The Christian Church in These Islands before the Coming of Augustine / Three Lectures Delivered at St. Paul's in January 1894

by G. F. Browne

Palladius went, then, about 432, to visit the scattered Irish Christians. There is not a word of his mission being of the same character as that of Germanus to Britain, namely, to attack Pelagianism. He landed in Ireland; and then the several accounts proceed to contradict one another in a very Celtic manner. The two earliest accounts, dating probably not later than 700, agree that the pagan people received him with much hostility. One of the two accounts martyrs him in Ireland; the other says that he did not wish to spend time in a country not his own, and so crossed over to Britain to journey homewards by land, but died in the land of the Britons. Another ancient Irish account says that he founded some churches in Ireland, but was not well received and had to take to the sea; he was driven to North Britain, where he founded the Church of Fordun, “and Pledi is his name there.” I found, when visiting Fordun to examine some curious remains there, that its name among the people was “Paldy Parish.”

The Scottish accounts make Palladius the founder of Christianity among the Picts in the east of Scotland, Forfarshire and Kincardineshire and thereabouts, Meigle being their capital for a long time. They are silent as to any connection with Ireland. They are without exception late and unauthentic, whatever may be the historical value of the matter which has been imported into them. But all, Scottish and Irish, agree in assigning to the work of Palladius in Ireland either no existence in fact, or at most a short period and a small result. The way was thus left clear for another mission. The man who took up the work made a very different mark upon it.

I shall not discuss the asserted mission from Rome of St. Patrick, for we have his own statements about himself. Palladius was called also Patrick, and to him, not to the greater Patrick, the story of the mission from Rome applies.

Some time after the death of Celestine and the termination of Palladius’s work in Ireland, Patrick commenced his missionary labours; and when he died in or about 493, he left Christianity permanently established over a considerable part of the island. That is the great fact for our present purpose, and I shall go into no details. It is a very interesting coincidence that exactly at the period when Christianity was being obliterated in Britain, it was being planted in large areas of Ireland; and that, too, by a Briton. For after all has been said that can be said against the British origin of Patrick, the story remains practically undisturbed.

It is, I think, of great importance to note and bear in mind the fact that Ireland was Christianised just at the time when it was cut off from communication with the civilised world and the Christian Church in Europe. Britain, become a mere arena of internecine strife, the Picts and Scots from the north, and the Jutes and Saxons and Angles from the east and south, obliterating civilisation and Christianity,—Britain, thus barbarously tortured, was a complete barrier between the infant Church in Ireland and the wholesome lessons and developments which intercourse with the Church on the continent would have naturally given. Patrick, if we are to accept his own statements, was not a man of culture; he was probably very provincial in his knowledge of Christian practices and rites; a rude form of Christian worship and order was likely to be the result of his mission. He was indeed the son of a member of the town council, who was also a deacon,—it sounds very Scotch: he was the grandson of a priest; his father had a small farm. But he was a native of a rude part of the island. And his bringing up was rude. He was carried off captive to Ireland at the age of sixteen, and kept sheep there for six years, when he escaped to Britain. After some years he determined to take the lessons of Christianity to the people who had made him their slave. The people whom he Christianised were themselves rude; not likely to raise their ecclesiastical conceptions higher than the standard their apostle set; more likely to fall short of that standard. In isolation the infant Church passed on towards fuller growth; developing itself on the lines laid down; accentuating the rudeness of its earliest years; with no example but its own.

