History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis: Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket [1 ed.] 0367187078, 9780367187071

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis: Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket

Jennifer O’Reilly

History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis

Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket Edited by Máirín MacCarron and Diarmuid Scully

Photo © Dermot Roantree.

Dr Jennifer O’Reilly (1943–2016) Dr Jennifer O’Reilly lectured on medieval history in University College Cork between 1975 and her retirement in 2008. Her scholarly interests and publications lay principally in three areas: the iconography of early Irish and Anglo-Saxon art, the writings of Bede the Venerable and Adomnán of Iona, and the Lives of Thomas Becket. In these areas she explored the intimate relations between medieval texts and images and the traditions of biblical exegesis shaped by the Church Fathers. Her teaching inspired generations of students, many of whom went on to complete doctorates under her supervision. In retirement she continued to write extensively, and she gave numerous public lectures, including the Jarrow Lecture and the Brixworth Lecture. She was a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Her collected essays are published in the Variorum series in three volumes: History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis: Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket; Early Medieval Text and Image: The Insular Gospel Books; Early Medieval Text and Image: The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art.

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Máirín MacCarron and Diarmuid Scully; individual chapters, the estate of Jennifer O’Reilly The right of Máirín MacCarron and Diarmuid Scully to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of Jennifer O’Reilly for the individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-18707-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19776-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1078

CONTENTS

List of illustrations Preface Introduction

xi xii xiii

Bede 1 Introduction to Bede. On the Temple ([xvii–lv], in Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 21 tr. Seán Connolly [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995]) 2 Islands and idols at the ends of the earth: exegesis and conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica ([119–45], in Bède le vénérable. Entre tradition et posterité, ed. Stephane Lebecq, Michel Perrin and Olivier Szerwiniack [Lille: Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2005]) 3 Bede on seeing the God of gods in Zion ([3–29], in Text, image and interpretation. Studies in AngloSaxon literature and its Insular context in honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts [Turnhout: Brepols, 2007]) 4 The multitude of isles and the cornerstone: topography, exegesis and the identity of the Angli in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica ([201–27], in Anglo-Saxon Traces, ed. Jane Roberts and Leslie Webster [Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011]) 5 St Paul and the sign of Jonah. Theology and Scripture in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ([1–32], The Jarrow Lecture, 2014, published in 2018 by The Parish Church Council of St Paul’s Church, Jarrow.) ix

3

36

65

88

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6 Bede and monothelitism

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7 Bede and the dating of Easter

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Adomnán 8 Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba ([80–106], in Studies in the cult of St Columba, ed. Cormac Bourke [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997]) 9 The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord in the Life of St Columba ([159–211], in Spes Scotorum. Hope of Scots, ed. Dauvit Broun and Thomas Owen Clancy [Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark (an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.), 1999])

189

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10 Adomnán and the art of teaching spiritual sons ([69–94], in Adomnán of Iona: theologian, lawmaker and peacemaker, ed. Jonathan Wooding, Thomas O’Loughlin et al. [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010])

256

11 Columba at Clonmacnoise ([380–90], in Sacred Histories. A Festschrift for Máire Herbert, ed. John Carey, Kevin Murray and Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015])

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12 The Bible as map, on seeing God and finding the way: pilgrimage and exegesis in Adomnán and Bede ([210–26], in Place and Space in the Medieval World, ed. Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes and Heidi Stoner [New York and London: Routledge, 2018])

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Thomas Becket 13 Candidus et rubicundus: an image of martyrdom in the Lives of Thomas Becket ([303–14], in Analecta Bollandiana 99 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1981])

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14 The double martyrdom of Thomas Becket: hagiography or history? ([185–247], in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 [New York: AMC Press, 1985])

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Index

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S

5.1 The Codex Amiatinus. The Scribe and the Books of Scripture. MS Amiatino 1, fol. 5r. 5.2 The Codex Amiatinus. Prologue to the Book of Jonah (from Jerome, Epistle 53). MS Amiatino 1, fol. 664r. 10.1 Stuttgart Psalter. Stuttgart, Wuerttembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. fol. 23, fol. 41v. 10.2 St Dunstan’s Classbook. The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. MS. Auct. F.4.32, fol. 1r. 10.3 The Eadui Psalter. London, BL Arundel MS 155, fol. 133. 10.4 Cycle of illustrations of Gregory the Great’s Vita Benedicti: Abbot Desiderius’s lectionary for Vigils, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 1202, fol. 80r.

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115 117 272 275 278 280

P R E FA C E

When she died in 2016, Jennifer O’Reilly left behind a body of published work in three areas of medieval studies: the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona; the early lives of Thomas Becket; and the iconography of the manuscript art of early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. In these three areas, she explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis. This book brings together her studies of Bede, Adomnán and Becket. It is one of three volumes of her collected essays published in the Variorum series. The others are: Early Medieval Text and Image: The Insular Gospel Books, and Early Medieval Text and Image: The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art. In each volume endnotes have been converted in to footnotes, and the pagination of the original publications is indicated in the text by bold numbers within square brackets. The editors wish to thank the National University of Ireland and the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Science in University College Cork for grants towards the costs of publication. They thank also those who have encouraged and helped them in their task, especially Professor Bernard Hamilton, Professor Jo Story, Dr Dermot Roantree, Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin and Professor Terence O’Reilly. They owe a particular debt of gratitude to Tom O’Reilly, who laid at their disposal his expertise as a publisher, and worked tirelessly to see the book through production.

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The essays by Jennifer O’Reilly that have been gathered in this book were written over a period of almost forty years. Seen together, they demonstrate her distinctive approach to the intellectual culture of Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages. Certain recurring themes give them unity, notably the interplay of medieval images and texts, and the shaping influence on both of biblical exegesis. Informing them all is a concern to trace the ways in which the intellectual and artistic traditions of Late Antiquity were transmitted from the world of the Mediterranean to ‘the islands at the ends of the earth’, and there developed and transformed. This approach, and the rich methodology on which it rests, are apparent in Jennifer O’Reilly’s other writings also: in her monograph on the medieval iconography of the virtues and vices, and in her numerous studies of Insular art, edited by Carol A. Farr and Elizabeth Mullins.1 Her research interests were multiple, and she wrote about a wide range of texts and media, but always with a coherent vision in mind. The essays examine a selection of historical, exegetical and hagiographic writings composed in Britain and Ireland between the age of Bede in the seventh century and that of Thomas Becket in the twelfth. Despite the long time span involved, these bear witness to a remarkable consistency, based on the monastic traditions in which the writers were formed, and which they assumed their readers knew. Of particular importance, the author argues, was the meditative reading of Scripture: practised in accord with patristic exegesis, it offered a key to the workings of Providence in history. The conversion of these islands to Christianity, for instance, was interpreted by patristic commentators, and later popes, as a fulfilment of scriptural prophecy, discerned in Old Testament passages that varied from the explicit to the arcane. The resulting discourse was developed by Insular writers, notably Bede,

1 Jennifer O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Garland, 1988). The essays on Insular art are being published in the Variorum Series in two volumes: Early Medieval Text and Image: The Insular Gospel Books, and Early Medieval Text and Image: The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art.

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to provide the peoples of Britain and Ireland with a sense of their shared identity as members of the universal Church. A selection of such ideas and images in the work of Bede, his contemporaries and forbears, is explored in Chapters 1, 2 and 4. Bede’s concern with the correct interpretation of the scriptural text, and the importance of orthodox belief at the centre of the Christian world and at its periphery, are examined in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. The careful tracing of the nuances and subtleties of specific scriptural phrases, a recurring feature, comes to the fore at certain points: in Chapter 13, for instance, on the description of Thomas Becket’s body in terms drawn from the Song of Songs, and in Chapters 3 and 12 on the psalm verse, ‘they shall go from virtue to virtue: the god of Gods shall be seen in Zion’ (Psalm 83.8). Such close readings of Scripture in its Insular context have implications for our understanding of the reception in these islands of the Latin Bible. They demonstrate that variant Latin versions of the text were known, and valued as cumulatively important for the varied, but compatible, insights they offered into the Bible’s spiritual sense. Chapter 3 draws attention to the presence of this feature in the exegetical writings of Bede, where it coexists with his advocacy of Jerome’s Vulgate (discussed in Chapter 5), the version his monastery chose to reproduce in the magnificent Codex Amiatinus (Chapters 1, 5 and 9). The appropriation of the patristic mode of reading the Bible is by no means the only aspect of monastic culture that the essays explore. They examine, for example, the ways in which Insular writers combined the spiritual interpretation of Scripture with their understanding of the teachings and ascetical practices of the desert fathers, which they knew about principally through the writings of John Cassian and adapted to their own circumstances and needs. This approach informs Chapters 8 and 11 on the Vita Columbae of Adomnán of Iona, where it is used as a key to understanding the enigmatic stories the work contains, and in Chapters 9 and 10, which study Adomnán’s use of monastic teachings on discernment and the formation of ‘spiritual sons’. Although the island of Iona was at the furthest remove from the deserts of the East, Adomnán provided, in De locis sanctis, a most influential account of the holy places of the Bible from which Bede later created his own version, and these texts along with the purpose of pilgrimage are considered and compared in Chapter 12. The coherence across the centuries of the traditions that these essays examine is revealed most completely in the final one (Chapter 14), where the analysis of the Lives of Thomas Becket in the light of long-established hagiographic motifs includes a comparison with the early eighth-century Life of the Northumbrian bishop and saint Wilfrid composed by Eddius Stephanus (Stephen). * When reading the essays, it is helpful to bear in mind that many of the arguments they advance were first worked out in the context of university teaching. Jennifer O’Reilly’s engagement with research was inseparable from her commitment to the undergraduate and postgraduate students she taught in University College Cork. Her powerful impact as a teacher and lecturer was legendary, not only within the xiv

INTRODUCTION

University, but far beyond its walls.2 In this volume, her speaking voice is most evident in Chapter 5 (the 2014 Jarrow Lecture) and the two papers included in Chapter 7 (‘Bede and the dating of Easter’). A reader encountering her written work for the first time might begin with these essays, which encapsulate many of her essential ideas and methods, and convey something of her presence as experienced by students, colleagues and friends. In her classes on Bede, Jennifer O’Reilly approached the Historia Ecclesiastica (HE) as a great work of art. Her students were encouraged to see it as a microcosmic expression of Bede’s exegetical reading of human, angelic and divine endeavours, in time and in the natural world, encompassing the entire cosmos. With a novelist’s eye for the narrative’s plot devices and architecture, she explored Bede’s use of trailers and flash-forwards in his account of the Easter Controversy, and showed how he flagged its providential resolution through Egbert when first introducing Columba, Iona and the Irish mission to the English (HE 3.5). She presented his narrative of the entire Controversy as a means of understanding not only his account of the dispute itself, but more deeply his vision of Insular unity within the universal Church, with these islands at the oceanic ends of the Earth incorporated into that spiritual continuum in the last Age of the world, at the approaching end of time. From her earliest teaching days, she saw in Bede’s treatment of Britain and Ireland his glimpse of a world beyond time: Eden, the New Jerusalem and the restored creation to come, prefigured in the paradisiacal landscapes of Ireland and the scattered but related ‘islands of the Gentiles’ of the entire archipelago (Genesis 10.5). She explored Bede’s depiction of the English as a people changed in ideal from stony Saxons to angelic Angli: ‘In the habitations where once dragons lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes (Isaiah 35.7), that is, the fruit of good works shall spring up where once beasts dwelt or where men lived after the manner of beasts’ (HE 3.23). Questions of identity, and the creation of interwoven identities (individual, institutional, ethnic, religious), were constant themes in her teaching. She drew the attention of her students to the subtle ways in which Bede represented the Irish and English peoples, and the Columban familia in particular. His treatment of the Britons and the Jews was an abiding concern. Her essays on these topics helped to transform scholarly perceptions of how Bede viewed the Insular nations and communities and the complex interactions between them. Equally influential were her related studies of orthodoxy and heresy in Bede’s exegetical, historical and chronological works. A fascination with Bede’s imagery of islands and his inclusive vision of Iona, combined with her courses on the iconography and contexts of early Insular illuminated manuscripts, led her toward the study of Adomnán and the Columban 2 See the memoir by Diarmuid Scully, which may be accessed on the website of the School of History in University College Cork (www.ucc.ie/en/history/drjenniferoreillymemorialpage/). The festschrift dedicated to Jennifer O’Reilly also attests to her impact on her students’ formation and research: Listen O Isles unto Me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in honour of Jennifer O’Reilly, ed. Elizabeth Mullins and Diarmuid Scully (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011).

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tradition. She learned much from the specialist knowledge of Iona and its community possessed by two of her friends and colleagues in Cork: Máire Herbert, to whom she later dedicated one of her last essays (Chapter 11), and Aidan MacDonald.3 Like them, she believed that Adomnán’s writings were something other than mines of information to be excavated for facts and dates. The availability of an affordable paperback translation of the Vita Columbae made it possible for her to teach a case study in historical research on the text.4 The exchange of ideas in this class further clarified her perception of Adomnán as an artist in words, like Bede an immensely generous spirit, and one steeped in sacred Scripture and its interpretation. The discriminating approach to Insular history that informed all Jennifer O’Reilly’s teaching was particularly evident in how she taught her students to read Bede’s presentation of the ecclesiastical opponents of the Columbans and the Britons. When discussing the subject, she was careful to distance herself from any temptation to see them as correct in their theology, but repulsive in their personalities and behaviour. Her nuanced treatment of the issues concerned may be seen in her essays on Augustine’s confrontation with Britons over the dating of Easter (Chapter 5) and on Wilfrid’s role in the Synod of Whitby (Chapter 7). Her thinking about Wilfrid, in the earlier years of her academic career, had implications for her analysis of Thomas Becket, another apparently proud and arrogant churchman, whose cult Henry VIII suppressed with the accusation that ‘there appereth nothynge in his lyfe and exteriour conversation whereby he shuld be callyd a sainct’.5 In her seminars on Becket, she found in the Life of Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus a model for reflection on the kind of narratives that Becket’s hagiographers constructed, and how they interpreted the meaning of his life and death.6 Her resulting essays on the subject (Chapters 13 and 14) offer a sensitive and learned analysis of medieval texts, and their scripturally and exegetically informed sense of history. * The volume is divided into three sections. The first consists of seven studies of Bede’s writings, notably his biblical commentaries and his Ecclesiastical History. Two of the essays (Chapters 6 and 7) are published here for the first time. The five studies in the second part, devoted to Adomnán, discuss his life of Saint Columba and his guide to the Holy Places. One essay (Chapter 12: ‘The Bible as Map’), published posthumously, compares his presentation of a major theme, the earthly

3 Máire Herbert’s study, Iona, Kells and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba was published by Oxford University Press in 1988. A monograph by Aidan MacDonald on the history of Iona in the Middle Ages is being prepared for publication. 4 Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, trans. Richard Sharpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). 5 Cited in ‘The Double Martyrdom of Thomas Becket: Hagiography or History?’, p. 185. Reprinted in this volume as Chapter 14. 6 ‘The Double Martyrdom of Thomas Becket’, p. 187.

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and heavenly Jerusalem, with the approach adopted by Bede. The third section consists of two studies of hagiography and history in the Lives of Thomas Becket. Within each section, the essays are arranged in the order of their publication, permitting the reader to trace, when appropriate, developments in the author’s thought. Their ordering, however, does not constrain the reader: they may be read in sequence, by section, by theme or individually. However they are approached, they reveal the quality of their author’s scholarship, and the significant contribution she made to our understanding of the medieval world. Máirín MacCarron Diarmuid Scully

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1 INTRODUCTION TO BEDE. ON THE TEMPLE

The theme of the Tabernacle and Temple recurs throughout Bede’s exegetical writings and provides the main subject for three homilies and three of his biblical commentaries, De tabernaculo (c. 721–25), In Esram et Neemiam (c. 725–31) and De templo (c. 729–31)’.1 At first sight this interest in defunct Jewish buildings and their associated cultic ritual and priesthood may seem antiquarian and strangely at variance with the vital contemporary concerns of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731), with which his reputation is identified for most modern readers. During the past twenty years or so, however, scholars have shown that Bede inherited rhetorical traditions from Late Roman Christian historiography and that his historical writings share some of the preoccupations and even the techniques of his Old Testament commentaries.2 Henry Mayr-Harting has argued that the description of the universal Church in De templo and the account of the building of the Church among the gens Anglorum in Historia Ecclesiastica (HE) in particular ‘form a kind of diptych’.3 1 De tabernaculo, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969); tr. A. G. Holder, Translated Texts for Historians Series (Liverpool University Press, 1994). De templo, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969). In Esram et Neemiam, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969). Homiliae euangelii 2.1, 2.24, 2.25, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 122 (Turnhout, 1965); tr. L.T. Martin and D. Hurst, 2 vols. Cistercian Studies Series, 110–11 (Kalamazoo, 1991). A. G. Holder, ‘New Treasures and Old in Bede’s De tabernaculo and De templo’, in Revue Bénédictine, 99 (1989) pp. 237–49. 2 R.D. Ray, ‘Bede, the Exegete, as Historian’, in Famulus Christi, ed. G. Bonner (London 1976) pp. 125–40; idem., ‘What do we know about Bede’s Commentaries?’, in Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médièvale, 49 (1982) pp. 5–20; idem., ‘Augustine’s De Consensu Evangelistarum and the historical education of the Venerable Bede’, in Studia Patristica, 16 (1985) pp. 557–63; C.B. Kendall, ‘Imitation and the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. M.H. King and W.M. Stevens (Collegeville, 1979) pp. 161–90; J. Davidse, ‘The Sense of History in the works of the Venerable Bede’, in Studi Medievali, 23 (1983) pp. 647–95; A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983) pp. 130–53; J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Old Testament Kings’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983) pp. 76–98. 3 H.M.R.E. Mayr-Harting, The Venerable Bede, the Rule of St Benedict, and Social Class (Jarrow Lecture, 1976) p. 13.

3

INTRODUCTION TO BEDE. ON THE TEMPLE

In the autobiographical note appended to the HE, Bede (673–735) testifies that throughout his monastic life, which was spent in the joint foundation of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, he had applied himself to the study of the Scriptures. Partly for the benefit of his monastic brethren, he made ‘brief extracts from the works of the venerable Fathers on the holy Scriptures’ and added notes of his own ‘to clarify their sense and interpretation’. This modest disclaimer may give a misleading impression of his biblical commentaries, especially his later work. Bede was immensely well read in patristic exegesis in which the theme of the Tabernacle and Temple frequently occurs but De templo is very far from being a mere pastiche. Not only has its modern editor identified few direct patristic quotations in the text but in the Latin tradition it appears to be the first sustained allegorical [xvii] commentary on the description of Solomon’s Temple in 3 Kings 5.1–7.51, just as Bede’s earlier commentaries on the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus 24.12–30 and on the account of the Second Temple in Ezra and Nehemiah also fill gaps in the patristic legacy. As will be seen, the theme of the Temple was peculiarly suited to Bede’s well-known objective of supplying teaching materials for the purposes of monastic formation and the education of spiritual teachers who had a crucial role in his vision of the regeneration and inner conversion of contemporary society. The inspiration of Gregory the Great is evident but both the form in which De templo is cast and Bede’s handling of individual features reveal a work of originality and insight, marking the culmination of a lifetime’s thought and writing on the subject: the closest parallels to De templo occur in three of Bede’s own Gospel homilies. The key to understanding the significance of the Temple image for Bede and his monastic contemporaries lies in the huge importance of the image in Scripture itself where its Christian interpretation is already well established. An indication of the major links in the chain of biblical texts concerning the Temple (which are all in some way used or assumed in De templo) may therefore give some idea of the scale and complexity of the materials at Bede’s disposal and of the allusive subtlety with which he used Scripture to comment on Scripture in the light of his patristic reading.

The Tabernacle and Temple in Scripture 1. The Old Covenant house of God The Book of Exodus describes the pivotal event in Jewish history, namely the deliverance of God’s chosen people from slavery in Egypt and his covenant with them. It recounts their crossing of the Red Sea and forty-year exile in the wilderness before their final homecoming to the Promised Land. In the New Testament these events were read as having an underlying and continuing significance for Christians who perceived in the literal text divinely ordained prefigurings of their own deliverance from sin through baptism, and of their journey through this earthly life to the heavenly Promised Land and the new Jerusalem (1 Corinthians 10.1–4, 11). 4

INTRODUCTION TO BEDE. ON THE TEMPLE

The Exodus story was recalled and appropriated in the early liturgy for the Easter vigil and baptism of catechumens so that the new [xviii] chosen people, gentile as well as Jewish converts to the Church, became the spiritual inheritors of the covenant made between God and his people in the desert and of the divine promise that they would become ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19.6; 1 Peter 2.9–10). That deliverance and covenant had been graphically epitomised in the Tabernacle which God had instructed Moses to build, a tentlike structure in which the sacred shrine of the Ark of the Covenant could be housed during the long sojourn in the desert. Two golden cherubim were placed over the Ark in the innermost Holy of Holies and God promised, ‘I will speak to you over the propitiatory and from the midst of the two cherubim’ (Exodus 25.22). When the Jews became a settled people in the Promised Land, the Ark was transferred to the Holy of Holies in the Temple which David’s son Solomon had been divinely inspired to build in Jerusalem (3 Kings 8.1–20). Both the Tabernacle and its successor the Temple were seen as the house of God, the place of God’s presence with his people. As well as the detailed accounts of the Tabernacle in Exodus 25–30, 35–40 and of the Temple in 3 Kings 5–8, the image of God’s dwelling-place recurs right through the Old Testament in supplementary descriptions of the two successive buildings and their cults, in many allusions in the psalms and the prophets and in historical accounts of the fortunes of the Israelites typified in foreign desecrations and subsequent rebuilding of the Temple. The image carries the whole history of God’s relationship with his people. In a homily, Bede chronicles this process from the construction of Solomon’s Temple to its destruction by the Babylonians four hundred and thirty years later; from the return of the chosen people after their seventy-year exile, and the rebuilding of the Second Temple in forty-six years under Zerubbabel and Joshua, to its profanation with idolatrous images by Antiochus the Greek three hundred and fifty-six years later and its subsequent purification and re-dedication under Judas Maccabeus. Bede’s summary ends with a quotation from St Paul: ‘“All these things were done as an example for us” (1 Corinthians 10.11) and were written down for us, and so we must scrutinise them carefully for their spiritual meaning.4 Paul’s text, originally applied to the account of the Exodus, encapsulates an entire methodology of interpretation and was frequently cited in exegesis and applied to the whole of the Old Testament. It is quoted at the opening of De [xix] tabernaculo to explain why Bede’s exposition extends to all the circumstantial details of time, place, objects, deeds and words contained in the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus. Similarly, immediately after the introduction to De templo, Bede explains he will be discussing all the details of the Temple’s construction contained in the biblical account of Solomon’s Temple ‘for these matters too are pregnant with scriptural mysteries according to the testimony of the apostle: “All

4 Homily 2.24, Martin and Hurst 1991, pp. 248–49.

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these things happened to them (in the Old Testament) by way of example, and they were recorded in writing to be a lesson for us”’. 2. The New Covenant and the heavenly sanctuary While the magnificent Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, filled with the glory of the Lord, is a powerful image of Isaiah’s experience of the presence of God (Isaiah 6.1–6), the prophet was also aware that the Creator of heaven and earth could not be circumscribed (Isaiah 66.1, cf. Psalm 10.5) and his words were taken up in the New Testament to show that God who made the world ‘dwells not in temples made with (human) hands’ (Acts 4.8–9; 17.24; John 4.21–24). The Epistle to the Hebrews gives an extended exegesis on the replacement of the entire Old Covenant by the New which greatly influenced patristic expositions of the Tabernacle and Temple. The ‘former Tabernacle’ (including, by extension, the Temple) is revealed to have been but an earthly shadow or copy of the heavenly reality shown to Moses (Hebrews 8.5, 9; 10.1), its priesthood and blood sacrifices now superseded by Christ’s priestly offering of himself which has enabled him to pass through the veil of the Holy of Holies, not into the inner sanctuary reserved for the High Priest in the earthly Tabernacle, but into the heavenly sanctuary ‘not made with hands’ which is the abode of God (Hebrews 9.11–12, 24). A roll-call of honour reviews Old Testament history and heroes, including Abraham and other faithful patriarchs from even before the Mosaic Law, who desired not simply a homeland but a city ‘whose builder and maker is God’ (Hebrews 11.10); these are the spiritual ancestors of all Christians (cf. Galatians 3.5–29). As in the prophetic visions of the Temple in Isaiah, Ezekiel, the psalms and the Apocalypse, the image of the heavenly sanctuary here broadens and merges with that of the walled citadel of the heavenly Jerusalem to which all the faithful will eventually be drawn (Hebrews 12.22). For the faithful there can [xx] be no lasting earthly tabernacle or city: ‘We seek one (yet) to come’ (Hebrews 13.14); when ‘the earthly house of this habitation be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’ (2 Corinthians 5.1). The text forms part of the closing image in De templo. The idea that the Church has already, since the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, spiritually replaced the Tabernacle and Temple on earth but is itself incomplete, awaiting its future fulfilment in heaven whose eternal joys can only be glimpsed and desired by the faithful still on earth is a fundamental assumption underlying Bede’s De templo. This does not mean that the Jewish Temple is to be reviled; rather it is to be revered because, like the Tabernacle, it had been divinely ordained in its day as a shadow or prefiguring of the divine temple ‘not made with hands’ and therefore a proper spiritual interpretation of its features still has much to teach the present Church. As well as looking back at the material structure of a building in the past, Christian exegetes also looked at scriptural accounts of the heavenly sanctuary yet to be revealed. Discussion of the heavenly Jerusalem was shaped by knowledge of the earthly sanctuaries which were held to prefigure 6

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it. The heavenly Jerusalem is thus built foursquare, recalling the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon (Revelation 21.6; 3 Kings 6.20); it has twelve gates inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, recalling the encampment of the twelve tribes around the Tabernacle in the desert (Revelation 21.13; Numbers 2.3–31; Ezekiel 48.30–35). The theophany of the Ark of the Covenant in the heavenly sanctuary and the vision of the glory of God filling the heavenly Temple of the new creation (Revelation 11.19; 15.5, 8) evokes the scenes of God taking possession of his Tabernacle in the desert (Exodus 40.34–35) and of his Temple in Jerusalem (3 Kings 8.10–11; Isaiah 6.4). All three sanctuaries – the Mosaic Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple and the heavenly Jerusalem – signify God’s presence with his people. Clearly there is no suggestion in the New Testament of a particular church building as the replacement of the Temple: how, then, was God’s presence among his new chosen people expressed? 3. The Temple of Christ’s body In John’s Gospel Jesus is challenged by the Jews to give some sign of the divine authority by which he had presumed to cleanse the Temple in Jerusalem of its traders and money-lenders. He replied: ‘Destroy [xxi] this temple and in three days I will raise it up’. They understood him literally, but, explains the Evangelist, ‘he spoke of the temple of his body’ (John 2.13–18). In Mark’s account of Christ’s trial his Jewish priestly accusers say, ‘We heard him say, “I will destroy this temple made with hands and within three days I will build another not made with hands”’ (Mark 14.58; cf. Matthew 26.61; 27.40). The new Temple, the place of the divine presence, is here presented as the incarnate body of Christ. 4. The living Temple of the Church The Old Testament Tabernacle and Temple were seen, therefore, in the New Testament itself as prefiguring both the eternal heavenly sanctuary, the destined homeland of the faithful into which Christ passed after his atoning sacrifice, and his incarnate body in which that propitiation had been made. The allegorical interpretation of the Temple was further enriched, however, by New Testament texts visualising the Church on earth in terms of architectural images which merged with the Pauline metaphor of the Church as the body of Christ, its various members having different spiritual gifts and functions as the limbs of the body variously serve its head. Two texts are of particular importance here. Ephesians 2.19–22 describes the formation of the new people of God, Gentiles as well as Jews, as an organic building which is still growing, ‘built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone, in whom all the building is framed together, grows up into an holy temple to the Lord [. . .] in whom you also are built together into an habitation of God in the Spirit’. The second text, 1 Peter 2.4–10, describes all the members of the Church as inheriting God’s promises made to their spiritual ancestors in the desert before 7

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the construction of the Tabernacle: ‘You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ (cf. Exodus 19.6). It is therefore the community of the faithful, not a material church building, which forms the new household of God; its members are exhorted to be ‘as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices to God by Jesus Christ’. Individual scriptural images offer the possibility of extending the building metaphor still further. Both Ephesians 2.20 and, more fully, 1 Peter 2.4–8 incorporate the Old Testament image of ‘the stone which the builders rejected’, destined to become the cornerstone of the building [xxii] (Psalm 117.22) and the precious stone laid in the foundation of Zion (Isaiah 28.16), explicitly identified with Christ in the synoptic Gospels and Acts. The new ‘holy temple to the Lord’ built of living stones upon the apostles and prophets also has Christ as its one foundation (1 Corinthians 3.11). This spiritual building can be viewed from various perspectives. It is the continuing community of all the faithful on earth, awaiting its completion in the heavenly sanctuary of which it is but a reflection. But individual Christians can also be seen as building up the Church from the foundation which has been divinely laid (1 Corinthians 3.10). Each Christian is exhorted not only to become a living stone or a pillar in the new temple (Galatians 2.9; Revelation 3.12) but at baptism to become that temple and remain worthy of being so: ‘Know you not that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?’ (1 Corinthians 3.16; 2 Corinthians 6.16). The faithful thus strive to become like Christ whose body, filled with the Holy Spirit, forms the new temple of the divine presence with his chosen people on earth. It will by now be evident that the great chain of scriptural texts using the architectural metaphor to describe the incorporation of the faithful into Christ reveals insights into the multiple meanings of the term ‘the body of Christ’ – incarnate, sacramental, ecclesial, mystical. Though already, through baptism, forming part of the body of Christ, the community of the Church on earth longs to be fully joined with Christ and united with all the faithful who have gone before.

The Temple theme in patristic exegesis The interpretation of the Temple as a figure of the incarnate body of Christ, the community of the Church on earth, the individual soul and the heavenly sanctuary or city of the New Jerusalem was therefore not the invention of patristic or medieval exegesis but is already contained within the New Testament. The Fathers were important, however, in demonstrating the simultaneity of these modes of interpretation, and in popularising exegetical chains of texts featuring elements of the image. A few examples must suffice to illustrate something of the range of other scriptural texts to which the Temple exegesis was applied, with a variety of rhetorical approaches and differences of theological emphasis. The interpretative method of Origen (185–254/5) was of fundamental importance to the history of the allegorical interpretation of [xxiii] Scripture. In the first of his sixteen surviving Homilies on the Book of Leviticus, translated by 8

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Rufinus, he argued that, just as the human flesh of the Word of God veiled his divinity from most eyes, so the underlying spiritual meaning of the Word of God as expressed in the Old Testament is veiled by the literal letter of the Law and the prophets. It follows that the literal text is inspired and important: Moses really was shown ‘heavenly things’ but the Tabernacle and later the Temple and its cult were merely copies of that reality, ‘a shadow of things to come’ (citing 1 Corinthians 10.1–4; Colossians 2.17; Hebrews 10.1).5 The regulations governing the ritual purification, ordination, vestments, sacrifices and altar vessels of the Old Covenant priesthood described in the book of Leviticus therefore have a continuing importance for the Christian because they represent divine precepts to be understood spiritually, although no longer practised literally. Scripture is used to explain Scripture; the Epistle to the Hebrews transformed Origen’s reading of Leviticus and the associated Old Testament accounts of the Tabernacle and Temple. Particularly influential was the exposition of the ‘twofold sanctuaries’ in both buildings: the outer one, visible and open to the Aaronic priesthood, represents the present Church on earth which is open not only to the ordained but to all the elect through baptism, while the inner sanctuary, invisible and entered only by the Jewish High Priest, is a figure of heaven itself.6 The distinction is a major element in Bede’s De templo. Ambrose (c. 339–97) was important in mediating this Alexandrian allegorical interpretation of Scripture to the Latin West. He applied the scriptural texts of the architectural metaphor to the interpretation of the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel, which itself uses the image of the Temple in Jerusalem as a means of showing how the Old Covenant priesthood and sacrifices were superseded by Christ. In the third book of his commentary Ambrose links several key texts concerning the Temple. Christ is ‘the priest who is to come [. . .] who would not offer sacrifice for us in a temple made with human hands (Hebrews 9.11, 24; Acts 17.24) but he would offer propitiation for our sins in the temple of his body’ (John 2.19–22). He very briefly describes the Temple built by Solomon as the type of the Church built by God and describes its origin and nature, its growth and vocation through the New Testament metaphor of the spiritual building [xxiv] formed of living stones (1 Peter 2.5), built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ as its cornerstone ‘in whom all the building framed together grows into a temple’ (Ephesians 2.20–21). Ambrose applies this exegetical chain, however, not to an exposition of the Old Testament Temple building but to his discussion of the genealogy of Christ in Luke 3.23–38 which immediately follows the account of Christ’s baptism.7 Bede’s commentary on Luke’s Gospel was influenced by 5 Homilies on Leviticus, tr. G.W. Barkley (Washington, 1990) pp. 29, 141–42, 205. 6 Barkley 1990, pp. 195–96. 7 Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, Book 3, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 14 (Turnhout, 1957). J. O’Reilly, ‘Exegesis and the Book of Kells: the Lucan genealogy’, in The Book of Kells, ed. F. O’Mahony (Aldershot, 1994) pp. 344–97 (355–69 and 383–88); repr. in Scriptural Interpretation in the Fathers, ed. T. Finan and V. Twomey (Dublin, 1995) pp. 315–55.

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Ambrose’s so it may seem surprising that he did not incorporate book three of Ambrose’s work in his own discussion of the Lucan genealogy. However, it may well have been an important source of inspiration, particularly its treatment of the faithful who lived before the Incarnation, which is a favourite theme with Bede and is fully integrated into the architectural metaphor of Solomon’s Temple in De templo. Ambrose shows that the royal and priestly human lineage taken on by Christ at his Incarnation is also that of his Church. Christ’s Old Testament ancestors are therefore the spiritual ancestors of all those, whether Jew or Gentile, who in baptism share in Christ’s anointing as prophet, priest and king and who ‘in time past were not a people but are now the people of God’ (1 Peter 2.9–10, citing Hosea 1.10). The pastoral theology of baptism is fundamental to an understanding of De templo where it signifies not only initial conversion into the unity of faith and membership of the household of God but is an image of the process of continuing inner conversion which characterises the Christian life and the monastic vocation in particular. The Temple metaphor permeates the work of Augustine (354–430), not only in his commentaries on texts such as John 2.19–21 which were links in the exegetical chain, but in his influential commentaries on the psalms which in a monastic society were intimately known through the daily divine office. Psalm 86.1–2, for example, (‘The foundations thereof are in the holy mountains: The Lord loves the gates of Sion above all the tabernacles of Jacob’), prompts a dazzling rhetorical display.8 Augustine deploys the usual texts, such as Ephesians 2.19–22, 1 Peter 2.5–9, 1 Corinthians 3.11, to reveal the psalm’s spiritual allusion to the present Church, the heavenly Jerusalem and Christ himself and its direct relevance to his readers and listeners: ‘These words apply to us’. Augustine then stands the figure on its head to show its inconsistencies [xxv] and even absurdities: how can the prophets and apostles be the foundations of this spiritual building if its one foundation is Christ? How can Christ possibly be described as a door, such as is made by a carpenter? This introduces the key exegetical concept that divinity is present in all places and the likeness of all things can simultaneously be applied to it, but in reality it is none of these things. Having justified the use and the necessity of paradox and of the mixed metaphor in attempting to give some glimpse of an ultimately unknowable mystery, he shows how the spiritual building of the Church is that part of the body of Christ still in pilgrimage on earth, Christ having ‘gone ahead’. The theme, central to Bede’s world view, underlies The City of God. Commenting on the idea that Old Testament references to Jerusalem as the city of God seem to be fulfilled when Solomon builds the Temple, but are also a symbol of Jerusalem in heaven, Augustine notes: ‘Now, this class of prophecy in 8 Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. D.E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL 38–40 (Turnhout, 1956) pp. 1198–1203; tr. A.C. Coxe (New York, 1888, repr. Grand Rapids, 1950). G.B.C. Ladner, ‘The symbolism of the biblical cornerstone in the medieval west’, in Medieval Studies, 4 (1942) pp. 43–60; repr. in G. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages. Selected Studies in History and Art (Rome, 1983) I, pp. 171–96 (180–81).

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which there is a compounding and commingling, as it were, of both references, is of the greatest importance in the ancient canonical books which contain historical narratives and it still exercises the wits of those who examine sacred Scripture’.9 The divine promise made to King David about the building of the future Temple, literally fulfilled by Solomon, also refers to ‘the one that was to come, who would build God a house not of wood and stone, but of human beings [. . .] you are that temple’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 3.17). This is very much Bede’s approach in De templo. The influence of Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) on Bede’s exegesis and his vision of the Church and its reform is well known.10 Arthur Holder has noted some points of comparison between Gregory’s homilies on Ezekiel 40 and Bede’s De tabernaculo and De templo and the general influence on Bede of Gregory’s practical spiritual application of the scriptural text, particularly regarding pastors and teachers.11 In a homily on Luke 19.41–47, Gregory noted how Christ’s prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple showed that ‘the downfall of the people arose principally from the sins of the priests’.12 Bede shared Gregory’s view [xxvi] and incorporated the passage into his own commentary on Luke. In Ezekiel, Gregory found the prophetic figure of a priest aware of the responsibilities and contemporary shortcomings of the pastor. In the context of the Israelites’ exile from Jerusalem, Ezekiel’s vision is not simply of rebuilding the physically desecrated Temple in Jerusalem abandoned by God, but of reconstituting his people through thoroughgoing religious reform so that God could dwell with them again. The image of Ezekiel’s visionary Temple, partly based on the description of Solomon’s Temple in the books of Kings and Chronicles, is called into imaginative being through the incantatory measurement of its features reiterated in the Apocalyptic vision of the new Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40–42; Revelation 21.15–17). Gregory’s and Bede’s use of the common exegetical tool of numerology in discerning the concealed meanings of architectural features is particularly appropriate in their exposition of the Temple whose dimensions have such an important role in both its historical description and visionary evocations in Scripture.

9 De civitate Dei 17.3, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL 47–48 (Turnhout, 1955); tr. H. Bettenson (Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1972) p. 714, cf. pp. 734–35, 768. Temple theme also in Bk 17.20; 18.45; 18.48; 21.26. 10 Thacker 1983; idem., ‘Monks, preaching and pastoral care in early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Pastoral Care Before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and R. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992) pp. 137–70 (152–59); J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Notes on Genesis and the training of the Anglo-Saxon clergy’, in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in memory of Beryl Smalley, ed. K. Walsh and D. Wood (Oxford, 1985) pp. 17–30 (17). 11 Homiliae in Ezechielem Bk 2, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 142 (Turnhout, 1971); tr. T. Gray, The Homilies of Gregory the Great on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Etna, Calif. 1990). Holder 1989, p. 244; McClure 1983, p. 81, n 27. 12 Homiliae in euangelia, 39, ed. in PL 76; tr. D. Hurst, Cistercian Studies Series 123 (Kalamazoo, 1990) p. 358.

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In his preface Gregory notes that Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple is veiled in clouds of obscurity. His ten homilies, which are confined to Ezekiel 40 alone, are extremely diffuse and only partly concerned with the interpretation of the Temple’s architecture but contain a number of features which were to be assimilated by Bede in De templo. Several parts and dimensions of the Temple, for example, are interpreted as denoting the triad of faith, hope and charity, and the numerology of the decalogue is used to expound the perfection of combining the active and contemplative life, the love of God and one’s neighbour. Gregory interprets Ezekiel’s reconstituted Temple and city of Jerusalem as both the heavenly Jerusalem and the Church ‘which labours on earth before it will reign in heaven’. He cites the usual New Testament texts to reveal this as a spiritual building made of living stones laid on the foundation of Christ (1 Peter 25; 1 Corinthians 3.9,11, 17). As in De templo the faithful are variously described as living stones in the Temple fabric or as being the Temple in which God dwells or as entering the Temple to contemplate their heavenly end. The holy teachers are seen as weighty squared stones supporting others and as builders laying stones in the Temple building. The emphasis is on elucidating the building up of the spiritual life, aspects of which are illustrated from the experience of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. Like Bede in De templo, Gregory shows that ‘He enters the building of the heavenly city who meditates by imitating the ways of the good in the Church’ and stresses it is the [xxvii] function of priests to guard the Temple through keeping watch over the faithful, praying, preaching, administering the sacraments and correcting the lives of the worldly. Preachers in particular are the very gateways into the Temple; like Bede, Gregory is emphatic on the importance of their knowing and interpreting Scripture, the standard of measurement for the spiritual life and good works. Like Bede, Gregory distinguishes between models of the spiritual life and those still in thrall to their carnal senses who do not know how to bum with inward love and yearning towards the heavenly. He distinguishes between levels of spiritual perfection and between the compunction of fear and love represented by the Temple’s two altars of sacrifice and incense but shows that there is one life of blessedness promised to all the faithful, little and great (Psalm 113.13) for ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14.2). Both quotations are cited in De tabernaculo and resonate through Bede’s De templo.13

Bede’s objectives and approach What, then, is distinctive about Bede’s handling of a traditional theme? In his early handbook on rhetorical figures, De schematibus et tropis (c. 700/701), Bede explains that one word or historical event or place in Scripture can at the same time figuratively designate several kinds of understanding. The historical temple built by Solomon, for example, can be seen allegorically as the body of Christ or his Church;

13 Gray 1990, pp. 184, 197; Holder 1994, p. 22; De templo, Prologue; 11.3, 16.2, 18.14, 25.3.

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tropologically it can refer to the life of the individual soul, the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit, and anagogically, ‘leading us to higher things’, it can signify the joys of the heavenly dwelling in the new Jerusalem (120–21). He concludes: ‘My discussion of the Church in accordance with the allegorical interpretation has followed the example of that most scholarly commentator, Gregory, who in his Moralia, while he did not apply the specific name of allegory to those deeds and words about Christ or the Church, nevertheless interpreted them figuratively’.14 Gregory taught the literal meaning of the Old Testament text, ‘its bearing on the mysteries of Christ and the Church, and the sense in which it applies to each of the faithful’ (HE 2.1). Similarly, although Bede does occasionally use a formal fourfold or threefold interpretation of a scriptural passage, in practice he had a [xviii] far more flexible approach, particularly in his later work, usually only distinguishing between the historical meaning of the literal text and its underlying spiritual significance for the present reader, which he variously termed the allegorical or mystical or figurative sense.15 The opening of Book I of De templo is a tour de force in which Bede succinctly demonstrates his command of the temple metaphor’s entire range by citing or alluding to scriptural texts from each level of its traditional interpretation, though without using rhetorical terms. The house of God built by Solomon in Jerusalem ‘was made as a figure of the holy universal Church’ built by Christ. The obvious limitations of describing the Church through the static image of a building are immediately confronted. The architectural metaphor spans vast time and space, and is animated and articulated through attributing to it the characteristics both of a pilgrim people and the limbs or members of a body. Thus the Church is still in the process of being built, part of it is still in exile in this earthly life, part already ‘reigns with him in heaven where, when the last judgment is over, it is to reign completely with him’. It is further shown to be the temple of Christ’s incarnate and risen body (John 2.21) and the temple of the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of the faithful (1 Corinthians 3.16); thus ‘it is quite clear that the material Temple (of Solomon) was a figure of us all, that is, both of the Lord himself and his members which we are. But it was a figure of him as the uniquely chosen and precious cornerstone laid in the foundation (Isaiah 28.16; 1 Peter 2.5–10) and of us as the living stones built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2.20), that is, on the Lord himself’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 3.11). The figure of Solomon’s Temple can therefore apply to Christ in some respects, in others to all the elect, collectively and individually, both those on earth and those already in heaven. In his homily on John 2.12–22 and in two homilies for anniversaries of the dedication of his own monastic church at Jarrow, Bede had already discussed texts 14 De schematibus et tropis ed. C.B. Kendall, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975); tr. G.H. Tannenhaus in Readings in Medieval Rhetoric, ed. J.M. Miller, M.H. Frosser, T.W. Benson (Bloomington and London, 1973) pp. 96–122 (121). 15 C.W. Jones, ‘Some Introductory Remarks on Bede’s Commentary on Genesis’, in Sacris Erudiri, 19 (1969–70) pp. 113–98 (131–51); Holder 1994, pp. xviii, 25, 104; B. Ward, Venerable Bede (London, 1990) pp. 41–87.

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in this exegetical chain and had allegorically expounded certain physical features of Solomon’s Temple.16 In De templo he proposes a systematic verse-by-verse consideration of Solomon’s Temple as it is described in 3 Kings 5.1–7.51, just as in his earlier work De tabernaculo, he had provided a sustained commentary on the description of the Mosaic Tabernacle in Exodus 24.12–30.21. Another [xxix] claim to originality is that Bede established a distinction between Tabernacle and Temple which considerably refined his exegesis of the Temple.17 Each can show us ‘an image of the universal Church which is the one Church of Christ’, but whereas the Tabernacle was a temporary portable structure built in the desert ‘on the route by which one reaches the promised land’, the stone Temple was built in that land of promise, in Jerusalem, so ‘the former can be taken to represent the toil and exile of the present Church, the latter the rest and happiness of the future Church’ in the heavenly Jerusalem (1.1, 2).18 De templo is without the digressions of Gregory’s exegesis on the enigmatic ‘profound mysteries’ of Ezekiel’s vision; instead, it is based on a historical account of an actual building, from which it draws mysteries. The Old Testament passage expounded in De templo describes King Solomon building a house for the Lord in fulfilment of his father David’s intentions, and God’s promise to dwell in the midst of his people Israel if they will keep all his commandments. 3 Kings 5 describes in detail the provision of the building materials and organisation of the workforce. Chapter 6 chronicles the gradual construction of the outer porch, the floors, walls, doors, windows and roof, the building’s dimensions and the rich embellishment of all the interior surfaces; it also describes the construction of an inner oracle to house the sacred Ark of the Covenant enshrining the Law and set beneath two golden cherubim. Chapter 7 details particular features of the building, notably the two massive pillars set up at its entrance, various Temple furnishings such as the water laver and, finally, the Temple treasure chambers into which, at the completion of the building work, Solomon brings all the precious vessels dedicated by his father. Bede’s commentary therefore expounds a description not of the anatomy of a building but of its organic growth through time. The building of Solomon’s Temple in seven years and its dedication, presumably in the following year, facilitated its allegorical application not only to the spiritual growth of the individual faithful, but to the whole historical development of the universal Church and its future completion and dedication in the eighth age of the world. It is a remarkably focused, coherent piece of work with persistent themes which further identify it as an original creation within a tradition. [xxx] Some insight into these preoccupations is given in the third prologue. It is addressed to Bede’s close friend, Acca, who was abbot and bishop of Hexham (709–31). He was a very learned theologian who had built up a large and noble

16 Homiliae 2.1; 2.24; 2.25. 17 Cf. De tabemaculo 2, 1; Holder 1994, pp. xv, xiv, 45; Homily 2.25. 18 Numbers given in parentheses refer to the chapter and section divisions of De templo.

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library (HE 5.20) and had for long encouraged Bede in his exegetical writing to help create an educated Anglo-Saxon clergy. Several of the earlier commentaries are dedicated to Acca,19 whom Bede describes as one accustomed in this transitory life to find consolation in the vision of ‘the land of the living’ revealed in the study of Scripture and the writings of the Fathers. Bede sent De templo in spiritual friendship to this seasoned monastic reader, who fulfilled the Gregorian ideal of the teacher and of those in spiritual authority by combining the active and contemplative life. Concern for orthodoxy and authorial humility alike prompted Bede to describe the work as following in the footsteps of the Fathers yet it is also self-confessedly ‘novel’, designed to present afresh familiar truths whose contemplation would then reveal further consolatory mysteries of Christ, the Church and of the heavenly mansions (John 14.2) which are the desire and the destination of the Christian life and the monastic vocation. Acca is invited to emulate the example of St John, the author of the Apocalypse, whose intense contemplation of ‘the heavenly mansions’ of the new Jerusalem enabled him while still in his literal exile on Patmos and the figurative exile of this earthly life, to share in the angelic discourse of heaven. Patristic and early medieval exegesis interpreted the Apocalypse ecclesiologically, that is, as a commentary on the contemporary Church.20 Bede in De templo paradoxically seeks ‘the spiritual mansion of God in the material structure’ of Solomon’s Temple (2.1). The sublime objective of the work is pursued through the exposition of the scriptural account of Solomon’s Temple, its construction, materials, layout, dimensions, its decoration and liturgical furnishings and vessels. Although the Temple had long since been superseded by the Church and indeed physically destroyed, like the earlier Tabernacle its original construction had been divinely ordered and planned. The prologue opens with St Paul: ‘Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction’ (Romans 15.4).21 Even circumstantial details are therefore of importance: ‘the writing of [xxxi] the Old Testament overflows with such perfection that, if one considers it properly, it contains in itself all the mysteries of the New Testament’ (5.2). Bede shows respect for the inspired literal text and its historical meaning, trying to resolve any ambiguities or apparent inconsistencies between the descriptions of the Temple in the Book of Kings and in Chronicles and consulting the work of the Jewish scholar Josephus and of Cassiodorus for clarification of particular features of the building (8.2; 17.1–3). In his homily on the cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem, Bede had already explained that because ‘that temple made with hands prefigured our Lord’s most sacred body (John 2.19–21) [. . .] and likewise pointed to his body the Church’, he would like to record some details of its construction so that ‘this fraternal gathering may recognise how everything that is written about it is applicable to Christ’s

19 McClure 1985, pp. 17–20; Ward 1990, pp. 51–73. 20 Matter 1992, p. 49. 21 Cf. the opening of De tabemaculo.

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Church’. Bede’s description of the building contains echoes of other scriptural accounts of the Temple. As in De templo 8.1, for example, the door to the spiral stairway on the right side of Solomon’s Temple suggests the means of spiritual ascent offered to the faithful by the wound opening Christ’s side, the source of the sacraments, an allusion to the water of life which flowed from the right side of the Temple in Ezekiel’s vision.22 The idea of expounding Solomon’s Temple, sketched in the Lenten homily, grows immeasurably in De templo in concept and technique. The mental tour of the great building opens vistas on the historical journey of the chosen people journeying to the Promised Land, on the continuing journey of the new people of God towards the heavenly Jerusalem, a journey accomplished by the individual believer at death but continuing for the Church as a whole until the end of time. The work describes how the Church on earth can be built up spiritually to become more like that heavenly dwelling. It ends where it begins with the longing for the heavenly mansions but with the reader’s understanding of that image extraordinarily enriched. Bede does not simply treat the figure of the Temple as a mnemonic framework but exploits the function of its architectural components and the characteristics of its building materials. The initial straightforward exposition of the portico and outer part of the Temple respectively as the faithful of old and the faithful born after the Incarnation, for example, is transformed by the information that access to the inner [xxxii] Holy of Holies, representing the joys of the heavenly kingdom, is granted to both groups. The same lesson is then differently taught by exposition of the three materials from which the walls and floors of the building are constructed, ‘for in the different materials there is a manifold repetition of the same figures’: stone, denoting the ancient people of God and the Law; a timber lining, representing the new chosen people and the Gospel; and finally gold leaf covering all surfaces and symbolising the heavenly reward open to all. The reader is drawn into a deeper understanding that these three categories do not merely refer to three different periods of time. Some people who lived ‘before the era of the Gospel led the life of the Gospel’, while there are ‘a great many at the present time who are content with the precepts of the Law’ (i.e. with its literal observance, not its spiritual interpretation); they ‘are but at the beginning of spiritual life’ (11.3). The historical function of the Temple’s structure in delineating areas accessible only to certain categories of people has been quite overturned to reveal spiritual truths about the nature of the universal Church. Similarly the Old Covenant priests who were ritually purified in the bronze water laver and could alone enter the Temple court do not just represent ordained Christian priests or religious but prefigure all those who, through baptism, share in Christ’s priesthood (19.1);

22 Homily 2.1; Ezekiel 47.1; J. O’Reilly, ‘St John as a figure of the contemplative life: text and image in the art of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform’, in St Dunstan, His Life, Times and Cult, ed. N. Ramsay, M. Sparks, T. Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge, 1992) pp. 165–85 (173–74).

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‘After all, it was not only to bishops and priests but to all God’s children that the apostle Peter was speaking when he said, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood”’ (17.4; 1 Peter 2.9).

De templo and the Ecclesiastical History There is here no debate over the dating of Easter, the nature of Petrine authority or the rites of baptism and consecration; there is no discussion of synods and councils, the creation of dioceses or the rules of abbatial succession. There is only a brief commendation of the role of kings in increasing and supporting the Church (2.2). Bede’s vision of the building up of the universal Church in De templo is, however, of the greatest interest in casting light on his account of the building of the Church among the gens Anglorum in HE.23 [xxxiii] 1. Evangelisation The same evangelising imperative underlying the HE is described in Bede’s exposition of the large bronze water laver which stood in the Temple for ritual purification as prefiguring Christian baptism (19.1; 1 Corinthians 10.1–2). It was supported by twelve bronze oxen arranged in groups of three looking outwards to the north, south, east and west (19.5). Bede interprets the oxen not only as the twelve apostles but as their successors as well, ‘all the ministers of the word’ taking belief in the Trinity to the four corners of the world, teaching and baptising all nations (omnes gentes) as directly commanded by Christ (Matthew 28.19–20). In a letter of 624 which Bede quotes in HE 2.8, Pope Boniface commends Justus, archbishop of Canterbury, for his work among the Gentiles, namely the peoples subject to King Eadbald, commenting that the Matthean text ‘has been fulfilled in your own ministry, opening the hearts of nations to receive the mystery of the gospel through your preaching’. In De templo the distinction between the apostles Paul and Barnabas, who took the Gospel to the Gentiles, and the apostle James, who was ordered to remain in Jerusalem to strengthen the Church already established there, is directly applied to the different roles of Augustine, Paulinus and the rest of the mission to the Anglo-Saxons and to Pope Gregory who had to remain in Rome (20.7). Gregory is acclaimed as combining both roles, however, in the laudatory biography in HE 2.1, which describes both the continuing need for Gregory’s pastoral work in Rome, ‘long converted to the true faith’, and his active role in sending and supporting the English mission so that he may properly be called ‘our apostle’ who ‘made our nation, till then enslaved to idols, into a Church of Christ’. Part of Bede’s distinction between the Tabernacle and the Temple is that the Jews alone built the Tabernacle in the desert but Solomon was assisted in

23 Mayr-Harting 1976, pp. 19–22.

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constructing the Temple by the gentile workforce sent by Hiram king of Tyre (2.3). Though both structures are ‘an image of the universal Church’, in De templo the Tabernacle is particularly associated with ‘the ancient people of God’ and the Temple with the Church assembled from the Gentiles as well as the Jews. In the HE the process by which the gens Anglorum were initially brought to the faith and then drawn ever more fully into the universal Church is presented as a continuation of the conversion of the Gentiles recorded in the Acts of the Apostles in response to Christ’s command to teach [xxxiv] all nations.24 If the Anglo-Saxons are the Gentiles, the question may reasonably be asked: who in this context are the Jews? The native British Christians whose ‘unspeakable crimes’ and refusal to share their faith with the pagan invaders Bede so deplores, are presented by the latter-day Old Testament prophet Gildas, whom Bede cites, as a people who have broken the covenant. God therefore appointed ‘much worthier heralds of the truth’ to bring the Anglo-Saxon people, whom he foreknew, to the faith (HE 1.22; Romans 11.2). The following chapter immediately introduces the Gregorian mission, and Augustine and his monastic community settled at Canterbury are specifically described as imitating ‘the way of life of the apostles and of the primitive church’ (HE 1.26). But Bede shows that this apostolic way of life was also adopted by the Irish monks engaged in converting and ministering to the Anglo-Saxons and, indeed, by some of their Anglo-Saxon disciples, as is made clear in the memorable pen-portraits of Aidan, Colman and the community at Lindisfarne, and of Chad. Similarly in De templo Bede notes that the skilled stonemasons of Solomon and Hiram are equally engaged in building the Temple at Jerusalem, both successfully hewing large dependable foursquare living stones which can be laid on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2.20) and of Christ himself (1 Corinthians 3.11): Bede directly relates this to the building up of the early Church by both Jewish and gentile Christian evangelists as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. However, he notes that Hiram’s woodcutters were at first supervised by Solomon’s workmen: they needed instructions, not on how to fell trees, but on how long to cut the planks required in building the Temple! In the same way, Bede argues, ‘the first teachers from among the Gentiles needed the apostles themselves who had received training [. . .] lest, were they to begin to teach without masters, they might turn out to be teachers of error’. 2. The Easter controversy The theme of the building of the universal Church in De templo is informed by Bede’s reading of the building of Solomon’s Temple in the light of the early history

24 Ray 1982, pp. 19–20; G.W. Olsen, ‘Bede as Historian: the evidence from his observations on the life of the first Christian Community at Jerusalem’, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982) pp. 519–30.

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of the Church as recorded in Acts. The historical narrative in Acts provided him with exemplifications of the [xxxv] heavenly qualities described in the Epistles and needed in the construction of the present Church. He was probably engaged in revising his early commentary on Acts (with careful attention to its literal text and problems of composition) at the same time that he was working on De templo and the HE. Reading Bede’s account of the building of the Church among the gens Anglorum in the light of De templo casts into relief certain underlying themes in the HE which have sometimes been obscured by attempts to reduce the evangelisation process to a contest between Roman and Irish (or Columban) missionaries and to regard Bede’s treatment of the Easter controversy as curiously inflated or triumphalist. The British Christians do not represent the Jews of the Old Covenant depicted in De templo. Rather, they are faithless Jews, meaning the obdurate and spiritually blind: ‘no healing or benefit was obtained from their ministry’. Augustine heals the blind and shares the faith (HE 2.2). The Gregorian missionaries and those, regardless of racial origin, who are in harmony with them, are the spiritual descendants of those faithful Jews, the apostles, who recognised in Christ the fulfilment of inspired Old Testament prophecy. Columba’s monastic descendants are also consistently honoured in the HE for their belief, their apostolic way of life and for sharing the faith. Bede explicitly clears them of the false charge of being Quartodecimans, that is, of celebrating Easter on the same day that unconverted Jews celebrate the Passover (HE 3.4, 17). However, in his account of the famous meeting at Whitby in 664, Bede shows the Columban monks were charged with obduracy in still preferring their own local customs in the dating of Easter rather than the ‘truth’ as now manifested in decrees of the apostolic see, in the practice of the universal Church and ‘confirmed by the holy Scriptures’ (HE 3.25). Bede describes the eventual conversion of the last of the Columban monks on Iona in 716 as the climax of his story. They are converted by one who had been divinely diverted from the apostolic task of preaching the Gospel to nations who had not yet heard it and were still practising heathen rites (HE 5.9, 22). Bede does not, of course, mean the Ionan monks needed converting from pagan idolatry, but he is describing a further process, a deeper level of conversion of those already far advanced in the spiritual life who had long ago overcome the earthbound fleshly desires which St Paul describes as ‘the service of idols’ (Colossians 3.5). The text is quoted in De templo’s account of the veil of the Temple at the entrance to the Holy of Holies which [xxxvi] signifies entry into the heavenly city, the same veil of the Temple which was rent at the Crucifixion to show that ‘the figures of the Law thereupon came to an end and the truth of the Gospel and the heavenly mysteries and the very entrance to heaven were no longer a matter of prophecy or figurative meaning’ (16.2–3). The Ionan monks, at the very entrance to the Holy of Holies, are converted from a lingering spiritual idolatry of their own customs. They are converted ‘from the deep-rooted tradition of their ancestors to whom the apostle’s words apply: “They had a zeal of God but not according to knowledge”’; Bede is here quoting, for the second time, St Paul’s 19

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comment on Jews who do not submit to God’s justice through Christ but seek to establish their own (Romans 10.2–3; HE 5.22; 3.3). At Whitby Wilfrid explains that the early apostles had been unable to bring to a sudden end the entire observance of the Mosaic law, including the custom of circumcision, among their Jewish converts in the way they had been able to insist that gentile converts abandon the worship of idols (Acts 15.1–6). Although Wilfrid does not specifically mention the Council of Jerusalem’s agreement to abandon this custom which was threatening the universal mission of the Church, there is the clear implication that ‘in these days when the light of the Gospel is spreading throughout the world’, persistence in this Judaising custom would be a form of idolatry. As with early diversity of practice in the calculation of Easter, that which had once been accepted was now ‘not even lawful’ (HE 3.25). The Columban monks’ recalcitrance at Whitby could not, in this view, be accommodated as a harmless expression of the Gregorian ideal of diversity in unity but is designated a sin because it violated unity. Every instance of Bede’s careful preparation of the Easter controversy theme in HE is accompanied by reference to the ideal of Church unity. Notwithstanding their manifold virtues, in their persistent spiritual blindness over this matter the Columbans might be compared with the British Christians who had refused to respond to Augustine’s exhortation that Christ ‘makes men to be of one mind in his Father’s house’ (HE 2.2). The true diversity in unity runs throughout De templo’s repeated insistence on the fellowship of all the faithful in the one house of God in which it imitates heaven: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ (11.3, 16.2, 18.14, 25.3). The Columbans, like the British, were in effect refusing to break bread in the same house of God with other Christians at Easter, thereby violating the Church’s incorporation into the one body of [xxxvii] Christ (1 Corinthians 10.16–17). Significantly it is Egbert, an Anglo-Saxon whose religious formation is Irish, who becomes God’s agent in finally convincing the Ionan community of its error concerning Easter, and it is Cuthbert, another Anglo-Saxon conforming to postWhitby teaching about Easter dating but formed in the Irish monastic tradition, who is presented as Bede’s culminating example of pastoral monastic bishops; Cuthbert’s form of monastic life at Lindisfarne is traced back both to the time of Aidan and to the practice of Augustine in Kent on the directions of Pope Gregory ‘our apostle’ whose instructions, quoted again by Bede at this point, cite the practice of the early Church (HE 1.27; 4.27). The ‘Jewish’ and ‘Gentile’, Mediterranean and barbarian spiritual and cultural traditions are inextricably entwined in the conversion and building up of the Church among the gens Anglorum. In De templo Bede repeatedly uses the theme of the Jews and Gentiles as the archetypal New Testament image of reconciliation and of all peoples and estates being drawn into the Church. In describing the laver in the Temple court which is an image of baptism, Bede shows that ‘it is here that the circumcised and the uncircumcised are made one in the Lord through faith, hope and love’ (19.8; Colossians 3.11). The living stones of the Temple are cemented together ‘for in Christ Jesus there is no circumcision nor lack of it’, 20

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only ‘the faith which works through love’ (11.2; Galatians 5.6). The evenness of the floor in Solomon’s Temple denotes that ‘though there are Jews and gentiles, barbarians and Scythians, freeborn and slaves, high-born and low-born, they all boast of being brothers in Christ and of having the same Father in heaven’ (14.3; Colossians 3.11). The decorative chains woven together and linking the tops of the columns in the Temple show that all believers, ‘quite removed from each other though they may be in space, time, rank, status, sex and age, are nevertheless linked together by one and the same faith and love’ (18.9). The new people of God in the HE are not the Anglo-Saxon race but all members of the universal Church of which the Anglo-Saxons form but a tiny part at the ends of the earth. But the Church that is established among them in a manner recalling many features of the early Church of the apostles discussed in De templo, is also presented as a microcosm of that universal Church and itself undertakes the apostolic task of the evangelisation of other Germanic Gentiles (HE 5.9–11). The ancient chosen people of God mystically prefigured the universal Church but the Old Testament’s historical account of their [xxxviii] society and kingship seemed to the Anglo-Saxons to bear many points of comparison with their own. Like the Jews, the Anglo-Saxons’ sense of their own identity grew with their knowledge and service of God. It is in this sense that Bede presents them as a chosen people of God, but an inclusive one. Their royal protectors hold sway over the speakers of four languages: British, Pictish, Irish and English (HE 3.6); in the opening chapter of the whole work Bede notes that in addition Latin is now in use among them all ‘through the study of the scriptures’. He finds a parallel to the five languages in the fact that ‘the divine (Mosaic) law is written in five books, all devoted to seeking out and setting forth one and the same kind of wisdom, namely the knowledge of sublime truth and of true sublimity’. De templo reveals this to be an important image for Bede of the unity and harmony of the Church itself which casts further light on his arrangement of the history of the new people of God in five books, like the account of the chosen people in the Pentateuch. Constantly in the architectural features and dimensions of the Temple, in its liturgical furnishings such as the two cherubim and the altar of sacrifice, Bede discerns some allusion to the concord of the Old and New Testaments and particularly to the five books of the Mosaic law whose divine precepts are summarised in the Gospels as love of God and one’s neighbour (13.2). Everything Moses said ‘bore testimony to the sayings of the four Evangelists so that, as a result of the harmony of both, our common faith and love of Christ might strengthen the hearts of all’ (20.8; cf.18.8; 22.3). The theme of harmony and unity is concealed beneath every surface in Solomon’s Temple: doorways, pillars, units of measurement ingeniously render up their inner meaning as figures of the joining together of Jews and Gentiles, the Old and New Testaments, the apostles and prophets which in turn prefigure not only particular groups of people in the present Church but, more profoundly, point to spiritual qualities necessary in the building up of the universal Church: ‘Variously and in many ways the self-same mysteries of our salvation are prefigured’ (20). 21

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The reader gradually becomes aware that these are not isolated features but part of a vast coherent plan in the design of God’s providence. 3. Pillars of the Church The walls of the Temple ‘are all the peoples of the holy Church laid [xxxix] upon the foundation of Christ’; the Church it prefigures is still being built, new precious stones are being added but they represent not only the inclusion of people from every nation and background. but the variety of spiritual gifts which make up the body of Christ (8.6; 1 Corinthians 12.8–10; Galatians 5.22). The only hierarchy is in the practice of charity and the progress of the spiritual life which is marked out by faith and good works, love of God and one’s neighbour and the longing for the heavenly life. The real division is between ‘the carnal’, who are ‘beginners in the way of righteousness’ and still have to wrestle with base cravings of the flesh and ‘the perfect’ who as well as the faith, hope, charity and good works required of all, ‘also, like the apostles, labour in preaching the word, distribute all their goods to the poor, give themselves to vigils, fasting, hymns, spiritual canticles as well asto sacred reading’ (17.7). By their teaching and ministry of the sacraments they open the doors of the Temple to the carnal. They already imitate the life of angels on earth and constantly contemplate the heavenly sanctuary. These are the successors of the apostles and prophets who evangelise at various levels, by exhortation and stern reproof, and especially by their example and by their knowledge of Scripture ‘without which we can have neither hope of heaven nor love of neighbour on earth’, neither can the teachers’ manner of life nor their word be sound (20.5). Alan Thacker has drawn attention to the crucial role of the teacher and of the monastic pastorate in Bede’s Gregorian vision of reform in Church and society ‘which is a key to the understanding of all Bede’s later works’, and has studied Bede’s prose Life of Cuthbert as an exemplification of the type.25 Bede’s treatment of Aidan also offers an extremely interesting example of the translation from precept to practise and of the expression of common preoccupations in the different literary modes of the De templo and the HE. Aidan is first and foremost in the gallery of good examples in the HE who wonderfully embody the various virtues of the elect found in every feature of the building fabric of the Temple in De templo, making it most like the heavenly sanctuary. Yet the portrait of Aidan illustrates the tension which Glenn Olsen identified between Bede’s view of the primitive apostolic Church as a golden age in which he believed the monastic life to have been formed and which he consciously recalled in his description of the more [xl] recent golden age of seventh-century pastors and monastic bishops, and his historical understanding of the growth and maturation of the Church, partly evidenced in its periodic eradication of Judaising tendencies.26

25 Thacker 1983. 26 Olsen 1982, pp. 525–26.

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In his letter to Egbert bishop of York (734) Bede adopts the exhortatory and denunciatory tone of an Old Testament prophet to give a dire warning that contemporary developments in episcopal and monastic life threaten the spiritual well-being of the Church.27 Already in De templo this tone had briefly broken through in his condemnation of ‘the sluggishness of our time when some want to have the appearance and name of being teachers, priests and pillars of the house of God though they have absolutely none of the firm faith needed to despise worldly ostentation and make invisible goods their ambition’ (18.16). In contrast, he who observes and teaches everything which the Lord commanded the apostles, without adding or omitting anything, ‘such a one is indeed a pillar in God’s house which is the Church and a bulwark of truth such as the apostle Paul admonished Timothy to be (18.7; 1 Timothy 3.15). In HE 3.5 Aidan’s pastorate is offered ‘in great contrast to our modern slothfulness’. His role as a pillar of the Church is perhaps figured in HE 3.17 in the story of the miraculous survival through successive fires of a church buttress which Aidan had leaned against as he died; eventually the buttress was set up not as a physical support to the rebuilt structure, but as a memorial inside the church where it effected miraculous cures. Bede’s criticism of Aidan’s monastic successors at Whitby in 664, only thirteen years after Aidan’s death, and his stricture in De templo that anyone who ‘despises the apostolic decrees or proposes something novel on his own whim’ is not a fit pillar for the temple of God (18.7), at first sight may seem to question Aidan’s credentials as a pillar of the Church. But De templo is here condemning those motivated by laziness or arrogance. Immediately after the story of the church buttress which was Aidan’s memorial, Bede, while censuring Aidan’s rustic ignorance regarding the Easter dating, entirely exonerates [xli] him from any suspicion of slothfulness, heresy or obduracy and stresses that ‘in his celebration of Easter he reverenced and preached no other doctrine than we do’. He emphasises Aidan’s diligence in the study of Scripture which informed his teaching and example: ‘He made it his business to omit none of the commands of the evangelists, the apostles and prophets, but he set himself to carry them out in his deeds’. In his chapter on Whitby Bede shows that, far from threatening Church unity, Aidan had been deservedly loved and respected by all, including those who had other views on the dating of Easter, such as bishops Honorius of Kent and Felix of the East Angles. He had diligently laboured to practise the works of faith, piety and love, ‘which is the mark of the saints’. By implication he is to be included among those holy forefathers of Colman’s community whom Wilfrid said would have followed the proper dating if anyone had instructed them ‘as they are known to have followed all the laws of God as soon as they learned them’ (HE 3.25). 27 Gildas had used the scriptural architectural metaphor, quoting the whole of 1 Corinthians 3.11–16, in denouncing the priests of his day who had violated the temple of God through neglect of their pastoral charge: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. M. Winterbottom (London and Chichester, 1978) pp. 73, 78; cf. Gregory, Regulae pastoralis liber 2.7, ed. C. Morel, SC 381–82 (Paris 1992); tr. H. Davis, Gregory the Great. Pastoral Care (Westminster, Md., 1950) p. 71.

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The Pauline image of the apostles and their followers as pillars of the Church (Galatians 2.9) is very fully developed by Bede in De templo. It also appears in Gregory’s homilies on Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple. What has not been noticed is that Gregory’s exposition has a substantial commentary on the Judaising crisis in the apostolic Church. In Galatians 2.9 James, Cephas and John are described as pillars; unlike some commentators, Gregory insists that Cephas here refers to Peter, who is described by that form of his name in the previous two verses, where the missions of Peter and Paul to the Jews and the Gentiles respectively are designated the Gospels of the circumcision and of the uncircumcision. Gregory actually quotes Paul’s condemnation of Peter for continuing to preach the circumcision of converts: ‘I withstood him to his face because he was to be blamed. [. . .] And to his dissimulation the rest of the Jews consented’ (Galatians 2.11, 13). Gregory upholds Paul’s action and describes Peter’s subsequent acknowledgement (in 2 Peter 3.15–16 after he had read Paul’s epistle!) that Paul had been right. The spiritual lesson Gregory derives from this episode is that Peter was the friend of truth even when he was blameworthy, that he yielded ‘to his lesser brother for harmony and thereby became a follower of his inferior so that he even excelled in this, in that he who was the first in the leadership of the apostles was also the first in humility’: Peter refrained from reminding Paul that he had received the keys of the kingdom. For Gregory, this is not incompatible with his earlier acclamation of Peter as the first of the apostles and ‘a great [xlii] pillar in the true Tabernacle’.28 Nothing of this background to the Council of Jerusalem appears in Wilfrid’s reference to the Judaising issue in his speech at Whitby where Petrine authority is strongly argued as the safeguard of Church unity. Peter is shown to have been right about Easter (or at least from the time of his arrival in Rome). Bede’s exegesis, however, shows he was aware that the Council of Jerusalem had other spiritual lessons to teach. Ironically, these lessons are in the HE taught by Aidan and the Columban community on Lindisfarne whose apostolic life is eulogised in the chapter immediately following the debate at Whitby. Roger Ray has argued that although ‘the synod of Whitby was to Bede what the Council of Jerusalem was to Luke: the point at which a new Church went on record for catholic faith’, Bede made sophisticated use of the rhetorical arts of inventio in adapting this material for his purposes.29 His exegesis on the New Testament material suggests other considerations were also involved. At a meeting of apostolic missionaries in Jerusalem it was decided that gentile converts, saved by faith and the grace of Christ, no longer needed to submit to the requirements of the Jewish Law concerning circumcision and dietary observances; they were, however, to distance themselves from pagan practices and at least ‘refrain

28 Homily 6, Gray 1990, pp. 221–22. 29 R.D. Ray, ‘The triumph of Greco-Roman rhetorical asumptions in pre-Carolingian historiography’, in The Inheritance of Historiography 350–900, ed. C. Holdsworth and T.P. Wiseman (Exeter, 1986) pp. 67–84 (80).

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from the pollutions of idols and from fornication and from things strangled and from blood’ (Acts 15.20). In his commentary on Acts, Bede scarcely mentions the accounts in Galatians chapters 2 and 5 which show there was considerable dissension between the apostles over this question, and he completely omits any mention that Paul had roundly denounced the Judaising stand of Peter himself and had said of those continuing to practice circumcision: ‘You are made void of Christ you who are justified in the law; you are fallen from grace’ (Galatians 5.4). Instead, Bede stresses the agreement reached by the apostles at Jerusalem in moving to the next stage in the Church’s growth: because of the diversity of those early times, ‘the sacramental signs could be diverse, though nevertheless reverting most harmoniously to the unity of the same faith’.30 He also explains the modest minimum standard required of gentile converts was a concession ‘in view of their rudimentary faith and the longstanding custom of the gentile world’. Gradually, as they continued [xliii] to gather to read the law and the prophets (for Bede says he is aware the primitive Church still practised Jewish customs including Jewish readings in their Sabbath celebrations), the converts would receive the principles of life, meaning a more rigorous understanding and practice of the Christian faith. Little by little, they will receive ‘the rules requiring the keeping of mutual love’, a process repeatedly described in De templo as a movement from the literal precepts of the Law to an understanding of its spiritual interpretation (11.3). In De templo Bede’s reflections on Acts 15 are also pastoral and not concerned with ecclesiastical politics. The Temple’s outer court or great hall and portico formed a sacred precinct for the admission of all who had fulfilled ‘the basic requirements of ritual purity and observance of the prescriptions of the law’ but who were not allowed to enter the main sanctuary reserved for the ritually cleansed Jewish priests (17.1). From the literal text and the historical building Bede draws various lessons for the contemporary Church. The outer court offers ‘a figure of those of the Gentiles who were believers in Syria and Antioch and other provinces and cities on whom the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem imposed no further burden than that they refrain from that which has been offered to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication’ (17.7; Acts 15.20). Bede specifically likens this example from the primitive Church to the distinction in the contemporary Church between ‘the carnal’, possessed of only the most elementary virtues, and the full rigour of the Christian life required of ‘the perfect’. The Temple’s outer court thus ‘suggests figuratively the life and behaviour of the carnal in the holy Church to whom the apostle says “But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual people but as people of the flesh, as little ones in Christ, I fed you with milk, not solid food”’ (17.5; 1 Corinthians 3.1–2). Similarly Pope Gregory had applied the Corinthians text to the apostles who form both the outer and inner gates of Ezekiel’s visionary Temple. They give ‘the little ones

30 The Venerable Bede: Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, tr. L.T. Martin, Cisterican Studies Series (Kalamazoo, 1989) p. 130.

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of Christ milk to drink not meat’, instructing them in the first entrance into faith and, as they advance inside the Temple, lead them ‘through subtler perception to inner truths’.31 In the HE Bede has the apostolic figure of Aidan express St Paul’s view at a meeting of the Columban monastic elders on Iona gathered to discuss problems encountered in the evangelisation of the Anglo-Saxons. Aidan observes that, [xliv] because of their ignorance, the pagans should have been ‘offered the milk of simpler teaching, as the apostle recommends, until little by little, as they grew strong on the food of God’s word, they were capable of receiving more elaborate instruction and of carrying out the more transcendent commandments of God’ (HE 3.5). Despite his own failure, whether through ignorance or custom, to observe Easter ‘at the proper time’, Aidan is shown to be an exemplary missionary pastor (HE 3.17). When read from the perspective of Bede’s exegesis on Acts 15 and on the Temple’s outer court, the account of the meeting on Iona has clear parallels with the meeting at Jerusalem. His interpretation of both meetings as points of growth not division for the Church informs his portrait of Aidan in the HE and his exposition of the pillars in De templo. Bede associates the apostolic pillars of the Church in Galatians 2.9 with the two great bronze pillars erected at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple: ‘There are two of them so that they may bring together both Gentiles and circumcised into the Church by preaching’; Peter is not named but Paul is described as ‘a most eminent pillar of the house of the Lord’ (18.5). The pillars also denote spiritual teachers, ‘strong in faith and work and elevated to heavenly things by contemplation’, who follow the apostles and the norm of apostolic teaching. Their dimensions conceal an arcane allusion to the name of Jesus, whom the saints imitate (18.4). Bede had already cited these columns in his early commentary on the Apocalypse (c. 703– 09) by way of expounding Revelation 3.12, ‘He that shall overcome, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God’. The saints as Christ-bearing figures are therefore of importance to the Church on earth and in heaven and provide a fundamental connection between the two, a basic assumption of hagiography which, interestingly enough, is made particularly clear in the imagery of Adamnán of Iona’s late seventh-century Life of Columba.32 The tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reformers depicted saints, including their own monastic leaders, as living stones and pillars of the Church in art and hagiography,33 and the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester,

31 Gray 1990, p. 246. 32 A.O. Anderson and M.O. Anderson, Adomnan’s Life of Columba (Oxford, 1991) pp. 15, 107, 225, 227, 229. 33 R. Deshman, ‘The imagery of the living Ecclesia of the English monastic reform’, in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. P. Szarmach (Kalamazoo, 1986) pp. 261–82 (273–78). For the use of the architectural metaphor elsewhere in early insular culture, including the Book of Kells, f 202v, see C.A. Farr, Lection and Interpretation = the Liturgical and Exegetical Background of the Illustrations in the Book of Kells (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1989) pp. 32–191; O’Reilly 1994.

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makes particularly lavish [xlv] use of the architectural metaphor in its pictorial exegesis. The various heavenly choirs are depicted as human columns, standing on ‘living stones’ and the opening scene of the Confessors shows the Church supported by St Benedict flanked by Pope Gregory and St Cuthbert. The Benedictine reformers identified themselves with the seventh-century monastic bishops whom Bede describes in the HE but his extensive exegesis on the Temple theme may also have been an important influence.

Living stones In an oration on the dedication of the cathedral of Tyre in 317, Euscbius had applied almost the entire catena of scriptural texts on tabernacle, temple and the living stones, etc., to the magnificent new church and hailed its patron-bishop as a new Solomon. The topos, if not that particular example, was certainly known to insular writers. ‘As Moses built an earthly tabernacle made with hands [. . .] according to the pattern shown by God’ so Wilfrid built and gloriously adorned a columned stone church at Ripon whose dedication is compared by his biographer with the dedication of Solomon’s Temple.34 In the HE Bede notes the building of stone churches as part of the evangelisation of the Anglo-Saxons and probably as one aspect of increasing Roman and Gaulish cultural influences in their further conversion. But, as Arthur Holder noted, for all Bede’s interest in the architectural metaphor for describing the Church, he never gives a church building an allegorical interpretation.35 Again De templo and related scriptural exegesis can throw light on Bede’s historical work. The allegorical exposition of the figural ornament in Solomon’s Temple led Bede to his often-quoted defence of religious art as providing ‘a living writing’ for the illiterate (19.10). Less quoted is the section which immediately follows where he shows that what the Law forbids is not the making of images but the idolatrous purposes to which impious Jews and pagan Gentiles alike may put them (19.11). In the Acts of the Apostles the deacon Stephen addresses the Jewish Sanhedrin to answer charges of blasphemy against the Temple and [xlvi] the Law. He argues that the idolatry of their forefathers in worshipping ‘the works of their own hands’ when they made the bronze calf in the wilderness at the time of Moses is paralleled by their own over-materialistic understanding of the Temple and its cult, and, by implication, their failure, though professional interpreters of the Law, to recognise in Christ the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy: ‘The most High dwells not in houses made by hands, as the prophet 34 The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927) pp. 35, 37; S. Connolly, ‘The power motif and the use of Scripture in Cogitosus’ Vita Brigitae’, in Aquitaine and Ireland in the Middle Ages, ed. J. M. Picard (Dublin, 1995) pp. 207–20 for the example of Cogitosus’s description of Kildare as fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 2.2–3. 35 A.G. Holder, ‘Allegory and history in Bede’s interpretation of sacred architecture’, in American Benedictine Review, 40 (1989) pp. 115–31 (121–31).

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says: “Heaven is my throne and earth my footstool. What house will you build me?” says the Lord’ (Acts 4.8–9, quoting Isaiah 66.1). Significantly, the same quotation from Isaiah is later cited in St Paul’s speech before the assembly of the Areopagus in Athens: ‘God who made the world and all things therein, he being Lord of heaven and earth, dwells not in temples made with hands’ (Acts 17.24). Before this pagan gentile audience the prophetic warning is directed against idolatrous worship of the man-made. The Creator in whom we live and move and have our being is not ‘like unto gold or silver or stone, the graving of art and the device of man’ (Acts 17.28–29). Bede’s reflections on these passages, first expressed in his commentary on Acts in 709, underlie his vignette of King Oswy succeeding in converting a fellow ‘Gentile’ where the Roman missionaries had failed. Using reasoned argument ‘in friendly and brotherly counsel’ like St Paul, not forcing his will on a tributary king, Oswy explains to Sigeberht of the East Saxons that ‘objects made by the hands of men could not be gods’ and that the Creator of heaven and earth, incomprehensible in his majesty and invisible to human eyes, has his abode ‘in heaven, not in base and perishable metal’ (HE 3.22). The argument had already been rehearsed, directly citing Psalms 95.4 and 113, in Pope Boniface’s letter to King Edwin which Bede quotes in HE 2.10. Throughout the book Bede tackles idolatry at various levels from initial conversion from paganism through further inner conversions from preoccupation with man-made possessions and worldly values. The movement away from attachment to ‘carnal desires’, which characterise those clustered at the doorway into the Temple, and the drawing closer to the hidden Holy of Holies seeking what ‘eye has not seen nor ear heard’ is also repeatedly described in De templo (cf. 12.4; 18.14). In De templo Bede extols the spiritual qualities of St Stephen which made him a pre-eminent pillar of the Church. Some twenty years earlier, commenting on Stephen’s speech to the Jewish Sanhedrin in Acts 7.44, 49 (the companion passage to Paul’s speech to the Gentiles in Acts [xlvii] 17.24), Bede showed that Stephen was here explaining to the Jews ‘that the Lord does not place a high value on dressed stone, but rather desires the splendour of heavenly souls’. He interprets the successor to the Temple, the Christian Church, as a community not a building, and one not confined to this earth. Bede says of Gregory the Great, ‘Other popes applied themselves to the task of building churches and adorning them with gold and silver, but he devoted himself entirely to winning souls’ (HE 2.1). Similarly, Augustine’s successor at Canterbury, Archbishop Lawrence, ‘strove to build up the foundations of the Church which had been so magnificently laid (cf. 1 Corinthians 3.10–11) and to raise it to its destined height; this he did by frequent words of holy exhortation and by continually setting a pattern of good works’, including his pastoral care of ‘the new Church which had been gathered from among the English’ (HE 2.4; cf. 2.6). The ‘living stones of the Church’ gathered together in Chad’s exemplary monastic community at Lichfield are described as being translated at death ‘from their earthly sites to the heavenly building’ (HE 4.3). In contrast ‘the lofty buildings’ of Coldingham are reduced to ashes as a 28

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direct consequence of the community’s failure to abandon worldly occupations and cultivate the desire for heaven (HE 4.25, and De templo 7.3). These observations have all the more force coming from one whose whole life had been spent among the monastic buildings of Wearmouth-Jarrow, which must have constituted a wonder of the northern world. In the HE and the Lives of the Abbots Bede chronicles as acts of religious zeal his founder’s labours in securing stonemasons and glaziers from Gaul for the building of St Peter’s church at Monkwearmouth, 674, and his repeated trips to Gaul and Italy to secure ‘everything necessary for the service of church and altar’ – sacred vessels, vestments, reliquaries, books and pictures. There is no sense of profligacy in this seemly honouring of the house of God, but neither does Bede suggest Benedict Biscop was a second Solomon: on his deathbed Benedict avers that he would rather his foundation revert to the wilderness it once was than endanger its monastic life.36 In a homily for the anniversary of the dedication of Jarrow, in which so many of the themes in De templo are already sketched, Bede urges his monastic community, We must not suppose that only the building in which we come together and pray and celebrate the mysteries is the Lord’s temple, and that we ourselves are not more [xlviii] fully his temple and are not so named, since the apostle clearly says, ‘You are the temple of the living God’. [. . .] If we are the temple of God, let us take great care and busy ourselves with good deeds so that he may deign [. . .] to make his dwelling place here. Bede gives the brethren a condensed tour of Solomon’s Temple in the course of the second dedication homily, so that the marvellous workmanship that went into the construction of the Lord’s earthly house might delight you and so that these details, spiritually understood, might arouse our minds to more ardent love of the heavenly dwelling place. Therefore, my brothers, let us love whole-heartedly the beauty of the eternal house we have from God in the heaven and let us seek [. . .] that we may be worthy to dwell in his house all the days of our life37 Other insular churchmen could justify a different use of the Temple imagery. In invoking the models of Moses’s Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple in the account of the foundation of Ripon, Wilfrid’s biographer said it was to stir up the faith of

36 Historia abbatum, ed. C. Plummer, Ven. Baedae opera historica (Oxford, 1896) 1; tr. D.H. Farmer in The Age of Bede (Harmondsworth 1965) pp. 185–211 (196). 37 Homilies 2.24; 25, Martin and Hurst 1991, pp. 242, 267.

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the people and to honour Christ. The allocation of lands and consecrated places to the bishop for the service of God as part of the celebrations at the dedication of Ripon strongly recalls the assigning of sanctuary lands to the Temple priesthood and Levites in Ezekiel 45.1–6. Wilfrid’s response to the ruinous state of Paulinus’s church at York is that of the prophets Daniel and Jeremiah in denouncing the desecration of the Temple; his rebuilding of the church is presented as a cleansing of the Temple; Wilfrid is another Samuel in whose work the house of God is honoured. The biographer runs out of superlatives in describing Hexham and says that Wilfrid was ‘taught by the spirit of God’ in its construction; so too was Bezalel, the builder of the Tabernacle, (Exodus 35.30–33).38 Wilfrid’s biographer draws attention to the dressed stone, the great height as well as the length of the church at Hexham and to its different levels connected by spiral stairs. These are all general features yet also figure in the description of Solomon’s Temple in the Book of Kings. Richard Bailey has suggested that the remarkable crypts at Hexham and Ripon, notwithstanding their rectangular plan, carry an iconographic reminiscence of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.39 It may be added that although a Christian counterpart to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem had not been erected in [xlix] the period of the New Testament, in the changed circumstances of the Constantinian era the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as preeminently the Church of the Resurrection, came to be viewed (and may originally have been intended) as ‘the keystone in founding the New Jerusalem’.40 By the sixth century various symbols, relics and even holy sites once associated with the Temple had migrated to the Holy Sepulchre complex, and early representations on coins and pilgrims’ souvenirs represent the front elevation of the Temple (or the Holy of Holies) and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in a similar schematised manner, despite their very different ground plans. In his lengthy appreciation of the work of Wilfrid, Bede does not once refer to Wilfrid’s role as a patron of splendid church buildings (HE 5.19). Yet in the following chapter he notes that Wilfrid’s longtime priest Acca, who succeeded him as bishop of Hexham, enriched the fabric of the church there with all kinds of decoration and works of art, gathering relics of the apostles and martyrs of Christ, putting up altars for their veneration and establishing various chapels for this purpose within the walls of the Church. Furthermore, Acca ‘zealously provided sacred vessels, lamps and many other objects of the same kind for the adornment of the house of God’. Wilfrid’s biographer had also noted that Acca provided ‘splendid ornaments of gold and silver and precious stones’ for the enrichment of Hexham.

38 Colgrave 1927, pp. 33–37, 45–47. 39 R.N. Bailey, ‘St Wilfrid, Ripon and Hexham’, in Studies in Insular Art and Archaeology, ed. C. Karkov and R. Farrell, American Early Medieval Studies, 1 (1991) pp. 3–25 (20–21). 40 B. Kühnel, ‘Jewish symbolism of the Temple and the Tabernacle and Christian symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre and the heavenly Tabernacle’, in Jewish Art, 12/13 (1986–87) pp. 147–68 (150); R. Ousterhout, ‘The Temple, the Sepulchre and the Martyrion of the Saviour’, in Gesta, 29 (1990) pp. 44–53 (44–47).

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Acca was banished from his see in 731; if the prologue to De templo was written then or later, it would have had the extra dimension of offering consolation to one literally in forced exile like St John on Patmos, but this is hardly its primary purpose41 nor is it attempting to convert Acca from an undue regard for church fabric. Acca combined a proper respect for the beauty of God’s house in this transitory world with an active concern for the education of its pastors and therefore the spiritual welfare of the people of God, evidenced in his library and his long-standing involvement with Bede’s exegetical work. There is a clear consistency between Bede’s refusal to allegorise man-made church buildings in the HE and his spiritual interpretation in De templo of the Temple building which is described in holy Scripture ‘for our instruction’ and built according to a divine plan. The churches [l] built by human hands and the attempts to identify them with the Temple in Jerusalem are but figures or copies of the true Jerusalem and can themselves become an earthbound preoccupation or idol. The true building of the Church, discernible beneath the figure of the Temple building, is the spiritual growth of the whole diverse community of the body of Christ and its journey through the exile of this life to the new Jerusalem. Bede’s view, sustained through exhortation and example in De templo and the HE, had been stated by the Fathers, notably in Augustine’s comment that the prophecy of Haggai 2.9, ‘The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former’, was not fulfilled in the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem built of wood and precious stones and metals but in this house, the Church ‘whose stones are of more worth because they are living stones’.42 But the Church ‘was symbolised in the restoration of that Temple, because the very renewing of the Temple symbolises in a prophetic message the New Covenant’. The glory of this latter house will be seen to be even greater, however, when it is dedicated (i.e. completed, at the end of time), ‘for then will come the one who is longed for by all nations’, Christ, the master-builder himself. In 3 Kings 7.51 the earthly master builder, Solomon, finishes building the Temple in Jerusalem ready for dedication and finally brings into it his father’s consecrated vessels of gold and silver to be stored in various treasuries within the building. This is interpreted in De templo 25.2–3 as prefiguring the time after the universal judgement when Christ will bring into the joys of his heavenly kingdom all the elect, the company both of teachers and the rest of the faithful of diverse spiritual gifts, to be laid up like consecrated vessels in the treasuries of his Father’s house. Bede then turns to Gregory’s meditation on Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple to explain the reason why Solomon made one house of the Lord but furnished it with various treasuries to accommodate the vessels of different kinds (3 Kings 7.51): ‘there is one house of 41 The monastic consolatory tradition used by Bede also appears in the correspondence of AngloSaxons in voluntary exile for Christ, who requested copies of Bede’s exegetical works for teaching purposes ‘and for our consolation in exile’. M. Parkes, The Scriptorium of Wearmouth-Jarrow (Jarrow Lecture, 1982) p. 15. 42 City of God 18.48; Bettenson 1972, pp. 830–31.

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the Father not made with hands that will last eternally in heaven (2 Corinthians 5.1), but many mansions in it (John 14.2) to receive all who fear him, and, the Lord blesses those that love him, both little ones and great’ (Psalm 113.13). [li]

Appendix: the Codex Amiatinus In the famous Codex Amiatinus produced at Bede’s monastery is a diagram which has been variously described as the Tabernacle and the Temple.43 The huge manuscript, a pandect or single-volume copy of the whole Bible, is the survivor of three such copies made for the joint foundation of Wearmouth-Jarrow under the direction of Ceolfrith, during his abbacy from 688–716, and was the copy which Ceolfrith eventually, in 716, took with him on his final pilgrimage to Rome to present to the Pope.44 The book’s format and illustrations have often been seen as modelled on another pandect, the now lost Codex Grandior produced in the monastery of Cassiodorus (d. 598) at Vivarium in Italy, which has usually been identified with the pandect ‘of the old translation’ brought back to Northumbria from Rome in 678, a year or two before Bede’s admission to the monastery as a child of seven.45 In De tabernaculo 2.12 Bede mentions details of the altar of holocausts that he himself had seen depicted in Cassiodorus’s book; he notes that the learned Cassiodorus derived his knowledge of this and of the layout of Tabernacle and Temple from teachers among the Jews. In De templo Bede describes details of the Temple enclosures in the picture which Cassiodorus had ‘put in the pandect, as he himself mentions in his exposition of the psalms’ (17.2). In the relevant passage, Cassiodorus refers to Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities as a source of information on the Temple building. But although Bede is here clearly interested in discovering information about the historical fabric of the Temple46 it is as a preliminary to the spiritual interpretation of its features and the passage he refers to in Cassiodorus’s psalm commentary is on Psalm 86, a psalm which had already in Augustine’s influential commentary attracted the whole range of scriptural texts interpreting the Tabernacle and Temple as figures of the Church and the heavenly sanctuary. There has been considerable scholarly debate on the diagram in the Codex Amiatinus. It has, for example, been suggested that there were [lii] two separate pictures of the Tabernacle and Temple in Cassiodorus’s Codex Grandior and that the diagram in the Codex Amiatinus is a direct copy of one of them, the

43 Florence, Biblioreca Medicea Laurenziana MS Amiatinus I; Alexander 1978, cat. 7, pl 23–27; R. L.S. Bruce-Mitford, The Art of the Codex Amiatinus (Jarrow Lecture, 1967); repr. in Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser. 32 (1969) pp. 1–25. L. Webster and J. Backhouse, The Making of England. Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900 (London, 1991) cat. 87–88. 44 Vita Ceolfridi 20, ed. C. Plummer in Ven. Baedae opera historica, 1, pp. 388–404; tr. D. Whitelock in English Historical Documents, 1 (London and New York, 1955, 2nd ed. 1979). 45 Historia abbatum, 15. 46 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 97–98 (Turnhout, 1958) pp. 789–90; G. Henderson, Bede and the Visual Arts (Jarrow Lecture, 1980) p. 545.

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Tabernacle, strictly as described in Exodus.47 Others, however, have noticed discrepancies, both between the Codex Amiatinus diagram and the Exodus account of the Tabernacle, and between the diagram and Bede’s description of the picture he had seen in Cassiodorus’s book.48 A third approach has been to see the Codex Amiatinus diagram as derived from a single picture in the Codex Grandior which was not a literal depiction of either Old Testament building but was cast in the Jewish and Early Christian tradition of architecturally ambiguous images. In this tradition a representation of the Tabernacle might also allude to the Temple and, in Christian versions, to the sanctuary of the heavenly Jerusalem as well.49 The issues underlying the debate are complex and only a few observations on the diagram in the Codex Amiatinus may be made here. Certain liturgical furnishings shown in the diagram were common to Tabernacle and Temple, as Bede makes clear when he refers readers of De templo 24.4 to his section on liturgical vessels in the De tabernaculo; the two buildings also had a similar division between the sanctuary and inner Holy of Holies. While additional details in the Codex Amiatinus diagram, such as the inscription of the names of Moses and Aaron and the sons of Levi around the sanctuary and of the twelve tribes of Israel encamped around the outer court, suggest it is the Tabernacle in the desert, the positioning of the water laver is that prescribed for the Temple court (20.15; 3 Kings 7.39), not for the Tabernacle. Moreover, Bianca Kühnel has noted that the tiny cross placed over the entrance to the building transforms this sanctuary of the Old Covenant into the eternal temple and city of the New Covenant.50 The four words written in golden capitals on the four sides of the diagram conceal a further level of allusion. The initial letters of these Greek words for the four cardinal directions – Anatole, Dysis, Arctos and Mesembria – spell out the name of Adam. As [liii] Greek letters they also have a numerical value and add up to forty-six, the number of years it took to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and hence they can allude to the temple of Christ’s body (John 2.19–21). This numerology, frequently used by Augustine, is used by Bede in his homily on the cleansing of the Temple and in his exposition on the rebuilding of the Temple in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.51 The building in the Codex Amiatinus diagram

47 P. Meyvaert, ‘Bede and the Church Paintings at Wearmouth-Jarrow’, in Anglo-Saxon England, 8 (1979) pp. 63–77 (71–72, n. 7); S. Ferber, ‘The Temple of Solomon in Early Christian and Byzantine Art’, in The Temple of Solomon: Archaeological Fact and Medieval Tradition in Christian, Islamic and Jewish Art, ed. J. Gutmann (Missoula, 1976) pp. 27, 29, 41 also points to other Jewish sources probably underlying Cassiodorus’s work. 48 K. Corsano, ‘The first quire of the Codex Amiatinus and the Institutiones of Cassiodorus’, in Scriptorium, 41 (1987) pp. 3–34 (9–11); Holder 1994, p. 92 n. 1. 49 Kühnel 1986–87, pp. 164–66. For early Christian and insular pictorial exegesis of the TabernacleTemple theme, see Farr 1989; O’Reilly 1994; D.H. Verkerk, ‘Exodus and Easter Vigil in the Ashburnham Pentateuch’, in Art Bulletin, 77 (1995) pp. 94–105. 50 Kühnel 1986–87, p. 166. 51 W. Berschin, ‘Opus deliberatum ac perfectum: why did the Venerable Bede write a second prose life of Cuthbert?’, in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, ed. G. Bonner, D. Rollason,

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may therefore be read as referring simultaneously to the Tabernacle and Temple of the Old Covenant, which prefigured the Church of the New Covenant, and to the Temple as the body of Christ and the sanctuary of the heavenly Jerusalem. The diagram does not appear in isolation. The book’s well-known frontispiece depicts Ezra, the scribe who had restored and interpreted the Jewish scriptures as an essential foundation to religious reform and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Captivity. He is shown in Jewish priestly dress but in front of a book-cupboard containing all the books of the Bible, both from the Old and New Testaments. The combination of historical detail and visual exegesis continues in the diagram of the Tabernacle and the sanctuary vessels which spans a double opening (originally ff. 4v–5r). This is followed by a series of ingenious diagrams depicting the books of the Pentateuch within the shape of a Cross and the harmony of the three standard classifications of all the books of the Bible in conjunction with the depictions of the Trinity. George Henderson has questioned whether these are either copies of diagrams in the Codex Grandior or directly derived from Cassiodorus’s work in his Institutiones and has persuasively suggested they could include a considerable element of Northumbrian editing and interpretation.52 The whole enterprise of producing the Codex Amiatinus and its two sister pandects, in Roman uncial script and from the best available manuscripts, based not on the Old Latin translation but on ‘the Hebrew and Greek originals by the translations of Jerome’ (including his third revision of the Psalms, iuxta hebraicos), was an astounding feat of scholarship and scribal activity.53 It may well have been completed before Bede began his biblical commentaries and certainly [liv] provides their background. The centrality of a proper understanding of Scripture to the process of building up the Church through further levels of conversion is strongly sketched in the letter explaining the dating of Easter to the Pictish king Nechtan c.710 which rightly forms part of the climax of the HE. The rejection of Columban customs by Nechtan and his reformed nation is here presented as the prelude to the final conversion of Iona. Modem commentators have often assumed Bede wrote the letter but he specifically ascribes it to his revered abbot Ceolfrith and it is entirely compatible with the interests already manifested in the Codex Amiatinus. The explanation of the true date of Easter, unlike its implementation, is based not on Petrine authority or Easter tables but on rules divinely laid down in the law of Moses and the Gospel ‘which no human authority can alter’ (HE 5.21). Ceolfrith proceeds to establish at some length the historical meaning of the literal text of Exodus on the Passover of the Old Covenant, then to seek its C. Stancliffe (Woodbridge, 1989) pp. 95–102; for Adam’s name as a cosmic tetragrammaton in the Fathers, McNally 1971, pp. 115–16. 52 G. Henderson, ‘Cassiodorus and Eadfrith once again’, in The Age of Migrating Ideas, ed. R.M. Spearman and J. Higgitt (Edinburgh, 1993) pp. 82–91 (82–86); Bruce-Mitford 1967, pl 2, 7, 9–12, C. 53 Life of Ceolfrith, 37; Ward 1994, 6; Parkes 1982, pp. 3–6.

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spiritual significance through reading it in the light of the New Covenant Passover sacrifice, then to show its relevance to the present Church, as did the apostles. Bede had been formed in a monastic community where the spiritual interpretation of the Old Covenant Law, priesthood and sacrifice, Tabernacle and Temple provided a focal image for understanding the universal Church and the inspired authority of the whole of Scripture. He was to return to the theme time and again, culminating in one of the most important exegetical works of his maturity, the De templo. [lv]

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2 I S L A N D S A N D I D O L S AT T H E E N D S O F T H E E A RT H Exegesis and conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique, Bède met en scène sous une forme narrative les themes exégétiques qui lui tiennent à coeur dans ses commentaires bibliques sur la construction et la reconstruction du temple de Jérusalem. Il y abandonne la métaphore biblique architecturale et utilise à la place l’image des îles aux confins du monde en adaptant les lieux communs classiques, bibliques et patristiques du centre et de la périphérie. Son histoire détaillée de la conversion des barbares au bout du monde, qui renoncent au culte des idoles pour se faire baptiser et passent d’une lecture littérale à une compréhension plus complète du message divin, illustre le processus continu de la conversion intérieure nécessaire dans la vie du croyant et de l’Église universelle.

The characterisation of Britain and Ireland as islands ‘at the ends of the earth’ was a commonplace among early Insular writers in a variety of literary genres. In none of them is it simply a geographical description, but in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica the topos is elaborated on a grand scale, both as an exegetical theme and a narrative device, using classical, biblical and patristic concepts of centre and periphery. Classical antiquity saw the north-westerly group of islands in Ocean as the furthermost edge of the habitable world. Roman historians and panegyrists therefore acclaimed the conquest of Britain and its barbarian people as a symbol of the universal extent of Rome’s dominion and civilising role.1 Christian commentators living in the empire regarded the pax Romana as a providential preparation for the spreading of the Gospel worldwide, but interpreted this image of Rome and the barbarians in the light of the biblical view of the world, which has Jerusalem at the centre, in medio gentium, that is, surrounded by nations or peoples other than the singular chosen people of Israel (Ezekiel 5.5). Commenting on Ezekiel’s phrase, Jerome described Jerusalem as the umbilicus terrae, the place of salvation 1 See D. Scully, ‘Bede, Orosius and Gildas on the early History of Roman Britain’ in this volume.

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‘in the midst of the earth’ (Psalm 73.12), and in this was followed by Adomnán of Iona and Bede. Jerome further described Jerusalem as surrounded at its four cardinal points by all the peoples of Asia, Europe and Africa.2 Genesis 10.32 describes how, from the three sons of Noah, ‘the nations (gentes) were divided on the earth after the flood’; from Japheth ‘were divided the [119] islands of the gentiles in their lands: every one according to his tongue and their families in their nations’ (Genesis 10.5). Bede, like Isidore, noted that the descendants of Japheth ‘occupied Europe and the islands of the sea’.3 Like Augustine, Bede clarified the biblical text to show that the dispersal of peoples throughout the world and the confusion of their single speech into the disharmony of many languages was a divine judgment passed on human pride after the building of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.7–9).4 To describe the place of the Gentiles in providential salvation history patristic commentators used a chain of texts, particularly from the psalms and the prophets, freely adapting the tenses used by the biblical authors. Gentiles were particularly associated with islands and with the ends of the earth, far from the temple in Jerusalem, which represented the place of God’s presence with his people. The psalmist characterised Gentiles as being enslaved to idols which ‘have mouths and speak not: they have eyes and see not. They have ears and hear not’.5 Manmade idols were shown to be powerless to help those who served them, in contrast to the God of Israel, the maker of all things, who delivered his people from the yoke of slavery in Egypt.6 All the works of creation, the heavens themselves, were seen to proclaim his divine power: ‘there are no speeches or languages where their voices are not heard [. . .] Their sound has gone forth into all the earth and their words unto the ends of the world’ (Psalm 18.4–5). The prophets foretold that distant peoples would

2 Jerome, Comm. in Hiezechielem, CCSL 75, p. 56, lines 69–80. Adomnán used Jerome’s interpretation of Psalm 73.12 in describing the centrality of Jerusalem, the place of the passion and resurrection; a column erected there cast no shadow at the summer solstice: D. Meehan (ed. and tr.), Adamnán’s De locis sanctis I.11, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 3, Dublin, 1958, p. 56. Bede, in his own version of Adomnán’s work, cited Psalm 73.12 and the detail of the column, adding the testimony of Victorinus of Poitiers, ‘There is a place that we believe to be the centre of the whole world’: W. Trent Foley and A. Holder (tr.), Bede: a biblical miscellany, Liverpool University Press, 1999, p. 10. 3 Bede, De templo II.19.3, CCSL 119A, p. 208. Isidore, Etymologiae 9.2.37: ‘Haec sunt gentes de stirpe Iaphet, quae a Tauro monte ad aquilonem mediam partem Asiae et omnem Europam usque ad Oceanum Brittanicum possident’, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos 433, p. 746; Etymologiae 14.6.2–6, BAC 434, p. 192. 4 R. Green (ed.), Augustine, De doctrina christiana, Oxford University Press, 1995, II.8–9, 3126–28, pp. 61, 189–91; Augustine, De civitate Dei XVI.3–4, CCSL 48, pp. 503–04; Bede, Expositio Apocalypseos, Praefatio, CCSL 121A, p. 229; Bede, In Principium Genesim, III, CCSL 118A, pp. 143, 155–56. 5 Psalm 113B.4–8; Psalm 134.15–18; cf. 95.5; 97.1, 7; Isaiah 40.12–26, 44.9–25. 6 Isaiah 40.12–26; 44.9–25.

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also hear of God’s glory through his appointed messengers, ‘Listen, O isles, unto me and hearken ye people from afar, the Lord has called me from the womb. [. . .] And he said, I will give you as a light to the gentiles that you may bring salvation unto the end of the earth (usque ad extremum terrae)’.7 The psalmist prophesied that the God of Israel, worshipped in Jerusalem, would be recognised by Gentiles throughout ‘the multitude of isles’ (Psalm 96.1); his dominion would extend from East to West: ‘from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth [. . .] before him the Ethiopians shall fall down [. . .] the islands of the sea will bear him [120] gifts [. . .] all peoples shall serve him’ (Psalm 71.8–11).8 The key texts in this exegetical chain were repeatedly expounded by patristic commentators in amplifying the New Testament view that such prophecies were fulfilled at the Incarnation and in the apostles’ work of taking the Gospel of salvation from Jerusalem, the site of the Resurrection, to Gentiles as well as Jews, in obedience to Christ’s explicit final command that his disciples should teach and baptise omnes gentes and bear witness to him ‘even to the uttermost part of the earth’ (Matthew 28.19–20; Acts 1.8).9 St Paul applied Isaiah 49.6 and Psalm 18.5 to the apostolic mission (Acts 13.47, Romans 10.18) and in this was followed by patristic commentators.10 Gildas, like other Insular writers, duly noted that, ‘as the psalmist said of the apostles, “Their sound went out into every land”’ (Psalm 18.5).11 Orthodox teachers were seen to share in the apostolic mission. Accordingly, St Patrick had presented his own mission to the Irish at ‘the uttermost ends of the earth’, beyond the limits of the Roman empire, as being in obedience to Christ’s command (Matthew 28.19–20) and as a fulfillment of the prophecy that the Gospel would be announced to all peoples before the world’s end (Matthew 24.14): ‘Behold, we are the witnesses that the Gospel has been preached to the limit beyond which no-one dwells’. Patrick quoted God’s promises to his chosen people, as attested by the prophet Hosea and re-used by St Paul, and directly

7 Isaiah 49.1–12; cf. Isaiah 11.10–12; 42.6, 10; 66.19; Psalm 2.8. 8 G. Henderson, ‘Bede and the visual arts’, Jarrow Lecture, 1980, pp. 9–12, on Bede and the imagery of ethnic stereotypes in the panegyrics and the psalms. For patristic exegesis of Psalm 71, see T. Mommsen, ‘Aponius and Orosius on the significance of the Epiphany’ in K. Weitzmann (ed.), Late classical and medieval studies in honour of A.M. Friend, Princeton, 1955, pp. 97–104. 9 Augustine, Ep. 185, 3–5; Ep. 199, 45–50, CSEL 57, pp. 3, 4, 282–88. 10 Eusebius, HE II.3; III.8, G. Williamson (tr.), Eusebius, The history of the Church from Christ to Constantine, rev. ed. London, 1989, pp. 39, 77; W.J. Farrar (tr.), The proof of the Gospel. The Demonstratio Evangelica of Eusebius of Caesarea, London, 1930, 3.5, p. 112; Jerome, Ep. 58.3, J. Labourt, Jérôme, Lettres, Paris, 1953, 3, p. 76; Augustine, Ep. 199. 50, CSEL 57, p. 288; Leo the Great, Ep. 10.1, P.L. 54, 629, W. J. Farrar (tr.), The proof of the Gospel, being the Demonstratio Evangelica of Eusebius of Caesarea, London and New York, S.P.C.K. and Macmillan, 1920, pp. 129–30, 152–57. 11 Gildas, De excidio, 70; M. Winterbottom, Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and other works, Chichester, Philimore, 1978, pp. 56, 121.

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applied them to those in Ireland who had always worshipped idols but ‘have lately been made a people of the Lord ( plebs Domini)’ and ‘sons of the living God’.12 Patristic commentators were well aware that Christianity had reached the islands of Ocean, the Britanniae.13 Jerome saw Britain, ‘a place apart’, as the western extremity of the universal faith first established in Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts 2.1–11), reversing the divisive confusion of tongues at Babel and harmoniously joining peoples of different languages – Hebrew, Greek, Latin and [121] even savage barbarian tongues. He eloquently linked the biblical image of distant islands with the classical tradition concerning the western islands in the Ocean but showed, as Bede was to do, that their incorporation into the universal Church transformed the remoteness of their geographical location: ‘Access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem, for “the kingdom of God is within you”’.14 Augustine noted that the mission begun by the apostles was prophetic and continuing and that God’s promise of salvation would be taken to all peoples before the Second Coming. For patristic commentators the psalmist’s prophecy ‘he shall have dominion from sea to sea’ (Psalm 71.8) evoked the classical idea that ‘the land is encircled by a great sea which is called the Ocean’.15 Augustine explained that Scripture’s frequent mention that all the islands of the Gentiles would one day worship God meant that: no part of the earth is excluded from having the Church, since none of the islands is left out, some of which are found in the Ocean [. . .] Thus, in some single islands there is a fulfillment of the prophecy: ‘He shall rule from sea to sea’ (Psalm 71.8): the sea by which every single island is surrounded, as is the case of the whole world which is, in a sense, the greatest island of all because the Ocean girds it about. It is to some of its shores in the West that we know the Church has come, and whatever shores it has not yet reached it will eventually reach.16

12 Romans 9.25–26, quoting Hosea 2.23; 2.1; cf. 1 Peter 2.10; Jeremiah 16.19. Patrick, Confessio, 34, 38, 40, 41, D. Conneely, The letters of St Patrick, Maynooth, An Sagart, 1993, pp. 40–43, 70–72. 13 A. Haddan and W. Stubbs (ed.), Councils and ecclesiastical documents relative to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. Oxford, 1867–78, I, 3–26 for patristic references; H. Williams, Christianity in Early Britain, Oxford, 1912, pp. 96–100; C. W. Jones, ‘Some introductory remarks on Bede’s Commentary on Genesis’, Sacris Erudiri 19, 1969, p. 121. 14 Jerome, Ep 46.10 (cf. Virgil, Eclogues I.67); Ep. 58.3; 60.4, Labourt, Lettres, 2, pp. 110; 3, pp. 77, 93; Jerome, In Esaiam 4.11, CCSL 73, pp. 154–55; Tractatus de Psalmos, Psalm 95: 10, CCSL 78. Cf. Eusebius, Vita Constantini III.19; Demonstratio Evangelica 3.5–7, W.J. Farrar (tr.), op. cit. 15 Augustine, Ep. 199.47, p. 285; Enarrationes in psalmos, Psalm 71.8, CCSL 39, pp. 979–80; Cassiodorus, Expositio in psalmorum, Psalm 71.8, CCSL 98, pp. 652–53. 16 Ep. 199. 47, W. Parsons (tr.), Saint Augustine. Letters 4, pp. 394–95.

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Though he was aware that in Africa and elsewhere there were still ‘innumerable barbarian tribes among whom the Gospel has not yet been preached’, Augustine knew that the Church already possessed regions beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire.17 Like some earlier patristic writers, including Origen and Tertullian, he stressed the limitations of the nature and extent of Roman power compared with that of Christ’s dominion. Just as Paul taught that salvation was for Gentiles as well as Jews (Galatians 3.28, 29), the fathers showed that the spiritual seed of Abraham included all peoples, barbarians as well as Romans. The crucial link between Jerusalem and Rome was the missionary activity of Peter and Paul, beginning in Jerusalem and culminating in Rome with their martyrdom. Their story, detailed by Irenaeus, elaborated by Eusebius and translated by Rufinus, c. 402–03, told how Peter, having received the foundational commission from Christ (Matthew 16.18, 19), was providentially brought to Rome, bearing ‘spiritual light from the East to those in the West’.18 Similarly, Jerome described Paul as coming to Rome, ‘so that Christ’s Gospel might also be preached in the [122] West’.19 Such ideas were familiar before the writings of Prosper of Aquitaine and Leo the Great in the 440s, promoting the concept of a new centre of the world. Drawing on the traditions of the centrality of imperial Rome and of Judeo-Christian Jerusalem, there developed a third tradition, that of papal Rome. Rome was seen as having been re-founded from Jerusalem as the see of Peter, sanctified by the blood of the two princes of the apostles and by the presence of their tombs and relics and those of other martyrs.20 Rome became revered as the centre of Christ’s spiritual realm on earth, a visible image of the heavenly Jerusalem: ‘Rome has become greater as the citadel of religion by her principatus of the apostolic priesthood than it ever was as the seat of power’.21 Papal Rome’s influence extended to peoples beyond the imperial Roman frontier: Bede cited Prosper’s report that Palladius had been

17 Augustine, Ep. 199.45–50 to Hesychias, Epistolae, CSEL 57, pp. 282–88, W. Parsons (tr.), Saint Augustine. Letters, Fathers of the Church, New York, 1955, 4, pp. 392–98; cf. Ep. 119. 47; Enarrationes in psalmos, Psalm 95.2, CCSL 39, p. 471. 18 G. Williamson (tr.), Eusebius, The history of the Church, II.14, p. 49; cf. II. 22, 25; III.1–4. 19 Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum on Acts 28.31, CCSL 121, p. 99, quotes Jerome, De viris illustribus, 5. 20 Leo, sermon on the feast of Peter and Paul, 441, Tractatus 82, CCSL 138A, pp. 508–18, tr. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 12, pp. 194–96. Peter and Paul were ‘equal in the election, alike in their toils, undivided in their death’, p. 517. 21 Prosper, De uocatione omnium gentium, II.16–17, PL 51.703–04, P. De Letter (tr.), The call of all nations, Ancient Christian Writers 14, 1952; Leo, Tr. 82. 1, 3: Rome ‘through St Peter’s see established here, the head of the world (caput orbis), ruling more widely now by means of divine religion than it ever did by worldly dominion’; ‘the most blessed Peter, chief of the Apostolic band, was appointed to the citadel of the Roman Empire’. See R. Markus, ‘Chronicle and theology: Prosper of Aquitaine’ in C. Holdsworth and T.P. Wiseman (ed.), The inheritance of historiography 350–900, Exeter, 1986, pp. 31–43 at pp. 38–39; T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Palladius, Prosper, and Leo the Great: mission and primatial authority’ in D. Dumville (ed.), Saint Patrick, A.D. 493– 1993, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 1993, pp. 1–12; ID, Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 202–14.

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sent by Pope Celestine ‘to the Irish believers in Christ to be their first bishop’.22 In De templo he presented Pope Gregory’s mission to the Germanic peoples settled in post-Roman Britain as a continuation of the apostolic mission.23 The classical and biblical association of islands with the ends of the earth, whose conquest symbolised universal dominion, was to take on a new significance for the papacy in its relations with the northern islands of Ocean. Even more strikingly, the recognition of Rome as caput mundi, representing the unity of the faith first preached by the apostles in Jerusalem, was vigorously made by Christian writers from different regions within the remote Ocean archipelago who wished, at various stages of the Easter controversy, to demonstrate their orthodoxy and full membership of the universal Church. Well over a century before Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, for example, Columbanus had appropriated the rhetoric of the fathers and of the Leonine papacy to furnish his credentials in a letter to Pope Boniface IV in 613. He claimed that ‘all we Irish, inhabitants of the world’s edge, are disciples of saints Peter and Paul [. . .] we accept nothing outside [123] the evangelical and apostolic teaching [. . .] the catholic faith, as it was delivered by you first, who are the successors of the holy apostles, is maintained unbroken’.24 The image of imperial Rome was transformed in his acclamation of the city as ‘nobler and more famed’ through its identification with the chair of Peter. He asserted that Christ’s worldwide dominion had been established, ‘as far as the western regions of earth’s farther strand’, through the apostolic preaching of the Gospel, led by Peter and Paul, whom turbulent seas could not withstand and to whom the psalmist’s words concerning the heavens applied: ‘Their voice is gone out into every land and their words to the ends of the earth’ (Psalm 18.2). He recognised Rome as ‘the head of the churches of the world, saving the special privilege of [Jerusalem] the place of the Lord’s resurrection’.25

Bede’s use of papal exegesis on islands and idols The exegetical tradition on islands and the ends of the earth outlined here appears in several papal writings which Bede directly quotes in his Historia Ecclesiastica. In the Moralia, Gregory the Great had interpreted Job 36.29–30, ‘he will spread 22 B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (ed. and tr.), Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969, repr. 1991, I.13, hereafter cited by book and chapter in parenthesis in the text. PROSPER, Epitoma Chronicon, MGH, AA 9, 473; Contra Collatorem, 21, PL 51.271. 23 De templo II.20.7. 24 Roma orbis terrarum caput est ecclesiarum: G.S.M. Walker (ed. and tr.), Sancti Columbani Opera, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, Dublin, 1957, Ep. 5.3, p. 39; Ep. 5.11, p. 48. D. Bracken, ‘Authority and duty: Columbanus and the primacy of Rome’, Peritia, 16, 2002, pp. 168–213 at 172–98; J. O’Reilly, ‘The art of authority’ in T.M. Charles-Edwards (ed.), After Rome. Short Oxford history of the British Isles, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 141–89, discusses the topos and Insular art. 25 Columbanus, Ep. 5.11, pp. 48–49.

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out clouds as his tent [. . .] he will cover also the ends of the sea’, as a prophecy that the Lord would send out holy preachers to ‘convert to divine love even the farthest boundaries of the world’. Gregory saw the prophecy fulfilled in the conversion of Britain, by which God had ‘joined together in one faith the boundaries of the East and the West’. His panegyric, lauding the peaceful spiritual conquest of ‘proud Ocean’ and its fierce barbarian people, whom earthly military might had never entirely subdued, probably referred to the Roman Britons. It is quoted by Bede and applied to the subsequent conversion of another barbarian people in Britain: ‘In these words St Gregory also declares that St Augustine and his companions led the English race (gentem Anglorum) to the knowledge of the truth’ (HE 2.1).26 Pope Gregory, the successor of St Peter, is also cast by Bede in the tradition of St Paul. Gregory combined the charisms of Peter and Paul, the preachers to the Jews and Gentiles respectively, who share a liturgical feastday and are several times paired in the Historia Ecclesiastica, as in the twin dedications at Canterbury and Wearmouth-Jarrow. He remained in Rome but sent out the mission and [124] sustained it, thereby ministering to those near and far off.27 King Aethelbert of Kent ‘attained to the knowledge of heavenly glory by Gregory’s own labour and industry’ (1.32). Gregory’s successors saw themselves as continuing in his tradition. Pope Honorius was to recommend that king Edwin should be frequently employed with readings ‘from the works of Gregory, your apostle and my lord’ and that the metropolitan of Canterbury in preaching the Gospel should follow the rule of Gregory, his master and head (2.17, 18). Gregory was again linked with Paul in the Epistolam ad Ecgbertum, where Bede repeated the customary patristic recommendation that those in spiritual authority should read St Paul’s epistles to Timothy and Titus, but added, ‘also the words of the most holy pope Gregory’, notably his Pastoral Rule and Gospel homilies.28 An earlier Insular account of Anglo-Saxon conversion, the Whitby Life of Gregory, had already made extensive use of Gregory’s writings and had likened him to the apostles in his role as teacher of the English.29 Bede further integrated Gregory’s teachings into the narrative of conversion and inserted the Libellus Responsionum (1.27) and some of Gregory’s letters dealing with the English mission at 26 Gregory, Moralia in Iob, 27, 11.21 (CCSL, 143B, p. 1346). Some scholars regard the passage as a later addition by Gregory, referring to his own recent mission to the Anglo-Saxons rather than to the conversion of the Roman Britons. However, the Moralia passage recalls details of the Britons in Constantius’s Life of Germanus, quoted by Bede, HE 1.17–21, as noted by C. Stancliffe, ‘The British church and the mission of St Augustine’ in R. Gameson (ed.), St Augustine and the conversion of England, Stroud, 1999, pp. 107–51 at 112. 27 De templo II.20.7 (CCSL 119A, p. 218). The Whitby Life of Gregory, 6, notes that Gregory ‘was absent in the body yet present in the spirit’ (1 Corinthians 5.3). 28 Epistolam ad Ecgbertum, 3, C. Plummer (ed.), Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, vol. 1, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1896, p. 406. 29 B. Colgrave (ed. and tr.), The earliest Life of Gregory the Great, 6, University of Cambridge Press, 1985.

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appropriate points in the chronology. Moreover, he explicitly marked the parallel with Paul’s mission to the idol-worshipping Gentiles, noting that Gregory ‘made our nation, till then enslaved to idols, into a Church of Christ’, and echoed the words of Paul’s own converts (1 Corinthians 9.2) to acclaim Gregory as ‘our apostle’.30 Like St Paul’s epistles to newly founded churches and to fellow Evangelists, the letters of Gregory and his papal successors which Bede includes in his History contain not only instructions and exhortations to kings and preachers on practical and moral issues, but statements of belief and a whole pastoral theology of conversion. The inclusion of the papal letters has a function beyond that of filling the blanks in Bede’s knowledge of events and satisfying the historian’s desire for dating and documentation. The letters form a more specific, coherent group of documents than those reproduced by Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica. The papal letters demonstrate the importance of Rome in preserving the faith of the apostles and taking it to all the world. They lay down authoritative teaching relevant to establishing and building up the Church, much of which is enacted in Bede’s historical account of events. The following examples also provide a view of providential history which helps unite Bede’s account of particular and local experiences with those of the people of God in other times and places. They supply biblical prophecies and patristic exegesis concerning islands and the ends of the earth which are literally and spiritually fulfilled in Bede’s description of the history of the north-westerly islands of Ocean. [125] Pope Boniface V, for example, sent the pallium to Justus of Canterbury, and authorised the consecration of more bishops to assist in preaching the Gospel among all those peoples not yet converted. His accompanying letter, quoted by Bede, provides the rationale (2.8). He cites Christ’s promise to be with his disciples who carry out his commandment to teach and baptise all peoples (Matthew 28.20) and assures Justus that the promise is especially fulfilled in his ministry in Britain. The papal mission is clearly placed in the apostolic tradition and interpreted as part of the universal mission, prophesied long ago, by which ‘all nations will confess having received the mystery of the Christian faith and will declare in truth that “their sound is gone out into all the earth, and their words unto the end of the world”’ (Psalm 18.5; Romans 10.18). Boniface’s letter to King Edwin of Northumbria, urging him to turn from the worship of idols and be freed from devilish bondage, is based not on knowledge of the practices of Anglo-Saxon paganism but on direct quotations from the chain of Old Testament texts concerning the practices of Gentiles, whose association with islands at the ends of the earth made them a particularly suitable image of the Angli (2.10). In the language of the psalms Boniface witnesses to the power of the divine Creator – ‘All the gods of the gentiles are devils; but the Lord made the heavens’ (Psalm 95.5) – and to the impotence of man-made idols: ‘Eyes have they but see not; they have ears but hear not [. . .] and those who put their trust in

30 HE 2.1, quoting Acts 26.18 and 1 Corinthians 9.2.

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them therefore become like them’ (Psalm 113.5–8).31 Paraphrasing Isaiah 44, the Pope notes that idols of inanimate human form are made of perishable materials by human hands; in contrast, the divine Creator of all things makes man in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1.26) and is adored throughout his creation, ‘from the rising to the setting sun’ (Malachi 1.1). A third example, Pope Vitalian’s letter to King Oswiu (3.29), rejoices in the king’s own conversion and especially his work in bringing his people to ‘the true and apostolic faith’, which the Pope interprets as the fulfillment of a whole chain of prophecies, ‘For your race has believed in Christ who is God Almighty, as it is written in Isaiah, “In that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand as a sign for the peoples: him the gentiles shall seek”’ (Isaiah 11.10). In the following verse, Isaiah’s naming of the lands of the Gentiles who will seek the Lord includes ‘the islands of the sea’.32 Vitalian’s letter goes on to apply Isaiah 49.1 to Oswiu’s people: ‘Listen, O isles, unto me, and hearken ye people from afar’ and, like St Paul in his justification of taking the Gospel to the Gentiles, he quotes God’s command from Isaiah 49.6, ‘I have given thee for a light to the gentiles that thou may be my salvation unto the [126] end of the earth’, as well as its succeeding verses (cf. Acts 13.47). Vitalian quotes Isaiah 42.6–7, again describing the light to the Gentiles which will release those imprisoned in darkness, referring to the spiritual blindness of those who worship unseeing idols. The quoted text is framed in Isaiah by references to the islands which ‘wait for his law’ and are summoned to join his universal praise: ‘his praise is from the ends of the earth. You that go down to the sea [. . .] you islands, and you inhabitants of them’. The Pope uses this exegetical chain to refer not simply to the primary evangelisation of the Northumbrians from paganism, but to their more recent ‘conversion’ to a fuller expression of ‘the true and apostolic faith’ in their acceptance of the Roman Easter dating at the synod of Whitby, summoned by Oswiu in 664. Vitalian exhorts the king: ‘as a member of Christ, always follow the holy rule of the chief of the apostles in all things, both in the celebration of Easter and in everything delivered by the holy apostles, Peter and Paul, who, like two heavenly lights, illuminate the world’. A section of the letter not quoted by Bede contained further remarks ‘about celebrating the true Easter uniformly throughout the whole world’. Referring to his citation of scriptural prophecies Vitalian concludes, ‘Most excellent son, as you see, it is clearer than day that it is here foretold that not only you but also all peoples will believe in Christ the Maker of all things’. He urges Oswiu to hasten to dedicate the whole island, ‘to gather together a new people for 31 Cf. Acts 17.24–29 and Psalm 134.15–18. 32 In an Easter homily, Bede too followed patristic exegesis in reading Isaiah 11.10 as a prophecy of universal salvation and gave it a local application, saying that the Lord ‘has not summoned the Jews alone, but us too, who are able to cry out to him from the ends of the earth’: Homiliae Evangelii, CCSL 122, Hom.II.10, p. 252, L. Martin and D. Hurst (tr.), Bede. Homilies on the Gospels, 2 vols., Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1991, 2, p. 96.

