| #### 2. ITALY, GAUL AND SPAIN IN THE CENTURY OF ST. GREGORY |

| #### #### In Italy by the time the Lombards arrived (568) the municipal regime of the empire as Diocletian rebuilt it had disappeared. In every city it was the bishop and the tribune who supported the burden of government, the ecclesiastical power and the army: at Rome the pope and the duke. From the safety of Ravenna and its lagoons the exarch ruled, in the emperor's name, what parts of Italy had escaped these Lombards: strips and patches along the coast-line, Rome, Naples, Aquileia, Apulia and Sicily, and kept the road between Ravenna and Rome. As the years went by this rule was less and less of a reality. Rome, in particular, the Lombard kings and dukes never ceased to covet. Its danger was henceforward a permanent feature of life. The emperors could not spare troops enough to clear the Lombards out of Italy, could not, very often, even defend adequately the towns the Lombards menaced. Policy and tradition, on the other hand, forbade them to negotiate with the Barbarian. They could not make war, they would not make peace. To protect Rome, and yet not betray the imperial policy, was already the great problem of papal diplomacy. #### Pelagius II had, in 586, successfully negotiated a three years' truce. It ended in 589 and three years later the Lombard army again marched on Rome. It fell to St. Gregory to organise the defence, to find money to pay the arrears of the imperial army's wages, to appoint military governors. There followed a military demonstration in the Campagna, and the Lombards retired. Next year they returned, in greater force than ever, headed by their king. This time it was by spiritual weapons that the pope conquered, and by the offer of tribute. In an interview he bought off the Lombards with an offer of 500 gold pounds annually. His real aim was a perpetual peace throughout Italy between the emperor and the Barbarian. Meanwhile he acted as intermediary, working on behalf of the prisoners taken in the numerous raids, finding ransoms, and assisting their distressed families. All this to the mixed amusement and annoyance of the incompetent Byzantine functionaries at Ravenna, who put every obstacle in his way, even to denouncing him at court as a traitor. In the end the pope's patient diplomacy won this much of success at least that, in 598, after thirty years of war, the emperor and the Lombards signed a definitive treaty. #### In matters more purely ecclesiastical St. Gregory exercises, and with refreshing vigour, all the rights of his see over the other churches of Italy. Dioceses depopulated in the long wars are united, vacant sees visited and administered by his delegates. Complaints against bishops are received and heard and decided without the intervention of any council. The Bishop of Amalfi is warned that if he will not reside in his diocese he will be interned in a monastery. The Bishop of Tarentum is suspended for causing a woman to be flogged. The Bishop of Naples is deposed. #### Outside the special sphere of St. Gregory's jurisdiction as metropolitan, there lie the suffragans of the other metropolitan sees, Milan, Aquileia, Ravenna. With these bishops the pope has, still, little direct relation. It is still their own metropolitan who confirms their election and gives them episcopal consecration. On the other hand the metropolitans themselves are in close relation with the pope. When the See of Ravenna falls vacant, it is the pope who names the Bishop of Cervia to make the visitation, and the newly-elected metropolitan goes to Rome to be consecrated by the pope. In 595 neither of the candidates proposed to the pope suited him, and he named one of his own monks. With Aquileia relations were still strained. After thirty years the schism bred of the action of Pelagius I during and after the General Council of 553 still endured. [ ] Nor was St. Gregory's patience ever able to end it. It survived his death, and Aquileia was only reconciled under Honorius I (625-638). If Aquileia was in schism, Milan was by this time foreign territory, in the power of the Lombards. It was as a refugee at Genoa, still imperial territory, that the successor of Laurentius (593) was consecrated. St. Gregory's delegate assisted, to confirm the election and to see that the newly-elect was consecrated by bishops of his own province as the custom there demanded. To him, as to the Metropolitan of Ravenna, St. Gregory sent the pallium. #### The leading figure in the religious life of Gaul during the first part of the century of St. Gregory was St. