Gwen ‘Teirbron’ the Saint-Bearer of Brittany and Dorset

Saint Gwen Teirbron

The eighteenth of July is the feast of the sixth-century Saint Gwen Teirbron of Brittany. Her cognomen, ‘Teirbron’, means ‘three-breasted’, and she has had far more names than breasts. Having devotions in France and England as well as Wales and Brittany, she is known variously by Gwenn, Alba, Blanche, Candida, Ceridwen and Hwíta (or Wite) – most of which are cognates of her Breton name. She is noteworthy also in that her relics, housed in a small reliquary tomb in Dorset, somehow managed to survive the harrowing of the monasteries in the Reformation – being rediscovered behind a wall by a the parish vicar of Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset in 1848. It was one of two reliquaries in England which survived the Reformation; the other belonged to Éadweard the Confessor.

At any rate, this buxom Breton lass was the daughter of Budic II, King of Brittany. She first married a Breton, Eneas Ledewig; and she had a son by him named Cadfan. After Eneas’s death, she married Saint Fragan [also Bracan or Brychan], King of Cornwall, the cousin of King Cado of Dumnonia and brother of Saint Cybi. She bore him four children. The first two, Gwyddnog and Iago, were born in Cornwall. A plague broke out in Devon in 507 and Fragan took his wife with him to Brittany, along with a number of Cornish refugees. There she bore him another son, Gwenolau, and a daughter, Creirwy. This is how Welsh sources have it, anyway. English and French ones seem to offer the opinion that she married Fragan first and then Eneas Ledewig. All five of her children, by both husbands, also became saints. It was apparently common for a widow who remarried to be called ‘three-breasted’, but this cognomen of hers was taken quite literally in Catholic devotional art, statuary and hagiography – where her third breast was a miraculous symbol of her fertility and saintly motherhood. Her icon above shows her cradling her three sons by Saint Fragan.

While she lived in Brittany, so the legend goes, she was kidnapped twice by heathen pirates from the kingdom of Sussex. Both times, however, she successfully fled her captors and wondrously walked on the waters of the Channel back to Brittany. After her second husband died, Saint Gwen retired from this-worldly life and became an anchoress. She returned to Britain and took up a small cell in the Marshwood Vale. She lived there for many years in quiet prayer and solitude, often setting up beacons along the shoreline to protect sailors. However, her hermitage was attacked by Saxon pirates, who plundered her home and murdered her.

Intriguingly, after the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity, they developed a fond local cultus for the saint their forebears had killed. This seems to be the same impulse that drove the newly-converted Danelaw Danes to patronise the cults of Saint Éadmund and Saint Ælfhéah, or the newly-converted Slavs came to celebrate Pokrov. The Church of Saint Candida and Holy Cross indeed dates back to the reign of Saint Ælfrǽd the Great, who founded the Hwítan Cyrican on the site of Saint Gwen’s hermitage. ‘Saint Wite’ of Dorset – who likely was Saint Gwen Teirbron – had a holy well and wondrous healings associated with her shrine long before the Norman Conquest, and was a particular patron of nursing mothers. Holy mother Gwen, bearer of many saints and noble-hearted anchoress, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

O noble exiles Fragan and Gwen
who fled to Brittany in troubled times:
you established churches to God's praise and glory;
your children brought joy and gladness to the Breton people.
We praise you, glorious Saints!

Chapelle Sainte Blanche, France

Holy Hieromartyr Frideric, Bishop of Utrecht

Saint Frideric of Utrecht

The eighteenth of July in the Orthodox Church is the feast day of Saint Frideric, the martyred Frisian bishop of Utrecht. The grandson of the heathen Redbad, king of the Frisians, Frideric was raised from an early age among the clergy of Utrecht, who taught him by the holy books that lay in their possession. A pious and fastidious youth, with a certain proud and stubborn streak no doubt inherited from his mighty heathen forebear, he was known for taking upon himself vigils, fasting and ascetic disciplines well in excess of what was expected of a pupil his own age. As a young man, he was ordained priest by Bishop Ricfride, and placed in charge of the young catechumens of Utrecht.

