In the seventh and eighth centuries the Church was still carried along by the momentum received from the fruitful pontificate of St. Gregory the Great. The Council of Orange had given the Holy See great prestige and had confirmed the doctrinal authority of St. However, the predominant influence and unifying force was monasticism, and especially Benedictine monasticism. Meanwhile, the Anglosaxons, who had arrived in England as pagans, were now sending forth missionary monks to the continent.
Willibrord evangelized the Low Countries and St. Boniface, assisted by monks, nuns and clerics from England, labored from until his martyrdom in to establish the Church in Germany and to reform the Church in the Frankish empire. The successors of St.
Boniface also preached the Gospel in Hungary and in Scandinavia. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great and Cassiodorus. It was not, to be sure, a reincarnation of the ancient Roman Empire, but Charlemagne did succeed in bringing the Roman and Germanic peoples together under one emperor and the universal authority of the Holy See.
During his long reign the liturgy was stabilized, the biblical text was unified, the Gelasian Sacramentary was revised, Gregorian chant was promoted and new hymns and prayers were introduced. The monasteries played a significant role in all of this renewal and reform; in fact, Charlemagne had desired to see all monasteries under one rule but the first move in that direction was made only after his death. The first representative writer on the theology of the monastic life, according to Leclercq, 5 was Ambrose Autpert, who died in as abbot of a monastery in southern Italy.
Augustine and St. Gregory the Great, since he saw the monastic life as a distinctive form of ascetical combat in which the monk seeks personal sanctification by separation from the world and loving meditation on the mysteries of Christ. Although Benedictine spirituality did not subscribe to the speculative contemplation and gnosis of the Alexandrian Fathers, it did esteem that affective or loving contemplation which is superior to pure intelligence.