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles. Like St. Honoratus and St. Hilary, Bishops of Arles a hundred years before, he was a monk of Lerins. Like them, too, he was a zealous missionary who by his continuous preaching and his endless journeys throughout the province where- he was metropolitan, did much to give the fervent ideals of Lerins a very wide influence indeed. He was also himself a monastic founder and the author of a very famous rule which, particularly in convents of women, carried all before it in Gaul until the coming of the rule of St. Benedict. But St. Caesarius has a greater claim to a place in history, as the agent responsible for a work of more general importance than the maintenance of the good Arlesian tradition of religious life. It was due to his decisive action that, after a century of more or less open conflict, the debates of the rival schools of Augustinians and semi-Pelagians were brought to an end. St. Caesarius is the hero of the Council of Orange of 529. #### To explain this we must go back to the closing years of St. Augustine's life, when his great theories on the nature and the working of Grace, after routing the pretensions of the system of Pelagius, were beginning to be a cause of lively discussions among the Catholics of southern Gaul. To make the story clearer it is perhaps better to anticipate what the controversy ultimately showed to be true -- that although the Church recognised officially the main lines of St. Augustine's teaching as against Pelagius, there were elements in that teaching -- on predestination, for example, and on the fate of unbaptised children -- which it did not make its own. It was in part around these points that the new discussions took place (419-429); but in opposing what we may call St. Augustine's personal theories, his critics -- followers of Cassian at the beginning of the fifth century and of St. Faustus, Bishop of Riez, at the end of it -- fell foul of the implications of the official anti-Pelagian teaching. The story can hardly be told, even summarily, without the introduction of more theological matter than there is space for here. [ ] #### The troubles came to a head -- and Rome was brought into them at the time of the reconciliation of the Eastern churches in 519. [ ] The treatise of St. Faustus, directed against the supporters of St. Prosper, who was himself a strong Augustinian, had come into the hands of those monks of Constantinople who, throughout the late schism, had been Rome's constant supporters. They read it as Pelagianism, and appealed for a decision to the Apostolic See. They also brought the book to the notice of the greatest theologian of the day, the African bishop, St. Fulgentius, then exiled for the faith to Sardinia. The pope, Hormisdas, referred his enquirers to the writings of St. Augustine and St. Prosper, and especially to the decision of the Roman Church given in the previous controversy a hundred years before. This, in the circumstances, was not enough to halt the discussions; and soon all southern Gaul was again filled with their noise #### It was how that St. Caesarius, metropolitan and also, by appointment of Pope Symmachus (498-514), papal vicar for the Visigothic Kingdom, took up the matter. He drew up and sent to the pope, Felix IV, a list of nineteen propositions which purported to resume the Catholic teaching on the disputed points, and asked the pope officially to sanction it. The list was returned, with some changes: the sections that treated of predestination and of reprobation were struck out; other clauses, taken from the Sententiae of St. Prosper (which again derived from St. Augustine), were added. St. Caesarius added- to the list thus revised more matter of his own, touched up the whole, and presented the document, thus arranged, for acceptance to the bishops of his province assembled at Orange for the dedication of the basilica there (July 3, 529). They signed it; and St. Caesarius next sent the document to Rome for ratification. Felix IV was dead. It was to his successor, Boniface II, that the decree came. He approved it, January 25, 531, [ ] as an adequate expression of the Church's teaching, and thus gave it all the force needed to end the controversy. #### Little by little, as the decree circulated, the controversy died out. The critics of St. Augustine had to admit, as part of Catholic teaching, that, even for the first movements of man in the work of his salvation, grace was needed; and that, apart from grace-left to its own resources -- human free-will is incapable of sustained moral goodness. On the other hand, those developments which had, in part, caused the controversy -- St. Augustine's theory on the intrinsic malice of concupiscence, on the transmission of original sin from parent to child through the parental concupiscence which the act of generation involved, on the lot of unbaptised children, and some of his ideas regarding predestination-none of these were approved. [ ] The Augustinian doctrine, as against Pelagius, was fully confirmed. On the other hand the controversy had brought out clearly that others of the saint's conclusions -- and some of them are extremely repugnant -- were no more than the theories of a learned theologian: and were not the Church's teaching. [ ] #### The Gaul of St. Caesarius, however, where Arian princes ruled, Visigoth or