The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow by the Venerable Bede and completed in AD 731, is one of the great achievements of Western literature. As the British historian Christopher Dawson wrote, Bede’s History is an “exceptional, almost a unique” work of history. In it, Bede tells the story of cultural conflict and religious controversy unfolding according to the divine plan for what became known as the British Isles. The History contains a wealth of historical detail, some found nowhere else. Although his methods were not modern, and Bede would not have understood the current obsession with “objective” history, nonetheless historians have long spoken approvingly of Bede as a historian. Bede knew what he knew, and what he didn’t, and what was in between, and the word legetur (it is said) appears often as a clue to where Bede signals he is not fully sure of his source.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: An Introduction and Selection
Bloomsbury Continuum
200 pages
$37.50
Bede wrote the History in a graceful and educated Latin, but it was so influential that King Alfred the Great selected it among only a few works that he ordered translated into Old English, during the 9th century. There was one major exception to Bede’s Latin, however. He includes, in the original Anglo-Saxon, the earliest example of English poetry we have, what is called Caedmon’s song. It is like a voice from the English fields and villages piercing the monastic Latinate veil of the rest of the work.
Of Bede himself, little is known other than what he himself tells us. There is a letter from a fellow monk, but that relays largely only details of his death. Bede lived his entire life at the monastery, in Northumbria, given to be educated by the monks there by his parents when he was about seven years old; that was not an unusual practice in this period. He lived in the monastery his whole life, dying (it is thought) in 735, and was the author of many works of theology and Scripture commentary in addition to the History. Long called the “Father of English History” for his wide learning and nuanced historical writing, Bede was made a Doctor of the Catholic Church in 1899.
Over the centuries since he died, however, Bede has often been invoked as a weapon during ecclesial or political conflict. The seeds were there, even in the actions of Alfred: the desire to set up Bede as a defender of a kind of insular Englishness, for example, remained strong. Later, during the Reformation in England, some reformers invoked Bede as an example of a unique British Church separate from Rome, although British Catholics also cited him as a call to return to the Old Faith. The reformers would have been better served by invoking Bede’s adversaries, for as Rowan Williams notes in his thoughtful introduction, there is no question that Bede looked to Rome as the center of the Christian world. At important parts of his account, Rome’s centrality is emphasized, such as Pope Vitalian’s sending Hadrian and Theodore from Rome to serve as bishops in England. Indeed, the work is structured in large part as a call to the British church to stay within the Roman fold. The idea of a national church in the way we might understand, for example, the Church of England would have been incomprehensible to him.
Bede, therefore, remains of continued interest and importance, aside from the beauty of his language and the reserve of historical detail. For we too are caught in a part-pagan, part-Christian world where the future of the Church in the West may hang in the balance, and where the guardians of orthodox Christianity have arguably lost the fervor for preaching the Good News, as Bede thought they had in his. The History, among other things, shows us that the history of the Church is ever the same. The appearance of this heavily, but smartly, pruned edition of Bede’s enduring work is therefore welcome.
These selections, translated by Sr. Benedicta Ward, feature some of the most well-known or important passages of the massive full History. Thus we find the great story of Pope Gregory sending missionaries to England, the actions of Oswiu and Oswine, and the lives of Bede’s heroes, Saints Cuthbert and Aidan, among many other historical set pieces that linger, still, in the Western historical imagination.
Behind Bede stood seven centuries of thought on the actions of God in history, beginning of course with the person of Christ but continuing through to Bede’s own time. Bede was a student of this tradition, especially of the philosophy of history as first adumbrated in the work of St. Augustine. This historical approach combined the world-chronicle typical of early medieval writers such as Eusebius with the microcosm of that chronicle in a particular place. St. Augustine, as Dawson explained, impressed upon Christian historiography the conviction that history is a dynamic process unfolding the divine plan, and that the individual has a role in that plan. Thus the saints become not simply exemplars of faith but historical actors: the saint “has become a citizen of the eternal city, a celestial patron and a protector of man’s earthly life. So that in the lives of the saints we see history transcending itself and becoming part of the eternal world of faith.”
The cultural and political situation Bede was writing about and in which he lived was complex. The western Roman Empire was no more, though its influence was everywhere felt. The centurions had left Britain a century and more before, and the overarching civitas of Rome—though nominally continued in the West under the Emperor in Constantinople—had been replaced by a set of squabbling kingdoms. Moreover, the native Britons were being displaced by those whom Bede calls the Angli, first by their raiding parties, then by their colonization. Who the Angli were is not clear, but they were not, initially, Christian; the native Britons were. But Bede reminds us throughout the work that although the political power of Rome has faded, its sacramental influence and institutional force as the Church remain, and he is careful o trace legitimate ecclesial and even on occasion political authority to Rome.
This may seem to set up a simplistic dichotomy of pious Britons versus pagan Angli invaders, with the latter ultimately converted by the former. But Bede was too conscious of the record to make that mistake, and his narrative is too rich in nuance to permit a Whiggish history. The pagan faiths and Christianity were competing, sometimes within the same household. Bede recounts, for example, that King Raedwald, king of the East Saxons, although nominally a Christian, “seemed at the same time to serve Christ and the gods whom he had served before; and in the same temple he had an altar to sacrifice to Christ, and another small one to offer victims to devils.” Bede instead inverts the expected narrative, replaying (as Williams puts it) the drama of salvation history in Britain. The native, Christian Britons are chastised for their weak convictions and for failing to evangelize the invaders. The Angli, on this view, are an instrument of God’s plan, even as Israel was chastised through non-Jewish overlords. They will become the basis for the revivified Church in England, not the Britons. Indeed, so the story goes, it was seeing the faces of these Angli in a slave market in Rome (“Non Angli, sed angeli!“) that caused Pope Gregory to send Augustine to preach the faith in Britain. (This missionary bishop, who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, is to be distinguished from his great predecessor, Augustine of Hippo.)
Seen in this way, the title of Bede’s work comes into better focus. He is writing an ecclesiastical history of the English people. That is, he is exploring how the newcomers came into the Kingdom of God. Thus the importance of something as remote to us as the proper calculation of Easter comes into focus. For Bede—who was legendary in his own day for being able properly to calculate the precise date of Easter and other holidays—whether the British would follow the Roman practice was emblematic of whether they would continue to celebrate the truer faith. But even here he is not doctrinaire: those who proceed in their Paschal calculations (according to Bede’s lights) in error, but who are nonetheless acting according to their faithful attempts to live the Gospel, still receive praise. Moreover, Bede does not whitewash the record. Not all of his heroes are saints, and the villains are not unredeemed by good actions, even actions that further the faith.
Bede’s History is a masterful effort to recount the real events of history under the auspices of discerning God’s actions in history, to show the eternal even in the temporal squabbles of kinglets and the singing of peasantry.
Gerald J. Russello is editor of The University Bookman (www.kirkcenter.org).
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