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 When the
pagan Anglo-Saxons invaded England, they drove the native Celtic inhabitants
north into Scotland and west into Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall. The
Anglo-Saxons were subsequently converted to Christianity by Celtic
missionaries from the north and west, and Roman and Gallic missionaries from
the south and east. As a result, they ended up with two different "flavors"
of Christianity. The difference was expressed mainly in the form of a
disagreement about the proper method for calculating the date of Easter, a
disagreement which we may suspect was a stand-in for other disagreements a
little more difficult to articulate. In 663, a council was called to settle
the dispute, the Synod of Whitby. It decided in favor of the Roman or
continental way of doing things.
Soon after, the Archbishop of Canterbury died, and the English elected a
successor, Wighard, and sent him to Rome to be consecrated by the Pope.
Wighard died in Rome before he could be consecrated, and the Pope (Vitalian)
took it upon himself to choose a man to fill the vacancy. He consecrated
Theodore of Tarsus (the native city of the Apostle Paul), a learned monk
(not a priest) from the East then living in Rome, 65 years old. This
surprising choice turned out to be a very good one. Theodore was (as Bede
put it in his Ecclesiatical History) "the first archbishop whom all the
English obeyed." Having made a tour of his charge, Theodore filled the
vacant bishoprics and in 672 presided over the first council of the entire
English Churh, at Hertford. He established definite territorial boundaries
for the various dioceses, and founded new dioceses where needed. He found
the Church of England an unorganized missionary body, and left it a fully
ordered province of the universal Church. The body of canon law drawn up
under his supervision, and his structure of dioceses and parishes, survived
the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are substantially
intact today.
He founded a school at Canterbury that trained Christians from both the
Celtic and the Roman traditions, and did much to unite the two groups. The
school was headed by Adrian, an abbot born in Africa but later resident in
Italy, who had been the Pope's first choice for Archbishop, but who had
refused and recommended Theodore instead. Adrian was learned in the
Scriptures, a good administrator, and fluent in Latin and Greek. The school
taught Bible, theology and sacred studies, Latin and Greek (Bede alleges
that some of the students knew these languages as well as they knew
English), poetry, astronomy, and calendar calculation (of some importance
for political reasons, as stated above). Adrian died 9 January 710. Theodore
died 19 September 690, being 88 years old.
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