Continental Business
Michel Aaij
University of Tennessee
Discussed in this review:
Jelsma, Auke. 2003. Bonifatius: Zijn Leven, Zijn Invloed [Boniface: His life, his influence]. Zoetermeer: Meinema. ISBN 9021139030. 183 pages.
von Padberg, Lutz E. 2003. Bonifatius: Missionar und Reformer [Boniface: Missionary and reformer]. München: Beck. ISBN 3406480195. 128 pages. 3 maps.
Lutterbach, Hubertus. 2004. Bonifatius—Mit Axt und Evangelium: Eine Biographie in Briefen [Boniface—with axe and gospel: A biography in letters]. Freiburg: Herder. ISBN 3451285096. 334 pages. 22 illustrations.
§1. The 1250th anniversary of Boniface's martyrdom has been good for Boniface studies, and in this column I can report on no fewer than three biographies that appeared in the last two years, one Dutch and two German. Boniface remains one of the most popular saints on the calender: the festivities in Dokkum, Friesland, and Fulda, Germany, were unparalleled for any saint this day and age, and if you missed the party, you can always order the CD of the German Boniface musical ( http://www.bonifatius musical.de), or the Boniface video from the tourist board in Dokkum (http://www.bonifatiusdokkum.nl).
§2. The first book in this selection is Dutch, and not exactly new: to underscore Boniface-enthusiasm, growing interest from the reading public, requests from pilgrims to Dokkum (20,000 a year, according to Jelsma!), and a financial contribution from his publisher prompted Auke Jelsma to revise his earlier De Blaffende Hond (The Barking Dog, a reference to Boniface's self-characterization in Tangl 78). That book has long been out of print; I have been unable to compare the two and will base my review only on the new book. Jelsma begins with a sort of disclaimer: the book intends not to be a biography in the usual sense of the word, but to focus on specific aspects of Boniface's life. Regardless, the twelve chapters mainly follow standard chronology, but the subdivision into chapters prefaced by (long) citations from different sources (Willibald's and other vitae Bonifatii, the Boniface correspondence, the Vita Leobae, and the documentation of the Concilium Germanicum) does break up the monotony of chronology in an attempt to thematize the life of Boniface.
§3. Jelsma is an interesting character to be writing about Boniface, since he is Protestant; especially in the first four decades or so after the Second World War, the Netherlands were so compartmentalized in different denominations (with one added compartment for Social-Democrats) that his interest in Boniface is at least somewhat surprising. He also possesses, in great plenitude, typical Dutch sobriety, the character trait that will not let him take anything for granted, especially not hagiography—one gets the feeling he trusts almost anyone more than Willibald, and sometimes this is refreshing. This same reserve applies to his characterization of Boniface, as a man possessed of great energy but very little respect and diplomacy. For instance, Jelsma unfavorably compares Boniface to Pope Gregory the Great, who he says advocated tact in conversion: where Gregory, according to Jelsma, wanted pagan temples to be remodeled into Christian churches, Boniface simply destroys them; protected by servants, he chops down the sacred oak at Geismar; following victorious Frankish armies, he helps replace indigenous with Christian law. Jelsma adds, "This kind of action, by the way, won't always have made him popular. He wasn't murdered for nothing!" (61).
§4. The book is clearly not intended for an academic audience: the bibliography is short (yet still the documentation is difficult to navigate); there are no footnotes, no index; its tone is sometimes far from academic. Jelsma mentions in his introduction how he, especially as he got older, came to admire Boniface more and more, but it is a tough kind of love, the love one might have for a stern father who chastised too much, too often, in too righteous a manner. In fact, the character trait he ascribes most often to the saint is intolerance, which really is the red thread in the first seven full chapters (chs. 3-9), and I identify in Jelsma's account no fewer than six causes of this intolerance: the puer oblatus has a strong (too strong) identification with Christ (29-29); Boniface was a stranger without any ties to the area he worked in (41-43); his image of God was so exclusive it could not allow the validity of any other concept, be it pagan or Arian (47-51); his real interest was fixed exclusively on the hereafter (56-57); he recognized only the authority of Rome, against the interests of secular leaders (77-83); his strict adherence to Roman orthodoxy led to pettiness, even vengefulness (107, 109). None of these explanations would strike a Boniface scholar as revolutionary; what strikes me, though, is that half the book reads almost like a litany of complaints—one sometimes wonders what Jelsma does appreciate in Boniface.
