Chapter IV: Christianity in Gaul From the Sixth to the Eighth Century

A very special interest belongs to the history of Christianity in Gaul. There is no more striking example of what the Church did to bridge over the gulf between the old culture and the barbarians.

[Sidenote: Roman Gaul.]

Among early Christian martyrs few are more renowned than those who died in Southern Gaul. Paganism lived on, concealed, in many country districts, but the life and power and thought of the people became by the time of Constantine, by the fourth century, entirely Christian. As the state organised so did the Church. Gaul had seventeen provincial governments; it came to have seventeen archbishops, and under them bishops for each great city. On the Roman empire and the Christian Church the foundations were laid; and they were laid firm.

[Sidenote: The barbarian invasions.]

At the beginning of the fifth century a terrible storm swept over the land. It was the storm of Teutonic invasion. Vandals, Burgundians, Alans, Suevi poured over the land; the Huns followed them, only to be beaten back by a union of the other tribes. Then, after the Battle of Châlons (451), there gradually rose out {42} of the Teutonic conquerors the conquering power of one tribe, that of the Franks.

[Sidenote: The Church in Gaul.]

By the first ten years of the sixth century Gaul was united again, under the rule of Chlodowech (Clovis), King of the Franks. Till well on in the Middle Ages it was that title which the rulers of Gaul always bore, "Rex Francorum," King of the Franks. France to-day still dates her existence as a nation from the baptism of Clovis. It was that, his admission into the Catholic Christianity of the Gauls over whom he ruled, which enlisted on the side of the Frankish power all the culture and civilisation which had never died out since the Roman days. Under the fostering care of the Church it had survived. Brotherhood, charity, compassion, unity, all the great ideas which the Church cherished, were to work in long ages the transformation of the Frankish kingship. And when Chlodowech became king under the blessing of the Church, which had survived all through these centuries since it was planted under the Romans, the fusion of races soon followed. The French nation as we now know it is not merely Celtic, or Gaulish, but Roman too, and lastly Frankish--that is, Teutonic.

[Sidenote: The baptism of Chlodowech, 496.]

The history of the baptism of Chlodowech is one of the most dramatic in the annals of the early Middle Age. His wife, Chrotechild, was the niece of the Burgundian king, and she was a devout Catholic. Slowly she won her way to his heart. Never, said the chroniclers, did she cease to persuade him that he should serve the true God; and when in the crisis of a battle against the Alamanni he called her words to mind, he vowed to {43} be baptised if Christ should give him the victory. The legend adorns the historic fact that Chlodowech was baptised by S. Remigius at Rheims, on Christmas Day, 496, and that some three thousand of his warriors were baptised with him. "Bow thy neck, O Sigambrian," said the prelate, "adore that which thou hast burned and burn that which thou hast adored." Within a generation all races of the Franks had followed the Frankish king.

[Sidenote: The dark days of the Merwings.]

The years that followed were full of growth. But for long the Christianity which was nominally triumphant was imperfect indeed. Chlodowech died in 511; his race went on ruling, Catholic in name but very far from obedient to the Church's laws. The tale of their successors, their wars and their crimes, is one which belongs to social or political history, not to the history of the Church. The Church's life was lived underground in the slow progress of Christian ideas. Chlothochar, sole ruler of the Franks, died in 561. How little had the half-century accomplished. Then came an age of division, murders, horrors, in which the names of great ladies stand out as at least the equals of their lords in crime. Predegund, who became the wife of Chilperich of Neustria, and Brunichildis, the wife first of Sigebert of Austrasia, and then of Merovech, Chilperich's son, were rivals in wickedness. The horrors of those days are recorded in the history of Gregory, who ruled over the see of Tours from 573 to 595. It was an age in which, while the rulers were Christian in name, and the land was mapped out into sees ruled by Christian bishops, and monasteries were springing up to teach {44} the young and to set an example of religious life, the general atmosphere was almost avowedly pagan. Men said, tells Gregory, that "if a man has to pass between pagan altars and God's church there is no harm in his paying homage to both," and the lives of such men showed that it is impossible to serve God and Mammon.

