In 2013, we visited Canterbury, primarily to see the cathedral and the shrine of Thomas Beckett, the archbishop murdered by henchman of Henry II. There had been a mention in the our travel book of a nearby site, the Abbey of St. Augustine, and we walked a few blocks to see it. I’m glad we did.
The abbey is a ruin, destroyed during the dissolution of the churches by Henry VIII (Thomas Cromwell, he of Wolf Hallfame, directed the destruction). But walking around the ruins, listening to the audio tour, you get a good idea of what the site would have been like in its prime. A question we had was, who was St. Augustine? It clearly wasn’t the saint and theologian who died in Hippo in North Africa in 430 A.D. As it turns out, not a whole lot is known about the missionary sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom led by King Aethelbehrt and Queen Bertha (she was a Christian; the king was not).
The mission was highly successful; Augustine eventually became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
Augustine of Canterbury by Robin Mackintosh aims to answer that question, at least as fully as it can be answered. The fact is that we don’t know much of the man’s early life, until he appears in the church records and accounts in Rome. Mackintosh also goes further. He discusses the context of Augustine’s mission, based on recent historical, archaeological, and sociological studies. He looks at Augustine’s leadership and what it might imply for the church in the 21st century. And he challenges the negative interpretation of the mission, which started with the Venerable Bede himself.
Mackintosh was in a good position to write this story. He’s the director of Licensed Ministries and Warden of Readers in the Diocese of Canterbury and an honorary cathedral canon. He’s also spent considerable time in research; the book is only 192 pages (including notes, bibliography, and index) but it is packed with historical context of Rome, southern and northern France, and England in the late sixth century. When he describes, for example, what Augustine and his companions would have seen in Aix-en-Provence on their journey, the reader feels he’s right there in the moment, seeing what Augustine saw.
We travel with the mission from Rome to southern France, with a return when more letters from the pope are needed; then he returns through France and finally southeastern England. With Augustine, we navigate the sets of royal politics through numerous kingdoms. If we don’t know much about Augustine’s personality, we can see some of it reflected in the people along the way he had to deal with.
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| Robin Mackintosh |
Eventually we land in England, wait for the official welcome by the king and queen to be organized, and then begin the mission. The king becomes a Christian (the critical conversion), and soon the mission is working its way through the people. Christianity had been introduced to Britain during Roman times, but the Romans had left a hundred years before and the church, had found itself (along with native Britons) pushed to margins of Wales and northern England by the Anglo-Saxon invasions.
Augustine of Canterbury was published in 2013; I’d read a similar approach to a subject with Annie Whitehead’s 2018 Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, in which a small kingdom in north central England left almost no historical record of its own. Researching the context can tell us much even when we have little direct evidence from the subject of the study.
Top photograph: Ruins of the Abbey of St. Augustine, Canterbury, via Wikimedia Commons.
Some Monday Readings
Pundits: “Ignorance” Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers to Economic Confidence Poll – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
I Once Thought British Jews Were Special. Not Anymore – Tanya Gold at The Free Press.
Fundamentally Religious and Catholic: A review of Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway – Adam Schwartz at Kirk Center.
Many People at Once: The Role of Literary Translators – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
November Poem a Day 2023, Week 2 – Kelly Belmomte at Al Nine.
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