Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi XV (1919), letters 4–7 — modern British English translation. Ehwald’s German editorial matter is rendered in English.

(Codex Vindobonensis fol. 20; Epistolae Merovingicae I 231 ff.; Giles, Works of Aldhelm p. 83 ff.)

¹ TO THE MOST GLORIOUS LORD RULING THE SCEPTRE OF THE WESTERN KINGDOM — whom, as He who searches the heart and the reins is my witness, I embrace with brotherly love — TO GERAINT THE KING, AND TOGETHER TO ALL THE PRIESTS OF GOD DWELLING THROUGHOUT DUMNONIA, ALDHELM, EXERCISING THE OFFICE OF ABBOT WITHOUT THE PREROGATIVE OF ANY MERIT, SENDS HAPPY GREETINGS IN THE LORD.

² Recently I was in a council of bishops, where an innumerable company of God’s priests had gathered from nearly the whole of Britain, assembled for this purpose especially: that for the care of the churches and the salvation of souls the decrees of the canons and the statutes of the fathers should be treated of by all and preserved in common under Christ’s protection. When these matters had duly been performed, the whole priestly council compelled my littleness, by a single command and a like opinion, to direct written characters of a letter to the presence of your Piety and to intimate their fatherly petition and wholesome suggestion by the pen of scripture — namely, concerning the unity of the catholic Church and the concord of the Christian religion, without which faith slumbers idle and the future reward withers away. For of what avail are the rewards of good works if they are performed outside the catholic Church — even if someone diligently pursues the active rule of a strict manner of life under the discipline of a community, or, shunning the company of all mortals, passes the contemplative life of an anchorite remote in a squalid solitude? Therefore, that your sagacity may more certainly perceive for what causes my mediocrity has directed writings, I shall set them out summarily and briefly.

³ For we have heard and ascertained from various reports of rumour that your priests do not agree in the rule of the catholic faith according to the precepts of scripture, and that through their rivalries and word-battles a grave schism and cruel scandal is arising in the Church of Christ — which the psalmist’s sentence detests, saying: “Much peace have they who love your name, and there is no stumbling-block in them.” For holy concord joins the peace of religion, just as dire contention pollutes charity. For the psalmist exhorts the followers of right faith to fraternal unity, saying: “God, who makes men of one mind to dwell in a house.” And this “house” is allegorically understood to be the Church diffused through all the cardinal points of the world. For heretics and schismatics, strangers to the fellowship of the Church, sprouting in the world by the arguments of contentions — like the dread seed of tares sown in the middle of the fruitful crop — defile the Lord’s harvest. But the apostolic trumpet restrains the disgrace of such altercation: “If anyone wishes to be contentious,” it says, “we have no such custom, nor the Church of God, which has neither spot nor wrinkle.” For that peace is the mother of catholics and the begetter of the sons of God the gospel oracles proclaim: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” Therefore, when our Lord and Saviour descended from the highest peak of heaven to wipe out the handwriting of the first-formed man and reconcile the world with peace as its mediator, the angelic melody sang: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will”; and the psalmist: “Peace be in your strength, and abundance in your towers.”

⁴ Moreover a rumour contrary to the faith of the Church has spread far and wide: that there are in your province certain priests and clerics who obstinately refuse the tonsure of St Peter, prince of the apostles, defending themselves persistently with an apology of such excuse — that they imitate the tonsure of their authorities and predecessors, whom they declare with grandiloquent assertions to have been illumined by divine grace. If these men were carefully asked by us who was the first author of this shaving and tonsure, they fall utterly silent, either ignorant of the truth or dissembling the falsehood. But we, following the opinion of very many, have learned that Simon, the inventor of the magic art, was the originator of this tonsure — what a deceit of necromancy and how great he fraudulently contrived against the blessed Peter, the Contest of the Apostles and the ten books of Clement bear witness. We, I say, bearing witness of our tonsure from the authority of sacred scripture and truth, assert that the apostle Peter took up this rite for various reasons: first, that he might bear the form and likeness of Christ upon his head, since Christ, when about to undergo the gibbet of the cross for our redemption, was cruelly crowned by the accursed race of the Jews with sharp spikes of thorns; secondly, that the priests of the Old and New Testaments might be distinguished in tonsure and habit; lastly, that the same apostle and his successors and followers might bear upon them the ridiculous mockery of cackling — for the Romans also used to sell their captives and conquered enemies “under the crown” [i.e. with chaplets on their heads]. Moreover in the Old Testament the sign of tonsure took its beginning, unless I am mistaken, from the Nazarenes — that is, the holy ones; for it is a sign of royal and priestly rank. For among the ancients the tiara was set upon the head of the priests: it was made of twined byssus, round like a half-sphere — this is signified by the part of the head being shorn; while the crown is the golden width of a circle which girds the heads of kings. Both signs, therefore, are expressed on the heads of clerics, Peter saying: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood.” By this rite of clipping and shaving it is signified that our vices are cut away, and that we are stripped of the hairs of our flesh as of our crimes.

