Saint Augustine of Canterbury M Iniat Ures from the C.C.C

SAINT AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY M INIAT URES FROM THE C.C.C. l\1 .S., CAMBRIDGE, No. 286, TH E SO-CALLED ST. AUGUST INE's GOSPELS. Frontispiece. THE BIRTH OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH SAINT AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY BY SIR HENRY H. HOWORTH K.C.I.E,, HoN. D.C.L. (DURHAM), F.R.S., F.S.A., ETC. ETC. PRESlDBNT OF THE ROY. ARCH.. INST. AND THB ROY. NUMISMATIC 5-0CIICTY AUTHOR OF uSAlNT GREGORY THE GREA.T 11 BTC. ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS MAPS, TABLES AND APPENDICES LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1913 All rights reurv~d TO PROFESSOR WILLIAM BRIGHT AND BISHOP BROWNE OF BRISTOL I WISH to associate the following pages with the names of two English scholars who have done much to illuminate the beginnings of English Church history, and to light my own feet in the dark and unpaved paths across that difficult landscape. I have extolled their works in my Introduction, and I now take off my hat to them in a more formal way. An author's debts can often only be paid by acknowledgment and gratitude. ERRATA. Page 34. For" Christianitas" read" Christianitatis." Page 41, footnote. For" Brown" read" Browne." Page 53. For " 'Povrov,ruu" read "'PoVTov,r,m." Page 65, last line but two. For" though" read "since." PREFACE IN writing a previous work dedicated to the life of Saint Gregory I purposely omitted one of the most dramatic events in his career-namely, the missi?n he sent to Britain to evangelise these islands. My purpose in writing that work was not to publish a · minute and complete monograph of the great Pope. That had already been done in a much larger book by Mr. Dudden,- but to give an account of him such as would enable my readers to understand what manner of man it was who first conceived the notion of sending a Christian mission to the English race ; what were the surroundings in which he lived ; what was the position he filled in the drama of European politics at the beginning of the seventh century; what was the nature of the administrative changes he effected ; how he governed the Church and its possessions ; how he dealt with the secular rulers of Europe; what was his mental attitude towards the great theological problems of his day and how he affected the future history of thought, especially of religious thought. To give, in fact, in sufficient detail and with as complete accuracy as I could command, a picture of the Man and the Pope who$e scholars and whose friends were the first vii viii PREFACE missionaries to the English race, and who brought with them what he had taught them. That work I meant to be the foundation-stone for a further volume in which the story of the Pope's English mission should be told as completely as I could tell it. This volume I now offer as a victim to my critics. I feel, as I have always felt, that these islands are, both geologically and historically, only de tached fragments of a much larger country, and that neither their geology nor their history can be understood without a continual reference to the geology and history of. the other European lands. Especially is this the case with their religious history. Whatever polemics there may be about the ties of the earlier Church here, generally known as the British Church, there can be no question whatever that the Church of the English was the daughter of Rome. What the missionaries brought with them and planted here was what they had learnt very largely indeed from the lips of the great Pope whose spiritual children they were, for they had been trained in the monastery he had founded, where he had spent much of his leisure, and where his heart was generally to be found when his body was elsewhere. It is a misfortune that we have next to noth ing recorded in regard to the personal views of the missionaries themselves, on religious or secular subjects. Not a scrap of their writings (if any ever existed} has survived. The documents containing the story of their mission, scanty as they are. deal PREFACE ix only with its external aspects. For an account of the Christianity they planted here, its dogmatic leanings, its ritual, and its general policy, we must turn to the voluminous writings of their devoted father and master, Gregory. Hence the necessity for a careful survey of the great Pope's life and works as a preparation for any satisfactory study of the mission. This, as I have said, I made in the previous volume. The present volume deals with the history of Gregory's venture from its inception to its close on the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, when the Epis copal succession derived from Augustine came to an end, and had to be revived under more promising conditions by Archbishop Theodore. It does not profess to deal with the British or with the Scotic Church. With both of them that mission had slight ties and both of them have an entirely different history, with which I may deal on another occasion. It is nut a very exhilarating story that I have to tell, for, notwithstanding a good deal of romantic writing by soft-hearted and sentimental apologists, the mission was essentially a failure. The conditions were, iry fact, difficult and unpromising. The part of England then possessed by the English, instead of being governed by one sovereign or one royal stock, as in Gaul, was broken up into several rival principal ities, at continual feud with each other. They had only one common occasional tie, in the person of a specially redoubtable person among the rival princes X PREFACE who became for a while supreme, and for a while held the hegemony of the whole country, which presently passed to another strong man. This dis integrated condition of the community presented great obstacles to any concerted action on the part of the champions of a new faith. It led to jealousies, and it offered wild souls who preferred the religion of their fathers a ready means of finding a champion, if not at home, in some neighbouring state, to oppose those who surrendered to the new God and the new forms of magic (as they doubtless understood the ritual of the foreigners) of the Italian monks. I hope I have made it plain in the previous volume that Gregory, although not technically a monk, was a very ideal monk in his heart and aspira tions. Religion meant very largely with him a devotion to asceticism and a sacrifice and surrender of this life, in order maybe to purchase another and a happier existence beyond the clouds. He would have liked the whole world to be a monastery and all mankind to be clad in homespun, to abnegate all kinds of resthetic living, and to devote them selves to penitence and prayer. Hence he forms the one heroic figure in the history of monkery. He idealised the monkish life and monkish stand ards, and he accepted as more or less divinely in spired the mystical thought and the materialised dreams and imaginings which pursue men when they press asceticism to the verge of endurance and starve their bodies and punish them with pain and suffering, until their morbid thought has become PREFACE xi more or less ecstatic and epileptic. His Dialogues prove this most- completely. With this ideal of life, he was the first Churchman of great parts who deliberately placed the monk's role and career above that of his secular brethren. Parish priests who had td live a much more trying life in, and continually to associate with, the world, its diseases and its crimes, and to apply such remedies to them as they could with their frail weapons, had, he thought, a humbler sphere. Gregory not only placed the life of a secular prie~t at a lower ideal level than that of a monk, but he deemed it largely inconsistent with a monk's vocation. He was also re sponsible for introducing the germs of what became, perhaps, the most pernicious of all innovations on the Christian polity of primitive times-namely, the exemption of monasteries from episcopal supervision and the loosening of their disciplinary regimen. The fact that the missionaries who came to evangelise the English were monks and not secular clergy, and the consequences that followed, are so important that I must be forgiven for enlarg ing somewhat on the ideals of the early monks and their methods of attaining them. The theory underlying the monastic life has some difficulty in justifying itself by an appeal to the New Testament. The institution was not of Christian origin. It had close ties with some forms of Jewish asceticism as practised by the Essenes and other Jewish sects among whom the secluded life had be come widely prevalent at the opening of the Christian xii PREFACE era, and it was with one of these sects that Christ's precursor, John the Baptist, probably passed the greater part of his career. But we find nothing re sembling monasticism in the teaching of Christ or embodied in His scheme. The central and original idea of a monk's life was not the bettering of the world and the leavening of his fellow-men with higher aspirations, by working among them, and teaching those who were weaker, more ignorant, or more un fortunate than himself how to spend more profitable and joyful lives. Not at all.

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