Honor for the Defeated

Bede thought Colmán wrong on the Easter question, said so without hedging, and sided firmly with the party that defeated him at Whitby. And yet, in the very chapter that records Colmán’s withdrawal, Bede pauses to praise the frugality, poverty, and holiness of the Ionan and Lindisfarne community Colmán had led, in some of the warmest sentences in the whole Ecclesiastical History. This file holds those two facts together — Bede’s genuine conviction that the Celtic Easter was an error, and his genuine reverence for the sanctity of the men who kept it — and draws from their coexistence a model of charitable disagreement deeply resonant with the Orthodox conviction that truth and love are not rivals.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)

The Paradox of the Portrait

The strangeness of Bede’s treatment of Colmán is easy to miss because we are so used to reading history written by winners who despise the losers. Bede does the opposite. He is, by his own lights, a partisan: a monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, formed in the Roman use, who regarded the Insular Easter as a defect to be corrected and who structured his whole History around the gathering of the English Church into the catholic observance (Bede, HE III.25–26, V.21–22; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Goffart 1988). He never pretends the Celtic party was right. Yet when he comes to the moment of their defeat — the point at which a polemicist would press his advantage — he turns instead to praise, and the praise is unfeigned (Bede, HE III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991). This combination of firm doctrinal disagreement with warm personal and communal admiration is the distinctive note of Bede’s portrait of the loser, and it is the heart of this section.

It is worth saying plainly at the outset what Bede did and did not think. He did not think the question trivial: the right keeping of Pascha touched the unity of the Church and the obedience owed to the universal tradition, and Bede believed the Irish were genuinely in the wrong on it (Bede, HE III.25, V.22; Higham 2006). Nor did he think holiness made the error harmless; he laments that men of such sanctity should have erred, treating the wrongness of their Easter as a real and regrettable fault, not a matter of indifference (Bede, HE III.3, III.17, III.25). But neither did he let the error swallow the men. He distinguishes, with a clarity the modern reader can learn from, between a question on which a man is mistaken and the worth of the man’s whole life before God — and he refuses to collapse the second into the first (Mayr-Harting 1991; Thacker 1996).

The Withdrawal and the Praise (HE III.26)

The setting of the great encomium is the immediate aftermath of Whitby. When Oswiu’s decision went against the Insular Easter, Colmán would not conform; rather than abandon the tradition he had received from his elders, he resigned the see of Lindisfarne and withdrew, taking with him those of the Irish and the English who chose the older way, first to Iona and then to Ireland (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; see Departure to Iona and Ireland). It is precisely here, with the defeated bishop departing the kingdom, that Bede stops the forward motion of the narrative to look back on what was leaving with him.

What Bede then writes is a portrait of evangelical poverty so admiring that it has been read for centuries as one of the great descriptions of early monastic Christianity. He recalls how few and frugal the men were who had governed Lindisfarne in the Irish manner, and he sets down, as a thing worthy of imitation, the parsimony and continence (parsimonia and continentia) that the place had learned from its founders (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The whole passage is governed by a single contrast: between a clergy that sought the world and a clergy that sought only God.

What Bede Admired: The Marks of the Ionan Life

Bede’s praise is specific, and its specifics deserve to be drawn out, because they are exactly the things he found holy. He says the place had very few buildings beyond those needful for a regular life, and no money — for whatever was given them by the rich they at once gave to the poor (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). He notes that they had no need to gather money or provide lodgings for the powerful, since such men came to the church only to pray and to hear the word, and the king himself, when he came, came with only five or six attendants and departed when the prayers were ended (Bede, HE III.26). The frugality is not incidental; it is the visible form of a community that had renounced the apparatus of worldly power.

Three marks of the life stand out in Bede’s account, and each is praised without qualification.

The poverty that flowed straight to the poor. Bede underlines that the church possessed no wealth of its own: it held no money but only cattle, and whatever gifts the rich pressed upon it were given immediately to the needy (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The community was, in effect, a conduit and not a treasury — receiving in order to give. This is the patristic ideal of almsgiving and detachment in its plainest institutional form, and Bede holds it up as a standard against which the wealthier churches of his own day might measure themselves (Mayr-Harting 1991; on the ideal, see Holy Tradition).

The clergy who went about to preach. Bede records that the whole concern of these teachers, bishops, and clergy was to serve God and not the world — to feed the soul and not the belly — so that wherever any cleric or monk went he was gladly received as a servant of God, and if travelers met one on the road they would run to him and ask his blessing (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The clergy did not wait for the world to come to them; they went out to it, preaching in the villages, and the people received them with reverence because they manifestly sought nothing for themselves. Bede plainly regards this missionary poverty as the engine of the Northumbrian conversion (Bede, HE III.3, III.26; Thacker 1996).

The king who listened gladly, and the building of monasteries. Bede notes that the kings, who heard such men gladly, gave lands and endowed monasteries, so that the English were instructed in the regular life by Irish masters, and the discipline of religion grew (Bede, HE III.26, III.3; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The point of the praise is that all this fruit — converted kings, founded monasteries, a people catechized — flowed from men who sought God and not the world. The order of causation is, for Bede, exactly the reverse of the worldly assumption: it was the renunciation that bore the fruit (Mayr-Harting 1991; Higham 2006).

The summary sentence carries the whole weight of the encomium: the entire care of these teachers, Bede says, was to serve God, not the world — to cultivate the heart, not to fill the stomach (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). That this is said of the very community that had just lost the great controversy of Bede’s narrative is the point that must not be lost.