⁵ There is, however, another more cruel destruction of souls: that in the most sacred Paschal solemnity they do not follow the rule of the 318 fathers who in the Nicene council wisely ordained that the nineteen-year cycle of the calendar should run its course by ogdoad and endecad until the end of the world, and handed down the series of reckoning and the limit of the Paschal calculation from the fourteenth moon to the twenty-first — which they judged it unlawful, against right and divine law, to anticipate or transgress. But those others, following the decemnovennial calculation of Anatolius — or rather the rule of Sulpicius Severus, who described a course of eighty-four years — celebrate the Paschal sacrament on the fourteenth moon with the Jews, although the pontiffs of the Roman Church follow neither for the complete reckoning of the calculation; nor did they decree that the cycle of Victorius’s Paschal calendar, contained in circles of 532 years, should be followed by posterity. For there was a certain kind of heretics among the Easterns called tessareskaidekatitai, that is, Quartodecimans — because on the fourteenth moon they keep the Paschal solemnity with the Jews who blaspheme Christ and trample the pearls of the gospel after the manner of swine, and for this are unhappily reckoned, strangers to the blessed fellowship of the orthodox, among the conventicles of schismatics; whom I remember the blessed Augustine recorded in the book written On the Ninety Heresies.

⁶ But how greatly that differs from the catholic faith and disagrees with evangelical tradition: that beyond the strait of the river Severn the priests of Demetia [Dyfed], glorying in the private purity of their own way of life, so greatly abominate our communion that they will neither deign to celebrate the offices of prayers with us in church nor to partake together at table of the dishes of food for charity’s sake! No rather, they cast the fragments of the dishes and the leavings of the feasts to the jaws of greedy dogs and to filthy swine to be devoured; and the vessels and cups they bid be expiated and purified either in the sandy gravel of the shore or in the tawny ashes of the hearth. No peaceful greeting is offered, no kiss of holy brotherhood is given, though the apostle says: “Greet one another with a holy kiss!” No washing-water or water with a towel is offered to the hands, nor is a basin set at the feet for washing — though the Saviour, girt with a linen cloth, washing His disciples’ feet, handed down to us a pattern of imitation, saying: “As I have done to you, so do you also to others!” No indeed, if any of ours — that is, of catholics — shall have gone to them for the purpose of dwelling, they do not deign to receive them into the fellowship of their sodality until they are compelled to undergo a space of forty days in penance; and in this they unhappily imitate the heretics who wished to call themselves Cathars, that is, the Pure. Alas, alas! For such great errors — rather than “hurrah, hurrah!” — I think it must be mournfully repeated with tearful voices and querulous sobs; and all this is done against the precepts of the gospel, after the empty traditions of the Pharisees, Christ truly attesting: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, who cleanse that which is outside the cup and the dish!” For the Lord is described as having held banquets with publicans and sinners, that as the true physician He might compound the remedies of divine pity and the poultice of heavenly clemency for the festering wounds of souls. Therefore He in no wise despised the company of sinners after the manner of the Pharisees, but rather, with His accustomed clemency, mercifully comforted that sinful woman mourning the stains of her polluted life, wetting the Lord’s feet with pouring showers of tears and wiping them with the loosened and flowing locks of her hair, saying: “Her many sins are forgiven, for she loved much.”

⁷ Since these things are so, for the sake of the common lot of the heavenly fatherland and the college of the angelic fellowship, beseeching with earnest prayers and on bended knee, we suppliantly implore your Fraternity that you no longer contemn with the haughty disdain of a stubborn heart and a defiant breast the teaching and decrees of the blessed Peter, nor arrogantly despise the tradition of the Roman Church, relying on the ancient statutes of your forebears with a tyrannical obstinacy. For Peter, confessing the Son of God with blessed voice, deserved to hear: “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven… and loosed in heaven.” If therefore the keys of the heavenly kingdom were given to Peter by Christ — of whom the poet says: “The heavenly key-bearer, who opens the gate in the sky” — who, spurning the principal statutes of His Church and despising the commands of His teaching, shall pass rejoicing through the gate of the heavenly paradise? And if he himself merited by happy lot and peculiar privilege to receive the power of binding and the monarchy of loosing in heaven and on earth, who, rejecting the rule of the Paschal feast and the rite of the Roman tonsure, would think himself to be absolved in any way rather than bound with tight knots inextricably?

