.

Over against this earthly polity is set the city of God: that is, the community of Christians whose city is not of this world, who indeed are aliens (peregrini) in this terrestrial world. Such notions were not new. There was a rich Judaic literature of exile which was developed by early Christian writers. It was Paul who wrote to the Corinthians of ‘an house not made with hands’. The anonymous author of the Epistle to Diognetus, writing in about 200 and echoing another Pauline passage, had observed that Christians ‘spend their existence upon earth, but their citizenship is in heaven’.8 There were also influences at work from outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Neoplatonic philosophers who strongly influenced the young Augustine had written persuasively of the soul imprisoned in the body, trapped in the flesh, from which it strives to break free. What Augustine did was to express these ideas of exile and alienation with passion and force. To one word in particular he imparted a special resonance: peregrinus. ‘And so long as he is in this mortal body, he is a peregrinus in a foreign land,’ he wrote in Book 19 of De Civitate Dei, echoing II Corinthians v.6. It was a technical term in Roman law: to be a peregrinus meant to be a resident alien, a stranger, a person without kin, friends, sureties, patrons. It was also a word with further connotations within the Judaeo-Christian scriptural tradition. Exile or deprivation were often associated with sin and punishment, but sometimes also with a sense of divinely allotted destiny. Jacob fled into exile because of murderous conflict between kinsmen; his destiny was to inherit the land of his exile or pilgrimage (peregrinationis) and through him were all peoples of the earth to be blessed (Genesis xxviii). So a pilgrim could also be a harbinger, like John the Baptist. Augustine seized upon the possibilities latent in this everyday word. Here was an exacting standard for the Christian. He must become a peregrinus, an exile or pilgrim, make of his life a peregrinatio, a pilgrimage, cutting loose like a monk from the worldly ties that bind and accepting instead the liberating society and disciplines of the city of God: ‘The Heavenly City, while on its earthly pilgrimage, calls forth its citizens from every nation and assembles a multilingual band of pilgrims; not caring about any diversity in the customs, laws and institutions whereby they severally make provision for the achievement and maintenance of earthly peace.’9

Here then is Augustine’s vision of a Christian community not confined to the Roman empire. Other strands of his reading and reflection were woven into it. In common with other Christians of his day Augustine was convinced that the end of the world was near. But before this could happen there had to be a universal preaching of Christianity. ‘This gospel of the Kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the earth as a testimony to all nations: and then the end will come.’ Augustine was forced to elucidate this apocalyptic passage in Matthew’s gospel (Matt. xxiv.14) at the very time that he was working on De Civitate Dei. Prompted by an earthquake on 19 July 418 Bishop Hesychius of Salona (Split) consulted Augustine about Daniel’s prophecies of the end of the world. In his reply Augustine made reference to Matthew’s passage on the in-gathering of the nations which must precede the end and to other biblical passages of similar purport. But Hesychius, evidently a persistent man, was not satisfied and wanted more. He got it. Augustine, never one to skimp where doctrinal exposition was concerned, replied in a long letter divided into no less than fifty-four chapters. This second letter circulated widely as a separate pamphlet under the title De Fine Saeculi (On the End of the World). Hesychius had evidently claimed that the gospel had already been preached to all nations. Not so, argued Augustine, ‘for there are among us, that is in Africa, innumerable barbarian tribes among whom the gospel has not yet been preached … yet it cannot rightly be said that the promise of God does not concern them’ because ‘the Lord did not promise the Romans but all nations to the seed of Abraham’. He went on to elucidate ‘the prophecy made of Christ under the figure of Solomon, “He shall rule from sea to sea” (Psalm lxxii.8)’. This must mean ‘the whole earth with all its inhabitants, because the universe is surrounded by the Ocean sea’. All nations, therefore, ‘as many as God has made’ are to adore the Lord and call upon him.10 But – and here Augustine turned to Paul’s words in Romans x.14–15 – ‘How shall they call upon Him in whom they have not believed? How shall they believe Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they be sent?’ Augustine did not follow the logic of the argument to its conclusions: therefore we must send out missionary preachers. But we can see how a combination of influences – the African intellectual tradition, apocalyptic speculations, episcopal responsibilities, ideals of pilgrimage and renunciation – brought him to the brink of that conclusion.

