Rome and the Isles: Ireland, England and the rhetoric of orthodoxy

4 Rome and the Isles: Ireland, England and the Rhetoric of Orthodoxy DAMIAN BRACKEN Identities: Jewish, Greek and Christian ‘CHRISTIANS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.’1 Tertullian’s words, written around AD 200, express a fundamental precept of the new religion. Christianity preached salvation for all; its spiritual mission would not be contained by cultural barriers, nor confined to any geographic location, and would transcend the racial divisions imposed by descent at birth. The corporal divisions that separated Jew from Greek, even male from female (Galatians 3:28; Romans 10:12; I Corinthians 12:13), were subordinated to a new, spiritual identity acquired through the convert’s reception into the church. Tertullian’s contemporary, Clement of Alexandria, expressed the transcendent spirituality of Christianity that encompassed Jewish and Gentile identities when he wrote that the approach to faith was made ‘by the Greeks in a Gentile way, by the Jews Judaically, and in a new and spiritual way by us’.2 Both Greeks and those ‘from the law’ are now ‘gathered into one genos of the saved people’.3 The earliest writers presented the adoption of Christianity, therefore, as a spiritual rebirth that transcended their physical birth. This principle was so fundamental that Cyril of Jerusalem (c.305) expected anyone being admitted as a convert in his church to know it: ‘For our bodies are begotten by parents 1 Apologeticus Adversus Gentes pro Christianis, 18.4: ‘fiunt, non nascuntur christiani’; PL 1, 378 in Patrologia Latina (PL), (ed.) J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris 1844–64). The passage is discussed in J. Lieu, Christian identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world (Oxford 2004) 298; also G. D. Dunn, ‘The universal spread of Christianity as a rhetorical argument in Tertullian’s adversus Iudaeos’, J Early Christian Stud 8 (2000), 1–19. Cf. Tertullian, De Testimonio Animae: ‘fieri enim, non nasci solet Christiana’; PL 1, 610. 2 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6.5; see Lieu, Christian identity, 260. 3 Clement, Strom. 6.42.2; discussed and quoted in D. K. Buell, ‘Rethinking the relevance of race for early Christian self-definition’, Harvard Theolog Rev 94 (2001), 449–76: 461. Proceedings of the British Academy 157, 75–97. © The British Academy 2009. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 76 Damian Bracken who are seen, but our souls are begotten anew through faith.’4 The catechumen should know that his new faith brought a new birth into freedom from the slavery of sin; this freedom was, paradoxically, ‘the most blessed bondage of the Lord’. In the west at the beginning of the following century, St Augustine (411) expressed these same ideas when he wrote that Christians are made not by generation, but by regeneration (non facit generatio, sed regeneratio Christianos) and that ‘cleansing from sin comes to no one by being born, but to all by being born again’.5 Further into the west, in Ireland at the furthest known extreme, St Patrick drew on these ideas when describing his Irish converts. He uses the natal metaphor to consider identity, particularly that of the convert, and how biological determinants of identity that rest on the flesh progress to a spiritual identity formed by the experience of conversion. He presents his own spiritual awakening as a rebirth since before it he had ‘lived in death’ (Confessio 33).6 Although he was ‘freeborn according to the flesh’ (ingenuus fui secundum carnem; ep. 10) and the son of a decurion, he left behind the ‘noble’ (nobilitatem; ep. 10) status of his birth, his country and his parents to endure a ‘ministry of servitude’ (ministerium servitutis; Conf. 56) for the Irish. Their conversion, too, is a rebirth. He writes of those whom ‘I have begotten (genui) in Christ’ (ep. 16, 2), and of how ‘many people were reborn (renascerentur); in God through me’ (Conf. 44). The consequence of his own conversion is the radical subversion of social values determined by birth in favour of spiritual ideals; this is also the experience of his Irish followers. In almost identical passages in the Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus, he says that young Irish nobles have abjured their status conferred at birth (these are ‘the sons and daughters of Irish chieftains’ (Scottorum regulorum; Conf. 47; ep. 12)) and are now ‘monks and virgins of Christ’.7 They have become ‘the people of the Lord’ (plebs domini) and ‘have been born (nati sunt) there from our gens’ (Conf. 48). Initiation into Christianity for these Irish converts therefore brought membership of the transcending gens of the church. Coroticus, who carried off Patrick’s Irish converts to Britain as slaves, had ‘stained his hands with the blood of the 4 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 1.2; tr. in Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers (NPNF) ser. 2, vol. 7, 6 (repr. Edinburgh, various dates). 5 . . . a peccatis nemo nascendo, sed omnes renascendo mundantur; Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum 3.17; PL 44, 196; tr. NPNF ser. 1, vol. 5, 75 (repr. Edinburgh, various dates). 6 Editions and translations of Patrick’s Confessio (hereafter Conf.) and Letter to Coroticus (hereafter ep.) are found in D. Howlett, The book of letters of St Patrick the bishop (Dublin 1994) and D. Conneely, St Patrick’s letters: a study of their theological dimension (Maynooth 1993). For convenience, references are to the sectional divisions in Conneely’s translation. 7 This is very much a reflection of Patrick’s monastic outlook. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 77 children (filiorum) of God whom he recently acquired for himself in the uttermost parts of the earth’. Despite the remoteness of these Irish Christians, they are now members of the body of the church and their fate concerns all Christians for, writes Patrick, ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together’ (I Corinthians 12:26; ep. 16). As a fellow Christian, Patrick should count Coroticus a ‘fellow citizen of the holy Romans’ (ep. 2), but by his actions Coroticus had cut the bonds that unite Christians as members of the one spiritual gens. Patrick calls his converts brothers and sons (fratribus et filiis; Conf. 14) because of their shared Christian identity. Coroticus and his followers’ treatment of their fellow Christians, therefore, has made them into kin-slayers; they are ‘patricides, fratricides’ (patricida, fratricida; ep. 5). He writes that Coroticus and his company did not accept the converts’ Christian identity because ‘It is scandalous to them that we are Irish’ (ep. 16). This rejection was based on race and, as such, conflicted with the basic Christian teaching that membership of the Church is not determined by ethnicity. Significantly, Patrick says that Coroticus’s violence has turned the Irish from being ‘the people of the Lord’ into extranei ‘strangers’ or even ‘foreigners’ (ep. 16). In the Confessio, Patrick defends his mission among barbarians beyond the imperial frontiers to his British superiors (the enigmatic dominicati rhetorici). In his account of his life, the stages of his mission are modelled on the story of Exodus and Patrick presents himself as a Mosaic figure. The comparison, however, points up a significant distinction, for Moses cared for God’s chosen people as defined by their physical descent, but Patrick’s mission was to ‘those parts beyond which there lives nobody’ (Conf. 40). In extending providential care usque ad ultimum terrae (Conf. 1 and 4; cf. Isaiah 49:6; Acts 1:8, etc.)8 Patrick was bringing to completion what Moses began. He was not simply advancing Christianity a stage further, but bringing the process of conversion to a conclusion by converting the Irish. The principle that the church achieved a universal reach showed that it was not confined to any race or geographic location, and confirmed its identity as a community of the spirit. The earliest of Irish literature, therefore, is a forceful affirmation of the importance of Christian universality and an indictment of those who refused to acknowledge the significance of this principle or who would undermine it. 8 The theme of ‘the ends of the earth’ is the subject of a recent landmark paper, to which I am very much indebted, by Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘Islands and idols at the ends of the earth: exegesis and conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in S. Lebecq, M. Perrin and O. Szerwiniack (eds.), Bède le Vénérable: entre tradition et postérité, Collection Histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest (Lille 2005) 119–45. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 78 Damian Bracken Columbanus—Cummian—Bede Columbanus wrote his letter to the Gaulish clergy in 603 at the time of the council of Châlons. The council met to discuss the dating of Easter, a major source of friction between Columbanus, his missionaries, and the established clergy in Gaul. The letter is a characteristic combination of profound spirituality and a forthright adherence to principle. Typically, Columbanus saw questions of the nature and exercise of leadership in a doctrinal setting. Every dispute had, therefore, a spiritual basis; it was a manifestation of the breaking of the bonds of caritas that united the church. He ends the letter on this theme of unity in what appears to be a conciliatory tone reminding his readers that in the church, national allegiance and racial identity have been superseded by a spiritual identity, ‘for we are all joint members of one body, whether Gauls or Britons or Irish (sive Galli, dive Britanni, sive Iberi) or whatever our races (gentes) be’ (ep. 2, 8).9 This is more than a rhetorical flourish. Columbanus here draws on concepts of ethnicity and Christian identity to be found in the earliest stages of the debate about Easter and the importance of maintaining unity. This chapter considers these questions of ethnicity in the portrayal of the Irish in the literature of the Easter question and their role in shaping the earliest Anglo-Saxon accounts of the Irish. Columbanus refers to his Irish identity in his letters especially when he emphasises his homeland’s location at what he believed was the furthest point in the West and its unique place in salvation history. His letters are important not least because they are the earliest expressions of Irish identity in existence; but to understand what Columbanus says, his letters must be interpreted in the context of earlier literature that considers the significance of establishing Christianity in barbarian lands. Christ’s followers are commanded to be his witnesses ‘to the end of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) since Christ’s mission of ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations’ (Luke 24:47; cf. Matthew 28:19). Christianity was therefore not to be circumscribed by race or location; its foundations are spiritual and, for early writers, this was testified to by its universal extent. Irenaeus of Lyons (d. c.200) saw the conversion of barbarians (that is, those who do not understand Greek, Latin, or, by extension, scripture), as especially significant. In Adversus Haereses, he writes that the church is ‘dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth’, but it remains united in belief (I, 10).10 In Book III he considers the importance of 9 The edition and translation (some with very slight modification) of Columbanus’s works referred to are by G. S. M. Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (SLH) 2 (Dublin 1957). 10 Tr. in Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) 1, 330–2 (repr. Edinburgh, various dates). Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 79 tradition and the link to the apostolic age in maintaining this orthodoxy. He sets those who gather in ‘unauthorised meetings’ against ‘the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul’.11 Had the apostles left no writings, in the absence of scripture it would be necessary to follow the traditions they handed on to those who govern the apostolic churches. Christians ‘who, in the absence of written documents . . . are barbarians, so far as regards our language’, cannot read scripture and are, therefore, in such a position. When these barbarians, without the benefit of scripture, reject heretical beliefs, they do so ‘by means of that ancient tradition of the apostles’. Barbarians, once they are converted to Christianity and reject ‘the inventions of the heretics’, affirm tradition and apostolicity as the basis of orthodoxy. In his list of the Christian peoples, Tertullian (d. c.225) names ‘the varied races of the Gaetulians and the manifold confines of the Moors, all the limits of the Spains and the diverse nations of the Gauls and the haunts of the Britons—inaccessible to the Romans, but subjugated to Christ . . . and of many remote nations, and of provinces and islands many, to us unknown, and which we can scarce enumerate’.12 Christianity had overcome these racial boundaries in its worldwide spread, but also surmounted natural barriers to reach the Britons who ‘are shut within the circuit of their own ocean’. These same themes are found in Columbanus’s letters for he writes as one coming ‘from the world’s end’.13 In his letter to Pope Boniface IV, he writes of the miraculous spreading of Christianity, overcoming the natural barrier of the sea, to reach Ireland in ‘the Western regions of the earth’s farther strand’.14 The conversion of Ireland was therefore more than another stage in the progress toward the realisation of the Christian oikoumen e; it marked the point at which the church achieved its mission to reach all nations. Columbanus writes to Rome as one acutely aware of his position on the geographic fringes and at the furthest remove from the civilised centre. He presents himself as a ‘blind Westerner’15 to Gregory the Great and as a ‘dull Irish pilgrim’ to Boniface IV.16 But he was also aware of the advantages in presenting the Irish on the outermost fringe of the barbarian world as orthodox. They may inhabit the world’s edge,17 but the Irish ‘accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic teaching; none has been a heretic, none a Judaizer, none a schismatic’ (ep. 5, 3). The orthodoxy of the barbarian Irish 11 Ibid. 415. Tertullian, Adversus Judaeos I.7; PL 2, 610; tr. ANF 3, 158. 13 . . . de extremo mundo; ep. 5, 8. 14 . . . in occidua transmundialis limitis loca; ep. 5, 11. 15 Ep. 1, 9. 16 . . . peregrinum Scotum hebetem; ep. 5, 14. 17 . . . ultimi habitatores mundi; ep. 5, 3. 12 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 80 Damian Bracken was therefore an affirmation both of the universal extent of Christian salvation and also of the universal extent of the bishop of Rome’s pastoral responsibility. This positive view of Ireland’s position among ‘the barbarian peoples’18 in Columbanus’s letters contrasts sharply with some later sources, particularly the literature of the Easter controversy. Ireland’s remoteness is viewed in a negative light and as symptomatic of isolation from the doctrinal norms defined and maintained at the centre, at Rome. In his account of the synod of Whitby (the Northumbrian council that met in 664 to decide between the so-called ‘Celtic’ Easter tables and the ‘Roman’), Bede, in the Historia Ecclesiastica, contrasts the universal extent of the Roman Easter with Irish particularism. Speaking at the synod in defence of Roman practice and on behalf of Bishop Agilbert, Wilfrid says that his party’s Easter is ‘universally (ab omnibus) celebrated in Rome . . . Italy and Gaul . . . Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and throughout the whole world (omnem orbem)’. Only the obstinate (‘Picts and the Britons’) living on the ‘two remotest islands of the Ocean (de duabus ultimis Oceani insulis), and only in some parts of them, foolishly attempt to fight against the whole world’.19 Wilfrid’s description of the Irish as far removed both geographically and doctrinally from orthodoxy finds a very direct parallel in the Irish cleric Cummian’s Easter letter written c.631, one hundred years before Bede completed the HE. Cummian wrote following the decision of the clerics at the synod of Mag Léne to adopt Roman practice. A delegation was sent to Rome to see how things were done there. The letter reports what they found: the Irish were seriously out of step with the universal church. Cummian’s approach is similar to Bede’s (or to Wilfrid’s, as reported by Bede), but the language is even more forthright. He invites the reader to weigh both parties in the controversy. On one side, ‘Gaul, Britain, Africa and Persia, the East and India and all barbarian nations adore one Christ, observe one rule of truth,’20 as do ‘the Hebrews, Greeks, Latins and Egyptians’. Against these are ‘an insignificant group of Britons and Irish who are almost at the end of the earth, and, if I may say so, but pimples on the face of the earth’.21 Both Bede and Cummian (the latter writing less than a generation after Columbanus’s death) contrast the isolated Irish with the unity of the universal church. To emphasise that difference, Bede recounts how Colmán, the spokesman for the 18 . . . in barbaris gentibus; ep. 3, 3. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.25; B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (ed. and tr.), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Oxford 1969) 300–1; all references to the Historia Ecclesiastica (hereafter HE) are from this edition and translation. 20 M. Walsh and D. Ó Cróinín (ed. and tr.), Cummian’s letter ‘De Controuersia Paschali’ and the ‘De Ratione Conputanti’, Texts and Studies 86 (Toronto 1988) 76–7. 21 Ibid. 72–5. 19 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 81 Irish party at Whitby, claimed to derive his Easter custom from John the Evangelist, while Wilfrid appealed to the authority of Peter and Paul.22 Why should Bede’s and Cummian’s presentation of the Irish differ so markedly from that of Columbanus? Leo the Great and the New Rome The theme of the universal reach of Christianity figures prominently in the literature of the early church to show the superiority of the spiritual kingdom of Christ over temporal, earthly empires. For many, that temporal realm was the Roman empire, but now ‘God and Jesus, not Rome and the princeps, stand as the supreme, legitimate rulers of every nation under heaven.’23 In the fourth and fifth centuries the decisive shift in power to the east and the long decline of the west led to tensions between Rome and Constantinople. The New Rome asserted its claim to an enhanced status within the church. Old Rome resisted by insisting that this amounted to nothing more than a crude attempt to equate ecclesiastical status with political power. In this context, the spreading of Christianity outside the empire and the conversion of barbarians assumed a new significance. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Vita Constantini is a foundational political document that gives the ‘Byzantine vision of imperial authority in its relation to Christianity’.24 Constantine is portrayed as the exemplary Christian ruler who, as leader of the oikoumene, has also a duty to guide the church. The model for this representation of the emperor who combines political and ecclesiastical duties is Moses.25 In the Vita Constantini, Constantine’s career follows the pattern of Moses’s life and this reveals the providential nature of his mission (a device also used in Patrick’s Confessio). Claudia Rapp explains the curious references to Constantine as a bishop in the Life by showing how, in the east, Moses served as the prototype of episcopal leadership.26 This similarity is significant, but 22 HE 3.25. G. Gilbert, ‘The list of nations in Acts 2: Roman propaganda and the Lukan response’, J Biblical Lit 121 (2002), 497–529: 510. 24 C. Rapp, ‘Imperial ideology in the making: Eusebius of Caesarea on Constantine as “bishop”’, J Theolog Stud 49 (1998), 685–95: 685. 25 A. Wilson, ‘Biographical models: the Constantinian period and beyond’, in S. N. C. Lieu and D. Montserrat (eds.), Constantine: history, historiography, and legend (London and New York 1998), 107–35. 26 C. Rapp, Holy bishops in late antiquity: the nature of Christian leadership in an age of transition (Berkley CA 2005); M. J. Hollerich, ‘Religion and politics in the writings of Eusebius: reassessing the first “court theologian”’, Church Hist 59 (1990), 309–25; G. W. Bowersock, ‘From emperor to bishop: the self-conscious transformation of political power in the fourth century AD’, Classical Philology 81 (1986), 298–307; J. A. Straub, ‘Constantine as JOIMOR EPIRJOPOR: 23 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 82 Damian Bracken what separates Constantine from his biblical type is more significant. Like Patrick, Constantine’s mission is shown to extend beyond the empire. His political life begins in Britain and he extends his rule to ‘the nations that dwell in the very bosom of the Western ocean’. His influence extends from the extreme west to the east; the pivotal point in his career takes place at Milvian Bridge in Rome, the centre of the known world, and is completed in the foundation of Constantinople in the east. Eusebius writes that he diffused ‘the effulgence of his holy light to the ends of the whole world, even to the most distant Indians, the nations dwelling on the extreme circumference of the inhabited earth’.27 Here, Eusebius’s portrayal of the universal extent of Constantine’s power reflects the emperor’s own perception of his role as leader of all Christians, even those outside the empire. In his letter to the council of Tyre, Constantine wrote that ‘even the barbarians have now come to the knowledge of God, by means of me’.28 The ‘political’ consequences of this sense of mission were profound because as the leader of the Christian world, a world not confined by race or political boundaries, he perceived that his duty extended even to Christian barbarians outside the empire. His letter to Saphor, asking the Persian king to exercise care over the Christians in his kingdom, is perhaps the clearest evidence of this.29 There is a striking similarity in how Eusebius presents Constantine’s mission and how Patrick presents his own mission in the territories beyond the limits of the empire. They both appear as Mosaic figures, but supersede Moses by bringing to completion his task of extending providential care for the people of God to ‘those parts beyond which there lives nobody’ (Conf. 40) in Patrick’s case, and to the ‘distant nations’ (Vita Constantini 1.8) in Constantine’s. Moses was the agent of providence for the people of God at a time when they were defined as a race by descent, but both Constantine and Patrick, in their very different ways, complete the task of creating the plebs Dei made up of all believers. This is the basis of the Byzantine theocracy where the emperor fulfilled a spiritual as well as ‘secular’ function, and where the care of barbarians was a fundamental concern, for the emperor was ‘responsible for the tradition and innovation in the representation of the first Christian emperor’s majesty’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 21 (1967), 37–55; W. Seston, ‘Constantine as “bishop”’, J Roman Stud 37 (1947), 127–31. 27 Eusebius, Vita Constantini I.8, PL 8, 13; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 1, 483. 28 The letter is preserved in Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos, tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 4, 145; quoted in A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the conversion of Europe (Toronto 1978). According to Eusebius, Constantine proclaimed himself a bishop also ‘ordained by God for all outside the Church’; Vita Constantini 4.24; discussed by Rapp, ‘Imperial ideology’, 685. 29 The letter reads: ‘beginning at the furthest boundaries of the ocean, I have, one after another, quickened every part of the world with hope’; it is preserved in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical history, 1.24; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 3, 59. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 83 Christianization not only of the empire but of the world’.30 It was also the basis for Constantinople’s claim to leadership of the universal church, its long interest in the conversion of barbarians and in establishing links with Christian communities outside the empire. In the context of the developing and competing claims to ecclesiastical authority in the fifth century, then, ‘missionary activity among the barbarians, and especially the right to consecrate a bishop to care for barbarian Christians, was a matter of concern in the highest circles’.31 Spreading the faith to all peoples was the realisation of the church’s spiritual mission, therefore Constantinople, the centre of this mission, saw itself as the centre of the Christian world. Such claims were rejected by Rome which considered itself to be the universal city and focus for unity. As the capital of the empire, Constantinople was civitas regia (‘the royal city’), but could never become civitas apostolica (‘the apostolic city’). The status of a church depended on divine, not imperial, favour and ‘there can be no sure building save on that rock which the Lord has laid for a foundation’.32 Rome saw in the circumstances of its own foundation by Peter and Paul, the principes Apostolorum, the basis of its claim to universal authority. The first council of Constantinople (381) claimed a status second only to Old Rome for the imperial capital. About this time, St Gaudentius of Brescia (d.410) composed his Tractatus 20 [de Petro et Paulo]. He preached the sermon on 29 June, the saints’ feast day, in Milan, probably in the presence of St Ambrose. After the preliminaries, Gaudentius says that the Trinity granted to humankind three kinds of birth: the first, in the flesh, is common to all; the second is a rebirth through baptism; the third, through martyrdom, brought birth into God’s kingdom.33 Gaudentius illustrates all three in the lives and martyrdom of Peter and Paul. Drawing on the story of their mission, Gaudentius presents the saints as symbols both of the universality of the faith and its unity. He says that Christ called Peter the rock on which the 30 R. W. Mathisen, ‘Barbarian bishops and the churches in barbaricis gentibus during late antiquity’, Speculum 72 (1997), 664–97: 665. 