Ostrogoth, was soon to give place to a new condition of things once the now baptised Franks of the north made themselves masters of the whole country. By the time of St. Gregory the Great, all Gaul was Frank and Arianism had disappeared. The saint's task in Gaul was, however, hardly easier, for all that the princes with whom he had to deal were Catholics. #### The first important event in the ecclesiastical history of the new Barbarian kingdom, after the baptism of Clovis, was the national council held at Orleans in 511. Clovis was by this time master of two-thirds of Gaul. He had, in a few years, destroyed the Visigothic sovereignty of the south-west and with the victory his new religion, too, had triumphed. "I cannot tolerate that Arians should rule so great a part of Gaul," he had declared; and on his way south he had prayed as a pilgrim at the shrines of St. Martin and St. Hilary. The Council of Orleans was the first event to mark the new national unity. It marked also the beginning of those close relations between Church and State that were to characterise all later French history. Clovis, apparently, had summoned the council; and to Clovis it made its report, begging him to support with his power the decisions it had made. The whole of Gaul was represented, bishops even from the districts still in the hands of the Burgundians. On the other hand there was not a single bishop from the sees of the distant north-eastern frontier -- Mainz, Treves, Cologne, Tongres, Metz, Toul, Verdun -- some of which had apparently disappeared in the century of disorder which began on that fatal day, in 407, when the great flood of marauders had destroyed the Rhine frontiers once and for all. #### With Clovis the 3,000 soldiers of his guard accepted the new faith in 496. The rest of his people remained, for the moment, pagan, their conversion an additional task before the Gallo-Roman Church still occupied with the conversion of the pagan countrysides. The Catholicism of the ensuing century was necessarily a very mixed affair. St. Gregory of Tours, our chief source for the history of the Franks at this time, has left us a dark picture indeed, of a society almost wholly pagan in its morals. Cruelty, drunkenness, debauchery, sacrilege and superstition are its leading features, and Catholicism a thin, scarcely recognisable veneer. The reigning princes set the fashion, their nobles follow it, and in the train of their crimes come blood-feuds and private wars to destroy all security. To add to the causes of misery, the kingdom of Clovis is, upon his death (511), divided among his sons. Reunited in 558, it is once more divided in 561, to remain divided for another fifty years. Between the closely related kings civil war is continuous, and the pages of St. Gregory are a record of revolting cruelties. #### Good men are, however, by no means lacking; there are saints even, and in every walk of life. Preachers like St. Caesarius of Arles remind these decadent and half-civilised princes and their associates that God is just and the avenger of wickedness in high places. Missionaries tour the pagan countrysides risking, often enough, their very lives, in an endeavour to make the Gospel known. For paganism dies hard, its devotees, lords as well as peasants, resist violently this new "Roman" conquest. Even so late as 626 councils are still legislating against sacrifices, and against Catholics who assist and take part in them. #### One method of stabilising the spiritual conquest and of guarding against any relapse into the attractions of the old servitude is the substitution of Christian feasts for the pagan saturnalia. Shrines are built in the place where once the gods were worshipped-shrines of the martyrs and, more often still, of the champions of ascetic austerity, such heroic bishops as St. Martin, St. Hilary, St. Germanus of Auxerre. The cult of the saints spreads rapidly. Every town, every village has its patron. He is its special protector and in time of crisis he is expected to deliver his clients -- if need be, by miracle. It is the age of the miraculous. The lives of the saints are, often, little more than a catalogue of marvels; and the popular conception of sanctity, the test which gives the right to veneration, is the power of working such miracles. In the shrine there is preserved the body of the saint, or, where this is not possible, some relic: not, as yet, a part of his body, for in the West such mutilations are held in horror. " Who dares to touch the bodies of the saints dies," St. Gregory wrote to the empress when she asked of him the head of St. Paul. He sent instead part of the saint's chains. The saints are a coveted treasure. Around their earthly life a new genre of literature grows. First the neo-Manicheans, to capture the prestige of the saints for their sect, and then the Catholics, produce a whole series of romantic histories, with one or other of the saints for the hero. Soon a type is created, a fixed formula of