The World Chronicle and Eschatology

The Reckoning of Time ends not with the tides but with the whole course of history and its consummation. Bede framed universal history on the six ages of the world (sex aetates mundi), looking forward to a seventh age of rest and an eighth of eternity; and he held a deliberately restrained eschatology, revising the chronology of the world downward, refusing to calculate the end, and answering the charge of heresy this revision drew with a firm appeal to the hiddenness of the times. This file treats his world chronicle and the sober doctrine of last things bound up with it.

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

The Two Chronicles

Bede wrote universal history twice, and both times as the climax of a work on time. In De temporibus (On Times, 703), the short handbook of his early maturity, he closed with a brief chronicle of the world from the creation to his own day — the so-called Chronica minora — running the count of years through the ages of the world (Wallis 1999, introduction, lxvii; Brown 2009, ch. 5; Darby 2012, ch. 1). Twenty-two years later he did it again at far greater length: the sixty-sixth chapter of De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time, 725) is itself a complete world chronicle, the Chronica maiora, the longest single chapter of the book and one of the most influential chronicles of the early Middle Ages (The Reckoning of Time 66; trans. Wallis 1999; Wallis 1999, commentary on ch. 66). The chronicle is not an appendix to the science of time but its purpose: having taught the reader to reckon days, months, and years, Bede shows him the largest reckoning of all — the measure of the world’s whole duration in the hand of God.

The chronicle is built from sources Bede names and adapts — above all the chronicle of Eusebius in Jerome’s Latin version, with Isidore’s Etymologies and chronicle, Orosius, the Liber pontificalis, and others — but it is no mere compilation. Bede recasts the chronological framework he received, prunes the legendary matter, brings the narrative down to his own day, and orders the whole on a frame the Eusebian chronicle had not used as its governing structure; the recasting is the most consequential thing about it (Wallis 1999, commentary on ch. 66; Darby 2012, ch. 1; Brown 2009, ch. 5). The Chronica maiora would in turn become a principal source for later medieval universal chronicles, carrying Bede’s framework and his lower chronology forward through the Latin Middle Ages (Wallis 1999, lxvii–lxxii).

The Six Ages of the World

Bede orders the whole of history on the scheme of the six ages of the world, the sex aetates mundi, an Augustinian inheritance that he made the standard frame of medieval universal history (Augustine had set it out, e.g., in On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed and at the end of The City of God; Bede follows it in The Reckoning of Time 66–67; trans. Wallis 1999; Darby 2012, ch. 2). The six ages run by the great turning-points of salvation history: the first from Adam to the Flood; the second from Noah to Abraham; the third from Abraham to David; the fourth from David to the Babylonian Exile; the fifth from the Exile to the coming of Christ; and the sixth from the Incarnation to the end of the world (The Reckoning of Time 66; trans. Wallis 1999). The sixth age, the present age, is the age of the Church, and — unlike the five that preceded it — its length is not given. This is theologically deliberate: the five past ages can be measured because they are closed, but the sixth is open, and its term is known to God alone.

To the six ages of history Bede adds two more that lie outside the count of historical time. The seventh age is the Sabbath — the rest of the souls of the saints, which runs alongside the sixth age rather than after it, the repose into which the faithful departed enter while the world’s history continues. The eighth age is the eternal Day — the age of the resurrection and the life of the world to come, which begins at the general resurrection and has no end (The Reckoning of Time 67, 70–71; trans. Wallis 1999; Darby 2012, chs. 2, 6). It is essential to Bede’s meaning, and he is explicit about it, that the seventh and eighth ages are not further chronological periods to be added to the timeline of the world. They belong to a different order: the seventh is the present rest of souls, the eighth the future life of the resurrected. They cannot be dated, counted, or located on a chronicle, because they are not measured by the sun and moon at all (The Reckoning of Time 71; trans. Wallis 1999; Wallis 1999, commentary; Darby 2012, ch. 6). The seventh age runs concurrently with the sixth, not after it: from the death of Abel — the first to enter the rest of the righteous dead — souls have been passing into the Sabbath of repose while the history of the world has gone on its course, so that the seventh age is being lived now, hidden, alongside the visible sixth (The Reckoning of Time 71; trans. Wallis 1999; Darby 2012, ch. 6). The eighth alone is wholly future, beginning at the resurrection and never closing. This distinction is the hinge of his whole eschatology, and it should be received as Bede’s theological reading of the ages — a venerable patristic theologoumenon in the Augustinian line, taken up and refined, not a conciliar definition (cf. METHODOLOGY §4).

The Revised Chronology and the Charge of Heresy

The most striking and most dangerous feature of Bede’s chronicle was a matter of numbers. The Eusebian chronicle Bede inherited reckoned the years of the early ages from the Septuagint, whose long generational figures yield a high count for the Anno Mundi — the year of the world — placing the creation some five thousand and more years before Christ (the familiar figure in the Greek tradition being in the region of 5,500 years). Bede, working from the shorter Hebrew figures preserved in Jerome’s Vulgate, recomputed the early ages and arrived at a substantially lower total: by his reckoning only some three thousand nine hundred and fifty-two years separated the creation from the Incarnation (The Reckoning of Time 66; trans. Wallis 1999; Wallis 1999, commentary on ch. 66; Darby 2012, ch. 1). He had already adopted this shorter chronology in De temporibus of 703.

The revision was philologically defensible — it followed the Hebrew verity that Jerome himself had championed — but it had an alarming side-effect in the minds of contemporaries. Many believed, on a calculation derived from the “thousand years are as a day” of 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4, that the world was appointed to last six thousand years, one millennium for each of the six days of creation, so that the sixth age would close and the end come around Anno Mundi 6000. On the old Septuagint count, that terminus was near. On Bede’s lower count, it was pushed far off into the future — the sixth age appeared far less advanced than the inherited chronology implied — and to some this looked like a tampering with the appointed span of the world (Wallis 1999, introduction, lxxi–lxxii; Darby 2012, ch. 1; Brown 2009, ch. 5).

