St. Samson of Dole is one of the most famous early Christian kings in Britain. He was a man of power and wealth, but he was also a man who lived in monastic life. He is considered to have been the first Christian monk, and is said to have founded a monastic order known as Cenobiteism.
00:00:30.000Hello and welcome to the Celtic Saints of Britain, part two.
00:00:41.400You're listening to me, Sven Longshanks, broadcasting at RadioArian.com.
00:00:45.620And I am joined today for this series, for the entirety of this series, in fact, by my co-host, Florian Geyer.
00:00:53.500Florian, how are you doing? How did you find the last episode?
00:00:57.080I'm doing just grand, Sven. You know, it really is. It's very nice to be back to record these episodes with you.
00:01:03.060And I thought the last episode was great. I thought it was a very good introduction, very good context for Christianity in the ancient world and in ancient Britain.
00:01:11.620And I think it'll prime our audience, for those who are not familiar, for our discussion of some of the highlighted saints.
00:01:18.820And they're really, I mean, we only have a few that we can go through in the next couple of episodes we're doing for the series because there's so many.
00:01:25.280It's really, it's shocking to me. I mean, there's a depth of richness there that when you begin to dive into it is amazing is the only word. Amazing.
00:01:36.340It is unfortunate that we're having to be so brief. I mean, we could do a whole series on just one of these saints, you know, going through all the original recordings of them, written recordings of them.
00:01:47.820So what we're having to do is just sort of get potted histories on them. Quotes from here, there, and Wikipedia as well, we've had to use for some of this.
00:01:57.800And this saint that we're going to be talking about today is St. Samson of Dole.
00:02:02.180And I thought this would be a good one to use as an example, because a lot of nationalists will try and say that Christianity was some kind of a slave uprising.
00:02:11.960It was to do with slaves. And that's just not true. The early, early Christians were princes or retired kings.
00:02:20.000A lot of the time you have a king and he would, he would go into battle and he would have lots and lots of battles.
00:02:24.820And because he'd killed so many people, he would then retire in old age.
00:02:29.240He would hand over the kingship to his son and then he would go and live in a monastery and atone for having to kill these people.
00:02:36.080Of course, he had to kill them because he had to defend the realm, but he also wanted to make penance for them.
00:02:42.380And St. Samson of Dole, he was royalty.
00:02:45.800And the primary source that we have for his biography is the Vita Sancti Samsonis, written sometime between 610 and 820 and clearly based on earlier materials.
00:02:56.840And it also gives a lot of useful details of contacts between the churchmen in Britain, Ireland and Brittany, which is what we were talking about.
00:03:04.460These, these maritime routes that they had in the last episode.
00:03:08.200Samson was the son of Amon of Domitia and Anna of Gwent, daughter of Morig at Tudrig, king of Glamorgan and Gwent.
00:03:19.520His father's brother married his mother's sister.
00:03:22.320So their son, St. Magloir, was Samson's cousin twice over.
00:03:27.840Due to a prophecy concerning his birth, his parents placed him under the care of St. Iltad, abbot of Hlantwit-Far, where he was raised and educated.
00:03:37.560And St. Iltad is another famous one that we're not actually going to be covering.
00:03:42.340Samson later sought a greater austerity than his school provided.
00:03:46.660And so he moved to Hlantwit's daughter house, the island monastery of Caldy, off the coast of Dovet, or Pembrokeshire in Wales, where he became abbot after the death of St. Pure.
00:03:58.460Samson abstained from alcohol, unlike Pure, who was killed when he fell down a well whilst drunk.
00:04:05.500As a Cenobite and later an Eremitic monk, he travelled from Caldy to Ireland, where he is said to have founded or revived a monastery.
00:04:15.880I'll just stop there. A Cenobite and an Eremite, that sounds like something from Hellraiser, but it's obviously not.
00:04:21.740No. So these refer to the two major types of Christian monastic practice, of which there are three.
00:04:31.920So Cenobite is regular group style monasticism, where you have a group of men who live together under the direction of an abbot,
00:04:39.180and they pray and they eat together and live together and work together.
00:04:43.880Then you have a semi-Cenobitic, or it's called a Lavral-type monastery, which was not particularly popular in the West.
00:04:51.760It comes from Palestine, where people will live sort of as hermits, maybe off in some caves or something like this,
00:04:59.640but they'll come together on Saturday and Sunday for church, for worship.
00:05:03.280And then there is Eremitic, or Hermetic, not in the sense of Hermes Trimegistus, but in the sense of Eremus, to be alone,
00:05:13.100which is, you know, the solitary ascetic life, right?
00:05:16.940What we kind of think of when we think about, you know, the Christian hermit living in the cave or on an island or on the top of a tree somewhere.
