Alban, Protomartyr of Britain

Saint Alban

With deep gratitude and reverence, today the Orthodox Church in America commemorates the Glorious and Right-Victorious Alban the Protomartyr, whose holy blood first sanctified to Christ the ground of the British Isles.

Our great historian of the Church Bede the Venerable gives us an account of Saint Alban’s life, and places his martyrdom during the murderous reign of Diocletian. Bede gives no account of Alban’s parentage or upbringing, but it seems reasonable to assume that he belonged to the Romano-British population of the southern parts of Great Britain: the ancestors of today’s Welsh, Cornish and Breton peoples. Alban, so Bede’s account goes, was still a pagan when Diocletian’s persecutions of Christians began, likely worshipped the local British aspects of the Greek-Roman pantheon, and he lived in the præ-Roman Iron Age settlement and Roman municipium of Verulamium, since renamed in the honour of this greatest of its natives.

As the Roman soldiery on Diocletian’s orders were beginning to round up Christians and deliver them up to torture and death, the still-pagan Alban gave shelter to a priest who was then fleeing. Bede then recounts the martyrdom of Alban:

And when he observed this man’s unbroken activity of prayer and vigil, he was suddenly touched by the grace of God, and began to follow the priest’s example of faith and devotion. Gradually instructed by his teaching of salvation, Alban renounced the darkness of idolatry, and sincerely accepted Christ. But when the priest had lived in the house for some days, word came to the ears of the evil ruler that Christ’s holy confessor, whose time of martyrdom had not yet come, lay hidden in Alban’s house. Accordingly he gave orders to his soldiers to make a thorough search, and when they arrived at the martyr’s house, holy Alban, wearing the priest’s long cloak, at once surrendered himself in the place of his guest and teacher, and was led bound before the judge.

When Alban was brought in, the judge happened to be standing before an altar, offering sacrifice to devils. Seeing Alban, he was furious that he had put himself in such hazard by surrendering himself to the soldiers in place of his guest, and ordered him to be dragged before the idols where he stood.

‘Since you have chosen to conceal a sacrilegious rebel,’ he said, ‘rather than surrender him to my soldiers to pay the well-deserved penalty for his blasphemy against our gods, you shall undergo all the tortures due to him if you dare to abandon the practice of our religion.’ But Saint Alban, who had confessed himself a Christian to the enemies of the Faith, was unmoved by these threats, and armed with spiritual strength, openly refused to obey this order. ‘What is your family and race?’ demanded the judge.

‘How does my family concern you?’ replied Alban. ‘If you wish to know the truth about my religion, know that I am a Christian, and am bound by the laws of Christ.’

‘I demand to know your name,’ insisted the judge. ‘Tell me at once.’

‘My parents named me Alban,’ he answered, ‘and I worship and adore the living and true God, who created all things.’

The judge was very angry, and said: ‘If you want to enjoy æternal life, sacrifice at once to the great gods!’

Alban replied: ‘You are offering these sacrifices to devils, who cannot help their suppliants, nor answer their prayers and vows. On the contrary, whosoever offers sacrifice to idols is doomed to the pains of hell.’

Incensed at this reply, the judge ordered God’s holy confessor Alban to be flogged by the executioners, hoping to shake his constancy of heart by torture, since threats had no effect. But for Christ’s sake, he bore the most horrible torments patiently and gladly, and when the judge saw that no torture could break him or make him renounce the worship of Christ, he ordered Alban’s immediate decapitation. Led out to execution, the saint came to a river which flowed swiftly between the wall of the town and the arena where he was to die. There he saw a great crowd of men and women of all ages and conditions, who were doubtless moved by God’s will to attend the death of His blessed confessor and martyr. This crowd had collected in such numbers that he could hardly have crossed that evening, and so many people had come out from the city that the judge was left unattended. Saint Alban, who ardently desired a speedy martyrdom, approached the river, and as he raised his eyes to heaven in prayer, the river ran dry in its bed and left him a way to cross. When the appointed executioner saw this, he was so moved in spirit that he hurried to meet Alban at the place of execution, and throwing down his sword, fell at his feet, begging to die with the martyr if he could not die in his place.

While this man changed from a persecutor to a companion in the true Faith, and other executioners hesitated to pick up his sword from the ground, the most reverend confessor of God ascended the hill about five hundred paces from this spot, accompanied by the crowd. This hill, whose sides were not steep or rough, rose gently from a plain, and was covered with many kinds of flowers, its beauty providing a worthy place to be hallowed by the martyr’s blood. As he reached the summit, holy Alban asked God to give him water, and at once a living stream bubbled up at his feet – a sign to all present that it was at the martyr’s prayer that the river also had dried in its course. For it was not likely that the martyr who had dried up the waters of the river should lack water on a hilltop unless he willed it so. But the river, having performed its due service, gave proof of its obedience, and returned to its natural course.

Here, then, the gallant martyr met his death, and received the crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him. But the man whose impious hands delivered the death-blow was not permitted to boast of his deed, for as the martyr’s head fell, his eyes dropped out onto the ground.

The soldier who had been moved by divine intuition to refuse to slay God’s confessor was beheaded at the same time as Alban. And although he had not received the purification of Baptism, he was certainly cleansed of the shedding of his own blood, and was rendered fit to enter the kingdom of heaven. Astonished by these many strange miracles, the judge called a halt to the persecution, and whereas he had formerly fought to crush devotion to Christ, he now began to honour the death of His saints.

