On the Ruin of Britain

Notes

1. Episcoporum vel ceterorum sacerdotum aut clericorum in nostro quoque ordine. The peculiar use of vel preceding aut in this clause, renders the meaning somewhat difficult to deduce. Is it two classes or three that are indicated? We may be helped in arriving at a decision by observing that in late Latin writers vel has frequently the meaning of et, e.g., Fulgentius (pro fid. cath., p. 537) quotes Rev. xix, 16: et habebat in vestimento vel (in Greek καὶ) in femore suo scriptum: the Chronographer of A.D. 354 has: Odenatus vel Aureolus in Italia tyranni fuerunt, 234, 14: the Anon. of Valesius: cunctus senatus vel populus. These and many other instances are given in Rönsch, Collectanea philol., pp. 51, 826; also Itala und Vulgata, p. 345.
   Three classes may thus be regarded as implied in these words. (1) The bishops (episcopi), (2) the other priests, that is, the presbyters associated with the bishops (ceteri sacerdotes), (3) the clergy, bishops, presbyters or deacons that had adopted the monastic life (clerici in nostro — i.e. monachorum — ordine). The message of Gildas is directed first of all and mainly to bishops, then to other clerics. He nowhere implies that there was any other function in the Church important enough to be addressed by him; this fact seems to dispose of the attempt made to find, in Gildas’ time, the ordo inusitatus described by Beda as prevailing at Iona, and probably at Holy Island and other places, where ecclesiastical jurisdiction was in the hands of Abbots (H. E., iii, 4; iii, 5, 17, 25. Vita S. Cudb., c. xvi). Cf. Reeves’ Adamnan, and Dr. Bright’s Early English Church History, 135 ff.
   The only monks included by Gildas in his message were clerics, and his appeal is not directed to anyone holding any such monastic office as Abbot of a monastery. But his bishops, further, cannot be “diocesan” bishops; they have their parochiae (c. 67), but are so numerous, good as well as bad, as to be, in his opinion, in excess of the requirements of the Church; if not too many, there were certainly, he says, not too few. We seem to find ourselves in Britain face to face with the older kind of episcopacy which we meet with, for instance, in Africa and Italy, about A.D. 250, when the Bishop of Rome and the Bishop of Carthage could bring together a council, the one of sixty, the other of ninety bishops. By the fourth and fifth centuries, sees could be counted by hundreds in either of the countries named. The state of things in the later Church of Ireland which astounded St. Bernard, when he wrote his Life of Malachias, would seem to fit Britain in the time of Gildas, that it is say, there were almost as many bishops as churches (ita ut singulae pene ecclesiae singulos haberent episcopos—De Vita Mal., c. 10). Many reminiscences of this “congregational episcopacy,” as it has been called, have filtered down into the Welsh hagiographical writings. The Life of Teilo represents him, as “of his own counsel, consecrating Ishmael for the Church of Menevia, because Dewi had migrated to the Lord”; but, “many other men, also of the same order, did he raise to the episcopate, sending them throughout the country, and distributing parochiae to them, as was convenient for clergy and people.”
   It is worthy of note that Gildas, with his heavy indictment of crimes against the bishops, nowhere mentions any ecclesiastical authority, either of Synod or of Metropolitan, that might be expected to take disciplinary cognizance of the irregularities involved in those misdeeds. Wasserschleben has remarked, with respect to the Irish Canons, which belong to a time later than Gildas, how bare those canons are of any reference to organisation in Ireland, uniting different communities and securing ecclesiastical jurisdiction: the relation of bishops to Archbishops as Heads of Provinces is but barely mentioned in them. “Auffallend ist es”—these are his own words—“dass die Sammlung nur sehr spärlich Bestimungen aufgenommen hat, welche die Kirchliche Verfassung und die Gliederung der Organe für die Kirchliche Jurisdiktion regeln. Die Organisation der Kirche in Diözesen und Provinzen, das Verhältniss der Bischöfe, als Leiter der erzteren, ze den Erzbischöben, als Haupten der Provinzen, ist nur selten berührt.” (Die irische Kanonensammlung, xxxvi.)
