St. Augustine of Canterbury

They had come a long way north when the fear caught them. Somewhere in the green valleys of Gaul the monks stopped on the road and would not go on. Ahead lay the sea, and beyond the sea an island at the cold rim of the world, full of a people they had been told were fierce and faithless and whose language not one of them could speak. They had left a warm monastery on a Roman hill for this, and the closer it came the less they could bear it. They turned to the man Gregory had set over them and asked him to go back and beg the Pope to let them all come home.

So Augustine went back. He was the prior of Gregory's own monastery of St. Andrew in Rome, a tall, grave man more at home with the order of the cloister than the open road, and he carried his brothers' terror to the one man who could release them. Gregory would not release them. He sent Augustine north again with a short letter that has outlived everyone who first read it: better never to begin a good work than, having begun, to look back from it. Take heart. Finish what you started. The toil of the road and the tongues of men are nothing beside the reward. Augustine turned around once more, the letter in his hands, and the forty frightened men went down to the sea.

In the spring of 597 they landed on the Isle of Thanet, off the coast of Kent. The king of that country was Æthelberht, a pagan, but not an ignorant one — his wife Bertha was a Christian princess of the Franks, who kept her faith in an old Roman church in Canterbury with a bishop of her own. The king was wary. He sent word that the strangers should wait on their island, and when at last he came to hear them he sat down to do it in the open field, under the sky, taking care not to meet them indoors — for if these were sorcerers, the old belief held, a roof would give them power over him. He need not have worried about magic. Up the field came the monks in procession, one of them holding a tall silver cross and another a wooden board painted with the face of Christ, and all of them singing, their voices carrying across the grass as they asked God's mercy on the place.

Augustine sat down before the king and preached. Æthelberht listened to the end and answered him plainly: the words were fair, but they were new, and he could not throw over the faith of his whole people for the sake of something strange. Yet he would not harm them. They had come a long way meaning to share what they believed was good, and so he would feed them, house them, and let them preach to whoever would listen. He gave them lodging in Canterbury, his chief city, and into Canterbury they went the same way they had come up the field — behind the cross and the painted board, singing.

What they could not win by argument they won by living. The monks settled near the queen's little church, prayed through the hours, fasted, preached, took only what they needed, and asked nothing. People watched them, and people came. Before the year was out the king himself was baptized, and the gates opened. Word travelled back across the Channel and down to Rome that on a single Christmas Day more than ten thousand of the English had been baptized. Augustine crossed the sea to Gaul to be made a bishop, and came back a shepherd with a flock that had not existed when he arrived.

Rome answered the news with a fleet of help. In 601 Gregory sent more monks — Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, Rufinianus — and with them a baggage train of holy things: vessels of silver, vestments, relics of the apostles and martyrs, and books, many books, the seed of England's libraries. He sent, too, the pallium, a band of white wool that made Augustine an archbishop and tied the raw young church of the English to the see of Peter. And he sent counsel, shrewd and gentle: do not tear down the people's temples, only the idols inside them; sprinkle the old shrines with holy water, set altars in them, and let the people keep coming to the places they have always loved, only now to the true God. Lead them up by steps, Gregory wrote, not by leaps.

Not everything yielded. West of the Saxon kingdoms lived the older British Christians, who had kept the faith through all the pagan years but kept it their own way, with their own reckoning of Easter and their own customs, and no love for the Roman newcomer the Saxon kings had brought in. Augustine met their bishops under a great oak to ask two things — that they fall into step with Rome, and that they help him preach to the English who were strangling them. The talks failed. At a second meeting the British bishops, forewarned, resolved to judge him by whether he rose to greet them; Augustine kept his seat, and they walked away unreconciled. The breach he could not close outlived him by centuries.

He had only a few years left. He raised a cathedral church in Canterbury and began a monastery of Saints Peter and Paul outside the city walls, planted bishops at London and at Rochester, and before he died took care to consecrate a successor, Laurence, so the work would not falter when he was gone. He died on a day in late May, in the year 604, the abbey he had begun still unfinished around his grave. They laid him in the porch of its half-built church, on the island's edge where the road from Rome ran out — the frightened pilgrim who had turned back once on that road, and then had not.