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Christ and establish among them the catholic and apostolic faith’, and he prophesies that all the islands will be made subject to God. The letter suggests a strong connection between exegesis and action. The Pope refers to his current search for a suitable candidate for the vacancy at Canterbury: ‘we will send him to your land with full instructions so that he may [. . .] entirely root out, with God’s blessing, the tares sown by the enemy throughout your island’. The letter, acknowledging gifts sent by Oswiu ‘to the blessed chief of the apostles’, was accompanied by papal gifts of relics of St Peter and St Paul and other Roman saints. In 716, the same year in which the narrative of the Historia Ecclesiastica ends with the final acceptance of the Roman Easter by the Columban monks on the island of Iona (5.22), the abbot and members of Bede’s community of St Peter and St Paul set off on pilgrimage to Rome bearing the Codex Amiatinus, a great Vulgate bible made in Wearmouth-Jarrow to the highest specifications of Romanitas; it was dedicated as a gift to St Peter, ‘whom ancient faith declares to be head of the Church’, from Ceolfridus, Anglorum extremis de finibus abbas.33 The Old Testament part of the Codex Amiatinus has a single liturgical lection marked at [127] the passage beginning: Audite insulae et adtendite populi de longe (Isaiah 49.1).34

The peoples of Britain and ‘the multitude of isles’ In addition to including papal letters which clearly make use of exegetical traditions on the ends of the earth and specifically apply them to the islands of Ocean, Bede also deploys classical, patristic and papal elements of the composite topos in the different register of his own historical narrative. The book is described as Historiam gentis Anglorum ecclesiasticam in the opening lines of the Preface, but encompasses much more than this might seem to imply. Bede identifies the three Germanic tribes – Saxons, Angles and Jutes – who settled in Britain, and the various warring Anglo-Saxon peoples descended from them (1.15) who, through their conversion, received a new identity. As is well known, Bede, following Pope Gregory, refers to these peoples collectively as Angli  35 and records the tradition that Gregory had described the Angli as

33 Historia abbatum auctore anonymo, 37, C. Plummer (ed.), Baedae opera historica, I, p. 402. On the Romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus and the parallels of its conception and illustrations with Bede’s exegesis, especially In Esram et Neemiam, see J. O’Reilly, ‘The library of Scripture: views from Vivarium and Wearmouth-Jarrow’, P. Binski and W. Noel (ed.), New offerings, ancient treasures. Studies in medieval art for George Henderson, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2001, pp. 3–39. In HE 5.7 Bede records the epitaph in St Peter’s, Rome, of Caedwalla, another pilgrim who had come from Britain, ‘earth’s remotest end’, bearing gifts for the shrine of St Peter. 34 Noted by R. Marsden, The text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 189. 35 M. Richter, ‘Bede’s Angli: Angles or English?’ Peritia, 3, 1984, pp. 99–114; P. Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the origins of the Gens Anglorum’ in P. Wormald, D. Bullough, R. Collins (ed.), Ideal and reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society. Studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 99–129; N. Brooks, ‘Bede and

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‘fellow-heirs of the angeli in heaven’ (2.1). But the Angli are not themselves the new chosen people. Rather, they are the latest addition to the people of God, the universal Church, which in the Old Testament was prefigured by the chosen people of one particular race and land. Although the barbarian peoples living in Britain are literally Gentiles to whom, in their unconverted state, the biblical image of idol-worshippers on islands at the ends of the earth readily applies, Bede’s account of their conversion also draws on the history of God’s providential revelation to all his chosen people, both of the Old Covenant and the New. The book charts the stages in a particular people’s history, but the account of their movement from idol-worship to baptism, and from a carnal understanding of the faith to a deeper level of belief and a fuller participation in the sacramental life of the universal Church, also operates as an image of the continuing conversion and re-conversion that is the spiritual life. In the Historia Ecclesiastica Bede provides a documented historical account of the most recent stages of the Church’s universal mission. He also brings to life in narrative form ideas about the spiritual growth of the Church which preoccupy his commentaries on the biblical accounts of the divine commands for the building of the tabernacle in the desert and the temple in Jerusalem and for the re-building of the temple after the Babylonian Captivity.36 In these exegetical works Bede deploys the full rhetorical range of biblical architectural metaphors [128] to reveal the ways in which Christ, his Church, the individual soul and heaven itself may be seen as the new temple of God. In the account of the building up of the Church among the Angli there are a number of the themes from his temple exegesis but very few traces of its architectural metaphor.37 He uses instead the extended image of the islands at the ends of the earth which is far more appropriate to the physical location and historical reality he describes. Brittania Oceani insula: so begins Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and his masterly re-working in Book 1 of classical and patristic materials concerning the island’s historical geography and the use made of those traditions by Gildas.38 Bede here refers to his work as ‘this account of the history of the Church of Britain, and of the English people in particular’ (haec de historia Brittaniarum, et maxime gentis Anglorum) and later as ‘the history of the Church of our island and race’ (historiam ecclesiasticam nostrae insulae ac gentis) (5.24). The Angli, and

the English’, Jarrow Lecture 1999; G. Tugène, L’image de la nation anglaise dans l’Histoire Ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001, pp. 86–88. 36 D. Hurst (ed.), De tabernaculo, De templo, In Esram et Neemiam, CCSL 119A. Translations quoted here are from A.G. Holder (tr.), Bede: On the tabernacle, Liverpool University Press, 1994 and S. Connolly (tr.), Bede. On the temple, Liverpool University Press, 1995. 37 J. O’Reilly, Introduction to S. Connolly (tr.), Bede. On the temple, pp. xvii–lv; H. MayrHarting, ‘The Venerable Bede, the Rule of St Benedict and social class’, Jarrow Lecture, 1976, p. 13. 38 D. Scully, The Atlantic archipelago from antiquity to Bede: the transformation of an image, unpublished doctoral thesis, University College Cork, 2000.

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particularly the Northumbrians, are presented both as one regional member of the universal Church and as a microcosm of the Church and its history, recapitulating features of the early Church founded by the apostles and eventually maturing in knowledge and service of God to participate in the continuation of the apostolic task of preaching the Gospel to all peoples. Their relationship with other peoples on the island of Britain and Britain’s location among other islands are therefore essential parts of their story. The book is concerned with the whole island and devotes the first fourteen chapters to the history of Britain, including the arrival of the Britons, Irish and Picts, before the coming of the Germanic peoples, and a further eight chapters to the history of the Britons before the arrival of the Gregorian mission to the Angli. Unlike Gildas’s De excidio Britonum, the Historia Ecclesiastica is also concerned with the surrounding small islands and gives prominence to the Irish who, like the Angli, had never been part of the Roman Empire. The opening chapter describes Ireland, ‘the largest island of all next to Britain’, not as the haunt of savages as in most classical accounts, but in terms of a spiritual landscape, a metaphor of the heavenly paradisal life anticipated in the spiritually fruitful earthly life of many of the Irish described in the book.39 Bede’s interest in the entire group of islands in Ocean finds a focus in the four peoples who, over time, had come to inhabit the island of Britain and who, through conversion, are connected with the Roman world. From the perspective of c. 731 Bede reflected: [129] At the present time, like the number of books in which the divine law was written, one and the same knowledge of supreme truth and true sublimity is sought and confessed in the languages of five gentes, namely of the Angli, Britons, Scots, Picts and Latins, which [i.e. the last of which] has become common to all the others [i.e. to all the other peoples] through meditation on the Scriptures. (1.1)40 This compressed passage receives some illumination from Bede’s exegesis. In De tabernaculo the number five occurs several times in the measurements of the tabernacle and the enumeration of its furnishings, and is repeatedly expounded to evoke the five books of the divine law. Spiritually interpreted, they all may be seen to contain the Gospel: ‘the same perpetual brightness and bright perpetuity’ of the heavenly homeland is contained ‘in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy’. The literal letter of the five books of the Mosaic law ‘educated 39 C.B. Kendall, ‘Imitation and the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, M.H. King and W.M. Stevens (eds.), Saints, scholars and heroes, Collegeville 1979, pp. 161–90 at 81–82; J. O’Reilly, ‘Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba’, C. Bourke (ed.), Studies in the cult of St Columba, Dublin, 1997, pp. 80–106 at 95–97. 40 The translation offered here differs from that of Colgrave and Mynors, p. 17.

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the former people of God in faith and good works, but when spiritually understood [. . .] in the time of the new covenant, the same letter instructs us in faith and works of virtue also in the present and incites us to the hope of eternal reward in the future’.41 The divine wisdom made known through Moses and the law is, by grace, made known through the Gospel to all the races contained in the four parts of the world.42 By extension, five is ‘a type of the ancient people of God who fulfilled the decrees of the law according to the letter’, but it also designates ‘those of us born after the coming of the Lord in the flesh, who keep the books and sacraments of the law spiritually’; all the faithful in both testaments believed in one and the same God and served him with works of one and the same piety and charity. In De tabernaculo Bede demonstrates how, ‘in the precepts of the law, Moses shows us the pattern of the angelic life’.43 Jerome’s Epistle 53, well known to Bede, surveys all the books of the Bible to show that Christ, the divine Wisdom, is concealed beneath the literal letter. In the Codex Amiatinus an entire page is devoted to a diagram of the Pentateuch: five circles, each containing the name of one of the five books of the divine law and Jerome’s brief exposition of it, are interlinked and arranged in the form of a cross to demonstrate that ‘the law of the Gospel’ is revealed through the spiritual interpretation of the five books.44 In De templo the number five is again featured in the measurements of architectural details, including the two golden cherubim placed above the Ark of the Covenant, prompting Bede to observe that human beings are called to be fellow citizens of heaven with the angels, who ‘keep with untiring devotion the divine law which is written in five books, that is, by loving the Lord their God with all their strength and by loving their neighbours as themselves. For love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Romans 13.10).45 The summary of the Mosaic law as love of God and neighbour is common to the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 6.5) and the Gospel (Matthew 22.37–39) and is frequently invoked in Bede’s scriptural [130] exegesis; it is the golden rule exemplified in Aidan (3.25) and articulated in the description of St Cuthbert, who knew ‘that he who said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”, also said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour”’ (4.28). In his reference to the five books of the divine law in the opening chapter of the Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede abandoned the architectural metaphor of his biblical commentaries on the tabernacle and temple, but drew on their exegetical and numerological tradition in order to describe the truth and constancy of divine revelation to the chosen people of the Old Covenant and the New, continuing into the post-biblical present. In a homily on Pentecost, Bede noted that the observance of the law was given to only one nation, that of the Jews, while the word of the Gospel was to be 41 42 43 44 45

De tabernaculo II.7, p. 68 (tr. Holder, pp. 75–76). De tabernaculo I.2, p. 10 (tr. Holder, p. 7). De tabernaculo II.2, p. 48 (tr. Holder, p. 52). O’Reilly, ‘The library of Scripture’, pp. 9–11, fig 5. De templo I.13.2, p. 179, (tr. Connolly, p. 48).

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proclaimed to all nations throughout the world and confessions of the Christian faith were to be made in the languages of all peoples.46 In his Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, Bede describes the descent of the Holy Spirit in tongues at Pentecost (Acts 2.4) as indicating that the Church, ‘when it had spread to the ends of the earth, was to speak in the languages of all nations’, recovering in humility ‘the unity of languages which the pride of Babel had shattered’. He relates the variety of languages spoken at Pentecost to the Holy Spirit’s original gift of languages to human beings, by which human knowledge is taught and known outwardly, as a sign that the variety of graces given by the Holy Spirit can also make men inwardly wise, through the wisdom of God.47 In the Historia Ecclesiastica, the linking of the five books of the divine law with the five languages of the gentes suggests that the four Insular barbarian peoples share access not simply to knowledge of the language of the Latins through the literal text of Scripture, but to the knowledge of ‘supreme truth and true sublimity’ found in the divine law through meditation on the Scriptures (meditatione scripturarum). Already in the opening chapter Bede has sounded the theme of the calling of all the diverse people of God and the ideal of their unity. His ensuing account, in five books, of how the gentes at the world’s edge received the unifying language of Scripture, is resonant with patristic themes of the Church’s apostolic mission to all peoples, their diversity signified by their variety of languages.48 He depicts the Christian Northumbrian king Oswald as ruling a whole world: ‘he held under his sway all the peoples and kingdoms of Britain, divided among the speakers of four different languages, [131] British, Pictish, Irish and English’ (3.6). From early on in the Gregorian mission it is clear that papal interests in the islands of Ocean – like Bede’s – were not confined to the Angli. Augustine of Canterbury, whom Bede describes as Brittaniarum archiepiscopus (2.3), was given charge over ‘all the bishops of Britain’ by Pope Gregory (1.27, 29). Augustine’s successor Laurentius and his two fellow Roman bishops, Mellitus and Justus, wrote to the bishops and abbots ‘throughout the whole realm of Ireland’, recalling the authoritative papal initiative in the mission to the pagans: ‘The apostolic see, according to its custom in uniuerso orbe terrarum, directed us to preach to the heathen in these western regions, and it was our lot to come to this island of 46 Homiliae evangelii II.17 p. 307; L. Martin and D. Hurst (tr.), Bede the Venerable. Homilies on the gospels, 2 vols, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Studies, 1991, 2, pp. 172–73. 47 Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, CCSL 121, p. 16–17, L.T. Martin (tr.), The Venerable Bede, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, Cistercian Studies, Kalamazoo, 1989, pp. 29, 38 n. 5. The idea is elaborated in Bede’s later Retractiones, (CCSL 121, p. 126) to describe the unity of the multitude of believers of many languages at Pentecost who served the Lord with ‘but one heart and soul’ (Acts 4.32). Cf. Gregory, Homiliae in Evangelia, 30 (CCSL 141, pp. 259–60). 48 The HE frequently refers to languages, interpreters and translation, e.g. Augustine arrives with Frankish interpreters (1.25), Oswald interprets for Aidan (3.3), Wilfrid and Cedd interpret at the synod of Whitby (3.25), Theodore and Hadrian teach Greek as well as Latin (4.2), Caedmon versifies the Latin scriptures in the vernacular (4.24), John of Hexham heals a dumb man and teaches him the rudiments of English speech (5.2), Ceolfrith’s letter to Nechtan is translated (5.21).

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Britain’ (2.4). But Bede makes clear that Laurentius also aimed to ‘bestow his pastoral care upon the older inhabitants of Britain as well as upon the Irish who live in Ireland, which is an island close to Britain’, and that this was connected with the realisation that their life and profession ‘was not in accordance with church practice in many things’, notably in the dating of Easter. Laurentius wrote urging Irish ecclesiastics ‘to keep the unity of peace and of catholic observance with the Church of Christ which is scattered over the whole world’. He also sent a letter, ‘of a sort befitting his rank’, to British ecclesiastics, ‘striving to bring them into catholic unity’ (2.4). Bede summarises Pope Honorius’s letter to the gens Scottorum, whom he describes as living in extremis terrae finibus, and quotes part of the letter sent by Pope-elect John IV to Irish bishops, teachers and abbots, both letters again attempting to establish unity in the dating of Easter (2.19). It has recently been suggested that, following Columban resistance to ‘conversion’ to the Roman Easter at the synod of Whitby, Vitalian’s letter to Oswiu (3.29) may indicate their joint desire to bring, ‘not just Britain, but “islands” into the orthodox fold via Northumbrian hegemony’.49 The sense of the Angli and of the island of Britain as one of a number of neighbouring peoples and islands is also evident in Wilfrid’s confession of ‘the true and catholic faith’, ambitiously made at the papal synod in Rome in 680 ‘on behalf of the whole northern part of Britain and Ireland, together with the islands inhabited by the English and British races, as well as the Irish and Picts’ (5.19).50 Bede’s use of the topos of the islands at the ends of the earth, however, serves not simply to present successive phases in the conversion of Insular barbarians from the centre, both at a primary and a secondary level, but to show how their histories providentially overlap and intertwine, developments taking place at different times for different peoples and individuals within the life of the universal Church. This parallels Bede’s approach in biblical exegesis where he repeatedly shows that ‘variously and in many ways the self-same mysteries of our salvation are prefigured’.51 [132] The Historia Ecclesiastica closes with a survey of ‘the state of the whole of Britain at the present time’, 731, including all four Christian peoples inhabiting the island. It itemises the bishoprics established in the prouinciae of the various Anglo-Saxon peoples and refers to their peaceful co-existence with the Irish in Britain and with the Picts who now ‘rejoice to share in the catholic peace and truth of the Church universal’ (5.23). The Britons, however, are still unreconciled to the Angli and to the catholic Easter and the eschatological mood and omens of Bede’s final chapter qualify his reference to ‘these favourable times of peace and 49 T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp. 432–34. G. Tugène, L’image de la nation anglaise dans l’Histoire Ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable, p. 88 for convergence of royal and papal interests. 50 Also quoted in Vita Wilfridi, 53, B. Colgrave (ed. & tr.), The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, Cambridge, University Press, 1927, p. 115. 51 De templo II.20.1, p. 214.

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prosperity’. The story is not over.52 Yet there is cause for rejoicing at the end of the Historia Ecclesiastica. The providential growth of the Church at the ends of the earth has been recounted on a truly epic scale. The island of Britain can at last be set, in the words of Psalm 96, amongst ‘the multitude of isles’ which rejoice in their salvation. Bede closes by customising a composite quotation from the first and last verses of the psalm: ‘Let the earth rejoice in his perpetual kingdom’ and let Britain rejoice in his faith ‘and let the multitude of isles be glad and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness’. His insertion of the name of Britain is entirely in harmony with the particular application of the Old Testament prophecies concerning islands and the ends of the earth made in the papal letters which he quotes. Patristic exegesis of Psalm 96 has a number of themes directly relevant to Bede’s work, particularly the overthrow of idols, which is expounded at a literal and spiritual level and directly related to the architectural metaphor of the building up of the living stones of the Church on Christ the cornerstone. The fathers interpreted the opening verse as an acclamation of Christ’s universal dominion. ‘Let the multitude of isles rejoice’, said Augustine, because ‘the word of God has been preached not in the continent alone, but also in those isles which lie in the middle of the sea; even these are full of the servants of God. For the sea is no barrier to him who made it’. Like Jerome, and later Cassiodorus, he saw that ‘figuratively, the isles may be taken for all the churches’ throughout the world.53 Spiritually interpreted, the psalm celebrates the restoration of the whole earth by the resurrection of Christ, the prophesied taking of salvation to the Gentiles, the overthrow of idols and the establishment of the Church world-wide. But it also affirms the belief of the faithful in their divine Creator and Saviour, and admonishes those who no longer literally serve stone idols but continue to serve earthbound concerns, or who worship their own image of God. Exegesis of the final verse exhorts the faithful to turn from earthly expectations of peace and joy to serve God alone, to sing his praises and prepare themselves for sharing in the joy of his perpetual kingdom. [133] Bede demonstrates through his narrative of events in particular times and places the continuing fulfillment of the kind of biblical prophecies cited in the papal letters he quotes and in the standard exegesis of the psalm with which he brings his work to a close. But the prophecies are fulfilled at various levels of interpretation. Most obviously he tells the story of primary conversion from the worship of idols,

52 Bede here avoids speculation on the details and date of the future consummation: posterior aetas uidebit. R. Markus, ‘Bede and the tradition of ecclesiastical historiography’, Jarrow Lecture 1975, p. 15, notes the similarity with the close of Bede’s shorter Chronicle: the remainder of the sixth age ‘is clear only in the sight of God’. Cf. Greater Chronicle, ch. 68, p. 240, ‘they behave dangerously if any of them presumes to speculate or to teach that this [hour] is near at hand or far off’. 53 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, CCSL 39, pp. 1354–55; Jerome has two commentaries on Psalm 96 in his Tractatus sive homiliae in psalmos, CCSL 78, pp. 156–61, 440–46; Cassiodorus, Expositio in psalmos, CCSL 98, p. 873.

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but much of the book concerns the process of continuing inner conversion of the baptised from the spiritual idolatry of lingering worldly desires, values and pre-occupations which deny God the worship due to him alone. Even Bede’s enumerations and physical descriptions of the islands at the ends of the earth, which provide a distinctive composition of place in the telling of local histories, challenge any simplistic model of the centre conquering the periphery. After the introductory chapter on their geography and original settlement, the islands are first described in his account of the Roman conquest, then in the initial evangelisation of the Angli and then again in reporting the consolidation of conversion. The historical account of the successive conversions of the various Insular peoples living in Britain alternates in presenting Britain as a single island among the islands of Ocean, emphasising unity, and as a kind of archipelago containing a diversity of peoples. Seen from different viewing-points, it can seem either utterly remote or an integral part of the contemporary world.

Island and archipelago, centre and periphery Roman Britain: conquest and conversion Bede records that the emperor Claudius achieved the surrender of the greater part of the island of Britain: ‘He even annexed to the Roman empire the Orkneys, some islands which lie in the Ocean beyond Britain’, and were believed to be the most northerly habitable point of the world. Similarly, Bede notes that the Isle of Wight was brought under Roman rule in Claudius’s reign and records its dimensions and distance from the south coast of Britain (1.3). He emphasises that the Romans ‘possessed suzerainty over the further parts of Britain as well as over the islands which are beyond it’ (1.11). But the limitations of their actual conquest and symbolic claim to the entire archipelago at the ends of the earth, and thus to universal dominion, are evident in Bede’s account of their troubled reign and eventual withdrawal. In this he is consistent with a long patristic tradition which had stressed the universality of divine, not earthly, rule. The Romans left the Britons exposed to the devastating raids of barbarians – first from the Irish and Picts ‘from over the waters’, meaning, Bede explains, not literally from outside Britain but from the northern areas of the island separated from the Britons by two wide arms of the sea (1.1, 12). The classical perception of the demarcation of the areas north and south of the firths of Forth and Clyde survives in medieval maps where the two areas appear as two separate islands or as joined by only a tiny neck of land.54 Bede knew that, although the two arms of the sea do not actually meet, they deeply [134] penetrate the land

54 See, respectively, the Hereford mappa mundi and map A of Matthew Paris, both illustrated in P.D.A. Hervey, Mappa Mundi. The Hereford world map, Hereford Cathedral, second ed., 2002, pp. 52, 36.

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from east and west, and that the Romans had further separated the northern area of unconquered tribes by what he describes as a fortified rampart and ditch ‘from sea to sea’ and by ‘a very wide and high wall’ running across the island, between the two seas.55 Also, he reports, ‘the shores of Ocean were infested with Franks and Saxons’ (1.6); the Romans were powerless to help when the Britons lamented: ‘the barbarians drive us to the sea: the sea drives us back on the barbarians’ (1.13). Britain is shown to be a fragmented island and still very much ‘a world apart’ after four centuries of Roman rule. Within this time frame there threads the story of another limited conquest of the periphery, the conversion of the Britons. There is brief mention of the invited assistance of the papacy (1.4), the fragile flowering of the faith in Britain during and after the Diocletian persecution (1.6–7), and then the attack on the faith by the spread of heresy ‘which corrupted the whole world and even infected this island, sundered so far from the world’.56 Unlike Eusebius, Bede does not vaunt the power of Constantine in establishing the Church worldwide. Rather, he notes that in Constantine’s time ‘arose the Arian heresy which was exposed by the Council of Nicaea. Nevertheless, the deadly poison of its evil doctrine [. . .] tainted the churches of the whole world, including our own islands’ (1.8). Worse even than the attacks of Irish and Picts on the Britons was ‘the spiritual death’ which their own sins brought upon them (1.14), divinely punished in the ravaging of the country ‘from the east to the western sea’ by Germanic invaders, which reduced the Britons to destitution, exile or slavery (1.15). There was a respite when the hostile raging waters of Ocean, which had twice wrecked part of Caesar’s invading Roman fleet (1.2), were miraculously subdued by St Germanus on his voyage from the continent to lead the British Christians in spiritual warfare against the heresy of Pelagianism and in literal warfare against the Saxons (1.17). The Britons’ belief in heavenly grace was confirmed and they experienced a renewal of their faith, before all but a remnant again succumbed to gross temptations and internal divisions and reverted to a state of barbarism. So, although the Gospel had reached the ends of the earth long ago, as patristic writers well knew, Bede shows that by 597 the process of conversion was far from complete among the Britons and only just beginning among the Anglo-Saxons. The pagan Angli: primary conversion from Rome Bede convincingly describes a barbarian society in which the collective conversion of an Anglo-Saxon people followed that of their king; conversion involved the king in taking counsel with leading followers, though the heir often remained

55 Referring to Severus’s re-building of Hadrian’s Wall (1.5) and the Antonine Wall (1.12). 56 HE 1.8, Arianism infected ‘hanc insulam extra orbem tam longe remotam’: a possible echo of Virgil, Eclogue I.66, ‘toto divisos orbe Britannos’, used by Jerome, Ep. 46.10: ‘Diuisus ab orbe nostro Britannus’ and preserved in Isidore, Etymologiae 9.2, 102.

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pagan, and a royal baptism or apostasy could signify the nature of the political relationship between catechumen and baptismal sponsor.57 But Bede’s [135] account also provides vivid enactments of biblical precepts and patristic teaching, much of which is enunciated in the papal letters quoted in the Historia Ecclesiastica. Most obviously, the new barbarian islanders are presented as idolators, enslaved to devils. Conversions of the Anglo-Saxons are related to the renunciation of idolatry,58 while lapses in the faith of the recently converted are explicitly identified with the restitution of the bondage of idol-worship.59 In Bede’s version of a tradition earlier used by the Whitby author of the Life of Gregory, there is the significant additional detail that the fair-skinned Angli who awakened Gregory’s concern ‘for the salvation of our race’ when he saw them in Rome, were not only in the thrall of paganism but were literally slaves (2.1). Like Gregory, Wilfrid and Aidan redeemed pagan slaves, ‘releasing them from the slavery of the devil, at the same time releasing them from the yoke of human slavery by granting them their liberty’ (4.13). Gregory’s letter to king Aethelberht in 601 invokes the example of Constantine who, subjecting himself to Christ, converted Rome ‘from the false worship of idols’. Gregory exhorted Aethelberht similarly to ‘suppress the worship of idols; overthrow their buildings and shrines’ and to hasten the conversion of the kings and nations subject to him by all the means at his disposal (1.32). Barbarian kings did not have Constantine’s means, however, and Bede notes that Aethelbert’s grandson was the first English king to order idols to be abandoned and destroyed throughout the kingdom (3.8). Gregory’s message to Augustine of Canterbury, through a letter to Mellitus, counsels the missionaries themselves to confine their efforts to cleansing and rededicating pagan holy places so that ‘when this people see that their shrines are not destroyed they will be able to banish error from their heart and be more ready to come to places they are familiar with’ (1.30). The letter is not in direct contradiction to the letter sent to the king: both letters are concerned that idols be destroyed. But Gregory’s account of his ‘long deliberation about the English people’ in his letter to Mellitus suggests reflection on earlier patristic warnings that, although Christians might encourage pagans to overthrow idols on their own lands, they should not be foolhardy and break down pagan abominations in places where God has not yet given them power. St Augustine of Hippo had advised that Christian teachers amongst pagans should resist the zealous urge to ‘destroy their altars and break in pieces their groves and hew down all their images’,60 unless invited to do so by the territorial lord. Rather, they should

57 A. Angenendt, ‘The conversion of the Anglo-saxons considered against the background of the early medieval mission’, ‘Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo’ 32.2, Spoleto, 1986, pp. 747–81. 58 HE 2.15, p. 189; 3.21, p. 281; 4.13, pp. 375, 377. 59 HE 2.5, p. 153; 2.15, p. 191; 3.1, p. 213; 3.30, p. 323; 4.27, p. 433. 60 Exodus 34.13; Deuteronomy 7.1, 13.3.

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first concentrate on breaking down the idols in the hearts of pagans.61 Bede notes that even before the king’s conversion to the faith already held by his queen, the missionaries’ apostolic way of life and practise of what they preached had already won converts (1.26). Elsewhere, progress was much slower. Bede shows that although Paulinus ‘toiled hard and long in preaching the word’ in Northumbria, at first he made little [136] headway because, ‘as the apostle says, “the god of this world blinded the minds of them that believed not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ should shine on them (2 Corinthians 4.4)”’ (2.9). Unlike Eusebius’s account of Constantine taking the initiative in destroying idols or Bede’s own report from Orosius in his Greater Chronicle of Constantine’s closure of the pagan temples, king Edwin’s public renunciation of idolatry occurred at last only when the chief pagan priest, Coifi, recognised the powerlessness of idols to help those who serve them. He listened again, more carefully, to Paulinus and in the royal council proclaimed that ‘the truth shines out’ from his teaching.62 Coifi then counselled the king that the pagan temples and altars be destroyed and, in a memorable scene, he initiated the destruction of idols and profaned their shrine (2.13). The association of the pagan Angli with the biblical image of idolatrous Gentiles is made particularly clear in Pope Boniface’s letter to Edwin (2.10), already discussed. Among his chain of biblical citations are two psalm texts earlier used by Augustine of Hippo in his commentary on Psalm 96 when he characterised pagan idols, ‘Eyes have they, but they see not, they have ears but they hear not’ (Psalm 113.5, 6) and ‘All the gods of the gentiles are devils’ (Psalm 95.5).63 Augustine contrasted the sacrifices made to such gods and the sacrifices made by the children of Israel to the living God. Pope Gregory similarly recalled the time when ‘the Lord made himself known to the Israelites in Egypt’ and allowed them to preserve the custom of blood sacrifice but to redirect it ‘to the true God and not to idols’. Although the outward form of the sacrifice remained familiar, the intention was different, and therefore the Hebrew sacrifices were not the same as pagan offerings (1.30). The lesson Gregory drew was not the sanctioning of continued blood sacrifice among recently converted pagans, but the need to preserve some element of familiarity in their religious practices, such as the Christian dedication of their former shrines and the slaughtering of animals, not as sacrifices, but for use as

61 New Testament Sermon 12, on Matthew 8.8 and 1 Corinthians 8.10, translated in St Augustine, Sermon on the Mount. Homilies on the Gospels, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF), first series, 6, pp. 301–03. 62 Eusebius, Vita Constantini, 2.45, 3.54, 57; Bede, De temporum ratione 66, F. Wallis (tr.), Bede: The Reckoning of Time, Liverpool University Press, 1999, p. 213. 63 Augustine on Psalm 95.5 quotes St Paul: ‘The things which the gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice unto devils and not to God; we know that an idol is nothing (1 Corinthians 8.4) and that what the gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice unto devils and not to God, and I would not have that you should have fellowship with devils’ (1 Corinthians 10.20); his commentary on Psalm 96.7, ‘Confounded be all they that worship carved images’, also quotes 1 Corinthians 8.4, 10.20, 21.

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food to celebrate the Christian feasts of martyrs. In this way, Gregory reasoned, the people would turn more readily ‘from the worship of devils to the service of the true God’. Stubborn minds would be changed by degrees, as a climber ascends by steps and not by leaps.64 Similarly, the apostles had agreed on the need for a gradual approach in converting pagans, but had insisted that, as part of a minimum commitment, converts should ‘abstain from things sacrificed to idols’ (Acts 15.29). Redwald’s post-baptismal syncretism demonstrates complete misunderstanding of the change of heart involved in even this basic requirement, so that his last state was [137] worse than his first: he ‘seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims for devils’ (2.15). The episode gives voice to St Paul’s warning to the Corinthians, underlying Gregory’s letter, that gentile converts might receive the grace of God in vain: ‘You cannot be partakers of the table of the Lord and the table of devils’.65 The East Saxons had early rejected the faith they had received and returned to the worship of idols (2.5). In the next generation, the Northumbrian king Oswiu is shown in the remarkable role of evangelist, persuading Sigeberht of the East Saxons that ‘objects made by the hands of men could not be gods’ because gods could not be created from materials such as wood and stone, whose remnants decayed or were burned, thrown away, put to profane use. Similarly, he argued that God, the Creator of heaven and earth and of humankind, its ruler and judge, ‘incomprehensible in his majesty, invisible to human eyes’, does not dwell in something made of base and perishable material (3.22). Though the conversion is set in the political reality of the relations between a royal sponsor and a client king and his followers, Oswiu is here closely summarising the Old Testament argument against idolatry (particularly Isaiah 44.9–19), used by St Paul in teaching Gentiles (Acts 17.24, 29) and by Pope Boniface in writing to king Edwin (2.10). Bede leaves the language of formal exegesis to the papal letters, but notes that Oswiu reasoned with his fellow barbarian ‘in friendly and brotherly counsel’ and over a period of time to bring him to baptism. When commenting on Paul’s evangelising tactics (Acts 17.24) in his Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, Bede, following Gregory, had emphasised, ‘The order of the apostle’s argument deserves careful examination. Among Gentiles the treatment of his subject takes the form of a series of steps. [. . .] Now if he had chosen to begin by destroying the idolatrous rites, the ears of the gentiles would have rejected him’.66

64 In De temporum ratione, 15, Bede gives thanks that his people have been turned from blood sacrifice ‘to offer thee the sacrifice of praise’, F. Wallis (tr.), Bede: On the reckoning of time, p. 54. 65 1 Corinthians 10.20, 21, 28; cf. 2 Corinthians 6.16, ‘What agreement has the temple of God with idols?’ Wilfrid was to recall Acts 15.29 at the synod of Whitby (3.25). 66 L.T. Martin (tr.), Bede. Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, Kalamazoo, Cistercian Publications, 1989, pp. 142–43.

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Bede’s exegetical interests also speak through his descriptions of the physical landscape. His account of the prolonged primary conversion of the gens Anglorum from the worship of idols emphasises the island nature of Britain, noting details of coastal places and tides, the names of many coastal and riverside sites and the island’s division by internal waterways, separating peoples and leaving some kingdoms almost bounded by water. The northern firth ‘divides the lands of the Angli from that of the Picts’ (4.26), the lands of the north and south Angles are divided by the great river Humber (1.25, 2.5), Mercia is divided by the river Trent (3.24), the province of the East Saxons ‘is divided from Kent by the river Thames and borders on the sea to the east’ (2.3), Lindsey is ‘the first land on the south bank of the river Humber, bordering on the sea’ (2.15). Royal women are given safe escort between Northumbria and Kent by sea (2.20, 3.15). There are also brief geographical descriptions in the Roman manner of several off-shore islands and the narrative of the conversion recalls elements of the [138] Roman image of suzerainty over the whole barbarian Ocean archipelago. Pope Gregory’s missionaries sent from Rome, who dreaded going to ‘a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving people whose language they did not understand’ (1.23), first landed on the island of Thanet; its dimensions and separation from the Kentish mainland by the river Wantsum, with details of the crossing places and outlets to the sea, are duly noted (2.1, 1.25). Edwin’s conquest of the Mevanian islands (Anglesey and Man), ‘which lie between England and Ireland and belong to the Britons’ (2.5), and which, like the Orkneys, formed part of Roman geographical descriptions of the islands of Ocean, is reported twice. The islands’ dimensions and relative fertility are appended as part of the claim that Edwin, as an augury of his future membership of the kingdom of heaven, ‘held under his sway the whole realm of Britain, not only English kingdoms but those ruled by the Britons as well’ (2.9).67 Finally, ‘after all the kingdoms of Britain had received the faith of Christ, the Isle of Wight (Vecta insula) received it too’. It had ‘until then been entirely given up to idolatry’ (4.16). The precise size and location of the Isle of Wight were given when Bede described its conquest by the Romans (1.3). It is now graphically characterised as an island in Ocean, distinct from the lands of neighbouring named peoples. The Solent, the narrow sea which separates the island from the borders of the South Saxons and Gewisse on the mainland by three miles, is the meeting place of the waters that encircle the whole island of Britain: In this sea the two Ocean tides which break upon Britain from the boundless northern Ocean meet daily in conflict beyond the mouth of the river Hamble, which enters the same sea (the Solent), flowing through those

67 R. Cramp, ‘Whithorn and the Northumbrian expansion westwards’, Third Whithorn Lecture, Whithorn, 1995.

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Jutish lands which belong to the kingdom of the Gewisse. When their conflict is over they flow back into the Ocean whence they came. (4.16)68 The faith brought from Rome has gone full circle since its arrival in the island of Thanet in the south-east and extension northwards to Edwin’s kingdom, which reached west to the Mevanian Isles. And yet this further conquest of the ends of the earth is, like that in the time of the Romans, very incomplete. Eusebius had boasted that the Roman Empire under Constantine was coterminous with Christianity, uniting all peoples and reaching to the farthest end of the earth; it was so peaceful and well-ordered that people could travel safely from West to East and East to West, thus fulfilling the prophecy, ‘He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth’ (Psalm 71.8).69 Similarly, Bede records ‘there was so great a peace in Britain, wherever the dominion of king Edwin reached, that, as the proverb runs, a woman with a new-born child could walk unharmed throughout the island from [139] sea to sea (a mari ad mare)’ (2.16). But he goes on to show that Edwin’s imperium collapsed with his violent death at the hands of a pagan AngloSaxon king and a British king, Caedwalla, who, though a Christian, was still ‘a barbarian in heart’ and brutally attempted to destroy the whole English people in Britain (2.20). Bede states that, before the reign of Oswald, ‘as far as we know, no symbol of the Christian faith, no church and no altar had been erected in the whole of Bernicia’ (3.2). Edwin’s immediate successors ‘reverted to the filth of their former idolatry’ and were also killed by Caedwalla (3.1) and the next Christian king, Oswald, was killed in battle and his body mutilated by the heathen (3.6, 9). The context of the later conversion of the Isle of Wight in a time of plague and famine is similarly barbarous: its savage military conquest in the 680s by another merciless king called Caedwalla, this time the pagan king of the West Saxons, and the scenes of slavery and execution of the newly baptised, starkly reveal continuing divisions between the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the elementary nature of the primary conversion (4.15, 16).70 What is striking is that the story of the faith at last reaching the idolatrous Isle of Wight is immediately followed in Bede’s narrative by his account of the council of Hatfield in 679, which provides a most sophisticated image of the church in Britain as part of the universal Church whose larger unity it emulates (4.17). Long before there was a single royal authority, an assembly of ‘the bishops of the island of Britain’ was summoned by Theodore of Tarsus, ‘archbishop of the

68 For Bede’s scientific interest in tides and islands, his classical and Irish sources and probable use of eyewitness information received from correspondents, see W. Stevens, Bede’s scientific achievement, Jarrow Lecture, 1985, pp. 11–18. 69 Eusebius, Laus Constantini, 16, Vita Constantini, 2.28, trans. NPNF, 2nd series, 1, p. 606, 507. Cf. Eusebius, Demonstratio Evangelica 7.3; 9.17, W.J. Farrar (tr.), The proof of the Gospel, being the Demonstratio Evangelica of Eusebius of Caesarea, p. 94, pp. 187–88. 70 S. Bassett, The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Leicester University Press, 1989, pp. 78, 89.

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island of Briton and of the city of Canterbury’, and earlier described as ‘the first archbishop whom the whole English Church consented to obey’ (4.2). Bede cites the council’s written record: We united in declaring the true and orthodox faith as our Lord Jesus Christ delivered it in the flesh to the disciples who saw him face to face and heard his words, and as it was handed down in the creed of the holy fathers and by all the holy and universal councils in general and the whole body of the accredited fathers of the catholic church. (4.17) The assembly was concerned not with the literal idolatry of pagans but with Christians who made God in their own image. It formally recognised the decrees of the five universal councils from Nicaea in 325 to Constantinople in 553 and the Lateran council of 649, all of which had anathematised various Christological heresies, and it subscribed to a Trinitarian confession of the faith, witnessed by a visiting papal emissary, John the archcantor of St Peter’s, Rome (4.17, 18). The events are part of the process Bede closely documents by which spiritual dominion over the islands by petrine Rome, the pre-eminent guardian of the faith, is extended, fortifying both the papal role as earthly head of Christ’s universal body and Insular claims to be full members of that body. The preservation of the faith through the overthrow of heresy is a recurring theme throughout the Church’s mission in the Historia Ecclesiastica.71 Bede, however, is concerned to show that full membership of the universal Church does not simply [140] consist in receiving instruction and baptism, doctrinal statements, law and episcopal structures from ‘the centre’, but in interiorising and practising what such visible signs of the unity of Christ’s body represent, a process which is continuous and lifelong, occurring at different rates among different peoples and individuals. By the end of the book the spiritual life is highly advanced for some, for others scarcely begun, illustrating the claim Bede makes in De templo that some living before the age of the Gospel lived the life of the Gospel, whereas many at the present time are content with just observing the precepts of the Law.72 The same kingdom of heaven receives both, but Bede several times repeats Christ’s words, ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14.2) and cites St Paul (Galatians 5.6, Colossians 3.11) to show that, although there is one house of the Lord, it will be variously experienced, not according to differences of ethnic background, rank, age, learning or gender, but according to the capacity for spiritual perfection.73

71 Heresies and heretics refuted in Bede’s works are listed by C. Plummer (ed.), Bedae opera historica I, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1896, pp. lxii–lxiii. 72 De templo, I.11.3; see O’Reilly, Introduction to S. Connolly (tr.), Bede. On the temple, pp. xxxiii, xxxviii. 73 De templo, I.11.2, 14.3, 18.9, 19.8.

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Islands and inner conversion: ‘a world apart’ One of the ways in which Bede depicts post-baptismal conversion at a deeper spiritual level in the Historia Ecclesiastica is through his adaptation of the Roman topographical tradition of the islands at the ends of the earth for the third time. Though he continues to note physical features such as their size, type, location and tides in the manner of a gazetteer, the islands he highlights in Books 3–4 had not appeared either in Roman geographical descriptions of Ocean or in his own accounts of the Roman conquest of Britain and the primary conversion of the Anglo-Saxons from Rome. The effect of his description of the inhabitants of these other islands is to subvert too literal an understanding of Rome’s centrality and to give a new meaning to the topos of ‘a world apart’. Bede’s list begins and ends with Iona, an island beyond the limes of Roman imperial rule and north-west of the division of Britain marked by the firths of Clyde and Forth. Like Adomnán, abbot of Iona, Bede described the island as belonging to Britain, ‘separated from the mainland by a narrow strait’.74 It is only five hides in extent (3.4) which, compared with the Isle of Wight and the Mevanian isles, is very small.75 Adomnán, who in De locis sanctis had taken Insular readers in imagination on a journey to the holy places of Jerusalem at the centre of the earth, had in the Vita Columbae memorialised Iona as a holy place whose peripheral location was a foil to its spiritual significance. Although St Columba ‘lived in this small and remote island of the Britannic Ocean, he merited that his name should not only be illustriously renowned throughout our Ireland, and throughout Britain, the greatest of all the islands of the whole world, but that it should reach even as far as Spain and Gaul and Italy [. . .] also the Roman city [141] itself, which is the chief of all cities’.76 But it was Bede who acclaimed this island on the world’s edge as a major centre of the Church’s universal mission. He shows that over thirty years before the arrival of Pope Gregory’s Roman missionaries on the island of Thanet in 597, Columba, ‘a monk in life no less than habit’, had come from Ireland to Britain, turning the northern Picts beyond the Grampians to Christ ‘by his words and example’. Columba established a monastery on Iona where his successors were renowned for ‘their great abstinence, their love of God and their observance of the Rule’ and, from the 630s, were instrumental in the conversion of the Northumbrian Angli and their extensive areas of influence (3.4). The work of bishop Aidan and the community of Lindisfarne, the Northumbrian coastal base of the Columban mission to the Angles, is the subject of some of Bede’s most sublime descriptions of the Christian life in its active and contemplative aspects (3.5, 17, 26). Although he refers to insula Lindisfarnensi (5.19),

74 HE 3.3; A.O. Anderson and M.O. Anderson (ed. and tr.), Adomnán’s Life of Columba, rev. ed., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, second Preface, p. 7. 75 The Isle of Wight is 1,200 hides (HE 4.16), Anglesey is 960, Isle of Man is 300 (HE 2.9). 76 A.O. Anderson and M.O. Anderson (ed. and tr.), Adomnán’s Life of Columba, 3.23, p. 233.

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he notes it is not quite an island: ‘As the tide ebbs and flows, this place is surrounded twice daily by the waves of the sea like an island and twice, when the shore is left dry, it becomes again attached to the mainland’ (3.3).77 In the outer precincts of Lindisfarne there was a place of retreat which was also ‘surrounded on every side by the sea at flood tide’. One of Aidan’s successors, Eadberht, used to withdraw there in Advent and Lent ‘in deep devotion, with abstinence, prayers and tears’ (4.30). Columban traditions lived on in Cuthbert, who also resorted to this secluded island within an island. When he ‘attained to the silence and secrecy of the hermit’s life of contemplation’ he withdrew from Lindisfarne and went further out into the fathomless Ocean to the tiny isle of Farne.78 Bede had already applied the classical distinction between a tidal half-island and an island in the deep and boundless Ocean when describing Lindisfarne and Farne in the Vita Cuthberti.79 In the Historia Ecclesiastica he describes the island of Farne as a savage place ‘utterly lacking in water, corn and trees, and as it was frequented by evil spirits, it was ill-suited for human habitation’. Cuthbert subdued and transformed it by his spiritual fruitfulness, so that its rocky hardness yielded life-giving water and barley. Jerome’s commentary on the image of ‘the multitude of isles’ in Psalm 96.1, with which Bede closes his book, shows that islands, though once subject to the dominion of the devil and idols, rejoice on seeing the reign of the Lord. Spiritually interpreted, the islands may refer not only to all churches, set in the turbulent sea of this world, but to individual souls which are battered daily by [142] various thoughts and temptations. These islands cannot be broken. Rather, they break the advancing waves. Their foundation is Christ: ‘behold, the isles stand fixed, and at last the sea is calmed’.80 Cuthbert served God in solitude for many years on Farne ‘and so high was the rampart that surrounded his dwelling that he could see nothing else but the heavens which he longed to enter’ (4.28). Bede’s account of the topography of Farne functions as an image of the saint himself. The separation from worldly concerns exemplified in the life of the desert fathers is here renewed on an island in the northern Ocean: ‘This is the end of all perfection, that the mind purged from all carnal desires may daily be lifted towards spiritual things, until the whole of life and all the thoughts of the heart become one continuous prayer’.81 77 ‘qui uidelicet locus accedente ac recedente reumate bis cotidie instar insulae maris circumluitur undis, bis renudato litore contiguus terrae redditur’. 78 For Cuthbert’s embodiment of the Gregorian ideal of monk and pastor, see A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s ideal of reform’ in P. Wormald (ed.), Ideal and reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society, Oxford, 1983, pp. 130–53 at 138–42; C. Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the polarity between pastor and solitary’ in G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe (ed.), St Cuthbert, his cult and his community to AD 1200, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1989, pp. 21–44. 79 B. Colgrave (ed. and tr.), Two Lives of St Cuthbert, Cambridge University Press, 1940, 17, p. 214. 80 Jerome, Tractatus sive homiliae in psalmos, CCSL 78, pp. 156, 440. 81 Cassian, Conlationes, 10.7, translation quoted from NPNF, 2nd series, 11, p. 404. Jerome’s ‘true story’ of a hermit exiled on an island in the Adriatic anticipates several features in Adomnán’s account of Columba on Hinbar and Bede’s account of Cuthbert on Farne (Jerome, Ep. 3,

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In the land of the South Saxons Bishop Wilfrid founded a monastery and established a rule of life at Selsey where, Bede says, the tyranny of the devil was overthrown and the reign of Christ begun (4.14). He explains that the name Selsey means ‘the island of the seal. This place is surrounded on all sides by the sea except on the west where it is approached by a piece of land about a sling’s throw in width. Such a place is called in Latin paeninsula (almost an island) and in Greek cherronesos’.82 Bede twice notes that Ely, founded by Aethelthryth, ‘resembles an island in that it is surrounded by marshes or by water’ (in similitudinem insulae uel paludibus, ut diximus, circumdata uel aquis). Aethelthryth, having renounced the royal and married status of her earthly life, there became ‘by the example of her heavenly life and teaching, the virgin mother of many virgins dedicated to God’ (4.19). In contrast, the holy priest Hereberct lived the solitary life ‘on an island in that large mere from which spring the sources of the river Derwent’ (4.29). Bede notes that ‘if in any way he had less merit than the blessed Cuthbert’, the manner in which he bore a long illness made him equal in grace and ‘worthy to be received into one and the same dwelling of perpetual bliss’. The enclosed nature and even the etymology of some other inland sites also suggest ‘islands’ of holiness in the landscape. The Irish monk Dicuil served the Lord among the South Saxons in humility and poverty in the small monastery of Bosham, which was ‘surrounded by woods and sea’ (siluis et mari circumdatum) (4.13). Bishop John of Hexham and a few followers used to withdraw for prayer and reading, especially in Lent, to ‘a remote dwelling, enclosed by a rampart (uallo circumdata) and amid scattered trees’, separated from the church at Hexham by the river Tyne (5.2). Drythelm became something of a living island. He renounced [143] the world and entered the monastery of Melrose, ‘which is almost encircled by a bend in the river Tweed’ (quod Tuidi fluminis circumflexu maxima ex parte clauditur). He was given a secret retreat on the river bank where he could ‘devote himself to the service of his Maker in constant prayer’ and often stood motionless, immersed in the water in all weathers (5.12). Eorcenwold established ‘an excellent form of monastic Rule and discipline’ near the river Thames ‘at a place called Chertsey, that is the island of Ceorot’ (4.6).83 Hild of Whitby, disciple of Aidan and famed for her wisdom and devotion to the service of God (4.23), was

J. Labourt (ed.), Lettres III.8–25) and the Lérins monastic tradition of Mediterranean island saints too had presented the holy man Honoratus as ‘a locus of sanctity’: C. Leyser, ‘“This sainted Isle”: panegyric, nostalgia and the invention of Lérins monasticism’, W. Klingshirn and M. Vessey (ed.), The Limits of Ancient Christianity, Michigan, 1999, pp. 188–206. 82 Selaeseu, quod dicitur Latine Insula uituli marini. Est enim locus undique mari circumdatus praeter ab occidente, unde habet ingressum amplitudinis quasi iactus fundae; qualis locus a Latinis paeninsula, a Grecis solet cherronesos uocari. 83 Chertsey’s island-like nature is confirmed in what John Blair has identified as the oldest extant boundary clause in a charter which describes Chertsey’s bounds in the 670s as including the Thames and ‘the ancient ditch Fullingadic’: see M. Lapidge (ed.), The Blackwell encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, 1999, p. 102.

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founder of the Rule in Hartlepool, which Bede calls Heruteu, ‘that is, the island of the hart’ (Insula Cerui), (3.24).84 Britain is thus portrayed as a multitude of isles. Topographically very different from each other, these ‘islands’ of diverse monastic communities and eremitical individuals, men and women, of various dates, of both Irish and Anglo-Saxon origin, of Columban or Roman formation, scattered from north to south of the island of Britain, are all distinguished by their purity of life and detachment from the carnal preoccupations of this world. All are geographically remote from Rome and Jerusalem but close to heaven. Such figures of sanctity are far removed from the state of Gentiles newly converted from the service of idols, but the charge of spiritual idolatry is tacitly made in the Historia Ecclesiastica against islanders of various ethnic backgrounds who had been long years in the Christian faith. Bede draws on Pauline and patristic models to show how various earthly preoccupations among the faithful are, in effect, man-made idols and deny God his due service. Bede illustrates the variety of types and degree of such Christian idol-worship in various individuals, communities and peoples and in the process reveals more of the nature of the true service of God. The presentation of the example of the Columban monks in particular is closely integrated into the book’s extended topos of the islands. Bede’s images of Iona and Lindisfarne as islands of sanctity appear to offer a very different view from the stereotypical image of islands at the ends of earth applied by papal reformers and fellow islanders to the Columbans in the context of the Easter controversy. In that context they are at first described as rustic barbarians living ‘so far away at the ends of the earth that there was none to bring them the decrees of the synods concerning the observance of Easter’ (3.4) and later, more critically, as a handful of people ‘living in the remotest corner of the world’ (in extremo mundi angulo), inhabiting only some parts ‘of the two remotest islands of the Ocean’, whose veneration of their own local traditions on Easter made them at odds with the practice of the universal Church (5.15, 3.25). [144] By such apparently opposed views in his presentation of the Columbans, Bede constantly shifts the reader’s perspective. The geographical remoteness of the island of Iona highlights the community’s providential role as a centre of the Church’s mission, in the tradition of the apostles taking the Gospel out from Jerusalem to the Gentiles. But it is also used to evoke classical images of barbarians beyond the frontier of Roman civilisation and biblical images of Gentile islanders worshipping idols of their own making at the ends of the earth. Though Aidan is presented as a model of holiness and the Columbans are strongly contrasted with the Britons in their profound understanding and practice of the love of God and

84 It is not known where exactly on the headland peninsula the monastery was located, R. Daniels, ‘The Anglo-Saxon monastery at Hartlepool’ in J. Hawkes and S. Mills (ed.), Northumbria’s golden age, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1999, pp. 105–12.

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neighbour, the Columban attitude at Whitby to their man-made local traditions to some degree also recalls New Testament images of zealous Jewish converts in Jerusalem whose understanding of the universal nature of the Christian faith was limited by their excessive veneration of their own local religious customs. The Columbans’ eventual reception of the Roman Easter is told in terms reminiscent of the taking of the Gospel itself to the ends of the earth, not directly from Rome, but from a neighbouring island, just as the Columbans had once journeyed from Iona to evangelise the pagan Angli (5.9, 22). Cumulatively, these different views of a church in a particular time and place, which is also a glimpse of the Church in all times and places, reveal that the service of God on earth, even among its most holy practioners, is a process of continuing inner conversion from the service of idols. Drawing on Pauline and exegetical traditions, Bede uses the debate about the date of Easter to expound the meaning of the event it celebrates. His account of Iona’s joyful celebration of ‘the greatest of all festivals’ in unity with the universal Church in 716, the climax of the book, reveals that the process of finding this ‘more perfect way’ is dependent on the mercy of God and only completed in heaven (5.22). Iona’s celebration of Christ’s resurrection is shown to be a participation in its eternal celebration by the heavenly host, a foretaste (not just a symbol) of the heavenly kingdom and the unending Sabbath of God’s perpetual praise.85

85 Bede’s exposition of the meaning of the service of idols and the service of God in his account of the Britons and especially the Columban monks of Iona is the subject of the second part of this study, to appear in Peritia.

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In research papers spanning his academic career and brought to a remarkable synthesis in Ritual and the Rood, Éamonn Ó Carragáin has not only made a major contribution to the study of the Ruthwell Cross and the Old English poems of the Dream of the Rood tradition, but has enlivened our visualisation of the city of Rome and its importance in the world of Bede.1 Ritual and the Rood analyses creative Anglo-Saxon responses to aspects of papal Rome, especially its stational liturgy and cults of St Peter, the Virgin, and the Cross, and considers the art and inscriptions of some of the chief churches which are likely to have been seen by visiting monastic leaders and other pilgrims. Éamonn Ó Carragáin’s own convivial study tours of Rome in recent years have illuminated such sites for many medievalists. Bede, however, our most important source on early Anglo-Saxon contacts with papal Rome, and well-placed to know a good deal about Roman liturgy and its architectural contexts, is tantalisingly silent on what pilgrims actually saw there. The following reflection on the theme of pilgrimage in some of Bede’s exegetical works, which may help explain this reticence, is offered in tribute to a generous friend and colleague at University College Cork, with whom I have for many years had the pleasure of teaching and sharing research interests in Insular monastic culture and its inheritance from the Mediterranean world. Bede was acutely aware of the propensity of religious people to worship idols. Splendid church buildings could aid and reflect true devotion, but they could also be accorded the veneration properly owed to what they represented. Bede drew on the whole range of biblical architectural images and accounts of the building of the [3] Tabernacle and the Temple in his descriptions of the living ecclesia, which he emphasised was not to be confused with any individual church building.2 Similarly, in the tradition of the fathers, he used biblical accounts of the journey to the Promised Land and to Jerusalem to describe the inner pilgrimage of the faithful in 1 Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the ‘Dream of the Rood’ Tradition (London, 2005). 2 Arthur G. Holder, ‘Allegory and History in Bede’s Interpretation of Sacred Architecture’, American Benedictine Review, 40 (1989 A), 115–31 (pp. 119–25); Bede. On the Temple, trans. by Seán Connolly (Liverpool, 1995), introduction, pp. xvii–lv.

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his exegesis, but when he wrote of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims, he described their pious motivation and the spiritual significance of Rome rather than the external details of their journey and its destination, as two contrasting examples may illustrate. Caedwalla, king of the West Saxons, who was still a savage pagan at the time of the late conversion of the Isle of Wight, gave up his throne to win an everlasting kingdom and went to Rome.3 Bede explains that Caedwalla had learned that only through baptism could the human race enter the heavenly life; he wanted the special privilege of receiving it ‘in the fountain of baptism within the threshold of the apostles’. Pope Sergius gave him the baptismal name Peter, ‘that he might be united in name also with the blessed chief of the apostles, to whose most sacred body he had come from the ends of the earth, inspired by loving devotion’. He was baptised on Easter Saturday 689 and died days later, joining ‘the bands of the blessed in heaven’, and was buried in St Peter’s.4 Bede presents the pilgrimage of a barbarian king drawn from ‘earth’s remotest end’ to Rome and passing from death to life, from earth to heaven at Easter, as a didactic tableau of the primary conversion of the Anglo-Saxon people and the role of Petrine, papal Rome as the source of baptism and the centre of faith for the universal Church. Benedict Biscop, a more seasoned pilgrim, also died in 689 but was buried near the relics of St Peter in the monastic church at Wearmouth. Bede dissolved the physical distance between Rome and Northumbria by noting that Benedict’s body in death ‘was not far from the altar and relics of him whom he had always loved during his earthly life and who had opened for him the gates of heaven’.5 Bede [4] treats the first of Benedict’s pilgrimages to Rome, c. 654, as an expression of devotion and ascetic exile from earthly preoccupations – the renunciation of country, home and family for Christ’s sake (Matthew 19.29, Mark 10.29) – but notes that the Pope himself had ordered Benedict to curtail one pilgrimage for the higher purpose of escorting Theodore, a teacher of truth, to his appointed task as archbishop in Britain, 668.6 He records that in Theodore’s day the journey to Rome was considered to be an act of great merit, but makes it clear that Benedict’s primary and predestined role was to raise up spiritual sons for Christ; his 3 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. by Bertram Colgrave and R.A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 4.15, 16; 5.7. All citations of the Historia Ecclesiastica are from this volume. 4 Hoc sibi gloriae singularis desiderans adipsci, ut ad limina beatorum apostolorum fonte baptismatis ablueretur [. . . ]. Cui etiam tempore baptismatis papa memoratus Petri nomen inposuerat, ut beatissimo apostolorum principi, ad cuius sacratissimum corpus a finibus terrae pio ductus amore uenerat, etiam nominis ipsius consortio iungeretur: Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.7. 5 ut quem degens in carne semper solebat amare, quo pandente ianuam regni caelestis intrabat, ab huius reliquiis et altari post mortem nec corpore longius abesset: Historia abbatum, in Venerabilis Baedae: opera historica, ed. by Charles Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), I, p. 379; trans. by D.F. Farmer in J.F. Webb, The Age of Bede, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 187–210 (202). All citations to the Historia abbatum are to Plummer’s edition. 6 Historia abbatum, c. 3; Homeliarum Evangelii libri II, I.13, ed. by David Hurst, CCSL, 122 (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 92–93, trans. by Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst in Bede the Venerable: Homilies on the Gospels, 2 vols (Kalamazoo, 1991), I, p. 129.

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subsequent pilgrimages, the last three undertaken from Britain, are shown to serve this purpose directly. They are seen not in terms of the fulfilment or indulgence of Benedict’s personal devotional aims, but as his untiring efforts to bring back spiritual sustenance from Rome, enabling his monastic community to remain within the cloister of the monastery to serve Christ.7 In contrast to his omission of descriptions of the Roman shrines of Peter and Paul and other churches and images pilgrims saw, Bede lists the variety of spiritual treasures Benedict Biscop brought back from Rome, in particular the many holy pictures, both iconic and narrative, to be displayed in the churches dedicated to St Peter and St Paul in Wearmouth-Jarrow. The images recalled Scripture at a variety of levels of understanding. In the church at Jarrow, the typological pairing of scenes from the Old Testament with the events of the passion they prefigured gave pictorial expression to one of the techniques of biblical exegesis.8 Those in the church at Wearmouth functioned as affective aids to learning, devotion and compunction. Bede describes them as bringing the face of Christ and his saints before the eyes, making beholders more intensely aware of the Lord’s incarnation, while the scenes of judgement prompted the examination of conscience. This is very like Adamnán of Iona’s report of the effect certain holy sites had on pilgrims in Jerusalem.9 [5] The only pilgrimage churches Bede visualises are the holy places of Jerusalem and beyond. He refers to the written record of contemporaries who have been in Jerusalem, but does so in order to describe the enshrined sepulchre of Christ in the context of an Easter homily on the significance of the Resurrection for all peoples. His account includes material from Adamnán’s De locis sanctis, and he also made his own version of Adamnán’s whole work, which he regarded as ‘useful to many and especially to those who live very far from the places where the patriarchs and apostles dwelt and only know about them what they have learned from books’.10 The work is useful because the places described recall the events of Scripture and the descriptions help clarify details of the literal text of Scripture, which is an essential preparation for understanding its underlying spiritual meaning.11 After acknowledging the pilgrim Arculf as a source of Adamnán’s account, however,

7 Homeliarum Evangelii, I.13, trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, I, 132. On Benedict’s role, see Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood, pp. 91–92, 223–24. 8 Historia abbatum, c. 9. See George Henderson, Bede and the Visual Arts (Jarrow Lecture, 1980), pp. 13–17. 9 Historia abbatum, c. 6; Adamnán, De locis sanctis, I, c. 23, 13, ed. and trans. by Denis Meehan (Dublin, 1958), p. 66, lines 35–39. 10 Fecitique opus [. . .] multis utile et maxime illis, qui longius ab eis locis, in quibus patriarchae uel apostoli erant, secreti ea tantum de his, quae lectione didicerint, norunt: Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.15. The next two chapters quote extracts from Bede’s version of Adomnán’s De locis sanctis to describe the churches marking the sites of the nativity, Crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. See also Homeliarum Evangelii, II.10. 11 Thomas O’Loughlin, ‘The Exegetical Purpose of Adomnán’s De locis sanctis’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 24 (1992), pp. 37–53, and ‘Res, tempus, locus, persona: Adomnán’s Exegetical Method’, Innes Review, 48 (1997), pp. 95–111.

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Bede dispenses with Adamnán’s device of presenting much of the useful information through the eager eyewitness testimony of a pilgrim visiting the sites. He opens his own version of De locis sanctis by reference instead to the journey to the heavenly Jerusalem: Da Iesu, ut patriam semper tendamus ad illam, Quam beat aeternum uisio summa tui. [Grant, O Jesus, that we may always press toward that homeland, which delights eternally in the highest vision of you.]12 This was the subject of his life’s work. The speed of Caedwalla’s journey from baptism to the joys of the heavenly homeland, like that of two young princely victims of his early savagery, was dramatically satisfying but not typical.13 Bede [6] often warned that the baptised ‘must first be trained by long struggles in the exercise of virtues, and then they will be granted the abiding gift of heavenly blessedness’, just as, when the Israelites had been ‘liberated from Egypt by the blood of the lamb and had been led through the Red Sea, the Lord first instructed them for forty years in the desert, and so led them into the land of promise’.14

The forty-two mansiones on the desert journey Bede was concerned in his exegetical works to equip a native Anglo-Saxon pastorate with the intellectual resources for understanding the literal text of the Latin Bible, but also to feed them spiritually so that they might interiorise the hidden meaning of Scripture and teach its precepts by example as well as words.15 He was encouraged in this task by his friend Acca, Bishop of Hexham, ‘a very learned theologian’ who had been to Rome, and had built up ‘a very large and most noble library’.16 In a letter of c. 716 Bede replied to a scholarly query from Acca 12 Bede, De locis sanctis, in Itineraria et alia geographica, ed. by J. Fraipont, CCSL, 175 (Turnhout, 1965), pp. 251–80 (251, lines 9–10), trans. in W. Trent Foley and Arthur G. Holder, Bede: A Biblical Miscellany (Liverpool, 1999), pp. 5–25 (5). The relationship between literal pilgrimage and the inner journey had often been debated in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, for example, in Jerome’s Epistle 53 to Paulinus. 13 Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.16. 14 Denique dominus liberatum sanguine agni populum de Aegypto et per rubrum mare eductam prius in deserto quadraginta annis instituit et sic in terram repromissionis induxit quia nimirum populus fidelium non statim post baptisma caelestis patriae potest gaudia subire sed primo longis uirtutum exercendus agonibus ac deinde perpetuis supernae beatitudinis est donandus muneribus: Homeliarum Euangelii, I.1, ed. by Hurst, p. 3, lines 48–55, trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, I, 3; see further II.8 (p. 72). 15 Alan Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. by Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough, and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53. 16 [I]n litteris sanctis doctissimus [. . .] amplissimam ibi ac nobilissimam bibliothecam fecit: Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.20.

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concerning the chronology of the Israelites’ forty-two halting-places (mansiones) on the journey to the Promised Land.17 At first sight it seems an unpromising subject. Origen had long ago reported that the text in question, Numbers 33.1–49, was often regarded as difficult and even unnecessary for Christians to read. He contended, however, that since all of Scripture proceeds from the Holy Spirit, no part of it, not one iota, can possibly be useless or unnecessary. Moses, moreover, had been commanded by God to write down the names of the camping-places of the children of Israel who went out of Egypt (Numbers 3.1–2). Origen recognised that Scripture contains food for various spiritual appetites and that this [7] particular text would be spat out by many, but argued that, if properly interpreted according to St Paul’s example, it could reveal the way of salvation. The apostle, followed by the fathers of the Church, viewed the Israelites’ divine deliverance from slavery in Egypt – their crossing of the Red Sea, their temptation and sin in the wilderness, and God’s provision of manna and water from the rock to sustain them on their journey to the Promised Land – as a historical event but also as a figure of the Christian life and mysteries, written down for the instruction of present readers (I Corinthians 10.1–11). Accordingly, Origen argued that the details of the forty-two campsites on the route could, for some readers, reveal particular insights about the way to the heavenly promised land and the new Jerusalem, like certain other apparently obscure or superfluous biblical listings of names and numbers concerning the twelve tribes of Israel and their encampments, which were to give rise to much ingenious exegesis.18 He urged the reader to turn the eyes of the mind towards the divine author and earnestly ask the meaning of such texts. Origen expounded the passage by revealing the spiritual significance concealed within the number forty-two and the very names of the campsites or resting-places of the Israelites on their desert pilgrimage. The route-map of the ancient Israelites recorded by Moses was thereby decoded, at least for a readership whose spiritual capacity was advanced beyond the elementary or ‘carnal’ stage of understanding, as a divinely given guide for the journey of the soul and of the Church, the new Israel, advancing from camp to camp through the desert of this world, gradually ascending heavenwards. Origen’s homily now survives only in Rufinus’s translation but was influential, especially through its appropriation by Jerome in a letter to Oceanus in Rome. Jerome had thereby improved on the hesitant answer he confessed he had once given when Fabiola, another member of his circle and a zealous student of the Scriptures, had asked him to explain the deep mysteries of the list of mansiones in the Numbers text.19 17 De mansionibus filiorum Israel, PL 94.699–702; trans. in Foley and Holder, Bede: A Biblical Miscellany, pp. 29–34. 18 In Numeros homilia XXVII, PG 12.780–801; trans. by Rowan A. Greer, Homily XXVII on Numbers, in Origen (London, 1979), pp. 245–69 (245–47). 19 Ep. 77, Ad Oceanum; Ep. 78, Ad Fabiolam. De mansionibus filiorum Israhel, S. Jérôme Lettres, ed. by J. LaBourt, 8 vols (Paris, 1949–63), IV, pp. 39–52 (p. 47), 52–93.

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Bede’s letter, therefore, concerns a passage which was an ancient crux; it cites Jerome’s work, which it is likely Acca knew too, but does not simply summarise it. Bede affirmed that the Numbers text had been written down as a sign signifying a great mystery, but he did not copy the arcane etymologies of the names of the forty-two mansiones which were so important to Origen, Jerome and Isidore and [8] which entirely occupy the commentary on the Book of Numbers in the Irish Reference Bible.20 Nor did he feel it necessary to explain, as they had done, the Christological significance of the number forty-two, or the meaning of the name ‘Israel’ as ‘seeing God’.21 Rather, he focussed on Acca’s technical question about the historical relationship between the number of resting-places or campsites and the number of years the Israelites spent meandering in the desert. He resolved the apparent contradictions and obscurities in the biblical account of the historical journey by a close reading of the literal text of Numbers 33 and a comparison with other Pentateuch passages, and then briefly expounded the story’s spiritual meaning. In his early commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, which had also been sent to Acca, Bede cited the patristic interpretation of the number forty as designating this temporal earthly life and then linked the forty years of the Exodus and the forty days between Christ’s resurrection and ascension to provide an insight into the spiritual life. The forty days of Christ’s post-resurrection appearances and conversatio with his disciples signified to them that after his Ascension he would, by his hidden presence, fulfill his promise to be with them always (Matthew 28.20). Bede assures the reader that Christ’s promise extends to his latter-day disciples, whose lifespans and spiritual lives are prefigured in the forty-year journey of the Israelites of old: ‘For after we have been buried in death with Christ through baptism (Romans 6. 4), as though having passed over the path through the Red Sea (see 1 Corinthians 10.1–2), it is necessary for us, in this wilderness, to have the Lord’s guidance. May he lead us to the heavenly kingdom’.22 Bede’s letter to Acca on Numbers 33 assumes knowledge of this interpretative tradition and succinctly develops the theme to provide an initiated reader with a highly allusive interpretation of the Exodus journey described in Scripture, where [9] it takes forty years – a lifetime – to progress at irregular intervals through the forty-two 20 Pauca problesmata de enigmatibus ex tomis canonicis. Praefatio et libri de pentateucho Moysi, ed. by Gerard MacGinty, CCCM, 173 (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 196–204. 21 Christ’s descent from heaven to earth at his incarnation, represented by the forty-two generations of his human ancestors (Matthew 1.1–17), was linked with humanity’s ascent to heaven from the Egypt of sin through the forty-two mansiones. The etymology of Israhel uir uidens deum is included in Jerome’s Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum, ed. by P. de Lagarde, CCSL, 72 (Turnhout, 1959), p. 139, line 22. 22 Nam postquam consepulti fuerimus cum Christo per baptismum in mortem, quasi rubri maris calle transito, necessarium in hac solitudine domini habemus ducatum, qui nos ad caelestia regna perducat: Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, 1.3, ed. by M.L.W. Laistner, CCSL, 121 (Turnhout, 1983), pp. 6–7, lines 25–33, trans. by Lawrence T. Martin (Kalamazoo, 1989), p. 10.

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mansiones. The Israelites led by Moses through the Red Sea had sinned in the desert, wandered about for years and eventually died there; it was the younger generation who, recapitulating their fathers’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, had finally crossed the river Jordan under Joshua and defeated the Canaanite tribes in order to inherit the Promised Land. Bede expounds the familiar Old Testament account as a description not simply of primary conversion and baptism, but of the lifelong process of continuing conversion by which the soul aspires to fulfill the baptismal image of casting off the old self and putting on the new, created in the likeness of God (Ephesians 4.22–24; Colossians 3.9–10).23 Bede is here offering spiritual consolation to one already advanced on the journey. The purpose of the final section of the letter is no longer to instruct Acca on the literal text of Numbers but to sustain a fellow pilgrim with the spiritual meaning of God’s word. He draws from the text divine reassurance that whenever, through sin, we turn aside from the path of truth, then, through penance, the soul is gradually brought back to higher things and so resumes the heavenward ascent. The soul grows to spiritual maturity in the desert of this life by learning and re-learning, with God’s help, how to produce deeds worthy of repentance, to fortify the camp and ward off the demonic attacks of temptation, and, at last, to cross the river of death and enter the kingdom of heavenly promise.

De virtute in virtutem In the hermeneutical tradition of commenting on a scriptural text through another scriptural text, Origen and Jerome had used words from Psalm 83.8 to illuminate the image of spiritual progress figured in the mansiones of the Israelites’ pilgrim journey through the desert: ibunt de virtute in virtutem: videbitur Deus deorum in Sion (‘they shall go from virtue to virtue: the God of gods shall be seen in Zion’).24 Bede used the same psalm verse in his letter to Acca: [10] incessu proficimus de virtute in virtutem quasi castra quaedam mansionesque, Deo duce, rectissimas Dei conspectu dignissimas per desertum mundi sitientis agamus. [As long as we are advancing from virtue to virtue as if to certain camps and resting-places throughout the desert of [this] arid world, let 23 Foley and Holder, Bede: A Biblical Miscellany, pp. 33–34. 24 et ita per singula quaeque tentamenta vitae ac fidei prosecuta, mansiones habere dicitur: in quibus per singula virtutum quaeruntur augmenta: et impletur in iis illud quod scriptum est: Ibunt de virtute in virtutem, usquequo perveniatur ad ultimum, imo ad summum gradum virtutum, et transeatur flumen Dei, ac promissa suscipiatur haereditas: Origen, In Numeros homilia XXVII, PG 12.786; trans. by Greer, Origen, p. 252. The Vulgate wording of the full psalm verse is ‘Etenim benedictionem dabit legislator; ibunt de virtute in virtutem, videbitur Deus deorum in Sion’ (Psalm 83.8). For variants, see notes 29, 30. Ambrose briefly used the Origenist spiritual interpretation of the names of the mansiones in his commentary on Psalm 118, Beati immaculati in via, which elaborates the metaphor of walking in the law of the Lord: Expositio Psalmi CXVIII, ed. by M. Petschenig, CSEL, 62 (Vienna, 1913), 5.5.

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us do whatever things are right and proper in the sight of God, secure in the progress of our good work with God as our leader.]25 He pictured the Church and the faithful soul as yearning for heaven and hastening to climb the ascent out of slavery in Egypt in the hope of ‘being set free from this vale of tears’ in order, at last, to go up to the place prepared for the blessed, that is, to see the God of gods in Zion. For a reader familiar with the Psalter through the daily monastic office, the idea of the desert journey as a spiritual ascent is strengthened by Bede’s use of Psalm 83.8 and his allusion to the last words of the previous verse, ascensiones in corde suo disposuit, in valle lacrimarum, in loco quem posuit (‘In his heart he has disposed to ascend by steps, in the vale of tears’). The psalm describes the desire and longing of Hebrew pilgrims going up to Jerusalem to God’s house. Like the Israelites’ original Exodus journey to the Promised Land, the journey to Jerusalem was used by patristic writers as a figure of the inner pilgrimage from earth to heaven. The psalmist’s words had been directly related by Cassiodorus to the faithful acquiring particular virtues by mounting each step to the Temple and gaining ascendancy over contrary vices with God’s help. He quotes the opening phrase of Psalm 83.8, Etenim benedictionem dabit legislator (‘For he who gave the law shall give a blessing’), when describing the movement from virtue which lies in the law to virtue which lies in grace; both merge in the person of Christ, the author of both the Old and the New Testaments. Cassiodorus urges that the soul, receiving forgiveness from the divine law-giver through grace, must not slacken, but always continue to advance heavenwards ‘from virtue to virtue’.26 Gregory the Great had quoted the same psalm verse, ambulabunt de virtute in virtutem, in relating the steps of the [11] Temple in Ezekiel’s vision to the soul’s ascent through the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit leading to the heavenly life.27 Both patristic works were familiar to Bede, who used lines from Psalm 83 repeatedly and with considerable variety of theological and spiritual inflection in his own exegesis. The recitation of the psalms in the daily pilgrimage of the monastic life and the liturgical use of scriptural allusions to the Exodus journey and Jerusalem pilgrimage, particularly in the season of Lent and Easter, made such spiritual interpretations of the literal text deeply felt. Patristic commentators saw Psalm 83.8 as a resonant evocation of the spiritual journey which progresses

25 De mansionibus filiorum Israel, PL, 94, 701; trans. in Foley and Holder, Bede: A Biblical Miscellany, p. 33. 26 Sequitur etenim benedictionem dabit qui legem dedit. Cum prophetiae tempus esset sub lege Domini constitutum, nec adhuc uenisset gratiae donum, eumdem dicit benedictionem daturum, id est gratiam suam, qui legem dedit ante iustitiam: docens Dominum Christum utriusque testamenti euidenter auctorem, cum dicit, benedictionem dabit qui legem dedit: Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by M. Adriaen, CCSL, 98 (Turnhout, 1958), p. 770, lines 146–52. 27 Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechielem prophetam, 2.3.3, ed. by M. Adriaen, CCSL, 142 (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 238–39, lines 49–66.

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through stages to the heavenly city symbolised by the earthly Jerusalem. Variant Latin translations offered commentators different nuances. The Gallican version used in the Vulgate reads ibunt de virtute in virtutem, where the verb in the third person plural (often supplied with the subject sancti, meaning the blessed or the elect) suggests their going forth or advancing, and virtus might be understood not simply as virtue but as spiritual power, strength or fortitude, goodness or even perfection.28 Indeed, the Hebrew Psalter text (the version contained in the Codex Amiatinus) has ibunt de fortitudine in fortitudinem, wording which had prompted Jerome and others to stress that the journey was not a progression from weakness to strength, but from being strong to being stronger.29 The Roman Psalter evokes the image of advancing on foot, ambulabunt de virtute in virtutem.30

Periphery and centre In 716, the year in which Acca consulted Bede about the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land, Bede’s abbot, Ceolfrith, set out on pilgrimage to Rome.31 The [12] liturgy of the early Anglo-Saxon Church used the Roman Psalter, and the phrase ‘ambulantes de virtute in virtutem’ appropriately formed one of the antiphons chanted at Wearmouth the morning Ceolfrith left, when he led his community from Mass in solemn procession. As they walked they sang, ‘The way of the just is right and the journey of the holy is prepared’ (Isaiah 26.7) and ‘walking from strength to strength’ (Psalm 83.8), as well as Psalm 66, which prays for God’s mercy and blessing and that his way may be known on earth.32 The processional chants implicitly associated Ceolfrith’s pilgrimage to the shrines of the holy apostles in Rome with pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the inner heavenward journey it represented. The links between Rome and Jerusalem were well developed. Papal Rome had fostered the concept that Rome had been refounded from Jerusalem by St Peter and St Paul; it was the western extremity of their evangelising mission from the biblical centre of the earth at Jerusalem and became the new centre from which their papal successors continued the apostolic mission to the ends of the earth.

28 Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. by Roger Gryson and others, 4th edn (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 876. 29 Biblia sacra, p. 877. 30 Le Psautier Romain, ed. by Robert Weber, Collectanea Biblica Latina, 10 (Vatican, 1953), p. 208. 31 Bede notes that work on his commentary on Samuel was interrupted by each of these events: see the opening lines of his letter to Acca, De mansionibus filiorum Israel, trans. in Foley and Holder, Bede: A Biblical Miscellany, p. 29, and the letter to Acca accompanying In primam partem Samuhelis libri IIII, ed. by David Hurst, CCSL, 119 (Turnhout, 1962), p. 212. 32 Uia iustorum recta facta est, et iter sanctorum praeparatum est and ambulantes de uirtute in uirtutem: Vita Ceolfridi, 25, ed. by Charles Plummer, Historia abbatum auctore anonymo, in Baedae: opera historica, I, 396–97, trans. by Farmer in Webb, Age of Bede, pp. 221–22. Discussed by Éamonn Ó Carragáin, The City of Rome and the World of Bede (Jarrow Lecture, 1994), pp. 8–14. All citations of the Vita Ceolfridi are to Plummer’s edition.

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Like Jerusalem, Rome drew all peoples to itself. The veneration of Rome as the site of the martyrdom and tombs of the Princes of the Apostles was crucial to the recognition of papal Rome as the guardian of the faith they had received. Christ’s unique commission to Peter (Matthew 16.18–19), in which each of his papal successors shared, demonstrated the oneness of the universal Church, the brotherly concord of Peter and Paul its harmony and unity. These were important themes in the iconography of early Roman churches, but Rome also came to share symbolically in the spiritual associations of the pilgrim city of Jerusalem through the imitatio of its topography and cults. The architecture, iconography and liturgy of Petrine Rome incorporated images of Jerusalem, the earthly symbol of the heavenly city. Rome itself came to function as a symbol of the New Jerusalem and the Church in heaven.33 The stational liturgy of Rome, for example, which involved the papal court in processing to basilicas in the city for the Pope as bishop to celebrate Mass in each of these stationes on its own particular day in the liturgical calendar, included two [13] Lenten processions from the Lateran to the nearby basilica of Hierusaleme and its relic of the True Cross.34 The first of these ceremonies enacted the Church’s symbolic pilgrimage to Jerusalem in preparation for Holy Week; the second, on Good Friday, imitated the ancient Good Friday procession of the bishop and pilgrims in Jerusalem to venerate the Cross at Golgotha. The processions recalled Old Testament images of the Exodus journey and of pilgrims going up to Jerusalem for the Passover, which were evoked in the liturgy of Lent and Easter, but also had a strongly eschatological dimension as a figure of the pilgrim Church in via, journeying towards its completion in the heavenly Jerusalem at the end of time. Éamonn Ó Carragáin has vividly suggested how the inspiration of the stational liturgy of papal Rome, expressing the unity of the churches of the city of Rome and of the universal Church under its bishop but also the community of all the saints on earth with those in heaven, is reflected in the anonymous biographer’s account of Ceolfrith’s ceremonial departure to Rome. He led his community from Mass and they processed with incense and chant around the Wearmouth altars of St Peter, St Mary, and St Lawrence, ‘three of the greatest patrons of Rome’.35 The antiphons and psalm were repeated as the monks processed towards the river, where Ceolfrith venerated the Cross and set off on his final pilgrimage. Though he died on the way, before reaching Rome, his followers ardently believed he would reach his heavenly destination.36 Ceolfrith had enjoined the monks of St Peter’s, Wearmouth, to preserve concord and unity with the brothers of St Paul’s, Jarrow, as members of one monastery 33 Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Art of Authority’, in After Rome, ed. by Thomas Charles-Edwards (Oxford, 2003), pp. 141–89 (148–51). 34 See Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood, pp. 148–50, 183–201, for a luminous account of these and other examples of the Roman stational liturgy and the veneration of the Cross. 35 City of Rome, pp. 8–14 (13). 36 Letter of Ceolfrith’s successor Hwaetberht to Gregory II, Vita Ceolfridi, 30.

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under one abbot. Bede described the brotherly love that would unite the two houses just as it had bound together the two chief apostles, Peter and Paul.37 The close connection between the two houses and the shrine of St Peter in Rome was renewed by Ceolfrith’s pilgrimage and expressed in the distribution of the three great pandect Bibles produced at Wearmouth-Jarrow during his abbacy: the anonymous biographer says that one remained in the church of St Peter at Wearmouth, one in the church of St Paul at Jarrow, and Ceolfrith took the third one (the Codex Amiatinus) as a gift to St Peter’s shrine at Rome. The texts and images of the opening quire variously demonstrate the spiritual interpretation of [14] God’s word, in harmony with the universal Church.38 Ceolfrith’s dedication of the book is ‘to the body of sublime Peter, justly venerated, whom ancient faith declares to be head of the Church’ and seeks in return ‘a memorial in heaven’ for himself and his community.39 The Pope wrote to the new abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow, acknowledging Ceolfrith’s gift to their common lord and patron, the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and prayed that ‘this most approved teacher of the holy precepts of the rule might show the way in God’s sight to worthy disciples’. He again acknowledged the late abbot’s spiritual leadership when he called on divine grace to perfect Ceolfrith’s merits ‘like those of Aaron and Moses, the holy leaders of the chosen people who were called away before they reached the Promised Land’.40 The theme of the Exodus journey runs through the prefatory texts and diagrams of the Codex Amiatinus. Cryptic allusions to Christ, his Church and the Temple of the heavenly Jerusalem are contained within the double-page depiction of the Tabernacle surrounded by the encampments of the twelve tribes, and their leaders, Aaron and Moses (Numbers 2.1–31). Both the prologue of the book on fol. 4 and the titulus of the diagram on fol. 6, which sets out the arrangement of the books of the Bible according to the Septuagint, refer to the seventy palm trees at one of the forty-two campsites, in mansione Helim, as a figure of the constituent books of Scripture. The diagram of the Pentateuch on fol. 7v, citing the spiritual interpretation of each of the five books of Moses from Jerome’s Epistle 53, sharpens his allusion to the significant numerology of the book of Numbers: ‘are not its very figures and mensurae terrae and the forty-two mansiones in the wilderness so many mysteries?’41 [15] 37 Historia abbatum, c. 7. 38 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatino I. 39 Vita Ceolfridi, 37, records the dedication: Corpus ad eximii merito uenerabile Petri | Dedicat aecclesiae quem caput alta fides | Ceolfridus Anglorum extremis de finibus abbas [. . .] . In caelis memorem semper habere locum. 40 fidem eius in muneris conlatione probantes, dignum commemorationibus assiduis censuimus, ac probatissimum preceptorem in sanctis ac regularibus institutis dignis auditoribus praeuium ante Deum existere peroramus, ut illum, Aaron et Moysi sanctis diuinae plebis ducibus ad promissionis patriam tendentibus euocatis: Vita Ceolfridi, 39, trans. in Webb, Age of Bede, p. 228. 41 In the Codex Amiatinus the phrase mensurae terrae replaces prophetiae Balaam used in Jerome’s letter: Numeri uero nonne totius arithmeticae et prophetiae Balaam et quadraginta duarum per heremum mansionum mysteria continent? S. Jérôme Lettres, 3, Ep. 53.8, ed. by LaBourt, p. 16,

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Bede, however, does not apply the biblical image of the Exodus to the details of Ceolfrith’s arduous journey towards Rome. Rather, in a letter to Acca he mourned the passing of the leadership of Moses and Aaron in Ceolfrith’s departure from his abbatial office.42 Notwithstanding his own frequent exegetical use of Psalm 83.8, Bede in the Historia abbatum does not mention that it was sung on the occasion of Ceolfrith’s departure for Rome.43 Ceolfrith’s literal pilgrimage is not criticised, but neither is it presented as a model for all to follow. The Prologue of the Rule of St Benedict, an important influence in the life of Wearmouth-Jarrow, uses Psalm 14 to describe the route of the virtuous life by which the Lord shows the faithful the way to his tabernacle and his holy mountain. The path becomes an image of the monastic life itself, narrow at the outset: Processu vero conversationis et fidei, dilatato corde inenarrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur via mandatorum Dei, ut ab ipsius numquam magisterio descedentes, in eius doctrinam usque ad mortem in monasterio perseverantes, passionibus Christi per patientiam participemur, ut et regno eius mereamur esse consortes. [But as we progress in this way of life and faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments. [. . .] Never swerving from his instructions, then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may also deserve to share in his kingdom.]44 Bede’s account of Ceolfrith’s final pilgrimage chiefly commemorates his long and exemplary practice of the monastic life. Bede insists that the resignation from abbatial cares was prompted by Ceolfrith’s concern that he could no longer in old age teach the community by the vigorous example necessary to provide the spiritual leadership required for the community’s disciplined observance of the Rule, handed down by its father on the authority of traditional practice. The only details which Bede gives of the journey show Ceolfrith as frail and ill but faithfully continuing in the monastic life of prayer without ceasing and in celebration of the Eucharist.45 The new abbot in a letter to the Pope praised Ceolfrith for having fostered his monastery’s ‘spiritual peace and liberty in the calm of the cloister’. He honoured

42 43

44 45

lines 24–26. For the illustrations of the Codex Amiatinus as visual exegesis, see Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Library of Scripture: Views from Vivarium and Wearmouth-Jarrow’, in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, ed. by Paul Binski and Will Noel (Stroud, 2001), pp. 3–39. Bede, In primam partem Samuhelis, ed. by Hurst, p. 212. However, he earlier explains the appropriateness of the psalm (82), which was being sung by the monks in church at the moment that Benedict Biscop died in his monastic cell: Historia abbatum, c. 14. The Rule of St Benedict, ed. and trans. by Timothy Fry (Collegeville, MN, 1981), pp. 164, 166. Historia abbatum, c. 16, c. 22.

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[16] him as a future ‘mighty patron and advocate for our transgressions before the throne of grace’, though was resigned to the probability that Ceolfrith would die in Rome and his body remain there.46 Bede applauded Hwaetberht’s zeal in securing the privilege of bringing the bodies of two past saintly abbots, Eosterwine and Sigfrid, into the chapel of St Peter’s at Wearmouth, to entomb them next to the monastery’s founding father, Benedict Biscop, who was buried near the altar of St Peter.47 These local lives of virtue were therefore memorialised not only in the liturgical calendar and literary monumenta of the Vita Ceolfridi and Historia abbatum, but in the fabric of the monastery, together with the imported relics of St Peter and other universally honoured saints, to guide future generations undertaking the daily round of their lifelong pilgrimage within the monastic precincts. Bede’s exegetical works present this concept of the living ecclesia and the community of saints through combining the biblical metaphors of journeying to Jerusalem and of building the Temple. In De templo he explains that ‘in the universal assembly of the elect various righteous persons succeed each other’ and lesser ones are glad to follow faithfully in their footsteps, guided by the example of the life, sayings, and writings of the righteous: ‘For we know that virtues beget virtues and saints advance from virtue to virtue until the God of gods is seen in Zion’ (Psalm 83.8).48 The foundations of humility are laid in the individual soul by following the example of such teachers; the wall is built up by good works, by laying one upon another like courses of stones, and by advancing from virtue to virtue.49 He pictures those of greatest virtue, who are closest to the Lord through their [17] humility, as large, squared, precious stones forming the foundation of the house of the Lord. The courses of stones or timber laid upon them are the priests and teachers who followed, each in his own time, ‘by whose ministry the fabric of the Church grows or by whose virtues it is shaped’.50

46 Commendamus autem tuae sanctae benignitati [. . .] uenerabiles patris nostri dilectissimi canos, Ceolfridi uidelicet abbatis, ac nutritoris tutorisque nostrae spiritalis in monastica quiete libertatis et pacis; magnum pro nostris excessibus apud supernam pietatem intercessorem habemus et patronum: Historia abbatum, c. 19; Vita Ceolfridi, 30. 47 Historia abbatum, c. 20. 48 Scimus enim uirtutes de uirtutibus nasci et sanctos ambulare de uirtute in uirtutem donec uideatur Deus deorum in Sion: De templo, ed. by David Hurst, CCSL, 119A (Turnhout, 1969), pp. 203–04, lines 478–80; trans. by Connolly, On the Temple, p. 80. 49 Post fundamentum uero talibus ac tantis lapidibus compositum aedificanda est domus praeparatis diligentius lignis ac lapidibus ac decenti ordine collacatis quae olim de prisco suo situ uel radice fuerant abstracta quia post prima fidei rudimenta post collocata in nobis iuxta exemplum sublimum uirorum fundamenta humilitatis addendus est in altum paries operum bonorum quasi superimpositis sibi inuicem ordinibus lapidum ambulando ac proficiendo de uirtute in uirtutem. Vel certe lapides fundamenti grandes pretiosi quadrati primi sunt ut supra dixeram ecclesiarum magistri: De templo, ed. by Hurst, p. 156, lines 356–70; trans. by Connolly, On the Temple, p. 16. 50 De templo, ed. by Hurst, p. 156, lines 364–70. The image is applied to the ministry of Gregory the Great and to Augustine’s successor, Lawrence. Gregory’s care of souls is contrasted with popes who devoted themselves to building churches and adorning them with gold and silver; Historia Ecclesiastica, 2.1. Lawrence ‘strove to build up the foundations of the Church which had been

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Ceolfrith had resolved to visit once more the shrines of the holy apostles in Rome, where he had gone with Benedict as a young man, but now with the intention of awaiting death there by giving himself to unhindered prayer and penance. Once he had secured his release from office, Ceolfrith left his own community and kindred ‘to be a stranger in foreign lands so that he might with greater freedom and purity of heart devote himself to contemplation with the legions of angels in heaven’. Hwaetberht’s letter of commendation to the Pope described Ceolfrith beginning once more, as though newly summoned to the heavenly life as a reward for his love of virtue, to set out as a pilgrim for Christ at the end of his days: ‘thus the glowing fire of penance may more freely burn away the old thorns of earthly cares in the furnace of the Spirit’.51

On seeing the God of gods in Zion: the ascent to contemplation Bede used the same penitential image, but of St Cuthbert, who had also laid aside the burden of pastoral care when he withdrew from Lindisfarne after many years in the monastery and journeyed, not to Rome but further out into the Ocean bounding the ends of the earth, to the tiny island of Farne.52 Cuthbert gave himself undividedly to prayer and fasting and the rigours of the solitary life to prepare himself for death or, rather, eternal life, so that ‘the flame of his old contrition [18] might consume more easily the implanted thorns of worldly cares’.53 He too had first secured the support of his community: Gaudebat namque quia de longa perfectione conuersationis actiuae, ad otium diuinae speculationis iam mereretur ascendere. Laetabatur ad eorum sortem se pertingere de quibus canitur in psalmo, Ambulabunt de uirtute in uirtutem, uidebitur Deus deorum in Syon. [He rejoiced because, after a long and blameless active life, he was now held worthy to rise to the repose of divine contemplation. He rejoiced to attain to the lot of those concerning whom the Psalmist sings:

so magnificently laid’ (1 Corinthians 3.10–11) by ‘frequent words of holy exhortation and by continually setting a pattern of good works’ (Laurentius archiepiscopi gradu potitus strenuissime fundamenta ecclesiae, quae nobiliter iacta uidit, augmentare atque ad profectum debiti culminis et crebra uoce sanctae exhortationis et continuis piae operationis exemplis prouehere curauit: Historia Ecclesiastica, 2.4). 51 rursus incipitperegrinari pro Christo, quo liberius prisca sollicitudinum secularium spineta, camino spiritali feruens compunctionis ignis absumat: Historia abbatum, c. 19. 52 Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.28; Vita Sancti Cuthberti, c. 17, ed. and trans. by Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 215–17. 53 Abiecit pondus curae pastoralis, atque ad dilectum heremiticae conuersationis agonem quamtotius remeare curauit, quatinus inolita sibi sollicitudinis mundanae spineta liberior priscae compunctionis flamma consumeret: Vita Sancti Cuthberti, c. 36, ed. and trans. by Colgrave, pp. 266–67.

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‘the saints shall go forth from strength to strength; the God of gods shall be seen in Zion’.]54 Origen’s interpretation of the mansiones in the desert had described how, before arriving at perfection, the soul dwells in the wilderness, where it is trained in the commandments and tested by temptations and demons, overcoming them by increasing in virtues one by one and fulfilling what is written, ‘They shall go from virtue to virtue’.55 As in some other Insular works of hagiography, such as the lives of Fursa and Guthlac, Psalm 83.8 is associated in the Vita Cuthberti with the anchoritic life of spiritual warfare in desolate places.56 Cuthbert had progressed from learning the rudiments of the solitary life, in temporary withdrawals on the outer precincts of the Lindisfarne monastery, to the more remote battlefield of Farne where, armed with virtues, he engaged in combat against demonic attack, overcoming temptations (Ephesians 6.16–17). The fortification of the [19] camp in the desert and the entry into the Promised Land are here located on an island in the North Sea. With the help of angels Cuthbert built a dwelling-place, at one point described as a mansione, at another as the civitas of his imperium. Unlike the great sites in Rome or the fine stone churches of Wearmouth-Jarrow, built in the Roman manner, it was constructed of turf and boulders, rough timber and straw; it is not the building but its inhabitant, Cuthbert, who is a dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. He is shown as already living very close to the angelic life, a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem. His dwelling on Farne was surrounded by a rampart so high ‘that he could see nothing else but the heavens which he longed to enter’; it ‘lifted the whole bent of his mind to higher things’, restraining the lust of the eyes and of the thoughts.57 The image recalls Gregory the Great’s teaching that, in order to contemplate the invisible Creator, it is necessary to cast out earthly and heavenly images from the mind’s eye and thoughts arising from the bodily perceptions of 54 Vita Sancti Cuthberti, c. 17. 55 Trans. by Greer, Origen, pp. 252, 257. 56 Wanting to live the life of a pilgrim, Fursa constructs a monastery in a Roman camp in the kingdom of the East Angles and has visions of angels who sing, Ibunt sancti de uirtute in uirtutem, et iterum Videbitur Deus deorum in Sion, and protect him from the onslaughts of evil spirits attempting to prevent his journey to heaven: Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.19. When Guthlac is delivered from temptation and torment by evil spirits and returned to his island dwelling in the fens, he hears heavenly voices singing, Ibunt sancti de uirtute in uirtutem et reliqua: Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, 33, ed. and trans. by Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), p. 108. St Brendan and his companions approach an island of anchorites where three choirs – of boys, youths and elders – are continuously on the move except when each choir in turn stands in one place to chant Psalm 83.8, so that the versicle is sung without ceasing, at all stages of the anchoritic life: Navigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis, from Early Latin Manuscripts, c. 17, ed. by Carl Selmer (Notre Dame, 1959), p. 49. 57 Nam intrinsecus uiuam cedendo rupem, multo illum fecit altiorem, quatinus ad cohibendam oculorum siue cogitationum lasciuiam, ad erigendam in superna desideria totam mentis intentionem, pius incola nil de sua mansione praetor coelum possetintueri: Vita Sancti Cuthberti, c. 17 (pp. 216–17); see also Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.28.

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the senses.58 Bede records that Gregory too in his monastic seclusion ‘used to think nothing but thoughts of heaven, so that, even though still imprisoned in the body, he was able to pass in contemplation beyond the barriers of the flesh’. The true holiness of Gregory and Cuthbert, however, was revealed in their surrender of such longed-for exile from earthly concerns and their submission again to the burden of office and pastoral care when it was required of them.59 In a homily on John 1.43–51 where Christ, wanting to go to Galilee, summons Philip to follow him, Bede shows the nature of true discipleship through the patristic explanation of ‘Galilee’ as meaning both ‘a passing over’ and ‘revelation’. In its first sense, the name denotes the passing of faithful disciples from vices to virtues, or their gradual daily progress from lesser to greater virtues so that, with the Lord’s help, they journey on and pass over ‘from this vale of tears to the height of heavenly gladness’ (see Psalm 83.6–7). In its second sense, ‘revelation’, it [20] suggests the blessedness of eternal life for which the faithful labour in this present life. Bede emphasises that the psalmist includes both interpretations of the name ‘Galilee’ in one verse, when he says: ‘They will walk from virtue to virtue; the God of gods will be seen in Zion’ (Psalm 83.8). He identifies the psalmist’s prophecy as the vision concerning which the apostle Paul says, ‘We, with unveiled faces beholding the Lord’s glory, are transformed from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord’ (2 Corinthians 3.18). Bede makes it clear that the heavenward journey described by the psalmist in Psalm 83.8 means following the Lord by imitating him: just as he suffered and was resurrected and entered into his glory, so he showed his followers how to grow in virtue and pass through transitory sufferings to the joy of eternal gifts.60 The same patristic etymologies of ‘Galilee’, and the same text from Corinthians, are combined in Bede’s great Easter homily on the risen Christ’s final appearance to his disciples on earth, which foreshadows their perpetual vision of him in heaven. Obeying the directive of the angel at the tomb, the disciples had gone 58 Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechielem prophetam, 2.5.9, ed. by Adriaen, pp. 281–82. 59 ut nulla nisi caelestia cogitare soleret, ut etiam retentus corpore ipsa iam carnis claustra contemplatione transiret: Historia Ecclesiastica, 2.1; 4.28; Vita Sancti Cuthberti, c. 24, ed. and trans. by Colgrave, p. 239. See further Clare Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity Between Pastor and Solitary’, in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community to A.D. 1200, ed. by Gerard Bonner, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 21–42 (36–42). 60 In eo autem quod reuelationem sonat ipsam uitae aeternae beatitudinem pro qua in praesenti laborant insinuans cuius utramque interpretationem nominis psalmista uno uersiculo conprehendit ubi ait: Ambulabunt de uirtute in uirtutem, uidebitur Deus deorum in Sion. Haec est namque uisio de qua dicit apostolus: Nos autem reuelata facie gloriam domini speculantes in eandem imaginem transformamur a gloria in gloriam tamquam a domini spiritu. Bene ergo uocaturus ad sequendum se discipulum Iesus uoluit exire in Galileam, id est in transmigrationem factam siue reuelationem, ut uidelicet sicut ipse teste euangelio proficiebat sapientia et aetate et gratia apud Deum et homines (Luke 24.26) sicut passus est et resurrexit et ita intrauit in gloriam suam sic etiam suos sequaces ostenderet proficere uirtutibus ac per passiones transitorias ad aeternorum dona gaudiorum transmigrare debere: Homeliarum Evangelii, I.17, ed. by Hurst, pp. 120–21, lines 46–61; trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, I, 167.

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to Galilee and, seeing Christ there, some adored him (Matthew 28.7, 17). Bede explains that those who are Christ’s follow him and they in their turn pass over from death into life; seeing him there ‘they adore him whom they contemplate in his divine form, and praise him for ever’. With extreme economy Bede suggests the transformation of redeemed humanity: ‘Then, indeed, “we, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord are changed into the same likeness” (2 Corinthians 3.18), all of us who now commit our way to him and follow his footsteps.61 In his homily on Pentecost, the liturgical completion of the Easter [21] season, Bede describes Christ’s resurrection as the pattern for the faithful: ‘We must believe that our bodies too, after their resurrection, will be endowed with heavenly glory’. The children of the resurrection will no longer require earthly sustenance; their joy will consist of none other ‘than that which is chanted in the psalm, “Blessed are they who dwell in your house, O Lord, they will praise you for ever”. And again, “The God of gods will be seen in Zion”’ (Psalm 83.5, 8). The mysteries of that age, ‘when God will be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15.28), remain hidden.62 It can be seen from these examples that Bede does not use Psalm 83.8 simply to describe moral progress. The active love of neighbour, itself the work of grace, is a condition of every stage of the heavenward journey he describes, but he further associates the psalm text with the ascent to contemplation, which for most is only completed in heaven.63 Acca longed to ‘see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living’ (see Psalm 26.13), and in De templo Bede once more offered his friend an aid to achieving a glimpse of that vision through the Scriptures. He pictured Acca in the exile of this present life (and possibly in literal exile too) but solaced by the contemplation of ‘the unfathomable mysteries of the heavenly mansions’ (see John 14.2), like the blessed John exiled on Patmos.64 To describe that contemplative vision Bede repeatedly returned to Psalm 83, and

61 Sequuntur hi qui sunt Christi et ipsi in suo ordine ad uitam transmigrant ibique eum uidentes adorant quem in specie suae diuinitatis contemplantes sine fine conlaudant. Cui uisioni congruit illud quod Galilaea etiam reuelatio interpretatur. Tunc etenim reuelata facie sicut apostolus testatur gloriam domini speculantes in eandem imaginem transformamur quicumque modo reuelamus ad eum uiam nostram eiusque uestigia fide non ficta sequimur: Homeliarum Evangelii, II.8, ed. by Hurst, p. 234, lines 30–33; trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, II, 69–70. 62 Sed et nostra post resurrectionem corpora caelesti gloria praedita credendum est ad quicquid uoluerint agendum esse potentia ad ueniendum ubicumque libuerit esse promptissima; sed quia nulla tunc manducandi necessitas uel utilitas aliunde possit inferri nullatenus inmortale saeculum cibis mortalibus esse fruiturum ubi filiis resurrectionis non aliud esca et potus uita et salus gaudium pax et omnia bona quam illud nimirum sit quod in psalmo canit: Beati qui habitant in domo tua domine in saecula saeculorum laudabunt te; et iterum: Videbitur Deus deorum in Sion. Vnde et apostolus illius saeculi archana describens ait: Quando erit Deus omnia in omnibus: Homeliarum Evangelii, II.9, ed. by Hurst, p. 244, lines 178–89, trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, II, 85. 63 For other examples of Bede’s exegesis on the active and contemplative life, and for discussion of the patristic background, see Scott DeGregorio, ‘The Venerable Bede on Prayer and Contemplation’, Traditio, 54 (1999), pp. 1–39 (27–32). 64 iuxta exemplum beati Iohannis qui ab imperatore nefando intra angustias unius paruis – simae religatus insulae confestim a pio conditore per spiritum est ad contemplanda infinita illa caelestium

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especially its [22] image of seeing God, in various contexts and with a variety of theological as well as spiritual insights gained from reading it in the light of other scriptural texts. The incarnation and resurrection of Christ are central to the vision. In an Advent homily on John 1.15–18, for example, the psalm is evoked for him by the Gospel’s declaration of the invisible God made known in Christ, the transcendent Word made flesh: ‘No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son of God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared (narrauit) him’. He emphasises there is one heavenly homeland for all the blessed, but they will experience it according to their varying spiritual merits. Bede affirms that Christ will, after the general judgement, reveal the glory of the invisible and indivisible Trinity by leading all the elect to the vision of his brightness. To those who had only understood him in his humanity he will reveal his divinity. Meanwhile, to some of the faithful who have already died, he has begun to fulfill his promise that ‘He who loves me is loved by my Father, and I will manifest myself to him’ (John 14.21). This blessing is already being experienced by the apostles, martyrs, confessors and others, though many righteous but less perfect people wait in the blessed rest of paradise for the general resurrection when they will appear before the face of the Lord, while others of the elect will first be chastised in purgatory. Bede says that the only begotten Son will tell all of them about God, but ‘according to the capacity of each, when at the time of resurrection, he who gave the law will give a blessing, so that, journeying from the virtue of faith and hope to the virtue of contemplation, they may see the God of gods in Zion’.65 Bede’s use of other scriptural texts about seeing God can extend our understanding of what might be meant by his use of the image as it occurs in Psalm 83.8. In De locis sanctis, Adamnán, having closely questioned the pilgrim Arculf, describes the rock-hewn cave of Christ’s sepulchre, which is clad in marble, adorned with gold, and enshrined within a great pilgrimage church in Jerusalem. Adamnán adds that doubtless the prophet was prophesying the burial and resurrection of Christ in this cave when he said, ‘he shall dwell in a high cave of [23] the strongest rock’ and ‘you shall see the king with glory’ (Isaiah 33.16, 17). Bede, though fond of the Isaiah text, omits it from his own version of De locis sanctis and elsewhere in his exegesis expounds it as referring to Christ and members of his body, the

mansionum archana introductus et ubi putatus est: De templo, ed. by Hurst, p. 144, lines 64–67; trans. by Connolly, On the Temple, p. 3. See further note 73. 65 Qua autem ratione ad uisionem incommutabilis et aeterni luminis perueniri debeat euangelista consequenter exposuit dicens: Vnigenitus filius qui est in sinu patris ipse narruit [. . .] . Quibus tamen omnibus unigenitus filius qui est in sinu patris Deum iuxta modum cuiusque capacitatis narrabit cum tempore resurrectionis benedictionem dederit qui legem dedit ut ambulantes de uirtute fidei et spei in uirtutem contemplationis uideant Deum deorum in Sion, id est incommutabilis ueritatis cuius beneficiis et muneribus aeternis laus et gratiarum actio in omnia saecula saeculorum: Homeliarum Evangelii, I.2, ed. by Hurst, p. 11, lines 169–71; p. 13, lines 220–26; trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, I, 15, 17.

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Church.66 De templo describes the eternal reward of those who observe the law by loving their neighbour, whom they can see, and God, whom they now do not see. In the next life they will ‘see the king in his beauty’ (Isaiah 33.17), that is, God in the glory of his divinity, but will also see their neighbour glorified and beautified in God; human nature will be eternally united to God.67 In his Gospel homilies he warns that only the eyes of the just will see the king in all his beauty, meaning that only those who follow the example and teaching of Christ’s human life will see his divinity, for ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5.8).68 The Letter on the death of Bede by the deacon Cuthbert records [24] Bede’s own yearning for the vision: ‘The time of my departure is at hand, and my soul longs to see Christ my King in all his beauty’ (Isaiah 33.17).69 Augustine’s psalm commentary, which Bede knew well, cites the opening of Psalm 83.8, ‘For he who gives the law will give a blessing’, and asks its meaning, which he finds in the second part of the same verse: ‘Grace shall come after the law; grace itself is the blessing. And what has that grace and blessing given us? They shall go (ambulabunt) from virtue to virtue’. Augustine explains that there is a diversity of virtues, which he describes under the form of the gifts of the Spirit 66 Similarly, Gregory the Great noted that the Isaiah text describes the heights the faithful soul can ascend by the virtues of the active life and by fixing his thoughts on heavenly things, though he cannot in the flesh behold the land of the living as it really is: ‘He shall dwell in high places [. . .] . His eyes shall see the king in his beauty, they shall behold the land afar off’ (Isaiah 33.16–17). At the Judgement the pure in heart will at last ‘see the king in all his beauty’; that is, in his divinity. Qui ambulat in iustitiis [. . .] et claudit oculos suos ne uideat malum (Isaiah 33.15), ilico ab eiusdem actiuae uitae gradibus ad quae contemplationis culmina ascendatur adiunxit, dicens: “Iste in excelsis habitabit, munimenta saxorum sublimitas eius, panis ei datus est, aquae eius fideles sunt”. Regem in decore suo uidebunt oculi eius, cernent terram de longe. [. . .] . Regem in decore suo oculi nostri conspiciunt, quia Redemptor noster in iudicio et a reprobis homo uidebitur, sed ad divinitatis eius intuendam celsitudinem soli qui electi sunt subleuantur: Moralia in Iob, III.51, ed. by M. Adriaen, 3 vols, CCSL, 143–143B (Turnhout, 1979–85), III, p. 1620, lines 26–29, 42–44. 67 Qui ergo decalogum in Dei et proximi dilectione custodiunt iure mercedem huius custodiae in Dei simul et proximi uisione percipiunt quique in hac uita et proximum quem uident et Deum quem non uident diligunt hi in futura uita et Deum regem in decore suo et proximum in Deo glorificatum ac decoratum uidebunt: De templo, ed. by Hurst, p. 227, lines 1383–88; trans. by Connolly, On the Temple, pp. 108–09. 68 Nam et reprobi in iudicio Christum uidebunt sed sicut scriptum est: Videbunt in quem transfixerunt. Soli autem regem in decore suo uidebunt oculi iustorum. Beati enim mundo corde quoniam ipsi Deum uidebunt: Homeliarum Evangelii, II.17, ed. by Hurst, p. 305, lines 170–73, trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospel, II, 170. This homily is on John 14.15–21, the last verse of which is also linked with Isaiah 33.17 in Bede’s homily on Luke 2.45–52: Me ipsum, inquit, manifestabo (John 14.21), id est non qualem me omnes conspicere qualem etiam infideles uidere possunt et crucifigere sed qualem in decore suo regem saeculorum soli uidere possunt oculi mundi, sanctorum talem me ad rependendam uicem dilectionis his qui me diligunt ostendam (Homeliarum Evangelii, I.19, ed. by Hurst, p. 135, lines 21–26 on Luke 2.42–52; trans. by Martin and Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, I, p. 188). 69 Tempus uero absolutionis meae prope est; etenim anima mea desiderat Regem meum Christum in decore suo uidere: Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae, ed. and trans. by Colgrave and Mynors in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, pp. 580–87 (584–85).

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and the cardinal virtues; they are acquired through grace and are necessary in this earthly vale of tears, but from these many virtues we go to one Virtue, namely, ‘Christ, the power of God (Dei virtutem) and the wisdom of God’ (1 Corinthians 1.24). He repeats the psalm verse, in variant form, ibunt a virtutibus in virtutem, and recasts his argument: what will that one virtue be, towards which we are going, but the virtue of contemplating God alone? He asks, ‘What is contemplation?’ and answers, ‘the God of gods shall appear in Zion’ (Apparebit Deus deorum in Sion). He shall appear as he is, ‘God with God, the Word with the Father, by whom all things were made [see John 1.3], and he shall appear to the pure in heart, because “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”’ (Matthew 5.8).70 The blessing or beatitude to which Augustine refers (Matthew 5.8) is itself a key text. It is used, for example, in Cassian’s description of monastic perfection as attaining to complete purity of heart, which is love.71 Cassian uses Psalm 83.8 to describe phases in the longing for that state of blessedness as degrees of perfection, moving from fear to love: [25] Videtis ergo perfectionum gradus esse diuersos et de excelsis ad excelsiora nos a domino prouocari ita, ut is qui in timore dei beatus et perfectus extiterit, ambulans sicut scriptum est de uirtute in uirtutem et de perfectione ad aliam perfectionem, id est de timore ad spem mentis alacritate conscendens, ad beatiorem denuo statum, quod est caritas. [We are called by the Lord from high things to still higher in such a way that he who has become blessed and perfect in the fear of God, going, as it is written, from strength to strength, and from one perfection to another [i.e. from fear of the Lord to hope], is summoned in the end to that still more blessed stage, which is love.]72 He explains that all who fear the Lord will be blessed, though there is a great distinction between those who obtain mercy and those deemed worthy to enjoy the most glorious vision of God, ‘for the Saviour says that in his Father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14.2). Bede uses this image in a similar way.73 Cassian

70 sub lege gemuimus; quid restat, nisi ut benedictionem det qui legem dedit? Adueniet gratia post legem; ipsa est benedictio. Et quid nobis praestitit ista gratia et benedictio? Ambulabunt a uirtutibus in uirtutem. Hic enime per gratiam multae uirtutes dantur [. . .] . Multae uirtutes, sed hic necessariae; et ab his uirtutibus imus in uirtutem. Quam uirtutem? Christum, Dei uirtutem, et Dei sapientiam. Ipse dat diuersas uirtutes in loco hoc, qui pro omnibus uirtutibus necessariis in conualle plorationis et utilibus dabit unam uirtutem, seipsum: Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by D. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, 3 vols, CCSL, 38–40 (Turnhout, 1956), II, p. 1157, lines 7–11, 15–19. 71 Cassian, Conlationes, 1.1.10, 14.1.9, in Jean Cassien. Conférences, ed. and trans. by E. Pichery, Sources chrétiennes, 42, 54, 64 (Paris, 1955–59), 42, p. 89; 54, p. 195. 72 Conlationes, 11.1.12; ed. and trans. by Pichery, 54, p. 114. 73 Bede similarly links John 14.2 with fear and love and the image of ‘star differing from star in glory’ (1 Corinthians 15.41) in De templo. The many mansions of God’s house will receive ‘all

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adds that not all will reach the same measure of perfection of love. The disciplined experience of monastic practice, including knowing and learning the Scriptures, prepares for insight into the hidden mysteries of Scripture, where God is revealed; this transforming experience guides the ardent quest for greater purity of heart, leading to still deeper understanding of the divine word in scriptural texts which have long been known.74 [26] Like Augustine and Cassian, Bede links the beatitude of Matthew 5.8 with Psalm 83.8, for instance in De tabernaculo, where he adds that the heavenly reward of the faithful – seeing God – is sometimes disclosed by divine grace even in this earthly life, to those who are pure in heart. Though God dwells in light inaccessible to earthly hearts, Bede cites Moses on the Exodus journey as an example of some spiritual teachers who ‘have been permitted to ascend to the grace of divine contemplation once they have perfected the active life’. Such teachers do not then retire from the active life; they exemplify love of God and neighbour when they descend the mountain and by their word and example mediate something of the inner understanding of the divine word granted to them, assisting others to advance, according to their capacity, from virtue to virtue (Psalm 83.8).75 The precept is embodied in Bede’s portrait of Cuthbert, who was fired with divine love and longing for the life of contemplation, yet summoned the people committed to his charge to heavenly things. He believed that ‘to give the weak brethren help and advice was a fit substitute for prayer, for

those who fear him, and the Lord blesses those who love him, both little ones and great’: De templo, ed. by Hurst, p. 144, lines 45–48; pp. 233–34, lines 1639–48; trans. by Connolly, On the Temple, p. 2. Nam et hoc in consolatione scripturarum inuenimus quia benedixit omnes timentes se dominus pusillos cum maioribus (Psalm 113.21) multasque nobis in domo patris sui mansiones esse declaruit: De templo, ed. by Hurst, p. 144, lines 45–48; trans. by Connolly, p. 2. Sicut stella a stella differt in claritate ita et resurrectio mortuorum (1 Corinthians 15. 41–42). Quod utrumque iudex ipse ac distributor praemiorum dominus una sententia demonstrauit cum ait: In domo patris mei multae sunt mansiones. Vnam ergo domum domini fecit Salomon sed multos in ea thesauros ad recipienda uasa diuersi generis una tamen benedictione sanctificata parauit quia nimirum una est domus patris non manu facta aeterna in caelis sed multae in ea mansiones ac recipiendos omnes timentes se ac diligentes dominus benedicit pusillos cum maioribus. Amen: De templo, ed. by Hurst, pp. 233–34, lines 1639–48, trans. by Connolly, p. 117, and introduction, p. xxviii. 74 See Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (Oxford, 1998), pp. 42–44, and his Introduction to Purity of Heart in Early Ascetic and Monastic Literature, ed. by H. Luckman and L. Kulzer (Collegeville, MN, 1999), pp. 8–15; Philip Rousseau, ‘Cassian, Contemplation and the Coenobitic Life’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 26 (1975), pp. 113–26; Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 187–89; Martin Laird, ‘Cassian’s Conferences Nine and Ten: Some Observations Regarding Contemplation and Hermeneutics’, Récherches de théologie anciènne et mediévale, 62 (1995), pp. 145–56. 75 Septimo autem die uocat ad altiora dominus Moysen quia post operum perfectionem requiem nobis lex promittit aeternum ut qui in altitudine rectae actionis domino assistere curauimus iam ad eius uisionem atque colloquium ascendere mereamur iuxta illud psalmistae: Etenim benedictionem dabit qui legem dedit, ambulabunt de uirtute in uirtutem, uidebitur Deus deorum in Sion: De tabernaculo, ed. by Hurst, CCSL, 119A, p. 8, lines 136–42; Bede. On the Tabernacle, trans. by Arthur Holder (Liverpool, 1994), pp. 3–6, also pp. 44, 91.

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he knew that he who said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” also said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour”’ (Matthew 22.37, 39).76 There is an extraordinary spiritual and theological coherence in the multiplicity of contexts and ways in which Bede uses the psalm text to describe the heavenward journey, both in the life of the individual and of the Church through the ages. In a final example, he makes extensive use of Psalm 83, linked with the beatitude, Matthew 5.8, in a rhapsodic description of the life of eternity which forms the climax of his vast exegesis on Easter, the mystical meaning of computus, and the sanctification of time in De temporum ratione.77 Earlier in the work, he had related the term ‘Passover’ first to the passing over, in baptism, from ‘the power of Satan to the portion allotted to the saints’, then to the soul’s daily [27] passing over from vice to virtue and the love of God and neighbour throughout the pilgrimage of life, and then to the passage from death to resurrection.78 He emphasises that it is only through the mystery of Christ’s resurrection – our Passover (1 Corinthians 5.7) – that we hope we shall ‘return once more to that first realm of supernal joy from which we departed into a far-off land’, but that in order to make a spiritual Passover it is necessary to ‘pass over to better things by daily progress’.79 The De temporum ratione draws to a close with an evocation of the future resurrection of the faithful in the Eighth Age of the world, on the Eighth Day (the day of the Lord), which was prefigured in Christ’s resurrection on the eighth day of the week. Bede comments that the psalmist was prophetically longing for the vision of that eternal Eighth Day when he said, ‘Better is one day in thy courts than a thousand’ (Psalm 83.11). He adds that the Lord himself, who is ‘the way, 76 Hoc ipsum quoque orationis loco ducens, si infirmis fratribus opem suae exhortationis tribueret, sciens quia, qui dixit ‘Diliges Dominum Deum tuum’, dixit et ‘Diliges proximum’: Historia Ecclesiastica, 4.28. 77 De tempore ratione, c. 71, ed. by C.W. Jones and T. Mommsen, CCSL, 123B (Turnhout, 1977), p. 554, lines 73–91; trans. by Faith Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool, 1999), p. 249, introduction, pp. lxxi, lxxxiii–lxxxiv. 78 Et quia nos in baptismo, ut de potestate Satanae in partem sortis sanctorum transire queamus, sinceritatem ac veritatem tenere necesse est, itemque toto nostrae peregrinationis tempore, quod septenario dierum numero uoluitur, quotidiano profectu ad meliora transire praecipimur, quasi et in pascha azymis uesci, et in diebus azymorum pascha spiritaliter agere cognoscimur [. . .] . In nomine quidem paschae, ut de uitiis ad uirtutes transitum quotidie faciamus spiritalem: De tempore ratione, c. 63, ed. by Jones and Mommsen, pp. 455–56, lines 57–63; c. 64, p. 458, lines 89–91; trans. by Wallis, Reckoning of Time, pp. 150–51. Gregory’s similar explanation warns that none comes to the day of the Lord save he who has kept the love of God and of his neighbour, Homiliae in Hiezechielem prophetam, 2.4.3, ed. by Adriaen, p. 259, lines 62–82. 79 Quia per huius mysteria solemnitatis primam nos stolam recepturos, primum supernae beatitudinis regnum, a quo in longinquam regionem discessimus, nos repetituros esse speramus [. . .] . Nec minus etiam moralem nobis commendant paschalia tempora sensum: De tempore ratione, c. 64, ed. by Jones and Mommsen, p. 456, lines 14–17; p. 458, lines 88–91; trans. by Wallis, Reckoning of Time, pp. 151–52, 154. Ceolfrith’s letter to Nechtan stresses the necessity of keeping the Passover with Christ by faith, hope and love, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.21, p. 545. For the idea of peregrinatio as a return (reditus) to our true patria, see M.A. Claussen, ‘“Peregrinatio” and “Peregrini” in Augustine’s City of God’, Traditio, 46 (1991) pp. 33–75 (71–73).

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the truth, and the life’ (John 14.6), has declared who will be able to enter into the one unending day of light, the Eighth Day, and see this vision: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5.8). The words of Psalm 83.5 concerning pilgrims who worshipped God in the Temple in Jerusalem, ‘Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they shall praise thee for ever and ever’, are interpreted as foretelling how the saints at the resurrection, when ‘renewed in the blessed immortality of flesh and spirit’, will eternally sing God’s praises in heaven. Finally, Bede tells of their beatitude in the unending vision which shall delight them there, ‘for he who gave the law will give a blessing and they will go from [28] strength to strength and the God of gods will be seen in Zion’ (Psalm 83.8).80 The vision of the invisible God is beyond mortal imagining. Through the words of the psalmist Bede evokes the contemplation of the divine, which is the recognition of who God is, in the revelatory act of seeing.

80 sed nobis tunc incipiet cum ad eam uidendam meruerimus intrare, ubi quo actu occupentur sancti, perfecta spiritus et carnis inmortalitate renouati, testatur psalmista, qui Deo per laudem amoris canit: Beati qui habitant in domo tua, in saeculum saeculi laudabunt te. Quo uisu delectentur, idem consequenter exponit: etenim benedictionem dabit, qui legem dedit, ambulabunt de uirtute in uirtutem, uidebitur Deus Deorum in Sion. Quales ad hunc uenire possint, ipse qui est uia, ueritas et uita, testatur dominus, Beati mundo corde, quoniam ipsi Deum uidebunt: De tempore ratione, c. 71, ed. by Jones and Mommsen, p. 544, lines 81–91; trans. by Wallace, Reckoning of Time, p. 249.

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4 T H E M U LT I T U D E O F I S L E S A N D THE CORNERSTONE Topography, exegesis and the identity of the Angli in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica In De templo Bede expounds the Old Testament description of Solomon’s temple as a rhetorical figure of a spiritual body or living temple, which can refer to Christ, to the Church and its individual members on earth, and to the heavenly life. A meditative reading of the text, 1 Kings 5.1–7.51, calls up other biblical passages, often linked by a shared word or image, to reveal the means by which the spiritual temple may be built up in the life of the Church. Bede cites examples from the New Testament accounts of the formation of the apostolic Church and identifies the Gregorian mission to Britain as a continuation of the process.1 In the Historia Ecclesiastica’s documented account of this latest stage of the Church’s universal mission, many of the timeless spiritual precepts presented in the exegesis of the temple are brought home in descriptions of the building up of the faith by pastoral leaders in seventh-century Britain.2 The historical narrative, however, makes little use of the metaphor of sacred architecture and gives readers no occasion to confuse man-made church buildings, even those built of stone in the Roman manner, with the spiritual edifice prefigured by the temple [201] in Jerusalem.3 Arthur Holder has commented that, although ‘Bede the historian and Bede the exegete were the same man’, he was very aware of the difference between the genres of history and exegesis and of the methods appropriate to each. Believing that Scripture was divinely inspired and alone contained figures of spiritual mysteries, he largely ‘limited allegorical exposition to the realm of biblical exegesis’.4

1 Bede, De templo 1, lines 1–60, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969), 147–48; Jennifer O’Reilly, “Introduction”, in Bede. On the Temple, trans. Seán Connolly (Liverpool, 1995), pp. xvii–xxxiii. 2 Henry Mayr-Harting, “Bede, the Rule of St Benedict, and Social Class” (Jarrow Lecture, 1976), p. 13; Alan Thacker, “Bede’s Ideal of Reform”, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53; Bede. On the Temple, pp. xxxiii–li. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), hereafter cited as Bede, HE. 3 Bede follows Augustine: see Finbarr G. Clancy, “Augustine’s Sermons on the Dedication of a Church”, in Studia Patristica 38 (Leuven, 2001), pp. 48–55. 4 Arthur Holder, “Allegory and History in Bede’s Interpretation of Sacred Scripture”, American Benedictine Review 40 (1949): pp. 115–31, at 116, 127, 131.

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Overt biblical exegesis in the Historia Ecclesiastica is mostly confined to the papal and archiepiscopal letters which Bede quotes, but their patristic themes pervade his narrative. He makes imaginative use of the established associations of one major exegetical figure in particular, and one better suited than the temple to the book’s subject.

Topography and conversion From the opening words Bede emphasises that ‘Britain is an island of the Ocean’. It is the largest of a series of islands, situated in the northwest of the Ocean that encircled the earth. Settled by diverse peoples at different times – first the Britons, then the Picts and the Dalriadan Irish (‘Scotti’), and finally the Anglorum siue Saxonum gens (Bede, HE 1.15) – the island of Britain is itself seen as almost an archiepelago, with deep firths and internal waterways separating peoples and many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms divided or partly bounded by water. Over twenty rivers are named and many of the place-names are of coastal and riverside sites; precise details are given of the length of the island’s indented coastline, the dimensions and tides of several of its off-shore isles and of the daily confluence of tides in the Solent (Bede, HE 4.16). Throughout the book the tempestuous Ocean which surrounds and isolates Britain is a hostile, threatening presence: it breaks up forty ships of Caesar’s fleet at anchor; it demonically imperils the mission of Germanus of Auxerre to the Britons, the voyage of Oswiu’s bride from Kent to Northumbria, and the return of monks of Lindisfarne from Farne Island; it wrecks the pilgrim Arculf on the western coast and scuttles the ship which Egbert of Rathmelsigi had provisioned to sail round Britain to the continental mission.5 Geography was a rhetorical aid to the writing of history in antiquity, but the depiction of the islands of Ocean in the Historia Ecclesiastica constitutes more than a classical composition of place. Orosius had influentially used geography in a Christian view of world history, and Gildas had briefly expounded [202] the spiritual significance of the geography of Britain.6 Moreover, patristic tradition had adapted rhetorical techniques of historiography to the interpretation of Scripture.7 Bede began his commentary De tabernaculo by explaining the need to consider the significance of topography and other circumstantiae in the scriptural

5 Bede, HE 1.2, 17; 3.15; 5.1, 15, 9. 6 Jeremiah (Diarmuid) A. Scully, “The Atlantic Archipelago from Antiquity to Bede: The Transformation of an Image” (Ph.D. diss., University College Cork, 2000); A.H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 64–99, 229–309; Nicholas Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven, 2008), p. 50. 7 R.D. Ray noted that ‘patristic exegesis involves a veritable introduction to rhetorical historiography’: “Bede, the Exegete, as Historian”, in Famulus Christi, ed. Gerald Bonner (London, 1976), pp. 125–40, at 130; and that Bede’s historical education ‘was in many ways an incident of biblical study’: idem, “Augustine’s De consensu evangelistarum and the Historical Education of the Venerable Bede”, in Studia Patristica 16 (Kalamazoo, 1985) pp. 557–63, at 557.

