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Chapter 9.1: Saint
Gildas reconsidered
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Arthur had two successors. Not in
the realm of war or politics – at least, not
of practical politics. Each claimed a different
part of his mantle - of his attitudes, of his
intellectual and moral heritage; and one of them
is already known to us.
Let us ask a question:
Arthur’s radical rejection of the obsession
with Romanity had led to a new political culture,
Christian and Latin-speaking but based on Celtic
categories, capable of astonishing sweep and
broad organization. Does this remind us of
anyone? It does. It is the political equivalent
of Gildas’ literary art, with its
combination of non-Roman culture with Roman
Catholic faith, its ability to arrange arguments
with a scope and depth unknown to Continental
contemporaries, its altogether new conception.
We remember that I argued, from
the suggestion of Auerbach, that Gildas’
style and construction cannot have been the
result only of individual genius, however much
that was present, but of a whole culture; and we
have since found here and there evidence of
similar high culture. It is there in the
inventive and penetratingly insightful use of the
two Gospel scenes of banquet and temptation in O;
in A’s analytical account of royalty; and in
Nennius 48’s fragment about Vortigern, with
its elegant Latin antitheses and conclusion: Postquam
exosi fuerunt illi omnes homines gentis suae pro
piaculo suo inter potentes et impotentes, inter
servum et liberum, inter monachos et laicos,
inter parvum et magnum, et ipse dum de loco ad
loco vagus errat, tandem cor eius crepuit et
defunctus est - non cum laude. These
are the fragments of an once brilliant and
original tradition of Latin writing, of whom
Gildas may have been the highest instance. But
where did he draw his breadth of vision, his
insight, his long-range literary art? From
contemporary society? Hardly. The
chronic and pervasive short-termism of his
contemporaries, incapable of seeing beyond their
own immediate interest, is exactly what he raises
his vast rhetorical talent, what he hurls the
resources of his intellect, against; in the name
of a vision beyond the mere family feuds, beyond
the miserable greed of individual kings whose
incapacity to learn even from their own mistakes,
let alone from the great patrimony of a culture
whose store of high examples, insight, morality
and knowledge Gildas so values, drives him to
despair.
We have asked implicitly, when
examining the majesty of Gildas’ literary
art, where such a solid, mature and bold approach
to writing could have been developed and learned,
in the tribal narrowness of the Britain he
describes. There certainly was no resource
in contemporary Continental literature, where the
best is but chronicling (Gregory of Tours) and
the worst is dead rhetoric badly applied
(Cassiodorus). But now our
research has led us to conceive of a political
leader with the same bold and solid approach to
politics, if nothing like the humanity and
Christian sense of values: the Arthur who, in his
middle years, came to look at all the countries
surrounding Britain, from the Scandinavian
outlands from which its pagan settlers – and
perhaps his own mother’s father – had
come, to the Spanish sea route which looked
towards the mighty and terrible Empire of the
East; and had conceived plans to use this vast
range of political problems and conditions not as
a threat but as an advantage, rejecting the
ossified and irrelevant remains of Roman ideas in
favour of a uniquely bold new design whose
enormity and baroque complexity resolved itself,
like Gildas’ great literary work, into a
simple, vast conception with the fascination of
inevitability – do away with the failed
Roman order; neutralize the external dangers,
Scandinavia, Ireland, Byzantium; master the more
threatening barbarian entities; and above all,
master Gaul, claiming for yourself both the
heritage of the Celtic ancestors still remembered
by learned Romans such as Ausonius and that of
the Latin and Catholic West. Like Gildas,
Arthur saw the point and stuck to it.
And Arthur himself generated, it
seems, a good deal of literature: generous to
bards, fond of being praised, he was the direct
cause of the writing of L and probably of A, two
fundamental texts. It was to L, and
to a lesser extent to A, that Gildas was reacting
throughout his book, and it follows that he must
have taken L very seriously, as a work of
literature, and as a presentation of values.
As we have seen the correspondence between the
kind of mind displayed by Arthur and the literary
art of Gildas, here we have the connecting link:
it was by reacting to the claims, the
justifications, the moral and intellectual
underpinnings of the Arthurian revolution, that
Gildas reached the peak of his genius – like
the American and French Revolutions stimulated
swarms of writers of genius on both sides, from
De Maistre to Carlile to Michelet to Herzen and
up to the towering peaks of Toqueville. And
if a man of Gildas’ genius – for we
cannot ignore, when all is said and done, his
sheer natural talent, which would have made him
an artist in words whatever the form and level of
literary art he happened to be born in –
regarded A and L as important stimuli, and
constructed an awesome rhetorical structure in
reacting to them, it follows that A and L must
have been literary work of some merit. They
must have reflected the intellectual and
spiritual impulse of the Celticizing revolution,
which, by consciously and elaborately breaking
with Roman ideas, released a flood of new vision
which, though it ultimately failed, must
represent the brightest moment – lost, alas
– of a very dark century. No wonder
that Arthur loomed so great across the
generations to follow!
Born in 516/7, Gildas was still a
boy when Arthur slew his mighty brother Hueil,
and grew up in the shadow of successive triumphs
by the enemy of their house. It is possible
that he was placed in a monastery (the monk of
Ruys and Caradoc of Lancarfan agree that his
family chose a religious life for him) to keep
him out of the way of trouble and of
Arthur’s suspicions. Even so, we are
told that when he came from Armagh to Britain,
the monastery in which he lived somehow ended up
being besieged by Arthur, until he (?) and its
abbot pacified the king.
He was barely adult when the
impulse of Arthur’s conquests finally spent
itself; and the king’s power began to decay
as Gildas’ prodigious literary talent was
manifesting itself. Gildas was 24 or 25
when Arthur died. I have to assume that
Gildas was aware of the memory of his mighty
brother, since an echo of Hueil’s praises
can still be heard even in Caradoc of
Llancarfan’s Life; and one cannot
imagine that he looked back on his killer with
any affection. He did, however, speak with
praise of the victory at Mount Badon – in
which Hueil took no part – if only to
underline that he was born at its time. I
doubt whether, as Gerald of Wales was told, he
actually hated the king for killing his brother
and therefore suppressed all mention of his great
deeds. The Ruin of Britain treats L
as a representation of a glorious recent past,
disciplined and victorious, even though it is
trying to demolish the results of the revolution
by encouraging the “good” party to take
a more thorough control of affairs in the country
– that is, inevitably, to centralize power;
which is the opposite of Arthur’s policy.
Gildas claims he has seen the
evils grow worse and worse in his own lifetime,
indicating that they represented a fairly recent
development in British society. Already by
his thirty-fourth year, he had resolved that what
the age needed was severe condemnation and a call
to repentance, written in the kind of Latin he
could best produce; but he did not have the nerve
- Quia non tam fortissimorum militum enuntiare
trucis belli pericula mihi statutum est, quam
desidiosorum; silui, fateor, cum inmenso cordis
dolore, ut mihi renum scrutator testis est
Dominus - spatio bilustri temporis uel eo amplius
praetereuntis. It took him ten years to
work up the courage to speak - but “if not
now, when? If not us, who? If I am
silent, who will speak?” Who, if not
Gildas, could have mobilized the Latin language
and the Christian religion and culture of his
country in the cause of obvious right? Certainly,
to his contemporaries (auctor Giltas) he
stood alone; even to his enemies, as
we shall see, he was the one voice of an age they
believed they had silenced.
