Bede - Metanarratives of History: Eusebian and Augustinian Perceptions of History in Orosius, B

Overview of the scholarly evalution of HEGA

The Venerable Bede’s influence on the intellectual foundations of the Middle Ages was equal to that of Orosius.⁵³³ Both appear in Dante’s Paradiso among the saints in heaven,⁵³⁴ and their works formed, together with Jerome, Eusebius, Gregory of Tours, and Isidore of Seville, the basis and model for all medieval historiography.⁵³⁵ In addition, Bede’s reputation as a quasi-Church Father also rested on many of his biblical commentaries and exegetical and scientific writings, some of which were ground-breaking, such as De temporum ratione. Bede’s intellectual output is all the more formidable considering how he had never set foot outside Northumbria, but made use of a vast social network of sources and correspondents.⁵³⁶

The manuscripts of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (HEGA) are numerous in England and on the Continent, with over 166 complete or once-complete items known and extant.⁵³⁷ It has an Old English translation (OEHE), and provided the raw data for indeed all later English histories, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William of Malmesbury, and Geoffrey of Monmouth.⁵³⁸ The textual transmission of HEGA is ‘almost as problem-free as a modern book’.⁵³⁹ The ease of access, which manifested not only in the plenitude of manuscripts, but also in Bede’s elegant and clear-cut Latin, has inspired decades of scholarly study. HEGA has been analysed in nearly all its aspects and data-mined for an abundance of subjects: Church politics, power structures, the creation of the ‘English nation’, and the reception of Classical learning in England, wordplay, and even dating Beowulf.⁵⁴⁰

533 Whitelock, After Bede, pp. 37–49.

534 Dante Canto X.

535 Brown, A Companion to Bede, pp. 117–34.

536 Reynold & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, p. 89.

537 Westgard, Dissemination and Reception of Bede's ‘Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’, pp. 135–39.

538 Brown, A Companion to Bede, pp. 131–32.

539 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, p. 236.

540 For an analysis of Church Politics, see Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, pp. 235–328; on power structure and social hierarchy, see Foot’s ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, pp. 25–49. Bede’s creation of the idea of the English nation has been well analysed, and the results are well summarized by Wormald in ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, pp. 99–129, and Speed’s ‘Bede’s Creation of a Nation in his Ecclesiastical History’, pp. 139–54. Grey’s ‘Historiography and Biography from the Period of Gildas to Gerald of Wales’, pp. 323–350, details the Classical antecedents of Bede’s writing. For wordplay and an analysis of Bede’s poetic language, confer with Martins’s ‘Bede’s Structural Use of Wordplay as a Way to Truth’, pp. 27–46; and for the dating of Beowulf, see Riley’s ‘Bede, Beowulf and the Law:

Some Evidence for Dating the Poem’, pp. 4–5.

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Curiously, the metanarrative employed by Bede is an under-researched subject of study, as well as the question whether he had an overarching paradigm to his view of history. The closest any study has come to investigating the Bedan metanarrative is Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History, Higham’s ‘Message and Discourse’ in Re-reading Bede, Hanning’s ‘Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica’ in The Vision of History in Early Britain, and Barnard’s ‘Bede and Eusebius as Church Historians’.

Goffart mostly concerns himself with the political and ecclesiastical issues left untold in HEGA, and it presents Bede’s work as highly moralistic in composition. According to him, HEGA can essentially be seen as an extended hagiography of Gregory the Great, the true father of the English (and Northumbrian) Church, in opposition to Bishop Wilfrid. As Goffart argues, much like Orosius composed his work as an apology against pagan detractors, Bede wrote HEGA to demonstrate that the Gregorian mission was divinely ordained and successful, and that the present peace and prosperity of the English Church was only due to Gregory the Great, and no other.⁵⁴¹ Bede carefully edited the selection of his evidence, and inflated symbolic issues out of all proportion, such as the Easter controversy. ‘Mobilizing the past for the uses of the present,’⁵⁴² Bede retrofitted his ecclesiastical history to persuade his contemporary audience on certain issues.⁵⁴³ It may be inferred then that Bede was writing teleologically: he either understood history as running in a foreordained course, deviation from which was perilous, or selected and arranged his material so as to leave no alternative to his view (depicting Bede as calculating and biased). We must note, however, that Goffart tended to view his subjects in isolation from traditions and philosophies,⁵⁴⁴ which is a particularly erroneous course in the case of an author as steeped in the patristics as Bede was.⁵⁴⁵

Higham sees ‘a muscular and active Christian God, deeply involved in the affairs of man in general and Englishmen in particular,’ as the central character of HEGA, ‘whose thoughtful potency substitutes for the sense of causation to be found in modern historical narratives.’⁵⁴⁶ Higham states that Bede knew Eusebius’ Church History well, and that his work is apologetical, but also explanative (almost exegetical and hermeneutical): it expounds the

541 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, pp. 296–307.