00:05:23.600So that's where the word hermit would come from, the Eremites.
00:05:33.780Well, we're going to get into this, I think, but the Celtic monastic tradition is very, very influenced by the monastic traditions of southern France,
00:05:42.880which come out of Egypt and Palestine.
00:05:45.460So there is, and as we saw in the earlier history, that there has been traditionally quite a link between Britain and Egypt because of the vigorous trade.
00:05:55.340And so the particular monastic traditions of Celtic monasticism, which are distinct from Roman, Western Roman style monasticism,
00:06:08.100are very much influenced by Egypt and by Palestine, which tend to place a greater emphasis on hermeticism, you know, hermeticism.
00:06:20.060Hermeticism on the solitary life, on being a hermit.
00:06:26.320All those, there certainly is all different types of monastic lifestyles that are practiced, depending on one's, you know, vocation and style and all these kind of things.
00:06:34.980And monasticism was really central to the church in the British Isles right up until the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry.
00:06:47.120But especially in the sort of pre-Latin, if you want to use the term indigenous sort of Celtic monastic period,
00:06:57.040these were really the centers of the civilization, as we saw through much of Europe, through much of Italy, Germany, Russia,
00:07:07.460after it was colonized, after it was Christianized, and the reconquest in Spain and Anatolia, these sorts of places.
00:07:17.460This is very common for the monastic center, Cenobitic monastery, to be the center of not only spiritual life,
00:07:27.020but economic and civilizational life as a deposit of kind of the Roman religio-civilizational tradition.
00:07:36.380There was a lot of rejection of worldly goods.
00:07:40.000They tried to live as poor as they possibly could, and they would travel barefoot and just have their clothes and their staff,
00:07:47.560and just work the land and try to live as poorly as possible.
00:07:51.180And I guess that expanded so that all the land that they actually worked,
00:07:55.780they could then use that food to feed the poor with, basically.
00:14:23.940That's well, so this is one of the things, I mean, we can get into this now is especially in, um, what we could say late antiquity, um, so, uh, fifth to seventh century in this kind of area, six, uh, yeah, fourth to seventh century.
00:14:41.340There is quite a, uh, dispersion and, uh, heterogeneity in how the local churches are organized and administrated.
00:14:51.100And which is really quite remarkable because they have a very strong uniformity of belief.
00:14:55.580And this is one thing as well that you will see people begin to obfuscate by, um, you know, saying, oh, well, you know, these, the Celtic Christianity, this is a different Christianity, Roman Christianity.
00:15:07.140Like, this is some sort of, uh, you know, semi-paganized, Gnostic, anti-authoritarian, um, you know, feminist, Druidic, crypto, um, heathenry, right?
00:15:18.380That is only, you know, that, that has just managed to co-opt Christianity for itself as nonsense.
00:15:23.800I mean, these guys are some of the most radical in terms of doctrinal purity.
00:15:27.720And we'll see this later on with even, um, St. Cuthbert and these people where, you know, they won't even associate with people if, if they cut their hair the wrong way, this kind of thing.
00:15:38.660Um, and in terms of the doctrine, it's very, it's, uh, it's a universal, right?
00:15:42.760I mean, cause these are all literal societies.
00:15:44.740All of these monasteries speak and write in Latin and to a lesser extent Greek.
00:15:49.640And so there, until, especially until the degeneration of the, uh, seaborne trade networks by the northern predation of the barbarian invasions, the naval invasions, and the Arab Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean trade routes and subsequent piracy therein later on in the 7th century, 8th century, there still is a quite a large degree of communication with, um,
00:16:17.820the continuing Roman civilization, which is what we see from St. Samson's life when he goes over into, uh, Flavian, you know, or Romanized Gaul, which is a mix of these kind of Franks, these Germanic peoples,
00:16:30.960these Celts, which, um, lived especially in provincially speaking, you know, Brittany, uh, Southern France, the, um, Languedoc, which was in many ways until the Muslims destroyed Southern France, as we have mentioned before,
00:16:47.100was one of the richest parts of the world and certainly the richest part of Western Europe and was thoroughly Roman.
00:16:53.780And even, uh, much Greek was spoken there as well.
00:16:57.620Very, very integrated part of the Roman Republic.
00:16:59.860And so, or the Roman Empire, excuse me.
00:17:02.120And so we see that until the, uh, early 7th century, which is when things, and late 7th century, that is when things really start to unravel,
00:17:13.240there is still a lot of communication and trade networks, even if political authority in the Western Roman Empire has disintegrated and has reverted to local, um, nobility and warlords and monarchs.