Upon Ricfried’s repose, Frideric was chosen as bishop – the eighth Bishop of Utrecht in the apostolic succession from Saint Willibrord – at a folkmoot. With tears and entreaties, Frideric declared to the gathered throng that he was unworthy and unqualified to be a bishop; however, the Frankish king Clovis the Fair compelled the Frisian priest to accept the office. Having received this command which he dared not reject, Frideric retreated to Mainz where he received the omophor from his ecclesiastical superior, Metropolitan Hadewulf, in the presence of all the bishops and Clovis. He was then enjoined with taking the Gospel into the northern reaches of Frisia, which were as yet mired in heathenry.

Frideric, despite his own assertions to the contrary, proved to be a capable and compassionate archpastor of the Frisian flock. He certainly put his erudition and book-learning to good use. He maintained a friendly scholarly correspondence with the Benedictine intellectual Metropolitan Hrabanus Maurus of Mainz, and he also penned a Life of his predecessor Saint Boniface. He was well-beloved among the common folk, but he made himself something of a nuisance among the as-yet-heathen notables of Walcheren by preaching against consanguineous marriages. The heathen Frisian hathelings often contracted such close kin marriages among themselves, and Saint Frideric and his missionaries often found themselves in an uphill battle opposing such liaisons.

On the eighteenth of July, 838, just after Frideric had celebrated the Liturgy and retired into the chapel of Saint John the Baptist to pray his private devotions, two men approached him, grabbed him by the shoulder and stabbed him in the stomach. Within a few minutes he gave up the ghost, and the words of Psalm 116 were upon his lips: ‘I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.’ Where these two godless assassins came from, and who sent them, is unclear – but there are two likely possibilities. The first is that they were sent by the heathen of Walcheren, who were hostile to Saint Frideric and his missions. The second is that they were sent by the Empress Judith of Bavaria – and this requires a bit more explication.

Clovis King’s policy toward the newly-conquered Saxons and Frisians was far more lenient than his father Karl’s had been, and was aimed at undoing some of the damage that had been wrought by Karl’s heavy-handed treatment of the heathen Saxons. He lightened their taxes and issued an amnesty to Saxons who had been condemned or outlawed. This made Frideric’s job of converting the heathen a good deal eather. However, he divided his father’s empire between himself and his three sons by his first wife Irmingard: his eldest Lothair was given Middle Francia and [northern] Italy; his second Pippin was given Aquitaine; and his youngest Clovis II was given East Francia [Germany]; while he kept West Francia for himself.

Clovis père remarried a Bavarian beauty named Judith, who bore him a son named Karl ‘the Bald’: later king of West Francia. Judith was a remarkably quick and adept student of Frankish court intrigues, and deftly leveraged her power and influence with her consort to advance the interests of her biological son Karl against those of her stepchildren. She so provoked Lothair and Pippin and Clovis fils that they broke their filial bonds and rose in open revolt against their father. Contemporary commentators were therefore markedly hostile to Judith, whom they saw as an immoral and power-hungry Jezebel, willing to plunge the land of the Franks into civil war to sate her greed and lust. However, if Saint Frideric did indeed ever issue such Chrysostom-like homiletics against Judith, these are no longer extant to a modern readership. As a result, though contemporary authorities seem to prefer the latter theory that the assassins of Saint Frideric were sent by Judith, modern historians seem to prefer the theory that they were agents of the heathens of Walcheren.

Regardless of which theory holds true, Saint Frideric did indeed die as a martyr proclaiming the truth of Christ, against the self-interest, greed and sexual indulgence of the rich and powerful. His relics were interred with great honour in the same Sint-Salvatorkerk at Utrecht where he had served with earnest goodwill his entire life. Holy and righteous hieromartyr Frideric, witness to the good news of Christ among the heathen, entreat Christ our God to have mercy upon us!

Cynehelm of Winchcombe, Prince and Passion-Bearer

Saint Cynehelm of Winchcombe

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate a martyred young prince, slain treacherously by the will of a wicked elder sibling in pursuit of political power and office, who offered himself up willingly and without resistance to his killer. No, this prince is not Boris and not Gleb, but in the legends surrounding him he does bear a certain spiritual resemblance to these two great quintessentially-Russian Orthodox passion-bearers, as well as to the later martyred Éadweard King. The saint we venerate today is indeed Cynehelm of Mercia, who was slain violently in the year 811.