542 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, p. 326.

543 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, pp. 307–28.

544 Gunn, A Study of Bede's Historiae, p. 118.

545 Brown, A Companion to Bede, pp. 117–18.

546 Higham, Re-reading Bede, p. 148.

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providential plan for the Anglo-Saxons and deduces God’s motivation behind His actions.

According to Higham, the two main narrative strands, the continuing conquest of Britain and the conversion of the English, are the ‘unfolding of divine providence.’⁵⁴⁷ The do ut des of Eusebius and Orosius is also present: Higham writes of a divine ‘rewards culture’⁵⁴⁸ instantiated on the numerous saints and pious kings. The obverse also appears: God mercilessly wreaks vengeance upon his enemies (i.e., those who oppose his plan).⁵⁴⁹ Overall, Bede urged his audience, through the example of a handful of illustrious ecclesiastical personages, to be ever ready for the impending millennium, which, now that the grand work of converting the Anglo-Saxons has been completed, is very near.⁵⁵⁰ To Higham, then, HEGA is a manual: by clarifying the existence of a divine plan, describing its salient details, and demonstrating its operation on both its beneficiaries and enemies, it strives to prepare the reader for imminent judgement.

Barnard’s analysis compares the Ecclesiastical Histories of Eusebius and Bede side by side. Barnard makes much the same points about Eusebius’ work and metanarrative as Chapter 1 of the present dissertation. In short, it describes the Ecclesiastical History as a tendentiously theocratic apology, which claims that the Christian Roman Empire was divinely foreordained, and Constantine, without actually being identified with the Son, is nonetheless the vicegerent of God. History is merely the playing out of God’s plan for the final triumph of the union of the Church and Rome, whose enemies have been, are being, and shall be actively destroyed by divine providence, removing all hindrances from the path of Christianity triumphant.⁵⁵¹ Barnard’s evaluation of Bede, although in the same vein, is much more lenient. He writes:

Bede lived and worked in a period of relative political stability … He tended to project this outward political stability into his account of the Church in his own times. Himself a man of peace Bede suppressed the harsh facts of internal quarrels and so portrayed the growth of the English Church as a direct continuation of the Roman mission, much as he stressed the unity of the small Kingdoms in the one, great English nation.⁵⁵²

According to Barnard, Bede gives a much less distorted picture of the events than Eusebius, partly due simply to less stress on the Church in his lifetime. This also makes him less radical

547 Higham, Re-reading Bede, pp. 148–150.

548 Higham, Re-reading Bede, p. 151.

549 Higham, Re-reading Bede, pp. 151–164.

550 Higham, Re-reading Bede, pp. 180–183.

551 Barnard, Studies in Church History and Patristics, pp. 358–364.

552 Barnard, Studies in Church History and Patristics, p. 370.

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in his sentiments: for example, he finds something good to say even about Wilfrid, ‘for whom apparently he had little sympathy.’⁵⁵³

Finally, Hanning argues that Bede followed Gildas, his main source in the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of Britain, in the construction of a thoroughly Eusebian narrative, where

‘Christian salvation and national prosperity are two aspects of the same providential process in history.’⁵⁵⁴ In his view, Bede’s Christian vision is a social one, Oswald being its most illustrious example, a veritable new Constantine.⁵⁵⁵ ‘National, ecclesiastical, and personal salus are complementary, concurrent goals of the historical process,’⁵⁵⁶ and this process cannot be halted by British stubbornness: it inexorably moves to the Anglo-Saxons, who spread salus eventually on the Continent as well, succeeding the Apostles and their own apostle, Gregory the Great.

To sum up the conclusions common to the four analyses: HEGA is a moralistic, apologetic work, with the clear aim to demonstrate the existence and working of providential plan with the Anglo-Saxons, and the continuing operation thereof. Bede carefully selected his material so as to maximise this effect, both for argument and instruction. Finally, God is an active character in HEGA, continuously adjusting reality to the benefit of his saints and the detriment of his enemies.

