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On the Ruin of Britain
St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899
GILDAS.—Cursed is he that moves boundaries, certainly those of his neighbour. Let each …
GILDAS.—Cursed is he that moves boundaries, certainly those of his neighbour. Let each1 abide wherein he was called with God, so that neither be the chief changed, except by the will of those subject to him, nor the one that is subject obtain the place of a superior, except with the advice of an older. What things are honourable with us, we surround these with fuller honour. It is therefore salutary for bishops and abbots to judge those subject to them, whose blood, if they rule them not well, the Lord will ask at their hands: let those that are disobedient to fathers be as the gentiles and the publicans; and to all men, both good and bad, besides those subject to them, that word of the apostle applies, counting all men, etc. That judgment about the uncertain issue of life has come to pass when we read in scripture of an apostle lost by covetousness, and a thief, by confession, carried to heaven.
Notes
- Hibernensis, xxxviii, 31, from Unusquisque to obtineat, with the heading: “Respecting remaining in every vocation.” Episcopis abbatibusque: the bishop and the abbot seem to be placed on a par in this extract, and therefore one might be led to infer that we have here an indication of a tendency in the direction of that cloistral pre-eminence which is regarded as so marked a feature of Celtic ecclesiastical life. How indefinite the idea regulating the relation of monasteries to the more ancient episcopal organisation of the Church were in the West, even after the middle of the fifth century, is shown by the long dispute between Faustus,’abbot of Lerins, and Theodore, bishop of Frejus. The monastery, as such, was the home of a community of laymen; the abbot at its head might be a layman; any cleric who entered it was a layman in relation to his abbot, and to the other members of the fraternity. But the cleric was also bound by the usages of the episcopal organisation, which had had its own growth in the Church previous to the rise of monasticism. A presbyter owed obedience to his bishop; a bishop had a high and definite authority in the Church as to worship, and discipline—perhaps all the higher, where, as in Gaul, the metropolitan system was but imperfectly developed, or in Britain, where it had never existed. How, then, were these older powers and relations to be kept intact, face to face with the absolute authority of an abbot? In Gaul the position of the bishop became secure in general acceptance, as superior to the abbot and his monastery with certain fixed limitations, but in Britain and Ireland the position of the abbot seems to have acquired an increasingly more independent character.* The obedience due to him is regarded by Gildas here as parallel to that of the clergy to their bishop.
* For Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries we may refer to the canons of the third Council of Arles, A.D. 455; Thomassinus, Vetus et Nova Disciplina, I, Lib. iii, c. 26. Hefele, Conciliengesch., ii, 583. The sense of an earlier time is, in a very interesting way, as usual, shown by Jerome in his Ep. 14, 8, ad Heliod., e.g., Sed alia, ut ante perstrinxi, monachorum est causa, alia clericorum. Monachus si ceciderit, rogabit pro eo sacerdos; pro sacerdotis lapsu quis rogaturus esset? also Ep. 52, ad Nepotianum.