Cynehelm was one of two children of Cœnwulf King of Mercia, the other being his elder sister Cwénþrýð. The earlier and more reliable records we have indicate that Cynehelm was born in 786, which would have made him twenty-four years of age at the time of his death. Given that his name appears on several official charters, deeds and proclamations of the time both as beneficiary and as witness, it can be safely assumed that he had reached his majority well before 811. However, he is portrayed both in his hagiographical legend and in Orthodox iconography as a young child of seven years. One historical record relates that he fell in battle against the Welsh, possibly the result of a deliberate betrayal on his own side similar to the fate of Uriah the Hittite in Scripture. Another record makes him the direct victim of a Mercian court intrigue involving Cwénþrýð and several accomplices who desired to take power in the kingdom. Later hagiographical versions of Cynehelm’s death, such as that written by William of Malmesbury, embellish the latter history. This version of Cynehelm’s tale, however, is the most popular – and it even appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where it is placed in the mouth of Chauntecleer in the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’.

In the hagiographical legend, the young boy Cynehelm was given the kingdom of Mercia as an inheritance at the behest of his father Cœnwulf. The legend also makes Cynehelm’s aunt Burghild (historically the sister of Cœnwulf King) into a kind and loving elder sister as a foil to the jealous Cwénþrýð. Cwénþrýð, hating her brother in her heart, conspired with her lover Æscberht, who was also the tutor of Cynehelm. Giving him money, she told Æscberht to find some opportunity to slay Cynehelm that she might rule.

Cynehelm was not witless to what was about to happen to him. He knew his sister’s temperament and intentions. He was given to see in a dream a premonition of his own death. In this dream, Cynehelm climbed a tall tree from which he could see the four corners of Mercia. Three of the corners bowed to him and paid him homage as king. The fourth rushed toward the tree and began to hack it down with axes. As the tree fell, Cynehelm changed into a dove and flew heavenward in bliss. He told this dream to his nurse, Wulfwynn, who both wept that Cynehelm was to die at the hands of the wicked, and rejoiced that he was to join the throng of the blessed in martyrdom.

Æscberht led the young Cynehelm on a hunt into the woods near Worcester. Cynehelm wearied in his ride, and lay down beneath a tree to sleep. While he slept, Æscberht busied himself digging a grave for the boy. However, Cynehelm awoke and chided Æscberht: ‘You think to kill me here in vain. I shall be slain somewhere else.’ Then he took a dead ashen branch and stuck one end of it into the open grave. Wondrously, the upright end of the branch began to blossom into living leaves and flowers, and the downward end took root in the grave. This branch grew into a great tree that was called Saint Cynehelm’s Ash.

Instead of being shamed and chastised by this saintly wonder from the young boy he was to kill, Æscberht took the boy upwards into the Clent Hills and murdered Cynehelm by beheading him with a sword, as the boy knelt singing the Hymn of Ambrose, and buried him in another hasty grave on that spot. He returned to Cwénþrýð and told her that the deed had been done, and that she was now queen. Cwénþrýð ruled with equal jealousy as she had pursued rule: she forbade any mention of her brother’s name in Mercia.

In the meanwhile, in the Church of Saint Peter in Rome, a white dove descended from heaven with a scroll, which landed in the palm of the Pope of Rome (who, in 811, would have been Leo III). He unfurled it, and it bespoke a murder of one of God’s saints that had happened in the Mercian kingdom in England. The Pope dispatched the contents of this message with great urgency to Wulfred, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Wulfred despatched a party from Winchcombe to seek the body of the unjustly slain. They were guided as they went by an unearthly pillar of light coming from the Clent Hills, which arose from the spot where the murdered boy had been hastily buried. At the graveside they found a white cow, which stood there as though at vigil. As the relics were borne up out of the ground, wondrously a spring of clean, fresh water bubbled up from the grave.

Wulfred’s party bore the bones back from the Clent Hills to Winchcombe, but they were pursued along the way by an armed party sent from Worcester to take the relics of the saint for themselves. They rode at a fast pace to baffle pursuit, but soon wearied. As they rested nearby Winchcombe in Gloucester, another well sprang up where they lay their staffs. They drank of this water and were refreshed enough to bear the bones of the saint the rest of the way home.

What happened after Cynehelm’s murder was brought to light is a matter of disagreement among the stewards of the Cynehelm legend. Some hagiographers hold that the wicked queen Cwénþrýð’s eyes were put out as she was reading the Psalter, and that she was later done to death ignominiously along with her paramour Æscberht. Others hold that she was stricken with remorse at seeing her brother’s body, renounced her queenship and Æscberht, and retired to a nunnery. The latter seems more historically likely, given that a Mercian Cwénþrýð is listed among the abbesses of Minster.

