On the Ruin of Britain

Notes

1. The style of this part, directed against the priesthood, is in keeping with that of c. 27, where kings and judges are censured: Reges habet Britannia sed tyrannos; iudices habet sed impios.
2. Sacerdotes. This term, as well as ministri, clerici, pastores, may perhaps include presbyters as well as bishops, but the allusion to “the chair of Peter” evidently proves that the writer has the latter mainly in view.
3. Ecclesiae domus. The term ἐκκλησίας οἶκος, or οἶκοι ἐκκλησίας is found at least three times in Eusebius in the sense of “church building,” or simply “church,” i.e., the house or structure used by the Church for its assemblies. Paul of Samosata refuses to leave the “church house;” but the Emperor Aurelian “decided the matter most equitably, ordering the building (οἶκον) to be given to those to whom the bishops of Italy and the city of Rome should adjudge it” (H. E., vii, 30, 19. See also viii, 13, 13, of Constantius, who did not pull down “the church buildings”: μήτε τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν τοὺς οἴκους καθελών. Also ix, 9, 24). Bingham (Book viii, 1, 3) understands domus ecclesiae in Can. 1 of the Second Council of Toledo, A.D. 527 or 531, as signifying “the bishop’s house,” and Hefele agrees with him (Concilgesch., ii, 719). Here, however, as the next words imply, it can only have the meaning it has in the official language quoted or alluded to in the pages of Eusebius. It may well contain a reminiscence of the fact that Christian assemblies were, for two centuries or more, accustomed to meet in private houses; or that the original architectural form of Christian churches, in consequence of such a custom, was taken from the Roman private house.
4. Raro sacrificantes. This use of the verb sacrificare—to sacrifice—as well as offerre, along with the nouns sacerdos and altaria, affords proof how, in the British Church of the sixth century, that idea of the Eucharist as the highest act of worship, sacrificial worship, which found form and expression in other lands, at that time and subsequently, was the prevalent one. These terms are not used by Gildas in any figurative or metaphorical sense.
5. Sedem Petri apostoli. We seem to have in this phrase, as in Petri cathedra, the survival of a belief that had died out elsewhere. It means that every bishop is regarded as a successor of Peter, just as every bishop’s chair is a sedes apostolica (c. 92): such appears to have been the faith of the Church in Britain when Gildas wrote. If we look up the writings of Tertullian and Cyprian, comparing them with the Tractate De Aleatoribus (supposed now to have been written at Rome itself), we find a living conviction that every bishop is a successor of Peter; that his position is marked by the cathedra Petri to which he has been called. Tertullian states, in Scorp. 10, that “the Lord had given the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter, and by him to the Church (per eum ecclesiae reliquisse).” In the De Pudicitia, 21, he is indignant that the bishop of Rome (Callistus) should appropriate to himself the power of binding and loosing which really appertains “to every church belonging to Peter” (ad omnem ecclesiam Petri propinquairi). It is true that these last passages are strongly marked by the Montanist leanings of Tertullian, but the same idea is very prominent in Cyprian. To him the bishop of Rome was the successor of Peter, nevertheless he has the whole episcopate in mind; it was, “in ordering the office of the bishop and the course of his Church in the Gospel, that he says to Peter” (quoting Matth. xvi, 18, etc.), Ep. 33, i: “There is one God, one Christ, one Church, and one chair, founded on Peter by the word of the Lord (una ecclesia et cathedra una super Petrum Domini voce fundata), Ep. 43, 5. The question itself is not to be touched upon here, but the historical survival of phrases that once had a peculiar meaning is of interest. One might refer as to these views in the African and other Churches during the early third century, to Sohm’s Kirchenrecht, 251-256; Harnack, Texte und Unters., v, i, 73-76. There is certainly a temptation to draw, as regards Britain, a conclusion which is evident in the case of Tertullian and Cyprian. In their case, many such sayings as those quoted are reminiscent of the fact, that the Church of Africa had received its teaching from Rome; such a conclusion would hardly be contested. But may we not find in this use of the phrase” chair of Peter,” for the whole episcopate, an indication of very early Roman influence upon the ideas prevailing among the Christian communities in Britain also?
