On the Ruin of Britain

Notes

1. Paenitentiae medicamine. Cf. coelestis medicina, De Paenit. 1. It is quite possible that these words may refer to penance as imposed by a priest for sins committed after baptism, or, as might be said, in a sacramental sense. Can. 18 of Stat. Eccl. Antiqua directs: “ut sacerdos paenitentiam imploranti absque personae acceptione paenitentiae leges iniungat.” But here, in a writing of Gildas, as we remember the peculiar penitential usages of the very next generation, we are led to adopt another view. According to that view, this mention of the “remedy of penance,” opens out a characteristic feature of the history of the Church in Britain and Ireland. The Life of Columbanus (who was a disciple of Comgall, first Abbot of Bangor) relates that when he came from Ireland into Gaul with twelve companions, “the power of religion had well-nigh disappeared in that country at the time. Only the Christian faith remained, for the remedies of penance and the desire of mortification were scarcely to be found, or only in a few of those places” (c. 11); but after the founding of the monastery of Luxeil, it is said that “the people from all sides flocked there for the remedies of penance” (c. 17). In both these extracts Jonas has the very words of Gildas—paenitentiae medicamenta—and they suggest to us that such a penitential discipline as was introduced from Ireland into Gaul by Columbanus, was in the mind of the British writer as he penned the sentence we are noticing. The letter of Columbanus to Pope Gregory I, in which he mentions the correspondence between Vinnianus and Gildas, refers to this very sin of adultery, quite in the way that the “Penitential” of Vinnianus also refers to it. Further, there is printed in our present volume a “Penitential” of Gildas; we know also of the Penitential canons of a British Synod (perhaps the Senedd Vrevi, mentioned in the Buchedd Dewi, p. 112, Elucidarium, ed. by John Morris Jones); of another Synod at Lucus Victoriae, and similar canons from “The Book of David.” The four fragments just named have been published by Wasserschleben in his Bussordungen der Abendländ. Kirche; the Fécamp MS., from which they are taken, is fully described by Maassen (Geschichte der quellen u. der Lit. des canonischen Rechts, s. 784). When the “De Paenitentia” of Gildas, the seven canons of Sinodus Aquilonalis Britanniae, the nine of Sinodus Luci Victoriae, and the sixteen given as Excerpta quaedam de Libro Davidas, are compared with the Penitentials of Vinnianus and Columbanus, they reveal to us a new phase of Church discipline, of which the cloister, not the bishop’s church, is the centre. The position is novel, so also is the penance; both are Celtic.
   The book of such a discipline would contain an enumeration of sins, together with the penance imposed in the case of each, for the healing of the soul. The usage itself of resorting to an abbot for “the medicine of penance,” is, some two or three times, mentioned as taking place at Iona under Columba (Adamnan, Vita Columb., i, 22; ii, 39), but the defect deprecated by Gildas in the present passage, shows that anything like a general use of Penitentials had not, when he wrote, established itself in Britain.
   On the question of Penitentials see Seebass, Das Poenitentiale Columbani, Zeitschrift für Kirchengesch., xiv, 430; Realencyklopädie of Herzog, 3rd edition, iii, 581; and for a very different opinion, Schmitz, Die Bussbucher und die Bussdisciplin der Kirche.
2. Apostolicos sensus. The meaning implied in sensus here, where it seems to be almost identical with sententia, is not given in Du Cange. It may, however, be found in some ecclesiastical writers: the Tome of Leo, c. 6, for instance, in a reference to the heresy of Eutyches, reads as follows: “ut . . . . imprudentia hominis imperitietiam ab hac sensus sui peste purgetur.” Faustus, De Gratia, Prol.: “Cum autem mentionem de opere et labore fecerimus, prophetae evangelistae, apostoli et verbis utemur et sensibus.”