Justified True Belief

(●) The English schoolmaster who spent thirty-five years planting the church in Germany, and organized it so well that Charlemagne inherited it. + He was born Wynfrith, somewhere in the west of England, and he could have lived a quiet and distinguished life. By his early forties he was a respected Latin master in his corner of Wessex, with a grammar of his own making and a monastery that wanted him for its abbot. He gave it up, crossed the North Sea, and spent the rest of his life among people who had never heard of him. What makes him matter to a Christian reader is not the travelling. Missionaries came before him and came after him. Boniface is the one who stayed long enough to build. He cut down a sacred oak in Hesse and used the wood for a chapel; then he founded monasteries, drew the boundaries of dioceses (a diocese is the district one bishop is answerable for, much as a county has one sheriff), called councils that put a stop to bishops who hunted and fought and never preached, and tied the whole arrangement to Rome by a written oath he had sworn on Saint Peter’s tomb. The church the Carolingian kings reformed a generation later was largely the church he had drawn up. One detail a reader tends to keep. In his sixties, half blind, he wrote home to a bishop in Winchester asking for a particular book of the prophets, because he remembered that its letters were written large and well spaced, and he could no longer make out small ones.

(●) c. 675 AD: Born in Wessex and named Wynfrith, he told his father as a small boy that he wanted the monastery. + His biographer Willibald, a priest of Mainz writing within about fifteen years of his death, says the boy was four or five when travelling preachers came to his father’s house and he began questioning them about heavenly things. When he finally said out loud what he wanted, his father "rebuked him most vehemently," first with threats and then with coaxing, and held out the family land as the sensible alternative. It is the oldest argument in the world between a father and a son, and the father lost it. The year is a reckoning, not a record. Willibald gives no birth date, and scholars put it anywhere between about 672 and 680; "c. 675" is the convention, and nothing on the family is known beyond what Willibald says. The tradition that he was born at Crediton in Devon is worth even less as evidence: it cannot be traced back further than a bishop of Exeter writing in the fourteenth century, six hundred years after the fact. The father gave in during a serious illness, and the boy went to the monastery at Exeter under an abbot named Wulfhard, then on to Nursling in Hampshire under an abbot named Winbert. Willibald gives no age for the day he left home, only that he was still a child, and he never lived outside a monastery again.

(●) c. 705 AD: Ordained at about thirty, he taught Latin at Nursling and wrote textbooks his pupils could use. + Nursling was a small house near Southampton, and Wynfrith ran its school. Teaching Latin to boys who spoke Old English at home meant teaching a foreign language from scratch, and the tools for it barely existed, so he made his own: a grammar (the Ars grammatica), a short treatise on where the pauses fall in a line of Latin verse, and twenty riddle-poems, ten on the virtues and ten on the vices, each with its answer spelled down the first letters of the lines like a crossword clue that gives itself away. That is a very English kind of scholarship, and it was the family trade. Aldhelm had written riddles like these a generation earlier; Bede was writing at Jarrow while Wynfrith taught at Nursling. England in 705 was one of the newest Christian countries in Europe and, improbably, one of the most learned, which is the fact behind everything he did afterwards. He was also becoming known outside the monastery walls. When a quarrel broke out that the West Saxon church could not settle on its own, its leading men called a council on King Ine’s advice and picked Wynfrith to carry the business to Berhtwald, archbishop of Canterbury, and to bring the answer home. Willibald gives no year for it; the usual reckoning is c. 712, which would make him a man of about thirty-seven whom his own church trusted to speak for it. When Winbert died, the brothers wanted him for their abbot. He turned it down.

(●) 716 AD: His first mission to Frisia collapsed inside a season, and he came home. + Frisia is the marshy coastal country of what is now the northern Netherlands, and English monks had been working there for a generation. Wynfrith crossed with a few companions in the spring of 716 and arrived in the middle of a war. The Frankish ruler Pippin had died at the end of 714, his widow and his son Charles were fighting over what he left, and the Frisian king Radbod took the moment to drive the Frankish garrisons out and the Frankish missionaries with them. Churches came down. Nobody would listen. He went back to Nursling before winter. Picture that for a moment, because the rest of his life reads like an unbroken march and this one season shows that it was not: a man past forty, who had turned down an abbey to go and do this, back in the same small school he had left, with nothing to show for the summer. He did not treat it as an answer. He treated it as a lesson about protection. Preaching in a country at war with the Franks had failed; from then on he went nowhere without a written commission from Rome behind him and a Frankish prince’s safe-conduct in his baggage.

