Library › St Gildas › On the Ruin of Britain
On the Ruin of Britain
St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899
And let no one of the priests flatter himself solely on his consciousness of a pure body,…
And let no one of the priests flatter himself solely on his consciousness of a pure body, because the souls of those over whom he rules, if any one of them perish through his ignorance, or slothfulness, or flattery, shall be asked at the hands of the same in the day of judgment, as their murderer. Because the death which is inflicted by a good man is not milder than that caused by a wicked man. Otherwise the Apostle would not have said, in leaving a kind of paternal legacy to his successors: I am clean from the blood of all men. For I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole mystery of God. Seeing that you are intoxicated by the habit and dense mass of your sins, and incessantly overwhelmed as if by waves of crimes heaped on crimes rushing upon you, seek with all effort of soul the one plank of penance, as if after shipwreck, on which you may escape to the land of the living. In this way the wrath of the Lord may be averted from you, inasmuch as He mercifully says: I wish not the death of the sinner, but that he may be converted and live.
May the almighty God of all consolation and mercy Himself preserve His very few good pastors from all evil, and make them citizens of His city, the heavenly Jerusalem (the common enemy being subdued), that is, of the assembly of all saints1—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to whom be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Notes
- Sanctorum omnium congregationis. These words appear to have a bearing upon the history of the Roman Symbol, or, as generally called, the Apostles’ Creed, in Britain. The singularity found in an Irish form of the Creed has been frequently commented upon: that form is as follows: “I believe that there is a holy Catholic Church, a communion of saints, etc.” (sanctam esse ecclesiam catholicam).* But in the present expression we find ourselves witnessing, probably, the very time of the introduction of the phrase “communion of saints” into the Church of Britain. Zahn says, that “the origin and the original meaning of sanctorum communionem are still obscure;”t he proves, however, what is also generally accepted, that the phrase, along with “Catholic Church,” appears for the first time in Nicetas (c. A.D. 400), and afterwards in a writer almost contemporary with Gildas, Caesarius of Arles (died 542). The very expression used by Nicetas respecting the Catholic Church, in the sermon or Explanatio Symboli, from which the Creed as known by him is extracted, is that of Gildas here—sanctorum omnium congregatio. “Communion of saints,” we gather, meant “the assembly, or congregation, of all saints,” at the time when the phrase emerges into life in Britain. Hahn’s Bibliothek der Symbole gives two forms of the Creed in which the words “all saints” are found (pp. 80, 115). Now the Commentary from which the first of these is taken runs as follows: “they also confess one catholic church and communion of all saints, that is, the assembly (congregationem) of all believers in Christ” (Hahn, p. 355). Here, again, we have Gildas’ congregatio in connection with that enigmatical (to quote Harnack’s word) expression “communion of saints,” which spread everywhere, and so found a fixed place in the Textus Receptus of the Creed. Gildas appears to me, by the tenor of this last clause, to have been acquainted with Augustinian phraseology, and, by this particular expression, acquainted also with the Apostles’ Creed before it acquired its final form in his own church.
* Antiphonary of Bangor, vol. ii, p. 21, H. Bradshaw Society.
† The Apostles’ Creed, Engl. Tr., p. 188.