St. Augustine of Canterbury

Long before he was a pope, Gregory was said to have been walking through the market of Rome when he passed a knot of slaves set out for sale — boys with fair skin and bright hair, unlike anyone in the crowd. He stopped and asked where they were from. From the island of Britain, he was told, where all the people looked so. And were they Christians or pagans? Pagans, came the answer. Gregory sighed over their beautiful faces and asked the name of their nation. Angli — Angles. Non Angli, sed angeli, he is supposed to have said — not Angles, but angels, were they only Christian. He asked the name of their province, and of their king, and turned each answer into a kind of pun and a kind of vow. The story is one Bede himself passed on as something the English loved to tell, and tradition holds that Gregory tried to go to Britain as a missionary then and there, and was only stopped by the people of Rome, who would not let him leave. What he could not do himself he would, as pope, lay on the shoulders of a monk named Augustine.

The mission very nearly ended in Gaul. The monks had set out obediently enough, but the journey worked on them — every mile of it brought the barbarous island nearer, and they had no language to meet it with and no idea whether they would be welcomed or killed. They halted and would go no further. By common agreement they sent Augustine, whom Gregory had marked to be their bishop if the English received them, back over the road they had come to lay their fear before the Pope and ask to be let off. Gregory heard him out and sent him back with a letter meant for them all. Since it is better not to begin a good work than, having begun, to turn from it, he wrote, finish with all your hearts the work you have begun. Do not let the hardship of the journey or the slander of men's tongues hold you back; carry it through with steadfastness and zeal, and know that the greater the labour, the greater the glory that follows. He commended them to a fellow servant who would go with them, and signed himself the servant of the servants of God. The monks read it, and went on.

Æthelberht of Kent was the most powerful king in the south, his rule reaching as far as the Humber, and he did not become so by trusting strangers. When the monks asked to meet him he made them wait on Thanet while he decided what they were. He had heard of the Christian faith before — it lived in his own house, in his Frankish queen — but heard of a thing is not the same as bound by it. When he came at last to hear them he sat down deliberately in the open air, under no roof, guarding himself against any spell the newcomers might cast in an enclosed place. They approached in procession, a silver cross lifted before them and a board painted with the likeness of Christ, chanting a litany for the king and the land. Augustine preached the gospel to him there in the field. Æthelberht's answer was the answer of a careful man: the promises were fair but new and unproven, and he would not abandon the religion of his whole people on the strength of them — yet he would do the strangers no harm, would feed and house them, and would forbid no one to follow them who wished. It was all the opening they needed.

There was already a Christian in the king's bed and a chapel within sight of his hall. Years before, Æthelberht had married Bertha, daughter of a Frankish king, on the condition — fixed before the wedding — that she be free to keep her faith. She came to Kent with a bishop named Liudhard as her chaplain, and the two of them worshipped in a small church on the east side of Canterbury that had stood since Roman times, dedicated to St. Martin. It was the oldest church in England still in use, a survival from the lost Christian Britain the pagans had overrun. Into its shelter Augustine and his monks now moved, and there they kept the round of prayer and the celebration of the Mass while they preached through the city. The queen's quiet, decades-long fidelity in that little building had kept a flame alight in a pagan court; the monks found it burning when they arrived, and fed it until it spread.

The conversion of the king broke the dam. In that world a people followed their lord, and once Æthelberht came down into the faith his subjects came after him in crowds. Augustine did not force them; the king did not command them; but the preaching and the plain life of the monks and the example of the court drew them in numbers no one had dared hope for. By the next Christmas the harvest was so great that word of it ran all the way to Rome and beyond — Gregory wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria, at the far end of the Mediterranean, that on the feast of the Lord's Nativity more than ten thousand of the English had been baptized. Ten thousand in the cold rivers of Kent, a single winter's day, where a year before there had been none.

Augustine sent his report back to Rome and with it a sheaf of questions — how should the new church handle its offerings, how should bishops be made, who might marry whom, what was he to do about the differing customs of the churches of Gaul. Gregory answered them one by one, in a long reply Bede copied out whole. Then, in 601, he sent reinforcements: a second wave of monks led by Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, and Rufinianus, and with them everything a young church needed and could not yet make — sacred vessels, altar cloths, vestments, relics of the apostles and the martyrs, and a freight of books. Most of all he sent the pallium, the woollen band worn over the shoulders that marked an archbishop and bound its wearer to Rome. With it came a plan, ambitious past anything the facts on the ground could bear: twelve bishops under Augustine, a second archbishop at York with twelve more, the see one day moved to London. Little of the grand scheme came to pass. But the pallium made Augustine the first archbishop of the English, and the office he received has never since been empty.

Gregory had thought hard about how to win a pagan people, and as the mission deepened he sent Augustine a piece of advice that ran against the instinct to smash everything heathen flat. Do not destroy the temples of the idols, he wrote; destroy only the idols. Wash the buildings with holy water, set up altars, place relics in them — for if the shrines are well built, it is a labour worth keeping to turn them from the worship of demons to the service of the true God, so that the people, seeing their familiar places spared, may the more readily gather at them to know him. Let them keep their festivals, too, in changed form: where they used to slaughter cattle in sacrifice to devils, let them still kill and feast, but on the dedication days of the churches and the feasts of the martyrs, giving thanks to God for their fullness. The man who would climb to a high place, Gregory wrote, rises by steps and not by leaps. It was a strategy of mercy and patience, and it shaped how the faith took root in England.

To the west, beyond the Saxon kingdoms, the old British Christians had held the faith all through the pagan centuries — but in isolation, with their own dating of Easter, their own form of the tonsure, their own ways, and a deep distrust of the Roman who had arrived in the train of the Saxon kings who were their enemies. Gregory had placed them under Augustine's care, and Augustine went to meet their bishops under a great oak on the border country to ask them to fall into step with Rome and to join him in preaching to the English. Bede says he offered a sign to break the deadlock, and a blind Englishman was brought forward whom the British clergy could not heal and Augustine did. Still they would not decide without consulting their people. Before the second meeting they asked counsel of a holy hermit, who told them: if this Augustine is a man of God, follow him; and you will know it by whether he rises to greet you, for the meek bear the yoke of Christ. They came; Augustine, weary or unbending, kept his seat. They took it for pride and refused him everything — his Easter, his authority, his mission. He warned them, it is said, that since they would not preach the way of life to the English, they would one day suffer death at English hands. The rift did not close for centuries.

In the years he had left, Augustine built. He set up his cathedral in Canterbury, the mother church of England, and just outside the city walls he laid the foundations of a monastery dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, meant to be the burial place of the archbishops and the kings of Kent — the house that would later bear his own name. He sent his fellow monks out as bishops: Mellitus to London, where the East Saxons had begun to turn, and Justus to Rochester. And knowing the whole fragile work hung on his own life, he did the last necessary thing and consecrated Laurence to follow him, so that the church would not be left shepherdless at his death. Then, on the twenty-sixth of May in the year 604, the work still half-done, he died. The abbey church he had begun was not yet roofed over, so they buried him just outside it, in the open porch, until it should be finished and could take him in. The pilgrim who had once turned back on the road to Britain lay now at the end of it, in the ground of the island he had crossed the world, twice over, to reach.