31 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge 2000) 207, for a detailed discussion. 32 Leo I, Letter 104 to Emperor Marcian Augustus; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 12, 72; on this theme, see P. Stephanou, ‘Sedes apostolica, regia civitas’, Orientialia Christiana Periodica 33 (1967), 563–82. 33 Tres intelligimus nativitates humano generi ab aeterna Trinitate concessas. Una carnalis est omnium: duae spiritales sunt pro merito fidei singulorum. Prima, qua creamur ex nihilo in substantiam vitae mundanae: secunda, qua regeneramur in Baptismo ex iniquitate, et erroribus ad justitiae veritatem: tertia, qua beatissimi martyres, ob confessionem nominis Christi, per tormenta nascuntur ad regnum; PL 20, 993. The sermon is reprinted, in parts, in B. Degórski, ‘Pietro e Paolo martiri a Roma nell’insegnamento di Gaudenzio di Brescia’, in Pietro e Paolo, il loro rapporto con Roma nelle testimonianze antiche. XXIX incontro di studiosi dell’antichità cristiana. Roma, 4–6 maggio 2000, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 74 (Rome 2001). I am grateful to Éamonn Ó Carragáin for this reference. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 84 Damian Bracken church would be built (Matthew 16:18–19) and Paul the ‘vessel of election’.34 Gaudentius’s point is that the two apostles represented the origins of the church and its final mission to reach all peoples; Peter provided its firm foundation, while Paul, through his teaching, became the ‘vessel of election to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel’ (Acts 9:15). He recounts the manner of the apostles’ martyrdom: Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded (Petrus crucifigitur verso ad terram capite . . . Paulus gladio capite truncatur). The manner of their deaths also indicates the universal significance of their mission, beheading being a form of execution reserved for Roman citizens and crucifixion the execution of the non-Roman. Towards the end of the sermon, Gaudentius emphasises the unity of Peter and Paul despite their differences, a unity they maintained to the last through martyrdom. He then gives a remarkable exegesis of the symbolism of their death. The death of martyrdom brought them a spiritual rebirth to become citizens of heaven. Their joint suffering united them in true brotherhood and they are reborn from the one womb of a single confession to become twins joined by ties of blood,35 not the blood of a common descent, but the blood of martyrdom. The purpose of the structure of Gaudentius’s sermon, then, is to show how Peter and Paul exemplify the central tenet of Christianity: that it transcends racial and man-made divisions, uniting all believers in a shared spiritual identity. These points were developed and their connection with Rome emphasised by Leo the Great36 in his own sermon on Peter and Paul’s dies natalis, preached on 29 June 441. What is striking about the sermon is its author’s confident assertion of authority in the face of the very obvious decline in the status of Rome. The barbarian threats to the city in Leo’s lifetime (the Goths in 410, Vandals in 442 and Huns in 452) are among the clearest indications of that decline. Leo’s masterstroke was to turn those signs of weakness into strength in a sermon that redefines Christian identity. The sermon opens by claiming that Christian Rome had triumphed over imperial Rome in terms of its territorial and temporal extent. Peter and Paul ‘promoted thee [Rome] to such glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state, and the head of the world through the blessed Peter’s holy see 34 Super unum fundatur Ecclesia: alter pretiosum fidei myrum doctrina sua portat in populo, ipse vas electionis effectus; PL 20, 995. 35 Quem cui praeponere audeam, nescio; cum Dominus eos sub una confessione aequales in passione monstraverit, in vera fraternitate conjunxerit, unanimitatis vinculo copularit . . . Sunt etiam Petrus et Paulus vere consanguinei fratres, quos una pariter fides proprii sanguinis fecit communione germanos. Ego eos et geminos dicere fratres audebo, quos mater una confessione, felici utero, simul fudit in regnum; PL 20, 96. 36 For Gaudentius’s influence on Leo, see C. R. Norcock, ‘St Gaudentius of Brescia and the Tome of St Leo’, J Theolog Stud 15 (1913), 593–6. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 85 thou didst attain a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government’.37 Thomas Charles-Edwards has shown that Leo probably had the Roman mission led by Palladius to Ireland, in 431, in mind when he wrote of the extension of Christianity beyond the imperial frontier.38 The spreading of Christianity is a major theme of the sermon and Leo dwells on the mystical connection between Saints Peter and Paul, and Rome, in this universal reach. Although he does not expand on the nature of the apostles’ deaths, he does draw a similar inference from their sacrifice as Gaudentius. He contrasts them with Romulus and Remus, brothers in the flesh, founders of classical Rome and ‘of whom the one that gave thee thy name defiled thee with his brother’s slaying’. Ancient Rome was founded by brothers who were tied by the bonds of flesh and it failed; its decline was obvious at the time of Leo’s writing and, even at its height, it had extended to ‘almost all nations’ (pene omnibus gentibus). But now, through the mission of Peter and Paul in Rome, Christianity was spread ‘throughout the whole world’ (per totum mundum)39 because these were brothers not joined by bonds of blood which, being physical, are limited to one place, but are joined in the faith which is destined to spread ‘throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations’ (Matthew 24:14). Rome’s destiny to become the ‘head of the world’ was realised not by its earthly empire, but by the church founded by Peter and Paul who were united in spiritual bonds. These ideas were certainly known to Columbanus when he wrote of Ireland’s special position in fulfilling the universal mission of Peter and Paul. He alludes to the mission from Rome led by Palladius and presents it as the arrival ‘in the Western regions of the earth’s farther strand’ of ‘Christ’s twin apostles’ (Christi geminos apostolos; ep. 5, 11). In language remarkably similar to Leo’s, he wrote that ancient Rome reached ‘almost all nations’ (omnium prope gentium), but now, through the conversion of Ireland, Christian Rome was known ‘throughout the whole world’ (totum per orbem). Following the conversion of the Irish, Christian Rome achieved what eluded its imperial shadow and was now ‘head of the churches of the world’ (terrarum caput . . . ecclesiarum). Columbanus’s ideas, and sometimes his very words, match Leo’s. Leo recounts the considerable extent of Peter’s mission (Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, Antioch and, eventually, Rome) and how he had a special care for the people of the circumcision (Jam populos, qui ex circumcisione crediderant, erudieras). He says that Paul was the ‘vessel of election and the special teacher of the Gentiles’ (vas electionis et specialis magister 37 Text, PL 54, 422–8; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 12, 194–6. T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Palladius, Prosper, and Leo the Great: mission and primatial authority’, in D. N. Dumville (ed.), Saint Patrick, AD 493–1993 (Woodbridge 1993) 1–12. 39 Leo, Sermo 82; PL 54, 423. 