(●) 719 AD: Pope Gregory II sent him into Germany with a commission, and from about then Wynfrith was answering to the Roman name Boniface. + He walked to Rome in the autumn of 718 and stayed the winter. On 15 May 719 Gregory II gave him a commission to preach to the pagan peoples east of the Rhine, and the name Boniface, "doer of good," goes back to about this time. Willibald puts the renaming three years later, at the ceremony that made him a bishop, but letters from 719 onward already call him Boniface, so his biographer has almost certainly attached the right event to the wrong visit to Rome. Wynfrith the Wessex schoolmaster went in at the door; Boniface came out of it. The commission mattered more than the name. It made him the pope’s man rather than a freelance holy man, and in a country where Irish, Frankish and English preachers were already working past each other with rival customs and no agreed boundaries, that single piece of parchment settled who he was. He spent the next three years in Thuringia and then in Frisia, where Radbod had died and the old missionary Willibrord was at work again out of Utrecht. Willibrord, then in his sixties, tried to make Boniface his coadjutor and successor: a coadjutor is the assistant bishop who is appointed to step straight into the older man’s place when he dies, so the offer was the settled rest of a life. Boniface refused, on the ground that the commission in his bag was for the German interior and not for a bishop’s chair on the coast, and went inland.

(●) 723 AD: Now a bishop, he cut down the oak of Thor at Geismar while a crowd waited for the god to stop him. + Rome had called him back in 722. On 30 November, the feast of Saint Andrew, Gregory II consecrated him a bishop with no city and no diocese, a roving bishop for the German mission, and had him swear an oath at Saint Peter’s tomb: to hold the Catholic faith, to enter no agreement against the unity of the church, and to report to the pope any bishop he found living against the ancient rules. He went north with a letter from Gregory to Charles Martel, the Frankish strongman, and Charles issued him a written protection. Then came Geismar, in Hesse. Willibald says that some of the local converts were still sacrificing at trees and springs, openly or in secret, and that the others advised the felling. The tree the Latin calls the Oak of Jupiter, Thor’s oak in the language the Hessians actually spoke, was very large, and cutting it with an axe took long enough for "a great multitude of pagans" to gather from the farms around and watch. They were, Willibald says, cursing him in their hearts and waiting. Nobody who has watched a tree come down will miss the detail he records next: Boniface had barely notched the trunk when the oak went over on its own, "driven by a divine blast from above," and burst into four trunks of equal length as it hit. He had the timber made into a wooden chapel on the spot and dedicated it to Saint Peter. What the crowd had come to see was whether the god would defend his own tree. The god did not.