But the only reality known to
Gildas, as we have seen, was the Celto-British
reality in which he was born. One certain
fact about him, repeated in both of his medieval Lives
(which have otherwise very little in common) is
that he was the son of Caw of Prydyn (Pictland),
a Highland king whom various faded traditions
make the father of a variable number of saints.
The Life of St.Cadoc locates him beyond
the Campsie Fells. That is, Gildas may have
loved the Latin language, but his father’s
kingdom lay far beyond any permanent Roman border
ever reached. This seems symptomatic of the
changes that had taken place in post-Roman
Britain, with the advance - mainly military - of
the Christian border tribes into the unsettled
North; and it is possible that
even in Gildas’ time, some Latin-born Briton
from the lowland south might have been more in
touch with ancient Roman realities than this
enthusiastic but naive outsider, fed only on
libraries, helpless when he did not have Roman
books to consult.
One Roman book he did not read was
clearly a digest of Roman law; as we have seen
not only by his ignorance of the meaning of consul,
but also by his misapplication of purely Celtic
political categories to the Roman world, in
Britain and outside. And this reflects on
his political project. He wants to see the
Ambrosiad high king rule, that is – in
modern terms – he wants a more centralized
and effective State; but he does not even know
where to begin. The only central
institution he knows are the all-purpose rectores,
tax collectors, judges, political envoys; a more
sophisticated legal mind would realize that of
course one person in one place could not fulfil
so many offices at once – of course quia
inclinati tanto pondere sunt pressi, idcirco
spatium respirandi non habent.
The rector is the one
Gildasian element which does not seem to
originate in Celtic ideas: a dependent of the
high king of all the island, that is of the
succession of Constantine III and Ambrosius.
The Irish borrowed the rechtaire from
Britain along with Christianity. Other than
that, the very notion of salaried dependency is
alien to Celtic law, since it implies personal
independence in all things that do not have to do
with salary; it is a relationship between legal
equals, inconceivable to the Celtic mind.
The correspondence between rechtaire and rector
is not perfect: the rechtaire does not
seem to be delegated, like Gildas' rector,
to represent the country's highest king - in all
his functions - in the territory of lesser
sovereigns, but merely to collect royal income.
This tax-gathering aspect, which Gildas seems to
studiously ignore, is probably the aspect of the rector
that struck most forcibly observes across the
Irish Sea; and it follows that it must have been
quite important. It is even possible that
it was imported directly by British invaders: in
particular, if Arthur’s invasion of Ireland
had any historical reality, it seems to me very
possible that he would put in place, as any
conqueror would, arrangements for the collection
of tribute and the control of local elements.
However, as Gildas himself
acknowledges, as a political institution the rector
was a failure. It did not manage to curb
the wilfulness of local powers, much less to
avoid ruinous wars and the unwholesome growth of
the likes of Maglocunus. In effect, the
conflict between the principle of the sovereignty
and independence of every sovereign "married
to the land", however small his territory,
and that of national unity and uniform
administration, the one a Celtic principle, the
other Roman, was irreconcilable.
Since Gildas was so completely
ignorant of Roman law, which indubitably could
still be encountered on the Continent, I incline
to disbelieve the statement that Gildas went to
the Continent in his youth to perfect his
learning. This is not impossible: before
his 25th year, much of Gaul would have
been held by Arthur, and there is evidence of
direct British contact with Frankish (not
Gallo-Roman) ecclesiastics about 535. However, even the
kind of surviving Roman learning known to Gregory
of Tours would surely have been enough to correct
some of the more bizarre Gildasian notions about
the Roman Empire. It is likely enough that
Gildas died on the continent, in the
monastery of Ruys that was later dedicated to
him; but the legend in the Life of David
suggests that he left Britain only after being
defeated by David, which can only have happened
late in his life; and that his departure from the
island was a traumatic event with all the
features of a personal tragedy. The Life
of David certainly distorts, and probably
exaggerates, these events; but that does not mean
that it cannot be taken as a hint, at least, of
how they were originally perceived.
At any rate, even the statement
that Gildas had anything to do with Ruys in his
life is open to question, given the way in which
the Life of St.Gurthiern places not only
the death, but even the life and much of the
activities of its patron in Brittany, where the
historical Vortigern could never have gone!
Other Breton and Irish Saints’ lives show a
similar habit of appropriating people who had
died elsewhere, like for instance the two
“Finnians”. Later Welsh sources
repositioned Gildas’ own father Caw in
Anglesey, of all places; and we remember that we
have suggested a similar post mortem
destiny for Maglocunus, transferred from North
Britain to Gwynedd. One clue does suggest
that Gildas might have been in Armorica in the
late 560s: the summoning of the Council of Tours
(567), which ruled against a scandal - irregular
episcopal elections in Armorica - which he had
denounced in The Ruin; this may suggest
that he had managed to make his protest known to
Gaulish church leaders.
I am committed to the date 561 for
the writing of The ruin of Britain, in the
shadow of the Justinianic wars and the peace with
Persia. It seems to have made Gildas a
respected authority, whose opinion was sought in
all sorts of things to do with Church life and
general morality. The largely legendary Life
of Gildas by a monk of Gildas’ monastery
in Ruys, Brittany, makes him be summoned to
Ireland by one king Americus of Ireland to reform
monastic life there. This notice is
credible on more than one ground. Irish
annals do mention a visit by Gildas in 565.
There was an Irish king Ainmire, not of all
Ireland, but of Leinster, at the right time; he
only lasted three years. And it is notable
that, while The Ruin was widely known both
on the Continent and in Anglo-Saxon England,
Gildas was known in Ireland mainly for his
writings on monastic discipline. It is in
Ireland that long selections from letters on
monastic discipline, and the
“Penitential” - a collection of rulings
on monastic life - were preserved. And
forty years after his death, Columbanus, an
Irishman from Leinster, mentions him admiringly
as an authority on monastic and ecclesiastic
discipline. Altogether, when confirmation
flows from so many different sides, I think we
may treat the notice of Gildas’ reforming
journey as historical.
However, the visit to Ireland
seems to have been intended to nip in the bud
there a phenomenon which he had already met and
fought in Britain. Along with the writing
of The ruin of Britain and the visit to
Ireland, the best established event about Gildas
is his clash with the monastic movement of
St.David, the future patron of Wales. There
is a well-known and long-since-noticed verbal
correspondence between the severe rule of
St.David, reported by his biographer Rhygyvarch,
and two of Gildas’ “fragments”.
