Exegesis and the Fathers

Bede’s method as a biblical scholar was, by his own deliberate choice, a method of standing under the Fathers and handing on their teaching, not of standing over them with novelties of his own. This file sets out that method: his humble and explicit debt to the four great Latin Doctors — Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, whom he calls “our apostle” — the marginal source-marks by which he named them; his clear practice of the spiritual senses of Scripture, the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical, displayed at length in the commentaries on the Tabernacle and Temple and the Song of Songs; and the real exegetical judgement he exercised within that inherited frame, shown above all in the Acts Retractatio where he goes back to the Greek. It closes on the Orthodox resonance of all this: the spiritual reading of Scripture, typology, and the consensus of the Fathers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)

A Tradent, by Conviction

Bede’s exegetical method begins with a self-understanding, and the self-understanding is one of subordination. He did not conceive of himself as an original interpreter of Scripture who would correct or supersede the Fathers; he conceived of himself as their servant and transmitter, whose task was to gather, order, and hand on what they had already established. This is not false modesty extracted from him by convention. It is stated programmatically and acted on consistently across the whole body of his commentaries, and it is the single most important fact about his method (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, Holder on Bede as exegete; Ward 1990). Bede is, in the precise sense, a tradent — one who hands on a tradition — and he means to be.

The clearest single statement of this is the preface to his commentary On the Gospel of Luke, addressed to his friend Bishop Acca of Hexham. There Bede explains that he has compiled his exposition “from the works of the venerable Fathers,” and names the four whose authority stands behind it — Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome — asking expressly that whatever is found in the work be reckoned to them and not claimed for himself (Bede, In Lucae evangelium expositio, preface to Acca; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). The same conscience governs his concern, expressed in more than one preface, that copyists preserve the attributions and not garble the text (see The Library and the Method). Bede’s exegesis is thus framed from the outset as an act of fidelity: the comment he reports is to be received as the Father’s, and the reader is to be able to tell whose it is.

The Four Latin Doctors and “Our Apostle”

The Fathers Bede leaned on were, overwhelmingly, the four great Latin Doctors. Augustine is the most pervasive single presence in his thought, the source above all for doctrine, for the theology of grace, and for the reading of Genesis and the Psalms; Jerome stands behind Bede’s text of Scripture itself, the Vulgate, and behind much of his attention to the literal and historical sense, the Hebrew names, and the geography of the Holy Land; Ambrose supplies allegory and the Greek-mediated learning of the Hexaemeron and the Lucan commentary; and Gregory the Great is the master of the moral and spiritual reading, drawn on constantly from the Moralia in Iob and the Homilies on the Gospels and on Ezekiel (Laistner 1935; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, Love on the patristic inheritance). These four are the architecture of Bede’s exegesis; the rest — Isidore, Cassiodorus, Primasius, Tichonius mediated through Augustine, and others — fill in around them.

Of the four, Gregory holds a special and personal place, because Gregory was the pope who had sent Augustine of Canterbury and the mission to the English. Bede calls Gregory “our apostle,” the father of the English in the faith, and devotes the longest single tribute in the Ecclesiastical History to his life and writings (HE 2.1, the life of Gregory; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Brown 2009). The debt is not only sentimental: Gregory’s exegetical manner — the patient drawing-out of the moral and spiritual senses, the building of the soul’s ascent from the letter of the text — shaped Bede’s own more deeply than perhaps any other single model, and the Moralia in Iob, Gregory’s vast allegorical and moral reading of Job, stands behind Bede’s whole practice of the spiritual senses (Bede, prefaces and HE 2.1; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010; see St. Gregory the Dialogist). When Bede reads the Tabernacle or the Temple morally, building from the historical fact to the lesson for the soul, he is doing what Gregory taught him to do.

This debt Bede made visible on the page. As the prefaces describe and the surviving manuscripts in part confirm, Bede had the names of his sources entered as abbreviated marks in the margins — AVG or AG for Augustine, AMB or AM for Ambrose, GR for Gregory, HIER or IER for Jerome — keyed to the passages drawn from each, so that the reader could see at a glance whose exegesis was being reported at any point (Bede, In Lucam, preface; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010; Ward 1990; see The Library and the Method). The marginal sigla are the visible sign of the whole method: an attribution built into the text, so that the borrowed word cannot silently become Bede’s own. They are unusual in his age, and they are the precise mechanism by which Bede the tradent kept faith with the Fathers he handed on.