(●) 732 – 748 AD: Made an archbishop, he spent sixteen years turning a mission into a church with borders, rules and monasteries. + In 732 Gregory III sent him the pallium, the woollen band an archbishop wears across the shoulders, with authority to consecrate bishops of his own. It changed the work completely. A preacher makes converts; an archbishop makes a structure that outlives him, and from here on Boniface is mostly an administrator, which is the least glamorous and most durable thing he ever was. The work itself is dry, and the dryness is the whole achievement. After a third visit to Rome in 738 he reorganized the Bavarian church into four dioceses in 739, ordaining bishops for Salzburg, Freising and Regensburg, and leaving Vivilo, who already held Passau, where he was. Gregory III confirmed the whole arrangement by letter on 29 October that year. Then he set up bishoprics in the country he had evangelized himself: Würzburg, Büraburg and Erfurt in 741, and Eichstätt a little later. He planted monasteries as bases, staffed largely by English monks and nuns who crossed over at his asking, among them his kinswoman Lioba, who ran the house at Tauberbischofsheim. The greatest of them was Fulda, settled in 744 by his disciple Sturm in a forest clearing on land granted by Charles Martel’s son Carloman, and made answerable directly to Rome. Then the councils. Carloman convoked the first of them on 21 April, in 742 or 743, and the reason for the two years is that the acts carry a date historians read two ways, with capable scholars still lined up on both sides. Boniface presided. This is the assembly usually called the Concilium Germanicum, and the rules it passed, its canons, read like a description of what was wrong: priests were forbidden to hunt, to carry arms, to keep women in the house; bishops were to be examined and to visit their dioceses; the pagan rites still practised by baptized Franks were listed and banned. More synods, which is to say more councils of churchmen sitting together to settle such things, followed almost yearly. By about 746, after the Frankish bishops blocked a plan to seat him at Cologne and the bishop of Mainz was deposed for killing a man in a blood feud, he was settled at Mainz as its bishop and the senior churchman in Francia. The title he is usually given from that point, archbishop of Mainz, needs one caution. Mainz itself was not made an archbishopric until his successor was given a pallium a generation later, so "archbishop of Mainz" is a title the calendars handed him afterwards. The pallium he wore was granted to him personally in 732, and it went with the man rather than with the city. Two things are often said about these years, and neither one holds. Willibald says only that Pippin received the kingship of the Franks in 751, and names nobody as having anointed him; the naming of Boniface as the man who poured the oil comes from Frankish annals compiled two generations later, and historians now generally discredit it. And it is easy to say that he single-handedly christianized Germany, which he would have denied: he was working in country where Irish and Frankish clergy had laboured for a century, and much of his effort went into ordering what they had begun.

(●) 5 June 754 AD: At Dokkum he ordered his men to put down their weapons, and died with about fifty of them. + He was near eighty and he went back to Frisia, the country where he had failed at forty. He handed Mainz over to his English pupil Lull, took a party of clergy and servants north, baptized through the spring, and camped by the river Boorne to wait for the newly baptized to gather on an appointed day for confirmation, the laying on of a bishop’s hands on people already baptized. It was to be an ordinary morning of a bishop’s work, the kind he had given his life to. What arrived instead was an armed band. Willibald says the servants seized their weapons and Boniface came out of the tent carrying his relics, the bones and keepsakes of the saints that a churchman of his century took on the road the way a soldier carries a photograph from home, and he stopped them: "Stop fighting, lads! Give up the battle! For we are taught by the trusty witness of Scripture, that we render not evil for evil, but contrariwise good for evil." Then he turned to the clergy and told them not to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, and they were cut down where they stood. Willibald counts fifty companions with him, priests, deacons and monks, and names none of them; the number later tradition settled on is fifty-two. The attackers broke open the chests expecting gold, found books and relics, quarrelled over the wine instead, and left the library in the mud. A ninth-century account from Utrecht says he held a book up over his head as the blow fell, and Fulda still keeps a manuscript, the Ragyndrudis Codex, with cuts in it that look like they were made by a blade. Willibald, the earliest witness, has him holding relics and not defending himself at all, so the book is a later tradition rather than a report. His body went first to Utrecht, then to Mainz, and finally, at his own wish, to Fulda, where it still lies.

