Archbishop Stigand, the last Orthodox Primate of the British Church
In 1054 the Church was turned upside down and shaken, and the confusion created then is still with us today. Up until that time the world had only one single Christian Church, of which everyone west ofConstantinople was a member. Since then the two great churches (the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic church) have been separated, with the Pope heading one and the collective Patriarchs and their synods heading the other. Today their members make up the overwhelming majority of people who actually attend churches Sunday by Sunday. The rest of the Christians are distributed among the 41,000 (that’s right 41,000!) Protestant denominations that separated from the Pope’s church and its derivatives.
The split in the Church took twelve years to reach the British Isles. Things happened slowly in those days; it took years just to verify a bit of worrying information, and it’s fair to say that only certain people in Britain were terribly interested in the Pope anyway. However, in 1066 all that changed. The Normans invaded with papal financing—along with papal bishops to replace the British bishops.
The Normans were bad, but these islands had incorporated invading barbarians before, and although that was not within living memory, neither was it in the mists of distant time. But the Norman invasion was different, not only because England had by that time become a unified country with a central government, but also because the Normans were not pagans in need of the Gospel—they were bringers of another gospel.
Norman invasion of England. Fragment of tapestry from Bayeux, late eleventh century
Within a decade of the Norman invasion, five hundred ships left England carrying refugees, and even more left travelling by land across the Continent. They went to two places: The ships sailed to Constantinople and the overlanders made their way to Kiev—both cities under the influence of the Byzantine Empire and the home of the original, non-papal, Orthodox Church. This in my view answers the question of whether or not they were religious refugees, because the reasons for leaving William of Normandy’s England were many and varied. Of course not all were explicitly religious refugees, but even those who left for political reasons or whose land had been stolen still went to Byzantium to find sanctuary and to start a new life without the influence of the papacy, and they formed there an English colony on the north coast of the Black Sea in the Crimea.
Had these people considered themselves “sons of Rome” simply at odds with the Normans, they could have emigrated to scores of other places that posed far less danger. In an age when the average Englishman had never even been to Scotland or Ireland, they packed their children and their chattel and sailed to faraway Constantinople, leaving both home and heresy behind.
England’s population at the time of the Conquest was around two and a half million, and many thousands who had the ability to travel chose to leave and live under the Orthodox Church rather than the papal church, which had been brought to England with Norman swords.
Icon of Saint Aristobulus. Photo: Wikipedia
For a thousand years up to the Norman invasion the British Isles had had their own indigenous Church, solidly in communion with the whole Church worldwide. Records show that Saint Aristobulus was sent by the Church of Jerusalem to be bishop of Britain in 37 A.D., a time when all the Apostles were in Jerusalem, and therefore he had full Apostolic authority. This fact is not popular with most modern historians. However, we know the names of subsequent bishops up to and beyond the great Saint David, primate of the Church in Britain, Saint Patrick, Saint Aidan, Saint Ninian, Saint Columcille and countless other luminaries, both men and women, over a millennium right up to Stigand, the last Orthodox Primate of the British Church in 1066.
The teachings of this Church, which derived directly from the Apostles, was inherited by the British Christians; it was their way of life, passed from generation to generation beginning within a very few years after the Resurrection. Therefore, when the Patriarch of the West (that is, of Rome) broke with the other four Patriarchs it meant that he was schismatic; and since the Popes had already begun to introduce unauthorized changes to doctrine, he was a heretic as well. These changes have multiplied over the centuries and have produced a gap in both doctrine and practice that is all but unbridgeable.
This brings us back to those many thousands who, between 1066 and 1076, chose not to try to bridge it even then, when it was nowhere as severe as it is now. They forsook everything dear to them and set out on an arduous and dangerous journey to a foreign land and culture in order to preserve the Faith delivered to them by the saints. They were English and Orthodox. This should give us pause to think when we look at the debacle that Christianity has become in this country, with the very basics of doctrine and morality reworked or abandoned by every “denomination”, ostensibly to bring the Gospel to more people. Meanwhile in reality the number of people who describe themselves as any sort of Christian is diminishing catastrophically year by year.
Where is the Church in all this? Where is the real Gospel, the Gospel that sent five hundred thousand people east in the eleventh century? It is here. The East has come to us. As long ago as 1870, the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Synod) authorized a western use Liturgy for Britain, and since then, albeit gradually, the Orthodox jurisdictions have been opening churches here. Many of them—around sixty—are worshipping almost entirely in English, and many more are tentatively introducing English as it becomes evident that the Church must become indigenized.
References:
Ciggaar, Krijnie N. (1974), “L’Émigration Anglaise a Byzance après 1066: Un Nouveau Texte en Latin sur les Varangues à Constantinople”, Revue des Études Byzantines, Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines,32 (1): 301–42,doi:10.3406/rebyz.1974.1489,ISSN 0766-5598
Ciggaar, Krijnie N. (1981), “England and Byzantium on the Eve of the Norman Conquest”, Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Fifth Battle Abbey Conference, Ipswich: Boydell Press, 5: 78–96
Dasent, G. W., ed. (1894), Icelandic Sagas and Other Historical Documents Relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen on the British Isles [4 vols; 1887–94], Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi scriptores ; [88],3, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode
Fell, Christine (1978), “The Icelandic Saga of Edward the Confessor: Its Version of the Anglo-Saxon Emigration to Byzantium”, Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3: 179–96,doi:10.1017/S0263675100000673,ISSN 0263-6751
Godfrey, John (1978), “The Defeated Anglo-Saxons Take Service with the Byzantine Emperor”, Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the First Battle Abbey Conference, Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1: 63–74
Pappas, Nicholas C. J., English Refugees in the Byzantine Armed Forces: The Varangian Guard and Anglo-Saxon Ethnic Consciousness, De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History, retrieved 2008-03-20
Shepard, Jonathan (1973), “The English and Byzantium: A Study of Their Role in the Byzantine Army in the Later Eleventh Century”, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion, New York: Fordham University Press, 29: 53–92, ISSN 0362-1529
Williams, Ann (1995), The English and the Norman Conquest, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, ISBN 0-85115-588-X
Hieromonk Michael (Wood)
Saint Bride Hermitage, Scotland (ROCOR)
Saint Bride Hermitage, Scotland (ROCOR)
5/31/2017
No comments:
Post a Comment