03 — The Apostle of Germany
The missionary heart of the collection: Boniface’s preaching and church-founding in Hesse and Thuringia through the 720s and 730s, and the single most famous act of his life — the felling of the sacred oak of the god Donar at Geismar, the deliberate, public destruction of a pagan cult-object that, in Willibald’s telling, broke the hold of the old gods on the Hessians. Here the missionary method, the confrontation with Germanic paganism, and the limits of what the sources will support are all on view.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)
This section covers the period after the consecration of 722, when Boniface, now a missionary bishop with a papal mandate and the protection of Charles Martel, turned to the German lands east of the Rhine. In Hesse and Thuringia he found a population partly Christianized, partly pagan, and largely served — where served at all — by clergy he judged irregular or corrupt. His work there was at once evangelism among pagans and reform among nominal Christians. The felling of Donar’s Oak stands at the center of the story as the dramatic emblem of the first task; it is reported by Willibald and is pinned here to that attestation, with the historical questions handled openly.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Hesse and Thuringia | The mission east of the Rhine through the 720s–730s; the preaching, the reported mass baptisms, the founding of the first churches and monastic cells; the mixed field of pagans and lapsed or irregular Christians; the method Boniface and his adviser Daniel of Winchester worked out. |
| The Felling of Donar’s Oak | The destruction of the sacred oak of Donar (Jupiter) at Geismar, pinned to Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii; the confrontation with Germanic paganism, the building of a chapel from the wood, and a source-critical reading of the famous scene. |
See Also
- The Commission from Rome — the mandate under which this mission was conducted
- Bishoprics and Monasteries — how the converted territories were organized
- The Life by Willibald — the source for the oak and the mission narrative
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of Boniface’s mission
References
- Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface. Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954.
- The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.
- Clay, John-Henry. In the Shadow of Death: Saint Boniface and the Conversion of Hessia, 721–54. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010.
- Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001.