6. Merito cupiditatis. We find merito here used as a preposition =propter with accus. Instances may be found in ecclesiastical Latin, such as Cyprian, 711, 4 (Hartel). Cum tamen merito benedictionis: Sulp. Sev., Chron., i, 12, 7; Artaxersi merito obsequiorum carissimus, id., ii, n, I. One early instance I have met with (in a review of Hoppe, De Sermone Tertulliano, in Wolfflin’s Archiv.), Domitiamim saevitiae merito poenas luisse: Suetonius, Vesp., 1.
7. Religiosam forte matrem sen sorores domo pellentes. Gildas has in mind the rule established by the well-known Canon 3 of Nicaea: “The great Synod wholly refuses to bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, or in short anyone in the ranks of the clergy, the right to have a strange woman (in their homes), only a mother, or sister, or aunt, or solely such persons as incur no suspicion,” Such a woman is termed συνείσακτος, subintroducta, in this and in numerous canons repeatedly passed down into the eighth century. The habit condemned, may-have included constant cases where there was no real ground of suspicion, clerics and chaste women living under the same roof in strict purity. Yet gross indecencies arose; under cover of a specious plea of spiritual intercourse, came the secretius ministerium of which Gildas mockingly speaks. A “complaint of like nature is made against two British presbyters in Armorica, by Licinius, Metropolitan of Tours (509-521), before this work of Gildas had been written. The women in his letter are termed conhospitae. The article on Subintroductae, in the Diet, of Chr. Ant., gives a full account of the many canons that, time after time, sternly condemned a habit which, we see from this passage, had taken deep root in Britain. But in other countries we hear the same invective, so that Britain was by no means alone in this immoral custom.” Pudet dicere proh nefas; triste sed verum est: Unde in ecclesias agapetarum pestis introiit? Unde sine nuptiis aliud nomen uxorum? I mo unde novum concubinarum genus?” So wrote an earlier monk than Gildas—Jerome—in 384. (See p. 155.)
8. Tyrannico ritu. The next chapter not only enlarges upon the simony practised by the clergy, but explains also how their ordination is irregular and violent: the bishops and presbyters “steal the title of priest” (rapto sacerdotali nomine), because when thwarted in the church (parochia) for which they seek ordination, and there refused, they sail across seas, to Gaul, perhaps, or Ireland, and secure their object by bribes. It is self-seeking men (ambitores) that ordain them, against the will of those to whom it legitimately belonged. We may surmise that, except where such base influences as are here described operate and break through ecclesiastical usages, a bishop would be elected by the whole community, so that “the episcopate should,” in the words of Cyprian, “be conferred upon him de universae fraternitatis suffragio” (Ep. 67, 5). The great Leo, writing to the bishops of the province of Vienne in Gaul, just a hundred years before Gildas, insists that the “consent of clergy and people” (ordinis consensus et plebis) should be duly observed; adding that, “he who is to preside over all must be elected by all” (Ep. 10, 6). Any bishop ordained otherwise is ordained by a tyrannicus ritus.