Rhygyvarch: iugum ponunt in humeris;
suffossoria vangaque invicto brachio terrae
defigunt; (“they place[d] the yoke on
[their own] shoulders, and dug up the earth by
shovel and spades in [their own] invincible
arms”); Gildas: aratra trahentes et
suffosoria figentes terrae (“pulling
ploughs and digging shovels in the earth”).
Once again, the correspondence is verified by a
rare Latin word, suffossorium, unknown to
most Latin dictionaries; just as we once deduced
the existence of A from the coincidence of sablones
in Gildas and Nennius. Then, there are
definite mentions in Irish sources of a contest
between David and Gildas for supremacy over the
British church, which David won. Thirdly,
there is a legend of a bell made by Gildas and
denied to David. Fourthly and decisively,
there is David’s own legend, in which the
mere presence of the still unborn David silences
Gildas in the middle of his preaching. To
ignore all these matters, as a recent account of
Gildas’ position in Church history does, seems to me
ill-advised.
The legend of the bell is the
remotest of these four pieces of evidence; but it
clearly suggests that there was very little
sympathy between the cults of Gildas and David.
For reasons we can no longer fathom, some tales,
both in Brittany and South Wales, make Gildas a
skilled maker of bells. In the Life by
the monk of Ruys, he sends one as a gift to
St.Brigid of Kildare. That one reaches its
addressee, and we hear nothing more about it; but
in two other accounts, Gildas’ bell has a
troubled journey. In the Breton Life of
St.Iltud, Gildas designs his bell for David,
but Iltud - teacher of both - conceives a great
desire for it: as a result, the bell will not
ring for David, who perceives the will of the
Lord and sends it to Iltud. The same story
is told, to the glory of Cadoc, in the Welsh Life
of St.Cadoc, in which the Pope himself takes
the place of St.David, and Cadoc that of Iltud:
Gildas’ bell will not ring for the Pope,
since Cadoc desired it, and it has to be sent to
him.
I have no doubt that the Cadoc
version is derivative, and the Iltud version
original; because it seems clear that at the
heart of this story is some sort of disguised
apology - “why won’t the bell of
St.Gildas ring for the Pope/St.David?”
The story resolves this troubling question by
positing a higher claim: a better man had desired
it. No such problem arises when Gildas
sends his bell to Brigid, patroness of Leinster,
where Gildas had worked to reform the monasteries
in Ainmire’s time and left permanent
memories; but when the bell is sent to David - or
to the Pope - there is trouble.
Now, it would make perfect sense
to read the silence of the bell as an echo of the
apparent silence of Gildas’ voice in Wales
(no church in the Principality is consecrated to
him). Why won’t the bell of Gildas
ring for David, why is Gildas’ voice silent
in Wales, when another bell rings so clearly for
Brigid, when his voice rings loud and clear in
Leinster? I repeat: the point of the story
is, clearly, to explain this troubling silence by
positing a higher claim - namely, that of the
great sage Illtud.
This is not contradicted by the
fact that, whatever Iltud’s relationship to
Gildas, there is no doubt that the idea that
David was also his disciple is an invention.
Not only is Iltud unknown to the Life of David,
but Rhygyvarch ascribes him a quite different
teacher, one Paulinus. Why, then, should
Iltud be made the teacher of David? Obviously,
to place Iltud’s claim to the bell on a
higher level than David’s - which, given
that David is the patron of all Britain, can only
be ascribed to someone ahead of both him and
Gildas in time, learning and sanctity, and whose
claim may legitimately and peacefully be accepted
by both. Thus, a teacher of both must be
introduced (in Celtic hagiography, legendary
teachers often have a special place); thus, Iltud
is intruded in the hagiography of David against
the evidence.
That makes perfect sense; a story
in which Gildas’ bell does not sound for a
completely unhistorical Pope, and in which the
superior claim that justifies it is that of Cadoc
- placing Cadoc above the Pope! - makes none.
However, this Cadocian rewriting is not without
significance. We notice that in all three
legends, the bell is sent to dignitaries of the
highest degree: if it is not St. David, it is
Brigid - “the Mary of the Gael” - or
the Pope. The fact that the Pope should
have replaced St.David testifies that this saint
was regarded, by the time the Life of Cadoc
was written, as having some sort of supreme rank
among the saints of Wales; not unlike Brigid of
Kildare, one of Ireland’s Trias
thaumaturga. Gildas’ bells, it
seems clear, are only for the highest: if not
St.David, then the Pope. How Gildas got to
receive the name of “he who makes bells for
the highest of saints and bishops”, however,
is more than I can guess. None of his
surviving writings, or of the better kinds of
notices, seems to shed any light on the matter.
But there can be no doubt that the basic point of
the story is that the sound of Gildas does not
ring out for David.
The story of the bell can only
date to a fairly late period. What it
describes and tries to explain is not a contest
or clash, but a permanent condition, the silence
of Gildas in Wales; that is, when it was
conceived, the fact that Gildas did not
“speak” in Wales - that his name was
not honoured in Wales - was already an undeniable
and permanent reality. What is more, it was
a reality whose origins the legend-writers did
not know; if he or they had known any idea of
original hostility between the two great British
saints, they would not have invented a legend
that not only does not suspect any such thing,
but actually places both in a common line of
spiritual descent from the Great Teacher Iltud.
Incidentally, the fact that Iltud rather than
Paulinus is the figure of the Great Teacher shows
- if there was any need to prove it - that the
legend was produced within the cult of Gildas -
probably in Ruys or the surrounding area - rather
than that of David. David’s cult had
its own ideas about Gildas, we will find out soon
enough.
A contest between David and Gildas
for supremacy over ecclesiastical Britain is
described in the Irish Life of St.Finnian of
Clonard[9] - trailing historical
problems in its wake. The notion of a
contest for supreme power is of course
unacceptable. There is nothing to suggest
that Gildas was in any sense the head of the
British church, or even that he desired such a
position. The reverse is true: it was David whose
complete victory in the struggles of the British
Church led to his becoming a bishop (we have no
evidence that Gildas ever was one), while
Gildas’ name was driven out of Wales to
Ireland and the remote fastnesses of south-east
Brittany. It was because the ideological
struggle effectively resolved itself in the
conquest of ecclesiastical supremacy by David and
his party, that a later age imagined the struggle
between the two giants of British Christianity in
terms of a clash for ecclesiastical power.
Apart from a ludicrous and
patently late legend about David, Padarn and
Teilo being consecrated by the Patriarch of
Jerusalem (in whose background we discern Muslim
control of the Holy Land, thinly disguised as
Jewish), the claim for David’s supremacy is
based on David’s triumph at the Synod of
Llandewi Brefi. According to Rhygyvarch,
the Synod was convened to deal with a resurgence
of Pelagianism in Britain. But the chaos
and the crowd made it impossible for anyone to be
properly heard. The assembled fathers
feared lest the crowd should simply go home,
unpreached-at, unconvinced, and unprotected
against Pelagianism. Paulinus, David’s
teacher, decided that David had to intervene: his
voice, if anyone’s, would have the power to
make the crowd listen. The story says that
David had to be asked and begged before he
consented - in his humility - to speak before the
assembled bishops and people of Britain; even
though already before entering the Synod, he had
performed a major and symbolic miracle,
resurrecting a dead young man - clearly
significant of the new life he was to breathe in
the all-male Church establishment of Britain.