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account of how Moses was commanded to construct the tabernacle. He stressed that this was because sacred Scripture is full of mystical figurae; such signs, denoting an underlying spiritual meaning, are contained not only in the words and deeds described, but in the very times and places in which the historical events happened, all of which, as St Paul said, were ‘written down for us’ (1 Corinthians 10.11); that is, for the present reader’s spiritual edification.8 Though believing the divine plan for human redemption to be fully revealed in Scripture, Bede shows that God’s purposes for universal salvation through the Incarnation continue to be worked out in post-biblical history in the providential particularities of time and place. References to the remote location and insular topography of Britain in the Historia Ecclesiastica make use of classical ethno-geographical traditions, but their stereotypes of centre and periphery are fundamentally transformed by Bede’s knowledge of patristic exegesis on islands and the ends of the earth in biblical prophecies of salvation. Roman historians and poets had regarded the islands of Ocean as marking the edge of the habitable world and the conquest of Britain as therefore signifying the universal extent of imperial Rome’s dominion; the barbarian nature of the inhabitants was seen as directly related to the island’s distance from the civilising center. Old Testament writers, on the other hand, who regarded the temple in Jerusalem as the center of the world, where the one true God was worshipped by his unique chosen people, visualised idolatrous Gentiles as living far away, at the ends of the earth and on unnamed islands. The psalms and the prophetic books repeatedly contrast God, the Creator of the world and deliverer of his chosen people, with the powerless gods and man-made idols worshipped by the Gentiles, and prophesy a time when the islands of the Gentiles would abandon their idols and acknowledge his glory. The New Testament presents the Incarnation as the [203] fulfillment of those prophecies and the mission of the apostles as the divinely-ordained means by which the Gospel was to be taken from Jerusalem to all peoples, to the ends of the earth (Matthew 28.19, Acts 1.8).9 Patristic interpreters of Scripture were familiar with Greco-Roman geographical concepts. The idea of the earth as an island bounded by the circular Ocean served Augustine’s view that the Old Testament texts which prophesied that all the islands of the Gentiles would one day worship God, ‘each from their own place’ (Zephaniah 2.11), clearly showed that the Church would be world-wide: No part of the earth is excluded from having the Church, since none of the islands is left out, some of which are found in the Ocean [. . .] Thus, in some single islands there is a fulfilment of the prophecy, ‘He shall

8 Bede, De tabernaculo, 1, ll.1–9, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969) p. 5. 9 Jennifer O’Reilly, “Islands and Idols at the Ends of the Earth: Exegesis and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica”, in Bède le vénérable: Entre tradition et posterité, ed. Stephane Lebecq, Michel Perrin, and Olivier Szerwiniack (Lille, 2005) pp. 119–45.

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rule from sea to sea’ (Psalm 71.8), the sea by which every single island is surrounded, as is the case of the whole world which is, in a sense, the greatest island of all because the Ocean girds it about. It is to some of its shores in the West that we know the Church has come, and whatever shores it has not yet reached it will eventually reach.10 Papal Rome saw itself as continuing the apostolic mission, brought from Jerusalem to Rome by Peter and Paul. Taking the Gospel to islands at the perceived ends of the earth and to peoples from beyond the frontiers of imperial Rome, first the Irish and eventually the Anglo-Saxons who had settled in Britain, was an important element in the Church’s claims to be truly universal. Bede quotes papal letters in the Historia Ecclesiastica which interpret Petrine Rome’s mission to the barbarian peoples ‘in extremis terrae finibus’ as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies concerning the conversion of remote islands and idolatrous Gentiles.11 Bede’s historical narrative of the primary conversion of the Anglo-Saxons from idol-worship says little about pagan Germanic belief and custom, but is alert to the biblical and patristic themes expressed in the papal letters. Moreover, his account of the ecclesiastical history of the converted Angli, and of the other peoples on the island who had received conversion much earlier, was influenced by New Testament uses of the image of the worship of man-made idols to describe the variety of levels of belief and practice to be found within the Church, ranging from those still enslaved by earthly preoccupations and desires, ‘which is the service of idols’ (Ephesians 5.5), to those who are devout, or even holy, but whose undue reverence for their local man-made religious traditions [204] could lead them to transgress God’s commandments, notably the ‘new commandment’ of fraternal love.12 Following St Paul, the fathers had argued that the universal nature of Christian salvation overturned old distinctions based on ethnicity and location, yet on occasion they made rhetorical use of the classical topos of center and periphery to criticise minorities whom they perceived as particularist and marginal to the orthodoxy of the universal Church.13 In Bede’s narrative Iona is presented as a great centre of pastoral mission, yet Wilfrid at the synod of Whitby describes the Columban monks who persisted in their local customary dating of Easter as ‘a few people in one corner of the remotest of islands’, their location suggesting their rustic ignorance and spiritual distance, not simply from Rome, but from the universal Church (Bede, HE 3.25). 10 Augustine, Epistolae, 199.47, ed. W. Goldbacher, CSEL 57 (Vienna, 1911) p. 286; trans. W. Parsons, Letters of St Augustine, Fathers of the Church (New York, 1955), 4.395. 11 Bede, HE 2.8, 10; 3.29. 12 Colossians 3.2–10, 5.9–11; Romans 1.25, 10.2–3; Matthew 15.3, John 13.34. 13 Colossians 3.11; Galatians 5.6. David Brakke, “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria”, Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001) pp. 453–81, at 467–69.

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The interleaving of such patristic traditions in the Historia Ecclesiastica, and some of the implications for re-evaluating the role of the Easter controversy in the book, have been illustrated elsewhere.14 The following reflections suggest that Bede’s references to the location and topography of the islands, which exploit the associations of an exegetical figure more appropriate than Solomon’s temple for his purposes, were more closely connected with that revered biblical image than might immediately appear to a modern readership. The discussion first considers an example of the association made in patristic literature between conversion from idol-worship on islands at the ends of the earth, a major theme in the Historia Ecclesiastica, and the building up of the spiritual temple, a figure repeatedly used in Bede’s biblical commentaries and homilies. Secondly, it will be suggested that the connection made by patristic commentators between the two sets of images can shed unexpected light on the language of conversion in the Historia Ecclesiastica, notably in the presentation of the identity of the Angli.

‘The multitude of isles’: patristic exegesis of Psalm 96 In the final words of the Historia Ecclesiastica Bede showed that the island of Britain could now be numbered among the many isles which the psalmist prophesied would rejoice in the Lord. He inserted the name of Britain into a composite quotation from the first and last verses of Psalm 96 (97): In cuius regno perpetuo exultet terra, et congratulante in fide eius Brittania, laetentur insulae multae et confiteantur memoriae sanctitatis eius. (Bede, HE 5.23) [205] [Let the earth rejoice in his everlasting kingdom and Britain rejoice in his faith, and let the multitude of isles be glad and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness.] The Psalms were regarded as an epitome of Scripture and were interiorised through prayerful repetition in the daily monastic office. Augustine’s Enarrationes in psalmos was familiar to Bede and to writers important to him, especially Cassiodorus and Gregory the Great. Psalm 96 does not contain any reference to the temple in Jerusalem; yet, in expounding its images of islands and idols, commentators were readily put in mind of biblical texts concerning the building up of the spiritual temple. Their work offers an illustration of the wider symbolic associations which Bede’s account of conversion from the worship of idols in the islands of Ocean might have suggested for his monastic readers. The brief and often enigmatic headings of the psalms were considered to be inspired, like the psalm text itself, and to provide an interpretative key. The titulus 14 O’Reilly, “Islands and Idols at the Ends of the Earth”, pp. 124–45.

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of Psalm 96 is Huic David, quando terra eius restituta est (‘A psalm of David when his land was restored’). The psalm praises God the Creator. All creation – the heavens and the earth, islands and mountains, fire and lightning – acclaims his exaltation above the gods and man-made idols of the Gentiles. Beyond this literal sense of the Hebrew psalm, Augustine saw its allusion to the further revelation of the Creator’s glory through the resurrection, when the whole earth was restored. The commentary moves swiftly between the Old Testament and the New, between the apostolic Church, the present life of the Church and the individual soul, and the future heavenly life, showing how the psalm points to Christ and to human redemption.15 Augustine succinctly recounts Christ’s saving death, resurrection and ascension, the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in the apostolic mission to Gentiles who had never heard God’s word. He emphasises the early Church’s gradual understanding of the universal nature of salvation. He recalls that even St Peter had to be divinely shown that salvation was to be extended to the idol-worshipping Gentiles (Acts 10); he quotes St Paul’s delayed realisation that God is the creator and re-creator of all who serve him, of every race and nation and that ‘he is not the God of the Jews alone but of the gentiles also’ (Romans 3.29). The Creator’s glory, revealed through the incarnation, has now been made known to earth’s remotest shores. ‘Let the multitude of isles rejoice’, says Augustine, quoting Ps 96.1, because ‘the word of God has been preached not in the continent alone, but also in those isles which [206] lie in the midst of the oceans; even these are full of Christians. [. . .] For the sea is no barrier to him who made it.16 Augustine relates the verse, ‘The heavens have proclaimed his justice and all nations have seen his glory’ (Psalm 96.6), to the opening words of Psalm 18.1–5, ‘the heavens proclaim the glory of God’, which continues, ‘Their sound has gone forth into all the earth and their words to the end of the world’. He quotes from St Paul’s interpretation of Psalm 18 as prophesying the apostolic preaching of salvation to all peoples (Romans 10.14, 18).17 In a letter to Justus of Canterbury quoted by Bede, Pope Boniface used the prophecy of Psalm 18 in the context of the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons (Bede, HE 2.8). Augustine refers ‘the heavens’ in Psalm 96.6 to the apostles, but also to the subsequent mission of the Church to proclaim the love of Christ to all who have not yet believed. Expounding verse 4, ‘His lightnings have shone forth to the world; the earth saw and trembled’, he describes how Christ sent Peter and the apostles as his preachers into all the world, and their words and miracles, like flashes of lightning from the clouds, inspired awe of the divine, the beginnings of conversion.18

15 Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. D.E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, 3 vols., CCSL 38–40 (Turnhout, 1956), 2:1354–71; trans. A.C. Coxe, NPNF, first series, 8 (New York, 1888, repr. Grand Rapids, 1956) pp. 475–80, where Psalm 96 in the ordering of the Septuagint and Vulgate appears as Psalm 97, following the numbering in the Hebrew Bible and the King James translation. 16 In psalmum 96, 3, Enarrationes, 2:1356–57. 17 In psalmum 96, 10, Enarrationes, 2:1361. 18 In psalmum 96, 8, Enarrationes, 2:1360.

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Augustine’s interpretation was closely paralleled in a passage of Pope Gregory’s Moralia, partly quoted by Bede in HE 2.1. Gregory was commenting on Job 36.29–30, which describes the Creator’s cosmic power: ‘He will spread out clouds as his tent, and lighten with his light from above; he will cover the ends of the sea’. Gregory read the text as a prophecy that God would send out his preachers, dispersing them like clouds over all the earth, and that through the raining down of their words and the lightning of their miracles, ‘they would convert to divine love even the farthest boundaries of the world’. God once dwelt with a particular people but St Paul brought knowledge of God from Jerusalem to Rome, to take possession of the whole world. Gregory testifies that by this means God has already ‘penetrated the hearts of almost all nations, that he has joined together in one faith the boundaries of East and West’.19 Bede quotes Gregory’s next lines which, subverting the conventions of Roman panegyric, show that the conquest of the Britons at the western ends of the earth was a spiritual victory, in fulfillment of Job’s prophecy. Gregory proclaims that the uncouth tongue of Britain, the island here personifying its fierce and barbarous inhabitants, has long since learned to sing God’s praises ‘with the Alleluia of the Hebrews’.20 The swelling hostile Ocean was divinely subdued and the [207] island overcome, not by force of arms but by the words and miracles of preachers. Bede adds that, in these words, Gregory also proclaims that St Augustine and his companions led the gentes Anglorum to knowledge of the truth (Bede, HE 2.1). A few lines later Bede tells the well-known story (to be discussed below) of Gregory’s encounter in Rome with pagan Angli from the island of Britain and his recognition that they were called to sing God’s praise in that place and to be fellow heirs of the angels in heaven. The version of the story in the earlier anonymous Whitby Vita Gregorii explains that the property of angels is to praise God without ceasing, that their endless cry of ‘Alleluia’ (Revelation 19.6) means ‘God’s praise’.21 Singing God’s praise was a comprehensive description of the service due to him, the antithesis of the service of idols. Commenting on Psalm 96.7b, ‘Adore him, all you angels’, for example, Augustine had declared that God is to be worshipped and adored. In contrast he cites, ‘All the gods of the gentiles are devils’ (Psalm 95.5), an identification used in St Paul’s assertion that the Gentiles ‘sacrifice to devils and not to God’ (1 Corinthians 10.20). Augustine called on pagans to imitate the angels, who sing the glory

19 Gregory, Moralia in Iob, 27.11, 19, ed. M. Adriaen, 3 vols., CCSL 143, 143A, 143B (Turnhout, 1979–85), 3:1346. See George Henderson, “Bede and the Visual Arts” (Jarrow Lecture, 1980) pp. 10–11. 20 Bede’s borrowings from Constantius’s Vita Germani include the story of how the Christian Britons, led by preachers, won the “Alleluia victory” (Bede, HE 1.20), already mentioned in Bede’s De temporum ratione, ed. C.W. Jones and T. Mommsen, CCSL 123B (Turnhout, 1977) p. 518. 21 Vita Gregorii: The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Lawrence, KS, 1968, repr. Cambridge, 1985) pp. 12, 13. For the meaning of Alleluia, see Jerome, De nominibus hebraicis, ed. P. de Lagarde, CCSL 72 (Turnhout, 1959) p. 13.

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of him they love; the faithful are like the angels in singing his glory, not arrogating to themselves, or even to holy men, the honour and service due to God alone.22 The psalmist’s image of idols who have eyes but cannot see (Psalm 113.5) is here related to nominal Christians whose eyes are dimmed by passion, avarice, or lust and are unable to see heavenly truth. Augustine thus extended the psalmist’s condemnation of pagans who ‘adore graven images and glory in their idols’ (Psalm 96.7), to those who have known God, yet have ceased to recognise him and have turned to idols of their own concerns. Bede’s own exposition of the titulus of the previous and related psalm, Psalm 95, shows how the penitent can return to the true service of God. He explains that the title, ‘A canticle for David, when the house of God was being built after the Captivity’, appears to foretell the historical rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem by the Jews after their return from the Babylonian Captivity. Understood in the anagogical or higher sense, however, it suggests the spiritual construction of the universal Church, made from souls ‘freed from the demonic captivity of sin and brought back to the recognition of their Creator’. Like Augustine, Bede interprets the psalm’s opening verse, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song [. . .] in every land [. . .] Declare his glory among the nations, his deeds among all peoples’, as enjoining all the faithful to build up the Church by singing to the Lord ‘a new song’, [208] namely by loving him, keeping his commandments and preaching salvation to all peoples throughout the world.23 When expounding such a psalm, whose text or titulus alludes to the temple in Jerusalem, the fathers interpreted it in terms of the spiritual house of God. But it may be asked why patristic commentators, who related the images of islands and idols in Psalm 96 to the primary conversion of the Gentiles and the deeper interior conversion of their readers, also evoked biblical images of building the temple, which do not appear to be warranted by the wording of this particular psalm at all. The imaginative connecting link between islands, idols, and the temple was stone. Even though Scripture sometimes says, ‘The idols of the gentiles are silver and gold, the works of the hands of men’ (Psalm 113B.4; Psalm 134.15; Acts 17.29), the fathers most often imagined idols to be of stone. The prevalence of stone statues in pagan Roman culture may have helped influence their response to Old Testament condemnations of sculptilia, particularly the second commandment, Non facies tibi sculptile (‘Thou shalt not make graven images’ [Exodus 20.4]), and Psalm 96.7, Confundantur omnes qui adorant sculptilia, qui gloriantur in simulacris suis (‘Confounded be all who worship graven images, who glory in their idols’). Cassiodorus’s commentary on this verse derived simulacrum from simulatio sacra, because the honour belonging to another is accorded to such idols. Man-made idols are but simulations of God’s creation. Those who

22 In Psalmum 96, 12, Enarrationes, 2:1365. 23 Bede, In Esram et Neemian, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969) p. 257; trans. Scott De Gregorio, Bede on Ezra and Nehemiah (Liverpool, 2006) pp. 32–33.

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make such idols and worship them become like them (Psalm 113.8), that is, like blocks of stone.24 Augustine’s commentary on the same verse (Psalm 96.7) had cited related texts: the man-made idols of the Gentiles are nothing (1 Corinthians 10.19; 8.4), ‘they have eyes and do not see’ and those who serve them are like them (Psalm 113.5, 8). Augustine declared such stones are dead; indeed, they have never lived.25 Commenting on Psalm 96.1, ‘The Lord has reigned, let the earth rejoice, let the multitude of islands be glad’, Cassiodorus condemned idolators who give to inanimate stone the worship properly belonging to the divine Creator. Paradoxically he insisted there is one stone that must be spiritually worshipped and feared: ‘it is the cornerstone’, meaning Christ, the prophesied cornerstone of the spiritual temple (cf. Acts 4.12).26 The fathers produced such arresting conceits by exploiting the range of positive and negative associations that stone has in Scripture. Cassiodorus, like Jerome and Augustine, extended those associations to islands, which were characterised as rock-like. All argued that the many islands [209] rejoicing in God’s universal reign in Psalm 96.1 may be taken figuratively for all the churches throughout the world: they withstand the waves of temptation and tribulation in this earthly life which continue daily to dash against them.27 Jerome noted that the islands can never be broken if their foundation (fundamentum) is Christ; he was alluding to St Paul’s words on building the spiritual temple: ‘For other foundation (fundamentum) no man can lay, but that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus’ (1 Corinthians 3.11).28 Crucially, Jerome identified converted islands with their faithful inhabitants, who at their conversion have become the ‘living stones’ (vivi lapides) of Christ’s spiritual house (1 Peter 2.5). But before their conversion, their rocky hardness made it possible to liken them to their very opposite; that is, to obdurate Gentiles worshipping stones. In his commentary on Psalm 96.3, 5, Augustine combined two biblical texts, one describing Gentiles as lifeless stones, like the idols they worship (Psalm 113.5, 8), the other describing believers as living stones in the spiritual temple (1 Peter 2.4–8). Elsewhere, he used the same combination to emphasise that the transformation of dead stone into living stone is the work of divine grace. He explained that Christ’s warning of judgement for unrepentant Jews who presumed on God’s favour because of their descent from Abraham contains a promise of mercy for others. Even though the Gentiles are like the dead stones they worship,

24 Cassiodorus, Expositio in psalmorum, ed. M. Adriaen, 2 vols., CCSL 97–98 (Turnhout, 1958), 2.870–75; trans. P. Walsh, 3 vols., Ancient Christian Writers 51–53 (New York, 1990–91), 2:427–28. 25 In psalmum 96, 11, Enarrationes 2:1326. 26 Cassiodorus on Psalm 96.1, Expositio 2:870–71, trans. Walsh, 2. 424–25. 27 Augustine, Enarrationes, 2:1357; Jerome, Tractatus de psalmo 96, Opera homiletica, ed. D.G. Morin, CCSL 78 (Turnhout, 1958) pp. 157–58; Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, 2:870–71. 28 Jerome, Opera homiletica, pp. 157–158; 440–41.

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the God who made man in his own image (Genesis 1.26) ‘is able of these stones (lapides) to raise up children to Abraham’ (Matthew 3.9).29 Leo the Great expounded Matthew 3.9: ‘softening the stone-hard hearts of pagans, God’s mercy raised up true children of Abraham from these stones’.30 Similarly, Gregory the Great asked, ‘What were these stones (in Matthew 3.9) if not the hearts of the Gentiles, unaware of the knowledge of almighty God?’ The Gentiles who worshipped stones are properly signified by that name, but when the stony hard hearts of Gentiles believe in Christ, who is the spiritual seed of Abraham (Galatians 3.16, 29), then they too become the children of God.31 Patristic tradition thus mixed metaphors and interpreted the softening and transformation of dead stones in the context of St Paul’s teaching on God’s mercy to the Gentiles: all those baptised in Christ, irrespective of background, become the spiritual children of Abraham (Romans 9; Galatians 3.16, 29). [210] Augustine had shown in his psalm commentary how the hardest stone could be softened. He referred the image in Psalm 96.3, ‘A fire shall go before him’, not to any earthly fires but to the flame of love received by believers, as the apostles received the flame of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This is relevant to his comment on verse 5, ‘The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord [. . .] of all the earth’. Augustine explained that the mountains may be seen as unbelievers who, with rock-like obstinacy, raised themselves against God in pride, yet trembled, yielded, melted at the deeds of Christ and his followers. The hardness of the unbelieving pagan, who has not yet become a living stone (vivus lapis) in the spiritual edifice of the Church (1 Peter 2.5), is here likened to the hardness of the mountains (durus mons), which are in the process of being melted or subdued at the presence of the Lord of all the earth.32 Two papal letters reproduced by Bede in the Historia Ecclesiastica made use of such exegesis and the traditions of the panegyric. Pope Boniface’s letter to Edwin, urging him to abandon the worship of idols, quotes Psalm 95.5, ‘All the gods of the gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens’ (Bede, HE 2.10). Boniface also denounces the idols of the Gentiles at length in the words of Psalm 113 (115).5–8: ‘They have mouths and speak not: they have eyes and see not [. . .] Those who put their trust in them become like them’. Paraphrasing Isaiah 44.6–19, as King Oswiu was to do in persuading Sigeberht of the East Saxons to renounce idols (Bede, HE 3.22), Boniface speaks of man-made stone idols which have never had the breath of life. He describes God, in contrast, as the Creator of all things (Exodus 20.11). God made man in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1.26), fashioning him out

29 Augustine, Sermon 24, PL 38.163. 30 Leo the Great, Sermo 66.2, PL 54.366; trans. J. Freeland and A.J. Conway, St Leo the Great: Sermons (Washington, DC, 1996) p. 287. 31 Homily 20.9, Grégoire le Grand, Homélies sur l’Evangile, 1, ed. R. Étaix, C. Morel, and B. Judic, Sources chrétiennes 485 (Paris, 2005) p. 458, trans. D. Hurst, Gregory the Great: Forty Gospel Homilies (Kalamazoo, 1990) p. 41. 32 In Psalmum 96, 7, Enarrationes 2:1359.

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of clay, breathing into him the breath of life (Genesis 2.7) and melting, ‘by the fire of his Holy Spirit, the frozen hearts of races even at the far ends of the earth to knowledge of himself’ (Bede, HE 2.10). Boniface urged Edwin’s Christian queen to enkindle the king, and thereby his people, with the love of God. He called on her to soften Edwin’s hard heart (duritiam cordis ipsius) by teaching him God’s commandments and ‘to inflame his cold heart by teaching him about the Holy Spirit’ (Bede, HE 2.11). Similarly, in the Moralia, Pope Gregory had described the Gentiles as living in the cold north, without the warmth of faith and the sun, until breathed on by the Holy Spirit, who melted the hearts of unbelievers to love God.33 Bede used the same vocabulary of conversion in his own exegesis, where he associated the Gentiles with the north, languishing in the darkness and cold of disbelief before the Incarnation, rather than burning with love of their Creator, and he described [211] faith first coming to life ‘in the cold heart of the gentile world’ at the time of the apostolic mission.34 Alongside the biblical exegesis of Pope Boniface’s letters quoted in the Historia, the conversion of the Gentiles is translated to the northern world of Anglo-Saxon heroic society in the extended account of how the Deiran king and his people were turned from the worship of man-made idols, thereby fulfilling Gregory’s threefold punning prophecy of their conversion (Bede, HE 2.1). Edwin unknowingly first experienced God’s mercy when in literal exile and under threat of death. Alone outside at dead of night, seated on a stone (lapis) and consumed by the futile ‘inward fire’ of an anguished spirit, he had a vision in which he received a stranger’s threefold riddling promise of life, victory and salvation, and also a mysterious sign, only later revealed by Gregory’s missionary Paulinus as a key to the spiritual understanding of the promise (Bede, HE 2.12). Signs of the continuing work of grace in turning Edwin from idols are revealed in charged accounts of early events in his reign and in his counsellor’s lament of the brief and temporal nature of the solace offered by the fire burning on the hearth in the king’s hall in winter. After recounting Edwin’s baptism and dominion ‘from sea to sea’ (cf. Psalm 71.8), Bede quotes the letter Pope Honorius addressed to Edwin, rex Anglorum, rejoicing that the fire of faith now burned brightly in the king’s worship of his Creator (Bede, HE 2.17).

The making of the gens Anglorum Bede’s discernment of divine mysteries figured in sacred Scripture and his recognition of signs of divine providence in post-biblical history are two closely related

33 Moralia, 27.27, 51:1371–72; also 27.43, 71:1386; trans. in Library of Fathers of the Church, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1844–50), 3:239, 252. 34 Bede, De tabernaculo, 2:64, trans. Holder, 71; Homelia 2.25, ll.341–44: 377, trans. Martin and Hurst, 2:267, and Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, ed. M.L.W. Laistner, CCSL 121 (Turnhout, 1983) p. 56, trans. L. Martin (Kalamazoo, 1989) pp. 107–08 for comment on Acts 11.18, which quotes Gregory’s Moralia 27, 43, 71. See also Gildas, De excidio Britonum, 8, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (Chichester, 1978) pp. 16, 89; 18, 91.

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activities, as is evident in his use of exegetical traditions concerning islands and idols in the Historia Ecclesiastica. Awareness of the patristic association of biblical texts on idols and islands with texts on the stones of the temple, as seen in commentaries on Psalm 96, and of the recurring figure of the temple in Bede’s exegetical works, can offer further insight into the language of conversion used in the Historia, notably in its presentation of the identity of the gens Anglorum. Michael Richter surveyed in detail the evidence for thinking that Bede’s remarkable use of the term Angli to describe collectively, from the period of conversion, all the Germanic peoples of Britain, not just the Angles in its eastern and northern parts, derived from Gregory the Great. Other continental writers, Gildas, and most Insular writers used the term Saxones, as Bede usually did for [212] the period of invasion and settlement. Gregory consistently used the term Angli in his correspondence concerning the mission, including letters reproduced in the Historia Ecclesiastica. His practice, it is argued, was founded on his mistaken belief that those to whom he directed his mission were a single people called the Angli.35 Patrick Wormald also considered that Bede’s use of Angli to refer to the Germanic peoples in Britain from the time of their conversion was adopted from Gregory, but came via Canterbury and reflected concerns for the unity of a single ecclesia for a single gens Anglorum.36 Nicholas Brooks noted early Deiran uses of the term Angli and commented that by 725, when it appears in De temporum ratione, Bede had already come to hold that ‘the converted Anglo-Saxons were a single “English” gens’.37 Bede’s account of Gregory’s exposition of the name Angli, in a story which purports to explain the origins of his mission to them (Bede, HE 2.1), has been important to the discussion of the origins of the Angli. Earlier in the same chapter, however, the Angli are already named through a variety of literary voices which cumulatively set Gregory’s mission in the context of the continuing universal mission of the apostolic Church. Bede begins by testifying in the first person as one of the gens Anglorum, but using the language of St Paul’s mission as apostle to the Gentiles (Romans 11.12) to describe Gregory’s work in converting the Angli ‘from the power of Satan’ (cf. Acts 26.18). Gregory is ‘our apostle’; ‘we are the seal of his apostleship in the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 9.2). Bede repeatedly uses the Pauline image of conversion as liberation from slavery in his summary of Gregory’s achievement: ‘he made our nation, till then enslaved to idols, into a Church of

35 Michael Richter, “Bede’s Angli: Angles or English?”, Peritia 3 (1984): pp. 99–114, at 102–08. 36 Patrick Wormald, “Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum”, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. idem, D. Bullough, and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983) pp. 99–129, at 124; Georges Tugène, L’image de la nation anglaise dans l’Histoire Ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable (Strasbourg, 2001) pp. 86–88. 37 Nicholas Brooks, “Bede and the English” (Jarrow Lecture, 1999) pp. 17–20, cites from the dedication of the Codex Amiatinus: “Ceolfridus Anglorum extremis de finibus abbas”; Nicholas Brooks, “Canterbury and Rome: The Limits and Myth of Romanitas”, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi Sall’Alto Medioevo 49 (2002) pp. 797–829, at 816.

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Christ’; specifically, Gregory delivered nostram gentem from the ancient enemy to participate in everlasting freedom, ‘by sending us preachers’. The chapter contains one of the Historia’s few explicit allusions to the trope of building up the spiritual temple. Gregory’s devotion to winning souls is contrasted with the dedication of other popes to the building of churches and adorning them with gold and silver. The Pauline allusion is expounded by Bede’s later commendation of Laurentius, Augustine’s successor at Canterbury, who, by [213] means of his holy words and example, ‘strove to build up the foundations of the church which had been so magnificently laid and to raise it to its destined height’ (Bede, HE 2.4). Bede instances Laurentius’s attempt to extend his pastoral care not only to the new church gathered from among the Angli, but to the older inhabitants of Britain and to the Irish in Ireland, whose pastoral leaders he urged to keep the unity of peace and observance of the universal Church of Christ. Gregory, Augustine and Laurentius are thus seen as successively following the pattern for pastors laid down by St Paul, who, like the wise architect or master-builder (ut sapiens architectus), built up the spiritual temple on the foundation of Christ Jesus. Paul warned subsequent leaders to build on that foundation alone, mindful that the spiritual quality of their own contribution, whether of gold, silver, or other material, would be made manifest (1 Corinthians 3.9–17). In HE 2.1, Bede quotes the rhetorical passage from Gregory’s Moralia, already discussed, which describes earlier spiritual teachers who had ‘long since’ (iamdudum) subdued the Ocean and taught barbarous Britain ‘to sing the praises of God with the Alleluia of the Hebrews’. Bede sees the passage as prophetic of the conversion of another people in Britain, for he adds that, in these words, Gregory also proclaims (quoque declarat) how Augustine and his companions led the gens Anglorum to the truth by preaching and showing heavenly signs.38 From the Liber pontificalis, Bede documents Gregory’s death and burial, and he quotes the elegiac couplets of the epitaph inscribed on Gregory’s tomb, which testifies that by his words and example he converted the Angli to Christ, ‘acquiring multitudes for the faith from a new people’. The chapter closes in yet another literary register with the telling of ‘a tradition of our forefathers’ (traditione maiorum), whose threefold questions and riddling replies can blunt modern readers’ awareness of its craft. In Bede’s version, the boys of striking appearance whom Gregory saw in the Roman marketplace are, significantly, slaves (HE 2.1).39 Gregory was told that they came from the island 38 See n.20. Clare Stancliffe, “The British Church and the Mission of Augustine”, in St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson (Stroud, 1999) pp. 107–51, at 111–13, also argues that Gregory was referring to the Britons, but that Bede thought he meant the Anglo-Saxons. 39 Aidan ransomed slaves, instructing many for the priesthood (Bede, HE 3.5); Wilfrid released slaves through baptism ‘from the slavery of the devil, at the same time releasing them from the yoke of human slavery’ (Bede, HE 4.13). For Gregory’s own instructions on buying pagan pueri Angli in Gaul to serve God in monasteries, see Ep. 6.10, Registrum Epistolarum, ed. L.M. Hartmann, MGH (Berlin, 1899), 1:389, trans. John R.C. Martyn, The Letters of Gregory the Great, 3 vols. (Toronto, 2004), 2:408–09.

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of Britain, whose inhabitants ‘were like that in appearance’. Bede was familiar with the stereotype of classical ethnography which associated fair skin and light hair with the barbarous inhabitants of the cold north; he elsewhere regarded [214] it as typified in the Saxon: candidi corporis sive capilli Saxonum.40 In his account of the slaves seen by Gregory the convention is transformed. The islanders are described as beautiful and as having dazzling white bodies (positos candidi corporis ac uenusti uultus).41 Discovering that they were still pagan, Gregory exclaimed that the brightness of their outward appearance belied their inner enslavement to the author of darkness. He asked the name of their race and was told they were called Angli. His famous response, ‘they have the face of angels (angelicam habent faciem) and such men should be fellow-heirs of the angeli in heaven’ (cf. Colossians 1.12–13), has sometimes been seen as legitimising the Angli as the new singular people of God, signifying their right to the promised land of Britain. Rather, Gregory discerned in their name, as in the radiance of their physical countenance, a sign of grace and the restoration of the divine image in fallen humanity. His response describes not the particular reward of the Angli for any innate merit, but the heavenly destiny of all redeemed humanity to sing God’s praises with the angels who, unlike humankind, had never lost that bright image through sin. He discerned that the name of the kingdom from which the slaves came, Deira, was a further sign of their deliverance from the wrath (de ira) of Christ to his mercy, to partake in his glory (cf. Romans 9.21–25).42 As St Paul had shown that belief in universal salvation through Christ overturns old distinctions between Jew and Gentile, freemen and slaves, so Gregory demonstrates that Roman and barbarian are called to share in contemplation of the divine glory.43 Finally, Gregory interpreted the name of the king of Deira, Aelle, as signifying ‘Alleluia! The praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts’, and he resolved that a mission should be sent to the gens Anglorum.44 The Roman mission reportedly first entered Canterbury singing ‘Alleluia’ and beseeching God in his mercy to turn his wrath from the city (Bede, HE 1.25). [215] Aspects of the story are illuminated by Bede’s exegetical work. In his Gospel homily for Pentecost, he explains that the Hebrew word Alleluia means ‘Praise

40 De octo quaestionibus, 6, PL 93.455–62, at 459, trans. W. Trent Foley and Arthur Holder, Bede: A Biblical Miscellany (Liverpool, 1999) p. 158; see Henderson, “Bede and the Visual Arts”, pp. 9–13. 41 For other aspects of Bede’s vocabulary – venustus, candidus corporis – see Stephen J. Harris, “Bede and Gregory’s Angels”, Criticism 44 (2002) pp. 271–89, at 273–75; for examples of candidus in patristic tradition, J. O’Reilly, “Candidus et rubicundus: An Image of Martyrdom in the Lives of Thomas Becket”, Analecta Bollandiana 99 (1981) pp. 303–14, at 304, 309–10. 42 The Pauline allusion to the Gentiles is made explicit in Vita Gregorii, 14: Aelle’s descendant Edwin is described as predestined to be “a vessel of God’s mercy” (Romans 9.23). 43 Colossians 3.11, Galatians 3.28. 44 Cassiodorus gives the etymology of Alleluia and its syllables, surmising that the reason why twenty psalms have ‘Alleluia’ as their heading is because ‘the Creator’s power must always and everywhere be praised’: Psalm 104, Expositio in psalmorum, trans. Walsh, 3: pp. 49–50.

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the Lord’; it is eternally sung by the angelic host in heaven (Revelation 19.1–6) and by the whole Church on earth, particularly at the season of Easter and Pentecost, as a sign of the unity of those who will be one in heaven.45 The same homily observes that the Church rejoices at this liturgical season ‘to add new people for God’. Following their restoration to life in baptism, they ‘put on white garments (albis stolis, cf. Revelation 6.11; 7.13–14) and by the radiance of their dress show forth the brilliance of their purified minds”, intimating how, at the last day, all the faithful will be clothed with the immortality and incorruption of the flesh.46 In the different idiom of De templo, Bede drew particular attention to the characteristic brilliant whiteness (candissimi generis) of the Parian marble used in building the historical temple in Jerusalem, which he saw as denoting the purity of the living stones built into the spiritual temple.47 First taught by spiritual leaders to renounce the devil, then purified in baptism of all blemish of corruption from original sin, they are exhorted to remain undefiled, ‘such as that wise architect (St Paul) wanted those stones to be which he laid upon the foundation of Christ’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 3; 2 Corinthians 7.1).

The problem with Saxones Bede’s mastery of the exegetical language of the temple casts light on his use of the term Angli in his historical writing, first by suggesting why he might have wanted to avoid the term Saxones when describing the providential history of his people from the time of their conversion. J. C. Plumpe noticed that patristic writers understood the idea of ‘living stone’ differently from classical writers. Whereas the Latin fathers used the biblical image of vivi lapides to describe the faithful as living stones (Ephesians 2.19–22; 1 Peter 2.4–7; 2 Corinthians 5.1), classical poets used vivum saxum to describe natural rock, especially that which appears to grow from out of water.48 The foregoing discussion, however, has shown that patristic commentators had linked texts concerning the living stones of the temple with texts about islands and the worship of stone idols, and had applied the image of stone (lapis/lapides) to Gentiles. This interpretation was also used in exegesis of the term lapides in other biblical texts, [216] such as ‘God is able of these stones to raise up sons to Abraham’ (Matthew 3.9). Gregory incorporated his exegesis on this Gospel text when commenting on the phrase in similitudine lapidis aquae durantur (‘the waters are

45 Bede, Homily 2.16, Homeliarum evangelii, CCSL 122, ed. D. Hurst (Turnhout, 1955) pp. 294–99, trans. Martin and Hurst, 2:154–56. These points are didactically incorporated in the story in Vita Gregorii, 12, 13. 46 Homeliarum evangelii, 299, ll. 320–25, trans. Martin and Hurst, 2:160. 47 1 Chronicles 29.2; De templo 1:156, ll. 371–90, trans. Connolly, pp. 16–17. See Isidore, Etymologiae 16.5, 8; 14.6, 28. 48 J.C. Plumpe, “Vivum saxum, vivi lapides: The Concept of ‘living stone’ in Classical and Christian Antiquity”, Traditio 1 (1943) pp. 1–14.

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hardened like a stone’) in the Moralia. He noted that a stone, lapis, by reason of its very hardness could designate the Gentile peoples because they worshipped stones and those who make stone idols ‘become like them’ (Psalm 113.8), but the Gentiles, though hardened in unbelief, were by God’s inscrutable mercy softened to receive the faith (Romans 11.30–32).49 Bede stressed that God’s promise to give hearts of flesh to the Jews who hardened their hearts against his law (Ezekiel 36.26) is, in the New Testament, extended to those who are as ‘dead stones (lapides mortui), hard and unfeeling’, that is, the Gentiles.50 On receiving instruction in the faith, they are built into the unity of the Church, joined to Christ the living cornerstone and themselves become living stones, lapides vivi (1 Peter 2.5).51 Gentiles could therefore be referred to as lapides either before or after their conversion. It was an established conceit: their hardness was changed by grace when they were converted from dead to living stones. The term saxum, on the other hand, served only to emphasise the hardness of the unconverted Gentiles, as in Leo the Great’s description of how God made for himself an Israelite people out of all nations: ‘the stony hardness of the hearts of gentiles having been softened (saxeo illi gentilium cordium rigore mollito), he has raised up true sons of Abraham from the stones (de lapidibus)’.52 Saxum could also have negative associations when it appeared in other Christian contexts, notably in descriptions of island topography. It has been seen that patristic exegesis, including Jerome’s commentary on Psalm 96, had associated islands with their inhabitants who were transformed from lifeless stone to living stones at the coming of Christ. Elsewhere, however, Jerome contrasted a desolate Adriatic island of crags and bare rocks (nuda saxa), pounded by the sea, with the spiritual fruitfulness of the holy hermit who settled there ‘like a tiller in a new Eden’ (Ep. 3).53 In Insular hagiography, a similar contrast appears in [217] descriptions of St Cuthbert on Farne, an island in deepest Ocean which was barren rock and the haunt of devils (cf. Psalm 95.5; 1 Corinthians 10.20). The anonymous Vita Cuthberti describes monks visiting the island and coming to a stone of great size (venerunt ad lapidem, cf. 1 Peter 2.4, 7); they were unable to move it but later saw it miraculously built into the saint’s dwelling. Cuthbert commanded 49 Job 38.30; Gregory, Moralia 29.56:1473–74, trans. 3:342. 50 In epistolas VII catholicas, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 121 (Turnhout, 1983) p. 213; Bede the Venerable: Commentary on Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. D. Hurst (Kalamazoo, 1985) pp. 82–83. Underlying the paradox of softening stone is a chain of texts concerning those who ‘made their hearts as the adamant stone’ and did not listen to God’s law (Zechariah 7.12). God’s promise to take away their stony hearts and write his law, not on tablets of stone (Exodus 24.12) but in hearts of flesh, where it may be spiritually interpreted and obeyed (Jeremiah 31.33; Ezekiel 11.19, 36.26), is extended to the Gentiles, who are part of the new people of God (Hebrews 8.10, 10.16; 2 Corinthians 3.3). 51 Bede thus links the two chains of images concerning hearts of stone and flesh and the living stones of the spiritual temple. 52 Leo, Sermo 56.2, PL 54.366. 53 Jerome, Epistola 3.4, ed. M. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54 (Vienna, 1910) p. 15.

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them to dig beneath it and, as he prayed, a fountain of living water broke out of the stony ground (de saxosa terra). Bede’s prose Vita Cuthberti omitted the anonymous author’s more obtrusive allusion to the metaphor of the spiritual temple when describing Cuthbert’s dwelling but emphasised it was built on very hard and stony rock (utpote in durissima et prope saxea rupe condita): the locus or temple of God’s presence was the saint himself. Cuthbert prayed that God might open a spring of water from the stony rock (de hac quoque rupe saxosa), and water bubbled from ground which was exceedingly hard and dry (aridissima ac durissima). Similarly, in the Historia Ecclesiastica 4.28, the island of Farne is a savage place, unfit for human habitation. At the coming of Cuthbert, the evil spirits depart and his holiness is manifested in the spring and crop of barley which appears from the very hard and rocky ground (erat autem tellus durissima et saxosa). Bede records that the Ionan monk who was first sent to evangelise Oswald’s people reported back that the Angli were intractable, hard, and barbarous (eo quod essent homines indomabiles et durae ac barbare mentis), meaning they were unteachable, but Aidan reproved him for his un-Pauline approach and successfully undertook their conversion (HE 3.5). The quality of duritia, however, was ineradicably expressed in the name of Saxon. Orosius and other late Roman writers described the Saxons who harried the Empire as renowned for their toughness and resilience. Diarmuid Scully has noted that in this tradition, Isidore’s Etymologiae derived the name of the gens Saxonum, who inhabited the continental shore of Ocean, from the word saxosus (stony).54 The name described not their land (which was marshy) but their nature: they were called Saxons because they were hard men. Bede explained both the origin of the name of the Angli (Bede, HE 1.15) and its intimation of a heavenly destiny (Bede, HE 2.1), but not the etymology of Saxones, a silence which has puzzled modern commentators.55 He was quite [218] prepared to recount the savagery of his pagan ancestors, the Anglorum siue Saxonum gens who came from the continent (Bede, HE 1.15) and the ‘Angli’ under

54 Saxonum gens in Oceani litoribus et paludibus inviis sita [. . .] et appellata quod sit durum et validissimum genus hominum: Isidore, Etymologiae 9:2, 100; Scully, “The Atlantic Archipelago”, pp. 59–66, at 59. 55 Brooks, “Bede and the English”, pp. 14–20. Georges Tugéne, L’idée de nation chez Bède le Vénérable (Paris, 2001) pp. 27–28, suggests that Bede’s reluctance to exalt the role of temporal power and conquest in the formation of his people explains his silence on the etymology and martial prowess of the Saxons, which Alcuin later vaunted when describing his continental ancestors. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, pp. 292–309, at 301, n.286, also contrasts Bede’s unusual approach with the passage from Alcuin: Est antiqua, potens bellis et corpore praestans / Germaniae populos gens inter et extera regna / duritiam propter dicti cognomine Saxi (‘Between the ancient peoples of Germany and the outlying realms there is an ancient race, powerful in war, of splendid physique, called by the name of “rock” because of its toughness’): Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae, pp. 46–48, in The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, ed. and trans. P. Godman (Oxford, 1982).

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Æthelfrith (Bede, HE 1.34, 2.2), but it seems likely that he was encouraged in the decision not to use Saxones as a generic term for the Germanic peoples in Britain because of its connotations of enduring hardness. Given Bede’s particular exegetical and historical interests, Saxones might have appeared problematic as the permanent name for the latest of the gentile peoples whom patristic tradition had identified with stones destined to be softened and changed by grace into vivi lapides in the spiritual temple. Whether or not Gregory’s own avoidance of the term Saxones was partly influenced by similar considerations, his consistent use of the name Angli for this people may well have held an attraction for Bede which has not so far been considered.

The cornerstone Three times in the commentary on Psalm 96 Augustine refers to Christ as the cornerstone, lapis angularis or simply angulus. The title is from the chain of New Testament texts identifying Christ with Old Testament prophecies of the stone which was rejected by the builders but became the caput angularis (Psalm 117.22), the precious cornerstone (angulus) laid in the foundations of Sion (Isaiah 28.16).56 Augustine succinctly alludes to three interpretive texts. First, in 1 Peter 2.4–10 the cornerstone is described as a living stone and those who are joined to it are transformed and themselves become living stones in the spiritual building; although in the past they were not a people, they now become part of the people of God.57 Augustine cites this text in commenting on Psalm 96.7. He contrasts those who are lifeless stones, like the man-made idols they worship, with the faithful who have come to the living stone, ad lapidem vivum (1 Peter 2.4), over whom death has no more dominion (Romans 6.9), whose glory has now been revealed to the whole world. Secondly, St Paul described the gentiles from far off who, at their conversion, are: no more strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God. Built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone (ipso summo angulari lapide), in whom all the building [. . .] grows up into a holy temple to the [219] Lord. (Ephesians 2.19–21). Augustine refers to this Pauline image when commenting on the titulus of Psalm 96, explaining how the whole earth was restored when Jews and Gentiles were

56 Matthew 21.42; Mark 12.10; Luke 20.17; Acts 4.11; Romans 9.32; 1 Peter 2.7. 57 1 Peter 2.10, like Romans 9.26, interprets Hosea 2.24 as a prophecy of the Gentiles’ inclusion in the new people of God.

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united by the atoning sacrifice of Christ, like two walls joined at right angles by the foundational cornerstone, forming a single holy temple to the Lord. Augustine was emphatic that in order to keep to the path of correct understanding of Psalm 96, the whole psalm must be applied to Christ: ‘Let us not depart from the cornerstone’. He was here alluding to a third text, St Peter’s acclamation of the crucified and risen Christ: ‘This is the stone (lapis) which was rejected by the builders, which has become the head of the corner (caput anguli). Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved’ (Acts 4.11–12; cf. Psalm 117.22). Hence angulus was one of the names of Christ. Referring to the caput anguli in his commentary on this passage, Bede emphasised that ‘salvation is in no other’, that the salvation of the whole world is in the sacrifice of Christ. God placed this stone at the head of the corner to unite law-reading Jews and idol-worshipping Gentiles, so that from two testaments and two peoples there might rise up a building of one and the same faith.58 In his substantial exposition of 1 Peter 2.4–10, Bede again identified the living cornerstone with the crucified Christ, whom God exalted (Philippians 2.9).59 Bede recognised the allusion to Christ in the word angulus when he read it in certain other biblical contexts. Expounding the Exodus account of the tabernacle, made not of stone but of wood, he noted that the name was contained in the description of the stabilising bar which extended ‘from corner to corner’ (ab angulo usque ad angulum) of the sanctuary (Exodus 36.33). He described this instance of the word as a sacramentum, meaning a divinely-placed sign in the text, which ‘in a figurative manner unambiguously describes our Redeemer himself’, who atoned for Jews and Gentiles alike.60 Bede immediately goes on to note that the one sacrificial altar of the tabernacle signified the unity of all believers, its four corners (anguli) the four regions of the world through which the Church has spread.61 Angulus, in the sense of a corner of the earth, could be used in the rhetoric of orthodoxy to describe a community perceived to be distant from the spiritual [220] centre, as in the charges Bede says some ‘Romani’ made against the monks of Iona, in extremo mundi angulo positis.62 But Pope Gregory had used the term positively in a letter to the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, to describe for 58 Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, 26, trans. Martin, p. 50. 59 On 1 Peter 2.4, In epistolas VII catholicas, 233, trans. Hurst, p. 82. 60 De tabernaculo 2:76, trans. Holder, 85. See In Ezram et Neemian, p. 352, trans. De Gregorio, p. 174, for Bede’s exegesis on ‘opposite the ascent of the strongest corner’ (contra ascensum firmissimi anguli) in Nehemiah 3.19: ‘the “strongest corner” is the Lord (firmissimus quippe angulus dominus est), who united the Jewish and gentile peoples in faith and love for him, which is why he is called a “cornerstone” in the psalm [Psalm 117.22] and in Isaiah [Isaiah 28.16]’. 61 Exodus 27.2, De tabernaculo 2:77, trans. Holder, p. 86. 62 Wilfrid described the Columbans as ‘a handful of people in one corner of the remotest of islands’ (de angulo extremae insulae), and Adomnán of Iona was warned, on a visit to Northumbria, that he and his small band, living in the remotest corner of the world (in extremo mundi angulo

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him a people who, though remote in terms of their literal location and origins, were made one with the universal Church through conversion to a common faith. Reporting the successful beginnings of the mission sent to the Angli, Gregory made a play on their name and their location in a corner of the world, where they had recently worshipped sticks and stones: gens Anglorum in mundi angulo posita.63 The entry on Gregory in the Liber pontificalis says he sent preachers ad gentem Angulorum, and the form ‘Anguli’ is also used in the Whitby Vita Gregorii.64 When identifying the continental homelands of the three Germanic tribes who had invaded Britain, Bede noted that the ‘Angli’ came from a land named ‘Angulus’, situated between the kingdoms of the Jutes and Saxons (Bede, HE 1.15).65 For Bede, part of the attraction of following Gregory’s use of the name Angli to denote a single people from the conversion period may have been that, in addition to its reference to their destined role as fellow citizens of the angeli in heaven, it concealed an allusion to their becoming one with Christ himself. Though outsiders from a far corner of the world, the Angli at their baptism became part of the whole people of God; they were united with the angulus or cornerstone and incorporated into the one universal house of God. The standard exposition of the names of Christ in Isidore’s Etymologiae explained that Christ is called ‘the cornerstone’ (lapis angularis) because ‘he joins two walls coming from different directions, that is from the circumcised and the uncircumcised, into the one fabric of the Church’, and because he makes peace in himself for humankind and angels.66 Isidore was epitomising St Paul’s [221] description of the angulus as holding the living spiritual building together, both horizontally and vertically (Ephesians 2.12–22). The second part of this twofold function was strongly emphasised by Bede in a Gospel homily on the Incarnation. He implicitly identified Christ, ‘the Mediator between God and man’ (1 Timothy 2.5), as the cornerstone that joins together all peoples on earth, Jews and Gentiles, who confess him in one faith, but also unites human beings with the angels in heaven. Directly citing Ephesians 2.14, ‘He himself is our peace and has made us one’, Bede describes Christ as the reconciler who ‘has made one house of God of angels and men’.

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positis), should not presume to go against the universal custom of the Church: Bede, HE 3.25, 5.15 at pp. 306, 506. Gregory, Ep. 8.29, Registrum Epistolarum 2:30–31, trans. Martyn, 2:524. Louis Duchesne, ed., Le Liber Pontificalis, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886–92), i:312; Vita Gregorii, ed. and trans. Colgrave, pp. 144–45, n.42. “Hoc est de illa patria quae Angulus dicitur” (Bede, HE 1.15). Nicholas Howe, “An Angle on this Earth: Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England”, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 82 (2000) pp. 3–27, at 4–6 for Bede’s two etymologies for Angli and the view that this conversion story led the island’s inhabitants later to define themselves as ‘the possessors of a promised land’, an image of the Angli as the New Israel which was ‘supported by the parallel between their own ancestral migration across the North Sea and that of the Israelites across the Red Sea’. This is to be distinguished from Bede’s account of the formation of the Angli. Etymologiae 7.2.39, trans. Barney et al., Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, p. 157.

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The homily, for midnight mass at Christmas, expounds the Gospel account of the angel’s night-time announcement of the Incarnation to the shepherds, how the splendour of divine brightness enclosed both the angel and the shepherds, and the heavenly host proclaimed ‘peace on earth’ (Luke 2.1–14). It explains that the angels sang ‘Glory to God in the highest’, knowing that the time had come when humankind, ‘casting off the gods who were made by men’, would recognise its heavenly Maker. Though originally created in the image of God (Genesis 1.26–27) to participate in the divine holiness, humankind had, through the darkness of sin, lost this radiance. At the incarnation God took on the likeness of sinful flesh (Romans 8.3) and thereby restored the light of the divine image in humanity. Those who had long been cast out from eternal bliss were, through redemption, called to be companions of the angels in the heavenly dwelling and to sing God’s glory with them.67 In this highly rhetorical homily Bede shows in universal theological terms what is conveyed with lively particularity through the story of the riddling wordplay used by Gregory to expound the providential signs of salvation he saw in the bodily appearance and very name of the Angli (Bede, HE 2.1). Bede’s homily, describing the Incarnation as the means of transforming human nature, and therefore of reconciling men and angels, is a skilful creation within a patristic tradition which can be traced in homilies on the same Lucan text by Leo the Great and by Gregory himself.68 Bede adapted a passage in Gregory’s homily on Luke 2.14, which argued that human beings were once far from the brightness of angels because of original sin and daily transgressions but that, because the king of heaven took on human weakness at his Incarnation, ‘the angels acknowledged us again as fellow-citizens’ of heaven. [222] Gregory’s Moralia had linked the same texts in an extended exposition of the image of the divine Creator laying the foundation and cornerstone of the earth (Job 38.4–6) as a figure of the spiritual edifice of the Church. Christ is its foundation (1 Corinthians 3.11) and cornerstone which ‘made both one’ by uniting Jews and Gentiles as two walls of one Church on earth (Ephesians 2.14), and by uniting them both to the angels in heaven, who recognised the mystery of humanity’s redemption at the Incarnation (Luke 2.14). Christ the cornerstone is ‘the Mediator between God and man’ (1 Timothy 2.5), the divine Son who took on human nature and set forth the pattern of the love of God and neighbour.69

67 Bede, Hom. 1.6 on Luke 2.1–14, Homeliarum evangelii 37, pp. 44–45, trans. Martin and Hurst, 1.53, 62. Leo the Great, Gregory, and Bede stress that the destiny of humankind is to join the angels in the worship of God. Bede, In Ezram et Neemian, 3:384, trans. De Gregorio, 216, for the interpretation of the two choirs in Nehemiah 12.40 as the uniting of Jews and Gentiles in one song of divine praise, and as the unity of angels and human beings. 68 Leo, Sermon 21, Nativity 1, PL 54.190–93; Gregory, Hom. 78, Homiliae in Evangelia, ed. Raymond Étaix, CCSL 141 (Turnhout, 1999) pp. 53–56. 69 Job 38.4–6. Moralia 28.5, 14:1405–06; 7, 18–19:1409–10; 12, 31–14, 34:1419–22, trans. 3.271–72, 276–77, 287–88.

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At the beginning of De templo, Bede summarised its great metaphor. The Mediator between God and man ‘became the temple of God by assuming human nature (John 2.19–21) and we become the temple of God through his spirit dwelling in us (Romans 8.11)’.70 The temple is therefore a figure both of Christ and his members, but of him as the foundational cornerstone (lapis angularis) and of the faithful as living stones (vivi lapides) built on Christ (Ephesians 2.20; 1 Peter 2.5–6). This spiritual house exists partly on earth and partly in heaven, where it will be completed at the end of time; to it also belong the angels, ‘whose likeness is promised to us in the life to come’ (Luke 20.35–36). In various contexts Augustine, Leo, Gregory, and Bede all identified the cornerstone with ‘the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Timothy 2.5).71 The Pauline phrase unus et mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus was a favourite text with Gregory and Bede.72 It was an established confession of faith which had been quoted by patristic writers in the refutation of heresy, notably by Augustine against the Pelagians and by Pope Leo in his Tome. Leo’s articulation of belief in Christ the Mediator, in whom the divine and human natures are united, and through whom humanity’s true likeness to God can alone be restored, was used by the Council of Chalcedon, itself repeatedly affirmed as a touchstone of orthodoxy by Pope Gregory and the seventh-century papacy and acclaimed at the synod of Hatfield presided over by Theodore of Canterbury (Bede, HE 4.17). This exegetical tradition illuminates another of Bede’s few interjections in the first person in the Historia Ecclesiastica. After praising Aidan of Lindisfarne’s spiritual and pastoral merits, Bede testified that in his keeping of the Columban [223] date of Easter, ‘he reverenced and preached no other doctrine than we do, namely the redemption of the human race by the passion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven of the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’ (Bede, HE 3.17). Bede thereby defended him from suspicion of schism or heresy, especially Pelagianism, suggested to some contemporaries by the Columbans’ customary dating of Easter.73 The Columban monks used the same uncanonical dating as the Britons, which Bede could not approve. But he made it clear that the Columbans’ motivation did not lack that fraternal charity which was fundamental to a definition of orthodoxy, and that their contribution to the evangelisation of the Angli demonstrated their understanding of the universal significance of the resurrection and belief in its necessity for human salvation.

70 De templo, 1.1: 147, trans. Connolly, p. 5. 71 Augustine, In Psalmum 117.16–18, 21, Enarrationes 3:1662–63 (see also Bede’s Gospel homily 2.3:204–05); Leo, Ep. 124.6, PL 54.1066, trans. NPNF, second series, 12:93; Gregory, Moralia 28, 13, 33:1420–21, trans. 3: 276–77. 72 Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley, 1988) pp. 147–61, at 150–53 n.11 for the reconciliation of contraries by Gregory, who cites 1 Timothy 2.5 over fifty times. 73 J. O’Reilly, “The one Mediator of God and man: Bede and the Patristic Exegesis of 1 Tm 2:5”, paper given at the Patristic Studies Conference, University of Oxford, 2007.

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Pope Vitalian’s letter to Oswiu, after the synod of Whitby, had applied Isaiah’s prophecies concerning the conversion of Gentiles and far-off islands, not only to the primary conversion of the Angli from idol-worship, but to the conversion of all the islands to the true and apostolic faith, following ‘the holy rule of the chief of the apostles in all things’, including the celebration of Easter (Bede, HE 3.29). In Bede’s final chapter Iona’s eventual acceptance of the canonical Easter in 716 is presented in terms of another island ‘conversion’, but with the difference that its inhabitants had, like Gregory’s missionaries, been instrumental in the primary conversion of the Angli, and now, through grace, were themselves further converted to a more perfect way of life, in that matter in which they had been lacking (Bede, HE 5.22). It is the climax of the book, culminating in an exalted description of the island community’s celebration of the feast of the resurrection in unity with the rest of the universal Church on earth, anticipating the eternal joyful celebration of the feast with Christ and the citizens of heaven.

Coda The chapter which follows this ending of the historical narrative briefly appraises ‘the state of the whole of Britain at the present time’, 731, including all four of its Christian peoples (Bede, HE 5.23). It records the bishoprics established in the various prouinciae of the Anglo-Saxons and their peaceful co-existence with the Irish in Britain and with the Picts who now ‘rejoice to share in the catholic peace and truth of the Church universal’, though the Britons remained largely unreconciled. It also lists recent eschatological omens: the appearance of two comets in 729, ‘seeming to portend dire disaster to east and west alike [. . .] to indicate that humanity was threatened by calamities’, the plague of Saracens in Gaul, and unspecified setbacks marking the beginning of the reign of Ceolwulf, to whom Bede dedicated his History. Bede observes that it is impossible to guess what the [224] outcome will be, and avoids speculation on the details and date of the future consummation.74 At first sight this chapter would seem strangely at variance with the exultant scene on the island of Iona and the image of the rejoicing ‘multitude of isles’ from Psalm 96, which closes HE 5.23 and the entire work. The traditional interpretation of the psalm text may offer some explanation of its possible function in the Historia. The final verse of Psalm 96 is ‘Rejoice, ye just, in the Lord: and give praise to the remembrance of his holiness’, part of which Bede quotes, substituting as its subject ‘the multitude of isles’ from the psalm’s first verse.75 The last verse of 74 Posterior aetas uidebit. See De temporum ratione, 68:537, trans. Wallis, pp. 240–41: ‘they behave dangerously if any of them presumes to speculate or to teach that this [hour] is near at hand or far off’. 75 In cuius regno perpetuo exultet terra, et congratulante in fide eius britannia, laetentur insulae multae et confiteantur memoriae sanctitatis eius (‘Let the earth rejoice in his perpetual kingdom and let Britain rejoice in his faith and let the multitude of isles be glad and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness’). Psalm 96 (97), verses 1b, 12 in the Gallican and Hebrew Psalter versions:

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Psalm 96 parallels Psalm 29.5, whose patristic interpretation was influenced by that psalm’s titulus: ‘A psalm for the dedication of David’s house’.76 Augustine’s commentary had contrasted the construction of the Church, meaning its spiritual formation amidst temptations and tribulation on earth, with the heavenly completion and dedication of the Church at the end of time, when the faithful will share in the eternal joy of the resurrection.77 Commentaries on the final verse of Psalm 96 focus on the earthly anticipation of this future joy. Bede’s own interpretation of the verse appears in his commentary In Esram et Neemiam. The account of the Levites who entered the city of Jerusalem with songs of thanksgiving and celebrated its rebuilding and dedication after the Hebrews’ return from the Babylonian Captivity (Nehemiah 12.27) is interpreted both as a prefiguring of the end of time, when the faithful will be drawn from the four winds (Matthew 24.31) to celebrate the heavenly dedication of the completed spiritual temple, and also as referring to all the faithful on earth in the present life who already rejoice with song and thanksgiving in contemplating and desiring that dedication in the heavenly Jerusalem, according to the words of the psalmist: ‘Rejoice, you just, in the Lord, and confess to the remembrance of his holiness’ (Psalm 96.12). They ‘rejoice’ by accepting whatever happens in this world, by continuing in good works which encourage others to love the Lord, and by longing for their eternal inheritance of celestial peace. [225] Cassiodorus had noted that Psalm 96 celebrates the conversion of the multitude of islands from the service of idols, but also the return to Christ of sinners. He exhorts ‘the just’ of the final verse to rejoice in the Lord alone ‘and not in human aspirations and the self-esteem of this world’. Augustine’s commentary on the final verse had similarly warned that worldly notions of joy are not true joy; heavenly joys can only be perceived by the eye of the heart. His sober meditation on the psalm’s final phrase is articulated through Christ’s words to his disciples: ‘These things I have spoken to you that in me you might have peace. But in the world you shall have tribulation’ (John 16.33). Augustine added that Christians should not expect more peaceful and better times in this world. He recalled the solemn warning in Matthew 24.3–13 that in the last times many evils, tribulations, and iniquities will abound. In the first book of the Historia Ecclesiastica Bede quoted a letter from Gregory the Great to Æthelbert which cites the same apocalyptic Gospel passage and describes signs of cosmic upheaval which will announce the coming end of the world (Bede, HE 1.32). Gregory had urged the king to overthrow the worship of idols, warning him: ‘Not all these things will come about in our days, but they will follow after our days’; their purpose is to ‘make us heedful about our souls so Dominus regnavit; exsultet terra / laetentur insulae multae [. . .] laetamini iusti in Domino | et confitemini memoriae sanctificationis eius. The Roman Psalter has sanctitatis eius. 76 Psallite Domino, sancti eius, | et confitemini memoriae sanctitatis eius (Psalm 29 [30].5). See Augustine, Psalm 30.1, 5, Enarrationes 2:187, trans. NPNF 8:67. 77 Clancy, “Augustine’s Sermons”, p. 51.

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that when the Judge comes we may, through our good works, be found prepared’ (cf. Matthew 24.30, 44–46). The allusion is to Christ’s foretelling that the Gospel will first be preached in the whole world ‘and then shall the end come’, but of that day and hour ‘no one knows [. . .] but the Father alone’ (Matthew 24.14, 36).78 The taking of the Gospel to the ends of the earth and to all peoples was therefore a precondition for the final consummation, for whose unknown time all should prepare. Accordingly, the last book of the Historia Ecclesiastica includes local and recent visions of Judgement and the afterlife, each of which is recounted with an expressly cautionary and penitential purpose (Bede, HE 5.12–14). Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 96 ends with assurances that ‘he that shall endure to the end shall be saved’ (Matthew 24.13) and that the love of God will not go cold for those who remain fervent in spirit (Matthew 3.12; Romans 12.11). In the final verse of Psalm 96, ‘the just rejoice’ or, in Bede’s version, Britain and the multitude of isles rejoice, because of their salvation. With the conversion of the Angli and their own recent missionary endeavours, it can at last be said that the prophecies concerning the conversion of islands at the ends of the earth have been fulfilled. Read in the context of the patristic tradition on Psalm 96 and of the topos of islands as used in the Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede’s concluding quotation suggests a large vision of salvation. He does not name the Angli here but Britain, having depicted it as one of a multiplicity of islands, representing both a remote region and, in the diversity of its four peoples, a microcosm of the universal Church. Levels [226] of conversion among them at different times range from the primary abandonment of idols to the true service of God. Bede is insistent that the joyful hope of the faithful is not of reigning in this life, but of reigning with God for ever. Adapting the words of the psalmist, he finally calls on Britain, the islands and the whole earth – the worldwide Church – to fulfill the angelic vocation of redeemed humanity through offering praise to God, who alone is holy: ‘Let the earth rejoice in his everlasting kingdom and Britain rejoice in his Faith, and let the multitude of isles be glad and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness’ (Bede, HE 5.23).

78 Augustine, Ep. 199.48, Epistulae 4:286–87, trans. Parsons, p. 396.

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S T PA U L A N D T H E S I G N O F JONAH. THEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE IN BEDE’S HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS † ANGLORUM I start with the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving complete Latin Bible, magisterial in scale and execution, which was produced in Wearmouth-Jarrow, along with two other pandects, by 716. I do so partly to mark the recent acquisition of a facsimile of this great manuscript for Jarrow, but also to invoke its weighty testimony to the importance of Scripture in Wearmouth-Jarrow and the work of Bede.1 As much of his work has become more accessible and better understood in recent years, scholars are noting its variety, intellectual range and degree of originality, but also its coherence as a corpus. His entire output concerns Scripture and the kinds of knowledge and skills thought necessary for its understanding and application. Bede often describes the study of the sacred text as a spiritual process of discerning the continuing underlying meaning of the inspired word of God for the contemporary faithful, to learn what is God’s will in order to obey it – and to teach it to others in ways appropriate to their needs and capacities. The inclusion of works of history in this task proceeds from the belief that, although the divine plan for human redemption has been revealed in Scripture and the means of salvation already procured through the Incarnation, the providential purposes for universal salvation continue to be worked out in Creation and the ordering of time until the end of the world, and in the lifetime of each of the faithful.2 † At the time of her sudden death in February 2016, Jennifer O’Reilly was preparing her Jarrow Lecture for publication. The annotated text that she left has been edited by Professor Terence O’Reilly. He thanks for their assistance and advice Dr Susan Cremin, Dr Máirín MacCarron, Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Michael O’Reilly, Tom O’Reilly, Dr Diarmuid Scully and Dr Alan Thacker. 1 The arrival in Jarrow of a facsimile of the Codex Amiatinus was celebrated in May 2014 during a reception held in Bede’s World immediately before the Jarrow Lecture in St Peter’s Church. 2 See, for instance, Bede’s reflections on the divine plan for redemption in Homily I.1 (Homiliarvm evangelii, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 122 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955) p. 3, ll. 49–55; trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst, Homilies on the Gospels, 2 vols (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991) vol.1, p. 3), where he comments on the post-baptismal training needed for heavenly life: ‘And when the people had been liberated from Egypt by the blood of the lamb and had been led through the Red Sea, the Lord first instructed them for forty years in the desert, and so led them into the land of promise. Surely the faithful cannot pass immediately after baptism to the joys of the heavenly

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In the Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede does not expound recent events as allegories, parables, or slavish repetitions of biblical events, but is concerned with myriad source materials, chronology, dating, the events [1] and circumstances peculiar to a particular time and place, remote from that in which Scripture was written and the Church first formed. Formal biblical exegesis is largely confined to the papal and other letters he quotes as primary sources. But his perception of what was significant in the recent formation of his own people, and the historical imagination with which he presented his vision of the past to his contemporaries for their instruction and delight, were profoundly shaped by his upbringing in a monastic culture where Scripture was central.3 He was particularly influenced by the account of the early Church and its own interpretation of the past in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St Paul, and by patristic, especially Augustinian, interpretations of Paul.

St Paul and Jonah In an influential letter (Epistle 53), Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate text in the Codex Amiatinus, cited St Paul as a supreme exponent of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture: a Pharisee trained in the Law of Moses who came to explain the continuing spiritual meaning of the Law for all peoples in the light of the Gospel revelation of Christ. He describes St Paul as a kind of living concordance: ‘a vessel of the Law (Acts 9.15) and an armarium (bookcase, library) of the holy Scriptures’.4 St Paul was an immensely important model too for Bede, who uses brief Pauline texts and allusions at key points in the Ecclesiastical History, often to allude to divine justice and mercy. In particular Bede skilfully adapts Paul’s distinction between the

fatherland, but first they must be trained by long struggles in the exercise of virtues, and then they will be granted the abiding gift of heavenly blessedness’. The theme is developed in similar terms in Homilies II.9 and II.15. 3 This is apparent when he notes the synchronicity of certain events with the chanting of liturgical texts, such as psalms: see, for instance, History of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, c. 14, in Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. and trans. Christopher Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013) pp. 22–75 (55), on the singing of Psalm 82 at the time of Benedict Biscop’s death. Bede’s providential view of history is discussed further in Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Multitude of Isles and the Corner-Stone: Topography, Exegesis, and the Identity of the Angli in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in Anglo-Saxon Traces, ed. Jane Roberts and Leslie Webster (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011) pp. 201–27 (especially 203, 212). 4 Epistle 53.3, in Saint-Jérôme. Lettres, ed. and trans. J. Labourt, 8 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1949–63), vol. 3, pp. 8–25 (12). Bede quoted appropriate passages of the letter in his writings, for instance in his commentaries on Acts (Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, ed. M.L.W. Laistner, CCSL 121 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1983) pp. 3–4, 41) and Ezra (In Ezram et Neemiam, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnholt: Brepols, 1969) pp. 237, 309, 339). On the term armarium and Epistle 53 in the context of the Codex Amiatinus’s celebrated image of a scribe and Bede’s presentation of the figure of Ezra, see Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The library of Scripture: views from Vivarium and Wearmouth-Jarrow’, in New offerings, ancient treasures. Studies in medieval art for George Henderson, ed. Paul Binski and Will Noel (Stroud: Sutton, 2001) pp. 3–39.

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Figure 5.1 The Codex Amiatinus. The Scribe and the Books of Scripture. MS Amiatino 1, fol. 5r. Reproduced with permission from the Laurentian Library, Florence, with the concession of the MiBAC.

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characteristics of some Jewish and some gentile converts in the early Church. Some Jewish converts had continued to be zealous in the observation of the letter of the Law and all its accumulated man-made traditions, and their consciousness of being the chosen people made them either resistant to gentile converts or demand that they adopt Jewish customs. Gentile converts, without such a long religious history, were slow to understand the connection between faith and behaviour, and needed weaning from their carnal appetites and earthbound preoccupations. Both kinds of convert were open to the charge of idol-worship. These debates in the early [2] Church are explicitly recalled at the synod of Whitby, but they also inform Bede’s treatment of various individuals, communities and peoples, at least for periods of their history or in particular aspects of their life, throughout the Ecclesiastical History. Drawing on such biblical and patristic models concerning the idolatry of the believer, he displays its variety of types and degree, and in the process reveals the nature of its antithesis, the true service of God, characterised by seeking the better way to perfection and one’s heavenly home. St Paul, the Hebrew Apostle to the Gentiles, was often linked with Jonah, the only Old Testament prophet sent to Gentiles. Jerome’s entry on the Book of Jonah in Epistle 53 took on a life of its own, as seen in the Codex Amiatinus (fol. 664ra), where it is used as a prologue to the Book of Jonah: Ionas interpretatur columba naufragio suo passionem domini praefigurans mundum ad paenitentiam reuocat et sub nomine ninevae salutem gentibus nuntiat (Jonah, meaning ‘dove’, prefiguring by his shipwreck the Passion of the Lord, recalls the world to penitence and, under the name of Nineveh, announces salvation to the nations). This is not a summary of the biblical book but an interpretation of its significance. Names are important in Scripture and exegesis. The Hebrew name Jonah, interpreted in Latin as columba (dove), could signify a vessel of the Holy Spirit; the interpretation is used by Jerome in the prologue to his commentary on the Book of Jonah, by Columbanus of himself, by Adomnán of Iona when describing St Columba, and by Bede in his homily on St Peter, who was originally called Simon bar-Jona: ‘Wherever the sacred scriptures give the names of things or persons with an interpretation, it certainly indicates that a more sacred sense is contained in them. [. . .] Thus blessed Peter, on account of the grace of the Holy Spirit, was called BarJona (Matthew 16.17), that is, son of the dove’.5 [3]

5 Bede, Homily I.20 (ed. Hurst, p. 143, ll. 77–86; trans. Martin and Hurst, vol. 1, p. 199). See also Bede’s commentary on Acts 4.36 (ed. Laistner, p. 28; trans. Lawrence T. Martin, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989) p. 53); Jerome, Commentarius in Ionam prophetam, in Commentarii in prophetas minores, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 76 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969–70), p. 377; Columbanus, Sancti Columbani opera, ed. and trans. G.S.M. Walker, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, 2 (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970) pp. 2, 18, 20, 34, 54; Adomnán, Adomnán’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) pp. 2, 3; Isidore, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3.viii.18 (p. 167).

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Figure 5.2 The Codex Amiatinus. Prologue to the Book of Jonah (from Jerome, Epistle 53). MS Amiatino 1, fol. 664r. Reproduced with permission from the Laurentian Library, Florence, with the concession of the MiBAC.

The Book of Jonah is about the justice and the mercy of God: his just judgement of the Ninevites for their evil ways, and his mercy in sending a messenger to warn them of impending destruction, allowing them to avert punishment by repentance. But the story is also about the reluctant messenger. Nineveh was not only a pagan city but the capital of the Assyrians, Israel’s ancient enemy and oppressor, so the Hebrew prophet fled from God’s outrageous command that he should go and warn them. He set sail in the opposite direction, but when a terrible storm blew up, threatening to capsize the ship and crew, he recognised that ‘For my sake this tempest is upon you’ (Jonah 1.12) and was duly thrown overboard. For Christian readers Jonah’s descent into the belly of a great fish (Jonah 2.1) and his divine deliverance after three days became an image of deliverance from spiritual death through Christ’s descent into humanity and death and his rising again. This interpretation was grounded in Matthew’s Gospel, where the scribes and Pharisees demanded from Christ a sign and he gave them only the enigmatic sign of Jonah, warning that at the day of judgement they would be condemned by the men of Nineveh, who had done penance at the preaching of Jonah: ‘And behold a greater than Jonah is here’ (Matthew 12.38–41). The sign of Jonah could signify both the judgement to come and the means of redemption, ‘For as Jonah was in the whale’s belly three days and three nights, so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights’ (Matthew 12.40). Bede absorbed and extended the parallel in his commentary on St Luke’s account of ‘the sign of Jonah’ (Luke 11.29–32), saying it signified Christ’s Incarnation, particularly the passion of his humanity.6 Ambrose commented on the sign of Jonah that the Church would be gathered together, with the Ninevites, from the ends of the earth

6 Bede, In Lvcae evangelium expositio, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960) pp. 237–38, ll. 271–73.

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(de totis orbis finibus) by means of penitence.7 Jerome, in his full commentary on the Book of Jonah, interpreted God’s command that Jonah should take his word to the Ninevites as prefiguring Christ’s final command that the apostles go and teach and baptise those who were ‘in Nineveh’ (that is, all peoples), ‘in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28.19).8 Salvation was not just for the chosen people of the Old Testament but for Gentiles as well. [4] The Book of Jonah is specifically cited on two occasions in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that I will come to, but variations on some of these themes, as interpreted by patristic commentators, run through Bede’s account of the conversion of his own people, which is set in the context of universal salvation and multiple demonstrations of the continuing justice and mercy of God. From Origen onwards patristic commentators had compared the missions of Jeremiah and Jonah.9 The contrasting fates of Jerusalem and Nineveh, because of their differing responses to warning and correction, were made to speak to successive generations of Christians. In this tradition the pagan Saxon invaders of post-Roman Britain were cast as the savage agents of God’s judgement on a latter-day Israel. Gildas, ‘their own historian’ (HE 1.22), adopted the voice of Jeremiah lamenting the ruin of Jerusalem in order to rebuke his fellow Britons for their sins and urge their repentance.10 He also compared the Saxons’ devastation of the land by fire with the assault of the Assyrians of old on Judaea and their desecration of the temple, lamented in Psalms 73.7 and 78.1,11 and he reflected that if the Britons had only repented of their sin and genuinely gone back to God they would have averted punishment, like the penitent Ninevites: Jonah himself could not have brought punishment on the penitent Ninevites, for all his desire to do so.12 Bede also paralleled the Saxons’ laying waste of the lands of the

7 Ambrose, Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1957), Book 7. 96 (pp. 246–47); trans. Íde Ní Riain (Dublin: Halcyon, 2001) p. 220. The Ninevites were generally seen as standing for the gentile Church, drawn from the ends of the earth, but Bede quoted from Ambrose’s Lucan commentary (In Lvcae evangelium expositio, p. 238, ll. 281–83) to argue that the Ninevites’ example both proclaims the punishment and offers the remedy, and that therefore even the Jews may expect pardon if they choose to do penance. 8 Jerome, Commentarius in Ionam prophetam, 3.4 (p. 404). The importance of Matthew’s text, containing the Trinitarian baptismal formula and indicating the universal mission of the Church, is highlighted in the exegesis of Isidore, Columbanus and Bede, and in the Insular Gospel books, notably the Durham Gospels: see Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘Seeing the crucified Christ: image and meaning in early Irish manuscript art’ in Envisioning Christ on the Cross: Ireland and the early medieval West, ed. Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Richard Hawtree (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013) pp. 52–82 (61–62). 9 Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah: Homily on 1 Kings 28, trans. John Clark Smith, Fathers of the Church, 97 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1998) p. 3. 10 Gildas, De excidio Britonum, in Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London: Phillimore, 1978), Preface.5 (pp. 13–14). 11 Gildas, De excidio Britonum, 24.2 (p. 27). 12 Gildas, De excidio Britonum, 50.1 (p. 44).

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Britons with the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem by fire (HE 1.15, p. 52),13 but he reserved the example of penitent Nineveh for later in his narrative. Most important are the parallels between the story of Jonah, the Hebrew prophet sent to Gentiles, and that of St Paul, the Jewish Pharisee sent to teach the Gentiles. Both faced shipwreck, though at different points in their stories, and both were so zealous on behalf of their own people, the chosen people, that it took miracles of divine intervention before they undertook their divinely appointed missions. Gregory in the Moralia explains that Jonah’s flight from God’s first command that he go to warn Nineveh of impending judgement was because of the likely consequences of this extension of God’s [5] mercy to them: Jonah ‘feared that, if the Gentiles were chosen, Judaea would be forsaken’.14 This is the very question confronted by his fellow Hebrew, St Paul, when describing God’s revelation of salvation to the Gentiles: ‘Has God forsaken his people?’ (Romans 11.1). Jerome had linked the story of Jonah with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, including the image of the Gentiles as the wild olive being grafted into the stock of the good olive tree to take the place of its broken branches (those Jews who had become faithless). So too did Bede in his Commentary on 1 Samuel: But Jonah the prophet also, when ordered to preach to the Ninevites, preferred to commit himself to the peril of the sea rather than preach the word of faith to the nations, fearing assuredly that if the branches of the good olive were broken by a failure to believe, and the wild olive grafted in through faith (cf. Romans 11.17), there would spring up a sharer in the olive’s root and richness.15 The Ecclesiastical History alleges that the Britons had never preached the faith to the Saxons or Angles who inhabited Britain with them. ‘Nevertheless God in his goodness did not reject his people whom he foreknew (sed non tamen diuina pietas plebem suam, quam praesciuit, deseruit), but he had appointed much worthier 13 In his exegesis on the account of the Babylonian Captivity in 2 Kings 24.14, Bede states similarly that Jerusalem and the land of the Israel ‘here stand for the city of Christ, which is Holy Church’, and that Israel serves the Philistines or Chaldeans (Babylonians) ‘whenever any of the faithful who stand nominally inside the Church [. . .] are deceived by unclean spirits or [. . .] bow the necks of their conscience to greed, self-indulgence or any other sin’. Jerusalem is led into captivity whenever ‘the world’s temptations, or its calamities, suddenly overwhelm even the people’s teachers and those who have been seen to serve the Lord with invincible spirit and to keep the ten commandments faithfully in love of God and neighbour’: Thirty questions on the Book of Kings, Question 30, in Bede, a biblical miscellany, trans. W. Trent Foley and Arthur G. Holder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) p. 137. 14 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), VI.31 (pp. 306–07). 15 Bede, In primam partem Samuhelis, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), Book 3 (p. 138).

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heralds of the truth to bring this people to the faith’ (HE 1.22, p. 68). This echoes St Paul, ‘an Israelite of the seed of Abraham’, whose own conversion demonstrated that ‘God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew’ (non repulit Deus plebem suam quam praesciuit) (Romans 11.2). But Bede applies the phrase to the pagan Angli. Some historians, thinking it quite reasonable that the Britons did not wish to go and evangelise the enemy, have concluded that Bede here presents the English as God’s new and singular chosen people, implying their innate merit and licensing their usurpation of the Britons’ lands and power. This view, whatever insight it may contain into the violent realities of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, is very far from Bede’s inherited vision, consistently expressed in his exegesis, of the universal nature of divine salvation. In the New Testament and patristic view, the Gentiles had been divinely foreknown from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1.4; 3.3–9), their salvation prophetically figured in the Old Testament (Acts 15.14–18; Galatians 3.6–8), their evangelisation commanded by Christ (Matthew 28.19–20) and proclaimed by the apostles (Colossians 1.26–27); they were called to be members of the new Israel, the people of God, along with faithful Jews, including the apostles and St Paul himself.16 Augustine, for [6] example, had repeatedly expounded the significance of St Paul’s assurances that, in calling the Gentiles, God had not forsaken his people (Romans 11.1–2). He explained that Paul had used the testimony of Psalm 94.3 (which in the Old Latin version ends with the phrase quoniam non repellet Dominus plebem suam) to make it clear in Romans 11.1–2 who was meant by plebem suam, God’s people.17 In part, they were the faithful Jews of old, including the patriarchs and prophets, in whom all the sacramental signs of Christ were instituted, and also the many Jews, including the apostles, who had recognised the fulfilment of those prophecies in Christ and had formed the early Church. These are the people whom Paul described as a good olive tree, some of whose branches had been broken off, and into which a wild olive (the Gentiles) had been grafted, but under the same warning of the goodness and severity of God: Vide ergo bonitatem et severitatem Dei (Romans 11.16–24). Augustine then uses another Pauline image to picture Jews and Gentiles being joined to Christ, the cornerstone, and becoming one people (Ephesians 2.11–22), and he concludes, ‘In them let us observe the fulfilment of the promise that the Lord will not reject his own people’.18 16 The exegetical tradition on which Bede drew is expounded at length in St Augustine’s sermons on Psalms 78 and 94 (Enarrationes in Psalmos, ed. E. Dekkers and I. Fraipont, CCSL 38–40 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956), vol. 39, pp. 1097–111, 1336–42; trans., Maria Boulding, Expositions of the Psalms, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part 3, vols 15–20 (New York: New City Press, 2000–04), vol. 18, pp. 125–40, 409–22). It is reflected in Bede’s description in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) [hereafter HE]) 5.19 (p. 522) of how Wilfrid, preaching, instructing and baptising in Frisia, ‘spent the winter happily there with these new people of God (cum noua Dei plebe)’. 17 The phrase, cited also by Cassiodorus in his commentary on the psalm, appears in the Septuagint and hence the Old Latin version, but not in the Hebrew text or the Vulgate. 18 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, vol. 39, p. 1337; English trans., vol. 18, p. 417. Bede’s interest in the continuity between Judaism and Christianity, and in the early Church as a Jewish

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The Angli In the early part of the Ecclesiastical History Bede shows that the faith had reached the ends of the earth and the Britons, as well as the Irish and some of the Picts, long ago, but in the twenty-second chapter of Book One he announces that it is now about to reach the Angli. Coming from beyond the old frontiers of the Roman Empire, they are the last of the four peoples to inhabit the island of Britain and the last to receive the faith. But the Angli do seem rather improbable candidates for heaven at this stage, as is emphasised in the chapter closing Book One (HE 1.34). This brief chapter has puzzled historians from Plummer onwards, partly because it interrupts the account of the Gregorian mission in Canterbury already begun (HE 1.23–33) and introduces Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria, well before the Roman mission goes northward from Canterbury (HE 2.9), but mostly because of its enigmatic biblical allusions: [7] [Æthelfrith] ravaged the Britons more extensively than any other English ruler. He might indeed be compared with Saul who was once king of Israel, but with this exception, that Æthelfrith was ignorant of the divine religion. For no ruler or king had subjected more land to the English race or settled it, having first either exterminated or conquered the natives. To him, in the character of Saul, could be fittingly applied the words which the patriarch said when he was blessing his son, Benjamin, a ravening wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey and at night shall divide the spoil (Genesis 49.27). Æthelfrith was ‘ignorant of divine religion’, so the comparison made with Saul cannot focus on Saul’s divine calling and anointing; moreover, Saul’s loss of divine favour and the transfer of his kingdom to the completely separate line of David differs from the subsequent history of Æthelfrith’s lineage, which lasts till 716, close to the chronological limit of the whole book.19 Rather, Bede compares Æthelfrith with Saul in the context of describing Æthelfrith as the powerful warrior-king of Northumbria, ‘most eager for glory’.20 His fierce onslaughts on the Britons and the

institution, is noted by Andrew P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in AngloSaxon England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) pp. 74–97: ‘Perhaps more than any other early medieval author, Bede is interested in the primitivam iudaizantem ecclesiam’ (p. 86). On the importance of the cornerstone image for Bede, see Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Multitude of Isles and the Corner-Stone’, pp. 219–24, and Conor O’Brien, Bede’s Temple: An Image and its Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) pp. 84–88, 109, 187. 19 Saul’s loss of divine favour is described and condemned at some length in the words of Samuel in Gildas, De excidio Britonum, pp. 37–38 (36–37). 20 Æthelfrith’s repute as gloriae cupidissimus (HE, p. 116) echoes not a heroic poem celebrating deeds of Æthelfrith (Colgrave, p. 116 n.1), but Paul’s words in Galatians, in a chapter on the fruits of the flesh and the spirit: ‘Let us not be [made] desirous of vain glory (inanis gloriae cupidi)’ (Galatians 5.26). Further references to Saul may be seen in Bede’s commentaries on 1

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Irish, and his subjugation of land they had held, evoke the early victories of King Saul in subduing or destroying the various tribal enemies of his people (1 Kings 14.47–48).21 King Saul was from the tribe of Benjamin (1 Kings 9.1–2), and Bede goes on to say that Æthelfrith, in personam Saulis, fulfilled the prophetic blessing bestowed by the patriarch on Benjamin: Beniamin lupus rapax; mane comedet praedam, et vespere dividet spolia (Genesis 49.27: Benjamin, a ravening wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey and in the evening shall divide the spoil). The comparison of Æthelfrith with Saul seems, appropriately, to predict a career steeped in blood. More precisely, Saul and Æthelfrith both shed the blood of those dedicated to the Lord, in the slaughter of Nobe, the city of priests whom [8] Saul suspected of supporting his enemy (1 Kings 22.17–19), and in the slaying of the huge contingent of unarmed monks from the British monastery of Bangor present at the battle of Chester, whom Æthelfrith judged to be ‘fighting against us, assailing us as they do with prayers for our defeat’ (HE 2.2, p. 140). To this comparison between Æthelfrith and Saul traditional patristic exegesis of the Genesis text adds an important dimension, though Georges Tugène’s observation of its relevance has seldom been remarked.22 It is worth emphasising how commonly the fathers cited the traditional pithy exposition of Genesis 49.27 in a wide variety of exegetical contexts. Bede, aware of this, ingeniously quoted the Genesis verse alone, leaving informed readers to puzzle out how its customary interpretation might apply to the particular historical circumstances described in HE 1.34 and to what follows. In patristic exegesis the patriarchal blessing of Benjamin in Genesis 49.27 refers not to Saul, king of Israel, but to St Paul, whose original name was Saul and who, like King Saul, was descended from the tribe of Benjamin: ‘I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin’ (Romans 11.1; cf. Philippians 3.5). As a fierce champion of the traditions of his Hebrew forefathers, Saul was a zealous persecutor of the early Church in Jerusalem (Acts 8.3; 1 Corinthians 15.9; Galatians 1.13) and complicit in the death of Samuel, Book III (In primam partem Samuhelis, p. 137) and Acts 13.21–23 (Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, p. 62). See also Thirty questions on the Book of Kings, Question 4, and On Eight Questions, Question 6, in Bede, a biblical miscellany, trans. W. Trent Foley and Arthur G. Holder, pp. 96–98, 156. 21 See Alan Thacker, ‘Bede, the Britons and the Book of Samuel’ in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter, C. Karkov, J. Nelson, D. Pelteret (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) pp. 129–47 (138–39, 144, 146); Archibald A.M. Duncan, ‘Bede, Iona and the Picts’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages. Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R.H.C. Davis and J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) pp. 1–42 (18). Æthelfrith’s achievements against Aeden of the Dalriadic Irish are discussed by Rosemary Cramp in Whithorn and the Northumbrian Expansion Westwards, Third Whithorn Lecture, 1994 (Whithorn: Friends of the Whithorn Trust, 1995). 22 Georges Tugène, ‘L’Histoire “ecclésiastique” du peuple anglais: réflexions sur le particularisme et l’universalisme chez Bède’, Recherches Augustiniennes 17 (1982) pp. 129–72 (162); noted by J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. A Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) p. 48, and, with additional references, by David Rollason, ‘Bede and Germany’, Jarrow Lecture, 2001 (Jarrow: Jarrow Parish Council) p. 22 and n.171.

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its first martyr, the deacon Stephen (Acts 7.57). ‘Breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’, he set out on the road to Damascus, intent on further ravaging, but was divinely waylaid and redirected in a blinding vision of light.23 To Ananias, a member of the imperilled Christian community in Damascus, God revealed the astonishing news that Saul ‘is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and before the kings and the children of Israel’ (Acts 9.1–15; cf. 13.47). In his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, Jerome quoted Genesis 49.27 as Beniamin lupus rapax, mane comedet adhuc, et ad uesperam dabit escam (‘Benjamin is a ravening wolf: in the morning he shall eat, and in the evening he shall give food’), and he observed, ‘This is a most clear prophecy of Paul the apostle, in that he persecuted the Church in his youth and in his old age was a preacher of the Gospel’. Jerome repeatedly used this ancient reading [9] of the text, ending with the Old Latin dedet escam rather than diuidet spolia as in his later Vulgate translation from the Hebrew (the form used in Bede’s HE 1.34).24 Both interpretations lent themselves to the idea of Paul, after his conversion, giving spiritual food to the Church: In the blessings of Jacob, in the person of Benjamin, to whose tribe the apostle Paul belonged, we read these words: Benjamin a rapacious wolf: in the morning he will eat the prey and in the evening he will give food (LXX). Indeed, he who in the beginning persecuted the Church, later, throughout the world ( postea in toto orbe) and with great generosity, gave food to all who believed in the Gospel.25

23 In his Epistles Paul was to confess that he had ‘persecuted the church of God’ and that his sudden conversion was entirely through divine grace (1 Corinthians 15.9–10; Galatians 1.2–13). Arator, a major source for Bede’s early Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, described this as the subduing of a ravening wolf (Arator’s On the Acts of the Apostles: De actibus apostolorum, ed. and trans. Richard J. Schrader; Joseph L. Roberts and John F. Makowski, co-translators (Atlanta: Scholars Press, c. 1987) p. 46). 24 Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, trans. C.T.R. Hayward (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) pp. 87, 243–45. 25 Jerome, Commentaria in Osee 2.5:8–9, in Patrologia Latina, 25, cols 815–946 (col. 862): In benedictionibus Jacob sub persona Benjamin, de qua tribu Paulus apostulus fuit, legimus: Benjamin lupus rapax mane; comedet praedam et ad vesperem dabit escam. Qui enim in principio persequebatur Ecclesiam, postea in toto orbe evangelii credentibus alimenta largitus est. Jerome sought the historical context of Genesis 49.27 in the dividing and consumption of sacrifices, and in the biblical tradition that the Temple in Jerusalem, the place of sacrifice, was in the territory originally allocated to the tribe of Benjamin: see Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, trans. Hayward, p. 244. Rufinus similarly noted that Benjamin received his heritage in the place where the earthly Jerusalem would be the type and figure of the heavenly Jerusalem and church of the first-born (De benedictionibus patriarcharum, ed. M. Simonetti, trans. H. Rochais, revised P. Antin, Sources chrétiennes, 140 (Paris: Cerf, 1968), Book 2. 29, p. 138). Bede alludes to the tradition in his commentary on Nehemiah 11.3 and 11.36 (In Ezram et Neemiam, pp. 375–76; English trans., pp. 205–06).

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Genesis 49.27 was, in short, a topos of conversion: the contrasts between morning and evening, youth and age, hinged on the witness of the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline epistles that the dramatic transformation from Saul the persecutor to Paul the preacher was due, not to his innate virtue, but to his divine calling and the grace of baptism (Acts 9.1–23; 1 Corinthians 15.9–10; Ephesians 3.6–8). Jerome, citing the Genesis text, described Paul as a prime example of how ‘God judges us only from the time when we are born anew in Christ’.26 Rufinus and other exegetes, moreover, stressed that the prophetic blessings which the patriarch Jacob gave to each of his twelve sons (the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel) referred not simply to their individual lives, but to the future history of their respective tribes.27 Benjamin was the youngest of Jacob’s sons and so received the last blessing and was the last to enter into his inheritance; similarly, St Paul, designated under the figure of Benjamin in verse 27, was the last, and the least, of those [10] called to the apostleship (1 Corinthians 15.9; Ephesians 3.6–8).28 Augustine, in this vein, specifically links Genesis 49.27 with Romans 11.1–2. Pondering the words, ‘O God, the Gentiles have come into your inheritance’ (Psalm 78.1), he asks in what sense Israel was still ‘God’s inheritance’ after the Resurrection, and points to the fact that it was from Israel that the early churches of Christ in Judea came, including Paul, who was changed from a ravening persecutor to a preacher according to the prophecy spoken of him long ago, ‘a ravening wolf, seizing his

26 Jerome, Epistle 60: 8.2, in J.H.D. Scourfield, Consoling Heliodorus. A Commentary on Jerome, Letter 60 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) p. 52: ab eo tempore censemur, ex quo in Christo renascimur. Paulus, persecutor ecclesiae et mane lupus rapax Beniamin, ad vesperam dedit escam, Ananiae ovi submittens caput; cf. Bede’s reflections on Romans 5.20 (‘where sin abounded, however, grace abounded the more’) in his commentary on 2 Peter 3.16 (In epistulas VII catholicas, ed. M.L.W. Laistner and D. Hurst, CCSL 121 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983) pp. 179–342, p. 282; trans. David Hurst, The Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985) p. 55). 27 Rufinus, De benedictionibus patriarcharum, Book 2. 28–30 (pp. 136–42). Bede comments on another of the patriarchal blessings in his work on figures and tropes (De schematibus et tropis, in Opera didascalia pars 1, ed. Calvin Kendall, CCSL 123A, pp. 166–67; trans. Gussie Hecht Tannenhaus, ‘Concerning Figures and Tropes’, in Readings in Medieval Rhetoric, ed. Joseph H. Miller, Michael H. Prosser and Thomas W. Benson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) pp. 96–122, p. 119). 28 The resonances of the topos, the youth of Benjamin ‘in the morning’, the spiritual youth of Saul before his conversion, were amplified by the exegetical linking of Genesis 49.27 with other texts, notably Psalm 67.28, ‘There is Benjamin a youth, in ecstasy of mind. The princes of Juda are their leaders: the princes of Zabulon, the princes of Nephtali’. The reference to Benjamin was linked to Saul’s identification of himself with the tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3.5), and Benjamin’s ecstasy or trance with the vision which precipitated Saul’s conversion (Acts 9.3–8); the princes refer to the apostles, among whom is St Paul. On these connections in Psalm 67.28, see Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos, vol. 39, pp. 892–94; English trans., vol. 17, p. 355), Hilary (Tractatus super Psalmos, ed. Jean Doignon, 3 vols, CCSL 61, 61A, 61B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997–09), vol.1, pp. 283–84), Cassiodorus (Expositio Psalmorum, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 97–98 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1958), vol. 97, pp. 598–99; trans. P. G. Walsh, Cassiodorus. Explanation of the Psalms, 3 vols (New York: Paulist Press, 1990–91), vol. 2, p. 135).

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prey in the morning, and in the evening sharing out food’ (Genesis 49.27). That is why, as the Apostle to the Gentiles, sprung ‘from the stock of Israel and of the tribe of Benjamin’, Paul had preached, ‘God has not cast off his own people, whom he foreknew’ (Romans 11.1–2). Augustine sees Psalm 78.1 as corroborating the testimony of Psalm 94.3 (quoniam non repellet Dominus plebem suam) in clarifying the Romans text already discussed, and again gives assurance that the ‘inheritance of God’ is the whole Church, assembled from the remnant of Israel but also from the Gentiles, and that, in St Paul’s image, both peoples are joined to the cornerstone and reconciled in God to make one body (Ephesians 2.14–16).29 In some ways, then, the warrior Æthelfrith might be compared with the Benjamite King Saul in his early years, but in other ways he could be compared with the Benjamite Saul who became Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, because his conversion also serves as a model for a people’s conversion. In HE 1.34 a particular gentile people, the Angli, are represented ‘in the morning’ by the ferocious Æthelfrith, who was ignorant of divine religion, but the patriarchal blessing of Benjamin contains a prophecy of what is to come ‘in the evening’ from these unlikely beginnings: under the successors of Æthelfrith already in his loins, Oswald and Oswy, his people will be converted, and produce teachers who will convert others and ‘divide the spoils’ by giving them spiritual food. This brief chapter on Æthelfrith is followed, significantly, by the first chapter of Book Two about Gregory the Great, where Bede uses the language of St Paul’s epistles and his mission to the Gentiles to hail Gregory as our Paul, ‘our apostle’: ‘we are the seal of his apostleship in the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 9.2). He tells a story ‘based on the tradition received from our ancestors’ to show [11] how Gregory was prompted to undertake the evangelisation of this people through his encounter with pagans from the island of Britain in the slave market in Rome. Gregory’s oracular prophecy of their conversion is delivered, not through the enigmatic exposition of a biblical text, but through punning etymologies of the three names which form the answers to the three questions he asks about their origins: the name of their people Angli, their name as men of the kingdom, Deira, and the name of their king, Aelle, in which Gregory discerned the divine will that the Angli should be fellow heirs with the angels [angeli] in heaven, that the Deirans should be delivered de ira, from the wrath of Christ, and called to his mercy (cf. Romans 9.22–23), and that Alleluia, punning on the name of Aelle but meaning ‘praise God’, should be sung in those parts. In short, the Angli are not called for any inherent virtue – they are in the grip of the author of darkness – but they are called, through God’s mercy and grace, to the heavenly destiny of all the redeemed.30 29 Augustine on Psalm 78.1 and 78.3 (Enarrationes in Psalmos, vol. 39, pp. 1099, 1100; English trans., vol. 18, pp. 127, 129). 30 Gregory’s prophecy is fulfilled by lowly Caedmon in the Deiran monastery of Whitby singing in his own tongue, and ‘in praise of God the Creator’, songs of divine mercy and judgement (HE 4.24, pp. 416–17). The Pauline theme of a mission to the Gentiles, implicit in Bede’s account, is made explicit in the Whitby Life of Gregory (The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an

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Bede has juxtaposed two chapters, the end of Book One (1.34) and the start of Book Two (2.1), which introduce the Northumbrian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira through images of savage warfare and slavery, yet which, through the arcane exposition of names, reveal that they were divinely foreknown. The following chapter resumes the providential theme announced in HE 1.22, on the eve of Bede’s account of the Roman mission established at Canterbury, and describes how that mission sought the help of the Britons in the huge task of evangelising the heathen Angli.

Augustine and the Britons Bede’s attitude to the Britons has generally been seen as stemming, if not from ethnic antipathy, then from the desire to justify English usurpation of the Britons’ land by casting them in the role of the Jews of the Old Testament, now superseded by the emergence of the gentile Angli as God’s new chosen people. Modern readers, moreover, have often shared the Britons’ assessment of Augustine of Canterbury as lacking in humility, and have sympathised with them as a people defending their cultural identity from papal Rome and Saxon conquerors alike. Bede’s attitude, however, is more nuanced than such views suppose. [12] Bede pictures the Britons in periods of prosperity and heavy adversity and describes both good and bad periods in their spiritual history. He cites the request of a king of Britain, Lucius, to the bishop of Rome, that he might be made a Christian. Bede comments: ‘His pious request was granted and the Britons preserved the faith which they had received, inviolate and entire, in peace and quiet, until the time of the Emperor Diocletian’; ‘Britain also attained to the great glory of bearing faithful witness to God’ (HE 1.4, p. 24; 1.6, p. 28). He commends their martyrs of the Great Persecution, the Britons’ readiness to seek help in vanquishing the Pelagian heresy, the heroic remnant who resisted the enemy when the Irish and Picts attacked post-Roman Britain, but he also reports a period of spiritual death in the lull before the coming of the Saxons, when the Britons had ‘cast off Christ’s easy yoke (Matthew 11.29) and thrust their necks under the burden of drunkenness, hatred, quarrelling, strife and envy, and similar crimes’; even their pastors were enslaved by carnal sins (HE 1.14, p. 48). During a respite from warfare with the Saxons, the Britons again reached a low point in their moral life, when ‘all restraints of truth and justice were abandoned’.31 Bede comments: ‘To other unspeakable crimes, which Gildas their own historian describes in doleful words, was added this crime, that they never preached the faith to the Saxons or Angles who inhabited Britain with them’ (HE 1.22, p. 68).

Anonymous Monk of Whitby, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chapter 14, pp. 96–97), where Edwin, Aelle’s descendant, is described as predestined to be ‘a vessel of God’s mercy’ (Romans 9.23). See Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Multitude of Isles and the Corner-Stone’, pp. 214–15. 31 Bede here follows Gildas, De excidio Britonum, 25.3 (p. 28).

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Unlike some of their forefathers, the Britons who meet with Augustine of Canterbury are not accused of having ‘cast off Christ’s easy yoke’ (Matthew 11.29) or of enslavement to carnal sins. They have religious zeal, but they are bound to particularist customs, especially over the reckoning of Easter (HE 2.2). They recall, in this respect, Jewish converts in the early Church who were ‘zealous for the law’ and the retention of customs of their fathers, as described and reproved in the Acts of the Apostles. To persuade the Britons to join with him in converting the Angli and to unite with the universal Church in the celebration of Easter, Augustine first used brotherly admonitions, then prayers, exhortations and rebukes. The different approaches he tried recall the range of brief injunctions for those exercising authority in the Church which St Paul included in his pastoral epistles to Timothy and Titus. There he urged the need to avoid contention, ‘to reprove, entreat, rebuke, in all patience and doctrine’ (2 Timothy 4.2), ‘to exhort in sound doctrine and convince the gainsayers’ and to ‘exhort and rebuke with all authority’ (Titus 1.9; 2.15).32 The Britons, [13] however, remain unmoved by the gamut of Augustine’s exhortations and rebukes, ‘preferring their own traditions to those in which all the churches throughout the world agree in Christ’ (HE 2.2, p. 136). To avoid further contention, Augustine sought a direct revelation of the divine will. Quoting Psalm 67.7 he said: ‘Let us pray God who makes men to be of one mind in his Father’s house (Obsecremus Deum, qui habitare facit unanimes in domu patris sui) to vouchsafe to show us by heavenly signs which tradition should be followed’.33 The psalm’s image of the one house had strong eucharistic and Paschal connotations. Cyprian’s De ecclesiae catholicae unitate, an influential work in the literature of the Insular Easter controversy, explained the sacred meaning of the Pasch and the biblical command that the Passover lamb, slain as a type of Christ, should be eaten ‘in one house’ (Exodus 12.46): ‘This dwelling of concord is indicated and foretold by the Holy Spirit in the psalms, “God makes those who are of one mind to dwell in one house”’ (Psalm 67.7). God’s house is the Church of Christ, and those who are of one mind dwell in it in concord. Cyprian then quotes Christ’s commandment that his disciples should love one 32 Pope Gregory, in accord with his teaching in the Pastoral Care (Règle pastorale, ed. and trans. Bruno Judic, Floribert Rommel, Charles Morel, 2 vols, Sources chrétiennes, 381–82 (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 3.16, p. 356; trans. Henry Davis, S.J., Pastoral Care (New York: Newman Press, 1950), p. 138), had commended to Augustine the epistles of Paul to Timothy on how to be a bishop in the house of God (HE 1.27, p. 81). Bede, in turn, recommended to Bishop Ecgbert the study of the epistles to Timothy and Titus and the Pastoral Care (Letter to Bishop Ecgbert, in Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. and trans. Christopher Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013) pp. 124–61, 126–27), and in his commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah he underlined the duty of ‘leaders and fathers’ to assist those in error ‘by exhorting, rebuking and correcting’ (In Ezram et Neemiam, p. 250; English trans., pp. 20–21). 33 Psalm 67.7 in the Vulgate speaks of ‘God who makes men of one mind to dwell in a house’ (Deus qui inhabitare facit unius moris in domo). Bede’s quotation is from the Roman Psalter, omitting the last two words and substituting in domu patris sui, thus suggesting, perhaps, the diversity as well as the unity of God’s house by recasting the verse to allude to Christ’s words in John 14.2, In domo patris mei mansiones multae sunt (In my Father’s house are many mansions).

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another and abide in God’s love (John 15.10, 12) and concludes that, ‘Those who have refused to be of one mind in the Church of God cannot therefore be abiding with God’. They are identified with those who trust in outward signs, such as miracles, and in their own traditions (Matthew 7.22–23).34 Augustine and the Britons then engaged in a trial by miracle, reminiscent of the days of Elijah (3 Kings 18). The British bishops were unable to open the eyes of the blind man de genere Anglorum brought before them, while Augustine’s miracle of healing demonstrated he was the obedient servant of the Lord. Patristic and monastic writers warned of the spiritual dangers of such outward signs to those through whom they were performed, though they acknowledged their usefulness in conversion. Cassian, for instance, described holy desert fathers who would never use the gift of miracles they possessed unless some extreme necessity drove them to do so.35 Augustine’s miracle, however, is shown to have been ‘compelled by genuine necessity’ and justified [14] by the circumstances. He ‘prayed, bowing his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ ( flectit genua sua ad patrem Domini nostri Iesu Christi): the words are those of St Paul when he prayed for the continuing conversion of the Gentiles (Ephesians 3.14) at the culmination of his disquisition on how the mystery of the enlightenment of all men, ‘hidden from eternity’, had been revealed, showing that the Gentiles are, by grace, fellow heirs and of the same body. Augustine prayed similarly that restoring the literal sight of a blind man would ‘bring the grace of spiritual light to the hearts of many believers’ (here applied to the enlightening of the many Angli who would be converted through the successful outcome of the present meeting). There is a further implication. Though an outward sign of the sort normally reserved to convert the pagan or confirm the faith of those not far advanced in the spiritual life, the miracle of healing to which Augustine ultimately resorts is shown to have been appropriate to his discernment of the Britons’ spiritual wisdom in this context. It impressed them more than had his arguments for unity: ‘All acknowledged Augustine to be a true herald of the heavenly light’, and even ‘that it was the true way of righteousness which Augustine preached’. Yet they still did not turn to the light. They said they could not disown their former customs without the consent of their own people, and they demanded a second conference with a larger attendance.

34 Cyprian (De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, ed. and trans. Maurice Bévenot, S.J. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971) pp. 70–71, 80–83). Psalm 67.7 is cited also in Aldhelm’s letter to the British king Geraint complaining that the bishops of Dyfed beyond the River Severn had endangered the unity of the Church: ‘For the Psalmist enjoins the unity of brotherhood upon the followers of truth, saying God who makes men of one manner to dwell in one house’. See Aldhelm. The prose works, trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (Ipswich: Brewer, 1979) pp. 141–42, 156; 135–60. 35 Cassian, Conference xv. 2; 3; 6–8 (Conférences, ed. and trans. E. Pichery, 3 vols, Sources chrétiennes, 42, 54, 64 (Paris: Cerf, 1955–59), vol. 54, pp. 211–15, 216–18; trans., Boniface Ramsey, O.P., John Cassian: The Conferences (New York: Newman Press, 1997) pp. 538–40, 541–43).

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Bede then recounts the Britons’ preparation for a second meeting with Augustine after the protracted and inconclusive first encounter (HE 2.2). Seven British bishops and many learned men, especially from their most famous monastery of Bangor on the River Dee, consult a hermit on whether they should forsake their own traditions. The hermit advises them that if Augustine is a man of God they should follow him. Their problem is, how can they tell? The sign he gives them is a Gospel text, ‘Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart’ (Matthew 11.29). He explains that if Augustine is truly humble of heart, it means that he bears the yoke of Christ and is offering it to them to share with him (rather, it is understood, than enslaving them to his authority); if he is proud, there is no need to heed his words. The Britons again ask, ‘But how can we know even this?’ The hermit expounds the text by giving them an outward sign by which Augustine’s humility may be recognised: if he stands up when they come into his presence, they will know that he wears the yoke of Christ and is a servant of Christ ( famulus Christi), and they should therefore obey him; but if he despises them and does not rise, they should despise or reject him. The Britons therefore accuse Augustine of pride when he remains seated at their belated entry to the second meeting, and they strive to contradict him in everything he says, including his willingness to tolerate [15] all their other customs contrary to those of the universal Church if they would agree to the central points on Easter and baptism and evangelising the Angli. They refuse to have him as their archbishop. Christ’s ‘easy yoke’, thrown off by an earlier generation of Britons (HE 1.14) but invoked by the Britons themselves in their opposition to Augustine (HE 2.2), occurs in a passage (Matthew 11.28–30) which was of great importance in patristic writing and formed the central link in an exegetical chain. The yoke (iugum) as an instrument of servile labour is associated in the Old Testament with the recurring divine punishment of the chosen but sinful people by their literal enslavement to a foreign power. Figuratively, the yoke and the slavery it betokens may refer to enslavement to the service of pagan idols, slavery to sin and carnal desires, or the bondage of those who serve only the literal interpretation of the Mosaic law.36 In contrast, St Paul described Christ as humbly taking on the form of a slave and becoming ‘obedient unto death, even the death of the cross’ (Philippians 2.7–8). By bearing Christ’s ‘easy yoke’ through imitating his example of humility, the Fathers argued, the faithful are relieved of the weight of worldly desires and ambition; all burdens are thus made light, even in conditions of literal slavery, as the soul is motivated solely by longing to be with Christ in the eternal heavenly rest promised by him. Cassian repeatedly states that there is no means by which one who has put on the yoke of Christ in all humility – by surrender of the world, following Christ, and seeking to do the

36 See Leviticus 26.13; Deuteronomy 28.48; Jeremiah 2.20, 27–28; Ezekiel 30.18, 34.27; Acts 15.10; Galatians 5.1.

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Father’s will – can possibly be burdened, even by the experience of suffering persecution or wrong.37 Because wearing Christ’s yoke, understood thus, is the invisible sign of those who truly belong to him, exegetes linked Matthew 11.28–29 with a group of further texts describing Christ’s solemn disowning of those false disciples who, glorying in visible outward signs of holiness such as the performance of miracles, mistakenly believed themselves to be serving him: ‘Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, and in your name have cast out devils, and in your name done many wonderful works?” And then will I say unto them, “I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity”’ (Matthew 7.22, 23).38 These words, part of the climax of the Sermon on the Mount, received detailed exposition from Augustine of Hippo, [16] who warned of the difficulty of recognising false prophets and false Christs with ‘the name but not the deeds’ of Christ. He notes that their true motivation will be revealed in their quarrelsome behaviour and in conflicts they undertake ‘either in the hope of some temporal advantage, or in the terror of losing it’.39 The chain of texts contrasting such people with Christ’s true followers often included one or more references to Christ’s ‘new commandment’, obedience to which provided the unambiguous means of identifying those who truly bear the invisible yoke of Christ and humbly serve him: ‘By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another’ (John 13.34, 35; 15.12). The exegetical tradition throws light on Gregory’s letter to Augustine on humility, which was occasioned by news of the miracles Augustine had performed during the mission to the Angli. The letter, part of which is quoted by Bede, has been interpreted as a papal reproof of Augustine’s pride, and therefore as an important confirmation that the Britons were right in their assessment of him. In the opening sentence of the quoted section of the letter, however, Gregory assures Augustine that God ‘out of love for you has worked great miracles through you for the gens which it was his will to have among the chosen’ (HE 1.31, pp. 108, 110). He goes on to offer Augustine, his ‘most beloved brother’, pastoral support in facing the temptation to vainglory to which the performance of such spectacular miracles or signa inevitably exposes those through whom it has pleased God to work in this way. He earnestly recommends Augustine to use the customary safeguard of frequent penitential examination of inner motive. The language of

37 See, for instance, Cassian, Conference xxiv. 22–25 (ed. Pichery, vol. 64, pp. 193–99; trans., pp. 842–47); Gregory the Great on Ezekiel 40.14 (Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 142 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), Book 2, Homily 5.13, p. 286); Augustine on Psalm 54.11 (Enarrationes in Psalmos, vol. 39, p. 666; English trans., vol. 17, p. 67). 38 See, for instance, Augustine’s harmonisation in De consensu Evangelistarum of Matthew and Luke on the yoke and burden of Christ (De consensu Evangelistarum libri IV, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 34, cols 1041–1230, 2.33, col. 1116). 39 Augustine, De sermone Domini, 2.25.84; 2.25.82 (De sermone Domini in monte libri II, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 34, cols 1229–1308, cols 1307, 1306).

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the papal letter is, therefore, that of fraternal exhortation and spiritual consolation rather than reproof. Its content, moreover, is entirely consistent with advice given by Gregory in the Prologue of his Pastoral Care, a work which is highlighted by Bede at the start of Book Two where he describes Gregory as impressing upon those chosen to be rulers in the Church how they ought to live, with what discernment they should instruct different personalities, and ‘how earnestly they ought each day to reflect on their own frailty’ (HE 2.1, p. 126).40 In the part of his letter quoted by Bede, Gregory rejoices with Augustine that ‘the souls of the English are drawn by outward miracles to inward grace’, but cautions that ‘we ought to remember’ the warning Christ gave to those who rejoiced over their miracles with personal and temporal joy, here quoting Luke 10.17, 20, one of the admonitory texts commonly cited by exegetes alongside [17] the injunction to wear Christ’s humble yoke (Matthew 11.29). In the full letter, Gregory quotes two more texts from the same exegetical chain, one disowning those who trust in outward signs such as miracles (Matthew 7.22), and one containing the unambiguous sign of discipleship Christ gave by which his true followers would be recognised: their love of one another (John 13.35).41 It is significant that, unlike the earlier generation of British pastors who had thrown off Christ’s yoke (HE 1.14), the Britons who encountered Augustine are not accused of profligate living. The monks of Bangor lived by the labour of their hands; the Britons are described as learned; they know the importance of the practice of ‘asking the fathers’ (Deuteronomy 32.7) for spiritual guidance; the hermit they consult is ‘a holy and prudent man’ who responds with words of Christ himself. But their behaviour shows that, although they claim to value humility, none of them, including the hermit, discerns the meaning of humility in the text and its implications for their present situation. The Britons therefore, misreading the outward signs, ascribed personal pride to Augustine for remaining seated at their entry to the second meeting. At the collapse of the meeting, Augustine warned them that ‘if they refused to preach the way of life (uiam uitae) to the Angli, they would one day suffer vengeance of death at their hands’. The prophecy was later chillingly fulfilled ‘through the workings of divine judgement’ when many British monks from the monastery of Bangor were slaughtered by the pagan Anglo-Saxons.

40 ‘Consideration of our own weakness should abase every work accomplished, lest proud conceit empty it of its worth in the eyes of the hidden judge’ (RP, p. 126; English trans., p. 21). 41 At the beginning and end of the letter, the parts Bede does not quote, Gregory professes his certain hope that through divine grace Augustine’s sins are already remitted and that he has been divinely chosen for this purpose, ‘that through you the sins of others may be forgiven’. See the full text of Gregory’s letter in the Registrum epistularum, vol.11, letter 36 (Règle pastorale, vol.140A, pp. 925–29; English trans., vol. 3, pp. 779–82). In his Homilies on Ezekiel, Gregory again combines Matthew 7.22–23 and John 13.35 in distinguishing between those who perform miracles through love and those who do so through pride (Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, Book 2, Homily 5.22, p. 292).

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Adomnan and Coldingham In the chronicle entry in De temporum ratione on the Gregorian mission’s early success among the people of the Cantuarii and neighbouring kingdoms, Bede had already emphasised that ‘the people of the Angles north of the river Humber, under Kings Aelle and Æthelfrith, did not at this time hear the Word of life’.42 The reigns of Aelle’s son Edwin and Æthelfrith’s sons Oswald and Oswiu, the coming together of the two warring houses of Bernicia and Deira, and the formation of one people through membership of the Church, occupy Books Two and Three of the Ecclesiastical History. Bede shows that, like the Britons in the past, the Angli at their conversion become part of the new [18] people of God and recipients of divine mercy but, like the Britons, they now also become subject to divine justice. Similarly, St Paul had warned gentile converts that they had no innate superiority over the Jews, and that they too should heed both the goodness and the severity of God (Romans 11.17–22). When the pagan Northumbrian king Æthelfrith slaughtered the monks at Caerlegion, he was the unwitting agent of divine judgement on the Britons (HE 2.2). But when his Christian descendant, King Ecgfrith, ignored the warning of the holy man Egbert not to attack the Irish, a people ‘who had done him no harm’, and instead sent an army to Ireland which spared neither churches nor monasteries, he was divinely punished. The same term used to describe Æthelfrith’s ravaging of the Britons (gentem uastauit Brettonum) is used of Ecgfrith’s laying waste the Irish (uastauit misere gentem innoxiam) and the Picts (exercitum ad uastandam Pictorum prouinciam duxisset).43 Ecgfrith was punished for his sin, through failure to heed the warning of another holy man, Bishop Cuthbert, and suffered sudden military defeat and death at the hands of the Picts at Nechtansmere in 685. Bede, quoting Virgil on the fall of Troy, laments that ‘from this time the hopes and strength of the English kingdom began to ebb and fall away’ (HE 4.26, p. 428).44 Ecgfrith’s defeat is immediately preceded by the account of the burning of the double monastery of Coldingham, one of the main monastic communities of the Bernician royal house, which had been ruled by Ecgfrith’s aunt, King Oswiu’s sister, Aebbe (HE 4.25). It is a cautionary tale. But Bede emphasises that ‘God in his mercy did not fail to give warning of approaching judgement so that they might have been led to amend their ways and, by fasting, tears, and prayers, to have averted the wrath of the just Judge from themselves, as did the people of Nineveh’ (cf. Jonah 3.3–10).45 The inmates of Coldingham were not being chas-

42 De temporum ratione (ed. C.W. Jones, CCSL 123B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1977), p. 523; trans. Faith Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) p. 226). 43 HE 1.34, pp. 116–17; 4.26, pp. 428–29. 44 Virgil, Aeneid, Book 2, line 169. 45 Similarly, Gildas said that if the Britons had only repented of their sin and genuinely gone back to God, they would have averted punishment, like the penitent Ninevites: De excidio Britonum, 50.1 (p. 44).

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tised over their Easter practice; theirs were not the sins of the austere generation of Britons whom Augustine had encountered, who made a false god of their own religious traditions. The idols at Coldingham were of a more carnal nature: virgins consecrated to be brides of the heavenly Bridegroom were preoccupied with earthbound fleshly desires; cells built for praying and reading had become haunts of sloth, feasting, drinking, gossip, personal adornment and sexual dalliance.46 The inhabitants of Coldingham were like [19] the Britons encountered by Augustine in one respect, however, in that they were unable to take correction. They were entirely lacking in the basic fear of divine judgement which is necessary to the initial recognition of sin and of the need to make amendment. Though ostensibly living the religious life, and right about the dating of Easter, they are shown to be at a very elementary stage of conversion. Only one inhabitant, an Irishman called Adomnan, was living a penitential life devoted to God in austerity, vigils and prayer. When he returned from a journey one day with one of the brethren and Coldingham’s fine tall buildings came into view, he wept, knowing its destruction to be imminent. Yet he did not discern the urgent necessity of warning the inmates of the coming judgement so that they might repent and receive instead God’s mercy. Like Jonah he was reluctant, though for a different reason, to deliver God’s warning that ‘a heavy vengeance from heaven was preparing for this place in the form of raging fire’, for he feared upsetting the abbess and causing her trouble (p. 426). It was his companion who, hearing Adomnan’s prophecy, immediately told her. When the abbess questioned Adomnan, he described how he had been informed in a vision one night that a heavenly visitation had been carried out in every cell of the community and that few were found to ‘be setting themselves free from worldly occupations, to labour more eagerly to cultivate a desire for their eternal welfare’ (p. 424). On learning of the threatened punishment, the community were mildly alarmed and underwent a brief period of penance, but after the death of the abbess they complacently returned to their old ways, and it was, Bede observes, ‘when they were saying peace and safety (1 Thessalonians 5.3) that ‘suddenly the predicted punishment and vengeance fell on them’ (p. 426). Bede had used these words of St Paul, with the preceding verse (1 Thessalonians 5.2–3), in his commentary on Revelation 8.13, concerning the coming of the Day of Judgement. Commenting on Acts 1.7, ‘It is not for you to know the times or dates which the Father in his power has appointed’, he urged that, being always uncertain about the time of the coming of

46 Cf. Bede, De templo (ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnholt: Brepols, 1969), Liber 1, p. 163; trans. Seán Connolly, Bede. On the Temple, with an introduction by Jennifer O’Reilly (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995) p. 26): ‘those who have renounced the bond of marriage and consecrated their virginity to the Lord ought to give evidence of behaviour consonant with virginity, abstain from useless talk, anger, quarrelling, detraction, immodest dress, carousing, drinking, strife and jealousy, and earnestly give themselves instead to holy vigils, prayer, divine readings and psalms, to doctrine and almsgiving and the other fruits of the Spirit’ (Galatians 5.20–22; Romans 1.28–32).

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the divine Judge, people ‘should live every day as if the next day they were to be judged’. The point, often made in his exegesis and work on time, was also a major theme in monastic literature.47 Adomnan’s prophecy of the monastery’s destruction was fulfilled, its lofty buildings reduced to ruins, its community scattered. So the prophet Zephaniah had imagined the destruction of proud Nineveh: the beautiful city ‘will become [20] a wilderness, like a desert [. . .] this is the glorious city that dwelt in security and said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me [. . .] she has become a desert’ (Zephaniah 2.13, 15). Bede turns instead to a line in the psalms to explain the destruction of Coldingham: he reports that it was actually burned down through carelessness, ‘but all who knew the truth were easily able to judge that the reason it happened was because of the wickedness of those who dwelt there (Psalm 106.34), especially of those who were supposed to be its leaders’. He often quoted St Paul’s exposition of the Exodus journey as ‘written for our instruction’ (1 Corinthians 10.11), a figure of the Christian life, and Psalm 106 chiefly celebrates the mercies of God to his people on the Exodus journey to the promised land, when they wandered in the wilderness without water, when they were hungry and thirsty and could not find a city in which to live (vv 4–5): ‘He has turned a wilderness into pools of waters: and a dry land into water springs [. . .] and they made a city for their habitation’ (vv 35–36). But Bede quotes from the adjacent lines which describe the opposite and warn of the just judgement of God: ‘he has turned rivers into a wilderness, and the water springs into dry ground, a fruitful land into barrenness, because of the wickedness of those who dwell there’ (vv 33–34). Finally, he speaks urgently, in the first person, to warn the reader to learn from the well-attested happenings at Coldingham how awesome the Lord is in his dealings with the children of men (cf. Psalm 65.5), and to avoid his righteous anger. A large part of the Coldingham story is devoted to the reluctant messenger, Adomnan. An acute fear of judgement and the wrath to come had been important in first bringing him to repentance for some nameless sin of his youth. He had sought out a priest who might show him the way of salvation; the priest prescribed a period of penitential fasting, psalmody and prayer whereby Adomnan might find mercy, but then returned home to Ireland, not to return. Without the priest’s moderating guidance, Adomnan ‘gave himself up entirely to penitential tears and holy vigils and austerity’, including extreme fasting. Bede notes, however, that Adomnan’s motivation changed over time: although he ‘had begun this way of life in the fear of God and in penitence for his guilt, he now continued it unweariedly

47 See Bede’s commentaries on Revelation (Expositio Apocalypseos, ed. Roger Gryson, CCSL 121A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001) p. 345; trans. Faith Wallis, Bede: Commentary on Revelation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013) p. 167) and Acts (Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, p. 8; English trans., p. 12). In the fourth chapter of the Rule of St Benedict the monk is urged ‘to fear judgement day; to be terrified of hell; to yearn for eternal life with all spiritual longing; to look death daily in the eye’ (ed. George Holzherr, trans. Monks of Glenstal Abbey [Dublin: Four Courts, 1994], p. 63, and the note on the theme in monastic literature, p. 69).

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for the love of God and because he delighted in its rewards’. This transformation is described in the classic terms of monastic teaching on the continuing, lifelong inner conversion of the faithful, fitting them for the true service of God and for the heavenly life. The process is elaborated by Cassian and in the Rule of St Benedict, namely the movement from a servile fear of punishment to filial fear, which is love of God.48 In his portrait of Cuthbert (HE 4.28, p. 438) Bede shows that he too was ‘outstanding in his use of penitential abstinence’ but also knew that love [21] of neighbour, including concern for their salvation, was a necessary part and expression of love of God, and he quotes the golden rule (Matthew 22.37, 39), summarising the law in the Old and New Testaments alike, a very frequent theme in his exegesis. The heavenly night-time visitor to Coldingham duly commended Adomnan’s penitential vigils and prayers. He observed, however, that many others in the monastery had need to atone for their sins and that a heavenly punishment awaited them. The related themes of the fear and love of God, his mercy and judgement, and the need to despise the world and long for the heavenly life, run throughout the Ecclesiastical History, appearing in stories of extraordinary variety whose narrative features cue a wide range of pastoral and theological insights and emphases. The account of the Deiran double monastery at Whitby under the strong leadership of abbess Hild (HE 4.24), forms a particular counterpart to the story of the Bernician double monastery at Coldingham which it immediately precedes. It tells of how the illiterate layman Caedmon received the gift of song by the grace of God and how, discerning this, Hild ordered that he be professed and instructed in the course of sacred history (p. 418). This knowledge gave him his subject matter, but Bede emphasises that Caedmon did not learn the art of poetry ‘from men nor through a man’, echoing St Paul’s recognition that he was an apostle, non ab hominibus neque per hominem (Galatians 1.1). He goes on to show how Caedmon too was an inspired evangelist. The story of his gift of memorising and converting stories from the whole span of Scripture into melodious verse in the vernacular famously uses the metaphor of ruminatio to describe the contemplative interpretation of Scripture, and thereby his own spiritual growth as a humble monk, but it was a gift used for the benefit of others, including his teachers. He also made songs about the future Judgement, heaven and hell, acts of divine mercy and justice, ‘in all of which he sought to turn his hearers away from delight in sin and arouse in them the love and practice of good works’. Bede comments that many were inspired by his songs ‘to despise the world and to long for the heavenly life’ (p. 414), which the inhabitants of Coldingham so conspicuously failed to do. On a larger scale, the story of Adomnan and Coldingham may be compared to that of Egbert and Iona, the mother-house of the Columban mission to the English. Between both accounts there are striking correspondences and contrasts. Both

48 Cassian, Conference xi.11–13 (Conférences, vol. 54, pp. 112–18; English trans., pp. 417–21); Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 7 (ed. Holzherr, pp. 91–113).

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feature a divinely instructed messenger and explicitly refer to the book of Jonah, though to different parts of the story. Like the priest Adomnan, an Irishman at Coldingham in northern Britain, Egbert, an Anglo- [22] Saxon at Rathmelsigi in southern Ireland, is a holy exile living a life of extreme penance, mortification and prayer, initially prompted by fear of judgement and the desire to atone for unspecified sins of his youth. Like Adomnan at Coldingham, Egbert receives word of God’s judgement on the shortcomings of Iona through heavenly visions, though Iona’s misdoings are very different from those of Coldingham. Like Adomnan, Egbert is reluctant at first, though for different reasons, to announce God’s message to the community to which he is sent, and when he does, he meets with a very different response.

