06 — Bede’s Portrait of the Loser
St. Colmán lost at Whitby, and almost everything we know of him comes from a writer who thought he was wrong. Yet Bede — a monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow, committed body and soul to the Roman Easter — drew the defeated bishop and his community with a tenderness and admiration that has astonished readers ever since. This section holds the two halves of that portrait together: Bede’s genuine reverence for Colmán’s sanctity (the model of charitable disagreement, HE III.26), and the rhetorical art by which the same writer made the Roman victory appear providential and obvious (read critically, with the scholarship on Bede’s bias named).
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)
The figure of Colmán of Lindisfarne reaches us almost entirely through Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731, some sixty-seven years after the synod and fifty-five after Colmán’s death (Bede, HE III.25–26, V.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). This is the central problem and the central gift of the whole collection: our principal witness is a partisan of the party that won. He believed the Insular Easter wrong, said so plainly, and built his narrative to vindicate the catholic computus he himself kept (Goffart 1988; Higham 2006). And yet — this is the thing that must be reckoned with — the same Bede paused, immediately after recording Colmán’s defeat and withdrawal, to praise the frugality, poverty, and holiness of the community Colmán had led, in some of the most admiring sentences in the entire History (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The two files of this section take, in turn, the two faces of that portrait.
The first file, Honor for the Defeated, draws out Bede’s remarkable respect for the man he believed mistaken: the HE III.26 encomium of the Ionan/Lindisfarne life — bishops who sought only the necessities, a church with no money but only cattle, gifts given straight to the poor, clergy who went preaching while kings listened gladly — and Bede’s explicit insistence that he admired all this even while holding the Celtic Easter to be in error. The point is Orthodox-resonant: truth and love are not rivals, and one may hold another in genuine error on a real question while honoring his sanctity and the integrity of his life (METHODOLOGY §4). The second file, The Rhetoric of the History, reads the same Bede critically: how he shapes the Celtic party, stages Oswiu’s closing question and the assembly’s assent, and builds the whole narrative so that the Roman outcome appears providential — naming the scholarship (Goffart, Higham, Thacker, Stancliffe, Mayr-Harting) on Bede’s bias and rhetorical craft. Together they aim at a fair verdict: Bede is honest and generous, but he is not neutral, and the Orthodox reader honors him best by reading him with both gratitude and care.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Honor for the Defeated | Bede’s reverence for Colmán despite siding against him: the HE III.26 praise of the frugal, holy Ionan/Lindisfarne community — no money but cattle, gifts to the poor, clergy preaching, kings listening, the whole care of the teachers to serve God not the world — and the model of charitable disagreement it embodies (truth and love together). Paired with Bede’s parallel encomium of Aidan at III.17, and read as an Orthodox lesson in honoring the sanctity of one held to be in error. |
| The Rhetoric of the History | The same portrait read critically: Bede’s rhetorical construction of the debate, the staging of Oswiu’s question and the assembly’s assent, the narrative made to render the Roman outcome providential; the wider agenda of a History written in 731 for the unity of the English Church; Bede’s sources and his own Wearmouth-Jarrow standpoint. With the scholarship on his bias named (Goffart, Higham, Thacker, Stancliffe, Mayr-Harting) and the limits of certainty flagged. |
See Also
- Colmán and Wilfrid Debate — the debate whose aftermath this section interprets, with both cases reconstructed
- Bede as the Narrator — the fuller source-critical assessment of Bede as our principal witness
- Colmán the Saint — the holiness Bede honored, received into the Church’s veneration
- St. Aidan of Lindisfarne — Colmán’s predecessor, whom Bede praises at length in the same spirit
- St. Bede the Venerable — the historian-saint who drew the portrait, himself a partisan of the Roman Easter
- The Pre-Schism Church — the one undivided Church within which Bede and Colmán both stood
References
- Bede. The 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.chapter; the praise of Aidan at III.17, the synod at III.25, the praise of Colmán’s community and his withdrawal at III.26, the chronological summary at V.24.)
- Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (Bede’s purposes and the rhetorical architecture of the History.)
- Higham, N. J. (Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context. London: Routledge, 2006. (Bede’s authorial agenda and the political and ecclesial context of 731.)
- Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Bede’s even-handedness toward the Irish and his admiration for their sanctity.)
- Thacker, Alan. “Bede and the Irish.” In Beda Venerabilis: Historian, Monk and Northumbrian, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1996. (Bede’s complex regard for the Irish mission.)
- Stancliffe, Clare. Bede, Wilfrid, and the Irish. Jarrow Lecture 2003. Jarrow: St Paul’s Church, 2003. (Bede’s handling of the Irish and of Wilfrid; his sympathies and reticences.)