Letter 1

From: Reccared I, King of the Visigoths To: Pope Gregory the Great Date: ~589 AD Context: Reccared I [reigned 586-601], having converted from Arianism to Catholic Christianity along with the entire Visigothic nobility at the Third Council of Toledo in 589, writes to Gregory announcing this historic conversion. The Epistulae Wisigothicae [Visigothic Letters] are a collection of correspondence between the Visigothic court and Rome preserved in the late seventh-century Collectio Hispana. To the most holy and blessed Pope Gregory, bishop of the apostolic see of Rome, from Reccared, king of the Goths, in the name of the Lord, The grace of almighty God, who has guided our people from the darkness of error into the light of truth, moves me to share with you the great thing that has happened in our kingdom. You will have heard, most blessed father, that our people the Goths long held to the Arian heresy [which denied the full divinity of Christ and had been the dominant form of Christianity among the Germanic peoples for over a century]. For as long as this was so, there was a wall between us and the full communion of the Church — a wall that I mourned as king and that many of our people mourned as Christians who understood that they held something less than the fullness of the faith. By God's mercy, that wall has been torn down. At the council we assembled at Toledo [the Third Council of Toledo, May 589, one of the most significant events in the history of the Spanish church], the bishops of the Goths, together with the great men of the kingdom, confessed before God and before one another the orthodox faith as the Church has held it since Nicaea [the Council of Nicaea, 325, which defined the full divinity of Christ]. Arianism is dead in our kingdom. Our people are Catholics. I write to you as a son to a father, seeking your blessing on what God has accomplished among us. Reccared, king, servant of Christ