Miracles in the History

The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) is one of the great works of early-medieval historiography — and it is full of wonders: healings, incorrupt relics, visions of the world to come, and the gift of poetry granted in a dream. Bede was no credulous compiler. He characteristically pins his miracles to their sources, naming the authority on which he reports them and distinguishing what he found written from what he had on living testimony. This file surveys the kinds of miracle Bede records, the chains of witness by which he authenticates them, his restraint set beside other hagiographers, and the purpose the miraculous serves in his providential history — received, per the repository methodology, as what Bede attests on the authority he names, never adjudicated here as historical fact.

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

The Historian and the Holy

[Disputed: the historicity of the individual miracle-episodes reported below is not adjudicated here; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 they are reported as what Bede attests on the authority he names, with that authority specified wherever Bede himself supplies it.]

A modern reader sometimes comes to the Ecclesiastical History expecting either dry annals or pious fable, and finds neither. Bede’s History is a sustained interpretation of how the English peoples were brought to the true faith, and within it the miraculous is woven everywhere — yet it is woven by a man who, in the same book, names the bishops who supplied him with documents, distinguishes Northumbrian tradition from Kentish, and apologizes when his information runs thin (Colgrave & Mynors 1969, with Wallace-Hadrill 1988; see Bede’s Sources and Reliability). The tension between Bede the careful historian and Bede the recorder of wonders is not a flaw to be explained away; it is the central interpretive fact about the History, and the methodology of this collection makes it explicit: his critical care and his providential reading of the miraculous are presented together (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4; see The Historia Ecclesiastica).

The key to how Bede holds the two together is his habit of attribution. Again and again he does not simply assert that a wonder occurred; he tells the reader where he learned it. He writes that he has the account “from those who knew him,” or “as the venerable brethren who were present relate,” or that a thing was “told to me by a most truthful brother” — and where he can, he names the man (Colgrave & Mynors 1969, passim; Ward 1990; McCready 1994). This is the same discipline that governs his prose Life of Cuthbert, where he names Herefrith and the other witnesses in his preface (see The Lives of Cuthbert). The miracle, in Bede, almost always comes with a chain of testimony attached, and the reliability of the chain is something he expects his reader to weigh (McCready 1994; Wallace-Hadrill 1988).

The Kinds of Miracle Bede Records

The wonders of the History fall into recognizable families, and surveying them shows both their range and the consistency of Bede’s handling.

Healing miracles are the most frequent. They cluster around holy men in their lifetimes and, above all, around their relics after death — the recovery of the sick, the lame, and the demon-troubled at a saint’s tomb or through some object connected with him (Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Ward 1990). Bede typically reports each as something attested by named or describable witnesses rather than as a thing he simply knows.

The relics of King Oswald furnish one of the richest clusters. Oswald, the Christian king of Northumbria killed in battle at Maserfield in 642, becomes in Bede’s telling a martyr-king whose holiness is confirmed by signs at the place of his death and through his remains (HE 3.9–13; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede reports that the very dust of the spot where Oswald fell, and the earth from it, worked cures — that a traveller’s horse was healed there, and that earth carried from the place and dissolved in water restored the sick (HE 3.9–10; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). He tells how Oswald’s relics brought healing, and how a portion of the stake on which his head was set, and the moss that grew on it, were sought for cures (HE 3.11–13; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Throughout this sequence Bede marks his sources — what was related in the region, what the brethren of the monasteries that held the relics reported — and the cumulative effect is of a cult whose miracles Bede sets down as the testimony of the communities that kept it (HE 3.9–13; Wallace-Hadrill 1988; McCready 1994).

The relics of Cuthbert form the parallel cluster for the later books: the discovery of the incorrupt body at the elevation of 698 and the healings reported at the saint’s shrine and through objects associated with him (HE 4.30–32; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Here Bede draws on the same Lindisfarne testimony that stands behind his prose Life, and the two accounts can be read together (see The Lives of Cuthbert).

Caedmon’s gift of poetry is a miracle of a different and gentler kind, and one of the most beloved passages in the book. Bede tells of Caedmon, an unlettered cowherd of the monastery of Whitby under the Abbess Hild, who could not sing and would leave the feast in shame when the harp came round to him; one night, having withdrawn to the cattle-byre, he was addressed in a dream by one who bade him sing of the creation, and he woke with the gift of sacred song, going on to turn whole tracts of Scripture into vernacular English verse (HE 4.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede preserves the opening lines of Caedmon’s first hymn and frames the whole as a divine gift granted to the humble — a miracle of grace rather than of healing, attested by the memory of the Whitby community (HE 4.24; Ward 1990; McCready 1994).

The miracles of Germanus Bede does not vouch for on his own authority at all; he openly takes them from an earlier written source. In recounting the visits of Germanus of Auxerre to Britain against the Pelagians, including the stilling of a storm at sea and the bloodless “Alleluia victory,” Bede signals that he is drawing on the Life of Germanus by Constantius of Lyon (HE 1.17–21; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). This is attribution at the level of the whole episode: Bede tells the reader that these wonders come to him from a book, and which book, so that the testimony can be traced to its origin (HE 1.17–21; McCready 1994).

The Visions of the World to Come

A distinct and weighty category is the vision of the afterlife — the otherworld journey, in which a man dies or seems to die, is given a tour of the places of punishment and reward, and returns to tell of it. These are among the most influential passages Bede ever wrote, and they connect his History to the long Christian tradition of eschatological vision (see Eschatology).