Although there are multiple historical problems with this legend in its popular form, not least of which is the matter of dates, Cynehelm: a.) was a real historical personage; b.) was killed at a young age in an unjust manner; and c.) was already venerated locally as a saint by the Mercians during the ninth century. However, the historicity of the Cynehelm legend is, in the broad scheme, not so important. It must be stressed that the tale of Cynehelm puts the lie to culturally-essentialist arguments that Eastern, or specifically Russian, Orthodoxy is somehow uniquely (or, as some are again charging, genetically) predisposed to what Americanists are now calling ‘submission to tyranny’. When England too was united to the undivided Church, her saints – including Cynehelm and Éadweard (who is still particularly venerated by the Russian Orthodox!!) – embodied the exact same kind of kenotic nonresistance that Saints Boris and Gleb did. Their hagiographers (in Cynehelm’s case, even after the Great Schism!) clearly even celebrated this nonresistance. The Russian spiritual ‘type’, though it remains strongly unique in its kenotic and God-bearing simplicity, nonetheless bears common features with all the Orthodox peoples, including the pre-Schismatic English. Dearest Cynehelm, believing prince and passion-bearer, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

O passion-bearer and follower of Christ,
Young and guileless Cynehelm –
When thou wast murdered by thine own kin,
The secret iniquity could not be hidden.
A miracle revealed the truth to all the world,
And justice was restored.
Pray to Christ our God to save our souls!

Saint Cynehelm’s Well and Church, Worcester

Martyr Helier the Hermit of Jersey

Saint Helier of Jersey, Romard and Anquetil

In this series of British saints that I am doing, it is common to see anchorites and monks from the island venture to the continent to convert their kin and countrymen. For example: it is common to see Welsh and Cornish hermits like Malo, Tudwal, Samson and Tysilio venture to Brittany to convert the Bretons. It is also common to see English monastics like Willibrord, Boniface, Leoba and Wihtberht cross the English Channel to witness among the Old Saxons and Frisians. It’s quite a bit rarer to see that missionary journey go the other way.

And yet that is what we see with Saint Helier of Jersey, commemorated on the sixteenth of July in the Orthodox Church. Saint Helier, a continental Saxon by birth, was converted to Christianity by a Breton hermit, and sailed into the English Channel from the continental side to Jersey, where he lived as a hermit himself and converted the native population there.

Helier [also Elier, Hélyi or Hellerius] was born to heathen German parents in what is now Tongeren. His name, which may originally have been Heilbert or some derivation thereof, derives from the Germanic root hailaz, which means ‘healthy’, ‘whole’ or ‘to heal’. His mother, a Swabian woman named Liutgarda, apparently went into complications during labour, leading his Saxon father Sigibert to call for a Frankish cleric (traditionally Kunibert of Köln, though there are some obvious chronological problems with this) to assist in the childbirth with his prayers. The cleric agreed, on the condition that the parents hand their child over to be consecrated to God as Holy Prophet Samuel was. Sigibert, anxious for the lives of Liutgarda and his unborn son, hastily agreed.

Thanks to the cleric’s prayers, Liutgarda lived and her son was born healthy, in thanks of which she and Sigibert gave him his name. However, when the time came to hand him over to the cleric, Liutgarda refused. Only when Helier was seven years old and he fell deathly ill with a sickness that only the cleric could cure, did his parents agree to hand him over to them. The Frankish cleric taught young Helier the Gospel and the lives of the saints; and apparently Helier was such an eager young pupil that it disturbed his heathen parents, who had the cleric put to death.

Then next we hear of Saint Helier, he had become a pupil of Saint Markulf [or Marcouf] at his Nanteuil Abbey in the Cherbourg Peninsula (very near where the Allied troops landed on D-Day, in fact). He was baptised by Abbot Markulf himself, and tonsured. He worked two notable wonders among his fellow monks at the abbey there. He cured the eyes of a brother who had fallen blind, and he removed a venomous asp from the bed of one of his sleeping brothers without it biting him. He was also known for certain ascetic extremities – one of his practices was to dig two holes for his feet and fill them with hard stones and freezing water, surround himself with sharpened stakes to keep from falling, and stand in the holes for hours reciting the Psalms. After studying with Abbot Markulf for several years, and his spiritual father seeing that his desire for an eremitical life was sincere, Abbot Markulf sent him to an island off the coast of Cherbourg – to wit, Jersey.