38 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 86 Damian Bracken gentium). Peter therefore represented the church made up of converts from Judaism and Paul the church of the Gentiles (Galatians 2:7). They continued to represent all peoples to the end of their mission in the manner of their deaths. However, their mission becomes meaningful only in the locus of that mission and martyrdom, in Rome, the universal city. Furthermore, the apostles’ unity in the face of death symbolised Rome’s status as the focus of unity for Christian peoples of all origins, Jews and Gentiles, Roman citizens and non-Romans. Leo presents universality and unity as the defining attributes of the Roman church because these were also the defining characteristics of orthodoxy. Vincent of Lérins set out the general understanding of orthodox faith as ‘that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est) . . . We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses.’40 The word ‘Catholic’ denotes a church that ‘comprehends everything almost universally’ (quae omnia fere universaliter comprehendit). The insistence on universality and unity was, for churchmen of the early Middle Ages, more than an ideal; it was a doctrinal imperative. In matters of faith, universality and unity assured orthodoxy. Christ established one church based on one truth. When disagreement arose about the faith, one side must be right, the other wrong. But when all are united in the same belief and that faith is professed by all, it is orthodox. Universality and unity were therefore the guarantees of orthodoxy. As ‘the primordial church (ecclesiam principalem), the very source of episcopal unity (unitas sacerdotalis)’,41 in the words of St Cyprian of Carthage (d.258), Rome occupied that central point in the unity of the universal church because it was founded by Peter and Paul. Vincent is critical of heretics who threaten ecclesial unity and the universality of the faith. Their pride has led them to claim a special holiness for themselves and, as a consequence, to deny the claims of all others not connected with their faction. The hallmark of heretics is therefore their isolation and, in comparison with the universal church, their insignificance. Vincent writes of heretics as the ‘tiny portion’ (particula) that sets itself against ‘the communion of the universal faith’ (ab universalis fidei communione). Leo dwells on the importance of Peter and Paul as figures representing universality because the coming of the ‘chief of the apostolic order’ (princeps apostolici ordinis) to Rome confirmed its status as chief of cities in a Christian context, despite its political decline. In his sermon, Leo quotes I Peter 2:9 saying that the Christian world led by Rome has become ‘a holy 40 Vincent, Commonitorium 2; PL 50, 649; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 11, 132. Cyprian, Ep. LIX, 14; Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) 3 ii, 683; Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL) 3C (Turnhout 1953–), 361; G. W. Clarke (tr.), The letters of St Cyprian of Carthage, Ancient Christian Writers 46 (New York 1986) 82. 41 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 87 nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state’. The quotation occurs in the context of Leo’s assertion that the faith, through the activities of Roman missionaries, had spread further than the empire. The ‘holy nation, chosen people’ (gens sancta, populus electus) are now no longer Christians, including barbarian Christians, within the empire, but also the newly converted barbarians beyond the old imperial limits. The timing of this conversion was important because it happened when the signs of the empire’s passing were becoming obvious. The decline of Rome’s empire occurred at precisely the time when Roman missionaries were extending Christianity beyond the limits that the empire had reached at its height. This showed that Rome’s status as the head of the church did not depend on its political status as the head of an empire. It also allowed Leo to warn Constantinople that the attempt to claim an enhanced status in the church because of its position as the new capital of the empire was misguided. All earthly dominion passes, as Leo himself was witnessing. Only a spiritual foundation such as Christian Rome possessed could be permanent. Because the spirit would not be contained in one location or people, these spiritual foundations made Rome the centre of the universal faith and allowed it to extend Christianity to all nations. The harmony between Peter and Paul (concordia Apostolorum) led to the rebirth of Rome (renouatio urbis) as the capital of the Christian world and made it leader of all the nations (Electa gentium caput, sedes magistri gentium).42 References to Peter and Paul in the context of their mission at Rome occur in the literature of the Easter controversy and carry with them the associations that powerfully suggest the writers’ connection with the universal church and orthodoxy. Tradition of John, or Peter and Paul? Bede shows that, in the 630s, Cummian was not alone in condemning what he saw as his countrymen’s particularism. He refers in the Historia Ecclesiastica to a letter from Pope Honorius (d.638) to the Irish, warning them not to think that their ‘little community’ (paucitatem) which was ‘isolated in the uttermost ends of the earth’ (in extremis terrae finibus) exceeded the wisdom of all churches, ancient and modern, of the world. Honorius, in Bede’s report, sets the isolation of the wayward against the universal church. He accuses the Irish of cutting themselves adrift; his reference to Irish 42 These traditions are examined in detail by C. Pietri, ‘Concordia apostolorum et renovatio urbis (culte des martyrs et propaganda pontificale)’, École française de Rome. Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 73 (1961), 276–322; the quotation is taken from a hymn attributed to Ambrose, quoted in ibid., 302. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 88 Damian Bracken remoteness and insignificance in contrast to the unity of the universal church would have left no one in any doubt about his intentions. This is very much the flavour of Wilfrid’s attack on the Irish at Whitby. He defends what he believes to be the Roman Easter and underlines its universal character by connecting it with the Rome founded by Peter and Paul. This universality is spelled out in the following (highly aspirational) list of those places ‘throughout the world’ (omnem orbem) which observe that tradition. Set against this are some obstinate Irish, Picts and British. The Easter we keep is the same as we have seen universally celebrated in Rome where the apostles St Peter and St Paul lived, taught, suffered, and were buried. We also found it in use everywhere in Italy and Gaul when we travelled though those countries for the purpose of study and prayer. We learned that it was observed at one and the same time (uno ac non diuerso temporis ordine) in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and throughout the whole world (omnem orbem) wherever the Church of Christ is scattered, amid various nations and languages. The only exceptions are these men and their accomplices in obstinacy, I mean the Picts and the Britons, who in these, the two remotest islands of the Ocean (de duabus ultimis Oceani insulis), and only in some parts of them, foolishly attempt to fight against the whole world.43 This same arrangement of naming the parts that make up the oikoumen e (or at least enough of them to indicate its universal nature) and contrasting this with Insular particularism had been anticipated by Cummian a generation before the synod of Whitby and a century before Bede completed the Historia ecclesiastica. He asks his readers to consider which side represents the church: the Hebrews, Greeks, Latins and Egyptians or an insignificant group of Irish and British, ‘pimples (mentagrae) on the face of the earth’. Cummian uses the same word—particula ‘tiny portion’— for the Insular recalcitrants as Vincent had used to describe sectaries. But you ought to consider [writes Cummian] which are the conventicles (conuenticula) of which I spoke, whether they are the Hebrews, Greeks, Latins and Egyptians who are united in their observance of the principal solemnities, or an insignificant group (particula) of Britons and Irish who are almost at the end of the earth, and, if I may say so, but pimples on the face of the earth . . . Jerome, again, is at hand as a helper saying: ‘It should not be considered that there is one church of Rome, another of the whole world. For the provinces of Gaul, Britain, Africa and Persia, the East and India and all barbarian nations adore one Christ, observe one rule of truth’.44 It is clear that in structuring their argument, both Cummian and Wilfrid (in Bede’s account) were influenced by the same conventions. The conventions 43 44 HE 3.25; Colgrave and Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, 301. Walsh and Ó Cróinín, Cummian’s letter, 72–7. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 89 that had such a formative impact on the first accounts of the Irish and AngloSaxon attitudes toward the Irish are found in the earliest anti-heretical literature of the church. Optatus, bishop of Milevis in Numidia, wrote Against the Donatists about 384 and directed it in particular against Parmenian, Donatus’s successor in Carthage.45 He quotes verses from the Psalms taken to prophesy the universal spread of Christianity: ‘He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the rivers up to the ends of the earth’s compass’ (Psalms 71:8); ‘The Lord God of gods has spoken and has called the earth from the rising to the setting of the sun’ (Psalms 49:1). Addressing Parmenian and his Donatist followers, Optatus quotes Psalm 95, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’, but to show them that this verse applies not just to one people, but to all the church ‘which is everywhere’ (quae ubique est), he writes ‘Sing to the Lord, all the earth, declare his glory among the nations, his marvellous works to all peoples’. In presuming that they alone constituted the true church, the Donatists were in effect denying the Christian identity of all others: If you alone praise Him, the world’s whole compass (totus orbis), from the rising to the setting of the sun, will be silent. You have stopped the mouths of all the Christian nations . . . lest God should be defrauded, you yourselves must either give praise with all or, since you have refused to join with all, you alone must be silent.46 To illustrate the intractability of their position, Optatus twice labels the followers of Parmenian a ‘tiny portion’ (particula) in comparison with ‘all the nations’ and spells out the consequences of their isolation: So in order that [the church] may be among you in a tiny portion of Africa (particula Africae), in the corner of a little region, is it therefore not to be with us in another part of Africa? Is it not to be in the Spanish provinces, Gaul, Italy, where you are not? If you want [the church] only to be among yourselves, is it not to be in the three provinces of Pannonia, in Dacia, Moesia, Thrace, Achaia, Macedonia and in the whole of Greece, where you are not? So that it can be among you, is it not to be in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Pamphilia, Phrygia, Cilicia . . . And through so many innumerable isles and other provinces, which can scarcely be numbered, where you do not exist, shall it exist? Where then will the name ‘catholic’ have its proper application, when the reason for calling it catholic is its international and universal diffusion?47 45 M. Edwards, Optatus: Against the Donatists, Translated Texts for Historians (TTH) 27 (Liverpool 1997); PL 11, 883–1104; on Optatus, see R. B. Eno, ‘The work of Optatus as a turning point in the African ecclesiology’, The Thomist 37 (1973), 668–85; J. E. Merdinger, ‘Optatus reconsidered’, in E. A. Livingstone (ed.), Studia Patristica 22 (1989), 294–9. 46 Edwards, Optatus, 31; PL 11, 946. 47 Edwards, Optatus, 29; PL 11, 942. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 90 Damian Bracken This early example of rhetorical geography which sees the isolation and remoteness of heretics as symptomatic of doctrinal waywardness was followed by Irish and Anglo-Saxon writers in the Easter controversy.48 Like Optatus, Cummian and Bede employed the rhetorical device of naming the places that made up the universal church and setting the insignificance of the sectaries against the near-universal consensus of the rest of the Christian world. If the Catholic Church, according to Optatus, is that which ‘is spread throughout the whole compass of the earth’ (in toto terrarum orbe diffusa), then the Donatists represent a threat to that catholicity. However, their error is revealed by the fact that they are, in the words of Vincent of Lérins, a ‘small portion’ (particula) in opposition to the ‘communion of the universal faith’ (ab universalis fidei communione). Optatus then writes at length of Rome as the focus for unity within the universal church. Rome is the antithesis of the particula Africae because, as the Donatists must know, ‘the first episcopal see was set up in Rome, which was occupied by Peter the head of all the apostles . . . so that in this one see unity might be preserved by all’.49 There follows a list of the successors of Peter down to Damasus to show Rome’s link to the apostolic age.50 He then puts a withering question to the Donatists: ‘Tell us the origin of your see?’ They are ‘impious sons . . . boughs broken off the tree . . . the stream severed from the source’ (filios impios . . . ramos fractos ab arbore . . . rivum concisum a fonte),51 curtailed by their recent origins and the limited extent of their influence. By presuming that they are the true church, the Donatists confine the church ‘in a small space’, they ‘put 48 Another example, directly concerned with the controversy, is Constantine’s letter concerning the synod of Nicaea found in Eusebius’s Vita Constantini (although it ‘may owe more to Eusebius than just its preservation’). It reads that Easter is held ‘in the west as in the south and north of the world, as well as some churches in the Orient, thus all of these thought it well, and I myself put it up for consideration, that you would agree that what is unanimously observed in the city of the Romans and in all of Italy and Africa, in Egypt, Spain, Gaul, Britain, Libya, and in all of Greece and in the Asian and Pontian dioceses and in Cilicia . . .’; quoted in K. Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: a rhetorical history (Louvain 1998) 263; NPNF ser. 2, vol. 1, 525. 49 Edwards, Optatus, 32; PL 11, 947. 50 On this list, see R. B. Eno, ‘The significance of the lists of the Roman bishops in the antiDonatist polemic’, Vigiliae Christianae 47 (1993), 158–69; cf. also the list of Peter’s successors in Irenaeus, Adver. Haer. 3.3: ‘but this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles . . . has come down to us. And this is most abundant proof that there is one and the same vivifying faith, which has been preserved in the Church from the apostles until now . . .’ According to D. E. Doyle, ‘Spread throughout the world: hints on Augustine’s understanding of petrine ministry’, J Early Christian Stud 13 (2005), 233–46, similar ideas were popularised by Augustine in his anti-Donatistic writings. Rome represented ‘the church’s geographic universality . . . [and] the Catholic Church’s ancient faith’. Peter spoke as unus pro omnibus, quia unitas in omnibus (‘one for all, because he represented unity in all’); Augustine, Sermo 183, quoted by Doyle, p. 244. In ep. 53, Augustine also resorts to the device of naming the bishops of Rome in succession. 51 Edwards, Optatus, 39; PL 11, 962; cf. Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiae 5; PL 4, 501–2. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 91 down markers and fix boundaries’, showing themselves to be heretics by refusing to recognise that the church is universal, open to all regardless of race. Optatus quotes Psalm 95, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’, and says this did not apply to the Donatists alone, but to all the church ‘which is everywhere’ for, he followed this by saying: ‘Sing to the Lord, all the earth (omnis terra), declare his glory among the nations (in gentibus), his marvellous works to all peoples (in omnibus populis).’ He said, ‘among the nations’, he did not say, ‘in the tiny portion of Africa (in particula Africae), where you are . . .’52 Heretics deny the salvation that had been promised to the nations as they deny Christ what had been promised to him for ‘there is nothing in any part of the earth which has been withheld from His dominion, since the whole earth has been promised by God’. Aspects of these arguments are alluded to by Honorius, are dwelt on in greater detail by Wilfrid, but they run through the whole of Cummian’s letter. The presumption of the particula Hiberniae has pitted them against the universal church because it infers that the true church is found in Ireland and Britain alone: ‘What, then’, writes Cummian, ‘more evil can be thought about Mother Church than if we say Rome errs, Jerusalem errs, Alexandria errs, Antioch errs, the whole world errs; the Irish and British alone know what is right . . .’53 As we have seen, he refers to these churches as particula ‘a tiny portion’, and also as ‘conventicles’ (conuenticula)—another word ending in a diminutive suffix. The word is significant. In the earliest Christian literature, ‘conventicle’ means simply a small gathering. Over time, the word, because it denoted that which is diminutive, isolated or insignificant,54 came to have very negative associations and was used for gatherings that met in opposition to the universal church. In De Ecclesiae Unitate, Cyprian says that heretics and schematics have established ‘for themselves . . . diverse places of worship (conventicula sibi diversa constituent), they have forsaken the Head and Source of the truth’.55 In his letter to Pope Cornelius, he calls Rome ‘the primordial church (ecclesiam principalem), the very source of episcopal unity (unitas sacerdotalis)’,56 and sets against it the ‘conventicle of the lost faction’ (conventiculum perditae factionis).57 Optatus himself uses the term for the 52 Edwards, Optatus, 31; PL 11, 945. Walsh and Ó Cróinín, Cummian’s letter, 80–1. 