But once he had spoken, all those present
recognized at once that he, and only he, could be
the leader of the British church.
Now according to Rhygyvarch, the
synod had been summoned by authorities other than
David; but other sources thoroughly disagree.
Both the Life of St.Cadoc and the lost Life
of St.Cynnydd (of which an abstract was made
by the Englishman John of Tynemouth in the early
1300s) state that the synod was called by David
himself - flanked, in the Life of Cynnydd,
by his supporters Padarn and Teilo; and neither
speak of Pelagianism. Cynnydd, who was a
cripple, refused to go, and even reversed a
miracle performed by David to heal his twisted
leg; Cadoc, we are told, was absent when the
synod was summoned, and was furious when he found
out - until one of those providential angels, so
frequent in Celtic hagiography, ordered him to
forgive David.
It must be underlined that there
is no indication that the Lives of Cynnydd
and Cadoc are dependent on each other. Their
accounts of the synod episode are widely
different: Cynnydd is visited by the three saints
in person, and refuses out of humility (or so we
are told; but the fact that he will not even
allow St.David to heal his crippled leg could be
held to indicate hostility), while Cadoc has no
opportunity to either face David or any of his
supporters, for he is not there. And in the
case of Cadoc we are told that his anger had to
do with David not only summoning the Synod but
claiming presidency over it - a presidency which
Cadoc felt pertained to him; while no such claim
is made for the humble Cynnydd.
Cadoc, then - or, at least, the
ecclesial forces that identified with him - was
an enemy of David; and here we return to the Irish
Life of St.Finian of Clonard. It is not
only that it certifies that a tradition of a
Gildas-David clash existed, but that it brings
together four sixth-century figures who were
involved in the clash. Finnian himself,
though the Life makes him an Irishman (but
Cadfael remarks that he speaks British like a
native!), was very probably a British
contemporary of Gildas called Uinniau. According
to St.Columbanus, he had asked Gildas for advice
about rigorist monks; therefore, the
Irish-preserved letter fragments in which Gildas
condemns David’s movement were probably part
of one or more replies written to him. This,
in turn, suggests that Uinniau, himself was also
unhappy about their ways. The Life
also involves Cadfael - i.e. Cadoc - as the first
proposed arbitrator between the rival saints
(according to the story, he resigns his
arbitration in favour of the unknown young
Finnian, just over from Ireland) - the same Cadoc
who burned with indignation at David’s
usurping activities. In effect, both Cadoc
and Uinniau/Finnian may be suspected to have been
on Gildas’ side, however that is conceived.
The Life of Cadoc shows Cadoc’s
functionary - “the sexton of
Llancarfan” - taking “ the gospel of
Gildas” to a local lord.
The Irish Life concludes
with a determination in David’s favour, but
by the time it was written, St.David’s was
effectively, and long since, the greatest
bishopric in Wales. Even if Cadoc,
Uinniau/Finnian, and Gildas, had once been known
as David’s enemies, David’s name had
become so great that it was impossible to imagine
that anyone who opposed him could be a good
Christian - let alone a saint like the three in
question, who were all venerated in Ireland.
The presence of a cluster of interrelated names
of sixth-century ecclesiastics, involved in a
struggle which echoes, however remotely, one that
really happened, must be significant; but it is,
I should guess, practically impossible to find a
historical reality behind the legend. The
legend has been designed, consciously or
unconsciously, to hide it; but it has preserved
the evidence of the interconnection of these
churchmen, and of the clash of two of them.
These are all legends, and events
cannot be expected to have taken place as they
tell. Cadoc being absent as the Synod was
summoned, for instance, is too coincidental for
words, and sounds like a justification or excuse
for a major defeat in ecclesiastical politics.
If we were told that Cadoc had been present, had
vigorously opposed the Synod, and that the Synod
had taken place in spite of all his protests, his
status as a powerful and effective
miracle-working Celtic saint would be severely
affected. But these legends are based on
ecclesiastical claims; and it is clear that the
claims of St.David and his successors were based
on what was perceived to be his triumph at the
Synod. Just as the summoning of the Synod
is David’s offence in the Life of Cadoc
and his one appearance in that of Cynnydd, the
Synod itself is the central and triumphant moment
in Rhygyvarch’s Life. Its
centrality is shown by the way in which its echo
works its way backwards in the legend, to create
the tale of the silencing of Gildas. The
story is that Gildas was preaching to the people
of Britain in the days of King Triphun of Dyved
(the 480s), when he suddenly became incapable of
speaking. Inquiry showed that Non, mother
of David, was in the congregation, with the
unborn saint still in her womb, and that it was
the baby’s inborn spiritual supremacy that
had silenced Gildas. Cruelly, Rhygyvarch or
his source placed in Gildas’ mouth these
sycophantic words: “The son who is in that
woman’s womb has grace and power and rank
greater than I, for God has given him status and
sole rule and primacy over all the saints of
Britannia for ever, before and after the
Judgement. Farewell, brothers and sisters;
I am not able to abide here longer, owing to the
son of this nun, for to him is delivered sole
rule over all the people of this island, and it
is necessary for me to go to another island, and
to leave the whole of Britannia to this
woman’s son.”
The echoes of Llandewi Brefi are
impossible to miss: not only the fact that Gildas
predicts the supremacy of David over both the
clergy and the laity of Britain (which is why the
rather verbose speech seems to repeat itself),
which is realized at Llandewi Brefi, but also in
that the question is of the ability of each saint
to speak to the whole people of Britain. It
was because David was able to speak to the whole
people where no other Church leader had been able
to make himself heard above the crowd, that his
supremacy had been accepted.
The clash of David and Gildas
represented the clash of two visible and opposing
church parties. Gildas stood for decency
and order, for a certain old-fashioned idea of
rightness and duty, and even in his most
aggressive Jeremiads, his desire is clearly not
that king and bishops be exterminated, but that
they should turn, repent, and go back to their
proper duties. David, by contrast, is to be
identified as the leader of a virtually
independent monastic movement. Even six
hundred years after his age, the hagiography of
Rhygyvarch does not place him in anything like
the creative opposition with a king that is
almost a natural part of any Celtic saint’s
life; or rather, it twists the story to a purely
negative ending. The king of the region as
David is founding the monastery of Menevia is a
mysterious Boia, an Irish invader unknown to the
genealogies; and we recognize the opening scene
of the legend of Patrick and Loegaire in the
scene in which the king sees, from far away, the
smoke of a new fire, lit in his land without his
permission. As in the case of Patrick and
Loegaire, this is a challenge; but rather than
moving towards a reconciliation and the proper
submission of king to saint, the story moves with
relentless violence towards the complete
destruction of Boia and all his people.