Jersey, at that time settled by a mix of Gauls and Bretons, had been left struggling, poor and sparsely-populated by repeat attacks by Teutonic invaders from the sea – probably Saxons. They had no one to heal their sick or wounded, or to preach the Gospel to them. It was for this purpose that Saint Markulf sent Helier, together with a companion named Romard, to the island. Though the islanders had prepared a hut for them, Helier instead took up a lonely dwelling on a bare outcrop of rock – appropriately called Hermitage Rock – and lived there in solitary prayer for thirteen years. Romard regularly travelled to and from Hermitage Rock by way of a sandbar that would appear at low tide.

Helier earned the trust of the Jèrriais in several ways. From his perch atop Hermitage Rock, he was the first to be able to see the ships of any would-be invaders, and he would signal the villagers to flee and hide. In this way he saved their lives and spoilt the bloodthirsty sport of the raiders. To this day, dark clouds seen from the horizon at Hermitage Rock are called ‘les vailes dé St. Hélyi’ – ‘the sails of Saint Helier’. He also healed a Jersey man named Anquetil of his lameness. And on another occasion, at the approach of oncoming ships belonging to Saxon pirates, by the sign of the Cross he raised a storm that blew the invaders off-course away from the island.

The raiders returned, however, in the summer of 555. Helier made no attempt to hide from them. Indeed, he was weak in body from his ascetic practices and his extremities of fasting – then but skin and bone loosely strung together. Instead of trying to run, he preached to them in their own tongue the Gospel of Christ, and tried to persuade them to leave the people of Jersey be. The chief of the Saxon pirates, who beheld Helier’s radiance and heard his eloquence, was afraid of him, and ordered that his head be cut off with an axe. Thus Saint Helier was martyred. (The coat-of-arms of Saint-Hélier in Jersey still features a pair of crossed axes.) However, the body of Saint Helier picked up his head and walked toward the sea with it. The Saxon pirates, terrified at this omen, turned tail and fled to their ships.

As it turned out, a gale blew up as the Saxons were leaving and wrecked all their ships on a reef, leaving none of them alive. The villagers mourned the passing of their beloved hermit. When Romard went to Hermitage Rock and saw there Helier with his head literally in his hands, he took up the martyr’s relics and set them adrift on a raft to sea, which washed ashore at Bréville-sur-Mer in Manche. A local farmer found the raft and the body, and he took them both to the village church and graveyard, where the priest rang the bell and bade all the men come to help bury him. Four men bore up the saint’s body, and found it so light they hardly felt it. As soon as they crossed the threshold of the church, however, the body became as heavy as lead, causing the men to stumble and drop him. He was buried next to the threshold, but the next day a fountain of purest water gushed up from where he had been buried. This well’s water was found to have wondrous healing properties, and especially good for those suffering from blindness or lameness. The well at the church of Bréville-sur-Mer is still there today.

As for the island of Jersey, Saint Markulf founded an abbey there in his martyred pupil’s honour, which flourished in later days. This abbey was visited by Saint Samson of Dol. The monastery was razed by another group of invaders – the Normans – in the 900s. The site would later be revived and rededicated by the Catholic Augustinian Order beginning in 1125.

Saint Helier’s parentage and origins may have been Teutonic; however, he witnessed among Gauls and Bretons and belongs very firmly to the Celtic – namely Welsh and Breton – tradition of ascetic eremeticism. Certainly he was treated as such by the later Welsh and Breton saints who visited Jersey. As such, much like Saint Gwenffrewi [Winefride] or Saint Gwen [Wite], his cultus forms a bridge between the disparate peoples and cultures he represents. Venerable Helier, healer, hermit and martyr, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Hermitage Rock, Jersey

Le Maritain en fuite

Jacques Maritain

I should preface this blog post by saying that I still deeply admire the French conservative idealists and intellectuals – Maritain, Mounier, Dru, Borne, Weil, Berdyaev – whose thought underpinned the earliest formations of the ideology that would become ‘Christian democracy’. However, that ideology is fatally flawed in that it was subordinate from the beginning to a Kantian-Hegelian rationalism which continues to guide it into ideological cul-de-sacs. I have indeed written a blog post like this before, but I feel that it requires some expansion. I said before that ‘Christian democracy can’t save America’; that premiss was far too modest. It is, after all, all too apparent to the more stringent Christian democrats that American culture is constituted in such a way that such Christian idealism as its founders had will always be an alien element within it. I mean something much more deep-reaching. It should more rightly be said, that it is doubtful Christian democracy can be saved from itself.