§5. But his appreciation is brought out in the second part of the book. Jelsma admires Boniface for his stubbornness sometimes against better judgment; for the zeal with which he furthered the cause of Rome; for the love he bore his friends and expressed so dramatically (Jelsma reads most letters literally) in the correspondence. Jelsma never gets very lyrical about his subject, although the last sentence approaches heart-felt sentiment: "The association with a restless wanderer like Wynfreth-Boniface can still make people restless" (180).
§6. In the end, Jelsma's book vacillates between critique, hagiography, history, and character sketch; for me, it is not personal enough to function well as an homage, and not scholarly enough to be a useful academic book. For instance, the bibliography lists only seven books on Boniface (two Dutch, four German, one French), which suggests two things simultaneously: first, Boniface study in the Netherlands is far from being as popular as, for instance, the study of Willibrord; second, Jelsma is perfectly content, even in this revision, to barely look across the Dutch-German border where he would find a wealth of recent books and articles, by notables like Becht-Jördens, von Padberg, Kehl, and Stork. Jelsma mentions Marco Mostert's book from 2001, which I reviewed earlier on these pages, but the most recent German title is Schieffer's 1954 book.
§7. Even acknowledging that Jelsma did not intend to write a biography or an academic study, I see a scholarly problem of an epistemological kind. Jelsma treats hagiography with healthy Protestant distrust (realizing that the different vitae betray local interests [esp. 165-70]), and says more than once that he considers the Boniface-correspondence more historically accurate, giving us more insight into the real Boniface (163). He refutes Willibald's description of Boniface's death, that Boniface, holding relics, preached to his fellow martyrs and requested their guards lay down their arms, imploring all to embrace martyrdom—there could not have been time to do that (152). But, and I find this somewhat odd, he does accept the Utrecht vita's account that Boniface protected himself with a gospel (or a codex, perhaps the Ragyndrudis Codex in Fulda—Jelsma allows the eye witness might have mistaken one book for another), and thus accepts the "Schutzhypothese," the "protection hypothesis," refuted (well) by Lutz von Padberg (1994, 29): surely a discussion of Boniface's martyrdom would have benefitted from a look at von Padberg's work or Hermann Schüling's critique thereof.1 The only reason I see for his acceptance of this hypothesis is that it fits in with his characterization of a stern, stubborn Boniface, a Boniface who really was not very meek, who had an armed guard and therefore allowed the use of arms by laity; at the same time, he must refute, and he does, the Utrecht vita's statement that Boniface went to Friesland in 754 to explicitly seek martyrdom (152). Of course Jelsma has his reasons for both choices, but accepting one part from the Utrecht vita as true and rejecting another is at odds with the teleology of hagiography, with the unified (though not single) message of a particular hagiographic text.
§8. If Jelsma's choice of which part of which vita to choose as authoritative is at least problematic, so is the acceptance of the letters as somehow more truthful. He does note, in a chapter on "Boniface's sadness" (literally "The sadness of Boniface," an allusion to a well-known novel by Belgian author Hugo Claus), that Boniface exaggerates his failures in the many letters in which he bewails his lack of success and his growing problems with the Frankish hierarchy. He cites, for instance, Tangl 78, a letter to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury: "My labor seems like that of a barking dog that sees thieves and robbers break in and plunder his master's, but, because he has none to help him in his defense, can only whine and complain" (Emerton 1970, 138-39). Jelsma says this is too somber a picture, and spends two pages outlining the successes of Boniface's mission, but surely what applies to hagiography applies to the Boniface correspondence: Boniface's letters are not necessarily, or not simply, truthful accounts of actual events and states of minds; they are rhetorical constructions that attempt to make a point often in the starkest and most rhetorically powerful terms possible. One of the most important reasons these letters were collected in the first place was to function as rhetorical models to be copied, not unlike how hagiographies were often literally based on earlier hagiographies. Surely, then, the difference between any of the vitae and the letters cannot be one of veracity, though there is no doubt Boniface speaks more strongly through the letters than through Willibald and his followers—but this Boniface of the correspondence, who knew he wrote his letters for an audience of more than one person, is not necessarily more truthful, more "real," than the Boniface cast in the vitae to conform the hagiographical model.