events and characteristics, and for one life historically valuable there are a score of these colourless legends based on a common pattern. The prestige of a town, of a see, of an abbey is not infrequently measured by that of the saint it possesses. Fights over relics are not unknown, and pious thefts. A more permanent influence, possibly, is that the local chapels gain in importance and achieve a first beginning of administrative independence from the church of the episcopal city. #### The bishop of this sixth-century Gaul is not merely a pastor of souls but the chief personage in the social life of his see city and of all its neighbouring territory. He has the immense prestige that falls to the one surviving institution of the imperial regime, to which men look back, already, with an almost religious veneration. The bishop is a royal officer. Almost always he is of good family; and not impossibly the same see has been held in his family for generations. So it was with St. Gregory of Tours, who wrote that all the bishops of Tours save five were of his family. It is the bishop who stands between the people and the exactions of the king's lay representative, the count. Often the temporal administration is in his hands and he makes himself responsible for public works, for dykes, canals, fortifications. He undertakes the burden of finding ransoms for the innumerable victims of the endless wars, and systematically, with registers, poor-house and hospitals, he provides for the destitute. Especially is he the protector of widows and orphans and, from 585,' [ ] no judgement can be given in any suit that relates to them without the bishop's intervention. Another thoughtful council even forbids bishops to harbour fierce dogs lest they scare away the poor seeking alms and comfort. The church itself was a sanctuary, in which the criminal was safe from the unlawful violence of the mob or of the royal officers. Only on their swearing to give him a fair trial would the bishop hand him over. The serfs again, if they were the property of the Church, were to be treated with especial consideration, [ ] and the development began which ended in assimilating the serf to the cleric and placing him wholly under the jurisdiction of the bishop's court. Others gladly made themselves the bishop's men by recommendation, free men as well as serfs, and transferred to him their domain. Hence the subjects and dependants of the bishop could often be numbered by tens of thousands. #### The churches were inevitably increasing in wealth. Generous giving was the great virtue of the time -- whether in expiation, or from devotion or from interest. The custom of tithes too, though not yet of obligation, was slowly spreading. By the time of St. Gregory the Great, the Church was easily the greatest proprietor in Gaul. Its vast personnel was, by royal concession, immune from the numerous customs and tolls, as it moved about the country on business; and the church lands enjoyed a like freedom. They enjoyed, too, as the lands of all the great lords were beginning to enjoy, and again by royal grant, immunity from the action of the king's officers. On the domain of his church the bishop was ruler, judging and taxing his people; and his own personal subjection to the king was the only link between them and the crown. The property of the Church was inalienable-because it was the property of the poor; of which the bishop [ ] was only the administrator. This inalienability, partial at first, had been absolute since the intervention of Pope Symmachus in 513. #### The bishops themselves enjoyed complete immunity from the royal jurisdiction. As bishops, only bishops could judge them. They made the like claim for their clergy, but, at first, with only partial success. The conflict between the two tendencies went on throughout the sixth century. Finally, in the great council of 614, a compromise was arranged. Civil suits between clerics were to be decided by the bishop. If one of the parties was a layman, a mixed tribunal should judge. In criminal cases if the accused cleric was subdeacon, deacon or priest, the bishop was to judge him: if he was only in minor orders, the count. #### This system of immunity and privilege was of course always at the mercy of the half-civilised Barbarian upon whose good will it was built. "It is the conqueror who commands. I obey," said St. Remy, the bishop who baptised Clovis, in explanation of some departure from the canons; and the great council of 511, in which that far reaching conversion produced its first effects, laid the foundation of that dependence on the State which was to characterise ever afterwards the Catholicism of the French. #### No layman, it was there enacted, should be ordained or consecrated without the king's consent. Where Clovis had -- and of course successfully -- suggested candidates for the vacant sees, his still more brutal sons imposed them. Gradually laymen, their own brutal warriors, came to be