And not only was the Irish Church isolated as a Church, its several members were isolated one from another. It was a series of camps of Christianity in a pagan land, of centres of Christian morals in a land of the wildest social disorder. The camps were centred each in itself, like a city closely invested. The monastic life, in the extremest rigour of isolation, was the only life possible for the Christian, under the social and religious conditions of the time. And each monastic establishment must be complete in itself, with its one chief ruler, its churches, its priests, and the means of keeping up its supply of priests. There was no diocesan bishop, to whom men could be sent to be ordained, or who could be asked to come and ordain. They kept a bishop on the spot in each considerable establishment; to ordain as their circumstances might require; under the rule of the abbat, as all the members were. Very likely in great establishments they had several bishops. The groups of bishops in sevens, named in the Annals, the groups of churches in sevens, as by the sweeping Shannon at Clonmacnois or in the lovely vale of Glendalough, these, we may surmise, matched one another. We read of hundreds of bishops in existence at one time in Ireland, and people put it down to “Irish exaggeration.” But given this principle, that an Irish monastery, in a land not as yet divided into dioceses, not possessing district bishops, must have its own bishop, the not unnatural or unfounded explanation of “Irish exaggeration” is not wanted. In some cases, no doubt, a bishop did settle himself at the headquarters of a district, and had a body of priests under his charge, living the monastic life with him under his rule, and exercising ministrations in the district. But in the large number of cases the bishops were only necessary adjuncts to monasteries over which they did not themselves rule. A presbyter or a layman ruled the ordinary monastery, including the bishop or bishops whom the monastery possessed.

I have dwelt upon this because it is a point often lost sight of, and it explains a good deal. And there is a good deal to explain. When Columbanus and his twelve companions from Ireland burst suddenly upon Gaul in the year 590, they formed a very strange apparition. Dressed in a strange garb, tonsured in a strange manner, speaking a strange tongue, but able to converse fluently enough in Latin with those who knew that language, it was found that some of their ecclesiastical customs were as strange as their appearance and their tongue; so strange that the Franks and Burgundians had to call a council to consider how they should be treated. Columbanus was characteristically sure that he was right on all points. He wrote to Boniface IV, about the time when our first St. Paul’s was being built, to claim that he should be let alone, should be treated as if he were still in his own Ireland, and not be required to accept the customs of these Gauls. When Irish missionaries began to pass into this island, on its emergence from the darkness that had settled upon it when the pagan barbarians came, their work was of the most self-denying and laborious character. But contact with the Christianity of the Italian mission, or with that of travelled individual churchmen such as Benedict and Wilfrid, revealed the existence of great differences between the insular and the continental type. We rather gather from the ordinary books that these differences came to a head, so far as these islands were concerned, at the synod of Whitby, and that the Irish church not long after accepted the continental forms and practices, and the differences disappeared. But that is not the effect produced by a more extended enquiry. In times a little later than the synod of Whitby, Irish bishops—I say it with great respect—were a standing nuisance. One council after another had to take active steps to abate the nuisance. The Danish invasions of Ireland drove them out in swarms, without letters commendatory, for there was no one to give due commendation. Ordination by such persons was time after time declared to be no ordination, on the ground that no one knew whether they had been rightly consecrated. There was in this feeling some misapprehension, it may be, arising from the fact of the government of bishops in a monastery by the presbyter abbat, but no doubt the feeling had a good deal of solid substance to go upon. It was reciprocated, warmly, hotly. Indeed, if I may cast my thought into a form that would be recognised by the people of whom I speak, the reciprocators were the first to begin. Adamnan tells us that when Columba had to deal with an unusually abominable fellow-countryman, he sent him off to do penance in tears and lamentations for twelve years among the Britons. There is the curious—almost pathetic—letter of Laurentius and Mellitus, the one Augustine’s immediate successor, the other our first bishop of English London, addressed to the bishops and abbats of all Scotia. “They had felt,” they said, “great respect for the Britons and the Scots, on account of their sanctity. But,” they pointedly remark, evidently smarting under some rather trying recollections, “when they came to know the Britons, they supposed the Scots must be superior. Unfortunately, experience had dissipated that hope. Dagan in Britain, and Columban in Gaul, had shewn them that the Scots did not differ from the Britons in their habits. Dagan, a Scotic bishop, had visited Canterbury, and not only would he not take food with them, he would not even eat in the same house.”