Egbert and Iona In Bede’s chronica maiora, incorporated in the Reckoning of Time, Egbert receives a prominent entry: In the seven hundred and sixteenth year from the Incarnation of the Lord, Egbert, a holy man of the English people and priest in monastic life, training himself for the celestial homeland as a pilgrim [etiam pro caelesti patria peregrinus exornans], converted through his pious preaching many provinces of the Irish to the canonical observance of the timing of Easter, from which they had long strayed. Egbert’s work of conversion to the canonical Easter is dated here by the year of the Incarnation, a distinction shared in the Chronicle only by Dionysius, ‘who wrote paschal tables beginning in the 532nd year from the Lord’s Incarnation’.49 There is no mention of the Columban mission to the Angli, and neither Iona nor the place of Egbert’s own formation is named, but his consistent characterisation in the Ecclesiastical History as a pilgrim, a sojourner on earth seeking his heavenly country, is already made clear. In the History itself Egbert appears in no fewer than seven chapters. The instalments are woven through Books Three, Four and Five, from Iona’s foundation in 565 to its reception of the universal Easter in 716, which forms the chronological limit and grand finale of Bede’s narrative, with a monumental memorial of Egbert’s death, thirteen years later, as its epilogue (HE 5.22). The story of Egbert offers not only a pointed comparison and contrast with the story of Adomnan of Coldingham, but draws together the major themes of the narrative as a whole. It was noted earlier that in his epistles St Paul denounced the Christian service of idols, whether it was the zeal of some Jewish converts pre-occupied with a punctilious observance of the letter of the Law and [23] defence of their own man-made religious traditions, or the slowness of some

49 De temporum ratione, 66 (ed. Jones, pp. 532–33 and 521; English trans., pp. 235 and 225).

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gentile converts to realise the connection between faith and practice and the need to give up their enthralment to fleshly sins and earthly preoccupations. In the Ecclesiastical History these two types of besetting sins, blocking true inner conversion, are seen in the two extreme cases of the Britons (who ‘preferred their own traditions to those in which all the churches throughout the world agree in Christ’: HE 2.2) and of Coldingham (whose idols were more earthly and carnal). The Columban monks were very far from the spiritual state of Coldingham but, like the Britons, they cherished their own ancestral traditions concerning the dating of Easter against perceived innovations. At the synod of Whitby even they were charged with a kind of idol-worship. But their depiction is complex: their long-held traditional dating of Easter appears at variance with what other evidence suggests were their beliefs concerning what Easter and the unity of the universal Church represent. The figure of Egbert can offer some help in understanding Bede’s presentation of Iona from conflicting viewpoints. On the one hand, Bede subverts classical notions of geographical centre and periphery to picture Aidan and the Columban monks setting out from Iona in the 630s to convert the barbarian English, just as Gregory’s mission had set out from Rome: both missions are equally the spiritual descendants of St Paul and the apostles, faithful Jewish converts, who had gone out from Jerusalem to take salvation to the Gentiles and the ends of the earth. Bede presents Aidan as a model for his own day. Some of the most memorable narratives in the entire History attest to his quite extraordinary range of virtues, his powers of discernment and leadership, his spiritual interpretation of Scripture, and the fact that he was loved by all, including those who had different views about the date of Easter. Under the rule of Aidan and his two successors at Lindisfarne, the Columbans are exemplary monks, pastors and evangelists, and their influence is perpetuated through their English pupils and disciples, including Chad, Cedd, Hild and Cuthbert. The fervour and austerity of monastic life on Lindisfarne provides a pointed contrast to the decline of monasticism and pastoral care in Northumbria in the 730s, which Bede was to denounce in his letter to Ecgbert, Bishop of York. In the Ecclesiastical History it is evident that conformity to the Roman Easter was in itself no guarantee of the spiritual maturity and fraternal charity of an individual, a monastic community or a people. On the other hand, Bede repeatedly laments the Columban dating of Easter. The letter of Pope Honorius to the Irish some thirty years or so before Whitby, and Bede’s presentation of Wilfrid’s argument at Whitby, went much further. They invoked the Columbans’ geographical distance and isolation from the centre, an ancient rhetorical stereotype used in accusations of Judaising particularism and pride, to [24] claim that the only exceptions to the universal celebration of the canonical Easter were the Columbans, ‘with their accomplices in obstinacy, the Picts and Britons, who in these, the two remotest islands of the Ocean, and only in some parts of them, foolishly attempt to fight against the whole world’ (HE 3.25, p. 300). The Columbans’ Easter practice had left them open to suspicion about their intention and belief, to serious charges of being schismatics or even heretics. 137

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Bede defended them against ill-informed accusations of Quartodecimanism. He asserted that Aidan ‘always kept Easter, not as some falsely believe on the fourteenth day of the moon, like the Jews, no matter what the day of the week was, but on the Lord’s Day (between the fourteenth and the twentieth day)’, which he knew anticipated the final Day of the Lord. He also deflected any suspicion of Pelagianism which might have arisen from the Columbans’ lunar limits. His defence of Aidan’s doctrinal belief is remarkable and incorporates the great Christological statement of the History: I neither praise nor approve of him in so far as he did not observe Easter at the proper time. [. . .] But, nevertheless, I do approve of this, that in his celebration of Easter he had no other thought in his heart, he reverenced and preached no other doctrine than we do, namely the redemption of the human race by the passion, resurrection and ascension into heaven of the one mediator between God and men, even the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2.5). (HE 3.17, p. 266) In identifying Aidan’s belief with his own, Bede was citing a key Pauline text from the Pastoral Epistles which had been used in the accusatory papal letter of John IV elect, and repeatedly by Augustine, Leo the Great, Gregory and Bede himself, as a credo of orthodoxy, to emphasise that the redemption of fallen humanity was only made possible through the Incarnation of Christ, who was truly the Mediator between God and man by virtue of being fully divine and fully human. The reconciliation of God and man in Christ implied the reconciliation of all the faithful; the Mediator was often identified with the cornerstone (Acts 4.11), holding together Jew and Gentile, and uniting humankind on earth with the angels in heaven, in one living spiritual building.50 The problem was that Iona’s resistance to the consensus reached at the synod of Whitby in 664, when King Oswiu and others who had followed the Columban Easter practice ‘gave up their less perfect customs and hastened to accept those they recognised as better’ (HE 3.25, p. 308), had continued long afterwards, even against the attempts of their own abbot Adomnán, to persuade them to [25] celebrate the universal dating of Easter as he had witnessed it in Northumbria (HE 5.15, p. 506). What is the role of Egbert in navigating the reader between these views of Iona? He was not yet born when Aidan was sent from Iona to Northumbria, at King Oswald’s request, and set up his see and mission base at Lindisfarne to evangelise the Angli, an event that Bede recounts in the third chapter of Book Three. But Egbert is first mentioned in the very next chapter, which contains both a flashback and a trailer concerning the island monastery from which Aidan was sent. It

50 On the theme of the one Mediator and its connection with the image of the Temple, see Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Multitude of Isles and the Corner-Stone’, pp. 223–34.

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looks back to when Columba had come from Ireland to Britain in 565 to preach the word of God to the northern Picts and had founded the monastery of Iona. It also looks forward to the end of the entire period spanned by the Ecclesiastical History: ‘This reckoning of Easter persisted among them for a very long time, no less than 150 years, up to the year of the incarnation of the Lord, 715. At that time the greatly revered and holy father and priest Egbert came to them’ (p. 224). And through Egbert they were to be brought over to the true and canonical Easter Day. Aidan at this point has just been described as a man of outstanding gentleness, devotion and moderation, who ‘had a zeal for God’ (HE 3.3, p. 218). The phrase is taken from St Paul’s Epistle to Romans where he says of his fellow Jews: ‘The will of my heart and my prayer to God is for their salvation. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge’. He goes on to describe how, not knowing and submitting to the justice of God, they seek to establish their own righteousness (Romans 10.1–3). In patristic exegesis and Bede’s commentaries, this Romans text, especially in the longer form, is used to describe a wide range of culpability, including interpreting Scripture literally, but its application to Aidan is significantly qualified by an addition: Aidan ‘had a zeal for God though not entirely [non plene] according to knowledge’.51 It is clear too from the next sentence that the limitation in his knowledge refers specifically to his people’s customary dating of Easter ‘between the fourteenth and the twentieth day of the moon’. In the chapter following, which foretells the coming of Egbert to Iona, the text from Romans just applied to Aidan is expounded by a second Pauline text. Bede makes it clear that the Columbans knew well that the Resurrection must always be celebrated on a Sunday, but, ‘rude barbarians as they were’, they had never learned in which week that particular Sunday should come (HE 3.4, p. 224). However, ‘because they were not lacking in grace and fervent love, they were accounted worthy to gain full (ad perfectum) knowledge on this [26] subject also, even as the apostle [Paul] promised, saying: And if in anything you be otherwise minded, God shall reveal it unto you’ (Philippians 3.15). In his own exegesis Bede had expounded these words of Paul as meaning that, ‘If through love you put into operation the good things you know, then should you discern something in a way which is unseemly, divine grace will eventually grant you a right understanding of this as well’.52 The Philippians passage receives several entries in the same vein in the collection of excerpts Bede made from Augustine’s exegesis of Paul’s letters.53 Just as Bede had noted that there were about one hundred and fifty years between the coming of the Angli to

51 Bede later refers, not to Aidan’s ‘lack of knowledge’ about the observance of Easter Day (HE 3.17, p. 265), but to the fact that he knew about it less than perfectly (quod de obseruatione paschae minus perfecte sapiebat). 52 On Eight Questions, Question 6, in Bede, a biblical miscellany, trans. W. Trent Foley and Arthur G. Holder, p. 155. 53 Bede, Excerpts from the works of Saint Augustine on the Letters of the Blessed Apostle Paul, ed. David Hurst (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1999) pp. 264–67.

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Britain and the arrival of the Gregorian mission, he notes here that there were one hundred and fifty years between the coming of Columba to Iona and the arrival of Egbert. The chapter introducing Egbert therefore constitutes a most formal announcement of the workings of divine providence to fulfil for Iona the promise of Philippians 3.15 through the agency of Egbert. But the exalted account of that event in the final chapter suggests that more was involved than providing the community with information about Easter tables previously unknown to them.

Egbert and Jonah Egbert is not mentioned again until immediately after the work’s central chapters in Book Three on the synod of Whitby and Bede’s eulogy on Lindisfarne under Aidan and his successors, Finan and Colman. When first introduced, Egbert was briefly described as a revered holy father and priest, an Englishman who had long lived in exile in Ireland for Christ and was most learned in the Scriptures. Now we see the raw beginnings of his formation. He was a noble, one of the many Angli who had gone to Ireland for study or a more ascetic life. At the time of the synod of Whitby he would have been twenty-five, living in ‘a monastery the Irish call Rathmelsigi’, which was being decimated by the plague. There he fell dangerously ill, and thinking he was on the point of death, he reflected earnestly on his past life and was stricken with remorse for his sins.54 Weeping bitterly, he prayed that he might not die until he had time ‘to make amends for all the thoughtless offences of which he had been guilty during infancy and boyhood, and to practise good works more abundantly’. With this in mind he committed himself to an exacting regime of psalmody and fasting. He also made a vow that he would live in penitential [27] exile and never return to his native island, Britain. Book Four again describes Egbert as a lifelong exile, a peregrinus for the Lord, with a glimpse of how he had lived the monastic life with the holy Chad when they were both youths in Ireland (HE 4.3, p. 344).55 There is another sighting of Egbert immediately after the destruction of Coldingham, the community that Adomnán was unable to bring to repentance as Jonah had the Ninevites (HE 4.25). In the next chapter King Ecgfrith suffers defeat at Nechtansmere because he had refused to listen to the message of ‘the holy father Egbert’, urging him not to attack the Irish (HE 4.26). Early in Book Five (HE 5.9) we are informed of a further development. Egbert, sworn to exile from his earthly homeland so that as a pilgrim he might reach his heavenly country, ‘planned to bring blessing to many peoples by undertaking the 54 The topos, paralleled in the life of Adomnan of Coldingham, recurs often in Bede’s writings, notably in his story of the Mercian layman (HE 5.13) who, delaying confession, did not correct the errors of his youth and was damned. 55 The allusion to St Paul in Egbert’s later account (HE 4.3, p. 344) of a man who saw the soul of Chad descend with angels to take his brother Cedd to paradise (Scio hominem in hac insula, recalling 2 Corinthians 12.3) suggests that the man may have been Egbert himself.

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apostolic task of carrying the word of God, through the preaching of the Gospel, to some of those nations who had not yet heard it’. His intention was to evangelise the heathen, including those ‘from whom the Angles and Saxons, who now live in Britain, derive their origin’, or, failing that, to go to Rome to worship at the shrines of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ (p. 476). Everything that was necessary for the voyage was prepared. Then early one morning one of the brothers related to Egbert a vision he had seen during the night of Boisil, his revered teacher and prior of Melrose, who said: ‘Tell Egbert that he cannot perform his proposed journey. It is God’s will that he should go instead and give instruction in the monasteries of Columba’. Bede interrupts this dramatic moment with apparently gratuitous information: ‘Now Columba was the first teacher of the faith to the Picts who lived beyond the hills to the north and the first founder of the monastery in the island of Iona’ (p. 478). He not only repeats information already given in Book Three (HE 3.4), where he formally noted there were one hundred and fifty years between the coming of Columba to Iona and the coming of Egbert, but he adds: ‘Columba is now called Columcill by some, which is a compound of the word cella and the name Columba’. Bede frequently played on names and their meanings, and he knew very well (as his monastic readers would) that Columba was the Latin interpretation of the Hebrew ‘Jonah’. By drawing attention to Columba’s name through its Irish rather than its Hebrew form, and enabling the reader to decipher its meaning as ‘the dove of the Church’, he avoided spelling out the name of Jonah, yet pointed to the providential connection between Columba and Egbert, at this stage unknown to Egbert but long ago announced to the reader (in HE 3.4); and he does so at the very point [28] in the story where Egbert is about to quote from the Book of Jonah and apply the words of God’s reluctant prophet to himself. Like Jonah, Egbert wished to serve God by serving his own people, or rather their continental kin. When he heard about the vision instructing him it was God’s will that he should instead go and give instruction in the monasteries of Columba, ‘he feared it might be true; but, nevertheless, he was unwilling to cease his preparations for the journey to those people whom he intended to instruct’. Boisil appeared again to the brother and insisted he tell Egbert more forcefully that ‘whether he likes it or not, he must go to Columba’s monasteries, for they are cutting a crooked furrow and he must call them back to the true line’ (p. 478). Egbert was now sure of the vision, but he attempted nevertheless to start on his intended voyage. He and his brethren placed all they needed on board, and waited several days for favourable winds. But ‘one night there arose a fierce tempest in which some of the goods in the ship were lost and it was left lying on its side in the water’. There was no mistaking the sign of Jonah: ‘quoting the words of the prophet, For my sake this great tempest is upon you’ (Jonah 1.12), Egbert withdrew from the undertaking and resigned himself to staying at home. Like Jonah threatened with shipwreck and thrown overboard from the floundering ship, and Saul struck down on the road to Damascus (Acts 9.5, 6), Egbert had to receive correction and surrender his own zealous plans for teaching God’s word. Bede 141

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notes that he sent out Willibrord and others to preach the word to the heathen, but resumed his life of customary silence in his place of exile, helping his own people by the example of his virtues (p. 480). Whatever the actual ambitions of popes, kings and Insular Romani concerning Iona and the Columban familia may have been,56 it is here emphasised that Egbert’s eventual mission from Ireland to Iona was not of his own will, nor of others’ devising, but was directly inspired by God: ‘So Egbert, the man of the Lord, saw that he was not permitted to go and preach to the nations (gentes) himself, but was retained to be of some other use to the holy Church, as he had been forewarned by a prophecy’ (HE 5.10, p. 480). Notwithstanding this instance of initial reluctance to recognise and obey the Lord’s will rather than pursue his own, Egbert is presented consistently by Bede as a penitent, an exile from his earthly home, a lifelong pilgrim on his way to the heavenly country. He was a holy man, crucially ‘a most devout doer of all that he taught’, possessed of other virtues that had distinguished Aidan; and the Iona community recognised these credentials, for the final chapter is about the providential work of grace within Iona and its houses, which ‘were [29] brought by the Lord’s guidance to canonical usages in the matter of Easter’. Iona, like those to whom Jonah was called, received the Lord’s messenger and changed its ways in this matter, though what Bede describes is very different from the image of pagan Nineveh donning sackcloth and ashes under threat of judgement.

Easter 716 In his account of Iona ‘in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 716’, Bede does not dwell on the technicalities of dating Easter. This is at first sight surprising, for common sense suggests that the increasing inaccuracy of the Easter tables used by the community was one factor in their decision to accept change. He describes instead another kind of knowledge. When Egbert came from Ireland to Iona, he records, he was ‘most honourably and joyfully received [. . .] and gladly listened to by them all’ (HE 5.22, p. 552), and ‘by his constant earnest exhortations he changed57 that long-standing tradition of their ancestors, to whom the words of the apostle apply: They had a zeal of God but not according to knowledge’ (Romans 10.2). Here Bede repeats the text that had been applied, in qualified form, to Aidan when he introduced the Columban mission to the Angli eighty years earlier (HE 3.3). The Ionans’ reception of fraternal correction on the matter of Easter is ascribed to ‘a wonderful dispensation of divine mercy, since the people who had willingly and ungrudgingly laboured to communicate its own 56 See T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 433–35. 57 Not ‘converted’ (pace the translation of Colgrave and Mynors, p. 553): ‘inmutauit piis ac sedulis exhortationibus inueteratam illam traditionem parentum eorum’; cf. the description in HE 2.2 (p. 134) of how Augustine sought to persuade the Britons to join with him in evangelising the Angli (coepitque eis fraterna admonitione suadere).

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knowledge and understanding of God to the Angli were now, through the Angli, brought to a perfect way of life in matters wherein they were lacking’. This recalls the chapter where Egbert is first mentioned and his coming to Iona foretold, where Bede had said of the Columbans and their Easter dating: ‘Because they were not lacking in grace and fervent love, they were accounted worthy to gain perfect knowledge on this subject also, even as the apostle promised, saying, And if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal it unto you (Philippians 3.15)’ (HE 3.4, p. 224). The whole providential story of the Columbans, ranging from Book Three to Book Five, is thus framed by Pauline references to the life of the faithful as the journeying towards perfection and the heavenly life. And that is exactly what is celebrated in the final paragraph. Bede has been at pains in the History to show that the Columbans were distinguished from the Britons by their understanding that love is the fulfilling [30] of the Law, and that love of neighbour necessarily involves wanting that neighbour’s salvation.58 But their zeal in holding on to the traditions of their fathers on the dating of Easter had long been open to divisive interpretation. Now their outward practice reflected more perfectly their spiritual disposition, evident in other aspects of their life as monks, teachers and evangelists. He points again to the dispensation of divine providence: Egbert not only ‘passed from this world to the Father on Easter Day, but also when Easter was being celebrated on a date (24 April) on which it had never before been kept in those parts’, an event that tested and demonstrated the Ionan community’s acceptance of the canonical Easter of the universal Church.59 The holy man had consecrated the island anew to Christ, ‘lighting it once more, as it were, with the gracious light of ecclesiastical fellowship and peace’, and he lived with the community for the rest of his days – a further thirteen years – until Easter Sunday 729, when he celebrated mass ‘in memory of the Lord’s resurrection and departed to be with the Lord on the same day’. The only detailed explanation of the canonical Easter in the whole book is the letter of Bede’s own abbot Ceolfrith for the benefit of the Picts, which immediately precedes this final chapter. It details the scriptural and exegetical basis for the canonical dating of the Paschal feast and for the ordering of time in its annual implementation, but stresses that knowledge of all this is not enough for keeping the true Easter: ‘we only celebrate the solemn festival of the Resurrection on the Lord’s Day truly if we are careful to keep the Passover with him, that is, his passing from the world to his Father, with faith, hope, and love’ (p. 544). Augustine of Hippo describes this more fully in his Epistle 55, an important source for

58 See Bede’s Homily II.24 (Homiliarvm evangelii, p. 366, ll 363; English trans., p. 189). 59 Bede notes that by the intervention of divine grace Adomnán of Iona, ‘who greatly loved unity and peace’ (HE 5.15, p. 506), had been called to eternal life, sparing him from greater controversy with his community which the next Easter would have brought, presumably in a year when the difference between the Ionan and Roman Easter would have been marked. Conversely, Egbert is divinely granted length of days (HE 3.27, p. 314) so that at the age of ninety he celebrates the canonical Easter with the Ionan community in a year of similar discrepancy.

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Ceolfrith’s letter. Easter, he affirms, is not just the commemoration of an event but a sacrament. A passing over [transitus] from this mortal life to immortal life, that is, from death to life, has been consecrated in the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord. Meanwhile, on earth, ‘this passing from death to life is already being wrought in us by faith, which we have for the pardon of our sins, and by the hope of eternal life, when we love God and our neighbour; for faith works by love’ (Galatians 5.6).60 [31] Bede’s description of Egbert in extreme old age, in the midst of the Iona community on Easter Sunday 729, graphically portrays this passing over from death to the heavenly life he had for so long sought: ‘So he began the greatest of all festivals with the brothers whom he had converted to the grace of unity, and he completed it, or rather continues the endless celebration of it, with the Lord and his apostles and the other citizens of heaven’. They in turn rejoiced to have him as their heavenly patron. This euphoric passage, with echoes of the ending of the City of God and of Bede’s own Reckoning of Time, joyfully evokes the unity of the Church on earth and its unity with the Church in heaven, Easter celebrated on the Lord’s Day, a figure of the eternal Sabbath: Egbert ‘rejoiced to see the Day of the Lord; he saw it and was glad’ (John 8.56).

60 Augustine, Epistle 55 (Epistulae I–LV, ed. K.D. Daur, CCSL 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004) p. 235; trans. J.G. Cunningham, Letters of St Augustine, Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st Series, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Clark, 1994) p. 304). See too Bede’s discussion of the allegorical interpretation of Easter in De temporum ratione, Chapter 64 (ed. Jones, pp. 456–59; English trans., pp. 151–55, 351–52).

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For Alan Thacker1

Charles Plummer remarked, ‘There is hardly any form of heresy known in Bede’s time which is not refuted in his writings’, but in listing Bede’s prodigious references to heresy and heretics, he provided only one reference to monothelitism.2 The low count may seem surprising, for monothelitism was a seventh-century phenomenon, refuted by the Lateran Council of 649, and formally condemned, though not extinguished, by the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III) in 680–81. It was condemned as contrary to the christological belief, articulated in the Tome of Pope Leo the Great and defined by the Council of Chalcedon (451), that the two natures of Christ, his divinity and humanity, were inseparably united in one person at the Incarnation, but remained distinct and unconfused, so that one and the same person was truly Son of God and truly Son of man.3 In the West, and for the papacy, Chalcedon and the Tome had become a particular touchstone of 1 Jennifer O’Reilly was working on this essay at the time of her sudden death in February 2016. She intended to include in it a tribute to Alan Thacker, whose friendship she valued and whose scholarship she admired. He was present in July 2013 at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds when she read a paper detailing the research on which the essay is based. He welcomed the paper warmly, and drew attention to its significance in his article, ‘Why did Heresy matter to Bede? Present and Future Contexts’, in Bede and the Future, ed. by Peter Darby and Faith Wallis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 47–66 (p. 51, n. 34), which appeared the year following. The essay has been prepared for publication by Terence O’Reilly, who thanks Nicholas Madden, OCD, Éamonn Ó Carragáin, and Diarmuid Scully for their helpful comments on the text. [A version of this essay, dedicated to Dr Alan Thacker, is forthcoming in Cities, Saints and Communities in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Scott DeGregorio and Paul Kershaw, to be published by Brepols in the series Studies in the Early Middle Ages]. 2 Bede, Opera historica, ed. by C. Plummer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896) p. lxii, n.3. On Bede’s references to heretics and heresies in his Commentary on Luke (In Lucae evangelivm expositio, ed. by D. Hurst, CCSL 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960) pp. 1–425), see G.H. Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009) p. 61, n. 126. 3 The Tome was cited in Chalcedon’s definition of faith as being ‘in agreement with great Peter’s confession’, a reference to St Peter’s divinely inspired recognition of the identity of Christ in Matthew 16.16, which is quoted in the Tome itself: see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by N.P. Tanner, 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 80, 85.

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tradition and orthodoxy, and the christology they characterised was at the centre of Bede’s work. In the East, however, various Christian communities remained dissatisfied, including some Chalcedonians who wanted greater emphasis on the unity of Christ’s two natures in one person, and those, known by their opponents as monophysites, who rejected Chalcedon’s ‘in two natures’ formula and believed that the two natures of Christ were united in one nature at the Incarnation. In the reigns of Heraclius (610–41) and Constans II (641–68) a unifying theological solution was sought in a wider interpretation of Chalcedon, without resorting to another, potentially divisive, general council, and it was in this context that the debate about monothelitism arose. Proponents accepted that Christ had two natures, but believed them to be united by a single energy (i.e. monoenergism, meaning a single principle of activity or mode of operation) and by one will, the divine will of the incarnate Word.4 In the view of their opponents, this amounted to a denial of Christ’s human will, and therefore of his manhood in its fullness. During the 640s the papacy and its theological advisers assembled a monumental refutation of those who declared ‘there is only one operation and one will in Christ’.5 In Constantinople, however, support for monothelitism had emerged in the context of the crisis of empire and the attempt to reconcile the large monophysite populations in the Eastern imperial provinces, which were vulnerable first to the Persians and then to the Arabs: between 635 and 642 Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria had been taken. Monothelitism, and the debates about christology that it sparked, thus became central to the upheavals afflicting Church and Empire in the seventh century. My question, in the light of this, is twofold: what did Bede know about monothelitism, and what was its significance for him?

The Historia Ecclesiastica From a reading of the Historia Ecclesiastica it is not apparent that seventh-century papal Rome was subject to sometimes violent displays of imperial power to promote monothelitism or to prevent further discussion of the issues it had raised. The Liber pontificalis gives glimpses of such episodes, usually attaching blame to usurpers and exarchs or devious Eastern patriarchs rather than to the emperors themselves. It selectively recounts Pope Martin I’s summoning of the Lateran 4 The distinct origins of monoenergism and monothelitism and their overlapping histories are traced in C. Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century (Leiden: Brill, 2008) pp. 5–51, 163–67; P. Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) pp. 188–96, 264–65; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by R. Price with contributions by P. Booth and C. Cubitt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014) pp. 18–27, 87–94. 5 This formula is the usual way of referring to monothelitism in papal documents, and in the acta of the Lateran Synod and of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. It is used in the same sense by Bede. Scholars currently differ about the extent to which the opponents of the monotheletes misunderstood, or misrepresented, their theology: see, for instance, The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 92, and the contrasting approach of Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom.

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Synod in 649, which condemned the bishop of Alexandria and successive patriarchs of Constantinople for contriving innovations against the faith. The imperial exarch seized Pope Martin from the Lateran Church; he was taken to Constantinople and rough-handled. The Liber pontificalis laconically notes, ‘they failed to get his agreement’; Martin was sent into exile, ‘where, as it pleased God, the life of this confessor of Christ ended in peace, and he works many miracles to the present day’.6 No mention is made of the Pope’s public humiliation and show trial for treason, nor of the brutal treatment from which he died in exile in the Crimea in 655, a fate later shared by his eminent theological adviser, Maximus the Confessor (662). Pope Martin and the Lateran Synod are not mentioned in the Historia Ecclesiastica until the account of the synod of Hatfield, held thirty years later in 679.7 Archbishop Theodore, it is said, recorded that the bishops and learned men of the island of Britain assembled at Hatfield had united in declaring the orthodox faith and acknowledging all five universal councils of the Church. Bede then quotes their statement ‘from a little further on’ in Theodore’s synodal book: ‘And we acknowledge the council which was held in the city of Rome in the time of the blessed Pope Martin [. . .] in the ninth year of the reign of the most pious Emperor Constantine’ (Constans II). They anathematised those whom the Lateran Council had anathematised and accepted those whom it had accepted (HE 4.17, pp. 386–87). In the following chapter Bede briefly explains that the synod called by Martin was chiefly directed against those who declared only one operation and will in Christ, qui unam in Christo operationem et uoluntatem praedicabant (HE 4.18, pp. 388–91).8 He further notes: Those who held this belief had greatly disturbed the faith of Constantinople at that time, but by the grace of God they were exposed and overwhelmed. Pope Agatho, therefore, wishing to know what was the state of the church in Britain as well as in other kingdoms, and how far it was free from the heretical contagion, entrusted the task to the reverend Abbot John (the Archcantor) who had already been appointed to go to Britain. Bede does not, however, present the Hatfield assembly (September 679) as a preparation for the synod that Agatho had summoned to Rome for March 680 in order to demonstrate the unity and orthodoxy of the Western churches in refuting monothelitism. Agatho’s synod is mentioned quite separately from Hatfield, 6 Le Liber pontificalis, ed. by L. Duchesne, 3 vols (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 336–40; The Book of Pontiffs, trans. by R. Davis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989) pp. 68–71. 7 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, ed. by B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Book 4, Chapter 17, pp. 386–87. Henceforth referred to as HE. 8 Bede uses the full formula, as also in HE 5.19, though it is here translated by Colgrave and Mynors as ‘those who declared that only one will operated in Christ’ (pp. 390–91).

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and a whole book later, in the chapter devoted to bishop Wilfrid (HE 5.19), who went to Rome to appeal against his unlawful expulsion by his enemies at home at the same time that Agatho had called a synod there ‘to testify against those who declared that there was only one will and operation in our Lord and Saviour’.9 Wilfrid was ordered to sit among the bishops assembled for that purpose and to declare his own belief and that of the kingdom and island from which he had come. He made a confession of the catholic faith on behalf of ‘the whole northern part of Britain and Ireland, together with the islands inhabited by the Angles and Britons, as well as the Irish and Picts’, which was inserted into the acts of the synod.10 Again, Bede gives no hint that Agatho’s synod was itself in preparation for the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III), already summoned by the emperor. It was to meet in Constantinople in November of the same year, 680, and formally condemn those who had sown ‘the heresy of one will and one operation in the two natures of the one member of the Holy Trinity, Christ our true God’.11 Such silences in the Ecclesiastical History might lead one to conclude that Bede was not well-informed about the progress, scale and seriousness of the controversy, and to question whether he understood much about monothelitism because of its Greek theological background. The absence from the work of a more complete account may be explained otherwise, however, notably in terms of the book’s stated and implied objectives. Its story of conversion gives importance to the resolution of the Insular Paschal controversy, derived from a much older dispute within the Church but one which, unlike monothelitism, did not threaten schism between East and West or, in the view of moderate Romani such as Bede, question fundamental tenets of orthodox belief.12 Bede’s account of Hatfield and John the Archcantor’s mission is unique and detailed but, presented without further reference to the monothelete controversy, it serves primarily to testify that the recently converted Angli at the ends of the earth were members of the universal Church, ‘united in declaring the true and orthodox faith as our Lord Jesus Christ delivered it’ (HE 4.17, p. 385). It also affirms the continuing role of the papacy in safeguarding that tradition. It can be readily shown, moreover, that Bede had access to considerably greater knowledge of monothelitism than, for whatever reason, he chose to use in the Historia Ecclesiastica. There is, for instance his extensive use of the Liber

9 HE 5.19, p. 522: eos qui unam in Domino Saluatore uoluntatem atque operationem dogmatizabant. 10 HE 5.19, p. 524; The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, ed. by B. Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chapter 53, p. 14. 11 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, p. 126: unius voluntatis et unius operationis in duabus naturis unius de sancta Trinitate, Christi veri Dei nostri, orthodoxae plebi novisone disseminando haeresim. 12 Bede’s views on this differ from those of extreme Romani, notably Wilfrid. See J. O’Reilly, ‘“All that Peter Stands for”: the Romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus reconsidered’, in Anglo-Saxon / Irish Relations before the Vikings, ed. by J. Graham-Campbell and M. Ryan, Proceedings of the British Academy, 157 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 367–95.

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pontificalis in the different context of the Chronica maiora within the De temporum ratione (c. 725). This contains information on the monothelete controversy from before, during and after the reign of Pope Martin, including the Sixth General Council in Constantinople, with the additional information of the names of those it had anathematised, among them Pope Honorius.13 There is also the fact that information concerning events in Rome at various points in the controversy would have been available in Northumbria, and especially in Bede’s monastery, from returning visitors, among them senior ecclesiastics with contacts in Rome at the highest level. They included three of Bede’s abbots, several monks from his monastery, and two local bishops. Two of the visitors, Acca and Nothelm, were closely involved with Bede’s work.14 The monastery had close links as well with two major figures, conversant with the monothelete controversy, who were sent to Britain from Rome by the papacy on particular missions, the Greek monk and learned theologian Theodore of Tarsus (602–90), and Abbot John, the Archcantor of St Peter’s in Rome. When Pope Vitalian appointed Theodore to the see of Canterbury (668), he ordered Benedict Biscop, then visiting Rome from Lérins, to act as interpreter and guide to the new archbishop and all his associates. Benedict Biscop subsequently remained in Canterbury for two years in charge of the monastery of St Peter, of which Theodore’s fellow monk Hadrian was in due course made abbot.15 Theodore and Hadrian were Greek speakers by upbringing, and had direct knowledge of the christological debates of their time. Theodore had studied in Constantinople before arriving in Rome, where he appears to have become a seasoned ‘Lateran professional’,16 familiar with the theological issues 13 Le Liber pontificalis, ed. by Duchesne, vol. 1, pp. 350–59; The Book of Pontiffs, trans. by Davis, pp. 74–78; Bede, De temporum ratione, ed. by C.W. Jones, CCSL 123A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975–80) pp. 241–554 at 525–29; The Reckoning of Time, trans. by F. Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) pp. 229–32. 14 Between 653 and c. 684 Benedict Biscop made six visits to Rome, five of them from Britain. One of these (c. 678–79) was with Ceolfrith (Bede, Historia abbatum, in Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. and trans. by C. Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013) pp. 21–75 at 24, 26, 30, 38, 44). Ceolfrith’s successor, Hwaetbert, to whom Bede dedicated his commentary on the Apocalypse, had studied in Rome in the days of Pope Sergius (687–701) on ‘a stay of no little duration’ (Historia abbatum, p. 66). Other unnamed monks from the monastery were also in Rome in 701 (Historia abbatum, p. 59; De temporum ratione, p. 431; The Reckoning of Time, trans. by Wallis, p. 128). Bishop Wilfrid made three visits to Rome: the first, begun with Benedict Biscop, was probably at the time of the forced exile of Pope Martin (c. 653); Wilfrid was present later at Agatho’s synod in 679, preparatory to the Sixth General Council, and at John VI’s synod, 704. (HE 5.19, pp. 518–21, 522–27; The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, ed. by Colgrave, pp. 10–13, 56–67, 102–21). On this last trip he was accompanied by Acca, future bishop of Hexham (709–32), Bede’s bishop and correspondent, to whom he dedicated several of his exegetical works (HE 5.20, pp. 532–33). Nothelm, priest of the church of London, for whom Bede wrote In Regum librum xxx quaestiones, also visited Rome and supplied Bede with information from the papal registry (HE, Praefatio, pp. 4–5). 15 Historia abbatum, pp. 28–29. 16 T.F.X. Noble, ‘Rome in the seventh century’, in Archbishop Theodore. Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence, ed. by. M. Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 68–87 at 87.

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facing the papacy, and in particular with the thought of Maximus the Confessor, the leading opponent of monothelitism in Italy, who was instrumental in drafting the acta of the 649 Lateran Council.17 The influence of Maximus on the Canterbury biblical commentaries, which reflect the teaching of Theodore and Hadrian, is clear.18 Hadrian’s successor as abbot in Canterbury, Albinus, who had been educated by Theodore and Hadrian, was later described by Bede as ‘my principal authority and helper’ in the preparation of the Historia Ecclesiastica (HE, Praefatio, pp. 2–3). John the Archcantor, similarly, travelled from Rome to Northumbria with Ceolfrith and Benedict Biscop, who had invited him to teach chant at Wearmouth. Charged by Pope Agatho with reporting on the faith of the English Church, and specifically its christology, he attended the synod of Hatfield called by Theodore, and received a copy of its proceedings to take back to the Pope, while at Wearmouth he not only taught chant, but committed to writing ‘all things necessary for the celebration of festal days throughout the whole year’. Bede notes the value accorded to his writings, which ‘have been preserved to this day in the monastery, and copies have been made by many others elsewhere’ (HE 4.18, p. 389). He then continues: [John the Archcantor] had also brought with him the decision made by the synod called by blessed Pope Martin [synodum beati papae Martini {. . .} secum veniens adtulit] which had recently been held in Rome, which was chiefly directed against those who declared there was only one will and operation in Christ. He arranged for a copy of the decree to be made in the monastery of the holy abbot Benedict. (HE 4.18, pp. 389–90)19 The term employed by Bede to describe John’s legacy (synodum), rendered here as ‘the decision made by the synod’,20 is a formula used elsewhere to indicate not only the formal record of a council’s decisions but its full proceedings or acta,21

17 The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 99–100; É. Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (London: The British Library; Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005) pp. 266, 268, n. 27. 18 B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); M. Lapidge, ‘The career of Archbishop Theodore’, in Archbishop Theodore, ed. by Lapidge, pp. 1–29 at 23–24. 19 The translation has been modified here to include the reference to unam operationem omitted in the original. On this passage see Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood, pp. 226, 268, n. 29. 20 The translation perhaps reflects Plummer’s note, ‘“synodus” is here used loosely for “synodica or synodalis epistola”; i.e. the formal document containing the record of the resolutions of the council’ (Bede, Opera historica, ed. by Plummer, p. 234). 21 As in the account of Pope Agatho’s synod in 679 (HE 5.19, p. 525), where Bede affirms that Wilfrid’s acquittal was ‘was greatly assisted by the reading of the acts of the synod of Pope Agatho of blessed memory (lectio synodi beatae memoriae papae Agathonis)’, when ‘as the case required,

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and the Latin acta of Martin’s Lateran synod of 649 constitute a very substantial dossier of varied materials, including papal speeches and episcopal testimonies, scriptural proof texts and patristic florilegia, the condemnation of the imperial Ecthesis and Typos, the reading out and refutation of the views of named individuals who held there was only one will and one operation in Christ, contrary assertions of belief in Christ’s two operations and two wills, supporting references to the role of Leo’s Tome and the papacy in defending that belief, summaries of conciliar definitions, and a symbolum.22 Bede and his community, in other words, had at their disposal a detailed record of the tenets of monothelitism as these were understood and contested in seventh-century Rome.

Walking on water: Bede’s commentary on Mark 6.48–50 While it is clear, however, that Bede had information about the monothelete controversy that is not used in the Historia Ecclesiastica, and had likely access to far more than appears in his Chronica maiora, there remains the question of the degree of his understanding of monothelitism as this might be revealed in his works of biblical exegesis. Plummer long ago observed that Bede ‘had no doubt often seen and used’ John the Archcantor’s transcript of the Lateran Synod, but in his separate listing of Bede’s refutation of heresy and heretics the only example of monothelitism he cited, though without using that term and without further comment, was Bede’s reference to Theodore of Pharan.23 Some forty years later M.L. Laistner noted that the passage in which Bede cites Theodore, together with an extract from Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite to refute him, ‘is drawn almost word for word from the Latin version of the Acts of the Lateran Council’.24 How Bede used these texts, however, has not been discussed, yet it is of particular

the acts of this synod were read for some days in the presence of the nobility and a large crowd of people at the command of the Pope (cum ergo causa exigente synodus eadem coram nobilibus et frequentia populi, iubente apostolica papa, diebus aliquot legeretur)’. Similarly, the account of Pope Martin’s council in the Liber pontificalis reads: Quem synodum hodie archivo ecclesiae continetur. Et faciens exemplaria, per omnes tractos Orientis et Occidentis direxit, per manus orthodoxorum fidelium disseminavit (This synod is kept today in the church archive. He made copies and sent them through all the districts of East and West, broadcasting them by the hands of the orthodox faithful): Le liber pontificalis, ed. by Duchesne, vol. 1, p. 337; The Book of Pontiffs, trans. by Davis, p. 69. 22 Several scholars have remarked on features of the Lateran Synod that are echoed in the account of Hatfield in Theodore’s synodal book, from which Bede quotes in HE 4.17. It is possible that the Lateran acta brought by John the Archcantor were used in the framing of the Hatfield meeting, and that they were quoted or referred to there more fully than appears in Bede’s summary and extracts from the synodal book. 23 Bede, Opera historica, ed. by Plummer, pp. lxii–lxiii, n. 3. 24 M.L.W. Laistner, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in Bede: His Life, Times and Writings, ed. by A. Hamilton Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935) pp. 237–66 at 259; D. Ganz, ‘Roman manuscripts in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England’, in Roma fra oriente e occidente. Settemane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 49 (2002) pp. 604–47 at 617–45, n. 44.

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interest in trying to assess his knowledge of the Synod and his response to the heresy it had condemned. The two items in question (the references to Theodore and Dionysius), and a summary of the brief comment linking them in the Lateran acta, appear in Bede’s commentary on Mark’s Gospel, generally dated between c. 721 and 731.25 The context is his exposition of Mark’s account of the miracle following the feeding of the five thousand, when the disciples were in a storm at sea at night, labouring against the winds, and Christ came, walking on the water: ‘And he would have passed by them. But they, seeing him walking upon the sea, thought it was an apparition and they cried out. For they all saw him and were troubled’ (Mark 6.48b–50a). Bede comments: Up to the present time heretics have thought that [the body of] the Lord was a phantasm and that he did not assume true flesh from the Virgin. The latest, Theodore once bishop of Pharan, wrote that the Lord did not have in his flesh bodily weight but that he walked upon the sea without a body and weight. But against this, the catholic faith teaches that he has in his flesh both weight and bodily mass and that he walked upon the waters with bodily weight and mass without his feet sinking in. Now Dionysius, outstanding among ecclesiastical writers, in his work on the divine names says the following: For we do not know how, in accord with a law other than the natural one, he was formed from a virgin’s blood. We do not understand how with dry feet having bodily weight and mass he walked on the surface of the water.26 The quoted reference to Theodore of Pharan does not use the terminology of the one operation or one will of Christ or express a belief peculiar to monothelitism. Its inclusion in the list of arguments from Theodore’s work condemned in the acta of the Lateran Synod may at first glance, therefore, seem surprising. This particular entry in the acta, however, in the third session of the Synod, is but a brief summary, recalling the tenth of eleven quotations from Theodore’s treatise

25 W.T. Foley, ‘Bede’s exegesis of passages unique to the Gospel of Mark’, in Biblical Studies in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Claudio Leonardi and Giovanni Orlandi (Florence: Galluzo, 2005) pp. 105–24 at 108. 26 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, ed. by D. Hurst, CCSL 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960) pp. 427–648 at 517–18, ll. 1128–41: Adhuc heretici putant fantasma fuisse dominum nec ueram assumpsisse carnem de uirgine. Denique Theodorus Pharanitanus quondam episcopus ita scripsit corporale pondus non habuisse secundum carnem dominum sed absque pondere et corpore super mare deambulasse. At contra fides catholica et pondus secundum carnem habere eum praedicat et onus corporeum et cum pondere atque onere corporali incedere super aquas non infusis pedibus. Nam Dionisius egregius inter ecclesiasticos scriptores in opusculis de diuinis nominibus hoc modo loquitur: Ignoramus enim qualiter de uirgineis sanguinibus alia lege praeter naturalem formabatur et qualiter non infusis pedibus corporale pondus habentibus et materiale onus deambulabat in umidam et instabilem substantiam.

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to Sergius, bishop of Arsinore, which had appeared earlier in the same session. The acta describe how the eleven quotations – which ascribe one divine will and operation to Christ – had been read out by a papal notary and their teaching then reproved in a commentary delivered by Pope Martin.27 There follow four brief summaries of points drawn from those extracts (including the summary quoted by Bede); all four concern the Lord’s body, and each is compared with an appropriate passage from the teachings of the fathers of the Church, ending with an extract from the council of Chalcedon’s definition of faith, which affirms that the distinctive character of each of Christ’s two natures was ‘ceaselessly preserved’ and not destroyed at their ‘coming together into one person and one hypostasis’.28 In the Tome Pope Leo had corrected Eutyches (a figure of monophysitism) for failing to see our human nature in Christ, and had instructed him on the two distinct natures of the incarnate Christ, stressing that at the Incarnation ‘the proper character of both natures was maintained and came together in a single person’.29 Leo’s amplification of the statement, which was often quoted, appears in the Lateran acta in the florilegium of patristic texts on the natural operations of Christ: The activity of each form is what is proper to it in communion with the other: that is, the Word performs what belongs to the Word, and the flesh accomplishes what belongs to the flesh. One of these performs brilliant miracles, the other sustains acts of violence.30 Leo had cited familiar examples of what pertains to Christ’s human and divine natures respectively: Hunger, thirst, weariness, sleep are patently human. But to satisfy five thousand people with five loaves [. . .], to walk on the surface of the sea 27 Concilium Lateranense anno 649 celebratum, ed. by R. Riedinger, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, series 2, vol. 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984) pp. 123–26; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 204–09. The theological views of Theodore of Pharan are discussed in Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, pp. 58–59, 84, 118, 165, and in The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 191–92, where it is argued that the Synod’s interpretation of them was flawed. 28 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, pp. 128, 130; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 209–10, and n. 70. The text of the Chalcedon definition may be seen in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, p. 86: ‘nusquam sublata differentia naturarum propter unitionem magisque salva proprietate utriusque naturae et in unam personam atque subsistentiam concurrente’. 29 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, p. 78: ‘Salva igitur proprietate utriusque naturae et in unam coeunte personam’. 30 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, p. 79: ‘Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est, verbo scilicet operante quod verbi est, et carne exequente quod carnis est. Unum horum coruscat miraculis, aliud subcumbit iniuriis’. The Synod’s repeated quotation of this passage is noted and discussed in The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 120–21, n. 46; 214, n. 95; 240–42; 333, nn. 253–54.

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with feet that do not sink, to rebuke the storm and level the mounting waves, there can be no doubt that these are divine.31 Leo was clear that the two natures of Christ acted ‘in communion’, but the rhetorical listing of what characterised each of them separately was open to interpretation, by a range of religious opinion, as insufficiently emphasising their union.32 Bede’s exposition of the Gospel account of Christ walking on the water, perhaps reflecting this, affirms orthodox belief in the hypostatic union of the two distinct natures in Christ’s person, and in doing so refutes Theodore’s different account of the unity of Christ’s two natures, already documented in the foregoing section of the acta. In the eleven extracts from his treatise read out in the Lateran Synod, Theodore asserts that not only miraculous acts of power but all the properties of the incarnation of Christ belong to one divine operation in which he took on such natural human ‘passions’ or movements as sleep, weariness, hunger, thirst, distress and affliction.33 In the tenth of the quoted passages, Theodore argues that human beings do not have the power to shed their natural bodily properties; Christ’s shedding or suspension of human properties when he wished is an attribute of his ‘divine and life-giving body’, which is itself without any dimension at all: ‘for without bulk and (so to say) bodilessly he came forth, without causing any separation, from the womb and the sepulchre and through doors, and walked on the sea as on a floor’.34 These words are repeated in the papal commentary that follows in the acta and are duly refuted: For if indeed ‘without bulk and bodilessly he came forth from the womb’ and as he walked trod ‘on the back of the sea’, then his walking and advancing was a mere illusion and not God incarnate in essence; nor again was the growth from a virgin recognised as a miracle, and nor was God the Word incarnate’s walking on the sea a matter for astonishment.35 What Bede quotes from the Lateran acta is its brief summary highlighting Theodore of Pharan’s explanation of how Christ was able to walk on water: he did

31 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, pp. 79–80: Esurire sitire lassescere atque dormire evidenter humanum est, sed quinque panibus milia hominum satiare [. . .], supra dorsum maris plantis non desidentibus ambulare et elationes fluctuum increpata tempestate consternere sin ambiguitate divinum est. 32 The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 121, n. 47. 33 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 122; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 205, extracts 5 and 7. 34 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 123; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 206, extract 10. 35 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 127: nam si ‘absque tumore et incorporaliter ex utero processit et super dorsum maris deambulauit’, hoc ipsud quod ‘deambulabat et procedebat’ ergo fantasma erat, non enim incarnatus substantialiter deus. unde nec miraculum iam cognoscebatur uirginitatis germen, neque magnum erat incarnati dei uerbi super mare deambulatio; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 207–08.

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so ‘without a body and weight’. Understood in the context of the fuller quotation and examination of Theodore’s views in the immediately foregoing pages of the acta, this argues that Christ was able to dispense with properties of his humanity (in the present case his bodily weight) by the exercise of his one divine will. The fides catholica voiced in the extract from the Divine Names of Dionysius quoted by Bede contends that, on the contrary, Christ walked on the water ‘with his body’s solid weight’, but affirms that exactly how this was accomplished we cannot understand, because, like the mystery of the virginal conception and birth of Christ, the miracle was not in accordance with the known law of nature.36 Underlying this is the orthodox belief that at the Incarnation the divine and human natures of Christ remained distinct but were indissolubly united in one person. It follows that on the occasions when Christ performed miracles through the power of his divinity, as when he walked on water, his humanity was not temporarily suspended, and he did not cease to have all his human properties (including bodily weight). What the terrified disciples saw walking on the sea in the storm was not, therefore, an apparition or a phantasm (Mark 6.49). Having at the outset refuted Theodore of Pharan’s view that Christ’s lack of bodily weight as he walked on the sea demonstrated that his humanity was not present, and having countered, through the words of Dionysius, that Christ did have bodily weight, but that the event recounted in the Gospel was not susceptible to explanation according to the customary laws of nature, Bede returns to his initial question by allusion to the new order brought about at the Incarnation. He says that when Christ walked on water he was teaching that ‘he had a body freed from every burden of sins’.37 The idea of bodily weight as one of the characteristic properties of the full humanity which Christ took on at his incarnation and retained, even when walking on water, is here dramatically contrasted with the image of the whole of humanity weighed down by the burden of sin, from which Christ alone was free. The orthodox belief that Christ in his humanity was without sin is a recurring theme in Bede’s exegesis, though it is not elaborated here. The Chalcedon definition described Christ as consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and at the same time ‘consubstantial with us as regards his humanity: like us in all respects except for sin’ (Hebrews 4.15).38 Leo’s Tome had emphasised that Christ was holy not only in his divine nature but in his humanity: ‘His subjection to human weaknesses in common with us did not mean that he shared our sins’. By his ‘unprecedented kind of birth’ he had assumed human nature as it had been first formed by the Creator before the sin of Adam and Eve, that is, without inheriting

36 Dionysius is further quoted on the mystery of this miracle in the fifth session in the acta: Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 303; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 336–37. 37 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 518, ll. 1171–72: quod haberet corpus ab omni peccatorum grauidine liberum edocuit. 38 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, p. 86: consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem, per omnia nobis simile absque peccato.

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the burden of original sin common to the rest of humanity. His virginal conception from the Holy Spirit, ‘without stain of sin’, was essential to human salvation from sin and death.39 The canons of the Lateran Synod make the same point: because of the mode of Christ’s birth, he was incorrupt and without sin in his humanity.40 His human will was therefore not in conflict with his divine will; the two natures were in perfect accord in willing and bringing about human redemption and transformation. Bede’s insistence, when discussing Theodore’s views, on Christ’s freedom from sin is thus fully in accord with the Synod’s teaching.

Bede’s pastoral concern In his commentary on Mark 6.48–50, Bede is not concerned with explicating the historical details of the monothelete controversy or the technical terms of operation and will; he does not identify the acta of the Lateran Synod as the source of his quoted extracts concerning Theodore and Dionysius, even though aspects of his commentary suggest his awareness of the acta’s substantial quotation and refutation of Theodore’s views. He writes as an exegete and pastoral theologian, expounding sacred Scripture to reveal an essential aspect of the identity of Christ for the reader or listener. The opening sentence of his exposition declares, ‘Up to the present time heretics have thought that [the body of] the Lord was a phantasm and that he did not assume true flesh from the Virgin’.41 From the start, in other words, Bede indicates the serious implications of Theodore’s teaching: denying the reality of Christ’s human flesh denies the truth of the Incarnation. Theodore, once bishop of Pharan, is introduced as representing the most recent of such heretics, but the correction of his view offered by the text of Dionysius in the acta is quoted by Bede, not to address heretics, but rather to teach and sustain the faithful who, like the disciples in the Gospel episode, are vulnerable in their human weakness to occasions of fear and doubt. The exposition of Scripture by a great variety of means in order to reveal the true identity of Christ and its significance for the faithful is central to Bede’s work. This pastoral concern determines how Bede uses his knowledge of monothelitism in his teaching. Having considered the miracle of Christ walking on water, 39 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, p. 78: Nec quia communionem humanarum subiit infirmitatum, ideo nostrorum fuit particeps delictorum; p. 79: nova autem nativitate generatus, quia inviolata virginitas concupiscentiam nescivit, carnis materiam ministravit. 40 See Canon Three of the fifth session in Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, pp. 370–71; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 377. The canon is discussed in M. Hurley, ‘Born incorruptibly. The third canon of the Lateran Council, AD 649’, The Heythrop Journal, 2 (1961), pp. 216–36. See too J. O’Reilly, ‘“Know Who and What He is”: The Context and Inscriptions of the Durham Gospels Crucifixion Image’, in Making and Meaning in Insular Art: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Insular Art, ed. by R. Moss (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007) pp. 301–16 at 302–03, 313–14. 41 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 517, ll. 1128–30: Adhuc heretici putant fantasma fuisse dominum nec ueram assumpsisse carnem de uirgine.

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when his human nature was hard to see, Bede turns to ‘the storms of the Passion’, when Christ’s humanity was evident. His human vulnerability to suffering put his human resolve to the test but, Bede explains, because his human and divine natures were united in his one person, his divinity was also present at the Passion, though it was not discernible according to previous expectations of how divine power might be manifested: in the storms of the Passion, which were imposed on him by traitors to prove the constancy of his faith, the same divine nature was displayed in a way never before seen. Constantly moving between the literal text of the Gospel passage and its spiritual meaning, Bede shows the importance of right belief (the recognition of who Christ is) to the practice of the Christian life.42 He asks why the Lord, before reassuring the disciples and calming the storm (Mark 6.50b–51), had first increased the terror of those he came to liberate by walking on the sea as if to pass them by like a stranger (Mark 6.48b–50a). He shows that such a spectacular manifestation of Christ’s divine nature had the effect of increasing their wonder at his power and their thanksgiving for deliverance from the storm, but, because they were still at a carnal or elementary stage in understanding, their hearts remained blinded to the truth that this was God. They failed to recognise the fullness of his divine majesty when he calmed the storm and showed that he was Lord of the elements, just as they had failed to recognise the continuing presence of his humanity when, through his divine power, he miraculously walked on water. Bede then extends the image of the storm to the experience of the faithful in times of trouble, remarking: ‘Often, indeed, the divine mercy seems to have abandoned the faithful who are in tribulation, like the disciples labouring in the sea, so that Jesus might be thought to have wished to pass them by’.43 He cites the extreme example of the Church’s martyrs, evoking their cries of desolation through the words of the psalmist, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why do I mourn whilst my enemies afflict me [. . .] and say, “Where is their God?”’ (Psalm 41.10–11; Psalm 78.10). The tribulation of the faithful is likened to that of the disciples who feared shipwreck in the storm, but their divine consolation is similarly assured: ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you’ (Isaiah 43.2). Bede resumes the words of the Gospel, where Christ comforts the disciples in the storm: ‘“Have faith. It is I. Fear not”. And he went up to them into the ship, and the wind ceased’ (Mark 6.50b–51). So too, Bede says, whenever the Lord enters a heart by grace, all evil, worldly and vicious spirits in conflict within the heart are suddenly stilled.44 His spiritual interpretation of the Gospel text proceeds from the belief that Christ

42 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 518, ll. 1145–47: Quia in tempestatibus passionum quae pro constantia fidei a perfidis ingeruntur talis non numquam prouisio divinitus ostenditur. 43 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 518, ll. 1147–50: Saepe enim ita fideles in tribulatione positos superna pietas deseruisse uisa est ut quasi laborantes in mari discipulos praeterire Iesus uoluisse putaretur. 44 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 518, ll. 1164–67: In quocumque enim corde Deus per gratiam sui adest amoris mox uniuersa vitiorum et aduersantis mundi siue spirituum malignorum bella compressa quiescunt.

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shares in the storms and troubles of the faithful since he shares our human nature. Bede elsewhere in his exegesis often explained that because the faithful are united with Christ, whose human nature is united to his divine nature, he enables them in their human weakness to share in his divine power to endure earthly tribulation and overcome inner turmoil and temptation.45

Telescoping heresies: Eutyches and monothelitism In the Lateran acta, Pope Martin notes that Theodore of Pharan’s views, denying the full humanity of the Logos, showed him to be guilty of a whole range of heresies that had already been condemned in the work of the fathers and councils, including Arianism, Docetism, Manichaeism and Apollinarianism. The argument is also used in the Pope’s analysis of other monotheletes, Sergius of Constantinople and Cyrus of Alexandria, whom he reproached for repeating old heresies, and for concealing this by pretending that their erroneous doctrines were in accord with the teachings of Chalcedon and the fathers.46 Such telescoping of heresies from different periods of time appears in Bede’s own exegesis, for example in his comment on Christ’s words in Mark’s account of the feeding of the four thousand, ‘I have compassion on the multitude, for behold they have now been with me three days and have nothing to eat [. . .] they will faint in the way’ (Mark 8.2–3): In this passage one should consider in the one and same Redeemer of ours the distinct operation of the divinity and humanity. The error of Eutyches, who presumed to affirm as a dogma only one operation in Christ, should be driven away, far beyond the limits of the Christian world. For who can fail to see in the fact that the Lord took pity on the crowd, lest it falter from lack of food or the demands of a prolonged journey, a fellow-feeling, a compassion for human weakness and, in his satisfying the hunger of four thousand men with seven loaves and a few fish, a work of divine power?47

45 The belief is variously expounded in Bede’s exegesis, for example in his Gospel homilies on the Incarnation: Bede, Opera homiletica, pp. 34, ll. 84–91; 39, ll. 71–74; 50, ll. 165–67; Homilies on the Gospels, vol. 1, pp. 47, 54, 71. 46 The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 207, 223, 361, 401–02. Theodore, Sergius and Cyrus were also among those condemned in 680–81 at the Third Council of Constantinople for ‘sowing with novel speech among the orthodox people the heresy of a single will and a single principle of action in the two natures of the one member of the holy Trinity, Christ our true God’: Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, pp. 125–26. 47 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 527, ll. 1515–23: Et in hac lectione consideranda est in uno eodemque redemptore nostro distincta operatio diuinitatis et humanitatis, atque error Eutichetis qui unam tantum in Christo operationem dogmatizare praesumit procul a christianis finibus expellendus. Quis enim non uideat hoc quod super turbam miseretur dominus ne uel inedia uel uiae longioris labore deficiat affectum esse et compassionem humanae fragilitatis? quod uero de septem panibus et pisculis paucis quattuor hominum milia saturauit divinae opus esse uirtutis?

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The name of Eutyches is here related to the seventh-century monothelete doctrine of ‘one operation in Christ’. The miraculous feeding of the crowd was the kind of miracle that Pope Leo had listed when showing Eutyches what pertained to Christ’s divinity as distinct from what pertained to his humanity. Bede presents it in such a way as to emphasise that Christ’s two distinct natures, fully divine and fully human, worked in communion. The implied argument of the passage is that Christ, having two natures, necessarily has two ‘operations’ or distinct kinds of activity proper to each nature; it might, therefore, be said that Eutyches, believing him to have only one nature, had already ‘presumed to affirm as a dogma only one operation in Christ’.48 The tradition of designating heresy as an innovation, and at the same time as the manifestation of an old heresy already formally condemned by the fathers and councils of the Church, helps explain the opening statement of Bede’s chapter on the synod at Hatfield in the Historia Ecclesiastica, which has puzzled modern commentators: About this time Theodore [of Canterbury] heard that the faith of the church at Constantinople had been greatly shaken by the heresy of Eutyches. As he wished to keep the English churches over which he presided free from any such taint, he convened an assembly. (HE 4.17, pp. 384–85) The calling of the synod of Hatfield (679) is presented as a response to ‘the heresy of Eutyches’, yet Eutyches is named in the very same chapter as a heresiarch condemned at Chalcedon (451).49 Leo the Great’s Tome had been directed against Eutyches specifically for his inability ‘to recognise our [human] nature in the only-begotten Son of God’, and the name of Eutyches had come to represent extreme monophysitism. The doctrinal definitions of general councils were customarily identified in brief by the names of the particular heresiarchs each council had condemned. This convention is followed in the Historia Ecclesiastica in the listing of the five general councils acclaimed in the Hatfield synod (HE 4.17, pp. 386–87), and had already been used in Bede’s Chronica maiora.50 In both lists

48 The two complementary passages in the Marcan commentary that make a connection between the heresy of Eutyches and monothelete belief in one operation and one will in Christ are to be distinguished from the naming of Eutyches in Bede’s earlier Commentary on Luke, which focuses instead on the denial of Christ’s human nature for which Eutyches was condemned in Leo’s Tome (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, pp. 77–78). Bede’s exposition of Luke 11.27 denounces the heresy of denying that the only begotten Son of God was born of the ever virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and drew his flesh from her. Bede enjoins the present faithful: ‘Let us, therefore, lift up our voice against these statements of Eutyches in the company of the catholic Church’; he uses the condemnation of Eutyches as a means of reinforcing contemporary belief in the incarnate Christ’s human nature, and the truth that Christ, born from the Virgin’s womb, is true God and true man. In Lucae evangelivm expositio, pp. 236–37, ll. 213–44. 49 See the note on Eutyches in Bede, Opera historica, ed. by Plummer, p. 230. 50 Bede, De temporum ratione, p. 528; The Reckoning of Time, trans. by Wallis, pp. 231–32.

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the condemnation of Eutyches helps characterise the Council of Chalcedon. The appearance of his name at the beginning of Bede’s chapter on Hatfield signals a perceived theological connection between fifth-century monophysitism and seventh-century monothelitism, and the role of the papacy in the refutation of both at Chalcedon and at the Lateran Synod which affirmed Chalcedon. A similar connection between the two heresies was made in Pope Agatho’s weighty letter to the Emperor, which was to be read out at the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople (680–81). Agatho shows new heresy arising out of old, and he presents testimonies from Greek and Latin fathers to vanquish ‘the depraved dogma’ of those who threaten to split the unity of the Church by ‘asserting one will, and one operation of the two natures in the one Jesus Christ our Lord, a thing which the Arians and the Apollinarians, the Eutychians, the Timotheans, the Acephali, the Theodosians and the Gaianitae, and every heretical fury, taught, whether confusing or dividing the mystery of Christ’s incarnation’.51 The tradition was familiar to Bede, who in the Chronica minora showed that he was aware (through Isidore) that the heresy of the Acephali had been put down in the sixth century, yet in his Chronica maiora he could refer to three prominent seventh-century monotheletes, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius and Pyrrhus of Constantinople, as ‘instigators of the Acephalite heresy’ who ‘taught there was one operation of divinity and humanity in Christ and one will’ and were duly condemned at Pope Martin’s synod in Rome.52 Assembling and documenting ‘the tradition of the fathers’ on this matter had been carried out on an extraordinary scale in the preparation of the Lateran Synod of 649. A distinctive feature was the presentation in the fifth session of selected extracts from patristic writings, identified and arranged into florilegia on the natural wills and operations of Christ. Pope Martin proclaimed them to be ‘pious testimonies [. . .] for the rebuttal of heretics’; through the fathers God had ‘at many times and in many ways’ given enlightenment about the orthodox faith, which had been denied in the writings of those now condemned.53 After the florilegia were read out, the council members affirmed that, in accordance with the holy councils, they believed and taught as the fathers believed and taught, ‘adding nothing and taking nothing away from what they handed down to us’.54 In such ways the 51 Agatho, Epistola ad augustos imperatores, in Patrologia Latina 87, cols 1162–1214 at col. 1172: unam voluntatem, unamque operationem duarum naturarum asserentes in uno Domino nostro Jesu Christo: quod Ariani et Apollinaristae, Eutychianistae, Timotheani, Acephali, Theodosiani et Gaianitae, et omnis omnino haereticus furor, sive confundentium, seu dividentium Incarnationis Christi mysterium, docuit; The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. by H.R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, 14 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1991) p. 332. 52 De temporum ratione, pp. 525–26; The Reckoning of Time, trans. by Wallis, pp. 229–30. Bede here follows the Liber pontificalis: Le Liber pontificalis, ed. by Duchesne, vol. 1, p. 337; The Book of Pontiffs, ed. by Davis, p. 69. On the Acephali (Akephaloi), see J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) p. 120. 53 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 253; The Acts of the Lateran Council, trans. by Price, p. 304. 54 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 319; The Acts of the Lateran Council, trans. by Price, p. 346.

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Synod contrasted the recurrence of heresy in the Church with continuity in its orthodox teachings. This concept of authority and tradition is echoed in Bede’s excerpts from the professions of faith made at Theodore’s synod at Hatfield. Those assembled there, in acclaiming the general councils and the Lateran Synod, and condemning those whom the general councils had condemned, showed that they were not adding to, or subtracting from, the fullness of revelation and belief, as our Lord Jesus Christ delivered it in the flesh to the disciples who saw Him face to face and heard His words, and as it was handed down in the creed of the holy fathers and by all the holy and universal councils in general and the whole body of the accredited fathers of the catholic Church. (HE 4.17, pp. 386–87)

Gethsemane: Bede’s commentary on Mark 14.33–38 Christ’s words in the garden of Gethsemane on the eve of his Passion were of particular importance in the christological debate. They were central to the arguments against monothelitism formulated by Maximus the Confessor,55 and they feature strongly in the florilegium of the fifth session of the Lateran Synod, devoted to patristic texts on the natural wills of Christ. Some of these passages are also among the texts cited in Pope Agatho’s letter to the Emperor refuting the doctrines of the monotheletes. There Agatho explained that in the Gospel accounts of the Gethsemane scene Christ instructs the faithful that he is both true God and true man: ‘Thus as man he prays to the Father to take away the cup of suffering, because in him our human nature was complete, sin only excepted: Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will but as you will (Matthew 26.39; cf. Mark 14.36); and in another passage, Not my will but yours be done (Luke 22.42)’.56 Agatho invoked the testimony of the holy and approved fathers on what ‘my will’ and ‘yours’ signify, using the customary practice of expounding the terms in the light of an additional Gospel text, ‘I came not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me’ (John 6.38). Quoting extracts from patristic texts used thirty years earlier in the Lateran florilegium of 649, Agatho 55 See F.M. Léthel, Théologie de l’agonie du Christ. La liberté humaine du Fils de Dieu et son importance sotériologique mises en lumière par Saint Maxime Confesseur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979); M. Fédou, La voie du Christ, II: Développements de la christologie dans le contexte religieux de l’Orient ancien. D’Eusèbe de Césarée à Jean Damascène (1Vè–VIIIè siècle) (Paris: Cerf, 2013) pp. 570–85; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, pp. 96–99; Scripta saeculi vii vitam Maximi Confessoris illvstrantia, ed. by P. Allen and B. Neil, CCSG 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999) pp. xii–xxiii. 56 Agatho, Epistola ad augustos imperatores, PL 87, col. 1173: Orat quidem ad Patrem ut homo, ut calicem passionis transageret, quia in eo nostrae humanitatis natura absque solo peccato perfecta est: Pater, inquiens, si possibile est, transeat a me calix iste; verumtamen non sicut ego volo, sed sicut tu vis. Et in alio loco: Non mea voluntas, sed tua fiat; The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Percival, p. 333.

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cited not only Pope Leo, but also Ambrose,57 Athanasius and other fathers from before Chalcedon, whose writings were seen as containing the means of refuting the seventh-century heresy. On the crucial words, ‘Yet not my will but yours be done’, he cited Athanasius: ‘He shows that there are two wills, the one human which is the will of the flesh, but the other divine. For his human will, out of the weakness of the flesh, was fleeing away from the passion, but his divine will was ready for it’.58 Recalling conciliar definitions of the two natures in Christ after their inseparable union, implying two natural wills, Agatho referred to: most telling passages in other of the early venerable fathers, who speak clearly of the two natural operations in Christ, not to mention [. . .] those who afterwards conducted the laborious conflicts in defence of the venerable council of Chalcedon and of the Tome of St Leo against the heretics from whose error the assertion of this new dogma has arisen.59 It is instructive to turn from the florilegia of the Lateran acta and Agatho’s citations to Bede’s exposition of the words of Christ in Gethsemane in his commentary on Mark. This makes clear once again his familiarity with the Synod’s proceedings. Remarkably, he quotes or closely draws on several of the patristic texts assembled in the Synod’s florilegium on Christ’s natural wills. The manner in which he uses the material is also of interest. The modern edition of the commentary notes, for instance, that he uses a substantial quotation from Ambrose’s De fide in his exposition of Mark 14.33, Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem (‘My soul is sorrowful even unto death’),60 but the last few lines of the quotation had also been quoted in the acta of the Lateran Synod, in an extract which forms one of the first patristic texts in the florilegium on the natural wills of Christ.61 57 The passage from Ambrose, which includes the words, ‘because he bears my sorrow as man, he spoke as a man, and therefore he says: “Not as I will but as you will”’ (p. 333), had been quoted in the fifth session of the Lateran Synod: Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 274; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 316. 58 Agatho, Epistola ad augustos imperatores, PL 87, col. 1176: duas voluntates hic ostendit, et unam quidem humanam, quae est carnis, aliam autem divinam. Quoniam humana propter infirmitatem carnis refugiebat passionem, divina autem ejus prompta; The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Percival, p. 333. The passage (in fact from Pseudo-Athanasius, De incarnatione et contra Arianos) had been quoted in the Lateran Synod, and it was quoted again in the imperial confirmation of the decrees of Constantinople III: Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 282; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 323, n. 180. 59 Agatho, Epistola ad augustos imperatores, PL 87, col. 1197: Non desunt autem et aliorum venerabilium Patrum probatissima testimonia, duas manifeste dicentium naturales operationes in Christo, ut silentio transeamus [. . .] quicumque postmodum pro rectitudine venerabilis concilii Chalcedonensis, et tomo sancti Leonis satisfaciendo, laboriosos conflictus adversus confundentium haereses pertulerunt, de quorum errore et novi dogmatis descendit assertio; The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Percival, p. 335. 60 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 615, ll. 797–812. 61 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 274; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 316, extract 2.

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Ambrose had used the first-person voice of the faithful, affectively stressing that Christ at his passion ‘assumed my will and my distress’ because he had assumed human nature; it was as a man that he said [to the Father], ‘Not as I will but as you will’ (Mark 14.36), and therefore, Ambrose says, ‘mine is the sorrow that he assumed from my state of mind’ (mea est tristitia quam meo suscepit affectu). This leads Bede into a brief quotation from another work by Ambrose, his commentary on Luke, where the idea is repeated and extended: ‘Therefore he suffered for me who had no reason to suffer on his own account’. While remaining unchanged in his eternal divinity, Christ was affected by ‘the distress arising from my weakness’ (that is, because he had become man).62 This passage in the commentary on Luke (Bk 10.56) is another of the patristic extracts cited in the same Lateran florilegium on the natural wills of Christ.63 Part of the preceding extract in the acta, also taken from Ambrose’s commentary on Luke (Bk 7.133), forms the next item in Bede’s chain of quotations.64 He includes the opening of the extract, which cites ‘My soul is sorrowful, he says, unto death’ (Matthew 26.38; Mark 14.34), and the explanation that Christ (in his divine nature) was not sorrowful because of death; rather, in his dread he was showing that he had assumed humanity, body and soul,65 and with it the experience of hunger, thirst, distress and all the emotions. Bede then comments on Mark 14.36 with lines from Augustine’s Enarrationes in psalmos (Psalm 100.6), where Augustine cites the parallel Gospel text in Matthew 26.39, and shows its application to the faithful. When under fear of death they too are to say what Christ said ‘on our account’; that is, ‘Father, if it is possible, let this chalice pass from me’. But if this is not possible, they are to imitate Christ’s human will further by saying, ‘Not as I will but as you will, Father’. The few lines which Bede quotes are selected from a larger extract of Augustine’s text in the same Lateran florilegium.66 At this point the Gethsemane prayer, ‘Not what I will, but what you will’ (Mark 14.36), is repeated in Bede’s commentary, and further illuminated by the juxtaposition of Christ’s words from a different context, ‘I came not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me’ (John 6.38). This Gospel text leads directly into the opening of Bede’s brief quotation from the Second Tome of Leo the Great, drawn from an extract used in the florilegium of the Lateran acta, which cites John 6.38 and emphasises that what Christ here called ‘his own will’ is the one he took in time from the Virgin, while ‘the will of him who sent him’ refers to what he possessed in common with the Father through all 62 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, pp. 615–16, ll. 812–15. 63 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 274; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 317, extract 4. 64 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 616, ll. 815–20; Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 274; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 317, extract 3. 65 Qualified in the acta by the words, ‘apart from sin’ (cf. Hebrews 4.14), a phrase omitted by Bede. 66 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 616, ll. 830–35; Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 280; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 321, extract 11.

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eternity.67 The extract that directly follows Leo’s in the Lateran acta is from a homily of Pseudo-Hippolytus, In sanctam pascha. It explains that Christ cried out for the chalice to pass, thereby showing that he was man, but, remembering why he had been sent, he cried out again, ‘Father, not my will. The spirit is eager, but the flesh is weak’. Part of the extract is quoted by Bede, but he omits this final sentence and the abbreviated reference, ‘Father, not my will’, and instead reiterates the full text of Mark 14.36: Sed non quod ego uolo sed quod tu.68 Mark’s Gospel next recounts Christ’s exhortation to Peter to watch and pray that he might not enter into temptation: ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ (Mark 14.37–38). Instead of identifying this as an admonition to Peter concerning the inner struggle within all humanity between spirit and flesh (cf. Romans 7.23), Bede relates it to Christ’s own prayer in the previous verse, ‘yet not what I will, but what you will’ (Mark 14.36), and the submission of his human will to the Father, with whom he shares the divine will. He then reflects on the significance of Mark’s account, and, after the opening sentence referring to ‘the Eutychians’, his remarks are closely drawn from the extract ascribed to Athanasius which immediately follows that from Pseudo-Hippolytus in the Lateran acta:69 This passage also goes against the Eutychians who say that there was one operation and one will in our Lord and Saviour, the mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2.5). For when it says, the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak (Mark 14.38), it points to two wills: namely a human one, which is of the flesh, and a divine one, which is of God. Whence the human will, because of the infirmity of the flesh, shrinks from suffering, but his divine will accepts it most readily. For to dread suffering belongs to human weakness; but to accept suffering when it is given belongs to the divine will and power.70 Bede has at this stage quoted from at least seven of the extracts from patristic texts concerning the natural wills of Christ used in the Lateran acta specifically, 67 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 316, ll. 336–40 (the source of these lines in the Second Tome is not identified by the editor); Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 282; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 322, extract 13. 68 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 616, ll. 840–43 (the source in Pseudo-Hippolytus is not identified); Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 282; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 323, extract 14. 69 Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 282; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 323, extract 15. This is the passage mentioned earlier that Pope Agatho also quoted. 70 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, pp. 617–18, ll. 881–90: Facit hic locus et aduersum Eutichianos qui dicunt unam in mediatore Dei et hominum domino et saluatore nostro operationem unam fuisse uoluntatem. Cum enim dicit, Spiritus quidem promptus caro uero infirma, duas uoluntates ostendit humanam uidelicet quae est carnis et diuinam quae est deitatis. Vbi humana quidem propter infirmitatem carnis recusat passionem diuina autem eius est promptissima quoniam formidare quidem in passione humanae fragilitatis est suscipere autem dispensationem passionis diuinae uoluntatis atque uirtutis est.

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and in almost the same order, as authorities against monothelitism. Only now, however, does he refer to the belief of those heretics, namely ‘the Eutychians who say that there was one operation and one will in our Lord and Saviour’. The observation complements his reference earlier in the Marcan commentary to ‘the error of Eutyches, who presumed to affirm as a dogma only one operation in Christ’. Just as Bede had there insisted, ‘in this passage (Mark 8.1–2) one should consider in the one and same Redeemer of ours the separate operation of the divinity and humanity’,71 so now he shows that Mark 14.38 ‘points to two wills: namely a human one, which is of the flesh, and a divine one, which is of God’. He then goes further by referring to ‘our Lord and Saviour’ as ‘the mediator between God and man’ (1 Timothy 2.5), alluding to a Pauline text of great importance in christological debate and exegesis. Freely used by Augustine, and much quoted by Gregory the Great, it had a crucial role in Pope Leo’s refutation of Eutyches in the Tome, where, expounding the inseparable union of Christ’s truly divine and truly human natures at the Incarnation as necessary to human salvation, the Pope proclaimed: So the proper character of both natures was maintained and came together in a single person. Lowliness was taken up by majesty, weakness by strength, mortality by eternity. To pay off the debt of our state, invulnerable nature was united to a nature that could suffer; so that in a way that corresponded to the remedies we needed, one and the same mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2.5) could both on the one hand die and on the other be incapable of death.72 Bede, similarly, uses the text of 1 Timothy 2.5 throughout his writings to signal an orthodox faith in Christ.73 The naming of Eutyches in the Marcan commentary, however, not only recalls the belief of the monophysites that there is only one nature in the incarnate Christ, but suggests the extension of that error among latter-day ‘Eutychians’, meaning monotheletes. Their belief that there is only one will in Christ denies his full human nature, and therefore his identity as the one 71 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, p. 527, ll. 1515–18. 72 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, vol. 1, p. 78: Salva igitur proprietate utriusque naturae et in unam coeunte personam suscepta est a maiestate humilitas, a virtute infirmitas, ab aeternitate mortalitas, et ad resolvendum conditionis nostrae debitum natura inviolabilis est unita passibili, ut quod nostris remediis congruebat, unus atque idem mediator dei et hominum homo Christus Iesus et mori posset ex uno et mori non posset ex altero. 73 Examples include the description of Aidan in HE. 3.17, pp. 266–67; In Lucae evangelivm expositio, pp. 8, 53, 76; De templo, pp. 5, 178, 211; On the Temple, trans. by Connolly, pp. 5, 46, 89; De tabernaculo, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969) pp. 1–139 at 12, 30, 35, 72, 133; On the Tabernacle, trans. by A.G. Holder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994) pp. 10, 32, 38, 43 and n. 1, 81, 155; In Ezram et Neemiam, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969) pp. 235–392 at 245, 311, 339; On Ezra et Nehemiah, trans. by S. DeGregorio (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006) pp. 13, 115, 154. Further instances are noted in Bede: A Biblical Miscellany, trans. by W.T. Foley and A.G. Holder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) pp. 61, 64, 67, 92.

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mediator between God and man. Bede corrects such error in his exegetical and homiletic works in a variety of ways and contexts, but always consonant with the christological belief articulated by Pope Leo and Chalcedon, affirmed and clarified at the Lateran Synod of Pope Martin, and reiterated by Pope Agatho for the Sixth General Council.74 The foregoing examples do not exhaust the extent of Bede’s allusions to monothelitism. Elsewhere he demonstrates a similar interest in questions of operation and will when expounding the divinity and humanity of Christ,75 or the unity of the divine persons in the Trinity.76 They are sufficient, however, to indicate his detailed understanding of the heresy, and his engagement with the theological issues it had brought to the fore. They also show his familiarity with the proceedings of the Lateran Synod, and his careful selection and use of their contents, though without identifying his source. This knowledge Bede used judiciously, in accordance with his artistic and pastoral aims. He was not concerned primarily with the historical details and contexts of past heresies, nor was he attempting to stem the mass conversion of Northumbria to monothelitism. Rather he made use of the way in which heresy and heretics can readily represent or encapsulate continuing challenges to the faith, understanding and behaviour of the teaching Church and its individual members. Like the fathers, he knew that the refutation of heresy can, by contradistinction, illuminate orthodox belief and practice.

74 I am not arguing that Bede had seen Agatho’s letter refuting monothelitism, but that he was familiar with the tradition its collection of texts and arguments presents, the rhetorical conventions it uses, and many of the patristic authorities it cites. 75 Monothelitism probably left its mark, for example, on the emphasis on Christ’s two wills in Homily 2.3 on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem before his Passion (Matthew 21.1–9), where Bede mentions both Christ’s descent from heaven and the prospect of his human suffering, yet shows that, because he is without sin, his human will is in accord with the divine will, and therefore ready to fulfil the Baptist’s inspired prophecy that his suffering would take away the sins of the world: Bede, Opera homiletica, p. 200, ll. 1–10; Homilies on the Gospels, trans. by Martin, vol. 2, p. 23. Homily 1.6, on Luke 2.1–14, uses the same device in demonstrating the communion of the divine and human wills when Christ was born: Opera homiletica, p. 37, ll. 7–12; Homilies on the Gospels, trans. by Martin, vol. 1, p. 52. 76 In Homily 1.20, on Peter’s profession of faith in Christ (Matthew 16.16), Bede affirms, una est uoluntas et operatio patris filii et spiritus sancti. His concern is to show that since Christ shares his divine nature with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the will and operation of the Trinity is one and the same. Later he emphatically asserts the unity of the divine persons by describing the ‘double procession’ of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as a reflection of their ‘one will and operation’: Opera homiletica, p. 144, ll. 97–99, 108–11; Homilies on the Gospels, trans. by Martin, vol. 1, pp. 199–200. The Lateran Synod, similarly had affirmed its belief that in the Trinity there is ‘one and the same [. . .] will, operation’: Concilium Lateranense, ed. by Riedinger, p. 369; The Acts of the Lateran Synod, trans. by Price, p. 377. See also Homilies 1.5 and 2.6: Opera homiletica, pp. 109, ll. 146–58; 290, ll. 9–23; Homilies on the Gospels, trans. by Martin, vol. 1, p. 153; vol. 2, pp. 149–50.

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1. The image of the Mediator in the writings of Bede1 The Christological debates that followed the Council of Chalcedon continued intermittently throughout most of the seventh and the early eighth centuries, right up to the time Bede was writing the Historia Ecclesiastica. Yet in no way does he present them as a crucial part of the long, complex, but inexorable process of the separation of the papacy and the Christian emperor. Already in the De temporum ratione, in a rare reference to discord, Bede prefers to identify the determination of ‘the age of the Moon’ as the question ‘which has caused the long and serious controversy between the churches of the East and the West’.2 The importance of the Insular Easter controversy in Bede’s History has often been remarked. It has been viewed by some as an obsessive interest, unwarranted at the time he was writing and chiefly a means of demonstrating Roman – and hence Anglo-Saxon – triumphalism over the Columban monks of Iona and their extensive sphere of influence. Bede’s highly selective and simplified account of the controversy obscures the variety in Insular Easter practices in the seventh century and the wide knowledge of computistics the Irish are known to have had. He simply and 1 [Editors’ note. The two parts of this essay were composed separately as conference papers. The first part, The Image of the Mediator, was written in 2013 for a conference in Durham on ‘Producing Christian Culture: Gospel Text and Commentary in Medieval Perspective’. It was delivered on 5 July 2013 in St Paul’s Church, Jarrow. The second part, The Synod of Whitby, was written in August 2007 for the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford, and subsequently revised and extended. Both papers are published here for the first time. Recent studies of the issues they discuss include: ‘Bede and Monothelitism’ in the present volume; Computus and its Cultural Context in the Latin West, AD 300–1200: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, ed. I. Warntjes and D. Ó Cróinín (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); The Easter Controversy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, ed. I. Warntjes and D. Ó Cróinín (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); and Late Antique Calendrical Thought and its Reception in the Early Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, ed. I. Warntjes and D. Ó Cróinín (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017).] 2 Bede: The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) Chapter 43, p. 119.

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repeatedly refers to the 84-year cycle and lunar limits of the ‘Celtic’ Easter Sunday and, without referring to the problems of the Easter table produced by Victorius or naming the Dionysian cycle, he lets it appear that Rome had from time immemorial sanctioned a ‘canonical’ Easter against regional custom. Impressions of Bede’s partisanship have not been entirely overlaid for some readers by recent more positive re-evaluations of his attitude to the Irish, and of the role of the Columbans in particular, in his book, or by the identification of Bede and members of his circle, most notably Ceolfrith and Acca, as agents of reconciliation, like Adomnán, to be distinguished from some other Insular Romani, both English and Irish, who regarded fellow islanders of allegedly outmoded Easter practices as schismatics or even heretics. The question needs to be considered in the context of Bede’s overall objectives in his History. His references to the question of Easter are invariably accompanied by the idea of the unity and harmony of the universal Church. Among the Insular peoples during the course of the seventh century, unity on the date of the celebration of Easter, which had been demanded by the first of all the ecumenical councils, became a means of expressing full membership of the Christian community. It presented Rome as the serene guardian of the faith, not in contention with the Christian emperor. Bede portrays the spread of the ‘Roman’ Easter among the Insular peoples in terms of a further stage in the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies concerning the conversion of the pagan islands at the ends of the earth. Notwithstanding their peripheral geographical location, the islands could now be seen as fully part of the universal body of the Church, whose unity and orthodoxy were represented and safe-guarded by petrine Rome, from which they had received the Gospel entrusted by Christ to his apostles.3 This majestic vision of providential history excluded the spectacle of papal Rome in contention with the Christian emperor. Awareness of the Christological debate, however, can offer an interesting perspective on Bede’s handling of the Easter controversy. The Mediator In his homilies and biblical commentaries, Bede repeatedly relates the Incarnation to the moral and spiritual response required of the faithful: that they seek to imitate the example of Christ’s humanity in order to share in his divinity. His exegesis of Solomon’s temple, for example, reveals the means by which the spiritual temple may be built up or renewed in the life of the Church, particularly by its pastoral leaders. He draws examples from the Old Testament, and from New Testament accounts of the formation and teaching of the apostolic Church.4 In 3 See in the present volume Chapter 2, ‘Islands and idols at the ends of the earth: exegesis and conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’. 4 See Bede, ‘Concerning Figures and Tropes’, trans. Gussie Hecht Tannenhaus, in Readings in Medieval Rhetoric, ed. Joseph H. Miller, Michael H. Prosser and Thomas W. Benson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) pp. 96–122 (120–21); On the Song of Songs, in The Venerable Bede: On the Song of Songs and Selected Writings, trans. Arthur Holder (New York: Paulist Press,

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his Historia Ecclesiastica many of the precepts and insights of that exegesis are developed, not through allegory, but through a documented history of the continuation, in the seventh century, of the apostolic universal mission at the ends of the earth, a mission realised in the conversion and life of his own people, the Angli, viewed in the context of all the Insular peoples – the Britons, Picts and Irish. Though Bede’s presentation of this providential history is deeply influenced by his reading of Scripture and the fathers, there is little overt Christology, and scriptural citations and exegesis are largely confined to the historical documents he includes – papal, archiepiscopal, abbatial letters – whose themes are often picked up in the narrative. One such document is the letter of 640 from Pope-elect John IV and three officials of the apostolic see (Hilarus archipresbyter, Iohannes primicerius and Iohannes consiliarius) to certain Irish bishops, priests, other teachers and abbots. The recipients include Ségéne, generally identified with the abbot of Iona in the time of Aidan.5 It contains an exposition of a scriptural text that Bede often cited: Unus enim Deus, unus et mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus: qui dedit redemptionem semetipsum pro omnibus (‘For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus: who gave himself a redemption for all’) (1 Timothy 2.5–6).6 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín explained persuasively the Roman misunderstandings of the particular situation in Ireland (relating to Victorius’s provision for a problematic Easter date in 641) which probably underlie the stern papal warning of northern Irish churchmen against reported revivals among them of two heresies, Quartodecimanism and Pelagianism, both condemned long before. He also argued that a symbolic link between errors in the calculation of Easter and the heresy of Pelagianism was probably being made in Rome by this time.7 It is a link that Bede himself made in his De temporum ratione. There he stressed the importance of waiting until after the spring equinox to celebrate the Lord’s Passover, ‘so that the feast-day on which the Mediator between God and man, having destroyed the power of darkness, opened the way of light for the

2011) p. 125; Bede. On the Temple, trans. Seán Connolly, with an introduction by Jennifer O’Reilly (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995) pp. xxvii–xxxiii (Chapter 1 in the present volume). 5 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), Book 2, Chapter 19 (pp. 198–203) (henceforward HE). 6 Examples of Bede’s citation of 1 Timothy 2.5–6 and associated texts include his exegesis of Acts 4.11–12 in Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, trans. Lawrence T. Martin (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989) p. 50, and Homilies 1.3 and 1.6, in Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst, 2 vols (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), vol.1, pp. 22, 25, 52, 62. 7 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘A seventh-century Irish computus from the circle of Cummianus’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 82c (1982) pp. 405–30; ‘“New heresy for old”: Pelagianism in Ireland and the papal letter of 640’, Speculum 60.3 (1985) pp. 505–16. On the papal letter see also J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. A Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, reprinted 2002) pp. 82–83, 224–25, and T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 40, 409, 415.

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world, might show its inner [significance] by means of the order of time’.8 For the date of Easter to anticipate the equinox, he argued, would be ‘as if, like the Pelagians, we sought to be blessed without supernatural grace’;9 that is, it would be like claiming that the grace of the resurrection was not necessary to human salvation. In the Historia Ecclesiastica he included Ceolfrid’s letter which expanded the same image of Christ overcoming the darkness of death by his resurrection, and the same warning against anticipating the equinox (HE 5.21, p. 545). But Bede did not relate Pelagianism to the Irish. He did not accuse them of celebrating Easter before the equinox. On the contrary, the missionary and pastoral devotion, and the prayerful and ascetic monastic life, of the Columban monks who had evangelised Northumbria from the 630s are presented by him as a model for his own times. He partly quotes and partly summarises John’s letter, separating the two charges of errors in the dating of Easter and the outbreak of Pelagianism, in order to soften the papal accusation. Even so, it has not been explained why, if Bede really did wish to defend the Columban monks from serious and unwarranted charges of heresy, he should have retained in his History an extended theological passage from the section of John’s letter that alleges the revival of Pelagianism among the Irish (HE 2.19, pp. 200–03). The Pope-elect denounced this ‘execrable heresy’ and the pride of those who say that a man can live without sin, not by the grace of God, but by his own will. He argued that it was impossible for anyone to be without sin, except for that one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2.5), who was conceived and brought forth without sin. For all other men were born with original sin and are known to bear the mark of Adam’s transgression, even though they are without actual sin, in accordance with the prophet’s words: ‘Behold, I was conceived in iniquity and in sin did my mother bring me forth. (Psalm 50.7)10 Bede could not but agree. The refutation of Pelagianism and the citation of 1 Timothy 2.5 and Psalm 50.7, which both feature in John’s letter, are also combined in Bede’s early exegesis. In his commentary on the Catholic Epistles, for example, he argues that St John’s words, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1.8), should prevail over the heresy of Pelagius which claimed that ‘all children are born without sin, and that the elect, as they be without sin, are able to advance in this life’. He admonishes Pelagius to recognise the stain of original sin in humanity by acknowledging the prophetic truth of another text: 8 The Reckoning of Time, trans. Wallis, Chapter 64, p. 151. 9 The Reckoning of Time, trans. Wallis, Chapter 6, p. 26. 10 Meaning that all are born with the taint of original sin, a point emphasised with the same psalm text by Pope Gregory in the Libellus responsionum quoted by Bede in HE 1.27 (pp. 96–97).

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For see, I was conceived in iniquities and in sin has my mother borne me (Psalm 50.7). We who have come into the world with fault cannot exist in the world without fault, but the blood of Jesus, the Son of God, cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1.7), so that our sins may not keep us under the authority of the enemy, for the reason that the Mediator between God and men, the man, Jesus Christ, gave up for our sake what he did not owe. He explains that Christ, being sinless, was able to give the death of his body to free sinners from the death of the soul: ‘For he who for our sake gave the death of his body, which he did not owe, freed us from the death of the soul, which we owed’.11 Psalm 50.7, thus interpreted, was part of the anti-Pelagian argument used, for example, by Augustine, Jerome and Cassiodorus, with which Bede was very familiar, but the psalm verse could also appear in related contexts extolling the unique sinlessness of the Mediator’s humanity, where Pelagians were not specifically targeted. In his homily on the account of Christ’s conception in Luke 1.26–38, Bede succinctly expounds the identity of the Mediator (in one person his holiness as God, his sinlessness as man), in the tradition of Augustine, Leo the Great and Gregory: As a man born in time he received the same power of divine majesty that he had eternally had as Son of God, so that our Mediator and Redeemer was one person with two natures [. . .]. Indeed, we human beings are all conceived in iniquity and born in sin (cf. Psalm 50.7) [. . .]. In truth, our Redeemer alone, who deigned to become incarnate for us, was thereupon born holy because he was conceived without iniquity. He was born the Son of God since he was conceived of a virgin through the working of the Holy Spirit.12 In the Tome Leo the Great had articulated the role of the one Mediator as Redeemer. Against Eutyches (whose name came to represent those whom their opponents called monophysites), he argued that the necessary condition of human redemption was that Christ undertook to share in human weakness but was without sin. Specifically, he did not share the inheritance of original sin because of the unique circumstance of his virginal conception and birth: ‘Overcoming the

11 Bede the Venerable. Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985) p. 164. See also, in the same volume, Bede’s commentary on 2 Peter 2.1: ‘Pelagius [. . .] says, “Christ is not the Redeemer of children in baptism, because, having been conceived without iniquities and having been born without crimes (i.e. contrary to the belief the Fathers saw was stated in Psalm 50.7), they have absolutely no sin for which they ought to be forgiven and therefore Christ is not the saviour of all the elect”’ (pp. 134–35). 12 Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Martin and Hurst, vol. 1, pp. 22, 25.

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originator of sin and death would be beyond us, had not he whom sin could not defile, nor death hold down, taken up our nature and made it his own’. He argued that Christ’s sinless humanity was therefore necessary, as well as his divinity, to human salvation: To pay off the debt of our condition, invulnerable nature was united to a nature that could suffer; so that in a way that corresponded to the remedies we needed, one and the same Mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, could both on the one hand die and on the other be incapable of death.13 Monothelitism The Christology that 1 Timothy 2.5 succinctly embodies was central to the spirituality of Gregory the Great, who often recapitulated Pope Leo’s teaching,14 and the defence of Chalcedon on the divinity and humanity of Christ remained very much a live issue for Leo’s papal successors in the controversy over monothelitism in the seventh century. I have elsewhere discussed evidence of Bede’s knowledge of the controversy.15 Some of his many uses of the Mediator text show awareness of the specific challenge to Chalcedon presented by those who confessed that Christ had two natures but only ‘one operation and one will’. A single example may be cited here. When commenting on Christ’s agony in Gethsemane (Mark 14.38), a Gospel passage often included in the catena of proof texts concerning Christ’s two natures, Bede refers to the name of Eutyches and cites 1 Timothy 2.5, the text at the heart of Leo’s refutation of Eutyches’s failure to believe that Christ truly shared our human nature without lessening his divinity, and that the two distinct natures were united in one person. Leo had emphasised the importance of Christ’s sinless conception and birth, and the canons of the Lateran Council of 649, which comprehensively condemned monothelitism, had further drawn out the implications, namely, that as Christ’s humanity was incorruptibly conceived by the Virgin, and was therefore without original sin, his human will was not in conflict, but in accord, with his divine will. Bede does not focus here on the historical figure of Eutyches, but shows the essential connection between a failure to recognise Christ’s divine and human natures in one person (monophysitism) and the more recent heresy of monothelitism, which failed to recognise Christ’s two distinct but harmonious wills, divine and human. He expounds Christ’s words in Mark 14.38 13 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 77–78. 14 Carole Straw, Gregory the Great. Perfection and Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) pp. 147–61 (see particularly p. 150, n. 11). 15 See ‘Bede and monothelitism’ (Chapter 6) in the present volume.

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as a prophetic refutation of ‘Eutychians’; that is, of those who say, ‘that there was one operation and will in our Lord and Saviour, the Mediator of God and man’: For when it says, the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak (Mark 14.38), it points to two wills: namely a human one, which is of the flesh, and a divine one, which is of God. Whence the human will, because of the infirmity of the flesh, shrinks from suffering, but his divine will accepts it most readily.16 Adapting a patristic convention, Bede presents monothelitism as the revival of an old heresy in a new one, as an outgrowth or manifestation of ‘Eutychianism’ (monophysitism), rather as John IV had accused the northern Irish of reviving the old heresy of Pelagius. But he does not name the heresy itself, except through the formula (‘one operation and one will’) used in the Lateran documents, and his exegesis does not offer a lesson in Church history. It illuminates the orthodox faith for readers of the Gospel, putting them on guard against the continuing temptation to add to, or subtract from, right belief.17 The papacy’s opposition to monothelitism is generally associated with Pope Martin I’s calling of the 649 Lateran Council, but it began with Martin’s predecessors, Honorius (625–38), Severinus (640), John IV (640–42) and Theodore (642–49). In a letter to the patriarch of Constantinople in 634, attempting to bring about a peace with Constantinople that would both preserve Chalcedon and reconcile some of its Eastern critics, Pope Honorius I had twice used 1 Timothy 2.5 and stressed the sinless nature of Christ’s humanity. But in reassuring his correspondent that belief in the two natures of Christ did not mean that Christ had two contrary wills, he had inadvertently precipitated a crisis, for the form of his reference to Christ’s undivided will as ‘one will in Christ’ was open to interpretation as undermining Chalcedonian belief in the distinction of Christ’s two natures, and therefore the fullness of his humanity.18 Forty years later, when the Byzantine emperor was driven by other political preoccupations to seek peace with the papacy on the issue of monothelitism, the sixth general council of the universal Church (the Third Council of Constantinople in 681–82), acknowledging the ancient role of the papacy as defender of the faith, explicitly upheld Chalcedon 16 Bede, In Marci evangelivm expositio, ed. D. Hurst, Corpus christianorum series latina, 120 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960) pp. 617–18, ll. 881–90: Cum enim dicit, Spiritus quidem promptus caro uero infirma, duas uoluntates ostendit humanam uidelicet quae est carnis et diuinam quae est deitatis. Vbi humana quidem propter infirmitatem carnis recusat passionem diuina autem eius est promptissima. 17 Monotheletism was seen as denying Christ’s human will, and therefore his full humanity, which was essential to his saving role in the redemption of humankind. 18 See the partial text of the letter, and the references to the full text, in H. Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, ed. A. Schönmetzer, (Barcelona: Herder, 1965) pp. 166–67, trans. Roy J. Ferrari, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, (St Louis and London: Loreto, 2007) pp. 99–100.

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and Leo, the Lateran synod of 649 and the teachings of Pope Agatho, but still required that Honorius should be named among the Monothelites it condemned.19 Honorius died in 638, and there was a long delay before Constantinople affirmed the election of Severinus, who died in August 640. John IV’s letter to the emperor in 641, Apologia pro Honorio pape, asserted the orthodoxy of Honorius’s intentions and of what the West had understood him to mean, and it rejected the monothelite interpretation which had been put on Honorius’s letter. John vigorously attested to papal orthodoxy, denouncing past heresiarchs and those who were against the Tome of Pope Leo and the Council of Chalcedon. As in his recent letter to Irish churchmen, he linked Psalm 50.7 and 1 Timothy 2.5 in his account of original sin and human redemption. He affirmed belief in the two natures of Christ and specifically the harmony and communion of his divine and human wills, and he pointed to the reason for that harmony by acclaiming the one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who alone was conceived and born without sin: The Holy Spirit said through David [. . .] For behold I was conceived in iniquities: and in sin did my mother conceive me (Psalm 50.7). As in Adam all have sinned (1 Corinthians 15), so, according to the apostle, in Christ all will be justified. And as by the disobedience of one man many were made sinners, so also by the obedience of one man, many shall be made just (Romans 5.19) [. . .] . One and he alone is without sin, the Mediator of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2.5), who was conceived and born free among the dead (Psalm 87.6). Thus in the dispensation of his sacred flesh, he never had two contrary wills, nor did the will of his flesh resist the will of his mind. [. . .] In accord with this method, then, our predecessor [Honorius], is known to have written to the aforenamed Sergius the Patriarch.20 The context of John’s letter to the emperor makes it clear that 1 Timothy 2.5, which had a long association with anti-Pelagian polemic, could also stand as a compressed confession of Chalcedonian Christological orthodoxy. From the sections of John’s letter to the Irish quoted and summarised by Bede, it appears that southern Irish envoys had brought scripta to Rome in the brief reign of Severinus in 640, probably seeking confirmation of their proposal concerning the problematic dating of Easter in 641.21 His successor John was dealing in his response with unfinished business at the ends of the earth. At the same time he

19 s.v. ‘Constantinople, Third Council of’ and ‘Honorius I’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn, ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) pp. 410–11, 791–92. 20 See the text of the letter in Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64), vol. 80, cols 603A–06B (at 603B–C); it is reproduced in part in Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, pp. 169–70, trans. Ferrari, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, pp. 100–01. 21 As Dáibhi Ó Cróinín and others have construed, see n. 7.

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was preparing to hold a synod in Rome which anathematised leading Byzantine ecclesiastics, Sergius, Cyrus and Pyrrhus, who believed there was one operation and will in Christ. He was also composing his letter to the emperor on Christology. Though Bede was aware that Honorius had been condemned at the Third Council of Constantinople,22 we have no evidence that he knew of John’s letter to the emperor. It is clear, none the less, that he was closely familiar with the theological issues it discussed, and there is every reason to suppose that he would have supported the wording of John’s statement of orthodoxy and the quotation of 1 Timothy 2.5 contained in his letter to Irish churchmen. However, he also knew the Pope to have been misinformed about the alleged heretical beliefs and practices of the Irish. In his summary of a part of the letter to the Irish that he omitted, he stresses its assertion that Quartodecimanism had sprung up among the Irish ‘only recently, and that not all the people, but only certain of them, were implicated in it’ (HE 2.19, pp. 200–01). Remarkably, without openly criticising John, Bede echoed the Pope-elect’s statement of doctrinal orthodoxy and his citation of 1 Timothy 2.5 in order to defend the orthodoxy of the Irish monks of Iona. He made it clear that in praising the exemplary character and work of Aidan for the benefit of his readers he was in no way commending Aidan’s lack of knowledge in the matter of the observance of Easter: ‘indeed I heartily detest it, as I have clearly shown in the book which I wrote called De temporibus’ (HE 3.17, pp. 264–65). But Bede also distanced Aidan from the two heresies that John’s letter had denounced: I neither praise nor approve of [Aidan] in so far as he did not observe Easter at the proper time. [. . .] But, nevertheless, I do approve of this, that in his celebration of Easter he had no other thought in his heart, he reverenced and preached no other doctrine than we do, namely the redemption of the human race by the passion, resurrection and ascension into heaven of the one mediator between God and men, even the man Christ Jesus. And therefore he always kept Easter, not as some falsely believe, on the fourteenth day of the moon, like the Jews, no matter what the day of the week was, but on the Lord’s Day which fell between the fourteenth and the twentieth day of the moon. (HE 3.17, pp. 266–67)23 Bede here emphatically defends the Columbans from any charge of Quartodecimanism: Aidan always celebrated Easter on a Sunday because of his belief that the resurrection of our Lord took place on the first day of the week, ‘and also in hope of our resurrection which he, together with holy Church, believed would 22 The Reckoning of Time, trans. Wallis, p. 231. 23 The point is made earlier in HE 3.3 (pp. 218–19): ‘For after the manner of his people [. . .] he was accustomed to celebrate Easter Sunday between the fourteenth and the twentieth day of the moon’. The repetition of this in 3.17 thus brings together the defence against the two heresies with which John had charged some of the Irish.

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undoubtedly happen on this same first day of the week now called the Lord’s Day’.24 There is no reference to their dating of the equinox, and the passage rebuts any suspicion of Pelagianism that might have arisen from their lunar limits. Aidan believed in the necessity of Christ’s passion, resurrection and ascension for human salvation, and that Christ’s full divinity and humanity, combined in his one person as Mediator, were essential in effecting that redemption. The citation of 1 Timothy 2.5 in this context acts as a condensed credo of their orthodox belief.

2. The synod of Whitby The account of the synod of Whitby, the formal centre-piece of the Historia Ecclesiastica, has been seen as a sustained example of rhetorical inventio, its subject matter broadly paralleled with the account of the early Church in Acts 15.25 But the Whitby debate is also dense with arguments used in earlier stages of the Easter controversy in the Mediterranean world and by Insular writers, notably Columbanus and Cummian, and by Bede himself in describing Augustine of Canterbury’s debate with the British bishops. Though the particular Easter tables at issue varied in different times and places, it is noteworthy that the arguments invariably concerned much wider issues that found a particularly powerful symbolic expression in the idea of a ‘universal Easter’. The dating of Easter centred on the difficult task of harmonising the Old Testament accounts of the Passover, and the divine instructions for its annual commemoration, with the various New Testament settings of Christ’s passion and resurrection in the context of the Jewish feast of Passover.26 Recent scholarship, which has done so much to illuminate the further technical difficulties involved in producing Easter tables that could give practical effect to the exegesis (such as determining the time of the vernal equinox, the age of the moon or even the beginning of a day, and in the transposition from a lunar to a solar calendar), acknowledges that computus was an aspect of exegesis.27 Two of the underlying

24 Beliefs voiced by Wilfrid at Whitby (HE 3.25, pp. 302–03) and Ceolfrith in his letter (HE 5.21, pp. 544–45). 25 Roger Ray, ‘The Triumph of Greco-Roman rhetorical assumptions in pre-Carolingian Historiography’, in The Inheritance of Historiography, 350–900, ed. C. Holdsworth and T.P. Wiseman (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1986) pp. 67–84 (at 79–81). Cf. Ray, ‘Triumph of Greco-Roman rhetorical assumptions’, p. 80 and ‘What do we know about Bede’s commentaries?’ Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale 14 (1982) pp. 5–20 (at 19–20); Glenn Olsen, ‘Bede as Historian: the evidence from his observations on the Life of the First Christian Community at Jerusalem’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33.4 (1982) pp. 519–30. 26 T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 391–96. 27 See e.g. Faith Wallis, ‘Introduction’ to Bede: the reckoning of time, pp. xv–lxxxv; Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp. 396–405; Immo Warntjes, ‘Introduction’ to The Munich Computus: text and translation, Irish computistics between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede and its reception in Carolingian times (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010) pp. cvii–cci.

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assumptions of that interpretative tradition may bear further comment in connection with Bede’s account of Whitby. First, it was recognised that although the fullness of divine revelation had been handed by Christ to the apostles, understanding of the faith was further unfolded or clarified by the fathers and at various moments in the Church’s history when particular need arose, as at the apostles’ meeting in Jerusalem (Acts 15), or in the defence of the Church against heresy and schism. Such moments occasioned debate and often dissension until a consensus within the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, discerned whether or not a particular view was in accordance with the apostolic tradition. Often this consensus emerged or was accepted only over a long period of time, as in the case of the date of Easter, which Eusebius reports was ‘a case of no small importance’ already in the second century.28 Secondly, it was also recognised that the faith Christ handed down through the apostles was received within the Church in every age at various levels of comprehension, but that the understanding of the deeper mysteries of the Gospel was divinely granted only to ‘the perfect’, those who were humble and pure of heart. Adomnán’s Vita Columbae was to describe Columba as just such a vessel of the Holy Spirit; the description of the founder of Iona receiving divine revelation of profound scriptural mysteries evokes the contemplative image of St John on Patmos.29 A problem of discernment arose, therefore, when such revered figures and their followers seemed in some matter not to be in accord with the consensus of the Church, and particularly when, as at Whitby, both sides of the debate claimed that their tradition originated with an apostle. A satisfactory solution could not be reached by a contest in holiness. These and related issues concerning the interpretation of Scripture had long exercised the Church, and their best-known articulation is in the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lérins (434 AD). He explained that the canon of Scripture is complete and sufficient, but since ‘it seems possible to elicit from it as many opinions as there are men’, it is necessary to interpret it within the catholic tradition of the fathers to ensure the preservation of ‘that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all’ (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est).30 His work expounds at length the meaning of its opening scriptural text (Chapter 1.1), ‘Ask your fathers and they will show you; your elders and they will tell you’

28 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.23.1, quoted in J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius (London: S.P.C.K., 1987) p. 138. 29 See Chapter 9 in the present volume, ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord in the Life of St Columba’, pp. 238–41. 30 Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, Chapter 2.6, in A Commonitory, trans. C.A. Heurtley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, vol. XI (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991) pp. 131–56 (at 132). See also Documents Illustrating Papal Authority, a.d. 96–454, ed. E. Giles (London: S.P.C.K., 1952) pp. 270–78, and J. Stevenson, Creeds, Councils and Controversies. Documents illustrating the history of the Church, AD 337–461 (London: S.P.C.K., 1989) pp. 322–24.

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(Deuteronomy 32.7). Vincent argues that the Church is the guardian of the doctrines deposited in her charge and never diminishes them, never adds to them. He illustrates the work of the successors of the blessed apostles in zealously defending the integrity of the faith they received (Chapters 6 and 32). He cites the rebuttal of many heresies, especially the work of the Council of Ephesus in collecting the opinions of the fathers and following their ‘consentient and unanimous judgment’ in establishing the rule of divine truth (Chapter 29). Outside of such consensus, however, whatever an individual holy man has held, ‘be he bishop, confessor or martyr, which is other than or contrary to all [. . .] must be regarded as altogether lacking the authority of the common’ (Chapter 28). Progress within the Church is defined in terms not of change, but of growth in understanding of the same faith, and is likened to physical growth from infancy to adulthood, so that ‘what before was believed in simplicity might thenceforward be believed more intelligently’ and taught and practised more fervently (Chapter 23).31 The synod of Whitby was summoned by Oswiu ‘to inquire as to which was the truer tradition’, with the intention that all should then follow it. Colman’s case at Whitby rested on humbly following the fathers, a precept that was fundamental to the monastic life. The scriptural text most often used to express this idea of humility in monastic literature, notably by Cassian, and which had already been cited in the context of the Easter debate, both by Columbanus and by Cummian, was the same text expounded by Vincent of Lérins in his Commonitorium: ‘Ask your father and he will show you; your elders and they will tell you’ (Deuteronomy 32.7).32 In the early Church Polycrates had explained to Victor of Rome that the celebration of Easter by the churches of Asia, observing the fourteenth day of the Passover according to the Gospel, followed the rule of faith, ‘neither adding anything, nor taking away’ (cf. Deuteronomy 4.2). In this, he said, he was following the example of a host of saints, including John of the golden breastplate, ‘who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord’.33 Anatolius’s version of events describes how the bishops of Asia: 31 Bede notes that Benedict Biscop had entered the community at Lérins, ‘received the tonsure, and with proper care kept the discipline of the rule, marked with a monastic vow’, spending two years training in monastic life before returning to Rome: see Historia abbatum. 2, in Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. and trans. Christopher Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013) pp. 26–27. 32 Cassian, Conference 2.10.1, 14, 16, in John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 1997) pp. 90–91, 98–99; Cummian’s letter De controversia paschali, ed. and trans. M. Walsh and D. Ó Cróinín (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988) pp. 90–91; Columbanus, Epistula 1.2, in Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G.S.M. Walker (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970) pp. 2–3. Bede records that the saintly Chad was to counsel his monks to ‘follow with unwearied constancy the Rule of life he had taught them and which they had seen him carry out, or had learned from the words and deeds of the fathers who had gone before’ (HE 4.3, pp. 340–41). See Chapter 9 in the present volume, ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord in the Life of St Columba’, pp. 223–6. 33 Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, 5.24, trans. G.A. Williamson, rev. A. Louth (London: Penguin, 1989) pp. 171–72.

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who have accepted without question the rule by irreproachable authority, namely of John, who leant on the Lord’s bosom and who was no doubt the imbiber of spiritual teachings, celebrated the Pasch [. . .] whenever it was luna xiv and when the lamb was sacrificed to the Jews, once the equinox was over’. They did not assent to ‘the authority of certain men, that is of Peter and Paul, and their successors [. . .] who taught that the feast of our Lord’s resurrection could only be celebrated on a Sunday’.34 Anatolius affirms his own custom of extending the Pasch, if necessary to luna xx, to ensure that Easter was celebrated on the Lord’s Day.35 Colman too claimed to follow the Easter custom of the apostle John, which he believed to underlie that of the holy Columban fathers, but he made no reference, slighting or otherwise, to Peter and his successors. He evoked the Gospel image of John as the disciple whom the Lord specially loved, who was ‘reckoned worthy to recline on the breast of the Lord’ (qui super pectus Domini recumbere dignus fuit), and added that ‘all the world acknowledges [John’s] great wisdom’, an allusion to the patristic tradition that the pectoris sinus was the secret place of wisdom, and that John, recumbens in sinu Iesu at the Last Supper (John 13.23), had received spiritual wisdom from its fount.36 The devotion to St John, though well documented in early Irish Latin literature, was not a peculiarly Irish devotion: Colman was here appealing to a universal acknowledgement of John’s particular closeness to Christ.37 Bede strongly perpetuated this image of St John, as it had been transmitted by Augustine, in his own exegesis.38 He emphasised that in his Gospel St John ‘sets down for us the privilege of the preeminent love by which he deserved to be more amply honoured by the Lord than the other apostles’. John’s leaning on Christ’s breast was a sign that his Gospel would include ‘the hidden mysteries of divine majesty more copiously and profoundly than the rest of the pages of sacred Scripture. For because in 34 De ratione paschali 7, in The ante-Nicene Christian Pasch: De ratione paschali: The Paschal tract of Anatolius, bishop of Laodicea, ed. Daniel P. McCarthy and Aidan Breen (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003) pp. 48, 66. 35 De ratione paschali 8, ed. McCarthy and Breen, p. 67. 36 See Anatolius’s use of Origen’s commentary on John, in De ratione paschali, pp. 122–23; St Augustine’s commentary on John 13.23 in his Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans. J. Gibb and J. Innes, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. P. Schaff, vol. VII (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991) p. 312 (Tractate lxi.6); Bede, Homily 2.21, in Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Martin and Hurst, vol. 2, p. 213; The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp. 20–21 (Chapter 10), where it is recorded that at Whitby Colman claimed that in celebrating Easter on the fourteenth day his fathers followed the example of St John ‘like his disciples Polycarp and others’. 37 De controversia paschali, ed. Walsh and Ó Cróinín, p. 70. 38 Bede, Homily 1.8 on John 1.1–4, in Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Martin and Hurst, vol. 1, p. 73; cf. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans. J. Gibb and J. Innes, p. 208 (Tractate xxxvi.1). For the description of sancti Iohannes petali in Cummian’s letter, see De controversia paschali, ed. Walsh and Ó Cróinín, pp. 68–69, n. 89.

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Jesus’s breast are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2.3), it was fitting’, Bede argued, ‘that the one who leaned upon his breast was the one to whom he had granted a larger gift of unique wisdom and knowledge than to the rest’.39 Wilfrid did not challenge this view of John, nor did he deny the holiness of Iona’s founding father, Columba. He explained that St John’s literal observance of the law concerning the dating of the Passover in his celebration of Easter occurred ‘when the Church was still Jewish in many respects’. The early Church did not immediately come to an understanding of the universal nature of the faith. Wilfrid recalled that the apostolic task of persuading Jewish Christian converts to relinquish their increasingly divisive literal observation of the customs of the Mosaic law had been more difficult than the task of requiring gentile converts ‘to abandon their idols which are of devilish origin’ (cf. Psalm 95.5). He acknowledged that St Paul had continued to observe certain customs of the law (Acts 16.3), but explained it was in order to avoid scandalising converts among the Jewish diaspora who were ‘all zealous for the law’. Wilfrid only gives brief examples, but the context of the quoted passages from Acts makes it clear that Paul observed certain customs of the law after he had become convinced such customs were no longer necessary, and even after the decision of the meeting of the elders in Jerusalem not to enforce them on Gentiles.40 For patristic commentators, Paul’s motivation was crucial. Cassian had cited the same potentially problematic examples from Acts mentioned by Wilfrid at Whitby when he described how St Paul had his half-Gentile disciple Timothy circumcised and had himself undergone ritual purification, not for his own benefit but for the good of those under the law, who ‘had received the faith of Christ in such a way as still to be held by the ritual of legal ceremonies’.41 Gregory the Great recalled Peter’s acceptance of Paul’s public refutation of his view that gentile converts should be circumcised (Galatians 2.11, 13), citing it as an example of Peter’s humility and of the importance of following the truth when it is recognised.42 Though Bede readily concurred with the precept,

39 Homily 1.9, in Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Martin and Hurst, vol. 1, pp. 85, 88; cf. p. 94: ‘with the clearest of assertions he disclosed all the hidden mysteries of divine truth and true divinity, to an extent that was permitted to no other mortals’. 40 Wilfrid cites Acts 16.3, 18.18, 21.20–26; cf. 1 Corinthians 8.6–13. See R.D. Ray, ‘Bede, the exegete, as historian’, in Famulus Christi, ed. G. Bonner (London: S.P.C.K., 1976) pp. 125–40, who notes (p. 126) that ‘in his Retractatio [in Actus Apostolorum] written not long after the Historia, Bede re-assessed Acts 16.3 along the very lines followed in the Whitby narrative’. 41 Cassian, Conference 17.20.5, in John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey, p. 600; see also 17.20.1, 4, and 9 (pp. 599–602). 42 Homily 6.9 in The Homilies of Saint Gregory the Great on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, trans. Theodosia Gray (Etna, California: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1990) pp. 221–22. See the discussion by Jennifer O’Reilly in Bede. On the Temple, trans. Seán Connolly, pp. xlii–xliv, and Paul Meyvaert, ‘A letter of Pelagius II composed by Gregory the Great’, in Gregory the Great. A Symposium, ed. John C. Cavadini (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995) pp. 94–116 (at 104).

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in the context of the Whitby debate he avoids drawing attention to any dissension between the apostles or to Peter’s change of mind on the matter. Pope Gregory in expounding his gradualist approach to the conversion of pagans had cited the example of God allowing the Israelites, when liberated from Egyptian bondage, to preserve the pagan custom of blood sacrifice, but to redirect it ‘to the true God and not to idols’ (HE 1.30). At Whitby the argument moves from the example of the people of God in the Old Testament. Wilfrid refers to an age when the light of the Gospel was spreading throughout the world, so that it was no longer necessary or even lawful for believers ‘to be circumcised or to offer God sacrifices of flesh and blood’. He implies a parallel between the lingering preservation in the early Church of the custom of circumcision, belonging to the pre-Gospel age, and early practice in the dating of Easter. He argues that literal observance of the customs of the Mosaic law was once permitted in the Church, and was practised by undeniably holy men, but at a certain stage of its growth; when the apostles more fully understood the universal nature of the Gospel, the consensus was that these particularist practices, if continued, would be harmful to unity. Similarly, in De tabernaculo Bede had argued that certain things – including the keeping of the Sabbath and the rite of the bloody sacrifices of the paschal lamb – were once devoutly observed by the people of God in the time of the Old Testament in accordance with the Lord’s command, but ‘now that the Gospel gleams throughout the world, they are ordered to be observed in the Church not according to the letter but according to the mystical sense’. From among the passages in Scripture that show the accomplishment of this change, Bede cites the account ‘in the Acts of the Apostles in which believers from among the Gentiles were forbidden to be circumcised and were enjoined to be obedient to the grace of the Gospel, without the ceremonial sacrifices of the law’.43 At Whitby Wilfrid directly ascribed to St Peter the Church’s transition from the literal observance of the Mosaic law in dating Easter to its celebration on a Sunday, the day of the resurrection. He claimed continuity within the Church of the apostolic practice of observing Easter on a Sunday and between the fifteenth and twenty-first days of the moon, established by Peter at Rome and followed by John’s disciples, which was confirmed, and not invented, at the Council of Nicaea, until the present day. He therefore states that ‘having heard the decrees of the apostolic see, or rather of the universal Church [. . .] confirmed as they are by the holy Scriptures’, it would undoubtedly be sinful to disobey the catholic rule on Easter. In his youth Wilfrid had spent some years at Lindisfarne, ‘diligently striving to learn how to live a life of monastic purity’; though remaining untonsured, he had become ‘in no small measure distinguished for the virtues of humility and

43 Bede: On the Tabernacle, trans. Arthur G. Holder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994) pp. 40–41.

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obedience, which are more important than the tonsure’; he was ‘deservedly loved, honoured and cherished by his elders as though he were one of themselves’ (HE 5.19). He had, however, ‘gradually come to realise that the traditional way of virtue followed by the Irish was by no means perfect’ (animaduerit [. . .] minime perfectam esse uirtutis uiam), and resolved to go to Rome to observe ‘ecclesiastical and monastic practices’ in the apostolic see.44 Bede specifically notes that the Lindisfarne brothers had commended his plan and encouraged him to carry out his purpose. In Rome Wilfrid learned ‘the correct manner of calculating Easter’ from Archdeacon Boniface, counsellor to the Pope (HE 5.19). During the inquiry at Whitby as to ‘which was the truer tradition’, however, Wilfrid did not give the detailed exegetical or technical reasons why Peter’s celebration of Easter on the Sunday after the full moon, within the lunar limits xv–xxi, offered a better way, and he made relatively little reference to the tables which provide its particular date in a given year.45 He briefly indicated that when Peter was in Rome he came to realise that Easter ought to be kept on the Lord’s Day, on which the resurrection had taken place. He presented Peter’s practice as a spiritual interpretation of the custom and precepts of the law which John had followed literally: ‘So this evangelical and apostolic tradition does not abolish the law but rather fulfils it’. Wilfrid here unmistakably refers to Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount which stresses the need for the spiritual interpretation of the letter of the law, down to its smallest letter and serif: ‘Do not think that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil [. . .] one iota or one apex shall not pass of the law till all be fulfilled’ (Matthew 5.17–18). It was a passage that Bede repeatedly expounded in his exegetical works.46 This dominical text had a key role in patristic teaching on the sufficiency and harmony of inspired Scripture, the Old Testament and the New interpreted as a whole, in revealing God’s commands. The idea that nothing should be added to or taken from Scripture (cf. Deuteronomy 4.2) was used in much earlier paschal debates recorded by Eusebius. It was also used by Columbanus.47 Ceolfrid similarly applied the prohibition of adding or subtracting to Scripture in establishing lunar limits. His letter to Nechtan twice notes that apostolic tradition decreed that the time of the

44 See also the case of Oftfor, who had studied the Scriptures at Hild’s monasteries: aspiring to greater perfection (tandem perfectoriora desiderans), he went first to Canterbury, and then to Rome, ‘which in those days was considered to be an act of great merit’ (HE 4.23). 45 W. Stevens, ‘Sidereal time in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Voyage to the Other World, ed. Calvin Kendall and Peter Wells (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) pp 125–52 (at 126–28). 46 See Chapter 9 in the present volume, ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord in the Life of St Columba’, p. 229, n. 53. 47 Columbanus, Epistula 1.4, in Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. Walker, p. 6; Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. Williamson, V.24 (p. 171): ‘We for our part keep the day scrupulously, without addition or subtraction’. For further discussion, see Chapter 9 in the present volume, ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord in the Life of St Columba’, pp. 226–30.

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Passover according to the law ‘must by no means be anticipated or diminished’ (HE 5.21). Wilfrid makes the same point in saying that the Columban monks (unlike St John), ‘sometimes clearly keep Easter Day before full moon, that is on the thirteenth day of the moon, which is never mentioned in the law’. Colman responded to Wilfrid’s charge by repeating that his Easter practice was based on that of the Columban fathers, men beloved of God; he could not accept that such men could have acted contrary to the holy Scriptures, ‘seeing that there were many of them to whose holiness the heavenly signs and the miracles they performed bore witness’. Wilfrid has not endeared himself to modern readers by his retort: ‘I might point out that at the judgement, many will say to the Lord that they prophesied in his name and cast out devils and did many wonderful works, but the Lord will answer that he never knew them’ (cf. Matthew 7.22, 23). The quotation comes from the patristic chain of texts which warns against the assumption that miracle-working and other outer signs necessarily signify holiness; the same chain asserts the importance of humility and love as the Christ-given signs of the true discipleship of those who wear Christ’s yoke. As discussed elsewhere, the argument carried by this exegetical chain is prominent in Gregory’s Epistle 28 to Augustine of Canterbury, in Bede’s account of Augustine’s meetings with the British bishops (HE 1.31, 2.2) and in the writings of Cyprian, Cassian and Columbanus. It had long been used in the context of urging the unity of the Church and the peaceful settlement of disputes, including disputes about Easter.48 Like Cassian in his accounts of some of the early desert monks, Wilfrid acknowledged that the early Columban fathers in their rustic simplicity (simplicitate rustica) loved God and ‘were indeed servants of God and beloved by him’. He argued, however, that the holiness of the Columban fathers lay not in their miracles but in the fact that they had ‘followed all the laws of God as they had learned them’. Their observance of Easter did not do them much harm while no one had come to show them ‘a more perfect rule’ (perfectioris decreta) to follow; their holiness was such, he argued, that they would have followed the catholic rule (catholicus calculator) if it had been shown them (cf. 1 Corinthians 12.31). From this vision of humility co-existing in the early Columban fathers with a state of imperfect knowledge, Wilfrid again turned to the emotive depiction of the Columbans ‘in one corner of the remotest of islands’, living in the different circumstances of the year 664, who preferred their own local traditions to the known decrees of the universal Church of Christ. How far Columban standards of holiness had fallen since Aidan’s day the reader may judge by what Bede says in the chapter following the synod of Whitby, which is a significantly placed reflection on the ascetic life on Lindisfarne in the days of Colman and his predecessor Fintan: ‘the sole concern of these teachers was to serve God and not the world’ (HE 3.26). Wilfrid’s argument was not that the latter-day Columbans were generally

48 See Chapter 5 in the present volume, ‘St Paul and the sign of Jonah: theology and scripture in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum’, pp. 125–29.

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at a carnal stage of practising the faith, but that, in the matter of Easter, they were certainly lacking in spiritual discernment when they followed their fathers’ erroneous outer customs concerning the dating of Easter rather than their inner humility in being always ready to follow a better way than their own when it was revealed to them. Wilfrid warns contemporary Columbans against the idolatry of giving a servant of God – however holy Columba may have been – the worship due to God himself.49 In a letter addressed to ‘the Abbot Ségéne, successor of the holy Columba and other holy men, and Beccan the hermit’, Cummian had directly questioned the good faith of those rejecting the Roman Easter. He had, ‘in accordance with Deuteronomy’, asked the opinion of his fathers and elders on Rome’s attitude to their dating of Easter and reported that those who met at Mag Léne (ca. 630) said, ‘Our predecessors enjoined [. . .] that we should adopt humbly without doubt better and more valid proofs proffered by the font of our baptism and our wisdom and by the successors of the Lord’s apostles’.50 Cummian accused the unnamed ‘whited wall’ (Acts 23.3; Matthew 23.27), who disrupted the agreement to celebrate Easter with the universal Church, of only ‘pretending to follow the tradition of our elders’. The implication was that he was not humbly obeying Deutronomy 32.7 and the commandments of God, but simply following his or his community’s own will (cf. Matthew 15.2). Cummian concluded by warning that the failure to recognise errors and acknowledge ‘more certain proofs’, and the preference for holding a perverse opinion rather than abandon one that has been strongly defended, ‘is proper to heretics’.51 Wilfrid does not characterise Colman as a whited wall in Bede’s account of the debate at Whitby. He does question the Columbans’ interpretation of what was meant by ‘following the fathers’ on this particular issue. He also points out that they were not, in fact, following the practice of St John or the Easter cycle of Anatolius as they thought.52 He argues that, in contrast, the canonical Easter was founded by St Peter, in conformity with Scripture, confirmed by Nicaea and the decrees of the apostolic see, and observed by the universal Church of Christ. Wilfrid contrasts the authority rather than the holiness of Columba with the pre-eminent authority of Peter, the chief of the apostles. By implication his case refers to the episcopal as well as apostolic dignity of Peter in which his heirs also share. Both 49 Augustine in his commentary on Psalm 96 had designated this as a kind of idolatry, alluding to St Peter’s order that Cornelius should not prostrate himself in his presence, and citing St Paul’s reproof of Gentiles who saw the apostles ‘as gods come down to us in the likeness of men’ (Acts 14.10, 14, 15): St Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part 3, vols 15–20 (New York: New City Press, 2000–04), vol. 18, pp. 449–51. 50 De controversia paschali, ed. Walsh and Ó Cróinín, pp. 91, 93, ll. 259–68. 51 De controversia paschali, p. 95, ll. 294–96. 52 (which has the effect of exonerating them from the charge of Quartodecimanism.) See Wallis on the Liber Anatolii, ‘Introduction’, pp. lvi–lix, who comments that, at Whitby, ‘Colman defended the Celtic criteria, while Wilfrid attacked the Celtic cycle’, p. lix; McCarthy and Breen, De ratione paschali.