Saint Alban suffered on the twenty-second day of June near the city of Verulamium, which the English now call Verlamacæstir or Wæclingacæstir. When the peace of Christian times was restored, a beautiful church worthy of his martyrdom was built, where sick folk are healed and frequent miracles take place to this day.

In the same persecution suffered Aaron and Julius, citizens of the City of Legions, and many others of both sexes throughout the land. After enduring many horrible physical tortures, death brought an end to the sufferings, and their souls entered the joys of the heavenly City.

The priestmartyr whom Saint Alban sheltered in his home and died to protect, whose name Saint Bede seems not to have known firmly, is known to posterity as Saint Amphibalos. He may or may not be the same saint as the Hieromartyr Amphibalos who was killed along with 999 other martyrs at Lichfield in the same persecution on the second of January, 305. But the identification of the two seems unlikely as the feast day of the priestmartyr associated with Alban is normally commemorated on the twenty-fifth of June, three days after his pupil’s; and his name appears in history only with the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth some eight hundred years later.

Saint Alban was very early commemorated as a saint and a beautiful cathedral was erected on the spot where he fell, as Saint Bede relates to us. But his cultus seems to have taken off only with the arrival in Britain of Saint Germain of Auxerre, some twenty years before the arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes on Great Britain at the invitation of Vortigern. In those years the British Isles were riven with political instability, and this created opportunity for all sorts of heresies to arise – the most popular being the heresies of Arius and Pelagius. Pelagius – himself a Briton – turned out to be something of a political and moral elitist and individualist (something almost akin to a libertarian in modern terms), and this is something that the early modern debates in the West over free will and grace tend to overlook.

The ideological overreaction of Saint Augustine to Pelagius, which tended to wash out or elide the coöperative synergistic rôle of the human will in her salvation, unfortunately later overshadowed in the West the much more reasonable via media (taken by, for example, Abba Cassian and the majority of the Greek Fathers) which is generally taken to be the modern position of the Orthodox Church as a whole. Nevertheless, the Pelagian position made itself strongly felt in Britain in the early fifth century, and Saint Germain arrived in the Isle to attempt to correct the Britons to an Orthodox belief.

Saint Bede stresses that when Saint Germain arrived in Britain, he was welcomed by the common people, the lay folk of the plebeian class. The British commoners were rather put off by the Pelagians (whose individualistic spiritual elitism appealed primarily to patrician prelates like Severianus and his son Agricola who were primarily responsible for spreading the doctrine in Britain), but they lacked the eloquence and scholarly erudition needed to refute them. For this reason, when Saint Germain began preaching, the common people flocked to him and began to listen in particular to his injunctions against the doctrines of Pelagius. After some time, the Pelagians gathered themselves together and approached Saint Germain and his monastic followers. Bede presents us with a powerful picture that hints at the class differences involved. The Pelagians ‘appeared with rich ornaments and magnificent robes, surrounded by flattering followers’, writes Bede; ‘On one side stood the bishops, upheld by holiness and faith in Christ; on the other stood the Pelagians, full of presumption and pride.’

According to Saint Bede, Bishop Saint Germain deferred to the Pelagians and allowed them the honour of speaking first. They put forward a great number of pompous, long-winded arguments in the highfalutin language of the well-educated. The clergymen following Germain then spoke, and referred themselves always back to the Scriptures and the teachings of the Apostles and the Evangelists. The Pelagians were shamed and refuted on every point, and the throngs of common folk which gathered around them were only with reluctance restrained from violence against them. A blind girl of ten years was brought before both of them, but the Pelagians deferred to the Orthodox to heal her, and it was Saint Germain’s prayers to the Trinity and intercessions asked of the saints which were effective.

Saint Germain, thereupon, made a visit to the tomb of Saint Alban in token of thanksgiving, and asked that his reliquary be opened. Into this reliquary, he deposited the several relics of the Apostles and martyrs from various lands which he had brought with him from Gaul, thinking it fitting that Saint Alban should share in this blessed company. This was the true beginning of the cultus of Saint Alban, and the Protomartyr drew the same popular common devotion thereafter. This shrine was retained untouched until the arrival of the Danes in the 870s, when the relics of Saint Alban were removed for safekeeping, and later restored. Saint Alban’s shrine was destroyed in the reign of Henry VIII amid the iconoclastic madness of the dissolution of the monasteries; however, although the shrine itself was reassembled from the smashed pieces, the relics were tragically lost – possibly buried in an unmarked grave.

Nonetheless, to this day, this first and greatest of the martyrs of Britain, this spiritual forefather of the Brythonic faithful – Welsh and Cornish and Breton – and also of the later converts to Christ among the Gaelic and Germanic peoples, is still venerated deeply by all the peoples of the British Isles and beyond, being one of their foremost patrons. Holy and blessed witness to Christ against the blind idolatry of the Romans, meek in bearing yet forthright in faith, beloved Alban, pray to Christ our God for us sinners!

In his struggle your holy martyr Alban,
Gained the crown of life, O Christ our God.
For strengthened by you and in purity of heart,
He spoke boldly before the judges of this world,
Offering up his head to you, the Judge of all!

Cathedral of Saint Alban