Yet for a century and a half the Merwings, descendants of Chlodowech, had among them strong rulers, great conquerors, men of iron as well as men of blood. Early in the seventh century, from 628 to 638, there ruled in Gaul Dagobert, the greatest of the Merwing kings. His rule extended from the Pyrenees to the North Sea, from the ocean to the forests of Thuringia and Bohemia. He was "ruler of all Gaul and the greater part of Germany, very influential in the affairs of Spain, victorious over Slavs and Bulgarians, and at home a great king, encouraging commerce and putting into better shape the law codes of his subjects."

[Sidenote: Break up of their kingdom.]

That was the culmination of the Merwing power. The seventh century saw its decay, and a new step towards the medieval monarchy of the Franks. Two causes effected the fall of the Merwings--their own vices and the growth of feudalism with the creation of great local lords. These threatened to break up the kingdom of Chlodowech into small states, to disintegrate and thus destroy the united nation of the Franks.

The first cause is one which it is difficult to exaggerate. We read in the pages of that great historian and great bishop, Gregory of Tours, the terrible tale of their crimes, their brutal luxury, their lust for blood, the {45} unbridled licence of their passions. That was the record of the days of their decay. There was, however, even at the best a great change from the times of Roman rule. For civilisation, literary culture, law, we find substituted in the pages of Gregory of Tours savagery, scenes of brutality, drunkenness, robbery. Law and civilisation seem to sleep. It was in this state of the country, when every man's hand was against his neighbour, when law was unheard amid the strife, that feudalism arose, a natural development of the desire for self-preservation, which led to associations to supply the mutual protection which there was no strength behind the law to enforce. In all these movements the Church had an active part. [Sidenote: The influence of the Church.] It was her principles of association which taught men the idea of unity, of bonds by which personal security should be based on new guarantees amid the weakness of government and the neglect of law. The Church held the tradition of a civilisation the barbarians had never known, and in her own moral teaching she set forth the way to an ideal state which should combine all the elements of strength. The growth of the Frankish nation was guided almost entirely by the Church.

Feudalism, Roman administration and law, Christian faith and discipline--these three factors were at work throughout the Dark Ages from the fifth to the ninth century: and they were all--the last two most especially--under the direction of the Church. And first and most obviously the monarchy of the Merwings was a patent imitation of the Roman Empire. The clergy had maintained the imperial tradition. It was they who taught the sovereigns to replace the emperors {46} and to produce around them the illusion of a Roman rule. They employed officers with the same titles, centred their administration in their household, claimed and exercised unlimited power. No power above them did they recognise, save only, when they would listen to their teachers, the power of the love--more often the fear--of God. The barbarian invasions that had swept over the land had destroyed the local, as well as the central administration. At Arles survived the relics of the old Roman functionaries of the prefecture; but in the land of the Franks the whole system had to be reconstructed from the tradition of which the Church was the faithful guardian.

[Sidenote: Relations with the Eastern Empire.]

Thus the real aim of Chlodowech and his successors was not to conquer the Roman Empire, not to substitute a Teutonic power for a Roman one; but to take the place of the empire in Gaul, to succeed to its heritage, to re-establish its authority, under Frankish kings. Thus when the Empire of the West had ceased to be, the Frankish kings sought titles and alliances from the emperors who still ruled at Constantinople. It is a significant characteristic, indeed, of the Merwing monarchy that it kept up close relations with the distant Roman Empire in the East, that the Frankish kings professed to be the loyal allies, as they were often the formally adopted sons, of the Roman emperors and the consuls of the republic.

The Frankish kings, by their Christianity, imperfect though it was, were admitted to fellowship with the central power of the Christian world, with emperor at Byzantium and pope at Rome.

