It is generally taken that for much of the seventh century, the Irish Church was more or less in a state of schism. Disagreement over the dating of Easter in particular lay at the heart of the rift, which had deepened and hardened until by c. 630–40, it is suggested, two rival factions had taken to gathering separately in synods from which their opponents were excluded.Footnote 1 In outline, this was a division between a party intent on reform, concerned that practices which were current in Ireland did not conform to those of the universal Church, and a rival party of more conservative churchmen which remained strongly in favour of retaining those existing practices to which the Irish Church was accustomed. Although Easter was the most high-profile issue over which the two groups differed, it has been proposed that a whole array of other subjects, ranging from the principles of ecclesiastical organisation to the aims and methods of biblical exegesis, also became matters for dispute.Footnote 2 Exactly when we should imagine the dispute to have run its course is somewhat unclear: perhaps when conformity on the question of Easter had been reached, after the monastery of Iona abandoned its former practices in 716; or perhaps, if there really were a number of additional areas of dispute, then we should imagine factional loyalties persisting even further into the eighth century.Footnote 3 Whatever the full range of issues at stake, and whenever they were finally laid aside, the division between the two parties is held to have been sufficiently deep that by the height of the debate, it had attained a clear vocabulary: those churchmen who advocated for reform came to be termed Romani (the “Romans”) by themselves and by their opponents, while their rivals were identified instead as Hibernenses (the “Irish”).
This picture of the seventh-century Irish Church depends chiefly on an interpretation of the canonical compilation known as the Collectio canonum Hibernensis. Probably assembled in the early eighth century and described by its compilers as a work which had had to navigate “a great forest of writings,” the Hibernensis gathered together excerpts from a bewildering variety of authorities and sought to organise them systematically into “a brief, clear and harmonious exposition in a single volume.”Footnote 4 The sources of those excerpts were identified for readers by means of short attributions: to individual books of the Bible, to named ecclesiastical figures, and, most importantly for us, to a range of “synods.” Among those synodical canons are a substantial number which the compilers attributed either to Romani or to a sinodus Romana (“Roman synod”), and still more which they ascribed in similar fashion to Hibernenses and a sinodus Hibernensis (“Irish synod”).Footnote 5 On the grounds that both the “Roman” and “Irish” canons sometimes contain material that is derived from a number of firmly or potentially Hiberno-Latin sources, we have long taken it that these canons represent the acts of Irish church councils held in the period prior to the compilation of the Hibernensis. Broad differences are nevertheless apparent between those canons ascribed to Romani, which for instance make notable use of sources from beyond Ireland, and those ascribed to Hibernenses, which seem to have drawn upon less far-flung sources and which also exhibit connections with Irish law in a way that the canons of the Romani do not.Footnote 6 Although none of the canons ascribed either to Hibernenses or to Romani refer explicitly to the matter of Easter, we have naturally supposed that the way that the compilers of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis distinguished “Irish synods” from “Roman synods” must relate to the way that the respective merits of the “Irish” and “Roman” methods of calculating the date of Easter were debated during the seventh century. The Hibernensis has seemed therefore to indicate that the Irish Church must, as Thomas Charles-Edwards put it, have “dissolved into fully distinct ‘Roman’ and ‘Irish’ parties with separate synods” as a result of the debates over Easter.Footnote 7
This article argues that when the compilers of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis referred to Romani and Hibernenses, they were not speaking about parties within the early Irish Church as we have conventionally supposed. Our knowledge of both the Hibernensis and its sources has increased considerably since J. B. Bury first proposed, more than a century ago, that the material ascribed in the Hibernensis to “Roman synods” and “Irish synods” should be understood in this way.Footnote 8 It is the material which the Hibernensis identified as the work of Romani that this article focuses on in particular. I argue that there are reasons to think that significantly fewer of these “Roman” canons derived from Irish sources than we have previously thought. It may therefore be more likely that when the Hibernensis distinguished between “Irish” and “Roman” synods, it did so not because these were the statements of two opposing groups of Irish churchmen, but instead because this reflected the compilers’ sense of which canons had been issued in Ireland and which canons had not. The consequence of rethinking these labels from the Hibernensis is, in turn, that the very existence of those supposedly long-lived and mutually opposed “Roman” and “Irish” parties, meeting in their separate synods for much of the seventh century, becomes extremely difficult to substantiate. This is not to deny, I should say at once, that the debate over the “Roman” and “Irish” dating of Easter was the source of major disagreement and controversy in seventh-century Ireland. We have long recognized, however, that some of our evidence appears to indicate moments of “inter-party communication” and collaboration right across the period in which the two parties were meant to have been meeting in their separate synods.Footnote 9 It is only the Hibernensis, and the way that we have interpreted the appearance within it of “Irish synods” and “Roman synods,” which has convinced us that the debates over Easter had eventually produced a situation in which adherents of one view could no longer abide to be present in synod alongside adherents of the other view and remained resolute in that conviction for a period of several decades. In this article, I suggest that our confidence that the Hibernensis “demonstrates that separate synods identified as ‘Roman’ or ‘Irish’ were meeting in the seventh century” may have been misplaced, and therefore that we may in fact have conjured into existence two well-defined, long-lasting and self-identifying “parties” that did not exist in reality.Footnote 10
The Romani and the “Second Synod of St. Patrick”
Several of the canons which the compilers of the Hibernensis attributed repeatedly to Romani came from a short canonical collection which has come to be known as the “Second Synod of St. Patrick.” It is a somewhat miscellaneous document, covering an array of issues from the baptism of infants to the resolution of conflicting testimonies in legal cases.Footnote 11 Neither the date nor the immediate context for this “Second Synod” has been established with any certainty, beyond a general agreement that the supposed connection with St. Patrick is spurious; but on the basis that the Hibernensis could attribute it to Romani, we have generally concluded that the text must therefore have been produced by members of the “Roman party” within the early Irish Church.Footnote 12 It was certainly written by someone who was mindful of the existence of divergent views since, as studies by Aidan Breen and Sven Meeder have highlighted, one of the text's most distinctive features is the way that it spoke about practices that were followed only “among us” (apud nos), or about things that “we” do, but that which others seemingly might not. Both Breen and Meeder concluded that this “unconventional” language was a clear sign that the text had been produced in an atmosphere of “rivalry,” indicating “that these statutes were passed and enacted by one group against another.”Footnote 13 The “Second Synod of St. Patrick,” then, is a text which is hard to understand as anything other than the product of ecclesiastical dispute and disagreement.