What He Taught

(T1) Where people cannot read, the gospel has to be made visible before it can be heard. + A man explaining a boundary dispute to a neighbour who has never set foot in a courtroom does not start with the statute. He walks him down to the fence, puts a hand on the post, and shows him where the old line ran. Once the neighbour can see the thing, the law about it can be talked through. Boniface was preaching to farmers who could not read in any language, whose religion lived in visible places (a spring, a grove, a particular tree) and whose test of a god was whether he could act. So he worked in things a crowd could see. The oak at Geismar is the famous case, and it was an argument, not vandalism: the question the Hessians were standing there to have answered was whether Thor would defend his own oak, and the answer came down in four pieces. He built the chapel out of the same wood so that the point could not be forgotten. He wanted the book to be visible too. Writing to Eadburga, an English abbess on the isle of Thanet who ran a scriptorium (a room where nuns or monks copied books out by hand, a page at a time, with ink they had mixed themselves), he asked her for a copy of the letters of Saint Peter written in gold ink, and he said exactly why: so that the Scriptures would be honoured when he held them up in front of pagans. A book in gold, in a country where books were rare and gold meant a king, said something before a word of it was read. He did not think this replaced argument, and he asked for help with the argument as well. Bishop Daniel of Winchester wrote him a remarkable letter of advice, probably in the 720s, telling him never to attack the pagan gods head on but to ask questions and let the answers do the work. The pagans he was preaching to said their gods had been born, as men are born, of other gods. Very well, Daniel says: then the gods had a beginning, and if they had a beginning then something was there before them, so who made the world they were born into? And ask it all, Daniel added, "in no irritating or offensive manner, but with the greatest calmness and moderation." The felled oak and the courteous question were two halves of one method.

(Q) "So now I beg thee to carry still further what thou hast begun, and to copy in gold the Epistles of my lord, Saint Peter, that the Holy Scriptures may be honoured and reverenced when the preacher holds them before the eyes of the heathen." + Source: Boniface, letter to Abbess Eadburga of Thanet, c. 735 (Kylie translation, letter XIV). Eadburga had already been sending him books and vestments for years. In the same letter he adds that he longs above all to have with him the words of the man who first led him into this work, which is why the request is for Peter’s letters and not another book of the Bible.

(T2) The pagan Saxons are our own kin, and the English owe them what the English were given. + Around 738 Boniface wrote an open letter to everybody in England: bishops, priests, monks, nuns, "and in general to all God-fearing Catholics, sprung from the English race." He wanted prayer for the conversion of the continental Saxons, and the reason he gave was blood. The English were Saxons themselves, two or three centuries removed. Their great-grandparents had crossed from exactly that coast, and they still spoke a language close enough that an Englishman and a Saxon could make each other out. Boniface quotes the Saxons’ own saying back to his countrymen: we are of one blood and one bone. And the unspoken half of the argument is the part that lands. Within living memory England had been pagan too. Gregory the Great had sent Augustine to Kent in 597, and everything Boniface was, his Latin, his grammar school, his orders, existed because someone in Rome had taken the trouble. A debt like that is not discharged by being grateful. It is a plain missionary appeal rather than a piece of theology, but it rests on something the New Testament says outright: God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). If the human race is one family, then a people across the water are not strangers whose religion is their own business. They are relatives who have not been told. The appeal worked. English men and women crossed the Channel to work under him for the next twenty years, and his correspondence is full of them: Lull, who succeeded him at Mainz; Sturm at Fulda; Lioba, Tecla and Cynehilda running houses of nuns in Germany. He also mentions, almost in passing, that he has the approval of two popes for the request, which is the administrator showing through the preacher.

(Q) "Have pity on them, because even they themselves are wont to say ‘We are of one blood and one bone.’" + Source: Boniface, letter to the whole English people, c. 738 (Kylie translation, letter XLV). He signs this one "Boniface, or Wynfrith, an offshoot of the same stock," putting his English name beside his Roman one so that the claim of kinship is made twice, once in the argument and once in the signature.

(T3) A man who has taken the helm of the church may not let go of it because the sea is rough. + In 747 Boniface wrote to Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury, and the letter is the most personal thing that survives from him. He is past seventy, he is running the reform of the Frankish church, and he tells Cuthbert plainly that he is frightened: "fearfulness and trembling are come upon me," and he would gladly have given up the helm of the church long ago if he could have found a single example in Scripture or the Fathers that allowed it. He could not, so he reasoned it out with a picture any of his readers would have felt in the stomach. A steersman who handles a ship badly in heavy sea is in danger. A steersman who lets go of the tiller in heavy sea has done something worse. The church is that ship, and the men he names as having held the tiller before him are the ones who did it under persecution: Clement and Cornelius at Rome, Cyprian at Carthage, Athanasius at Alexandria. The storm he actually had in mind was not persecution. It was a Frankish church in which bishoprics had been handed out as rewards to soldiers, where clergy hunted and carried weapons and kept concubines, and where nobody had held a council in living memory. Fixing that meant naming names in front of princes whose armies he depended on for his own safety, and his letters make no secret of how uncomfortable the arrangement was. He steered anyway, and the councils of the 740s are the result.