"Gaul was really independent of the empire in all {47} respects," [1] and it is not there that we should seek for ecclesiastical relations with Constantinople. But there can be no question that the Catholicism of the Franks owed something to Eastern influences. There are points in the Gallican ritual which are distinctly Byzantine, and must belong to this period. Chlodowech, as an ally rather than a subject, and not least, perhaps, because he was a Catholic, received the dignity of the consulate from Anastasius.[2] And in the reign of the great Justinian the Merwings looked to the emperor for recognition and support. Theodebert, his "son," accepted a commission to propagate the Catholic faith in the imperial name.[3] Bishops, too, who might be in need of advice and consolation, applied naturally to Constantinople. Nicetius, Bishop of Trier, that "man of highest sanctity, admirable in preaching, and renowned for good works," [4] persecuted by Chlothochar and his men, wrote naturally to the holy and orthodox emperor, "dominus semper suus." In the midst of barbarities scarce conceivable,[5] the finest characters were trained by the simple verities of the Catholic faith, to which they clung with an extraordinary tenacity. Nor is this anywhere more strongly shown than in the history of the Franks. Of the meaning of the great struggle of Catholicism against Arianism, and of its immense personal value, the histories afford many instances. There is an eloquent passage in {48} [Sidenote: The strength of the Catholic faith among the Franks.] Mr. Hodgkin's _Italy and her Invaders_[6] which I cannot forbear to quote. "In the previous generation both Brunichildis and Galswintha had easily conformed to the Catholic faith of their affianced husbands. Probably the councillors of Leovigild expected that a mere child like Ingunthis would without difficulty make the converse change from Catholicism back into Arianism. This was ever the capital fault of the Arian statesmen, that, with all their religious bitterness, they could not comprehend that the profession of faith, which was hardly more than a fashion to most of themselves, was a matter of life and death to their Catholic rivals. Here, for instance, was their own princess, Brunichildis, reared in Arianism, converted to the orthodox creed, clinging to it tenaciously through all the perils and adversities of her own stormy career, and able to imbue the child-bride, her daughter, with such an unyielding devotion to the faith of Nicaea, that not one of all the formidable personages whom she met in her new husband's home could avail to move her by one hair's breadth towards 'the Arian pravity.'"

It was the strength of the Catholicism of those who were trained in it and by it, seen in Spain and Gaul as well as in Italy, which drew the Frankish churchmen naturally towards the great witnessing power of the Roman bishop. The pontificate of Gregory the Great affords significant illustrations of this influence.

From 595 the letters of S. Gregory show a continual interest in Gaul. A good deal of it is personal, concerned with the management of papal estates or with {49} the relations of particular persons towards the pope himself. [Sidenote: Gregory the Great and Gaul.] But Gregory was careful to assert a very special connection between Rome and the "lands of the Gauls" in all ecclesiastical matters. The Roman Church was the mother to whom they applied in time of need.[7] Gregory gave the pallium to Vergilius, bishop of the ancient city of Arles, and with it the position of papal vicar within the kingdoms of Burgundy, Austrasia, and Aquitaine. He recognised the terrible laxity of the Gallican Church: the clergy were negligent, simoniacal, vicious; laymen were often consecrated to the episcopate. He gave counsel freely to the kings: Childebert he warmly commended: Brunichild, whose tenacious adherence to the Catholic faith he knew, while he probably knew but little of her personal character, he wrote to with paternal affection, granted the pallium at her request and that of Gallican bishops to S. Syagrius, Bishop of Autun, and appealed to her as one who had the will as well as the power to reform abuses, remove scandals, and destroy paganism. He set himself determinedly to work against the taint of money which hung over the whole Church. He earnestly pleaded for the expulsion of "these detestable evils," for the summoning of a synod which should reform the whole Church. He pleaded in vain; but his work was not without lasting results. He founded the alliance between the papacy and the Frankish kings which was to be so fruitful in later history. And he founded it not with a political but with an entirely religious object. Through the court he hoped to reform the Church. He saw how closely Church and State were {50} linked together, and he thought that he could make the kings act as rulers who set the Church's interest always first. It has been well said that his work, though the Church long remained corrupt, was not in vain. "He succeeded in establishing a regular intercourse between himself and the churches of Gaul, especially in the cities of the east and south; he fixed a tradition of friendship between the apostolic see and the Frank princes; he held up an ideal of Christianity before a savage and half-pagan people; and he caused the name of bishop to be once more reverenced in a land where it had grown to be almost synonymous with avarice, lawlessness, and corrupt ambition. If Gregory did no more than this he accomplished enough. Though his work was not rich in definite results at the moment, yet afterwards, in the reign of Charlemagne, its effects became manifest." [8]

[Sidenote: Relations of the Frankish Church with Rome.]

