04 — The Mission to the English
Of all Gregory’s acts, the one that most shaped the future was the mission he sent in 596 to convert the Anglo-Saxons of Britain. He dispatched a party of monks from his own monastery of St. Andrew’s, under the prior Augustine (later Augustine of Canterbury), to the kingdom of Kent, whose king Æthelberht had a Christian Frankish wife. The mission succeeded: Kent was converted, Canterbury became the see from which the English Church grew, and Gregory was remembered ever after as the “apostle of the English.” These files treat the sending of Augustine — and the famous story, told by Bede, of the slave-boys in the Roman market who moved Gregory to the mission — and the remarkable missionary method Gregory laid down in his written answers to Augustine’s questions, the Libellus responsionum.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)
The English mission is doubly important for this guide. Historically, it is the act by which a Roman pope reached out to evangelize a barbarian people beyond the bounds of the old empire, founding a Church — that of the English — whose own historian, Bede, would venerate Gregory above all others as “our apostle.” Methodologically, it is also a test case in pinning a beloved story to its source: the “non Angli sed angeli” anecdote, on which so much of Gregory’s English fame rests, comes to us not from Gregory but from Bede and an earlier Whitby Life, more than a century later, and must be handled accordingly. And the Libellus responsionum — Gregory’s instruction to baptize and adapt pagan customs rather than destroy them — shows a missionary mind of striking flexibility, and connects Gregory to the whole later history of the English Church (cross-linked here to St. Bede the Venerable and St. Aidan of Lindisfarne).
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Sending Augustine of Canterbury | The 596 mission to Kent; King Æthelberht and Queen Bertha; Augustine’s faltering start and Gregory’s letters of encouragement; the conversion of Kent and the founding of Canterbury; and the “non Angli sed angeli” story, pinned to Bede and the Whitby Life. |
| The Responsa and Method | The Libellus responsionum — Gregory’s written answers to Augustine’s questions; the famous instruction to convert pagan temples to churches and to baptize pagan festivals rather than destroy them; the accommodationist missionary method and the question of the Libellus’s authenticity. |
See Also
- Servus Servorum Dei — the pope whose monastery supplied the missionaries
- The Gregorian Legacy — Gregory remembered as the apostle of the English
- St. Bede the Venerable — the historian who recorded the mission and venerated Gregory as “our apostle”
- St. Aidan of Lindisfarne — the later evangelist of the English north in the same mission-history
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church that sent the mission
References
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Books I–II. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
- Gregory the Great. The Letters of Gregory the Great. Trans. John R. C. Martyn. 3 vols. Toronto: PIMS, 2004.
- Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991.