08 — East and West
Bede belongs to the undivided Church, and his standing reaches across the later division of Christendom: he is the only Englishman Dante set among the wise spirits of Paradise, the only native Englishman the Roman Church has named a Doctor (1899), and a saint commemorated in the Orthodox calendar among the pre-Schism Fathers of the West. This section sets out that double standing — the honour East and West paid to a Northumbrian monk who never left his island — and then the narrower but real channel through which the Greek and Eastern tradition reached him: his own working Greek, the Acts Retractatio, and above all the school of Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian at Canterbury.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)
Bede died in 735, three centuries before the mutual excommunications of 1054, wholly within the one Church that East and West then still confessed together. His theology carries none of the later Western developments that would divide that Church; his Fathers are the Fathers East and West held in common; his veneration belongs, as the saints of the first millennium do, to the shared patrimony of both. That is why a Roman pope could make him a Doctor of the Church and the Orthodox could keep his feast without either claim contradicting the other: both are honouring a man who is theirs because he is the whole Church’s.
The two files of this section treat the two halves of that fact. The first takes Bede’s reception — Dante’s Paradiso, Leo XIII’s Doctorate, and the twentieth-century recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints by the Orthodox, with the contested feast-date handled in a structured note. The second takes the substance behind the symbol: what Bede actually knew of the Greek and Eastern tradition — his real but limited Greek, the bilingual manuscript of Acts behind his Retractatio, the Eastern learning Theodore and Hadrian planted at Canterbury, and his knowledge of the Holy Land through Adomnán and Arculf — presenting what is solid and flagging what is not.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| A Doctor of the Church, Venerated East | Bede’s standing across the later division of Christendom: the only Englishman in Dante’s Paradiso (10.130–131), named among the doctors with Isidore and Richard of St Victor; the only native Englishman made a Doctor of the Church (Leo XIII, 1899); his pre-Schism standing within the undivided Church; and his Orthodox veneration, with the feast-date question (25 vs 27 May) set out as a structured Disputed note. |
| Bede and the Greek Tradition | The narrower channel: Bede’s real but limited Greek and the Acts Retractatio against a bilingual Greek–Latin manuscript; the Eastern learning brought to England by Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian and the Canterbury biblical commentaries; his access to Eastern Fathers in Latin; and his knowledge of the Holy Land through Adomnán’s and Arculf’s De locis sanctis (HE 5.15–17) — what is solid and what is uncertain. |
See Also
- Exegesis and the Fathers — Bede’s patristic method, standing under the Fathers East and West held in common
- The Commentaries — the scriptural works, including the Acts Retractatio where he goes back to the Greek
- Legacy and Assessment — the wider reckoning of Bede’s greatness and his limits
- Relics at Durham — the cult of Bede in the West, the material side of his veneration
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church to which Bede belongs and the basis of his shared veneration
- The Church Fathers — the patristic consensus Bede transmitted, common to East and West
- The Church Calendar — the calendar on which Bede’s Orthodox feast is kept
- St. Gregory the Dialogist — another pre-Schism Western Father venerated whole by the Orthodox
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. (Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury, HE 4.1–2; Adomnán, Arculf, and De locis sanctis, HE 5.15–17; the list of writings, HE 5.24.)
- Dante Alighieri. Paradiso. In The Divine Comedy. (Bede among the wise spirits of the Heaven of the Sun, Paradiso 10.130–131.)
- Leo XIII. Urbis et Orbis (apostolic letter declaring Bede a Doctor of the Universal Church), 13 November 1899.
- Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
- DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Bischoff, Bernhard, and Michael Lapidge, eds. Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.