(Q) "Therefore, the Church, which like a great ship, sails over the sea of the world, and is buffeted by the many waves of temptation in this life, must not be abandoned, but steered." + Source: Boniface, letter to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury, 747 (Kylie translation, letter XLII). He introduces the image by saying that a metropolitan, a bishop with responsibility for a whole province, carries greater danger than other priests, because he can neither steer the ship carefully enough nor let it go without sin.

(T4) Even pagans know that a man should keep faith with his wife, and a king who does not know it has fallen below them. + Æthelbald ruled Mercia, the strongest kingdom in England, for forty-one years. In about 746 Boniface and seven other bishops working in Germany sent him a letter, and it is a model of how to tell a powerful man something he does not want to hear. They begin with what is true and good: he gives generous alms, he punishes theft and perjury, he protects widows and the poor, his kingdom is at peace. Then the turn. They have heard he has never married and does not live chastely either, and that the women involved include nuns. Boniface does not soften it. He says the rumour has reached Germany, that the bishops were "cast down by it," and that they wish it were not true. The argument he then makes is worth noticing on its own terms. He does not only quote Scripture at a Christian king, though he does that at length. He appeals to what the pagans of ancient Saxony do: they keep the marriage bond and they punish adulterers, and they have no Bible at all. Paul makes the same move in Romans, where Gentiles who do not have the law "by nature do what the law requires" and so "show that the work of the law is written on their hearts" (Romans 2:14–15). Theologians call this general revelation, the knowledge of right and wrong available to anybody through conscience and the created order rather than through Scripture. Boniface is using it as a rebuke: a baptized king is being outvoted by heathens on a point they worked out without help. Æthelbald was murdered by his own bodyguard in 757. Whether the letter changed anything in the meantime is not recorded, though a Mercian council of 749 did free the churches from certain royal burdens, and some have read that as a response.

(Q) "Not only by Christians but even by pagans is this sin reckoned a disgrace and a shame. The very pagans who are ignorant of the true God, in this matter observe by instinct what is lawful and what God ordained from the beginning, because, while they preserve faithfully the tie of matrimony for their own wives, they punish fornicators and adulterers." + Source: Boniface and seven fellow bishops, letter to King Æthelbald of Mercia, c. 746 (Kylie translation, letter XL). He goes on to describe the penalties the heathen Saxons and the Wends (the Slavic peoples living east of the Elbe, on the far frontier of the Frankish world) imposed on adulterers, which are savage, and he does not commend them. The comparison is about the standard, not the punishment.

(Q) "Let us not be dumb dogs nor silent watchmen, nor hirelings who flee before the wolf, but zealous shepherds, watching over the flock of Christ, preaching the whole counsel of Christ, to high and low, to rich and poor, and to all ranks or ages, so far as God gives us strength, in season, out of season." + Source: Boniface, letter to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury, 747 (Kylie translation, letter XLII). Two prophets and an apostle stand behind the sentence. Isaiah had said of the leaders of Israel, "His watchmen are blind; they are all without knowledge; they are all silent dogs; they cannot bark" (Isaiah 56:10), and Paul had told Timothy to "preach the word; be ready in season and out of season" (2 Timothy 4:2). Boniface adds that this is how Gregory the Great described the job in his Pastoral Care, the handbook every bishop of the period was expected to know. Seven years later he put down his own last argument by telling armed men not to fight back.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church he drew up was the church the Carolingians reformed and Charlemagne carried east. + Boniface died fourteen years before Charlemagne became king, and the two never met, but the younger man spent his reign working with what the older one had left: dioceses with fixed boundaries, bishops examined before appointment, synods meeting regularly, monasteries under a written rule, and the whole structure in formal communion with Rome. Before the 740s the Frankish church had none of that reliably. After them it was normal. The people carried it on. Lull held Mainz for thirty-two years after him, and it was Lull who at last received the pallium that raised the see, meaning the bishop’s own city and the district governed from it, to an archbishopric. Sturm built Fulda into one of the great libraries and schools of Europe, where the scholar Hrabanus Maurus later taught. Chrodegang of Metz, who had a voice in all the reforming councils of those years, wrote the rule for cathedral clergy that spread across the Frankish lands and took over the leadership of the reform when Boniface went back to Frisia. And Alcuin of York, the Englishman Charlemagne recruited to run his palace school a generation later, worked in the same grain: Latin learning, corrected books, an educated clergy. It is worth being exact about the debt, because it is often overstated. Boniface did not convert Germany by himself and did not claim to. What he did was decide that scattered mission stations were not a church, and then spend more than twenty years doing the unexciting work of making one.