At the same time the Frankish Church undoubtedly maintained a position distinctly independent of Rome. Arles never really became a papal vicariate. Gregory's endeavours were fruitless in practical result.[9] The Gallican churches continued to be governed by their bishops, with every degree of local variety, not by the pope. Gregory rather set forth an ideal than established a subordination. His influence was personal not constitutional, and it was not strong. Yet in the days between Gregory and Charles the Great the links connecting Rome with Gaul were not weakened. Later on they were to be strengthened still more by the growth of a reformed monasticism, which gave support {51} to the papacy while yet it looked to the popes for guidance. But meanwhile the influence of individual ecclesiastics in Gaul must not be forgotten. As was so often the case in medieval Europe, an age of wickedness presents, in the chronicles and biographies, a very large proportion of lives which received the praise of sanctity. Bishops, anchorites, monks, often, it would seem, rose far above the standard of their day: men noted their lives with awe and remembered them with reverence. They moved in a society of curious complexity.

[Learning at the court of the Merwings.]

Venantius Fortunatus, who dedicated his poems to Gregory the Great, and was "the great man of letters of his age," was a poet, but a Christian poet--a writer of letters, but a close friend of holy souls, and notably of S. Radegund, the exiled princess and saint.[10] We learn from him that even in those days of blood there was a literary society at the Frankish courts, and the savage king Chilperich made pretence to be a writer, a theologian, and even a poet, though Gregory of Tours assures us that he had not the least notion of prosody.

Venantius Fortunatus and his literary friends, Chilperich and his obsequious courtiers, link us to another and more notable name. To one bishop, who achieved canonisation, we owe very much of what we know of the history of those times.

Gregory of Tours wrote memoirs which "are those of a man who has played a great part in the State. At the same time he has the sense for interesting {52} things, miracles, and adventures, which is sometimes wanting in historians." [11]

[Sidenote: Gregory of Tours.]

We learn from his books that he had been trained in classic learning, and that the bishops of the day did not turn aside from the pagan classics. It is quite clear that his education was not merely theological or even exclusively Christian. Other writers he refers to, but with Vergil he certainly was familiar. And it is difficult to believe that he stood alone, bitterly though he complained of the ignorance of his contemporaries. The very fact that Gregory the Great denounced the custom of bishops studying and teaching classical grammar and classical fables, shows that the education of those days was not very closely confined. And of its results, seen also in a goodly list of clerical men of letters, Gregory of Tours is perhaps the best example.

He was before all things a bishop; he wrote indeed, as a French writer has happily said, "en évêque"; but he was also a statesman and a very keen observer of life. From his pages we learn how slight had been the impression that Christianity had yet made on the lives of barbarous men. We see kings still wondering that God's power could be greater than their own, yet when they were awoke to terror by the thought of death flying in craven fear to the feet of the minister of God. The whole history is a tale of treacheries and murders, of quarrels and of sins among men and women pledged to God; and yet it is evident that behind the cruelty and crime there was a new spirit at work, slowly transforming society by the conversion of individuals. It was a transformation {53} which was going on all over Europe; nowhere at this time, perhaps, more conspicuously than in Gaul and in Ireland. There are many parallels between the Celtic "age of saints" and the Merwing age of sinners. It is difficult to learn the full truth about either; but out of the darkness comes the conspicuous witness of individual saints. Of one or two of these a word may be said. Most notable is one who served both Ireland and Gaul.

[Sidenote: S. Columban (540-615).]

The figure of the great Irish monk Columban is a light in the darkness of the gross and cruel Merwing age. Born about 540, he died in 615, after a life of achievement and hardness such as was given to few of his time. He died at Bobbio, crowned with the halo of heroism and sanctity; but he was born in distant Ireland, and the main work of his life had been to introduce into Gaul the monastic movement which was led in Italy by S. Benedict. During the intellectual and moral weakness which the barbarian invasions brought upon the West the Church in Ireland appeared to stand forth resplendent in the security of her faith and virtue and in the cultivation of learning. In the warm Celtic nature the Gospel, so late introduced, had found a natural home. The monasteries which rose all over the land, with the huts of hermits and the cells of anchorites, were the seed-plots of religion and sacred lore. The community life of Christian religious was naturally grafted on to the old Druid stock. The tribes of the Goidels became the monasteries; the head of the family was the abbat; the country looked everywhere to the monks for leadership. Thus Armagh and Emly, Clonard, Ennismore, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, {54} Bangor, arose to teach and govern the Church. Their monks lived by severe rule, based, no doubt, upon the customs of the East, of Egypt or Syria, most strict in the abasement of the selfish will, in penitence, in work, in prayer. "Good is the rule of Bangor," said the ancient sequence, "strait, austere, holy, and just." It was this rule, with the enthusiasm which marked all classes for religion and for knowledge, which inspired S. Columban in his great work. It was a work whose keynote was sacred study and which found its harmony in monastic service. S. Columban was the type, the representative _par excellence_, of the Irish monk, in his high idealism, his thirst for self-sacrifice, his adventurous and missionary spirit.

