Christianity came to the cities of Provincia and the chief Roman colonies of Gaul (Lyons, Trèves, Cologne) in the course of the original dissemination of the Faith. There were Roman, Greek, or Syrian Christians in these towns before the end of the second century. Early Gallic Christianity spoke Greek and Latin, and its rather slow advance was due partly to the tenacity of Celtic speech even in the cities; while outside of them heathen speech and practices were scarcely touched. Through Gaul and along the Rhine, the country in the main continued heathen in religion and Celtic or Germanic in speech during the fifth century.[227] The complete Latinizing of Gaul and the conversion of its rural population proceeded from the urban churches, and from the labours and miracles of anchorites and monks. In contrast with the decay of the municipal governments, the urban churches continued living institutions. Their bishops usually were men of energy. The episcopal office was elective, yet likely to remain in the same influential family, and the bishop, the leading man in the town, might be its virtual ruler. He represented Christianity and Latin culture, and when Roman officials yielded to Teutonic conquerors, the bishop was left as the spokesman of the Gallo-Roman population. Thus the Gallic churches, far from succumbing before the barbarian invasions, rescued and appropriated the derelict functions of government, and emerged aggrandized from the political and racial revolution. In the year 400 the city of Trèves was Latin in speech and Roman in government; in the year 500 the Roman government had been overthrown, and a German-speaking population predominated in what was left of the city, but the church went on unchanged in constitution and in language.

There was constant intercourse between Teutons and Romans along the northern boundaries of the Empire. In the Danube regions many of the former were converted. The Goths, through the labours of Ulfilas and others in the fourth century, became Arian Christians; their conversion was of moment to themselves and others, but destiny severed the continuity of its import for history. In the provinces of Rhaetia, Vindelicia, and Noricum there were Christians, some of them Teutons, as early as the time of Constantine. For the next century, when disruption of the Empire was in full progress, the Life of St. Severinus by Eugippius, his disciple, gives the picture.[228] Bits and fragments of Roman government endured; letters were not quite quenched; but Alemanni and Rugii moved as they would, marauding, besieging, and destroying. Everywhere there was uncertainty and confusion, and yet civilized Roman provincials still clung to a driven life. Through this mountain land, the monk Severinus went here and there, barefoot even in ice and snow, austere, commanding. He encouraged the townspeople to maintain decency and courage; he turned the barbarians from ruthlessness. Clear-seeing, capable, his energies shielded the land. He was an ascetic who took nothing for himself, and won men to the Faith by this guarantee of disinterestedness. So he shepherded his harrowed flocks, and more than once averted their destruction. But his arm was too feeble; after his death even his cell was plundered, while the confusion swept on.

Such were fifth-century conditions on the northern boundary of what had been the Empire, conditions amid which the culture and doctrine germane to Christianity went down, although the Faith still glimmered here and there. Farther to the west, the Burgundians had gained a domicile in a land sparsely tenanted by Roman and Catholic provincials. Here on the left bank of the Rhine, in the neighbourhood of Worms, this people accepted the Christianity which they found. Afterwards, in the year 430, their heathen kin on the right bank were baptized as a people; for they hoped, through aid from fellow-Christians, to ward off the destruction threatening from the Huns. Yet five years later they were overthrown by those savage riders—an overthrow out of which was to rise the Nibelungenlied. The Burgundian remnants found a new home by the Rhone.

The Christianity of Burgundians and Goths was subject to the vicissitudes of their fortunes. The permanent conversion to Catholicism of the great masses of the Germans commenced somewhat later, when the turmoil of fifth-century migration was settling into contests for homes destined to prove more lasting. Its beginning may be dated from the baptism of Clovis as a Catholic on Christmas Day in the year 496. His retainers followed him into the consecrated water. By reason of the king’s genius for war and politics, this event was the beginning of the final triumph of Catholicism.[229]

The baptism of Clovis and his followers was typical of early Teutonic conversions. King and tribal following acted as a unit. Christ gave victory; He was the mightier God: such was the crude form of the motive. Its larger scope was grasped by the far-seeing king. Believing in supernatural aid, he desired it from the mightiest source, which, he was persuaded, was the Christian God. It was to be obtained by such homage to Christ as heretofore the king had paid to Wuotan. Any doubt as to the sincerity of his belief presupposes a point of view impossible for a fifth-century barbarian. But to this sincere expectation of Christ’s aid, to be gained through baptism, Clovis joined careful consideration of the political situation. Catholic Christianity was the religion of the Gallo-Roman population forming the greater part of the Frankish king’s subjects. He knew of Arian peoples; probably attempts had been made to draw him to their side. They constituted the great Teutonic powers at the time; for Theodoric was the monarch of Italy, and Arian Teutons ruled in southern France, in Spain, and Africa. Nevertheless, it was of paramount importance for the establishment of his kingdom that there should be no schism between the Franks and the Gallo-Roman people who exceeded them in number and in wealth and culture. Catholic influences surrounded Clovis; Catholic interests represented the wealth and prosperity of his dominions, and when he decided to be baptized he did not waver between the Catholic and the Arian belief. Thus the king attached to himself the civilized population of his realm. A common Catholic faith quickly obliterated racial antagonism within its boundaries and gained him the support of Catholic church and people in the kingdoms of his Arian rivals.