§9. In all, Jelsma's book is useful, but more for gauging how Boniface, so dependent on Rome in all his work, is treated by a Protestant scholar from a mainly Protestant country—with scepticism and understanding—than for coming to grips with Boniface and his life and influence. And he draws some interesting conclusions, for example: "Boniface was convinced that the God he served was a jealous, rough, authoritarian, stern God who was not to be trifled with. Remarkable is also that Mary as mother of Christ seems to play no part whatsoever in his religious experience. His image of God appears almost Calvinist. He may rightly be valued by both Catholics and Protestants as founder of their religious conviction" (51). As far as I can tell, this kind of appreciation, of a Catholic by a Protestant, has only come from the Netherlands—each country, each denomination creates the Boniface it wants or needs.
§10. Lutz von Padberg's new pocket-sized biography is a completely different kind of book from Jelsma's—more factual, drier, less personally involved, and, as a resource, much more useful. Von Padberg, professor of medieval history in Paderborn, must be under contract with the heirs of Boniface, since he produces a good Boniface study just about every other year (his Studien zur Bonifatiusverehrung [Frankfurt am Main, 1996] is the most useful book I know on the history of the Ragyndrudis Codex and the Fulda relics, though it should be read in tandem with Hermann Schüling's response, cited below in note 1). As the most notable German Boniface-scholar, von Padberg simply had to produce a book on the occasion of the anniversary, and this is a good one.
§11. The booklet (128 pages including index) follows the standard chronological order, and is divided into manageable chapters—everything points to a more popular market than academe, including von Padberg's tone, which at times is almost colloquial and, more often than in any of his other Boniface books, ironic, in the way Jelsma's often is. Like Jelsma, von Padberg sees Boniface's life as at least partly tragic, but von Padberg does a much better job of placing Boniface's tragedy in the politics of his time—the conflict between Rome and the Frankish gentry, the need for Boniface to have every little thing authorized by the pope, the needs of especially Pepin to navigate between Rome's spiritual and his gentry's worldly authority. The chapter "Church Politics" is in fact the strongest part of the book, giving a very clear exposition of the shift from nominal Merovingian to actual Carolingian rule, the dynastic struggles within the mayoral family, and the role and position of the Frankish noblemen and bishops. Strong also is the section on the Concilium Germanicum (a matter of great importance to German scholars), the Austrasian synod Boniface presided over in 742, when it seemed that Carloman and Boniface's common interests, after the death of Charles Martel, would create a model for the reform of the Frankish church also.
§12. Like every other biographer, von Padberg must choose which account of specific events to accept. Most Boniface-scholars take Willibald with a grain of salt, most German Boniface-scholars place little stock in the Utrecht vita, and most recognize that the letters teach us as much (or more) about Boniface's rhetoric as they do about his life (though Jelsma, the sober Dutch historian, cares less for rhetoric). Complete consistency can not always be achieved, and von Padberg, in my opinion, slips once or twice. For instance, there has been some discussion on Boniface's death, which at least one (German) scholar, Johannes Kern, claimed was the result of Frankish conspiracy (though no one seems to agree with him).2 Von Padberg, relying completely on Willibald, unquestioningly assumes it was just robbers (10) without giving any further evidence—but on the same page he states vengeance was exacted only on the robbers, which emphatically is not what Willibald says. Boniface's death is hardly controversial; still, I would have liked to see von Padberg say just a little bit more about the effects of Boniface's death, which, according to Willibald, really entailed the complete pacification (i.e., conversion) of the area.
