Reflections on My English Pilgrimage, Part 1

Part of the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury

In thinking over my English pilgrimage, I have three sets of reflections that have been rattling around in my brain, and I'll share them here in a series of posts, this week and next. First, about Christianity and the West; second, about the Eucharist; and third, about my own relationship to the church. So for this post, I'm looking back at the story of Christianity's re-emergence in Britain in the early medieval period, and what a burst of light in the so-called "Dark Ages" can tell us about our own day.

As a scholar of church history, and with a particular focus on the history of missions in early Christianity, I wanted to explore sites associated with the re-evangelization of Britain in the seventh century. Re-evangelization, you say? Well, yes. Britain had already received the gospel before that date, back when the native Britons were under the sway of the Roman Empire, and several of the sites I visited attested to that ancient heritage. There was St. Alban's Cathedral, marking the spot where--according to tradition--the first Christian martyr in England was killed, sometime in the late third or early fourth century. And there was St. Pancras Old Church in London, marking an old Roman encampment where, some believe, the first Christian church in Britain was erected after Constantine's edict of toleration in 313 AD. This Roman Christianity spread through the local population, such that the Britons largely became a Christian people over the succeeding years.

But paganism was about to mount a swift comeback in Britain, and it came in the form of a settler-invasion: the Angles and Saxons, Germanic stock from across the North Sea, settling first in Kent and East Anglia and gradually sweeping across the island. By the time the late sixth century rolled around, the Britons had been pushed back into Wales, and all of what is now England was once again pagan, bereft of the gospel. 

St. Chad, Lichfield Cathedral

It's at this point that my interest in the story picks up, because England would be the beneficiary of two great waves of missionaries, coming from the south (Rome) and the north (Irish monks in Scotland). While only one of the sites I visited on this trip attested to the legacy of the Celtic monks from the north (Chad's preaching in Mercia, where Lichfield Cathedral now stands), many of them were associated with the surge of evangelization from the south. Both the Roman and Celtic mission movements were spectacular: in the seventh century AD, in a time when the transmission of people and information was far, far slower than it is today, the message of the gospel raced across the hills and heaths of England at an astonishing pace. One needs only take a look at the handful of cathedrals I visited to see the story in real time: 

- Canterbury Cathedral, built on a site sacred to the memory of the original Roman missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, Augustine of Canterbury, who arrived there in 597 AD;

- Rochester Cathedral, marking the mission of Augustine's friend Justus, who planted the faith there just a few years later; and which cathedral is also the resting place of Paulinus, yet another member of the Roman mission team, whose ministry of evangelization in the early seventh century took him all the way northward, into York and Northumbria;

- St. Paul's Cathedral, which likely goes all the way back to the ministry of Mellitus, a fourth member of that same Roman mission team, consecrated by Augustine to plant a church in London;

- Christ Church Cathedral, marking a Christian abbey founded in the latter half of the seventh century by the Anglo-Saxon princess Frideswide;

- Ely Cathedral, also founded as an abbey in 672 by the Anglo-Saxon princess Etheldreda;

- Lichfield Cathedral, marking the seventh-century ministry of Chad, who had pressed the Celtic Christian evangelization of England deep into the last remaining pagan territory, adding to the legacy of a whole generation of Celtic missionaries like Cuthbert, Aidan, and Mungo.

Memorial to St. Paulinus, Rochester Cathedral

All that to say: many of the greatest churches of the land attest to a dramatic turning of the tides that came within the span of a single century. Britain had fallen from Christianity to paganism, and that violent conversion was, to all eyes, utterly complete. And then, in the blink of an eye, the whole thing was transformed completely, and the gospel made its second passage across the land in a way that transformed Britain entirely. It was a startling turn of events, and not by any means a guaranteed outcome--some of the other Germanic peoples of central, eastern, and northern Europe would take another half-millennium to fully convert to the Christian faith. Something swift and striking was afoot in seventh-century England, and it gives me hope for today.

We too live in an age where it looks like the former place of Christianity in our society is vanishing before our eyes. Like the earliest British Christians, we've seen tides of unfaith roll into our civilization with all the alarming power and swiftness of an invasion. Not only atheism, but paganism itself is making a startling return, and one gets the sense in visiting some of these old churches that one is really just walking through the ruins of a bygone age. The Christian world has fallen, and a new Dark Ages opens before us. Many readers will feel this sensibility about the course things are taking in America, but it is far more visible in western Europe, where the old churches built to call all the people to worship largely stand empty, save for a handful. Like Britain in the sixth century, it looks like Christianity's time has come and gone, and a pagan and disinterested populace looks everywhere for solace except to the old faith.

Marker in Ely Cathedral

But the sixth century was not the end of the story. Let's not forget just how fast the story changed, and how complete was the transformation effected by that change. There is no falling away so far and so completely that God is not mighty enough to bring us back. Even now, I wonder if we're not already seeing the seeds of a significant revival, as more and more public intellectuals begin to voice their doubts about the explanatory power of atheism. Walking around Oxford, the greatest university in the world, it is almost impossible not to bump into the question of God around every corner. It might be the case, just maybe, that the bleakness of European atheism in the twentieth century will fade in the memory as a blip in the storyline, like the pagan resurgence of sixth-century Britain, and that the twenty-first century will one day be remembered for a host of missionary-saints, with new cathedrals shooting up to embrace the sky. Bottom line: it's worth remembering that the West has seen a "post-Christian" age before, back in sixth-century Britain (and it's far from the only one). But it wasn't really post-Christian after all. It turned out, in the most marvelous way, to have been a pre-Christian age, a mere pause in the music before the symphony thundered on.