named, and to be consecrated even, without that year's novitiate which the canons prescribed for such cases. The councils protested, but in vain. Saints were never lacking in the hierarchy. More than one paid with his life for his bold reproof of wickedness in high places. But bad bishops abounded; and the pages of Gregory of Tours are filled with the record of these drunkards, debauchees and brigands, monsters of cruelty and avarice, politicians and intriguers. #### There was no centralisation of the Church in Gaul, no one primatial see. The old predominance of Arles had never matured. The century of invasion, and its division of Gaul into three mutually hostile kingdoms, had broken up the first attempt at any unity of ecclesiastical administration. The councils apart, each bishop was a law unto himself. Rome was far away, and, by now, in a foreign country where a heretic ruled. Communications were more difficult than ever. #### None the less the churches increased, and religious life within their boundaries. New sees had been established in the fifth century, and in the hundred years between Clovis and St. Gregory still more were added. The development of chapels outside the episcopal city, begun already in the fourth century and then so rudely interrupted by the invasion, was renewed. There were, for example, the private chapels established by the lords of the great estates for their population of Catholic dependants, and there were the new chapels erected as memorials to the saints. These last were at first regarded as the property of the local see and what revenues they possessed went to the bishop. From 511 the clergy who served them were allowed to keep two-thirds of the casual offerings they received. From 527 a permanent funded revenue was guaranteed to them and finally, at the Council of Orleans, 538, the principle was fixed that the clergy of such rural churches live on their revenues. The bishop, of course, retained all his authority, though he is warned not to abuse it, by, for example, robbing the church of its movables during a vacancy. A more serious menace than the chance of such a bishop was the permanent lay patron of the chapel built for the great estates. He was often an obstacle to the development of clerical discipline. Often he kept the revenues, and even the offerings, and in some cases the parish, by recommendation, made him its rector. #### These rural clergy were simply trained. The Council of Vaison, 529, urges the priest to house and supervise those who wished to be priests. If they are not free men, the lord's consent is necessary. If they are married they must promise to live henceforth in continency, though, as yet, there is no obligation to separate from their wives. The scholastic training is the very minimum. The priest must be able to read, must know something of the chant, of Holy Scripture, and how to baptise. To safeguard his good name the councils lay down a minute code of observances in all that relates to his business with the other sex. That there were abuses and disorders in this primitive organisation is certain-as it is certain that such disorders cause more comment, and leave more trace, than the humdrum virtue of the rest. The brutality of the time finds its habitual reflection in the clerical scandals that are recurrent. Drunkenness, incontinence, scandals from the renewal of married life after ordination, theft and murder -- all these occur in the indictment. That these rural clergy were, personally, poor enough may be gathered from such counsels as that of St. Caesarius that the priest should supplement his income by manual work. St. Caesarius, himself a tireless preacher and missionary, would have the priest supplement his first primitive schooling. He should, for example, read through the whole Bible four times a year. He should also preach to his people -- an office so far reserved to the bishop and to supply the less competent with the means, the saint compiled a whole series of homilies. #### To this live and turbulent Church so large-hearted a man as St. Gregory the Great could not be indifferent. His first opportunity came in 593 when Childebert II, King of Austrasia, [ ] became, by the death of his uncle, King of Burgundy too. Childebert, now the most powerful of the Frankish kings, wrote to St. Gregory asking him to restore the vicariate at Arles. The pope readily consented. It would be a means of extending his direct influence on affairs in Gaul and of introducing the much needed reforms. In his reply he goes to the root of the troubles when he asks the king never again to appoint a layman to the episcopate, and warns him that such practices imperil his salvation. #### The hope of royal assistance in the work of reform died, however, almost as soon as it was born. By 594 Childebert was no more. His kingdom was divided between his baby sons, Theodebert II and Thierry II, and their grandmother Brunhilda ruled as regent -- a valiant woman truly, who