The inheritance For this chapter, the Celtic peoples are those which still, in 600 CE, spoke a Celtic language. The continental Celts of antiquity are thus excluded, leaving only the Britons, who inherited their Christianity from Roman Britain, the Irish, who received theirs mainly from the Britons in the fifth and early sixth centuries, and the Picts. By 600 the initial constructive phase of Irish Christianity was over. It was three years since Columba died on Iona; Columbanus had already left Bangor for Burgundy. The great churches of the Irish were nearly all founded in the sixth century. There remained, however, many traces of that earlier period when, because of Irish settlements in Britain and British missionaries in Ireland, the church of the smaller island had been formed in the image of the church of the Britons. The insular scripts, shared by Britons and Irish, are only one especially obvious sign of the connection. The years about 600 were also, however, the time at which the younger Irish Church began to overshadow its British foster-parent. On the one hand, the British Church was suffering territorial loss and impoverishment from the English advance. On the other hand, Columbanus’s letters to the papacy betray a pride in the flourishing Christianity of his homeland. Not only had the British Church suffered from English advance, it was also threatened by the implications of the Gregorian mission to the English. Moreover, its Breton offshoot had, by 600, been instrumental in driving a wedge between the Christianity of “the Romans” of Gaul, those whom we call Gallo-Romans, and the Christianity of the Britons.

Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World

Beyond empire II: Christianities of the Celtic peoples

Churches in the landscape

By the early fifth century Western Roman Empire was theoretically Christian. There were still pagan intellectuals among the upper classes, especially among the lower classes of the countryside, but also among those who lived in the cities, including Rome itself, who continued to perform rituals which were condemned as idolatrous by the church. Nor are the Burgundians and the Franks the only peoples for whom Christianisation entailed hesitation between Arianism and Catholicism. Politics would play a major role in the ensuing Christianisation of the English, with powerful rulers putting pressure on their weaker neighbours, sponsoring them in baptism, and supporting missions to their kingdoms. The chief example of the use of force in evangelisation during the early Middle Ages is the Christianisation of the Saxons, which came to be intimately related to their conquest during the reign of Charlemagne.

Christianisation and the dissemination of Christian teaching

Anastasius, the Roman Empire in the beginning of the sixth century, inherited, and promoted, religious divisions that were to cast a long shadow over the Christian Roman or Byzantine Empire. Accounts of the second half of Anastasius' reign indicate increasing popular unrest, ostensibly owing to the religious policy of the emperor. At the beginning of the century, the long peace with Persia, the traditional enemy of the Roman Empire, and indeed of its predecessors, came to an end. Anastasius was succeeded by Justin I, who had risen through the ranks to become Count of the Excubitors. Justinian's reign was a long one, lasting until 565, thirty-eight years in all, or forty-seven if one includes the period as the power behind Justin's throne. The 'grand design' view of Justinian's reign sees all his actions as the deliberate restoration of the ancient Roman Empire, though a Roman Empire raised to new heights of glory as a Christian Empire confessing the Orthodox faith.

Eastern Empire in the sixth century.

The Kingdom and the kingdoms A little after 680 CE, Julian, bishop of Toledo, the capital of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, was challenged to answer a constant objection made by the Jews against Christianity. Christians were misguided to think that, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah – the “Christ,” the Anointed One – had come. The Messiah had not come. The world was only five thousand years old. The sixth age in which the Messiah would arrive had not yet even begun. The recent centuries lacked meaning. They were a blank space, a time of waiting for the arrival of the true Christ – the Anointed One of God. To the bishop of Toledo, his imagined Jewish interlocutors could not have been more wrong. History was already tinged with excitement. The Messiah had come. Christ had been born in Bethlehem in the days of the Emperor Augustus. His coming to earth had left a palpable trace. For it had coincided with a moment of almost supernatural quiet, throughout the Mediterranean world, associated with the foundation of the Roman Empire. Civil wars ceased. Peace returned to the cities. Relieved of military emergencies, the civilian population returned to the fields: “and the business of war was delegated to the Roman legions alone, to be conducted against barbarian nations.” For Julian, the peace of the Roman world in the age of Augustus, now over six centuries in the past, had been nothing less than the footprint on time of the incarnate God. The peace of Rome itself had not lasted.

Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World

Citations

Beyond empire II: Christianities of the Celtic peoples

Churches in the landscape

Christianisation and the dissemination of Christian teaching

Eastern Empire in the sixth century.

Introduction: Christendom, c. 600

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