This attitude is reflected in
Gildas’ testimony. We have spent
several books and hundreds of thousands of words
to find out one thing: Gildas does not lie.
He may avoid mentioning a fact that does not suit
his argument, but when he makes a charge against
someone, he has reason to. We must
therefore take seriously his charges against
David’s followers. He never names
David, to our knowledge; but, as we have seen,
his description of the extreme self-imposed
poverty of a certain rigorist group in his time (aratra
trahentes et suffosoria figentes terrae). -
is clearly parallel to the much later description
of the asceticism of David’s followers in
Rhygyvarch’s Life of St.David, (iugum
ponunt in humeris; suffossoria vangaque invicto
brachio terrae defigunt), and must come from
the same source. These people recur again
and again in the fragments of Gildas’
letters preserved in two Irish manuscripts, and
never in a positive light. Gildas hates
them, and his description shows heights of savage
rhetorical invective unclimbed even by The
ruin.
He starts with two ferocious
Pauline censures of heresy: “’the worst
of times will arise, and men will be seized with
self-love, miserly, arrogant, proud, blasphemous,
rebellious against their parents, ungrateful,
impure, without love or peace, accusers of
others, uncontrolled, cruel, hating what is good,
treacherous, brash, over-swollen, fond more of
their own lusts than of God, holding the shape of
religion but denying its nature.’ Many
will do evil and perish, as the Apostle says:
‘they have zeal for God, but not according
to knowledge; they know nothing of God’s
justice, and seek to set up their own - they do
not even begin to submit to God’s
righteousness.’” Given
Gildas’ huge knowledge of the Bible, and the
constant aptness of his quotations in The Ruin,
we cannot imagine that he chose these particular
passages without purpose; it is not his way to
use Biblical quotations haphazardly or where only
superficial parallels exist.
He goes on: “They busy
themselves charging every brother who does not
follow them in their novel practices and
individual views; while they eat bread by
measure, they brag of it beyond any measure;
while they use [only] water, at the same time
they get drunk on the cup of hatred; while they
enjoy dry stuff, at one and the same time they
take pleasure in condemning; while they stay
awake longer and longer, they take note of others
asleep. They say to the feet and other
parts of the body: ‘unless you all will be
head, we will reckon you as nothing’ - a
promise given not out of love, but out of
contempt. And as they brood on these
‘head decrees’ of theirs, they prefer
slaves to lords, the common people to kings, lead
to gold, iron to silver… And in the same way
they place fasting above mutual love, staying
awake to justice, their own contrivances to
concord, a little cell to the Church, savagery to
humility, man - to finish with - to God.”
To a modern spirit, of course,
preferring slaves to masters and the common
people to kings is nothing to be ashamed of; but
what Gildas is attacking is not any expression of
democratic sentiments, but rather the reversal of
sane standards in the service of a novel,
perverse, self-consecrated religious aristocracy.
“Those men, over there, fast, though fasting
does no good at all where the other virtues are
not followed; these men, here among us, act
according to charity, which is the fullness of
the law, being taught by God. As the harps
of the Holy Ghost say, ‘All our
righteousness is as rags filthy with menstrual
blood’. But these bellows of Satan say
to men who may be their betters, whose angels
behold the face of the Father: ‘go forth
away from us, for you are unclean’. To
this answers the Lord: ‘These shall be smoke
in My wrath, and a fire burning for
evermore’. Not those who despise their
brother does the Lord call blessed, but the poor;
not the rancorous, but the meek; not the envious,
but those who weep both for their own and for
others’ sins; not to those who are hungry
and thirsty for water and the contempt of others,
but for justice; not those who see others as
counting for nothing, but the merciful; not the
proud of heart, but the lowly; not the harsh unto
others, but the peace-makers; not those who bring
about wars, but those who suffer persecution for
justice - these, indeed, are to be believed to
inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Those who bring about wars! Qui
inferunt bella! Is Gildas telling us
that David and his people were instigating war?
He is indeed. His point throughout is that
the vicious egalitarianism of David’s
movement is a threat to the social order,
encouraging envy, civil dissension, and the thing
that Gildas hates worse than death - civil war.
A modern spirit may find much to admire in
David’s movement; and there can be no doubt
that Gildas’ attitude to it had something of
caste prejudice - he found it natural that kings
should be preferred to the uulgus. But
his main point is absolutely coherent with that
of The ruin: a detestation of civil
dissension, of self-seeking pride, of disruptive
influences in a society all too easily led to war
and slaughter.
And it is not as though the
opposition were Gandhian in their principles or
methods. Their attitude may be read in the
brutal suppression of Gildas’ memory; not
only a feature of the legend of the bell, but a
historical fact. No church dedicated to
Gildas exists in the Principality. What is
more, the legend itself abundantly proves that he
had been “silenced” in the ears of
David’s followers; that is, that they did
not read his work. The legend makes Gildas
preach and be silenced, and David be born, is
“in the reign of king Triphun”. Now
the genealogy of the Irish-descended kings of
Dyved is perhaps the most solid and historical of
all recorded Welsh genealogies, finding an exact
parallel of its early stages in an Irish source;
and it tells us that Triphun was Vortipor’s
grandfather - that is, at least, his
predecessor-but-one on the throne. This
must have been common knowledge, easily accessed
to any Welshman with genealogical skills - i.e.
practically any educated Welshman. And yet
anyone who read The Ruin would know that
it was written in Vortipor’s time, that
Gildas was 44, and that Vortipor was already very
old. In other words, Gildas cannot possibly
have been preaching in the time of
Vortipor’s grandfather.
What does this mean? It
means that those who wrote the legend were aware
of the clash between Gildas and David, but that
they had never read Gildas’ work. In
fact, they had no idea who Gildas was - apart
from the fact that he had opposed David. What
does the legend tell us, but that David had been
born to refute Gildas?
This has another corollary: that
the cult of David elaborated, very early on, a
historicistic doctrine that made David the
fulfilment of Welsh Christianity, overcoming and
silencing all past ages. This is why Gildas
came earlier. The Davidian environment
exaggerated his antiquity and outdatedness, so as
to make David’s birth represent the
fulfilment of the times, the moment in which
something new and triumphant replaces something
past, feeble, and unnecessary. Therefore -
why doubt it? - the followers of this new way
would not bother with the writings of the old;
and they identified the old way with the way of
Gildas, though they knew no more than his name.
So David’s movement
suppressed the works of Gildas. The
vindictive destruction of the work of enemies is
a feature we have had plenty of reason to suspect
in Arthur and his party; and for this reason, I
say that David is the other heir of Arthur.
If Gildas inherited the breadth of vision, the
intellectual energy and grasp of facts, that were
characteristic of the Celticizing revolution,
David is the heir of the energies of revolution,
of its contempt of the past and of the existing
order, of its eagerness for renewal and extreme,
self-sacrificing, muscular simplicity. Like
Arthur, whose party spent so much time writing
and rewriting their own view of history,
David’s followers believed that history
preluded to and justified them.