Another who was brought to that brink was Augustine’s younger contemporary Prosper of Aquitaine. Usually remembered mainly as the writer of a chronicle which is an important source for fifth-century history – we shall meet it in Chapter 3 – Prosper was also the author of works of theological controversy. One of these was called De Vocatione Omnium Gentium (On the Calling of All Nations) and it was composed at Rome in about 440. Prosper’s De Vocatione has been called ‘the first work in Christian literature to be concerned with the salvation of infidels’.11 Salvation, yes; but not quite their evangelization.

Prosper starts from the proposition that God wishes all men to be saved. However, by His inscrutable judgement some peoples receive the faith later than others. He considers, but rejects, the Eusebian position: ‘Christian grace was not content to have the same frontiers as Rome and has already subjected many peoples to the sceptre of Christ’s cross whom Rome did not conquer with arms.’12 Christian grace: this lay at the doctrinal heart of Prosper’s concerns. He was an extreme follower of Augustine’s teachings on grace. These had been developed in opposition to the doctrines on free will taught in Italy and subsequently Palestine by the British-born philosopher Pelagius, doctrines which caused a great stir in the church and were eventually declared heretical in 418. Prosper’s general position was that it was for divine grace alone to bring about conversion. One suspects that he would have sympathized with the Baptist ministers who rebuked William Carey in 1786. Like Augustine, Prosper hesitated. If grace is omnipotent, irresistible, omnipresent and inscrutable, then might it not be that for humans to choose to undertake missionary preaching was presumptuously to interfere with its workings? Prosper never asserted this in so many words, but one can sense the thought lurking there unformulated.

Perhaps, in the last resort, western theologians like Augustine and Prosper could never quite forget that they were Romans. They might have had their doubts – indeed, we know that they did have their doubts – about the moral tradition which had corralled Christianity safely inside the city walls of the empire; but it was hard to break with the cultural habits of a millennium. It takes an outsider to think the unthinkable. However, what had still been unthinkable in the age of Augustine and Prosper had become absolutely thinkable by the time that Paulinus encountered Edwin two centuries later. What had happened in between to bring this about?

CHAPTER TWO

The Challenge of the Countryside

‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, ‘The Copper Beeches’,

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

AT ONE POINT in the course of Origen’s celebrated work Contra Celsum, in the context of claims for the extent of Christian evangelization, the author boasted that Christians ‘have done the work of going round not only the cities but even villages and country cottages to make others also pious towards God’. This was certainly an exaggeration. In Origen’s day Christianity was still a preponderantly urban faith. What is interesting, however, is that the claim should have been made at all, that it should have seemed to the writer an apposite claim to make in the course of polemic. It is even more interesting that the earliest name associated with the conduct of rural mission within the Roman empire should have been a pupil of Origen. This was Gregory of Pontus, familiarly known as Gregory Thaumaturgus, Gregory ‘the Wonder-worker’.

The bare facts of Gregory’s career may be summarized as follows. He was born in about 210 into a prominent family of the province of Pontus Polemoniacus, roughly speaking the northern parts of central Asia Minor, modern Turkey, bordering on the Black Sea. Pontus was a quiet, undistinguished region. It was off the beaten track, a province whose towns were small, whose concerns were local and agricultural. It was modestly prosperous in the way that places are where nothing much happens to disturb the even tenor of life. Gregory belonged by birth to one of those provincial elites on whose local services and loyalties the empire depended for its smooth functioning. As a young man he was sent off to study at the famous law schools of Berytus (Beirut): a distinguished career in law or rhetoric or the civil service seemed to be in prospect. But his life took a different and unexpected turn. Gregory met Origen, who was then at the height of his fame as a teacher and scholar and who had attracted a talented band of pupils round him at Caesarea in Palestine. Gregory stayed with Origen for five years and then returned to Pontus; this would have been, as we may suppose, round about the year 240. On his return home he became bishop of the Christian community in his home town of Neocaesarea, the capital of the province, which office he exercised for the remainder of his life. He and his congregations survived the persecutions of the reign of the Emperor Decius (249–51) and weathered the disruptions of barbarian raids in the mid-250s. Under Gregory’s leadership the Christian community of Pontus grew, though at what rate or by how much we cannot tell.1 He died in about 270.