553 Barnard, Studies in Church History and Patristics, p. 369.

554 Hanning, The Vision of History, p. 82.

555 Hanning, The Vision of History, pp. 85–87.

556 Hanning, The Vision of History, p. 87.

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The Ecclesiastical History of the English

Bede himself clearly laid out his intention with HEGA: he wrote his work ‘ad instructionem posteritatis’ (to the instruction of our after comers),⁵⁵⁷ that is, the edification of the readers.⁵⁵⁸ The entirety of the text is a parable whose audience is not only the addressee, King Ceolfwulf, but all posterity. Bede is recording the bad about his protagonists as well as the good.⁵⁵⁹ He did not write HEGA with a figurative understanding of history,⁵⁶⁰ unlike, Eusebius and Orosius did, as we have seen. To the Venerable, history could not merely be reduced to archetypes, even if many of his characters were likened to biblical ones.

This is especially important because Bede was writing specifically an ecclesiastical, but at the same time national history. The concept of historia was well-established for Bede: he followed the example of the famous patristic authors.⁵⁶¹ Ecclesiastical history had its precedent in Eusebius; but previously to Bede no narrative of a national church had been composed.⁵⁶² Although it is difficult to pinpoint the reason why Bede eschewed figural interpretation of the past in HEGA while he uses it liberally in his other works,⁵⁶³ it is not unreasonable to suppose that the qualitative difference originates in the purpose of HEGA. Orosius was writing a universal meta-history: LH, as we have seen, collapses all human (and divine) action into a great algorithm and provides exempla and argumenta of it. Bede, on the other hand, has a story of struggle and growth to tell, in which he notes biblical parallels, but the story itself is a new one. For Orosius, history was almost finished; for Bede, the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church was a new beginning.

Bede was certainly inspired by Eusebius and Orosius in his work, and of course by Gildas.⁵⁶⁴ Their historical metanarratives are very similar in many aspects. HEGA is a string of

557 HEGA 1/Preface. All English translations come from J. E. King’s rendering in the bilingual Loeb Classical Library edition of HEGA.

558 Plummer, Venerabilis Bede Historiam Ecclesiasticam Gentis Anglorum p. xxii; Hanning, The Vision of History, p. 75

559 Davidse, ‘The Sense of History in the Works of the Venerable Bede’, p. 657.

560 Furry, From Past to Present, pp. 74-104.

561 Gunn, A Study of Bede's Historiae, pp. 115–46.

562 Although in the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours the ecclesiastical material outweighs the secular by a great deal, and Clovis is depicted as a new Constantine in the Eusebian vein, it is the lack of ‘uniformity of purpose or execution’ in Gregory’s work which makes Bede the first to compose an entirely national ecclesiastical history (Hanning¸ The Vision of History, p. 69).

563 Furry From Past to Present, pp. 141–43.

564 Mayr-Hartig, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, p. 42; Barnard, Studies in Church History and Patristics, pp. 354–58; Gunn, A Study of Bede's Historiae, p. 118 Hanning¸ The Vision of History, p. 67.)

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loosely interconnected anecdotes and episodes, focusing on particular moments where the working of divine judgement and providence could be seen. Bede, as we know from De temporum ratione, was thinking in the same six world-age system as Orosius (and Augustine),⁵⁶⁵ but unlike Eusebius and HL, HEGA takes place entirely in the sixth, the last aeon of the world. This, and the fact that it is an English church history, severely limits the scope of its metanarrative. Whereas Orosius goes to great lengths to detail the various correspondences between the ages, customs, and habits of various peoples to support his ideology of history, Bede has only his immediate past to work with. His scope is correspondingly smaller and takes the orderliness and unity of the Church on the Continent as given. For Bede the Catholic Church is a timeless and unchanging structure, into which the English Church will eventually mature.⁵⁶⁶ Consequently, the Bedan metanarrative is a subset of the Eusebian one: its starting and ending points are firmly set in the divine plan envisioned by the bishop of Caesarea, which is taken as absolute truth: ‘the Church’s arrival in Britain instantiates [Christ’s] reign in Bede’s own time and place.’⁵⁶⁷

Just as Eusebius ‘saw a close parallel between the victory of Christian monotheism and the growth of the Roman monarchy,’⁵⁶⁸ and Orosius drew a direct correspondence between Christianity and the prosperity of the emperors, with Bede kings rise as a result of divine favour.

The Anglo-Saxon communities become kingdoms only through the process of Christianisation and being drawn into the Roman fold. Similarly, although the Britons had two kings (Lucius, the first Christian king, and Vortigern, the last), after their succession by the English they no longer possess monarchies. Significantly, we do not learn anything about non-Christian communities. The history of the Anglo-Saxons before their beginning of participation in the divine plan simply does not exist. History for Bede, as with the Classical authors, is the affairs of kingdoms. Indeed, kingdoms are only formed in the process of Christianisation; previously, there had been only tribes and peoples, leaders and generals.⁵⁶⁹

565 De temporum ratione, Ch. 66; On the Nature of Things and Times 28; Furry, From Past to Present, pp. 105–

48.