54 The communities of Christians which held out against the official religion of the empire are referred to as conventicles in Galerius’s Edict of Toleration (311), PL 7, 205, and in the Edict of Milan (313) promulgated in the reign of Constantine, PL 7, 270. 55 PL 4, 509. 56 Ep. 59, 14; PL 3, 817. 57 In his own letter against Parmenian, Augustine condemned those who imagine themselves alone to be Christian, preferring to meet in their own conventicles and refusing to communicate 53 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 92 Damian Bracken ‘meeting place’ of the Donatists when they journeyed to Rome. Once there, they travelled outside the city, as they had travelled doctrinally outside the church, to ‘a certain cave outside the city with hurdles, to have a meetingplace (conventiculum) there’.58 Cummian and Bede were familiar with the descriptions of heresy, descriptions also familiar to Optatus, and used them in the earliest accounts of the Irish. This reading of Ireland’s remoteness is in marked contrast to that of Columbanus who took a positive view of his country’s geographic location and saw the arrival of Christianity at ‘the Western regions of the earth’s farther strand’ as the completion of the church’s mission to reach all peoples and an affirmation of Rome’s position as ‘head of churches’. The conflict between the local and the universal was a prominent theme in the debate about Easter from the earliest times. At the beginning of his account of the synod of Whitby, Bede says that the conflict was brought to a head by those who maintained that ‘the Irish observance of Easter Sunday was contrary to the custom of the universal church’ (contra uniuersalis ecclesiae morem).59 The differences in practice caused serious division in the kingdom of Northumbria for ‘the king [Oswiu] had finished the fast and was keeping Easter Sunday, while the queen [Eanfled] and her people were still in Lent and observing Palm Sunday’ (Bede, HE 3.25). In the fourth century Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (d.373), was worried by such a division and lamented ‘that Egyptians should feast while “the entire inhabited world” fasts’.60 He tried to bring his community into line with this (notional) universal practice by fixing both the length of the fast and the method for determining its dates. In his Festal Letters, he criticised the Alexandrians’ particularism because it inferred that they alone possessed the church: ‘God is no longer known only in Judea, but in all the earth, “their voice hath gone forth, and the knowledge of Him hath filled all the earth”’ (Psalms 19.4).61 He compares them to the Jews who, in observing the Passover, sought a single location, the earthly ‘Jerusalem which is here below’. But now that it had been superseded by the Christian Easter, Passover is no longer to be tied to the flesh, to a single race, or to a single place and celebrated only in Jerusalem: ‘For no longer were these things to be done which belonged to Jerusalem which is beneath; neither there alone was the feast to be celebrated, with the Catholic church: In quibus una generalis adversus omnes qui christianos se dici volunt, et Ecclesiae catholicae non communicant, sed in suis separatim conventiculis congregantur; PL 43, 48. 58 Edwards, Optatus, 34; PL 11, 954–55. 59 Colgrave and Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, 294–5. 60 Athanasius, ep. fest. 12.1; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 4, 538; quoted and discussed in D. Brakke, ‘Jewish flesh and Christian spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria’, J Early Christian Stud 9 (2001), 453–81: 459. Much of the following discussion is based on this work. 61 This and what follows is from ep. fest. 4.3; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 4, 516. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 93 but wherever God willed it to be’; that is, ‘in every place’. Accordingly, Jewish particularism with its attention to place and race is equated with the material and carnal. This led the Jews to cling to the literal understanding of the law. In their devotion to a single nation and specific location, they are caught up with earthly things and so they fail to see biblical ‘types’ as material prefigurations of the spiritual realities of the New Testament. Jews eat ‘a fleshly lamb’, not realising that this is a type of the ‘true lamb that was slain, even our Lord Jesus Christ’.62 This construction of Judaism became the basis for Athanasius’s portrait of the heterodox who, in their adherence to the local, are out of step with ‘universal’ Easter practice and so resist the spiritual universalism that marks orthodox Christianity.63 Therefore, neither the Jews nor the Arians nor the Melitians nor the heretics share in the festival . . . just as the Apostle wrote: ‘Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us’ [I Corinthians 5:7]. He did not say: ‘Our portion is divided up for small groups of people, for it is not fitting for us to proclaim it’. Rather, it belongs to everyone . . . 64 Jerome used similar arguments in a sermon for the Easter vigil. Universal unity in the observance of the Easter festival is essential if Christians are to be true to its spiritual meaning. The year-old lamb must be eaten in the one house (in una domo), that is, not outside the church.65 Jerome’s sermon was known in early seventh-century Ireland and Cummian quoted this section before condemning the wayward Irish and British as those qui sunt pene extremi et . . . mentagrae orbis terrarum (‘who are almost at the end of the earth and . . . but pimples on the face of the earth’, in Walsh and Ó Cróinín’s memorable rendering). Cummian made subtle but telling changes to Jerome’s sermon. The ‘year-old lamb’ agnus anniculus becomes agnus typicus (‘the typic lamb’) of the Old Testament that prefigured the New Testament fulfilment in Christ. To make the transition from the Old Testament shadow to the New Testament fulfilment, the celebration must be held within ‘the one house’ which Jerome interprets to mean the church, but which Cummian more particularly defines as aecclesia universalis (‘the universal church’). For Cummian, the Irish who do not join in the Easter celebration with the universal church limit it to one people and a single geographic location. Therefore, by their particularism, they are tied down to the material and are, 62 Ep. fest. 1.9; tr. NPNF ser. 2, vol. 4, 509. Brakke, ‘Jewish flesh and Christian spirit’, 469. 64 Ep. fest. 41; tr. Brakke, ‘Jewish flesh and Christian spirit’, 476, and Brakke, ‘“Outside the places, within the truth”: Athanasius of Alexandria and the localization of the holy’, in D. Frankfurter (ed.), Pilgrimage and holy space in late antique Egypt, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 134 (Leiden 1998) 445–81: 467 and 475. 65 Jerome, De Exodo, in Vigilia Paschalae; CCSL 78, 536. 63 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 94 Damian Bracken like the Jews, unable to rise from the literal, or ‘fleshly’, to the spiritual appreciation of Easter. Had they advanced from the fleshly state, they would have realised that the church, as a spiritual community, was not to be confined to a particular place and people in this way since its mission was to spread salvation to all nations. Universality is therefore linked to the spiritual and those who break from the universal betray the most fundamental precept of Christianity. Cummian is faithful to Jerome’s text when he condemns those who undermine that universality, for ‘Jews and heretics and all conventicles of perverse doctrines (omnia conuenticula dogmatum peruersorum) who do not eat the Lamb in one church do not eat the flesh of the Lamb, but that of the dragon . . .’66 The Easter question was such a burning issue for early Christians because it concerned the very nature of the church which, as a spiritual community, transcended the material barriers of race, geographic location, even natural barriers; it had crossed ‘over the channels’ surge . . . over the swelling flood’ to reach the Irish in ‘the western regions of the earth’s farther strand’.67 But, for Cummian and Bede, some among the Irish and British betrayed their origins and cut themselves off from the rest of the Christian world. In their view, they failed to understand the spiritual significance of the feast and are painted in the same colours as the Jews of antiJewish rhetoric and recalcitrant