So under Clovis and his successors the Gallic Church became the Frankish Church, and flourished exceedingly. Tithes were paid it, and gifts were made by princes and nobles. Its lands increased, carrying their dependent population, until the Church became the largest landholder in the Merovingian realm. It was governed by Roman law, but the clergy were subject to the penal jurisdiction of the king.[230] It was he that summoned councils, although he did not vote, and left ecclesiastical matters to the bishops, who were his liegemen and appointees.[231] They recognized the king’s virtually unlimited authority, which they patterned on the absolute power of the Roman Emperors and the prerogatives of David and Solomon. In fine, the Merovingian Church was a national church, subject to the king. Until the seventh century it was quite independent of the Bishop of Rome.[232]

It is common knowledge—especially vivid with readers of the famous Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours—that ethically viewed, the conduct of the Merovingian house was cruel, treacherous, and abominable; and likewise the conduct of their vassals. Frankish kings and nobles appear as men no longer bound by the ethics of the heathenism which they had foresworn, and as yet untouched by the moral precepts of the Christian code. Not Christianity, however, but contact with decadent civilization, and rapid increase of power and wealth, had loosened their heathen standards. Merovingian history leaves a unique impression of a line of rulers and dependents among whom mercy and truth and chastity were unknown. The elements of sixth-century Christianity which the Franks made their own were its rites, its magic, and its miracles, and its expectation of the aid of a God and His saints duly solicited. Here the customs of heathenism were a preparation, or themselves passed into Frankish Christianity. Nevertheless, the general character of Christian observances—baptism, the mass, prayer, the sign of the cross, the rites at marriage, sickness, and death—could not fail to impress a certain tone and demeanour upon the people, and impart some sense of human sinfulness. The general conviction that patent and outrageous crime would bring divine vengeance gained point and power from the terrific doctrine of the Day of Wrath, and the system of penances imposed by the clergy proved an excellent discipline with these rough Christians. Many bishops and priests were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved Christian belief and did something to improve morality. Everywhere the monk was the most striking object-lesson, with his austerities, his terror-stricken sense of sinfulness, and conviction of the peril of the world. No martial, grasping bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that the monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood in awe, or expectation, of the wonder-working power of his asceticism. Indeed monasticism was becoming popular, and the Merovingian period witnessed the foundation of numberless cloisters.

In the fifth and through part of the sixth century the Gallic monastery of Lerins, on an island in the Mediterranean, near Fréjus, was a chief source of ascetic and Christian influence for Gaul. Its monks took their precepts from Syria and Egypt, and some of the zeal of St. Martin of Tours had fallen on their shoulders. As the energy of this community declined, Columban’s monastery at Luxeuil succeeded to the work. The example of Columbanus, his precepts and severe monastic discipline, proved a source of ascetic and missionary zeal. With him or following in his steps came other Irishmen; and heathen German lands soon looked upon the walls of many an Irish monastery. But Columbanus failed, and all the Irish failed, in obedience, order, and effective organization. His own monastic regula, with all its rigour, contained no provisions for the government of the monasteries. Without due ordering, bands of monks dwelling in heathen communities would waver in their practices and even show a lack of doctrinal stability. Sooner or later they were certain to become confused in habit and contaminated with the manners of the surrounding people. These Irish monasteries omitted to educate a native priesthood to perpetuate their Christian teaching. The best of them, St. Gall (founded by Columbanus’s disciple Gallus), might be a citadel of culture, and convert the people about it, through the talents and character of its founder and his successors. But other monasteries, farther to the east, were tainted with heathen practices. In fine, it was not for the Irish to convert the great heathen German land, or effect a lasting reform of existing churches there or in Gaul.

The labours of Anglo-Saxons were fraught with more enduring results. Through their abilities and zeal, their faculty of organization and capacity of submitting to authority, through their consequent harmony with Rome and the support given them by the Frankish monarchy, these Anglo-Saxons converted many German tribes, established permanent churches among them, reorganized the heterogeneous Christianity which they found in certain German lands, and were a moving factor in the reform of the Frankish Church. The most striking features of their work on the Continent were diocesan organization, the training of a native clergy, the establishment of monasteries under the Benedictine constitution, union with Rome, obedience to her commands, strenuous conformity to her law, and insistence on like conformity in others. Their presentation of Christianity was orthodox, regular, and authoritative.

Some of these features appear in the work of the Saxon Willibrord among the Frisians, but are more largely illustrated in the career of St. Boniface-Winfried. Willibrord moved under the authority of Rome; the varying fortunes of his labours were connected with the enterprises of Pippin of Heristal, the father of Charles Martel. They advanced with the power of that Frankish potentate. But after his death, during the strife between Neustria and Austrasia, the heathen Frisian king Radbod drove back Christianity as he enlarged his dominion at the expense of the divided Franks. Later, Charles Martel conquered him, and the Frankish power reached (718) to the Zuyder Zee. Under its protection Willibrord at last founded the bishopric of Utrecht (734). He succeeded in educating a native clergy; and his labours had lasting result among the Frisians who were subject to the Franks, but not among the free Frisians and the Danes.