566 Interestingly, the early fights of the Church outside Britain are left untold by Bede; the persecution of Diocletian is mentioned only to give context to the martyrdom of St Alban. This reinforces the local arena of HEGA, where the spectacle of a new covenant with the Anglo-Saxons is played out against the backdrop of the immutable Roman Church.

567 Furry, From Past to Present, p. 84.

568 Mommsen, St Augustine and Christian Idea of Progress, p. 361.

569 The cases of the first Anglo-Saxon kings we encounter illustrate this impressively: Aelle is immediately pronounced by Gregory the Great as divinely ordained (his name echoing alleluia). Aethelberht ‘et antea fama ad

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In the case of the Eusebian metanarrative, Church history supersedes mundane history through the indissoluble unity of Church and State. Bede’s England, however, is superior to the native British kingdoms (where the Roman union failed) in that it springs upon the arena of history almost fully-formed: instead of a temporal conjoining, the England predicated by Bede is Christian from the moment of its birth. This is eloquently demonstrated by Gregory’s explanation of the significance of Deiran names, where Gregory puns on equating Angli with angeli, Aelle with alleluia, and Deira with de ira dei.⁵⁷⁰ Therefore the only English history that Bede could have possibly written as a Christian is an ecclesiastical one (unlike Jordanes). The Venerable charted the course of the Anglo-Saxon state(s) and Church from the moment of its birth in Gregory’s heart to its maturation in Bede’s own days.

Consequently, HEGA is also as triumphant as the works of its predecessors. Bede’s narrative is saturated with more than fifty miraculous acts of God, and he himself asserts on several occasions that he had chosen only the most notable ones. These miracles, on the other hand, do not serve the same purpose as in Orosius; they are not arguments against pagan detractors of Christianity. As Rosenthal notes, ‘Bede knew that his own audience was no longer living in the days of battle-line Christianity.’⁵⁷¹ (The same, of course, was true for Orosius as well.) The function of miracles in HEGA is closer to Eusebius’ view: they signify an outpouring of divine grace, which was already in place from the germination of faith in England, but reached its greatest extent in the maturity of Christianity. Significantly, unlike Orosius, Bede does not fabricate miracles where there was none, and is preoccupied with giving the sources of his stories, and not merely interpret events as miracles.

Bede’s argumentation therefore is not defensive, but constructive and corroborative.

The well-analysed invention of the gens Anglorum in HEGA is achieved through the unifying power of the correct faith and orthodox Church, in spite of the various kingdoms subduing

eum Christianae religionis peruenerat, utpote qui et uxorem habebat Christianam de gente Francorum regia, uocabulo Bercta’ (the bruit of the Christian religion had come also before unto him, as the which had married a Christian woman of the royal family of the Franks, named Bertha.) (HEGA 1/25) An interesting exception can be found in the case of rex Ceawlin, who is listed as the second possessor of imperium, between Aelle and Aethelberht (HEGA 2/5). Bede does not tell us anything about the exploits of Ceawlin, and the use of imperium in this particular passage has been hotly debated for decades, much like the composition of the list; see Wormald and Baxter, The Times of Bede, pp. 116–17.

570 HEGA 2/1.

571 Rosenthal, ‘Bede’s use of miracles’, p. 330.

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greater or lesser parts of Britain.⁵⁷² Although the concept of Englishness existed before Bede,⁵⁷³ the oneness of the Englishmen is introduced in HEGA by no other than Gregory, who exclusively refers in his letters to Angli.Although Gregory’s perception of the various Anglo-Saxon tribes as a unified people is likely to have been the result of a misunderstanding,⁵⁷⁴ the concept was taken up with enthusiasm by Bede and popularized by him. Indeed, in Gregory’s first letter to an Englishman, Aethelberht, he immediately calls him as rex Anglorum: in Bede’s reading, the founder of the English Church invented the very concept of ‘England.’⁵⁷⁵ It is remarkable that an external, unprecedented, and alien perception of the various Germanic tribes was so thoroughly internalised by Bede; but his model of Anglo-Saxon unity was the oneness of the Roman Catholic Church. Similarly, he treated the ‘Britons’ as one gens⁵⁷⁶ because of their unity in heresy: their opposition gathers them into an anti-Church.⁵⁷⁷ This is elaborated into a grand picture of the Britons as the recalcitrant Jews who are superseded by the gentile

In document Metanarratives of History: Eusebian and Augustinian Perceptions of History in Orosius, Bede, and the Old English Translations (Pldal 110-129)