Letter 17

From: [Visigothic church official] To: [Visigothic church official] Date: ~606 AD Context: Epistulae Wisigothicae letter 17; on the persistence of Arian attitudes and practices among some of the Gothic population, and the church's response more than fifteen years after the official conversion. To my dear brother, Your report on the persistence of crypto-Arian attitudes in the communities of your diocese gives me less surprise than it might, and I want to respond with the perspective that comes from having dealt with the same situation for the past fifteen years. The official conversion in 589 changed the formal religious identity of the Visigothic kingdom. It did not instantaneously change the beliefs and habits of every Gothic family in every community. People who had been taught from childhood that Christ was a being created by God, subordinate to the Father, do not abandon that understanding in a year or even a decade, even when they honestly intend to embrace the Catholic faith. The old theology is embedded in ways of talking, in the content of memory, in the assumptions underlying questions that people do not even know they are asking. What we can do: patient, consistent, clear preaching and teaching. Not hectoring or threatening, which produces resentment and drives the old views underground. Clear, positive, attractive presentation of what the orthodox faith actually teaches and why it is truer and richer than the Arian alternative. The generations born after 589 will not have this problem in the same way their parents do. The church we are building now is the church that will form them. Your brother and fellow laborer in the vineyard, A bishop of Spain