I have already established and developed the thesis advanced by Allan Carlson in his excellent book Third Ways, that the Christian democracy movement had a ‘fall’ in something like the Biblical sense, when its French and German forms consented, in the early 1950s, to water down its primary message in order to make itself a mass-political movement of the bourgeois centre-right. The bourgeois element was inimical to the Christian idealism of Berdyaev at the very least – inspired as he was by Léon Bloy. The bourgeoisie were, after all, the ones who crucified Christ – and who continue to crucify Christ in their hearts. And in trying to turn from the path of Christ onto the path of mass-political appeals, bourgeois parliamentary power and capitulation to big-business interests fundamentally aligned to American capital, they contravened the word of God that ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.’

The fundamental movement in this turn in Christian democracy, was to turn Christianity from a heart-directed conviction (so valuable to the thought of Berdyaev and Weil and Maritain!), into a civilisational signifier. They bourgeois-ified Christianity, in essence, by removing from its centre the risen Lord who trampled down death by His death, and settling instead upon the intellectual-philosophical and moral legacies of Western Europe which were the products of long centuries of concentrated Christian devotion – or, more crudely, upon the architectural and monumental historical legacies of Christian kings, emperors and armies. The creative, kenotic impulse which underlay an idealistic moment in European politics was quietly, but firmly, snuffed out.

Christian democracy, during this time, was able to retain its sanity and respectability, in large part, due to a rapprochement with the reigning spirit of the liberal political age. It espoused, fairly easily and conveniently, œconomic and scientific rationality and acknowledged the primacy of parliamentary structures and democratic rule. Centre-right, socially-conservative Christian politics in America existed comfortably alongside the classical-liberal tradition of American constitutionalism in large part due to the overarching threat of Cold War anti-communism, despite the antinomies between conservative and classical-liberal cultural priorities which were so obvious to, say, Canadian philosopher George Grant. The same phenomenon – albeit in an attenuated form, given the residual political independence of Europe and given the longer intellectual legacy of communitarian-conservative thought there – held true on the European continent. European conservatism of the Christian democratic variety did exist comfortably alongside German ordoliberalism, also developed during the 1950s, which furnished forth the model for a ‘social market œconomy’ in the capitalist European West.

In short, the threat of a monstrously and openly godless East – in the form of the Soviets – kept the outwardly (but not inwardly) godly West sane in its appearances. With the disappearance of that threat, however, and the disappearance of the outward pressures which had kept the inner contradictions of the bourgeois centre-right consensus under wraps, the cracks began to appear with much greater prominence. The Western European bourgeois centre-right, intellectually and politically headquartered in West Germany, largely acquiesced in the betrayal, subversion, bombing, dismemberment and sale of the Yugoslav experiment in worker ownership and œconomic democracy: an experiment which kept much more of its inward meaning, its ‘Byzantine’ radicalism, despite being under a godless communist government. If the accommodation of and identification with American capital was the ‘original sin’ of Christian democracy, then the destruction of Yugoslavia was Christian democracy’s ‘sin of Cain’.

With God, with Christ, absent from its centre, the antinomies of Christian democracy have become ever more pronounced in the meanwhile. Some Christian democratic parties, like the Christlich Demokratische Union in Germany, have wedded themselves more and more firmly to the neoliberal consensus in œconomics and the neoconservative option in foreign policy. Others, more recently – like Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party, have embraced the backlash politics of our nationalist moment. One end of the spiritual trajectory of Christian democracy in Europe is the athymic, reptilian, austerity-embracing miserdom of Angela Merkel; the other end is the simian, jowl-shaking, mouth-breathing, gut-bucket bigotry of Mateusz Morawiecki. The devolution of Christian democracy into both the bourgeois politics Berdyaev despised, and the fascism that Weil did so much to resist, by way of the very same political rationalism which was meant to provide a bulwark against the latter in particular, is indeed the final ironic twist.