The greatest of them is the vision of Dryhthelm (HE 5.12; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede reports that a devout householder of the region of the Northumbrians fell ill, died in the night, and at dawn revived, terrifying those who were mourning him; he afterward divided his goods, entered the monastery of Melrose, and lived as a strict ascetic, telling only those who sought spiritual profit what he had seen. In his account a shining guide led him through a valley of fire and ice where souls were tormented, to the mouth of hell itself, and then to a place of light and a flowery meadow where the not-yet-perfect awaited entry into the kingdom, and toward a still greater radiance he was not permitted to enter; he was told that because he had not yet been fully purified he must return to the body and amend his life (HE 5.12; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede gives the vision in detail and names his line of transmission — the account, he indicates, was related by Dryhthelm to those who knew him, among them men Bede could specify (HE 5.12; Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Ward 1990). The Dryhthelm vision, with its intermediate places of purification and waiting before the Last Judgment, became a foundational text for later Western visions of the otherworld; an Orthodox reading receives it soberly, as a vision attested by Bede on the authority he names, within the Church’s wider witness to the soul’s state after death (see Eschatology).

A second otherworld vision is that of the monk of Much Wenlock — better, the dying man in the monastery whom Bede reports in connection with the visions of his own day. Bede also records the vision of the Mercian man who saw two beautiful books and a hideous one in which his sins were written, and the death-bed despair of the unrepentant thegn who saw the books of his evil deeds and died without hope (HE 5.13; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). These darker visions Bede sets beside Dryhthelm’s deliberately: the otherworld journeys in Book 5 are arranged as a sequence on repentance and the fate of the soul, each pinned to the report by which it reached him, and together pressing the reader toward amendment of life (HE 5.12–14; McCready 1994; Wallace-Hadrill 1988).

Bede’s Restraint

Set against the wider field of early-medieval hagiography, Bede is notably restrained in his handling of the marvelous — not because he doubts that God works wonders, but because of the discipline he brings to reporting them (Ward 1990; McCready 1994). William McCready’s study of the question argues that Bede genuinely believed in the miracles he recorded and saw no conflict between that belief and careful method; what distinguishes Bede is not skepticism but the consistency with which he supplies a chain of testimony and prefers reports he can attribute (McCready 1994). Benedicta Ward, surveying the medieval understanding of the miraculous, places Bede among those for whom miracles were intelligible signs within a coherent theology of providence rather than free-floating marvels (Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind; Ward 1990).

The restraint shows in concrete habits. Bede frequently flags the source of a miracle and occasionally the limits of his knowledge, declining to elaborate where his information stops. He tends to draw his most extended marvels from communities and witnesses he can name, and to take whole supernatural episodes from identifiable written sources, as with Germanus from Constantius (HE 1.17–21; McCready 1994). Where a later or lesser hagiographer might multiply prodigies for their own sake, Bede subordinates the wonder to the lesson and the lesson to the providential argument of the book (Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Ward 1990). This is not the modern historian’s suspension of the supernatural — Bede has no such suspension — but it is a real and unusual care about evidence for the supernatural, and it is the reason his History reads so differently from the freer vitae of his age (McCready 1994; Brown 2009).

The Purpose of the Miraculous

Why, then, are the miracles there at all? For Bede they are not decoration and not mere wonder; they are signs within a providential history (Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Ward 1990; McCready 1994). The argument of the Ecclesiastical History is that God brought the English peoples out of paganism into the one true faith, and that He attended that work with confirmations of His favor. Miracles in Bede authenticate sanctity — they mark out the holy men and women whom God has glorified — and they authenticate the spread of the true faith, vindicating the mission and the Roman order Bede champions (Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Brown 2009). Oswald’s healing relics confirm that the Christian king was a saint; Cuthbert’s incorrupt body confirms the holiness of the Lindisfarne tradition reconciled to Rome; Caedmon’s gift confirms that the praise of God could be sung in English; the visions confirm the reality of judgment and the urgency of repentance (HE 3.9–13, 4.24, 4.30, 5.12; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The miraculous is the visible grammar of a providence Bede believes to be at work throughout, and it is inseparable from the book’s purpose of edifying its readers toward the good (HE, preface; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Wallace-Hadrill 1988).

For an Orthodox reader this purpose is wholly recognizable. The signs of holiness — relics that heal, bodies that do not corrupt, the soul granted a glimpse of what awaits it — belong to the Church’s own experience and are received, in the East as in Bede, as testimonies to be reported soberly, with their sources named, neither manufactured nor denied (see The Church Fathers). The repository holds Bede’s miracle-accounts in exactly that key: not certified as bare historical fact, not dismissed as fable, but reported as what Bede attests on the authority he gives — which is, in the end, precisely how Bede himself asks to be read (METHODOLOGY §3.5; McCready 1994; Ward 1990).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cited by book and chapter. Germanus and Constantius at HE 1.17–21; the relics and healing earth of Oswald at HE 3.9–13; Caedmon’s gift of poetry at HE 4.24; Cuthbert’s incorrupt body and relic-miracles at HE 4.30–32; the vision of Dryhthelm at HE 5.12; the visions of the books of deeds and the despairing thegn at HE 5.13–14; the providential purpose in the preface.)
McCready, William D. Miracles and the Venerable Bede. Studies and Texts 118. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1994. (Bede’s belief in and method of reporting miracles; his chains of testimony; the absence of conflict between his faith in the marvelous and his historical care.)
Ward, Benedicta. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. (The medieval theology of the miraculous as intelligible sign within providence.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s handling of the miraculous, his restraint, and his attribution of sources.)
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (Chapter-by-chapter commentary on the miracle-episodes, their sources, and Bede’s providential design.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. (Bede’s miracles within the purpose and art of the History.)
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Bede’s historiography and the function of the supernatural in his work.)