5 - Theodore, the English church and the monothelete controversy

Summary

In his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede tells his readers that the church is the cement to unite the squabbling tribes in the old Roman province of Britannia, especially through the link to St Peter mediated through Gregory the Great sending Augustine to Kent, and through Pope Vitalian sending Theodore of Tarsus in 668, ‘the first archbishop to whom the entire Church of the English consented to give obedience’. In Bede's pages the troubles of the church in the Mediterranean south seldom surface in the narrative. An exception is the account of the Council called by Theodore to meet at Hatfield on 17 September, probably in 679, where the assembled bishops affirmed their faith in the five oecumenical councils and also in Pope Martin Fs Lateran Council (649) whose condemnation of the doctrine that Christ, though fully human and fully divine, had only one will, created a storm with Byzantium and dreadful suffering for Martin.3 Bede records the Council's further assent to the double procession of the Spirit or ‘filioque’, on which the six councils were silent, but which Augustine's influence had erected into a non-controversial proposition in the western churches at large, even if they had not yet been added to the Credo.

Bede continues by adding that Benedict Biscop had returned from pilgrimage to Rome bringing with him the precentor (archicantator) of St Peter's, John, commissioned by the pope (probably Agatho) to examine the orthodoxy of the English churches and to report back to Rome. The precentor brought to England the decrees of the Lateran Council of 649, and a copy was made for the monastery at Jarrow.