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Wilfrid and Colman acknowledged that Christ had given the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter (Matthew 16.18, 19), but they are shown to be at different stages in understanding the full significance of this text for the observance of Easter. Wilfrid did not mention that Rome’s adoption of the Dionysian Easter was relatively recent; his concern, as articulated in Bede’s account of Whitby, was to assert the divinely appointed role of Peter’s successors in safeguarding the apostolic faith and its unfolding interpretation through the inspired consensus of the universal Church. The Columbans were now required to see the ‘universal’ Easter not as a man-made innovation, but as an integral part of that apostolic faith, and as a sign of fellowship and unity within the Church. After Oswiu had acknowledged his obedience to St Peter at the close of the Whitby debate, all present, both high and low, ‘having abandoned their less than perfect customs’ (abdicata minus perfecta institutione), hastened to accept those things which they had ‘recognised to be better’ (HE 3.25), though there was to be a delay of fifty years after Colman’s peaceful withdrawal from Lindisfarne before the Ionans too were ‘brought to a perfect way of life (ad perfectam uiuendi normam) in matters wherein they were lacking’ (HE 5.22). To summarise. In his account of the synod of Whitby, and in the Historia Ecclesiastica as a whole, Bede constantly shifts the reader’s perspective on the Columbans. What they were lacking sometimes seems hugely important, but sometimes their error in the dating of Easter serves to offset just how far advanced they were in the process of perfection. The geographical remoteness of the island of Iona is similarly presented from a variety of viewing-points. Bede uses it to evoke classical and biblical images of barbarians beyond the frontier of Roman civilisation and pagan islanders at the ends of the earth, receiving the law and enlightenment from the centre. But he also overturns too literal an understanding of the centrality of Jerusalem and papal Rome by highlighting the Ionan community’s own providential role as a centre of the Church’s mission, following, like the missionaries from Rome, in the tradition of the apostles in Jerusalem. For part of its history the Columban community also recalls New Testament images of zealous Jewish converts to Christianity in Jerusalem whose understanding of the faith still retains some trace of religious idol-worship through excessive veneration of their own man-made traditions. Cumulatively, these different views reveal that the service of God, even among its most holy practitioners, is a process of continuing conversion from the service of idols. The process is dependent on the mercy of God and will only be completed and brought to perfection in heaven. Bede’s account of Iona is a description of a church in a particular time and place which has relevance for the Church in all times and places. Choosing ‘the better way’, he implies, is the vocation of the faithful in every age.

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While commentators have acknowledged the importance of the monastic life of Iona to the Vita Columbae (VC),1 the book has also been discussed in the context of dynastic and ecclesiastical politics at the time of its composition shortly before 700 (Herbert 1988; Sharpe 1995). It has been seen, in part, as ‘Adomnán’s answer to Northumbrian attacks on Columba’ which had been made during the Easter controversy and as a response to the pressure on Iona exerted by the Roman party in Ireland and the primatial claims of Armagh (Picard 1982, 174; 1984). Important work has been done on the work’s sources and literary character. It features vivid circumstantial details drawing on oral and written testimonies of Columba as well as examples of his continuing power from beyond the grave, as experienced by Adomnán, the ninth abbot of Iona (679–704), and other named eyewitnesses. Adomnán’s tripartite account of the saint’s gift of prophecy, his miraculous powers and converse with angels also testifies to Columba’s holiness according to universally respected literary models (Herbert 1988). Gertrud Brüning long ago identified passages which echo Evagrius’s translation of Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus and the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (Brüning 1917); the structure of the Vita Columbae and the patterning of its miracle stories have since been compared with other seventh-century Irish saints’ lives and with earlier continental hagiography (Picard 1985; Stancliffe 1989). A good deal remains to be done, however, on the use of Scripture in the VC. This chapter examines some examples of scriptural passages which Adomnán actually quotes and biblical parallels he evokes; it suggests that Scripture provides not simply authenticating models for some episodes in his life of Columba, but an interpretation of them in the manner of the monastic tradition of lectio divina, which is often expounded through his narrative. The chapter concludes with a reading in this tradition of the sustained account [80] of the last days of Columba (VC III.23), which illustrates Adomnán’s monastic objectives and inspiration but also reveals unexpected insights into aspects of the Easter controversy.

1 The VC is referred to in the edition and translation of Anderson and Anderson (1961; rev edn Anderson 1991).

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The covenant Bede and Adomnán, Constantine and Joshua ( VC I.1) The book’s opening story of Columba and the Saxon king Oswald has been seen as part of an aggrandising claim for the role of Iona: Adomnán’s manipulation of Old Testament models in his portrait of Columba as the champion of rightful kings reveals that Adomnán himself, as Columba’s successor, ‘was bidding for a role in their selection and in the determination of their policies. That was clearly his grand design’ (Enright 1985, 100–02). Others have read the episode partly as a measured answer to the Northumbrians after Whitby or a counterpoise to the cult of Cuthbert at Lindisfarne (Picard 1982, 172–75). A vision of Columba appeared to the exiled Saxon ruler Oswald before his battle against the British king Cadwalla and assured him: ‘The Lord has granted to me that at this time your enemies shall be turned to flight’ (VC I.1). Though vastly outnumbered by the enemy, Oswald was victorious in the land of the Saxons which, until then, had been darkened by paganism. Adomnán’s opening story thus demonstrates Columba’s posthumous prophetic and intercessory power and presents Iona’s founder as the heavenly patron of the evangelisation of the land of the Saxons. Yet Adomnán does not use this episode as a partisan opportunity to vaunt or even mention the importance of the Columban monks of Iona, either in baptising Oswald while he had been in exile ‘among the Irish’ or in evangelising the English after Oswald’s victory in 634. It was left to Bede to record Oswald’s invitation of the Iona mission to Northumbria during the abbacy of Séigíne and the setting up of its base at Lindisfarne under the exemplary figure of Áedán (HE 3.3, 5, 17).2 Bede’s account of Oswald does not include the vision of Columba and draws a parallel with Constantine (Stancliffe 1995, 50–51). The two versions of the Oswald story perhaps bear further comment which may help clarify Adomnán’s use of Scripture. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History ix, had described Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge over the tyrannical Maxentius. Bede describes God’s latter-day triumph in the victory of Oswald against ‘the outrageous tyranny of the British king’ at the brook called Deniseburn (HE 3.1). In the Life of Constantine i.26–29, Eusebius tells how Constantine had been commanded by Christ to make a [81] likeness of the trophy of a cross revealed to him in a vision and to use it as a safeguard in battle. Bede pictures Oswald setting up a newly made cross as a standard or trophy and praying with his army for God’s help in a just war against the enemy at a place called Heavenfield, a name which was ‘an omen of future happenings; it signified that a heavenly sign (caeleste tropaeum) was to be erected there, a heavenly victory won’ (HE 3.2). Oswald, who was the first to introduce the cross into Bernicia, took the initiative in inviting Irish monks to evangelise the whole people whom he now ruled and

2 The HE is referred to in the edition and translation of Colgrave and Mynors (1969).

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gained from God ‘greater earthly realms than any of his ancestors had possessed. In fact he held under his sway all the peoples of Britain, divided among the speakers of four different languages, British, Pictish, Irish and English’ (HE 3.6). The implied parallel is with the victory of Constantine by which the Church was established throughout the various peoples of the Roman empire. In Adomnán’s earlier account there is also a Constantinian element but it is related to the means by which Oswald was assured of divine favour. While he was sleeping in his tent in camp on the eve of battle, the vision of Columba appeared and promised him that his enemies would be turned to flight. Oswald himself described the vision to Séigíne, the reigning abbot of Iona, from whom it was handed down to Adomnán. Constantine told his biographer Eusebius how Christ had appeared to him in his sleep at night (Lactantius has the detail of its being on the very eve of the battle) with the sign which was to safeguard him from his enemies. Adomnán says that, following his victory, Oswald was ‘ordained by God as emperor of the whole of Britain’; Oswald’s rule is seen as the divinely ordained context for the baptism of realms previously pagan. In recalling different aspects of the story of Constantine in their accounts of Oswald, Adomnán and Bede share a providential view of history and a belief in the universal nature of salvation. There are details unique to Adomnán’s account which give a further insight into his particular purpose in telling the story in the Vita Columbae. Quoting from Exodus 15, Eusebius had compared Constantine’s victory over the tyrant Maxentius, whose troops were drowned in the River Tiber, with the victory of Moses and ‘the God-fearing nation of the ancient Hebrews’ when the ‘villainous tyrant’ Pharaoh and the Egyptians were drowned in the Red Sea. Bede does not explicitly retain the parallel but Adomnán interestingly makes the comparison instead with Moses’s successor, Joshua. Unlike Bede, who says that Oswald’s entire army prayed at the trophy cross before the battle, Adomnán says that when Oswald’s followers heard of his vision of Columba, they promised to receive baptism after the prophesied victory; previously ‘all that land of the English was shadowed by the darkness of heathenism and ignorance, excepting the king Oswald himself, and twelve men who had been baptised with him, while he was in exile among the Irish’. The apostolic number twelve is frequently specified in accounts of the founding [82] of churches and missions by those seen as the successors of the apostles, including Columba’s original foundation of Iona (VC III.3). Such an interpretation here may seem at first sight to be precluded because the twelve baptised men who are specified in Adomnán’s account of Oswald’s expedition are lay followers of a military leader. There is, however, a further guide to interpretation in Adomnán’s text. In Oswald’s Constantinian vision on the eve of battle, Columba, ‘radiant in angelic form’, addressed him with words of encouragement which were ‘the same that the Lord spoke to Joshua ben-Nun, before the crossing of the Jordan, after the death of Moses, saying: “Be strong, and act manfully; behold I will be with you” and so on’. The epic story thus begun in the Book of Joshua three times repeats this divine assurance that the promised land would be delivered into the 191

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hands of the children of Israel if they continued to observe God’s law (Joshua 1.6–18; cf. Deuteronomy 31.6–7, 23). They left their camp, led by the Levites carrying the Ark of the Covenant in which the written law was enshrined, and came to the River Jordan whose waters miraculously drew back for them to cross, signifying the living God in their midst. The Lord commanded Joshua to choose twelve men, one from each of the non-priestly tribes of the chosen people, to take twelve stones from the river bed where the priests stood with the Ark (Joshua 3). They were to set up the stones in the camp they pitched at Gilgal on the far side of the Jordan as a perpetual monument of their divine deliverance and to mark the territory which they were to conquer from the enemy with numerically smaller forces. The Old Testament account itself shows that the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land recapitulated the Israelites’ deliverance from the Egyptians in the crossing of the Red Sea at the beginning of their long exile and demonstrated God’s continuing protection of a new generation of his people. God commanded that the meaning of the twelve stones was to be explained to future generations, ‘that all the people of the earth may learn the most mighty hand of the Lord’ (Joshua 4.19–25). In De locis sanctis (DLS) Adomnán records that the pilgrim Arculf actually saw those same twelve stones preserved in the great church at Gilgal; it was ‘built in the place where the sons of Israel first pitched their tent and dwelt in the land of Canaan when they had crossed the Jordan’ (DLS ii.14–15). Adomnán quotes in full the Lord’s command to Joshua to have the twelve men set up the twelve stones (Joshua 4.2–3) and elaborates the point that the church containing those same stones was built on the very site where the tabernacle had been pitched after the Jordan crossing. The Christian site and church building at Gilgal in the Holy Land, ‘honoured with wondrous cult and reverence by the folk of that region’, thus at the literal level of understanding commemorated the historical entrance of the children of Israel and the Ark of the Covenant into the earthly promised land. [83] The Joshua story was interpreted in patristic exegesis as a prefiguring of Christ leading the new chosen people of the universal Church into the heavenly promised land. Joshua’s victory over the enemy occupying the promised land could be read as a spiritual battle. Jesus, the Greek form of Joshua’s name used in the Septuagint (and twice used by Adomnán in DLS ii.13) helped establish the parallel. Jerome described Joshua as: a type of the Lord in name as well as in deed, who crossed over the Jordan, subdued hostile kingdoms, divided the land among the conquering people and who, in every city, village, mountain, river, hill-torrent and boundary which he dealt with, marked out the spiritual realms of the heavenly Jerusalem, that is, of the Church. (Ep 53: Gibson 1894, 99–100) The works of Jerome were well known in Columban monasteries (Meehan 1958, 14); Epistle 53 is warmly commended in Cassiodorus’s Institutes and this 192

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particular passage from the epistle is closely paraphrased by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae 6.2.8. Hillgarth has noted (1984, 8) that the Etymologiae was used by at least ten Irish writers before the end of the seventh century. The patristic interpretation of the Joshua story was to be perpetuated in the tradition of Hiberno-Latin exegesis. The etymological discussion of the nomina sacra in Angers 55, for example, says: just as in the historical sense, Jesus/Joshua the son of Nun, led the children of Israel over into the promised land, similarly, Jesus himself whose name means Saviour or Salvation, led the children of Israel (that is, the souls of those who see God) into the new promised land (that is, into eternal life). Of this land the prophet says: ‘I believe I will see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living’. (Psalm 26.13; cf. Psalm 114.8–9; Psalm 141.6; Latin text in CCSL 108B, 147) Sacramentally, this divine deliverance is effected in baptism. In mystagogical exegesis Joshua’s crossing of the Jordan was commonly a figure of Christ’s sanctification of the baptismal water for believers, and the twelve stones set up in the Jordan were seen to prefigure the apostles whom Christ appointed as ministers of baptism (Matthew 28.19). The twelve stones of the Joshua story prefigure the twelve apostles in the Laterculus Malalianus, which has been ascribed to Adomnán’s older contemporary, Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury 668–90: ‘for each single tribe of Israel, there is one apostle in the New Testament, as if they brought back twelve living stones from the bed of the Jordan’ (Stevenson 1995, 147, 213; cf. 1 Peter 2.5; Galatians 2.9; Ephesians 2.20; Revelation 21.12–14). The image from the opening of the Book of Joshua had already been applied in the sixth century by the British historian Gildas to a still earlier stage of the history of the Church in Britain. During the Roman persecution, [84] the River Thames had opened up at the prayer of the newly converted St Alban to provide him with a pathway which would lead him beyond death to the heavenly city, ‘a route resembling the untrodden way made dry for the Israelites, when the ark of the testament stood for a while on gravel in the midstream of the Jordan’. Gildas notes that Joshua’s military victory, by which the people of God were, historically, settled in the promised land, may be interpreted in its moral (or tropological) sense as the conquest of sin and the establishment of ‘the spiritual Israel’ (Winterbottom 1978, 19–20, 55–56). The original biblical context of the Joshua episode, and the traditional interpretation of its various prophetic levels applying to Christ, to his body the Church, to the individual soul and to eternal life can, therefore, offer an insight into Adomnán’s particular shaping of the Oswald story. His allusion to Joshua does not simply evoke a familiar type of the warrior leader who transmitted and observed God’s law. The fulfilment of Columba’s prophecy of Oswald’s victorious entry from exile into his own promised land, which brought all his people to baptism, 193

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presents a latter-day image of Christ’s deliverance of his new chosen people and of the continuing sacramental and eventual eschatological fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy contained in the Joshua story. Adomnán succinctly presents Oswald’s victory as part of the continuing fulfilment of this Old Testament prefiguring of the Church by combining the Joshua story with a reminiscence of the dream of Constantine, whose divinely ordained military victory had earlier led to the historical establishment of the Church throughout the peoples of the Roman empire. Similarly, it is implied, the darkness of heathenism on the edge of that world in another generation was vanquished by the victory of Oswald who was ‘ordained by God as emperor of the whole of Britain’. God speaks through Columba; like an Old Testament prophet he is sanctified from before birth (VC second Preface) and set over nations and kingdoms (cf. Jeremiah 1.5, 9–10), but his prophetic power transcends partisan claims. Adomnán’s opening chapter shows the saint to be involved in Christ’s universal work of redemption, and so announces a major theme of the book. De locis sanctis and water from the rock ( VC III.10) Bede devoted a good deal of his exegesis to Jerusalem and its temple as an image of the Church on earth, of the individual soul and of the heavenly Jerusalem to which the Church is journeying (O’Reilly 1995). In his account of how the Church of the apostles was taken to the ends of the earth, however, Bede honoured Jerusalem as the historical starting-place of the Church by incorporating extracts from his De locis sanctis, based on Adomnán’s earlier work of that title. The extracts describe in particular the great Constantinian churches which enshrined the hallowed Christian sites of the Nativity, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension, and the Martyrium [85] commemorating the finding of the True Cross (HE 5.16–17). Adomnán makes these stones speak. In De locis sanctis (c. 686–89) Adomnán repeatedly insists that the worthy pilgrim Arculf ‘saw the things that we describe here with his own eyes’ (i.12). Arculf drew sketch plans of the Holy Sepulchre and of three other churches for Adomnán (i.2, 18, 24); he described the physical features of the holy buildings and places, collected local stories and wonder-tales about them and their associated relics, and participated in liturgical ceremonies and devotions at the sites through which the sacred scriptural events they commemorated were made vivid in the lives of the pilgrims. Arculf often used to visit the sepulchre of Christ in the Anastasis ‘and measured its features with his own hand’ (i.2); through an opening in the lid of a reliquary he touched the chalice used at the Last Supper (i.7); he kissed the relic of Christ’s shroud (i.9); he swam to and fro across the Jordan at the site of Christ’s baptism (ii.16). He was ‘a sedulous visitor’ to the church on Mount Olivet which enshrined Christ’s footprints in the place from which he had ascended and once Arculf ‘was actually present [. . .] at the very hour’ to experience the force of the divine wind which filled the church, as it did every year, after the midday mass on the anniversary of the Lord’s ascension. He related that the light from the eight 194

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lamps of this hill-top church at night pours into the hearts of the faithful ‘greater eagerness for divine love and imbues them with a sense of awe coupled with great interior compunction’ (i.24). In the Vita Columbae Adomnán also sketches a holy land, but at the northernmost edge of the Christian world where Christ’s work of redemption, prophesied in the Old Testament, continued to be articulated through Columba. The veracity of the memorials to Columba enshrined within Adomnán’s book is attested by venerable local eyewitnesses in stories full of graphic details of time and place, of coastal weather and Irish names and folklore; by the topography of the island monastery of Iona and places in its area of influence made sacred by the presence of Christ in Columba; by the continuing practice on Iona of the monastic office and the recurring cycle of the liturgical year, some of whose scriptural texts and feasts had been so illumined by the saint. Adomnán’s two works are more complementary in objective and technique than has generally been recognised. O’Loughlin has ably revealed a different aspect of DLS, namely how Adomnán used Arculf’s testimony, supplemented by other historical written evidence, to help clarify details in the literal text of various passages in Scripture concerning the Holy Places, in the manner advocated in Augustine’s guide to hermeneutics, De Doctrina Christiana. O’Loughlin also notes the importance of Jerusalem itself to the monastic life and imagination through its role in Scripture, exegesis and liturgy. He quotes Cassian’s well-known use in Collationes xiv.8 of Jerusalem as an example in a systematic demonstration [86] of how Scripture can be understood both historically and at various spiritual levels – allegorical, anagogical and tropological (O’Loughlin 1992). The critical resolution of any apparent discrepancies or ambiguities in the literal text and its historical meaning is not only compatible with a spiritual interpretation but is its essential preparation. Some topographical and other local features recorded in De locis sanctis prompted Adomnán to comment not only on the literal sense but on the spiritual interpretation of certain Old Testament texts, including Isaiah 33.16–17 and Psalm 44.8; 73.12; 77.16. Like many commentators since Irenaeus and Origen, including Cassian in his demonstration of the fourfold meaning of Jerusalem, Adomnán quotes the example of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 10.4 as a standard authority for the exegetical method by which the inspired text of the Old Testament is read as a figure ‘written for our correction’. It has been suggested that Adomnán’s particular association of 1 Corinthians 10.4 with Psalm 77.16 may be adapted from Cassiodorus’s Expositio Psalmorum (O’Loughlin 1994, 25), but its use within the narrative of DLS and the implications of this for reading the VC have not been explored. Arculf reported that a stream miraculously created at the time of Christ’s birth was still to be seen at Bethlehem, near the church built on the site of the Nativity; Adomnán then expounded the ‘literal text’ of the visible evidence and supposed history of the stream as a graphic sign of a theological truth. It originated in a miracle performed by Christ, ‘of which the prophet sings: “Who brought forth water from the rock” [Psalm 77.16] and the apostle Paul: “Now the rock was Christ” 195

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[1 Corinthians 10.4] – he who, contrary to nature, brought forth a consoling flow for the thirsting people from the hardest rock in the desert’ (DLS ii.3). Adomnán here recalls St Paul’s well-known interpretation of the incident of Moses striking water from the rock during the journey through the desert (Exodus 17.6) as a prefiguring of Christ’s deliverance of his chosen people and of his continuing provision of the life-giving sacraments for the journey to the promised land. This divine assurance or ‘consolation’ to the faithful is embodied in the account in DLS ii.3 that Christ had provided the stream at Bethlehem at his incarnation and ‘from that very day up to our time through the cycles of many centuries [. . .] without any failing or diminution’. Adomnán stresses both this continuity and Christ’s divine identity by citing an additional text to show ‘It is the same power [of God] and wisdom of God’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 1.24) which first brought forth water from the rock at Bethlehem and always keeps its channels full of water. Psalm 77.16 and 1 Corinthians 10.4, texts directly quoted by Adomnán, are both from key scriptural reminiscences of incidents on the Exodus journey, including the crossing of the Red Sea, which Paul interprets as a prefiguring of Christian deliverance through baptism into Christ. The typology of the water from the rock is based not on the thirst of the chosen people of the Old Covenant but on [87] God’s provision for their needs, so it could be read as a prefiguring of the eucharist, but Adomnán gives the common baptismal interpretation. He supplies the narrative detail that when the water used in washing the infant Christ had been poured away, it had flowed into a natural channel in the rock, and had miraculously continued to stream from the rock beside the Church of the Nativity. The apocryphal story of the washing of the Christ Child was traditionally interpreted as an image of his baptism in which he blessed the sacramental cleansing water for believers; it is of interest that Adomnán records, not that the pilgrim Arculf drank from this ‘purest water’, but that he washed in it. In the VC Adomnán describes the miraculous origins of another spring. ‘At one time during the saint’s life in pilgrimage, while he was making a journey’, Columba prayed in a waterless place and blessed a rock from which water then flowed in an abundant cascade (ii.10). How are we to read this? Gregory the Great’s listener in the Dialogues ii.8 readily recognised that the story of St Benedict’s miraculous production of a water supply for three of his monasteries built on a mountain-top showed that ‘like Moses he drew water from the rock’. Gregory corrected his listener’s assumption, however, that this and other such biblically patterned stories simply revealed that Benedict ‘was filled with the spirit of all the saints’; rather, such stories revealed that Benedict ‘had the spirit of him alone who by the grace of his redemption has filled the hearts of all his elect’. Similarly, the brief episode in VC II.10 does more than conventionally glorify Columba through his implied identification with Moses. Adomnán’s narrative detail that the water from the rock was provided to enable Columba to baptise a child interprets the significance of the Old Testament story in accordance with St Paul’s interpretation in 1 Corinthians 10.4. Without directly quoting the scriptural texts used

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to expound the meaning of the miraculous spring at Bethlehem seen by Arculf, the circumstantial local details concerning the child baptised by Columba, such as his Irish name and parents’ place of origin, and the fact that the holy spring, potent in the name of Columba, is still to be seen there ‘even today’, bring to life, here and now, the sacramental continuation of Christ’s work of redemption and provision of spiritual refreshment for his pilgrim people which the Old Testament type prefigured. Such a reading does not require that the incident in the Vita Columbae be regarded as a complete literary fabrication. Patristic commentators insisted that the historical or material truth of biblical texts was not invalidated by the fact that they have a spiritual significance. In the City of God xiii.21 Augustine says it would be arbitrary, for example, to assume there was no material rock from which water flowed when Moses struck it, just because the passage in Exodus 17.6 can be interpreted spiritually, as St Paul did when he said ‘Now the rock was Christ’ (1 Corinthians 10.4). [88] The early development of the Pauline methodology and its application to the spiritual life passed into the monastic tradition particularly through Cassian and Cassiodorus. Expounding 1 Corinthians 10.4, Irenaeus had shown that the divine law and institutions revealed to Moses on the mountain and the events experienced in the desert were prefigurings of things to come, written down for our instruction, so that the chosen people might learn how to persevere in serving God and be called ‘from secondary to primary matters, that is through the figurative to the true, through the temporal to the eternal, through the carnal to the spiritual, through the earthly to the celestial’ (Grant 1997, 148). This was expounded in detail in Origen’s extensive series of homilies on the Pentateuch, in which the entire Exodus story of deliverance and the lifelong pilgrimage through the desert, with repeated experiences of temptation, hunger, thirst and weariness, and of divine consolation provided by resting-places and nourishment on the way, became an image of the spiritual life (Heine 1982; cf. Chadwick 1968, 83–84). MacDonald (1995) has discussed an example of such a parallel in VC II.2, which recalls Exodus 15.22–26, and there is an incident in VC I.37 which, though it does not cite a specific Old Testament text, seems in the light of the tradition outlined here to be open to such an interpretation. Food for the journey ( VC I.37) Baíthíne, who is described as Columba’s cousin, foster-son (alumnus) and one of the original twelve companions, was Columba’s successor as abbot of Iona and shared his feast-day (Anderson 1991, 239; Herbert 1988, 37–39). The VC gives valuable glimpses of his formation and exercise of spiritual authority under Columba. One harvest time Baíthíne was in charge of a group of monks returning, heavily laden, from the fields to the monastery. At the halfway point of their homeward journey they were all revived by an extraordinary sensation of joy and

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sweetness. A senior among them described a fragrance ‘as of all flowers combined into one’, a miraculous lightening of their heavy load so that it seemed no burden, a heat like fire but not painful, and ‘for several days they had this feeling, in the same place, and at the same vesper hour’. Baíthíne discerned that Columba: ‘is much distressed when we are late in reaching him. And for the reason that he does not come in the body to meet us, his spirit meets us as we walk, and in this fashion refreshes and gladdens us’. Hearing these words, they [. . .] worshipped Christ in the holy and blessed man. (VC I.37) In the monks’ eventual recognition of Christ in the spiritual consolation mediated to them by Columba, the reader sees something of the disciples’ delayed recognition of the risen Christ’s sustaining presence with them on the Emmaus road at sunset: ‘Did not our hearts burn within us?’ (Luke 24.32; cf. Psalm 125). The circumstantial details of time and place in Adomnán’s account of the [89] monks’ repeated experience – ‘in the evening’, ‘at the vesper hour’, on their weary homeward journey to the monastery – is a vivid literal realisation of their daily and lifelong spiritual journey to their heavenly home. It recalls the Exodus story of how the Israelites were physically sustained by God on their pilgrimage to the earthly promised land. The Israelites marvelled at the miraculous manna; the very name means ‘What is it?’, Quid est hoc? (Exodus 16.15). Moses explained ‘It is the bread God has given you’. When asked for a sign, Christ interpreted the manna as referring to himself (John 6.30–51); the Old Testament incident prompts the faithful to continue asking the meaning of this divinely provided consolation. Similarly, the Columban monks had begged Baíthíne ‘that he would endeavour to explain to them [. . .] the cause and origin’ of their miraculous experience of spiritual refreshment. The tableau in VC I.37 enacts a central theme in monastic literature. Those addressed in the Rule of the Master, for example, are pictured travelling the road of the pilgrimage of this life, tired, thirsty and burdened with their sins. The divine voice draws them, ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened and I will give you rest [. . .] my yoke is easy and my burden light’ (Matthew 11.28–29), and they are refreshed from a spring of living water (Isaiah 55.1; Eberle 1977, 94–95). In answer to the question ‘What is the holy art that the abbot must teach his disciples in the monastery?’ the Lord replies through the master, outlining the scriptural precepts of the monastic life. The spiritual consolation and sacramental refreshment enjoyed by those who persevere in this life is but a foretaste of the paradisal fruits and flowing rivers awaiting them in ‘the heavenly homeland of the saints’, heady with the fragrance of flowers (Eberle 1977, 117, 138). Columbanus’s Regula Monachorum ix draws on Cassian to warn monks humbly to seek the spiritual counsel of their elders: ‘We are enjoined through Moses: “Ask thy father and he will show thee, thy elders and they will tell thee”’ (Deuteronomy

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32.7). Through such lowliness the monks may learn the lowliness of Christ in order to feel the easiness of his yoke and the lightness of his burden: For lowliness of heart is the repose of the soul when wearied with vices and toils and in so far as it is wholly drawn to the meditation of this [. . .] so far does it enjoy repose and refreshment within, with the result that even bitter things are sweet to it, and things before considered hard and toilsome it feels to be plain and easy. (Walker 1957, 139–41) Drought and relics ( VC II.44) Adomnán’s account of one of Columba’s posthumous blessings also takes up this theme. He describes how the community ended a severe drought on Iona by walking in procession around the lifeless fields with the saint’s relics, elevating the relic of his tunic three times and invoking Columba’s name (II.44). This use of relics recalls a story in Gregory’s Dialogues iii.15 (Brüning [90] 1917, 251; Herbert 1988, 137–38), but it is transformed in Adomnán’s eyewitness account. He places the ceremony after the months of March and April (and therefore after Easter) yet still ‘in the season of spring’ shortly after ploughing and sowing, which might well indicate the period of rogationtide observed in Gallican practice during the three days before the feast of the Ascension. Rogationtide was traditionally a time of supplication characterised by penitential fasting and processions accompanied by the recitation of litanies. Such processions were originally concerned with securing the protection of God and his saints for the newly planted crops and their eventual good harvest, but they could include more general supplications, or be directed to local crises and needs in which the carrying of locally revered relics would have been particularly appropriate. Adomnán’s telling of the story however, does not simply record a memorable historical example of such a procession or reproduce a hagiographical topos. The occasion of the ritual is used to expound its continuing significance for the present community. The narrative focuses on the fulfilment of a prophetic scriptural text but also suggests that Scripture offered models for behaviour and reactions to events, not simply a lens through which the past was viewed. Adomnán says that the severe springtime drought ‘about seventeen years ago’ seemed to threaten the monastery with ‘the Lord’s curse laid upon transgressors, where he says, in the book of Leviticus: ‘“I will give you a sky above like iron, and earth like bronze. Your labour shall be spent in vain. The earth shall yield no produce, nor shall the trees give fruit” and so forth’ (Leviticus 26.19–20; VC II.44). Adomnán specifically says that, ‘Reading this, and in dread of the impending stroke, we formed a plan’, namely to take the tunic worn by Columba at his death and books written by his own hand in solemn procession around the fields. The original context of the scriptural quotation offers an insight into Adomnán’s presentation of an incident which he stresses he personally witnessed. In

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Leviticus 26 God recalls his covenant made through Moses on Sinai (Exodus 20) and renews both his promise and his warning to his people, summarised in solemn benedictions and maledictions: ‘If you walk in my precepts and keep my commandments, and do them, I will give you rain in due seasons. And the ground shall bring forth its increase and the trees shall be filled with fruit’ (Leviticus 26.3–4); conversely, ‘If you do not hear me, nor do all my commandments, if you despise my laws [. . .] I will break the pride of your stubbornness: and I will make to you the heaven above as iron, and the earth as brass. Your labour shall be spent in vain; the ground shall not bring forth her increase; nor the trees yield their fruit’ (Leviticus 26.14–15, 19–20). The passage quoted by Adomnán also appears in the list of divine blessings and cursings which sanction the ten commandments in Deuteronomy 28.23. Such sanctions are reiterated, in whole or in part, several times in the Pentateuch, [91] ritually recapitulating as a rule of life for the present reader the Exodus deliverance and God’s covenant with his chosen people. He promises them a fruitful land, ‘a land of hills and plains, expecting rain from heaven’. If they obey God’s commandments he will give to their land ‘the early rain and the latter rain’, that they may gather in their corn; however, if they depart from him, he will ‘shut up heaven and the rain come not down nor the earth yield her fruit’. Repeatedly he exhorts them: ‘Lay up these my words in your hearts and minds [. . .] teach your children that they meditate on them’ (Deuteronomy 11.8–18). The renewal of the law, divinely inscribed on stone, was received by Moses on the mount and placed in the Ark of the Covenant, which had been made for the purpose at God’s command (Deuteronomy 10.3–5, 8, 11). This archetypal reliquary enshrining the written word of God was ceremonially carried by four Levites on the Hebrews’ exile in the wilderness, leading the people of God on their journey through the desert to the promised land (Deuteronomy 27.2–3). Against such a biblical background, Adomnán’s description of the relic procession around the parched fields of Iona may be seen as rather more than a rain-making ceremony. It is a ritual enactment by the monastic community of its renewed pledge to walk in the divine precepts in order to make the earthly promised land of the monastery itself spiritually fruitful, a foretaste of the heavenly paradise. On their symbolic pilgrimage, the Iona monks carried books written by Columba’s own hand and the tunic worn by Columba ‘in the hour of his departure from the flesh’ (ii.44), when he had crossed over ‘to the heavenly country from this weary pilgrimage’ (iii.23). They exalted him, not only as their founder and intercessor, but as the embodiment of the monastic life they were pledged to live; carrying the relics of one so close to God reassured them of God’s continuing presence with those who keep his commandments. Adomnán does not describe any reliquaries, though it seems reasonable to assume that, by the late seventh century, these relics would have been enshrined; the text suggests that the tunic and at least some of the books remained accessible and were exposed on occasion. There is a striking contemporary analogue for the concept underlying the Iona ceremony in the panegyric beginning Benchuir bona regula, ‘Bangor of the good monastic rule’, preserved in the seventh-century Antiphonary of Bangor, which 200

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pictures the monastic community of Bangor itself figured in the Old Testament image of the Ark of the Covenant, protected by cherubim and carried by four men. This is a monastic and local application of the patristic interpretation of the Ark as representing the Church, the place of the divine presence among the new chosen people on their pilgrimage through the desert exile of this life to the heavenly paradise and the new Jerusalem. The Old Testament Ark of the Covenant which, when not being carried, stood in the Holy of Holies in the desert tabernacle and later in the temple in Jerusalem, could represent both [92] of these earthly sanctuaries and, like them, was a common figure of Christ’s body, the Church, and of the individual Christian called to be like him. But the Ark was also a prefiguring of the heavenly sanctuary of the new Jerusalem on which the tabernacle and temple were patterned and which the pilgrim Church of the faithful on earth, and particularly the monastic life, seek to imitate. Just as the good monastic life of Bangor could be pictured in the image of the Ark of the Covenant, so the portable reliquary of an individual saint in whom the spiritual life had been perfected could evoke the Ark. The later Irish reliquary of St Manchán still preserves its four carrying rings. The Old Testament Ark could only be carried by its guardian Levites. In describing how St Benedict had overcome the temptations of youth and become a mature spiritual guide for others, Gregory the Great noted in Dialogues ii.2: ‘The same principle was taught by Moses, when he ordained that the Levites [. . .] should not have charge of the sacred vessels until they were fifty’ (McCann 1980, 22). Similarly, Adomnán specifies it was decided that the relics of Columba should be carried by some of the monastic elders. The unworthy carrying of the Ark, and of reliquaries, could have dire consequences. In Northumbria in the 680s Ecgfrith’s queen had brazenly stripped Bishop Wilfrid of a precious reliquary and worn it as an ornament while riding around in her chariot: ‘But this brought nothing but evil upon her, as it did to the Philistines when, after routing the people of Israel, they captured the Ark of God and brought the holy of holies through their cities’ (Colgrave 1927, 71). Adomnán’s narrative of the relic procession in VC II.44 describes associative rather than corporeal relics, but these tokens of Columba’s earthly and heavenly life are used in a way peculiarly fitted to suggest the presence of the saint. It was decided that those who carried Columba’s relics should ‘three times raise and shake in the air’ the white tunic in which the saint had died. The pilgrim Arculf testified that he had been present in Jerusalem when the shroud which had covered Christ’s head (a relic whose authenticity had been miraculously demonstrated when it rose from a pyre and fluttered ‘on high like a bird with outstretched wings’) had one day been taken out of its reliquary, raised up and revered by the faithful (DLS i.9). The raising and shaking in the air of the white tunic of the dove, Columba, may similarly have suggested his risen life. Insular monastic writers were heirs to a rich exegetical tradition on the Pentateuch’s descriptions of Moses going up into the mountain, or entering the tabernacle in which the Ark of the Covenant was housed, in order to speak with God. They became common images of the contemplative life and of monastic lectio, 201

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most memorably described in Cassian’s Conference xiv.10 where he stresses it is impossible for the impure and worldly, however learned, [93] to gain the gift of spiritual knowledge. As an heir to this tradition Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Care exhorted spiritual leaders constantly to meditate on God’s word, to follow Moses’s example and stand before the Ark and consult the Lord, seeking a solution to any particular problems they may have in the pages of the sacred word. Adomnán presents the elders’ perambulation of the drought-stricken fields of Iona with Columba’s relics as such a decision inspired by the reading of Scripture; he further notes that the ritual itself included reading from Columba’s books (most probably from his transcriptions of Scripture), on the Hill of the Angels, exactly ‘where at one time the citizens of the heavenly country were seen descending to confer with the holy man’ (VC II.44). At this hallowed place of contact between heaven and earth, like Moses on the mount or before the Ark, Columba thus continued to speak to God on behalf of his people. In describing the exaltation of his relics (which in the next story are laid on the altar ‘with psalms and fasting’), Adomnán also suggests the life of sanctity perfected in Columba which his community offered up in the penitential pilgrimage of their monastic life. After the relic procession had been performed ‘according to the adopted plan’, Adomnán reports that the sky, which ‘had been bare of clouds’ for two months, was with marvellous rapidity instantly covered with clouds that rose from the sea; and there was great rain, falling by day and by night. And the earth, previously parched, was well watered, and produced its crop in season, and a very plentiful harvest in that same year The image of rain-filled clouds, frequently used in the Old Testament to describe God’s mercies, in exegesis typified the raining down of God’s spiritual blessings on the faithful. In Adomnán’s story such blessings are mediated by Columba. Similarly, Cassian describes in Conference xiv.16 how the word of salvation which a holy man with spiritual knowledge commits to his hearers, ‘will be watered by the plentiful showers of the Holy Spirit [. . .] [as] the prophet promised, “the rain will be given to your seed, wherever you sow in the land, and the bread of the corn of the land shall be most plentiful and fat”’ (Gibson 1894, 444).

The last days of Columba (VC III.23) Final blessings Gregory the Great had said of St Benedict of Nursia that he was ‘rightly called Benedict since he was so much blessed by God’. The play on the monastic name highlights the role of Benedict as a vessel of divine grace. Similarly, Adomnán in his second Preface explains the appropriateness of Columba’s name, which reveals his nature as a special dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit (O’Reilly 1994, 345–54), evokes images of Columba being caught [94] up in contemplation and 202

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filled with the Spirit and shows him to be a particularly potent Mediator of grace in the world, his blessing much sought. Columba’s last days are filled with ritual blessings. In the final chapter Adomnán records in six scenes how the saint blessed the whole island from the periphery to the centre, its inhabitants and stock, the barn and grain, the draught-horse, the monastery, the company of monks. Columba’s last action was to move his hand ‘as much as he was able, in order that he might be seen to bless the brothers [. . .] And after the holy benediction thus expressed he presently breathed out his spirit’. Adomnán begins the final chapter with a story already told in VC II.28. Columba was drawn in a wagon to announce his coming death to the monks working on the western edge of the island and consoled them in their grief with his blessing. Raising both his holy hands he blessed all this island of ours and said: ‘From this moment of this hour, all poisons of snakes shall be powerless to harm men or cattle in the lands of this island, so long as the inhabitants of that dwelling-place shall observe the commandments of Christ’. (VC II.28) Underlying this and other hagiographic examples of the snake-poison motif, or variants such as the banishing of snakes from a certain sacred space, there are important scriptural texts which were interpreted as relating to the spiritual life. Christ’s own promise to his faithful followers, ‘Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions’ (Luke 10.19), for example, is directly expounded in the Life of Antony. The saint shows how the monk may be said to trample serpents underfoot and render the demonic forces of evil and temptation harmless when, in devotion to Christ, he perseveres in monastic discipline. Such spiritual combat is conducted through the ascetical practices of fasting and vigils, by prayer and good works and the cultivation of inner virtues, particularly humility. Immediately before leaving his disciples Christ had prophesied that the ability to take up serpents or drink deadly poison and yet remain unharmed would be among the signs by which his faithful followers would be known (Mark 16.18), a prophecy St Paul fulfilled on the island of Malta when he miraculously survived a venomous snake-bite (Acts 28.3–6). Gregory the Great, however, explained that though the Gospel prophecy was fulfilled literally in miraculous external signs in the earliest stages of the Church’s growth, because miracles nourish nascent belief, Christ’s words also apply to what the Church now does daily ‘in a spiritual way what it then did materially through the apostles’. When, for example, believers ‘remove malice from the hearts of others by their good works of exhortation, they are picking up snakes [. . .] Surely these miracles are all the greater to the extent that they are spiritual?’ (Homily 29: Hurst 1990, 229). Gregory stresses the even greater need of God’s power to enable the faithful to perform such miracles of the spiritual life. Similarly, Columba’s blessing, which was conditional on the [95] Iona community’s observation of the commandments of Christ (II.28), is not 203

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a mere charm against snake-bites but summons divine aid for the future spiritual well-being of the island monastery. In bearing witness in the last chapter to the continuing fulfilment of Columba’s prophecy about the powerlessness of snakes on the island of Iona, Adomnán thereby testifies to the health of the community’s spiritual life in his own day and reminds the community of its calling (III.23). Moses had interceded on behalf of his people when they were punished for their faithlessness in the desert by venomous snake-bites (Numbers 21.4–9; cf. John 3.14–15). The Pauline interpretation of the events of the Exodus deliverance from Egypt and journey to the promised land as a figure written down for the spiritual guidance of the new chosen people, the Church (1 Corinthians 10.1–11), was, as already discussed, a foundation document for patristic exegesis. St Paul cites the idolatrous transgressions and lapses of faith of the Hebrews of old during their long exile and quotes their divine punishment: ‘Wherefore the Lord sent among the people fiery serpents, which bit them and killed many of them’. By this Old Testament example, St Paul warns the Christian reader to avoid spiritual evil and worldly preoccupations: ‘Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them tempted and perished by serpents’ (Numbers 21.5; 1 Corinthians 10.9). Bede described Ireland as a land of milk and honey, abounding in vines and creatures of earth, air and water; a place where serpents could not survive, where indeed ‘almost everything that the island produces is efficacious against poison’ (cf. Genesis 1.20–30; HE 1.1). By alluding to the earthly paradise and thus to the state of grace enjoyed by humanity before falling to the temptation of the serpent, Bede was not suggesting that Ireland was still in a pre-lapsarian condition but was picturing a spiritual landscape, a metaphor of the heavenly paradisal life of grace to which the Church on earth, and the monastic life in particular, aspires by abounding in spiritual fruits. Adomnán’s account of Columba blessing the island of Iona and banishing from it the power of snakes ‘from then to the present day’ (III.23) symbolically makes present in the life of the monastic community Christ’s work of redemption which fulfilled the Genesis prophecy of the serpent’s defeat (Genesis 3.14–15). Columba does not kill or banish snakes but renders them harmless to all creatures on the island – men and beasts – evoking the paradisal peace of the new creation: the asp and basilisk ‘shall not hurt, nor shall they kill in all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11.8–9). Insular writers were also familiar with the patristic and monastic traditions of using the image of the venom of serpents to characterise in particular the deadly spiritual evils of contention and discord which result in heresy and pollute this paradisal life. In De Excidio Britanniae xii, Gildas had described Arianism as a savage snake vomiting poison and causing ‘the fatal [96] separation of brothers who had lived as one’, and Bede, in describing Pelagius as spreading poison, quoted some couplets of Prosper of Aquitaine which denounced Pelagius as a serpent (Winterbottom 1978, 20; HE 1.10). It is possible that in the context of the unresolved issue of Easter dating in the late seventh century, Adomnán’s testimony that Columba was still continuing to vanquish the power of the venom of serpents on Iona carried assurances of the spiritual harmony prevailing on the 204

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island and enjoined on the community by its founder. There is some parallel in the account of St Antony’s announcement of his own imminent death: he had directly warned his monastic followers, both those far off in the outer mountain and his two attendants in the inner mountain, to avoid the corrupting influence of schism and heresy, spiritual evils threatening peace and fellowship which he had earlier denounced as being worse than the poison of serpents. Similarly, Columba’s final blessing delivered to those on the outer plain of the island monastery was to save the community from the poison of vipers while Columba’s final command, delivered in his lodging in the monastery and only in the hearing of his attendant, bound his followers to have among themselves ‘mutual and unfeigned charity, with peace’. Moreover, he identified the monastery with Jerusalem, whose standard etymology was ‘vision of peace’. On the day before his death, Columba blessed the monastery from a small hill overlooking it and foretold its future greatness among all peoples and saints, kings of the Irish and rulers of barbarous and foreign nations alike. Thus, the monastery itself is described in terms reminiscent of Old Testament prophecies that the holy citadel of Jerusalem on Mount Zion, the site of the temple, would one day be revered by all and would draw peoples from far and near (Isaiah 2.2–3). In the New Testament the image is in turn used of the eschatological city of the living God, the citadel of the heavenly Jerusalem (Galatians 4.26; Hebrews 12.22). Sabbath and octave Columba gave the blessing against snakes to console his monks when he announced his imminent death: At the Easter festival recently held, in the month of April, I desired with desire to depart to Christ the Lord [. . .] but I chose rather to put off a little longer the day of my departure from the world, so that the festival of joy should not be turned for you into sorrow. The distinctive phrase desiderio desideraui is a reminiscence from Luke’s account of Christ’s words at the Last Supper which refer to his death but, unlike St Cuthbert in Bede’s prose life, Columba in his last days was not called to follow the way of the Cross in physical suffering and spiritual anguish. His imitation of Christ took a different form. Christ’s words to his disciples at the Last Supper refer to the Jewish Passover which prefigured his own Passion and its sacramental commemoration, but also point beyond the Crucifixion [97] to the promise of the messianic banquet at the end of time, that is, to the heavenly life of all the faithful which is anticipated in every celebration of the eucharist: ‘With desire I have desired to eat this pasch with you, before I suffer. For I say to you that from this time I will not eat it, till it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God’. Columba’s cryptic allusion to the beginning of this speech in Luke 22.15–16 marks the beginning of the account of 205

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his own last days and death in VC III.23, an account which forms an exposition of the significance of Christ’s words, rather than a parallel to the Passion. The Lucan text was important in the complex exegetical debate which underlay the Easter controversy. The debate centred on the problems of the spiritual interpretation of the literal text of the Old Covenant prescriptions for the commemoration of the Passover in Exodus 12, and of showing how Christ fulfilled the law. Cummian, for example, in his letter De Controversia Paschali (c. 632), had cited Christ’s words Desiderio desideraui hoc pascha manducare vobiscum antequam patiar (Luke 22.15), together with St Paul’s acclamation, Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus (1 Corinthians 5.7), in the identification of the Passion as the fulfilment of the Old Covenant pasch (Walsh & Ó Cróinín 1988, 60, 64). Cummian’s editors have explained how he, and some at least of the southern Irish, following earlier authorities, had regarded the Last Supper and the Passion as ‘equally important in the Easter celebration as the Resurrection’. Though the Last Supper and the Crucifixion had ‘occurred on separate Julian days (Thursday and Friday), they were [. . .] deemed to have taken place on the same lunar day, luna xiiii’ (ibid., 24–29). The twice-blessed day (Good Friday which, historically, was the preparation day for the Jewish Sabbath) in this view marked the beginning of Easter. Walsh and Ó Cróinín speculate (ibid., 27) that Séigíne, fifth abbot of Iona, and Beccán, to whom Cummian’s letter was addressed, had probably pointed out to him ‘that Easter is the celebration of the Resurrrection, and that the lunar-limits of the cycles (whatever ones they might be) had reference to that day and not to the Passion’. Adomnán does not mention Easter tables and lunar limits. He does not, directly, deal with the Old Covenant pasch. By transposing his spiritual interpretation of the Old Covenant from the temporal constraints of linear time, in which the Church annually commemorates Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Day, and by locating it instead amidst events which took place after Easter one year, Adomnán freed himself to undertake through his narrative an exposition on the nature of the feast of the Resurrection. The contrast between Columba’s joy and the monks’ sorrow at the prospect of his death is repeatedly marked in the final chapter. Still bound by lingering earthly preoccupations, they grieved to lose his physical presence. Columba, however, had already been fully living the monastic ideal of the vita angelica on earth, as the rest of the third book shows, frequently conversing [98] with the angelic citizens of ‘the heavenly country’ which he longed to enter (VC III.16). A few days after consoling his monks he alone, in rapture, saw an angel in church during mass on the Lord’s day, waiting to conduct him heavenwards soon. The eucharist instituted by Christ at the Last Supper was for Columba, therefore, truly the ‘bread of angels’ prefigured in the manna in the Old Testament (Psalm 77.25) and a sacramental foretaste of the eternal life which Christ invited him to enter just one week later. The next recorded event is that Columba blessed the monastery’s barn, rendering thanks that his family of monks would have enough bread for the year if he should depart from them. There are details in Adomnán’s narrative which suggest 206

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that the story is not about an unusually early harvest on Iona and that Columba was not simply taking stock of his stewardship of the monastery’s resources. The time is distinctively noted: it happened ‘after an interval of six consecutive days’ following the Sunday mass just described (that is, on the next Saturday which is repeatedly described as the Sabbath day). The saint blessed two piles of grain which were already stored in the barn. Each day for six consecutive days the Israelites had collected the bread which God rained from heaven; on the sixth day they were told, through Moses, to gather double the daily portion in preparation for the seventh day, the Sabbath, which was divinely ordained as a day of rest (Exodus 16.4–5, 22–30). Patristic exegetes noted that the manna which physically sustained the Israelites in the desert had first been given on a Sunday and that in this earthly life (the sixth day) it is necessary to store spiritual sustenance against the Sabbath to come (Heine 1982, 308–11). Christ had interpreted the manna as a sign, signum, of himself, the bread of life (John 6.30–35, 48–52), and of ‘every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4.4; Deuteronomy 8.3). The implication is that, in imitating Christ, Columba’s own spiritual life expounded God’s word and was a means through which his monks received heavenly food on their journey to the promised land. Columba used the scene of the grain, harvested and stored by the Sabbath day, to explain his imminent departure ‘more plainly’. In ‘a few secret words’ which his attendant Diarmait was sworn not to disclose until after the saint’s death, Columba explained: ‘This day [Saturday] is called in the sacred books “Sabbath”, which is interpreted “rest” (quod interpraetatur requies). And truly this day is for me a Sabbath, because it is my last day of this present labourious life. In it after my toilsome labours I keep [the] Sabbath’; he explained that Christ had revealed to him that the time of his death would be ‘at midnight of this following venerated Lord’s-day’. Liturgically speaking, this refers to the beginning of the next day, Sunday. Adomnán’s account of the last week of Columba’s life thus very precisely marks out an eight-day period beginning and ending with a Sunday and gives a rare example of a [99] specific piece of exegesis attributed to Columba. What might this have meant for Adomnán’s monastic contemporaries? In the patristic exegetical tradition inherited by insular monasticism, the image of the octave could refer to the whole of salvation history, past, present and future. After the six days of creation God rested and sanctified the seventh day (Genesis 2.2–3), which was ritually prescribed as the Sabbath day of rest in the Old Covenant during the Exodus (Exodus 20.8–10). In the New Covenant Christ himself fulfilled what the Jewish Sabbath rest had prophesied: through his resurrection his followers entered not into temporal but into eternal rest. To mark this spiritual interpretation of the Old Covenant sign, the Sabbath was celebrated by the new chosen people, the Church, not on Saturday but on Sunday, the day of the Resurrection and human redemption, signifying a new creation. Sunday was therefore regarded as both the first day of creation in the cosmic week and as the eighth day, the true Sabbath of eternal heavenly rest and the figure of the resurrection in the world to come (Daniélou 1956, 319–32). 207

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The image applied also to the individual Christian who interpreted the Old Testament institution of the Sabbath spiritually rather than by the letter of the law, and therefore sought to abstain not simply from physical work one day a week but from worldly preoccupations and sin throughout this earthly life. The Christian consecrated to keeping a lifelong interior Sabbath would at death enter into the heavenly life of the eternal Sabbath rest. Speaking on Saturday, the seventh day within the octave marked out in Adomnán’s narrative, Columba expounded the Sabbath rest of the Old Covenant as a figure of the eternal Sabbath rest of the eighth day which he was about to enter on the Sunday. The theme of the Sabbath rest is related to other aspects of the Exodus story. The Israelites who had faltered in their belief and obedience during the lifelong desert pilgrimage (Numbers 14.26–38) were not allowed to enter the promised land, which is described as God’s ‘rest’ in the reminiscence of the story in Psalm 94.11: ‘These men have not known my ways so I sware in my wrath that they shall not enter into my rest (in requiem meam)’. The desert incident, described in Numbers 14 and recalled in Psalm 94, is quoted in the New Testament as a warning and a spiritual guide for Christians (Hebrews 3.7–4.11). The entry into the earthly promised land is already seen here as an image of the faithful Christian’s entry into eternal rest. Adomnán describes the transition from Columba’s last day on the literal Sabbath to his death, early on the eighth day, as a ‘crossing over to the heavenly country from this weary pilgrimage’. The Vulgate version of Hebrews 4.11 expresses urgency in its exhortation of the faithful: ‘Let us hasten (festinemus) to enter into that rest’. Psalm 94 is the daily invitatory psalm in the Rule of the Master and the Rule of St Benedict [100] (Fry 1981, 159) and the image of Psalm 94.11, as understood in Hebrews 4.11, is appropriated in monastic literature, including the final chapter of the Rule of St Benedict which urges those who would hasten toward their heavenly home to keep the monastic rule (cf. Hebrews 11.16). The Prologue of the rule cites God’s summons to the faithful through the words of Psalm 94 and, like the Rule of the Master, uses other scriptural texts to characterise the monastic life as a hastening to the Lord: ‘It is now the hour for us to arise from sleep’ (Romans 13.11); ‘Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you’ (John 12.35; Eberle 1977, 101; Fry 1981, 159). The tradition illumines details in Adomnán’s narrative. At the beginning of the final chapter he stresses that because Columba was ‘an old man, weary with age’, he had to be carried out in a wagon to visit his monks. Diarmait even had to raise the saint’s right hand to enable him to give the final blessing as he died. Nevertheless when, sometime after the evening vesper office on Saturday, the monastery bell sounded for the first office of the Lord’s day and the prophesied hour of his death, Columba ‘rose in haste and went to the church and, running, entered in advance of the others’ to pray. As he entered the completely dark church at midnight (and so into the everlasting Sabbath day) the church was filled with heavenly light, just briefly glimpsed by Diarmait as he approached and by a few brothers ‘when they too were a little way off’. The rest of the company of monks then arrived bringing lights into the darkness of the 208

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church. Seeing by this light only that Columba was dying, they lamented even though he, ‘with wonderful joy and gladness of countenance’, could see the holy angels who had come to take him to the promised rest of the eternal Sabbath. The image of the octave which, as has been seen, applies both to the passage of time through the whole of salvation history and to the lifelong interior journey of the individual, also refers to liturgical time. Literally meaning a festal period of eight consecutive days from one Sunday to the next, symbolically it denotes the Church’s particular celebration of the Resurrection over the fifty-day period which spans eight Sundays, from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost, the eighth ‘day’ in this symbolic octave, illumines the meaning of the Resurrection by showing its fruits for the faithful in the descent of the Holy Spirit (Daniélou 1956, 319–32). As Easter is historically linked to the Old Testament Passover, and to the Jewish seasonal feast of unleavened bread associated with it (Leviticus 23.5–7), so Pentecost is linked to the date of the giving of the law on Sinai fifty days after the Passover (Leviticus 23.16) and to the seasonal feast of the first fruits of the grain harvest. The Pentateuch’s various prescriptions for the celebration of these feasts are linked with its code for the observance of the Sabbath. The giving of the law on Sinai was fifty days after the slaying of the Passover lamb, but the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was fifty days after [101] Christ’s resurrection, not his Crucifixion. Accordingly, Pentecost was a Sunday, the day of the Lord, like the Resurrection whose meaning and liturgical celebration it completes. Adomnán gives no date for either of these related feasts in the year of Columba’s death, but in his use of scriptural and liturgical language he places Columba’s death on the feast of Pentecost. Although, citing Christ’s promise, Columba had ‘desired with desire’ to enter his promised heavenly rest at Easter, he acknowledges at the opening of the final chapter that his death then would have turned the feast of the Resurrection into a time of sorrow for his community who wished to hold on to his physical presence. He deliberately postponed his death in order to explain it and thereby deepen their understanding of Christ’s death and physical departure as the necessary means of the disciples sharing in his risen life and receiving the Holy Spirit. The narrative of Columba’s remaining days, unfolded within the symbolic octave of Easter, therefore expounds the true meaning of the feast of the Resurrection and culminates in the death and entry into life at Pentecost of one whose very name, ‘dove’, showed him to be a dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. The time of Columba’s death proposed here solely on the basis of Adomnán’s use of the language of sacred time receives support from modern commentators’ entirely separate interpretation of the hints in VC III.22 that Columba’s pilgrimage on Iona began on the same date on which he died, thirty-four years later. Sharpe notes that the later tradition of the twelfth-century Irish life of Columba specifically gives the date of his landing in Iona as the eve of Whitsunday: in 563 this day fell on 12 May according to the orthodox Easter calculation, but using the Irish table the date comes out as 9 June, the date of Columba’s death [in the Ulster Chronicle]. Could this be coincidence? 209

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Or may we accept that later tradition was correct, preserving the date in relation to the Church’s calendar, whether or not anyone remembered that the movable feasts would have all changed along with Easter? (Sharpe 1995, 371–72) It is worth adding that the Irish life also states that Columba remained with his monks from Easter to Whitsun in his final year, to console them, and that ‘when the bell for nocturns was rung on Whit Sunday night, he went to the church before everyone else’ and sent forth his spirit (Herbert 1988, §§61, 64). Adomnán, though personally persuaded of the ‘Roman’ calculation of Easter, was writing probably shortly before 700, some while before the rest of the Iona community conformed in 715 (HE 5.21, 22). Herbert has noted that ‘the compilation of the Vita was designed, therefore, to be a unifying force within the Iona community’ (1988, 144). The mention of either the Columban [102] or Roman date of Easter and Pentecost would have frustrated this design. At no point does Adomnán refer to any method of calculating the date of Easter, even when recalling the evangelisation of Northumbria (VC I.1); the only explicit reference to the controversy, and then without mention of Northumbria and Whitby, is the saint’s prophecy, inspired by revelation of the Holy Spirit, ‘concerning the great dispute that after many days arose among the churches of Ireland over the diversity in time of the Easter festival’ (VC I.3). This prophecy, among other manifestations of his sanctity, occurred while he was a revered guest at the monastery of Clonmacnoise; it concludes the early chapter describing his rapturous reception there in a ceremonial adventus recalling Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The monastery was not a Columban foundation. The point would not have been lost on Adomnán’s audience, particularly if Clonmacnoise had been among those Irish churches which had accepted the ‘Roman’ dating of Easter a generation before the Whitby debate. It has been seen that the last chapter opens with Columba blessing Iona to safeguard it from ever being harmed by the poison of serpents, an image of spiritual evil which could particularly refer to schism or heresy. His hilltop blessing of the monastery foresaw it would one day be honoured by ‘not only the kings of the Irish with their peoples, but also the rulers of barbarous and foreign nations, with their subjects [. . .] also especial reverence will be bestowed by saints even of other churches’. His final command to his spiritual sons was that they should have among themselves ‘mutual and unfeigned charity, with peace’, after the example of the holy fathers; his own intercession for them, and God’s continued provision for their needs, required them to follow the divine commandments. Adomnán demonstrates that Columba’s sanctity did not depend on his method of dating Easter but on the fact that he lived it and continued, after his death, to mediate its fruits. The fear of the Lord Adomnán’s claim that the spirit of Columba continued to guide Iona’s line of abbots is vividly expressed in his account of Columba’s last action before vespers, 210

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namely his transcription of part of Psalm 33. In the Epistle of Clement of Rome at the end of the first century, Psalm 33.12 was already interpreted as an invitation to eternal life issued by Christ: ‘Come my children; listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ (Staniforth 1968, 35). The verse opens Ambrose’s De Officiis Ministrorum; it was used in baptismal catechesis (Whitaker 1960, 136), and formed part of a chain of texts on the spiritual life used by monastic writers. Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences provide examples of monastic fathers whose words and deeds offered a sure guide to those seeking the way of perfection in the cenobitic life. One such holy abbot in the Institutes iv.32–43 counsels a new monk that ‘the fear of the Lord’ (Proverbs 9. [103] 10) is the beginning of salvation and inner conversion because it leads to compunction and the renunciation of worldly desires and preoccupations; in ascending this way of perfection the monk, no longer driven by dread but drawn by love of God, comes to fix his whole longing on the heavenly life. The quest for such purity of heart to understand the full meaning of ‘the fear of the Lord’ is described unambiguously in scriptural terms as being ‘nailed with Christ to the Cross’, being ‘crucified to this world’ (Galatians 6.14): ‘You no longer live but he lives in you who was crucified for you’ (Galatians 2.19–20). Cassian’s holy abbot says, ‘The fear of the Lord is our Cross’, and shows that the way of the Cross is reached through a monk’s humble daily submission to the monastic rule, to his superior and the example of his elders (Gibson 1894, 230). This spiritual process is famously described in the Rule of St Benedict (ch 7: Fry 1981, 193) through the image of ascending the ladder of humility whose first rung requires that a man always keep ‘the fear of God before his eyes’ (cf. Psalm 35.2). The rule affirms that ‘all who fear God have everlasting life awaiting them’. In the description of the way of renunciation and mortification, Benedict identified the ladder of humility with Jacob’s Ladder (Genesis 28.11–17; John 1.51), an image used in exegesis of the Cross which links heaven and earth and provides the means of God’s descent and man’s heavenward journey. The rungs of the monk’s spiritual progress are marked by his daily obedience to the monastic rule and to his superior and bring him to the perfect love of God (John 4.18). It is the task of the abbot, with and through Christ, to teach his monks the way, hence the exhortation, both in the Rule of the Master and in the Prologue of the Rule of St Benedict: ‘Come and listen to me, sons; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ (Psalm 33.12). In both rules this text follows the call to rise from sleep (Romans 13.11) and is immediately followed by the command: ‘Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you’ (John 12.35). Cassian had used another verse of Psalm 33 in his Conference i.13 to expound the text, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 110.10), as an invitation to those seeking spiritual riches: ‘O fear the Lord, all ye his saints; for they that fear him lack nothing’ (Psalm 33.10). This divine promise is echoed in Psalm 33.11, the last words Columba wrote on the last day of his life before handing over to his successor the task of transcribing a psalter: ‘Here, at the end of the page, I must stop. Let Baithéne write what follows’. Adomnán cites the psalm number, quotes 211

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the verse: ‘But they that seek the Lord shall not want for anything that is good’ (Psalm 33.11), and applies it to Columba: The last verse that he wrote aptly befits the holy predecessor, who will never lack eternal good things. And the verse that follows, ‘Come, my sons, hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ [Psalm 33.12], is [104] fittingly adapted to the successor [Baíthíne], the father of spiritual sons, a teacher, who, as his predecessor enjoined, succeeded him not in teaching only, but in writing also. After he had written the former verse, at the end of the page, the saint entered the church for the vesper office of the Lord’s-night. After vespers he returned to his lodging and recalled for the benefit of his monks the promised reward of ‘eternal good things’ awaiting those who follow the divine commandments. Columba is presented as an exemplary abbot in providing his monks with a spiritual guide in the form of his own life and in forming and appointing a successor who, on Adomnán’s testimony here, continued to teach Columba’s spiritual sons ‘the fear of the Lord’. For the next stage in the narrative, the reader needs to turn back to the beginning of the book and the story of the young St Fintan (VC I.2). He had just resolved to leave Ireland and seek out the holy Columba ‘in order to live in pilgrimage’ when two visiting monks arrived with the news of their founder’s death. Fintan asked: ‘Whom has he left as his successor?’ They replied, ‘Baithéne, his foster-son’ and all present exclaimed, ‘A worthy and fitting successor’. Fintan declared, ‘If the Lord permits, I shall sail out to Baithéne, who is a wise and holy man; and if he receive me, I shall have him as my abbot’. The account of how Columba had designated Baíthíne (Baithéne) as his successor on his last day, reserved for VC III.23, thus forms a highly allusive closure to the story; in between several scenes reveal Baíthíne’s spiritual formation under Columba, as the example in VC I.37 has already illustrated. Columba had praised Baíthíne for ensuring that the community of a church under his care was defended from the assaults of demons by the spiritual combat of fasts and prayers (VC III.8). Baíthíne, who was to take over from Columba the task of writing out Psalm 33.12, is early associated with Columba in the copying of Scripture and specifically of the psalms (VC I.23). On the island of Hinba, the grace of the Holy Spirit was poured out on Columba for the space of three days and nights during which ‘everything that in the sacred scriptures is dark and most difficult became plain, and was shown more clearly than the day to the eyes of his purest heart’. The saint: lamented that his foster-son Baithéne was not there, who, if he had chanced to be present during those three days, would have written down from the mouth of the blessed man very many mysteries, both of past 212

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ages and of ages still to come, mysteries unknown to other men; and also a number of interpretations of the sacred books. (VC III.18) The account suggests that on other occasions Baíthíne may have had a privileged share in the fruits of Columba’s contemplative experience and exposition of Scripture which was such a vital part of his charism as abbot. [105] Adomnán, like Báithíne, had succeeded to Columba’s role as teacher. The traditional interpretation of Psalm 33.12, which regarded those in spiritual authority as sharing in Christ’s work of teaching ‘the fear of the Lord’, saw the task as the revelation of the continuing meaning of God’s word for the believer. Modern study of the DLS and the VC is gradually documenting the degree of learning Adomnán was able to bring both to the explication of the literal text of Scripture and to its interpretation. Many books were ascribed to Columba; in the early commemorative poem, Amra Coluim Cille, he is praised as a pillar of learning, a formidable exegete, a reader of Basil and Cassian. In the monastic tradition shared with Cassian, however, Adomnán’s portrait of Columba exalts his closeness to Christ, rather than his human learning. He depicts Columba as literally copying Scripture and receiving the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit in its interpretation. Instead of quoting Columba’s exegesis on particular scriptural passages, he shows how the saint exemplified their precepts. Adomnán’s own considerable learning serves this larger purpose in some of the narrative episodes in the VC, and especially in the final chapter, where he too teaches the ‘fear of the Lord’, the beginning of wisdom, by showing how the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures may be read in the life of Columba.

Bibliography Anderson, A O & Anderson, M O (eds & trans) 1961 Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Edinburgh/ London. Anderson, M O (ed & trans) 1991 Adomnán’s Life of Columba (rev edn). Oxford. Brüning, G 1917 Adamnan’s Vita Columbae und ihre Ableitungen. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 11 (1917), 213–304. Chadwick, O 1968 John Cassian. Cambridge. Colgrave, B (ed & trans) 1927 The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus. Cambridge. Colgrave, B and Mynors, RAB (eds & trans) 1969 (repr 1991) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford. Daniélou, J 1956 The Bible and the Liturgy. Notre Dame. Eberle, L (trans) 1977 The Rule of the Master. Kalamazoo. Enright, M J 1985 Royal succession and abbatial prerogative in Adomnán’s Vita Columbae. Peritia 4 (1985), 83–103. Fry, T (ed) 1981 The Rule of St Benedict. Collegeville. Gibson, E (trans) 1894 The works of John Cassian, the Institutes and Conferences. In Schaff, P & Wace, H (eds) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser, vol 11, 161–641. Oxford (repr Grand Rapids 1978).

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Grant, R M (trans) 1997 Irenaeus of Lyons. London. Heine, R (trans) 1982 Origen. Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. Washington DC. Herbert, M 1988 Iona, Kells, and Derry, The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford (repr Blackrock 1996). Hillgarth, J N 1984 Ireland and Spain in the seventh century. Peritia 3 (1984), 1–16. Hurst, D (trans) 1990 Forty Homilies of Gregory the Great. Kalamazoo. MacDonald, A 1995 A fruit tree at Durrow. Hallel 20, 1 (1995), 10–14. McCann, J (trans) 1980 Life of Benedict (Dialogues II). Manchester. Meehan, D (ed & trans) 1958 Adamnan’s De Locis Sanctis (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 3). Dublin = DLS. O’Loughlin, T 1992 The exegetical purpose of Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis. Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 24 (1992), 37–53. O’Loughlin, T 1994 The Latin version of the Scriptures in Iona in the late seventh century: the evidence from Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis. Peritia 8 (1994), 18–26. O’Reilly, J 1994 Exegesis and the Book of Kells: the Lucan genealogy. In O’Mahony, F (ed) The Book of Kells, Proceedings of a Conference at Trinity College Dublin, 6–9 September 1992, 344–97. Aldershot. O’Reilly, J 1995 Introduction. In Connolly, S (trans) Bede. On the Temple, xvii–lv. Liverpool. Picard, J M 1982 The purpose of Adomnán’s Vita Columbae. Peritia 1 (1982), 160–77. Picard, J M 1984 Bede, Adomnán, and the writing of history. Peritia 3 (1984), 50–70. Picard, J M 1985 Structural patterns in early Hiberno-Latin hagiography. Peritia 4 (1985), 67–82. Sharpe, R (trans) 1995 Adomnán of Iona, Life of St Columba. Harmondsworth. Stancliffe, C 1989 Irish saints’ lives. In Fontaine, J & Hillgarth, J N (eds) The Seventh Century, Change and Continuity, 87–115. London. Stancliffe, C 1995 Oswald ‘most holy and most victorious king of the Northumbrians’. In Stancliffe, C & Cambridge, E (eds) Oswald, Northumbrian King to European Saint, 33–83. Stamford. Staniforth, M (trans) 1968 Early Christian Writings. Harmondsworth. Stevenson, J (ed) 1995 The ‘Laterculus Malalianus’ and the School of Archbishop Theodore. Cambridge. Walker, G S M (ed & trans) 1957 Sancti Columbani Opera (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 2). Dublin. Walsh, M & Ó Cróinín, D (ed & trans) 1988 Cummian’s Letter De Controversia Paschali and the De Ratione Computandi, 55–97. Toronto. Whitaker, E C (trans) 1960 Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy. London. Winterbottom, M (ed & trans) 1978 Gildas. The Ruin of Britain and Other Works. London/ Chichester.

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The Life of Columba contains vivid images of the saint as scribe. Some features of this composite portrait are depicted with circumstantial details so convincing that they have been regarded as true to life. However, the same stories which have provided modern historians with glimpses of contemporary book production and have set archaeologists discussing the likely form and location on Iona of Columba’s writing-hut, disconcertingly show that Columba’s pen, his inkhorn, the vellum on which he wrote, generated marvels and prophecies, and that from his writing-hut he commanded both demons and angels.1 Pages written by the saint’s own hand survived long immersions in water and his books continued to effect miracles and to be revered by his community as sacred objects and salvific relics in the lifetime of his biographer Adomnán, the ninth abbot of Iona (679–704). Such wonders are not presented as an editorial comment on historical episodes but are conveyed through the very narrative; the scribal equipment and activities which Adomnán describes are charged with an other-worldly significance whose precise meaning, it seems, is never spelled out. A second point of difficulty in the interpretation of this material for the modern reader is that, although Adomnán repeatedly [159] depicts Columba as a scribe, he does not explicitly portray him as a scholar or name a single text he authored or any non-biblical work he read. This seems an enigmatic image of the founding father of Iona, particularly in view of Adomnán’s own impressive learning and the range of texts which modern scholarship suggests must have been available to him in the island monastery. It also appears to contradict other testimony, including that of the early praise poem, Amra Choluimb Chille, that Columba was a pillar of learning, a great teacher and interpreter of the Law, a scriptural exegete and a reader of Basil and Cassian, who had also studied computistics

1 R. Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona: Life of Columba (Harmondsworth, 1995) pp. 284–88, nn. 125, 127; T. O’Neill, ‘Columba the scribe’, in C. Bourke, ed., Studies in the Cult of Saint Columba (Dublin, 1997) pp. 69–79. See M. Richter, ‘The personnel of learning in early medieval Ireland’, in P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter, eds, Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur (Stuttgart, 1996) pp. 275–308, for Irish uses of terms scriba, sapiens.

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and Greek grammar.2 Is Adomnán’s image of Columba to be explained as the evocation of some different kind of hagiographic stereotype? The radical renunciation of earthly property and preoccupations by the eremitical desert fathers, for example, had certainly involved an ambivalent attitude towards the written word, the pursuit of learning and even the possession of books, which was personified in the image of the unlearned holy man. Athanasius described St Antony as one in whom memory of the Scriptures took the place of books: ‘Neither from writings nor from pagan wisdom nor for some craft was Antony acclaimed but from religion alone’.3 If, however, Adomnán’s silence on Columba’s achievements as a scholar is simply seen as part of an attempt to show the saint continuing the traditions of the desert at the Ocean’s edge, then the question of why Adomnán shows Columba producing books in a coenobitic monastery only becomes more rather than less puzzling. The Life of St Martin had formed a very early link between the desert tradition and monasticism in the north. His biographer, Sulpicius Severus, says that Martin could expound the Scriptures with words of wisdom but was a man untrained in letters. Sulpicius had been concerned to show that St Martin, though living in a monastery in Gaul and having pastoral responsibilities, had not only equalled but excelled the spiritual merits of the [160] desert anchorites and that the stark austerities of monastic life at Tours recalled the heroic desert tradition and its biblical models. It is in this ascetic context that Sulpicius says, approvingly, of Martin’s monastery, ‘No art was practiced there, except that of transcribers, and even this was consigned to the brethren of younger years, while the elders spent their time in prayer’.4 The implication is that the copying of certain texts was a practical necessity for the monastic community, but not one which could be allowed to distract those advanced in the spiritual life. Adomnán, on the contrary, shows that Columba transcribed texts while he was abbot and until the day he died, and that he commended his successor to continue the tradition of writing. The influence of the Life of Antony and the Life of St Martin on the Life of Columba has long been recognised but, clearly, cannot account for Adomnán’s particular use of the scribal image. Before simply assuming the influence of some further hagiographic source to explain this apparently discrepant feature, it may be useful to recall what theological and other concerns informed the

2 T.O. Clancy and G. Márkus, Iona. The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (Edinburgh, 1995) pp. 104–15. 3 Vita Antonii, 93, PG 26.974: Nequaqua m enim scriptis suis, non gentili sapientia, non aliqua arte. Adapted in Evagrius of Antioch’s version, quem nee librorum disseminatorium oratio luculenta, nee mundane sapientiae disputatio. For this tradition of unlearned wisdom, see D. Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert (Oxford, 1993) pp. 54–62; A. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, 1991) pp. 112–13. 4 Vita Martinii, 10; translation from NPNF 2nd series, vol. XI, 9. See also P. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978) pp. 138, 147.

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earlier image of the unlearned holy man and to ask whether Adomnán’s overall portrait of Columba is compatible with these concerns. Learned writers in Late Antiquity used the image of the unlearned holy man, together with accounts of miraculous manifestations or signs of his wisdom, as a sophisticated rhetorical device in distinguishing between the nature of a transcendent Christian knowledge, derived from divine revelation, and the limitations of knowledge derived from human learning and demonstrated through reason and eloquence alone. The hagiographic image did not, therefore, embody a general argument for rejecting human learning, but provided a model for understanding the inspired word of God. In the Preface to De Doctrina Christiana St Augustine acknowledged that, in exceptional cases, learning was directly given by God and he specifically cited the example of the holy and perfect Egyptian monk Antony who, though lacking any knowledge of the alphabet, is reported to have memorised the divine Scriptures by listening to them being read, and to have understood them by thoughtful meditation. But Augustine warned against the gross presumption that such [161] miraculous enlightenment might be granted to oneself, that one could know the alphabet without learning it. For most people, he argued, understanding the divine word expressed in Scripture involved learning its language, just as children learn their native language and other tongues by listening and by learning from a human teacher. As the teacher who teaches the actual alphabet has the intention of enabling others to read too, so Augustine’s highly influential work was intended as a guide to learning how to read the language of Scripture.5 De Doctrina Christiana is not a handbook of the rhetorical rules he had learned and taught in pagan schools, and neither does it simply give examples of his own scriptural interpretation; rather, it provides rules on discovering what we need to learn, and the process of presenting what we have learnt both about things and about signs in Scripture, about its literal text and its spiritual meaning for an initiated Christian audience.6 The rules encompass an encyclopaedic range of human learning. Thomas O’Loughlin has shown that Adomnán’s understanding of Augustine’s interpretative rules is well demonstrated in his particular use of oral and non-biblical written sources in De locis sanctis to help elucidate problematic passages in the literal text of Scripture.7 At first sight, this thought-world may seem remote from the collection of diverse ‘prophetic revelations [. . .] divine miracles [. . .] appearances of angels and certain manifestations of heavenly brightness’ which constitute the three books of the Vita Columbae. As De locis sanctis demonstrates, however, biblical learning could be expressed in genres other than scriptural commentaries. It has been suggested elsewhere that in the Vita Columbae Adomnán 5 De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 5, 9. For discussion and recent bibliography, see R.A. Markus, Signs and Meanings. World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool, 1996) pp. 71–124. 6 De Doctrina Christiana, I.1.4. 7 T. O’Loughlin, ‘The exegetical purpose of Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 24 (1992) pp. 37–53 and above, p. 139f.

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is also concerned with the exegesis of Scripture, but with the interpretation of its underlying meaning rather than the preliminary clarification of its literal text. Moreover, his two works are complementary in other ways. As De locis sanctis ostensibly describes a literal pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the earthly Jerusalem, so in the Vita Columbae, features [162] of the monastic interior pilgrimage towards the heavenly Jerusalem are mirrored in a number of ways, such as the text’s reminiscences of the Israelites’ desert Exodus to the Holy Land,8 and brief allusions to the island monastery of Iona in terms of the earthly paradise and of Jerusalem.9 Scriptural learning is also evident in Adomnán’s use of the image of the scribe to expound the nature and stages of the monastic life. The objective of the present discussion is not primarily to pinpoint specific sources but to attempt to read the image and resolve some of its apparent paradoxes in the light of Iona’s inheritance of patristic and monastic traditions of reading Scripture.10 It will be asked what associations Adomnán’s account of Columba’s scribal activity might have held for a contemporary insular monastic audience familiar with the techniques of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture through constant practical experience of lectio divina, the liturgy and the monastic office, and whether these associations can help to identify broader themes in the book for the modern reader. This is not, of course, to claim that biblical, patristic and liturgical influences are the only ones at work, but to suggest that they underlie rather more than the book’s known hagiographic borrowings and topoi.

Knowledge and wisdom Underlying Adomnán’s account of Columba’s sanctity is a precept which had been widely disseminated through the biblical commentaries of Origen, their Latin translations by Jerome and Rufinus, and the whole tradition of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture which they influenced. In particular, the precept had been articulated for early Western monasticism by John Cassian. In this exegetical tradition, the process of understanding the divine word expressed through the inspired text of Scripture could be [163] served by human learning (and in most cases required lifelong study); the objectives of such scriptural learning and of ancillary studies, however, were not intellectual but practical. Commentators

8 VC I.1, 37; II.2, 10, 42; III.23. 9 VC II.28, III.23. J. O’Reilly ‘Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba’, in Bourke, ed., Studies in the Cult of Saint Columba, pp. 80–106. The comparison of literal and inner pilgrimage was a patristic topos. 10 For discussion of source materials and models see G. Brüning, ‘Adomnans Vita Columbae und ihre Ableitungen’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 11 (1917) pp. 213–304; J.M. Picard, ‘Structural patterns in early Hiberno-Latin hagiography’, Peritia 4 (1985) pp. 67–82; M. Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry, The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988, repr. Blackrock, 1996) pp. 134–50; Sharpe, Adomnán, pp. 56–65.

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repeatedly stressed the impossibility of understanding the divine word without obeying it. The study of Scripture therefore required not only human learning but the moral and spiritual conversion of the reader. The carnal passions were to be driven out so that the ‘eyes of the heart’ might begin to gaze on the mysteries (sacramenta) of Scripture, as though a veil had been removed. Following his well-known demonstration in Conlationes xiv.8 of the multiple ways in which the literal text of Scripture may be spiritually interpreted, Cassian had stressed that to gaze with the pure eye of the soul on such profound and hidden mysteries ‘can be gained by no learning of man’s, nor condition of this world, only by purity of soul, by means of the illumination of the Holy Spirit’.11 In the Vita Columbae Adomnán is concerned to show that the task of discerning Scripture’s underlying spiritual meaning for the present reader or listener is a quest not for knowledge but for divine wisdom, a process dependant on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and inseparably bound up with purity of heart and holiness of life. Adomnán, like Cassian, recognises that instruction and formation in this way of salvation is most effectively given through the practical example of elders (seniores) in the monastic life and especially through one particular example of perfection.12 Accordingly, it is because of Columba’s spiritual wisdom (sapientia), not because of his superior knowledge or scientia, that he is presented as one pre-eminently fitted for the abbatial task of expounding the word of God to his community. But the lessons he has to teach do not arise from a biographical account of an inner conversion or stages on an arduous journey in the spiritual life. We are simply told in hallowed terms that, since boyhood, he ‘had devoted himself to training in the Christian life, and to the study of wisdom; with God’s help, he had kept his body chaste and his mind pure and shown himself, though placed on earth, fit for the life of heaven’.13 There are no details of the [164] syllabus of studies he pursued as a young deacon while studying the wisdom of sacred Scripture (sapientiam sacrae scripturae) with the holy bishop Finnbar (Uinniau) in Ireland14 or which he later taught his own monks. His learning is not questioned, but his role in exemplifying and teaching wisdom is shown by other means. The idea of both the necessity and the limitations of books, even books of the Bible, often occurs in patristic and monastic discussion of learning spiritual wisdom. In a widely known letter, Epistula 53, Jerome called Paulinus of Nola from his secular learning to the spiritual understanding of the books of Scripture, urging him ‘to live among these books, to meditate upon them, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else. Does not such a life seem to you a foretaste of heaven here on earth?’ Jerome, who had dedicated his own formidable learning

11 12 13 14

Conlationes xiv.9; translation NPNF, 2nd series, XI, p. 439. Conlationes iv.20; translation NPNF, 2nd series, XI, p. 338. VC second preface; Sharpe, Adomnán, p. 105, n. 18. VC II.I.

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and linguistic skills to the service of studying Scripture, had cautioned another correspondent, however, that although we come to recognise Christ, the light of believers, through the divine Scriptures, ‘even if we were to know here everything that is written, we should know only partially and see darkly (cf. 1 Corinthians 13) [. . .] And when we merit to be with Christ and when we are similar to the angels, all knowledge from books will cease’.15 Columba, who already merited while still in this life to speak with angels, is shown at heightened moments of illumination without books. Even though what was dark and difficult in the Scriptures might be divinely revealed to him on such occasions,16 his experience is not conveyed to the reader in the form of scholarly scriptural commentary. The only example of Columba’s direct exegesis – on the word ‘Sabbath’ – is conveyed by reported speech.17 With considerable skill Adomnán resolves the difficulty of at once portraying Columba’s exemplification of the wisdom which transcends books and his conduct of the abbatial task of teaching the word of God, which of necessity involved the written word. First, Adomnán often evokes and sometimes quotes [165] scriptural texts whose underlying spiritual meaning according to exegesis is concealed in his very narrative. Certain episodes particularly invite a ruminative reading and reveal Columba expounding the Scriptures through his own life, death and posthumous miracles. Secondly, through using the image of the scribe and some of its particular associations in patristic and monastic traditions, Adomnán is able to show Columba as a teacher and a maker of books while avoiding any suggestion that Columba’s wisdom is simply a superior grade of human learning. The image of Columba as scribe differs in important respects from early medieval representations of the inspired biblical or saintly author. The AngloSaxon Whitby Life of Gregory, c. between 704 and 714, quotes from Gregory the Great’s works of exegesis and gives the earliest version of the legend that the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove rested upon him while he was composing his Homilies on Ezekiel.18 The legend influenced a number of early medieval depictions of Gregory writing or dictating to a scribe. Adomnán fully exploits exegesis on the dove to portray Columba as the vessel of the Holy Spirit but does not combine this with the scribal image to focus on the divine inspiration of a work of the saint’s own authorship. The portrait of Columba as scribe also differs from the famous picture of Ezra in his well-appointed Late Antique study, which forms the frontispiece in the Codex Amiatinus, produced at WearmouthJarrow before 716. The haloed figure of the Old Testament scribe, derived from an early tradition of Evangelist author portraits, is shown copying out the Hebrew Scriptures while seated in front of a bookcase containing all the books of the Latin Bible. 15 Jerome, Ep. liii.10, Ep. xxx.8: Saint Jérôme Lettres, iii.23; ii.34; translations NPNF 2nd series VI, pp. 96–102. 16 VC III.18. 17 VC III.23. 18 Vita Gregorii, pp. 24–27; The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, pp. 122, 120.

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The iconography is supplemented in the manuscript’s opening quire by a series of inscribed diagrams showing patristic classifications of the books of Scripture and extracts from Jerome’s Epistula 53 on their spiritual interpretation.19 Bede’s exegesis on Ezra stresses his sanctity, his exemplification of the wisdom of the scribe described in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and the way in which he presents a figure of Christ himself. But he also describes the critical, editorial aspect of Ezra’s work of transcribing [166] Hebrew Scripture and his development of script, as part of the divinely inspired historical process of transmitting the divine word to all peoples.20 For Bede and his contemporaries the portrait of the scribe Ezra in the Codex Amiatinus must have offered some comment on the scholarly and scribal contributions which Abbot Ceolfrith and his scriptorium made to the enterprise by producing this monumental Vulgate pandect and its two sister manuscripts. Notwithstanding the evidence of much earlier development of scripts and of critical approaches to the scriptural text in the Irish schools, however, and of Adomnán’s own standing as a biblical scholar, there is no celebration of scholarly or calligraphic achievements in his pen portrait of the founding father of Iona as a scribe. What, then, does he show was the nature and purpose of Columba’s scribal work and why were books in his handwriting so important?

Columba’s books Adomnán describes the saint copying out or supervising the copying out of texts. The only texts he specifies are psalters and a book of hymns for the week.21 It is not known what form the ymnorum liber septimaniorum might have taken, but Jane Stevenson has argued that a cursus of hymns seems already to have been in use in sixth-century Ireland, probably modelled on the hymnody of southern Gaul, and in this connection she emphasises the importance of canticles and the influence of the monastic traditions of Lerins and of Cassian.22 St Paul’s recommendation of threefold praise in the early Church briefly hints at the range of

19 All illustrations reproduced in R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford, ‘The art of the Codex Amiatinus (Jarrow Lecture, 1967)’, Journal of the Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 32 (1969) pp. 1–25, pl. C, II, IX–XII. 20 Bede, In Ezram et Neemiam, CCSL 119A, pp. 307–10. 21 VC I.23, II.9, III.23. 22 J. Stevenson, ‘Irish hymns, Venantius Fortunatus and Poitiers’, in J.M. Picard, ed., Aquitaine and Ireland in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 1995) pp. 81–110. Jerome’s second Psalm Preface, however, translates the original Hebrew title of the Psalterium as volumen hymnorum. Isidore of Seville noted that in the Hebrew title, Sepher Thelim, quod interpretatur volumen hymnorum, the original metrical nature of the psalms is made evident: Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem I, 768; Isidore, Etymologiae 6.15: San Isidoro de Seville. Etimologias I, 570. For early Irish use of Jerome’s prefaces, see M. McNamara, ‘Psalter text and psalter study in the early Irish church (A.D. 600–1200)’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 73 C (Dublin, 1973) pp. 201–72 at 221, 254.

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spiritual functions it could serve: ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you abundantly: in all wisdom, teaching and [167] admonishing one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual canticles, singing in grace in your hearts to God’ (Colossians 3.16; cf. Ephesians 5.19). Even unglossed copies of the Psalm text could carry allusions to interpretative traditions through prefaces, and through the headings and numbering of the psalms which were regarded as part of the text. The earliest and one of the most widely attested of the various series of Latin tituli psalmorum is the ‘St Columba series’, so named by Pierre Salmon because its first extant appearance is in the Cathach (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 12 R 33), a psalter of sixth- or early seventh-century date, which was traditionally ascribed to the hand of St Columba. The tituli in the rubrics of the Cathach provide a spiritual interpretation of each psalm’s meaning and preserve a very early and Christological tradition of patristic psalm exegesis.23 While Adomnán does not say which particular canticles, prefaces, headings and collects, if any, were contained in Columba’s psalters, it is clear that the term psalterium could designate very much more than a copy of a book from the Old Testament. In the long tradition stemming from the exegesis of Origen and the practice of the desert fathers, the Psalter was seen to embrace the whole of divinely inspired Scripture; spiritually interpreted, the words of the psalmist can not only apply to Christ but offer the words of Christ to his Church and to the individual soul in all the variety of its needs, and also articulate the soul’s own prayer and compunction. Athanasius’s pastoral letter to Marcellinus summarises this interpretative tradition, emphasising the uniqueness of the Psalms which contain the pronouncements of the patriarchs, prophets and evangelists: other books of Scripture offer past models of behaviour for emulation, but the listener or reader recognises in the Psalms his own words, ‘And the one who hears is deeply moved, as though he himself were speaking, and is affected by the words of the songs, as if they were his own songs’: [168] He who chants (the Psalms) will be especially confident in speaking what is written as if it is his own and about him. For the Psalms comprehend the one who observes the commandment as well as the one who transgresses, and the action of each [. . .] these words become like a mirror to the person singing them, so that he might perceive himself and the emotions of his soul [. . .] he who hears the one reading receives the song that is recited as being about him and either, when he is convicted by his conscience, being pierced, he will repent, or hearing of the hope that 23 McNamara, ‘Psalter text and psalter study’, pp. 266–68, notes that the Cathach’s revision of the Gallicanum against the Irish family of Hebraicum texts ‘indicates the existence of a critical textual approach to the Psalter text in Irish schools’ already in the sixth century or the early seventh century at the latest. For psalm headings ‘of St Columba’, see P. Salmon, Les ‘Tituli Psalmorum’ des manuscrits latins, Collectanea Biblica Latine 12 (Vatican, 1959) pp. 45–74.

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resides in God, and of the succour available to believers – how this kind of grace exists for him – he exults and begins to give thanks to God.24 Praying the psalms was therefore intimately bound up with the inner journey of the spiritual life, with acquiring self-knowledge and trying to discern the divine will. Contemporary concerns and situations called to mind particular psalm texts, as is witnessed in insular hagiography, for example in VC I.30, 37 and III.23. Modern scholarly interest in the Antiochene elements in HibernoLatin psalm commentary has sometimes tended to overshadow the continuing influence of this tradition for seventh-century insular monastic culture, which was mediated partly through Augustine’s Ennarationes in psalmos and Cassiodorus’s Expositio Psalmorum, but particularly through the work of Cassian. He details the arrangement of the nocturnal and daily psalms of the office in the Institutiones ii–iii, but in the Conlationes is concerned with the constant, interior, prayerful appropriation of the Psalms by the individual monk. In Conlationes x, Abba Isaac describes how the truly pure and humble ‘will take in to himself all the thoughts of the Psalms and will begin to sing them in such a way that he will utter them with the deepest emotion of the heart not as if they were the composition of the Psalmist, but rather as if they were his own utterances’; he will recognise that the words of the Psalms ‘are fulfilled and carried out daily in his own case’. [169] Meditated upon in this way, the Psalms are not simply committed to memory but become implanted within the individual’s very being and their meaning is revealed not by theoretical exposition but by daily practical experience. Like Athanasius, Cassian presents the Psalms as a mirror in which the soul can see and affectively understand itself and learn to enter into a more perfect recollection of God. What is the significance of Columba copying out the Psalms? A primary association of Columba’s scribal work is with the ceaseless offering of prayer and praise from the psalms and canticles constituting the monastic hours or office, in which the monastic life most especially aspires to the heavenly life of the angels (cf. Psalm 118.62, 164; Psalm 137.1). This is not to say that his writing is presented only as the task of producing service books for the liturgy and the office, which established members of the community are likely to have sung from memory. Copying out the Psalter could itself be regarded as singing the Lord’s praises and as part of the meditative process of memorising and internalising the divine word through constantly hearing, reading and chanting Scripture. The method

24 Ep. ad Marcellinum, PG 28.11–46; translation from R. Gregg, Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus (London, 1980) pp. 109–11; cf. M.J. Rondeau, ‘L’épître à Marcellinus sur les psaumes’, Vigiliae Christianae 22 (1968) pp. 17–197. For Cassian on the importance of psalmody to mystical prayer, see translation and discussion of Conlationes x.11 in L. Bouyer, A History of Spirituality, I (London, 1968) pp. 507–08. On the spiritual interpretation of the psalms, see K. Torjesen, ‘Origen’s interpretation of the psalms’, Studia Patristica XVII. 2 (1982) pp. 944–58; M.J. Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du psautier III–Ve siècles, ii (Rome, 1985); B. Ward, Bede and the Psalter (Jarrow Lecture, 1991).

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of prayerful meditation described by Cassian, whereby those praying the Psalms ‘become like their authors and anticipate their meaning rather than follow it’, would find concrete expression in the practice of writing out the Psalms. Columba’s writing is categorised in Adomnán’s Second Preface, together with prayer, reading, work, unwearying fasts and vigils, as one of the spiritual disciplines of the monastic life which, together with the office, occupied him by day and night, even the night of his death. Columba is distinguished from the various hagiographic models of sanctity he recalls – St Antony, St Martin and St Benedict – by his particular identification with writing as a holy task. Adomnán’s accounts of the many books written by Columba which later survived immersion in water, are not presented as haphazard wonder tales but as part of his demonstration of the saint’s closeness to God and consequent power over ‘contrary elements’, even beyond death. The stories are localised in Ireland, but the details of perishable vellum manuscripts and leather satchels also transmute elements of a patristic store of images about books and their containers. The contrast of the transitory medium of manuscripts, the skin of dead animals (membranas [170] animalium mortuorum), and the enduring nature of their contents, for example, had provided Jerome with a favourite conceit. The word scrinium, meaning a chest or coffer for storing letters and books, was also used by early Christian writers to denote a treasure chest or shrine enclosing secret and precious things, including books, and could refer to sacred books themselves, which contained the treasury of the Scriptures.25 The image was to be embodied in the custom of covering or enshrining sacred books in precious metalwork. Adomnán does not describe a literal enshrinement of books and even displaces the image. A book of hymns, written in the hand of Saint Columba and salvaged from a river after many weeks, was unharmed by the water which had rotted its skin satchel; in contrast, the book within the satchel was of extraordinary whiteness and clarity, as clean and dry as if it had remained in a scrinium.26 Similarly, a page described simply as ‘written by the holy fingers of St Columba’, was recovered from a bag of books after being submerged in the River Boyne for three weeks; though protected only by a skin satchel, it emerged as dry and undamaged as though it had been kept in scriniolo, whereas the pages of other un-identified books in the satchel had rotted. The telling of the story leaves the inescapable conclusion that what distinguished this page from those which perished was not the medium on which it was written, the text it contained, or its calligraphy, but the holiness of the copyist. Columba’s copying out of texts does not simply function as a metaphor of his exemplary interpretation of their life-giving meaning. Adomnán insists that the story of the salvaged book in VC II.9 is based on the testimony of trustworthy eyewitnesses and he records his own presence at

25 Saint Jerome sur Jonas, SC, 4–3, 55 n. 3; M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990) pp. 39–41 for scrinium. 26 VC II.9.

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the ending of a drought on Iona, miraculously effected through the ceremonial carrying of books in Columba’s handwriting (libris stilo ipsius discriptis) around the ploughland and reading from them at a spot where Columba had spoken with angels.27 The books were clearly regarded as powerful relics of the saint and signs of his continuing presence with the community and were placed on the altar with psalms and fasting and invocation of his name in order [171] to secure a favourable wind for the shipping of building materials to the island monastery. Adomnán’s accounts of these posthumous miracles reveal a spiritual reality perceived to be sacramentally present in the earthly books produced by Columba’s holy hand.28 Similarly, the physical properties of a knife were miraculously changed when it was blessed with the sign of the cross Columba made with his pen while he was copying out a book. The knife was found to be incapable of wounding or killing and this quality was transferred to all the iron tools in the monastery which the monks overlaid with molten metal from the knife, ‘because the efficacy of that blessing of the saint continued’.29

The tegorium In evaluating the evidence in Vita Columbae for the monastic topography of Iona, Aidan MacDonald has noted the symbolic rather than archaeological significance of Adomnán’s references to the hut where Columba wrote.30 From the sparse information that it was in a raised-up place, supported on beams and that its door probably faced eastward, it is not possible to reconstruct the hut or its location if, indeed, Adomnán has in mind an actual building. In all six chapters where the hut or cabin is mentioned (VC I.25, 35; II.16; III.15, 22, 23), Adomnán uses the word tegori(ol)um, and the possible significance of his repeated use of this term in De locis sanctis will be discussed elsewhere. In the Vita Columbae he describes the writing-hut, not in terms of a scriptorium or a contemplative retreat from abbatial business, but as the very hub of that activity and of Iona’s spheres of influence. Adomnán pictures Columba working there with the door open, fully aware of the comings and goings in the monastery. He is variously seen writing or reading and with one or two [172] monks in attendance or studying with him, but he is also shown prophesying distant events outside the monastic life, receiving a visitor from outside the island enclosure and pronouncing blessings ‘according 27 VC II.44. 28 For discussion of the post-Augustinian development of a sacramental vision in which carnal signs were seen to mediate between this world and the next, see C. Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley, 1988), 47–65 and R.A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambrige, 1997) pp. 47–50. 29 VC II.29. For further comment on these two sets of miracles, see above, Clancy, pp. 14–19, and Márkus, pp. 118–19. 30 A.D.S. MacDonald, ‘Adomnán’s monastery of Iona’, in Bourke, ed., Studies in the Cult of Saint Columba, pp. 24–44 at 42. Jerome uses the same term, tuguriolum, in the Vita S. Hilarionis, 9 to describe the anchorite’s hut of sedge and reeds.

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to the custom’ on tools and equipment and those engaged in the daily work of the monastery, such as milking the cows.31 It is from the spiritual vantage-point of his elevated writing-hut that Columba has prophetic insights concerning his monks in Durrow as on Iona, which prompt him to chastise, exhort or sustain them according to their needs. While writing in the hut he routs a demon, invokes the help of angels, and receives a heavenly vision announcing his coming death and resurrection.32 The active and contemplative aspects of the coenobitic life and of the abbatial vocation are inseparably combined in Adomnán’s extended scribal image, which has various sources of inspiration but surely no equal in its scale and coherence.33 The tegorium was also the setting for the scene where Columba handed on his abbatial office to his successor, through the image of handing on his scribal task.34 Columba was working on a copy of the psalms. He announced: ‘Here, at the end of the page, I must stop. Let Baíthéne write what follows’. Adomnán comments: ‘And the verse that follows, “Come my sons, hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Psalm 33.12), is fittingly adapted to the successor [Baíthéne], the father of spiritual sons’. This psalm verse had very early been interpreted as Christ’s invitation to the faithful to learn from him ‘the fear of the Lord’ which is the way [173] to eternal life, and so the text was applied in patristic and monastic literature to the role of the pastor or abbot who shares in Christ’s work of teaching.35 Cassian had frequently used the term ‘the fear of the Lord’ to describe the whole monastic way of compunction and longing for the heavenly life in which the monk is guided by the traditions of the elders and by the abbot in learning to understand and obey the divine word, as discerned in the spiritual interpretation of Scripture. In the Prologue to the Rule of St Benedict, the divine voice is heard through the words of Psalm 33.12 summoning the faithful to the task of learning ‘the fear of the Lord’. At the end of Columba’s exemplary abbacy the task of teaching the fear of the Lord is not complete, however. It is concerned not simply with securing initial conversion to the monastic life, but with prompting

31 VC I.25, 35; II.16, 29. 32 VC II.16; III.15, 22. 33 In contrast, the contemporary biographer of St Cuthbert says of Cuthbert’s sojourn in the island monastery of Lindisfarne, ‘He dwelt there according to Scripture, following the contemplative amid the active life, and he arranged our rule of life which we composed then for the first time and which we observe even to this day along with the Rule of Benedict’. The Vita Columbae and the Vita Cuthberti share certain themes and both draw on the Lives of Antony, Martin and Benedict (see A. Thacker, ‘Lindisfarne and the origins of the cult of St Cuthbert’, in G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe, eds, St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community to AD 1200 [Woodbridge, 1989], pp. 103–22 at 112–15). But whereas Columba departs from their example in his frequent association with books and writing, Cuthbert, like Antony, is served by memory instead of books: Vita sancti Cuthberti auctore anonymo, III.1, IV.1: Two Lives of St Cuthbert, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940) pp. 94–96, 110–12. 34 VC III.23. 35 O’Reilly, ‘Reading the Scriptures’, pp. 103–04.

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a continuing process of inner conversion throughout this life, leading to a deepening understanding of what the term ‘the fear of the Lord’ can mean. The process cannot be seen at work in Columba himself, who was a son of promise from before his birth and already a figure of sanctity when first presented to the reader, but is evident in Adomnán’s account of Columba’s spiritual sons.

Learning the spiritual alphabet Scribal work is already highlighted at an earlier stage of Baíthene’s monastic career. ‘One day, Baíthéne went to Columba and said, “I have need of one of the brothers, to run through and emend with me the psalter that I have written”’. Columba foretold that only a single letter ‘i’ would be found missing and so it proved to be.36 Jean-Michel Picard sees this episode as primarily a borrowing from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus. Apollonius, a Pythagorean philosopher, marvelled when a brahman was able to foretell that a delta was missing from an epistle he had not seen. Picard suggests that Adomnán gave a Christian resonance to the story by changing the missing letter to an ‘i’ (alluding to the iota in Matthew 5.18), so that an even greater power of prescience is attributed to Columba, iota or ‘i’ being the smallest letter of [174] the alphabet.37 The episode may also be read as a demonstration of Baíthéne’s high degree of scribal accuracy and as an instance of the scholarly practice of emending a transcript against its exemplar, which Adomnán earnestly commends to all future copyists of his own work.38 But other readings are possible in the light of monastic uses of the scribal image. Adomnán does not directly use the metaphor of the spiritual alphabet which is featured in a number of Irish works, but its context in the work of Cassian and other early writers offers a key to understanding the function of the scribal image in the Life of Columba and even the format in which Adomnán tells the story.39 Cassian in his Institutes, for example, had likened the initial stages instructing monks to learn the true humility, obedience and mortification of carnal desires necessary to continue in the monastic life, to the process of teaching them ‘the alphabet, as it were, and first syllables in the direction of perfection’. He describes

36 VC I.23. 37 J.M. Picard, ‘Tailoring the sources: the Irish hagiographer at work’, in Ní Chatháin and Richter, eds, Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur, pp. 261–74 at 261–62. I am grateful to Prof. Picard for a copy of his paper. Brian McNeil notes a relevant example among the accretion of parallels from legends about heroes, gods and holy men from other religions to the life of Jesus in early apocryphal literature, ‘Jesus and the alphabet’, Journal of Theological Studies ns 27 (1976) pp. 126–28 and n. 29. 38 VC III.23. 39 P.P. Ó Néill, ‘The date and authorship of Apgitir Chrábaid: some internal evidence’, in P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter, eds, Irland und die Christenheit: Biblestudien und Mission (Stuttgart, 1987) pp. 203–15; G. Márkus, ‘What were Patrick’s alphabets?’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 31 (1996) pp. 1–15, has suggested the likely influence of Cassian’s Institutiones in Tireachán’s use of the alphabet as an image of a basic outline of Christian faith. See n. 40.

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the ideal response of learners of this alphabet when summoned from their cells to prayer or work: one who is practising the writer’s art, although he may have just begun to form a letter, does not venture to finish it, but runs out with the utmost speed, at the very moment when the sound of the knocking reaches his ears, without even waiting to finish the letter he has begun; leaving the lines of the letter incomplete he [. . .] hastens with the utmost earnestness and zeal to attain the virtue of obedience.40 The scene, which became something of a topos, shows the monk has learned [175] an early lesson in the fundamental monastic virtue of surrendering his own will. The next chapter stresses that no-one should venture to say that anything is his own: ‘it is a great offence if there drops from the mouth of a monk such an expression as “my book”, “my tablets”, “my pen”’; the following chapter warns against pride in one’s own labour, even if it benefits the whole community. Similarly, the Rule of St Benedict forbids any monk to presume to retain anything as his own, ‘not a book, writing tablets or a stylus [. . .] since monks may not have the free disposal of their own bodies and wills’. Any monk, furthermore, who ‘feels that he is conferring something on the monastery’ by his own skill, is to cease practising his craft until he has demonstrated his humility and is ordered to resume by the abbot.41 The task of the teacher is to help the pupil know himself and discern impurities of motivation, particularly any false humility which may be concealed beneath his apparent progress in the spiritual alphabet. In Cassian’s Conlationes, Abbot Nesteros teaches a younger monk how to seek purity of heart and guard himself against the spiritual temptations which will beset him in the process of learning spiritual wisdom: the first practical step towards learning is to receive the regulations and opinions of all the Elders with an earnest heart, and with lips that are dumb; and diligently lay them up in your heart, and endeavour rather to perform than to teach them [. . .] And so you should never venture to say anything in the conference of the Elders [. . .] as some who are puffed up with vainglory pretend that they ask, in order really to show off the knowledge which they perfectly possess. For it is an impossibility for one, who takes to the pursuit of reading with the purpose of gaining the praise of men, to be rewarded with the gift of true knowledge.42 40 Institutiones iv.9, 12, NPNF XI, pp. 221–22. In the Life of Cainnech of Aghaboe the saint left the letter ‘O’ half-formed when he obeyed the summons of the monastic bell: O’Neill, ‘Columba the scribe’, 73. In VC II.13, Adomnán avoids the obvious and St Cainnech’s instant obedience is expressed in his running to the church with only one shoe on when he was summoned by Columba to pray. 41 Institutiones iv.13; Regula Sancti Benedicti 33, 57: SC 182, pp. 562, 624. 42 Conlationes xiv.9; NPNF XI, p. 439.

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It is a fundamental lesson which may readily be taught through the example of writing, too. In the light of this tradition, certain details in Adomnán’s telling of the story of Baíthéne in VC I.23 come into sharper focus. Columba does not commend Baíthéne’s remarkable scribal achievement at all. Rather, on hearing his request for help in checking his text he reproves him: [176] Why do you impose this trouble upon us, without a cause? Since in this psalter of yours, of which you speak, neither will one letter be found superfluous, nor another to have been left out, except a vowel ‘i’, which alone is missing. (Cur hanc super nos infers sine causa molestiam? Nam in tuo hoc de quo dicis quae sola deest psalterio nec una superflua repperietur litters nec alia deese excepta .i. uocali quae sola deest.) There is here the suspicion that Baíthéne was drawing attention to his psalter and to his own skill, disturbing the abbot and others and presuming to initiate action. It is not the description of a bad monk but of youthful vainglory. A number of sayings preserved in the literature of the desert monastic tradition offer interesting comparisons with this episode. For example, a brother who proudly told an old man at Scetis that he had copied out the whole of the Old and New Testament with his own hand was admonished with the words, ‘You have filled the cupboards with paper’. A brother who had eagerly asked an elderly scribe to copy a book for him then pointed out some scribal omissions and demanded they be corrected, but the old man refused, saying, ‘Practice first that which is written, then come back and I will write the rest’.43 The literary genre of such sayings or apophthegma assumes that the audience is seeking spiritual wisdom. In order to make sense of each story the reader must ponder the unexpected and enigmatic reply of the older monk, which discloses the young monk’s true interior disposition in addressing him. The concern [177] of the two younger monks for completeness and perfection in the execution of the external letter of Scripture contrasts with the elementary stage they are shown to have reached in learning humility and spiritual wisdom. In both cases, an apparently testy response to apparently harmless youthful enthusiasm over a question 43 Noted in Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, pp. 115, 154; cf. pp. 59–60 for the story of Abba Arsenius, who, on entering the desert life, had humbly recognised the need for a new kind of knowledge. To those who marvelled that a man of rank and learning should consult an old monk of lowly origin, Arsenius replied: ‘I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not know even the alphabet of this rustic’ (Apopthegmata Patrum, De abbate Arsenio 6, PG 5.89A). There is a reversal of roles between a teacher of the alphabet and his pupil, demonstrating their different kinds of knowledge, in an apocryphal story told by Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I.xx.1, cf. R.M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons (London, 1997), p. 84. In the version which was known early in Ireland through the Gospel of Thomas, the infant Jesus is taught the alphabet from Alpha to Omega and then berates his teacher for presuming to teach the letter Beta when he does not know the meaning of the letter Alpha, whose mystery Jesus expounds, opaquely (see M.R. James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924) pp. 50–51; McNeil, ‘Jesus and the alphabet’).

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of scribal skill offers the reader a veiled spiritual insight. Typically, such stories do not go on to detail the younger monks’ reaction: the reaction takes place within the heart and the life of the reader. Frequently, as in these examples, Scripture is not quoted but evoked. By presumptuously addressing their elders and receiving a ‘word’ from them, the two young monks unwittingly demonstrate the importance of the Mosaic command on which this literature is based: ‘Ask thy father and he will show thee; thy elders and they will tell thee’ (Deuteronomy 32.7). Less often, Scripture is quoted and the teaching point made directly. One of St Antony’s cautionary ‘sayings’, for example, simply describes some monks who ‘fell away after many labours and were obsessed with spiritual pride for they put their trust in their own works and being deceived they did not give due heed to the commandment, “Ask thy father and he will tell you”’.44 Adomnán’s technique in his story of the scribe Baíthéne in VC I.23 has much more in common with the first two examples. The episode urges the need to pass beyond the literal text of Scripture, which Baíthéne transcribed almost perfectly, in order to seek its inner meaning. The image of writing Scripture therefore says something about how it should be read and lived. Adomnán’s approach may be further defined by comparison with that of Columbanus, who had also been influenced by Cassian and the traditions of desert monasticism and had dealt with some of the same themes discussed here concerning the humility and purity of heart necessary for the discernment and practice of God’s word. In Epistula IV.6, Columbanus declares: ‘none will be saved by his own right hand (cf. Job 40.9) [. . .] except him who humbly uses his capacities, which are themselves gifts, with fear and trembling in the will of God’. In Epistula I.2 he [178] explains that he is seeking the counsel of Gregory the Great, not from presumption but illud canticum, Interroga patrem tuum et annuntiabit tibi, maiores tuos et discent tibi (Deuteronomy 32.7). He quotes the same scriptural text in stressing a monk’s constant need to ‘ask his father’ for spiritual counsel and teaching (Regula Monachorum ix, x; Sermon II.1). Epistula VI.I warns the writer’s own ‘dear secretary’, a young monk who asked for instruction beyond what he had already been given by his spiritual father, that ‘the man to whom little is not enough will not benefit from more’ (cf. Sermons I.3, III.4 and Regularum Monachorum viii).45 This teaching appears in the form of precepts given in the context of epistulae, instructiones and monastic rules addressed to a variety of recipients, often supported with citations of Scripture and patristic authority,

44 B. Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Alphabetical Collection (Oxford, 1975) p. 7. In contrast Columba as a young deacon had ascribed his first miracle to his spiritual father, bishop Finbarr: VC II.1. 45 G.S.M. Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera (Dublin, 1957). For the authenticity of Ep. VI and the sermons see N. Wright, ‘Columbanus’ Epistulae’, in M. Lapidge, ed., Columbanus. Studies on the Latin Writings (Woodbridge, 1997) pp. 29–92 at 58–59 and C. Stancliffe, ‘The thirteen sermons attributed to Columbanus and the question of their authorship’, in Lapidge, ed., Columbanus. Studies on the Latin Writings, pp. 93–202.

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and sometimes with specific application to current ecclesiastical problems and theological discussion. In the very different medium of the Life of Columba, the teachings of a living monastic tradition are renewed in the process of their being recognised by the reader in the saint’s enigmatic deeds and sayings and in Adomnán’s allusive scribal image.

The complete measure and the least letter What are we to make of Columba’s prophetic insight that there would not be one superfluous letter in Baíthéne’s psalter and not one missing except a letter ‘i’? The brief incident carries echoes of major exegetical themes. The complete measure and sufficiency of the divine word as a rule of life for the faithful, nothing more nor less, is strongly expressed in Moses’s exhortation about the keeping of the law: ‘The word which I have commanded you, you shall neither add to it, nor diminish it’ (Deuteronomy 4.2). Columbanus cited this text in Epistula I.4 (c. 600), against those whose dating of Easter would, in his view, be adding to the divine instructions in Exodus 12.15 for the dating of the Passover. Such assertions of the inviolable integrity of Scripture had long featured in defences of orthodox belief against schismatics and heretics. Similarly, [179] Eusebius in The History of the Church, v. 16, had quoted an early apologist who was anxious not to be accused of adding another paragraph or clause to the wording of the New Covenant, ‘to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken away, by anyone who has determined to live by the gospel itself’.46 The concept was also expressed through the image of not adding or taking away even a single letter from Scripture. Eastern fathers directly paralleled the alphabet, complete in all its characters, with the truth of the Gospel, complete in all the characters used to write it: Just as the body of the alphabet is complete in its members, And there is no character to take away, and none other to add, So also is the truth which is written in the holy gospel, in the characters of the alphabet, The complete measure, which is not susceptible of less or more.47 In these and other examples the complete measure and sufficiency of Scripture does not simply mean a canon of individual biblical books, but a particular way of reading Scripture as a whole enabling the reader to see the completeness of 46 Eusebius: The History of the Church, tr. G.A. Williamson, revd and ed. A. Louth (Harmondsworth, 1989) p. 160; cf. p. 171 for the same argument used by Polycrates. 47 Ephraem the Syrian, Hymns against Heresies, xxii: pp. 1, 78, translated in S.H. Griffith, ‘The image maker in the poetry of Ephraem the Syrian’, Studia Patristica 25 (1993) pp. 258–69 at 259–60.

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God’s law as the way of perfection. Origen’s sense of the divine mysteries contained by the sign of the literal text of Scripture was profoundly influential on Greek and Latin Psalm exegesis. In his commentary on Psalm 1 he said that ‘the wisdom of God has penetrated to all inspired Scripture even as far as the ‘slightest letter’. Moreover, he explicitly identified that slightest letter with the Greek equivalent of ‘i’, the iota, citing as his authority Christ’s reference to the iota in Matthew 5.18, which is preserved in the Vulgate phrase, iota unum aut unus apex (familiar in the AV and Douai translations: ‘one jot or one tittle shall not pass from the law, till all be fulfilled’). Origen several times used this image of the iota in stressing the unity and coherence of the whole of inspired Scripture, which is [180] revealed if it is spiritually interpreted: in the holy Scriptures through which Christ speaks, ‘there is not one super fluous jot or tittle’; there is ‘no jot or tittle in the Scripture which will not receive its effect on those who know how to understand it’.48 The potency of the least of letters also arose from its numerological significance. Iota forms the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet and represents the number ten; in the Latin alphabet, the letter ‘i’ represents the number one. In the Pythagorean tradition of number symbolism the elemental relationships and ratios of musical and cosmic harmony were seen to lie in the first four numbers, whose aggregate is ten. Because counting, when it reaches ten, returns to begin again at one, which is the principle of all numbers, the number ten contains within itself all other numbers, proportions and harmonies.49 Christian exegetes utilised such concepts as demonstrations of the all-embracing power of the divine Creator and the order and harmony both of his creation and of sacred Scripture. The number ten, a figure of perfection, was therefore likened to Jesus, in whom all things come together, and whose name in Greek begins with iota, meaning ten; in Latin, Iesus begins with the letter ‘i’, standing for the first number. Patristic and Insular exegetes found confirmation of these numerological concepts concealed not only in Christ’s words concerning the iota, but within sacred Scripture’s references to the decalogue and the denarius (Matthew 20.2), to the numbers four, ten, their product and multiples. The number ten, composed of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, in particular represented the ten commandments of the Old Testament law which, if spiritually interpreted and interiorised, could be seen to be filled with the four Gospels.50 This argues for the inspiration and harmony of the whole of sacred Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, in which Christ is revealed. Thus, alongside the notion that the complete alphabet represented the complete measure of Scripture, divinely inspired to its least letter, there had also developed the idea that the least letter could itself mysteriously express that wholeness and perfection. Such [181] 48 Philocalia ii.4; i.28: SC 302, pp. 366–70; The Philocalia of Origen, pp. 32, 28. F. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge, 1997) pp. 21–24. 49 C. Butler, Number Symbolism (London, 1970) pp. 2–13. 50 For example: Augustine, De consensu evangelistiarum, CSEL 43, II.4; De Doctrina Christiana, II.62–65; Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum, CCSL 92, pp. 62, 116.

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numerological concepts help explain the weight of commentary on the letter iota in Matthew 5.18. Latin commentators similarly expounded the phrase iota unum aut unus apex which occurs in Christ’s declaration in the Sermon on the Mount that he had come not to destroy but to fulfil the law and the prophets: ’Till heaven and earth pass away, one iota or one apex shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled’ (Donec transeat caelum et terra, iota unum, aut unus apex non praeteribit a lege, donec omnia fiant, Matthew 5.17–18). Augustine interpreted Christ’s saying as ‘a strong expression of perfection’. He explained that, since the iota is the smallest of all letters, being made by a single stroke, and the apex but a duct or serif at the top of even that, Christ by these words shows that the law is to be obeyed, down to its smallest commandment, not only in its moral requirements but in its spiritual interpretation.51 Jerome too noted that from the figure of the letter, iota, Christ’s words in Matthew 5.18 show that even those things in the law which are considered to be of least importance are filled by ‘spiritual sacraments’ and that all things are brought together in the Gospel.52 Augustine expounded the next verses, Matthew 5.19–20, to show that whoever obeys Christ in interpreting the law spiritually may enter the kingdom of heaven, but whoever obeys the command and also teaches it ‘shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven’. The righteousness of such a person would be ‘greater than that of the scribes and pharisees’, who are often presented in the Gospel as religious men skilled in copying, knowing and keeping the Law, but only in its literal letter and external observance. The consequences of such limited understanding and practice of God’s word by its professional interpreters are laid bare in Christ’s indictment of those scribes and pharisees who thereby ‘shut up the kingdom of heaven against men’ (Matthew 23.13–33); they are immediately contrasted with the prophets, wise men and [182] scribes, his true disciples, whom Christ will send out into the world: Ecco ego mitte ad vos pr ophetas, et sa pientes, et scribas (Matthew 23.34). The scriptural contrasts of bad and good scribes were developed by the Fathers and their discussion of the least letter of the law in Matthew 5.18 is closely in harmony with their exposition of Christ’s words to his disciples commending the good scribe: ‘Every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like a man that is a householder, who brings forth out of his treasure new things and old’ (Matthew 13.52). Bede identified the scriba doctus in regno coelorum not simply with scholars knowledgeable on both the Old Testament and the New, but with

51 Quod autem ait: Iot unum vel unus apex non transit a lege, nihil potest aliud intelligi nisi nehemens expressio perfectionis, quando per litteras singulas demonstrata est, inter quas litt eras iota minor est ceteris, quia uno ductu fit, apex autem etiam ipsius aliqua in summo particula. Augustine, De sermone domine in monte I, 8, 20–29, 21: CCSL 35, pp. 20–23. 52 Ex figura litterae ostenditur quod etiam quae minima putantur in lege, sacramentis spiritalibus plena sint et omnia recapitulentur in evan gelio. Jerome, Commentariorum in Matheum I.510–15: CCSL 77, p. 27.

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spiritual teachers, meaning those to whom the two testaments had been divinely revealed as harmonious parts of the unified expression of God’s word, and who also practised the divine word and made it known to others by their example as well as their teaching. In De Tabernaculo and De templo in particular Bede gave a close reading of two Old Testament texts, demonstrating that the Gospels were already contained and figured within the Law, every part of which was important because, properly interpreted, it had an immediate application to living the spiritual life. He also repeatedly used the patristic interpretation of Christ’s words in Matthew 5.18 in commentaries on a variety of other scriptural texts. He observed that the number ten which denotes the Law (i.e. the ten commandments), also contains another ‘sacrament’ or heavenly mystery because both in Hebrew (ioth) and in Greek (iota), the tenth letter of the alphabet is the first letter of the name Iesus. He likened the letter iota to the observance of the Law which, when spiritually interpreted, contains all the fullness of faith and good works, hence ‘the Law, grasped in a spiritual sense, should not lose one iota or one apex until the end of all things’.53 As is well known, Hiberno-Latin writers were drawn to the kind of information often used by Jerome, which Isidore of Seville had compiled in Book I.3, 4 of his Etymologiae, such as the Hebrew, Greek and Latin equivalents for certain names and terms, and the fact that Greek and Hebrew letters, and some Latin letters, have a numerical significance. Hiberno-Latin works [183] sometimes give the numerical equivalents of Greek letters or render the nomina sacra in Greek characters and occasionally cite bilingual psalters and Gospel texts or give short texts in Greek, as in the Lord’s Prayer at the end of the Schaffhausen manuscript of the Vita Columbae.54 The Grecism iota, retained in the Latin text of Matthew 5.18, was a spur rather than a bar to insular interest in developing its exegesis. The probably seventh-century HibernoLatin Expositio IV Evangeliorum succinctly comments on this verse: Iota unum, nomen litterae, quae uno ducto: fit deca littera, id est, decem verba Legis, apud Graecos litterae, quad nos unum diximus. Unus apex, unum punctum, ad litteram; ad sensum autem, minima mandata Legis. Donec omnia fiant, quia quae lege minima fuerunt, plena mysteriis fiunt; iota vetus Lex, apex Nova.55

53 Bede, De Tabernaculo III.13 and De templo II, 18, 6, CCSL 119A, pp. 135, 200; Libri quatuor in principium Genesis IV, 547–55, 1678–92, CCSL 118A; Homiliae evangelii I. 14, CCSL 122, p. 139. 54 B. Bischoff, ‘Turning-points in the history of Latin exegesis in the Early Irish Church A.D. 650– 800’, in M. McNamara, ed., Biblical Studies. The Medieval Irish Contribution (Dublin, 1976) pp. 73–164 at 85–86. C. Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting (London, 1977), 32, pl. 1 for the Lord’s Prayer in Greek written in Latin characters, in the earliest painted Hiberno-Saxon manuscript, Durham, Cathedral Library MS A.11.10, fol. 3v. 55 PL 30.545.

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Moreover, Augustine’s De sermone Domini in monte and Jerome’s commentary on Matthew’s Gospel were both well known to early Irish commentators. An unpublished eighth-century commentary on Matthew in Munich Clm 6233, ff. 87r–v, for example, expounds Matthew 5.18 by dovetailing the comments of Augustine and Jerome on the immediate text (outlined above), with close verbal parallels, but also briefly expands the patristic description of the iota, made with a single stroke, and its apex: the stroke of the iota figures the Old Testament containing the Decalogue, and the apex, which has four letters in its name, signifies the four Gospels.56 Commenting on Matthew 5.18, the unpublished eighth-century compilation of early Hiberno-Latin exegesis known as the ‘Irish Reference Bible’, first quotes Jerome on the text. It notes the position of the iota as the tenth letter in both the Greek and Hebrew alphabets and its meaning as the number one in Latin [184] and the significance of the visual form of the letter.57 Such comments may be regarded as examples of Hiberno-Latin pseudophilological interests, or as an idiosyncratic reading of meaning into the letter. When read alongside the patristic tradition, however, this material can be recognised as a distinctive and condensed expression of a long-established exegesis on the scribal image in Matthew 5.17–20. It is a key text within the Sermon on the Mount, which drew the particular interest of Hiberno-Latin exegetes. Matthew 5.18 offered an enigmatic summary of Christ’s parallels and antitheses between the old law and the new, the literal letter and its spiritual meaning, external observance and interior obedience, and the words iota and apex appear in other contexts in Hiberno-Latin works in listings of highly allusive biblical pairs and opposites. At the end of the preface to Matthew’s Gospel (devoted to the harmony of Scripture), the ‘Irish Reference Bible’ had already elaborated Augustine’s description of the two pen-strokes which form the letter: the iota refers to the Old Testament, the Law of the ten commandments and the righteousness of the scribes, while the letter’s apex signifies the fulness of the spiritual sense, the New Testament, the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, and the righteousness of the apostles, manifested in fasting, almsgiving and prayer. The whole letter therefore refers to the totality of Scripture and to the need for its spiritual interpretation as a guide to the spiritual life which is to go beyond ‘the righteousness of the scribes’ (cf. Matthew 5.20). The biblical paradox of great things being contained in little is graphically expressed here in the use of the visual form of the written letter to carry the exegesis. The idea of seeing and obeying the ‘fulness of the spiritual sense’ of Scripture, even in its least commandment, is here figured in its least letter.

56 See nn. 51 and 52. I am grateful to Dr Seán Connolly for kind permission to use his transcript. 57 Preserved in the early ninth-century manuscript, Paris, B.N.lat.11561, fol. 149v–150, 137v.; on the ‘Irish Reference Bible’, see J.P. Kelly, ‘A Catalogue of Early Medieval Hiberno-Latin Biblical Commentaries I’, Traditio 44 (1988) pp. 537–71 at 552.

