St. Augustine of Canterbury
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury. When St. Gregory the Great decided that the time had come to evangelise England he chose the prior of his own monastery of St. Andrew on the Coelian hill to lead the mission, along with about thirty of his monks. In 596 they set out from Rome for England, but by the time they had reached Provence they became discouraged by reports of the savagery of the English. They decided to return to Rome and abandon the enterprise. St. Gregory was convinced that the English would be receptive to the faith and St. Augustine received the necessary encouragement to proceed with the mission. They landed on the Isle of Thanet in the territory of Ethelbert, King of Kent, who was himself baptised at Pentecost in 597. St. Augustine soon afterwards travelled to France, where he was consecrated bishop for the English by St. Virgilius of Arles. By the Christmas of the same year many of Ethelbert’s subjects were themselves baptised. St. Augustine sent two of his monks, Laurence and Peter, back to Rome to give a report on the mission, requesting more helpers and advice from St. Gregory. They returned with further missionaries, notably St. Mellitus, St. Justus and St. Paulinus.
St. Gregory gave St. Augustine clear instructions about how to develop the mission. Pagan temples were not to be destroyed but to be purified and consecrated for Christian worship. Local customs were to be retained as far as possible, with Christian festivals substituted for existing pagan ones. In Canterbury St. Augustine rebuilt an ancient church which became his cathedral. Outside the walls of the city he established a monastic foundation dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, though it later became known as St. Augustine’s.
St. Augustine became aware of the differences between the liturgical uses that he was accustomed to in Rome and those that existed in Britain. He therefore met with the leading ecclesiastics and tried to encourage them to co-operate with him in evangelising the English and adopt the same liturgical uses. The British bishops found St. Augustine’s demands lacked respect for their own customs, which they refused to abandon and consequently declined to accept St. Augustine as their metropolitan. Despite this failure, St. Augustine’s mission continued to grow in south east England and bishoprics were established at London and Rochester. He died about seven years after his arrival in England, on 26th May, 605.
The pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes had emerged as the new rulers of the land in the context of the power vacuum that had developed after the Roman withdrawal from Britain at the beginning of the fifth century. Christianity had made only limited progress in Roman Britain, but it had greater success in Wales, where the faith had been maintained after it had been largely obliterated by the new pagan rulers of England. The tribal kingdoms of Angles, Saxons and Jutes were as aggressive and warlike towards each other as they were to the existing population of the country. It is not surprising that St. Augustine was so alarmed by reports of their savagery that he had initially abandoned the mission.
However, St. Gregory was a man of energy and vision. Some years before he had asked about the identity of some slaves being sold in the marketplace in Rome. When he was told where they were from he responded that “they were not angles but angels”. He clearly saw that no people, however debased and degraded they might seem, were outside the divine calling to preach the gospel among all nations. He was himself a child of the Roman aristocracy but he lived in an age when Italy was in a state of collapse and the civilised world seemed to have come to an end. The future lay not with attempting to re-establish the old order, but rather with the evangelisation of the pagan tribes who had emerged as rulers of the new kingdoms that had replaced the Roman empire in the west.
Many of the pagan rulers like Ethelbert, King of Kent, were anxious to adopt the faith of what seemed to them to be a superior civilisation. His own wife was already a Christian, so he already had some familiarity with the faith. He saw St. Augustine and his mission as the emissaries of this more advanced way of life. They were literate, kept accounts and planned ahead. Hence, becoming Christian was not seen as a backward looking step, but a sign of social progress. It seems that this outlook greatly contributed to the success of the mission (however imperfectly the faith was adopted by the people in practice).
St. Gregory cared little about liturgical uniformity and advised St. Augustine to adopt whatever uses seemed most suitable in his new context. Since St. Augustine was himself a monk of St. Gregory’s own monastery, he decided simply continue to use the Roman liturgy to which he was accustomed. Hence, the new English converts were encouraged to be “Roman of the city”. This was a momentous development in the context of the time. The Roman rite was then still essentially only the use of the Church of Rome. Other parts of Italy had their own uses, such as the Ambrosian in Milan, whereas Spain used the Mozaribic rite and France the Gallican. St. Augustine broke with this precedent by simply adopting the Roman rite for the new English Church. This caused the Roman rite to spread for the first time outside of Italy and be ever after associated with English Christianity and wherever English missionaries went. It was through later English missionaries like St. Willibrord and St. Boniface that the Roman rite was adopted in the Netherlands and Germany. Later Charlemagne desired to abandon the Gallican uses of his own kingdom for the Roman rite. He employed an Englishman (Alcuin) to assist this process by incorporating many of the existing Gallican uses that the people were familiar with into the Roman rite that was now being adopted. Thus, over the course of many centuries, the Roman rite became that of western Christendom as a whole.
It is important to emphasise this point today because it is often supposed that the traditional Roman rite was the product of a rigid and narrow clericalism that had been imposed on the people. In fact, it was a developed customary usage of the Church of Rome that was only gradually adopted by the Western Church as a whole. It was less the initiative of the Popes themselves (who had little or no interest imposing their own liturgy on other churches), but rather the result of the enthusiasm to be “Roman of the city” by St. Augustine’s mission to England. The Roman rite was therefore used from the outset in the English Church and was later spread further by English missionaries, eventually becoming the rite of the whole Western Church.
Let us therefore remain faithful to the life and witness of St. Augustine in our own time and place and continue to uphold the use of the traditional Roman rite.
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
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