The Spiritual Senses of Scripture

The framework within which Bede read Scripture was the patristic doctrine of the multiple senses — the conviction that the inspired text carries, beyond its literal or historical meaning, further senses planted in it by the Spirit. In its developed form, inherited from the Fathers and systematized in the Latin tradition that Bede received and passed on, this is the scheme of the four senses: the literal or historical (what the text says happened), the allegorical (what it teaches about Christ and the Church), the tropological or moral (what it teaches the soul to do), and the anagogical (what it discloses of the last things and the life of heaven) — the scheme later crystallized in the medieval distich littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia (on the fourfold sense as a tradition, de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). Bede does not always enumerate all four mechanically, and he sometimes works with a simpler doubling of the literal and the spiritual; but the conviction beneath the scheme — that Scripture means more than its surface, and that the Christ-centred and moral and heavenly senses are really there in the text — governs everything he writes.

Bede expounds this theory explicitly. In his treatise De schematibus et tropis — formally a schoolbook on the figures and tropes of grammar — he turns at the end to the figurative language of Scripture and sets out the spiritual senses with examples, teaching his pupils that the Bible’s own rhetoric carries allegory, tropology, and anagogy (Bede, De schematibus et tropis; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010; see Teacher and Computist). What is taught there in the schoolroom is practised at length in the commentaries. The doctrine of the senses is not, for Bede, a theory detached from exegesis; it is the working tool he uses on every page of the Old Testament.

Allegory at Work: The Tabernacle, the Temple, the Song

The place to watch Bede’s theory become practice is in the great allegorical commentaries On the Tabernacle and On the Temple. There Bede takes the literal, historical description of the desert sanctuary and of Solomon’s Temple — every court, veil, vessel, measurement, and material — and reads the whole as a sustained figure of the Church of Christ and of the soul’s life within it (Bede, De tabernaculo; Bede, De templo; Holder 1994; Connolly and O’Reilly 1995; DeGregorio 2010). The method is disciplined, not arbitrary: Bede begins with the literal sense, establishes what the text actually describes, and only then builds the spiritual reading upon it, so that the allegory is anchored in the history and not floated free of it. The Temple rising stone upon stone becomes the Church built of living stones on Christ the cornerstone (1 Peter 2:4–5; Ephesians 2:20–22); the gold overlaying the sanctuary is the brightness of wisdom and charity; the two cherubim over the ark are the two Testaments gazing on the one Christ between them. The building, read this way, becomes a figure of the Body of Christ and a map of the spiritual life — and Bede’s care to let the moral sense (what the soul must do) and the anagogical sense (the heavenly sanctuary toward which the earthly one points) emerge in their turn shows the full fourfold habit at work (Holder 1994; Connolly and O’Reilly 1995; DeGregorio 2010).

The same is true of the commentary On the Song of Songs, where Bede reads the love-poetry as the song of the union of Christ with the Church and with the faithful soul — the standard patristic and Orthodox reading, in which the eros of the text is wholly taken up into the figure of spiritual love (Bede, In Cantica Canticorum; Brown 2009; Holder on Bede’s exegetical works). Here too the method is to honour the letter and then to mount from it to the spiritual sense, and here too Bede prefaces the work with a doctrinal defence — against the Pelagian Julian of Eclanum — that ties the spiritual reading to the dogma of grace (Bede, In Cantica, preface; Brown 2009). The allegory is never a flight from the text or from doctrine; it is the disciplined drawing-out of the Christ the Fathers had taught Bede to find within it.

Judgement Within the Tradition: The Acts Retractatio

It would be a mistake, however, to read Bede’s deference to the Fathers as the absence of judgement. He is a tradent, but a tradent who weighs, selects, arranges, and on occasion corrects — and the proof is the Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum, his “Retraction” or reconsideration of his earlier commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. The very title is borrowed, deliberately, from Augustine’s Retractationes, the great Father’s late and humble review of his own works; in taking it Bede places himself in the Augustinian tradition of the scholar willing to revise himself (Bede, Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum; Laistner 1939; Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). And what drives the revisions is, in significant part, Bede’s having gained access in the interval to the Greek text of Acts: working from a Greek-and-Latin bilingual manuscript, he repeatedly corrects or refines his earlier exposition by appeal to what the Greek actually says, noting where the Latin he had relied on was imprecise (Bede, Retractatio; Laistner 1939; Brown 2009; see Bede and the Greek Tradition).