   (2) The second expression, ceteri sacerdotes, implies, as in fact the whole language of this part implies, the same idea as prevailed elsewhere by that time, that the ministry of the Church is a priestly one. In the first rank, and unless otherwise limited, it is the bishops that are the priests, but the name sacerdotes is also applied to presbyters: the chair of both presbyter and bishop is a priest’s chair (post sacerdotalem episcopatus vel presbyterii sedem, c. 66). Gildas has not yet, nor the usage of his time, arrived at the terminology found in Wasserschleben’s Irish Canons, viz., episcopus, sacerdos, diaconus. It is not quite out of place to remind ourselves that the application of the term “priest” (sacerdos) to presbyters was not usual before the end of the fourth century. For Tertullian and Cyprian, the sacerdos is the bishop only. Koffmane mentions one instance (Ep. 67, 4) in the writings of Cyprian, where sacerdos may be taken as another term for presbyterus; but it does not, I feel on reading the whole context, seem to bear out his statement. Ritschl maintains that the priesthood of presbyters is implied in a few passages (Epp., 61, 3; 72, 2; 5, 2), yet his view has been disputed (Studia Biblica, vol. iv, 258).*
   This early limitation of the term “priest,” prevails in Gildas to the extent that his reference to presbyters is quite secondary; there could hardly be, at his time, any presbyters in sole charge of a church: altari et sacrificiis deserviunt, to use words of Cyprian in regard to them, in the same church as the bishop, or in churches under his immediate personal supervision. They were, however, regarded as priests in Britain; and conformably with this idea of their and the bishop’s office, we not only find frequent use of such terms as “altars” and “sacrifices,” by Gildas, in allusion to the Eucharist, but also “offering for,” or “making sacrifice for”: pro bonis regibus, he says, sacra debemus offerre (De Poen., xxiii). The doctrine of the Eucharist and the ministry of the Church, which Britain knew, is evidently the same, let us say, as that of the Roman bishop, who lived not long after Gildas, Gregory the Great (590—604); or, in other words, it is that which, by a natural development, grew to be the mediaeval doctrine.
   * One fact suggested by the work to which reference has been made—Cyprian von Karthaga und die Verfassung der Kirche—seems to have a peculiar cogency for us: while the noun is sacerdos, the verb is generally offere, and though the noun may not be applied to presbyters, the verb is used of them: they are said “to offer” (offerunt). Now, in the Welsh language, the substantive sacerdos seems to have left no derivative, as in the Irish and Gaelic languages, but the verb has remained in offeiriad (priest) and offeren (mass, offerenda).
   (3) The words in nostro ordine cannot but refer to the ordo of monks, implying also that the writer is himself a monk, one of these very clerici. Had he intended a reference to any one of the three clerical orders, he would have used gradus, as he, in fact, does in c. 66. Jerome, in a terribly severe chapter of his Ep. ad Eustochium, says, almost anticipating the diatribes of Gildas: “Sunt alii, de mei ordinis hominibus loquor, qui ideo presbyteratum et diaconatum ambiunt, ut mulieres licentius videant” (Ep. 22, 28). Monks, of course, as such were laymen; the great movement was originally a lay movement. I may mention an exhaustive account by Dr. Grützmacher* of early monasticism, in which he has embodied conclusions derived from the Coptic sources published in the Annales du Musée Guimet (Tome xxii, Paris), as well as from Greek and Latin writers. He shows how Pachomius insisted that even presbyters who joined his discipline must, as members of his community, be laymen. He monachized the clergy, thereby preparing the way for clericizing the monks. During the age preceding that in which Gildas was born, many of the most influential men of Western Christianity were clerics that had been trained as monks. After describing the life observed in the monastery over which St. Martin of Tours presided, Sulpicius Severus adds: “A great number of them we see afterwards as bishops; for what city or church was there, which did not wish to have its priest (i.e., bishop) from the monastery of Martinus” (Vita Mart., 10). Eucher also, describing the southern centre of monasticism, on the island of Lerins, exclaims: “that worthy island which rears distinguished monks, and produces active, eager priests” (De Laude Eremi, 42). Copious evidence to the same effect may be read in Arnold’s Cäsarius von Arles, 41, n.
   This fresh invigorating flood of new life could not fail to find its way to Britain; the previous age, upon the memory of which Gildas longingly dwells, may have been due to men in the ministry of the Church, who had experienced the elevation in which such men as Eucher exulted. The earliest instance that I can find of such a monk-bishop in Britain, is a friend of Faustus, the third abbot of Lerins, who was himself a Briton. Faustus was abbot of the monastery of Lerins from 433 to 460, and afterwards bishop of Riez (civitas Regiensis) until his death about 495. Apollinaris Sidonius, from whom we have an interesting account of the British lady that was Faustus’ mother, relates also, how Faustus sent two of his writings to Britain by the hands of a fellow-countryman, Riocatus. This Riocatus is styled bishop and monk—antistes ac monachus (Mon. Hist. Germ., viii, 157). He must have had many comrades and successors in that double capacity.
   The oldest Welsh Vitae, or Lives of Saints, a few of which may date from a very early period, such as Vita Samsonis (Anal. Bollandiana), represent these men as abbots and bishops: they were probably the originators of the Welsh llan, which, as the author of the Vita Pauli Leonensis explains it, means monastery (Lanna Pauli, id est, monasterium Pauli). Such were Dewi Sant, Samson, Paul Aurelian, Maclovius (St. Malo), Dubricius, Teilo and others: a large number of the “saints” (=monks in Welsh hagiography) who crossed to Armorica in the sixth century were bishops. Beda’s account of Irish monasteries of the north, Iona and Lindisfarne, shows that there were bishops who led a coenobite life unattached to any parochiae. The Life of Dewi Sant also mentions another bishop, Gwislianus, who lived with him as a simple monk, and the consecration of deacons and presbyters within the monasteries is a feature common to most of the Welsh Lives.