As a partial corrective to the above narrative – I am not insensible of the historical sins of social democracy, either, which are of much earlier provenance than those of Christian democracy. But the one advantage the centre-left politics of the elder European establishment enjoys over the centre-right is that it isn’t weighted down with the old Cold War suspicions that any and every material effort to ameliorate the privation and debt of the toiling masses is, at bottom, a creeping communist conspiracy. (Hint: historically, it’s been quite the opposite.) Still, a ‘harder’ left approach (like that of Samir Amin, for example) is more amenable to considering the thick communal attachments that the modern rationalised œconomy does so much to uproot, as well as the specific, systemic deprivations faced worldwide by rural people – what used to be a strength of the Catholic distributists.

But amid this Luciferian absconsion of Christian democratic politics, there is still to be seen a deep, spiritual yearning for a common life which approximates justice and equity. Moreover, the centrifugal pulls of the body politic away from the centre in the directions of nationalism and communism are, in fact, warped expressions of this yearning. But the direction for this politics is not to be found in the old political rationalism – the world of wonkery and interest-group balancing and focus-group sloganeering. The impetus for this kind of public life rests instead in those post-colonial areas of the world where Christianity is not merely a civilisational husk, regarded as dry grass to be threshed for its rationalised kernels: to Africa, to Asia broadly considered, to the Balkans and Eastern Europe and Russia. We can and should still look to the leading lights of the Christian democratic moment in Western Europe as one of the great intellectual wellsprings of this kind of politics; however, we should recognise that the politics that has coöpted their names is en fuite and very far indeed from home.

Holy Hierarch Swíþhún of Winchester

Saint Swíþhún of Winchester

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate Swíþhún [Swithun, or Swithin], the renowned ninth-century Bishop of Winchester who is connected with Æþelwulf King and also with his distant successor, Saint Æþelwold of Winchester.

Saint Swíþhún was born around the year 800, during either the reign of Beorhtríc of Wessex or his successor Ecgberht, who returned from exile to Wessex in 802 upon his foe Beorhtríc’s death. How Swíþhún spent the first thirty-eight years of his life remain, sadly, a blank and a loss to history; however, one hagiographer states that he was ordained a parish priest by the Bishop of Winchester at the time, Helmstán, in 838. He distinguished himself primarily by his humility and his love for the poor; however, he somehow managed to come to the attention of Ecgberht’s son Æþelwulf King of Wessex, who patronised this priest from his own wealth. Although the tales that Swíþhún served as an advisor to Æþelwulf and as a tutor to Æþelwulf’s famous son Ælfrǽd may or may not be pious fiction, some connexion between Æþelwulf and the humble priest is more than likely: in 852, after Bishop Helmstán’s death, the king had him appointed as Bishop of Winchester in his place. Saint Swíþhún is also directly attested in the primary sources as a witness to some twenty West Saxon charters in Æþelwulf’s name. We can see from this, also, that Saint Swíþhún was literate and formidably intelligent – yet all this worldly knowledge did not ‘go to his head’.

There are tales about how Swíþhún chose to use Æþelwulf’s trust which illustrate the saint’s modest and self-effacing character even as bishop, and also to his great love for the poor. He used the money he was donated largely to repair old churches or build new ones – or else gave it away to the poor. Whenever he would by virtue of his office hold a feast, he would only ever invite the poor and hungry, and never the rich. And when he had commissioned a repair project or a church-building project – or, indeed, the stone bridge at Winchester – instead of leaving the site or watching from afar, he would come by and sit and converse with the workmen as an equal as they worked. At one time, a poor old woman came across the bridge as the workmen were working on it, carrying a basket of eggs. The workmen maliciously took her basket and smashed the eggs. Swíþhún saw this and took pity on the woman. He chastised the workmen, mended the broken eggs and restored them to her basket. She thanked the bishop with tears in her eyes as she went on her way.

Swíþhún’s laudable and praiseworthy self-effacement extended even to his death, which occurred on the fifteenth of July, 863. His wish was not to be buried inside the church at Winchester; instead he asked that he be buried outside beneath the threshold of the church door, so that the folk going to church and passers-by might tread over him, and so that the rain from the eaves might fall upon him. This wish was only to be honoured for a short time; for God had other uses for His saint. During the Benedictine reform movement of the late 900s, one of the principals, Saint Æþelwold of Winchester acting on behalf of Saint Éadgár of England, had Saint Swíþhún’s relics dug up from underneath the threshold and translated into the church. This translation was undertaken for the purpose of bolstering local observance of a saintly cultus in Winchester and building support for the monastic reforms of Saint Æþelwold, Saint Dúnstán and Saint Ósweald. Nevertheless, the church tradition holds that the humble Saint Swíþhún was displeased with the move, despite the good intentions of his translators. The translation into the church was delayed on account of excessively heavy rains – from which arose the legend of Saint Swíþhún’s feast day being a predictor of the weather during the English summer:

Saint Swithun’s Day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
Saint Swithun’s Day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair.

