Wild Speculation

Intrigued by what I learned about the Visigoths in Toledo, Spain, I came home and started poking around to see what more I could learn. Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, created a Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible into Gothic. A partial copy of his work remains, the Codex Argenticus, now housed in Sweden. He taught an Arian form of Christianity, that is, he was a Unitarian. He was deeply involved in conversation with leaders of the emerging Roman Catholic faith, trying to persuade them to a different theology. Both Saint Ambrose in particular had Arians the neighborhood of his church in Milan, Italy. They had their own church building and enough followers to make life difficult for the emerging Roman Catholic hegemony. Ultimately, Ambrose won the day, on the theological scene. And ultimately, the Visigoths moved westward to what is now the South of France, but I have no idea of cause or effect.

The Visigoths had come from Dacia, which is more or less where Romania is now. They began their commitment to Christianity when they were there, serving as allies of the Romans, defending the borders of the empire. They were displaced by the Huns, at least as rulers. Who knows how many stayed behind? Much later in Translylvania, part of the ancient Dacia, a Unitarian theology found new roots when it was imported from Poland in the sixteenth century. Even though it came most directly from Poland, the Transylvanian version of Unitarianism originated in northern Italy, one of the places where Ulfila's gospel was taught.

Ultimately, the Unitarian Visigoths traveled to Spain, where they settled in the Duero Valley as well as in Toledo and some other strategically located cities. They continued to have influence in the South of France, the very part of the world where the Cathar heresy later had to be stamped out. I read that the Cathars "denied the incarnation". Unitarians? I wish I knew more.

And of course, many centuries later, Michael Servetus raised the banner of Unitarian theology one more time. He came from Northern Spain, from Aragon, not all that far from the part of the world where the ancient Visigoths had settled.


My wild speculation is that varieties of Unitarianism were actually not uncommon among the Christians of the old Western Roman Empire, that vestiges of much earlier teaching continued to live among the people, even if they had been pretty well suppressed among the official leaders of communities.

My sense of Ulfila's theology was that he had much in common with the Gnostics who are so popular among academics just now. His was a pretty "high" christology, not something most U.S. Unitarian Universalists would find congenial, but I have the sense he was the founder of an important, though hidden, tradition in Western Christian theology. So here's my wild speculation: that the Visigoths were carriers of seeds that blossomed much, much later as Unitarian and humanistic flowers in Romania, in Northern Italy, in Southwestern France, and in Aragon. I'm wondering: if this is so, how were those seeds preserved? Of what did they consist? Who carried them?