A Pre-Schism Western Saint

Alban belongs wholly to the undivided Church: he died, on any dating, in the third or early fourth century, and the Church that opened his tomb in 429 to lay the apostles’ relics beside him was the one Church of East and West. This file sets out the theology of his Orthodox veneration — inheritance, not adoption — and the formal acts that expressed it: the ROCOR recovery of the Western saints under St. John Maximovitch (Decree No. 223, 1953) and the 9 March 2017 decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose list of pre-Schism Western saints added to the calendar names St. Alban the protomartyr of Britain explicitly.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

The Principle: One Church, One Roll of Martyrs

The ground of Orthodox veneration of Alban is ecclesiology, not sentiment. Through roughly the first millennium the Church was one in East and West: one faith, one baptism, one calendar of martyrs honoured from Britain to Mesopotamia. Alban died — whether under Severus c. 209, in the 250s, or under Diocletian c. 304 (see The Evidence) — not merely before the Schism but before Nicaea: he belongs to the age of the persecuted, pre-Constantinian Church, the common root of every later communion. To speak of the Orthodox Church “adopting” him is therefore to get the history backwards. He was glorified by the veneration of the undivided Church — a Gallic bishop at his tomb in 429, a Gallic poet counting him among the world’s martyrs c. 570 (Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 8.3.155) — and the Orthodox Church, in venerating him now, recognizes what he already was (see the identical logic worked through for a sister saint in The Orthodox Reception (St. Patrick), and the hub treatment in The Pre-Schism Church).

Alban’s case gives the principle a peculiarly concrete form, because the earliest document of his cult is itself an icon of the undivided Church: Germanus of Auxerre, sent from Rome’s Celestine by way of Gaul, opening a British tomb to place in it “relics of all the apostles and of various martyrs,” that saints “gathered from diverse lands, equals in heaven, should be lodged in one grave” — and carrying British blood-earth back to Gaul (Constantius, Vita Germani 16, trans. Hoare, The Western Fathers, 1954; see The Visit of Germanus). The 429 relic-exchange is the pre-Schism communion of saints enacted in a single liturgical gesture: one Church, sharing its martyrs as common treasure across every boundary of province and people. Orthodox veneration of Alban today claims nothing more than what that gesture claimed.

The content of the cult raises no doctrinal difficulty of any kind. What the tradition attributes to Alban is the primitive substance of Christian sanctity: he confessed “the true and living God, who created all things” and died rather than sacrifice to idols (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.7, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, Oxford, 1969). There is nothing here to examine for “unblemished confession” beyond the confession itself — the martyr’s creed is the first article of every creed, and the criterion the Russian Synod’s commission applied to the Western saints in 2017 (see below) is met by the very words the tradition puts in his mouth (see Bede and the Protomartyr).

The Diaspora Recovery: St. John Maximovitch and ROCOR

The conscious modern recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints belongs to the twentieth-century Orthodox diaspora, and its central figure was St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco (1896–1966). As a ROCOR hierarch in Western Europe in the 1950s, St. John was keenly aware, as his hagiographers record, “of the multitude of saints who pleased God in the West before the Great Schism of 1054”; he collected their lives and images, restored their commemoration among his flock, and submitted lists of Western saints to the ROCOR Synod — his Decree No. 223, “On the Veneration of Ancient Saints of the West” (23 April 1953), directing that the pre-Schism confessors of the Orthodox faith in the Western lands be honoured (“St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco,” OrthoChristian.com; the decree and its context are treated at length in this repository’s St. John of Shanghai collection and in the Patrick collection’s reception file). Through this labour saints such as Genevieve of Paris and Patrick of Ireland — and with them the martyrs and monastics of ancient Britain — re-entered the living devotion of Orthodox communities in the West, decades before any synod in Moscow acted. For the Orthodox faithful of the British diaspora specifically, the recovery meant that the saints of their adopted land — Alban first among them, as its protomartyr — could be venerated as their own (see Orthodox Britain and the Feast).

