Anskar - The Apostle Of The North. 801-865

by Rimbert, Charles Henry Robinson (Translator)

Introduction to Series. The series entitled Lives of early and mediaeval missionaries is designed to include the lives of the best known pioneer missionaries to whose labours the conversion of Europe to the Christian faith was due. Within recent years biographies of a large number of modern missionaries have been published, but, with hardly an exception, no attempt has been made to provide English readers with biographical sketches of the missionaries who worked in Europe between the fourth and the twelfth centuries. This fact is the more surprising, inasmuch as, in many cases, biographies exist which were written by con temporaries and which, though they were not written from a modern critical standpoint, nevertheless enable us to apprehend the conditions under which the Gospel was first preached to the various nations of Europe, while at the same time they throw light upon the missionary problems which their successors in the Mission Field of to-day are called upon to solve. It is proposed that the biographies issued in this series should consist of translations of the earliest existing lives of the selected missionaries with introductions which will enable readers to appreciate the historical value to be attached to the original biographies, and the conditions under which the work of the missionaries was undertaken.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.

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138 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 875

About the author

Saint Rimbert (or Rembert) (Flanders, 830 – 11 June 888 in Bremen) was archbishop of Bremen-Hamburg from 865 until his death.

A monk in Turholt (Torhout), he shared a missionary trip to Scandinavia with his friend Ansgar, whom he later succeeded as archbishop in Hamburg-Bremen in 865. He wrote a biography about Ansgar: Vita Ansgari.

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 3 out of 5]

This life of Ansgar, written by a close friend and protege, portrays the evangelist as a model of humility, service, and faith that God will sooner or later accomplish what seems improbable from a human perspective: over and over again, the conversion of groups of pagans to Christianity. Making allowances for the different contexts, the first dozen chapters read like a modern professional biography of the kind that gets posted on a corporate website or LinkedIn. But after that, the account gets more interesting.

One pattern that plays out multiple times consists of Danes (Vikings?) attacking a town or small kingdom. The leading figures of the suffering community pray to ‘their gods’, but receive no help. Then, persuaded that their gods have abandoned them, the local leaders accept the bishop’s exhortations to turn to the Christian God, and they are saved from material danger. At no point in the early chapters does the biographer suggest the pagan gods aren’t real; they’re just demonstrably weaker than God. In Chapter XIX, the author says that the pagan gods were in fact demons, but doesn’t repeat this elsewhere. Meanwhile, throughout the account, ‘the devil’ is a perpetual antagonist, stirring up hatred from Christians among the pagans. It’s unclear to me whether these are several ways of describing the same reality, or whether the text reflects several different cosmologies stitched together.