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Home The Coming of Christianity The Coming of Christianity; Part 4 |
The Coming of Christianity; Part 4The champion of the Celtic or British practice was Colman, who had come from Iona, and had succeeded Aidan in his work in Northumbria. The chief upholder of the Roman view was Wilfred, Abbot of Ripon. Wilfred had been trained in Lindisfarne, Aidan's own monastery, and might have been expected to take Aidan's views. But he had been on a pilgrimage to Rome, and had come back full of zeal for the Roman Church and Roman ways. The two argued it out before King Oswy of Northumbria, who presided at the Synod. The points of difference were not great. The Britons did not keep Easter on the same day as the Romans, they adopted a different tonsure, and had one or two other customs peculiar to themselves. Colman maintained that they should keep to the practices they had learnt from their fathers. Wilfred urged that the Britons stood alone in their habits, and that all the rest of Christendom followed Rome. At length Oswy asked Colman if the Keys of Heaven had been given to Columba as they had been given to Peter. Colman replied, "No". "Then," said the king - one may presume with a smile on his face - "if Peter is the doorkeeper I will never contradict him, lest when I come to the gates there should be none to open them", and he decided for Wilfred and the Roman practice.We may be tempted to regard a quarrel mainly about such things as dates and of methods of shaving the head as being nearly as trivial as the reason which Oswy gave for deciding in favour of the Romans, but we should be wrong. A much deeper question was really involved. Had England followed the British practice, she would have cut herself off from Rome and the rest of the civilized world. She would have lost all share in the art and learning which Rome alone could teach. Wilfred put the matter in a nutshell: "To fight against Rome", said he, " is to fight against the world." By deciding to accept the Roman view, England became once more a part of Christendom, a position she had not held since the coming of the Saxon invaders. The fruits of Oswy's decision were soon gathered. The archbishopric of Canterbury being vacant, an Englishman was sent to Rome to be consecrated. He died in Rome, however, and the Pope chose as Archbishop a Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus. Theodore justified the Pope's choice as thoroughly in 668 as we shall see another archbishop justify it in 1206. He set himself to unite the Church into one, and to organize it under bishops who were each to be responsible for his own diocese. In the British Church the monastery had been the centre on which all turned. The abbot was all-powerful, the bishop merely his subordinate, whose chief work lay in ordaining clergy. Hence bishops wandered up and down the land with no settled sphere of authority, and often quarrelling; monasteries, owning no master but their own abbot, divided the Church rather than united it. What the results of the British system were may be seen in Ireland, where, in the dark days before the English conquest, the Church fell entirely into the hands of the chiefs, lost its power, and merely gave an example of disunion to a people who already thought more of their own tribe than their nation. But Theodore by setting up the Roman system with its grades of rank - the priest in the parish, the bishop in the diocese ruling over the priests, the archbishop in his province ruling over the bishops, and the Pope as the head of all - united the land into one (The work was not completed by Theodore. He, however, began it). When all met together in a national synod they no longer thought of themselves as men of Northumbria, Kent, or Wessex, but as members of a United Church. |
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