Gildas’s De excidio Britonum and the Early British Church (review)

Karen George’s book appears to have two main objectives: to explore Gildas’s stance on Pelagianism and provide an analysis of his prose style based on a theory of “symmetrical parallelism.” Readers looking for an empirical study grounded in hard evidence will not find it here. With a few exceptions, some of which are mentioned below, George’s interpretations are not buttressed by any external evidence, although she frequently uses Gildas’s Biblical allusions to try to unravel obscure passages. Like many before her, George analyzes the text from within the text itself, relying on her own common sense and associations to offer readers a personal understanding of the text. In the introduction she tries to justify this approach by stating that in the absence of a contemporary “Insular or Continental context for the work,” one is left “to postulate a particular ecclesiastical context for the DEB [i.e. De excidio Brit.] based on the analysis of evidence found within the text itself” (quotations from pp. 4–5). But since “evidence found within the text itself” can often be vague, she sometimes compensates, quite understandably, by giving free rein to the imagination. It is very much to George’s credit that she is always the first to point out when her commentary turns speculative (e.g., p. 102: “the similarity is. . . suggestive, but not conclusive”), and to be fair, the vagueness of the text appears to invite speculative interpretations. But although George deserves full marks for disclosure and self-awareness, nevertheless her transparency, hesitations, and qualifications are no substitute for a solid argument, in the absence of which conclusions can be self-defeating. To take but two examples: “The context is quite obscure, but an ecclesiastical context seems marginally more plausible than a secular one” (p. 91), and “[p]erhaps all we can say at this point is that Gildas’s ambiguity on the question of faith and works may have revealed more about his doctrinal position to his monastic readers than it has yet revealed to us” (p. 107, from the conclusion of ch. 6). In other words, Gildas’s text is beyond us. Although I believe that an author is fully entitled to reach a non-conclusion (especially when dealing with Gildas’s opaque prose), he or she should not neglect to tell the reader what purpose such a conclusion is meant to serve.

I now come to the matter of Gildas and Pelagianism. The question of Gildas’s approach to Pelagianism is much-trodden ground, and George’s discussion of it is largely indebted to previous studies, which she acknowledges. She rejects the notion that Gildas was anti-Pelagian, and proposes that he was semi-Pelagian, or “anti-predestinarian” (p. 129), as she prefers to call it, which I find to be a refreshingly nuanced definition for what can otherwise be a daunting term.

George believes she found a number of “verbal echoes” and “similar ideas” from Pelagian texts in De excidio. But we must ask ourselves why she, and others before her, sought parallels between Pelagian texts and De excidio to begin with, given that Pelagianism is never explicitly mentioned in Gildas’s text. The only heresies that De excidio names are those of the Nicolaitans and Arians. The reason why Pelagianism was assumed to be hiding between the lines appears to be text-critical: a short phrase in De excidio concurs with a phrase found in two Pelagian works, Epistola de malis doctoribus and De uirginitate (pp. 71–72, 96). But how secure is the apparent borrowing from a Pelagian text, which sent George in search for more? The phrase in question is the following: non actum est [agitur : Gildas] de qualitate peccati, sed de transgressione mandati. I ran this phrase through Brepolis electronic database to see if it occurs in texts that are not Pelagian. The search yielded the following surprising hit: Augustine, Contra Iulianum, Book 6 (PL 45...