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The psalter as primer The familiarity of such exegetical traditions within insular monastic culture enabled Adomnán to use those traditions [185] allusively. In the context not of a biblical commentary but of a brief apophthegmatic episode set in his own monastery on Iona, Adomnán cites neither Matthew 5.18 nor the Greek letter iota in VC I.23. Through Columba’s cryptic prophecy of the letter missing from Baíthéne’s scribal work, however, he evokes both the smallest letter in the Latin alphabet and the idea of the sufficiency and measure of Scripture: neither will one letter be found superfluous nor another to have been left out, except a vowel ‘i’ (which, in the Schaffhausen manuscript of the Vita Columbae, written on Iona probably within the life time of Adomnán, appears as a minuscule ‘i’, not a capital ‘I’, as in the Andersons’ edition).58 The incident depicts Columba as spiritual teacher and demonstrates his discernment of the true state of Baíthéne’s progress in learning. An interpretation which ignores the note of censure in Columba’s response to Baíthéne’s almost perfect copy of the literal text of Scripture and reads the episode simply as a wonder tale of Columba’s arbitrary prophetic power, might regard the information that the text Baíthéne had copied was a psalter as an incidental detail. Of all the books of Scripture, however, the psalter was particularly appropriate to the metaphor of learning the complete spiritual alphabet, as it was in practice used as a primer to teach monks literacy. It has been noted, for instance, that the Gallican text of Psalm 30, 31 and part of 32 inscribed on the waxed wooden writing tablets of c. 600 or earlier, found at Springmount Bog, Co. Antrim, is written in an accomplished script, suggesting it was an exemplar for a student to copy.59 In the late seventh century, Tirechan said that he himself had seen a psalter which St Patrick had written for an ordinand. It is possible that Tirechan’s repeated references to Patrick writing alphabets (abgitoria, elementa) when establishing new churches and priests [186] may mean he wrote psalters or particular psalm texts for them as a guide to learning the spiritual life.60 58 Bernhard Bischoff observed, ‘The most noticeable stylistic peculiarity of almost all Insular scripts, whether half-uncial or minuscule, is the triangular terminals of the ascenders, a decorative element that is repeated on the shafts of i and other letters. These triangular tips were written either with a short turn of the pen against the direction of the writing or by the easier method of adding a separate, angular stroke to the shaft’. Latin Palaeography. Antiquity and the Middle Ages, tr. D. Ó Cróinín and D. Ganz (Cambridge, 1990) p. 86. The minuscule i, therefore, though undotted, is made up of two parts or strokes. 59 M. McNamara, ‘Tradition and creativity in early Irish psalter study’, in P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter, eds, Irland und Europa: die Kirche im Frühmittelalter (Stuttgart, 1984) pp. 338–89 at 350. 60 Et scripsit illi librum psalmorum, quem viti. L. Bieler, The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979) II.5; cf. 6.1, 33.1, 37.3, 47.2. J. Stevenson, ‘Literacy in Ireland: the evidence of the Patrick dossier in the Book of Armagh’, in R. McKitterick, ed., The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1990) pp. 11–35 at 19–22 for Tireachán’s account of St Patrick as a scribe and writer, concerned with Christian education, and for the suggestion that his description of Patrick writing out alphabets implies ‘some form of elementary Christian knowledge, such as

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The psalter opens with the image of the beatus vir who meditates on the law of the Lord day and night (Psalm 1.2), an image often cited as a model of the monastic life. Psalm 118’s fervently expressed desire to know and to practise God’s commandments was believed to articulate the longing of the exiles in Babylon for their return to Jerusalem, seat of God’s law, and hence acted as a figure of the Christian spiritual life, journeying from earthly exile to the heavenly Jerusalem, and especially of the monastic life in via. The psalter itself was seen as encompassing the law so that the reading, copying out and chanting of the psalms meant constant meditation on the divine law and the interpretation of its continuing spiritual meaning. Moreover, both the alphabet metaphor and the motif of missing letters are specifically associated with the psalms in patristic tradition, and precisely within the context of discussion on learning wisdom in the spiritual life. In the same commentary on Psalm 1 in which Origen, citing Matthew 5.18, proclaimed that the wisdom of God penetrates the whole range of Scripture, even to its least letter, the iota, he also observed that the canon of the Hebrew Bible has twenty-two books, ‘the same in number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For as the twenty-two letters of the alphabet may be regarded as an introduction to the wisdom and the divine doctrines given to men in those characters, so the twenty-two inspired books are an alphabet of the wisdom of God and an introduction to the knowledge of realities’.61 He noted that certain books and sections within Scripture have twenty-two divisions; in some cases, the [187] twenty-two Hebrew letters are used successively to form the initial letter of the opening word of a section. In particular, Origen interpreted the alphabetical, twenty-two-part structure of Psalm 118 to refer to the spiritual education of the believer which encompasses the whole range of letters, from beginning to end. The learning of wisdom through this spiritual alphabet is envisaged not as a simple progression from the moral or active life in the beginning to the contemplative life at the end, but as learning both to discern the divine will expressed through the whole range of inspired Scripture and to practise its commands at every stage of the interior journey marked by the psalm’s twenty-two alphabetical divisions. In Origen’s extant works the individual Hebrew letters are not given a specific interpretation, but their totality stands for the way of perfection. His commentary formed the most important element in the fifth-century Palestinian compilation of Greek commentaries on Psalm 118 and was extremely influential on Latin commentaries.62 Jerome, in the well-known Vulgate preface, the Prologus Galeatus, also related the twenty-two elements or characters of the Hebrew alphabet to the total of twenty-two books of the Bible (Old Testament) ‘by which, as by the alphabet of the doctrine of creed, or the Paternoster, or the Ten Commandments’; cf. G. Márkus, ‘What were Patrick’s alphabets?’; McNamara, ‘Psalter text and psalter study’, p. 206, n. 7. 61 Preserved in the Philocalia of Origen, ii.4, iii and cited by Eusebius, The History of the Church, vi.25. Josephus had earlier noted that no Jew had presumed to add to or take away from or alter the twenty-two books of Hebrew Scripture, which were regarded as the decrees of God. 62 La chaine palestiniènne sur le psaume 118, I, pp. 96–159.

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God, a righteous man is instructed in tender infancy’. The alphabetical image is used again in his explanation of Psalm 118, which incorporates this numerological image of universality and completeness of divine revelation in its very structure. Significantly, the psalm forms a long meditation on the divine commandments or law. In Epistula 30 Jerome explains that Psalm 118 is divided into twenty-two sections, each of eight verses, each section introduced by one of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet which he refers to as aleph, beth, etc.63 Each of the twenty-two letters has a meaning, by which its appropriate section of psalm verses may be understood. Jerome says that it is necessary, therefore, to understand the meaning of the individual Hebrew letters (which [188] he supplies), in order to understand the divine commandments, just as one could not read and make sense of the words in his present epistle without first understanding the letters which make up the words. He immediately takes the image of how the skills of literacy are acquired in graduated stages and applies it to the priority of deeds in learning the elements of the spiritual life: ‘so in the sacred Scriptures we cannot know the higher things unless we start with morals’. He quotes the experience of the psalmist who knew that it was only after he had practised the Lord’s word that he had begun to have knowledge of its mysteries: ‘By [obeying] thy commandments I have had understanding’ (Psalm 118.104). Conversely, it is necessary to meditate on the divine law day and night to discern how to obey the divine will. The individual interpretations of all twenty-two Hebrew letters in Psalm 118 in Jerome’s Epistula 30 are paralleled in the Latin Epitome of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Psalm commentary (which was transmitted through works of Irish provenance); in the Hiberno-Latin Gloss on the Pslams in an eighth-century manuscript, Vatican, Palatinus Latinus 68; and in the Psalter of Charlemagne, Paris B.N. lat. 13159. The Gloss’s editor suggests it was compiled c. 700, probably within the paruchia Columbae and possibly on Iona.64 Cassiodorus’s Expositio psalmorum was used by Adomnán in De locis sanctis.65 It presents the psalter as providing instruction in the seven liberal arts necessary to an understanding of Scripture’s literal text, and as an education in its spiritual interpretation (and therefore its application to the spiritual life). Jerome’s Epistula 30 is closely cited by Cassiodorus in his own extensive treatment of Psalm 118 and

63 Jerome, Ep. xxx Ad Paulam: Lettres ii, pp. 31–35. There were other substantial Latin commentaries on Psalm 118 which emphasised its twenty-two sections. Hilary referred to the numerical position of the Hebrew letters, but Ambrose interpreted the meaning of each letter: Hilaire de Poitiers: Commentaire sur le psaume 118; Sant’ Ambrogio: Opere esegetiche VIII, ii. 64 M. McNamara, Glossa in Psalmos: The Hiberno-Latin Gloss on Psalms of Codex Palatinus 68 (Psalm 39.11–151.7), Studi e Testi 310 (Vatican, 1986) pp. 72–74; McNamara, ‘Psalter text and psalter study’, 270, for use of the Hebrew letters or their Latinised names in other Hiberno-Latin psalm texts and commentaries. The use of a Latinised abecedarian form in two hymns ascribed to Columba in the Liber Hymnorum is well known; the preface to the Altus prosator in the Leabhar Breac notes its Hebrew alphabetic form and that Hebrew letters have a meaning. 65 T. O’Loughlin, ‘The Latin version of the Scriptures in use on Iona in the late seventh century: the evidence from Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis’, Peritia 8 (1994) pp. 18–26 at 23–25; O’Reilly, ‘Reading the Scriptures’, p. 87.

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the six other psalms which employ an alphabetical structure ‘teaching us that the sacred use of letters unfolds for us mysteries of heavenly matters’.66 Citing [189] Athanasius’s letter to Marcellinus, he regards the book of psalms as signifying the whole treasury of the Scriptures. It embraces ‘both Old and New Testaments in such a unique way that you can truly say that a spiritual library is built up in this book’.67 The psalter is associated with the daily, lifelong offering of praise in the psalms of the monastic office, which can represent the offering of the monastic life itself. Cassiodorus explains that the alphabetical psalms are of two types, complete and incomplete, and that this is significant. The first type (Psalm 110, 111, 118), using every letter in the Hebrew alphabet successively to introduce the various verses or groups of verses of the psalm, denotes the just or the righteous who sing the Lord’s praises through ‘the perfect devotion of their meritorious deeds’. Psalms in the second group (Psalm 24, 33, 36, 144) only use some letters of the Hebrew alphabet in their structure: ‘this incomplete alphabet denotes those who cannot sing the Lord’s praises with the fullest purity of good works’.68 He does not suggest that some psalms are better or holier than others but that the symbolism of these Hebrew letters can, if read properly, open up spiritual insights, just as the headings and the numbers of the psalms can. Cassiodorus mentions that he decided to inscribe the Hebrew letters clearly in ink in the text of the Psalter where appropriate.69 He is not concerned with speculating on the historical reason why some psalms use the abecedarian form incompletely, but regards their given form as an integral part of the divine word which, if read properly, continues to speak to the faithful. It is an aspect of the belief in the complete measure or sufficiency of inspired Scripture, nothing more or less, as a guide to the spiritual life. In the Expositio psalmorum he repeatedly insists: ‘Since all the Hebrew letters have their meaning, it is perhaps right to believe that an alphabet short of a particular letter does not embrace its [190] meaning either’. Psalm 36, which omits just one of the Hebrew letters, is therefore said to be symbolically ‘attributable to those deficient in some degree in the perfection of holy men’.70 Similarly, When a psalm unfolds with all the Hebrew letters, it denotes the just who through the Lord’s grace are shown to lack no virtue; but when it does

66 Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum: P.G. Walsh, Cassiodorus: Explanations of the Psalms, Ancient Christian Writers 51–53 (New York, 1990–91), i.246–47; iii.174. All translations here are from this work. 67 Psalm 150.6, Walsh, Cassiodorus iii.465–66. 68 Walsh, Cassiodorus i.246–47, p. 325. 69 The earliest extant (abbreviated) copy of Cassiodorus’s Expositio Psalmorum is Insular, Durham Cathedral MS B II 30 (Northumbria, ca 750); apart from the first psalm, the opening of Psalm 118 is alone distinguished with a decorated initial. Hebrew letters in Latinised form appear in the margin: R. Bailey, The Durham Cassiodorus (Jarrow Lecture, 1978) pp. 4–5, 22. 70 Walsh, Cassiodorus, i.357.

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not bear the signs of all the characters, it seems to point to those in the Lord’s Church not revealed as perfect in all good works. [. . .] In the case of this psalm (Psalm 144), a single letter is missing from the alphabet, so it seems not to indicate the higher category. It is like the words of Christ to the man who lived a praiseworthy life: ‘One thing is wanting’ (Mark 10.21). Cassiodorus uses the two types of alphabetical psalm, therefore, to distinguish not the good and the bad monk, but degrees of holiness within the community. The spiritual life will only be perfected in heaven; in this sense, ‘the incomplete alphabet points to the Church which is still developing here on earth whereas the full alphabet denotes the Jerusalem to come’.71 Cassiodorus ascribes to Hilary the comment, ‘We know that children and the uninstructed are taught by letters to seek the precepts of wisdom. In the same way, psalms of this [alphabetical] type are put before boys and learners so that their first lessons may be imparted by the letters acting, so to say, as teachers’. Their purpose is ‘for the instruction of those who are novices and amenable to teaching in Christ’s school’.72 Psalm 111 is one of those ‘interlaced with the letters of the entire [Hebrew] alphabet as though with golden guiding-lines’ and, through its progression, describes the blessed man whose deeds are rewarded: ‘this alphabet [. . .] undoubtedly points the way to the perfection of wisdom. Through it understanding of divine affairs is acknowledged’.73 The image implies a progression in learning from the novice’s performance of good works to the understanding of the higher mysteries of the divine commandments, but this is not to be misunderstood as a transition from a probationary period of active life to some higher contemplative state. Cassiodorus reveals that those truly advanced in the study of divine wisdom are [191] precisely those who excel in the humble and apparently elementary deeds of the monastic life. The good works of the monastic life predispose the monk to seek the mysteries of Scripture, which in turn bears fruit in action and greater purity of heart and the desire for further understanding of the divine word. Whereas Jerome’s Epistula 30 on Psalm 118 had focused on verse 104, ‘By thy commandments [i.e. by performing them] I have had understanding’, Cassiodorus highlights the complementary verse 73: ‘Give me understanding and I will learn [to carry out] thy commandments’. The verse begins with the tenth Hebrew letter, ioth. Cassiodorus comments, ‘If we sought to draw together the arguments about this verse, we would disgorge the length of whole books’.74 Psalm 118’s use of the complete alphabetical range of letters signifies its teaching on discerning and performing all the divine commandments.

71 72 73 74

Ibid., iii.422–23. Ibid., iii.125. The quotation is untraced, but see Hilary’s tractate on Psalm 118.1, CSEL 22, p. 355. Walsh, Cassiodorus iii.131, 137. Walsh, Cassiodorus ii.205–06.

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Baíthéne’s formation Examples of scribal and alphabetical metaphors used by the Fathers to describe the process of learning how to discern and practise the divine word have here been cited from Jerome, Augustine, Cassian and Cassiodorus, major authors wellknown to Irish commentators; some reference to Origen has indicated the greater antiquity and wider familiarity of these metaphors and traditions. Insular scholars not only knew these traditions but understood them and adapted them in their own exegesis. In the different literary genre of the Vita Columbae, the metaphors come to life. They are not didactically expounded or converted into parables, but their truth is concealed in brief narratives which, on initial reading, may seem inconsequential or puzzling or even depict Columba in an unfavourable light. The reader’s gradual recognition of oblique hints of scriptural and patristic themes is itself an act of interpreting the literal text to reveal an underlying sense. To move from examples of the various strands within the patristic traditions illustrated here to a re-reading of Adomnán’s text is to recognise more fully that, in omitting a letter from his psalter, Baíthéne falls short of monastic perfection. Columba’s teaching is, through the story, renewed for his latter-day spiritual [192] sons. The crucial test is whether such a reading of VC I.23 helps make sense of other episodes concerning Baíthéne and other monks learning the spiritual life, and of Adomnán’s other uses of the scribal image. In the immediately preceding story, Baíthéne is corrected by Columba for quoting certain passages of holy Scripture in support of a penitent whom Columba did not want to set foot on Iona.75 We are not told what the scriptural texts were nor, apparently, given any justification for Columba’s rejection of Baíthéne’s plea for showing mercy. Modern commentators who regard Columba’s behaviour as often irascible and peremptory, may warm to the attitude of Baíthéne in this episode. However, Adomnán’s wording reveals Columba’s superior spiritual discernment of Scripture enabling him to understand the divine commands. He knows that the man in question had committed ‘fratricide, the sin of Cain’ and an unheard of sin (inaudium in mundo) which is identified as incest with his own mother. St Paul had declared that he who committed this sin, ‘such fornication as is unheard of even among the heathen’, should be cast out of the Christian community (1 Corinthians 5.1; 6.18). Gildas had quoted Paul’s words in explaining why the Britons, inured in sin, were divinely punished by the coming of the Saxon invaders, and Bede quoted this much-used text to explain why an Anglo-Saxon king who married his stepmother was subjected to ‘the scourge of divine chastisement and correction’ before proper fear of God drove him to repentance.76 Although on another occasion Columba does show mercy and compassion to a genuine penitent (VC I.30), and applies to him the consolation of Psalm 50.19, he discerns that the 75 VC I.22. 76 De Excidio Britonum 21.2: Gildas. The Ruin of Britain and other Works, ed. M. Winterbottom (Chichester, 1978) p. 24; HE 2.5–6.

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sinner in VC I.22, despite his protestations, is not truly repentant and should not, therefore, be allowed to violate the Christian community, here represented by the monastic sanctuary of the island of Iona. In the introductory chapter, Adomnán had already quoted 1 Corinthians 6.17 to explain that Columba’s prophetic insight came from his closeness to the mind of God: ‘he who clings to the Lord is one spirit’.77 Baíthéne is shown to be still learning the wisdom of spiritual discernment which is prepared, [193] when necessary, to denounce, reprove and exhort in making known the divine will. There is no systematic chronological account of his spiritual progress, but Baíthéne is shown perfecting obedience and becoming more like his spiritual father Columba (Iona, Jonah, in Hebrew) in an encounter with a cetus mirae et immensae magnitudinis which evokes aspects of the Book of Jonah.78 Baíthéne is seen acting with growing discernment and spiritual authority as an elder, while humbly acknowledging the power of Columba in VC I.37. His guidance was sought by other monks (cf. Deuteronomy 32.7), and he interpreted their experiences and offered them spiritual ‘consolation’ in the tradition of interpreting the monastic life as a recapitulation of the Exodus journey to the Promised Land. When Baíthéne was in charge of a church on the island of Eth (Tiree), Columba praised him for defending it by fasts and prayers from the assaults of demons who were devastating the island with disease.79 From the wording of Adomnán’s preceding account of Columba’s own defence of Iona, it is clear that Baíthéne too had ‘taken to himself the armour of the apostle Paul’ and had learned to apply his understanding of the account of spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6.10–18. Columba, with the help of angels, entirely succeeded in driving the demons from Iona; Baíthéne lost just one man from his community. Such episodes give a series of insights into how Baíthéne, who was Columba’s kinsman, his alumnus and one of the original community, learned more of the spiritual life and the interpretation of Scripture and grew closer to Columba. Eventually he acquired a reputation as ‘a wise and holy man’ and was to be acclaimed as a ‘worthy and fitting successor’ to Columba (as Adomnán dramatically tells us at the very beginning of the book).80 Baíthéne is three times quite specifically identified as a scribe and the story of his missing out a letter when copying a psalter is an important part of the process by which he came to succeed Columba. [194] Several related exegetical themes come together in the scribal image in VC I.23, most notably the role of the spiritual father in monastic formation, the teaching

77 VC I.1. 78 V. Layzer, ‘The other dove: Jonah and Colum Cille’, in Proceedings of the Hagiography Conference, University College Cork, 9–13 April, 1997 (forthcoming). For Adomnán’s use of the Columba-Iona (Jonah) etymology in the context of patristic and Insular exegesis, see J. O’Reilly, ‘Exegesis and the Book of Kells: the Lucan genealogy’, in T. Finan and V. Twomey, eds, Scriptural Interpretation in the Fathers (Dublin, 1995) pp. 315–55 at 315–26. 79 VC III.8. 80 VC I.2.

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and learning of the spiritual alphabet, the significance of letters missing from the psalter and the importance of the smallest of all letters. In the alphabetical psalms the Hebrew letter equivalent to the Greek iota is rendered ioth or iod. Jerome in Epistula 30.5 explains that it means ‘the beginning’ (principium). Cassiodorus says that in Psalm 33 the letter iod announces the verse ‘Fear the Lord, all ye his saints: for there is nothing wanting to them that fear him’ (verse 10). Cassiodorus comments that the psalmist, enjoining ‘fear of the Lord’ on all, however saintly they may be, shows in his next words exactly what this means: those rich in worldly goods, power and bodily health may still lack something: ‘the only man short of nothing is he who is enriched with fear of the Lord’.81 Adomnán quotes the last line of this verse as the last words Columba wrote when copying out the psalter on the night of his death: ‘But they that seek the Lord shall not want for anything that is good’ (Psalm 33.11). Adomnán uses the Old Latin version, Inquirentes autem dominum non deficient omni bono. The use of deficient, rather than the Vulgate’s minuentur, heightens his application of the text to Columba: ‘The last verse that he wrote thus aptly fits the predecessor, who will never lack eternal things’ (cui numquam bona deficient aeterna). Columba calls on Baíthéne to write out the next verse of the psalter, ‘Come, my sons, hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ (Psalm 33.12). Adomnán quotes this verse too and comments that it was ‘appropriate for Baíthéne his successor, a father and teacher of spiritual sons, who, as his predecessor enjoined, followed him not only as a teacher but also as a scribe’ (Successori uero sequens patri spiritalium doctori filiorum, ‘Venite filii audite me’; timorem domini docebo uos, congruenter conuenit, qui sicut decessor commendauit non solum ei docendo sed etiam scribendo successit).82 Thus Baíthéne, whose imperfect understanding of the wisdom of the scribe had once been manifested in his omission of the smallest letter from the psalter he was copying, was now called on to continue copying out a psalter begun by the holy hand of Columba himself. He [195] had in the meantime learned from Columba more of that wisdom which is the proper ‘fear of the Lord’ and which, as a wise scribe himself, he was now to teach under Columba’s posthumous guidance.

The vision on Hinba (Vita Columbae iii.18) The same monastic traditions which help explain the thematic function of this remarkable scene in Adomnán’s account of Columba’s last hours, directly illumine the cluster of episodes leading up to the final chapter. Adomnán shows that Columba, while still on earth, spoke with angels: ‘The grace of the Holy Spirit was poured out upon him abundantly and in an incomparable manner. [. . .] He saw, openly revealed, many of the secret things that have been hidden since the

81 Walsh, Cassiodorus, i.329. 82 VC III.23; Sharpe, Adomnán, p. 228.

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world began. Also everything that in the sacred scriptures is dark and most difficult became plain, and was shown more clearly than the day to the eyes of his purest heart’; very many mysteries were revealed to him ‘both of past ages and of ages still to come, mysteries unknown to other men; and also a number of interpretations of the sacred books’.83 Adomnán’s description here evokes the Wisdom theme of the Pauline epistles: ‘We speak wisdom among the perfect, yet not the wisdom of the world. [. . .] We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, a wisdom which is hidden, which God ordained before the world’; such wisdom is revealed only by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 2.6–7, 10); it is ‘the mystery which was kept secret from eternity which is now made manifest’ (Romans 16.25–26). After this prolonged and ecstatic contemplative experience on the island of Hinba, the saint regretted the absence of his alumnus Baíthéne, ‘who’, comments Adomnán, ‘if he had chanced to be present during those three days, would have written down from the mouth of the blessed man very many mysteries, both of past ages and of ages still to come, unknown to other men; and also a number of interpretations of the sacred books’.84 Baíthéne is said to have been detained on the island of Eigg by contrary winds until these three days and nights had come to an end. As, on other occasions, Columba could command the winds and protect [196] his monks from peril at sea, it seems unlikely that we are here just being given an unusually bad coastal weather report. Adomnán draws attention to the absence of the scribe Baíthéne, yet the explanation he offers is unsatisfactory and prompts the reader to look further. The question Ubi sapiens? Ubi scriba? had been memorably asked by St Paul in 1 Corinthians 1.20 (quoting Isaiah 33.18), not in order to ascertain the physical whereabouts of a particular scribe, but to show that the manifestation of the wisdom of God goes beyond the understanding of human wisdom which the scribe represents. Paul explains that his teaching, therefore, is not based on ‘the persuasive words of human wisdom’, but on showing the power of God (1 Corinthians 1.18; 2.6). He reiterates that ‘the deep things of God’, which God has prepared for them that love him, are beyond human imagining and wisdom, are only revealed by the Holy Spirit and can be received only by ‘the perfect’ or ‘the spiritual man’ who has the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2.9–16). The whole Pauline passage is central to the exegetical tradition stemming from Origen’s spiritual interpretation of Scripture whereby Christ, the divine wisdom, is revealed not to ‘the carnal’, but to ‘the spiritual man’, by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Pauline concept of ‘the spiritual man’ was particularly applied to St John, as in Jerome’s Epistula 53.4, but is also embodied in the Lives of other saints, notably the Vita Antonii, 77–80, and Gregory’s account of St Benedict in Dialogii ii.16, which substantially quotes 1 Corinthians 2.9–12, 6.17. The image of scribe could carry negative connotations, suggesting worldly wisdom, as in

83 VC III.18. 84 Ibid.

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Paul’s quotation from Isaiah 33.18 in 1 Corinthians 1.20, and in the Gospels’ frequent depiction of the scribes’ and pharisees’ merely literal understanding of the law. Both Antony and Benedict are appropriately and pointedly depicted, not as scribes but as wisely unlearned (cf. 1 Corinthians 1.19–31). It has been suggested here that Adomnán’s portrait of Columba as scribe is by no means incompatible with this Pauline Wisdom theology, but draws on different aspects of the scribal image. It adapts patristic and monastic uses of the figure of the scribe to convey the process of learning the elements of the Christian life, in which human learning can have an important role. The tradition, however, influenced by the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, pictured the wise scribe copying out in his heart and meditating on the divine commandments in order to practise them, and it [197] constantly adverted to the limitations of human learning and reason in the search for divine wisdom (Proverbs 3.1–7). Adomnán’s powerful evocation of Columba’s heightened experience of divine wisdom in the scene on the island of Hinba sets aside the role of the scribe. Though the reader has watched Baíthéne learning his scribal elementa and knows that he is to be Columba’s worthy successor on Iona both as teacher and scribe, it is now made evident that Baíthéne is unable, in this life, to share the fulness of Columba’s experience of the divine. The saint himself is shown without pen or books as the mysteries of Scripture are revealed ‘to the eyes of his purest heart’. He exemplifies the spiritual man who has the mind of Christ and is joined to the Lord in spirit (1 Corinthians 2.16, 6.17). At the opening of his earlier work, De locis sanctis, Adomnán, abbot of Iona, had presented himself as a scribe, writing down on tablets the eyewitness testimony dictated to him by Arculf. Whether one views Arculf as a historical figure or a literary device, he is clearly depicted as having been on a literal pilgrimage to the earthly Jerusalem. His visual, aural, tactile experiences of the Holy Places at the centre of the earth are recorded by Adomnán and then written up on parchment, supplemented with additional information from works of reference. Human learning, reason and sensory experience are used by Adomnán in the important task of explicating passages in the literal text of Scripture concerning the Holy Places which Christ and his patriarchs, prophets and apostles had hallowed by their physical presence.85 In the Vita Columbae this is by no means discounted, but the images of scribe and pilgrim take on a different role. Adomnán shows that, at the ends of the earth, Columba’s life itself offered a guide to the inner spiritual pilgrimage and its destination and fulfilment in the life of the heavenly Jerusalem. His monastic life on Iona is described as his pilgrimage in Britain, his death as a crossing over from this pilgrimage to the heavenly country, already anticipated in life, particularly in the vision on the island of Hinba, a vision he mediated to his spiritual sons.86 The mysteries revealed to him on Hinba through

85 De locis sanctis [DLS] 35, ed. D. Meehan, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae vol. 3 (Dublin, 1958); O’Loughlin, ‘The exegetical purpose of Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis’, pp. 37–53 and above pp. 139f. 86 VC III.22, 23; III.18–21.

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manifestations of divine power [198] transcended the kind of knowledge which could be dictated to a scribe, even to a future abbot of Iona. Instead Adomnán uses the image of ‘immeasurable brightness’ lighting up the night. He shows that already, while in the darkness of this life, the saint shared in the eternal day of the heavenly life. Columba’s wisdom – his wordless understanding of the divine word and heavenly mysteries – is the result neither of his learning nor even of his superior spiritual merits but is divinely given to him. He is filled with the Holy Spirit and beams of brightness from the house he is in can be seen at night, escaping through chinks in the door and through the key-holes. It is granted to Columba to reveal to others in this life some insight into the heavenly perfection of the pursuit of wisdom.

Teaching the fear of the Lord The three stories which immediately follow the vision scene on Hinba (VC III.19–21), each repeating the apparition of light, do not simply multiply marvels through anecdote. By deft pen portraits Adomnán compares three of Columba’s spiritual sons who chance upon the vision, and Columba’s response to each. The monk Virgno was praying in the church while others slept one night. When Columba unexpectedly entered the church accompanied by the radiance of heavenly light, Virgno could not endure the brightness ‘just as none can look with direct and undazzled eyes upon the summer midday sun’.87 The well-known image of St John as the Evangelist who alone could contemplate the light of the divine with sublime and steady gaze, just as the eagle, alone of all creatures, can look directly at the rays of the sun, had been used by St Augustine in his influential depiction of John as a figure of the contemplative life. The opening sentence of his homilies on John’s Gospel quotes 1 Corinthians 2.14, ‘the natural man perceives not the things which are of the Spirit of God’, and recognises that there must be many such natural or carnal men among Augustine’s listeners who cannot raise themselves to the spiritual understanding of John’s sublime Gospel opening in which Wisdom is revealed. He distinguishes them from others who may understand when it is explained to them and a [199] third category who may understand even before it is explained. Three levels of understanding the mysteries of Scripture had been directly related to the Pauline Wisdom texts by Origen. Augustine presents John as one who contemplated divine Wisdom and was able to receive that which ‘eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has ascended into the heart of man’ (1 Corinthians 2.9) because although a man, John ‘had begun to be an angel. For all saints are angels, since they are messengers of God’. The first homily concludes with the image of John illuminated and filled by the divine light; Augustine urges those slow of heart who cannot yet receive that light, because of their

87 VC III.19.

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sins, to strive to become pure in order to see the wisdom which is God: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5.8).88 Like St John, the beloved disciple, Columba already shares in the life of angels, as Book iii of Vita Columbae repeatedly shows, and he is therefore able to contemplate the divine light and to illumine others, according to their purity of heart which determines their capacity to receive spiritual enlightenment. His response to Virgno, however, seems surprising. He commends him, but not for catching a glimpse of the light: ‘You have been well-pleasing, little son [. . .] in the sight of God, this last night, in lowering your eyes to the ground through dread of his brightness. For if you had not done so, your eyes would have been blinded by seeing that inestimable light’. The remaining two stories are even less edifying on an initial reading for they apparently portray Columba as arbitrary and severe. The second monk, Colen, also prayed one night while others slept, and also caught sight of the apparition of light in the church and was also afraid yet, unlike Virgno, he was chastised by Columba next day: ‘Henceforth take great care, my son, not to attempt like a spy to observe heavenly light that has not been granted to you’.89 On a third occasion he very sternly reprimanded Berchán, who had tried to see the heavenly vision.90 The attempt to interpret this group of enigmatic stories requires that their genre be identified. [200] Adomnán is doing something new with traditional elements, both in terms of content and of literary format. To some extent he is taking features characteristic of the Apophthegmata Patrum and re-locating them in the coenobitic monastery of Iona. In addition to formal literary works devoted to the Life of a particular saint, most importantly the Life of Antony, the desert monastic tradition was preserved in a great gallery of spiritual exempla of the words and deeds of holy anchorites preserved by their disciples at different times and places and variously collected and arranged, without thematic structure. They feature brief incidents and epiphanies in the lives of the abbas and particularly their short, pithy sayings which often discern the innermost promptings of those who came to seek ‘a word’ from the holy man. Sometimes this took the form of a precept or command and the divine voice of Scripture was heard quite distinctly through the word of the holy man, but often it was given by an enigmatic verbal image or icon of holiness, or through a short story without any obvious scriptural citation or formal explanation of its meaning: only in pondering the word might the abba’s listeners (and subsequent readers of the story) come to recognise its scriptural echoes and understand its relevance to the conduct of the spiritual life. Something of this desert tradition was transmitted to the West through Latin translations and intermediaries such as the Verba Seniorum, works of hagiography, 88 Tractatus in Iohannem, xv.1, i.1, 4, 18–19: CCSL 36.150, pp. 1–11. Adomnán had earlier alluded to the image of St John and light in describing the first miracle of Columba (cf. John 2.1–11), which is set at VC II.1 to ‘illumine like a lantern the opening of this book’. 89 VC III.20. 90 VC III.21.

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the Historia monachorum and particularly the Institutes and Conferences of Cassian.91 At the end of his ‘little rule for beginners’, St Benedict famously directed that for anyone ‘hastening on to the perfection of monastic life, there are the teachings of the holy Fathers’. In addition to Scripture, ‘the truest of guides’, he specifically commended the Conferences of the Fathers, their Institutes and their Lives and the rule of Basil.92 But in the process of transmission, the desert fathers material was often adapted to different contexts and literary forms. John Cassian’s influential presentation of the sanctity and spiritual insights of the heroic anchorites of the Egyptian desert, for example, is directed to his readers in a coenobitic monastery in Gaul. He dwells on the importance of [201] having a guide or elder in the spiritual life and presents his material with a single authorial voice in the form of twenty-four sustained conlationes, rather than short sayings, elicited from fifteen desert fathers. He arranges the material thematically and frequently cites or quotes Scripture. Conlationes xi is of particular interest in the study of the closing chapters of the Vita Columbae. When the aged and holy abba Chaeremon is prevailed upon by Cassian to lay aside his silence, he discourses on Perfection at some length. Scripture promises that ‘all they that fear the Lord shall be blessed’ (Psalm 127.1) but also warns that they differ in their capacity to be blessed, ‘as star differs from star in glory’ (1 Corinthians 15.41–42). The holy abba then describes different kinds of fear which reveal different stages of spiritual capacity and growth. He established ‘that Perfect love casts out fear [. . .] he who fears is not yet perfect in love’ (1 John 4.18) but shows that fear can at least bring us to ‘the first beginning of blessedness’ and the necessary realisation that we are unprofitable servants. We must, however, mount from this servile fear of punishment, and from the mercenary hope of reward, to that filial love of God which loves him because he first loved us.93 The importance of these ideas in monastic history has somewhat obscured the climax of his discourse. Cassian’s companion Germanus is puzzled by Chaeremon’s account because it seems at variance with a number of passages in Scripture which show fear of the Lord in a very positive light, most notably in the injunction, ‘Fear the Lord, all you his saints, for they that fear him lack nothing’ (Psalm 33.10). Chaeremon then shows how this and other such texts on the fear of the Lord are perfectly reconcilable to his theme. He interprets the poetic parallelism of Isaiah 23.6, ‘Wisdom and knowledge are the riches of salvation: the fear of the Lord is his treasure’, to mean that the saving wisdom and knowledge of God can only be preserved by ‘the fear of the Lord’, which here means the fear only of falling short in love of God. He contrasts this kind of fear with the fear of his first quotation, the fear of punishment which prevents a person from being

91 For this tradition see Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, pp. 76–103. 92 Regula, §73. 93 Conlationes xi. 12, 7; NPNF 2nd series, XI, pp. 420–21, 417.

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made perfect in love (1 John 4.18). Immediately, he alludes to further texts in the exegetical chain on timor Dei to underline [202] the distinction between the fear in which nothing is lacking (Psalm 33.10) and that imperfect but necessary fear of the Lord ‘which is called the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 110.10; cf. Proverbs 1.7, 9.10). Finally he shows that the fear of the Lord in which nothing is lacking is among the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit which Isaiah prophesied would fill Christ himself at the Incarnation. First among them the prophet lists ‘the spirit of wisdom and understanding’ but in the last place ‘he adds as something special these words: “And the Spirit of the fear of the Lord shall fill him”’ (Isaiah 11.2, 3). This kind of fear, then, which is not servile but is part of unfailing love, belongs to the pattern of perfection offered in Christ.94 Adomnán shows Columba to have been so filled with the wisdom which is the perfect fear of the Lord that all temporal preoccupations were driven out; he was already, therefore, living the heavenly life and mediating Christ’s pattern of perfection to others. It is worth re-reading the account of his own vision in VC III.18 before re-considering the three stories which follow. On Hinba the holy man (sanctus vir; beatus vir) is shown keeping watch in the night, alone and fasting, in a house that was barred to temporal distractions on an island temporarily out of the reach of his community. The narrative details are eloquent. This is the setting for the description of how ‘the grace of the Holy Spirit was poured out upon him abundantly and in an incomparable manner and continued marvellously for the space of three days and as many nights’, to the sound of ‘spiritual songs unheard before’. Divine mysteries were revealed to him, ‘things that have been hidden since the world began [. . .] many mysteries, both of past ages and of ages still to come, mysteries unknown to other men’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 2.7, 10; Romans 16.25–26). The narrative details of Columba’s experiences on the island of Hinba recall the contemplative experiences of the apostle and Evangelist, St John. He too received his Apocalyptic vision of the heavenly Jerusalem and of past and future ages to the sound of a ‘new canticle’ while on an island (Revelation 1.9, 14.3), and was believed to have fasted for three days before receiving the inspired revelation of the divine mysteries which was to form the Prologue of his Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Moreover, the [203] heavenly light on which Columba, like St John, was able to gaze, is shown to have been unbearable to the still earth-bound figures in the three stories which follow. Columba’s words on their different responses to the light reveal their three different spiritual capacities, but the teaching conveyed through the three episodes may also be understood at various levels by Adomnán’s readers. St Paul had urged the faithful to graduate from being taught ‘the first elements (elementa) of the words of God’ and to ‘go on to things more perfect’ (cf. Hebrews 5.12, 6.1, 1 Corinthians 2.6), to strive for perfection in their understanding of Scripture, that is, for the divine wisdom

94 Conlationes xi. 11–13; NPNF 2nd series, XI, pp. 420–22.

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which is Christ. Quoting Paul, Origen had also acknowledged the necessity of a graded threefold approach in teaching wisdom. He argued that even the person who does not understand the text can see that the revelations granted to St John in his Gospel opening contain ‘a hidden depth of ineffable mysteries’; textual analysis alone is inadequate to expounding the sublimity of such Scriptural passages. Understanding requires the grace granted to the apostle who said: ‘But we have the mind of Christ that we might understand the gracious gifts bestowed on us by God and we impart it in words not taught by human wisdom but by the Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 2.16, 12–13). Citing the wisdom of Solomon (Proverbs 22.20–21), Origen urged a threefold approach in teaching Scripture, suited to the capacity of its various recipients. Just as the human being consists of body, soul and spirit, so the faithful might be variously edified by Scripture at three different levels, rising from a fleshly or literal understanding, to the spiritual understanding of those who approach St Paul’s description of the perfect (1 Corinthians 2.10–16). It was to such a person that the apostle said, ‘we impart a wisdom which is not of this world [. . .] a secret and hidden wisdom of God which God decreed before the ages for our glorification’ (1 Corinthians 2.6–7; cf. 14–15). Origen then applied this approach to a story in which three teachers are sent to three different categories of people. The first group receives the moral exhortation of ‘the mere light’; those ‘whose souls have left the realm of bodily concerns and base thoughts’ receive teaching from ‘outside the letter’ and, finally, the teacher described as the disciple of the Spirit addresses ‘men who have turned grey with insight’ (that is, the wise, who are not necessarily the old, cf. Wisdom 4.8). He ‘teaches them no longer through the written letter but through living [204] words’.95 There are obvious narrative differences between this and the three stories Adomnán tells after the vision on Hinba, in which a single teacher, Columba, encounters three individuals and gives no didactic explanation of their differing experiences. But Origen’s exposition, much mediated in exegesis, has interesting echoes in VC III.18–21, if these chapters are read as a sequence. In the three stories following Columba’s vision of divine wisdom the saint does not teach through reasoned argument or exegesis but through the manifestation of God’s power. The three episodes enact a number of themes concerning the fear of the Lord and the learning of wisdom, familiar in the patristic and monastic tradition. Some of these themes Cassian had treated in the very different literary medium of the long discourse of abba Chaeremon in Conlationes xi, which was structured around the resolution of apparently incompatible scriptural texts to show that the fear of the Lord can, in its different aspects, describe both the lowest and the highest stages of the spiritual life and so can, for an informed audience, describe in shorthand the entire process of learning spiritual wisdom.

95 De Principiis IV, ii.3–4 (Philocalia i.10–11); Origen on First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (London, 1936) pp. 274–76 and K. Froelich, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (Philadelphia, 1984) pp. 57–58.

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In a completely different literary format Cassian’s contemporary, Augustine, used both the image of light and the same text from Isaiah 11.1–3 describing the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, to set out the seven stages of wisdom in De doctrina christiana II.16–23. He reversed the order of gifts to demonstrate how ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’: ‘it is first necessary to be moved by fear of God towards learning his will’; this fear will inspire reflection on mortality and, therefore, amendment to a life of holiness. The third stage – knowledge – concerns reading Scripture in such a way as to realise it is about loving God and one’s neighbour. At the fourth stage, a man turns from the transient to love of the eternal; when ‘he beholds this light (as far as he is able to), shining as it does even into remote places, and realizes because of the weakness of his vision he cannot bear its brilliance, he is at the fifth stage [. . .] and purifies his mind’. After perfecting love of his neighbour, ‘he rises to the sixth stage, in which he now purifies the eye by which God may actually be [205] seen – to the extent that he may be seen by those who, to the best of their ability, die to this world’. The vision of that light, though now more steady and tolerable, ‘is none the less said to be seen still obscurely and through a mirror’ because we are still in this world though citizens of heaven (cf. 1 Corinthians 13.12). Finally, with a heart now purified ‘such a son ascends to wisdom’.96 Augustine returns to dwell at great length on the third stage of the pursuit of wisdom, which is the subject of his book, namely, the knowledge of Scripture, facilitating its spiritual interpretation, that those who fear God and seek to understand his word should attain. These major works by Augustine and Cassian illustrate how the same important theological theme and its associated scriptural texts and images could be handled with different points of emphasis and in very different literary genres. Adomnán’s creative renewal in an insular idiom of patristic and monastic traditions on teaching the fear of the Lord has gone unrecognised. In the brief but carefully crafted account of the ‘sayings’ of Columba in the triad of vision stories immediately following his own threeday vision on Hinba, there are no scriptural quotations but every circumstantial detail of tempus, locus and persona is of weight. On a re-reading of VC III.19, the first thing said about Virgno now leaps out of the text: he was fired with the love of God (in dei amore feruens). He prayed at night and in winter, concealed within the exedra of the church, behind the half-opened door where, presumably, his solitary vigil would not draw attention to his devotion. His overwhelming reaction to the vision of heavenly glory was fear, even terror, ‘so that his strength failed him utterly’. Realising his unworthiness in the divine presence, he responded not with cowardly flight but with awed humility and lowered his eyes. It is a brilliant little vignette describing someone who already understands and practises something of that fear of the Lord which is not only a proper sense of awe but also an aspect of the love of God; Virgno is warmly commended by his spiritual father in the words, Bene O filiole. The second monk, Colcu, has

96 De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 62–66.

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a different experience of the divine light, his fear is of a different order, and he is shown at a less advanced stage of the spiritual life, as will be discussed below. [206] Read in the light of the monastic tradition on ‘the fear of the Lord’ and the pursuit of wisdom, the third story suggests an explanation for Columba’s apparently disproportionate reaction to a lad peering through a key-hole.97 Again, Adomnán’s narrative details are crucial. Berchán, a young alumnus who was studying sacred learning (sapientia) with Columba and was avid for advanced tuition, came to the saint’s lodging nightly, but had so failed to grasp the most elementary lessons in the learning of wisdom that he wilfully disobeyed his spiritual father one night in order to spy on him, ‘supposing that within the house some heavenly vision was being manifested to the saint’. Berchán found he could not bear to look upon the heavenly brightness, even through the key-hole, and fled from the light, but, as Columba pointed out next day, he had remained quite unaware of his sinful presumption in not having a proper awe and dread of divine power and punishment. In other words, Adomnán is showing through the story that the youth lacked that necessary initial fear of the Lord which precipitates penance and amendment of life. Columba discerned that Berchán would be unable, therefore, to pursue his study of wisdom but would leave the monastery of Iona for a life of dissipation in Ireland and would not be brought to a tearful penance until the time of his death. The story describes one who went through life without learning that basic fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Adomnán makes it clear Berchán was only saved at the last because he was the saint’s alumnus and because Columba interceded that he might obtain God’s mercy. In contrast, Virgno, Columba’s ‘well-pleasing little son’, went on to become the fourth abbot of Iona (d. 623), the next but one after Baíthéne. Each in his turn would take up the abbatial role of teaching ‘the fear of the Lord’. Adomnán presents his three vision stories as case histories and particularly insists that the first had come to him by the priestly testimony of Virgno’s nephew. In his shaping and grouping of the three stories, however, it is possible that Adomnán is building upon Cassianic traditions particularly associated with Columba or which had been treated in other literary forms by Irish scholars. The influence of Old Testament Wisdom literature and of Cassian’s Conlationes is discernible in the early Irish Alphabet of [207] Devotion (Apgitir Chrábaid), which has been dated c. 600.98 It opens its teaching on the spiritual life with precepts on the initial necessity of fear of God, ‘For he who will not have fear of God will not have love of God’. It closes by affirming that ‘Wisdom without learning is better than learning without wisdom’ and with a description of the pure in whom desire for

97 VC III.21. 98 Ó Néill, ‘The date and authorship of Apgitir Chrábaid’; D. Ó Corráin, ‘The historical and cultural background of the Book of Kells’, in F. O’Mahony, ed., The Book of Kells (Aldershot, 1994) pp. 1–32 at 3–14.

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God has replaced all worldly desire: such a person is a vessel of the Holy Spirit. The intervening sections on learning the spiritual life include the image of light: ‘As a lantern raises its light in a dark house, so truth rises in the midst of faith in a person’s heart’. This is immediately followed by one of the work’s triads: ‘Three persons come to the Christian life. One of them is in it, another is beside it, another is far away from it’. This has suggestive parallels with Vita Columbae iii.19–21, though is devoid of the narrative details of Adomnán’s triad of stories about visions in which the viewing-point of each of the three figures is related to their various spiritual states and progress in learning wisdom, and their subsequent fates are described in terms of their nearness to the Christian life exemplified by Columba at Iona. The Alphabet of Devotion says of the good which the first of the three figures heard and saw: ‘he has loved it and has thus believed it and has fulfilled it’. The second figure in the descending hierarchy has denied the world with his lips but not in his heart, thus he is ‘overkeen at fasting and prayer’ but ‘he has not declared war against greed and meanness. One of his hands is towards heaven and one towards earth’.99 This may prompt a more careful reading of what Adomnán actually says about his second example and helps make sense of Columba’s chastisement of Colcu despite the fact that, like Virgno, he had prayed at night while others slept. Adomnán says that Colcu had ‘chanced to come to the door of the church’ and ‘stood there in prayer for a little time’. When Colcu fleetingly saw the apparition of light coming from inside the church, he failed to realise its source and significance and, much afraid, returned to his dwelling. This contrasts with the [208] setting of the first vision deep within the church. Virgno remained humbly in the recesses of the light-filled church when he recognised the divine presence and was therefore associated with his spiritual master in this powerful image of the vessel or tabernacle of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3.16–17). In the twelve brief printed lines of the Latin text of VC III.20 Adomnán explicitly draws attention to the fact that he has already mentioned at the beginning of his work this same Colcu ‘son of Aid Draigniche, of the descendants of Fechre’. His background and subsequent history, told in VC I.17, complement the picture of him in VC III.20 standing, as it were, between heaven and earth at the church door, zealous in prayer but denying the world with his lips only. In VC III.20 Columba discerned Colcu was not worthy to observe the heavenly light. In VC I.17 Columba discerned he was of spiritually flawed ancestry. He did not remain on Iona with Columba, who foretold that he would for many years be the primarius of a church in Ireland. Richard Sharpe has commented that Adomnán generally uses the word primarius in a secular context and suggests that Colcu was not in holy orders but was the proprietor of a private church, which would sharpen the contrast with

99 This suggestion is based on translations of the vernacular text: ‘The Alphabet of Devotion’ in Clancy and Márkus, Iona, pp. 200–07, quoted here, and V. Hull, ‘Apgitir Chrábaid: The Alphabet of Piety’, Celtica 8 (1968) pp. 44–89.

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Virgno’s future as abbot of Iona.100 Unlike Finten in VC I.2 and some other nonIonan church leaders who had had contact with Iona, Colcu is not honoured with any word of spiritual commendation from Columba or Adomnán (cf. Wisdom 3.16–17). The point of Columba’s apparently bizarre prophecy about the event which would signal Colcu’s eventual death – the sight of his butler or steward swinging a pitcher by its neck at a feast for his friends – may simply be Colcu’s status and his presence at the feast, suggesting he had not fully denied the world. Encapsulated in the story of Colcu’s vision in VC III.20 and its reference out to VC I.17, is the kind of spiritual profile given, by very different means, to the second figure in the Alphabet of Devotion’s account of the three people who come to the Christian life. Similarly, something of the spiritual state of Adomnán’s third figure, Berchán, may be recognised in the Alphabet’s third figure, who does not practise Christian habits all his life: ‘He reckons it will be easier to practise them some other season’.101 [209] Read in the context of the traditions outlined here, the three stories which follow Columba’s contemplative vision on Hinba (VC III.18–21) illumine each other and cumulatively reveal a coherent exposition of monastic teaching on sacred wisdom and the various stages of ‘the fear of the Lord’, which leads the reader to the final revelation of its meaning in the tableau in Columba’s writing-hut (VC III.23). The scene enshrines the text of Psalm 33.11–12, ‘Come my sons, hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’, as a highly charged summary of the continuing abbatial teaching task passed on by Columba to Baíthéne and, by implication, to Virgno. By describing aspects of how they learned from Columba the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom, and by showing Columba’s continuing exemplification of that fear of the Lord which is the perfect love of God, Adomnán placed himself in the Ionan abbatial teaching tradition. To the end, Adomnán shows Columba teaching monastic obedience in its least command. Columba’s remark, ‘Here, at the bottom of the page, I must stop’, appropriately announces the end of his earthly life, but its exact position within the detailed timetable of that last day is of interest. Cassian’s ideal novice, learning the spiritual alphabet along with his scribal task, had left off writing in the middle of forming a letter when summoned to prayer; Columba left off writing Psalm 33 halfway through and, ‘at the end of the page, the saint entered the church for the vesper office’. Shortly after, Adomnán stresses that the aged Columba obeyed the bell for the monastic office at midnight with alacrity: ‘he rose in haste and went to the church and, running, entered in advance of the others’ and knelt in prayer. His haste was prompted not by fear of death and punishment, but by joyful longing to be with God. Those monks nearing the church doorway briefly glimpsed the great light filling the church about the saint; the others then came running up in the darkness, bringing lights into the church, in time to witness Columba’s entry

100 Sharpe, Adomnán, pp. 278–79, n. 103. 101 Clancy and Márkus, p. 204.

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into eternal life. In the Prologue to the Rule of St Benedict, Christ’s invitation to the monastic life, voiced by the spiritual father through the words of Psalm 33.12, ‘Come my sons, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’, is immediately followed by the exhortation, ‘Run while you have the light of life, that [210] the darkness of death may not overtake you’ (cf. John 12.35).102 St Benedict’s biographer, Gregory the Great, never depicted him in the act of writing, but in the chapter preceding the saint’s death, he did report that Benedict wrote a Rule for monks: ‘If anyone wishes to know his character and life more precisely, he may find in the ordinances of that Rule a complete account of the abbot’s practice; for the holy man cannot have taught otherwise than as he lived’.103 Adomnán shows that with the wisdom of the scribe, Columba taught his spiritual sons the fear of the Lord through the monastic rule he offered in his own life and manner of death.

102 Regula, Prol.; and cf. O’Reilly, ‘Reading the Scriptures’, pp. 94–106 for fuller discussion of the final chapter, VC III.23. 103 Gregory, Dialogi ii.36.

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In The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Bede contrasts the carnal begetting of children with the generation and raising of spiritual sons.1 The Pauline image occurs in his description of how the monastery’s founding father, Benedict Biscop, had renounced country, home and family for the sake of Christ and the Gospel in order to receive a hundredfold in return and gain eternal life (Mark 10.29–30; Matthew 19.27–29): He refused to bring forth mortal children in the flesh, being foreordained by Christ to raise up for him spiritual sons nurtured in spiritual learning who would live for ever in the world to come.2 Bede had used the same image in a homily for the feast of Benedict Biscop and exhorted his fellow monks to let their father’s likeness appear in them: ‘We are his sons, if we hold by imitation to the path of his virtues’.3 In the unusual circumstances of the founder’s absences on pilgrimage to Rome, his conduct of the role of spiritual father after bringing the monastery into being is mostly depicted through his labours to provide spiritual sustenance for his community in the form of the sacred books and other treasures he brought back from his travels. In particular, when he sought to strengthen the monks in their observance of the monastic rule he had given them, Benedict Biscop insisted that what he had laid down was not of his own untaught devising but that he was handing on the best in the life of seventeen monasteries he had visited.4 As reported by Bede,

1 The image is used by St Paul: ‘My little children, with whom I am in travail until Christ be formed in you’ (Galatians 4.19); he distinguished his relationship with his converts from that of a mere pedagogue: ‘my dearest children [. . .] I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel. Wherefore, I beseech you, be followers of me, as I also am of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 4.14–16). 2 Historia abbatum I (ed. C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae opera historica, i (Oxford, 1896) p. 365; trans. J.F. Webb, The age of Bede (London, 1998) pp. 187–88). 3 Bede, Homiliae evangelii I.13 (ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 122 (Turnhout, 1955) pp. 92–99; trans. L.T. Martin and D. Hurst, Bede, Homilies on the Gospels, i (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991) pp. 129–31). 4 Historia abbatum 11; see also Vita Ceolfridi 3–6 (ed. Plummer, Opera, i, pp. 374, 388–90).

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the Rule of St Benedict was an important part of the eclectic monastic tradition transmitted by the founder of Wearmouth-Jarrow in this pre-Carolingian period of the regula mixta.5 The ‘mixed rule’ could take various forms: it might consist of the combination of [69] existing rules, or the oral instructions of a founder, supported by source texts or his experience of other revered communities. Benedict Biscop taught that the election of an abbot should not be according to rank or family influence, but ‘according to the Rule of the great St Benedict, our founder, and according to the decretals of privilege of this house’.6 He reasoned that, just as those who beget children by carnal generation are governed by earthly considerations in preferring their firstborn son as heir, so those who, ‘in a spiritual sense, bring forth children for God by the spiritual seed of his word’, should reckon as their eldest son the one most endowed with spiritual grace. Echoing the Rule of St Benedict, he instructed them to choose as abbot the one who had proved himself most worthy by the probity of his life and wisdom of his teaching to carry out the duties of his office.7 Adomnán’s Life of Columba presents a very different monastic founder and type of hagiography. Columba’s role as a holy man is presented through prophetic revelations, divine miracles and ‘appearances of angels and other manifestations of heavenly brightness’ quite absent from Bede’s memorial to the early life of the Wearmouth-Jarrow community.8 During Columba’s long peregrinatio far from Rome, his spiritual authority and power were acknowledged by a great diversity of people from the world constituted by the islands of the Britannic Ocean – pagan barbarians, Christian kings, lay men and women, and many churches and leading ecclesiastics from outside the paruchia of Iona. He is recognised in the Vita Columbae as ‘preordained by God to be a leader of nations into life’ (III.3). But his role is not only that of the exemplar and ‘arbiter of the holy’ in contemporary society, by which Peter Brown famously characterised the function of the holy man in Late Antiquity.9 Columba’s relationship with his own monks is a fundamental part of the Life; moreover, it goes beyond that of intercessor at the 5 P. Wormald, ‘Bede and Benedict Biscop’, in G. Bonner (ed.), Famulus Christi (London, 1976) pp. 141–69:142–43, nn. 5, 6, 15. 6 Historia abbatum 11 (ed. Plummer, Opera, i, p. 375); Ceolfrith gave a similar ruling, citing the Regula Benedicti, Vita Ceolfridi 16 (ed. Plummer, Opera, i, pp. 381, 398). 7 Regula Benedicti (henceforth RB) 64. Ceolfrith’s successor was chosen by unanimous consent of the monks of Wearmouth and some brothers from Jarrow, Vita Ceolfridi 28–29. Biscop’s appointment of Ceolfrith was made ‘after consulting Sigfrith and all the rest of the monks’ (Historia abbatum 13) and may not have been regarded as a violation of the requirement that the abbot be selected either by the community acting unanimously ‘or by some part of the community, no matter how small, which possesses sounder judgment’, RB 64.1 (ed. de A. Vogüé, La règle de Saint Benoît, ii, SC (Paris, 1971–72) pp. 648–51; ed. and trans. T. Fry, The rule of St Benedict (Collegeville, MN, 1981) p. 281). 8 The description is from Adomnán’s second preface, repeated at the opening of the third book of VC (ed. A.O. Anderson and M.O. Anderson, Adomnán’s Life of Columba (Edinburgh, 1961; 2nd ed. Oxford, 1991) pp. 5–7, 183). 9 P. Brown, ‘The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971) pp. 80–101.

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centre of a spiritual family or teacher in the ascetic formation of disciples, two functions which have been included in recent expansions of Brown’s definition.10 Columba is a spiritual father.11 He is therefore a teacher engaged in the whole spiritual formation of [70] his sons. He presents Christ to them from his own direct experience of the divine. To his family of monks he is noster patronus who intercedes for them; he is a stern corrector but also a mentor who bears their burdens and offers them consolation, nourishment and protection from spiritual harm. Scholarly interest has increasingly turned to the question of how models of the holy were constructed by writers.12 But Adomnán’s account of Columba’s holiness is punctuated by references to a future in which the monastery would be without his living presence, for which the long final chapter is a preparation. Remarkably, the Vita Columbae opens with the announcement of Columba’s death and the succession of Baithéne, his alumnus. The new abbot does not have the same prophetic powers and cannot identify an unknown supplicant who seeks an audience with him on Iona, yet he is already acclaimed as a worthy and fitting successor to Columba (VC I.2; II.45). Insights into Baithéne’s early monastic formation, and that of several other named monks, including Virgno, are later disclosed in narrative episodes. The final chapter, set within the liturgical framework of the Easter season, recounts how Columba on the night of his death had handed on the role of spiritual father to his senior spiritual son. Details in the scene find parallels in the Rule of St Benedict.13 This may at first appear surprising because bishop Wilfrid’s biographer, unlike Bede, presents the appearance of the rule in Northumbria in a context hostile to Columban traditions. Wilfrid’s boast that he had arranged the life of monks ‘in accordance with the rule of the holy father Benedict, which none had previously introduced there’, follows his Romanising claim to have been the first, after the generation of the Gregorian mission, ‘to root out the poisonous weeds planted by the Irish’ in the dating of Easter and form of the tonsure.14 Adomnán’s long-recognised use of the Life of Benedict as one of the literary models for his depiction of Columba, however, has 10 P. Rousseau, ‘Ascetics as mediators and teachers’ in J. Howard-Johnston and P. Hayward (ed.), The Cult of Saints in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages: essays on the contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford, 1999) pp. 45–59; C. Rapp, ‘“For next to God, you are my salvation”: reflections on the rise of the holy man in late antiquity’ in Howard-Johnston and Hayward, The Cult of Saints, pp. 63–81. 11 On the multiple roles of the spiritual father in desert monasticism, see K.T. Ware, ‘The spiritual father in St John Climacus and St Symeon the New Theologian’, Studia Patristica 18 (1989) pp. 299–316:305. 12 A. Cameron, ‘On defining the holy man’ in Howard-Johnston and Hayward, The Cult of Saints, pp. 27–43. 13 J. O’Reilly, ‘Reading the scriptures in the Life of Columba’ in C. Bourke (ed.), Studies in the cult of Saint Columba (Dublin, 1997) pp. 80–106:100–06. The parallels are not about the literal implementation of the Rule’s provisions for the election of the abbot (RB 64); other founding fathers, notably Wilfrid, designated their immediate successors: Vita Wilfridi 63, ed. B. Colgrave, (Cambridge, 1927). See n. 7. 14 Vita Wilfridi 47.

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been rightly seen as in part ‘an eirenic and inclusive approach’ to the divisions caused by the Easter controversy.15 The divisions were not simply between Iona and extreme Romani. Bede’s account of the synod of Whitby describes how Colman identified his community’s dating of Easter with the traditions of Columba and his successors, who were men beloved of God: ‘therefore I shall never cease to follow their way of life, their customs, and their teaching’ (HE 3.25). But Adomnán, after his mission to Aldfrith of Northumbria (c. 686), ‘preferred the customs [71] which he saw and heard in the English churches to those of himself and his followers’, though was unable to persuade his own monastic community to observe the ‘catholic’ Easter (HE 5.15). Ceolfrith, like Bede, had counted the renowned abbot Adomnán among those who upheld catholic unity, but observed that although he ruled over the monks of Iona as their lawful head, he was unable to bring them to ‘the better way’ regarding Easter and the tonsure.16 The reported resistance could suggest that the Ionan community saw a difference in the teaching and authority of their founding father and their present abbot. The echo of the Rule of St Benedict in Adomnán’s description of Columba passing on the role of spiritual father is, however, rather more than a ploy in the context of the continuing Easter controversy. What will be discussed here is the possible significance of this memorable scene in the Vita Columbae and in the larger context of early monastic history. The central question is: if Columba was an exemplar of holiness unlikely to be equalled, the direct recipient of spiritual graces beyond the reach of human effort and learning, what exactly was it that he handed on to his spiritual son? Adomnán’s account in VC III.23 draws together two major themes in the book which may first be briefly summarised.

The psalter and the scribe An enigmatic incident is recounted in VC I.23. One day, Baithéne went to Columba and said ‘I have need of one of the brothers, to run through and emend with me the psalter that I have written’. Columba chastised him, ‘Why do you trouble us without cause? Since in this psalter of yours [. . .] neither will one letter be found superfluous, nor another to have been left out, except a vowel ‘i’, which alone is missing’ (VC I.23). As discussed elsewhere, the encounter is transformed when read in the light of patristic and monastic traditions on the psalter.17 The psalter was used as a primer to teach novices the ABC, but learning the alphabet was also a standard metaphor for learning the elementa of spiritual

15 T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000) pp. 324–26, 191–93. 16 Tametsi eos qui in Hii insula morabantur monachos, quibusque speciali rectoris iure praeerat, necdum ad uiam statuti melioris reducere ualebat. Tonsuram quoque, si tantum sibi auctoritatis subesset, emendare meminisset (HE 5.21). 17 J. O’Reilly, ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord’ in D. Broun and T.O. Clancy (eds), Spes Scotorum, hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999) pp. 159–211:174–92. See also Columbanus’s instruction under Senilis, Jonas, Vita S. Columbani 6.

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wisdom. The image was used by Origen and Jerome, it figures in the opening of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and in Cassian’s Institutiones, where senior monks are described as training novices ‘with the alphabet, as it were, and first syllables in the direction of perfection, as they can see quite clearly whether the [72] novices are grounded in a false or true humility’. Juniors are warned not to address their elders without good cause or draw attention to their own knowledge, skill or handiwork; they are never to say ‘my book’ or ‘my pen’ (a point re-iterated in the Rule of St Benedict).18 Patristic writers sometimes spoke of the psalter as a spiritual library representing the whole of Scripture, which was seen as the complete measure of the rule of life. Those affirming the orthodoxy of their faith or their Easter reckoning sometimes showed their conformity to the measure of Scripture by citing the text, ‘The word which I have commanded you, you shall neither add to it nor diminish it’ (Deuteronomy 4.2). The parallel was made between the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the twenty-two books of the Hebrew Bible. The alphabet served as an image of completion and perfection; similarly, the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament which, when spiritually interpreted, reveals the Gospel, ‘constitutes an alphabet of the wisdom of God’. The wisdom of God was seen to extend to every letter of Scripture. Much was made of the least letter of the alphabet, iota in Greek, because of Christ’s words that he had come not to destroy but to fulfil the Law down to its smallest letter: ‘not one jot or title shall pass away from the Law until all be fulfilled’ (Matthew 5.17).19 Numerous commentators noted that some psalms have an alphabetical structure. The twenty-two sections of Psalms 110, 116 and 118 use the complete alphabet, while four others (Psalm 24, 33, 36, 144) now have only an incomplete alphabetical structure. This does not reflect on the respective merit of individual psalms, but was used as a way of describing degrees of holiness among the faithful. Cassiodorus commented that ‘When a psalm unfolds all the Hebrew letters it denotes those who, through God’s grace, are shown to lack no virtue; but when it does not bear the sign of all the letters [of the alphabet] it seems to point to those not perfect in good works’. Of Psalm 144, which has just one letter of the alphabet missing from its divisions, he said: ‘It is like the words of Christ to the man who lived a praise-worthy life: “One thing is lacking”’ (Mark 10.21).20 The reader of VC I.23 already knows Baithéne is to become Columba’s worthy successor, but in this episode Columba discerns that he still has some way to go in learning true humility. Baithéne’s omission of the smallest Latin letter ‘i’ from the psalter suggests there is something lacking. Columba is seen teaching Baithéne

18 Institutiones IV.9, 12, 13. Regula Benedicti 33, 57. 19 ‘iota unum aut unus apex’, meaning the serif of the letter. Augustine, De sermone domine in monte I.8, 20–29, 21 (CCSL 35, pp. 20–23) – see O’Reilly, ‘The wisdom’, pp. 179–87. 20 Trans. P.G. Walsh, Cassiodorus: Explanations on the Psalms, iii (New York, NY, 1990–91) pp. 422–23.

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the rudiments of the spiritual alphabet and the inner meaning of the letters of sacred Scripture whose outward forms he has already mastered. [73] Adomnán repeatedly depicts Columba himself as a scribe; there are miracles concerning the pen and the inkwell he used and the books he wrote.21 Six chapters are set in his tegorium, the hut in which he wrote and from which he conducted much of his work as abbot. Unlike the early elegy, the Amrae Coluimb Chille, the Vita Columbae does not present the saint as a scholar or author or mention his knowledge of Cassian and Basil. He is a copyist, and the only texts specified are the psalter and a book of hymns for the week ( ymnorum liber septimaniorum).22 In the Second Preface, writing is added to the list of holy tasks of prayer, lectio, fasts and vigils which occupied Columba day and night until the night of his death. His copying of the psalter may therefore be associated with the ceaseless offering of prayer in the psalms and canticles of the divine office; the task of writing out the psalms could be regarded as part of the meditative process of memorising and interiorising the divine word in order to discern the meaning of God’s will and obey it. The Lives of SS Antony, Martin and Benedict were important influences on the Vita Columbae, but in its sustained use of the scribal image it differs markedly from all three. Adomnán clearly shows, however, that, like those universal saints, Columba pursued divine wisdom rather than human knowledge and learning. The point is made in Book III in the sequence of episodes which describe Columba exemplifying and teaching ‘the fear of the Lord’. Together with the image of the scribe and the psalter, the theme of wisdom and timor domini is crucial to the account of Columba handing on the role of spiritual father in the final chapter.

The fear of the Lord During Columba’s contemplative experience of divine light on the island of Hinba, the grace of the Holy Spirit was poured out upon him abundantly over three days: He saw, openly revealed, many of the secret things that have been hidden since the world began. Also everything that in the sacred scriptures is dark and most difficult became plain, and was shown more clearly than the day to the eyes of his purest heart. (VC III.18) In a different genre, one of Cassian’s desert fathers had similarly taught that to gaze with the pure eye of the soul on the profound and hidden mysteries of [74] Scripture ‘can be gained by no learning of man’s, nor condition of this world, but

21 VC I.23, 25; II.8, 9, 29, 44. 22 VC I.23, II.9; III.23.

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only by purity of soul, by means of illumination of the Holy Spirit’.23 Adomnán’s description recalls the Wisdom theme in the Pauline epistles and the idea that the manifestation of the wisdom of God can only be received by ‘the spiritual man’ who has the mind of Christ.24 Gregory the Great had similarly quoted from 1 Corinthians 2.9–12 in describing St Benedict, who was so joined to the Lord through faithfully observing the divine commandments that he was one spirit with him (1 Corinthians 6.17), a text Adomnán directly applied to Columba.25 In the following three chapters, Columba teaches three of his alumni. He addresses each in turn, one as O filiole, the others as filii, evoking the spiritual fatherhood of New Testament pastors and of Christ himself who, when he gave his disciples the new commandment of love, addressed them as his little children, O filiolii.26 St John called his own disciples his sons and little children when he taught them this commandment, and St Paul addressed those he had converted as filioli mei.27 Paul’s idea of differing carnal and spiritual levels in understanding the mysteries of Scripture, developed by Origen and in Augustine’s tractates on John’s Gospel, underlies the triad of episodes that follows the vision on Hinba.28 In each scene, a spiritual son briefly glimpses a manifestation of divine light around Columba (VC III.19–21). All three respond with fear, but of differing kinds, from which Columba is able to discern their various levels of spiritual maturity. These episodes find close correspondences in patristic and monastic teaching on the concept of ‘the fear of the Lord’, among the desert fathers and in Western texts influenced by them. In Cassian’s Conference XI on Perfection, for example, a holy abba reconciles apparently conflicting scriptural passages on timor domini by showing that they apply to different spiritual capacities and stages of inner growth. The term ‘fear’ in the text ‘Perfect love casts out fear [. . .] he who fears is not yet perfect in love’ (1 John 4.18), refers to a negative carnal fear of punishment. But fear can also be a salutary awe of God’s power, prompting consciousness of sin and a move to penitence and amendment of life; in this sense, it is true that ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 110). In seeking spiritual wisdom, it is necessary to move from the servile kind of fear to filial fear: a true son only fears being found wanting in the love of God. The abba therefore urges his listeners to ‘Fear the Lord, all you his saints, for they that fear him lack nothing’ [75] (Psalm 33.10), meaning that those who fear God with the filial fear that is love are not lacking in anything.29

23 24 25 26 27

Conlationes XIV.8. Romans 16.25–26, 1 Corinthians 2.6–7, 10; 1 Corinthians 2.9–16, 1 Corinthians 2.14, 16. Dialogi II. 16 and VC I.1. John 13.33–35; VC III.19–21. 1 John 2.1, 12, 18, 28; Galatians 4.19; 2 Corinthians 6.13. ‘My little children, with whom I am in travail until Christ be formed in you’ (Galatians 4.19); ‘I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel’ (1 Corinthians 4.15). 28 O’Reilly, ‘The wisdom’, pp. 196–210. 29 Conlationes XI.13 (trans. B. Ramsey, John Cassian: the Conferences, Ancient Christian Writers 57 (New York, NY, 1997) p. 421).

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Cassiodorus commented that Psalm 33.10 is explained in verse 11: ‘The rich have wanted and suffered hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall lack no good thing’. Here, he says, the psalmist shows that ‘the only man short of nothing is he who is enriched with fear of the Lord’. Psalm 33.12 is the Lord’s invitation to teach ‘the fear of the Lord’ to children receiving their first instruction in the faith, not enforcing slavery but drawing them towards freedom: ‘This is not the fear which induces dread, but that which induces love’.30 It is by obedient submission to the Rule, as administered by the abbot, that the coenobitic monk is taught ‘the fear of the Lord’. The abbot in the regula Benedicti is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery and to mediate Christ’s teaching in the Scriptures, the true guide and rule of life. His monks, the adopted sons of God, address him by the title of Christ’s fatherhood, ‘abba, father’ (Romans 8.15).31 The disciple is to put the master’s instructions into practice instantly, ‘in the fear of God’ (RB 5.9). The first step of humility is that he keeps ‘the fear of God always before his eyes’ (Psalm 35.2), remembering that ‘all who fear God have everlasting life awaiting them’ (RB 7.10–11). Through surrendering his will in humble obedience, and doing only what is done according to the common rule of the monastery and the example set by his superiors (RB 7.55), the monk’s motivation is transformed and he moves from servile, carnal fear to true filial fear, ‘that perfect love of God which casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18).32 ‘Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ’ (RB 7.67).33 The abbot must himself ‘fear God and keep the rule in everything he does’ (RB 3.11). The chapter detailing his responsibilities as spiritual teacher and custodian of souls reminds him: ‘Those who fear the Lord lack nothing’ (Psalm 33.10).34

Venite filii audite me; timorem domini docebo uos On the night of his death, Columba was writing out a psalter. He was working on Psalm 33 and when he reached verse 11 he said, ‘Here, at the end of the page, I must stop. Let Baithéne write what follows’.35 Adomnán quotes the end of Psalm [76] 33.11: ‘But they that seek the Lord shall not lack anything that is good’ (non deficient omni bono). He observes that this verse was appropriate to Columba: it ‘aptly befits the holy predecessor who will never lack eternal good things’ (cui

30 Trans. Walsh, Cassiodorus: Explanations, i, pp. 329–30. 31 RB, 2.2–3, 63.13; Prol. 21 refers to the Gospel as the guide on the way of life; RB 73 asks what passage of the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not the truest of guides. 32 See especially RB 7.55, 67. 33 RB 7.62. 34 RB 2.36. 35 Vulgate text of Psalm 33.10–12 : v 10 Timete dominum omnes sancti eius: quoniam non est inopi timentibus eum. 11 Divites eguerunt et esurierunt; inquirentes autem dominum non minuentur omni bono. 12 Venite, filii, audite me: timorem domini docebo vos.

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numquam bona deficient aeterna).36 Adomnán then quotes the following psalm verse, to be written by Baithéne, Venite, filii, audite me: timorem domini docebo vos (Come, my sons, hear me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord: Psalm 33.12), and remarks that it was fittingly adapted to Baithéne as ‘the successor, the father of spiritual sons, a teacher who, as his predecessor enjoined, succeeded him not in teaching only, but in writing also’. The scene calls to mind the image of Baithéne in his early days as an alumnus, copying out the psalter and learning spiritual wisdom under Columba’s instruction (VC I.23). It also recalls the episodes earlier in Book III, where Columba is seen teaching the fear of the Lord to three of his spiritual filii. The objective of the monastic life is further expounded in the next scene on the evening before Columba’s death. He gave his final commands (mandata) to the brothers, in the hearing of his attendant alone. Referring to his monks intimately as little sons or children, Columba charged them: ‘have among yourselves mutual and unfeigned love, with peace’ (Haec uobis o filioli nouissima commendo uerba, ut inter uos motuam et non fictam habeatis caritatem cum pace).37 Columba told his sons that if they followed this course, after the example of the holy fathers, then he would pray for them and God would help them in the task. Echoing the assurance of Psalm 33.11 that there is no good which is lacking (deficient) in those who seek the Lord, he promised them that not only would God sufficiently provide for their earthly necessities, but that the reward of eternal good things is prepared for those who follow the divine commandments.38 The two scenes describing Columba’s last written and spoken words are linked. The first recounts how Baithéne was to continue the timeless abbatial task of teaching monastic sons the spiritual wisdom of ‘the fear of the Lord’, that is, how to love God. In the second scene, Columba’s final teaching as abbot recalls anew the mandatum of Christ and affirms that the indispensable means [77] and expression of loving God is to love one another. Significantly, the command is to be followed ‘after the example of the holy fathers’: this is what the whole tradition of living in community under an abbot was designed to foster.

36 Adomnán, following the Roman psalter, uses deficient in verse 11, instead of the Vulgate minuentur; it shapes his explanation of the verse’s aptness and his description of Columba’s final words after Vespers (see below). Verse 12 is the same in both the Gallican and Roman versions. 37 For the eucharistic resonances of the passage, see the paper by Clare Stancliffe in this volume (i.e. Adomnán of Iona: theologian, lawmaker and peacemaker, ed. Jonathan Wooding, Thomas O’Loughlin et al. [2010] pp. 51–69). The words of Christ echoed in Columba’s speech are also recalled in the last words of Cuthbert, as reported by Heribert in Bede’s Vita Cuthberti, 39, ed. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940): pacem, inquit, inter uos semper et caritatem custodite diuinum, noted by R. Sharpe, Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba (London, 1995) pp. 375–76, n. 412. 38 Et non tantum praesentis uitae necessaria ab eo sufficienter amministrabuntur, sed etiam aeternalium bonorum proemia diuinorum obseruatoribus praeparata tribuentur. Sufficienter plays on deficient in Psalm 33.11 and the contrast of earthly good and eternal good. See n. 35.

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The precepts of Basil’s shorter monastic ‘rule’, translated by Rufinus, were influential in the development of Western coenobitic monasticism. The first of the questions on which the work is structured – ‘Master, what is the great commandment (mandatum) of the Law?’ – is answered by Christ’s full reply, enjoining love of God and neighbour (Matthew 22.36–39).39 The second interrogatio quotes Christ’s new mandatum, as repeated three times in John’s Gospel, that his disciples should love one another.40 Basil comments, ‘Thus he who loves his neighbour brings to completion the love of God’. He immediately relates this love to timor domini, assuring those who are entering religion and ‘have the beginnings of the fear of the Lord’ that ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 1.7; Psalm 110.10).41 The last chapter of the Rule of St Benedict specifically recommends the regula sancti patris noster Basil and the collationes patrum et instituta et vitas eorum as guides for those hastening on to the perfection of monastic life.42 But the Rule itself has long been characterised as combining traditions of spiritual wisdom from the desert fathers, particularly as transmitted by Cassian, with Augustine’s vision of the monastery as an institution, a mixed cenobium of the spiritually strong and weak living the common life in a ‘community of charity’ under an abbot.43 The Rule states that it is expedient that the abbot has sole responsibility in the conduct of the monastery, ‘in order to preserve peace and love’ ( propter pacis caritatisque custodiam).44 The ‘golden rule’ of the Gospel, summarising the divine commandments as ‘Love the Lord God [. . .] and love your neighbour as yourself’, opens the chapter on the tools for good works. In the closing chapter, the monks are enjoined to show pure brotherly love to their fellow monks and loving fear to God.45 Adomnán recounts the final moments of Columba’s crossing over ‘to the heavenly country from this weary pilgrimage’ (cf. Hebrews 11.13–16). After writing out Psalm 33.11, Columba had gone to the church for the evening office of Vespers; [78] then, after resting on his bed and giving his mandata, he was obedient to

39 Cf. Deuteronomy 6.5; Leviticus 19.18; Regula ad monachos (Parvum asceticon), PL 103, cols 483–554:488. 40 John 13.35, 14.21; 15.12. Christ’s words concerning ‘the first and great commandment’ and the new commandment that ‘you love one another as I have loved to you’ are repeated in interrogatio 39 (PL 103, cols 491, 512). Jerome said that when in old age St John could hardly speak, he summed up his message: ‘Beloved sons, love one another’ (Filioli diligite alterutrum). In Epistolam ad Galatas (PL 26, col. 433). 41 PL 103, col. 492. Basil’s third interrogatio cites other scriptural texts on fraternal love and unity, for example Psalm 132.1, Acts 4.32. 42 RB 73; also 62.3. 43 A. De Vogüé, ‘Saint Benoît et son temps: règles italiennes et règles provençales au VIè siècles’, Regulae Benedicti Studia 1 (1971) pp. 169–93; Fry, The Rule, pp. 61–64; C. Leyser, Authority and asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000) pp. 106–07, 123–28. 44 RB 65.1. 45 RB 4.1; 72.8–9.

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the church bell at midnight.46 Although described at the beginning of the chapter as ‘an old man, weary with age’ who required assistance to move, he now rose in haste and joyfully ran to the church, reaching it before the others. In the darkness, Diormit and a few brothers who were a little way off briefly saw the whole church filled with angelic light about the saint. Then the other monks ran up in the darkness, bringing their lamps, and received their father’s silent benediction. The biblical, metaphorical language of the Prologue of the Rule of St Benedict offers a number of comparisons in concept and image. The opening voice of the Prologue presents the relationship of teacher and pupil in terms of a father’s formation of his son, as in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and calls on him to listen ‘with the ears of the heart’ and obey.47 The anonymous magister next addresses sons in the plural. He tells them that Christ ‘has already counted us as his sons’; they should behave as obedient sons, not worthless servants. He urges them to get up, to pay attention to the rousing words of the Scriptures: ‘It is high time for us to rise from sleep’ (Romans 13.11). Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven, that every day calls out this charge: ‘If you hear his voice today, do not harden your hearts’ (from Psalm 94, used as the invitatory psalm at the midnight office of Vigils).48 The divine summons to eternal life is then announced through two scriptural texts, strikingly juxtaposed: ‘“Come my sons, listen to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Psalm 33.12). “Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you”’ (cf. John 12.35).49 Next, still speaking through Psalm 33, the Lord asks, ‘Who yearns for life?’ and shows the way to eternal life to those who truly desire it: ‘Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from all deceit; turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it’ [79]

46 Earlier that Saturday, Columba had prophesied that ‘at midnight of this following venerated Lord’s day [. . .] I shall go the way of the fathers’, as Christ had revealed to him. 47 Obsculta (Ausculta), o fili, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui, et admonitionem pii patris libenter excipe et efficaciter comple. 48 RB 9 (ed. De Vogüé, pp. 5.55–68; ed. and trans. Fry, p. 407), on the Rule of St Benedict’s abandonment of the ‘all-night’ vigil for ‘an office of fixed structure and predictable duration’, after the monks have had an opportunity for sleep, which had distinguished it from the Rule of the Master and ‘an almost universal custom among monks in the East, in Gaul and in Italy’. The office of Vigils fulfils the prophecy, ‘At midnight I arose to give you praise’ (Psalm 118.62), RB 16. Vigils is sung nightly; the abbot gives a blessing after the psalmody (RB 9). Vigils for Sunday (i.e. on the Saturday night liturgically belonging to Sunday) is longer and the monks are warned to take special care not to arise too late (RB 11). 49 Currite dum lumen vitae habetis, ne tenebrae mortis vos comprehendant. Fry, Rule of St Benedict, p. 165, n., notes the different verb in the Vulgate text of John 12.35: ‘Ambulate dum lucem habetis’.

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(Psalm 33.13–15).50 The urgent imperative to run, ‘while there is still time’, is twice repeated at the end of the Prologue as a metaphor for making progress on the path of God’s commandments which leads to the heavenly home.51 Narrative details in the Vita Columbae’s account of that night – the use of Psalm 33.12 to describe the spiritual father’s task of teaching his sons the fear of the Lord, the vivid image of Columba and his monks rising and running to the monastic church at midnight, the transformation of the darkness of death by the divine light of eternal life – may suggest what is entirely probable, that Adomnán was familiar with the Rule of St Benedict. He could have encountered it on his visits to Northumbria, but it was known earlier to some Irish monks through its use in Columbanian monasteries in northern Gaul.52 It both preserved ancient monastic precepts and traditions and supplied practical arrangements lacking in the Regula Monachorum and other rules. Thomas Charles-Edwards has reviewed the evidence for thinking that Columbanus himself may have known it and ‘that by “the rule of Columbanus” was meant an oral rule of monastic life; and that this rule had textual sources, of which one was the Rule of St Benedict but others were the monastic works of Cassian and Basil’.53 In its use of Psalm 33.12, the Rule of St Benedict was handing on tradition. The belief that it is Christ who speaks in the Scriptures, through his Holy Spirit, with the words ‘Come my children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord’, was expressed very early, c. 96. Clement of Rome quoted the text and the following verses of the psalm, including the injunction to ‘seek peace and pursue it’, to support his appeal to the divided church of Corinth: ‘let them love all equally, who fear God’.54 Ambrose argued that as the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the words of Christ, ‘Come children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord’, reveal that it is Christ who is the teacher of wisdom (cf. Isaiah 11.2). Ambrose protested his own unreadiness for the episcopal office thrust upon him, but recognised its duty of teaching. He therefore presumed to teach, quoting the psalm text at the beginning of his treatise on the duties of the clergy, and said that he delivered to them, as to children, what Christ had imparted to him. Christ, he explained, is the true magister who alone has not learnt what he teaches, but human teachers have first to learn and receive from him what they may then hand on to others.55 [80] 50 The call to life contained in Psalm 33.13–16 is already quoted in the New Testament, 1 Peter 3.10–12, in the context of Peter’s exhortation to unity and fraternal love, ‘that you may inherit a blessing’. 51 RB prologue 44, 49. 52 VC II.46; HE V.15, 21. Vita Wilfridi 47. Wormald, ‘Bede and Benedict Biscop’, pp. 142–43; D. Ó Cróinín, ‘A tale of two rules: Benedict and Columbanus’ in M. Browne and C. Ó Clabaigh (eds), The Irish Benedictines (Dublin, 2005) pp. 11–24. 53 Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp. 384–88. 54 Epistola I ad Corinthios, 22, PG 1.258, cites LXX, Psalm 34.11–17, 21–22; trans. M. Staniforth, Early Christian writings, the Apostolic Fathers (London, 1968) p. 35. 55 De officiis ministrorum, I.1, PL 106, cols 26–27.

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In a homiletic exegesis of the psalm, Basil of Caesarea commented that the divine words ‘Come children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ are delivered by the voice of the teacher and that the disciple is the spiritual child of the teacher, formed and brought into existence as the child is formed in the womb, here citing St Paul (Galatians 4.19). Basil explained that the spiritual father teaches the salutary fear of the Lord; he teaches only ‘those who run to him through a desire of being saved’, those who are reconciled as adoptive sons through baptism, who are worthy through their regeneration to become sons of light.56 Those who have ‘the ears of the heart’ are urged to listen attentively and learn the fear of the Lord. Peter Chrysologus, bishop of Ravenna (433–50), similarly used Pauline images of cherishing and nourishing children to identify his teaching role and described God as calling to them through him: ‘Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’; that is, the way to eternal life, which he further expounds through Psalm 33.14–15.57 The psalm verse was also familiar from its use in baptismal catecheses, which may help explain the context in which it is used in the eclectic Rule of the Master. The Rule of St Benedict is widely believed to have used substantial sections from this anonymous rule.58 The material common to the Regula Magistri and the Prologue of the Regula Benedicti includes the very passage under discussion, which directly juxtaposes the texts ‘Come my children and listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ and ‘Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death will not overtake you’, and then quotes the following three verses of Psalm 33, down to the instruction ‘seek peace and pursue it’.59 The Rule of the Master provides a broad comparison, but not the source, for the preceding passage in the Rule of St Benedict, the opening salutation of the Prologue: ‘Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions ( praecepta magistri), and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice’.60 The Rule of Benedict is here more closely paralleled in the opening words of An admonition to a spiritual son: ‘Listen, my son, to the lessons of your father, and lend your ear to my words, and freely lend me your ears, paying attention with [81] a faithful 56 Basil. Exegetic homilies, 16.8 (trans. A. Way, [Washington, DC, 1963] pp. 259–65, 261). 57 Sermo 62, PL 52, col. 371C. 58 E.C. Whitaker, Documents of the baptismal liturgy (London, 1960) p. 136; De Vogüé, La règle de Saint Benoît, 4.42–54; idem., La Règle du Maître, SC 105–07 (Paris, 1964–65), i, p. 318, though M. Dunn, The Emergence of monasticism: from the desert fathers to the early Middle Ages (London, 2003) pp. 111–37 argues the priority of the Rule of St Benedict. 59 Ed. De Vogüé, La Règle du Maître, i, p. 318. 60 Obsculta (Ausculta), o fili, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui, et admonitionem pii patris libenter excipe et efficaciter comple. RB prologue 1. The prologue of the Rule of the Master opens, O homo, primo tibi qui legis, deinde et tibi qui me auscultes dicentem, dimitte alia modo quae cogitas, et me tibi loquentem et per os meum Deum te conuenientem cognosce. De Vogüé, La Règle du Maître, i, p. 288.

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heart to everything that I shall say to you’.61 This text was transmitted in the name of Basil, though was probably by Rufinus of Aquileia, the translator of Basil’s shorter ‘rule’ in the form known to the Latin West. Moreover, it is thought that the earliest extant manuscript of the complete Rule of the Master may originally have included a copy of the Admonitio ad filium spiritualem.62 A second Italian manuscript, from the late sixth century, contains a florilegium of monastic texts which has been identified as the ‘rule’ of Eugippius (d. c. 536). It includes a version of the Rule of Augustine, the same passages from the Rule of the Master used in the Rule of Benedict, as well as extracts from Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences and from Rufinus’s translation of the Rule of Basil.63 As already noted, chapter 73 of the Rule of Benedict recommends this rule of ‘our holy father Basil’ and the works of Cassian. Extensive research on the texts of the two Italian manuscripts and the Rule of Benedict, together with Caroline Bammel’s work on the long-term influence of the reading and publishing circle of Rufinus, have suggested something of the context in which the authors of the Rules of the Master, Eugippius and Benedict, like others elsewhere, were drawing on shared sources in the first half of the sixth century in the construction of texts designed to transmit a monastic tradition.64 Conrad Leyser has argued that in all three Rules the anonymity of the magister is ‘central to the notion of obedience they project. This teacher is not a particular individual, but a personification of the magisterium of tradition’, to which all in the monastery, including the abbot, are subject. The obedient listening to the divine word demanded of the pupil by the magister strongly recalls the traditions of spiritual wisdom from the desert fathers, as conveyed to the West by Cassian. Leyser notes that within the cenobitic community, it is the abbot who is ‘the living mediator of the word of God to the monks, as the rule is the textual mediator’.65 Unlike the instructions of the magister given in the three Rules, the invitation ‘Come my sons, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ is a direct quotation from Scripture (Psalm 33.12). It has been seen that this Old Testament text was understood from early Christian times to be not only the [82] word of the Lord, but, in a very particular sense, the teaching of Christ. Used in a monastic context, it signifies that the abbot, holding the place of Christ in the monastery, extends this 61 Audi, fili, admonitionem patris tui, et inclina aurem tua ad verba mea, et accommoda mihi libenter auditum tuum, et corde crudelo cuncta quae dicuntur auscultus, Admonitio ad filium spiritualem (PL 103, cols 683–84; ed. P. Lehman (Munich, 1955) p. 30); De Vogüé, La règle de Saint Benoît, iv, pp. 83–87. 62 Paris, Lat. MS 12205 is Italian, from the late sixth/early seventh century. 63 Eugippii Regula, ed. A. de Vogüé and F. Villegas, CSEL 87 (Vienna, 1976); Rule of St Benedict 64, 79, 89. The only copy of the Rule of Eugippius is Paris, Lat. MS 12634. 64 Discussed by Leyser, Authority, pp 103, 111–16; Bammel, ‘Products’, i, pp. 366–91; ii, pp. 430–62; iii, pp. 347–93. The date and origins of these early rules are the subject of continuing discussion: Dunn, Emergence of monasticism, pp. 112–13, 181–85, argues that the Rule of the Master combines Benedictine and Columbanian features and is to be associated with Bobbio. See n. 53. 65 Leyser, Authority, pp. 117, 120.

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invitation and teaches his sons ‘the fear of the Lord’, not simply by his own word and example but by the rule, which represents the authority of monastic tradition – the accumulated spiritual wisdom of the fathers on how to understand and obey Christ’s teaching about the true ‘fear of the Lord’ that is the way to eternal life. Adomnán’s use of Psalm 33.12 in his account of Columba’s last hours reveals great originality in adapting a theme that by the late seventh century was long-established. He does not suggest that Columba’s extraordinary spiritual gifts and miraculous powers were replicated in the person of his successor. He makes it clear that Baithéne was to pass on as a spiritual father what he had received as a spiritual son. He applies Psalm 33.12 to Baithéne, observing that it was ‘fittingly adapted to the successor, the father of spiritual sons, a teacher’, but then adds, ‘who, as his predecessor enjoined, succeeded him not in teaching only, but in writing also’.66 Adomnán here presents the psalm verse as a written text, not an oral instruction, and the spiritual father as a scribe. Drawing on the associations of the psalter with the divine office and on the topos of writing a psalter as denoting the learning and teaching of spiritual wisdom through the interiorisation of Scripture, he brilliantly visualises Columba handing on the abbatial office of teaching by summoning Baithéne to the task of copying out the Psalms: ‘Let Baithéne write what follows’. It is not by reference to an anonymous magister, but through the image of the continuing writing of the psalter from one generation to the next, with the text of Psalm 33.12 serving as a veritable summary of the rule, that Adomnán depicts the transmission of the magisterium of the monastic tradition itself. It is a unique and graphic image. None of the texts cited here which use the psalm verse ‘Come, my sons, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord’ directly combines the concept of the spiritual father with the image of the scribe or with a written text as Adomnán does. There are, however, some intriguing parallels in a different body of evidence, namely inscribed illustrations in early medieval psalters and related material. The illustrations survive in manuscripts later in date than the Vita Columbae. Three of the following four examples are from the post-Carolingian period, when the Regula Benedicti became the pervasive form of the ordering of the monastic life and the theme of teaching spiritual sons accordingly came to be particularly identified with [83] the Rule. The pictures, however, probably preserving earlier iconographic formulations, visualise themes and verbal images inspired by the early monastic traditions discussed here, on which the Rule of Benedict and other Western rules had drawn.

Pictorial analogues: the art of teaching spiritual sons The Carolingian Stuttgart Psalter, c. 820–30, is probably derived from a north Italian psalter of the late sixth or early seventh century, though its illustrations include 66 Successori uero sequens patri spiritalium doctori filiorum, ‘Venite filii audite me; timorem domini docebo uos’, congruenter conuenit, qui sicut decessor commendauit non solum ei docendo sed etiam scribendo successit, VC III.23.

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marked signs of still earlier pictorial influences.67 The interpretative illustrations of this Gallican psalter reflect different versions of the psalm text and of patristic exegesis, though no source has so far been identified for the illustration on fo. 41v.68 A layman and woman appear to commend two young boys into the care of a venerable haloed figure who is elaborately seated before a lectern in the manner of an Evangelist or author portrait (Figure 10.1). He is close in pose to the psalter’s frontispiece picture of Isidore composing his psalm preface on fo. 1v, except that his hands are extended to receive the two boys. They prostrate themselves and kiss his feet. The layman holds out a cloth above the boys. The picture suggests the spiritual fosterage or oblation of children.69 Richard Sharpe has speculated that the alumnus Berchan in VC III.21 may have been a lay youth, fostered by Columba to be educated in sacred learning.70 Columba, while still a youth, is described as living in Ireland with the holy bishop Findbarr, ‘learning the wisdom of the sacred scriptures’ (VC II.1). Bede recorded that, at the age of seven, he had been placed by his kinsmen into the charge of Abbot Benedict (Biscop) and then of Ceolfrith, to be educated.71 Gregory’s Life of Benedict describes how nobles from the city of Rome flocked to Benedict to give him their sons to be brought up for the service of Almighty God, notably Maurus, a youth, and Placid, who was still a child.72 The Rule of St Benedict, chapter 59, states that if a noble offers a young son to God in the monastery, the parents are to draw up a document stating the promise and, at [84] the presentation of their gifts, they are to wrap the document and the boy’s hand in the altar cloth. Much earlier, the rule of Basil had noted Christ’s invitation, ‘Let little children come unto me’ (Luke 18.16) and St Paul’s commendation of Timothy, who had studied sacred letters since childhood (cf. 2 Timothy 3.15). Basil concluded that every age from infancy onwards is suitable for receiving the fear and teaching of the Lord, but stipulated that it was necessary that infantes should be received with the agreement of their parents and should be offered by them before witnesses.73

67 Stuttgart, Würtembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Biblia Folio 23. 68 ‘Die patristischen Kommentare bieten für eine Deutung nichts’, F. Mütherich, ‘Die Stellung der Bilder in der frühmittelalterlichen Psalterillustration’ in J. Eschweiler and F. Mütherich (eds), Der Stuttgart Bilderpsalter, Württembergerische Landesbibliothek, Bibl. Fol. 23 (Stuttgart, 1965–66) p. 83. He tentatively points to the story of the infant Samuel presented to Eli by his parents. 69 For evidence regarding this practice (not including the Stuttgart Psalter picture) see M. de Jong, In Samuel’s image: child oblation in the Early Medieval west (Leiden, 1995). 70 Sharpe, Adomnán, p. 371. 71 Cura propinquorum datus sum educandus reuerentissimo abbati Benedicto, ac deinde Ceolfrido, HE, V.24. 72 Dialogi II.3. The Life of Maurus 8, supplements this account by mentioning that his mother as well as his father offered him to Benedict. See J.B. Wickstrom, ‘Text and image in the making of a holy man: an illustrated Life of St Maurus of Glanfeuil (MS Vat.Lat. 1202)’, Studies in Iconography 16 (1994) pp. 53–82:55. 73 Parvum asceticon 7, PL 103, col. 498.

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Figure 10.1 Stuttgart Psalter. Stuttgart, Wuerttembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. fol. 23, fol. 41v.

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The illustration in the Stuttgart Psalter is positioned at the bottom of the page, immediately below the block of text of Psalm 33. The page ends, not with the end of the psalm, but with verse 12. The scene is witnessed by two figures who protrude from the main picture area into the lower right hand margin, marking out Psalm 33.12 in the last two lines of text on the page. The pointing witnesses function as a nota bene symbol and direct the reader’s attention from the verse, Venite filii audite me timorem Domini docebo vos, to the seated figure below; the words act as a caption or titulus to the picture. The first words of this verse are also inscribed in the open book, presumably a psalter, lying in the lap of the haloed figure who is seated like a scribe.74 In the light of the traditions [85] outlined here, he may be seen as a spiritual father receiving spiritual sons, articulating the words of the Lord and inviting them to ‘Come sons, listen to me and I will teach you the fear of the Lord’. The second pictorial example is a mid-tenth-century line-drawing in a miscellany of earlier materials known as St Dunstan’s Classbook (Figure 10.2).75 Dunstan became abbot of Glastonbury in 940 and later monastic archbishop of Canterbury (959–88), and was prominent in the Anglo-Saxon reform movement, which introduced Benedictine monasticism and practices owing much to Carolingian and contemporary continental reform. Dunstan’s first biographer describes him as skilled in the art of writing and pingendi peritiam (the craft of painting or drawing) and he is generally seen as being responsible for the drawing in the Classbook, or for the addition of the figure of the monk and its inscription.76 His biographer notes that Dunstan’s concern from the first light of day was with correcting faulty books and erasing the mistakes of scribes.77 In the context of the saint’s monastic observances such as prayer and vigils, this may refer not literally to his scribal work, but to the metaphor of the teaching of spiritual wisdom and the need for the spiritual teacher to correct his sons as they learn the spiritual elementa. In the Classbook frontispiece, Dunstan is shown neither as a scribe nor, at first sight, in his abbatial teaching role. Though the drawing has been dated to the time

74 Elsewhere in the Stuttgart Psalter fol. 90r, the divine command, ‘Attend, O my people, to my law; incline your ears to the words of my mouth’ (Psalm 77.1) is articulated through the image of a similar haloed figure who stands behind a great book of the law declaiming to the assembled people of God shown in attitudes of attentive listening. See E. Sears, ‘The iconography of auditory perception in the early Middle Ages: on psalm illustration and psalm exegesis’ in C. Burnett, M. Fend and P. Bouk (eds), The second sense: studies in hearing and musical judgment from antiquity to the seventeenth century (London, 1991) pp. 36–37, fig. 7. 75 Oxford, Bodl. MS Auct. F.4.32, fol. 1r. 76 See M. Budny, ‘“St Dunstan’s classbook” and its frontispiece: Dunstan’s portrait and autograph’ in N. Ramsay, M. Sparks and T. Tatton-Brown (eds), St Dunstan: his life, times and cult (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992) pp. 102–42:104. 77 Vita S. Dunstani (B version) 37 (ed. W. Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1874) pp. 49–50).

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of his abbacy in Glastonbury, he is here depicted simply as a monk.78 The tonsured cowled figure lowers his head to the groundline in awe and deep humility before the towering figure of Christ, whose feet are obscured from view by a cloudline at the bottom of the page, indicating that this is a heavenly vision. The inscription on Christ’s rod or sceptre reads uirga recta est uirga regni tui: ‘the sceptre of thy kingdom is a sceptre of uprightness’ (Psalm 44.7). Augustine’s commentary on the verse refers to the inflexibly straight rod as both the rod of direction, uirga directionis, and a sceptre of righteousness, sceptrum aequitatis; it is an attribute of Christ as ruler and king. His mercy cannot strip him of his attribute of righteousness and justice, therefore sin must be punished. But Augustine quotes Psalm 2.9, ‘You shall rule them with a rod of iron and break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’, to show that Christ ‘rules’ those who are spiritual but ‘breaks’ those who are carnal. The soul who would be ruled by [86] Christ, rather than broken, should not await his judgment but hasten to acknowledge its own sins. Augustine emphasises that the plea of the penitential psalm, ‘Hide thy face from my sins’ (Psalm 50.9), does not contradict the psalmist’s repeated plea that God should look upon him. God is here being asked not to turn away from the penitent, but to turn his face from the penitent’s sins, allowing him to confess himself, ‘I acknowledge my transgression and my sin is ever before me’ (Psalm 50.3).79 The drawing shows Dunstan as a monk in deep proskynesis, his head bowed to the ground, his hand over his eyes, so that he humbly averts his gaze from the heavenly vision. The accompanying inscription voices Dunstan’s prayer for Christ’s protection and mercy to save him from hell.80 Christ does not abandon him but compassionately turns his face from the monk’s sin. Christ’s right hand holds the unbending rod, the uirgo recta, yet also points to the inscription on the book he holds in his left hand, which offers the way to eternal life: Uenite filii audite me timor e(t) dni docebo uos (Psalm 33.12). The Rule of Benedict teaches that a monk should always ‘manifest humility in his bearing no less than in his heart’, his head must be bowed and his eyes cast down. Judging himself guilty on account of his sins, ‘he should consider that he is already at the fearful judgment and constantly say: “Lord, I am a sinner, not worthy to look up to heaven” (Luke 18.13) [. . .] “I am bowed down (incurvatus sum) and humbled in every way (Psalm 37.7)”’. Persevering in such humility, a monk will arrive at the perfect love of God which casts out fear (1 John 4.18): ‘Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to

78 The figure is adapted from one of the carmina figurata in the Liber de laudibus sanctae crucis of Alcuin’s pupil, Hrabanus Maurus, with Dunstan’s name replacing that of Hrabanus in the inscription. J. Higgitt, ‘Glastonbury, Dunstan, monasticism and manuscripts’, Art History 2 (1979) pp. 275–90:278–81. R. Deshman, ‘Benedictus Monarcha et Monachus: early medieval ruler theology and the Anglo-Saxon reform’, Frühmittelalterlichen Studien 22 (1988) pp. 204–40:214. 79 For Columba’s compassionate consolation of a penitent sinner with words from Psalm 50, see VC I.30. 80 Dunstanum memet clemens rogo, Christe, tuere. Tenerias me non sinas sorbisse procellas.

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Figure 10.2 St Dunstan’s Classbook. The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. MS. Auct. F.4.32, fol. 1r.

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observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ’.81 In the drawing, Christ addresses Dunstan, and the reader, as his filii, inviting them to learn ‘the fear of the Lord’. One may assume that Dunstan has made some progress in spiritual wisdom towards the fear of the Lord which is love. But what Christ teaches here is the continuing need for the fundamental awe and ‘fear of the Lord’ which acknowledges God’s holiness and the soul’s sinfulness. Dunstan is seen learning from Christ what he, as an abbot holding Christ’s place in the monastery, must teach his spiritual sons. Adomnán, protesting his own unworthiness in serving Iona, teaches a similar point of spiritual wisdom in his account of Columba’s spiritual son Virgno, who was to succeed as fourth abbot. Already as a youth, he was ‘fired with the love of God’ (in dei amore feruens), but the story centres on how Virgno acknowledged the fearful vision of divine holiness suddenly made present to [88] him one night through the manifestation of light around Columba and humbly lowered his eyes from that unendurable brightness. Columba consoled him in his fear and commended his averted gaze as pleasing to God: Bene O filiole.82 In the early eleventh-century Eadui Psalter from Canterbury is a drawing probably derived from an earlier frontispiece to the Benedictine Rule (Figure 10.3).83 It is dense with texts. St Benedict is pictured enthroned as an imago Christi. His halo identifies him as ‘the father and leader of monks’ (Scs Benedictus. Pater monarchor. Et dux) and other abbreviated inscriptions on his robes and on the scroll above, drawn from the Rule of Benedict or from the Carolingian commentary on the Rule by Smaragdus, further describe the qualities of the ideal abbot he exemplifies and the obedience due to him. Over his brow, he wears a diadem prominently inscribed Timor Dei. Robert Deshman related the image to the Wisdom text, ‘the fear of the Lord is a crown of wisdom’ (Sirach 1.22), referring to the monastic life and its reward.84 The words also recall the importance of Timor Dei in the Rule itself, as in the precept that a man should keep the fear of the Lord always before his eyes (Psalm 35.2) and that the abbot should ‘do all things in the fear of God and in observance of the Rule’.85 The inscribed diadem serves to announce the Christ-like role of the abbot in teaching his spiritual sons the fear of the Lord. A small monastic figure, probably an abbot, prostrates himself beneath the feet of Benedict. They alone are fully painted; to the right of the central dividing pillar, the community of monks in the other half of the picture is drawn in tinted outline.

81 RB 7.62–67. 82 VC III.19. 83 London, BL Arundel MS 155, fo. 133, Christ Church Canterbury, c. 1012–23. Higgitt, ‘Glastonbury’, pp. 283–84; R. Gameson, The role of art in the late Anglo-Saxon church (Oxford, 1995) pp. 84–86. 84 Deshman, Benedictus Monarcho et Monachus’, pp. 211–18. 85 The first step of humility, RB 7.10; 3.11.

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The figure in deep obeisance wears a girdle marked zona humilitatis, suggesting the humility required of one who has the authority of the teaching office; the golden book he holds up, which is entitled lib(er) ps(almorum), may refer to the elementa of spiritual wisdom he teaches. The picture’s allusions to the monastic life and office through its position in a psalter, between the last psalm and the monastic canticles, and through its texts and depiction of the liber psalmorum, are competed by another book, borne by the foremost monk, which is inscribed with the opening words of the Prologue of the Rule: Ausculta o fili precepti [sic], ‘Listen, my son, to the master’s instructions’. John Higgitt speculated that the lantern held by one of the monks is a wordillustration of ‘the light of life’ in the text from John 12.35 also quoted in the Prologue.86 It will be recalled that this text, with the substitution of the very currite (‘Run while you have the light of life that the darkness of death may not overtake you’), immediately follows the quotation of Psalm 33.12 in the [89] Prologue. In the psalter picture, the foremost monk in particular, who carries the Rule and approaches Benedict, appears to be running. The community may be seen as hastening to respond to the Rule taught by St Benedict, the archetypal abbot. Their own immediate spiritual father humbly reveres Christ’s image in their founder. The picture shows the present monastic community and the unbroken monastic tradition handed on to them through the abbot and the Rule. It has been argued here that some of the images and narrative episodes in Adomnán’s account of Columba’s life, especially concerning his last hours, were partly inspired by the same features from monastic tradition that are [90] expressed in terms of visual images in these later manuscripts. But although the three illustrations associate the ‘fear of the Lord’ and even the full written text of Psalm 33.12 with the image of the spiritual father, and the Stuttgart Psalter also adapts the iconography of the author portrait, none of them directly uses the image of a scribe writing.87 The scribal image appears in the final example, from a different genre, a lavish cycle of illustrations of Gregory the Great’s Vita Benedicti in Abbot Desiderius’ lectionary for Vigils, which was produced at Monte Cassino for the reconsecration of the abbey’s basilica in 1071 (Figure 10.4). The monastery’s contemporary interests are accommodated in some details, but John Wickstrom argues that ‘Desiderius’ workshop seems at the same time to have followed very ancient traditions of illustration’.88

86 Higgitt, ‘Glastonbury’, p. 284. 87 In the frontispiece of a copy of Smaragdus’s commentary on the Rule of St Benedictine, c. 1180, St Dunstan is pictured at a draped lectern, writing the opening words of the Rule, Obsculta fili, precepta magistri, without further reference to spiritual sons or Psalm 33.12, London, BL, Royal MS 10.A.xiii. 88 Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 1202. J.B. Wickstrom, ‘Gregory the Great’s “Life of St Benedict” and the illustrations of Abbot Desiderius II’, Studies in Iconography 19 (1998) pp. 31–73:61. Belief in Gregory’s authorship was crucial to the early medieval popularity of the Vita Benedicti; for recent

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Figure 10.3 The Eadui Psalter. © The British Library Board. MS Arundel 155, fol. 133.

Gregory’s Life of St Benedict is cast in the form of a dialogue through which he instructs his young disciple, the deacon Peter. The first scene in the upper register of the opening page of the cycle, folio 17, however, shows Gregory seated at a questioning of its date and authorship see F. Clark, The ‘Gregorian’ dialogues and the origins of Benedictine monasticism (Leiden, 2003) pp. 219–59.

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lectern and writing the Life.89 With one hand he holds his pen, the other is raised in a speaking gesture to Peter, who stands listening. Through his account of Benedict, who possessed the spirit of Christ, Gregory is about to expound the Scriptures for his spiritual son, and the words voiced in the titulus written below are similar to the call to attentive listening made at the opening of the Rule of St Benedict: ‘Open your heart, be steadfast, reflect on what I will produce’. Alongside is a scene, not directly from the Vita Benedicti, which envisages the young Benedict himself as a spiritual son, reverently receiving a book – the word of the Lord – on veiled hands from an unidentified seated figure who is instructing him, the titulus suggests, in the spiritual alphabet: Hic docet hic discit quod litera, sillaba quid sit (‘The one teaches, while the other learns what letters and syllables are’). Benedict, in turn, is shown as a spiritual father in the scene of the oblation of Maurus and Placidus on folio 30v. Seated before the monastery gate and holding a book, Benedict receives a youth and a child offered by their noble fathers to be ‘schooled in the service of Almighty God’. The titulus beneath the illustration expresses the fathers’ prayer: Hos patri patrum, pater, instrue munere patrum (‘Father, teach these for the Father of fathers, through the legacy/gift of the fathers’), which succinctly suggests the handing on of the tradition of spiritual [91] wisdom.90 The scene is recast in the illustrated Life of St Maurus, included in the same manuscript, where the presentation of Maurus as a child by his natural father has the titulus, Do pater hunc xpo. Capet doctor et instrue xpo (‘Father, I give this (child) to Christ. Take him, O teacher, and instruct him in Christ’). Benedict here places his hand on the head of Maurus and blesses him. In the lower register, Benedict is seen seated, holding an open book and instructing his spiritual son, his future assistant, with the words, Ausculta fili patris edicta. Jussa magistri (‘Listen, my son, to the father’s instructions, the commands of the master’).91 The titulus is not taken from Gregory’s account in the Vita Benedicti, but recalls the Rule of Benedict. The identity of the Rule and the Life is already implied in Gregory’s remark that Benedict was a teacher and wrote a rule for his monks: If anyone wishes to know more about his life and character, he may find in the ordinances of that Rule a complete account of the abbot’s practice; for the holy man cannot have taught otherwise than as he lived.92 The opening image in the main cycle, folio 17, showing Gregory the Great writing the Vita Benedicti, is complemented by the corresponding scene on the last

89 C. Stewart, ‘Il ritratto scritto. I Dialoghi di Gregorio e il loro impatto stroico’ in R. Cassanelli and E. López-Tello Garcia (eds), Benedetto. L’ereità artistica (Milan, 2007) pp. 10–24, pl. 2. 90 C. Hahn, Portrayed on the heart: narrative effect in pictorial lives from the tenth through the thirteenth century (Berkeley, CA, 2001) pp. 200–03, fig. 89. 91 Fol. 114v. Wickstrom, ‘Text and image’, pp. 53–82. 92 Dialogi II.36 (ed. A. de Vogüé, SC 251, 260, 265, Paris, 1978–80) p. 242; trans. J. McCann, Saint Benedict (Dublin, 1980) pp. 55–56.

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Figure 10.4 Cycle of illustrations of Gregory the Great’s Vita Benedicti: Abbot Desiderius’s lectionary for Vigils, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 1202, fol. 80r. Reproduced by permission of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved.

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page, folio 80, where St Benedict is seated at a lectern writing his Rule, like an Evangelist writing the Gospel. Immediately next to this image, he is seen dying beside the altar in cruciform orans pose, his arms held up by his monks to support his weakened body.93 In the final scene on the same page, Gregory hands over the completed Vita Benedicti to his disciple. The dedicatory frontispiece of the manuscript shows the monastery’s founder, St Benedict, holding his Rule and blessing the completed Lectionary and its illustrated Vita Benedicti. It is shown in the hands of the present abbot of the monastery, Desiderius, who had the book made and is surrounded by other volumes of the holy fathers, further indicating his role in passing on monastic tradition to his own monks.94 The particular form of monastic rule observed on Iona, as elsewhere in the [93] seventh century, is not known. What can be said is that Adomnán, while alert to local names, places, stories and history, and to the testimony of local witnesses, does not portray the monastic life of Iona as a peculiarly local creation. The interpretation of the Scriptures offered through many of the narrative episodes in his Life of the founder reflects patristic exegesis, hagiographic models and monastic precepts which were, as the example discussed here shows, part of the common inheritance of early Western monasticism.95 With learning and artistry, Adomnán taught his own spiritual sons the fear of the Lord through the Vita Columbae. In writing the life of the founder, the ninth abbot of Iona not only celebrated a singular patron but transmitted to the community a living monastic tradition, whose authority might be recognisable to others.

93 Two of Benedict’s monks, ‘the one in the monastery, the other far away’, are shown seeing the vision of the lamp-strewn path, stretching eastwards from the monastery to the sky, by which ‘Benedict, the beloved of the Lord, ascended to heaven’ (Dialogi II.37). The preceding page (Stewart, ‘Il ritratto scritto’, pls 10–11) illustrates Benedict’s vision of the soul of Bishop Germanus: ‘The darkness of the night was utterly dispelled and so great a brightness succeeded it that the light which illumined the darkness outshone the light of day [. . .] the whole world seemed to be gathered into one sunbeam and brought under his gaze’ (Dialogi II.35). There are comparisons with the visions of light on Hinba and at Columba’s passing, VC III.18, 23. 94 F. Newton, The scriptorium and library at Monte Cassino, 1058–1105 (Cambridge, 1999) pp. 292, 301, 303. 95 For a recent summary of the stages by which a variety of texts disseminating the ideals of eastern monasticism for a Latin audience had been written, compiled and translated from the fourth century, forming a corpus in the sixth century on which Western monastic writers drew, see C. Rapp, ‘Hagiographic and monastic literature between the Greek East and the Latin West in Late Antiquity’, Settimane di studio della fondazione centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 51 (2004) pp. 1221–80:1269–80.

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Relatively few chapters on the monastic life in Adomnán’s Vita Columbae (VC) quote Scripture or cite scriptural parallels directly; those that do provide such aids to interpretation often point beyond the literal letter of the biblical text or parallel to the traditions in which Scripture was understood in the early Insular world. What distinguishes the work is the skilful and often innovative way these insights are conveyed through narrative, yet not as allegory or parable. The present essay examines one such episode, in the light of examples from some of the exegetical, hagiographic and monastic traditions with which Adomnán was familiar. It is offered as a small tribute to a distinguished scholar and generous colleague whose foundational study on the monastic familia of Columba has done so much to extend our understanding of the contexts and significance of Adomnán’s work.1 VC I.3 begins with time and place: At one time, when for some months the blessed man remained in the midland district of Ireland, while by God’s will founding the monastery that is called in Irish Dairmag [Durrow], it pleased him to visit the brothers who lived in the monastery of Clóin of Saint Céran [Clonmacnoise].2 Columba’s arrival at this important monastic ciuitas beyond the Columban familia is described, however, not just as a fraternal visit but as a ceremonial entrance or aduentus. The abbot and the whole community went to meet him outside the ualum monasterii.3 They acclaimed him, made obeisance, and led him in procession through the boundary to the church: When they heard of his approach all those that were in the fields near the monastery came from every side, and joined those that were within 1 Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry: the history and hagiography of the monastic familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988). 2 VC I.3: Alan O. Anderson and Marjorie O. Anderson (ed. and trans.), Adomnán’s Life of Columba (2nd ed.: Oxford, 1991) pp. 24–25. 3 For the suggestion that Adomnán’s indication of a triple boundary system delineating areas of sacred space at Iona is an arrangement that ‘can be seen in action’ at Clonmacnoise in this account,

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it, and with the utmost eagerness accompanying their abbot Alither they [380] passed outside the boundary-wall of the monastery, and with one accord went to meet Saint Columba, as if he had been an angel of the Lord. On seeing him they bowed their faces to the earth, and he was kissed by them with all reverence, and singing hymns and praises they led him with honour to the church. They bound together a kind of barrier of branches, and caused it to be carried about the saint as he walked, by four men keeping pace with him; lest the elder Saint Columba should be troubled by the thronging of that crowd of brothers.4 Adomnán’s visionary evocation of Iona as a holy land in the Vita Columbae, with the monastery as the earthly city foreshadowing the heavenly Jerusalem, has a historical counterpart in the archaeological evidence of the symbolic imitation of Jerusalem in early Irish monastic sites, including Clonmacnoise.5 Several circumstantial details in Adomnán’s description of the procession at Clonmacnoise, however – the joining together of those who had come in from the fields, when they heard of Columba’s approach, with those who came out from the monastery to meet him; their singing of hymns and praises; the carrying of branches around him; the multitude who accompanied him on the way into the monastery – have a more specific resonance. They serve not to replicate but to recall Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The Gospels recount that a great multitude in the city ‘went forth to meet him’, when they heard Jesus was coming to Jerusalem (John 12.12); some of the multitude ‘cut boughs from the trees and strewed them in the way’ and ‘the crowds that went before and that followed’ cried praises: ‘Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest’ (Matthew 21.8–9). The crowd’s hymn of acclamation, Benedictus qui uenturus est in nomine Domini, from Psalm 117.26, is quoted in all four Gospel accounts and in the annual liturgical commemoration of the event through its ritual re-enactment. The abbot and community of Clonmacnoise received Columba ‘as if he had been an angel of the Lord’. Adomnán later tells of how Columba visited his own monks unseen one harvest-time, as they returned wearily each evening from labouring in the fields (VC I.37). Half-way home, they would experience a miraculous sensation of rest and refreshment (cf. Matthew 28–30). Baíthéne explained that they received this solace through the coming of Columba to them in spirit. With great joy they knelt and ‘worshipped Christ in the holy and blessed man’

see Aidan MacDonald, ‘Aspects of the monastic landscape in Adomnán’s Life of Columba’ in J. Carey, M. Herbert and P. Ó Riain (eds), Studies in Irish hagiography: saints and scholars (Dublin, 2001) pp. 15–30 at pp. 19, 30. 4 Quandamque de lignis piramidem. For the barrier or baldachino of branches, see Richard Sharpe (trans.), Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba (London, 1995) p. 261 n. 63. 5 Tomás Ó Carragáin, Churches in early medieval Ireland: architecture, ritual and memory (New Haven and London, 2010) pp. 33–47, 57–59, 72–80.

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(Christum in sancto uenerantur et beato uiro). Columba is twice referred to by the epithet uir beatus in the chapter recounting his bodily visit to the monks of Clonmacnoise, where Adomnán also shows, by different [381] literary means, that the blessed man came in the name of the Lord and that in their recognition and reception of him the community of Clonmacnoise honoured Christ. Columba’s formal blessing of the community might be expected to follow, but events take a surprising turn. In the course of the procession to the church, during which Columba was protected from the multitude of brothers by the four men around him carrying branches, a ‘boy of the congregation’ (puer familiaris) attempted to come up behind him out of sight in order that he might secretly touch but the hem of his cloak, ‘without the knowledge or perception of the uir beatus’. Though Columba could not see this with his bodily eyes, he discerned it spiritually (spiritalibus perspexit), and suddenly stopped, reached back and brought the boy round to face him. Up to this point the incident recalls details from the synoptic Gospels’ accounts of the woman with the issue of blood. When Christ was thronged by a great crowd of people she approached him from behind and secretly touched the hem of his garment (Luke 8.43–49). The particular interest of Adomnán’s story, however, lies in its departure from the familiar Gospel narrative, which leads the reader to reflect further on what, exactly, is the nature of the link being made between the two cases. Adomnán elsewhere testifies that Columba cured the ailments of many sick people, who received his blessing through various means, ‘even by touching the hem of his cloak’ (VC II.6), but the boy at Clonmacnoise is not described as sick. Rather, he was much looked down on for his countenance and demeanour; though accused of no particular sin, he was ‘not yet approved by the elders’.6 Those present did not want Columba to take any notice of ‘this unlucky and mischievous boy’ (infelicem et iniuriosum [. . .] puerum), but Columba unexpectedly blessed the boy and publicly prophesied his growth in virtue, wisdom and renown. The boy is finally identified by Adomnán as ‘Ernéne, Crasén’s son, famous afterwards among all the churches of Ireland, and very widely known’ and ‘the prophecy concerning himself’ is formally authenticated as having been related by Ernéne to abbot Ségéne (623–52) in the presence of Adomnán’s predecessor Faílbe. Adomnán adds, ‘and from his disclosure I too have myself learned these same words that I have related’.7 The story is in some ways complementary to the previous chapter, which is set later in time, after the death of Columba. His successor, Baíthéne, reveals to the youthful Fintén, son of Tailchán, the prophecy privately made to him by Columba that Fintén had been chosen by God to remain in Ireland and become ‘an abbot of monks, and a leader of souls to the heavenly kingdom’. Like Ernéne, Fintén was

6 Eadem hora quidam ualde dispectus uultu et habitu puer familiaris, et necdum senioribus placens. 7 On the transmission and recording of testimonies, see Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry, pp. 134–36.

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to be held in high repute among all the [382] churches of the Irish, but the juxtaposed accounts of their early careers and reputations differ. Fintén had preserved ‘from the age of boyhood’ (a puerili aetate) integrity of body and soul and was devoted to studies of divine wisdom, meaning not only the acquisition of knowledge through study of the Scriptures, but the divinely inspired spiritual process of learning how to understand their underlying meaning in order to know God’s will and, therefore, how to obey and love him. Encouraged by the guidance of a wise and venerable priest, Fintén while still in his youth had an eager desire to go to Columba and live in pilgrimage. An early disposition to spiritual maturity is shared by the three universally revered saints whose Lives offered particular models for Insular hagiography, including the Vita Columbae. Gregory’s Life of Benedict testifies, ‘From the time he was a boy, he had the heart of an elder’.8 From the earliest years of his holy childhood St Martin aspired to the service of God. Not long after the age of ten he was completely converted to the work of God.9 St Antony had refused ‘to join in the silly games of the other little children’; when he went to church ‘he did not fool around as little children tend to nor did he show lack of respect as young boys often do’.10 But precocious signs of sanctity could, as in the case of Antony, be compatible with the unfolding of stages in the saint’s spiritual progress. Other saints, moreover, were accorded some latitude in infancy, including St Cuthbert (c. 635–87) in the anonymous Life produced at Lindisfarne, c. 699–705, even though the same three early Lives, especially the Evagrian Vita Antonii and Sulpicius Severus’s Vita Martini, were important influences, as were Irish traditions of hagiography.11 As a high-spirited eight-year old, Cuthbert is pictured disporting himself with other youngsters in all manner of games and tomfoolery (ioci uarietatem et scurilitatem agere ceperunt) before he is summoned to his calling. This childhood is detailed further in Bede’s reworking of the material in his prose Vita Cuthberti, c. 720, but is also carefully annotated from Scripture to chronicle a stage in the working of heavenly grace in the saint’s life: ‘up to the eighth year of his age, which is the end of infancy and the beginning of boyhood (usque ad octauum aetatis annum, qui post infantiam puericiae primus est), he devoted his mind to nothing but the games and wantonness of children’; like the blessed Samuel, ‘he did not yet know the Lord, neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed unto him’ (1 Samuel 3.7). Cuthbert’s childish [383] ways were

8 Dialogi ii.1: Adalbert de Vogüé (ed.), Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, II: livres I–III, SC 260 (Paris, 1979) p. 129: ab ipso pueritiae suae tempore cor gerens senile. 9 Vita Martini, ii: Jacques Fontaine (ed.), Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin, I, SC 133 (Paris, 1967) p. 254. 10 Vita Antonii i.1; PG 26, 841; Carolinne White (trans.), Early Christian lives (Harmondsworth, 1998) p. 9. 11 Vita Sancti Cuthberti auctore anonymo, 2: Bertram Colgrave (ed. and trans.), Two Lives of St Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940) p. 65; Alan Thacker, ‘The social and continental background to early Anglo-Saxon hagiography’ (D. Phil., University of Oxford, 1976) pp. 87–100.

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checked by the Lord through the reproof and prophecy miraculously uttered by a three-year-old, prompting Bede to observe the truth spoken by the Psalmist: ‘out of the mouth of babes and sucklings you have perfected praise’ (Psalm 8.3). From then onwards, that is, from the earliest years of his boyhood, heavenly grace urged Cuthbert ‘little by little into the way of truth’, so that he might accomplish what was destined for him. He then ‘put away childish things’ (1 Corinthians 13.11). While still a boy he was ‘wholly given to the Lord’ and, conforming to Jeremiah’s ideal (Lamentations 3.27, 28), submitted his neck from early youth to the yoke of monastic discipline.12 In the case of Ernéne at Clonmacnoise, the wayward phase extended into boyhood. His secret attempt to touch the hem of Columba’s cloak, however, gives some sign that his inner disposition may have been more favourable than his unsatisfactory outward demeanour suggested. The reader is primed to view the boy’s action through the lens of the Gospel miracle, rather than as a prank. The woman with the issue of blood had ‘said within herself, “If I touch but the hem of his garment, I shall be healed”’ (Matthew 9.21; Mark 5.28), thereby recognising the power of Christ. Knowing that someone had sought the aid of his power (uirtutem), Christ asked, to the puzzlement of the crowd, ‘Who touched me?’ The woman came trembling before him (tremens uenit) and he reassured her, ‘Daughter ( filia), your faith has made you whole’.13 Similarly, the boy was trembling greatly when brought before the face of Columba, who addressed him as O filii, and in great trepidation he received the saint’s blessing (ualde tremefactum [. . .] cum ingenti tremore). The scriptural image of fear and trembling in the divine presence, or before the Lord’s chosen messenger, is a hagiographic motif used elsewhere in the Life of Columba.14 VC III.19–21, 23 in particular also shows familiarity with patristic and monastic traditions on timor domini as applied to the differing spiritual capacities of individuals and to different stages of spiritual growth within the life of an individual. In Cassian’s Conlationes ‘the fear of the Lord’ can mean a negative fear of divine punishment in someone whose spiritual understanding is elementary. Fear can also be seen as a more positive awe of God’s power, leading to penitence, amendment of life and the seeking of spiritual wisdom. The desert fathers and compilers of monastic rules enigmatically taught that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 110.10), describing a transformation from servile fear to the truly filial kind of fear, which is fear only of being deficient in the love of God.15 [384]

12 Bedae Vita Sancti Cuthberti, 1: Colgrave, Two Lives, pp. 154–57. 13 Luke 8.45–48, Mark 5.30–34, Matthew 9.22. 14 VC second preface; I.37; II.23; III.2, 19: Anderson and Anderson, Adomnán’s Life of Columba, pp. 5, 71, 129, 185, 211. 15 Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord’ in D. Broun and T. O. Clancy (eds), Spes Scotorum: hope of Scots – Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999) pp. 159–211 at 192–211.

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Adomnán shows that Columba alone discerned Ernéne’s secret and fearful action to be the beginning of gradual change, ‘from this hour’ (ab hac hora). He prophesied that the boy would grow in goodness of life and virtues of the soul (bonisque moribus et animae uirtutibus) by degrees from day to day; ‘wisdom also with prudence will be increased in him more and more, from this day’ (sapientia quoque et prudentia magis ac magis in eo ab hac die adaugebitur). The linking of sapientia and prudentia may recall their pairing in Christ’s saying that the Father has hidden divine mysteries from the wise and revealed them to little ones: quia abscondisti haec a sapientibus et prudentibus et reuelasti ea paruulis (Matthew 11.25). Christ was cautioning those who think themselves wise, rather than humbly acknowledge that wisdom comes from God. Columba’s prophecy reveals the boy to be a recipient of divine grace, both as one of the ‘little ones’ in the Church whose understanding is still at a carnal level, and also as one who is to grow gradually in true sapientia et prudentia towards greater understanding of the spiritual and eternal. In the Andersons’ edition of the text, prudentia is interpreted as ‘discretion’; this is not annotated but has the effect of indicating how prudentia had long since come to be understood in a monastic context.16 In classical thought virtue had been defined as a disposition of the spirit (habitus animae) in harmony with the measure of nature and reason and consisting of four parts: prudentia, iustitia, fortitutudo, temperantia.17 It was necessary to divide the four virtues from their contraries, but also to distinguish them from the extremes at their own borders, which misleadingly appear to be related to them but are not. Prudentia, ‘the knowledge of what is good, what is bad, and what is neutral’, therefore governed understanding of the other virtues.18 In works on the monastic spiritual life, which probed intentions as well as actions and drew on scriptural traditions and a greatly increased vocabulary of the virtues, that sense of measured judgment was often expressed by the term discretio (discretion, discernment). In the rule of St Benedict, prudentia is among the qualities required of the abbot when correcting the brethren, but additional emphasis is given to its association with moderation and discernment: ‘he should use prudence and avoid extremes’, he should ‘prune faults with prudence and love as he sees best for each individual’, which required discernment of the individual’s spiritual strengths and weaknesses; indeed, discretio is ‘the mother of all virtues’.19 [385]

16 Anderson and Anderson, Adomnán’s Life of Columba, p. 27: ‘wisdom also with discretion will be increased in him more and more from this day’. Sharpe (Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, p. 116) has: ‘Wisdom and judgement will increase in him from today’. 17 Cicero, De inuentione, II, liii, 4–12: H.M. Hubbell (ed. and trans.), Cicero, De inventione; De optimo genere oratorum; Topica (Cambridge MA, 1949) p. 326. 18 Ibid.: prudentia est rerum bonarum et malarum neutrarumque scientia. 19 Regula Benedicti, 64: Adalbert de Vogüé (ed.), La Règle de Saint Benoit, II, SC 182 (Paris 1972) p. 652: testimonia discretionis matris uirtutum sumens; Timothy Fry (trans.), The rule of St Benedict (Collegeville, 1980) p. 282.