This doctrine is still present,
somewhat watered down and misunderstood, in
Rhygyvarch’s opening words, in which he
asserts that God foreknew the birth of His great
ones in advance, and laid visible foreshadowings
of David’s greatness before he was ever
born; and these foreshadowings, it turns out, are
the successive humiliations of St.Patrick -
driven out of Vallis Rosina thirty years before
David’s birth - and of St.Gildas, driven out
shortly before David’s birth. It must
be observed that, if Patrick left for Ireland in
430 or so, this entry is another chronological
monstrosity of the same character as that which
makes Triphun and Gildas contemporaries; which
does not surprise us, since this cycle of legends
was clearly created as a whole and with the same
purpose. The fact that Gildas “must go
to another island” strongly suggests that
he, too, must go to Ireland like Patrick, as a pis
aller, not having been allowed to remain in
Dyved; and this, in turn, leads to the conclusion
that the Davidists regarded Ireland as a sort of
dumping ground of the discarded and outdated
features of ecclesial life, no longer suitable
for the renewed Christianity of St.David’s
island.
A general anti-Irish orientation
is something that E.C.Bowen had reason to suspect
in David’s movements, suggesting that he
opposed the Irish-originated Dyved dynasty in the
name of a British nativist consciousness. It
is certain that the kings of Dyved were still
aware of their Irish roots in the time of
Vortipor, whose monument is written in both Latin
and Ogham Irish; and it is very curious that
Gildas, in the course of his exceptionally
skilful and multifarious repertory of invective
against the Five Tyrants, does not make use of
the Irish origin of the detested “wicked son
of a good father”. But perhaps that
same contumely explains the reason: if Gildas
were to attack Vortipor’s blood, he would
involve his “good father” (Aircol) in
his censure. David, who preferred the uulgus
to kings, has no such qualms.
Having said all the possible evil
of David, it is time to take a good look at
Gildas’ own position. Gildas,
civilized, moderate yet delightfully passionate,
immensely talented, asking for no more than
simple decency, is as sympathetic to the modern
mind - and certainly to mine - as David, savagely
self-righteous, exclusivist by nature and choice,
ascetic to the point of sadism and masochism,
excessive in everything, is antipathetic; and,
what is more, Gildas wrote the book. We
have no writings whatever by David, while
everything we have of Gildas excites admiration
and sympathy in equal parts. But if David
was standing up against Pelagianism, as
Rhygyvarch claims, then he was standing up for
the right; and if Gildas opposed him in this,
then Gildas was at least mistaken. Nothing
wrong with that; more than one Father of the
Church has held dubious opinions; but we have to
know.
Gildas avoided doctrinal battles.
Certainly, those who look for Pelagianism,
semi-Pelagianism, or Augustinianism, in The
Ruin, deceive themselves; no such thing can
be found, because Gildas, like St.Patrick before
him, did not want them there. (It is even
possible that Patrick and Gildas drew on a common
British Christian tradition emphasizing the
avoidance of direct doctrinal confrontation, and
attempting to recall heretics to the flock by
other means.) He clearly said that he had
no desire to be caught up in dogmatic arguments,
though his disclaimer of being intellectually up
to the job of refuting heresy (107.1) is, unlike
Patrick's admissions of ignorance, no more than
the kind of graceful, gentlemanly demurral we
would expect. His attitude - his political
moderation, his preference for individual reform
of character over collective political revolution
- is easily recognizable by any Catholic. He
reveres the See of Rome - he can say nothing
worse about simoniac bishops than that they
emulate Novatian, usurper of the dominica
margarita - and determinedly calls churchmen
to obedience, to follow the rule of the ancients,
to obey the vows made as a priest: haec quidem
ab apostolo mandata et in diem uestrae
ordinationis lecta, ut ea indirupte custodiretis
- these things, ordered by the Apostle and read
out on the day when you were ordained, so that
you should keep them whole and undefiled.
Part of this is simply the result
of his times. He is faced not only with
heresy, but with simony and gross sin among the
bishops themselves. 109.1, speaking of a
contemporary bishop and his son: ...quid erit
ubi nec pater nec filius - mali genitoris exemplo
prauatus - conspicitur castus? what shall
happen when neither the father nor the son,
depraved by his wicked parent's example, can be
seen to be chaste? We can only guess at the
extent of their unchastity, but it must have been
notorious. Faced with such crass and
unrepentant breaches of elementary morality,
Gildas does not trouble to argue: he goes back to
the equally elementary and already ancient
rituals and teachings of the Church, the
tradition of the fathers, and the duties laid on
any regularly ordained priest.
Nevertheless, it seems very likely
that his unmixed support for the Augustinian
polemics of E may have been given not in clarity
but in ignorance. It has long been noticed
that among the authorities he quotes, as
“one of us”, is the Pelagian writer of De
Virginitate; and historians eager to discover
evidence of massive survival of Pelagianism in
Britain seized on this detail with unthinking
eagerness, even though by itself it proves
nothing. First, we cannot even be sure that
he does quote him. The passage (non
agitur de qualitate peccati, sed de
transgressione mandati; "what matters is
not the level of the sin, but the disobedience of
an order") happens at least three times in
the same or similar words in three separate
Pelagian works - De Uirginitate 6, First
Letter, De Operibus 13 - and may, therefore,
have been a locus communis. What is
more, it is not itself heretical, but
unobjectionably Catholic, and may be paraphrased
from the Catholic Catechism. It is not fair to
suggest any Pelagianism in such a Catholic writer
as Gildas on such slender evidence.
What is far more troubling, and, I
would say, pretty much conclusive, is his
relationship with a series of powers which can be
connected with the surviving tradition of south
Irish Pelagianism. We remember that the
spread of Ogham “son of” stones was a
good marker for the presence of Pelagianism: and
that these stones are restricted to the far south
of Ireland and to Dyved. Dyved, it is well
known, was conquered by Irish settlers, and the
local dynasty, for all its adoption of Roman
names - Vortipor’s father, the “good
king” whom Gildas remembered, was called
Aircol or Agricola - was conscious of its Irish
inheritance until quite late: Vortipor himself
has a surviving funeral stone written in both
Latin and Ogham. In other words, this
dynasty is apparently associated with the spread
of a Pelagian type of funerary monument from
Ireland to Britain.
Now it is in the heart of the
dynasty of Dyved’s realm that David summons
the Synod of Llandewi Brefi, for the explicit
purpose, according to Rhygyvarch, of condemning
Pelagianism. This may be a late learned
addition, depending on the memory of Pelagianism
as “the British heresy”; on the other
hand, the Pelagian Ogham stones, and the presence
of Pelagius' Commentary in Powys and
Brycheiniog (Brecknock) in the seventh or eighth
centuries, show that Pelagianism
was certainly present in south-eastern Wales, and
in particular in the Irish-conquered territories
of Dyved and Brycheiniog. The negative view
of monarchy in David’s legend goes with the
notion that his legendary Boia was an Irish
raider come from abroad - which is actually true,
through several generations, of the kings of
Dyved in his time. And while the two things
are not exactly contemporary - Gildas was
probably dead before Llandewi Brefi - it cannot
be denied that he supported a probably heretical
dynasty, part of a South Irish complex with
Pelagian features, at roughly the same time as
David is said to have been preaching against
Pelagianism in their kingdom. The very fact
that he blamed Vortipor for being the bad son of
a good father means that he had no doubts about
Aircol’s religious orthodoxy; but Aircol may
well have been a Pelagian.
