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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2022
An emphasis on Gildas's De excidio as a jeremiad has reinforced a perception of the De excidio as a failed intervention. Indeed, Gildas begins his letter by invoking the lamentations of Jeremiah over the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of her temple:
I read how, because of the sins of men, the voice of the holy prophets rose in complaint, especially Jeremiah’s, as he bewailed the ruin of his city in four alphabetic songs. And I could see that in our time too, just as Jeremiah had lamented, ‘the city’ (that is, the church) ‘sat solitary, bereaved; formerly it had been full of peoples, mistress of races, ruler of provinces: now it had become tributary’.
He ends his letter, however, by summoning the more active and reformist ‘call to arms’ of Jeremiah's contemporary, Ezekiel, whom God had installed as the speculator or watchman for his people:
You are drunk with the practising of constant sins, and shaken by the waves of accumulated crimes that incessantly rush upon you; seek then, as though you had suffered shipwreck, with all the striving of your mind, for the single plank of penitence that can carry you to the land of the living, so that the fury of the Lord may be turned away from you. For in his mercy he said: ‘I do not desire the death of a sinner, but that he may turn and live’.
In offering, at the last, a ‘plank’ to the Christian leaders of Britannia, Gildas emphasised his role as a speculator within an Old Testament Israel where kings, priests, and prophets shared responsibility for protecting her people. That this model of authority offered in the De excidio – where the monastery provided holy men as speculatores – was successful in the British Isles is most clearly seen with the pastoral mission of the Irish peregrinus Columbanus to the continent at the end of the sixth century. Operating in both Gaul and Italy, Columbanus was confident in his ability to establish monastic foundations in inhospitable regions lacking in ecclesiastical infrastructure, and in his ability to edify volatile kings and territorial bishops lacking in moral leadership.
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