It seems to me, however, that if we were to read the “Second Synod” without any steer from the compilers of the Hibernensis, we would never have supposed that the group which had produced the text were in the habit of referring to themselves as Romani. In the oldest recension of the text, there are three separate canons which make mention of the views and opinions of Romani.Footnote 14 In each case, however, the author referred to these Romani in the third person, never in the first person which he used so freely elsewhere.Footnote 15 For us to suppose that the “we” for whom he spoke were identical to the Romani mentioned in other parts of the text, we would have to maintain that the text routinely, and inconsistently, switches between the first and third person in reference to the same group of people. This seems particularly hard to maintain when one of the canons refers both to Romani (in the third person) and to “our” practices within the same sentence:
Concerning unremitting abstinence from foods. The Romani state that the coming of Christ the Bridegroom shall find none of our laws of fasting [Statuunt Romani ut Christi aduentus sponsi nullas nostri leges ieiunii inueniat]. For what difference is there between a Novatian and a Christian, other than that a Novatian abstains unceasingly while a Christian fasts for a time only, so that place, time and person shall be observed in all things?Footnote 16
It was, in Aidan Breen's view, “highly improbable” that the group responsible for the text “would refer to themselves in the third person in one place and from the first person perspective in another,” and it was on that basis that he criticised alternative reconstructions of the text derived from the later, imperfect, recension of the “Second Synod.”Footnote 17 Nevertheless, his own conclusion that the “Second Synod” should be understood as “the legislation of the Romani” because it makes a number of third-person references to Romani requires us to read the text in exactly the way that he criticised.Footnote 18
We seem, therefore, to be faced with contradictory evidence. The compilers of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis understood the “Second Synod of St. Patrick” as the work of Romani, while for the author of the “Second Synod” himself, Romani were someone other than the group to which he thought that he belonged.Footnote 19 Moreover, although the author of the “Second Synod” did not identify himself as a Romanus, he clearly harbored no hostility towards Romani or their views. Each of the three occasions on which the “Second Synod” referred to Romani did so with approval, as if citing a recognised authority. In one of the more confrontational canons, dealing with the vexed subject of degrees of consanguinity, the “Second Synod” marshalled the views of the Romani against those of its apparent opponents, expressing disapproval of their practices because they had been “neither heard of nor read by the Romani.”Footnote 20 Elsewhere, it deployed the opinions of the Romani as if to settle a hitherto contested issue: “Concerning the separation of the sexes after a fault,” began one canon, “this is what the Romani say . . .”Footnote 21 Appealing explicitly to the authority of others to justify its rulings was a regular practice of the “Second Synod” which frequently directed its audience to listen to “what the Lord says,” “what the apostle says,” or to “hear the canonical statutes of the synod” on a given issue.Footnote 22 We should read the appeals to the views of Romani in the “Second Synod” in exactly the same way — as appeals to a source of authority which was respected by the group for which it spoke, but which was nonetheless external to them.
All this seems rather at odds with our conventional picture of the world which lay behind the “Second Synod” and the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, in which one was either a Romanus or not. One possibility would be to suggest that the eighth-century compilers of the Hibernensis were oversimplifying a more complicated situation which had pertained in the previous century, and that marginal groups and voices had in fact coexisted with the major parties of “Roman” and “Irish” opinion. But if we now have doubts about the context to which the “Second Synod” has previously been assigned, it is appropriate to first reopen some basic questions about its likely place of origin. Have we been correct to suppose that the “Second Synod” was written in Ireland at all? Although Sven Meeder states that “the Irish origin of the text . . . is not in doubt,” it has, I think, been assumed rather than demonstrated.Footnote 23 The supposition originates with J. B. Bury, on the basis that if the compilers of the Hibernensis could call it the work of a sinodus Romana, then it must have come “from the Acts of an Irish synod of the seventh century.”Footnote 24 But as Bury knew, and as Roy Flechner's new edition of the Hibernensis reinforces for us, the compilers of the Hibernensis also labelled several canons which manifestly did not originate in Ireland with the same labels of Romani or sinodus Romana.Footnote 25 These included excerpts from Gallic church councils and papal letters, and Bury proposed that in these cases we must be dealing with canons which had been adopted by the synods of the “Roman party” from these various “foreign sources,” and promulgated anew in their own acta.Footnote 26 As a solution to how authentically Irish texts and clearly not Irish texts could both share a common label in the Hibernensis, Bury's hypothesis is a neat one, but with regard to the “Second Synod” itself, it would permit us either to understand the text as an Irish composition, or to see it as a work which had been composed elsewhere and only subsequently gained acceptance in Ireland. Bury's preference for the first of those two options has guided subsequent scholarship on the text in the century or more since his work, but it is important to recognize that he advanced no particular evidence in support of it.
Aidan Breen's more recent search for textual affinities between the “Second Synod” and the Hiberno-Latin corpus represents a more thoroughgoing attempt to contextualize the piece, but in truth identified no clear quotation or dependency beyond instances where two or more authors cited the same biblical passage in support of their positions.Footnote 27 Nor can the interesting reappearance of one of its canons in an Old Irish legal text be taken as an indication of where the text was originally written, only that others besides the compilers of the Hibernensis had also taken it to be authoritative when they had encountered it.Footnote 28 There is, however, one canon in the “Second Synod” which exhibits an unexpected and close connection with a document written during the disputes over the legacy and direction of the monastic network established in Gaul and Italy by the Irish peregrinus Columbanus, and which may encourage us to place the “Second Synod” in a different context on the Continent.