[Sidenote: His work in Gaul.]

He was trained at Bangor, but there he could not stay. He was fired with the determination to spread the Gospel over sea, among the Gauls who, under a veneer of Christianity, still often lived a pagan life. There heathen superstitions still flourished, in worship of the old gods, in veneration of trees and rocks and idols: the heathen morals were hardly disguised. The Frankish society over which the Merwings ruled, the Gaul of Sigebert and Chilperich and Chlothochar, was stained with blood and lust. Apart from it altogether, it would seem, and exercising hardly any influence, were a few holy bishops and very many isolated monasteries, the homes of prayer and renunciation and penitence. In the sixth century it is said that some two hundred monasteries were founded in Gaul; but their protest against the vice of their age was for the most part a silent one. Columban, when he landed, was to make a more effective protest against the luxury of the time, {55} the ineffective, unmeaning faith in the forgiveness of sins apart from renunciation of them, which marked the semi-Christian society into which he came.

[Sidenote: Luxeuil and its rule.]

Guntchramn, king of the Burgundians, gave him a settlement at Annegray, and afterwards at Luxeuil, where there grew up, on the site of an earlier Roman township, a monastery of stern and rigid rule. Eventually he added a third foundation at Fontaine; and he presided over three houses, governing according to a rule which he himself drew up, after the examples of Clonard and Bangor. Its characteristic was the completeness of the self-denial aimed at; its motto the thought, "Think not of what thou art, but of what thou shalt be"; its government an autocracy depending wholly on the abbat; its scholarship not only that of the Bible, but of the Latin classics--of Horace and of Vergil. Its work was twofold. In the first place, it exemplified a strict life of obedience, self-sacrifice, and prayer, the home of which was ever ready to minister to sick souls without; and, secondly, it supplied the religion of the age with a penitential system--in the penitential based upon Irish models--which was of great influence in the secular and ecclesiastical legislation of the future. Columban was not favourably received by all the episcopate of his new country. They were men of different ideals, unacquainted with the culture which meant so much to him; and their acceptance of the general Western custom of observing Easter caused a warm dispute with the Celtic monks. To Gregory the Great and to the Gaulish bishops Columban alike appealed on behalf of the custom he had received; but finally, after more than thirty {56} years' residence in Burgundy, he consented to observe the Celtic custom in silence, without endeavour to make converts to it. A more grave enemy at the beginning of the seventh century was the wicked young Burgundian king, Theodoric, at whose court was his grandmother, Brunichild. His stern denunciations of vice, his refusal to recognise the king's unlawful children, brought on Columban the fury of the oppressor, and he was ordered away from Luxeuil into a sort of semi-captivity at Besançon, and thence into exile. Long he wandered through Gaulish lands, to Nevers, down the Loire to Nantes, whence it was said that the ship refused to bear him back to Ireland. At last, after a meeting with Chlothochar, King of Neustria, whose rule over all the Franks he had prophesied, he found refuge at Bregenz, by the lake of Constance. With him were several of his monks, among them the S. Gall whose settlement in those lands has given the name to a canton of what is now Switzerland. The long journey of the exiled monks, with their strange tonsure, their holiness, their alms, their works of healing, was a veritable mission. [Sidenote: Bobbio.] The journey eventually ended in Italy; the internecine strifes of the Merwings which ceased for the time in the union of the whole land of the Franks under Chlothochar, left Columban without interest in Gaul, and the Lombard sovereigns gave him a home at Bobbio, in the Apennines, where his monastery, aided by the holiness of Queen Theodelind, was a mighty influence in the conversion of Lombardy from Arianism. There, in 615, he died, the prophet of his age, the stern preacher of righteousness, the wise student, the faithful herdsman of souls. {57} Columban is a great figure, of the chief facts of whose life there is no doubt. It is not so with many others.

