Bede’s Portrait

Bede’s portrait of Aidan is the most important thing this collection has to interpret, because it is very nearly the only thing it has. It is a portrait of unmistakable warmth — Aidan is held up as a model of episcopal holiness, discernment, poverty, and zeal — combined with an equally unmistakable criticism: Aidan kept the Celtic reckoning of Easter, which Bede regarded as an error. At HE III.17 Bede states the tension outright, professing that he both admires the man and disapproves of his Easter, and refusing to let either judgment cancel the other. This file examines that double portrait, the partisan standpoint from which Bede writes, and how an Orthodox reader receives a source so generous and so committed at once.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle of Northumbria)

The Standpoint of the Witness

Before reading Bede’s praise or his criticism, one must locate the man writing. Bede (c. 673–735) was a monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, a thoroughly Roman house in observance, and he wrote the Ecclesiastical History in 731 — some eighty years after Aidan’s death — at the culmination of a long process by which the English church had adopted the Roman Easter and the Roman tonsure and aligned itself with Canterbury and Rome (see St. Bede the Venerable). On the central disputed question of his book, the dating of Easter, Bede was wholeheartedly a partisan of the Roman position; he regarded the Synod of Whitby (664), which set aside the Ionan Easter in Northumbria, as a deliverance, and he treats the Celtic reckoning as a real, if pardonable, error (HE III.25–26; Mayr-Harting 1991; Ward 1990). This commitment is the standing condition of everything he writes about Aidan and the Irish: he is praising men whose paschal practice he believed to be wrong (on the source generally, see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History).

That is what makes his praise of Aidan so striking. Bede had every theological motive to write the Irish mission down, and instead he writes it up — lavishly. The warmth of the portrait runs against the grain of its author’s ecclesiastical sympathies, which is one of the strongest reasons to trust its substance.

The Warmth

Bede’s admiration is stated plainly and repeatedly. He calls Aidan a man of “singular gentleness, piety, and moderation” (HE III.5; Colgrave and Mynors 1969), and in his summing-up he lists the bishop’s virtues as a catalogue meant for imitation: love of peace and charity, of continence and humility; a mind superior to anger and greed, despising pride and vainglory; diligence in keeping and teaching the commandments; assiduity in reading and prayer; the authority of a priest in reproving the proud and powerful and the tenderness of a comforter to the weak; and freedom from any care for worldly possessions (HE III.5, III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). He praises Aidan’s fasting and his refusal to flatter the rich, recording that the bishop would accept the hospitality of kings only to do good and would rebuke the powerful to their faces when justice required (HE III.5, III.14, III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The portrait is also, deliberately, a rebuke to Bede’s own age. When he praises the poverty and discipline of Aidan and the early Lindisfarne community, he does so with explicit reference to the laxity and avarice he saw in the clergy of his own eighth-century day, holding Aidan up as the standard from which his contemporaries had fallen (HE III.5, III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991; Ward 1990). Aidan is, for Bede, not a figure of merely antiquarian interest but a living reproach and a model — which is why the portrait is so carefully drawn.

The Criticism

Yet Bede does not conceal his disapproval of Aidan’s Easter, and it would be a falsification to soften it. He regarded the Ionan reckoning as a departure from the practice of the universal Church, and he says so. In the very passage where his praise of Aidan reaches its height, he inserts the qualification without flinching: he admired all these things in the man, “except only in that he did not observe Easter at the proper time” — keeping it, through ignorance handed down from his fathers, on a reckoning that diverged from the Roman (HE III.17; cf. III.3; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede is careful to locate the fault not in malice or schism but in inherited ignorance: Aidan and the Irish kept the wrong Easter because they had received it from their fathers and knew no better, not because they wished to divide the Church (HE III.3, III.17, III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). But he does not pretend it was not a fault.

The Tension Stated

What makes Bede’s portrait a model for the whole tradition is that he does not resolve the tension by suppressing either half. He states it. The decisive passage comes at the close of his obituary of Aidan, where he writes — and the sentence is worth giving at length — that he has written these things about Aidan’s character “by no means commending or approving his lack of knowledge in the matter of the observance of Easter,” but rather, “as a truthful historian,” setting down both the good and the less good in the man: commending what was praiseworthy in him — his love of peace and charity, of continence and humility, his diligence and zeal — and preserving the memory of his holiness for the profit of his readers, while not concealing the error in his Easter (HE III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). He goes further, and grants Aidan more than mere historical fairness: he affirms that Aidan “earnestly cultivated those works of faith, piety, and love which are customary among holy men,” and that for this he is rightly to be loved and honoured, his paschal error notwithstanding (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

This is the centrepiece of how the dispute was charitably held, and it deserves to be named as such. Bede, the committed Roman partisan, declares of a man whose Easter he believed wrong that he was nonetheless a holy man, to be loved and imitated, whose sanctity God Himself had vindicated by miracles (see The Miracles and the King). The error is not denied; the holiness is not denied; and the holiness is judged the weightier thing. Bede will not let a calendrical mistake cancel a manifest sanctity, nor let the sanctity excuse the mistake. He holds both — and in holding both he models the charity by which the whole Easter controversy was, in the end, contained rather than allowed to rupture the Church (the both-sides treatment of this is the subject of Holiness Across the Divide).

How an Orthodox Reader Receives It

For the purposes of this collection, three things follow from the character of Bede’s portrait.

First, the warmth is good evidence. Because Bede praises Aidan against his own ecclesiastical interest, the praise is not flattery and is unlikely to be invention; the holiness of Aidan is as well attested as anything in early English Christianity, precisely because the man who attests it had reason to wish otherwise.

Second, the criticism is honestly framed and need not be erased. Bede’s disapproval of the Celtic Easter is real and is part of the record; the Orthodox reader does not pretend it away. From the Orthodox vantage, the pre-Schism diversity of paschal computation among the local churches is itself a topic of the period (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne), and Aidan is venerated as a saint of the undivided Church notwithstanding his reckoning — which is, in fact, the very judgment Bede himself reaches.

Third, the portrait must be read as portrait. Bede is a theologian and a moralist as well as a historian; he selects, frames, and shapes Aidan to teach. The discretio anecdote (see The Sending from Iona), the going-on-foot, the giving-away of the horse, the poverty — all are chosen to make Aidan exemplary. This does not make them false, but it means the Aidan we have is Aidan-as-Bede-presents-him, and the honest reader keeps that frame in view. The man behind the portrait is real and holy; the portrait is a work of sacred art with a purpose, and the purpose is the formation of its readers.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.3, III.5, III.14, III.17, III.25–26. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The catalogue of Aidan’s virtues and the “except only … Easter” qualification, III.17; “singular gentleness, piety, and moderation,” III.5; Bede as “truthful historian” neither commending the Easter error nor concealing the holiness, III.17; the inherited ignorance of the Irish, III.3, III.25.)
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Bede’s Roman partisanship and his portrait of Aidan as a model; the III.17 tension.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s theology of holiness; Aidan as exemplar and rebuke to Bede’s age.)