The Orthodox Reception

Boniface died in 754, three centuries before the schism of 1054, a bishop and martyr of the undivided Church. As one of the pre-Schism Western saints, he is venerated in the Orthodox tradition along with the other holy missionaries, bishops, and martyrs of the first-millennium West. This file sets out the basis of that reception — why and how a Western missionary-martyr who served the see of Rome is honored as an Orthodox saint — and notes his feast on 5 June and the place he holds among the Western saints whom contemporary Orthodox Christians, especially in the West, have increasingly recovered.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The principle that governs Boniface’s Orthodox reception is simple and is the same principle that governs the reception of all the great Western saints of the first millennium: the saints of the undivided Church belong to the whole Church, East and West alike, because they lived and died within the one communion before the division of 1054 (Ware 1993; on the principle, The Pre-Schism Church). Boniface was a bishop in communion with all five patriarchates; he confessed the faith of the seven Ecumenical Councils (or the six that had met in his lifetime, the seventh following soon after); he held no doctrine that the Orthodox Church rejects; and he sealed his life with martyrdom for Christ. By every measure that the Orthodox Church applies to the saints of the first millennium, Boniface is one of them (Ware 1993).

His Roman loyalty, far from disqualifying him, is read in this light as the loyalty of an orthodox Western Christian to the orthodox see of Rome of his own day — not as adherence to the later papal claims over which East and West divided, which did not yet exist (see A Roman Loyalist and the Undivided Church). The Orthodox Church does not venerate the developed papacy; it venerates the saints who served the one Church when Rome was still part of it, and Boniface is among the greatest of them.

The Western Saints in the Orthodox Tradition

In recent generations the Orthodox Church, and especially Orthodox Christians living in the historically Western lands, have undertaken a deliberate recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints — the apostles, missionaries, monastics, and martyrs of Gaul, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and the Germanic lands who belong to the undivided Church (Ware 1993; on the recovery, see the sibling collections on St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Benedict of Nursia). This recovery rests on the recognition that the Orthodox Church is not an Eastern Church only but the continuation of the one Church of the first millennium, whose saints include the holy ones of the West. Boniface, as the apostle of an entire people and a martyr for the faith, has a natural and honored place among these recovered Western saints.

He stands in particular alongside the other Anglo-Saxon and Insular saints of the missionary age — Bede, Hilda, Aidan, Cuthbert, and the rest of that luminous company — and alongside the earlier Western missionary-bishops such as Patrick and Martin of Tours (see St. Bede the Venerable, St. Hilda of Whitby, St. Patrick of Ireland). The Anglo-Saxon church that produced him is one the Orthodox tradition has come especially to cherish, and Boniface — its greatest missionary export — is among its most significant figures.

The Feast and the Title

Boniface is commemorated on 5 June, the day of his martyrdom at Dokkum in 754; this is his feast in the Western calendars and in the Orthodox commemoration of the pre-Schism Western saints (Levison 1946; on the calendar, The Church Calendar). He is honored under the title by which history has known him — the Apostle of the Germans (Apostolus Germanorum) — a title earned by the conversion and ordering of an entire people, and as a holy hieromartyr, for he was at once a bishop and a martyr (Wood 2001; see Legacy and Assessment).

Why He Matters to the Orthodox Reader

For the Orthodox Christian, Boniface offers several things. He is a model of missionary martyrdom — a man who gave his life preaching Christ to the heathen and died as the ancient martyrs died, undefended and forgiving (see Dokkum 754). He is a witness to the catholicity of the undivided Church, an Anglo-Saxon who became the apostle of the Germans under a Roman commission, embodying the unity of a Christendom that stretched from the Eastern patriarchates to the western edge of the known world. And he is a reminder that the Orthodox faith was, in the first millennium, the faith of the whole Church, West as well as East — that the holiness of a Boniface, a Patrick, a Benedict, is part of the Orthodox inheritance, not foreign to it (Ware 1993).

The recovery of Boniface among the Orthodox is thus not an act of annexation but of recognition: the acknowledgment that this missionary-martyr of the eighth-century West was, and is, a saint of the one Church to which the Orthodox tradition lays claim — venerated rightly, with his feast on 5 June, as the Apostle of the Germans and a holy martyr of Christ.

See Also

References

  • Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The martyrdom and the basis of the cult.)
  • Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The date of the feast and the early cult.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (Boniface as missionary-martyr and the title “Apostle of the Germans.”)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The Orthodox reception of the pre-Schism Western saints; the undivided Church of the first millennium.)