Bede’s Ecclesiastical History

Nearly everything that can be said about Aidan comes from one book: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in 731, some eighty years after Aidan’s death. This file examines that source as such — its composition, the sources and methods Bede brought to it, the Wearmouth-Jarrow vantage from which it was written, and above all the Roman-Easter partisanship that colours every word it says about the Irish mission. To read Aidan responsibly is to read Bede critically, and this file sets out how.

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

The One Book

The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum — the Ecclesiastical History of the English People — was finished by the Venerable Bede in 731, four years before his death (on Bede see St. Bede the Venerable). It is a history, in five books, of the Christianization of the English from the Roman period to Bede’s own day, and it is the single most important source for the early English church; for many of the persons and events it records, including Aidan, it is effectively the only source. The relevant material on Aidan is concentrated in Book III, chapters 3–17 and 25–26 — his sending, his founding of Lindisfarne, his partnership with Oswald, his method, his miracles, his death, and the Easter question — with related matter in the surrounding chapters on the Northumbrian kings and the later bishops of Lindisfarne (Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991).

The dependence is near-total. Subtract Bede, and almost nothing of Aidan remains: a name, perhaps, in later martyrologies that themselves derive from Bede, and the synchronism in the Anonymous Life of Cuthbert that links Cuthbert’s call to Aidan’s death (see The Thin Record). The Aidan of history is, to an extraordinary degree, the Aidan of Bede. This is the central fact governing the whole collection, and the methodology requires that it be stated plainly rather than disguised by the multiplication of citations to a single ultimate source (METHODOLOGY §2–3).

Bede’s Sources and Methods

Bede was, by the standards of any age, a careful and conscientious historian, and he tells us something of how he worked. In the preface to the Ecclesiastical History, addressed to King Ceolwulf, he names his informants and describes his method: he gathered written records and oral testimony, sought out reliable witnesses, and took particular pains to obtain accurate information from the various churches and provinces (HE, Preface; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). For the affairs of the Lindisfarne and Northumbrian church he was unusually well placed: Wearmouth-Jarrow lay within Northumbria, not far from Lindisfarne; the events were within living institutional memory; and Bede had access to the traditions of the northern churches and to men who could trace their information back to eyewitnesses (for the storm miracle, for instance, he gives an explicit chain of report reaching back to the priest Utta himself — HE III.15; see The Miracles and the King).

This care is real and is one reason Bede’s account commands respect. But it must be weighed against three limits. First, the distance in time: eighty years separate Aidan’s death (651) from the completion of the History (731), so that even the best of Bede’s oral sources reach Aidan at second or third hand. Second, the dependence on local and monastic tradition, which preserves the edifying and the memorable — the anecdotes, the miracles, the exemplary scenes — and lets slip the mundane: chronology, administration, the ordinary texture of a life. Third, Bede’s purpose, which was not antiquarian but pastoral and theological; he wrote to edify, to set before his readers models of holiness and warnings of failure, and he selected and shaped his material to that end (Higham 2006; Ward 1990; see Bede’s Portrait). None of this makes Bede unreliable in the crude sense, but all of it shapes what kind of Aidan the History can give us: a portrait, drawn for instruction, from memory at one remove.

The Wearmouth-Jarrow Vantage

Where Bede stood matters as much as when he wrote. Wearmouth-Jarrow was a thoroughly Roman house — founded by Benedict Biscop, stocked with books and customs brought from Rome and Gaul, observing the Roman Easter and the Roman tonsure, oriented toward Canterbury and the universal Church. Bede was formed in this house from boyhood and never left the bounds of Northumbria, but his whole intellectual and spiritual world was that of the Romanizing English church that had triumphed at Whitby (Mayr-Harting 1991; Ward 1990). This is the vantage from which he looks back on the Irish mission: with admiration for its holiness, but from the far side of the Easter settlement, as a man who believed the question had been rightly decided against the Irish.

The consequence is a particular kind of double vision in his treatment of Aidan, which the next section of this collection examines in detail (see Bede’s Portrait). For the purposes of source-criticism the point is that Bede is not a neutral reporter of the Irish mission. He is a Roman-Easter partisan writing the history of a Celtic-Easter church, and his account is shaped at every point by the need to honour its sanctity while faulting its observance. This does not mean his facts are wrong; it means his framing is committed, and the reader must keep the commitment in view.

The Partisanship on Easter

The single most important thing to hold in mind when reading Bede on Aidan is his position on the paschal question (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne). Bede regarded the Roman reckoning of Easter as correct and the Ionan reckoning as an error, and he treats the Synod of Whitby (664), which decided for Rome, as a providential deliverance of the English church (HE III.25–26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). He is scrupulously fair to the Irish — he records their holiness, defends them against the false charge of Quartodecimanism, and attributes their error to inherited ignorance rather than to schism (see Holiness Across the Divide) — but he is not impartial. He has a thesis, and the thesis is that the English church found its right order when it conformed to Rome.

Two methodological consequences follow, and they cut in opposite directions, which is exactly why they must both be stated.

On the one hand, Bede’s partisanship makes his praise of Aidan unusually trustworthy. Because he had every motive to write the Celtic mission down and instead wrote it up, his warm portrait of Aidan’s holiness cannot be flattery and is unlikely to be invention; it runs against his own ecclesiastical interest, and a witness who praises against interest is a strong witness (Mayr-Harting 1991). The holiness of Aidan is therefore about as well attested as anything in the early English church.

On the other hand, Bede’s framing of the Easter question is a committed framing, and the reader should not mistake it for a neutral one. The very categories in which the dispute is presented — error, ignorance, the right order restored at Whitby — are Bede’s, and an account written from the Irish side, had one survived, might have framed the same facts as fidelity rather than error. The methodology’s requirement of both-sides handling (METHODOLOGY §4) is, in part, a corrective to the fact that only one side’s history survives, and that side’s was Roman (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne).

Reading Bede Responsibly

The upshot for this collection is a discipline rather than a suspicion. Bede is to be trusted as a careful and conscientious witness, especially where he writes against his own interest, as in the praise of Aidan; he is to be read critically where he frames the contested question of Easter, remembering that his is the Roman, victorious, and only-surviving account; and he is to be cited honestly as what he is — the single source, writing at a distance, for edification, from a committed standpoint. Where Bede is the only witness, this collection says so; where his framing is partisan, it flags it; and where his miracles and edifying anecdotes are concerned, it pins them to his text as his testimony rather than asserting them as fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Miracles and the King). To read Aidan is, in the end, to read Bede — and to read Bede well is to read him both gratefully and critically.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Preface and III.3–17, III.25–26. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Bede’s statement of his sources and method, Preface; the Aidan material, III.3–17; the Easter controversy and Whitby, III.25–26.)
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 sources, standpoint, and partisanship; the trustworthiness of his praise against interest.)
Higham, N. J. (Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context. London: Routledge, 2006. (Bede’s purposes and the shaping of his narrative.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s formation, theology, and method.)