In the seventh century again the Irish Church came back into closer association with the Church throughout {115} Europe. This union was due very largely to the influence of learning, and still more to the influence of missionary zeal. "From Iceland to the Danube or the Apennines, among Frank or Burgundian or Lombard, the Irish energy seemed omnipotent and inexhaustible." [2] Into Ireland it would seem that classical culture was introduced by the first Christian teachers, and that from the first it was intended to serve as a preparation for religious teaching.[3] It would seem that it was from Brittany that it spread to Ireland. [Sidenote: The influences outside Ireland] The schools of Ireland became famous. Books as diverse as the Antiphonary of Bangor and Adamnan's Life of Columba show that the teaching in its different ways was a sound and a liberal one.
In England the Irish tradition and influence spread. If the Celtic school of Bangor perished in the stress of the bitter wars between English and Welsh, Malmesbury, which trained S. Aldhelm, showed that the Irish love of letters was capable of transplantation into a land now most prominently Teutonic. But the Roman influence and the influence of the East were still more effective. [Sidenote: in learning,] Benedict Biscop brought back with him to Northumbria the traditions and rules of Italian art and learning, and Theodore of Tarsus brought a wider influence, which was Greek as well as Latin. He himself founded a school at Canterbury, and taught it; and in distant times Dunstan, at Glastonbury and at Canterbury, was his worthy successor. In the north Bede was at {116} Jarrow a writer of great power and wide scope, and the school of York was a nursery of classic studies which produced the great scholar Alcuin. Thus the community of scholarship brings the Churches together.
[Sidenote: in missionary work.]
More prominent was the zeal for the conversion of the heathen. The work of Columban and of S. Gall had its origin in the Irish schools, and there was no more fruitful influence on the Europe of the Dark Age. The work of Columba and his followers was to begin in the north of Britain what Roman missionaries undertook in the south. For more than thirty years Columba, who landed in Iona in 563, taught the Picts and Scots. His Life by his disciple Adamnan is one of the most beautiful memorials of medieval saintliness that we possess. The monastery which he founded lasted till the eighth century. His school did a famous work in North Britain in the seventh; King Oswald of Northumbria was trained there, and S. Aidan, his fellow-helper, the typical saint of Northumbria. From the same source came Melrose, the great Scottish monastery, and S. Chad, the apostle of the Middle English.
[Sidenote: Scotland.]
A century of intermittent strife swept over the northern lands. Scotland became Christian slowly and with little connection with the south. Heathen onslaughts ravaged the Christian lands, and yet, in spite of all, monasteries for men and women sprang up in the north. The influence of S. Aidan (died 651) was continued by S. Cuthbert and S. Hilda, typical parents of monks and nuns. In 664 (Synod of Whitby) at last came union with the Church of the English, who appealed to the authority of Rome and {117} of S. Peter in favour of their customs, and the Northumbrian king, Oswin, ratified the union of the Celtic and the English Churches. Early in the eighth century other Celtic Churches came into the agreement; only Cornwall held out for two centuries more.
[Sidenote: The mission of St. Augustine, 597.]
The English Church, which thus came to represent the Christianity of the whole island, was founded from Rome by S. Augustine in Kent in 597. It was from the first an active missionary body. It gradually won its way over the whole island, conquering and assimilating the alien influences which were at first opposed to it. So when a storm of heathen persecution swept over England and Scotland at the end of the eighth century, when "the ravaging of heathen men lamentably destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne," when the monks of Iona were given to martyrdom, when English prelates and kings gave their lives to hold the land for Christ, the Church still endured, with material loss but with, for the time at least, enhanced glory and virtue. Three names stand out conspicuously from the seventh and ninth centuries. [Sidenote: Theodore of Tarsus, 668.] Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 693, was the great organiser of the English Church. A scholar, a teacher, a statesman, he knit the different tribes of English, Saxon, Jute, together in the unity of faith and discipline. Church councils sprang up under him to rule, and Church laws to guide men in the way. He kept up a close connection with the Western Church, but he did not surrender independence to a papal supremacy. Wilfrith of Ripon, his contemporary, was great also as a teacher and as a missionary beyond the seas, {118} and among the Saxons of South Britain. The seventh century was the age in which the foundations of the English Church were laid on firm bases.
[Sidenote: Bede.]
Hardly less important, though in a different way, was the work of the monk Baeda, the father of English history. He was a man who knew the history and the theology of the Western Church, and who taught by his writings and his life. His influence on the development of the Church in the north, both by his great history, his religious treatises, and his influence on Egbert, Archbishop of York, is incalculable.