It is very interesting to find that we can, in these happy days of the careful examination of ancient manuscripts, put a friendlier face upon the relations between the two churches in times not much later than these, and in connection with the very persons here named. In the earliest missal of the Irish church known to be in existence, the famous Stowe Missal, written probably eleven hundred years ago, and for the last eight hundred years contained in the silver case made for it by order of a son of Brian Boroimhe, there is of course a list—it is a very long list—of those for whom intercessory prayers were offered. In the earliest part of the list there are entered the names of Laurentius, Mellitus, and Justus, the second, third, and fourth archbishops of Canterbury, and then, with only one name between, comes Dagan. The presence of these Italian names in the list does great credit to the kindliness of the Celtic monks, as the marked absence of Augustine’s name testifies to their appreciation of his character. Many criticisms on his conduct have appeared; I do not know of any that can compare in first-hand interest, and discriminating severity, with this omission of his name and inclusion of his successors’ names in the earliest Irish missal which we possess. It is so early that it contains a prayer that the chieftain who had built them their church might be converted from idolatry. Dagan, who had refused to sit at table with Laurentius and Mellitus, reposed along with them on the Holy Table for many centuries in this forgiving list.

Of a similar feeling on the part of the Britons, when isolated in Wales, Aldhelm of Malmesbury had a piteous tale to tell, soon after 700. “The people on the other side the Severn had such a horror of communication with the West Saxon Christians that they would not pray in the same church with them or sit at the same table. If a Saxon left anything at a meal, the Briton threw it to dogs and swine. Before a Briton would condescend to use a dish or a bottle that had been used by a Saxon, it must be rubbed with sand or purified with fire. The Briton would not give the Saxon the salutation or the kiss of peace. If a Saxon went to live across the Severn, the Britons would hold no communication with him till he had been made to endure a penance of forty days.” There is quite a modern air about this pitiful tale of love lost between the Celt and the Saxon[46]. Matthew of Westminster, writing in the fourteenth century, carries the hostility down to his time, in words which leave us in no doubt as to their sincerity. “Those who fled to Wales have never to this day ceased their hatred of the Angles. They sally forth from their mountains like mice from caverns, and will take no ransom from a captive save his head.”

Another result of the consideration, which I have suggested, of the date and manner of the Christianising of Ireland, is the probability that the Irish Church and the remains of the British Church had some not inconsiderable differences of practice. This is a point which it would be well worth while to examine closely, but we cannot do it now. Laurentius and Mellitus at first supposed that the Britons and the Scots were the same in their habits; then they supposed that they must be different; then they found they were the same. But this was the habit of hostility to the Italian mission in England, and that can scarcely be classed among religious practices. It is too much assumed that the British Church and the Celtic Church were the same in their differences from the Church of the continent. To take one most important point, while they differed from the Church Catholic in their computation of Easter, they differed from each other in the basis of their computation. The British Church used the cycle of years[47] arranged by Sulpicius Severus, the disciple of Martin of Tours, about 410, no doubt introduced to Britain by Germanus; the Irish Church used the earlier cycle of Anatolius, a Bishop of Laodicea in the third century. The Council of Arles, in 314, had found that the West, Britain included, was unanimous in its computation of Easter, and Nicaea, in 325, settled the question in the same sense. Then came the cycle of 410, of which the British were aware, and not the Irish. Then came another, in this way. Hilary, Archdeacon and afterwards Bishop of Rome, wrote in 457 to Victorius of Aquitaine to consult him about the Paschal cycle. The result was the calculation of a new cycle, which was authorised by the Council of Orleans in 541. It was this newer cycle of which the British Church was found to be ignorant, and their ignorance of it is eloquent proof of the isolation into which the ravages of the invading English had driven them. One of the indications of difference between the Irish and the British Church is rather amusing. When the Irish had conformed to Roman customs, well on in the seventh century, they solemnly rebuked the Britons of Wales for cutting themselves off from the Western Church.