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Columbanus, too, was familiar with the concept that ‘virtues are placed in the mean between extremes’ and taught that to avoid all excess, the virtues practised in the monastic life, ‘grown to a huge forest of names’, needed to be ‘weighed in the balance of discretio’. It was not acquired by human effort alone; the monk was to pray humbly for the divine gift of true discernment, ‘which opens the path to perfection’.20 This emphasis on discernment in sixth-century monastic rules reflects the teaching of the desert fathers and was augmented by Gregory the Great’s extensive practical advice in Book 3 of the Regula pastoralis on how the pastor was to weigh the disposition, temperaments and spiritual capacities of those in his charge and the means of appropriately admonishing or encouraging them.21 In Cassian’s Conlationes, the conference devoted to discretion had cited the authoritative counsel of St Antony himself that ‘discretio is the begetter, guardian and moderator of all virtues’.22 It is necessary for ‘discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart’ (Hebrews 4.12), in oneself or in others; it is seen, moreover, as a gift of divine grace, requiring humility and purity of heart in order to be brought into effect, so that any admonishment or correction offered is not motivated by self-interest or spiritual pride. Discernment is regarded, not as milk for infants but as ‘solid food for the fully grown, for those who through practice have their senses exercised for the discerning of good and evil’ (Hebrews 5.14), though the fathers repeatedly warned that such spiritual maturity was not necessarily related to seniority of age or position. Abba Moses recounts the cautionary tale of an austere unnamed elder. His reproach of a junior monk troubled by mundane temptations was so harsh that the young man was on the point of leaving the monastic life in despair when he met Abba Apollos, who discerned the cause of his sorrow and gave him consolation. Then, laying bare the heart of the elder, he urged him to learn ‘not to crush the bruised reed’ (Matthew 12.20) and to pray for that grace ‘by which you yourself may be able to sing with assurance in deed and power: “The Lord has given me a learned tongue so that I might know how to sustain by a word the one who is weary”’ (Isaiah 50.4).23 The ‘learned tongue’, instructed by wisdom, teaches and consoles others. Much of the teaching of the desert fathers was conveyed through stories and case histories, characteristically less explicit than this example in pointing to a meaning to be drawn. They often simply present an image, an enigmatic episode or saying in the life of a father or a monk, requiring the reader [386] to puzzle out

20 Columbanus, Regula monachorum, 8: G.S.M. Walker (ed. and trans.), Sancti Columbani opera, SLH 2 (Dublin, 1970) pp. 135, 137. 21 See Bruno Judic (ed.), Grégoire le Grand, Règle pastorale, II: livres III et IV, SC 382 (Paris, 1992). 22 Conlationes ii.4: Eugène Pichery (ed.), Cassien, Conférences I–VII, SC 42 (Paris, 1955) p. 116: Omnium namque uirtutum generatrix, custos moderatixque discretio est; Boniface Ramsey (trans.), John Cassian: the conferences, Ancient Christian Writers 57 (New York, 1997) p. 97. 23 Pichery, Conférences, pp. 26–29; Ramsey, John Cassian, pp. 95–98 at p. 97.

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its possible significance. It was a teaching device highly adaptable to different circumstances and literary genres. Read in the light of monastic tradition on discernment, Columba’s response to the boy at Clonmacnoise appears not as the arbitrary act of a wonder-worker but as a dramatic expression of the saint’s insight into the boy’s disposition and spiritual need and his discernment of the divine will for him. The particular power of Columba’s spiritual insight proceeds from his closeness to God, ‘the searcher of hearts and minds’ (Psalm 7.10), because, as Adomnán had earlier explained in the words of St Paul: ‘he who clings to the Lord is one spirit’ (1 Corinthians 6.17).24 Those who witnessed Columba’s response to a boy in whom they could see no promise, had urged the saint: ‘Send him away! Why do you keep hold of this wretched and mischievous boy?’25 On the contrary, ‘the saint drew from his pure breast ( puro pectore depromit) these prophetic words: “Let be, brothers, let be”’ and blessed the boy. Specifically, he commanded the boy to open his mouth (aperi os tuum) and put out his tongue; the words are reiterated, ‘the boy then opened his mouth as he was bidden and put out his tongue’ and Columba earnestly blessed his tongue. Monastic readers would be familiar with the psalm verse which begins the daily divine Office, ‘O Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth shall declare thy praise’: Domine, labia mea aperies et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam (Psalm 50.17). The psalms frequently speak of the calling of all people to praise the Lord, which commentators interpreted as meaning not only the literal singing of his praise, especially in the perpetual prayer represented by the daily round of the monastic Office, but the offering of praise through every aspect of a sanctified life, which builds up the Church. The formal blessing of Ernéne’s tongue signals the final element of Columba’s prophecy that he will grow in good deeds and inner virtues and will increasingly receive wisdom with discretion: ‘His tongue also will receive from God eloquence, with healthful doctrine’. The words lingua quoque eius salubri et doctrina eloquentia a deo donabitur convey a sense of the saving power of the doctrine which the boy, grown to spiritual maturity, would one day teach others.26 Finally, the connection between the two parts of VC I.3, the reception of Columba at Clonmacnoise and the incident with Ernéne during the procession into the monastery, receives oblique illumination from the account in the Vita Martini of the saint’s entry into Tours and a curious incident on his arrival. Adomnán’s story shares motifs with this story in a Life which was influential in the Vita Columbae, but handles them rather differently, and the nature of the differences helps identify further what is distinctive about his narrative. St [387] Martin’s 24 VC I.1: Anderson and Anderson, Adomnán’s Life of Columba, p. 18. 25 Ibid., pp 24–25: Dimitte, dimitte; quare hunc infelicem et iniuriosum retentes puerum? 26 Sharpe (Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, p. 116) translates the phrase as: ‘God will endow his tongue with eloquence to teach the doctrine of salvation’; see p. 262 n. 65 on the terms salubris and doctrina.

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triumphal progress into the cathedral city amidst tumultuous crowds has an echo of Christ’s adventus into Jerusalem, with the additional detail that Martin was conducted to the city amidst the multitudes that lined the way under a kind of guard: ‘sub quadam custodia ad civitatem usque deducitur’.27 There was one wish among those who had come out from the city and the crowds who joined them from neighbouring cities that he should be bishop, except for a few dissenters, among them some of the bishops who were assembled there for the selection, and particularly one called Defensor. Their objection to Martin was on the grounds of his contemptible appearance, clothing and unkempt hair, which they thought unseemly for a bishop.28 When the lector was unable to get through the crush of people for the appointed reading, an official took the Psalter and read aloud the first verse he saw: ‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings you have perfected praise because of your enemies, that you might destroy the enemy and the defender’: Ex ore infantium et lactantium perfecisti laudem propter inimicos tuos ut destruas inimicum et defensorem (Psalm 8.3).29 A great shout went up from the people, and the opposition were confounded. Sulpicius Severus comments it was believed this verse had been divinely chosen; it was prophetic because in the case of Martin the praise of the Lord was perfected ‘out of the mouth of babes and sucklings’, while ‘the enemy and defender’ (defensorem punning on the name of Defensor) was pointed out and destroyed. The crowds in the church, that is, although ‘babes and sucklings’, praised the Lord through their acclamation of his servant Martin, while the bishops, particularly Defensor, had failed to see beyond the unprepossessing appearance of Martin’s humble monastic clothing. Similarly, when Christ entered Jerusalem to the hosannas of the crowd and then went into the temple, the chief priests and scribes ‘were moved to indignation’ and reproved him because even children in the temple were singing his praises with the acclamation, ‘Hosanna to the son of David’. Christ, quoting Psalm 8.3, replied, ‘Have you never read: “Out of the mouth of infants and sucklings you have perfected praise”?’ (Matthew 21.15–16). Augustine in his commentary on Psalm 8.3 cites Christ’s quotation of the verse, and then expounds the continuing significance of the psalm text for the Church. He identifies the ‘infants and sucklings’ as people whom St Paul protectively described as ‘little ones in Christ’ ( parvulos in Christo), at a carnal or elementary level of understanding God’s word (1 Corinthians 3.1–2), in contrast with ‘the perfect’, who are capable of receiving more substantial spiritual food concerning the hidden mystery of the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 2.6–7).30 [388]

27 Vita Martini, iv, 2: Fontaine, Vie de Saint Martin, i, p. 270. White, Early Christian lives, pp. 142–43. 28 Ibid., p. 272: Impie repugnabant, dicentes scilicet, contemptibilem esse personam, indignum esse episcopatu hominem vultu despicabilem, veste sordidum, crine deformem. 29 This is the version in the Psalterium Romanum. 30 E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont (eds), Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos I–L, CCSL 38 (Turnhout, 1956) pp. 50–51.

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Augustine stressed, however, that the Church is perfected in its praise of God not only by ‘the perfect’ but by ‘infants and sucklings’ who, though not yet capable of the knowledge of things spiritual and eternal, are called to salvation and drawn to Christ in faith. The ‘enemy and defender’ mentioned at the end of Psalm 8.3 represents, among others, people who count themselves as wise. Augustine cites Christ’s warning that the Father has hidden divine mysteries from those who think they are wise and has revealed them to ‘little ones’ (cf. Matthew 11.25: quia abscondisti haec a sapientibus et prudentibus et revelasti ea parvulis); this is so that wisdom might be seen to come from heaven, rather than from human effort alone. The paradox is enshrined in the wisdom tradition of Scripture, ‘For wisdom opened the mouth of the dumb and made the tongues of infants eloquent’: quoniam sapientia aperuit os mutorum et linguas infantium fecit dissertas (Wisdom 10.21). Adomnán does not cite Psalm 8.3, which is central to the story of St Martin and Defensor, but some features of his narrative – the depiction of Ernéne as youthful in the faith, the opening of his mouth to eloquence, the importance of wisdom in Columba’s prophecy – have more in common with the psalm text and related exegesis than with the way the psalm text is used in the Life of Martin. Ernéne and his community of Clonmacnoise are not inter-changeable with the polarised figures of St Martin and Defensor. In VC I.3 the allusion to the Gospel parallel in the narrative of Ernéne touching Columba’s hem allows the reader to see what the community cannot discern and to share the implied reproof of them for seeing only the disreputable outward appearance and demeanour of the boy. But this does not lead to a general condemnation of Clonmacnoise. Columba’s reaction gives the reader pause. Ernéne’s community differs from Defensor and his fellow bishops, for the credentials of their faith and practice have already been unmistakably presented in the way they honoured Christ in recognising the sanctity of Columba, humbly bowing their faces to the earth. But they had failed to see that the boy’s attempt to touch Columba’s hem might similarly be an act of obeisance. Stories in the Vita Columbae concerning the monastic formation of the saint’s own spiritual sons on Iona, as well as figures such as Fintén and Ernéne who remained outside the Columban familia, present unexpected aspects or instances of precepts of the faith or monastic practice which are universally known, but whose understanding requires constant renewal and deepening, even by those advanced in the spiritual life. Columba taught the elders of Clonmacnoise through conferring his blessing on the boy they thought of little worth, but his fraternal correction of their lack of discernment in this case was measured: ‘let no man despise him’. Columba remained as their guest in the monastery and did not use against them the revelation granted him, during those days, of the future dispute among the churches of Ireland over the dating of Easter. As he commended ‘mutual and unfeigned [389] charity, with peace’ to his own community on the night of his death, so at the beginning of the book he is shown in concord with a great non-Columban Irish house. His prophecy was addressed not to the boy but 291

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to the community. He reassured them that they would recognise the boy’s spiritual growth when they saw it and would be greatly pleased by it: ‘in this community of yours he will be a man of great eminence’. The community would recognise the ideals of the monastic life in Columba’s foretelling of Ernéne’s spiritual growth in works and inner virtues and in receiving the gifts of wisdom with discretion and divine eloquence. Through this inspired prophecy Columba gave a blessing to Clonmacnoise.

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T H E B I B L E A S M A P, O N S E E I N G G O D A N D F I N D I N G T H E WAY Pilgrimage and exegesis in Adomnán and Bede1

Insular monastic writers inherited a tradition of biblical interpretation in which the Exodus, a defining event in the history of the Israelites, had been fundamentally reinterpreted by St Paul and the Fathers of the Church to extend its range of reference beyond one particular time, place and people. The apostle saw his Hebrew forefathers’ divine deliverance from slavery in Egypt – their crossing of the Red Sea, their temptation and sin in the wilderness, and God’s provision of manna and water from the Rock to sustain them on their journey to the Promised Land – as a figure of the Christian life and mysteries, written down for the instruction of present readers (1 Corinthians 10.1–11). Read in this way, Scripture provides the faithful with a map for their own spiritual journey, but it is a map which requires a key. Adomnán (c. 624–704), ninth abbot of Iona, and Bede (c. 673–735), monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, cited the authority of Paul when opening the meaning of Old Testament images of the Promised Land and Jerusalem for their readers. In writing about actual pilgrimage and inner journeys, however, they creatively adapted the rhetorical traditions of patristic biblical exegesis inherited from the Mediterranean world of late antiquity to a variety of literary genres and to the needs of their own particular time, place and people within the universal Church. The examples discussed here suggest something of the distinctive ways in which the two Insular monastic writers responded to a shared tradition of reading Scripture.

Bede: on seeing ‘the God of gods in Zion’ Bede was concerned to equip a native Anglo-Saxon pastorate with the resources for understanding the literal text of the Latin Bible, but also to feed them spiritually so that they might interiorise the hidden meaning of Scripture and teach

1 The editors are very grateful to Terence O’Reilly for the opportunity to include this contribution by Jennifer O’Reilly in this volume.

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its precepts by example as well as words.2 He was encouraged in this task by his friend Acca, Bishop of Hexham, a learned theologian. In a letter of c. 716 he replied to a query from Acca concerning the chronology of the Israelites’ forty-two halting-places (mansiones) on the journey to the Promised Land. At first sight it seems an unpromising subject. Origen had early reported that the text in question (Numbers 33.1–49), was often regarded as difficult and even unnecessary for Christians to read. He contended, however, that since all of Scripture proceeds from the Holy Spirit, no part of it – not one iota – can possibly be useless or unnecessary. He recognised that Scripture contains food for various spiritual appetites and that this particular text would be spat out by many, but argued that, if properly interpreted according to Paul’s example in 1 Corinthians 10.1–4, it could reveal the way to the heavenly Jerusalem, like certain [210] other apparently obscure or superfluous biblical listings of names and numbers concerning the twelve tribes of Israel and their encampments. He urged the reader to turn ‘the eyes of the mind’ towards the divine author and ask the meaning of such texts (Matthew 7.7).3 Origen had expounded the passage by revealing the spiritual significance concealed within the number and the very names of the campsites or resting-places of the Israelites on their desert journey. The route-map of the ancient Israelites recorded by Moses was thereby decoded, at least for a readership whose spiritual capacity was advanced beyond the elementary or ‘carnal’ stage of understanding, as a divinely given guide for the journeys of the soul and the Church, the new Israel, advancing from camp to camp through the desert of this world, gradually ascending heavenwards. Origen’s homily was translated by Rufinus and perpetuated through its use in Jerome’s exposition of the same text in a letter of c. 400 which attempts to redress Jerome’s self-confessed difficulty in answering a zealous student of the Scriptures who had asked him to explain the meaning and mysteries of the list of mansiones in the Numbers text.4 Bede’s letter therefore dealt with an interpretative crux. He cites Jerome’s work, which it is likely Acca knew too, and affirmed that the Numbers text had been written down as a sign signifying a great mystery, but he did not copy the arcane etymologies of the names of the forty-two mansiones which were so important to Origen, Jerome and Isidore and entirely occupy the commentary on the Book of 2 Alan Thacker, “Bede’s Ideal of Reform”, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough and Roger Collins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) pp. 130–53. 3 Origen, Homilies on Numbers, xxvii.1, in Origen, trans. Rowan A. Greer (London: Paulist Press, 1979) pp. 245–47. For visual exegeses of this conundrum in the Codex Amiatinus and the Book of Armagh, see Jennifer O’Reilly, “The Library of Scripture: Views from Vivarium and Wearmouth-Jarrow”, in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures. Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, ed. Paul Binski and William Noel (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001) pp. 30–34, figs 2, 8. 4 Jerome, Epist. lxxviii, in Saint Jérôme Lettres, 8 vols, ed. Jérôme Labourt (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1949–63), 4:52–93.

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Numbers in the Irish Reference Bible.5 Nor did he feel it necessary to explain the Christological significance of the number forty-two or the meaning of the name Israel as seeing God.6 Rather, he focused on Acca’s technical question about the historical relationship between the number of resting-places or campsites and the length of time the Israelites spent in the desert. He resolved the apparent contradictions and obscurities in the biblical account of the historical journey by a close reading of the literal text of Numbers 33 and a comparison with other Pentateuch passages, then briefly expounded the story’s spiritual meaning.7 Bede sent his initiated reader a compressed but allusive interpretation of the Exodus journey described in Scripture, where it takes forty years – a lifetime – to progress at irregular intervals through the forty-two mansiones. The Israelites led by Moses through the Red Sea had sinned in the desert, wandered about for years and had eventually died there; it was the younger generation who, recapitulating their fathers’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, had finally crossed the River Jordan under Joshua and defeated the Canaanite tribes in order to inherit the Promised Land. Bede expounded the familiar Old Testament account as a description not simply of primary conversion and baptism but of the lifelong process of continuing conversion by which the soul comes to cast off the old self and put on the new, created in the likeness of God (Ephesians 4.22–24; Colossians 3.9–10). Bede is here offering spiritual consolation to one already advanced on the journey. The purpose is not to instruct but to sustain, by affirming the belief that whenever, through sin, we turn aside from the path of truth, then, through penance, the soul is gradually brought back to higher things and resumes the heavenward ascent. It grows to spiritual maturity in the desert of this life by learning and re-learning, with God’s help, how to produce deeds worthy of repentance, to ward off the demonic attacks of temptation and, at last, to cross the river of death and enter the kingdom of heavenly promise. In the hermeneutical tradition of commenting on a scriptural text through another scriptural text, Bede, like Origen and Jerome, used a psalm verse to illuminate the [211] image of spiritual progress figured in the Israelites’ journey: ‘they shall go from virtue to virtue: the God of gods shall be seen in Zion’ (Psalm 83.8).8 He pictured the Church and the faithful soul as yearning for heaven and

5 Pauca problesmata de enigmatibus ex tomis canonicos. Praefatio et libri de pentateucho Moysi, ed. Gerard MacGinty, CCCM 173 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000) p. 196. 6 Bede, De mansionibus filiorum Israel, in PL 94, col. 701C, here citing Psalm 83.8 (videbitur Deus deorum in Sion); trans. in Bede. A Biblical Miscellany, ed. and trans. W. Trent Foley and Arthur G. Holder, TTH 28 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) p. 33. 7 Bede, De mansionibus, in PL 94, cols 699A–702A; trans. in Biblical Miscellany, pp. 29–34; spiritual exposition at 33–34. 8 Ibunt de virtute in virtutem videbitur Deus deorum in Sion.

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hastening to climb the ascent out of Egypt in the hope of being set free from this vale of tears, that is, to see ‘the God of gods in Zion’: As long as we are advancing ‘from virtue to virtue’ as if to certain camps and resting-places throughout the desert of [this] arid world, let us do whatever things are right and proper in the sight of God. [donec salvo nostri boni operis incessu proficimus de virtute in virtutem quasi castra quaedam mansionesque, Deo duce, rectissimas Dei conspectus dignissimas per desertum mundi sitientis agamus.]9 For a reader familiar with the Psalter through the daily monastic office the idea of the desert journey as a spiritual ascent is strengthened by Bede’s allusion to the last words of the previous verse of the psalm, ‘In his heart he has disposed to ascend by steps, in the vale of tears’ (Psalm 83.6–7).10 Psalm 83 describes the longing of Hebrew pilgrims going up to the Temple in Jerusalem, which, like the Israelites’ original journey to the Promised Land, was used by the Fathers as an image of the Christian journey from earth to heaven. The psalm’s reference to the steps leading up to the Temple, built on the citadel of Zion in Jerusalem, had been directly related by Cassiodorus to acquiring particular virtues and overcoming contrary vices with God’s help. Gregory the Great had quoted the same verse in relating the steps in Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple to the soul’s ascent through the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit leading to the heavenly life.11 Both works were familiar to Bede. Psalm 83.8 was a resonant evocation of the spiritual journey. Variant Latin translations offered different nuances. The Gallican version has ibunt de virtute in virtutem, but the Hebrew Psalter has ibunt de fortitudine in fortitudinem, which prompted Jerome to stress the journey was not from weakness to strength but from being strong to being stronger. The Roman Psalter pictures a journey on foot, ambulabunt de virtute in virtutem. In 716, the same year in which Acca asked for clarification of the Israelites’ historical progress from camp to camp to the Promised Land, Bede’s own abbot, Ceolfrith, set out on a journey. The liturgy of the early Anglo-Saxon Church used the Roman Psalter and Ambulantes de virtute in virtutem appropriately formed one of the antiphons chanted on the symbolic pilgrimage conducted by Ceolfrith when he led his community in solemn procession around the shrines of the saints in the Wearmouth monastery before

9 Bede, De mansionibus, in PL 94, col. 701C; trans. in Biblical Miscellany, p. 33. 10 Ascensiones in corde suo disposuit in valle lacrimarum. 11 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, in Magni Aurelii Cassiodori expositio Psalmorum, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 98 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1958) p. 770; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem ii.3.3, in Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 152 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971) pp. 238–39.

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departing on his final pilgrimage to Rome, a journey which was itself an imitatio of the journey to Jerusalem.12 Ceolfrith’s literal pilgrimage is not presented as a model for all to follow. The Prologue of the Rule of St Benedict, an important influence in the life of Wearmouth-Jarrow, uses Psalm 14 to describe the route of the virtuous life by which the Lord shows the faithful the way to his tabernacle and his holy mountain. The path becomes an image of the monastic life itself, narrow at the outset: ‘But as we progress in this way of life and faith we shall run on the path of God’s commandments [. . .] . Never swerving from his instructions, then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death’.13 Bede praises Ceolfrith for having fostered his monastery’s ‘spiritual peace and liberty in the calm of the cloister’;14 similarly, he describes Benedict [212] Biscop’s pilgrimages to Rome as part of his ascetic renunciation of kindred and country for Christ’s sake (Matthew 19.29; Mark 10.29), but also as a means by which he supplied his foundation with ‘all sorts of nourishment of saving knowledge’, enabling the community ‘to remain at rest within the cloister of the monastery to serve Christ’.15 Bede’s account of Ceolfrith’s final pilgrimage, on which he died, commemorates his long and exemplary practice of the monastic life. Bede insists that his resignation of abbatial cares was prompted by his concern that he could no longer in old age teach the community by the vigorous example necessary to provide the spiritual leadership required for the community’s disciplined observance of the Rule which its father ‘had established for himself and his community by the authority of the elders’.16 The new abbot, Hwaetberht, in a letter to the Pope, honoured Ceolfrith as a future ‘great interceder and advocate for our failings in the holy court of heaven’,17 and secured the privilege of bringing the bodies of two past abbots, Eosterwine and Sigfrid, into the chapel of St Peter at Wearmouth, to

12 Bede, H. Abb. 17; V. Ceolf. 25, in The Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. and trans. Chris Grocock and Ian N. Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp. 64–65; 102–05. See Éamonn Ó Carragáin, The City of Rome and the World of Bede, Jarrow Lecture 1994 (Jarrow: St Paul’s Church, 1995) pp. 12–14. 13 Prolog. 49–50: Processu uero conuersationis et fidei dilatato corde inenarrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur uia mandatorum dei, ut ab ipsius numquam magisterio discedentes in eius doctrinam usque ad mortem in monasterio perseuerantes. In Benedicti Regula, ed. Rudolph Hanslik, CSEL 75 (Vindoborne: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977) p. 10. 14 Bede, H. Abb. 19: Spiritalis in monastica quiete libertatis et pacis. In The Abbots, pp. 68–69. 15 Bede, Hom. i.13: Quia in his et huiusmodi rebus ideo tam plura laborare studuit ne nobis aliqua sic laborandi remaneret necessitas ideo toties transmarina loca adiit ut nos omnibus scientiae salutaris dapibus abundantes intra monasterii claustra quiescere et cum secura libertate Christo seruire queamus. In Opera rhythmica, ed. Johannes Fraipont and David Hurst, CSEL 122 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955) p. 93; trans. in Bede. Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst, 2 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 1:128–32. 16 Bede, H. Abb. 16: Prouuidus ex priorum auctoritate contribuit. In The Abbots, pp. 60–61. 17 Bede, H. Abb. 19: Magnum pro nostris excessibus apud supernam pietatem intercessorem habemus et patronum. In The Abbots, pp. 68–69.

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entomb them next to the monastery’s founding father, Benedict Biscop.18 Their local lives of virtue were therefore memorialised not only in the literary monumenta of the Life of Ceolfrith and Bede’s Lives of the Abbots but in the fabric of the monastery, together with the imported relics of universally honored saints, to guide future generations undertaking the daily round of their life-journey within the monastic precincts. In De templo, Bede explains that ‘in the universal assembly of the elect various righteous persons succeed each other’ and lesser ones are glad to follow faithfully in their footsteps, guided by the example of the life, sayings and writings of the righteous: ‘For we know that virtues beget virtues and “saints progress from virtue to virtue until the God of gods is seen in Zion”’.19 Ceolfrith longed to go to Rome, the place pre-eminently sanctified by the bodies of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ, to await death there by giving himself to unhindered prayer and penance. Having secured his release from his community, Ceolfrith left his own people and kindred ‘through zeal for the contemplative life and exchanged his fatherland for sudden exile for the Lord’s sake’.20 Hwaetberht described him as beginning once more, as though newly summoned to live the heavenly life, to live as a pilgrim for Christ, ‘by which the raging fire of his conscience may more easily burn up the ancient thorns of his worldly cares in its spiritual furnace’.21 Bede uses the same penitential image of Cuthbert, who also laid aside the burden of pastoral care when he withdrew from Lindisfarne after many years in the monastery and journeyed further out into the Ocean bounding the ends of the earth to live as a hermit on the isle of Farne.22 Cuthbert too secured the support of his community, for: after a long and blameless active life, he was now held worthy to rise to the repose of divine contemplation. He rejoiced to attain to the lot of those concerning whom the Psalmist sings: ‘The saints shall go forth from strength to strength; the God of gods shall be seen in Zion’. [Quia de longa perfectione conuersationis actiuae, ad otium diuinae speculationis iam mereretur ascendere. Laetabatur ad eorum sortem se

18 Bede, H. Abb. 20, in ibid., pp. 70–71. 19 Bede, De templo ii: Scimus enim uirtutes de uirtutibus nasci et sanctos ambulare de uirtute in uirtutem donec uideatur Deus deorum in Sion. In De tabernacvlo, De templo, In Ezram et Neemiam, ed. David Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969) pp. 203–04; trans. In Bede. On the Temple, trans. Seán Connolly (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995) p. 80. 20 Bede, V. Ceolf. 21: Qui, sicut supra commemorauimus, studio uitae contemplatiuae monasterii curam reliquit et patriam propter Dominum spontaneo mutauit exsilio. In The Abbots, pp. 100–01. 21 Bede, H. Abb. 19: Quo liberius prisca sollicitudinum secularium spineta camino spiritali feruens compunctionis ignis absumat. In The Abbots, pp. 68–69. 22 Bede, HE 4.28, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) pp. 435–39; Bede, V. Cuth. 17, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) pp. 215–17.

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pertingere de quibus canitur in psalmo, Ambulabunt de uirtute in uirtutem, uidebitur Deus deorum in Syon.]23 Cuthbert gave himself undividedly to prayer to await ‘the day of his death, or rather of his entrance into heavenly life’ in the austere hermit life on Farne,24 so that ‘the flame of his old contrition might consume more easily the implanted thorns of worldly [213] cares’.25 He had progressed from learning the rudiments of the solitary life in the outer precincts of the Lindisfarne monastery to the more remote battlefield of Farne where, armed with virtues, he engaged in spiritual warfare against demonic attack (Ephesians 6.16, 17). The fortification of the camp in the desert and the entry into the Promised Land are here located on an island in the North Sea. With the help of angels Cuthbert built a dwelling-place (described as a mansione) containing an oratory and cell, surrounded by a rampart so high ‘that he could see nothing else but the heavens which he longed to enter’; ‘thus restraining the lust of the eyes and of the thoughts, and lifting the whole bent of his mind to higher things’.26 Cuthbert here exemplifies Gregory the Great’s teaching that, in order to contemplate the invisible Creator, it is necessary to cast out earthly and heavenly images from the mind’s eye and thoughts arising from the bodily perceptions of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste.27 Gregory too in his monastic seclusion ‘used to think nothing but thoughts of heaven, so that, even though still imprisoned in the body, he was able to pass in contemplation beyond the barriers of the flesh’.28 The true holiness of both saints, however, was revealed in their surrender of such longed-for seclusion and their submission again to the burden of office and pastoral care when it was required of them.29 In his exegetical works Bede repeatedly associates Psalm 83.8 with the ascent to contemplation which is completed in heaven: ‘the God of gods will be seen in

23 Bede, V. Cuth. 17, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) pp. 214–15. 24 Bede, V. Cuth. 34: Diem mortiis uel potius uitae coelestis. In Two Lives, pp. 260–61. 25 Bede, V. Cuth. 36: Quatinus inolita sibi sollicitudinis mundanae spinet liberior priscae compunctionis flamma consumeret. In Two Lives, pp. 266–67. 26 Bede, HE 4.28: Tanta autem erat altitudo aggeris, quo mansio eius erat uallata, ut caelum tantum ex ea, cuius introitum sitiebat, aspicere posset. In Ecclesiastical History, pp. 436–37; V. Cuth., 17: fecit altiorem, quatinus ad cohibendam oculorum siue cogitationum lasciuiam, ad erigendam in superna desideria totam mentis intentionem, pius incola nil de sua mansione praeter coelum posset intueri. In Two Lives, pp. 216–17. 27 Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 2, 5, 9, in CCSL 152, pp. 281–82. 28 Bede, HE 2.1: ut nulla nisi caelestia cogitare soleret, ut etiam retentus corpore ipsa iam carnis claustra contemplatione transiret. In Ecclesiastical History, pp. 124–25. 29 Bede, HE 2.1; 4.28, in Ecclesiastical History, 125; 437, 439 (where Matthew 22.37, 39 is used of Cuthbert); V. Cuthb. 24, in Two Lives 239. Clare Stancliffe, “Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary”, in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community, ed. Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1989) pp. 36–42.

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Zion’.30 Augustine’s psalm commentary, which Bede knew well, cites the verse’s opening phrase, ‘For he who gives the law will give a blessing’,31 and probes its meaning: ‘Grace shall come after the law; grace itself is the blessing. And what has that grace and blessing given us? “They shall go from virtue to virtue”’.32 By the cardinal virtues acquired through grace in this earthly life: ‘We mount unto that other virtue’. And what will that be but the virtue of contemplating God alone? What is that contemplation? ‘The God of gods shall appear in Zion’ [. . .]. He shall appear to ‘the pure in heart’ as he is, God with God, the Word with the Father, ‘by whom all things were made’. [Ibunt a uirtutibus in virtutem: quam uirtutem? Contemplandi. Quid est, contemplandi? Apparebit Deus deorum in Sion {. . .} sicuti est Deus apud Deum Verbum apud Patrem, per quod facta sunt omnia, apparebit mundis corde; beati enim mundi corde.]33 The beatitude Augustine alludes to, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5.8), is itself a crucial text.34 It is used in Cassian’s description of monastic perfection as attaining to complete purity of heart, which is love.35 Elsewhere Cassian uses Psalm 83.8 to describe the degrees of perfection or phases in the longing for that state of blessedness: We are called by the Lord from high things to still higher in such a way that he who has become blessed and perfect in the fear of God, going as it is written ‘from strength to strength’, and from one perfection to another, that is from fear of the Lord to hope, is summoned in the end to that still more blessed stage, which is love. [uidetis ergo perfectionum gradus esse diuersos et de excelsis ad excelsiora nos a domino prouocari ita, ut is qui in timore dei beatus et 30 For further examples, see Bede, Homilia i.2, i.17, in CCSL 122, pp. 13, 120; and In epistolas VII catholicas (2 Peter 3.18), in Expositio Actvvm apostolorvm, Retractatio in Actvs Apostolorvm, Nomina regionvm atqve locorvm de Actibvs Apostolorvm, In Epistolas VII catholicas, ed. Max L. W. Laistner, CCSL 121 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983) p. 245. 31 Etenim benedictiones dabit legis dator. 32 Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos lxxxiii: Adueniet gratia post legem; ipsa est benedictio. Et quid nobis praestitit ista gratia et benedictio? Ambulabunt a virtutibus in virtutem. In Enarrationes in Psalmos LI–C, ed. D. Eligius Dekkers and Johannes Fraipont, CCSL 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956) p. 1157; trans. in Saint Augustine. Expositions of the Psalms, ed. and trans. Maria Boulding and John E. Rotelle, vol. 4, Psalms 73–98 (New York: New City Press, 2002) p. 198. 33 Augustine, Enarr. 83, in CCSL 39, p. 1158; trans. in Expositions, p. 199. 34 Beati mundo corde quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt. 35 Cassian, Conlationes i.10; x.14, in Collationes XXIII, CSEL 13, ed. Michael Petschenig (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1886, repr. 2004) pp. 16–18; 307–08; and Inst. iv.43, in De institutis coenobiorum, De incarnatione domini contra Nestorium, ed. Michaeol Petschenig, CSEL 17 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1888, repr. 2004) pp. 77–78.

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perfectus extiterit, ambulans [214] sicut scriptum est de uirtute in uirtutem et de perfectione ad aliam perfectionum id est de timore ad spem mentis alacritate conscendens, ad beatorem denuo statum, quod est caritas, inuitetur.]36 The disciplined experience of monastic practice, including knowing and learning the Scriptures, prepares for insight into the hidden mysteries of Scripture, where God is revealed; this transforming experience guides the ardent quest for greater purity of heart, leading to still deeper understanding of the divine word in texts which have long been known.37 Bede, like Augustine, links the beatitude of Matthew 5.8 with Psalm 83.8, in both his vision of the pure in heart seeing the God of gods in Zion in the eighth age, which forms the climax of his Greater Chronicle, and De tabernaculo, where he adds that the heavenly reward of the faithful – seeing God – is sometimes disclosed by divine grace even in this earthly life to those who are pure in heart. Though God dwells in light inaccessible to earthly hearts, Bede cites Moses as an example of some spiritual teachers who ‘have been permitted to ascend to the grace of divine contemplation once they have perfected the active life’.38 Such teachers do not, however, then retire from the active life; they exemplify love of God and neighbour when they descend the mountain and by their word and example mediate something of the inner understanding of the divine word granted to them, assisting others to advance, according to their capacity, ‘from virtue to virtue’.

Bede: the Tabernacle and the Temple Drawing on a major patristic tradition, Bede wrote uniquely sustained commentaries on the biblical descriptions of the Tabernacle constructed by the Israelites in the desert on the road to the Promised Land (Exodus 24.12–30.21) and its historical successor, the Temple built in Jerusalem.39 The tent-like Tabernacle which housed the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets of the Law, denoting God’s promises to his people Israel and their obedience to his Law, was to

36 Cassian, Conlatio xi.12. in CSEL 13, p. 327. 37 Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 42–44; Introduction of Purity of Heart in Early Ascetic and Monastic Literature, ed. Harriet Luckman et al. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999) 8–15; Philip Rousseau, “Cassian, Contemplation and the Coenobitic life”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975) pp. 113–26; Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 187–89; Martin Laird, “Cassian’s Conferences Nine and Ten: Some Observations Regarding Contemplation and Hermeneutics”, Recherches de theologie anciènne et medievale 62 (1995) pp. 145–56. 38 Bede, De tabernaculo i: Quod etiam in hac uita non nullis electorum constat esse donatum ut post actiuae perfectionem conuersationis ad diuinae gratiam speculationis ascenderint. In CCSL 119A, p. 8; trans. On the Tabernacle, 5. 39 Arthur Holder, “The Mosaic Tabernacle in Early Christian Exegesis”, Studia Patristica 25 (1993) pp. 101–06; and On the Tabernacle, pp. xiv–xx.

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be carried with them from camp to camp and finally across the Jordan. The Tabernacle thus symbolised God’s dwelling-place on earth and his continuing presence with his people on their journey. Bede explains that Moses was instructed to make the Tabernacle according to plans divinely revealed to him on the mountain. The reader who is on the road to the heavenly Promised Land is urged to do likewise, not literally but in a spiritual sense, that is, to assist in building up both the Church and his or her own soul as a dwelling-place of God, patterned as closely as possible on God’s heavenly abode, whose spiritual features are mysteriously concealed within the plans for the historical Tabernacle recorded in Exodus. In order to build the spiritual tabernacle from this biblical plan it is necessary to be clear first of all about God’s encoded directions to Moses for constructing the historical tabernacle while on the desert journey. Bede accordingly pays close attention to the literal details of time, place and circumstance, noting that the apostle says: ‘These things happened to them [the Israelites] in figure but were written down for us’ (1 Corinthians 10.11).40 He moves through the biblical description in Exodus line by line and, in the Christianised classical tradition of a rhetorical memory locus, systematically constructs the physical features of the Tabernacle as a means of organising his information and structuring a guide to reading the Scriptures in order to discern what God’s word means now.41 [215] Without leaving his monastery in Northumbria he sees the Tabernacle in the desert as clearly as it is depicted in the enormous labelled diagram prefacing the Codex Amiatinus copy of the Vulgate Bible, produced in his monastery before 716.42 He envisages for his readers, the new Israel, each detail of the Tabernacle’s layout, its dimensions, materials, liturgical vessels and vestments, all of which were made according to God’s detailed specifications. The outward appearances of these physical things, their names, measurements, materials and numbers, like the words of the literal text, act as sacramenta or sacred signs of divine matters and prompt association with texts elsewhere in Scripture. By disclosing the inner significance of the physical features of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant it contains, Bede gives concrete demonstrations of how the Gospel lies concealed within the ten commandments of the Law, the spirit within the letter of God’s word. He stresses that Christ did not destroy but fulfilled the Law (Matthew 5.17), and gives multiple examples of how, exactly, Christians of differing

40 Bede, De tabernaculo i: ‘Omnia’ enim, sicut apostolus ait, ‘in figura contingebant illis scripta sunt autem propter nos’. In CCSL 119A, 5; trans. On the Tabernacle, pp. 1–2, 44, 78. 41 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400– 1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 16–24; 251–54 describes the technique with reference to Augustine’s exposition of Psalm 41. 42 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Laurenziano Amiatino 1. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, pp. 234–37, pl. 24; O’Reilly, “Library of Scripture”.

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spiritual maturity must seek to interiorise the Law and practice its twin precepts of loving God and neighbor.43 Bede used the Temple in Jerusalem as a paradigm of the multiple levels of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture. He shows that Old Testament references to the Temple can be variously interpreted by the Christian reader to refer to the incarnate body of Christ, to the life of the Church and of the individual soul as the earthly dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit, and to the heavenly dwelling in the new Jerusalem.44 De templo, Bede’s commentary on the account of the Temple’s construction in 3(1) Kings 5.1–7.51, is an extraordinary rhetorical feat of moving through these levels of biblical interpretation and through time.45 He takes the reader on a mental journey through the sacred spaces of Solomon’s great building, progressing from the outer court to the inner Holy of Holies, but he also manages to suggest the Old Testament journey of the chosen people to the Promised Land and the earthly Jerusalem, and the continuing journey of the new people of God, the Church, towards the heavenly Promised Land and the new Jerusalem. Guiding the reader’s journey through the literal biblical account of the building of Solomon’s Temple, Bede again treats each feature described there – the pillars, doors, dimensions, building materials and furnishings – as written down for our instruction (Romans 15.4; 1 Corinthians 10.11). Each physical feature of the Temple building is visualised and expounded in the light of the New Testament, revealing insights into how the new Temple, the Church on earth, both collectively and in its individual members, can be built up spiritually to become more like the heavenly dwelling-place of God. The rhetorical trope is a means of associating biblical texts in order to present a structured interpretation of Scripture. The imaginary journey presents to the inner eye a deeper understanding of texts already known. The reader who interiorises and follows the route advances on the spiritual journey leading to the heavenly home by apprehending more fully the Pauline concept, ‘You are the temple of the living God’ (2 Corinthians 6.16).46

Adomnán of Iona: Jerusalem and the holy places In Bede’s youth, Adomnán had visited Wearmouth-Jarrow and a copy of his recent book, De locis sanctis, c. 683/86, was presented to King Aldfrith and circulated in Northumbria. Bede wrote an abridged version of the work in 702/03.47 Adomnán

43 Holder, On the Tabernacle, pp. 3, 84, 27, 40, 50, 70. 44 Jennifer O’Reilly, Introduction to On the Temple, pp. xviii–xxiii; cf. Bede, De schematibus et tropis, in Opera Didascalica, ed. Charles W. Jones and Calvin B. Kendall, CCSL 123A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975) pp. 59–171. 45 O’Reilly, Introduction to On the Temple, pp. xvii–xxxiii. 46 Vos enim estis templum Dei vivi. Bede also used the theme in homilies for anniversaries of the dedication of his own monastic church, in Hom. ii.24, 25. 47 Adomnán, DLS, in Adomnan’s De locis sanctis, ed. and trans. Denis Meehan (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958). For Bede, DLS, see Itineraria et alia geographica, ed. Johannes Fraipont, CCSL 175 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965) pp. 249–80; trans. in Biblical Miscellany, pp. 5–25.

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describes how a Gaulish bishop, Arculf, who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places, had dictated to him a ‘faithful and accurate record of all his [216] experiences’.48 It is now recognised that the book is rather more than a traveller’s tale: it uses written sources and provides an exegesis of the literal text of Scripture, ranging from verification of biblical place-names and details of topography to the clarification of apparent discrepancies in biblical narrative. Donald Bullough identified the work as containing possibly the earliest extant example of the use of the tetrad of questions concerning res, tempus, locus, persona in Hiberno-Latin biblical exegesis and Thomas O’Loughlin has demonstrated Adomnán’s assured use of patristic techniques which are most fully described in Augustine’s handbooks to reading the Scriptures, De doctrina christiana and De consensu evangelistarum.49 When Bede later quoted extracts from his own version of Adomnán’s work in the Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 731, he explained that it was from Arculf’s dictated eyewitness information that Adomnán had made the book ‘useful to many and especially to those who live very far from the places where the patriarchs and apostles dwelt and only know about them what they have learned from books’.50 Bede scarcely mentions Arculf in his account again. In contrast, Arculf’s personal testimony, and not simply the useful information he supplies, is crucial to the functioning of Adomnán’s text as O’Loughlin has shown.51 The abbot of Iona, however, remains the narrator, orders the material and interposes questions his readers might have asked of Arculf. Adomnán may have been following patristic traditions here more closely than has been thought; his description of Christ’s tomb, for example, answers exactly the kind of questions Cyril of Jerusalem had raised about its location and construction, as though voicing the questions of pilgrims gathered at the holy site, in his rhetorical demonstration that the specifications of the tomb fulfilled Old Testament prophecy and constituted a proof of the resurrection.52 Arculf’s journey provides the organising structure (or ductus) for Adomnán’s learned progress through the Scriptures. Moreover, it is through the eyes of this devout pilgrim that Adomnán reveals to readers living on the periphery of the world the universal nature of their belief; he takes them to the historic

48 Adomnán, DLS: describenti fideli et indubitabili narratione dictauit. In De locis sanctis, pp. 36–37. 49 Donald Bullough, “Columba, Adomnán and the Achievement of Iona”, Scottish Historical Review 43 (1964) pp. 111–30: and 44 (1965) pp. 17–33, pt 1, 122; Thomas O’Loughlin, “The Exegetical Purpose of Adomnán’s De locis sanctis”, Cambidge Medieval Celtic Studies 24 (1992) pp. 37–53, and “Res, tempus, locus, persona: Adomnán’s Exegetical Method”, Innes Review 48 (1997) pp. 95–111. 50 Bede, HE 5.15: Multis utile et maxime illis, qui longius ab eis locis, in quibus patriarchae uel apostoli erant, secreti ea tantum de his, quae lectione didicerint norunt. In Ecclesiastical History, pp. 508–09. 51 Thomas O’Loughlin, “Adomnán and Arculf: The Case of an Expert Witness”, Journal of Medieval Latin 7 (1997) pp. 127–46. 52 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures xii.35, in NPNF 7:91; compare Adomnán, DLS i.2, in De locis sanctis, pp. 42–47.

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centre of the faith and helps brings home to them the truth of the biblical events commemorated there. Adomnán presents Jerusalem as the navel of the world and the site of salvation, where the mid-summer sun blazes without shadow at midday.53 The city draws people from all nations, not to the Temple, long since destroyed, but to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre enshrining the place of the Resurrection. Half the book is devoted to Jerusalem, where Arculf sojourned for nine months, visiting the holy places there daily. The places are holy because they prompt recollection of sacred events already known to the pilgrim – and the reader – through the Scriptures.54 By his graphic description, in word and diagram, of the magnificent churches marking the holy places, by his eager participation in their liturgical celebrations and relic cults, and by his animated accounts of related miracles and wonders, the pilgrim Arculf stirs the memory but also affirms tenets of belief, affectively cues the reader’s or listener’s response to the continuing life of the sacred biblical events made present at the sites, and arouses intimations of divine power and the life to come. Arculf was, for example, a ‘sedulous visitor’ (sedulus eiusdem frequentator) to the church on Mount Olivet which preserved the imprint of Christ’s feet in the place from which he had ascended into heaven; this relic offered lasting ‘proof that the dust was trodden by God’.55 Portents of wind and fire attest the continuing presence of the divine. Arculf was once present ‘at the very hour’ (eadem hora) to hear the terrible wind which blasts through the church each year on the feast of the Ascension, forcing all to the ground. The light from the [217] eight great lamps which shine nightly from the church, illuminating the city below, ‘pours into the hearts of the faithful who behold it greater eagerness for divine love and imbues them with a sense of awe coupled with greater interior compunction’.56 The act of seeing here has a transforming effect. Leo the Great, like Jerome and other early Fathers, had argued that the Christian at Jerusalem is taught: to understand the power of the Gospel, not only by the written word but by the witness of the places themselves [. . .]. Why are things read or

53 Adomnán, DLS i.11, in De locis sanctis, pp. 56–57. 54 Sabine MacCormack, “Loca sancta: The Organization of Sacred Topography in Late Antiquity”, in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. Robert Ousterhout (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990) pp. 20–25. 55 Adamnán, DLS i.23: Quin etiam calcati Deo pulueris adeo perenne est documentum. In De locis sanctis, pp. 64–65. 56 Adamnán, DLS i.23: diuini amoris alacritatem credulorum respicientium cordibus infundit quendamque pauorem mentis cum ingenti interna compunctione incutit. In De locis sanctis, 66–67. Discussed by O’Loughlin, “Adomnán and Arculf ”, pp. 144–45; Jennifer O’Reilly, “Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba”, in Studies in the Cult of Saint Columba, ed. Cormack Bourke (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997) pp. 85–86. Bede reported a similar devotional response in those who gazed at pictures of New Testament events and the Last Judgement which Benedict Biscop brought back from pilgrimage to Rome and displayed in the church at Wearmouth, H. Abb. 6, in The Abbots, pp. 34–37.

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heard in doubt, where all the mysteries of man’s salvation obtrude themselves upon the sight and touch? [qui ad cognoscendam virtutem Evangelii, non solum paginarum eloquiis, sed ipsorum locorum testimoniis eruditur {. . .} . Et cur lecta vel audita sunt dubia, ubi se et visui et tactui tota humanae salutis ingerunt sacramenta?]57 With all five senses Arculf saw, measured, counted, walked around, touched, kissed, tasted and listened to these signs of an invisible God who once manifested himself here in human flesh. The primacy of sight among the five senses was a common metaphor for spiritual insight and, for those unlikely to see the holy places for themselves, Adomnán constantly stresses that Bishop Arculf ‘saw the things that we describe here with his own eyes’ (qui haec quae nos discribimus propriis conspexit oculis).58

Jerome: letters on pilgrimage Adomnán records his own earnest request to Arculf for information about Jerome’s sepulchre, near Bethlehem. Jerome was revered by Insular writers, his biblical scholarship and Vulgate Bible were well-known in Iona, as in Wearmouth-Jarrow; his Onomasticon was an important source for De locis sanctis.59 Some of Jerome’s epistolary works, encompassing itineraries, panegyric, exegesis and polemic, express features of fourth-century attitudes to pilgrimage and the holy places which find echoes in the very different cultural context of Adomnán’s work. Jerome set out a justification for the popular but still not entirely uncontroversial practice of pilgrimage to the holy places when he wrote to Marcella in 386, encouraging her to join Paula and other high-born pious Roman women living in Palestine under his spiritual tutelage. He recalls the central role of Jerusalem in providential history, as recorded and prophesied in Scripture and experienced in the present when people from all over the world, ‘of diverse tongues but one religion’, are drawn there to venerate Christ’s Sepulchre: even the Briton living at the world’s edge ‘no sooner makes progress in religion than he leaves the setting sun in quest of a spot of which he knows only through Scripture and common report’.60 57 Leo, Epist. cxxxix, in PL 54, 1103; trans. NPNF 2nd ser. 12:97. 58 Adomnán, DLS i.12, in De locis sanctis, 58–59. See Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes. Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000) pp. 18–19, 102–03, 111–12, 133. 59 Adomnán, DLS iii.5, in De locis sanctis, pp. 76–77; see discussion at pp. 13–18. 60 Jerome, Epist. xlvi.10: Diuisus ab orbe nostro Britannus, si in religione processerit, occido sole dimisso quaerit locum fama sibi tantum et scripturarum relatione cognitum. In Lettres, 2:110, trans. NPNF 2nd ser. 6:60. For fourth-century development of the holy sites and views about Jerusalem, see Bianca Kühnel, From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem (Freiburg: Herder, 1987) pp. 72–89; Robert Wilken, The Land Called Holy. Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992) pp. 82–125.

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Jerome pictures for Marcella what it would be like visiting the holy places; he lessens the distance by writing as though Paula and her daughter were themselves entreating her to join them. Through this literary device he visualises the three women weeping in the sepulchre of the Lord, together with Christ’s mother: ‘Then shall we touch with our lips the wood of the Cross, and rise in prayer and resolve upon the Mount of Olives with the ascending Lord’.61 Through seeing the holy places they participate in the continuing spiritual life of the biblical events commemorated there. Jerome affectively portrays the pilgrims’ imagined itinerary through the biblical landscape as an ardent spiritual quest for Christ. Their journey is not only to places associated with the New Testament but, like Arculf’s pilgrimage, to sites hallowed by Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. [218] Later, in a letter on Paula’s death, Jerome built ‘a monument more lasting than bronze’ (exegi monumentum aere perennius) to her memory, in which her role as pilgrim is prominent.62 He maps an extensive itinerary once undertaken by the holy widow and cites the biblical events which underlie the route. He uses her testimony as a means of emotively directing the reader’s inner eye to the sacred events; at the holy places the events come alive before Paula’s enraptured gaze and she enters into them. Within such a charged account of a literal pilgrimage, Jerome adroitly explains place-names or other textual details of the biblical passages associated with the sacred sites, supplies harmonisations of the texts and sometimes their spiritual interpretation. Jerome’s letter to Paulinus of Nola, who had expressed a wish to visit the holy places, at first seems self-contradictory: ‘Access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem’.63 This is not to question the value of pilgrimage, however, but to expound its dangers and exalt its inner meaning for one who had recently withdrawn from the secular life. He warns that the temptations of the crowded city of Jerusalem could be a serious obstacle to the purpose of seeking the spiritual Jerusalem within, especially for the monk who, by definition, has renounced the world, forsaken his country and fled the city in order, eventually, to become a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem. Jerome therefore counsels Paulinus to take as his pattern Paul, Antony and other great fathers of desert monasticism, many of whom had never visited the holy places in Jerusalem, and to remember that ‘the true temple of Christ is in the believer’s soul’ (uerum Christi templum anima credentis est).64 The journey Jerome proposes for Paulinus, a man of considerable secular learning, is not through the Aonian mountains beloved by classical poets, but through the biblical Mounts Zion, Tabor and Sinai, the ‘high places’ of contemplation. 61 Jerome, Epist. xlvi.13: crucis deinde lignum lambere, et in oliueti monte cum ascendente Domino uoto et animo subleuari. In Lettres, 2:113. 62 Jerome, Epist. cviii.33, in Lettres, 5:201. Like Arculf, she traverses all three continents. 63 Jerome, Epist. lviii.3: Et de Hierosolymis et de Britannia aequaliter potet aula caelestis, in Lettres, 3:77; trans. NPNF 2nd ser. 6:120–22. 64 Jerome, Epist. lviii.7, in Lettres, 3:81. Cf. 2 Corinthians 6.16.

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This is a journey through Scripture, accompanied by a guide, so that the pilgrim reader might learn how to read the map and see the sublime mystical meaning hidden from the multitude beneath the signs of the literal text.65 To do this, Jerome argues, ‘to walk in the holy scriptures’ and try to understand God’s word more fully in order to obey it more completely, is truly to seek and inhabit the heavenly Jerusalem.66 This was a central objective in Jerome’s reconciliation of actual and inner pilgrimage in his own ascetic life as a monk, living near Bethlehem in perpetual exile amongst the holy places, in fervent study of both the literal text of Scripture and its hidden meaning.

Adomnán: Iona and the life of Columba Adomnán’s book On the Holy Places, written at the world’s edge three centuries later, finds some points of comparison with Jerome’s accounts of real and fictive pilgrimages to the earthly Jerusalem and the biblical holy places. His second surviving work, the Life of Columba, describes pilgrims who never travel to those sites but whose experiences of pilgrimage are profoundly shaped by the biblical and exegetical traditions used by Jerome of both the Jerusalem journey and the inner journey. Adomnán’s two works, so very different from each other in genre and location, present something of a diptych. In the Life of Columba Adomnán demonstrates that the heavenly courts can, indeed, be approached as readily from Britain as from Jerusalem. Most obviously, the pilgrim image is used of St Columba himself, who had ‘sailed away from Ireland to Britain, pro Christi perigrinari uolens’ and founded his monastery there on the island of Iona,67 living in exile with periods of solitary withdrawal but as the active head of a coenobitic community for over thirty years until his death in 597. We hear too of those who voyage further into hazardous unchartered waters, seeking ‘a desert in [219] the ocean’ (ad quaerendum in ociano desertum pergit), of pilgrims coming to Iona, either as a devotion or a penance, and of how Columba’s purity of heart enabled him to discern their true spiritual condition and therefore the efficacy or futility of their pilgrimage.68 These are local examples of estrangement, departure from kin and country and abandonment to God which, if properly motivated, can help the soul on its journey from the exile of this earthly life to the heavenly home. But in his depiction of Columba, his community and his immediate successor, Baithéne, Adomnán, as the reigning abbot of Columba’s

65 In Epist. liii Jerome guides Paulinus on a journey through every book in the Bible, indicating how Christ the divine wisdom is concealed beneath the literal letter, and presents such a reading of Scripture as itself a foretaste of heaven, Lettres, 3:73–85. 66 Jerome, Epist. liii.9: in scripturis sanctis calle gradiaris, in Lettres, 3:83. 67 Adomnán, VC, pref. 2: de Scotia ad Brittanniam pro Christo peregrinari uolens enauigauit, in Adomnán’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp. 186–87. 68 Adomnán, VC I.20, in Life, pp. 248–49; see also I.21, 30, 32, II.39, 42.

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foundation, also gives a remarkable pastoral account of the monastic spiritual journey and its destination, which until recently has been largely overlooked. Scripture guides both literal pilgrimage and the inner journey. Through the medium of Arculf’s pilgrimage, Adomnán demonstrated the role of human knowledge, reason, memory, imagination, emotion and the five bodily senses in the fundamental task of reading the signs of the literal text of Scripture. The physical evidence of places sanctified by the presence of Christ and the patriarchs, prophets and apostles in historical time confirms and clarifies the text of biblical passages associated with those events. The act of seeing or picturing the churches, monuments, relics and ceremonies now honouring the sites prompts affective memories of the scriptural prophecies, prefigurings and accounts of Christ’s incarnate life on earth. Christ’s divinity and risen life are glimpsed through earthbound images (the empty tomb, the hole in the roof of the church of the Ascension), and through miraculous manifestations of divine power at the cult sites. But the spiritual wisdom necessary to discern Scripture’s inner meaning – to know the mind of God – transcends all these earthly signs of divine realities and is granted to few. Cassian described it as gazing ‘with the pure eye of the soul on profound and hidden mysteries’ which can be gained ‘by no learning of man’s, nor condition of this world only by purity of soul, by means of the illumination of the Holy Spirit’.69 Adomnán repeatedly shows that Columba received such wisdom. In a prolonged contemplative experience, alone in still deeper retreat on the storm-bound island of Hinba, Columba: saw, openly revealed, many of the secret things that have been hidden since the world began. Also everything that in the sacred scriptures is dark and most difficult became plain, and was shown more clearly than the day to the eyes of his purest heart [. . .] very many mysteries were revealed to him [. . .] and also a number of interpretations of the sacred books. [occulta ab exordio mundi arcana aperte manifestata uidebat. Scripturarum quoque sacrarum obscura quaeque et dificillima plana et luce clarius aperta mundissimi cordis oculis patebant {. . .} quaedem plurima ab aliis ignorata hominibus misteria discriberet, aliquantas quoque sacrorum explanationes uoluminum.]70 The grace of the Holy Spirit ‘was poured out upon him abundantly and in an incomparable manner’.71 What Columba saw with the inner eye is beyond words

69 Cassian, Conlatio xiv.9: aliud namque est facilitate oris et nitorem habere sermonis et aliud uenas ac medullas caelestium intrare dictorum ac profunda et abscondita sacramenta purissimo cordis oculo contemplari, quod nullatenus humana doctrina nec erudite saecularis, sed sola puritas mentis per inluminationem sancti spiritus possidebit. In Collationes, 2:409–10. 70 Adomnán, VC III.18, in Life, pp. 208–09. 71 Adomnán, VC III.18: gratia sancti spiraminis super eum habunde et inconparabiliter effussa. In Life, pp. 500–01. For patristic background, particularly the influence of Cassian, on Adomnán’s

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and images, but his purity of heart, and therefore his closeness to God and the heavenly life while still on earth, is rendered visible and revered in ways familiar in the literature of early Christian monasticism and pilgrimage.72 The transfiguration of his humanity is manifested, for example, in the ruddiness of his countenance and the immeasurable brightness of divine light around him at the Eucharist and night vigils.73 Holy men recognised Columba’s greater holiness; his [220] own monks and pilgrims drawn to Iona from diverse places ‘worshipped Christ in the holy and blessed man’.74 Similarly, Jerome had reported that the monks on the island of Cyprus had been drawn there from all parts of the world by love of the holy Epiphanius, whom Paula visited, as well as monks in the Egyptian desert, as part of her pilgrimage to the holy places: ‘In each of his saints she believed she saw Christ himself’.75 Jerome’s ‘true story’ of a hermit exiled on an island in the Adriatic who ‘sees the glory of God’ (uidet gloriam Dei), as St John did on the island of Patmos, anticipates several features in Adomnán’s account of Columba on Hinbar and Bede’s account of Cuthbert on Farne which have gone unnoticed,76 and the Lérins monastic tradition of Mediterranean island saints too had presented the holy man Honoratus as ‘a locus of sanctity’.77 Paulinus of Nola had rhetorically eulogised a holy man as a living monument: If the desire is a truly religious one to see the places in which Christ walked, suffered, rose again, and ascended into heaven [. . .] just think how much greater and fuller is the grace of beholding an old man yet alive who is the walking proof of divine truth. If [. . .] the places of Christ’s resurrection and ascension are famed as recalling God’s former presence, and if living proofs in lifeless objects demonstrate the ancient truth for today’s belief, then with what reverence must this man be regarded, with whom God deigned to converse, before whom God’s face was not concealed? [si ergo religiosa cupiditas est loca uidere, in quibus Christus ingressus et passus est et resurrexit et unde conscendit, et aut de ipsis locis exiguum puluerem aut de ipso crucis ligno aliquid saltem festucae simile

72 73 74 75 76 77

depiction of Columba as contemplative, see Jennifer O’Reilly, “The Wisdom of the Scribe and the Fear of the Lord in the Life of Columba”, in Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots, ed. Davit Broun and Thomas Clancy (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Ltd, 1999) pp. 159–211. O’Reilly, “Wisdom of the Scribe”, pp. 196–99. Adomnán, VC I.28, III.23, in Life, pp. 262–65, 516–49. Adomnán, VC I.37: Christum in sancto uenerantur [. . .] beato uiro, in Life, pp. 268–69; see also I.44, III.3. Jerome, Epist. cviii.14: Per singulos sanctos Christum se uidere credebat, in Lettres, 7:176. Frank, Memory of the Eyes, pp. 85, 96–97. Jerome, Epist. iii. 4, in Lettres 3:13. Conrad Leyser, “‘This sainted Isle’: Panegyric, Nostalgia and the Invention of Lérins Monasticism”, in The Limits of Ancient Christianity, ed. William Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999) pp. 188–206.

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sumere et habere, benedictio est: considera quanto maior et plenior gratia sit uiuum senem uel testimonio diuinae ueritatis inspicere? {. . .} si locus resuscitati euecti que memoria diuinae quondam praesentiae celebratur et ueterem ueritatem praesenti fide conprobant in rebus exanimis uiua documenta: quam religiose adspiciendus est hic, quem adloqui dei sermo dignatus est, cui se facies diuina non texit.]78 Similarly, Adomnán reveals Columba to be an object of pilgrimage because he is pre-eminently a dwelling-place of God on earth; he is a tabernacle or temple, filled with the Holy Spirit and God speaks from this human temple.79 By association, Iona is a holy land where God’s work of human redemption, prophesied in the Old Testament and described in the New, continues to be articulated at the ends of the earth through the figure of Columba as it had been through the prophets, apostles and major saints in the great places in the Christian world. Columba’s deeds of spiritual power, in life and after death, are attested by Adomnán in the reports of trustworthy eyewitnesses, in stories full of Irish names and circumstantial details of local time and place – the counter-part to Arculf’s testimonies from the regions of the Holy Land. Monuments, including crosses and a grave pillar, and natural features in the landscape, similarly mark the sites of some of the places associated with Columba’s words and deeds and were still to be seen in Adomnán’s day; the saint’s non-corporeal relics make him vividly present. It has been suggested elsewhere that many of the episodes in the Life of Columba recall the Scriptures and open up their spiritual meaning to the inner eye.80 They are not presented as biblical commentary or homily but often as enigmatic narratives or pronouncements requiring the questing reader’s response, rather in the manner of [221] the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. In De Locus Sanctis (DLS ii.3) Adomnán quotes Paul on how the experiences of the Israelites on the Exodus journey prefigured the experiences of Christ’s Church (1 Corinthians 10.4); he demonstrates how the same power and wisdom of God which brought forth water from the rock then is at work in the miraculous manifestations seen by pilgrims at the holy places now. Some of the most striking episodes in the Life of Columba also recall incidents from the Exodus pilgrimage, as those incidents are obliquely refracted through local stories of monks and others who encounter Columba in their own daily experiences of hunger, thirst, weariness and temptation, and of receiving manna, water from the rock, consolation and forgiveness. The biblical account of the Israelites’ crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land, memorialised in the twelve great stones set up by Joshua at Gilgal, is expressly recalled 78 Paulinus of Nola, Epist. xlxix.14, in CSEL 29, p. 401; trans. in The Letters of Paulinus of Nola, 2 vols, ACW 35–36, ed. Patrick G. Walsh (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1966–67), 2:273. 79 See Augustine on 1 Corinthians 3.17 in De doctrina christiana, Prooemium 6, in De doctrina christiana de vera religione, ed. K.D. Daur and Henry H. Bauer, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols 1962) p. 4. 80 O’Reilly, “Reading the Scriptures”, pp. 80–106; O’Reilly, “Wisdom of the Scribe”.

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in Adomnán’s account of Arculf seeing those very stones, but the continuing spiritual significance of the biblical text is demonstrated for those with eyes to see in the recent local work of divine providence described in the opening narrative of the Life of Columba.81 For members of Adomnán’s community, the life of the island monastery is a figure of their daily, lifelong inner journey through the desert. Iona is also a sacred landscape which presents an earthly image of their journey’s heavenly end, the paradisal Promised Land. Old Testament prophecies that the citadel of Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, would one day draw all peoples, are evoked in Columba’s final hill-top prophecy that Iona would be honoured by saints of other churches, by kings of the Irish and foreign kings, with their subjects. The prophecies concerning Jerusalem were literally fulfilled, as Jerome had observed, when pilgrims from the entire universal Church, even from the region of the setting sun, were drawn there to venerate Christ’s Sepulchre.82 In De locis sanctis Adomnán shows through one such western pilgrim that the Sepulchre at the centre of the earth still testified to the truth of the resurrection.83 In the Vita Columbae, however, he expounds the continuing meaning of the resurrection through his memorialisation of Columba’s passing ‘from earth to heaven’ (de terris ad caelos) on the periphery of the world.84 The culminating vision in the Life of Columba evokes the future spiritual fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies concerning Jerusalem, when all the faithful will finally be drawn to the glory of the risen life with Christ in the heavenly city. The vision recalls and surpasses Adomnán’s description of the earthly city of Jerusalem, where the mid-summer sun blazes without shadow at midday and the Mount of Olives is lit up like fire on the night of the feast of Christ’s Ascension, illuminating the entire city.85 Adomnán reports eyewitness accounts of marvels seen from near and far on the night of Columba’s death on Iona, when the saint joyfully crossed over ‘to the heavenly country from this weary pilgrimage’,86 and the island was lit up with the brightness of angels. From Ireland witnesses looked towards Iona: we raised our eyes and turned them to the region of the rising sun, and behold, there appeared what seemed like a very great pillar of fire which,

81 For stones at Gilgal, see Adamnán, DLS ii.14–15, in De locis sanctis, pp. 84–87; for VC I.1, see Life, pp. 194–205, esp. pp. 198–201. Compare with Jerome, Epist. liii.8 and cviii.12. See discussion in O’Reilly “Reading the Scriptures”, pp. 81–89. 82 See n. 60. 83 Adomnán, DLS i.11, 23 in De locis sanctis, pp. 56–57, 64–69. 84 Adomnán, VC III.23, in Life, 534–35. Columba’s passing is set in the liturgical ‘octave’ between Easter and Pentecost; see O’Reilly, “Reading the Scriptures”, pp. 94–106. 85 See above, n. 83. 86 Adomnán, VC III.23: de hac tediali perigrinatione ad caelestem patriam transmeantis. In Life, pp. 528–29.

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rising upwards in that midnight, seemed to us to illumine the whole world like the summer sun at midday. [oculos ad orientem eleuatos conuertimus, et ecce quasi quaedam pergrandis ignea apparuit columna, quae in illa nocte media susum ascendens ita nobis uidebatur mundum inlustrare totum sicuti aesteus et meridianus sol.]87

Acknowledgement In memory of George Every.

87 Adomnán, VC III.23, in Life, pp. 518–19. Compare VC III.19 and DLS i.11, 23.

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13 CANDIDUS ET RUBICUNDUS An image of martyrdom in the Lives of Thomas Becket

Eyewitness accounts of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 are vividly and independently told in the early biographies by William FitzStephen and Edward Grim, but include in their description of the archbishop’s mutilated body variations of an image which also occurs as a set-piece in other accounts and cannot be explained as part of their common use of conventional Gospel parallelism. In all, six writers ascribe a symbolic significance to the white and red of St Thomas’s spilled brains and blood, which in five cases are likened to lilies and roses.1 Edwin Abbott long ago commented on the difficulty of determining the origins of the metaphor and on the incongruity of wording in some versions.2 The present article offers an explanation of that obscure wording, suggests the traditions of thought on which the stock image drew and comments on its significance in the biographers’ interpretation of the saint. The four components of the metaphor are discussed in turn to suggest that (a) ultimately they were of patristic origin, preserved through repetition in standard medieval works of exegesis; [303] (b) that they had already, before the first Becket biographies, been revivified through their use in early works in the tradition of affective meditation on the Passion; (c) that their continuing currency in the later twelfth century is attested by their appearance, in various combinations, in the Life of Becket by Herbert of Bosham, which is independent of the six here under discussion, and in works quite outside the hagiographical genre. 1 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket (MTB), ed. James Robertson, Rolls Series, vols. II–IV, (London, 1875–79) for the four Latin narratives in this group: Edward Grim, II, pp. 437–38; William fitz Stephen, III, p. 143; Anonymous IV, IV, p. 194; Anonymous X, IV, p. 436. For details of these and other accounts of the Vita, Passio et Miracula S. Thomae see BHL 8170–8227; Suppl. 8189–8233a. Old French poem by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr, ed. E. Walberg, (Lund, 1922). Icelandic compilation, Thomas Saga Erikbyskups, ed. + tr. Eirikr Magnusson, Rolls Series, (London, 1875), vol. I, pp. 552–59. 2 Edwin Abbott, St. Thomas of Canterbury, His Death and Miracles, vol. I (London, 1898) p. 185.

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Candidus et rubicundus John of Fécamp had anticipated the affective meditation on the Passion of Christ developed by early Cistercians, most notably St Bernard, in the half century preceding the death of Becket. John’s influential Meditationes had evoked the emotive physical details of Christ’s crucified body, beginning with his white breast and blood from his wounded side, a motif which became popular in medieval English devotional lyrics: Candet nudatum pectus. Rubet cruentum latus.3 Similarly, the Becket biographers contrast the cerebrum candens et sanguis rubens of the martyr’s desecrated body. They also echo the exegetical tradition of using the colours white and red of Christ, interpreting them allegorically. The phrase Dilectus meus candidus et rubicundus in Canticles 5.10 was commonly applied to contrasted aspects of the Beloved, namely to Christ’s divinity and humanity, or to his life and death or resurrection and Passion. Such interpretations of the text were so entirely familiar they were often quoted or simply alluded to in homilies or in commentaries on other related texts. Jerome’s interpretation of this white and red as denoting Christ’s spotless life and bloody death was still being recoined in twelfth century commentaries such as that by Honorius of Autun.4 Similarly, in the accounts of St Thomas’s martyrdom, the white and red of his brains and blood are used to symbolise his exemplary life and violent death. [304]

Lilies and roses The application to saints of colours so authoritatively identified with Christ, and the particular image of white lilies and red roses, also had ample precedent. A generation earlier St Bernard had incorporated a conventional interpretation of Canticles 5.10 in his commentary on Canticles 1.4 to picture Christ, candidus et rubicundus in his virginity and martyrdom, surrounded by lilies and roses signifying the virgins and martyrs of the Church.5 But St Bernard too had been drawing on patristic usage of the colours and flowers to describe those who shared in Christ’s Passion. ‘Where there is the blood of martyrs there is Christ, who is a most beautiful flower’ observed St Ambrose in speaking of Christ as the pure lily of Canticles 2.1; in the same passage he referred to the hortus conclusus (Canticles 4.12) and the flowers that grow there: the violets of the confessors, the lilies of the virgins and the roses of martyrs.6 Jerome had directly linked this flower image with Canticles 5.10 and used the text’s associations to argue that martyrdom does

3 PL 40, col. 906. The Meditationes were attributed to St Augustine (or St Ambrose) by medieval copyists. See Jean Leclercq and J.P. Bonnes, Un Maître de la Vie Spirituelle au XIe siècle, Jean de Fécamp, (Paris, 1946) p. 44. 4 Jerome, Opera, pars. I, 2A, ed. M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum (C.C.), Series latina, LXXIII A, (Turnhout, 1963) p. 589. Honorius, PL 172 col. 440. 5 Opera, vol. I, ed. Jean Leclercq, C.H. Talbot, H. M. Rochais, (Rome, 1957) p. 199. 6 Opera, pars IV, ed. M. Adriaen, C.C., vol. XIV, (Turnhout, 1957) p. 258.

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not only consist in the shedding of blood, sed devotae quoque mentis servitus immaculata quotidianum martyrium est. Illa corona de rosis et violis plectitur, ista de liliis. Unde et in Cantico scribitur Canticorum: “Fratruelis meus candidus et rubicundus”; et in pace et in bello eadem praemia vincentibus tribuens.7 The simplified contrast of white and crimson (sometimes rendered purpureus), of lilies and roses, to signify the purity and inner suffering of white martyrdom and the red martyrdom of public persecution unto death, was already crystalised in Cyprian: Erat ante in operibus fratrum candida, nunc facta est in martyrum cruore purpurea: floribus ejus nec lilia necc rosae desunt; In pace vincentibus coronam candidam pro operibus dabit, in persecutione purpuream pro passione geminabit.8 The tradition was handed on, notably through St Gregory: Duo quippe sunt martyrii genera, unum in [305] mente, aliud in mente simul et actione [. . .] sancta Ecclesia, electorum floribus plena, habet in pace lilia, in bello rosas.9 William FitzStephen (or his reviser) was therefore adapting a time-honoured tradition to demonstrate that St Thomas’s distinction was to combine the life of a confessor and the death of a martyr, like Christ himself: Equidem floribus ecclesiae nec lilia desunt nec rosae, et in beati Thomae passione cum saevo extrahitur mucrone et cerebrum candens et sanguis rubens. Vera nempe et certissima signa, quod ovium Christi pastor et pro eis animam poneret archiepiscopus et agonista, confessor et martyr.10

The ‘whitening and reddening’ paradox Abbott noted that Edward Grim used language ‘slightly incongruous with the metaphor of flowers, describing the brains as reddened from the blood and the blood as whitened from the brain’ and suggested that Grim, an eyewitness of the brutal murder, modified the literary image in order to suggest that the martyr’s streaming blood and brains mingled.11 However, Grim’s studied and symmetrical phrasing (. . . ut sanguis albens ex cerebro, cerebrum nihilominus rubens ex sanguine, lilii et rosae coloribus virginis et matris ecclesiae faciem confessoris et martyris vita et morte purpuraret) is not immediately striking as a piece of realistic observation. Comparison with other accounts may suggest an alternative explanation. Grim is largely followed by Anonymous X: ut sanguis albens ex cerebro, et cerebrum rubens ex sanguine, liliis et rosis, coloribus viriginis et matris ecclesiae, faciem confessoris et martyris decoret. The French biographer Garnier of PontSte-Maxence, writing c. 1174–75, echoes the general sense of this in his comment 7 Epistulae, pars II, ed. I. Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. LV (Vienna, 1912; reprinted N. York and London, 1961) p. 349. 8 Opera, pars II, ed. M. Simonetti, C. Moreschini, C.C., (Turnhout, 1976) p. 72. 9 PL 76, col. 1263–64. 10 MTB III, p. 143. The editor notes the passage is missing from ms. J. 11 Op. cit., p. 208.

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that anyone seeing the saint’s blood and brains lie, one with the other, on the cathedral floor, would have thought of the rose and the lily: Car dune véist le sanc el blanc cervel rogir, Le cervel ensement el vermeil sanc blanchir.12[306] The notion that, though blood and brains mingled, their two colours were distinct and adorned the martyr, is preserved in the later Icelandic compilation, the Thomas Saga: In such a manner is beautified the bright countenance of this martyr and confessor through the glorious death for holy Church, that the blood brightened from the brain, and the brain reddened from the blood, as if rose and lily were beautifully blended together. The Saga further stresses the paradox of the saint being made bright and beautiful by his blood: ‘Although the blood oozed from the wound in the head all night through, yet that beaming beauty of his face faded none’; he did not require anointing for burial ‘who was already reddened in the blood of so glorious a passion’.13 Similarly, the coexistence of red and white, the idea that they enhance each other, that the blood actually adorns the Beloved, was a frequent theme in exegesis on Canticles 5.10 and related texts which posed the paradox: if the Beloved is white, why is he red? Why is Christ bloody if, being sinless, he has the whiteness of innocence? Commentaries explained that the Beloved was beautiful precisely because he was both white and red. The whiteness of Christ’s divinity and redness of his humanity were shown to be the inseparable aspects of his twofold nature; the whiteness of his purity and innocence in life illumined the redness of his death, as the radiance of his whiteness was made even more glorious by virtue of his bloody Passion. The blood of the Lamb which mysteriously whitens the stoles of the saints in Revelation 7.14 was customarily identified with the 12 Relevant passages from Garnier, Grim and Anonymous X can be conveniently compared in E. Abbott, op. cit., pp. 185, 149, 163. Anon. X is a late composition drawing on the major twelfth century accounts included in the Quadrilogus (MTB IV, pp. 266–430), though is not dependent on them for the passage in question as none of them (Benedict of Peterborough, William of Canterbury, Herbert of Bosham and Alan of Tewkesbury) features the white and red formula. 13 E. Magnusson ed. op. cit., pp. 552–53, 555, 559. The anointing detail also occurs in Benedict of Peterborough, the earliest extant narrative of the martyrdom (MTB II, p. 17), but he does not include the liles and roses or the white and red symbolism. The Saga’s other named source, a Life of St Thomas by Robert of Cricklade, a learned exegete and prior of St Frideswide’s, Oxford 1141–c. 1174, is not extant. It could well have included the white and red imagery featured in Grim, Anon. X, Garnier and the Saga, but cannot with certainty be claimed as the immediate source for the Saga’s particular version of the image: besides using the Quadrilogus, the Saga also drew on other earlier sources which are now lost.

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blood of [307] the Beloved in Canticles 5.10.14 The image could also be adapted to the violent death of a saint since, Christlike, the stole of a martyr’s body, white through innocence of life, was made even whiter by bloody martyrdom.15 The Becket biographers’ insistence on St Thomas’s combined whiteness and redness argues that his blameless life fitted him for martyrdom. Immediately before this passage William FitzStephen emphasises that the ‘saintly archbishop’ did not simply meet a violent death but accepted it freely and that Christ was once again suffering in the person of Thomas. Edward Grim adds that the white brains and red blood which poured from the head wound were then scattered by the sword of a clerk accompanying the four knightly murderers, ‘that a fifth blow might not be wanting to the martyr who in other things had imitated Christ’. The biographers’ many parallels from the Gospel Passion narrative, including the five wounds and the two emissions from a single wound, explicitly identify Thomas’s martyrdom with Christ’s Crucifixion, and implicitly vaunt his status among other saints. The white and red symbolism entirely accords with this interpretation. Significantly, the water and blood which issued from the wound in Christ’s side had sometimes received comment in the context of exegesis on two of the scriptural passages related to the candidus et rubicundus text. Ambrose had elucidated the phrase ‘he washed his stole in wine and his pallium in the blood of the grape’ (Genesis 49.11) by referring to the combination of cleansing water and redeeming blood which poured from the side of the crucified Christ. The connection survived in the glossa ordinaria.16 The Genesis image is recalled in Revelation 7.14 and commentators explained: ‘they washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb’ by again referring to the water and blood from Christ’s side. St. Bernard noted that the stoles were made white in this blood because of the whitening water which [308] also streamed from Christ’s wound, wherefore it is said in the Song of Songs, Dilectus meus candidus et rubicundus.17 Although this tradition for explaining the paradox of Christ’s combined whiteness and redness may have suited the lavish claims of Becket’s biographers when describing the white and red effusions from the martyr’s wound, it may reasonably be objected that one important element from the exegetical tradition sketched

14 E.g. Sermon 317 attributed to St Augustine in PL 39 col. 2352 and Bede PL 91 col. 1161. 15 E.g. Sermon 316A attributed to St Augustine in PL 39 col. 2351. For this and sermon 317, see E. Dekkers, Clauis Patrum Latinorum (Bruges, 1961) pp. 91–92. 16 Liber de patriarchis, in Sancti Ambrosii Opera, vol. II, ed. G. Schenkl, CSEL vol. 32 pars 2, p. 138. Glossa ordinaria, PL 113, col. 178–79, Nos enim Christus in sanguine uvae mundavit quando sicut botrus in ligno crucis pependit, et ex latere ejus aqua in ablutionem, et sanguis exivit in redemptionem. 17 In Resurrectione Domini: sermo primus in Opera, vol. V, ed. J. Leclercq, H. Rochais, (Rome, 1968) p. 81.

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above is missing from the biographies. The concept of Christ’s whitening blood and of his white body reddening had usually been conveyed through the imagery of garments, whereas the enigmatic whitening and reddening passage in the four Becket accounts uses instead the image of white and red flowers, which had the more limited connotations of white and red martyrdom. However, there are some reasons for thinking that the phrasing in Grim, Anon. X, Garnier and the Thomas Saga represents an awkward and perhaps not very conscious compounding of the images of garments and flowers.

The two-fold garment In exegetical cross-references between Canticles 5.10, Genesis 49.11 and Revelation 7.14, the imagery of white and red garments extended the associations evoked by the white and red of the Beloved’s body. Twelfth century commentators also perpetuated the patristic linking of Canticles 5.10 with a third text, Isaiah 63.1–3, containing the famous image celebrated in the Vexilla regis, of crimson-stained garments, identified with Christ’s crucified body. Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah 63.1 describes the horror of those angels who did not recognise Christ at his Ascension: Quis est iste qui de terra Edom cruentus advenit? They asked why the seamless tunic of his body, which came from the womb whiter than any fuller could make it, should now be bloodstained. The angels thought whiteness was more fitting for Christ than red, but Christ explained that he was actually adorned by the blood: sanguis quo aspersus sum, non mihi deformitatem tribuerit, sed decorum. He was therefore not only bloody, but bright, like the Beloved in the Song of Songs, adds Jerome, rubicundus in passione, candidus in resurrectione. [309] Jerome’s commentary on this verse was noted in the glossa ordinaria18 and the linking of the Canticles and Isaiah texts remained standard practice in the twelfth century. Gilbert Foliot’s commentary on Canticles 5.10 identifies candidus et rubicundus with Christ’s divine and human natures and with his Passion, and crossrefers to Isaiah 63.1.19 Gilbert of Hoyland, the Cistercian continuator of St Bernard’s commentary on the Song of Songs, relates the white and red of v.10 to the whiteness found along with redness in the garment of Christ in Isaiah 63.2. His garment, white in its innocence and purity, was made red – and beautiful – by the blood of his voluntary Passion. Gilbert stresses the singular mixture of the two colours in the person of the Beloved: Singularis mistura est colorum, qui in sola persona Domini Jesu operatione divina convenerunt in unum, non sic ut sint unus, sed ut sint in uno. He refers to the whitening blood of Revelation 7.14 in answering his own question on the enigma, Qualis rubor, qui dealbandi non caret affectu?20

18 Jerome, Opera, C.C., op. cit., p. 721. Glossa ordinaria, PL 113, col. 1306. 19 PL 202, col. 1278. 20 PL 184, col. 251–52.

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Similarly, the related Apocalypse passage 1.5 is quoted in the Cistercian Alanus de Insulis’s commentary on Canticles 5.10. Candidus, id est virgo et sine peccato [. . .] et rubicundus, id est sanguine aspersus; quia lavit nos a peccatis nostris in sanguine suo.21 This image of a garment or body whitened in blood could be used to describe the martyrdom of those who shared in Christ’s sufferings. Indeed, Herbert of Bosham actually cited both the Genesis 49 and Isaiah 63 passages in showing how St Thomas had imitated Christ supremely, roseus et rubicundus, lavans in vino stolam suam et in sanguine uvae pallium suum. Qui Imperatoris sui instar calcavit solus, et de Edom veniens tinctis vestibus de Bosra caelum ascendit?22 Herbert of Bosham had been Becket’s own learned master in Scripture and his eulogistic account is heavy with biblical allusion and allegorical interpretation. His insertion of the phrase caelum ascendit in his reference to Isaiah 63.1 doubtless indicates his familiarity with the traditional associations of this text with the angels’ Ascension-tide discovery of the mystery of Christ’s two-fold [310] garment. Herbert’s late biography of St Thomas, c. 1186–87, does not use the lilies and roses or candidus et rubicundus formulae, so his specific citation of texts which, it is here being suggested, underlie the compressed white and red imagery featured in the other six accounts, is of particular interest. It lends support to the idea that the common exegetical identification of the garments in these texts with Christ’s white body and red blood can elucidate the cryptic wording in the descriptions of St Thomas’s body by Grim, Anonymous X, Garnier and the Thomas Saga, which labour to show the blood whitening and the brain reddening, their combined but distinctive colours beautifying the martyr. The suggestion can be further examined by looking at the two remaining accounts, by Anonymous IV and William FitzStephen, since neither features the obscure wording common to the other four biographers, yet both unambiguously use the imagery of white and red garments. Alone of the six writers, Anonymous IV says that the saint was adorned by the white and red effusions at his death as if by a wedding garment fit for the heavenly banquet. At first glance, the nuptial image may seem an intrusion into the ‘white and red’ tradition. Certainly, the commonplace comparison of martyrs with guests hastening to the heavenly banquet had early been applied to St Thomas by Edward Grim, but in the context of testifying how eagerly the archbishop had awaited his murderers. Anonymous IV’s allusion to the eschatological banquet in the context of describing the white and red of the martyr’s mutilated body, however, is quite in accordance with traditional exegesis on Canticles 5.10 and related Apocalyptic texts which describe the marriage of the Beloved. St Thomas is presented not simply as a guest summoned to the marriage feast, clothed with a stole whitened in the blood of the Spouse; he imitates the Spouse. The saint’s body, or wedding garment, is not only white but

21 PL 210, col. 88. 22 MTB III, p. 523.

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crimson, like the Beloved as described by the Bride in Canticles 5.10: Discolor in mixtura utriusque substantia bifarie discreta martyris merita pie intuentem docere videbatur. Candebat namque in cerebro byssus innocentiae; rubebat in sanguine purpura martyrii.23 Contemporary familiarity with these traditional associations of Canticles 5.10 had also been assumed by the Cistercian Gilbert of Hoyland (d. 1172) when using the text for the non-hagiographical [311] purpose of describing the mystical transformation of the soul into Christ. Linking Canticles 5.10 and Revelation 7.14, he urged the soul wishing to prepare for the heavenly Spouse to emulate the Beloved’s twofold colouring, ut similiter candida et rubicunda sis.24 The remaining biographer, William FitzStephen, comments that St Thomas was destined to receive from the Lord a duplicem stolam, white to signify his role as a confessor, and crimson to denote his martyrdom. This elaborates the preceding sentence on the significance of the white and red of the martyr’s body, likening his cerebrum candens et sanguis rubens to the lilies and roses of the Church: Vera nempe et certissima signa, quod ovium Christi pastor et pro eis animam poneret archiepiscopus et agonista, confessor et martyr, duplicem stolam a Domino percepturus, et de archiepiscopio fideliter administrato candidam, et de martyrio feliciter consummato purpuream.25 St Thomas’s two-fold vestment alludes to the broad tradition of interpreting stolam as body and blood as garment, and of contrasting the whiteness of the one with the redness of the other in Christ, in whom they are mysteriously and inseparably combined. William FitzStephen alone of the biographers explicitly combines the contrast of candet and rubet, and of lilies and roses, with the image of the white and red garment which seems to form an important part of the range of allusions on which the other biographers drew and to provide the ‘missing link’ in the obscure and highly abbreviated phrasing found in four of the accounts. This is not to claim that William FitzStephen or his redactor originated the combination. Quite apart from the fact that this biography was probably not at all well known until the early thirteenth century,26 permutations of the familiar themes abounded, particularly in the spate of commentaries produced on the Song of Songs in the twelfth century. The Lives of St Thomas may offer an addition to C. J. Holdsworth’s list of contemporary hagiography marked with the imagery [312] of Canticles.27 St Bernard’s commentary, for example, which had an immediate, long-lasting and very

23 MTB IV, p. 194. Anon. IV is a sermon for the feast of St Thomas and was probably produced soon after the canonisation. 24 PL 184, col. 252. 25 MTB III, p. 143. 26 For the date of the Passio section of the biography, and for the second version, see Mary Cheney, ‘William fitz Stephen and his Life of Archbishop Thomas’ in Church and Government in the Middle Ages – Essays presented to C.R. Cheney, ed. C. Brooke, D. Luscombe, G. Martin, D. Owen, (Cambridge, 1976) p. 154–55. 27 ‘John Ford and English Cistercian Writing, 1167–1214’, Transactions of Royal Hist. Soc., Vth. Series, vol. II, 1961, p. 121, n. 2.

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widespread influence, provided a memorable precedent for combining the imagery of flowers and of garments and, moreover, in a context which actually quotes both the Canticles 5.10 and Isaiah 63.1 texts. In Sermon 28 on the Song of Songs (i.4), St Bernard uses lilies and roses to describe the whiterobed virgins and redrobed martyrs surrounding their motive and model, the Beloved, who is both candidus et rubicundus, and of whom it is said: Iste formosus in stola sua, gradiens in multitudine fortitudinis suae. The Isaiah reference to stola sua, Christ’s bloodstained body, is used by St Bernard to explain that, paradoxically, after his resurrection, Christ will be encountered in a white robe, surpassing in beauty even the angels. The Beloved’s Bride, the Church, is described as seeking the whiteness of innocence and the splendour of virtues under the dark vesture of the Crucified as, at the Crucifixion, the good thief had recognised Christ’s total innocence and majesty and the centurion had discerned that this was the Son of God.28 This finds a striking parallel in the work of Herbert of Bosham, who had close contacts with the Cistercians.29 He reports that the monks of Canterbury at last recognised their archbishop’s sanctity when, stripping the body for burial, they discovered fulllength sackcloth next to his skin. This bloodstained token of St Thomas’s white martyrdom of asceticism is likened to Joseph’s coat which was very commonly (and notably in the Stimulus amoris often attributed to St Bernard) identified with Christ’s bloodstained body taken from the Cross.30 Herbert specifically identifies the monks’ response to such evidence of two-fold martyrdom marked in the one garment of St Thomas’s body with that of the centurion who recognised Christ’s true and glorious nature revealed in his crucified body: Vere filius Dei erat iste! 31 The incident, though differently expressed, is of similar importance for other biographers in their interpretation of Thomas Becket’s significance. His stormy public career had not provided a self-evident argument for sainthood; his biographers strove to show that [313] his claims to sanctity were not based solely on his murder and posthumous miracles but that his entire archiepiscopate had been marked by secret asceticism and piety and by his endurance of criticism and betrayal on behalf of the Church. William FitzStephen, probably writing as early as 1172, the year before the canonisation, shows that the Christ Church monks’ unexpected discovery of the vermin-infested penitential sackcloth resolved their doubts about the late archbishop’s personal holiness: ‘Then was their sorrow turned into joy. [. . .] Having seen with their own eyes his two-fold martyrdom, the voluntary one of his life and the violent one of his death, they [. . .] invoked him as St. Thomas’.32 His deathbed garment is ironically contrasted with the white linen and crimson he had once worn as Chancellor. The description of the martyr’s body, cerebrum candens et sanguis rubens, is placed shortly before this 28 29 30 31 32

Opera ED. cit., vol. 1, p. 199. Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, (Oxford, 1973) p. 74. PL 184, col. 961. MTB III, pp. 521–22. MTB, III, p. 148. See also Grim, MTB II, p. 442 and Benedict of Peterborough, MTB II, p. 17.

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incident. Although not self-consciously learned like Herbert of Bosham’s direct use of Scripture and exegesis, the set-piece description stated most fully by William FitzStephen, with an individual variant by Anonymous IV and awkwardly compressed in Edward Grim, Anonymous X, Garnier and the Thomas Saga, ultimately drew on a long exegetical tradition which had recently been revivified and popularised in early affective meditations on the Passion. Its essential elements at least were sufficiently familiar for the white and red imagery to serve as an allusive summary of the biographers’ large claims for a still controversial saint: St Thomas was a martyr in life as in death and in both most closely imitated Christ himself.

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T H E D O U B L E M A RT Y R D O M OF THOMAS BECKET Hagiography or history?

Introduction Twelfth-century theologians debated whether Thomas Becket’s cause sufficed to make him a martyr, and modern historians have acknowledged that it was not his personality but the circumstances of his death in December 1170 and the rapid popular acclaim of the posthumous miracles which secured formal canonisation in February 1173.1 Political as much as religious considerations have been cited to explain the cult of a saint who in life had been ‘vain, overbearing [. . .] not a likeable type of feudal prelate’.2 Reappraisals occasioned by the eighth centenary of the murder in the cathedral rescued Becket both from earlier excessive denigrations of his character and from the vogue for psychoanalysing him as an actor playing a part or series of roles,3 but the accusation contained in the royal proclamation suppressing his cult in 1538 was not challenged: ‘there appereth nothynge in his lyfe and exteriour conversation whereby he shuld be callyd a sainct’.4 Even Becket’s contemporary biographers, it has recently been argued, ‘were encouraged to concentrate on the historical, non-hagiographical elements because Becket’s only claim to sanctity was his martyrdom’.5 Although Dom David Knowles, one of Becket’s most sympathetic modern commentators, felt that the

1 Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, (Oxford, 1973) p. 201; David Knowles, “Archbishop Thomas Becket. A Character Study”, Raleigh Lecture, (London, 1949) p. 5. 2 J.C. Russell, “The Canonization of Opposition to the King in Angevin England”, Anniversary Essays in Medieval History Presented to C.H. Haskins, ed. C.H. Taylor (Boston, 1922) p. 280. D.W. Rollason, “The Cults of Murdered Royal Saints in Anglo-Saxon England”, Anglo-Saxon England, 11, ed. P. Clemoes, (Cambridge, 1983) p. 22. 3 Charles Duggan, “The Significance of the Becket Dispute in the History of the English Church”, The Ampleforth Journal, 75.3 (1970) p. 367; D. Knowles, “Archbishop Thomas Becket – The Saint”, The Canterbury Chronicle, 65 (197) p. 10 and Thomas Becket (London, 1970) pp. 53–54; J.W. Alexander, “The Becket Controversy in Recent Historiography”, Journal of British Studies, 9 (1970) pp. 4–7. 4 Proclamation of Henry VIII, 16 November 1538 quoted by Tancred Borenius, Thomas Becket in Art, (London, 1932), App. I. 5 Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550–c. 1307, (London, 1974) p. 297.

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earliest biographers were ‘in every way, and above all in their analysis of character, committed to the ultimate sanctity of their subject’, he conceded that on their evidence ‘Thomas Becket does not display fully the characteristics of a saint’; because the biographers were writing when the canonisation was already assured or formalised, they had no need to overplay their hand and ‘the purely laudatory or pious paragraphs can be separated fairly easily from the rest’.6 The earliest biographers were writing c. 1171–77 and faced the difficult task of producing the Vita et Passio Sancti Thomae in the first spectacular wave of the cult following the martyrdom and miracles, yet within [185] immediate memory of Archbishop Becket’s often provocative and still controversial behaviour. No contemporary account of the archbishop of Canterbury, 1162–70, could confine itself to the conventional model of commemorative biography, remarking on the subject’s exemplary piety, spirituality and service to his monastic house or see, even if these had been striking attributes; some reference to events and issues of national and indeed international importance was unavoidable. Furthermore, the continuance in office of some of Becket’s ecclesiastical opponents and the continuing reign of Henry II would counsel a certain caution in reporting the conflicts within the Church and between regnum and sacerdotium which characterised Becket’s archiepiscopate. Yet, in the tradition of saints’ Lives, the celebration of a saint involved demonstrating his sanctity. Death alone does not constitute martyrdom, however heroically borne or sacrilegious the circumstances, as Lanfranc was aware when he questioned the claim to sanctity of Elphege, an earlier murdered archbishop of Canterbury.7 Such apparently contradictory demands on Thomas Becket’s biographers raise a number of basic questions to be considered here: Did they concentrate on vindicating the just cause for which St Thomas allegedly died (as Anselm had done when successfully resolving Lanfranc’s doubts about the sanctity of St Elphege) rather than attempt to create an image of personal holiness for their problematic subject? Or did they simply depend on the evidence of St Thomas’s abundant miracles, a proof of sanctity eloquently convincing to contemporaries? Either way might have enabled the biographers to confine their use of hagiographical conventions to garnishing at predictable moments (such as the archbishop’s birth, consecration and death) an otherwise admirably historical account. Does a close study of the biographies confirm this assumption of a clear-cut distinction between hagiography and history? Recent research has not been centrally concerned with what image of Thomas Becket his earliest biographers tried to project or with their techniques but has concentrated on the antecedents, the political and ecclesiastical context and the technical legal issues of the Becket Controversy and on the phenomenon of the

6 “Becket. A Character Study”, p. 4; “Becket – The Saint”, pp. 17, 7. 7 Vita Sancti Anselmi. The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury by Eadmer, ed. Richard W. Southern (London, 1962) pp. 50–54.

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martyr’s cult. However, specialist work on twelfth-century letter collections, canon law, and the theology of the schools which has, in the last two decades or so, greatly illumined the intellectual milieu in which the Becket Controversy occurred in the 1160s, also casts new light on the way it was reported in the 1170s. It has made possible a re-examination of the long-published biographical materials. It has prompted the reformulation of questions concerning how the writers understood and executed their task, their relationship to the conventional modes and [186] objectives of sacred biography and to the vigorous contemporary revival in historical and epistolary writing and the growth of written records. The best of the independent narratives do not fit neatly into any existing literary genre, though the problem facing St Thomas’s biographers, and some of their solutions, were not without precedent. St Wilfrid of Hexham, for example, had also been a provocative personality at odds with episcopal colleagues and the king, who appealed his case to Rome amid royal protests. Though without the advantage of a violent death to commemorate and embellish, Wilfrid’s biographer Eddius Stephanus was aided by the hagiographer’s repertoire of scriptural parallelism, the prophetic nature of the prelate’s birth, his miracles and posthumous signs of his sanctity, in order to praise a saint whom to know was a sure road to virtue.8 He clearly accommodated some events to this interpretation, particularly when defending the saint from his critics. But he also used eyewitness accounts, quoted documentary evidence and set his subject in a wider historical context, partly as a means of proving the veracity of his testimony. St Anselm offered a more recent example of an archbishop at variance with crown and bishops, whose biography involved a detailed commentary on contemporary church-state relations, informed by oral and archival evidence. Sacred biography’s traditional concern with exalting the monastic house associated with the saint (and his biographer) had long stimulated interest in local and occasionally national history: ‘Thus hagiography resulted in historical research and the historical interpretation of evidence’.9 It was difficult to identify Anselm with his monastic house; like Thomas Becket he incurred censure from the Christ Church community for his prolonged exile from Canterbury. Criticism did not abate with his death and necessitated the later supplementation of his biography with stories which modern readers would classify as hagiographical. Like Bede, however, Eadmer authenticated his sources for miracle stories; he did not present them as a different kind of truth from other events he reported.10 Furthermore, he urged the interdependence of his intimate account of Anselm’s spirituality and private conversation contained in the Vita Sancti Anselmi, and his record of the public relations between

8 The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927). 9 A. Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 106. 10 Vita Sancti Anselmi, pp. 149, 152; Benedicta Ward, ‘Miracles and History: A Reconsideration of the Miracles Stories used by Bede’ in Famulus Christi. Essays in Commemoration of the 13th Centenary of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner, (London, 1976) pp. 70–76.

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the archbishop of Canterbury and kings of England in the Historia Novorum in Anglia, both being necessary for a full understanding of St Anselm.11 The best of the early Latin accounts of St Thomas of Canterbury12 are vividly narrated, substantially eyewitness reports of national events immediately within the public memory. ‘The exceptional quality of the biographies [. . .] in contrast with other contemporary hagiographical literature, stems in part from their subject, but mainly from their direct [187] reliance on the surviving records of the dispute’; in particular, the use of the archives of Gilbert Foliot and of Becket by William of Canterbury and William FitzStephen respectively ‘made possible an approach to true historical writing’.13 Dr. Anne Duggan has shown how the huge collection of nearly six hundred relevant letters made by Alan of Tewkesbury, c. 1174–76, and used by all the other biographers to varying degrees, was probably drawn from archetypal collections of Becket’s two-way correspondence compiled before the canonisation, or even before the murder, as ‘an authentic record of the controversy and not a monument to the literary skill of the martyr’.14 The Lives include vehement criticism of the archbishop voiced by fellow churchmen. Yet, like the biographers of St Wilfrid and St Anselm, St Thomas’s biographers were not impartial reporters. Benedict of Peterborough, William of Canterbury and Alan of Tewkesbury were all members of the Christ Church community in the 1170s and hence concerned with promoting the cult of St Thomas by producing accounts of the martyr’s life and passion and collections of his miracles for pilgrims.15 ‘Anonymous IV’ had a paraliturgical function of providing a memorial of the saint to be read during his feast. William FitzStephen had known 11 Vita Sancti Anselmi, p. 2. 12 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. James C. Robertson (Rolls Series, 1875–79), vols. 1–4. References will be made in parenthesis in the text to the volume and page numbers of this work. Vol. 1: William of Canterbury, Vita, Passio et Miracula Vol. 2: Benedict of Peterborough, Passio pp. 1–19, Miracula pp. 21–281; John of Salisbury, Vita, pp. 301–22, supplement of Alan of Tewkesbury pp. 299–352; Edward Grim, Vita pp. 353–450. Vol. 3: William FitzStephen, Vita pp. 1–154; Herbert of Bosham, Vita pp. 155–534. Vol. 4: Roger of Pontigny (“Anon. I”), Vita pp. 1–79; The Anonymous of Lambeth (“Anon. II”), Vita pp. 80–144; “Anon. IV”, Passio pp. 186–95. 13 Anne Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of His Letters, (Oxford, 1980), Preface: p. 226; cf. pp. 175–203 for the use made of the Becket correspondence by Edward Grim, William of Canterbury, William FitzStephen, Herbert of Bosham. 14 “The French Mss. of the Becket Correspondence”, Thomas Becket. Actes du Colloque International de Sédières 1973, ed. Raymonde Foreville (Paris, 1975) pp. 2, 33. The Becket correspondence is printed in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Rolls Series, 1881–85 vols. 5–7; critical modern editions of parts of the correspondence in The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot ed. Adrian Morey and C.N.L. Brooke (Cambridge, 1967) and The Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 2 (1163–80) ed. W. J. Millor and C.N.L. Brooke (Oxford, 1979). References to John of Salisbury’s letters will cite the Epistle number and the page number of this edition. 15 For the dating, interrelationship and the authors of the biographies v Emmanuel Walberg, La tradition hagiographique de Thomas Becket avant la fin de XIIe siècle (Paris, 1929); A. Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 296–301; A. Duggan, Becket, A Textual History of his Letters, pp. 175–204.

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Becket from the days of his chancellorship, stood by him at his trial and witnessed his death. Herbert of Bosham and John of Salisbury were members of the group of learned clerical companions who variously attended the archbishop at his trial, exile and the events leading up to his death and not only shared, but prompted his ideology on relations with secular authority.16 Herbert of Bosham dedicated his reminiscences to a later archbishop of Canterbury in the specific hope that Baldwin and his successors would be inspired to emulate St Thomas in defending the Church (3:155–56). Two important writers, though outside these groups, had formative personal experience of their subject: ‘Roger of Pontigny’ probably served him in exile and Edward Grim witnessed his death. While some are deservedly famed as examples of the contemporary renaissance in historical writing, the accounts of Thomas Becket’s death do form a partisan interpretation to which some circumstantial details were accommodated, by the humanist scholar John of Salisbury and the sometime royal official William FitzStephen as readily as by the monastic custodians of the Canterbury shrine. The present work suggests that the extent of the biographers’ use of ‘hagiographical’ techniques has been obscured in the general modern approval of their historicity. Purple passages might, of course, be anticipated in descriptions of the martyr’s death; in considering whether the biographers’ accounts of the archbishop’s private and public life represent a different kind of writing and intention from their presentation of the passio, Part I examines the degree to which literary devices conventional in the [188] genre of sacred biography were employed to demonstrate the sanctity of Becket in life as in death. It questions whether such conventions can be uniformly regarded as pious flourishes detachable from an essentially historicaly narrative. The writers’ spiritual interpretation of events sometimes accurately reflects a polemical interpretation of current affairs and of history actually made in the 1160s by the archbishop and his circle, but viewed as historically authenticated prophecy by his champions in the light of his martyrdom. The context of the biographers’ liturgical allusions in particular often suggests they are not simply hagiographic asides or dating devices but reflect a historical situation in which both king and archbishop were able to use the symbolism and ceremony of liturgy to powerful propagandist effect. The importance of the epistolary evidence of the Controversy and of modern research in other contemporary uses of rhetoric, in canon law and the schools, for understanding the relationship between hagiography and history and their supposedly distinctive concerns and language, is further illustrated through a detailed example in Part II. A reconsideration of the biographers’ familiar accounts of an extraordinary liturgical event on the crucial last day of Becket’s trial at the Council of Northampton 16 For recent work on individual biographers v Margaret A. Harris “Alan of Tewkesbury and his Letters”, Studia Monastica 18 (1976) pp. 77–108; Mary Cheney, “William FitzStephen and his Life of Archbishop Thomas”, Church and Government in the Middle Ages. Essays presented to C.R. Cheney ed. C.N.L. Brooke, G. Martin, D. Owen (Cambridge, 1976) pp. 139–56; B. Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, pp. 59–86 for Herbert of Bosham, pp. 87–108 for John of Salisbury.

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on 1164 may suggest new insights, not only into the biographers’ attitudes and techniques, but into the conduct of events precipitating Becket’s flight and the formulation of his defense during the exile.

PART I Red martyrdom It has been observed that Thomas Becket ‘worked no miracles when alive and, apart from a reputed vision experienced by his mother before his birth, the biographers had a hard time finding parallels from other saints’ lives for events in Becket’s’.17 This need not necessarily demonstrate the historical, ‘non-hagiographical’ character of their narratives. In the elastic genre of saints’ Lives there were important precedents for the omission of miracle stories and their role is restrained in the Lives of Anselm, Ailred and Hugh of Lincoln.18 While it is true that few parallels are made with other named saints, the Becket biographers do use other means of modelling their subject on an acknowledged norm of sanctity, most obviously but not solely in their accounts of his death. St Thomas is shown to have been extraordinary from the beginning, even before his suffering distanced him so markedly from others. Although some of his champions tried to claim that his life alone offered a model for imitation, it was his death and miracles which revealed his exceptional nature and argued that he must, therefore, have been set apart [189] throughout life. The hagiographer’s premise finds conventional expression in the birth and infancy stories and in the comparison of Thomas’s parents with Elizabeth and Zachariah, the parents of John the Baptist (2:356). Jeremiah 1.5 had been quoted by St Wilfrid’s biographer in relating his birth and William FitzStephen alluded to it too: ‘And the Lord knew and predestined the blessed Thomas before ever he issued from the womb’ (3:13). Similarly, Eddius Stephanus had cited the usual text from Romans 8.30 in his opening chapter to show that God foreknew, predestined, called, justified and glorified his confessor Wilfrid, as was signified by the extraordinary circumstances of his birth. Both saints’ births were heralded by a remarkable theophany in the form of a house-fire, in both cases likened to a light being set up on a candlestick, a prophetic allusion to the text from Luke 11.33 used in the ceremony of translating saints’ relics and setting them up so that they could be properly venerated (2:358). 17 A. Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 297. 18 James Harper, “John Cassian and Sulpicius Severus”, Church History 34 (1965) pp. 371–73 and Patrick Wormald, “Bede and Benedict Biscop”, Famulus Christi, pp. 151, 167 n. 86 for early examples; R.W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer, (Cambridge, 1963) pp. 323–24 for the tradition of commemorative biography in the tenth and eleventh centuries; Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, (London, 1982) pp. 171–77, for the restrained role of miracles in the Lives of SS. Anselm, Ailred and Hugh of Lincoln.

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However, the biographers’ methods of demonstrating Thomas’s predestination to sainthood become more complex when they deal with his adult life. Intimation of approaching death, a standard feature of saints’ Lives, punctuate their narratives, but the hagiographic stock device of dreams and visions is used very sparingly, even by Herbert of Bosham. Instead, with the insight of the archbishop’s intimate companion in exile and the hindsight of a partisan writing from exile perhaps fifteen years after the canonisation, he pondered the past to disclose, as Eadmer did, the prophetic nature of apparently coincidental details and to report insights vouchsafed to the discerning at the time. Thomas’s ill-fated reconciliation with the king at Fréteval, for example, took place ‘as we learnt long afterwards’ in a meadow locally known as the Traitor’s Field (3:466). In 1169 Henry II had come as a pilgrim to the shrine at Mont Martre, traditional site of St Denis’s martyrdom, where he sought terms with Thomas Becket. One of the archbishop’s household there and then noticed the ominous portent of Thomas waiting in the Chapel of the Martyrdom when he received news of the king’s refusal of the requested kiss of peace. The prophecy was fulfilled a year later in Thomas’s dying invocation of the martyred bishop St Denis and in the manner of his death (3:445–49, 499). The readiness to see signs and symbols was not the prerogative of the hagiographer, but reflects the practice in lectio divina of ruminating on the literal word of Scripture to discern spiritual meaning. Contemporary events were seen as a continuation of this process of revelation. Nor was the practice confined to the scholarly exegete, but familiar to all who made constant liturgical use of Scripture. As Thomas’s envoys quipped to the French king Louis (when he cited an improving text from Ephesians which Henry II should have recalled and applied in his dealings with his archbishop): [190] ‘My lord, perchance he would have remembered it, if he had heard it as often as we do in the canonical hours’ (3:333). This helps explain why Herbert of Bosham, recalling his master’s return to Canterbury in early December 1170, to the popular acclamation ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’, could confidently address his reader: ‘And you would certainly have said, had you seen it, that the Lord was a second time approaching his Passion’ (3:478). Thomas Becket entered Canterbury during the first week in Advent, the liturgical season celebrating the coming of Christ not only at his Incarnation, but at his Passion and the end of time. The Gospel for Advent Sunday was the same as for Palm Sunday, Matthew 21.1–9, recounting Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and ending with the acclamation ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’. The Gospel is echoed in the antiphon and anthems accompanying the Palm Sunday procession about the church and its precincts which is evoked in Herbert’s description of St Thomas’s triumphal procession into his cathedral. In all probability, Herbert is here describing an Adventus, namely the liturgical ceremony for the reception of a king or bishop to his city or church, which directly used the Messianic and eschatological associations of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem and actually incorporated the acclamation ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’. The coincidence of the opening of the Advent season with the archbishop’s Adventus into Canterbury would have made such a ceremony particularly 333

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evocative. His return to Canterbury was later kept as a liturgical feast (the Regressio) and the emotive parallel with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem was preserved among the popular vernacular texts of the Early South English Legendary.19 Of course, St Thomas’s martyrdom at the end of the Advent season powerfully completed Herbert of Bosham’s allusion to Palm Sunday and the Passion narrative, but his report cannot be dismissed as merely a pious Gospel parallel retrospectively introduced long after the martyrdom and canonisation. William FitzStephen had early described Becket’s homecoming journey through his diocese to tumultuous popular acclaim, his ceremonial reception by the bishop and clergy of Rochester and especially by the canons of Southwark who met him in procession at the door of the church (as in the Adventus ceremony), singing the anthem ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel’. Royal messengers insisted Becket end his triumphal progress and confine himself to Canterbury, and various prophetic signs warned him of the evil awaiting him (3:121–23). This is substantiated in a letter written in early December 1170 by an eyewitness, John of Salisbury. His description of the archbishop’s return is heavy with the menace of the royal officials who might there and then have used force ‘but they were afraid of a riot [191] and were restrained by the great crowds which were as excited in receiving back their bishop as if Christ himself had come down from heaven among men’ (Ep. 304, p. 721). Becket’s return to Canterbury in Advent, 1170, greatly stirred friend and foe and caused the day to be enshrined among the other ‘memorable Tuesdays’ of his life, ranging from the day of his birth to the last day of his trial and flight into exile and the day of his martyrdom.20 Thus the calendar itself attested to the predestined nature of the saint’s career. St Thomas’s death recalls not earlier medieval saints, but the primitive age of persecution. In the acta martyrum prophecies and dreams point to the inevitability of the sufferings to be endured by Christ’s champions, as apparitions and miracles posthumously confirm their virtue. Similarly, Thomas prophesied that he would suffer martyrdom and be slain in a church, which one biographer actually likens to Polycarp’s prediction of his immolation (3:406), and was martyred on the very spot ‘where long ago in a dream he had seen himself crucified’ (1:132). William of Canterbury and

19 Ed. C. Horstmann, Early English Text Society 87, (London, 1887) pp. 159–60. For full liturgical references to the Adventus ceremony and its connection with Palm Sunday and Advent, v Ernst Kantorowicz, “The King’s Advent and the enigmatic panels in the doors of Santa Sabina”, Art Bulletin, 26 (1944) pp. 207–31. The last recorded time Henry II visited Canterbury before coming as a penitent to St Thomas’s tomb, had been in the company of the archbishop at the Palm Sunday procession of 1163. R.W. Eyton, Court, Household and Itinerary of King Henry II, (London, 1878) p. 60. 20 These five ‘holy Tuesdays’ in Becket’s life clearly impressed contemporaries. The coincidence is remarked in the Latin biographies, (Herbert of Bosham, 3:326) and in the vernacular work of the French biographer, Garnier of Pont-Ste-Maxence: J. Shirley, Garnier’s Becket, (London, 1975) p. 156. It is perpetuated in the Early South English Legendary, p. 177 and in the fifth lection at Matins in the Office for the feast of St Thomas’s Translation, Breviarium Ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, fasc. III, ed. F. Procter and C. Wordsworth, (Cambridge, 1886) p. 447.

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Benedict of Peterborough made bulky collections of Thomas’s posthumous appearances and miracles, which the other biographers cite in varying detail.21 A second point of similarity with the acta martyrum is that, as the early martyrs (mindful of Eleazer and the seven sons in 2 Maccabees 6.7) refused counsel and means of escape, sometimes provoking their tormentors for fear of delaying or losing martyrdom, so St Thomas’s biographers insist that ‘had he wished, the archbishop might easily have turned aside and saved himself by flight’ (3:140), but that he could not be persuaded by entreaty or argument. He dreaded that the opportunity for martyrdom ‘might be deferred or lost if he took refuge in the church’ (2:434), refused to take the elementary precaution of bolting the transept door and, in the opinion of John of Salisbury, who was present, imprudently and needlessly provoked his pursuers (2:9). In the acta martyrum the essentially voluntary nature of martyrdom is often conveyed by the joy with which the martyrs eagerly sought their grace-given reward, rejoicing ‘as though invited to a bridal banquet instead of being a victim of the beasts’.22 The eschatological image was also suggested by St Thomas’s longing for martyrdom as he prepared to meet his murderers: ‘It seemed to us who were present, he sat there waiting as unperturbed [. . .] as if they had come to invite him to a wedding’, recalled Edward Grim (2:433). Like the early martyred bishop Felix, he is described as deliberately extending his neck to the sword and dying in an attitude of prayer.23 Thirdly, the language in which even eyewitnesses recount Becket’s death in the cathedral further invites comparison with the heroes of the arena: he appears as God’s athlete, his ordeal as a contest, his murderers as [192] gladiators, torturers, even lictors. All the biographers, including Herbert of Bosham who generally portrays a vigorous, combative saint, admire Thomas’s personal bravery specifically for its exemplification of the virtues of patience and fortitude which had distinguished the early martyrs in their dying agonies, borne without flinching or complaint, as the acta repeatedly testify. And so with St Thomas. ‘In all his sufferings the illustrious martyr displayed an incredible steadfastness. Neither with hand nor robe, in the manner of human frailty, did he oppose the fatal stroke. Nor when smitten did he utter a single word, neither cry nor groan’ (2:438). John of Salisbury exclaimed, ‘With all reverence for the martyrs I venture to say that in my judgment none surpassed him in constancy’ (2:319). Several writers comment to the effect that the pains he endured were even sharper than those of earlier martyrs, for they at least were slain by non-believers, but the archbishop was slaughtered by his spiritual sons; the sacrilege was greater than all the persecutions of Nero and Diocletian (3:143, 509; 2:438). 21 For the miracle collections v Raymonde Foreville, ‘Les Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis’, Actes du 97e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes, Nantes, 1972, (Paris, 1979) pp. 443–68, reprinted in Thomas Becket dans la tradition historique et hagiographique, (London, 1981), and Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, pp. 89–109. 22 Acts of the Christian Martyrs ed. J. Musurillo, (Oxford, 1972) p. 797. 23 Ibid., pp. 271, 129; Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 2:320, 437; 3:498, 506; 4:77.

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Having established St Thomas’s glorious credentials in the manner of meeting his death, the biographers cite St Augustine’s dictum that ‘it is the cause that makes for martyrdom, not the sufferings’ and emphasise that to die for the statutes of the Church is even finer than to die for the faith (2:440; 4:135). They quote the archbishop’s dying intention that in his blood the Church might have liberty and peace and observe that his offering on behalf of the universal Church distinguished him from earlier martyrs (2:436, 438, 14). Thus, in the steadfastness of his endurance, the bitterness of his pain and above all, in the justice of his cause, the biographers show that Thomas’s claims to sanctity did not merely parallel but surpassed those of earlier saints. This helps explain the absence of a particular saintly model even in the narratives of Becket’s death. It was not for want of an appropriate prototype of clerical martyrdom. Although all the early biographers quote Archbishop Becket’s dying invocation of St Denis, none elaborates this apparently promising parallel with the martyred bishop of Paris, Herbert of Bosham alone noting later, and obscurely, the similarity of the two saints’ headwounds.24 St Stephen’s death had provided a classic model for early accounts of martyrdom and informed the general iconographic type of saints kneeling in prayer before their executioners, as St Thomas does in many medieval representations. In 1164 Becket had said the mass of St Stephen in memorable circumstances during his own trial at the Council of Northampton (3:56) and the liturgy for the protomartyr, celebrated by Becket in Canterbury cathedral in 1170 only three days before his own martyrdom there, must have taken on a new significance for his household, including future biographers, which the subsequent celebration of St [193] Thomas’s feast on 29 December, the anniversary of his death, not of his Translation, can only have perpetuated. In 1186 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, was to propose founding a collegiate church in Canterbury dedicated to St Thomas and St Stephen, and their proximity in the liturgical calendar was reflected in several works of art which pictured the two saints together.25 While the omission of any reference to St Stephen in the narratives of Becket’s death may be partly explained by the biographers’ prudent reluctance to cast Henry II in the role of stone-thrower, it does not necessarily point to their ‘historical’ rather than ‘hagiographical’ character. Other portents in the cluster of liturgical feasts preceeding St Thomas’s are duly noted. In dating Becket’s murder, Edward Grim observes that on the morrow of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the murderers came out against the innocent (2:430). Becket was born on the feast of St Thomas, 21 December. William FitzStephen adds that by his death, Thomas of Canterbury lit up the West as his apostolic namesake, Thomas of India, lit up the 24 3:499; G.M. Spiegel, “The Cult of St. Denis and Capetian Kingship”, Journal of Medieval History, I (1975) p. 50, n. 8. 25 D. Knowles, The Monastic Order, (Cambridge, 1940), p. 319; T. Borenius, Thomas Becket in Art, pp. 49, 83–84 and plates; P. A. Newton, “Some New Materials for the Study of the Iconography of Thomas Becket”, Actes [. . .] de Sédières, p. 256.

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East, their December feastdays balanced either side of the feast of the Incarnation (3:154). The absence of the more immediately obvious parallel of St Stephen receives a gloss in Benedict of Peterborough’s account of a vision in which the glorified Becket is revealed among the apostles themselves, of greater dignity than Stephen and other saints from the age of persecution (2:31–32). An anonymous passio says that Thomas Becket prayed for his murderers (4:198). Abbott suggested this unsubstantiated story was an attempt to show that Christ’s most recent martyr had very properly echoed the dying words of the protomartyr.26 But St Stephen’s prayer in Acts 7.60 itself imitates Christ’s prayer of forgiveness from the Cross. Similarly, Thomas’s dying prayer in William FitzStephen’s account, ‘Into thy hands O Lord, I commend my spirit’ directly evokes Christ’s last words in Luke 23.46 (recalling Psalm 30.6), also repeated by Stephen and often accredited to dying saints (including those who, like Ailred, did not suffer a violent death). By dispensing with the hagiographical device of modelling their subject on named saints, the biographers strengthened the effect of another hallowed convention which derived from the notion succinctly expressed in Romans 8:29: ‘Whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son’. The circumstances of Thomas’s death enabled his biographers to recall and surpass the earliest heroic age of persecution which had regarded violent martyrdom as the most complete expression of the imitation of Christ. All the biographers, including the earliest, the most scholarly and those who had been eyewitnesses of the murder, make remarkably sustained use of the device of Gospel parallelism for this purpose. It need only be briefly illustrated. [194] The archbishop’s entry into the cathedral preceded by his crossbearer is likened to Christ’s approach to Calvary (3:491): Gethsemane is recalled in Becket’s reproach to the knights, ‘And came you to me in arms?’ He imitated his Saviour in forbidding them to harm his followers, some of whom fled, even as the disciples deserted Christ. The four knights were joined in the murder by Hugh ‘Mauclerc’, ‘that a fifth blow might not be wanting to the martyr who in other things had imitated Christ’ (2:438); Becket’s head was pierced as Christ’s side was by Longinus (3:506). Pillagers meanwhile ransacked the archbishop’s palace ‘even as those who crucified Christ parted his garments among them’; the very sun was veiled in darkness at that hour (3:142–44). As an early biographer observed, ‘It would be hard, we believe, to find any other martyr whose passion so closely follows the Lord’s’ (2:18–19). It was an argument which rendered particular saintly models superfluous. This hagiographical technique derives from a particular view of history. One of the functions of the hagiographer, shared to varying degrees by St Thomas’s biographers, was to show how God is glorious in his saints because they reveal his

26 Edwin Abbott, St. Thomas of Canterbury. His Death and Miracles, 2 vols., (London, 1898), I, pp. 108–09. The various biographers’ accounts of the martyrdom may be conveniently compared in Abbott’s parallel texts.

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continuing work of salvation. Martyrs of the age of persecution were revered as worthy successors of the age of the apostles, ‘for these new manifestations of virtue will bear witness to one and the same Spirit who still operates’.27 In the very different context of the post-persecution era, the confessor St Wilfrid served as a reminder of the longer-term continuity of the divine purpose stretching from creation to the present day. Eddius Stephanus presents Wilfrid as one of the successors of the Old Testament prophets, as well as of the apostles, all united in making known to the sons of men God’s mighty acts.28 The allusion to the psalmist is preserved by John of Salisbury in praising the miracles of St Thomas (2:322). Other biographers conventionally compare him to Old Testament figures like Joseph, Moses, David, and Job who in medieval exegesis were regarded as ‘types’ of Christ. Alongside the notion of salvation gradually being revealed through the linear unfolding of time, with pre-Incarnation figures foreshadowing Christ as subsequent saints were living reminders of him, the contemporary interpretation of history was also profoundly shaped by the concept that the redeeming Cross is eternally present. This view of history underlies medieval exegesis, iconography and the complex ordering of biblical texts which comprise the liturgy; from it stems the hagiographer’s technique of identifying a saint with an Old Testament type of Christ. Like the device of Gospel parallelism, it could be used to show that not only do the saints imitate Christ, but that Christ is crucified in his saints. For example, Thomas Becket’s biographers likened him to Abel, interpreted as the [195] first of Christ’s martyrs in Matthew 23.34–35, but also an utterly familiar type of Christ’s own sacrifice in exegesis, cited in the Roman canon of the Mass and early represented in art at the eucharistic altar. Thomas was frequently depicted receiving his death blows either standing or kneeling at an altar, wearing a chasuble, with a chalice to denote the sacrificial as well as the sacrilegious nature of his martyrdom.29 This ‘non-historical’ representation of the death scene was entirely in accordance with the biographers’ interpretation. The most learned of them, John of

27 From the influential account of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp. 131, 107. 28 Life of Bishop Wilfrid, p. 39; pp. 15, 19, 29 for examples of such parallelism. Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, Bk. II, a most authoritative influence on hagiography, had stressed that St Benedict’s miracles in imitation of biblical saints were performed by the power of the single ‘Spirit of all the just’, manifesting the grace of Christ. 29 This iconography is already established in the earliest extant illustration of the scene, c. 1180, prefacing a copy of John of Salisbury’s letter describing the martyrdom (BL. MS Cotton, Claudius B.II) and also on the earliest example, c. 1190, of the forty-five surviving Limoges reliquary châsse. V catalogue of the Arts Council of Gt. Britain exhibition, English Romanesque Art, 1066–1200, (London, 1984), nos. 72, 292. For other examples, v T. Borenius, Thomas Becket in Art, pl. XXVII, XXVIII, XXX–XXXIX; Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, “Le meurtre dans la cathedral, theme iconographique mediéval”, Acts [. . .] de Sédières; Raymonde Foreville, “La diffusion du culte de Thomas Becket dans la France avant la fin du XIIe siècle”, Cahiers de civilisation mediévale, XIX (Poitiers, 1976) pp. 360–65, and plates.

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Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham, actually relocated Thomas’s martyrdom, setting it before the altar in order to stress the archbishop’s Christ-like combination of the roles of priest and victim in offering up his own blood (2:318; 3:498, 501). The reliquary which thirty years later depicted St Thomas’s death and Christ’s Crucifixion directly juxtaposed30 was no more extreme than the observation by William FitzStephen, an eyewitness of the murder, that ‘as Christ once suffered in his own body, so now he was suffering in Thomas’’ (3:142). The biographers’ narration of the martyrdom was affected by the posthumous proof of how precious was the death of his saint in the sight of the Lord. Benedict of Peterborough, referring to the miracle-working diluted relics of the saint’s blood, even noted that the blood of the lamb of Canterbury is drunk as the blood of the Lamb of Bethlehem is drunk – and of no other holy person could that be said (2:43). William of Canterbury reported an early (pre-canonisation) apparition in which Thomas was celebrated in English with an antiphon including the lines ‘A rare thing did our Lord/That He thy water changed to wine’ (1:151). Allusion to the miracle at the Marriage of Cana, the first of Christ’s ‘signs’, was part of the hagiographer’s repertoire, but the most detailed Gospel parallelism of all, and the extravagant claim that Thomas’s murder was even more unjust than Christ’s Passion, occurs already in the earliest account of the martyrdom, a letter written by John of Salisbury in early 1171 and incorporated, unchanged, in his biography.31 Accounts of the death thus used hagiographical techniques which were not simply pious surface embellishments of an otherwise ‘historical’ narrative, but reflect in a more fundamental way the biographers’ understanding of the past, even when reporting an event some of them had recently witnessed. To what extent, however, is their image of the martyr’s death consistent with their view of his life? It has been argued, for example, that Thomas’s change of life at his consecration ‘merely entitles him to be regarded as a good churchman, not a saint. [. . .] (The biographers) only tried to prove that he was personally a good man, frugal and chaste’.32 Does their account of the martyrdom then represent a radical break in either the intentions or the techniques of their work? How, in short, do they [196] reconcile the image of one who was simply a good man of conventional piety with one who ‘trod the winepress alone’ (3:523)?

White martydrom In their description of the carnage at Thomas’s death is an important indication of the biographers’ attitude to his life. Edward Grim wrote: ‘The blood, whitening from the brain, and the brain no less reddening from the blood, empurpled the face with the colours of the lily and the rose [. . .] the colours of the life

30 Op. cit., pl. 18, reliquary from Guelph Treasure, Cleveland Museum of Art, c. 1200. 31 Ep. 305, pp. 725–39. 32 A. Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 297.