shrank from no extremity of violence and treachery to repel that with which the baby princes' inheritance was attacked by their next of kin. For the next few years this task was her sole occupation. The outlook for religious revival was decidedly poor and the stream of exhortations from Rome fell on deaf ears. The aged queen did indeed pause in the midst of her strife with her rival fury, Fredegonda, to assist the mission of St. Augustine 011 its way to England, but that was the limit of what St. Gregory's patience and piety achieved. His aim was a national council, and he even selected his legate -- one of his own monks. Brunhilda, needing the pope's assistance in a negotiation with Constantinople, listened with a show of interest and consented. This was in 599, but though St. Gregory lived until 604 the plan never went any further. When the council finally met, St. Gregory had been ten years in his grave and a new religious force had entered Gaul and the Catholic life of the continent. This was the mission of the monks from Ireland, and its pioneer was St. Columbanus. #### St. Columbanus, the incarnation of Irish monasticisms's uncompromising austerity, was a man sixty years of age when, with a dozen companions, he left his monastery of Bangor in self-inflicted penitential exile. Providence guided the band to Gaul, and in 591 they appeared at the court of Gontran, King of Burgundy. Monasticism was, of course, by no means unknown in Gaul. The pioneer work of St. Martin, of St. Caesarius and the saints of Lerins had flourished exceedingly. Monasteries of men and of women were numbered by the hundred, and monastic saints among the Franks themselves -- St. Radegonde of Poitiers for example (for whom Fortunatus wrote the Vexilla Regis) -- were known and revered and a real force in religious life. But the Irish monks were almost a new revelation. #### The king treated them kindly, edified by the miracle of their surviving such austerities, and gave them site after site in the wild abandoned mountain country of the Vosges. There they founded successively the monasteries of Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines. Presently this deserted corner of Gaul became a centre of the most amazing spiritual revival. The new monks were the most zealous of apostles, the most terrifying of preachers. They knew no other desire than to win souls from sin, and presently disciples flocked in by the hundred. Presently too their troubles began, for trouble was inevitable once these saints turned to save the souls of the kings and their courts. Their blunt rebuke of the customary sexual licentiousness lost them their first patron. Next there was trouble with the local bishops. Monasteries in Gaul, as universally throughout the continental churches since the Council of Chalcedon, 451, were subject to the local bishop. The Irish monks brought with them a very different tradition. Also they brought their own local customs in such matters as the date of the feast of Easter, which was the centre of the year's liturgical cycle. #### The disputes ended with the condemnation of St. Columbanus by a synod of bishops (600). Whereupon he wrote the famous letter to St. Gregory in which, among other matters, with the blunt direct speech characteristic of his whole activity he rebuked the pope for his approval of the General Council of 553. No one escaped this new, hardy, undiplomatic, if not too well informed, sincerity, whether the kings for their animality, the bishops for their servile connivance at the royal sins, the very pope himself for his orthodoxy! The day came when kings and bishops united and the fearless monk, after twenty years of labour in Burgundy, was driven forth. For three years he wandered -- Paris, the west of France (Neustria), the Rhine valley, Mainz, Zurich, Bregenz-sowing monasteries as he passed, and finally came to Bobbio where, under Lombard protection, he founded the most famous of all his abbeys, and there in 615 he died, an old man of eighty-five. His vigorous missionary spirit survived in all his abbeys, and in the century which followed they continued to be centres from which, year by year, missionaries pushed out ever further into the hitherto untroubled Paganism of the German lands. #### St. Gregory had met with little success in Gaul. In Spain, however, his lifetime saw the great change of the conversion of the royal family to Catholicism. Ever since their first occupation of Spain, in the early fifth century, the Visigoths had clung to their own old-fashioned heresy, the vague Arianism of the Council of Rimini (359). Of their relations with their Catholic subjects during the fifth century we know very little, except that Euric (485), towards its end, for political reasons, persecuted them more or less. With the end of that century, and the Visigothic conquest of the north-east of Spain, Catholicism began to know peace once more. The custom of provincial councils was revived, and once again