These bare facts are just about all that we know. Gregory has left us a body of writings which tell us something about him. His farewell address of thanks to his master Origen has survived, from which we can learn something of both his intellectual development and a great teacher’s methods. A paraphrase of the book of Ecclesiastes bears witness to his biblical studies. A document known as the Canonical Letter sheds a little light on his pastoral activities as bishop. In addition to Gregory’s own writings we have a short oration or sermon in commemoration of him composed about a century after his death by his namesake Gregory of Nyssa. It has often been remarked that the oration contains little if any reliable information about the historical Gregory of Pontus. It is a collection of hagiographical commonplaces. Indeed: but the judgement needs two qualifications. First, traditions of Gregory had been handed down by word of mouth. Gregory of Nyssa’s own older brother, Basil of Cappadocia, had as a small boy learned wise sayings attributed to Gregory of Pontus at the knees of his grandmother Macrina. Oral traditions may be garbled, adapted, misunderstood, misapplied, but they will generally preserve something of the person who uttered them or to whom they refer. Second, the Christianization of Pontus was still incomplete when Gregory of Nyssa was writing. The stories he reports show what his late-fourth-century audience was ready to believe about the earlier Gregory, about the process he initiated which was still visibly and audibly going on round about them. The stories had to be plausible not just in terms of their expectations of a wonder-worker but also in terms of their expectations of everyday life: and it is not for us to be surprised if these categories of expectation prove to overlap. Carefully handled, the legends of Gregory Thaumaturgus may have something to tell us – just something – about what he set in motion in Pontus.

Gregory of Nyssa claimed that when Gregory became bishop of Neocaesarea there were only seventeen Christians in the diocese but that by the time of his death there were only seventeen pagans. This is demonstrably an exaggeration. It can be shown that pagan observance was lively in Pontus both before and after Gregory’s day. It has even been said that it is ‘misguided and anachronistic’ to cast Gregory for the role of rural missionary.2 Our reaction to such a judgement will depend a little on the images and expectations prompted by the phrase ‘rural missionary’. Pontus was a backwoods sort of place. Gregory felt affection for his native province, but even he must have been ready to concede that after the sophisticated urban culture of Beirut and Caesarea, in returning to Pontus he was retreating to a country backwater. (The Christian idealist who exchanged a promising ‘metropolitan’ secular career for a provincial ecclesiastical one is a recurrent figure of the late Roman period: Gregory is an early, Augustine the best-known example.) Because Pontus was the sort of place that it was, because urban and rural society overlapped and interpenetrated there, a bishop who made his presence and his power felt would be making an impression upon his rural as well as upon his urban constituency. It is in this sense that we may call Gregory a rural missionary.

Gregory saw visions. He was commanded to accept the bishopric of Neocaesarea by St John and St Mary – the earliest recorded vision of the Blessed Virgin in Christian history – who recited to him the creed which he should profess. According to Gregory of Nyssa, this credal statement was preserved in the cathedral of Neocaesarea in an autograph copy: ‘the very letters inscribed by his own blessed hand’. The cathedral itself had been built by Gregory. It was a new landmark among the city’s public buildings, and one moreover which did not suffer in an earthquake the damage experienced by secular buildings. Already one may detect some elements of what may have been going on. Gregory enjoyed direct access to the divine; a relic of his, a document from his hand, is venerated; God’s house built by him is miraculously preserved. A bishop such as this will command authority and prestige.

Then there were his wonders. Two brothers were quarrelling over the ownership of a lake. Their enmity had gone so far that they were preparing to arm their peasants and fight it out together. Gregory appeared on the scene as a mediator. At a twitch of his cloak the lake dried up and disappeared for ever. On another occasion the river Lycus was flooding and threatening damage. Gregory planted his staff on its bank to mark the limit beyond which the waters must not pass and the waters (of course) obeyed him. The staff grew into a tree which was still being pointed out to people a century later when Gregory of Nyssa recorded the story. Well, it’s not difficult to see how that story arose. But such a comment as this misses what would have been the point of the tale for those who told it to Gregory of Nyssa or heard it from him. God acted through Gregory to work wonders which healed human divisions and tamed the forces of nature. Demonstrations of supernatural powers – frequently in competition with non-Christian claimants to possess such powers – will meet us again and again. Almost invariably we are told that they led to conversions. What that might have meant is another matter.