The “Second Synod of St. Patrick” and the Regula cuiusdam patris
In the canon entitled “Concerning the taking of the Eucharist after a fault,” the “Second Synod” lays considerable stress on the salvific function of communion and emphasizes its necessity in a very particular circumstance:
After the examination of the prison for one year, the Eucharist is to be taken, especially on the night of Easter, on which anyone who does not receive Communion cannot be called a believer. Penitential fasts are short and strict among us for that reason, so that the soul of the believer shall not perish from having abstained from the celestial medicine for so long. As the Lord said, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.”Footnote 29
The incidental reference to an “examination of the prison” (examinatio carceris) is decidedly unusual — so unusual, indeed, that all three published translations of the “Second Synod” seem to have assumed that the text as we have it must be corrupt, and so rendered the phrase instead as a “testing of the body” or a “proving of the flesh” as if the text had meant to speak of an examinatio carnis.Footnote 30 The phrase is nevertheless common to both recensions of the “Second Synod” and secure in all eight complete manuscript witnesses to the text. It is, moreover, not exclusive to the “Second Synod,” but appears twice in an anonymous monastic rule preserved in Benedict of Aniane's Codex regularum under the inauspicious name of the Regula cuiusdam patris.Footnote 31 This Rule is a short and idiosyncratic document, marked out especially by its particular focus on the anticipated transgressions of its monastic community and the disciplinary measures needed to combat them. The measure which the Regula cuiusdam patris favoured above all was imprisonment, which it recommended regularly and for even the smallest indications of intransigence. “If a brother is found to be disobedient towards the abbot, the prior, or any of the brothers,” stated the Rule after its opening exhortations about the importance of love and obedience, “then he shall be sent into the prison.”Footnote 32 The author's expectation was that the wayward monk should conduct penance during his incarceration and would return to the community only “after the examination of the prison” (post examinationem carceris).Footnote 33 The phrase appears twice in the Regula cuiusdam patris, and appears to be found nowhere else other than our “Second Synod of St. Patrick.”
Despite its anonymity, the Regula cuiusdam patris can be placed into a well-defined historical context. It drew extensively upon the two Rules written by Columbanus, but adapted them according to radically different priorities. Albrecht Diem has made the persuasive case that it was written shortly after Columbanus's death in 615, during the period in which serious disputes arose in the monasteries of Bobbio and Luxeuil over their continued adherence to the ideals and practices of their founder.Footnote 34 Diem observed in particular that many of the specific changes which the Regula cuiusdam patris made to the Columbanian Rules fit closely with the criticisms voiced by the Luxeuil monk Agrestius, of which we have a partial record in Jonas of Bobbio's Life of Columbanus. According to Jonas, Agrestius had objected, among other things, to the fact that “their Rule required that the spoons from which they supped had to be signed repeatedly with the sign of the cross, and that a blessing had to be asked at the door of any building in the monastery when coming and going,” and “that the solemnities of Masses were performed with an inflated number of prayers and collects, along with many other superfluous things.”Footnote 35 The author of the Regula cuiusdam patris clearly shared these views. He made drastic cuts to the elaborate liturgical programme which Columbanus had laid out for his monks, simplifying the celebration of the Mass, removing technical liturgical language, and substantially reducing the number of psalms sung in the daily round.Footnote 36 He passed over entirely the detailed instructions which Columbanus had given for the blessing of objects and actions, which had indeed required them to continually sanctify themselves and their surroundings as they moved through the monastery and, especially, as they prepared for mealtimes.Footnote 37 Agrestius's grievances may well have extended to other matters besides these: he was certainly able to draw upon his connections from his time as notarius at the Burgundian royal court, as well as support from high-powered relatives like Abelenus, bishop of Geneva, and thereby to attain the backing of a powerful circle of allies, some clearly intent on settling their own scores with Luxeuil.Footnote 38 His discontent thus came ultimately to a synod at Mâcon in 626/27, at which Columbanus's successor at Luxeuil, the abbot Eustasius, offered his defence of the customs of his house.Footnote 39 Diem suggests that we should understand the Regula cuiusdam patris as a product of this contested moment in the 620s, which gave concrete shape to alternative visions of the meaning and nature of the monastic life that were being formulated inside the Columbanian network.
This reading of the Regula cuiusdam patris is, I think, a powerful and persuasive one. The question for us is whether there are grounds to think that the so-called “Second Synod of St. Patrick” might belong to this same context too, given the curious and otherwise unparalleled detail which both texts share about the “examination of the prison.” A single shared phrase is an exceptionally slender thread upon which to propose an association, but it deserves our consideration because the “examination of the prison” is not only an uncommon expression, but, more importantly, an uncommon idea. It conveyed a sense that the prison was an introspective and transformative space, the intended function of which was to facilitate the redemption of the errant soul through the performance of penance. The Regula cuiusdam patris made this explicit and stated outright that the wayward monk was incarcerated in order that he might “do as much penance as the senior determines, until he is corrected,” while in the “Second Synod” an equivalent view of the role of the prison is indicated by the immediate connection between the state of the prisoner unable to receive communion, and the need therefore for “penitential fasts [which] are short and strict.”Footnote 40 This shared notion in our two texts that imprisonment represented an appropriate method for enforcing penitential redemption was neither self-evident nor uncontroversial in this period. As Julia Hillner's recent work on the complex relationship of notions of imprisonment, punishment, and penance has shown, although Christian thinkers since Tertullian had opened up positive associations between the isolation of the prison and the reflective solitude of prayer, the notion that it was the very function of a prison to bring about personal redemption was not widespread by the seventh century.Footnote 41 The link between confinement and correction was established in the context of coenobitic monasticism, where the segregation of the sinner from his fellows was intended primarily to protect the purity and stability of the community at large, until such a time as the errant brother could, as the Rules of Pachomius put it, be “cleansed of all filth.”Footnote 42 Successive monastic legislators proposed various strategies of segregation, isolation, and confinement in pursuit of this goal, but tended not to refer to or conceptualize the spaces of penitential confinement as “prisons” (carceres).Footnote 43 Nor yet were the carceres of the secular world beyond the monastic enclosure routinely perceived to serve a corrective function for their inmates: the civic prisons which we encounter in early medieval hagiography remained forbidding places which typically did their inmates no good and only became “harmless,” according to the judgement of Constantius of Lyon, when they were “empty.”Footnote 44
For the “Second Synod” and the Regula cuiusdam patris to both express a shared conviction that prisons were primarily sites of penitential “examination” is, therefore, sufficiently unusual in this period as to raise the possibility of a connection between the two texts; and for both to express this uncommon idea by means of an identical phrase that appears to be found nowhere else is, in my view, hard to explain unless one text was quoting the other, or unless they had both been produced in closely associated contexts. If we were to suppose quotation, then it would seem more likely that the “Second Synod” was quoting from the Regula cuiusdam patris, rather than the other way around. It is after all the Rule which outlines in some detail the intended nature and function of its “examination of the prison,” while the “Second Synod” merely makes a passing reference to the practice. It says so little, indeed, that it is hard to tell whether what is being described is a secular or a monastic prison. We might see it either as the last of a series of canons in the “Second Synod” which deal with the affairs of monks (cc. 17–18 and 20–21, followed by the canon on the prison) or alternatively as the first of a new cluster of rulings which deal instead with lay concerns (cc. 23–31). It seems unlikely that the author of the Regula cuiusdam patris would have seized upon this ambiguous and incidental reference to an unfamiliar practice, and more probable that it was instead the “Second Synod” that was expanding upon the ideas of the Regula. But if the Regula cuiusdam patris should take priority in this way as the potential source, we should not lose sight of the text's evident obscurity even in the early Middle Ages. It is not a well attested document: had Benedict of Aniane not included it in his ninth-century compendium of Rules, it would survive as a complete text in no other manuscript and even Benedict seems to have known nothing of its original authorship or context, to judge from the inexact title which he gave to it in his collection.Footnote 45 It is hard to imagine the text being influential enough, or widely disseminated enough, to inform the author of the “Second Synod of St. Patrick,” if he were active in seventh-century Ireland, as we have typically supposed. But since the origins of the “Second Synod” are by no means certain, as we have seen, then we should consider the possibility that the “Second Synod” shares the distinctive ideas of the Regula about prisons and their uses because it had been written in a context not too far removed from that in which the Regula itself had been written on the Continent.
