Positively Medieval. Jamie Blosser

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СКАЧАТЬ names like St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, and St. Martin of Tours. By the close of the patristic age, churches had been planted from Ethiopia to Ireland, from Spain to India.

      Yet the medieval period brought new missionary challenges. The “barbarian” immigrants, mostly of Germanic races, had flooded the European continent from the northeast, carrying with them their devotion to pagan gods and hostility to the Catholic religion of their Roman adversaries. Even as these were receiving the first seeds of the Christian religion, new fiercely pagan immigrants arrived in the form of Vikings and Magyars.

      To complicate matters further, the initial missionary successes among the barbarians had been carried out by non-Catholic missionaries, the heretical Arians, who denied the divinity of Christ. Then there was the problem of Islam, which had overcome the Christian communities in Asia and North Africa by the eighth century. As for mainland Europe, while there were certainly still scattered communities of Catholic Christians, the institutional structures of the Church had been shattered by the invasions: many Christians had not seen clergy for decades and thus lapsed easily back into the pagan superstitions of their past.

      In short, by the time of the great missionary awakenings of the seventh century, many among the Christian leadership probably saw themselves as starting from scratch, re-evangelizing an utterly de-Christianized continent.

      In some ways medieval missionary work looks very different from the way it is typically carried on today. In the Middle Ages there was a shared cultural assumption that the general population would hold the same religion as the ruler, so a common pattern resurfaces where the conversion of a king would result in the mass baptisms of a nation’s entire population.

      Another cultural assumption was that a religious figure would legitimize his message by performing miracles, often “outperforming” the representatives of rival religions, as Elijah did on Mount Carmel (see 1 Kgs 18), or Moses before the Pharaoh (Ex 7). Further, because the primary religious alternative to Christianity was paganism, which the New Testament itself describes as demonic in inspiration (1 Cor 10:20), Christian missionaries were often seen as striving against Satanic powers, winning souls from devil-worship. These patterns or themes are, it seems, rarely stressed today.

      But in other ways the missionary work of the Middle Ages looks very familiar to us. Then as now, the task of evangelizing was usually combined with the task of civilizing, so that missionaries would spend as much time teaching agricultural methods and basic literacy and providing medical care as they did preaching the Gospel. Also, we see medieval missionaries wrestling with the question of inculturation, or how Christianity would fit into distinctive cultures, balancing a respect for the inherent goodness of every culture with the need to preserve the essential message of the Gospel without watering it down.

      Readers will also note how the preaching of the Gospel is most effective when it is combined with a pattern of generosity, charity, and sincere holiness on the part of the missionaries who bring it. And finally, in the Middle Ages as today, missionary work is sustainable only when it is part and parcel of a larger effort to establish lasting Church structures—schools, seminaries, and charitable institutions, for example—rather than being seen as the conversion of individual souls.

      Although tens of thousands of individuals probably devoted their lives to missionary work in the Middle Ages, the constraints of space permit the treatment of only a handful. We will first meet St. Columba, a standout among the Irish seafaring saints; then the three dominant figures who worked under the patronage of the bishop of Rome and the protection of the Frankish kingdom: St. Augustine of Canterbury (the Apostle to the English), St. Willibrord (the Apostle to the Frisians), and St. Boniface (the Apostle to the Germans); and, finally, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, the Greek brothers who missionized the Slavic peoples in the East.

      Together, a study of these figures shows us not only how Christians won thousands of souls for the kingdom of heaven, but how the Christian Church built and shaped Western civilization in the process.

St. Columba (521–597)

      It is not without reason that the Scots carried the relics of St. Columba ahead of their armies in the Scottish Wars for Independence. This was a saint, after all, whose missionary career was launched when he was exiled from his Irish homeland for instigating too many brawls. He had first gotten into trouble when he picked a fight with his teacher, St. Finnian, over whether he deserved to keep a copy of the psalter he had been assigned to copy: several men died in the ensuing scuffle. Shortly afterward, he ended up in the middle of a blood feud which broke out at a sporting event, and which resulted in the death of an Irish prince. It should surprise no one that Columba used a stone as a pillow.

      Columba’s early life actually fits neatly into the Irish tradition of the peregrini, or exiles. Irish Christianity was known for its harsh standards for penance: it was not unusual for those who engaged in mortal sin in the Middle Ages to be publicly flogged as penance. And those who had carried out particularly egregious sins often volunteered to undergo what, for the Irishman, is the greatest punishment of all—self-banishment from Ireland. Thus at the age of forty-four Columba, presumably in penance for his violent past, set sail with twelve companions in a wicker boat covered with animal skins.

      Landing in nearby Scotland, Columba returned to the boat and cast off again, complaining that he could still see his homeland from the first landing spot. When finally out of sight of his beloved Ireland, Columba began preaching the Gospel to the native barbarians (the Picts), whose king responded by donating the island of Iona to the monks. The monastery they built there became the center of Scottish Christianity, spawning numerous other monasteries across the country and eventually transforming itself into a school for missionaries.

      We know precious little about Columba’s life except for the vast number of miracles that are attributed to him by his biographers, so many that one would think he did little else with his time. Many of these miracle stories are rather incredible, though without at least some historical basis such traditions would certainly never have sprung up. Many of the stories reflect the agrarian culture of Scotland (blessing crops to increase their fertility) and the scholarly work of the monks (detecting grammatical errors in books without opening them).

      Columba and his Irish monks, the heirs of a brilliant Latin education—it is said that, at any time, three thousand scholars could be found studying under St. Finnian, Columba’s teacher—brought this literary culture to Scotland. Columba’s biographer claims that he wrote more than three hundred books by hand and died while transcribing a book.

      Some remark ought to be made about the “style” of Christianity brought to Great Britain. While St. Augustine of Canterbury had brought Christianity to England directly from Rome, Irish—or Celtic—Christianity had developed in almost complete isolation from Rome, cut off from any communication with the rest of worldwide Christianity. Thus the Christianity Columba brought to Scotland had several distinctive features: most importantly, abbots, rather than bishops, oversaw religious matters in geographic regions of the country, and Easter was celebrated on a different date from its calculations in Rome.

      Although often described as non-papal, the Irish had a great esteem for the bishop of Rome—they simply hadn’t heard from him in centuries! But as a consequence, much of the literature on English Christianity during this period describes the rather unedifying feuding between so-called Roman and Celtic missionaries.

       Columba Comes to Scotland

      The English monastic scholar St. Bede makes only brief mention of St. Columba, in connection with the founding of the monastery at Iona. But Bede draws attention to certain distinctive, Celtic features of Columba’s communities which were different from the English customs СКАЧАТЬ