⁸ But perhaps some crafty reader of books and sagacious discusser of scriptures may defend himself with such a shield of excuse and protect himself with such a shield of apology: “I,” he says, “revere with sincere faith the precepts of both Testaments, and I confess with believing heart the one essence and one substance of the Holy Trinity and the threefold subsistence of the persons; the sacrament of the Lord’s incarnation and the gibbet of His passion and the trophy of His resurrection I shall preach with free voice among the people; the last judgement of the living and the dead — when for each one, according to the diversity of merits, a differing retribution shall be weighed in the most just scales of judgement — I shall diligently proclaim; and by the privilege of this faith, gathered in the assembly of catholics, I shall be numbered without any obstacle of misfortune.” But this bulwark of excuse, under which they trust to hide themselves, I will strive to demolish and shatter to the ground with the ballista of apostolic chastisement. For James, the son of the Lord’s aunt, says: “You believe that there is one God” — and because he was speaking by irony to the twelve tribes placed in the dispersion, he at once added: “you do well: the devils also believe and tremble — for faith without works is dead.” For catholic faith and the concord of fraternal charity proceed inseparably by one path, as the illustrious preacher and vessel of election elegantly attests: “Though I know all prophecy and all mysteries, though I have faith so as to remove mountains, though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing.”

⁹ And that all may be concluded with the latch of a brief saying: in vain and emptily does he glory in the catholic faith who does not follow the dogma and rule of St Peter. For the foundation of the Church and the firmament of the faith, laid principally in Christ and secondly in Peter, shall by no means waver tottering beneath the onset of tempests’ whirlwinds — as the apostle proclaims: “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And to Peter the Truth thus sanctioned the privilege of the Church: “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church…”

[Here the text breaks off in the manuscript; the closing words addressed to Geraint himself and the valediction are wanting.]

[5] Aldhelm to Ehfrid — congratulating him on returning home flourishing with the praise of learning after six years in Ireland, and exhorting him, now exercising the office of teacher, to impart to his own people the benefit of what he has acquired. There is no longer reason for young men to leave Britain for Ireland for the sake of study, now that Theodore and Hadrian teach in the Canterbury school — by whom all the Irish are surpassed. Yet he does not wish to disparage them; in this matter his letter is playful. #

(Editor’s note, rendered: The identity of Ehfrid is disputed — Wharton conjectured Eadfrith bishop of Lindisfarne, but nothing proves he was in Ireland; Hahn’s conjecture of Aldfrith king of Northumbria is also rejected. All we know: an Englishman, educated in Britain but not at Malmesbury, then about six years in Ireland with many compatriots, probably a monk, now returned home. The letter was written while Theodore was still alive (he died 690), and cites the poem On Virginity (c. 686), so dates 686–690. The extravagant Hisperic style — alliteration, Greek loan-words, glossarial vocabulary, contorted word-order — deliberately imitates the Irish manner, as if to show that the artifices admired in the Irish flourish equally among English masters.)

¹ TO THE LORD EHFRID, WORTHY TO BE PROCLAIMED WITH VENERABLE PRAISE AND TO BE GREATLY HONOURED FOR THE MERITS OF THE SAINTS, ALDHELM THE LITTLE SENDS ETERNAL GREETING IN THE LORD.

(c. A.D. 686–690)

² First, chanting hymns with a stridulous symphony of voices and a song of melody and canticle, let us hymn — proclaiming to the author beneath the sky panegyrics and poems of the all-powerful chiefs and princes with a pious and especially fatherly privilege — chiefly because He deigned at last to send to the lands the offspring born of the gracious mother to blot out the inextricable sin of the first-formed and the handwriting of the ancients: Him who thrust into the Tartarus of foul torment the lurid one who spews from his triple-forked tongues rancid and virulent poisons torrenting through the ages; and where formerly the images and stag-shaped idols of that same accursed superstition were worshipped with crude stupidity in profane shrines, now in turn the hovels of disciples — no, the gracious temples of prayers — are skilfully built by the architect’s genius.

