08 — East and West
Boniface’s intense loyalty to Rome is the feature of his life most liable to anachronistic misreading. This section addresses it directly and even-handedly: it reads his Roman loyalty strictly in its pre-Schism setting — what an oath to the see of Peter did and did not mean in the eighth century, three hundred years before the schism of 1054 — and it sets out his standing as a saint of the undivided Church, venerated in the Orthodox tradition, with his feast on 5 June.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)
It is easy, from a vantage long after 1054, to enlist Boniface in later controversies — to read his oath to the pope and his work for the Roman–Carolingian alliance as proto-papalism, or conversely to feel that an Orthodox Christian must apologize for his Roman zeal. Both reactions are anachronistic. Boniface belonged to the undivided Church of the first millennium; his Rome was the senior apostolic see of a still-united Christendom, not the papal monarchy of later centuries; and the doctrines and jurisdictional claims that would divide East and West had not yet arisen. These two files read his Roman loyalty without projecting the schism backward, and set out his place in the Orthodox veneration of the pre-Schism Western saints.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| A Roman Loyalist and the Undivided Church | Boniface’s loyalty to Rome read in its eighth-century, pre-Schism context: what the oath, the pallium, and the legatine commission meant before 1054, and what they did not mean; an even-handed treatment that refuses anachronism in either direction. |
| The Orthodox Reception | Boniface as a saint of the undivided Church; his veneration in the Orthodox tradition; the feast on 5 June; the basis on which a pre-Schism Western missionary-martyr is honored as an Orthodox saint. |
See Also
- The Commission from Rome — the oath and the papal mandate read here in context
- The Papacy and the Carolingians — the Roman–Carolingian alliance, read without anachronism
- Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism — the later divergence not yet present in his day
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church to which he belonged
References
- The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.
- Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface. Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954.
- Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001.
- Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.