§13. Another inconsistency pertains directly to the martyrdom and its different accounts in the Willibald and the Utrecht vitae. In this matter, von Padberg disagrees with Jelsma, but is not completely consistent. First of all, he correctly posits that Willibald's vita is, in the presumed absence of eyewitnesses, based more on how a saint should die than on how this future saint actually did die (103-106). This means, of course, that not every detail in his account need be accurate. However, his way of refuting the Utrecht thesis (which Jelsma accepted—perhaps for nationalist reasons, or out of dislike of Willibald), which is supposedly based on the account of an eyewitness, lands him in difficulties—he says that since there were no eyewitnesses, this Utrecht eyewitness could not have existed. But there are no eyewitnesses only if the Willibald account, which states there were no survivors, is historically accurate, and this historical accuracy was denied earlier. He continues by saying that, if indeed there were eyewitnesses, then they must have been so far off they could not have recognized the book as a gospel, and it is true that the Ragyndrudis Codex is not a gospel—it seems clear, though, that to this witness, a young girl at the time, any big book must have looked like a gospel, and there is no reason the Ragyndrudis Codex could not fit the Utrecht bill. Von Padberg has elsewhere argued more cogently against the "protection thesis"; this is not his strongest exposition, especially not, when, at the end of this section, he seems to suggest historical accuracy for Willibald's account because it fits better with what we expect from a saint: now truly the cart has been put before the horse.
§14. Neither of these minor points really detract from the overall quality of the book: von Padberg does not disappoint, and the heirs of the Boniface estate can be pleased. He has produced an eminently readable, well-researched, well-documented popular study which, I assume for reasons of audience, makes clear choices in historical interpretation. If any Boniface study deserves translation for a more popular English-speaking audience, this is the one; we should really regret that no such biography is available in English, and I can only hope the author and the publisher will consider translating this very useful, valuable (especially considering the German price, around $9), and well-made little book.
§15. The final book in this review is truly original: Bonifatius—Mit Axt und Evangelium is the Bonifacian correspondence, with the blanks filled in by Hubertus Lutterbach, professor of Christian and Cultural History in Essen. Surely one of the most frustrating enterprises of any Boniface scholar is to deal with the missing letters in the correspondence. Who would not want to know the response by Aethelbald, King of Mercia, to Boniface's letter (Tangl 73) in which the missionary accuses the king of destroying church property, treating monks violently, and fornicating with nuns? Did Boniface reciprocate the sugary (and Virgil-laced) veneration offered by Egburga (Tangl 13; tr. Emerton 35), whose "very inmost soul [was] filled with a sweetness as of honey" at the mere thought of him; did he indeed fulfill her request—"I beg you earnestly to send me some little remembrance, perhaps a holy relic or at least a few written words, that so [sic] I may always have you with me"? Might there have been a Boniface scolded by a contemporary king for meddling in his affairs, or a Boniface citing Latin erotic poetry in a letter to a lonely abbess yearning for him back in England?
§16. Lutterbach creates this opportunity through creative writing, an opportunity to show us a side of Boniface missing from the vitae and the correspondence. Unfortunately, he does not seize it: his collection of real and imaginary letters restricts itself exclusively to church-related matters, and while Boniface's importance to the organization of the Western church is undeniable, it is not the most exciting stuff.
§17. This is not to say the book is not informative, because it is. Lutterbach knows a great deal about Boniface's time period, and shares freely—on the liturgy, on sexuality, on material culture. So we find, for instance, in the first few letters Lutterbach writes, Boniface informing pope Gregory II on how these pagan tribes live, what kinds of houses they build, what the climate is like, and so forth—all prompted by a remark in a letter by Boniface to Pope Zachary (Tangl 86), that Gregory II was interested in such anthropological information. No doubt one of the author's interests is to educate a modern German readership on their pre-Christian ancestry, and his book is certainly educational; there is an audience in Germany interested in such matters, and it is important to discuss that cultural ancestry outside the framework of Nazi-era politics.