³ I confess, client of the fraternal sodality and burgher of the high municipality: after we learned through the reports of tale-bearers that you had arrived safe at the margin of the Britannic territory, returning here on your way back from the wintry region of the north-western island of Ireland — where for a space of about twice three years you lived sucking the udder of wisdom — at once, as flaming and burning love demanded, rejoicing we offered ineffable thanks to the Most High Throne, with palms spread on high on either side; chiefly because the gracious Arbiter deigned to bring you back, an exile visiting the ancient clientage of your father’s countryside, across the blue-grey expanses of the sea and the vast gravel-banks of the surging waves and the foaming billows’ resistances, while the keel of the little skiff furrowed the tempestuous brine, your skipper rejoicing — so that, where once, born in the cradle of your novitiate, you grew up to manhood’s age among the rude, now in turn, abundantly supported by the heavenly aid of prerogative, returning to your homeland from your dwelling in a foreign land, you exercise the office of teacher, a name received and an allotted charge.

⁴ This likewise I in no wise conceal from your Beatitude’s graciousness, brought forth from the innermost of my heart — to the increase of mingled and common joys, as I deem, and greatly to the glory of the Lord’s name it has grown: that by the report, beyond measure renowned, of those dwelling in the Irish land — with whose company you were supported a while — our hearing is shaken as by a thunderous bellowing emerging with stormy clamour, and through so many and great tracts of earth the fame of your reading, published abroad in villages and provinces, grows frequent; since so constant is the traffic hence there and there hence, of voyagers frequenting the watery way of the gulfs, like a kindred swarm of bees skilfully making nectar. For just as the honey-flowing swarm — when the nightly mist departs alternately and the Titan rises through the watery sky — bears off, laden to the slender wicker hives through the flowering crests of the swelling lime-trees, its tawny loads; in the same way, unless I am mistaken, the conglobation of greedy readers — the skill of Tatfrith — and the rest of the sagacious band of disciples, culling thirstily from the flower-bearing fields of Holy Writ the twice-two oracles of the twofold disputation, not only of the grammatical and geometrical arts and the other engines of the physical art, but also of the allegorical and tropological, honey-sweet amid the heavenly darknesses of problems, lay them up in the hives of wisdom, storing them away to be kept with unceasing meditation — from whose catalogue excellent fame has spread abroad that your skill proceeds laden with spoil and watered by the torrents of the sacred flood and overflowing.

⁵ Therefore on bended knee with earnest prayers I implore your affable discipleship, as one prostrate and sobbing, that it may in no wise pass out of blotted memory: what the Peaceful One — heaven-inspired, possessing ambrosia, placed in succession to his father by hereditary right, bearing for twice four lustres of times the sceptre of empire over the Israelitish people, increased by the gracious inspiration — declared, saying: “Drink water from your own cistern and flowing streams from your own well; let your fountains be dispersed abroad, and in the streets divide your waters; keep them for yourself alone, and let no strangers be partakers with you.” Therefore, steeped in these sacred counsels, by constant effort open the fountain of orthodoxy and water the thirsty fields of minds, so that the seed of heavenly ecstasy, sown in the living and fruitful furrows of the orthodox by the sweat of the sower, no obstacle of parched drought withstanding, may sprout and flourish, and at last the thick crop ripen abundantly by God’s aid.

⁶ For this reason your suppliant has earnestly ventured to proffer this prayer: because some are known to be endowed with heavenly wisdom and filled to overflowing with the hidden light, yet, receiving it through gratuitous heavenly bounty and God’s lavish bestowal, by no means fully proclaim what they have attained, unlocking the treasury of knowledge, but bestow it piecemeal upon the greedy. For according to the proof of the evangelical authority, the burning lamp is by no means hidden secretly in the dark lair of a foul urn — it ought to shine for all with limpid light on the top of the lampstand; nor are the talents’ usuries vainly buried concealed beneath the underground sands, which ought rather to have been struck into the numerous coin-moneys of the money-changers — lest perchance, like the slothful servant torpid with acquired idleness, he be hurled headlong with his talent into the foulest squalor of the dungeons; but rather — “well done, well done!” — may he deserve, about to enter the joy, from the pious author. Therefore the psalmist bard, expiating on this account the sin of his own conscience, began with sacred presage: “Your justice I have not hidden,” and the rest.