It is therefore interesting that
F.J Byrne’s reconstruction of the earliest
recognizable Munster Latin culture, whose origins
I see as Pelagian, should be so similar to my
reconstruction of the Gildasian world. As
with Gildas, “There is a good deal of
evidence for a high standard of Latin learning in
Munster during the sixth and seventh
centuries…the tract De duodecim abusiuis
saculi, whose chapter on the justice of the
king was to have such widespread influence, came
from this school, which also produced works on
Biblical exegesis and Latin grammar.” Royal
justice, Biblical exegesis, and Latin grammar,
were of course all subjects very close to
Gildas’ heart. On the other hand,
there is an “absence of early annals for the
south… Iona was the home of the earliest
annals, and Bangor a possible secondary centre of
compilation” [both are northern
monasteries]; Professor Byrne thinks it likely
that the southern churches had little interest in
the “abstruse science” of computation,
and therefore “would have been the more
willing to accept Rome’s ruling, and they
are unlikely to have concerned themselves with
annalistic records.” Perhaps; but we
remember that Gildas did not know how to reckon
time, either. And people who can cope with
such an “abstruse science” as advanced
Latin grammar may be expected to survive a little
computation; complete lack of evidence suggests
rather complete lack of knowledge than complete
lack of interest.
I have no doubt that there was a
Christian, post-Pelagian cultural continuity in
Southern Ireland from the beginning. As the
continuous transmission of text is signalled in
the north by the survival of Patrick’s
writings, so is it signalled in the south by the
survival of Pelagius’ commentary on
St.Paul’s letters. Therefore, I find
it strange that we should not have even so much
of the pre-Patrician saints’ lives and
origins as we have of St.Patrick, where some
garbled notices survived. We have seen that
similar survivals can be argued for in Welsh
sacred history, for instance about St.Germanus
and St.Faustus of Riez; their complete absence in
south Ireland is a significant fact. Of
course, the vast majority of Irish documents are
far later than this period. Even the
earliest texts have been copied, sometimes
several times, before our earliest copies came to
be. There has been plenty of time for
conscious, let alone unconscious, censorship; to
remove the testimony of early doctrinal
conflicts, schismatic origins, and opposition
between Patrick’s successors in the north,
and the heirs of his Pelagian opposite numbers
elsewhere. All that remained was the memory
of some founders of churches in the south,
tenaciously remembered as earlier than Patrick.
But is it a coincidence that the Lives of these
founders should all be so late and so completely,
unremittingly unhistorical?
Some recorded events - which we
would dearly like to see expanded - give us a
clue as to what happened. Southern Ireland,
this early hive of intellectual and
ecclesiastical activity, aligned itself with
Rome, accepting the Roman Easter dating, in the
630s. Now Bede records two successive
letters from Rome to Ireland. The first, coming
from Pope Honorius and dated 634, is exclusively
concerned with the reckoning of Easter; Bede,
usually so scrupulous in transcribing documents,
does not even bother to copy it out, from which
we gather that there were no arguments in it
beyond those already rehearsed in his work.
It appears, nevertheless, to have come at the
right time to seal the reunion of the south Irish
with Rome. Honorius (otherwise notorious
for giving ill-considered assistance to the
Monothelite heresy) was a follower of Gregory I
and probably happy to see the islands return to
the fold; elsewhere in Europe, he had vigorously
backed the Irish-originated monasticism of
St.Columbanus, by placing the great monastery of
Bobbio under direct Papal protection.
It is in 641 that we find Pope
John IV sending a letter which strikes an
altogether different note. He is alarmed by
letters sent to his predecessor Severinus (who
died before he could respond, and who was, at any
rate, elderly, harassed and eventually robbed by
the Imperial governor Isaac). Though John
only reigned two years, he made a major change in
Papal policy, a noticeable hardening of the
theological climate. Honorius’
superficial support of Monotheletism arose more
from a desire to have an end to quarrels than to
any real support for the theory. John, less
concerned with church peace and more
theologically acute, condemned the doctrine.
It will be clear that his severe reaction to
reports of Pelagianism in Ireland is of the same
nature. He couples it with the Easter
question, but only in passing, showing clearly
that the prospect of Pelagianism redivivus
was far more in his mind.
Who sent Pope Severinus those
letters is a good question. Amazingly,
John’s response is addressed exclusively to
members of the still-schismatic northern church -
the bishop-abbots of Armagh and Clonard, the
bishops of Connor, Tibohine and Devenish, and the
abbots of Iona, Nendrum, Moville, Tory Island,
and an unidentified monastery. And he calls
them “our well-beloved and holy”, yet!
Even granting that such introductions were the
ordinary currency of ecclesiastical manners (the
savage letter of Licinius, Eustochius and
Melanius to Lovocatus and Catihernus opens with
similar pleasantries), it still sounds as though
the Pope did not know that it was the very
addressees of his letter who practiced Easter out
of season. He writes as though it was being
carried out by unnamed third parties. If
this is diplomatic talk (I mean, suggesting that
unnamed third parties are really responsible for
what you are in fact blaming in your own
interlocutor - to spare blushes), then it is very
untypical of the Vatican, who, at all times, have
never failed to pin the tail of schism or heresy
on the appropriate donkey in public. It is
likeliest to arise from a misreading of documents
that must, after all, have distracted the Popes
from the main business of a chaotic age in which
Longobard wars, Arab invasions and Byzantine
civil conflict must have claimed every available
moment.
However, that he addressed the
northern clergy suggests that it was from the
north that the original information had been
received. The Irish Pelagians, to use the
ecclesiastical expression, had been delated to
Rome. The Pope would respond to the people
who had written to him (or to his predecessor).
Also, if the letter had originated from him, he
would have written only to his fellow-bishops,
even if the message was ultimately intended for
other ears; he would not treat abbots as equal
sources of ecclesiastical authority with bishops.
In other words, he was responding to a letter
from those particular bishops and abbots.
If the delation of Pelagianism in
Ireland came from the people to whom the Pope
wrote, then the whole northern church was
involved. Eminent clergymen were addressed,
including the bishop of Armagh and the abbot of
Iona. We must bear in mind that before the
thirties of the seventh century, direct contact
between the Roman and Irish churches is hard to
imagine. In 604, the Irish bishop Dagan
shocked and horrified the Roman missionaries in
Kent by refusing to so much as eat under the same
roof as them - circumstances highly unsuitable to
close contact. Now, if contact between Rome
and Ireland had only been restored in the 630s,
what does it look like, that a letter of
complaint about Pelagianism should reach the
Papacy in 640 from the part of the church
which had not closed the rift over Easter
observances? Obviously, it looks like
internecine conflict. “My Lord of
Rome, do you know that these people, whom you
have admitted to Church unity, practice
Pelagianism?”