The influence upon the “Second Synod” of texts and ideas from the Continent is certainly not confined to the Regula cuiusdam patris. When the “Second Synod” considered the question of whether or not a man might marry the widow of his deceased brother, for instance, it passed over the biblical answer to that question expressed in Deuteronomy (which strongly encouraged such unions), and quoted instead the declaration made at the Council of Orléans in 511, and subsequently restated at the Council of Tours in 567, that such marriages were entirely impermissible.Footnote 46 In another place, the criticism voiced by the “Second Synod” about those who thought that marriage partners needed to be separated from one another only by four degrees of consanguinity seems likely to have been informed by the expanded understanding of incest which had been promulgated first at the Council of Epaone in 517, which extended the prohibited degrees of consanguinity as far as marriages between second cousins.Footnote 47 This, according to the Roman reckoning of consanguinity, was a prohibition as far as the sixth degree; and it is probable that it was this novel and influential expansion of the application of incest regulations which had made the more permissive observance of far fewer prohibited degrees of consanguinity seem insufficient to the creator of the “Second Synod.”Footnote 48 These passages certainly indicate, as Kathleen Hughes emphasized more than forty years ago, that the “Second Synod” was the work of someone “very much aware of the continental church.”Footnote 49 If we now require him not only to have been familiar with the pronouncements of major Gallic councils, but also with texts as idiosyncratic and poorly circulated as the Regula cuiusdam patris, then it is hard to avoid the suspicion that our author might have been “aware of the continental church” because he was himself the product of it. Certainly it is easier to imagine how the “Second Synod,” which enjoyed considerable circulation on the Continent and was quoted approvingly in penitentials and canon law collections alike, could come to be held as an authority also in Ireland by the compilers of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis despite being written elsewhere, than it is to maintain an Irish origin for the “Second Synod” and therefore to require its author somehow to have obtained and taken as authoritative the obscure monastic Rule produced by the circle associated with the Luxeuil monk Agrestius.
The debates over monastic practice in which the Regula cuiusdam patris participated were closely tied to a particular set of communities, during an intense but relatively short-lived moment in their history and perhaps that should encourage us to regard the text's availability to the creator of the “Second Synod” as an indication that he too cannot have been far removed from those same debates. There certainly seems to have been much that he would have agreed upon with Agrestius and his allies, to judge from some of the shared preoccupations which emerge if we read his text alongside the Regula. Both texts share an overriding concern, for instance, with the question of how the sins of one person might pollute others by association. Most of the first third of the “Second Synod” is given over to considerations of this issue, while for the Regula, the communal consequences of individual sin are advanced early on as the crucial justification for its especially punitive vision of monastic life.Footnote 50 Also common to both texts is their treatment of the salvific power of the Eucharist and its relationship to other spiritually beneficial acts. As Albrecht Diem has shown, although the Regula made ample room for the performance of penance, it was the Eucharist which “holds the position that is in other Columbanian rules held by paenitentia,” and which it emphasized as the essential “remedy for sins.”Footnote 51 The “Second Synod,” as we have seen, insisted on exactly the same principle, and justified its preference for periods of penance which were shorter and more exacting than those prescribed by others, precisely “so that the soul of the believer shall not perish from having abstained from the celestial medicine for so long.”Footnote 52
The otherwise unattested concept which both texts share, of achieving spiritual correction by way of an examinatio carceris, is not therefore an isolated point of convergence, but only the most distinctive aspect of a more pervasive resemblance between the two texts, and if we are indeed to regard the Regula as the work of the circle which the Luxeuil monk Agrestius had gathered around himself, one wonders whether the “Second Synod” might even be another product of that same milieu. There are certainly parts of the “Second Synod” which are capable of being read rather pointedly in connection with the specific details of Agrestius and his career. According to Jonas of Bobbio, the tensions between Agrestius and his abbot had begun when Eustasius tried to prevent Agrestius from leaving the monastery to embark upon missionary work, and it is tempting to associate this event with the statement in the “Second Synod” that monks should remain in the monasteries to which they had been admitted unless “a more profitable cause arises, in which case it should be granted with a blessing, each one seeking not ‘the things that are their own but those which are Jesus Christ's’.”Footnote 53 Agrestius himself cannot have been its author, given the somewhat peculiar but nonetheless explicit comment in the “Second Synod” that “we are not monks, but are instead what they call bactroperitae, that is, despisers [of the world],” and the related declaration that it was “we,” rather than monks, who “not inappropriately maintain the unity of the people.”Footnote 54 Those statements presumably indicate episcopal authorship and here, one wishes that we knew more about the various bishops and other allies who had given their support to Agrestius. His relative Abelenus, bishop of Geneva, was certainly among them and they clearly drew on existing connections among the Burgundian aristocracy — chiefly Warnachar, the maior palatii, who convened the synod in 626/27 and Treticus, bishop of Lyon, who presided over it — but Jonas of Bobbio, whose account remains our only narrative of the dispute, was content to leave the number and identity of most of the “other Gallic bishops” (ceteri Galliarum episcopi) undeclared.Footnote 55 As Andreas Fischer has emphasized, there are enough indications in Jonas's account to suspect both that the circle was wider than a casual reading of his text would suggest, and that the synod of Mâcon in no way resulted in the immediate disintegration of the group as Jonas tried to imply.Footnote 56 Our limited sense of their interests and ideals beyond the specific matters which Agrestius raised at Mâcon makes it hard to know for sure whether we should hold them directly responsible for the creation of the “Second Synod,” or only indirectly responsible for some of the ideas which passed eventually into it.Footnote 57