⁷ But I, a poor little man, turning this over in dictating, was tortured by anxious scruple. “Why,” said I, “should Ireland be extolled with a kind of ineffable privilege — where thronging readers flock, borne in fleets — as though on this side, in the fruitful turf of Britain, no Argive or Roman teachers could possibly be found, who might avail to open to eager learners the knotty problems of the heavenly library?” For though the aforementioned land of Ireland is adorned by a rich and blooming, so to speak, pasture-numerousness of readers, like the cardinal points of the sky with the star-bearing flashes of gleaming constellations — yet Britain, placed in the western clime at the utmost edge of the world, enjoys, figuratively speaking, a sun fiery-flaming and a lucent pattern of the moon: that is, Theodore, exercising the pontificate from his very novitiate of the rudiments to the ripeness of the sophistic art, and also Hadrian, client of the same sodality, ineffably endowed with the most polished urbanity! And I shall boldly declare in the open, the deceiving fribble of falsehood being disregarded, with the just censure of truth weighing in the balance: even though Theodore, steering the helm of the high priesthood, is thronged round by a globe of Irish disciples — as a fierce boar encircled by a pack of yelping Molossian hounds — with polished grammar’s tooth, suffering no loss of damage, he swiftly scatters the rebellious phalanxes; and like a warrior in the middle of the field, a champion fenced about by the legions’ phalanxes of rivals, at once stretching the sinewy bow of his arms’ strength and darts drawn from the quiver — that is, the dark and sharp syllogisms of chronography — the troop swollen with the swelling of disdain, losing the testudo of their shields and turning their backs, seek the lurking-places of black caverns in hasty rout, the victor triumphing.

⁸ Nor, however, let anyone suppose that in philosophising thus I would sneer at the Irish scholars, of whose jewelled honeycomb of dogmas your sagacity has enjoyed a while — since my earnest aim was to weave affably a eulogy of our own people, not to spread abroad a mockery of yours with ridiculous cackling. No rather, in the manner of a jester and a buffoon, it was jesting with rash witticism at the speakers — under the pretext of fraternal irony of affection; but if anything in my page shall be convicted of having uttered garrulity through the prompting of ignorance, as the verse-writer says:

⁹ “Let it become a worthy utterance of Glingius the babbler: ‘a gurgling fugitive stammers’;
Nor let the writer fear the jests of a threatening tongue!
So ever do they long to carp at writers’ pages,
As a shaggy goat gnaws the vine-clusters with its tooth;
Yet they do not correct the stumbling poet’s writing.”

[6] A certain Irishman petitions Aldhelm to teach him and to lend him a book. #

(Codex Vindobonensis fol. 25v; Epist. Mer. I 237 no. 4; from Ussher’s Sylloge no. XII p. 35.)

¹ TO THE HOLY AND MOST WISE LORD ALDHELM, IN CHRIST MOST BELOVED, [AN IRISHMAN OF UNKNOWN NAME] SENDS ETERNAL GREETING IN GOD.

² Since you excel in talent and in Roman eloquence and in the varied flower of letters — not ignorant even of the Greek manner — I choose rather to learn from your mouth, that is, from the purest fountain of knowledge, than to drink from any turbulent master whatever. This especially I note, knowing beforehand — for which reason I confidently beseech you to receive and teach me: since the splendour of wisdom, as is said, shines in you before many readers, and you know the minds of pilgrims desiring to learn wisdom, because you yourself were a stranger at Rome; and moreover because you were reared by a certain holy man of our own race [i.e. Maildubh]. These things are intimated briefly because, if you will attend humbly in charity, you will perceive no less by few words than by many discourses.

³ This also I set before you sincerely: I wish to read a certain little book which I do not have, which is no greater than a borrowing of two weeks — yet I say this short time not because I need no more, but lest this petition breed distaste in your mind; a servant also and horses I think to obtain. In this season of harvest I shall hope for a glad answer from you; may divine grace deign to guard your Beatitude, praying for us.

[7] Æthelwald, afterwards king of Mercia, asks the abbot Aldhelm “to complete the benefit of the generous instruction begun,” and sends Aldhelm his poems. #

(Codex Vindobonensis fol. 35v; Epist. Mer. I 238 f.)

¹ TO THE MOST SACRED ABBOT ALDHELM, BOUND TO ME BY INDISSOLUBLE KNOTS OF KINDLED CHARITY AS MY DESERTS DEMAND — ÆTHELWALD, THE SUPPLIANT FOSTER-SON OF YOUR HOLY PATERNITY, SENDS PERPETUAL GREETING OF WELFARE IN THE LORD.

² In the summer heat of this passing time — while this most wretched fatherland is mournfully disfigured by the wasting malice of immense deadly conflicts on every side — I tarried conversing with you in the zeal of reading. Then to me, unworthy though I am, your Beatitude’s sacred sagacity — steeped in the writings of nearly all panegyrical volumes, both those issued by the eloquence of secular literary verbosity and those elaborated by the pen of spiritual ecclesiastical dogma — laid open most lucidly the hidden studies of the liberal letters, snatching away the veil of dense dullness with which the secrets of dark mysteries are shut off from all ignorant minds. To which…

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