The 2017 Decision: Alban Named

Formal pan-Russian expression came on 9 March 2017, when the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, at a session chaired by Patriarch Kirill, added more than fifteen pre-Schism Western saints to the Church’s calendar and menologion, following the report of Metropolitan Clement of Kaluga and Borovsk, chairman of the commission compiling the Menaion. The commission’s stated principle was the inclusion of ancient saints “who labored in western lands before the Great Schism of 1054,” its stated criterion each saint’s “unblemished confession of the Orthodox faith” — and the approved list, alongside St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Genevieve of Paris, expressly included St. Alban the protomartyr of Britain (“St. Patrick of Ireland and Other Western Saints Officially Added to Russian Orthodox Church Calendar,” OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/101734.html, March 2017; the decision’s framing as a reminder “of the times of the undivided Church” was made explicit in Russian church commentary — Pravmir, “Inclusion of Western Saints’ Names on Moscow Patriarchate Calendar Aims to Remind of Times of Undivided Church,” 2017).

Three things about the act deserve note. First, it was ratification, not innovation: Alban had been venerated by Orthodox Christians in Britain for decades (and by the undivided Church for a millennium and a half); the Synod gave the whole Russian Church’s sanction to a veneration already alive. Second, it was ecclesiologically precise: the pre-Schism criterion concedes nothing to later Western developments the Church has not received — the saint is received on the basis of the faith he confessed in the undivided age, which in a martyr of the persecutions is the baptismal faith itself (METHODOLOGY §4.1 governs the framing here: the Orthodox Church receives the saints of the ancient West as her own, and this is stated as the Church’s position, not as one opinion among equals). Third, it was explicitly open-ended — a first step in a continuing enlargement of the calendar toward the full inheritance of the ancient West (OrthoChristian.com, 2017).

The Theology of Reception, in Alban’s Case

What does the Church claim when she sets a Romano-British martyr of uncertain date in her calendar? Exactly what the hagiography-versus-history section of this collection concluded she claims (see Bedrock and Legend): not a certified biography but a received cult — the unbroken testimony, from 429 at latest, that this man glorified God by his death and intercedes for those who ask. The 2017 act did not adjudicate between Morris and Bede on the year of the martyrdom, and did not need to; the Church’s reception runs on the cult’s rails. Nor did the open dating question give the Synod’s commission any pause that the record shows — rightly, since the dies natalis of 22 June, the thing the calendar actually requires, has been fixed since Bede (Bede, HE I.7; see The Scholarly Positions on the feast’s independence from the dating problem).

There is also a pastoral dimension, best stated plainly. Orthodoxy in Britain is largely a church of immigrants and converts, worshipping in a land whose visible Christian fabric — cathedrals, place-names, calendars — is post-Schism and Reformed. The pre-Schism saints are the bridge: in venerating Alban, the Russian, Greek, Romanian, or English-convert Orthodox Christian venerates a saint who is simultaneously of this land and of the one Church — no more foreign to Orthodoxy than to England. The protomartyr of Britain turns out to be the natural patron of Britain’s newest Christians, precisely because he is its first (see Orthodox Britain and the Feast, and the same dynamic in St. Columba of Iona and St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne).

See Also

References

  • Constantius of Lyon. Vita Germani 16, trans. F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed and Ward, 1954. (The 429 relic-exchange.)
  • Bede. Historia ecclesiastica I.7, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The confession; the feast of 22 June.)
  • Venantius Fortunatus. Carmina 8.3.155. (Alban in the Gallic catalogue of the world’s martyrs, c. 570.)
  • “St. Patrick of Ireland and Other Western Saints Officially Added to Russian Orthodox Church Calendar.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/101734.html), March 2017. (The 9 March 2017 Holy Synod decision; Metropolitan Clement’s report; the criteria; the list including St. Alban the protomartyr of Britain.)
  • “Inclusion of Western Saints’ Names on Moscow Patriarchate Calendar Aims to Remind of Times of Undivided Church.” Pravmir (pravmir.com), 2017.
  • “St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/97771.html); St. John Maximovitch, Decree No. 223, “On the Veneration of Ancient Saints of the West” (23 April 1953). (The ROCOR recovery of the Western saints.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §4.1–4.2, this repository. (The confessional standpoint and the both-sides scope governing this file.)