§18. A crucial question, it seems to me, is if Lutterbach gets the tone right, and if he can add to, not just emulate, the remaining letters, which are mostly very formal, full of commonplace rhetorical figures and tropes, and impersonal in tone as well as content. Sometimes he does, sometimes he does not. In the first letter, for instance, Boniface introduces himself to Gregory II; like a narrator in a play, Lutterbach's fictional Boniface (hereafter LB) imports Willibald's vita into the correspondence to produce a biographical sketch. But the tone, occasionally, is that of a politician, not of a churchman convinced of the truth of his and Willibrord's mission (they worked together from 719-721 in Friesland). Recounting the famous episode in which Willibrord invoked Redbad's wrath, LB says, "[Willibrord], in the aforementioned place [Fositesland, modern-day Helgoland], had a few people baptized and killed the cows that grazed there and were venerated as if they were holy, and then finally even threatened the enraged Frisian king" (14; Lutterbach here borrows from Alcuin's Vita Willibrordi). "Even" is nothing if not ironical; irony is hard to find in the correspondence, and seems out of place here—unless one posits that serious disagreement between Willibrord and Boniface (see, for instance, Schieffer 118-19; von Padberg, 2003, 35-36) seeped into Boniface's fictional correspondence with the pope. One would expect more clarity on this, if not from LB then at least from Lutterbach himself, in a footnote. Strangely left out of LB's biography is the father, who allowed his son to enter the monastery in Exeter only after he was struck by illness (according to Willibald). But the description of monastic life really disrupts the fiction—I am willing to believe that LB would want to present himself to Gregory II by describing his fruitful years in a monastery, but that he would describe monastic life in great detail to a pope who had spent all his life inside churches and monasteries, a pope who in the same year LB writes this letter was heavily involved with the restoration of Monte Cassino, that is a stretch. 3 What is clever about this first exchange of letters is that, in Gregory's response (Tangl 12), Lutterbach adds a sentence, "We thank you for your extensive introductory letter, so rich in experiences" (26), which validates his own fiction.
§19. Even though Lutterbach gives us extensive detail in the fictional letters, I cannot say that LB really comes to life to me. True, the struggle with martyrdom is interesting, and Lutterbach is quite explicit: his Boniface is looking for a bloodless martyrium, not for a spectacular exit (esp. 29-30, in a report to pope Gregory II on his activities in Friesland). Interesting also is the account of events in Geismar, when Boniface cut down the Donar oak; Lutterbach adds an almost Protestant note of realism to one of the most emblematic of scenes from Boniface's life. Chopping down the tree was hard work, LB says, and took many hours: "Of course, if some of our supporters declared, soon after the fall of the Donar tree, that the Christian God has helped us such that it only took a few blows to conquer the tree, not a word of that is true" (55). Both von Padberg and Lutterbach are in agreement: it was a well-planned operation intended to show the Christian God as the supreme ruler. Von Padberg's account, one of the main historical sources for Lutterbach, adds a detail that Lutterbach seems to have chosen to leave out: close-by was Buraburg, a Frankish stronghold, so Boniface probably had no reason to fear pagan retaliation. This detail, of a Boniface employing more worldly force to reach his spiritual goals, could have added a little life to a man who sometimes seems too much consumed by petty doubts concerning his salvation.
§20. While there is no doubt that Lutterbach knows his subject matter very well,4 on some occasions it seems that LB's letters are written to display that knowledge, such as when he reports to pope Zachary that he busted two priests who had been committing the worst sin possible between men (140), or that he threw a bishop in jail who confessed that his father had had carnal knowledge of animals (155)—Lutterbach is the author of a study on sexuality in the middle ages, and this interest is more his than Boniface's, as far as I can tell. The German ancestry I mentioned above is another example of erudition gone a bit too far. In the letter that reports the Geismar episode, LB talks at length about the history of the area, describing for instance a grave built by the Chatten, the original settlers. He measures it very precisely, conveying those measurements in the metric system, then mentions how the grave is around 2,700 years old. The anachronistic precision is already strange, and a look at the notes reveals that Lutterbach used some surprising sources here. His main historic reference books on this period are quite old—two from the nineteenth century, the most recent from 1925—and the one recent book, Hans Willem Hammerbacher's Die Donar-Eiche: Geschichte eines Heiligtums (2002), can only be described as a popularizing sensational book with a political agenda which seems directly inspired by the archaizing philosophy of Rosenberg, so beloved by the Nazis. That Lutterbach would choose this particular book to base his historical account on I find curious, even troubling; I wonder if he read the last few chapters, which call for a rebirth of the German spirit and an end to Christian oppression.
§21. To be sure, Lutterbach never endorses Hammerbacher's German nationalist agenda. If there is a political perspective, it is that which was endorsed also in the 2004 Festspiel performed in Fulda, which calls for a rebirth of Christian rather than national values, and promotes Boniface as a doctor and pharmacist who can cure the sicknesses of our modern time.5 Lutterbach's Boniface is sympathetic to such an invocation, proclaiming in a letter from 744, "Pope Zachary! Those were such wonderful times, when the Christians who gathered around Jesus still knew what sin was"(138). No doubt this was the appropriate sentiment to express in a nominally Christian area ruled by a clergy firmly allied with the worldly powers, and with scant knowledge of or care for the correct, Roman way of doing things, but it fits in equally well in 2004, when many Christians especially in Europe fear that negligence, carelessness, and extreme secularism threaten a way of life established in part by Boniface.