The breach over Easter does not
seem to have looked so important to the North
Irish as to the Roman party; it certainly did not
stop Columbanus, in spite of his great
independence of mind, from treating the Pope as
the ultimate authority, or acting as though quite
happily at home in the Continental Catholic
Church. He spoke with affection and
gratitude of having received the Gospel from Rome
(surely an allusion to Palladius and Patrick).
Though Leinster-born, Columbanus was trained in
the north; if his views were widely shared among
the northern clergy, then if they had something
to denounce to the Pope, their different Easter
habits would no more prevent them than it
prevented Columbanus.
I suggest that the Pelagians
delated by the northerners were in the south.
There must be some reason why Columbanus, born in
Leinster and with such a strong view of Roman
supremacy and Catholic orthodoxy, deserted his
country to go study in Bangor, Ulster. Severinus
and John IV, elderly, harassed, with their minds
largely elsewhere, and already familiar with
Ireland as a country where Easter was celebrated
incorrectly, got the message a little garbled
(all those foreign names!) and condemned
irregular Easter practice and Pelagianism
together and as if the same group practiced both.
If the northern church was able to
delate other Irishmen for Pelagianism, that means
that they had a good idea that the doctrine was
false and condemned; and that they knew this by
themselves, without any need for encouragement
from the Continent. In other words, the
doctrinal conflict between Pelagians (wherever
they resided) and northern churchmen pre-dated
the renewed contact between Ireland and Rome in
the 630s; the Northerners had not waited for
contact with Rome to decide that Pelagianism was
wrong.
If I am right, then the effect of
the letter on the southern clergy must have been
devastating. They had consciously submitted
to Rome and re-entered the universal Church, only
to find that the auctor whose Pauline
commentaries they had been copying and studying,
whose doctrine had been followed by their
founders, was a heretic; and that their revered
founders were schismatics. No wonder that
the real facts about the
“Pre-patrician” saints of the south
vanished in a whirlwind of legend!
What seems to have been,
therefore, the naïve rush of the southern
church, with its Pelagian origins, to join a
Roman whole in which the name of Pelagius was
remembered with horror, seems - like the culture
itself of the southern church, so brilliant in
prose and thought, so deficient in exact
chronology - exactly comparable with the attitude
of Gildas. Like the south Irish, Gildas
reverenced the throne of Rome, was eager to be
joined to the universal church, and apparently
quite unaware - even to the extent of misreading
his own source E - of the universal condemnation
of Pelagians. Time and again, we become
conscious of the shared, collective culture
behind the individual and towering genius of
Gildas; and it perhaps is no coincidence that
when he left Britain, it was to southern Ireland
that he went - to carry on from there his
struggle against the reform of David with its
opposition to Irish ways and to Pelagianism.
However garbled, the notice that
Gildas “had to” leave Britain does seem
to suggest his last years. The annals make
him go to Ireland in 565; the Life of the monk of
Ruys tells that he went at the behest of the
short-lived king Ainmire, who only reigned over
Leinster about three years in the late 560s -
however we read the annalistic data. As the
Life does not seem to know anything about
Ainmire’s defeat or death, we have to
suppose that Gildas did not stay in Ireland very
long; but the annals tell us that he died in 570,
and the Life that he died on the Continent -
where the Council of Tours, 567, had dealt with a
scandal denounced by him.
David triumphed at the Synod of
Llandewi Brefi; and however we are to read the
legend, it certainly tells us that the
“silencing” and “exile” of
Gildas had taken place a good deal earlier.
Therefore the Synod must have taken place at some
point between Gildas’ leaving Britain (565)
and David’s death (589); we would not be far
wring in accepting the sometimes asserted date of
580.
By the time the bishops of Wales
confronted St.Augustine of Canterbury, the church
of Wales had a recognizably Davidian shape. The
monastery of Bangor is-Coed was claimed to have
2100 members all of whom worked for their living
with their own hands, in the manner demanded by
David and deplored by Gildas; and the bishops
themselves followed the lead, not of one of them,
but of an anchorite called Dinoot (Latin Donatus,
Welsh Dunawt). This person has left no trace in
Welsh hagiography, but there is an otherwise
unexplained[15] “Spring of
Dunawt” within the parish of St.David’s
itself. Why, therefore, have historians not
noticed this: that an extremist religious
movement had taken over British religious life,
just as Britain was falling into the hands of the
barbarians? The two things are contemporary; we
have Gildas’ word that David’s party
were disruptive; why has nobody wondered whether
the emergence of the revolutionary egalitarian
movement of the monk from Menevia had any part in
the catastrophe that handed over most of free
Britain to her enemies? Of course, the
coincidence in dates may also mean the opposite;
it may mean that the people of Britain reacted to
the catastrophe by attaching themselves to the
revolutionary and somewhat millenarian movement
of David. But the coincidence exists and must be
relevant.
By 597, everything that Gildas
loved and cared for had completely collapsed.
Already most of Britain’s most temperate and
fertile provinces had fallen to the Saxons - a
reality unimaginable to him; and the still
unconquered part was turning - perhaps had
completely turned - to the way of his
ecclesiastic enemies, those whose ascetic fads he
had fought in Ireland. He was, in a sense, lucky
to die when he did. Already in his forties when
he wrote The Ruin, there is nothing
particularly surprising about being informed by
the Irish annals that he died only eight years
later, in 570; the early fifties would be by no
means an unusual date of death in such an
uncertain and insanitary age (and it would
explain why, in spite of his literary genius, he
did not write anything else of the scope of The
ruin). What is more, we know from Marius of
Avenches that a plague ravaged Gaul and Italy in
the same year; perhaps it accounted for Gildas,
perhaps even for his adversary Maglocunus, long
supposed to have died of the plague. A lucky
death for poor Saint Gildas: he did not see - or
he only saw the beginning of - the end of his
country in a whirlwind of Saxon swords.
And his luck extended to the
unique fortune of his masterpiece, surviving
alone of all the probably vast literary
production of his age, and due to what might be
called – in a perverted way – fortunate
timing. In 561, poor old Gildas predicted the
ruin of the proud lords of Britain unless they
started turning their swords, together, against
the Saxons; within a few years, ruin does indeed
come to Britain – at the hands of those same
Saxons. Meanwhile poor old Gildas has died, so
that people cannot even apologize to him for not
having listened in time. Would that not be enough
to insure that, among the few books that could be
snatched from the flame - whatever David and his
monks might say - his had the pride of place? And
yet this was not simply a coincidence; while
Gildas had not seen from which side the blow was
to fall, he was only too correct – based on
a real understanding of the moral nature of man
both individual and in groups – in saying
that the situation of his day simply could not be
sustained, and that disaster was bound to come.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
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