   It seems evident that Gildas expected a higher sense of rectitude and devotion from this third class than from the other two.
   * Pachomius und das älteste Klosterleben, 1896.
2. Ab his veniam impertiri. Peculiar significance attaches to the “few” whom Gildas excludes, or partially excludes, from his general invective. Besides the present passage, a similar allusion will be found in cc. 26, 69, 92, 109. It is to the first of these — c. 26 — that he refers in the words ut iam in superioribus dixi; and when the words used here, and in that section, are compared with those of the other sections named, we find that Gildas recognises two classes as standing outside the mass of those repudiated by him:—
   (1) In the first class are those who, so few in number (tam brevis numerus), that the Church, their mother, does not know them as her own real sons, who nevertheless lead a “noble life admired of all, beloved of God,” whose prayers also had been the writer’s firm support in the past. So far extends the description conveyed in the section named. These we have already understood to be the monks of his time. The present section adds, that the life of these men is one which Gildas not only praises, but prefers to all the world’s wealth; in which, also, he earnestly hopes, some day, to have a share, if possible (si fieri possit). But we have seen that he is already a monk. What, then, can such a hope imply? An answer is furnished in the Epistle of Columbanus to Pope Gregory the Great, written sometime about A.D. 595. The Irish missionary and founder of monasteries is disturbed by a new current of the ascetic life: monks, he informs the Roman bishop, are seeking desert places in the wilderness, impelled thereto by the fervour peculiar to monks (fervore monachorum cogente), with the result that some find the desert a place for higher perfection, while others give way to laxity of discipline. We learn from the same letter that an Irish abbot, of the name of Finian, had consulted Gildas respecting so new a departure in monastic discipline, which involved the abandonment of that common life, under a strict regula, that prevailed in the cloisters. (This Finian was probably the founder of Clonard, not another, who, owing to more trustworthy records, is better known, viz., Finian of Moville.) Gildas is said to have sent “a most fit” answer to his old pupil, then at Clonard, presiding—if we are to believe what is said of him in prose and verse—over a community of 3000 monks. Vennianus auctor Gildam de his interrogauit, et elegantissime illi rescripsit. We are not told what the substance of that answer was. The eager desire expressed by Gildas in the present passage can, we conclude, be no other than a thirst for the cell of the recluse, the meudwy (= servant of God?) of the Welsh. Some echo, perhaps, of this appears in The Life of Oudoceus, who was Bishop of Llandav about or after the middle of the sixth century; it describes Gildas as leading a hermit’s life in the island of Echni. “Ecce vir bonus et iustus et totius Brittaniae historiographus, Gildas sapiens, ut in historiis nominatur, qui eo tempore convertabatur in insula Echni ducens anchoritalem vitam.” (Vita b. Oudocei, in Evans’ The Book of Llandav, p. 138.) The Welsh addition on p. 135 places Echni in the estuary of the Severn: “Hafren nyhyt can ynys Echni.” This trace of what we may regard as real history is interesting; Gildas the monk, at present in the heat of his battle against ecclesiastical declension, when bishops decline the task, looks longingly for the seclusion of a cell, such as a number of his acquaintances had already found, in the desert. If our explanation of his language be correct, it disposes completely of the view adopted by many, that Gildas wrote this work, late in life, at the monastery of Ruys in Brittany. Such, it is well known, is the account given in The Life of Gildas written by the monk of Ruys, but the passage we have been noticing proves it to have been impossible.
   (2) The second class of “the few” appears in cc. 69, 92, 109. It consists of bishops and presbyters against whom no charge of schism, or pride, or uncleanness can be brought. In his treatment of these worthy men, the real Gildas reveals himself more fully, perhaps, than elsewhere. He is not at all unwilling to confess their good qualities (quod nec vehementer et nos diffitemur); he knows that they are “chaste and good,” that many of them have obtained the “apostolic throne” in the recognised way (legitime), being well able also to confer spiritual gifts (c. 92), but—they are not heroic, they should be made of sterner stuff; some are too like Eli; martyrs are not found among them; they have not fearlessly excluded the wicked from the Church. Who of them like Abraham, he asks, is willing to offer a son, if need be, in the cause of Christ? Who, as Joseph, has rooted out of his heart the remembrance of an injury?
   Gildas’ soul is grieved and troubled within him that the good “few” are not awake to the awful call of the time: they also must be numbered among the inertes sacerdotes of c. 83.