§22. Such reflections, it seems to me, are the real reasons for Lutterbach to have produced this extensive labor of love. Sure, the book is an educational tract on German history, Roman liturgy, and papal and Frankish politics, but first and foremost it attempts to establish the relevance of the Apostle of the Germans to our time. If Lutterbach really wanted to write a biography of Boniface the man, if he really wanted to bring him back to life as more than a church reformer and a stickler for liturgical detail (which way to face when Mass is said, when to eat bacon, how to light the candles at Easter without endangering the soul), this book is a missed opportunity. Of course Boniface must have asked all those questions, since various popes answer them, but that does not mean that this is all Lutterbach can do. Only rarely does a human Boniface appear, for instance toward the end of his life, when LB bewails his lack of success as a missionary and reformer (237), but those instances are few and far between. Impressive as the book is, it fails to capture the imagination.
Notes
1. Hermann Schüling. 1962. Die Handbibliothek des Bonifatius. Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Ersten Hälfte des 8. Jahrhunderts. In Vol. 4 of Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, eds. Bertold Hack and Bernhard Wendt. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler Vereinigung. 285-348. [Back]
2. Kern, Johannes P. 1989. "Zum Tode des Hl. Bonifatius." Theologie und Glaube 79:301-21.[Back]
3. I note a similarly unnecessary description in a response to a letter from Gemmulus, a Roman deacon, who had sent him a formula to avert thunder and lightning. In his response, LB repeats the formula word for word—clearly not for Gemmulus's benefit, but for the reader's (174). This spares Lutterbach from having to write the original letter, but really declares its own fictionality a bit too loud. [Back]
4. However, I note a few minor problems. In the account of Boniface's death, he combines the Utrecht and the Willibald account quite elegantly—many a scholar has wondered how Boniface could be holding, at the same time, relics (Utrecht, Willibald) and a codex (Utrecht); Lutterbach's Boniface has his relics around his neck on a necklace, so to reach for those relics with one hand while holding the book with another is perfectly natural. But Lutterbach's account differs oddly from the Utrecht vita, in which the eyewitness is a young woman at the time, which makes sense: if she was young in 754, she might still be alive in the next century to tell her story to the Utrecht author. Lutterbach, however, has an old woman as an eyewitness, for no reason I can discern. And there is another problem: that Boniface would have consecrated Pepin is by now denied by most scholars, except for the one Lutterbach references in his note, Jörg Jarnut, in a relatively old article, from 1982 (recent agreement with Jarnut is found in Michael Glatthaar (2004), Bonifatius und das Sakrileg: Zur politischen Dimension eines Rechtsbegriffs [Frankfurt am Main: Lang]). The problem is not so much that Lutterbach's Boniface chooses to have consecrated Pepin, but that a biography at this important point would not have at least a footnote indicating scholarly disagreement: creative writing has overpowered scholarly accuracy. [Back]
5. "Und fragst du mich nach einem klügen Arzt und Apotheker, / so sag ich wieder: / Geh zu Winfried Bonifatius!" ["And if you ask me for a smart doctor and pharmacist, so I tell you again: Go to Winfrith Boniface!"] (Abel 2004, 9). [Back]
Works Cited
Abel, Winfrid. 2004. Bonifatius Lebt: Festpspiel zum 1250. Todestag des Apostel der Deutschen. Petersberg: Michael Imhof. [Back]
Emerton, Ephraim, trans. 1970. The letters of Saint Boniface. New York: Norton. [Back]
Padberg, Lutz von. 1994. "Bonifatius und die Bücher", in Der Ragyndrudis-Codex des Hl. Bonifatius, Lutz E. von Padberg and Hans-Walter Stork, 7-76. Paderborn: Bonifatius. [Back]
Tangl, Michael. 1955. Die Briefe des Hl. Bonifatius und Lullus. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Selectae 1. 2nd ed. Berlin: Weidmann. [Back]