Christmas Every Day

The Feast of St Margaret of Scotland

St Margaret of Scotland was not Scottish. A member of the royal family of England, she was born in exile in Hungary in 1045. The career of this pious woman shows the twists and turns that the life of a princess could take in the Middle Ages.

Eleventh-century England saw a confused and violent set of claims to the throne. Margaret’s family, descended from King Edmund Ironside, had fled England during the reign of Danish invaders, taking refuge in Hungary where she and her brother Edgar the Aetheling were born. The clan returned to England in 1057 during the rule of Edward the Confessor. When Edward died in 1066 three rival armies claimed the English crown: one led by a native noble Harold Godwinson, one of Vikings by Harald Hardrada, and one by the Duke of Normandy, William the Bastard. When the smoke cleared, the Bastard had become the Conqueror. Because Edgar the Aetheling also had a claim to the throne, William kept him in Normandy for a time but when Margaret’s brother returned he allowed himself to be associated with a rebellion against William and the family had to flee after its failure.

The ship carrying Margaret was driven by a storm to land in Scotland where she came to the attention of the king, Malcolm Canmore (“Big Head”). A widower with sons, he married Margaret in 1070; together they had eight children, three of whom became kings of Scotland and one a queen in England.

Margaret’s piety was famous. She was known for her personal charity and patronage of the Scottish church which she urged toward reform in accordance with the great changes toward purifying religion sweeping Europe. She died on November 16, 1093 shortly after learning of the death of her husband and oldest son in battle against the English.

The story of her earthly remains is an interesting one. Margaret and Malcolm were buried in Dunfermline Abbey but in 1560 the reliquary containing her head was brought to Edinburgh at the command of Mary Queen of Scots, supposedly as a sacred relic to assist in Mary’s childbearing. In 1597 the head was in the keeping of the Jesuits in the Scottish college in Douai, France but it was lost during the destruction of churches and shrines during the French Revolution of the 1790s. Somehow, Philip II of Spain obtained other bits of Margaret and Malcolm and had them transferred to the royal palace in Madrid where they too have become lost. Margaret is a patron saint of Scotland.

1280

Death of the Universal Doctor. Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great, was a priest, bishop and one hailed as the most learned man of his day. Born c. 1200 into a German aristocratic family he joined the Dominican order, receiving his doctorate in theology at the University of Paris where he taught the young Thomas Aquinas.

This was the era when the Church was struggling with how best to deal with the writings of the newly-rediscovered Aristotle and the great philosopher’s Arab commentators. Albertus and Thomas Aquinas defended the synthesis of Christian thought and Aristotle against both those who drank too deeply from Averroes (the most influential of the commentators) and those who feared the intrusion of pagan philosophy. In doing so they built the foundations of Scholasticism which provided the Catholic Church with its approach to theology for centuries.

The thirteenth century was also a time of growing interest in the natural sciences. Those who claim that the Church ignored or suppressed science in the Middle Ages have to ignore the contributions of Albertus or his English Franciscan contemporary Roger Bacon. Botany, geography, mineralogy, chemistry, optics and physics were among the areas mastered by Albertus with an emphasis on observation and experimentation. In insisting that God had given humanity two guides to knowledge, scripture and nature, the work of Albertus helped lead to the first Scientific Revolution, one largely carried out by the clergy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

So wide was his learning that his contemporaries called him the miracle of the age; later admirers would say Nil tetigit quod non ornavit – “He touched nothing that he did not adorn”. He is the patron saint of philosophers and scientists.

354

Aurelius Augustinus is born in Thagaste, Numidia. As Augustine of Hippo he will be regarded as the greatest mind of Late Antiquity, a Doctor of the Church and patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, sore eyes and Kalamazoo.

The son of a pagan official and a devoutly Christian mother, Augustine was given an excellent education in the traditional Roman classics. As a young man he fell among Manichees and became a follower of that dualistic religion which was spreading from Persia. He became a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage and took a mistress who bore him a son, Adeodatus. In 383 he taught rhetoric in Rome but his friendship with the influential politician and scholar Symmachus won him as post of professor of rhetoric in the imperial capital of Milan. By this time he was disillusioned with Manichaeism and had become interested in Neoplatonism. In Milan he was taken up by the Christian bishop Ambrose whose combination of piety and learning drew Augustine closer to the faith of his mother. A conversion experience in 386 led to his Christian baptism. In 388 he returned to North Africa, where he gave most of his property to the poor and became a priest in the town of Hippo Regius. His renown as a preacher and scholar led to his becoming bishop, a post he was still occupying at his death in 430.

North Africa was the scene of many lively (and occasionally deadly) theological disputes. Augustine would preach and write not only against pagans, Manichaeans, Donatists, Arians but also Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians. Among his monumental works are The City of God Against the Pagans, with its sweeping understanding of human nature and history and Confessions, the first spiritual autobiography. His views on predestination were enormously influential in the development of Protestantism. He died while his city was under siege by the barbarian Vandals. His relics are enshrined in Pavia, Italy.

1518

Pope Leo X issues the bull Cum postquam which defends indulgences as a treasury of merits, from which popes may make withdrawals to be applied to the spiritual accounts of believers, remitting their temporal suffering in Purgatory and speeding their way to Heaven.

In the previous year the Augustinian monk and Wittenberg professor Martin Luther issued his 95 Theses attacking the doctrines of Purgatory and indulgences. Angered by the papally-approved sale of indulgences in eastern Germany by the Dominican monk Johann Tetzel, Luther proclaimed “I say that no one can prove by a single word of Scripture that divine justice desires or demands any sort of suffering or satisfaction from the sinner other than his heartfelt and genuine sorrow or conversion, with the intention to bear the cross of Christ from now on …” The resulting brouhaha we call the Protestant Reformation.

It was unfortunate for the Catholic Church that Leo, born Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, was its ruler at the time of this controversy. He was not even a priest until his election as pope; he was a patron of the arts but no shepherd of souls.