How did fourth or fifth century priests in Europe approach pagans to convert them? What were their tactics?
Presumably they didn’t travel alone.
I also presume they had converts with them who spoke the language of the target people to be converted.
Pagans would also perhaps have wanted to convert if it meant benefitting from it in some material sense.
My real interest though is in the psychological approach to converting chieftains/rulers/kings. How did they sense that rallying around a religion might enable them to consolidate power/authority? Would the priests themselves have advertised Christianity’s temporal benefits?
How would the Christian message have come across to the pagans? How would it have resonated with them?
The message wouldn’t have just been lapped top without some counter-struggle to keep their old beliefs.
What reliable accounts are there of conversion that went well? I know other attempts ended in failure.
I look forward to your feedback.
Found that there are a series of pretty good century-by-century summaries on Wikipedia. Here is the 4th century. Links to others at the top of each page.
Thanks Darren. I’ve read many summaries but I haven’t read any accounts of what was going through the minds of the missionary priest or the pagans as they were receiving the gospel. I’m sure studies have been done.
This is what I’m getting at. But it is a summery and I was hoping to find a more detailed account of how exactly an evageliz
ing monk/priest went about his business.
“Often the conversion of the ruler was followed by the compulsory baptism of his subjects. Some were evangelization by monks or priests, organic growth within an already partly Christianized society, or by campaigns against paganism such as the conversion of pagan temples into Christian churches or the condemnation of pagan gods and practices.[1] A notable strategy for Christianization was Interpretatio Christiana – the practice of converting native pagan practices and culture, pagan religious imagery, pagan sites and the pagan calendar to Christian uses, due to the Christian efforts at proselytism (evangelism) based on the Great Commission.”
I’d think that personal daily journals of the thoughts of priests and pagans will be very thin on the ground–both because few people were writing them and because a tiny percentage of the few that were written will have survived 15 centuries.
Generally, in Britain and Gaul at least, they concentrated on women ( if the barbarians trusted celibate men alone with their wives [ on the other hand, in Germanic societies one tried not to get women pissed off ] ), particularly Queens, who might then mention their new faith to their husbands. Repeatedly.
In the late 6th century Pope Gregory sent a group of missionaries to Kent to convert Æthelberht, King of Kent, whose wife, Bertha of Kent, was a Frankish princess and practising Christian.*
*The spread of Christianity in the north of Britain gained ground when Edwin of Northumbria married Æthelburg, a daughter of Æthelbert, and agreed to allow her to continue to worship as a Christian. He also agreed to allow Paulinus of York to accompany her as a bishop, and for Paulinus to preach to the court. By 627, Paulinus had converted Edwin, and on Easter, 627, Edwin was baptised. * Wikipedia — Gregorian mission
It’s not for nothing Christianity, slightly more merciful than competing creeds, was known as a ‘Womans’ Religion’
Another possibility suggested from the experience of St Columba is that the missionaries’ literacy made them useful as diplomats, so one can imagine them graduating from that to advisors - and if that meant helping rulers to achieve things peacefully without losing valuable soldiers, you can see how that could be ascribed to a Christian rather than pagan god. Plus, of course, there are plenty of tales of miracles.
Yes yes, it all starts with kind words and gentle hands.
But later there is burning and bleeding and screaming and suffering to rival the plagues of egypt.
One ventures to guess (but it is just a guess), that the way this works is that the proselytizer convinces the rulers that God will support them in battle. Firstly, this encourages them to go into battle, which is nice because if they lose then the nearby Christian kingdom can slide on in and take the space while everything has been destabilized. But if they do happen to win then, hey, proof that God is real!
Once you’ve got the nobility, they’ll convert their subjects on their own.
Sometimes the introduction of Christianity worked hand-in-hand with consolidation of territory. A lot of places were just a bunch of petty kingdoms (e.g., Norway and Sweden) and eventually one kingdom got stronger and assimilated it’s neighbors.
A local petty king doesn’t worry so much about managing a large territory, keeping records, setting up trade relations. But the king of a “country” does. Where are you going to find people to help you do that? The Church. What are they going to ask for? “Well, we’d like to practice our religion in peace, maybe convert a few people, train some of them to be priests and help us out. And we can help you get the stuff you need to take over even more of your neighbors. By the way: have you heard of this great guy called Jesus?”
That and the wives, as noted. Once you got big enough, you wanted to marry someone from a well-off kingdom for alliance purposes. And that usually meant taking a Christian wife. If you were a prince among the Rus getting a Byzantine princess mail-order bride was quite a coup for business purposes and guess what happens then?
I once met a religious type who talked about how the idea was to get people hooked with “the milk of human kindness”, as you start babies on eating by giving them milk. I don’t think I was ever told what you had to do to move onto metaphorical solids.
While not a daily journal St Augustine’s Confessionscome pretty damn close. And there are bucketloads of saint’s lives from the period, many of whom were proselytizers.
Maybe, but that isn’t “accounts of what was going through the minds of the missionary priest or the pagans as they were receiving the gospel.” They weren’t going “Dear Diary, today I met with the villagers for the first time. The chief wears a really funny hat! It is hard to understand them, but they were all very nice to me. Gee, I look forward to leading them to Jesus!”
St Patrick left some writings that are considered authentic. He was not new to Ireland–he’d been captured as a slave, escaped, then went back to preach the Gospel. And was not the only missionary to Ireland–or even the first.
Later tales of Patrick include many marvels & miracles & are viewed with skepticism. But you can read his words here.
One thing that Christianity offered pagan kings was a religion that would agree to underpin their authority as king. The Christian God grants earthly powers to kings, in a manner much the same as he grants spiritual powers to his clergy. Which may then become the divine right of kings. A religion that basically says that your king is anointed by God, and to rise against him is to rise against God’s will is a good call for most kings. Not hard to see how they would be swayed to adopt that as the national religion as opposed to random pagan beliefs.