00:17:29.240And so the same is the case with the church administration, because nominally, the Bishop of Rome, because he lives in the Imperial City, has, uh, you know, broad, you could say, jurisdiction over Western Europe.
00:17:46.000But as far as the local church was administrated, this was not a jurisdiction of, um, administration.
00:17:51.880This was just a, more of a spiritual, what could you say, dominion.
00:17:57.580You know, it's like a grandfather and a family.
00:18:00.240And this would be, as we will see when we get into the missions of St. Augustine, this would be a source of conflict with later, um, agents of the Roman papacy,
00:18:08.760which at this time was perfectly Orthodox and communion with all of Christianity.
00:18:13.000Um, because their style of ecclesiastical life, uh, administrative culture was very different.
00:18:21.180And, you know, today we, we could consider them to be, if we were to use modern, um, ecclesiological terminology, it's sort of an autonomous church or even an autocephalous church.
00:18:30.480You know, they're independent, although they are linked with general Western Christianity, um, intimately.
00:18:37.060And so the, uh, primacy of the monastic superior, the abbot, is a testament to the power of the monasteries.
00:18:47.420And we see this in other societies as well.
00:18:49.340Um, Russia has many similarities to Britain, in fact, in terms of how it's, um, fluorescent church culture before it's degenerate.
00:18:58.680And even it's degenerate, there's lots of similarities there between the histories, but we probably don't have time to get into that.
00:19:03.000Um, and this is the, this is perfectly aligned with even Eastern Christian tradition, um, where the bishop is supposed to be a product of the monastery, the monastic environment.
00:19:16.340Um, this is the only way, you know, you can produce men who can pray properly, men who are relatively honest, is if they have gone through this process of asceticism, of that, you know, training, of study, of discipline, right?
00:19:28.000And this is the thing is the, the, the Celtic civilization after it has sort of merged with this Roman civilization, even before it had a very developed, as we saw, culture of literacy, of studiousness and of former clerical education.
00:19:46.160And so the monasteries in many ways take on these roles of, um, education centers, which everyone knows, but there's a great book called, you know, how the Irish save the world or something like this, which it goes into.
00:19:58.000How these later, um, you know, sort of 6th century, 7th century, 8th century, Irish monastics successfully missionaried and, um, converted many Western Germanics on the mainland, on the continent.
00:20:13.320Um, and this is just because the level of monastic life was at such, had become elevated to such a high degree where they just had hundreds of monks, thousands of monks.
00:20:24.440And they were all so very highly educated, so rigorous, so ascetic that they, they had literally, the grace was overflowing.
00:20:32.220And we talk about this with, um, with saints that's, you know, people who are living saints, the grace of God, they have so much inside of them.
00:20:39.200And it just, it overflows and pours out into the world around them and they become these, you know, these temples of God.
00:20:44.040So the Irish, not only the Irish, but the British peoples at this time period, um, the people of the British Isles really had a tremendous, tremendous experience.
00:20:54.440Um, form of Christianity and an extremely developed culture and civilization, generally speaking.
00:21:01.060Um, and so I, I think that is really the crux of this whole, this whole series is to try and bring that to people, to expose this to people.
00:21:08.680And just to demonstrate that through some of the lives of these saints, really did the glory, uh, that we have in our past, that people really have a very low knowledge of, they, they neglect totally.
00:21:23.120This is what, you know, where we, where we come from is that modern European man is really comes out of this fusion of these different people in periphery of the Roman empire with experience of Roman civilization, late, uh, antiquity, Roman civilization.
00:21:37.780And this is, this is where, uh, Christendom Europa, you know, grand sense comes from.
00:21:46.920Yeah, I think they, they, they, they were responsible for their own areas and they had a law that, um, a bishop couldn't come into another bishop's area unless they had permission.
00:21:58.500They, they, they were almost like the spiritual counterpart to, to the king.
00:22:02.700They were responsible for the spiritual welfare of, of the people that were there.
00:22:06.880And they, they took it, they took it very seriously.
00:22:09.560I, I don't think there was actually, um, uh, uh, uh, an actual melding together of the Celtic church with the, with the Catholic church until the 11th century.
00:22:20.440I mean, even though they were all part of the same faith, as you say, you know, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Celtic church, that they were all part of the same.
00:22:26.520But they, they, they each still had their own separate jurisdictions that, that they were actually responsible for.
00:22:33.740And the, the Celtic church, they claim that, they claim to be apostolic, the same as, um, the Roman Catholics do.
00:22:39.500And they, they, they, their liturgy actually came from St. John and that comes up, uh, in one of these arguments with, with Bede.
00:22:48.240Um, and, and they're talking about the date of Easter.
00:22:52.020And it turns out that that's why the Celtic church's date for Easter is different to the Celtic, to the, um, Roman Catholic date for Easter is because the, the Celts got it from, uh, John the Blessed.