This is independent exegetical and textual judgement of a real, if modest, kind, exercised by a Latin monk whose Greek was limited and largely self-taught — and it is exercised, characteristically, not against the Fathers but in the same spirit as the Fathers, going behind the received Latin to the original tongue exactly as Jerome had done before him. The Retractatio shows that Bede’s submission to the tradition was not the passivity of a copyist. He stands under the Fathers; but standing under them, he reads with attention, and where the evidence — even the evidence of the Greek New Testament — requires it, he is willing to correct himself. His humility and his judgement are not in tension: it is precisely as a faithful tradent of the consensus that he attends so closely to the text that the consensus expounds.

Standing Under the Fathers, Not Over Them

Bede’s whole posture, then, is to stand under the Fathers and not above them, and this is the deliberate and theological choice it appears to be. He does not measure the Fathers against his own reason and keep what survives the test; he receives their teaching as the Church’s settled mind and labours to transmit it whole. Where he differs — correcting Isidore on a point of natural science, refining a reading from the Greek — he does so within the tradition and in its own spirit, not as a critic standing outside it (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010; Ward 1990). This is the very opposite of the later Western temper that would set private judgement over the Fathers; it is, rather, the temper of a man who believes that the truth about Scripture has been given to the Church in her teachers and that his task is to serve and spread it. For an Orthodox reader this posture is recognizable and congenial: it is the mind of the consensus patrum, the conviction that the Fathers together hold the Church’s reading of Scripture and that the interpreter’s office is to abide in that reading, not to overturn it (see The Church Fathers).

The Orthodox Resonance

Bede belongs wholly to the undivided Church of the pre-Schism West, and his exegetical mind is one the Orthodox tradition recognizes as its own (see The Pre-Schism Church). Three things in particular resonate. First, the spiritual reading of Scripture: Bede holds, with the whole patristic tradition East and West, that the inspired text means more than its letter, that Christ is hidden in the Old Testament and revealed in the New, and that the senses of Scripture open the soul to God — the same conviction that animates the Orthodox liturgical reading of the Old Testament as a tissue of figures fulfilled in Christ (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010; see Holy Scripture). Second, typology: Bede’s reading of the Tabernacle and Temple and of the persons of the Old Testament narrative as figures of Christ and the Church is precisely the typological method the Fathers and the Orthodox hymnography practise — Adam and Christ, the ark and the Church, the Temple and the Body of the Lord. Third, the consensus of the Fathers: Bede’s refusal to set himself above his authorities, his insistence on transmitting their agreement and naming them as he does so, is an enacted doctrine of the consensus patrum, the Orthodox conviction that the Fathers in their agreement are the reliable interpreters of the faith (see The Church Fathers).

The chief mediator of all this to Bede was Gregory the Great, whose Moralia in Iob taught him to read morally and whose mission had made the English a Christian people; and it is fitting that the Englishman who did most to transmit the patristic reading of Scripture to the West should have learned it above all from the pope the Orthodox honour as St. Gregory the Dialogist (Bede, HE 2.1; Brown 2009; see St. Gregory the Dialogist). Bede is, in the end, the West’s great example of the scholar as servant of the tradition: a man whose holiness and whose learning were the same thing, expressed in a lifetime of reading Scripture under the Fathers and handing on what he had received.

References

Bede. Commentary on the Gospel of Luke (In Lucae evangelium expositio). Preface to Bishop Acca, naming Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome and describing the marginal source-marks. Latin in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 120.
Bede. On the Tabernacle (De tabernaculo). Trans. Arthur G. Holder. Translated Texts for Historians 18. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994.
Bede. On the Temple (De templo). Trans. Seán Connolly, with an introduction by Jennifer O’Reilly. Translated Texts for Historians 21. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.
Bede. On the Song of Songs (In Cantica Canticorum). Cited by preface and division. Latin in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 119B.
Bede. De schematibus et tropis (Concerning Figures and Tropes). Cited for the exposition of the spiritual senses of Scripture. Latin in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 123A.
Bede. Retractation on Acts (Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum). Ed. M. L. W. Laistner, Bedae Venerabilis Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et Retractatio. Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939. English trans. in Lawrence T. Martin, The Venerable Bede: Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. Cistercian Studies 117. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989.
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The life and praise of Gregory the Great, “our apostle,” at HE 2.1.)
de Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture. Trans. Mark Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans / Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998–2009. (On the fourfold sense as a patristic and medieval tradition.)
Laistner, M. L. W. “The Library of the Venerable Bede.” In Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson, 237–266. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Chapters by Arthur Holder and others on Bede the exegete and the patristic inheritance.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.