9. Praecepta sanctorum.......ineptas saecularium hominum fabulas. In this contrast we have implied the great change that found its completion during the sixth century. With the fall of the Empire fell also the schools of the rhetoricians, which had kept alive the taste for the classic literature of antiquity. They were replaced by Christian schools connected with the great churches, or with monasteries; and in these, reading was confined to the works of Christian writers, and chiefly those writings which inculcated asceticism and monastic retirement. The celebrated dream of Jerome, of which he gives a graphic account in his letter to Eustochium (Ep. 22, 30), shows how the feeling of aversion to Pagan literature was, at the end of the fourth century, beginning to carry even men of the highest equipment away from the great writers of Greece and Rome. “What has Horace to do with the Psalter? What has Maro in common with the Gospels? What has Cicero with the Epistles?” (cf. the 7th chapter in Ep. 53; Taceo, de mei similibus.....). In his dream he found himself standing before the judgment-seat of Christ. He had been reading Cicero and Plautus with delight, but felt a shudder at the uncouth language of the prophets; when asked about his condition, his answer was: “I am a Christian;” whereupon He who sat upon the throne said; “Thou liest: thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian.” After the severe flogging inflicted upon him by the Judge, he vows that he will never again read “secular books” (codices seculares). His antagonist Rufinus could well reproach him that the vow was badly kept. There was an uneasy feeling in such men as Jerome, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, with respect to the reading of heathen writings; but such anxiety of mind before long disappeared; then came likewise the abandonment of Homer, Virgil and Cicero. Another kind of reading spread widely, with a taste newly formed, which eagerly scanned the praecepta sanctorum. Under this term we may include the works of the ecclesiastical writers, but more especially such writings as those of John Cassian and the popular Lives of Saints, a species of literature introduced by Jerome.
   Eucher, about a hundred years before Gildas penned these words, wrote a letter of advice to a relative (Epistola paraenetica ad Valerianum cognatum) in which he exhorts him to abandon the works of secular writers, and devote himself to the study of Christian doctrine, to the studies and writings of our men (ad studia te nostrorum et scripta converte), and especially to approach as a searcher “ad fontes ipsos sacri eloquii.” Can. v of Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua, c. A.D. 450-500, commonly observed in Gaul, directs “That a bishop shall not read heathen books (gentilium libros), but those of heretics, as demanded by the necessity of the times.” The spirit of such admonitions spread more and more, though several writers besides Boetius and Cassiodorus continued in a feeble, declining way, to show that the old taste was still alive. The story told by John of Salesbury, that Gregory the Great caused the valuable Palatine Library to be burnt, lest the study of Scripture might be prejudiced by the perusal of its books, is at least a true picture of the sentiments entertained by men of the monastery during the fifth and sixth centuries. Gildas may be understood as presenting here the view held by a fervent monk, of the men in Britain who still continued to read the ancient literature.
10. In flexibus mundialium negotiorum mendacibus doctissimos. The last word implies that the clergy in Britain, or some of them, were engaged in some trade or other for their maintenance. We need not refer to the frequent legislation upon this subject, such as the exemption from trade dues granted by imperial edict in 343 and 353, but afterwards limited; and the prohibition issued by Valentinian III, in 452, which forbade clerics to pursue any trade: ut nihil prorsus negotiationis exerceant (Cod. Theod., xvi, 2, 36). But Britain had long been outside the range of any edict. The Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua, the basis for Church law and custom in Gaul in the second half of the fifth century—it might well have been so in Britain—in two canons reads as follows: “Clericus quantumlibet verbo Dei eruditus artificio victum quaeret” (can. 51). “Clericus victum et vestimentum sibi artificiolo vel agricultura absque officii sui detrimento quaeret” (can. 52). A cleric’s sustenance and clothing was to come to him by some trade or by agriculture, provided it did not prejudice his own proper work.
11. Pecunia redimentes. Now begin the charges, frequently repeated, of simony, in addition to the assumption of sacred office by violence, that is, against the will of the community (rapto sacerdotali nomine). The office of bishop or presbyter was bought for an “earthly price”; priesthoods are bought from “tyrants;” which means that princes—whom Gildas, a thorough imperialist as a civis Romanus, will only name as tyranni—were able to influence appointments.
12. Summum . . . gradum: the simple episcopate only, would be the highest gradus. There probably were never any metropolitans or archbishops in the British Church.
13. Magistri gentium. This—Teacher of the Gentiles—is a favourite appellation with Gildas: it occurs in cc. 72, 73, 97.