So it was that around 708, at the table of Bishop Wilfrid, Bede was accused of heresy. As Bede himself reports the episode, certain “rustics” — lewd, unlearned men — denounced him in his absence, the charge being that by his chronology he had denied that the world was in the sixth of its ages, and so had fallen into error touching the reckoning of the world’s age and the expectation of its end (Bede, Letter to Plegwine 1–3; trans. Wallis 1999, appendix; Wallis 1999, lxxi–lxxii; Darby 2012, ch. 1).

The Letter to Plegwine and the Refusal to Calculate the End

Bede answered the charge with indignation and at length in the Epistola ad Pleguinam, the Letter to Plegwine, written to a friend so that the truth might reach Wilfrid’s circle. The letter is one of the most revealing documents he ever produced, and its argument has two parts. First, Bede defends his chronology as a matter of scholarship: he had not invented a new reckoning out of pride but had followed the Hebrew text and the authority of Jerome, and the higher Anno Mundi figures rest on the Septuagint’s numbers, which a careful reckoner is free to correct (Letter to Plegwine 4–14; trans. Wallis 1999, appendix; Wallis 1999, commentary; Darby 2012, ch. 1).

Second, and more importantly for his eschatology, Bede refuses outright the assumption on which the heresy charge rested — the assumption that the age of the world tells us anything about the nearness of its end. He denies the equation of the six ages with six millennia: the ages are not of equal length, and the sixth age has no measured span, so that no count of years from the creation can yield the date of the end (Letter to Plegwine 14–17; trans. Wallis 1999, appendix; Darby 2012, chs. 1, 5). And he grounds this refusal in Scripture. To calculate the time of the end is precisely what the Lord forbade: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7), and “of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36). The times are hidden by God’s own appointment, and the man who reckons toward them transgresses (Letter to Plegwine 14–17; trans. Wallis 1999, appendix; cf. The Reckoning of Time 67–68; Darby 2012, ch. 5).

This is the center of Bede’s doctrine of last things. He was a tireless reckoner of every measurable interval of time — and at the one point where reckoning would have been most eagerly received, the date of the end, he set down his pen and declared the calculation forbidden. The world will end; the sixth age will close; but when, no man may compute, and the attempt is not piety but presumption (The Reckoning of Time 67–68; Letter to Plegwine 14–17; trans. Wallis 1999; Darby 2012, ch. 5).

A Restrained, Anti-Millenarian Eschatology

Bede’s eschatology is accordingly austere and anti-millenarian. He treats the signs of the end and the figure of Antichrist soberly, as Scripture gives them, and in the closing chapters of The Reckoning of Time he sets out the future — the coming of Antichrist, the end of the world, the resurrection, and the Day of Judgment — without indulging the speculative datings and lush millennial scenarios that flourished elsewhere (The Reckoning of Time 68–70; trans. Wallis 1999; Darby 2012, chs. 3–4). The thousand years of Revelation 20 he does not read as a coming earthly kingdom of fixed length but, in the Augustinian manner, figuratively, so that no chiliastic expectation can fasten onto it (The Reckoning of Time 67; Darby 2012, ch. 4). The seventh and eighth ages, as noted, drain the temptation to millenarianism of its object: the “rest” the faithful await is not a thousand-year reign upon the earth but the present Sabbath of souls and the eternal Day of the resurrection, neither of which can be entered by calculation (The Reckoning of Time 71; trans. Wallis 1999; Darby 2012, ch. 6).

This restraint is deeply consonant with the mind of the Orthodox Church, which likewise confesses the certainty of the Second Coming and the resurrection while forbidding the prediction of their hour and resisting chiliastic literalism about the thousand years (see Eschatology). Bede’s six ages are his own theological framework rather than a dogma binding on the conscience, and his refusal to date the end is not a dogmatic definition but the obedience of a scholar to the plain word of his Lord. Yet in that obedience — measuring everything that may be measured, and declining to measure what God has hidden — Bede gave the Latin West a model of sober expectation, and the heresy charge that his honesty drew from the unlearned has become, in retrospect, one of the clearest testimonies to it (Wallis 1999, lxxi–lxxii; Darby 2012, conclusion; Brown 2009, ch. 5).

References

Bede. The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione). Translated, with introduction, notes, and commentary, by Faith Wallis. Translated Texts for Historians 29. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. (Cited by chapter; the Chronica maiora and the world chronicle, ch. 66; the six ages and the seventh and eighth ages, chs. 66–67, 70–71; the signs of the end, Antichrist, and the resurrection, chs. 68–70; the lower Anno Mundi figure of 3,952 years, ch. 66. The Letter to Plegwine [Epistola ad Pleguinam] is translated in the appendix and cited here by section; Wallis’s introduction, lxvii–lxxii, on the two chronicles and the heresy charge at Wilfrid’s table c. 708.)
Darby, Peter. Bede and the End of Time. Studies in Early Medieval Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. (The definitive study of Bede’s eschatology; the chronological revision and the Letter to Plegwine, ch. 1; the ages of the world, ch. 2; Antichrist and the signs, chs. 3–4; the refusal to date the end, ch. 5; the seventh and eighth ages, ch. 6.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Anglo-Saxon Studies 12. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. (The chronicles, the Anno Mundi controversy, and Bede’s eschatology, ch. 5.)
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Essays on Bede’s computus, chronicles, and theology, including Faith Wallis on Bede and time.)