Whether we choose to see the “Second Synod” as another product of Agrestius and his circle, or only shaped in part by the ideas which he and his allies had propounded, a key aspect of the text was to insist that the views which it articulated were not those of some small and unrepresentative group, but were instead wholly aligned with well-established Christian norms. It repeatedly directed its readers to note the scriptural or canonical precedents which existed for its own opinions, while at the same time suggesting that its opponents were unable to provide any such indication of the authorities from which they had drawn their dissimilar notions. Those opponents were, it appears, the intended readers of the “Second Synod”: its opening words make clear that the text was in some sense a reply to a very particular, although unfortunately unnamed, readership, which it addressed in the second person (“Concerning what you have commanded . . .”), and whom it later criticized for observing customs which could be “neither heard nor read” anywhere else.Footnote 58 This was a familiar style of argument in the seventh century, for which the synod of Mâcon again provides us an instructive example. In pursuing his criticism of the monks of Luxeuil, Agrestius offered various accusations which together amounted to the charge that the abbot, his monks, and his saintly predecessor Columbanus were to be regarded as “heretics” on account of the way that their customs “differed from those of others”; and in discrediting Agrestius's memory, Jonas of Bobbio was quick to fling equivalent accusations back in the direction of Agrestius himself, saying that it was instead he who had “joined with schismatics” and become “separated from communion with the whole world.”Footnote 59 We should probably understand the “Second Synod” in much the same way, as part of an ongoing debate between its creators and its recipients about the orthodoxy of their respective positions.
It was this context which had motivated the “Second Synod” to make its appeals to the authority of Romani, which prompted our investigation. As Ralph Mathisen has observed, “the term Romanus could convey an image of religious affiliation” when deployed by writers in this period.Footnote 60 Specifically, it connoted what Walter Ullmann characterized as a sense of being a “member of a divine institution, the body of Christ, that was ruled by him whose seat was in Old Rome.”Footnote 61 Those who used this terminology typically did so to imply a perceived oneness of thought and practice which encompassed all of Latin Christendom, against which the thoughts and practices of others could be measured. This looks to have been its intended meaning in the “Second Synod.” The text expressed its scepticism about the unheard-of practices of its opponents precisely because they had been “neither heard nor read by the Romans,” thereby discrediting them on the grounds of nonconformity with the collected practice of Latin Christendom at large, while at the same time implying that its own declarations were perfectly in line with acceptable “Roman” opinion.Footnote 62 Continual vigilance in the face of nonconformity was imperative, the “Second Synod” suggested, to prevent new life being given to old heresies. It reminded its readers about the errors of the Novatianists in the course of its ruling about fasting, and positioned its own ideas as if they were a safeguard against theirs, not because active followers of this long-defunct sect had newly re-emerged in the seventh century, but rather because the continued critique of ancient errors offered a useful way of demonstrating an attentiveness towards the orthodoxy of one's own practices.Footnote 63 Again, this was a familiar technique to contemporaries. Later in the seventh century, Bonitus of Clermont made the same rhetorical use of the memory of the Novatianists in a letter which likened his own theological rivals to a resurgence of this same late antique sect.Footnote 64 The group which had produced the “Second Synod” strove to show themselves to be “orthodox in a world of deviance,” in Andreas Fischer's useful phrase, and seem to have found considerable utility in demonstrating their ability to distinguish clearly between what was heretical and what was “Roman.”Footnote 65
It is unfortunate that the identity of the readers to whom the “Second Synod” was addressed has not been preserved, and therefore that only the outlines of the dispute in which its creators and its readers were engaged can be determined. But if we are indeed to locate that dispute in seventh-century Gaul rather than in Ireland, as I have argued, then this carries important implications for the question of the divided state of the Irish Church in the seventh century with which I began this article and to which we should now return. In brief, my conclusion in what follows is that rethinking the origins of the “Second Synod of St. Patrick” not only means that the text can no longer be regarded as a window onto the ideas of a “Roman party” within the Irish Church, but also more fundamentally that the notion of a well-defined and self-identifying “Roman party,” holding its own synods for more than half a century in opposition to those of a rival “Irish party,” is itself an illusion.