[Sidenote: S. Wandrille.]

S. Patrick belongs, we do not doubt, to true history; but there is no doubt as to the richness of the legendary element in his life. Much the same is true of S. Wandrille. Few Englishmen, we suspect, have heard his name; but he was a great figure in an age which Mabillon called golden in its religious aspect, the strange, wild time of the Merwings, the seventh century after Christ. In 648 S. Wandrille founded the abbey of Fontenelle, in the district of Caux. He lived till a great age, his death being probably much later than 667, to which year it has been assigned. His career affords a very vivid picture of the monastic life of the time, standing out amid the darkness of crime. He rightly emphasises the holiness and wisdom and learning of the great bishops of the Merwing age. It was their work as leaders, missionaries, statesmen in the highest Christian sense which the monasteries were called upon to continue and perfect. The monasteries were the refuge and the rallying-ground of those who fought against the secularisation of the Church at the hands of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy. S. Wandrille, born of the great Karling house, was a leader among leaders, statesman among statesmen, monk among monks. He was one who passed from a great though barbaric court, where he had been a trusted official, into the strictness of monastic training, and then into the solitude of secluded communion with God. Such lives as his were the great attractive forces of the seventh century; such retreats as the valley of Fontenelle were the centres of Christian influence of the age.

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Between these men and Gregory of Tours it might seem that there was little in common. But there were others whose lives combined the interests of the two, the interests of monk and statesman and bishop.

[Sidenote: S. Didier.]

Another great clerk of the seventh century who must not be forgotten is S. Didier (Desiderius) of Cahors, at one time treasurer of Chlothochar II, and of Dagobert I., the friend of saints like Eloi (Eligius), Ouen, and Arnulf. Through him we learn something of the religious life of Southern Gaul. He died probably in 655, and thus he represented the earlier part of the seventh century. His biographer gives a long list of the holy bishops who were his contemporaries, and of the churches and monasteries which were scattered thickly over the land. The whole tone of his writing--earnest, biblical, spiritual, shows how the Church, in spite of weakness and sloth and failure in some of her chief men, yet held up a standard of right and justice, purity and devotion, which penetrated all over the country, into castles and humble homesteads, and profoundly affected the whole national life. And this work was concentrated in the public eye in those good men who at court, amid good and ill report, lived as servants of Him who went about doing good.

But while the Church was thus entering into all the national life, as a sharer in its interests of every kind, it was the monastic ideal, there can be little doubt, which ultimately exercised the greatest influence on the Franks. The saints who won reverence were for the most part monks. The work of Columban passed into the work of Benedict, and when Luxeuil accepted {59} the Benedictine rule, and when the Council of Autun in 670 declared it to be the rule for all monks everywhere, a great step was taken towards the intimate union of Gaul with the rest of Christendom in the things on which they had begun to set most store.

[1] Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, vol. i. p. 396.

[2] Greg. Tur., ii. 38 (Migne, _Patr. Lat._, p. 236).

[3] Bouquet, _Recueil_, tom. iv. p. 59, epist. 15: cf. Gasquet, _L'Empire byzantin et la Monarchie franque_, p. 165.

[4] Greg. Turon., _Hist. Franc._, x. 29 (Migne, p. 560): cf. also his _Vitae Patrum_, 17. Hontheim, _Historia diplomatica_, i. 47.

[5] Cf. Greg. Turon., v. 3, on the frightful cruelty of Rauching.

[6] Vol. v. p. 262.

[7] S. Greg., _Epp._ v. 58.

[8] F. H. Dudden, _Gregory the Great_, ii. 69.

[9] Cf. E. Lavisse, _Hist. de France_, tome ii. p. 219,

[10] M. Roger, _L'Enseignement des lettres classiques d'Ausone à Alcuin_, p. 100.

[11] W. P. Ker, _The Dark Ages_, p. 125.

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