Holiness Across the Divide

The most remarkable thing in Bede’s whole treatment of Aidan is that the committed Roman partisan, who believed the Celtic Easter to be an error, nonetheless insists that Aidan was a holy man — to be loved, honoured, and imitated — and that God Himself vindicated his sanctity by miracles. Bede does not resolve the tension by choosing one side; he holds both, judging the holiness the weightier. This “holy despite his error” framing became the model for how the whole Easter dispute was charitably held, and it is the centrepiece of this collection’s both-sides treatment of the controversy. This file examines that framing and its significance.

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

The Hard Case Bede Set Himself

Bede had set himself a genuinely hard problem, and it is worth feeling its difficulty before admiring his solution. He believed, sincerely and on principle, that the Ionan reckoning of Easter was wrong — a departure from the practice of the universal Church, however innocently inherited (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne). He also believed, on the evidence of everything he had learned, that Aidan was a man of extraordinary holiness: gentle, ascetic, charitable, fearless before the powerful, tender to the weak, and attended in life and death by miracles (see Bede’s Portrait and The Miracles and the King). The two convictions pulled against each other. A lesser historian, or a more partisan one, would have resolved the strain in one of two easy ways: either by suppressing the holiness to protect the Roman cause, or by suppressing the Easter error to protect the saint. Bede did neither. He kept both in view and refused to let either dissolve the other.

What Bede Actually Says

The decisive text is the close of Bede’s obituary of Aidan, HE III.17. There Bede states his procedure as a historian and his judgment as a Christian in the same breath. He has set down, he says, the character and works of Aidan, “in no way commending or praising his insufficient knowledge in the matter of the keeping of Easter” — the disapproval is explicit and unretracted — but rather, as a truthful historian, recording the man as he was: commending what was praiseworthy and preserving it for the profit of his readers (HE III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). And what was praiseworthy, on Bede’s own listing, was nearly everything else: Aidan’s love of peace and charity, his continence and humility, his zeal for justice, his diligence in reading and prayer, his authority in rebuking the proud and his gentleness toward the weak, his freedom from avarice (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

Bede then says the thing that makes the passage a model. He does not merely concede that Aidan had virtues despite his error; he affirms that Aidan is to be loved and honoured as a holy man, and that the error in his Easter, real as it was, does not cancel the sanctity. Aidan, he writes, “earnestly sought after and cherished” the works of faith, piety, and love — and a man who does that, whatever the fault in his computus, is a man God loves and the Church should honour (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The miracles, in Bede’s mind, settle the matter: God would not work wonders through a man He did not hold holy, and so the wonders are God’s own answer to the question of how to regard a saint of the wrong Easter (see The Miracles and the King; Mayr-Harting 1991; Ward 1990).

There is even a hint that Bede was prepared to extend a kind of charity to the error itself. He locates the fault firmly in inherited ignorance rather than in any will to divide the Church — the Irish kept their Easter “in good faith,” having received it from their fathers and lacking the means to know better (HE III.3, III.4, III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). An error held in good conscience, by men otherwise wholly given to God, is for Bede a fault to be corrected, not a sin to be condemned. This is the seed of a genuinely catholic distinction: between the objective question of the right reckoning and the subjective standing before God of those who, in good faith, kept the wrong one.

Why This Is the Model

Bede’s “holy despite his error” became the pattern for how the whole Easter dispute was held in memory, and it is a pattern worth naming precisely.

First, it keeps the question of truth and the question of holiness distinct. The rightness of a reckoning and the sanctity of a person are different questions, decided by different criteria; to settle the first is not to settle the second. Whitby decided the reckoning for Rome; it did not, and could not, unmake the saints who had kept the other (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne). Bede grasps this and builds his whole portrait on it.

Second, it refuses the temptation to weaponize the dispute against the persons. Because Bede holds the holiness and the error apart, he can be a partisan of the Roman Easter without becoming an enemy of the Celtic saints. The controversy is contained: it is about the date of a feast, not about the worth of the men. This is exactly the charity by which the early Church, again and again, carried real disagreement without rupture — most famously in the second century, when Polycarp and Anicetus “agreed to differ in peace” over the very dating of Pascha and parted in communion (a parallel worth marking; the Quartodeciman question of that earlier age is a distinct dispute, but the spirit of charity is the same).

Third, it judges the holiness the weightier thing. When the two are held together, Bede does not leave them in equipoise; he comes down, finally, on the side of honour. Aidan is, in the end, a saint to be loved — and the Easter error is recorded as the one shadow on an otherwise luminous life, not as the verdict on it. The proportion matters: the error is a clause, the holiness the sentence.

The Orthodox Reception

For an Orthodox reader this framing is not merely admirable history but a sound instinct about the Church. The pre-Schism centuries knew a real diversity of liturgical and computational practice among the local churches, carried — within limits — without breaking communion (see The Orthodox Reception and The Pre-Schism Church). Aidan belongs to that undivided Church, and is venerated across it as a saint — not in spite of some compromise of the faith, for the Easter question touched the computus of a feast and not the deposit of doctrine, but as one of the holy fathers of the British Isles whose sanctity the whole Church received. The Orthodox calendar keeps his feast on 31 August (see Relics and the Cult), honouring exactly what Bede honoured: a man wholly given to God, whose holiness was greater than the one fault his most critical admirer could find in him.

It is fitting, and a little providential, that the chief witness to Aidan’s sanctity should be the man who most disapproved of his Easter. Bede’s honesty is the reason we can be confident the holiness is real; his charity is the reason the dispute did not poison the memory of the saints. In holding the two together — the firm judgment on the reckoning, the warm honour for the man — Bede gave the tradition a model for how to disagree about a real question without dishonouring the holy, and that model is itself part of what makes Aidan’s story worth keeping.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.3–4, III.17, III.25. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Bede “in no way commending” the Easter error yet honouring Aidan’s holiness, III.17; the catalogue of virtues, III.17; the inherited and good-faith character of the Irish error, III.3, III.4, 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 handling of the holiness-and-error tension; the good-faith framing of the Celtic Easter.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s theology of holiness and his charity toward the Irish saints.)