Part 10 (1/2)
[1] According to the chronicle of Kristian.
[2] The Sat.u.r.day fast was still observed in many parts of Christendom.
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CHAPTER XII
PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN GERMANY
[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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 Amoneburg. 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 a.s.sumed 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 wors.h.i.+ppers of the Germanic G.o.ds; 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 G.o.d 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 Pa.s.sau, and later on he founded other sees also, including Wurzburg. 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 leaders.h.i.+p, over the Celtic missionaries, n.o.ble 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 Dokk.u.m 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.
Boniface was truly attached to the popes, truly respectful to the Roman See: but he preserved his independence. His att.i.tude towards the secular power was precisely similar. He was a great churchman, a great statesman, a great missionary; but his religious and political opinions cannot be tied down to the limits of some strict theory. His was a wide, genial nature, in things spiritual and in things temporal genuine, sincere; a true Saint, a true Apostle. Through the lives and sacrifices of such men it was that the Church came to exercise so profound an influence over the politics of the Middle Age.
[Sidenote: The Emperors and missions.]
The work which S. Boniface began was continued by weapons other than his own. When the Empire of the Romans was revived (as we shall tell in the next chapter) by the chiefs of the Arnulf house, when a Catholic Caesar was again acclaimed in the Roman churches, the ideas on which the new monarchy was to rest were decisively Christian and Catholic.
Charles the son of Pippin was a student of theology, among many other things. He believed firmly that it was a real kingdom of G.o.d which he was called to form and govern upon earth. The spirit which inspired the followers of {140} Muhammad inspired him too. He was determined not to leave to priests and popes the propagation of the faith which he believed.
[Sidenote: Charles and the Saxons.]
For thirty-two years Charles the Great, as his people came to call him, was engaged in a war which claimed to be waged for the spread of the Christian faith. Charles was before all things in belief (though not always in life) a Christian, and it was intolerable to him that within the German lands should remain a large and powerful body of heathens.