Voor wie niet (meer) weet wie Bonifatius was, hier een informatief artikel van Stephen Neil uit Lindsay Jones (red.), Encyclopedia of Religion (2e druk, 2005), vol. 2, 1017-1018:
BONIFACE (673–754), the most distinguished in
the
group of English
missionaries who, in the eighth and succeeding
centuries, felt
impelled to cross the seas and to
preach the gospel
to the peoples of the continent of Europe
who were still
non-Christians. Winfrith, to whom the pope,
as tradition has
it, gave the name Boniface in 722, was a missionary,
founder of
monasteries, diffuser of culture, and
church organizer.
Born in Devonshire, he was introduced to
monastic life at
an early age. Here he grew up in an atmosphere
of strict
observance of the Benedictine rule and acceptance
of the vivid
culture which was spreading abroad from
Northumbria.
His many gifts would have assured him of a
distinguished
career in the growing English church but he
felt within
himself an intense inner call to carry the gospel
to the as yet
non-Christian world.
Two attempts at
missionary work with Willibrord in
Friesland led
to nothing, perhaps because of temperamental
differences
between the two. In 719, Winfrith made the
journey to Rome
and received a commission from the pope
as missionary
to the Frankish lands. This commission was
later
strengthened by his consecration as bishop. Before long
the missionary
convictions of Boniface became firmly settled
on three
points: that the missions of the Western church
must be
controlled and directed by the central authority in
Rome, that
religious houses both for men and women must
be founded to
supply the necessary continuity of Christian
life in a
period of almost ceaseless military disturbance, that
regular
dioceses must be founded and supplied with loyal
and well-trained
bishops.
The first
period of Boniface’s work was marked by notable
successes in
Hesse and Thuringia. At Geismar he dared
to fell the
sacred oak of Thor. This episode was understood
by the people
of the time as a conflict between two gods.
When Boniface
felled the oak and suffered no vengeance
from the
resident Germanic god, it was clear that the God
whom he
preached was the true God who alone is to be worshiped
and adored.
Boniface was
successful in securing the confidence and
support, first
of the all-powerful Frankish ruler, Charles
Martel, who in
732 defeated the Muslims at the battle of
Tours, and,
after Charles’s death in 741, of Martel’s sons
Carloman and
Pépin. This helped Boniface greatly in his
work of
restoring or creating order in the churches in the dominions
of the Franks,
the goal of his second period of the
work. He was
successful in creating four bishoprics in Bavaria,
where churches
existed but without settled order. He also
called into
being four dioceses in the territories to the east
of the Rhine.
During this period he brought in many colleagues,
both men and
women, and founded a number of religious
houses. His
favorite was Fulda (744), where he was
buried, and
which for more than a thousand years was a great
center of church
life in Germany.
Until 747
Boniface had been a primate and archbishop
without a
diocese. In 747 he was appointed archbishop of
Mainz. In the
meantime his influence had extended westward,
until it was
felt in many parts of what is now France.
In 742 he was
able to hold a synod of the French churches,
commonly known
as the German Council, and in 744 an
even more
important meeting at Soissons. It is to be noted
that the
decrees of the earlier council were issued in the name
of Carloman and
became the law of the church as well as of
the state.
Two special
features of the work of Boniface are to be
noted. Boniface
was too busy to become an accomplished
scholar but was
deeply concerned for the spread of culture
and used his
monasteries as centers for the diffusion of
knowledge. He
himself wrote Latin clearly and elegantly,
coming between
the over-elaborate style of Aldhelm
(d. 709) and
the rather flat scholastic Latin of the Middle
Ages. Frank
Stenton has called him the one great writer produced
by the early
schools of southern England and a man
of individual
genius.
The part played
by women in the development of the
church in this
period is astonishing. At a time at which the
vast majority
of women were illiterate, the religious houses
of England
produced a number of aristocratic and highly cultivated
nuns, a number
of whom Boniface brought over to
Europe to be
the abbesses of his newly founded monasteries.
To Leobgytha
(Leoba), abbess of Tauferbischofsheim, he was
bound, as the letters
exchanged between them show, in a relationship
of specially
affectionate friendship. She survived
him by more
than a quarter of a century, and when she died
in 780, she was
buried near her venerable friend at Fulda,
in accordance
with her earnest desire.
In 752,
Boniface, feeling that his work was done, and
perhaps wearied
by the increasing opposition of the Frankish
churchmen to
the English dominance, resigned all his offices
and returned as
a simple missionary to Friesland, where he
had begun his
missionary career. Great success marked the
first year of
this enterprise. But on June 4, 754, Boniface and
his companions
found themselves surrounded by a band of
pagans,
determined to put a stop to the progress of the gospel.
Boniface forbade
armed resistance, and he and fifty-three
of his
followers met their death with the quiet fortitude of
Christian
martyrs.
The English are
accustomed to speak of these years as
“the dark ages,”
but, as the eminent German church historian
K. D. Schmidt
once remarked, “to us this was the period
of light, when
the light of the Gospel and of Christian civilization
came to us.”
Boniface, the apostle of Germany, was
one of those
burning and shining lights.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The primary
authority is the large collection of the letters of Boniface,
to be found in
Latin, Bonifacius: Die Briefe des heiligen
Bonifacius and Lullus, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1916), admirably edited
by Michael
Tangl. A good many of these letters are available
in English in The
Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, edited
and translated
by Charles H. Talbot (New York, 1954).
For those who
read German the outstanding modern work
is Theodor
Schieffer’s Winfrid Bonifatius und die christliche
Grundlegung Europas (Darmstadt, 1972). In English the pioneer
work is William
Levison’s England and the Continent in
the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946). Among more popular
works, Eleanor
S. Duckett’s Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars
(New York,
1947), pp. 339–455, can be specially recommended
as both
scholarly and readable.
STEPHEN C. NEILL (1987)