relations with Rome were renewed. These councils make hardly any reference to the Arians or to their Arian sovereign. Their one positive achievement is the development of the primacy of Toledo, and the establishment of a single liturgical observance. #### In 552 the empire once more reappeared, after a hundred and fifty years, called in by rebels. Justinian's armies, fresh from the reconquest of Italy and Africa, regained a great part of the provinces of Baetica and Carthagena and henceforward, almost until the Mahometans swept all into a common oblivion, a Byzantine Spain continued to exist along with the Visigothic kingdom. One result of the reconquest was to link, in the minds of the Visigothic kings, Catholicism -- the religion of Justinian-with treason, and to add to their existing grievances against the Church. These grievances were largely domestic, and arose from mixed marriages; for by this time the Visigoths were the only survivors of the once large group of Arian royalties. The daughters were married to Frankish princes, and on their marriage they went over to Catholicism. The sons married Frankish wives, and the new Spanish princesses remained Catholic, despite a certain persecution. The French wife of Hermenegild, for example, was forcibly re-baptised by an Arian to please her Arian mother-in-law. #### It was not among the Visigoths that Catholicism made its first gains, but among their neighbours to the west and north-west, the Suevi, settled in Galicia since the time of the great invasion of 407. The hero of the conversion of the Suevi is St. Martin of Braga, and the first preparation for the change was the miraculous cure of the king's heir through devotion to St. Martin of Tours. This was about 550, and it was about the same time that St. Martin came to the Suevi. He was a monk and an oriental, a learned man and a writer, bishop, first of all of Dumio and then in 570 of Braga. By 560 the king had become a Catholic, and the remainder of his court soon followed. In 561 the bishops of the kingdom met in council at Braga at the king's command. What remains of their deliberations is the last evidence of the survival of Priscillianism. Of Arianism, curiously enough, there is no mention at all. #### St. Martin died in 580, by which time the conversion of the Visigoths, too, was in operation -- a story whose centre is a family tragedy. Their king, at this moment, was Leovigild (567-586), an administrator and lawgiver, and a mighty warrior who, before he died, was to destroy the kingdom of the Suevi and make the Visigoths supreme in Spain. His eldest son was the husband of that Frankish princess, Ingonda, whose forcible re-baptism has been mentioned. To ease the family situation Hermenegild was sent, in command, to Seville. There he met the Catholic bishop, St. Leander, and himself became a Catholic. The next act in the drama was a civil war in which Hermenegild, allied to the Suevi and to the Byzantines, attacked his father. Leovigild, in reply, adopted a new policy of religious uniformity -- on an Arian basis of course -- and for the next five years (579-584) waged a war of repression. Ingonda was banished and took refuge at Constantinople. Leander accompanied her, and at the capital met St. Gregory. It is from Leander's story, given to St. Gregory, that this account of the matter derives. Galicia was annexed, the Suevi monarchy destroyed, and Hermenegild murdered. [ ] #### Two years later (586) Leovigild died. His younger son, Reccared, succeeded. He recalled Leander, and the bishop was henceforth his chief adviser. The new king wished to embrace the faith in which his brother had died, but he also wished for national unity, and before he made his submission he spent two years in an endeavour to win over his co-religionists. The national Council of Toledo in 589 was the scene of this solemn reconciliation. The king and his nobles and the Arian bishops -- eight in all -- made their submission. Two liturgical details of this council’s proceedings are of interest. The Filioque made its first appearance in the so-called Nicene Creed, and the Creed was ordered henceforth to be sung at Mass "as is the custom in the East." #### In this unexpected spiritual conquest St. Gregory had had no share. He was not, even, at the time pope. It was largely the work of his friend St. Leander and it was several years before the official reports of what had happened reached Rome. Of St. Gregory's relations as pope with Visigothic Spain little survives. We have his joyful letter to Leander acknowledging the news of the Council of Toledo, and a reply to the homage of the newly converted Reccared and his thanks for Reccared's present of a chalice to St. Peter. In return he sent the king relics of St. Peter's chains and of the wood of the true Cross. To Leander he sent the pallium, sparing him, the pope gracefully says, the usual admonition to live worthy of this new dignity, "since your good deeds outstrip my words." ####  |