“Roman synods,” “Irish synods,” and the Collectio canonum Hibernensis
To the compilers of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, it made sense to characterize the “Second Synod of St. Patrick” as a sinodus Romana (a “Roman synod”) or as the work of Romani (“Romans”). At least eight canons excerpted from the “Second Synod” are attributed in this way in one or both of the two recensions of the Hibernensis.Footnote 66 The compilers were not alone in attributing the text to “Romans,” and they may not have been the first to do so. In the so-called Collectio 400 capitulorum, an eighth- or ninth-century collection produced perhaps in southern Germany, a selection of canons from the “Second Synod” appears under the rubrics “Interrogandae Romanis” and “Interrogatio Romanis.” Since the Collectio 400 shows no sign of having been influenced directly by the Hibernensis, its independent association of material from the “Second Synod” with Romani is striking.Footnote 67 The same attribution is made in a roughly contemporary penitential, the Paenitentiale Martenianum; and perhaps also in the canons ascribed to Adomnán of Iona, where an oblique reference to certain “questions of the Romans” (quaestiones Romanorum) has again been understood in reference to the “Second Synod.”Footnote 68 It is likely, therefore, that the text had already attained its association with “Romans” before it came into the hands of any of these compilers, who probably had little indication of the precise circumstances in which the text had first been written. They clearly valued its contents, and perhaps regarded its purported “Romanness” as a sign of its authority, but may otherwise have had only a weak impression of exactly which “Romans” might have been responsible for its creation. On the basis that the compilers of the Hibernensis were willing to attribute canons from the “Second Synod” not only to “Romans,” but also, on at least one occasion, to Jerome, it may be that the “Second Synod” seemed to early medieval readers to be older and more venerable than it in fact was.Footnote 69 Exactly how it came subsequently to be associated with St. Patrick is hard to say, but certainly the compilers of the Hibernensis, for whom Patrick evidently held substantial authority, claimed none of the canons from the “Second Synod” as his work.Footnote 70
The Collectio canonum Hibernensis was not, therefore, alone in suggesting that the “Second Synod” had been created by “Romans.” It is nevertheless clear that the terms Romani and sinodus Romana hold a broader significance in the Hibernensis as a whole, since there are more than forty further canons which bear these same labels in one or both recensions of the collection. They are on the face of it a miscellaneous group of canons, drawn from a range of different sources. The compilers’ decision to classify them all by means of a shared label seems intended, however, to parallel the group of almost one hundred canons which were attributed instead to Hibernenses (the “Irish”) or to a sinodus Hibernensis (“Irish synod”) in one or both recensions. Indeed, the occasional appearance in the B-recension of variant labels like sinodus Romana uel Hibernensis (“a synod, either Roman or Irish”) reinforces the sense that we are intended to regard these two sets of canons as a pair in some way.Footnote 71
In any other context, we would probably have understood this paired contrast of material attributed to Hibernenses and to Romani to have been intended to distinguish between “things from Ireland” and “things from elsewhere in Latin Christendom.” Inclining us away from such a reading is the fact that some of the “Roman” canons can be shown to contain material taken from Hiberno-Latin sources, and it was on that basis that Bury first proposed that we should understand the “Roman” canons to refer to “synods held in Ireland in the seventh century in the interest of Roman reform.”Footnote 72 On this point, however, our conclusion that the “Second Synod of St. Patrick” may in fact originate in seventh-century Gaul fundamentally alters our sense of how much Hiberno-Latin material lies within the “Roman” canons of the Hibernensis. The canons which are attributed to Romani in one or both recensions of the collection, and which can currently be traced back to extant sources, can be summarized as follows:
• eight canons quoted from the Statuta ecclesiae antiqua Footnote 73
• two or three canons from the acts of Gallic councils which had not been collected into the Statuta Footnote 74
• three excerpts from papal lettersFootnote 75
• two canons from Dionysius Exiguus's translation of the Canones apostolorum Footnote 76
• one canon which runs together two passages from Cassian's De institutis coenobiorum Footnote 77
• two canons, perhaps, from the Excerpta de libris Romanorum et Francorum (unless in fact it was the Hibernensis which was the source for the Excerpta)Footnote 78
• one statement first found in a letter of Pope Innocent I, but which appears twice in a modified form that is otherwise extant only in Cummian's Paschal LetterFootnote 79
• one canon from the so-called “First Synod of St. Patrick”Footnote 80
• the various canons from our “Second Synod of St. Patrick”
Clearly, we have here a mix of Irish and non-Irish material all bearing the same attribution to Romani. But the mix is not an equal one and it is only for the last three items in this list that any connection with Ireland could be made. If we are now to regard the final item, the “Second Synod of St. Patrick,” as a work produced on the Continent in a context influenced by the debates over monastic practice which had been aired at the synod of Mâcon in 626/27, then the quantity of demonstrably Irish material which the compilers of the Hibernensis attributed to Romani becomes vanishingly slight.
Of the remaining “Roman” canons which do still exhibit connections with Irish texts — a canon from the fifth- or sixth-century “First Synod of St. Patrick,” and a statement found twice in the B-recension which corresponds to a passage found in Cummian's seventh-century letter on the Easter controversy — we should not overlook the fact that the first comes from a source purporting to be the work of a Briton, while the other is a modified version of a statement initially made by a fifth-century pope. That is to say that even though we might regard both of them as connected to “Hiberno-Latin” sources, the compilers of the Hibernensis may have had good reason to view them rather differently. The passage which is shared with Cummian's letter — a statement concerning the authority of Rome — has a particularly unclear transmission which makes it difficult to speak with precision about exactly where the compilers of the Hibernensis may have obtained it. It is attested first in a letter of Pope Innocent I to Victricius of Rouen, in which the pope instructed that “major causes should be referred to the seat of the apostles,” but at some point prior to its inclusion in the Hibernensis, the statement could also be found in a modified form, in which Innocent's original description of Rome as the “seat of the apostles” had been replaced by the phrase “chief of cities.”Footnote 81 It is the variant version which appears in the Hibernensis, and which seems otherwise to be extant only in Cummian's letter.Footnote 82 The Hibernensis might conceivably have drawn the statement directly from Cummian's letter, or, as Maura Walsh and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín suggest in their edition of the letter, Cummian may simply be a witness to a version of the canon which was already in independent circulation during the seventh century.Footnote 83 From the evidence available, it is hardly possible to say for sure, but in any case, it would be hard to hold this statement up as a firm instance of a “Roman” label being applied in the Hibernensis to an unambiguously Irish canon, since even if we were to take Cummian to have been the compilers’ immediate source, his letter made clear that the statement did not originate with him, but came from elsewhere (in his view, from a “synodical decree” [decretum sinodicum]). We are on firmer ground with the so-called “First Synod of St. Patrick,” from which the Hibernensis's last remaining “Roman” canon comes.Footnote 84 Here, we are assuredly dealing with a Hiberno-Latin source being fitted with a “Roman” attribution, but the association of the text with Patrick, a Briton whose own Romanitas he put to particular rhetorical use in his own writings, probably means that we need no special explanation for the compilers’ decision to characterize one of the canons ascribed to him in just the same way.Footnote 85
