A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

A paradoxical feature of these vigorous Anglo-Saxon affirmations of Western Latin theology was that the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding over the councils was a brilliant Greek, a scholar named Theodore who, like the Apostle Paul, came from Tarsus. Maybe Pope Vitalian had sent him to England because he was worried that Theodore might be disruptive in Rome, but it was still a remarkable reminder that England’s links to a wider world were overwhelmingly thanks to the Church. One of Theodore’s most important and energetic colleagues was the Abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, Hadrian, sent to England by the Pope more or less to keep an eye on the archbishop; Hadrian was just as exotic as Theodore, since he was a refugee from the now beleaguered Church in North Africa.