Gildas

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Gildas, modern statue in Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys

Gildas (* probably around 500 ; † 570 ), also Gildas the Wise , was an outstanding representative of Celtic Christianity in late antique- post-Roman Britain , famous for his education and his literary style.

Choir of the monastery church in Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys

Life

Statue of Gildas in the Bieuzy Chapel

Gildas was a clergyman and wanted to promote the early medieval ideal of monks with his work ; in many ways it can also be counted as late antiquity . Gildas was later canonized; his feast day is January 29th. He is the patron saint of the Saint-Gildas-en-Rhuys monastery in France.

While the majority of Gildas researchers currently date to the middle of the 6th century, others represent an early date to the 5th century and suspect that his work was written as early as 485. David N. Dumville suspects Gildas to be the teacher of the Finnian von Clonard , who in turn was the teacher of St. Columban of Iona .

plant

Gildas' most important surviving work De Excidio Britonum ("The Fall of the Britannians"; also known as De Excidio Britanniae ) is a long Latin sermon in three parts in which he condemns the deeds of his temporal and spiritual contemporaries as sin, God's judgment conjured up. The first part consists of Gildas 'explanation of his work and a brief description of Roman Britain from its conquest by the Romans to Gildas' own time. He reports:

“As to their resistance, submission and rebellion, about their second submission and hard bondage; concerning religion and persecution, the holy martyrs, many heresies, tyrants, two plundering peoples, concerning the defense and another devastation, a second vengeance and a third devastation, concerning hunger, the letter to Agitius [usually equated with the army master Flavius ​​Aëtius will], victory, crime, enemies suddenly announced, a remarkable plague, a council, an enemy fiercer than the first, the disruption of the cities concerning those who survived, and the final victory of our country granted by our time the will of God. "

In the second part, which begins with the statement, "Britain has kings, but they are tyrants, and judges, but they are oblivious", Gildas speaks about the lives and deeds of five contemporary " warlords ": Constantine of Dumnonia , Aurelius Caninus , Vortipor from Demetae (now called Dyfed ), Cuneglasus from "the bear's fortress" (Din Eirth, possibly Dinarth near Llandudno ), and Maglocunus or Maelgwn . Without exception, he describes these rulers as cruel, illegitimate and predatory; they live a life in sin.

The third part begins with the words “Britain has priests, but they are fools; many clergy, but they are shameless; Clerics, but they are crafty looters ”. Gildas continues in his jeremiad against the clergy of his time but does not mention any names, so that no light falls on the history of the Christian church of this period.

The vision of a country devastated by looting invaders and the bad government of corrupt and negligent rulers has long been uncritically accepted by scholars. This view of things fitted too well with the popular belief that a barbarian invasion would have destroyed Roman civilization. This also relieved science of the need to look for other reasons as to why Britain was one of the few parts in the west of the Roman Empire that apparently did not adopt Latin during the rule of the Romans: the Romanized, Latin-speaking part of the population was Physically destroyed in the 5th and 6th centuries by the wars described by Gildas.

However, Gildas himself wrote quite good, demanding Latin. He once quotes Virgil, but that does not mean that he read Virgil in larger excerpts. If you try to interpret Gildas' writing, you have to take into account that it was also his intention to preach to his contemporaries in the manner of an Old Testament prophet, which is why he created a particularly gloomy picture that should not be taken literally. It was not his intention to produce an accurate historical account; rather, he painted a sinister picture intended to encourage his readers to moral purification. While Gildas offered one of the earliest descriptions of Hadrian's Wall on the one hand , he left out other historical details that did not fit his message.

Nevertheless, his book remains an important source, not only on late antique-early medieval or British history - especially since it is one of the very few works from 6th century Britain that has survived. It is remarkable, among other things, that Gildas was still in the 5th / 6th Century, when the country was, according to long prevailing opinion, in general decline, could receive such a solid education on the late antique model.

In the copy of De Excidio Britonum available today , Gildas mentions that the year of his birth was the year of the battle of Mons Badonicus ( Beda Venerabilis seems to have been given a different version). The Annales Cambriae , a chronicle found in a manuscript with the Historia Britonum , gives the year of his death as 570, but the reliability of this information is very controversial. A biography of Gildas was written by Caradoc von Llancarfan in the 12th century. Since Gildas was admired for his classical and ancient education, he was later called sapiens ("the wise").

Gildas is also associated with a hymn called Lorica (breastplate), a prayer for redemption from evil that contains interesting fragments of Hiberno-Latin. Whether another poem, a penitential and some letter fragments are authentic is partly controversial.

Patron saint of horses

Saint Gildas was considered the patron saint of horses in Brittany. A priest blessed all horses in the village of Port Blanc on Pentecost . Before the Second World War, a procession and a horse race to the island of Saint Gildas across from Port Blanc took place.

Editions and translations

literature

  • Michael Lapidge: Gildas . In: John Blair et al. a. (Ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England . Oxford 1999, p. 204.
  • Thomas D. O'Sullivan: The De Excidio of Gildas: Its Authenticity and Date . New York 1978.
  • Michael Lapidge, David Dumville (Eds.): Gildas: New Approaches . Woodbridge 1984.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Cf. C. Kasper: Gildas the Wise . In: S. Döpp, W. Geerlings (ed.): Lexicon of ancient Christian literature . Freiburg / Basel 1998, pp. 255f.
  2. ^ Pentecost for horses . Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 23, 1953.
personal data
SURNAME Gildas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gildas the Wise
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Representative of Celtic Christianity in Britain; Author; Saint
DATE OF BIRTH at 510
DATE OF DEATH around 570