1996 NAPS Presidential Address on the Brink: Bede

The venerable Bede (673–735) occupies a unique place in the history of Christian scholarship. A Germanic barbarian, descendant of those warriors who overran Christian, Roman Britain, he spent his life preserving the culture his ancestors almost destroyed. Indeed, so identified is he with that culture, that many scholars consider him a church father. The Clavis Patrum Latinorum has canonized him by inclusion and others continue to ratify that decision, ¹ but The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by two leading students of Early Christianity, dissents, identifying Isidore of Seville (d. 636) as the last of the fathers. ² This paper will not focus on that question, except to note that only one person could have said with confidence whether or not Bede was a father, and that was Bede, who would have said no.

This paper will focus instead on Bede as a scholar on the brink between two worlds, an ancient one he knew only from books but which he still loved dearly, and a modern one, which he frequently criticized, ³ but whose inhabitants, the English, the newest of God’s elect peoples, ⁴ he also loved dearly. Bede struggled for a lifetime to bridge the gap between those two worlds, earning a compliment from his fellow Anglo-Saxon, the great missionary Boniface, who called him a candela ecclesiae. ⁵ This was indeed a light which shined brightly, enlightening the study of early Christianity to our own day.

That last sentence sounds startling, but a survey of Bede’s legacy will validate it. His Historia Ecclesiastica provides the only reliable data on the career of the Romano-British missionary Ninian, ⁶ and it preserves an important work of Gregory the Great, his libellus responsionum or “little book of replies” to the queries of Augustine of Canterbury about how to deal with the newly converted English, ⁷ an essential witness to Gregory’s missionary policy.

Like all Anglo-Saxons, Bede admired Gregory the Great. Not only did he make him a central figure of the early part of the Historia Ecclesiastica, he also made extensive use of the pope’s exegesis and even cited him in his works on grammar and writing, hardly a common practice in the middle ages. ⁸ Given the amount of modern scholarship on Gregory, interest in him does not seem remarkable, but, in Bede’s day, Gregory was not popular in his own city. After his death in 604, the Roman clergy did not elect another monk as pope for more than four centuries, choosing instead from their own ranks. ⁹ The Liber Pontificalis has a “scrappy and grudging” biography of him which is shorter than those of many other popes, and the first full Roman biography was commissioned by Pope John VIII (872–882) and then only after he had learned of the great reverence for Gregory among the northern Christians, a reverence spread by English missionaries and Bedes writings. ¹⁰ Bede knew that Gregory had “by his efforts (converted the English) from the power of Satan,” ¹¹ and that God had worked through such a man. He may have been biased, but Bede made the Western world take Gregory seriously as a scholar.

He also did the same for Primasius, whose Apocalypse commentary became known in the West because Bede used it for his own commentary. ¹²

When Paul the Deacon, a late eighth-century Carolingian, prepared a standard homilarium, he included more of Bede’s homilies than those of even Augustine and Gregory, and many medieval homilists learned patristic preaching through Bede’s use of it. ¹³ Bede’s opera exegetica were so popular that the Anglo-Saxons had to invent a new type of minuscule to meet the demands for his works on the continent. ¹⁴ He became the first writer to place together Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory as the four great doctors of the Church. ¹⁵ Because Bede preferred the Vulgate to the various Vetus Latina versions in circulation, he employed it in his chronological and exegetical works, thus increasing its popularity. No less an authority than...