The situation that we are left with, then, is that in all the instances in which we can identify the sources of canons in the Hibernensis which were attributed to Romani or to a sinodus Romana, we seem to be dealing in the main with material which was written outside Ireland, plus a small amount of additional material which was contained in or transmitted through Hiberno-Latin texts, but which derived from, or was otherwise attributed to, individuals who were not themselves Irish. All this is in direct contrast to the canons ascribed to Hibernenses or to a sinodus Hibernensis. Here, admittedly, there are far fewer texts which can be traced back to extant sources, but those for which sources can be identified draw upon a number of very securely Irish texts, including Muirchú's Vita Patricii as well as collections of secular and ecclesiastical decrees.Footnote 86 Others have been shown to exhibit clear knowledge of distinctive legal concepts that are recognizable from vernacular law tracts, in a way which the “Roman” canons do not.Footnote 87 There are again only two real outliers: one canon which was originally part of the Synodus Luci Victorie, a work probably composed in Britain during the sixth century; and a statement about the treatment of suspected sinners which is an abbreviated version of a passage thought to come ultimately from Gildas's letter to Uinniau.Footnote 88 In both cases, however, individual passages from the Synodus Luci Victorie and from Gildas were already in independent circulation in Ireland prior to the compilation of the Hibernensis, in forms which did not always make clear their British origins. The canon which the Hibernensis shares with the Synodus Luci Victorie had already, for instance, passed into Irish penitentials during the seventh century and since the Hibernensis shows no wider knowledge of the Synodus Luci Victorie in its own right, it is likely that it had been taken from just such a Hiberno-Latin intermediary which had already made independent use of the ruling.Footnote 89
Gildas's letter to Uinniau could also be encountered in part rather than in whole, through a series of extracts which had been made from it and which now represent the only extant witnesses to the original letter. These extracts survive now most fully within a seventh-century florilegium, and it was from there, as Richard Sharpe has established, that the compilers of the Hibernensis had accessed them.Footnote 90 Michael Elliot has observed that one feature of this particular florilegium was, however, that its inconsistent rubrics make it “quite difficult to discern where one chapter ends and another begins.” That meant that it was easy for the individual fragments of Gildas's letter to become misattributed or wrongly conflated with adjacent items.Footnote 91 In one case, for instance, the A-recension of the Hibernensis quoted a passage in which Gildas had offered a paraphrase of 2 Timothy on the subject of the apocalypse, but attributed the quotation not to Gildas (nor indeed to Paul, the purported author of 2 Timothy), but rather to Jeremiah.Footnote 92 The misattribution looks to have been the result of the fact that the immediately preceding extract in the florilegium did indeed end with a short quotation from Jeremiah, which suggests that the compilers had run into precisely the problem which Elliot anticipated as they sought to determine where one excerpt ended and another began.Footnote 93 The compilers had needed to exercise a degree of guesswork as they made their way through this part of the florilegium, and we should not therefore place too much significance on the appearance, on one occasion in the B-recension, of one of these Gildasian passages being attributed erroneously to a “sinodus Hibernensis.”Footnote 94 The mistake reflected the compilers’ difficulty in unpicking their immediate source material, rather than anything specific about who or what the “Irish synods” represented to them.
Overall, therefore, where we can identify the sources of the “Irish” and “Roman” canons in the Hibernensis, the overwhelming impression is that the compilers’ intention was simply to distinguish material that had been written in Ireland, and material that had been written elsewhere. Demonstrable exceptions to this are not only few, but also ambiguous: a Hiberno-Latin canon attributed to Romani, but perhaps only because it was purported to be the work of Patrick, a Briton; a statement which is now extant only in the letter of Cummian attributed to Romani, but which was itself only a modified version of a declaration made in an earlier papal letter; and two passages bearing attributions to Hibernenses which come ultimately from texts composed in sixth-century Britain, but which the compilers had accessed through intermediary sources which obscured their sense of whose words they were reading. Of course, it remains the case that a large proportion of the “Roman” and “Irish” canons in the Hibernensis cannot now be traced back to their sources: by far the majority of the “Irish” canons lack extant sources, as do around half of the “Roman” canons. Bury, in fact, saw this as a key indication that the “Roman” canons must have been Irish in origin, since in his view it was “hardly likely that so many . . . citations of this kind from foreign sources would remain unidentified,” and that it was therefore “much more likely that [they] derived from native sources, seeing that the Acts of the Irish synods before A.D. 700 have not been preserved.”Footnote 95 It is perhaps harder than it once was to share Bury's confidence on this point. The conciliar record of Merovingian Gaul alone is sufficient to emphasize to us, as Gregory Halfond has stressed, “the precarious nature of canonical transmission” and the fact that even here we have to contend with the problem that there are “dozens of councils whose acts either do not survive or never existed.”Footnote 96 This highly fragmentary corpus should make us cautious about reading too much into our inability to identify sources for some of the “Roman” canons in the Hibernensis.
Where does this leave the “Roman party,” whose existence as a discrete bloc within the early Irish Church we have hypothesized on the basis of the foundations laid by Bury's interpretation of the Hibernensis? Theoretically, one could of course still maintain that all the “foreign” material attributed to Romani in the Hibernensis had indeed been received by a self-declared “Roman party” in Ireland and promulgated anew in its own synodical decrees, as Bury had suggested. But if the attributions to Romani and Hibernenses now seem to map neatly onto a distinction, as the compilers saw it, between Irish texts and non-Irish texts, then we appear no longer to require Bury's hypothesis of “Roman” and “Irish” parties at all to explain the labels as we find them. Outside the Hibernensis, the presumed existence of the two parties has sometimes been brought to bear on other, securely evidenced events in Ireland's ecclesiastical history, such as the well-explored attempts of Kildare and Armagh in the seventh century to claim archiepiscopal status for themselves. Imagined connections with Rome certainly played a part in these attempts, which have therefore been understood as efforts to “exploit the principles of the Romani to [their] own advantage.”Footnote 97 We need not, however, think that appeals to “Romanness” would only have made sense if there existed a coherent and self-defined “Roman party” with which to curry favour. The ideologically charged use of Roman symbolism is a notable feature of these competing claims for status and privilege, but one which would remain comprehensible to us even without a formal sundering of ecclesiastical loyalties into firmly divided “Roman” and “Irish” parties. There do, of course, exist a small number of appearances of Romani in other Irish texts besides the Hibernensis, all of which have at some point been interpreted in connection with a faction within the Irish Church. Nevertheless, as Richard Sharpe cautioned long ago, none of them are so particular in what they say about Romani as to rule out the possibility that they are in fact describing individuals or groups from elsewhere in Christian Europe. Sharpe's observation was made in relation to the extant letter of an otherwise unidentified Colmán, written after he had taken possession of a number of books “written by Romans [a Romanis],” a statement so fleeting that we can hardly take it as a firm indication of who those Romani were or where they were based.Footnote 98 The short note, preserved in a Würzburg manuscript, which celebrates the learned skill of “Mo-Chuoróc maccu Neth Sémon whom the Romans [Romani] named doctor of the whole world” is no less capable of being read in connection with “Romans” outside Ireland, given the way that Mo-Chuoróc was said to have attained a reputation which surpassed anyone else in the “whole world.”Footnote 99 Any of these might, of course, refer to a group within the Irish Church, but we would probably not have supposed so had we not already taken the Collectio canonum Hibernensis to indicate that such a group existed and was drawn up in formal opposition to a rival group of Hibernenses.Footnote 100 Caitlin Corning's recent review of the material concluded that ultimately it was only the Collectio canonum Hibernensis which actually “demonstrates that separate synods identified as ‘Roman’ or ‘Irish’ were meeting in the seventh century,” and that the remaining miscellany of documents which mention Romani cannot by themselves be made to bear substantial weight.Footnote 101 If now even the Hibernensis cannot be taken as a clear indication of the existence of a formal split of this kind, and may instead simply reflect an attempt to distinguish Irish from non-Irish material in its use of the attribution of canons to “Irish synods” and “Roman synods,” then our image of opposing parties meeting in synod for decades to enact legislation against one another becomes extremely difficult to sustain.