“Even While Believing Them Wrong”: Truth and Love Together

The decisive thing is that Bede’s admiration is not a softening of his judgment but stands beside it, undiminished. He does not write, “they were holy, therefore their Easter was acceptable”; nor does he write, “their Easter was wrong, therefore their holiness was suspect.” He writes both — that they were in error on the computus, and that their life was a pattern of sanctity — and he lets the two stand together without resolving them into each other (Bede, HE III.25–26; Mayr-Harting 1991; Stancliffe 2003). Earlier, treating Aidan, Bede had made the logic explicit, distinguishing what he disapproved (the wrong Easter) from what he could not but praise (the holiness of the man); the III.26 encomium applies the same discipline to the whole community Colmán led (Bede, HE III.17; see below).

This is a moral and theological achievement, not merely a stylistic grace. Bede grasped something that polemic almost always loses: that to hold a man in error on a real question is not to license contempt for him, and that the integrity of a life can be honored by one who thinks its owner mistaken on a matter that genuinely matters. He neither flattened the disagreement into “everyone was basically right” nor weaponized it into “the wrong are wicked.” He kept the truth-claim and the love together (Mayr-Harting 1991; Thacker 1996). [Disputed: how far Bede's generosity toward the defeated Irish is principled charity and how far it is rhetorical strategy — Mayr-Harting (1991) and Thacker (1996) read it as genuine reverence rooted in Bede's debt to the Irish mission and his ascetic sympathies; Goffart (1988) and, with qualifications, Higham (2006) read the praise as also serving Bede's larger design, since honoring the now-conformed Irish past costs nothing once the present is safely Roman and makes the eventual conformity look like the crowning of an already-holy people rather than the defeat of a rival — the two readings are not exclusive].

The Orthodox Resonance

For an Orthodox reader this passage is more than a curiosity of seventh-century historiography; it models a habit the Church names as its own. The Orthodox tradition insists that truth and love are not in competition — that one speaks the truth in love (Eph. 4:15), and that zeal for right doctrine which curdles into contempt for persons has already lost the love without which it profits nothing (1 Cor. 13:2; METHODOLOGY §4). Bede’s portrait of Colmán’s community enacts this: a firm conviction that the Celtic Easter was wrong, held together with an unfeigned veneration for the holiness of those who kept it (Bede, HE III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991).

The Church’s own verdict on Colmán confirms the deeper point. The man who lost at Whitby is honored as a saint — by the later medieval calendars, by the Irish tradition that received him, and in Orthodox reckoning today — not in spite of Whitby but because his sanctity was never in doubt to those who knew his life, Bede included (see Colmán the Saint; Mayo and the Cult). The Church can canonize the loser of a real controversy because holiness is not a prize for winning arguments. Bede, the partisan of the winning side, saw this clearly enough to write it down, and in doing so he gave the defeated their due. [Disputed: whether Bede regarded Colmán himself as personally holy in the full sense or chiefly admired the *community* and its founders — Bede's explicit, extended praise at III.26 is of the Lindisfarne/Ionan life as a whole and of named founders (Aidan especially, III.17), and he nowhere gives Colmán an individual encomium; whether this reflects reserve toward Colmán in particular or simply the focus of the passage on the institution he led is not determinable from the text (Stancliffe 2003)].

The Aidan Parallel (HE III.17)

Bede’s treatment of Colmán’s community does not stand alone; it is the second instance of a pattern he had already established with Colmán’s predecessor, Aidan of Lindisfarne, the founding bishop sent from Iona in 635 (Bede, HE III.5, III.17; see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne; Iona and the Lindisfarne Succession). At Aidan’s death Bede composed a long and famous encomium (HE III.17) praising the bishop’s peace and charity, his continence and humility, his diligence in study and prayer, his fearless rebuke of the proud and powerful, his tenderness to the poor and the enslaved whom he ransomed, and his refusal of worldly possessions — giving away whatever the rich gave him (Bede, HE III.17; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

And it is in this very encomium that Bede makes his charitable method most explicit. He says outright that he both admired and loved much in Aidan, but that he could not approve of his observance of Easter — and he begs the reader not to think that, in praising the man, he is also commending the error (Bede, HE III.17; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991). Bede goes further, excusing Aidan in part on the ground of ignorance, reasoning that Aidan kept the only Easter he knew, having received it from his own fathers, and that what mattered to God was the love and devotion with which he labored, which were no less than those of any who kept the catholic Easter (Bede, HE III.17). This is the same logic that governs III.26: a real error, honestly named, set beside a real holiness, fully honored — with the explicit warning that the praise of the second is not an endorsement of the first (Bede, HE III.17, III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991; Thacker 1996). Colmán inherited Aidan’s see, Aidan’s tradition, and — in Bede’s pages — Aidan’s portrait. The man who lost at Whitby was drawn by the historian of the winners in the colors he reserved for the saints.

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 encomium of Aidan and the explicit “I cannot approve his Easter… yet do not think I commend the error” at III.17; the synod at III.25; Colmán’s withdrawal and the praise of the frugal, poor, holy Lindisfarne/Ionan community — no money but cattle, gifts to the poor, clergy preaching, the king with few attendants, the whole care to serve God not the world — at III.26; the Irish mission and the founding of monasteries at III.3, III.5.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Bede’s distinction between the error and the men, his admiration for Irish sanctity, and the genuineness of his reverence.)
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 and largely warm regard for the Irish mission and its ascetic ideal.)
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. (The rhetorical design within which even Bede’s generosity functions.)
Higham, N. J. (Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context. London: Routledge, 2006. (Bede’s authorial purposes and the place of the Irish past in his design.)
Stancliffe, Clare. Bede, Wilfrid, and the Irish. Jarrow Lecture 2003. Jarrow: St Paul’s Church, 2003. (Bede’s sympathies toward and reticences about the Irish.)
Scripture cited: Ephesians 4:15 (truth in love); 1 Corinthians 13:2 (knowledge without love profits nothing).