(†) England took him back as a patron saint within a year of his death, and Fulda kept his books. + The news reached Canterbury in 755, and Archbishop Cuthbert wrote to Lull to say what the English church had decided to do about it. A general synod had fixed the day of the martyrdom as an annual feast, and, Cuthbert wrote, "we seek him especially as our patron along with blessed Gregory and Augustine." That is remarkable company. Gregory the Great had sent the mission that made England Christian and Augustine of Canterbury had led it, so the English were placing the man who took the gospel out of England beside the men who had brought it in. Milret of Worcester wrote to Lull in the same months calling him the glory and support of everyone born in that land. Fulda did the rest. Lull and Bishop Megingoz commissioned Willibald of Mainz to write the life, which is why a detailed account exists at all, and the abbey kept the tomb, the letters, and the damaged books recovered from the camp at Dokkum. Because Fulda kept the correspondence rather than only the legend, Boniface is one of the very few people of the eighth century whose own voice can still be heard at length, complaining about his eyes, asking for a cloak, worrying about whether he is compromised by the company he keeps. And the man who comes through the letters is not the hero of the legend. He is a working churchman who went where he was sent, stayed, and organized, and who kept asking his friends at home to pray for him while he did it.

(†) Twice his rigor outran his judgment, and both times Rome had to rein him in. + The same instinct that made him a good organizer, an intolerance of loose ends, went wrong at least twice, and both times the record is his own correspondence rather than a critic’s. - The botched baptisms. In Bavaria he found a priest whose Latin was so poor that he had been baptizing "in nomine patria et filia et spiritus sancti," which does not mean "in the name of the Father and of the Son" but something closer to "in the name of the fatherland and the daughter." Boniface judged the baptisms invalid and had people rebaptized. Two clergy in Bavaria, Sidonius and Virgil, went over his head to Rome, and Pope Zacharias overruled him on 1 July 746: where the man was introducing no error and no heresy but simply mangling a language he did not know, the baptism stood and must not be repeated. The pope was right, and the principle is one the church had settled long before: a sacrament, one of the acts Christ commanded his people to keep (baptism, the Lord’s Supper), does not depend on the competence of the man performing it. Boniface had been so anxious to have things done properly that he had made the rite depend on grammar. - The complaint against Virgil. Two years later he reported the same Virgil, an Irish scholar working in Salzburg, to Rome for teaching that there is another world and other people under the earth. Zacharias answered on 1 May 748, telling him to hold a council and depose the man if the charge was proved. It was not, and Virgil went on to become bishop of Salzburg and, in time, a canonized saint. The worry underneath the complaint was a real one. If there were people living on the underside of the world, Boniface seems to have assumed, they could not be descended from Adam, and a race outside Adam would be a race outside the redemption Christ won for Adam’s children. That is a question worth asking. It is not a question worth deposing a man over, and what he was moving against was a colleague’s speculation about geography. Neither episode is a scandal and neither was hidden. They are the recognizable failing of a reformer: a man who has spent his life fighting genuine disorder starts to see disorder in things that are merely unfamiliar. It is worth remembering where both stories come from. They come from his own letters, because he was the one who wrote to Rome and asked, and when the answer went against him it went into the file with everything else.