Egyptians in Athanasius’s day. Viewed in the light of early stereotypes of heretics, it becomes clear that Cummian and Bede drew on these descriptions to represent the Irish who, in their estimation, were out of step with the universal church. The enduring influence of the early accounts is seen when these writers ally the different Easter traditions with Peter and Paul on the one hand and John on the other. Cummian alludes to this conflict in his reference to the disagreement (diuersitas) about Easter among the successors of Saints Peter and John.68 The reference occurs at the beginning of the section of the letter that considers the major councils that discussed the celebration of Easter, a hint at conciliar activity in the earliest stage of the debate. Bede fleshes out this rather perplexing reference in Cummian in the narrative of the synod of Whitby for Wilfrid’s speech links Peter and Paul to the Roman party, and John to the Irish. From the second century, these figures represented the different traditions in the conflicts about Easter. In the accounts of that conflict in its Insular context, writers drew on anti-Jewish rhetoric and standard descriptions of the heretical to stigmatise the Irish (and, it should be noted, the first to do this was the Irishman Cummian). The same process is at work in the way they link the Irish to John and the Romanising party to Peter and 66 Walsh and Ó Cróinín, Cummian’s letter, 72–3. Columbanus, ep. 5, 11. 68 Walsh and Ó Cróinín, Cummian’s letter, 72–3. 67 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 95 Paul. Wilfrid claimed that his Easter is celebrated by all in Rome, ‘where the apostles St Peter and St Paul lived, taught, suffered, and were buried’. In Bede’s account, Colmán claimed to derive his Easter from the evangelist John, ‘who was reckoned worthy to recline on the breast of the Lord’ (cf. John 13:25), and who was followed by all the churches of the east. The account of the synod by Eddius Stephanus in his Life of Wilfrid reports that Colmán claimed John, ‘who leaned on the breast of the Lord’, as his authority69 and that this Johannine tradition was followed by ‘Polycarp and his disciples’. Polycarp (d. c.155), who had ‘conversed with many who had seen Christ’, is associated with John in Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses.70 Irenaeus recalls Polycarp’s visit to Rome in the reign of Anicetus in the chapter where he provides a list of Roman bishops (the earliest to survive).71 Polycarp seems to have been recognised as the senior eastern bishop and Eusebius in the Historia Ecclesiastica gives more information about this Roman visit. Polycarp adhered to the tradition of the east and celebrated the Pasch on the day of the Jewish Passover, that is, the fourteenth of Nisan, regardless of the day of the week it fell on. In the west, the death of Jesus was commemorated on Friday and the Resurrection, therefore, always on Sunday. When in Rome Polycarp defended his practice (later condemned as Quartodecimanism) to Pope Anicetus. But they both agreed to adhere to their respective traditions, Polycarp out of respect for John, and Anicetus because ‘he ought to keep the custom of those who were presbyters before him’, and they parted on good terms.72 Eusebius relates in the HE that, at the end of the second century, Pope Victor (189–98) was not so tolerant of diversity and attempted to impose the dominical custom, threatening to excommunicate all, including the entire eastern church, who did not fall into line. He refers to a letter from Irenaeus exhorting Victor to moderation. In 195, synods were convened to settle the matter and decided to follow ‘apostolic tradition’ and end their fast on the day commemorating the Resurrection which was always to be kept on a Sunday. Eusebius then recalls the reactions of the eastern church in the letter of their leader, Polycrates, to Victor. They decided to retain their Quartodeciman practice because it derived from ‘John 69 B. Cosgrave, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge 1985) 20–1. ANF 1, 416. 71 Eusebius writes of the Roman see as ‘the very great, the very ancient, and universally known church founded and organised at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul’; A. Rousseau and L. Doutreleau (eds.), Irénée de Lyon. Contre les Hérésies, Sources Chrétiennes (SC) 210 (Paris 1941–), quoted in E. Lanne, ‘L’église de Rome, a gloriosissimis duobus apostolis Petro et Paulo Romae fundatae et constitutae ecclesiae (Adv. Haer III, 3, 2)’, Irénikon 49 (1976), 275–322: 275; tr. ANF 1, 415–16. 72 Columbanus alludes subtly to this example of diversity within unity in his letter to Gregory the Great, ep. 1,4. 70 Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved 96 Damian Bracken . . . who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord’. However, Eusebius also reveals what led to the convening of the synods for Polycrates says that he summoned the Asian bishops ‘at your [Victor’s] request’. The Asian synod and, probably, the western synods Eusebius mentions met in response to the bishop of Rome’s summons. This marks an important development in recognition of Rome’s status because, for the first time, its bishop exercised responsibility for the universal church in convening synods in many parts of the Christian world.73 From the earliest times, then, the character of the Easter celebration was tied to Roman claims to universal responsibility for all churches (sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum). Universality was the defining characteristic of orthodoxy, salvation was to be brought to all the nations through the church and Rome was seen as the focus for unity within that universal church. To resist the universal celebration of Easter was portrayed, therefore, as a betrayal of the most important Christian principles. John was associated with the Eastern ecclesiastics who were believed to have offered such resistance. From the time of Cummian, association with John was an effective way of stigmatising the Irish. One of Eusebius’s sources was the paschal tract De Ratione Paschali by Anatolius of Laodicea whose authority the Irish appealed to at the synod of Whitby.74 It was written, according to the editors, shortly after 264 and gives an account of the Easter controversy of Victor’s time. The Asian bishops are said to accept the irreproachable authority ‘of John, who leant on our Lord’s bosom, and who . . . celebrated the Pasch without question in every year whenever it was luna 14 and when the lamb was sacrificed among the Jews’. They did not agree with the dominical tradition of Peter, Paul ‘and their successors’. There are clear precedents, then, in the earliest literature of the Easter controversy, to connect John with Jewish practice and all the negative associations that brought to the minds of contemporaries. According to Wilfrid, John ‘literally (iuxta litteram) observed the decrees of the Mosaic law when the church was still Jewish in many respects’. The Irish at Whitby are therefore portrayed as guilty by association of the Jewish faults of particularism and materialism that result in their failure to comprehend the spiritual significance of the Pasch and the doctrinal need for the universal observation of the fast and feast. The Easter controversy, as a formative event in Insular history, engendered a literature that preserves some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon accounts 73 Discussed in K. Schatz (tr. J. A. Otto and L. M. Maloney), Papal primacy from its origins to the present (Collegeville MN 1996) 11–12; see also K. Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: a rhetorical history (Louvain 1998) 319–87. 74 D. P. McCarthy and A. Breen, The ante-Nicene Christian Pasch ‘De Ratione Paschali’. The paschal tract of Anatolius, bishop of Laodicea (Dublin 2003) 48–9 (text), 66–7 (tr.). Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved ROME AND THE ISLES 97 of the Irish and, indeed, in the case of the letters of Columbanus and Cummian, the earliest accounts of the Irish by the Irish themselves. But much of those accounts are shaped by the rhetoric of orthodoxy and the Irish are measured against the external criteria that defined the orthodox. These accounts of Irish identity must be interpreted with reference to stereotypes of orthodoxy and heresy which the Insular writers knew well. On the other hand, to try to see in this literature objective, historicist accounts of the early Irish is, in many cases, to force a literal interpretation to which it does not yield, and to underestimate its sophistication. Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved Copyright © British Academy 2009 – all rights reserved