Saint Swíþhún thereafter became a favourite intercessor among farmers, to whom they would pray for rain in the event of a drought. The cultus of Saint Swíþhún spread even as far afield as Norway: he is the patron of Stavanger Cathedral there, which is now held by the state Lutheran Church. Holy Father Swíþhún, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

The grace of God manifestly revealed thee
To thy flock as a teacher of compunction,
A model of meekness and a champion of piety;
For by thy surpassing humility thou didst attain the summit of holiness,
And for thy manifold virtues thou hast received a crown on high.
O holy bishop Swíþhún our father, entreat Christ God,
That He save those who honour thy memory with love.

Winchester Cathedral

Holy Hierarch Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury

Peterborough Cathedral

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate the sixth Archbishop of Canterbury, the first native-born Englishman to hold that see. First, a note on naming. In the world Friþwine, this Archbishop of Canterbury was given a Greek name that is transcribed into Latin in various ways. In the local English sources, it is always, including by Saint Bede (who should have known better), written Deusdedit. But the name Deusdedit (‘God has given’) is an inaccurate Latinisation of the Greek name Theódotos [Θεόδοτος] (‘given by God’), which is more appositely rendered in Latin as Deodatus or Adeodatus, the ‘simple, devout, wise and shrewd’ pre-Schismatic saintly Pope of Rome for whom the English Deusdedit was likely named! In fact, the English Deusdedit is known precisely by this latter name shared with his patronal Pope (Adeodato, Adeodat) in Southern European Romance countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Romania. I use the name Deusdedit in this blog post both to avoid confusion for my primarily English-language audience as well as out of respect for the primary sources, but I do want to take the opportunity to register with firm resolution that I find this Latinisation inept and improper. Saint Iþamar, I wag my scholarly finger at you – naughty, naughty!

This is something of an opposite case from that of his predecessor Saint Mellitus, where a certain degree of etymological overcorrection led his name to be sometimes incorrectly transcribed in our iconography as Meletios [Μελέτιος] despite the two names having completely different origins. See, Greeks can get it wrong, too.

Ahem. As I was saying…

Friþwine was a South Saxon monk, probably of the first generation of insular Saxons raised by Christian eldern since the conversion of the saintly Æþelberht King by Saint Augustine of Canterbury. He was consecrated as bishop by the aforementioned Saint Iþamar of Rochester, and subsequently elevated to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the first native-born Englishman to occupy that office: his saintly predecessors –Augustine, Laurence, Mellitus, Justus and Honorius – had all been Romans of Italy, OG members of the Gregorian mission to the English.

Friþwine, who was given the name of Deusdedit at his consecration, had the misfortune – or perhaps good fortune, depending on whom you ask – of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury at a time when the power and prestige of the office was at a low ebb. There were few new consecrations of bishops under his rule – the one notable exception being the West Saxon Damian, Iþamar’s successor as Bishop of Rochester. However, Deusdedit did consecrate several new churches and monasteries during his tenure, such as Medehamstede Abbey – which is now the notable Peterborough Cathedral.

Deusdedit was Archbishop of Canterbury for, again according to Bede, nine years, four months and two days. Little else is known of him for certain, except that he seems to have lived the meek, humble and blameless life expected of a monastic, and one fit for sainthood. After an ominous solar eclipse appeared in May of 664, southern England was wracked by an episode of bubonic plague, which afflicted Saint Deusdedit. The Synod of Whitby took place during this year, though the Archbishop was too ill to attend in person.

Deusdedit reposed in the Lord on the fourteenth of July, 664, and one of his priests – a ‘good man well-fitted to be a bishop’ named Wigheard – was sent to Rome to attain the Pope’s blessing to succeed him. Sadly, Wigheard too succumbed to the plague during an outbreak in Rome; and a Greek of Asia Minor, Saint Theodore of Tarsus, was chosen instead on the recommendation of the African monk Saint Hadrian by Pope Saint Vitalian of Rome to succeed Saint Deusdedit in Canterbury. Holy Father Deusdedit, meek and loving archpastor of the Kentish folk, we ask you entreat Christ God to save our souls!