00:23:05.120Well, it's funny, we can dive into this.
00:23:07.140I made some allusion to this earlier on.
00:23:09.100Well, this is, this was, was a topic of controversy that, um, it did not start for the first time in Britain.
00:23:15.000It actually was a very early schism in the church in about the third century, um, where the Western parts of Rome and, and, um, North Africa went into schism, uh, and excommunicated the churches in, uh, in Anatolia.
00:23:35.340And St. Irenaeus of Lyon, he writes to the Pope of Rome at this time, uh, in the very early third century is actually quite late.
00:23:43.480It's basically the early second century petitioning him to lift this excommunication because it was a contest over very just this, the date of Easter.
00:23:51.980And so coming out of the Anatolian tradition, the very ancient Joannine tradition from St. John the Theologian, John the Evangelist, is that Easter is dated, uh, at the day of the, where the Hebrews have their Passover, according to the lunar calendar.
00:24:08.220Um, whereas in the West and what, and not just in the West, but in many other parts of the Roman Empire, um, what eventually became, came to be accepted is what we have currently where it has, it's a date that is after Easter, after Passover, but it's its own date.
00:24:26.200It's a hybrid model where it uses both a solar and a lunar calendar, where for now we celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the spring equinox, in order to avoid, um, confusion, uh, with Jews, essentially.
00:24:42.020And so in Britain, they held to this more, um, both are equally, uh, as old, they have the same antiquity, but they held to this, this less mainstream tradition.
00:24:55.000And this became a source of, and that's controversy later on, as we will see when we get into some of these saints, when the Roman church began to, uh, missionize in earnest because of their competing traditions.
00:25:06.900And this is, uh, for, for some of, for the ancient church, things such as, um, the uniformity of monastic tonsure because of the importance that's placed on this action or, uh, essentially haircuts, religious haircuts.
00:25:20.760And then as well, the, the dating of Easter, you know, the high holiday, these, these are incredibly important because this is the foundation of church unity, right?
00:25:28.440You know, if you're celebrating, if you're in one, one community, you celebrate Easter at different times.
00:25:32.680Uh, it's, uh, it's tremendously, uh, um, disruptive to church unity.
00:25:40.020Um, and this is, you know, we see these even contemporarily in the Orthodox church with issues in the calendar, although there's only one church, only Finland celebrates Easter at a different time than the rest of the Orthodox, but this is still, this is an issue, right?
00:25:53.200So, so, but you're, you're definitely right, that the, the Celtic church, which was, you know, the same, same faith, uh, apostolic Christianity absolutely was, uh, autonomous in the independent, uh, part of Christendom, you know, um, you know, as part of the Roman empire, part of, part of Western Christianity and our family, generally speaking, but it was separate from, from the church of Rome, uh, liturgically.
00:26:22.960Linguistically, monastically, administratively, uh, in all of these different ways.
00:26:28.160Although there was some Latin, but it was not very widespread.
00:26:31.240They had their own indigenous languages.
00:26:33.920Um, and we see that, we'll see this later on with the conversion of the Saxons, where you see once the Anglo-Saxons are converted to Christianity, there is an attempt to, to translate the Gospels, the Littles of the Gospels, the Psalter, all of this stuff into Old English.
00:26:48.340Um, and so it might be a little bit, um, too, too far outside of our scope to discuss, you know, with, when did the, was English Christianity suppressed by the vision of William the Bastard?
00:27:02.840Um, you know, which, when they argue, I personally subscribe to who it was, but, you know, okay, so.
00:27:10.500Yeah, that, that was the 11th century, because you, you had the, you had the schism between the, which, I think 1056, and that was when you really got Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox.
00:27:23.040And then in 1066, you have, um, William the Bastard coming over with the Normans and, uh, doing to the Saxons what the Saxons did, did to the Welsh.
00:27:34.160And they actually got rid of every cleric, apart from two, I think, and replaced them all with, with French ones.
00:27:41.160And nothing like that happened when Augustine came over to convert the, the Saxons.
00:27:47.860He didn't say, well, all, all these, um, British bishops, they've all got to be replaced by, by Roman ones.
00:27:54.820He said, well, you're following the same, you have the same faith as us.
00:27:58.780There are a few differences, such as the tonsure, um, the date of Easter, and also the Celtic church weren't baptizing.
00:28:05.880They weren't baptizing, uh, in, in water either.
00:28:09.800But he said that the, the, the essential parts of it are still the same.
00:28:14.400And that's what Catholic meant was universal.
00:28:16.320And that everybody had the same belief.
00:28:18.000It meant that they used both the Old and the New Testament.