In choosing to apply the single label “Roman” to material drawn from across Latin Christendom, the compilers of the Hibernensis were participating in what Walter Ullmann called a “conflation of Romanitas and Christianitas.”Footnote 102 This was an increasingly familiar conflation in the early medieval West, and we have already seen something similar at work in the text which came to be known as the “Second Synod of St. Patrick,” which sought to measure the validity of its opponents’ views against the collected norms of a wider “Roman” world. The Hibernensis shared that same sense of the oneness of Latin Christendom when it offered occasional statements about the way that “Roman custom and the unity of the Church” were one and the same.Footnote 103 We should not, however, misunderstand the compilers’ decision to differentiate “Roman” canons from “Irish” ones as if it were intended to convey an ideological message that they therefore thought that Ireland stood apart from the rest of that unified “Roman” world. The Hibernensis gives no sense that canons which lack an explicit “Roman” attribution had been judged intrinsically un-Roman by the compilers, since it is clear that even canons from a single Church council might in one place possess the “Roman” designator and in other places lack it. The acts of the Council of Orléans (511), for instance, appear sometimes in the Hibernensis as “Romana sinodus,” but elsewhere only as “sinodus” or “sinodus Auriliensis.”Footnote 104 There is a generic quality to the way that the compilers of the Hibernensis handled Romanness: it was a designation which could be supplemented or supplanted by a more precise identification of the city or region in which the canons had been issued.
The compilers’ assiduity in seeking to distinguish “Irish” from “Roman” seems likely, therefore, not have been intended to hold Ireland apart from the rest of the “great forest of writings” which the western Christian world had produced, but rather to hold it up for special attention. We have long noticed, and found remarkable, that at no point in the Hibernensis do any of its “Irish” and “Roman” canons ever conflict with or contradict one another. When we took these canons to be the work of separate and mutually opposed parties within the Irish Church, then this had always previously seemed to call for special explanation, not only because, as Roy Flechner has said, “two ostensibly rival parties can reasonably be expected to have passed conflicting decisions in their respective assembles,” but also because the compilers of the Hibernensis had “a penchant for highlighting contradictions they found between authoritative sources.”Footnote 105 Our solution to this apparent oddity has hitherto been to suggest that the compilers were seeking to draw a veil over the disputes of the preceding century, perhaps even to enable a rapprochement between the two “parties,” by consciously selecting only canons in which the rival factions were in agreement.Footnote 106 But if we now have reason to question the idea that the labels of Romani and Hibernenses represented parties in the Irish Church, then the fact that the “Roman” and “Irish” canons in the Collectio canonum Hibernensis never openly contradict one another suggests a different motivation for the compilers.
Working shortly after the last adherents of the “Irish” Easter had abandoned their old reckoning, it would seem, the compilers presented an image of Irish ecclesiastical life which banished any lingering suspicion of unorthodoxy or nonconformity.Footnote 107 They consciously gave little place in their work to the sensitive issue of Easter, and emphasized when they did that it was in fact the Britons who stood “contrary to the whole world, enemies of Roman custom” in this matter.Footnote 108 The Irish, by contrast, were shown to have fostered a notable body of conciliar legislation that sat easily alongside “Roman custom.” When the compilers distinguished between “Irish” and “Roman,” they did so in much the same way that Columbanus, early in the seventh century, presented the situation of Ireland to Pope Boniface IV as being both apart from Rome, in the sense of having never been an imperial province, and yet also now united with it after the subsequent expansion of Christianity: “For we [i.e. the Irish] are bound to St. Peter's chair; for even though Rome is great and known to all, among us she is great and illustrious only because of that chair.”Footnote 109 A similar treatment of the relationship between Ireland and the wider world of Latin Christendom is offered, tacitly but pervasively, in the Hibernensis: the canons attributed to “Irish synods” are on the one hand held up for special consideration alongside those from the collected “Roman” world, and yet on the other shown nowhere to contradict the substance of each other. The compilers’ pattern of attribution drew special attention to Ireland, but strove to present its conciliar tradition as a contribution to a larger whole rather than a separate body of opinion. In the immediate aftermath of the drawn-out Easter controversy, such a presentation must have seemed both timely and necessary.
The world from which the Hibernensis emerged was certainly one in which there existed widely different views on the relationship between the Irish Church and the wider Christian world. The bearers of those different views seem not, however, to have been arrayed against each other in distinct, self-identifying, and mutually excluding “parties” to the extent that we have usually supposed. One wonders if a broader spectrum of opinion therefore existed in the seventh century, beyond the maximalist positions taken by hard-line reformers and committed traditionalists over some of the key questions, and perhaps no longer requiring our seventh-century texts to speak according to strict “party” lines may allow more marginal or equivocal voices to emerge. Certainly, a greater variety of voices seems now to emerge from the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, if the canons which it attributed to “Romans” do indeed cover everything from papal decretals to texts influenced by the ideas of breakaway Columbanian monks. The compilers of the Hibernensis characterized their materials as “a great forest of writings,” and there remain parts of that forest which we have only begun to explore.