Finally there was Gregory’s public role as bishop. He built a new cathedral, as we have seen. He interceded for his flock during an outbreak of plague, did what he could to shield them during the Decian persecution. In troubled times he was a force for order and stability. His Canonical Letter, to which we shall return in Chapter 3, shows him grasping at scriptural precept to assist in sorting out the harrowing human consequences of barbarian attack. This enlargement of a bishop’s responsibilities was to have a long and fruitful future.

Why did efforts to convert the country-dwellers begin, in however patchy and hesitant a fashion, in the course of the third century? It is a question which has never satisfactorily been answered. It may be that the trend towards near-identification of Romanitas with Christianitas, of empire with Christendom, rendered it desirable, even necessary, for all Romans to become Christians. ‘All Romans’ would mean all Roman citizens, a group which had been vastly enlarged by the so-called Constitutio Antoniana of the year 212, by which the government of the Emperor Caracalla extended the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship to all free men. (There were, of course, enormous numbers of country-dwellers who were not free.) Another factor, less nebulous and offering at least the possibility of investigation, might have been the changing social composition of the bishops who ruled the churches. Historians are agreed that the third century was marked by a steady if obscure growth in Christian numbers. Numerical increase was matched by increase in respectability. It would be possible to compile a list – granted, not a long list – of third-century Christians of some not inconsiderable social standing. Gregory the Wonder-worker is a good example. Persons of such rank and wealth who became bishops might be expected to be solicitous for the spiritual well-being of the peasantry on their estates, apprehensive of their vulnerability to demonic attack, despite the entrenched attitudes alluded to in the preceding chapter; and their example might be the more infectious to others who shared their status. What were the peasantry of the feuding brothers of Pontus encouraged to think when they were told to put their weapons away and get back to their fields? It is an interesting question.

After the imperial adhesion to Christianity under Constantine, never to be reversed except during the brief reign of Julian, the Christian community within the empire underwent phenomenal growth – which changed its character. Imperial patronage colossally increased the wealth and status of the churches. Privileges and exemptions granted to Christian clergy precipitated a stampede into the priesthood. Devout aristocratic ladies acquired followings of clerical groupies, experimented with fashionable forms of devotion. Christian moralists were apprehensive that conversions were occurring for the wrong reasons – to gain favour, to obtain a job, promotion, a pension. As far as the historian can tell, their anxieties do not appear to have been misplaced. Fashion is a great force in human affairs. The adherence of the establishment to Christianity in the course of the fourth century made more urgent than ever the task of converting the outsiders on whose labours the establishment rested: the huge majority who toiled in the countryside.

The process by which the empire became officially Christian may be said to have been completed in the course of the reign of Theodosius I (379–95). A cluster of events and decisions mark this: the defeat of an avowedly pagan military coup, the issue of legislation formally banning pagan worship, the removal of the Altar of Victory from the senate house in Rome, the destruction of the temple of the god Serapis at Alexandria. Some of the markers are uncomfortable portents: the first execution of a heretic (the Spaniard, Priscillian, in 385), and a rising tide of Christian anti-Semitism. It is surely not coincidental that it is from this period that influential voices can be heard urging landowners to make their peasantry Christian. Here is John Chrysostom, John ‘the golden-mouthed’, the most fashionable preacher of his day, patriarch of Constantinople between 398 and 404, preaching in the capital in the year 400 to an upper-class audience living, we presume, in their town houses, about their responsibilities to those on their landed estates.

Many people have villages and estates and pay no attention to them and do not communicate with them, but do give close attention to how the baths are working, and how halls and palaces are constructed – not to the harvest of souls … Should not everyone build a church? Should he not get a teacher to instruct the congregation? Should he not above all else see to it that all are Christians?3

And here is Augustine, congratulating Pammachius in 401 on ‘the zeal with which you have chased up those peasants of yours in Numidia’, and brought them back to Catholic unity. (Pammachius had converted them, not indeed from paganism to Christianity, but from deviancy in schism back to orthodoxy, but that does not weaken the point.) And here, finally, is Maximus, bishop of Turin from c. 398 to c. 412, and another famous preacher, in one of his sermons.