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and death of a confessor and martyr’ (2:437). He is followed by Anonymous X; two early biographies, by William FitzStephen and the French poet Garnier of Pont-Ste-Maxence, as well as the early Anonymous IV and the late compilatory Icelandic Thomas Saga, based on twelfth-century accounts, all use variations of the image.33 It draws on a complex and recently revivified tradition of exegesis on Canticles 5.10 and related texts, using candet and rubet both to comment on Christ’s wounded body and to denote his spotless life and bloody death, and also to describe the confessors and martyrs who shared in his suffering. The particular contrast of lilies, to signify the inner tribulation and asceticism of white martyrdom, and roses to designate the red martyrdom of public persecution to death was an established convention, summarised in a sermon by Gregory the Great, who was echoing Jerome and Cyprian before him: There are two types of martyrdom: one in the soul and another in deed as well as soul [. . .] one hidden and the other public. [. . .] Holy Church is full of flowers of the elect, that in times of peace she has lilies and, in times of persecution, roses.34 St Thomas’s distinction was, Christlike, to combine both, as William FitzStephen explained: Verily in the garlands of the Church neither lilies nor roses are lacking and in the passion of the blessed Thomas both the gleaming white of the brain and the crimson red of the blood [. . .] were sure and certain signs that he was a good shepherd of Christ’s sheep, inasmuch as he laid down his life for them; archbishop and champion, confessor and martyr, destined to receive from the Lord a stole of two-fold colour – white in token of his faithful governance of his archiepiscopal see, and purple (crimson) in token of the happy consumation of his martyrdom.35 Despite the sacrilege of his murder, the personal sanctity of the archbishop had not been immediately evident to the monks of Canterbury, [197] however. Edward Grim, an outsider, recalls one of them saying that the archbishop ought not to be

33 Edward Grim 2:437–38; William FitzStephen 3:143; Anon. IV 4:194; Anon. X 4:436. La vie de saint Thomas le martyr, ed. E. Wallberg (Lund, 1922) p. 190 for Garnier’s metrical Life of 1172– 74; Thomas Saga Erkibyskups, ed. Eirikr Magnusson (Rolls Series, London, 1875), vol. 1, pp. 552–59 for the Icelandic compilation. 34 PL 76:1263–64; 22:905; 4:249–50. The exegetical tradition behind this imagery is discussed in J. O’Reilly, “Candidus et Rubicundus in the Lives of Thomas Becket”, Analecta Bollandiana, 99 (1981) pp. 303–14; v Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints, (Chicago and London, 1981) p. 77 for non-exegetical examples of the antique topos. 35 Translations of William FitzStephen are from George Greenaway, The Life and Death of Thomas Becket, (London, 1961) pp. 157–58.

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regarded as a martyr having been slain as the reward of his own obstinacy (2:440). Critical in changing their response was the discovery when they stripped the body that Thomas had secretly worn not only a hairshirt, but sackcloth from thighs to knees, a spectacular proof of chastity and ‘a circumstance of which we have neither read nor heard of an example in the case of any other saint’ (2:17). All was so vermin-ridden that ‘anyone might have thought that the martyrdom of that day was less grievous than that which these small enemies continually inflicted’ (2:442). William FitzStephen also stresses the importance of the disclosure: Having seen with their own eyes his two-fold martyrdom, the voluntary one of his life and the violent one of his death, they prostrated themselves on the ground, they kissed his hands and feet, they invoked him as a saint and proclaimed him God’s holy martyr. (3:148) Although the personality of Archbishop Anselm more readily suggested sanctity, earlier monks of Christ Church had entertained doubts about Anselm’s claims to sainthood long after his death, so Eadmer appended miracle stories to his biography. Despite the important precedents for the omission of miracles from saints’ Lives, by the twelfth century ‘the question of sanctity was one that only a generous supply of miracles could settle decisively’.36 Such proof was not wanting in the case of Thomas. All his biographers, including those who wrote before the canonisation, were writing in the context of immense popular acclaim for the posthumous miracles. Certainly they form an important part of their testimony; John of Salisbury classified them rather as Christ listed his miracles in answer to John the Baptist’s question, ‘Art thou he that should come?’ (2:322). Miracles were regarded as grace-given signs of a saint’s virtue. Caesarius of Haisterbach, reporting debates on Becket’s sanctity occasioned by the lack of miracles in his lifetime, vindicated his reputation by citing the many and great posthumous proofs of his sainthood (2:291). But however crucial such proofs may have been in securing popular and canonical recognition for Becket, (indeed, because of this), the biographers insist that St Thomas’s claim to sanctity was not based on his miracles. Walter Daniel, while supplementing and defending the miracle stories in his Vita Ailredi, felt the need to explain, ‘The miracles wrought by Ailred [. . .] were grounded in his merits’37 and the contemporary monastic and particularly Cister-

36 R.W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer, p. 330. 37 The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel, ed. M. Powicke, (London, 1950) p. 81, also p. 78: ‘I marvel at the charity of Ailred more than I should if he had raised four men from the dead’. V B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, pp. 98, 191 on the importance of the papal canonisation process in sanctioning this trend in twelfth century biography, which regarded virtue as the basis of sanctity, ‘to be established beyond all possible doubt by an account of the life of the saint’ and an authenticated and improving account of miracles as evidence of divine approval.

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cian insistence on virtue as the basis for sanctity was acknowledged by Becket’s biographers. The evidence of John of Salisbury is revealing: [198] Many folk in diverse places strove at the devil’s prompting to hide by false interpretation the virtues and good works of the most blessed Thomas, while yet he laboured for God’s law and the Church’s liberty. So now, since God has made manifest (i.e. through the posthumous miracles) what manner of man, how great the archbishop was, they are compelled even if unwillingly to proclaim his glory.38 This letter dates from as late as 1177–79. It suggests that there had been, and continued to be, a real need for Becket’s biographers to explain how ‘false interpretation’ of his life had arisen and been credible and to demonstrate, in the light of the martyrdom and the continuing miraculous proof of his sanctity, the true nature of St Thomas’s virtues and good works in the cause of the Church’s liberty. In 1186–87, Herbert of Bosham still needed to demote the posthumous miracles as signs for unbelievers and asserted, ‘I have set forth this man, not to be wondered at for his signs, but to be imitated for his works’; to Baldwin, a successor to the saint’s see, he commended St Thomas as ‘an example of purity whereby you should regulate your own life’ (3:156). As early as 1171–72 Edward Grim had urged his readers to consider not the martyrdom or the miracles of the saint but ‘the life that was full of martyrdom’ (2:354). Yet clearly there were problems involved in substantiating the claim of ‘white martyrdom’ as a vital part of the biographers’ larger claims for Thomas’s sanctity. Confronted with the hairshirt, the Canterbury monks had been frankly ‘astounded at this proof of a hidden piety greater than would have been credited the archbishop’. In resolving, it also voiced misgivings about his life: ‘Could he ever have set his thoughts upon an earthly kingdom, who had thus preferred sackcloth to all worldly pleasures?’ (2:17). His magnificence as Chancellor was well-known. Even after his alleged conversion, he remained a connoisseur and patron of the arts. He travelled to Tours in state and even in exile with a large entourage. The Pope commended him to the Cistercians ‘in order that you, who have hitherto lived in affluence and luxury, may learn in future [. . .] a lesson which can only be learnt from poverty’ (2:34). The biographers dealt with the problem in a variety of ways. Their description of Becket’s conversio on his election to Canterbury in 1162 – putting off the secular man and utterly abandoning the world – has tended to be regarded as rhetoric on their part or theatricality on Becket’s. But despite rhapsodic epithets, they do not describe a total revolution in Becket’s personal life; after all, even as Chancellor,

38 Ep. 325, p. 803. John here testifies to one of the many examples of punishment miraculously administered to those who doubted the power or sanctity of St Thomas or showed him insufficient honour.

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he had not exceeded the bounds of chastity and honour. The real revolution lay in his attitude to the Church. On an unknown date, but probably immediately after his consecration [199] on 3 June 1162, he resigned the chancellorship in which office he had profited from the Canterbury vacancy since the death of Archbishop Theobald in 1161 and had been privy to the king’s alleged design against the Church (3:180; 4:14). The biographers do not dwell on the disappointment Becket must have caused his mentor, Archbishop Theobald, who had recommended him, while Becket was Archdeacon of Canterbury, for the chancellorship probably in late 1154. Theobald had presumably hoped thereby to give some safeguard to the interests of the Church in the new reign, but Becket had put off the deacon and put on the Chancellor.39 The biographers insist, however, that on his promotion to the archiepiscopal office, Becket ‘opposed the king’s design by every means in his power’. Henry II’s disappointment and rage against the archbishop, even before their formal confrontation at Westminster in October 1163, concerning the judicial treatment of criminous clerks, could therefore be related by the biographers to ‘the king’s design against the clergy of England as a body’, which originated, they claimed, from ‘sometime before, in the episcopate of Archbishop Theobald’ (3:43). This partly deflects attention from Becket’s personal responsibility in alienating royal favour, so vital to the security of the Church, through his early peremptory actions such as the attempts to recover alienated Canterbury possessions, to excommunicate a royal tenant-in-chief, and to contest a royal taxation measure. John of Salisbury bitterly lamented from exile in 1165 that the archbishop had ‘seemed from the start to have roused the resentment of the king and his associates by his zeal – somewhat inadvisedly’ (Ep. 150, p. 49). Becket’s reluctance to accept the archiepiscopal office because, as Chancellor, ‘he had destroyed holy Church and despised her laws’, was reportedly overcome by Henry of Winchester’s injunction: ‘You must and shall change from Saul the persecutor to Paul’.40 The archbishop and his supporters certainly made some attempt to promote the Pauline image but it was rendered exceedingly difficult by the post-conversion behaviour of Becket’s ‘who yielded in the Church’s cause at Clarendon [January 1164] and who, when summoned legally for a financial offence [at the Council of Northampton, October 1164], conscious of wrongdoing, lost confidence in his pretexts, and by a secret flight both unwise and impudent, professed his own guilt’.41 In trying to create an image of personal sanctity for their provocative subject, therefore, the biographers chiefly relied on showing that although ‘his outward visage was like that of ordinary man’, his death had revealed that ‘within, all was different’ (3:37). The very paradox was part of the martyr’s appeal: ‘All ran

39 3:168, 173. For Becket’s career as Chancellor, v L.B. Radford, Thomas of London before his Consecration, (Canterbury, 1894) pp. 153–84. 40 La vie de saint Thomas le martyr, 1.490; J. Shirley, Garnier’s Becket, p. 14. 41 This is John of Salisbury, ruefully putting the case for the opposition, Ep. 187, p. 237.

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to view clad in sackcloth, him whom as Chancellor they had beheld vestured in purple and satin’ (3:148). The same [200] writer noted that at his consecration, the archbishop took as his pattern St Sebastian and St Cecilia, public figures who had also concealed their asceticism ‘mortifying the flesh with sackcloth’ while appearing ‘outwardly adorned with vesture of gold’. Likewise, St Thomas endeavoured to be more devout than he appeared. His dietary austerities were hidden from general view by his virtues as a host; the hairshirt adopted at his consecration was worn throughout exile ‘unknown even to his nearest friends’ (2:346); the daily scourgings were only revealed after death by his confessor, when it became evident at last that ‘this saintly man had in his secret life all the tokens of sanctity and religion’ (4:79; 3:147). Another contrast noted between public image and private life, appearance and reality, was that, although a secular clerk ordained only the day before his consecration, inwardly the archbishop was a monk. To some extent this reflects the anxiety of the Christ Church monks that the archbishop of Canterbury, and therefore their abbot, should be a regular (2:368; 4:15–16). An anonymous account has Prior Odo discoursing on the qualities desirable in the archbishop, most notably that he should be a monk. He cites at length Thomas Becket’s predecessors who had fulfilled this requirement (4:181–85). Alan of Tewkesbury, who became a monk of Christ Church c. 1174 and its prior in 1179, explains that Thomas in exile felt unworthy to receive back his pastoral charge from the Pope unless he also received the monastic habit because: he had learnt that from the first foundation of the Church of Canterbury the archbishops had nearly all been monks, nor according to the histories of olden times had there ever been a schism in the kingdoms save when the archbishop had been a secular priest. (2:345) Clearly, Thomas and his biographers tried to make good this deficiency. But the most authoritative biographers – William FitzStephen, Edward Grim, Herbert of Bosham – were themselves secular clerks. Other considerations may have prompted their insistence on Becket’s quasi-monastic status. White martyrdom, or the willingly undertaken living death to self for love of God, had been exemplified in the asceticism and isolation of the desert fathers in the post-persecution era when the red martyrdom of physical death for Christ no longer marked out his saints. The tradition was made available to the West through Evagrius’s translation of Athanasius’s Life of St. Anthony, Rufinus of Aquilea’s translation of the rules of St Basil and Cassian’s Collations. It was given authoritative expression in the works of Jerome, Augustine, Caesarius of Aries, and Gregory the Great. It was popularised through the influence on hagiography of Sulpicius Severus, who acclaimed St Martin’s willing endurance of watchings and fasting, the scorn of the envious and the persecutions of the wicked as a living bloodless

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[201] martyrdom.42 For many early saints, notably St Columba, peregrinatio – wandering like a fugitive, deprived of the consolation of friends and kin – formed an important part of their practice of this bloodless martyrdom.43 Pilgrimage, either imposed as a penance or voluntarily undertaken as an ascetic and devotional exercise, was a characteristic feature of medieval spirituality. Thomas’s exemplar Archbishop Anselm had been harrassed like a common fugitive in 1097, but nothing could efface the memory of how he had dignified his journey by publicly taking the pilgrim’s scrip and staff from the altar at Canterbury before setting off into exile.44 Herbert of Bosham’s prolonged description of Thomas’s flight as a fugitive, his arrival, like Anselm, at St Bertin, his continental wanderings, his dispossession, the lamented banishment of his friends, makes a virtue of necessity and evokes something of the peregrinatio pro Christi (3:318–22, 357–62, 373–75). However, by the twelfth century the concept of white martyrdom had become particularly identified with the strict observance of the eremitcal and coenobitic life, which provided a penitential pilgrimage of the spirit and had undergone profound renewal in the practice of the Camaldonese and early Cistercians: obedience to monastic vows amounted to the daily crucifixion of the monk. In his spiritual counsels Anselm vigorously upheld the superiority of the pilgrimage provided by the monastic life.45 Herbert of Bosham asserts that Thomas personally chose to retreat to the Cistercian house of Pontigny (3:357) which John of Salisbury referred to as ‘the land of your pilgrimage’ and Garnier has the archbishop call to mind the example of Abraham leaving his country and kin (Genesis 12.1), which was a classic model of peregrination in hagiography.46 Through the good offices of John aux Bellesmains, Bishop of Poitiers (a banished member of Becket’s circle who was closely connected with the Cistercians), the Pontigny community had already been praying for Thomas before the exile and remained faithful to him throughout.47 Accounts of his retirement to a life of monastic poverty there ‘as

42 Louis Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages, (London, 1927) pp. 205–10; Augustine McGregor, “Martyrdom and the Monastic Life”, Hallel, Review of Monastic Spirituality and Liturgy, 9 (1981) pp. 57–72; Clare Stancliffe, “Red, white and blue martyrdom”, Ireland in Early Medieval Europe. Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick, D. Dumville (Cambridge, 1982) pp. 29–32. 43 K. Hughes, “The Changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960) 143–51; Arnold Angenendt, Monachi Peregrini. Studien zu Pirmin und den Monastischen Vorstellungen des frühen Mittelalters, (Munich, 1972) pp. 137–38, 146–47, 151–52. 44 Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. M. Rule (Rolls Series, London, 1884) pp. 87–88. 45 Giles Constable, ‘Monachisme et pèlerinage au Moyen Age’, Revue Historique, 258 (1977) pp. 3–27; Jean Leclercq, ‘Monachisme et pérégrination du IXe au XIIe siècle’, Studia Monastica, 3 (1961) pp. 33–52. 46 Ep. 179, p. 191; La vie de s. Thomas Becket, I. 2616, pp. 80–81. 47 “The Place of the Cistercian Order in the Early Years of the Becket Controversy”, Bernard McGinn, The Golden Chain. A Study in the Theological Anthropology of Isaac of Stella, (Washingon, 1972) pp. 34–50. I am indebted to Fr. Hugh McCaffery of Mt. Melleray Abbey for this reference.

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befits an exile and athlete of Christ’ (2:34), detail observation of the canonical hours, lectio divina and such austerities of fasting and flagellation as to endanger his health (3:376). After his enforced withdrawal from Pontigny, his exile at the Benedictine abbey near Sens ‘where the body of the glorious virgin and martry St Colomba lies’, from November 1166, until the month before his death (half of his archiepiscopate), was marked by asceticism, compunction and the fervent interior life of the contemplative (2:415, 417). Over his hairshirt Thomas continued to wear the coarse, ill-fitting habit with which he had been vested by the abbot of Pontigny (2:345) and to administer daily the discipline which had become a common feature of contemporary monastic penitential practice, offering the flagellant a particular share in the sufferings of Christ. He died near the [202] altar in Canterbury cathedral dedicated to St Benedict, ‘under whose protection and by whose example he was crucified to the world’, and this monastic asceticism is identified with his endurance of ‘every penalty inflicted by the executioners of the flesh’ at his murder (2:436). The Canterbury monks who discovered the evidence of their abbot’s white martyrdom exclaimed: ‘See, see, he was a monk and we knew it not’ (2:442); ‘Behold, one who was indeed a monk and indeed a hermit, who endured torments not only in death but also in life’ (4:79). The next question which needs to be considered is whether the biographers’ claims for Thomas’s personal sanctity were confined to such descriptions of his private asceticism and spirituality, whose very secrecy conveniently defied refutation by his critics. How does this image accord with the treatment of his memorable public life? The biographies give a remarkably vivid account of the passionate denunciations of the archbishop by his fellow bishops, which is corroborated by the contemporary correspondence. While this may win modern approval for the biographers as historians, it is not necessarily incompatible with their demonstration of the saint’s sanctity, though at times it exercises their ingenuity and affirms that public doubts on this score had not been entirely allayed by the martyrdom. The Anonymous of Lambeth in particular felt the need to meet criticisms of St Thomas – for his lapse at Clarendon, his flight, the uncounselled excommunication of his episcopal colleagues from Vezelay, his vainglory. All pass swiftly over the archbishop’s inglorious behaviour at the Council of Clarendon. He had there been required to give formal assent to a written version of the customs concerning relations between royal and ecclesiastical authority, which allegedly represented the practice of Henry I’s time, and which Becket had, with reluctance, verbally undertaken to observe, ‘saving his order’. FitzStephen alone says that at length, in fear of his life and anxious to placate the king, Becket appended his seal, though even Herbert of Bosham admits that ‘with some caution he did not utterly refuse’ to do so, but sought a delay and took away a copy of the Constitutions (3:288). William of Canterbury made the best of the capitulation before the king by piously observing that the failings of a saint are sent as a warning to the faithful, rather as St Wilfrid’s biographer had loyally, if unoriginally, commented that lightning strikes the peaks first (1:17). Few acta have survived from Thomas’s archiepiscopate and it seems likely that ‘he was unable to exercise much jurisdiction in England during 346

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exile’.48 His somewhat shadowy pastoral image receives some reflected light from allusions to St Martin, exemplary bishop and friend of monks.49 Benedict of Peterborough contrasts the archbishop with the bishops who were ‘hirelings rather than pastors in God’s church’ (2:14) and their criticism is accordingly defused [203] to some extent. Thomas’s frequent consultations with his eruditi offset the bishops’ complaints that he acted without counsel. The defection of some bishops after the Council of Westminster is interpreted as a demonstration of how God constantly tries those whom he calls to be his saints (3:275). Thomas’s vulnerability on the serious charge of deserting his flock for six of the eight years of his office by flight into exile is met partly by insistence that he had been in grave danger, and also by editorial vindications citing scriptural precedents for justified flight. It is tempting to skip such passages in order to get on to the next ‘historical’ part of the narrative – Herbert of Bosham apologises for his own prolixity and tediousness on these occasions – but they can often reveal clues about the biographers’ techniques and historicity. Herbert defends Becket’s flight by twice citing Christ’s exhortation in Matthew 10.23: ‘And when they shall persecute you in this city flee into another’ (3:319). Herbert later ponders on the theme of spiritual flight to the Cross. His apparently haphazard patchworking of scriptural allusions however, and inversion of John 10.11–16 (he has the Good Shepherd fleeing, not the hireling!) is not simply a tortuous attempt to manufacture a line of defence for Becket’s behaviour. It draws on the standard paradox posed in patristic exegesis: If the apostles were good shepherds and not hirelings, why did they flee in time of persecution? John 10.11–16 presented a formidable challenge to the fugitive prelate. Its strictures could only be countered by expounding another question: And why did our Lord say, ‘When they persecute you in this city, flee ye to another’? Even so, the extenuating circumstances justifying the flight of a priest were considered to be very limited.50 Matthew 10.23 was cited not only in exegesis but in hagiography too, for instance, to explain the flight of the Salonika martyrs in the early acta martyrum.51 Just such a historical example, invoking the same Gospel precept, was actually read by Becket and his intimates (including Herbert himself) at supper after the dramatic end of the trial at Northampton and apparently helped in the very formulation of the plan for Becket’s ‘evangelical flight’ that night (3:312). In short, the case for the 48 Anne Duggan, Acts [. . .] de Sédières, p. 35. 49 3:197, 202, 404. For the influence of Sulpicius Severus’s Vita S. Martini ‘as the paradigm of the life of a monk who also held episcopal or abbatial authority’, particularly in the Lives of St Ailred and St Hugh, v B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, pp. 173, 268, n. 21. 50 E.g. Augustine, In Iohannis evangelium, xlvi, 7 in Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, I. xxxvi, pars viii (Turnhoult, 1954) p. 402. Tertullian’s De fuga in persecutione is extreme in its recommendation of martyrdom, but its insistence that Matthew 10.23 was applicable only to the apostles was an argument which could readily be used to undermine any citation of the Gospel passage as a justification of flight. V T.D. Barnes, Tertullian, A Historical and Literary Study, (Oxford, 1971) pp. 176–96 for the early Christian debate about flight. 51 Acts of the Christian Martyrs, p. 281.

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defence was ready made once the initial identification of Becket’s cause with that of Christ’s apostles and martyrs had been established. And clearly, that identification was being claimed, long before the martyrdom. From exile another of the eruditi had fully listed, in order to refute, the damning charges then being levelled against Becket – his vacillation at the Council of Clarendon, exposure of the Church to danger and especially the secret flight which professed his guilt. John of Salisbury’s main line of defence in his tireless correspondence rallying faltering sympathisers in 1166–67 was to accuse the bishops of perfidy and to justify Becket’s behaviour with lengthy citations of scriptural precedents: ‘It is the right [204] course and based on the examples of the prophets and apostles’; in particular, the archbishop had St Paul and, supremely, Christ himself ‘as authority for his flight’.52 This alludes to Matthew 10.23 and the foregoing Gospel passage describing Christ’s predictions of the persecution and betrayal by false brethren awaiting his apostles, a passage traditionally applied to Christian martyrdom, both physical death and the living martyrdom of those who endure temptation and persecution for Christ’s sake. From this perspective, Herbert of Bosham’s use of scriptural allusion no longer seems simply a hagiographical excursus written with the rose-tinted hindsight of the martyrdom: it elaborates the rhetoric with which the archbishop’s circle is known from the epistolary evidence to have constructed his defence already in the 1160s. To a modern reader it would seem that they protest too much. Recent study of the opposition’s argument may help to suggest why. The archbishop’s flight into exile was seen by his enemies as the indictment of his career and produced particularly dangerous criticism. E.M. Peters has shown how Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, did not limit himself to traditional allegorical techniques in applying to Becket’s flight an alternative scriptural maxim from Proverbs 28.1, ‘The wicked flee and no man pursueth’ (4:337). His letter to Becket in 1166, Multiplicem nobis, skilfully uses canon law to build up a charge of Becket’s ‘canonical culpability for having deserted his flock’. The crucial text from Matthew 10.23, used by Becket’s supporters to justify his exile, had also been cited in Gratian’s discussion of the episcopal office, but so had John 10.12 and, in the interests of pastoral stabilitas, the Decretum envisaged very few circumstances which could justify episcopal flight; indeed, it could constitute ‘one of the technical grounds for removing a bishop’.53 Foliot’s version of Becket’s and particularly the king’s behaviour at

52 Ep. 187, p. 237; Ep. 225, pp. 391–93. William of Canterbury recounts, c. 1173, a vision at the time of Becket’s flight, in which a hedgehog with the book of the Acts of the Apostles on its back was driven into the sea by the royal hunt (1:40–42). Beryl Smalley notes it ‘signified that St. Paul had set the example of fleeing from his persecutors, as Becket did’, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, p. 108. The vision would seem an accurate reflection of the contemporary debate described here. 53 “The Archbishop and the Hedgehog”, Law, Church and Society: Essays in honour of Stephen Kuttner, ed. K. Pennington and R. Somerville, (Pennsylvania, 1977) pp. 167–84 (p. 173). The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 170, pp. 229–43 for the text of Multiplicem nobis.

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Clarendon and Northampton claimed that the archbishop’s flight was not provoked by any such extenuating circumstances and was therefore illegal. Becket’s supporters could only counter this in the mid-1160s with scriptural typology and emotive images of the forced exile of the persecuted. But this confrontation between Foliot’s use of ‘modern’ legal language and the ‘old-fashioned’ rhetoric of Becket and his supporters can be misleading. Foliot’s letter gives little support to the view that precise technical language is necessarily any more truthful or historical than the allegorical mode. Foliot did not oppose Becket on ideological grounds but largely because he judged the archbishop’s alienation of the king had been unnecessary and highly dangerous to the Church. He used the arguments of very recently formulated canon law to show that Becket was personally unworthy of his office. At Northampton, Hilary of Chichester had voiced [205] the longing that Becket cease to be archbishop, and other bishops urged him to resign as a way out of the impasse. His reinstatement by Alexander III in November 1164, was not enough to vindicate him, either to silence Foliot or to reassure some of Becket’s own supporters who had been uneasily aware that he had already tried to flee the country after Clarendon, where his weakness before the king had in itself constituted a flight (1:29). After Clarendon, one of his own household had already reproached him through allusion to John 10.12: ‘When the Shepherd has fled the sheep lie scattered before the wolf’ (2:324–25). This strengthened the need of the eruditi to identify the exiled archbishop with the cause of the Church and to promote as far as possible an image of sanctity. Of urgent necessity there was a hagiographic element in their discussion of current affairs. Herbert of Bosham supplied the learned footnotes to the discussion of the flight in his biography some twenty years or so later, when the reproach of John 10.12 evidently still caused him some trouble. Paradoxically, after martyrdom, the biographers were best able to strengthen Becket’s case not by exegetical ingenuity, but by citing the authenticated testimony of recent history. William FitzStephen’s eyewitness report of the Council of Northampton partly refutes the premiss and counters the language of Foliot’s accusation by demonstrating the extenuating circumstances in which the archbishop had fled from his trial. Accounts of the archbishop’s public life are dominated by courtroom confrontations with accusations and defence continuing throughout the exile. The bishops, especially Gilbert Foliot, are revealed as false witnesses in this prolonged trial and Thomas’s endurance of their betrayal as part of his white martyrdom. Even his prophetic dreams of red martyrdom are staged in a courtroom where his prosecutors, Hilary of Chichester and Foliot, are struck dumb and putrefied.54 For the biographers, the justice of the respective causes of the real-life courtroom protagonists is manifested in the contrast between their rhetorical performances. Thomas Saga recalls that the young Thomas Becket had a slight stutter and the partisan Stephen of Rouen jibed that Becket had remained silent at the Council

54 La vie de saint Thomas le martyr, 11.3636, 3861; Garnier’s Becket, pp. 97, 102.

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of Tours in 1163 because of his inadequate command of spoken Latin.55 Nevertheless, William FitzStephen specifically portrays Archbishop Becket delivering his inspired defence at Northampton in 1164 without stammering (3:63), and Garnier depicts him later at the papal court in Sens arguing his case in fair Latin as if he were Solomon. Garnier labours the point. The archbishop was constantly interrupted and his every argument exhaustively contested by one favourable to the king, William of Pavia, because, remarks Garnier, he suspected Becket of having learned his speech off by heart! The biographer insists that Becket was undaunted by this interrogation, which lasted [206] half a day, and his language sounds to have been businesslike: ‘He completed his excellent chain of reasoning; he demolished the laws (i.e. the Constitutions of Clarendon) by well-supported argument, by consistent logic and clearly-demonstrated proof’.56 This might just mean that the archbishop had done his homework, but that is not what chiefly strikes the biographers in reporting the courtroom exchanges. The learned and usually eloquent Gilbert Foliot is shown at a loss for words, and the other rhetorically accomplished royal envoy, Hilary of Chichester, (who ‘trusted in his own eloquence rather than in truth and justice’, remarked Alan of Tewkesbury), is left floundering in grammatical error and mispronunciation when attempting to accuse his spiritual superior (2:338). Eadmer’s skill in presenting his account of the Council of Rockingham in 1095 as a piece of on-the-spot reporting has perhaps obscured his rather different use of this traditional device of contrasting the rhetoric of courtroom protagonists. The chief instigator of discord between Anselm and the king (and, like Foliot, allegedly desirous of the archiepiscopal office) was the Bishop of Durham. He was ‘quick-witted and of ready tongue, rather than endowed with true wisdom’ and marvelled at the artless simplicity of Anselm’s unanswerable defence.57 Such courtroom ‘proofs’ of the true or false wisdom of the speaker, demonstrated through a particular quality of language and delivery, need not have been entirely unhistorical. Indeed, the fact that most of Becket’s biographers report Hilary of Chichester’s grammatical slip and that Herbert of Bosham, an eyewitness, also mentioned it in a private letter soon afterwards, strongly suggests that something extraordinary did happen (5:341–42). But what made such incidents noteworthy to the medieval author of sacred biography was the resonance they carried of the famous Gospel passage immediately preceeding Matthew 10.23 already discussed. In Matthew 10.16–22 Christ warns that, for his sake, his followers will be betrayed by false brethren, scourged in synagogues, delivered up in councils and brought before kings and governors. His true disciples are exhorted and promised: ‘Be wise (prudent) as serpents and simple (foolish) as doves. [. . .] 55 Thomas Saga, I, p. 28; R. Somerville, Pope Alexander III and the Council of Tours, (Los Angeles, 1977) p. 14. 56 La vie de saint Thomas le martyr, 11.2360–72; Garnier’s Becket, p. 63. 57 Historia Novorum in Anglia, pp. 60–61. I am indebted to Dr J.M. Picard for the observation that the contrast between eloquence and true wisdom is a classical topos too.

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When they shall deliver you up take no thought how or what to speak, for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. For it is not you who speak but the spirit of your Father’. Thus Garnier notes that Becket in delivering his defence speech was prudent, filled with the Holy Ghost and intelligible to all. Christ’s promise as recorded in Luke 21.15 (“I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist”) had been early fulfilled in the protomartyr’s disputation with his opponents in the synagogue: ‘And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit that spoke’ (Acts 6.10). The spirit prompted [207] subsequent martyrs on trial to fluency or eloquent silence, or struck their wrongful accusers dumb or incoherent. The liturgy for martyrs uses references from the Old Testament Wisdom literature to this concept of trial by rhetoric: ‘Blessed is he that hath not slipped with his tongue’. Herbert of Bosham actually cites one such text (Ecclesiastes 20.20) to show how the falsity of the bishops’ case is revealed in their uncharacteristic slips of the tongue when accusing Becket at the papal court (3:336). The martyr’s trial, sometimes featuring such manifestations of divine judgment while based in some sense on court records related by an eyewitness sympathiser, had formed an important part of many of the acta martyrum. Thomas’s clerk William FitzStephen, who witnessed and reported the trial of Northampton, reflected ‘O how great was the martyrdom he bore in spirit that day’ (3:68). At the papal court in Sens, Herbert of Bosham floridly described that trial as a spiritual gladiatorial combat and the tribulations of the archbishop’s subsequent flight in terms reminiscent of St Paul’s account of his heroic sufferings. Alexander III was moved to tears and proclaimed that the archbishop ‘while still living, could claim the privilege of martyrdom’ (3:335). If the biographers’ accounts of Becket’s death constitute a passio of the martyr, it may be asked how far their descriptions of his life resemble that other main hagiographic type, the vita of the confessor. A life story characterised by secret asceticism and endurance of public opposition as has so far been described, would, in itself, scarcely qualify: the confessor’s vita is generally structured on the gradual progress of the saint’s spiritual ascent.58 In explaining why the Becket biographers concentrated on the ‘historical non-hagiographical elements in their subject’, Dr. Gransden has observed that Becket ‘underwent neither sudden religious conversion [. . .] nor perceptible slow improvement in his spiritual life’.59 The problems involved in depicting the archbishop on the road to Damascus in June 1162 have already been indicated. Yet a remarkably full historical account of contemporary criticism of Becket after this ‘conversion’ and of his own admissions of error, is not entirely incompatible with the image of the confessor Christi, futurus martyr. Answering criticisms of the archbishop in 1165–66, John of Salis-

58 C.F. Altman, “Two Types of Opposition and the Structure of Latin Saints’ Lives”, Medievalia et Humanistica, 6 (1975) pp. 1–4. 59 Historical Writing in England c.550–c.1307, p. 297.

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bury conceded that Becket had done wrong both before and after his consecration but that he had repented, confessed and been absolved, and that both his learning and character had improved during the early months of exile. His urgent entreaty that Becket show patience, humility and moderation in his dealings with the king and bishops (‘above all be cautious that you show no sign of arrogance’) makes its own comment on the archbishop’s demeanour, but in the same letter John commends his cause and identifies those who persecute Becket with those who persecute Christ.60 [208] It is possible to discern a story of spiritual progress in the biographers’ revelation that growing opposition sharpened the archbishop’s sense of his own vocation, leading him to confess past weakness and renew his dedication. They recount not only Gilbert Foliot’s denunciation of Becket’s lack of courage, prudence and humility, but the taunting accusation of a member of his own household after his vacillation at Clarendon: ‘What virtue is left to him who has betrayed his conscience and his reputation? [. . .] having left posterity an example hateful to God, thou hast joined with the wicked servants of Satan to the confusion of the Church’s freedom’. All the biographers present this as a major crisis for the saint: ‘I repent and am so aghast at my transgression that I judge myself unworthy as a priest to approach him whose Church I have thus basely sold’.61 He did penance, and abstained from celebrating Mass until ordered to do so again by the Pope (1:24; 5:88). He attempted to take a stand at Northampton but again faltered. After fleeing the country he dramatically resigned his archbishopric to the Pope, confessing that his appointment had been uncanonical and that his strength was unequal to the task. While this is open to interpretation as an astute diplomatic move,62 Alan of Tewkesbury’s informed and detailed narrative reports Alexander reinstating Thomas with the acclamation ‘Now at last it is plain to us [. . .] how pure a confession you have witnessed from the time you were first made archbishop [. . .] we know you to be a man tried and proved in manifold temptations’ (2:344). Such outbursts of compunction, accompanied by the charismatic gift of tears abundantly evident from his consecration till the eve of his death, mark the saint’s spiritual pilgrimage in the biographies and form part of his white martyrdom. Remorse culminated in his final confession and resolution before his murderers: ‘Once I fled like a timorous priest. Now I have returned to my Church. [. . .] Nevermore will I desert her’ (3:134–35). The extensive use of the idiom of early persecutions in the accounts of Becket’s passio has already been remarked but may now be seen to have had a significance greater than that of illustrating his courage or attempting to supplement the deficiency of saintly models in his life by the provisions of a classic martyr’s

60 Ep. 175, pp. 163, 165. Also Ep. 150, p. 49; Ep. 167, p. 99; Ep. 168, p. 107; Ep. 187, p. 237. 61 2:324–25, translation from English Historical Documents, 2, ed. D.C. Douglas and G.W. Greenaway, (London, 1953) p. 723. 62 W.L. Warren, Henry II, (London, 1973) p. 491.

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death. Martyrdom had been the essential context of the intense discussion of flight in early exegesis. As has been seen, this attempted to reconcile the precepts of John 10.11–13 and Matthew 10.23, on which both the Decretum (and therefore Gilbert Foliot) and Becket’s supporters drew. The apologia for his flight could only be completed in his return from exile to face his murderers without flinching. Attention has already been drawn to the concerted testimony of the biographers, including eyewitnesses of the events immediately leading up to Becket’s murder, emphatically declaring that ‘had he wished, the archbishop might [209] easily have turned aside and saved himself by flight’ (3:140), that he refused such counsel, dreaded the opportunity for martyrdom might be lost if he took refuge in the church and refused even to take the precaution of bolting the door against his murderers. The similarity with Nehemias in 2 Esdras 6.10–11 was noted by a subsequent archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, when he extolled St Thomas as a model of the steadfast good prelate.63 Edward Grim’s eyewitness and pre-canonisation description of the martyrdom not only repeatedly uses the image of the Good Shepherd from John 10.12, but specifically links it with the crucial passage from Matthew 10.23 (italicised below): Becket’s followers were scattered before the murderers ‘like sheep before wolves’; he was urged to flee to the church ‘but he, mindful of his former promise that he would not through fear of death flee from those who kill the body, rejected flight. For in such case it were not meet to flee from city to city’. He chose ‘to die by the sword rather than see the divine law and sacred canons subverted’. In defending the cause of his flock that good shepherd ‘would not delay the hour of his death, when it was in his power to do so [. . .] that the fury of the wolves, satiated by the blood of the shepherd, might spare the sheep’.64 Such passages, which may easily be dismissed as purely laudatory, pious set-pieces, detachable from an essentially historical narrative, may now appear to reflect a vital and continuing contemporary debate. The biographers’ triumphal reply to the taunts of Foliot and the suspicions of others that Becket had been a ‘fugitive prelate’ was to be annually exalted in the liturgy for St Thomas’s feast, which enshrines John 10.11–16 as the Gospel reading for his mass and as a lection for his Office.65 Alongside the attempt to demonstrate the archbishop’s personal sanctity in life, and especially to vindicate his flight into exile, his supporters argued that his cause was that of the Church, despite the king’s and eventually most of the bishops’ opinion to the contrary. The formulation of the argument, associating Becket’s case with that of former archbishops of Canterbury, will be examined more closely in Part II, but its essential features may be sketched here. Thomas Becket’s veneration of St Anselm is well known and the similarities between their 63 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, (2nd ed. Oxford, 1952; repr. Notre Dame, 1978) p. 252, n. 2. 64 2:433–34; Herbert of Bosham also alludes to John 10.12, 3:483. 65 Breviarium Ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, fasc. 1, ed. F. Procter and C. Wordsworth, (Cambridge, 1882), third nocturn, p. cclx.

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two archiepiscopates is evident – their alienation from episcopal colleagues in the conflict with the crown over royal customs and divine law; the qualification to their promises to uphold such customs ‘according to the will of God’ or ‘saving their order’; their citation of the Petrine claims; their appeals to Rome, long exile from the Christ Church community and vigorous concern with the possessions and privileges of Canterbury, especially its primacy over York. The manner in which Becket had fled the royal court and the country markedly distinguished him from saintly Anselm however. At the [210] papal court after the Council of Northampton, Gilbert Foliot claimed that the dissension there had arisen over ‘a minor and unimportant matter, which might easily have been resolved if a discreet moderation had been shown’; Becket, acting on his own opinion had pushed matters to extremes and fled simply to escape blame for his own rashness. Similarly, Roger of York argued that Becket’s inveterate obstinacy and vanity were at fault (2:332–39). The limitations of a defence depending on Matthew 10.23 during the exile have been indicated. John of Salisbury countered the charge in his correspondence: ‘Those who persecute the archbishop of Canterbury in this case do not persecute him because he is Thomas’ but because, like the prophets and apostles of old he performed the unpopular but holy task of summoning ‘the princes of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah to hear and obey the law of God’.66 By setting the archbishops of Canterbury in the biblical tradition of seers persecuted for witnessing to Christ, and by emphasising Becket’s role as one of the custodians of Canterbury, Becket’s defenders and Becket himself sanctified his flight with the aura of exile and cast his critics in the role of persecuting his sacred office, not his provocative personality. The privileges and possessions of Canterbury, Becket reminded the English clergy in 1166, were: the patrimony of our crucified Saviour, not given for our use but entrusted to our stewardship. Although the divine mercy has sometimes allowed the archbishop of Canterbury to be exiled unjustly, yet whoever heard of his being tried and condemned, compelled to give bail in the king’s court, above all by his own suffragans?67 The propaganda potential of liturgy and the cult of saints in medieval society was considerable. Anselm offered an instructive model in emphasising the unique vocation of Canterbury and the role of the archbishop as steward of its patrons. He had revived the liturgical honour accorded St Gregory and the Canterbury saints, notably Dunstan and Elphege, before the Conquest. Professor Southern has ascribed to Anselm a sermon for a revived feast of St Gregory, possibly preached 66 [Editors’ note: in the original publication, this note is blank. For the sake of consistency, we have retained it.] 67 5:490–512, Ep. ccxxiii. As early as January 1165, John of Salisbury was warning Becket to seek papal protection against encroachments on the possessions of Canterbury during his exile, Ep. 144, p. 35.

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before a meeting of the Curia Regis in 1101, where its plea for a renewal of the bond established between Rome and England by Pope Gregory I would have had a particularly topical application.68 Before delivering the controversial sentences of excommunication of his enemies, originally intended to include the king, from Vezelay in 1166, Becket journeyed to Soissons and spent three nights in vigil before the shrine not only of its patron bishop ‘the refuge of those about to fight’, but of the Canterbury patron St Gregory ‘the founder of the English Church who lies buried in the same city’.69 In 1166 Becket reminded the king of his promise made to the previous archbishop of Canterbury, to preserve the liberty of the Church and particularly enjoined him to restore to the church of Canterbury ‘from which you [211] received your promotion and consecration, the rank it held in the time of your predecessors and mine, together with all its possessions’.70 Writing to the Bishop of Exeter in 1169, John of Salisbury reported King Henry’s astute demand at Montmirail that the archbishop simply preserve the customs observed by his predecessors at Canterbury. It stole Becket’s own argument. Some clerics there, deceived by the apparent moderation of the royal demands, cited Scripture to exhort Becket to defer and follow the customs of his fathers! Becket retorted: ‘In evil deeds it is not right to imitate our fathers’ and anyway, he argued, ‘none of his predecessors had been compelled [. . .] to make profession of customs, save only St Anselm who went into exile for seven years for the same cause’.71 He again cited the example of Anselm in asserting the rights of Canterbury at Fréteval in 1170 (3:110), and interpreted the coronation of the young king by the Archbishop of York on 14 June that year as a calculated insult to Canterbury.72 The authoritative example of predecessors at Canterbury was thus enunciated during Thomas’s exile as an important part of his case. His opponents did not question the sanctity of his pattern, but denied he was cast in the same mould. Dismissing as a deception the archbishop’s claim to be suffering for justice and the Church, King Henry asserted at Montmirail in 1169, ‘I have always been willing and I am willing still, to allow him to possess and govern the Church, over which he presides, in the same freedom as any of his holy predecessors’ (3:424). But Becket was, in return, required to preserve for the king the customs observed by his five predecessors at Canterbury, ‘some of whom are saints and shine brightly with their miracles’, Henry added pointedly. Similarly, Foliot counselled Becket to emulate his Canterbury predecessor St Augustine, whose concern for the interests of the Church had been manifest in his moderation towards the king. Foliot

68 St. Anselm and his Biographer, pp. 364–66. 69 John of Salisbury, Ep. 168, p. 111. Becket’s vigil ended on Ascension Day, 2 June, which in 1166 ‘concurred with that of St. Drausius’, J.C. Robertson, Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, (London, 1859) p. 184. 70 5:282, Ep. CLIV. 71 John of Salisbury, Ep. 288, p. 643. 72 Anne Heslin, “The Coronation of the Young King in 1170”, Studies in Church History 2, ed. G.J. Cuming, (London, 1965) p. 166.

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scorned Becket’s stance as the exiled martyr in a venerable tradition: he had abandoned the Church and fled to escape the death with which no one threatened him.73 John of Salisbury found it necessary to write to Christ Church in 1170, spelling out Thomas’s parallel with the exiled Anselm and exhorting the monks to welcome his return accordingly.74 Even Herbert of Bosham was uneasy that the saint did not from the outset measure up to the founding fathers of his cause and had him confessing this shortcoming after Clarendon: ‘It is through me, and because of my sins, that the English Church is reduced to bondage, that Church which my predecessors [. . .] led through so many and great dangers’, withstanding the enemy even to the shedding of blood (a clear reference to St Elphege) (3:289). However, Herbert also shows Becket a year before his martyrdom still apologetic about the flight from Northampton, and aware that ‘there have been archbishops before me, holier and greater than I’, but equally [212] aware that their historic task of extirpating abuses of the Church was incomplete. With a composure that exasperated those trying to mediate peace and end the exile, Becket declared he was ready to resume the charge of his church with all its liberties, such as the holy men his predecessors had enjoyed, but would condemn as contrary to their institutes any fresh customs detrimental to the Church. He therefore declined to submit unconditionally to the king’s demands. Herbert of Bosham did no harm to his later image of St Thomas in reporting after the martyrdom what was in all probability historically true: those present at Montmirail imputed the failure of the negotiations to Becket’s arrogance. But in commenting that they lacked the discernment to see that the archbishop was standing firm and resolute in the tradition of his saintly predecessors, Herbert was accurately reporting what Becket and his circle claimed at the time. As has been observed of St Wilfrid, another image-conscious archbishop, there is no reason to doubt that the biographer cast his subject in the same general mould as St Thomas would have cast himself.75

PART II The first part of this study has discussed the biographers’ use both of conventional rhetorical devices and of documented, eyewitness accounts and has made some comparisons of their language and interpretation of events with that of the contemporary epistolary evidence. It has suggested that, despite the problematic nature of their subject, St Thomas’s biographers were concerned in their accounts of his death and hidden life and even of his controversial public life to promote

73 Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 170, pp. 239–40. 74 Ep. 303, p. 713. 75 H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, (London, 1972) p. 141.

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an image of personal sanctity and a just cause, and were not content to rely upon the circumstances of his martyrdom or the posthumous miracles. Their image of Thomas Becket’s combination of red and white martyrdom, whatever modern readers may personally feel about its plausibility, questions the notion that the biographers simply laid a hagiographic veneer over parts of their essentially historical narrative. The second part of this work will try to explore more fully some of the themes outlined in the introductory survey. It begins by looking at examples of the language used, or allegedly used, in the debates at the Councils of Clarendon and Northampton. Finally, it examines in some detail aspects of the biographers’ accounts of the crucial last day of Becket’s trial at Northampton in October 1164, on the eve of his flight into exile. This may throw new light, not only on the biographers’ techniques but again on the events they record.

The language of the debate The accounts of St Thomas’s living martyrdom are free from the extended Gospel parallelism which glorifies his death, yet incorporate biblical and [213] liturgical allusions. It has been suggested above that such allusions do not necessarily denote a change from the historical to the hagiographical mode. Further discussion of the biographers’ use of such language had been made possible by recent scholarship in three important areas of twelfth-century activity which has greatly illumined the intellectual context in which the Becket controversy occurred in the 1160s and in which it was reported in the 1170s. First, the correspondence of the controversy, the largest of all twelfth-century letter collections, has received a detailed textual history and the letters of Gilbert Foliot and John of Salisbury monumental critical editions.76 Secondly, the study of canon law has transformed understanding of the problems arising from the rapid development of two overlapping and conflicting systems of law in which the position of criminous clerks in particular was still unclear. Charles Duggan showed that Becket’s arguments against the Constitutions of Clarendon were not of his own devising but grounded in canon law. Notably, his case against chapter three’s apparent proposal that unfrocked criminous clerks be handed over to the royal courts for sentence is, as reported by his biographer William of Canterbury, a patchwork of quotations from Gratian’s Decretum linked by phrases from Rufinus.77 Professor Duggan has argued for a direct canonical source, even of biblical and patristic dicat ‘wherever

76 V above, nn. 13 and 14. 77 “The Becket Dispute and the Criminous Clerks”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 35 (1962) pp. 1–28; “The Reception of Canon Law in England in the later Twelfth Century”, Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, (Vatican City, 1965) pp. 360–65. For the text of the Constitutions of Clarendon and a detailed commentary, particularly on ch. 3, v Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, vol. 1, Part II 1066–1204 ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett, C.N.L. Brooke (Oxford, 1981) pp. 855–83.

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we find a precise record of the controversy as allegedly argued by the principal contestants’. In citing John of Salisbury’s Policraticus as a precedent for Becket’s use of the Septuagint text of Nahum 1.9 (“God will not punish twice for the same offence”), he observes that ‘the canonical source of John’s phrases is not hard to find’.78 Thirdly, attention has been drawn to the relevance of contemporary theological debate to the Becket dispute. Beryl Smalley has shown how the eruditi sancti Thomae, particularly his future biographers John of Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham, encouraged Thomas to defy the king and briefed him in the teaching of the schools on relations between regnum and sacerdotium. While agreeing that canon law provided an arsenal of texts from which William of Canterbury and, to a lesser extent, Herbert of Bosham and William FitzStephen could retrospectively draw up a dossier of suitable arguments in their presentation of Becket’s case, Dr. Smalley has also pointed out that in his prophetic Policraticus, John of Salisbury ‘cites no canon law authority to support his application of the scriptural maxim’ from Nahum 1.9: ‘it is just as likely therefore that Becket drew his text from a theological as from a canon law context’.79 Richard Fraher has since used illustrations of the ambiguous and inconsistent state of canon law on privilegium fori in the 1160s and even the 1170s as additional arguments for locating ‘the actual source of Becket’s contention among the theologians rather than the canon lawyers’.80 Recently, Professor Duggan has warned [214] against any false polarisation: ‘the canonical and theological arguments are complementary, not contradictory; there were experts in both disciplines in Becket’s household, and some key texts are found in canonical and theological sources’; similarly, the editor of John of Salisbury’s letters had acknowledged the theologian’s legal expertise.81 The technical details about textual sources remain open to scholarly discussion; what is clear is that contemporary letter collections, canon law and the schools provided the best of Becket’s biographers not only with their documentary material and their intellectual training, but with a common language. The allegorical interpretation of Scripture was not the only language of the second half of the twelfth century, but it was a fundamental tool of exposition and polemic in canon law and in political debate conducted through the rhetorical art of letter writing, as well as in theology. The Becket correspondence shows that well before the martyrdom and canonisation, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture was being

78 Actes [. . .] de Sédières, pp. 130–31; “The Becket Dispute and the Criminous Clerks”, pp. 17–18. 79 The Becket Conflict and the Schools, pp. 127–28; 124ff. 80 “The Becket Dispute and Two Decretist Traditions: the Bolognese Masters revisited and some new Anglo-Norman Texts”, Journal of Medieval History 4 (1978) pp. 348, 353–54. Fraher notes that William of Canterbury used the Summa Rufini extremely selectively in his account of Becket’s argument at Clarendon quoting out of context and omitting passages favourable to the king’s case. 81 Addenda et Corrigenda p. 6 to the Variorum reprint of Charles Duggan’s articles on the Becket Dispute and decretal collections Canon Law in Medieval England, (London, 1982); C.N.L. Brooke in The Letters of John of Salisbury 2, p. xii.

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applied to the general jurisdictional issues raised by the Constitutions of Clarendon and specifically to Becket’s own case. Moreover, it was used not only by Becket and his eruditi but by his opponents, as one instance may illustrate. In the course of the famous denunciation of Becket in the letter Multiplicem in 1166, Gilbert Foliot commented ‘Thus Israel went down into Egypt’.82 The standard exegetical interpretation of Israel as referring to Christ or his body, the Church, is here applied to the circumstances of the Council of Clarendon in 1164 when, Foliot maintained, Christ’s Church was delivered into bondage by Becket’s fainthearted submission to the king’s demands for an unconditional promise to observe ‘the ancient customs of the realm’. Repudiating Foliot’s taunts and vindicating the archbishop in a letter later the same year, however, John of Salisbury rhetorically asked: ‘Was not Egypt afflicted with plagues because it kept the Church in slavery by an ancient grandfatherly custom of nigh on three hundred years standing?’83 Age, he suggests, does not make wrongful customs lawful; Henry II’s claim at Clarendon to be upholding the customs of his grandfather’s day is seen as the cause of the Church’s present bondage in this alternative application of the same scriptural allusion to the same contemporary event. The letters of the controversy, and others of the period, also show that the practice of presenting a range of arguments, including biblical allusions, which the writer considered would have been suitable to a particular occasion, rather than reporting the actual discussion verbatim, was by no means peculiar to hagiographers. Herbert of Bosham reports that Becket’s criticism of chapter three of the Constitutions of Clarendon was on the grounds that Christ is once again judged before the seat of Pilate when clerics in criminal and civil causes are handed over to secular justice (3:281). [215] Whether or not the biographer was quoting the argument precisely as formulated in January, 1164, Becket himself was discussing the issue in similar, indeed, more radical terms in his letter to the English Church in 1166 when he claimed that at his own trial at Northampton in October 1164 ‘Christ was judged in my person before the tribunal of the prince’ (5:494). Caution is necessary before dismissing the biographers’ biblical allusions as pious passages overlaying the essentially ‘historical’ core of their narrative. The point may be illustrated in more detail by a passage in William FitzStephen’s account of that Council of Northampton. FitzStephen’s biography, probably completed 1173–74 in its first version, is generally regarded as the most informed and authoritative on events before and after the exile. The writer’s personal knowledge of Becket and his familiarity with legal matters are evident, and he had ‘epistolary evidence for nearly every statement which was not derived from his own personal knowledge or experience’.84 It is therefore perhaps surprising at first to read in his masterly eyewitness report of Becket’s trial that the

82 The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 170, p. 234. 83 Ep. 187, p. 233. 84 A. Duggan, Thomas Becket. A Textual History of his Letters, p. 200.

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archbishop’s refusal to be judged on the secular charge laid against him and his appeal to Rome was greeted by some present with the words, ‘Behold, we have heard the blasphemy proceeding out of his mouth’ (3:64). It is highly improbable that in 1164 Becket’s critics did him the honour of condemning him with the words in which Christ had been condemned by the High Priest in Matthew 26.65. But the biographer’s quotation of the Gospel passage here need not necessarily be dismissed as a momentary lapse into the hagiographic vein, an interpolation of a Gospel parallel made appropriate only by Thomas’s subsequent martyrdom. Already in the Policraticus of 1159, dedicated to Chancellor Becket, John of Salisbury had specifically cited the High Priest’s condemnation of Christ as an ironic illustration of the method by which contemporary royal tyranny condemned clerks who invoked their clerical privilege in resisting the demands of Caesar.85 The context of William FitzStephen’s quotation of the same Gospel text as a hostile response to the archbishop’s insistence on his privilege is instructive. First, Becket’s speech outlining his respective duties to God and the king was in reply to King Henry’s angry reminder, delivered through his barons, of Becket’s duties as the king’s liege man and of his promises at Clarendon to preserve the royal privileges. Secondly, the archbishop’s insistence on his overriding obedience to God, condemned at Northampton in the words of the High Priest, is followed in the very next sentence of FitzStephen’s narrative by magnates near the king threateningly citing Henry’s father and grandfather as examples of strong rulers who had successfully crushed disruptive clerics. By implication they counsel Henry to do likewise, a tableau which contrasts with the ideal [216] presented in Policraticus 4:6 of the wise prince advised on God’s law by priestly litterati. Although the king was surrounded not only by bellicose barons but by most of his bishops, Becket and his circle denounced these priestly litterati as false interpreters of the law, familiar with the mechanics of allegorical interpretation but misguided and perverse in its application. Commenting on the bishops’ censorious letter to Becket in 1166 ‘dictated by Achitophel’ (Foliot), John of Salisbury declaimed: ‘Judas the betrayer, whom Achitophel prefigured, left in Christ’s death an example of treachery and treasonable murder not only to the Jews but to our scribes and pharisees too’. Again alluding to Henry II’s ‘grandfatherly customs’ of Clarendon, John shows that the scribes and pharisees falsely charge Christ/ Becket with attacking the laws of Caesar, and betray their own prophetic calling so that passing through clouds of foggy reasoning and destroying the law by abuse of correct language they finally conclude that: ‘He is worthy of death: Crucify

85 Policraticus, ed. C.C.J. Webb (Oxford, 1909) vol. 2, pp. 6–7, conflating Christ’s trials before the High Priest and Pilate (Matthew 26.65 and John 19.12) and the charges of blasphemy against God and Caesar. Dr. Smalley discusses the relevance of the text to the Becket dispute but without reference to the biographies, The Becket Dispute and the Schools, pp. 100–01. R. Foreville discussed the general relationship between Becket and Policraticus in L’église et la royauté en Angleterre sous Henri II Plantagenet (Paris, 1943) pp. 260–93.

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him. [. . .]’86 Later in the exile John denounced those who said ‘We have no king but Caesar. Crucify him, crucify our bishop [. . .] who asserts that God’s law is to be preferred to human custom’.87 The problem of correctly interpreting the divine law on relations between regnum and sacerdotium was not confined to England. The contemporary papal schism presented the unedifying spectacle of the pharisaical Archbishop of Cologne assisting the tyrant Emperor to blaspheme the holy one of Israel (in this case Alexander III) by falsely citing Scripture to support the imperial cause: ‘We know no king but Caesar’.88 Nor was the problem confined to the 1160s. Sacred biography and history written over half a century before the Policraticus provided the improving example of an appropriate application of Scripture to the issue in a courtroom situation which in some ways foreshadows Becket’s trial. At the Council of Rockingham in 1095, Archbishop Anselm was opposed by his own bishops who ‘wishing to be on the king’s side and having no regard for justice’, tried to prove to Anselm that recognition of Urban as Pope entailed breaking the faith he owed to the king. But Anselm confounded them with the words of Christ to the pharisees who had tried to ensnare him: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s’. The bishops were reduced to clamouring that Anselm was ‘blaspheming against the king’.89 Eadmer noted that Anselm inspired popular sympathy: ‘If you had been there you would have heard this or that bishop dubbed now by one man, then by another with some nickname [. . .] such as “traitor Judas”, “Pilate”, or “Herod”’. The application of such names to those who persecuted the martyrs was an early hagiographical commonplace yet used by John of Salisbury in a letter commenting on Becket’s death.90 William FitzStephen’s [217] account of Becket saying in exile, ‘And he among my brethren occupied the place of the traitor Judas’, with reference to Hilary of Chichester who had betrayed him at Northampton, has the appearance of an anecdote (3:55). Such parallels came readily to lips and pen and were not confined to an exclusively hagiographic genre. The charges of blasphemy against God and Caesar made against Christ before the High Priest and Pilate, and his condemnation on the evidence of his own mouth, were echoed in the trials of the early martyrs.91 But Becket’s biographers were hampered in casting him in this heroic mould in 1164, not only by his subsequent flight, but by the fact that his stance at Northampton, attended by eruditi alone, appealing to divine law and treating his bishops as friends of Caesar, was in marked contrast to his inglorious behaviour at Clarendon only nine months earlier. There it was Becket who had been the friend of Caesar, Gilbert Foliot claimed 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ep. 175, pp. 155, 159. Ep. 244, pp. 487–89; also Ep. 295, p. 681. Ep. 186, pp. 227–29. Historia Novorum in Anglia, pp. 64–65, 104; Vita Anselmi, p. 86. Ep. 305, p. 729; Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, p. 7. Ibid., pp. 287, 307.

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in 1166: ‘The archbishop himself acquiesced in the king’s royal prerogative and the ancient customs of the realm’, abruptly betraying the united episcopal stand against the ‘threats of princes’. Foliot denounced Becket’s subsequent Christ-like posturings and cast him in the role of Judas.92 Time and the martyrdom vindicated the eruditi’s interpretation of events. The martyr’s biographers could appropriately draw parallels with the sufferings of Christ. Read with hindsight, the condemnation of St Thomas at Northampton in the same words by which Christ had been condemned was, of course, a splendid piece of irony. But this does not reduce it to a ‘nonhistorical’ hagiographic commonplace. William FitzStephen’s statement that some at Northampton had judged Becket’s refusal to render the king his apparent due as ‘a blasphemy proceeding out of his own mouth’, if not reporting a historical incident, uses the very language in which the debate is known to have been conducted long before the martyrdom.

13 October 1164 An incident took place earlier the same day, the seventh of the Northampton trial, which affords further insight into the archbishop’s line of defence and its reception. It may also serve to illustrate in more detail some of the foregoing general observations about the biographers’ techniques and language and the degree to which they were able to reconcile their image of the saint’s martyrdom and personal sanctity with the vivid memory of the archbishop’s controversial public behaviour. Examination of this incident may also sharpen the focus on the biographers’ attitudes to related issues already outlined in Part I, particularly the relevance of the opening year of Becket’s archiepiscopate to the crisis with the king in 1163–64 which culminated [218] at Northampton; the contribution of the last day of that Council to the role of Becket’s Canterbury predecessors in the development of his claims to be representing the interests of the Church; the importance of his flight from that Council, both immediately and in the subsequent debate about his sanctity. W. L. Warren noted, when commenting on Thomas’s famous entrance at the final session of the Council of Northampton, bearing his own cross: It was St. Stephen’s day, 12 October, and the archbishop first celebrated mass, with its significant Introit, ‘Princes also did sit and speak against me; but thy servant is occupied in thy statutes’. So would Becket behave, and being Becket he could not omit the melodramatic gesture.93 The feast of Stephen is on 26 December, however, and the biographies, particularly the detailed chronology of William FitzStephen’s account which modern

92 Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 170, p. 240. 93 Henry II, p. 487.

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historians have found convincing, place the mass on the liturgically curious date of Tuesday, 13 October. It was, therefore, not the regular liturgy of the day which prompted Becket’s ‘melodramatic gesture’ of taking up his cross: that liturgy had been chosen. The lesson for the feast (Acts 6.8–10, 7.54–60) describes the martyrdom of the deacon Stephen after his trial by the Sanhedrin, the Gospel in Christ’s prophecy of the persecution of his true disciples and the opening of the introit or office, repeated in the gradual, is ‘Princes also did sit and speak against me, wicked men have persecuted me’. Some present straightway interpreted it ‘that the archbishop had said the mass for himself, like another Stephen, against the king and his wicked persecutors’ (3:56). Besides the polemical pertinence of the clerical protomartyr’s liturgy to the archbishop’s own situation at a critical moment of his trial, the actual date on which he chose to celebrate it may have been a further cause of provocation. The formal canonisation of Edward the Confessor had been procured only three years earlier at the instigation of the abbot of Westminster and with the active cooperation of the king. By honouring his Anglo-Saxon ancestor, Henry II emphasised the continuity of the royal house and the unity of its peoples and presumably hoped to acquire prestige for the Angevin monarchy after the style of the Capetian cult of sacred kingship and the canonisation in 1146 of Edward’s older contemporary, Henry II of Germany. In supporting the cult of Edward the Confessor the king demonstrated his piety and may also have been attempting to capture a potentially subversive popular appeal to the past.94 By the third quarter of the twelfth century canonisation was clearly regarded as a papal prerogative and official recognition of royal saints in the post-Gregorian period had been limited to the 1146 precedent.95 Despite interest shown in their royal ancestor by William the Conqueror, Henry I and Stephen and the devotion to Edward at Westminster fostered by prior Osbert of Clare, a petition for [219] his canonisation had been refused by Innocent II in 1139. Eventual official sanction for such royal propaganda in 1161, even if granted as a diplomatic expedient by Alexander III seeking support in the papal schism, must have been particularly gratifying to the crown. Gilbert Foliot, Roger of York and Hilary of Chichester were among those who sent letters testimonial in Edward’s cause.96 Probably during the Canterbury 94 In late twelfth century England ‘national sentiment developed in opposition to the policies of the Crown [. . .] a strong sentimental attachment to the past became one of the chief instruments of opposition to the Crown’; the canonisation of Edward the Confessor was part of the magnates’ appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon past, R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Essays, (London, 1970) pp. 147, 155. C.N.L. Brooke designated the Westminster movement for the canonisation as ‘the religious counterpart to the growing opinion that King Edward represented the tradition of Old England, that good law must be related to the ‘law of King Edward’ and good kings to his family’, The Saxon and Norman Kings, (London, 1963) p. 208. 95 E.W. Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church, (Oxford, 1948) p. 89. 96 Printed in Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, (London, 1970) pp. 312–15; The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 133, pp. 175–77.

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vacancy after the death of Theobald, Foliot further petitioned the Pope for the Translation of the new saint’s relics, though the privilege of officiating at the ceremony eventually went to his successful rival to the archiepiscopal see, Thomas Becket (5:19; 3:261). St Edward’s relics were translated at Westminster in 1163 on 13 October. Becket’s neglect of the first anniversary of such an important royal event in favour of the mass of St Stephen must have seemed studied in the context of the Northampton trial. The royal envoys, Gilbert Foliot and Hilary of Chichester, subsequently denounced his celebration of that mass to the Pope,97 though modern commentators have not explored its implications. Roger of Pontigny, who probably received his information directly from Thomas Becket during his exile, recounts a heated exchange on temporal and ecclesiastical authority between the king and the archbishop, not long after their dissension at the Council of Westminster in October 1163. Answering Henry’s jibes about his lowly origins, Thomas had retorted, ‘I am not “sprung from royal ancestors”; neither was St Peter, Prince of the Apostles, on whom the Lord deigned to confer the keys of the kingdom’ (4:28). Thomas’s Gregorian secularising view of monarchy could have carried the additional sting of alluding to Henry’s very recent attempt to demonstrate his lawful inheritance to the sanctity of the royal office by ceremonially shouldering his kinsman’s sainted royal remains to the high altar at Westminster. Edward the Confessor’s biographer had stressed his exemplification of sacramental kingship. At his consecration the king, probably through the unction of chrism, ‘became christus dei’.98 In spite of the postGregorian papacy’s attempts to prevent the royal use of chrism (because of its association with the ordination of priests and consecration of bishops), Gilbert Foliot testified that chrism had been used at Henry II’s own anointing in 1154.99 That consecration had been received at the hands of Becket’s predecessor at the church of Canterbury however, as the archbishop was to remind the king in a letter of 1166: ‘Kings receive their power from the Church’ (5:281, Ep. CLIV). Like other twelfth-century rulers, Henry doubtless recognised the propaganda value of a canonised king as an argument in the debate between regnum and sacerdotium,100 a contest which the biographers suggest was planned by Henry even before Becket’s consecration in 1162: the king ‘believed his design against the Church could be most effectively carried out through Thomas’ (4:14, 3:43–44). [220] 97 Herbert of Bosham, 3:335–36; Garnier of Ponte-Sainte Maxence adds that Foliot accused Becket of having sung the Mass pur sorcerie [. . .] E el despit le rei, La Vie de Thomas Becket, p. 54, 11, 1559–60. 98 Vita Aedwardi Regis, ed. F. Barlow, (London, 1962) pp. 9–10; Edward the Confessor, pp. 61–64, 119, n. 2. 99 A. Morey and C.N.L. Brooke, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, (Cambridge, 1965) pp. 176–77. For the probable use of chrism at the coronation of the young Henry, v P.E. Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, (London, 1939) pp. 126–27. 100 Bernard Scholz, “The Canonization of Edward the Confessor”, Speculum, 36 (1961) pp. 50–60. ‘Henry’s support of the canonization had thus a purpose similar to the designation of his devoted chancellor to the highest office of the English Church’, p. 57.

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The ‘design against the Church’ can no longer be regarded as a hagiographer’s bogey. Work on the first eight years of Henry’s reign shows that ‘far from biding his time until Theobald died, he had at once began to pursue a vigorous and comprehensive policy of asserting royal authority against the Church’, anticipating several of the Constitutions of Clarendon.101 The design, however, was thwarted by the new archbishop’s unexpected resignation of the royal office of chancellor and the rapid deterioration of his relations with the king.102 In letters from exile in 1166, John of Salisbury was to admit that Chancellor Becket had been ‘the servant of wicked men, putting the king before God’ but that since his consecration he had preferred ‘to use God’s word as master’.103 John’s further admission that, as archbishop, Becket had provoked the king from the start, and the biographers’ terse accounts of the opening year of the archiepiscopate, point to their unease at the rapidity of the breakdown in relations with the king, even before the overlapping jurisdictional claims of royal and ecclesiastical authority were hotly debated at the series of councils beginning with Woodstock in July 1163. The spring of 1163 would seem to have been a critical period. Becket’s modelling of himself on Anselm has long been recognised as probably ‘the most important of all the clues for understanding the transformation of the archbishop after his election’.104 Anselm’s formidable performance in the early rounds of the conflict between regnum and sacerdotium has recently been stressed, particularly his responsibility for ‘the first decisive check to the English sacerdotal monarchy’; furthermore, ‘in compensation for the loss of ecclesiastical character which Henry [I] suffered in 1107, there arose a new cult of sacramental kingship’, demonstrated in the development of Edward the Confessor’s cult at Westminster.105 It has often been suggested that Becket’s request at the Council of Tours, in May 1163, for the canonisation of Anselm was an attempt to counterbalance the canonisation of Edward the Confessor, and an indication of already strained relations with the king.106 On 9 June, Alexander III remitted Anselm’s

101 Henry Mayr-Harting, “Hilary Bishop of Chichester (1147–69) and Henry II”, English Historical Review 78 (1963) p. 224; A. Saltman, Theobald Archbishop of Canterbury, (London, 1956) pp. 44–45. 102 C. Duggan notes that Ralph de Diceto ‘makes explicit comparison with the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne as imperial chancellors, and records Henry’s anger at Becket’s resignation of the chancellorship on election to Canterbury’, “Bishop John and Archdeacon Richard of Poitiers. Their Roles in the Becket Dispute and its Aftermath”, Actes [. . .] de Sédières, p. 74, n. 20 and ‘Ralph de Diceto, Henry II and Becket with an Appendix on Decretal Letters’, Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government in Honour of Walter Ullmann, ed. B. Tierney and P. Linehan, (Cambridge, 1980) p. 66. 103 Ep. 168, p. 106; Ep. 187, p. 245. 104 R.W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer, p. 338; Raymonde de Foreville, L’église et la royauté en Angleterre sous Henri II Plantagenet, pp. 270–74. 105 F. Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154 (London, 1979) p. 302. 106 B.W. Scholz, “The Canonization of Edward the Confessor”, p. 57; F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, p. 284; R. Somerville, Pope Alexander III and the Council of Tours, pp. 59–60.

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case to Becket, promising to uphold the decision of the archbishop’s provincial council. No record of such a council has survived and it has generally been assumed that proceedings were abandoned or interrupted by Becket’s exile. R. W. Southern, however, discovered that the Feast of Anselm’s Translation was already being observed on 7 April at Canterbury before Becket’s death, and deduced it was ‘just possible that a Translation may in 1163 or earlier have preceded the process of canonization’.107 Ursula Nilgen has since argued strongly for the 1163 date and has further suggested that on 7 April that year Anselm was very probably translated, at Becket’s behest, to the chapel in Christ Church cathedral then dedicated to the Princes of the Apostles, SS. Peter and Paul. In honour of the occasion, it is suggested, [221] Becket commissioned the decoration of the chapel with scenes of the lives and persecution of Peter and Paul ‘who stood for the Church and her freedom which Anselm had defended’.108 Archbishop Becket’s implicit identification with their cause through the iconography of his commission and its occasion would, in the contemporary conflict between regnum and sacerdotium, have amounted to a political statement.109 The ideas of various scholars outlined in this paragraph were evolved over a long period and in pursuit of rather different questions. They have not so far been used as a standpoint from which to view the biographers’ accounts of the last day of Becket’s trial. The Translation of St Edward the Confessor had been deferred after his canonisation in 1161 because of the king’s prolonged absence abroad. Although Henry returned in January 1163, the Translation was not arranged for the anniversary of the Confessor’s canonisation (7 February). It seems possible it was planned 107 St. Anselm and his Biographer, p. 340. The only years in Becket’s archiepiscopate when 7 April fell on a Sunday liturgically appropriate for such a ceremony were 1163 and 1168; the latter seems improbable. 108 “Thomas Becket as Patron of the Arts. The Wall Painting of St. Anselm’s Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral”, Art History, 3 (1980) pp. 363, 370 n. 13. Professor Nilgen does not discuss the image of SS. Peter and Paul in Anselm’s own Prayers and Meditations, a book Becket is known to have used constantly; v Part II below, and nn. 129–31. 109 Art. cit., p. 362. It is suggested (pp. 363–66) that traditional exegesis on the subject of the surviving painting (showing St Paul, newly saved from shipwreck but attacked by a viper) would have had a topical application to the attacks on Becket following his recent salvation from the spiritual shipwreck of earthly vanities at his conversion. Professor Nilgen set this commission in its artistic context in a paper, “Intellectuality and Splendour: Thomas Becket as Patron of the Arts”, delivered to the Symposium on Patronage of the Arts in England, 1066–1200 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1984). In another paper there on “Prior Wibert’s Wall-Paintings” (i.e. in the crypt of Christ Church), Dr. Deborah Kahn gave further stylistic and archaeological support for assigning the painting of St Paul and the viper in the chapel of St Anselm above to the early 1160s. Neither speaker referred to John of Salisbury’s letter to the subprior of Christ Church, 1167, chastising him and the community for failure to support their abbot and archbishop in exile while thoughtlessly squandering money on pictures and delighting the eyes of the ignorant multitude with vain paintings (Ep. 243, p. 480). This may refer, not to the Pauline scheme in the chapel of St Anselm (as suggested in p. 480, n. 2), but to the decoration of the chapels of St Gabriel and the Holy Innocents immediately below, following extensive rebuilding of the crypt to strengthen lateral towers, c. 1160.

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during a royal council held in March that year.110 If so, Becket’s presumed Translation of Anselm on 7 April, and his certain and well-prepared application on 19–21 May for Anselm’s formal canonisation (thereby pre-empting the eventual Translation of Edward the Confessor on 13 October 1163), looks more pointed still. October 13 became St Edward’s feastday (not the anniversary of his death or canonisation). At Northampton on 13 October 1164, Becket’s neglect of the feast of the king’s holy royal predecessor in favour of a votive mass would have been conspicuous. His alternative celebration of St Stephen (a martyr for the Church, like SS. Peter and Paul) with the introit ‘Princes also sat against me’, might seem of a piece with his promotion of his own priestly ancestor at Canterbury, Archbishop Anselm, ‘the hammer of tyrants’ (5:35, Ep. XXIII; 3:210). It was not a cause with which Henry II would have sympathised. The king had gone to considerable lengths to prevent the archbishop from posturing in the guise of the persecuted Church at Northampton. Becket had been summoned there on the entirely secular charge of John the Marshal (3:49). After his full submission, he had been faced with a further secular charge for which he had not been summoned, and then arraigned on financial matters arising from his conduct of the chancellorship, despite the fact that he had been relieved of all such accountability at his consecration. On the fourth day of the trial, when it was evident that the king could not be pacified with money, the archbisop’s advisers felt his only hope was to throw himself entirely on the king’s mercy. The Council did not formally meet for the next two days, during which there were intensive consultations and rumoured plots against Becket’s life. It was before appearing at the seventh session of the Council that Becket offered the mass of St Stephen. Clearly, it was open to the interpretation that the archbishop was dramatically [222] insisting that he was being tried, not on the ostensible secular charges, but as a representative of the Church. The biographers’ brief description of the consternation caused by Becket’s celebration of a votive mass on 13 October 1164 becomes more intelligible in this wider context. It does, however, again raise the question here being investigated of whether the biographers were able to reconcile the archbishop’s provocative, apparently politically motivated behaviour with their image of the blameless martyr, persecuted in life as in death for the cause of the Church. Their omissions concerning Anselm and Edward the Confessor are of interest here. The cult of St Anselm was eclipsed after 1170 by that of his martyred and miracle-working successor at Canterbury. Any reminder that the latter had advanced Anselm’s cause would not have lent much lustre to St Thomas’s reputation and may, indeed, have recalled an aspect of his relations with the king best forgotten. This could explain why Herbert of Bosham, writing in the mid-1180s, omits mentioning Thomas’s request for Anselm’s canonisation at the Council of Tours, although he describes

110 F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, p. 282, notes the presence of both Ailred and Prior Laurence at a council held in Westminster in March 1163.

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Thomas’s journey and honourable reception there, and elsewhere shows reverence for Anselm’s memory (3:254–55, 210). None of the other biographers mentions the canonisation either, not even John of Salisbury who was commissioned to rewrite Eadmer’s Life of Anselm, probably the work presented to the Pope at Tours in 1163. The biographers describe the king later that year, enraged with Becket’s attitude over criminous clerks, storming out of the Council of Westminster, whose members had arrived in London on 1 October, according to the Summa causae inter regem et Thomam (4:201). There are difficulties in imagining that the splendid ceremony of the Translation of Edward the Confessor on 13 October, conducted by the archbishop in the presence of the king, took place after their dramatic dissension at the council. Professor Barlow commented that if the thinly attested date for the opening of the council on 1 October be discounted and the two Westminster ceremonies conflated so that ‘the council described by Becket’s biographers opened with Edward’s translation, we have to accept that most contemporary writers either forgot the ceremony or considered it irrelevant to their story’.111 As reference to the liturgical calendar was so commonplace a dating device, it is perhaps unlikely that every early biographer save one simply forgot such a feast, but there are some grounds for supposing they did consider it ‘irrelevant’ to their story. The evidence of Herbert of Bosham who alone refers to the ceremony is, perhaps, revealing. First, he emphatically insists that the Translation of the royal saint was a harmonious occasion when king and archbishop were still of one heart and mind (3:261). He does not, however, date the event or associate it with the Council of Westminster but places [223] it in an unchronological list of examples of Becket’s sacramental and liturgical duties as archbishop, in the chapter before his material on the outbreak of dissension culminating in the summoning of the Council of Westminster (3:264–66). Secondly, although all the biographers mention Becket’s celebration of the Mass of St Stephen during the Council of Northampton in October 1164, none says that it occurred on the feast of St Edward the Confessor. Only Herbert of Bosham makes any reference at all to the liturgical calendar in commenting on Becket’s timing of the Mass. His wording is ambiguous: Et hancquidem missam, die qui festus non erat, cum pallio celebravit, nisi quia beati Calixti papae et martyris natalitium fuit (3:304). Dom D. Knowles felt that Herbert based his chronology ‘on the assumption that the feast of St Calixtus (14 October) fell on the critical Tuesday of the council’; Herbert simply made a mistake when trying to date the event twenty years later and the problematic wording may be due to a scribe subsequently tampering with Herbert’s text ‘in order to eliminate a difficult date’.112 However, the ambiguity of wording does not preclude the possibility that Herbert, a cleric and an eyewitness of the event,

111 F. Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154, (London, 1979) p. 302. 112 The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket, (Cambridge, 1951), Appendix IV, pp. 164–65.

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was aware that Tuesday 13 October 1164 was only the eve of St Calixtus’s feast. It is possible that by alluding to the martyred Pope and omitting any mention of the feast of the royal saint Edward the Confessor, Herbert hoped to suggest a reason for Becket’s choice of that particular date for celebrating a special mass in pontificals which would underline the identification of his cause with that of the persecuted Church (so effectively made in the mass of the protomartyr), yet would be less open to censure. Herbert tried to present Thomas of Canterbury as the English saint, a potential counterpart to the martyred bishop Denis of France, whose flourishing contemporary cult had been promoted by Capetian royal patronage.113 There may have been some embarrassment, acknowledged by the silence of all the other biographers, in recalling that the would-be patron of England had slighted so prestigious a royal saint as Edward the Confessor, whose veneration was by no means confined to royal partisans. Henry’s petition for the canonisation of his kinsman claimed the support of the whole English Church.114 Becket had sought the spiritual support of Cistercian houses, including Rievaulx, soon after his consecration; the order assisted him in exile as long as possible and promoted his cult, yet the most revered English Cistercian, Ailred of Rievaulx (d.1167), had himself composed, if not actually delivered, the homily for St Edward’s Translation at the request of his kinsman the Abbot of Westminster. Ailred also rewrote Osbern of Clare’s Life of St. Edward which became the basis of the royal saint’s liturgical commemoration. The revised Life was dedicated as a spiritual model to Henry II whom Ailred hailed as the cornerstone binding [224] together the two walls of the English and the Norman race.115 In the reign of such a monarch, the Church might prosper, combining the best of its hallowed Anglo-Saxon past with the post-Conquest reforms of a wider Christendom. This was strikingly exemplified in Ailred, the foremost English abbot of the international Cistercian reform, yet loyal to the memory of the local Anglo-Saxon saints of Hexham, Wilfred, and Cuthbert, from the custodians of whose shrines Ailred was himself descended.116 Henry II’s espousal of Edward the Confessor’s cause astutely appropriated such sentiments; the saintly Ailred’s active support of this piece of royal piety offered a marked contrast to Becket’s behaviour on St Edward’s feast in 1164.

113 G.M. Spiegel, “The Cult of Saint Denis and Capetian Kingship”, pp. 43–69. 114 F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, App. D, pp. 309–24 for texts of surviving letters of petition. 115 In the letter prefixed to the Life of Edward; v Life of Ailred, pp. xlvii–li for Ailred’s sympathies with Henry II and his friendship with Gilbert Foliot. Vita Aedwardi Regis, ed. F. Barlow, (London, 1962) pp. 130–32. 116 M. Powicke, Life of Ailred, pp. xxxvii ff. cites evidence (omitted from Walter Daniel’s Life) for Ailred’s patriotic spirituality and for his role in powerfully reconciling the old and new orders in Church and kingdom. Particularly interesting in the present context is Ailred’s work on the Saints of Hexham, part of which he probably read as the homily at the Translation of their relics there in 1154–55 after their ‘adoption’ by the new Austin canons who had actually displaced Ailred’s own forebearers from the custodianship of the shrine.

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Furthermore, the subversive implications of Becket’s conduct were only too clear: ‘In the person of Becket resistance to the king had been canonized’,117 hence Henry’s penance at the martyr’s tomb, rewarded by his victory at Alnwick. Though Herbert of Bosham mused on this striking example of cause and effect (3:544–48), the biographers writing during the reign of Henry II, unlike the later royal suppressor of the cult of St Thomas, had no wish to present Archbishop Becket as ‘a rebell and traytour to his prince’. After the immediate memory of Henry’s reign, the fine reliquary châsse of c. 1200, possibly ordered by the monks of Christ Church and intended for the Translation of St Thomas’s relics, was able to provide him with a much more seemly setting.118 Its decoration features Christ flanked by the early martyrs, Peter and Paul, and the martyred Thomas Becket amongst his holy predecessors at Canterbury – Augustine, Elphege, Dunstan and Anselm – but, significantly, it also reveres two canonised Anglo-Saxon kings, St Edmund and St Edward the Confessor. Herbert of Bosham in the 1180s could not go so far but it is worth noting that Herbert, the sole biographer to mention the Translation of Edward the Confessor,119 not only separates it in his narrative from any suggestion of involvement in the controversy between Becket and Henry, but directly couples it with another splendid liturgical ceremony conducted by the archbishop in the presence of the king and illustrating their concord (3:260–61). That ceremony, the consecration of the abbatial church at Reading, would also, like the Confessor’s Translation, have served to glorify the piety of the royal house because the Cluniac foundation at Reading had been lavishly patronised by the king’s grandfather, Henry I, whose great tomb was exalted to a place of honour before the High Altar in the newly completed church. Other features of the Becket biographies remain unexplained by any account of the purely political motivation of his behaviour. All agree that the mass of St Stephen marked a turning point in his trial. From then on the archbishop insisted on his clerical privilege. It was directly from [225] celebrating this votive mass that he planned to re-enter the council, barefoot, vested presumably in the red of martyrs), carrying the viaticum and his processional cross. Gilbert Foliot regarded the last detail as a declaration of war and, for different reasons, St Thomas’s champions later prized the image: Herbert of Bosham saw it as a battle standard, a literal response to the injunction ‘Take up thy cross’ (3:305–06) and the Early 117 J.C. Russell, “The Canonization of Opposition to the King in Angevin England”, p. 280. The Thomas Saga says ‘the highest lords of the land forbid, under peril of life and limbs, any one to call archbishop Thomas a holy man or even a martyr. But [. . .] threaten the people with all its might as the king’s power would, the pilgrimages to the archbishop’s grave multiply all the more’, vol. 2, p. 91. 118 W.D. Wixom, “A Reliquary Châsse attributed to Canterbury, c. 1200”, paper read at the Symposium on Patronage of the Arts in England, 1066–1200, (London, 1984). The Chasse is in the Cloisters Museum, New York. 119 B.W. Scholz, “The Canonization of Edward the Confessor”, p. 53, n. 73 for later medieval references to the Translation of Edward the Confessor, including the Thomas Saga 1, pp. 136–37.

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South English Legendary was to describe the saint’s cross as a banner ‘for holi churche to fighte’, his St Stephen’s mass vestments, worn into the council, as armour befitting such a knight of Christ.120 However, Roger of Pontigny and William FitzStephen specifically state that Thomas’s clerks successfully dissuaded him from going into the council in full pontificals; he retained only the stole (4:45, 3:56). Furthermore, it was courtiers present at the mass of St Stephen who had considered it to portend something special: ‘informers, spying on him for the king, told him how this mass had been sung, maliciously interpreting it (maligne interpretantes) that the archbishop had said the mass for himself, like another Stephen, against the king and his wicked persecutors’.121 In the great psalm of the Law from which the introit for the mass is taken, the Lord’s persecuted servant meditates on the divine statutes in order to understand them aright (Psalm 118.17–24). St Stephen’s exposition of the Old Covenant in Acts 7 forms his defence speech at his trial where he is charged before the High Priest and scribes and martyred for blasphemously asserting that Christ will change the customs of Moses (Acts 6.11–14). The opposition of custom and the truth of Christ’s law, and the identification of the accusers with those who should have understood the divine law yet persecuted the prophets (Acts 7.51–53) has obvious relevance to the earlier conduct of the Becket debate and to the polemical defence of the archbishop’s case by his eruditi after Northampton. But if in saying the mass of St Stephen that day Becket had been deliberately presenting himself as a second Stephen undergoing persecution in the royal council before false scribes and pharisees, then it would seem that his eruditi did not directly take up this emotive battlecry when promoting his case from exile, though they did not hesitate to use more extravagant parallels. Reviewing Becket’s continued vulnerability to criticism in 1166, especially concerning his behaviour at Northampton and flight, John of Salisbury relied heavily on scriptural parallels to show that (whatever the archbishop’s personal errors of judgment) his cause set him firmly in the hallowed tradition of prophets and apostles persecuted as Christ’s martyrs for witnessing to truth and justice. John’s omission of St Stephen from his examples of early martyrs is all the more surprising as he refers to the familiar martyrdom text in Matthew 23 (discussed above) which immediately [226] precedes the passage used in the Gospel reading

120 Ed. Horstmann, pp. 133–34. 121 2:330; 3:56. The Thomas Saga, 1, pp. 207–09 has much the same story. Thomas said all the Hours of the blessed martyr Stephen before singing the Mass himself; it was ‘certain king’s folk and clerks’ who happened to be near the church, ‘thinking in their mind with some wonder, what this song (Etenim sederunt) might import, or why it should happen to be sung at this time’. The Thomas Saga drew on the Quadrilogus, (Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 4:266– 430), a composite of the accounts by Benedict of Peterborough, William of Canterbury, Herbert of Bosham and Alan of Tewkesbury, but also names another twelfth century source, now lost, a Life of St Thomas by Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide’s, Oxford, 1141–c. 1174.

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for St Stephen’s day. Furthermore, Matthew 23.32, cited by John in asserting that those who persecuted Becket ‘fulfill the measure of their fathers’, was quoted in one of the nocturn lections for St Stephen’s feast and directly applied to his persecution.122 Alan of Tewkesbury, supplementing John of Salisbury’s conventionally pious biography of Becket, says that the archbishop’s cross-bearer had bitterly accused him of having failed to withstand the civil power at Clarendon in defence of the Church’s freedom, and applied to that council the words of the psalmist: ‘Princes did sit and gather themselves together against the Lord’s Anointed’ (2:324). In a letter of 1167, still trying to justify Becket’s flight, John of Salisbury adapted this text to the circumstances of the Council of Northampton: ‘The archbishop saw that kings and princes were conspiring together against the Lord and his anointed. So he fled to the Pope’.123 The last sentence was something of a let-down. John had already admitted that, as Chancellor, Becket had himself been ‘the servant of wicked men’ and even that ‘with Saul he attacked the Church’. (Saul had consented to the stoning of Stephen.) John of Salisbury was anxious to assure the Bishop of Exeter in June 1166 that his exiled archbishop was now ‘prepared with Paul to lay down his life’ for the Church,124 which represented a change of attitude, some might have wryly observed, dating not from Becket’s consecration, as John tried to suggest, but from some time after 13 October 1164. If in saying the mass of the protomartyr Becket had publicly presented himself as a second Stephen at Northampton, and if his supporters could have sympathised with such a gesture, then his subsequent martyrdom and its annual victorious liturgical commemoration within three days of the regular feast of St Stephen, would have rendered the Northampton mass extraordinarily prophetic. As has already been shown however, the narratives of Becket’s death stress his imitatio Christi but nowhere mention St Stephen. Thomas’s devotees did exploit the reverberations of St Stephen’s liturgy but indirectly. The Gospel for the feast mentions Abel and Zacharias (generally identified in exegesis with the High Priest’s son who, like Stephen, was inspired by the Spirit of the Lord to denounce the transgressions of his people and was accordingly stoned to death in the Temple by order of the king). The Gospel reading, expounded in the lections, presents Stephen’s martyrdom as one fulfillment of Christ’s prediction of the persecution of his true disciples at the hands of scribes and pharisees; future saints are here united with earlier witnesses of the redemption: And some you will put to death and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city: that upon you may [227] come all the just blood that hath been shed upon earth, from the 122 Ep. 187, p. 247. 123 Ep. 225, p. 393, (Psalm 2.2). 124 Ep. 168, p. 107.

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blood of Abel the just, even unto the blood of Zacharias the son of Barachias, whom you slew between the temple and the altar. (Matthew 23.34–35) In 1172 before Becket’s canonisation was secured, supporters appealed to the Archbishop of Sens, claiming that the blood of the Lord’s anointed (Becket) ‘calls forth from the earth to the Lord more than the blood of Abel the righteous’.125 In a letter probably the following year, John of Salisbury described Becket as ‘the son of Barach’ who had shed his blood in a holier place than between the temple and the altar.126 In 1173, on the first celebration of St Thomas’s feast (and therefore only three days after the feast of St Stephen on 26 December), Gervase of Chichester preached that St Thomas was ‘our new Abel, the righteous man”, offering his blood that one might die for the many’.127 Both the Anonymous of Lambeth and the anonymous passio which was to form a lection for St Thomas’s feast use the reference to Abel specifically made in the Gospel reading for the feast of Stephen.128 Abel and Zacharias, the first and last innocent victims recorded in the Old Covenant, are not only prefigurings of the persecutions of Christians in general or of laity and clergy or of individual martyrs (of whom Stephen and Thomas are the first and latest examples). They, and most notably Abel, prefigure Christ. St Thomas’s supporters depicted him as a new Abel, but not as a second Stephen. Instead, the biographers attribute the identification of Thomas and Stephen only to hostile critics. Whether or not Becket intended that the informers, spying on him for the king, should deliver his political ultimatum, the timing of the Northampton mass must have been provocative in effect. Open to the obvious interpretation that Becket was presenting himself as the sole upholder of the divine law amidst the pharisees, it would further alienate him from his fellow bishops as well as from the king, making compromise impossible. It was not that the eruditi disapproved of his cause, but their disquiet at Becket’s conduct of the case, in such a way as to precipitate crisis and flight, is evident. John of Salisbury’s attitude has already been noted. Herbert of Bosham recalls in his biography the frequent occasions when he personally gave the archbishop advice and William FitzStephen reports in detail the counsel he himself offered Becket during the last day of the Northampton trial. Neither claims responsibility for urging Becket to say the St Stephen mass that morning and FitzStephen goes to some lengths to minimise any militant implications. 125 Attributed to John of Salisbury in Alan of Tewkesbury’s letter collection. V The Letters of John of Salisbury 2, Ep. 307, pp. 745, xliv. 126 Ep. 310, p. 757. 127 Unpublished. Quoted by B. Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools, p. 224; v pp. 202–03 for Peter the Chanter’s citation of Becket as a second Abel. 128 4:133, 194; Breviarium Ad Usum Sarum, fasc. 1, p. cclvi. Herbert of Bosham also alludes to Abel in describing Becket’s betrayal by his brother bishops, 3:275.

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The biographers suggest that the mass was not a calculated act of political provocation but an anguished plea for protection, reached after Becket had been taken ill and retired trembling to his monastic lodging at a [228] critical moment of his trial. Omitting all reference to the feast of St Edward the Confessor, they severally explain the timing of the mass of St Stephen by testifying that the previous day the archbishop had been secretly warned by sympathetic nobles that if he attended the council next day, he would undoubtedly be arrested or gaoled, some said maimed or even killed ‘by a conspiracy of wicked men against him, as though without the king’s knowledge’ (3:58; 305, 4:44). He consequently spent a troubled night in vigil and on the advice not of his eruditi but of a certain religious, perhaps his confessor Robert of Merton, in the morning before returning to his trial he said the entire office and then the mass of St Stephen at his altar with such fervent devotion and abundant tears of compunction that he frequently had to stop and start the collect again (2:330, 393; 3:304, 4:44–45). He offered the mass ‘with the intention that on that day he would not be harmed by the malice of his foes’ (2:393); the central petition of the introit was repeated in the psalm: ‘Help me, O Lord my God’. If the biographers give reasons why Thomas Becket offered a special votive mass that particular day, do they give any additional hints concerning the choice of the saint to whom it was dedicated, or the connection between this mass and the archbishop’s behaviour on returning to his trial? St Stephen had early become a particularly popular intercessor. Because he had prayed for his enemies, it was presumed in the acta martyrum he would be even more ready to act on behalf of his friends; he had a privileged position in the Litany and, of all the martyrs, the reading of his life story was alone allowed to remain within the mass. During the eleventh century Stephen was included among the small group of saints to whom special prayers, stemming from the collects and expanded Litany, were framed and to whom St Anselm had addressed his famous prayers.129 In the quite separate context of describing Thomas’s piety after his consecration and conversion, Herbert of Bosham stressed his customary fervour and tears of compunction when saying mass and his practice of using Anselm’s prayers, especially when saying mass, but also elsewhere. They were practically his enchiridion, particularly conducive to promoting true contrition (3:210).130 One can, of course, only speculate on the contribution they might have made to the context of devotion and compunction in which the biographers set Thomas’s decision to invoke St Stephen at his

129 Benedicta Ward, The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm, (Harmondsworth, 1973) pp. 38, 42. 130 Similarly, St Ailred habitually carried one particularly edifying book, wont to produce tears, the Confessions of St Augustine, ‘which had been his guide from when he was converted from the world’, Life of Ailred, p. 50. Becket is the first named instance of someone outside Anselm’s own circle using these fervent, affective Prayers, but they were frequently copied, with an early tradition of illustration. V Otto Pacht, “The Illustrations of St. Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956) pp. 68–83. Becket, a bibliophile and art patron, may well have possessed an illustrated copy.

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time of peril, when he recalled past weakness and tried to take fresh courage; they reveal him in the small hours of 13 October 1164 as a tearful suppliant beseeching divine aid through the merits of the holy martyr. The account of Stephen’s trial in Acts 7 which forms the epistle for his feast, evokes in Anselm’s long prayer to St Stephen a meditation on compunction. The sinner stands before the tremendous Judge. ‘He is accused of many and great offences. [229] He is convicted by the witness of his conscience’. He fears sentence of imprisonment and stands continually in danger. He begs St Stephen make haste before he is condemned: Stephen’s merits are so great they suffice for the sinner too. The prayer closes with a meditation on Stephen’s martyrdom. His prayer of forgiveness for his enemies becomes a moving refrain and the sinner adopts it to invoke Stephen’s aid that God ‘lay not his sins to his charge’. Finally, the sinner describes his own discord, ‘the soul cannot follow the flesh without fear, and longs to be at rest’.131 In this light several features in William FitzStephen’s account of Becket’s return to his trial from the votive mass, generally obscured by the more dramatic and durable image of the militant defender of holy Church, are thrown into relief. After a hostile reception, Thomas was left in silence with his clerks while the bishops were summoned into the king’s presence. The biographer here recalls the rumours of Thomas’s arrest and death threatened for that day: ‘No wonder that grief and groaning and contrition of heart beset the archbishop’ (3:58). Countering Herbert of Bosham’s advice that he lay excommunication on any who impiously threatened him, FitzStephen reminded Thomas ‘not so did God’s holy apostles and martyrs when they were seized and lifted up on high; rather, should this occur, let him pray for them and forgive them. [. . .]’ The point is argued in a letter to Thomas in his tribulation from one of his friends in 1164. Referring to the example of Stephanus noster in a context which clearly means Becket’s martyred predecessor St Elphege, the writer considers the dilemma of the pure and innocent when violently threatened by the impious: he is to imitate his Lord and offer himself up for immolation, uncomplaining – and praying for his enemies (5:107–08 Ep. LIX). After the trial, Thomas privately exhorted his followers ‘let no word of bitterness proceed out of your mouth. Make no response to them that speak evil of you’ (3:68). At FitzStephen’s suggestion he fixed his attention on the uplifted Crucifix for consolation while delivering his final defence, imputing the blasts of adversity ‘not to the lord my king or any other man, but chiefly to my own sins’ (3:64). In resolving anew to stand fast, he acknowledged his earlier lapse; ‘If we fell at Clarendon (for the flesh is weak) we ought to take fresh courage’. However

131 The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm, pp. 175–77, 179, 182. Anselm’s Prayers also show that SS. Peter and Paul, like St Stephen, could be fervently invoked in a context of compunction and longing for true conversion, and not only as triumphalist examples of the Church’s defence against her persecutors. Becket’s known and frequent use of Anselm’s affective Prayers may suggest at least an ambiguity in the meaning of the wall paintings of SS. Peter and Paul which Becket may have commissioned for Anselm’s Translation, (v above and n. 108).

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his appeal to Rome caused uproar; he sought a safe conduct but feared that the king’s delay in answering ‘boded some future ill’ and fled that night. FitzStephen’s account of Northampton,132 now much admired for its historicity, is generally supposed to have been based on notes taken at the time. It is without obvious hagiographical stylisation yet for contemporaries it must have carried echoes of the classic format of martyrs’ trials. St Stephen had been brought before a council of scribes and pharisees [230] descended from those who had persecuted the prophets (and Becket’s episcopal colleagues were regularly identified with such in the correspondence of the exile). The justice of Stephen’s cause was evident from the inspired manner of his speech and delivery and FitzStephen likewise commends Becket’s delivery. As Stephen was sustained by a vision of Christ, so Becket gazed at an image of the Crucified. He began his address with the opening salutation of Stephen’s famous courtroom oration: Viri, fratres, and was similarly denounced for blasphemy. This may reveal that Becket’s cause was that of the martyr’s but the biographers tacitly admit that in 1164 Becket personally fell short of the ideal presented by Stephen ‘the perfect martyr’ who, without prompting, prayed for those who used him cruelly and steadfastly continued his exposition of the true law before his accusers until silenced by death. Becket’s image on the last day of his trial is augmented in FitzStephen’s account by the maxims on true sanctity which the biographer alleges he offered the archbishop at the time, or which he possibly considered on reflection would have been appropriate to the occasion. Either way, his picture is not of a triumphant second Stephen, but of a still fearful penitent emerging from the votive mass, heroically striving but, by the end of the day, failing to emulate his holy intercessor. Six years later he was to surpass him. It has been suggested above that the biographers present examples of Thomas’s faltering courage, injudicious behaviour and confessions of weakness as steps by which he painfully came to comprehend and accept his predestined vocation to martyrdom. Accordingly, they show that fear, piety, and contrition were essential elements in his decision to offer up the mass of the great intercessor St Stephen to secure divine protection at his trial. Although they indicate that it was open to hostile interpretation as a polemical act of defiance, they make no attempt to show why its actual timing would have been particularly provocative. Instead, their emphasis is on showing that (whatever his personal shortcomings) Thomas’s cause was that of the Church, in life as in death. In this they were not simply projecting back an image forged in the liturgy and bloodshed of 26 and 29 December 1170, but reporting and reflecting an interpretation of current events and of history made at the time by Thomas and his circle. Thomas’s viewpoint was not novel, his plight was not peculiar to him personally. It was part of the sufferings traditionally endured by archbishops of Canterbury in defending the Church in England. The argument involved a veritable cult of spiritual ancestors.

132 For text and commentary v Councils and Synods with other Documents relating to the English Church I, pt. II, pp. 895–914.

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John of Salisbury wrote to Thomas early in the exile, commending the memory of the holy patrons of Canterbury in the midst of the present storm and bidding him recall how zealous his immediate predecessor [231] Theobald had been until the day of his death.133 Thomas also extolled his mentor Theobald, whom he had accompanied in defying the royal prohibition to attend the papal council of Rheims in 1148. Such fidelity to Rome, Thomas argued in a letter to Cardinal Boso in 1166, served as an example of the lesson of history. Along among English bishops, the archbishops of Canterbury had been prepared to resist princes in order to defend the liberty of the Church, even though some of them suffered persecution, exile and death. And so it continues, observed Thomas, writing from his own exile (6:57–58 Ep. CCL). His letter echoes the advice he had received three days before celebrating the mass of St Stephen and making his defence at Northampton. He had sought counsel from his ecclesiastical colleagues and although some had recommended he appease the king or resign his office, one had urged him ‘Far be it from the archbishop to consider the safety of his person and dishonour the church of Canterbury. [. . .] Not so did any of his predecessors, although they in their days suffered persecution’ (3:55–56). The argument was to be amplified early in Thomas’s exile in a letter by Herbert of Bosham. He praises his master’s illustrious predecessors SS. Dunstan, Elphege, and Anselm, strongly emphasising their zeal for Canterbury and continued protection of its interests from beyond the grave. ‘In our present troubles they are our consolation. [. . .] We are protected by their merits, informed by their example’ (5:340, Ep. CLXXVI). He recalls that Dunstan and Anselm suffered exile and persecution, while Elphege drank the full chalice of martyrdom, praying for his executors on bended knee as they stoned him ‘that in this too he might show himself to us another Stephen’ (5:338). This manifesto, declaring that the Canterbury patrons offered protection for one who succeeded to their inheritance, illumines the testimony of Roger of Pontigny, probably received from Becket at Pontigny which he entered a few weeks after his flight from Northampton.134 Describing Thomas’s fear and contrition on hearing rumours during the trial of his threatened arrest and even death, the biographer quotes the counsel Thomas received from a certain religious ‘with whom, for a long while, he discussed the issue’. The religious reminded him it was still possible to extricate himself from danger and escape the king’s wrath. Nevertheless, ‘it is not your undertaking but God’s’. He counselled the archbishop to celebrate the mass of St Stephen first thing in the morning before returning to the council. Thomas was to commend the cause of the Church before the Eucharist not only to 133 Ep. 152, p. 57; Ep. 315, p. 775. 134 Joseph van der Straeten, “Les vieux latines de Saint Thomas Becket et son exil en France”, Actes [. . .] de Sédières, pp. 30, 32 for the date usually given for Becket’s arrival in Pontigny, 30 November or early December 1164. However, Martin Preiss, Die politische Tatigkeit und Stellung der Cisterzienser in Schism 1159–77, (Berlin, 1934) p. 81 and n. 71 argued that Becket’s arrival was not before the first half of January 1165.

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Christ, the Virgin, and St Stephen, but also ‘to our blessed apostle Gregory as well as to St Elphege and to the other patrons of Canterbury’ (4:45). [232] Invocation of sainted antecessores stressed the continuity and sanctity of the Canterbury office not only from the Norman Conquest but from the very foundation of the Roman Church in England. Understandably, there is no suggestion it was intended to trump Henry II’s championing of his own predecessor Edward the Confessor whose feastday it was. But Thomas’s commendation of the Church’s cause to Gregory, the papal patron of his see, to its saints his predecessors and specifically to St Elphege, whose manner of death had emulated that of the first martyr of the universal Church, succinctly summarise the archbishop’s identification of his plight with that of Canterbury and therefore of the whole Church in England. He returned to his trial with a programme: ‘now I know what I do, for it is to preserve the peace of God for my person and the Church of the English’ (3:57). His first encounter was with his own episcopal colleagues, not the king; his defense was based not simply on sacerdotalism but on his Canterbury office. When the bishop of London criticised him for taking up his cross, he replied: ‘If you were here in my place, you would feel otherwise’. William FitzStephen next censures the archbishop of York for infringing the privileges of Canterbury by appearing outside his province with his own processional cross. Thomas’s conduct of his argument was highly controversial among his bishops, and doubts about his eligibility for sanctity probably lingered for some of FitzStephen’s early readers. At this point he refers at length to a discussion between Robert of Melun, whom Thomas had consecrated bishop of Hereford, and other ecclesiastics, on whether the archbishop should be regarded as a martyr if killed in the cause of the freedom of the Church. Whether the debate took place then (or indeed at all) its position in the narrative is of interest. It serves to emphasise that the prospect of Becket’s death was in the air (and implicitly makes his invocation of SS. Stephen and Elphege – and his flight – seem less extreme). And it is an occasion for arguing the case that martyrdom can have many causes other than the classic one of death for the faith. Significantly, the most detailed example cited in the discussion is Anselm’s justification of Elphege’s disputed claim to sanctity (3:60–01). While it was customary in a saint’s Life to glorify the relics and history of his monastic house (usually the hagiographer’s own) by likening the saint to the established luminary of the place, the several references to St Elphege in the Lives of St Thomas cannot be so readily explained. Only one comes from a Christ Church monk. It was emphatically not as abbot that Thomas was celebrated and Elphege’s reputation must, if anything, have been augmented by association with St Thomas rather than vice versa. Although salvaged from neglect by Anselm and Christ Church hagiography, [233] honoured by an altar next to the High Altar at Canterbury and an increasing number of feasts there, Elphege was not a national figure.135

135 R.W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer, pp. 265–67.

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Almost nothing was known about him. Yet the biographer’s testimony that Elphege figured in the formulation of Thomas’s large claims is confirmed by letters such as those already cited. Elphege’s murder was obviously crucial here. But perhaps it was Elphege’s relative obscurity as well, his safe distance from the time and circumstances of Thomas’s situation, which made him a more telling authority to cite than Anselm, with whom Thomas felt affinity but who had alienated king, bishops and the community of Christ Church before peacefully expiring on a bed of sackcloth and ashes. Thomas’s claim that his sufferings were those of a great tradition culminated in the ‘splendid sermon’ he preached in the presence of his predecessors’ tombs and altars at Canterbury on Christmas Day 1170: and when he made mention of the holy fathers of the church of Canterbury who were therein confessors, he said that they already had one archbishop who was a martyr, St. Elphege, and it was possible that in a short time they would have yet another. (3:130) William of Canterbury, a monk of Christ Church and guardian of St Thomas’s tomb, who had been ordained deacon by the Archbishop shortly before that Christmas sermon, pointed to the saint’s combination of the two traditions of sanctity exemplified by the martyrs and confessors who were his predecessors. Even in life, notably his endurance of admonitions at the Council of Clarendon, Thomas had recalled St Elphege’s endurance of martyrdom (1:16). Thomas’s commendation of the Church’s cause to St Elphege and the Canterbury patrons in 1164, and the citation of them in exile as precedents for his own actions, though derided by opponents, was shown by the biographers to have been prophetic. He stood fast at the approach of his murderers ‘that under the wonderful providence of God he might receive death in front of the sepulchres of his dead co-archbishops’ (4:131, 1:133). He invoked the Canterbury patrons at the moment of death; two writers specify that he actually named St Elphege.136 A third, Edward Grim, reserves until his description of Thomas’s yearning for martyrdom and refusal to escape, an account of what the archbishop is reported to have said in the hearing of many since his return from exile: ‘You have here a martyr, Elphege, beloved of God and a true saint. The divine compassion will provide you with yet another; he will not tarry’ (2:434). Becket’s ominous reception by royal officials and the young king on his return from exile to Canterbury is attested in a contemporary letter by John of Salisbury: ‘We await God’s salvation in great danger’; the archbishop and his attendants

136 Interestingly enough, they are Roger of Pontigny and William of FitzStephen (4:77; 3:141), who also recall that St Elphege had been invoked by Becket at the St Stephen’s mass in October 1164 and that Elphege’s martyrdom had been cited in discussions about Becket that same day.

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are threatened by ‘the snares of those who thirst for the church’s blood’.137 In the atmosphere of impending doom at Canterbury [234] when the archbishop celebrated High Mass on the feast of Stephen, 26 December 1170, members of his household, including three future biographers, must have recalled his extraordinary celebration of that feast on 13 October 1164, allegedly in fear of his life. Herbert of Bosham later described Thomas’s martyrdom in terms of the Priest of the Most High sacrificing himself to the Most High ‘in the temple and before the altar’ (3:498). In a narrative larded with scriptural allusions by a master in spiritual interpretation, this apparently non-historical detail may well allude to the Gospel for St Stephen’s day. As has been seen, it was evoked in a nocturne lection for St Thomas’s own feast. Later that St Stephen’s day, Herbert of Bosham was ordered to Sens on a final mission for the archbishop, so was not present on the twenty-ninth to offer his customary radical counsel. But Thomas had absorbed previous lessons. The Anonymous of Lambeth notes the actual location of the murder, but comments that the saint had intended to take up his stand before the High Altar ‘to pour forth his blood for Christ in the very spot where he had been wont to offer up Christ’. The words of the St Stephen’s day liturgy may still have been ringing in Thomas’s ears, as they patently were for his biographer when he described the sacrilege: ‘If the blood of Abel [. . .] and the blood of Zacharias who fell between the temple and the altar call out to the Lord from the earth, how much more terribly doth intone the blood in front of the altar by which the Holy of Holies was profaned?’ (4:133). On hearing of the outrage, the archbishop of Sens immediately informed the Pope in a letter which already accords with the general interpretation expressed by Herbert of Bosham in his biography of c. 1186–87. Herbert may have been on hand in Sens to help interpret the news from Canterbury; one manuscript attributes the letter to him.138 It describes Thomas standing before the altar embracing the cross, offering himself up – and praying for his persecutors. This powerful myth was not created by the biographies but was already present in the news reports.

In conclusion This closing, liturgical image of St Thomas is appropriate. The role of liturgical events, language and allusions in his life and biographies has here been stressed as a body of material which is often undervalued as a historical source. The liturgy itself embodies an allegorical interpretation of Scripture which not only celebrates and interprets past historical events and anticipates their future consummation, but refers directly to the present celebrant and congregation. While this would usually have a spiritual application, in certain circumstances and times, liturgy could continue to make a very dramatic, public and ritualised exegetical commentary

137 Ep. 304, p. 723. 138 7:429–33; A. Duggan, Actes [. . .] de Sédières, ed. R. Foreville, p. 33.

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on current events. [235] A canonisation, Translation, episcopal Adventus or votive mass could make a powerful political statement. Liturgy could both influence and express contemporary attitudes and, it has been suggested here, even behaviour. The sheer number and quality of the early Becket biographies and the quantity of relevant correspondence, as illumined by the scholarship of the last twenty years or so, provides an unrivalled illustration of the role of allegorical language, alongside the developing languages of law, disputation and reporting, in the writing of history in the twelfth century. Certain historical events automatically evoked for eyewitnesses the universal and poetic language of liturgy, nothing more so than Thomas Becket’s death, which was perceived by his supporters, and then revealed to others, as a sacramental sacrifice, effecting what it symbolised. It has been seen that the biographers used, with restraint, the conventional devices of dreams and apparitions, together with the spiritual interpretation of historical events, to show that Thomas’s death was predestined and prophesied in the time-honoured manner of saints. But the epistolary evidence shows that, in their depiction of Archbishop Thomas himself using the techniques of spiritual interpretation to promote his cause, the biographers were reporting a view of events taken at the time in his household and intelligible to others, though doubtless regarded by opponents simply as the misguided and presumptuous polemic of contemporary political debate. Thomas’s uncompromising identification of his cause with that of Christ’s Church exasperated contemporaries as much as it has done some modern critics. Gilbert Foliot thought Thomas rashly and lightly invoked martyrdom. Even the normally sympathetic King Louis was provoked into asking him at Montmirail in 1169, rather sarcastically, ‘My lord archbishop, do you seek to be more than a saint?’ Herbert of Bosham could report the incident ironically, however, for ten years later the same king had come as a pilgrim to the shrine at Canterbury (3:425, 538). Thomas’s increasingly frequent, explicit and public predictions of his death during the last months could therefore be revealed not simply as conforming to a hagiographical stereotype, or as eyewitness accounts of his use of inflamatory propagandist formulate. His predictions are interpreted as well-attested historical proofs of his predestined and lonely vocation to martyrdom, culminating in the willing acceptance of death which was implicit in his decision to return from exile (3:113). Herbert of Bosham implied that he understood this aspect of his master’s white martyrdom all along, but William FitzStephen hints that until the archbishop’s death, even those most intimate with the formulation of his defence of the sacerdotium did not fully appreciate that he meant what he said. On his return from exile Thomas explained to his clerks that the cause of the Church could [236] not be concluded without the shedding of blood. He made spiritual preparation for the end. They ‘did not understand, attending only to the words. But later, those who saw the deeds, remembered the words’ (3:126–27). The biographers’ claims for Thomas’s sanctity did not rest with their elaboration of the circumstances of his death, the continuing testimony of the posthumous miracles or even the cause for which he died, crucial though these were in 381

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securing canonisation and perpetuating his cult. As the Evangelists, particularly St Matthew, had used scriptural allusions to show that the life and passion of Christ had fulfilled the requirements of the Messianic prophecies of the Old Covenant, so the twelfth-century writers used Old Testament typology and Gospel parallels to show that in his life and passion, Thomas of Canterbury fulfilled the requirements of sanctity more completely than other saints, exemplifying both white and red martyrdom in his imitation of Christ. But the biographers also inherited a longstanding tradition of using the medium of a saint’s Life for the history of the monastic house or see, privileges and relics associated with him, or for events of more than local significance, this historical material in turn helping to demonstrate the truth of the testimony about the saint. Hagiographical techniques and the historical evidence of eyewitness reports and archival records were not mutually exclusive, neither did their use distinguish the monastic from the secular writer, the ignorant from the educated. Hagiographic conventions are most obvious at predictable moments such as the saint’s birth, conversion and death. However, it has been suggested above that their use was, perhaps, more extensive than is sometimes acknowledged and that it did not invariably take the form of pious purple passages detachable from an otherwise historical narrative. Still less can ‘hagiographical’ and ‘historical’ elements be readily distinguished to denote the fanciful and the true, or to represent a hierarchy of truths. Rather, the biographers’ interpretation of history and therefore their reporting of the past, was affected more profoundly by the notion of sanctity traditionally expressed through venerated conventions. Like the Gospel writers – and Herbert of Bosham actually referred to himself, frequently, as ‘the disciple who wrote these things’ – the biographers wrote from their experience of an event which transformed and made sense of the past and whose significance was still being miraculously confirmed. Seen from this vantage-point the conventions were renewed, spiritual and historical truths were one.*

* I am most grateful to Dr Bernard Hamilton and Professor C.N.L. Brooke for their encouragement and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any remaining errors are my own.

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Note: Page numbers in italic indicate an illustration on the corresponding page. Abraham, biblical 6, 40, 96–97, 103, 120, 122, 345 Adomnan, priest, at Coldingham 132–36, 140 Adomnán of Iona De locis sanctis (On the Holy Places) xiv 37n2, 60, 67–68, 82, 308 and the Bible as map 303–6, 311–12 and the Life of Columba 192, 201, 213 and water from the rock 194–97 and the wisdom of the scribe 217–18, 225, 238, 245 on Jerusalem and the holy places 303–6 and Columba’s last words 263–70 and the fear of the Lord 261–63 and pictorial analogues 270–81, 272, 275, 278, 280 and the psalter 259–61 and spiritual sons 256–59 Vita Columbae (Life of St Columba) xiv, xvi, 26, 60, 177, 189 and Baíthéne’s formation 241–43 and the Bible as map 308–13 and Columba’s books 221–25 and the covenant 190–202 and the fear of the Lord 210–13, 246–55 and final blessings 202–5 Iona and 308–13 knowledge and wisdom in 218–21 monastic life in 282–92 and the psalter as primer 236–40 and Sabbath and octave 205–10 and the spiritual alphabet 227–35 and spiritual sons 256–59, 261, 267, 270, 281

and the tegorium 225–27 the vision on Hinba 243–46 and the wisdom of the scribe 215–18, 226n33 Aidan 22–24, 48, 54, 60–63, 137–40, 142, 175–76 Alan of Tewkesbury 330, 344, 350, 352, 372 Alexander III, Pope 349, 351–52, 361, 363, 365 allegorical interpretation 4, 7–8, 12–14, 27, 88 Alexandrian 9–10 and the double martyrdom of Becket 348–49, 358, 360, 380–81 and martyrdom in the Lives of Becket 318, 323 Ambrose 9–10, 71n24, 117–18, 118n7, 238n63, 267 De Officiis Ministrorum 211 and martyrdom in the Lives of Becket 318, 321 and monothelitism 162–63, 162n57 Angli in Bede 53–59, 121–26 angulus in Bede 105–10 Anselm, Archbishop 328–32, 341, 345, 350, 353–56, 361, 365–68, 370, 374–79 as model for Becket 353–56 pilgrimage of 345 Ark of the Covenant 5, 7, 14, 48, 192, 200–1, 301–2 Athanasius Life of St. Anthony 344 Augustine (of Hippo) Becket and 355

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Bede and 126–31 The City of God 10–11, 144, 197 on martyrdom 344 Temple metaphor in 10 Baíthéne 211–12, 226–31, 236, 252, 254, 258–64, 270, 283–84, 308 in Adomnán 241–46 Baldwin 331, 336, 342 Basil 215, 261, 265, 267–69, 271 rule of 248, 344 Becket, Thomas Anselm as model for 365–68 bearing his own cross 362–63 conversio of 342–43 and ‘design against the Church’ 365 double martyrdom of 327–31, 380–82 the language of the debate concerning 357–62 red martyrdom 332–39 and Edward the Confessor 363–64, 366 excommunication by 355 exile of 355–56, 377 flight of 347–49 Herbert of Bosham on 368–69 and King Henry II 364, 367, 370 and the mass of St Stephen 370–78 murder of 317, 346 paradox of 343–44 passio of 352–53 pastoral image of 346–47 peregrinatio of 345–46 return from exile 379–80 and St Elphege 378–79 trial of 350–52 vindication of 353–54 see also Lives of Becket Bede and Adomnán 190–94 on the building of stone churches 27–32 commentary on Mark 151–56, 161–66 De Templo 3–6, 9–16, 28–29, 31–33, 81–83 and the Ecclesiastical History 17–27 de virtute in virtutem in 71–73 and the forty-two mansiones 68–71 on ‘the God of gods in Zion’ 293–301 Historia Ecclesiastica 36–41, 88–89, 110–12, 113–14 and Adomnan and Coldingham 132–36 the Angli in 121–26

the Britons in 126–31 Christ as cornerstone in 105–10 and Easter 716, 142–44 and Egbert 136–42 gens Anglorum in 98–102 islands and inner conversion in 60–64 and monothelitism 146–51 papal exegesis on islands and idols in 41–45 patristic exegesis of Psalm 98 in 92–98 the peoples of Britain in 45–52 primary conversion from Rome in 53–59 Roman Britain in 52–53 and the term Saxones 102–5 topography and conversion in 89–92 The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow 29, 256, 298 the Mediator image in 167–76 and monothelitism 145–46, 158–61 objectives and approaches of 12–17 pastoral concern 156–58 periphery and centre in 73–78 on seeing the God of gods in Zion 65–68, 78–87 St Paul and Jonah in 114–20 and the synod of Whitby 176–85 on the Tabernacle and the Temple 301–3 Benedict 27, 29, 66–67, 76–78, 149–150, 196, 201–02, 211, 224, 244–45, 248, 256–63, 271, 277, 279, 281, 287, 298 346 rule of 135, 211, 226, 228, 255, 263, 265–70, 274, 276, 279, 297 Benedict of Petersborough 346 Benedictines 273, 346 See also Benedict, Rule of Bible books of Acts 8–9, 18–20, 25–27, 124, 180–81 Colossians 19–21 1 Corinthians 8, 11–12, 17–18, 84–86, 196–97, 244–46, 249–50 2 Corinthians 102, 303 Ephesians 7, 9–10, 107–9, 124–25, 242, 333 Exodus 4–5, 7–9, 33–34, 74–76, 196–98, 206–8, 301–2 Ezra 33–34, 220–21 Ezekiel 6–7, 11–16, 24–25, 30–31 Galatians 21–22, 24–26 Genesis 97–98, 121–25, 321–23

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Hebrews 6, 9, 208, 288 Hosea 10, 38 Isaiah 6–8, 44–45, 82–83, 83n66, 204–5, 244–45, 248–49, 322–23 John 6–7, 9–10, 12–13, 32–33, 80–84, 130–31, 170–71, 207–8, 262–63 3 Kings 4–5, 7, 14, 31, 33, 128 Leviticus 8–9, 47, 199–200, 209 Luke 108–9, 205–6, 351 Mark 157–58, 172–73 Bede’s commentary on 151–56, 161–66 Matthew 83–87, 111–12, 116–18, 126–31, 182–85, 232–37, 286–88, 300–1, 347–51 Nehemiah 4, 33, 111 Numbers 7, 69–71, 294–95 1 Peter 7–10, 96–97, 105–6 Psalms 5–6, 92–98, 222–26, 237–40, 260–61 Revelation 7–8, 133, 320–22, 324 Song of Songs xiv, 321–22, 324–25 general and Adomnán on Columba 308–13 and Adomnán on Jerusalem and the holy places 303–6 and Bede on ‘the God of gods in Zion’ 293–301 and Bede on the Tabernacle and the Temple 301–3 and Jerome 306–8 as map 293 Britons 52–53, 63–64, 109–10, 118–21, 132–33 Augustine (of Canterbury) and 126–31 in Bede 126–31 Caesarius of Aries 344 Caesarius of Haisterbach 341 Camaldonese 345 Canterbury 340–45, 354–55 death of Becket at 346 Canticles martyrdom in 340 Cassian, John xiv, 84–85, 128–30, 135, 178, 180, 183, 195, 197–98, 202, 211, 213, 215, 218–30, 241, 248, 250–54, 260–62, 265, 267, 269, 286, 288, 300, 309, 332n18 Collations 344 Cecilia 344 Christ and the Angli 88, 96–97, 101–3, 105–6, 112

385

and the art of teaching spiritual sons 256, 258, 260, 262–67, 269–71, 274, 277 and the Bible as map 297–98, 302–3, 306–7, 309, 311 Church of 14, 17, 43, 50, 100, 127, 183–84 city of 119n13 and Columba at Clonmacnoise 283–84, 286–87, 290–91 and the dating of Easter 180, 185 the divine wisdom 48, 244, 249–50, 308n65 and the double martyrdom of Becket 329–30, 359–61, 363, 366, 370–73, 376, 378–81 red martyrdom 333–34, 338 white martyrdom 341, 346–48, 350–51, 354, 356 and Historia Ecclesiastica 40, 44–46, 54–57, 59–62 imitation of 163, 205, 207, 276 and martyrdom 321, 323, 326, 337–39, 362, 382 Incarnation of 136, 138–39, 142, 154 and the Life of Columba 190–93, 195–99, 201, 204, 210–11, 213 and martyrdom in the Lives of Becket 319, 325 and monothelitism 145–48, 150–53, 155–62 Passion of 6, 116, 318, 382 red and white martyrdom of 318, 320–24, 326, 339–40, 344, 382 resurrection of 38, 41, 51, 64 and the Angli 93, 109–11 and the Bible as map 304–5, 310, 312 and the dating of Easter 170, 175–76, 179, 182 and the Life of Columba 194, 206–7, 209 and martyrdom in the Lives of Becket 318 and seeing the God of gods in Zion 67, 70, 81–82, 86 and St Paul and the sign of Jonah 124, 138, 143–44 and the wisdom of the scribe 226 and seeing the God of gods in Zion 66, 72, 74–76, 78, 80, 83–84 and St Paul and the sign of Jonah 114, 117, 120, 125–31, 137, 140–41 and the Temple 7–13, 15–16, 18–22, 24–27, 30–31, 33–34

INDEX

and the wisdom of the scribe 220–22, 232–35, 240, 245, 255 see also Mediator Christ Church (Canterbury) 329–30, 341, 344, 354–56, 366, 370, 378–79 Cistercians 318, 325, 342, 345 house of Pontigny 345–46 Clarendon 343, 346–48, 350–52, 356–65, 372, 375, 379 Clonmacnoise 210, 282–92 Codex Amiatinus xiv, 32–35, 45, 48, 73, 75–76, 99n37, 113–14, 115, 116, 117, 220–21, 302 Coldingham 28 and Bede 132–36 See also Adomnán, priest, at Coldingham Colman 18, 23, 140, 178–79, 183–85 Columba xv, xvi, 19, 60, 116, 139, 140, 141, 177, 180, 184, 189–91, 193–213, 215–31, 236, 241–47, 249–55, 257–67, 270–71, 276–77, 282–92, 308–12, 345 at Clonmacnoise 282–92 Columban familia xv, 142, 282, 291 peregrinatio of 257, 345 see also Adomnán of Iona: Vita Columbae Columbanus 41, 116, 176, 178, 182, 183, 198, 230–31, 267, 288 conquest in Bede 52–53 Constantine 53–58, 147 and Vita Columbae 190–94 Constitutions of Clarendon 346, 350, 357, 359, 365 conversion in Bede 52–59, 89–92 inner 60–64 cornerstone see angulus covenant Vita Columbae and 190–94 Curia Regis 355 Cuthbert 20, 27, 48, 61, 226n33 and the Angli 103–4 and the Bible as map 298–99, 310 and Columba 190, 285–86 and martyrdom 369 and seeing the God of gods in Zion 78–80, 83, 85 and St Paul and the sign of Jonah 132, 135, 137 Cyprian 127–28, 183, 319 on martyrdom 340

Daniel, biblical 30 Daniel, Walter Vita Ailredi 341–42 Dunstan 273–77, 354, 370, 377 Eadmer 329, 333, 341, 350, 361, 368 Easter Controversy xv, 41, 63, 92, 127, 148, 259 De Templo and 18–22 and the Life of Columba 189, 206, 210 and the Mediator image in Bede 167–76 and the synod of Whitby 176–85 Egbert xv, 20, 23, 89, 132, 135 Bede and 136–44 Elphege 328, 354, 356, 370, 375, 377–79 Eutyches 153, 171–72 monothelitism and 158–61 Evagrius 189 translation of Life of St. Anthony 344 evangelisation De Templo and 17–18 exegesis papal in Bede 41–45 patristic in Bede 92–98 Temple theme in 8–12 Ezra 4, 33–34, 220–21 familia see under Columba fear of the Lord 210–12, 246–55 FitzStephen, William see under Lives of Becket Foliot, Gilbert 322, 330, 348–50, 352–57, 359–64, 370, 381 Garnier of Pont-Ste-Maxence see under Lives of Becket gens Anglorum in Bede 98–102 Gentiles 17–18, 20–21, 24–28, 37–40, 42–44, 55–56 and the Angli 90–91, 93–99, 105–8 and the dating of Easter 180–81 and St Paul and the sign of Jonah 118–20, 123–26, 137–38 Gethsemane 172, 337 in Bede 161–66 Gildas 23n27, 38, 46–47, 89, 99 and the Life of Columba 193, 204 and St Paul and the sign of Jonah 118, 126

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God of gods in Zion xiv, 71–72, 77–87, 293–301 Gregory 354–55 influence on Bede 11–12 on martyrdom 340, 344 Vita Benedicti 280 Gregory I, Pope see Gregory Gregory the Great see Gregory Grim, Edward see under Lives of Becket Henry I 346 Henry II, king 328–29, 333–34, 334n19, 336, 343, 346 Becket and 354–56, 364–65, 367–71, 370n117, 373–78 and Becket’s exile 349–50 and Becket’s flight 348–49 and Becket’s passio 352 and Becket’s personal sanctity 353 and Edward the Confessor 363, 366 and the language of the Becket debate 357–62 Henry of Winchester 343 Herbert of Bosham see under Lives of Becket heresy xv, 23, 53, 59, 109, 145, 148, 151–52, 159–62, 166, 177, 204–5, 210 Arians and Arianism 53, 158, 160, 204 Eutyches and monothelitism and 158–61, 172–73 Pelagius and Pelagianism 53, 109, 126, 169–70, 173, 204 Hilary of Chichester 349–50 Hinba in Adomnán 243–46 idols in Bede 41–45 Insular xiii–xiv, xv–xvi, 49–50, 59–60, 167–69, 293 and the wisdom of the scribe 223, 236, 241–42 Iona 63–64, 141–44 Bede and 136–40 and the Bible as map 310–12 and spiritual sons 257–59 and the wisdom of the scribe 225–26, 245–47, 252–54 see also Adomnán of Iona Ireland 18–21 and the Angli 91, 100, 110 and the art of teaching spiritual sons 258–59, 267, 271

and the Bible as map 308, 311–12 and Columba 189–91, 193, 204–6, 209–10, 212, 282–85 and the dating of Easter 167–70, 173–76, 179, 182 and Historia Ecclesiastica 36–41, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 57–58, 60, 62–63 and St Paul and the sign of Jonah 121–22, 126, 132–34, 136–37, 139–42 and the wisdom of the scribe 219, 221–22, 224, 229, 234–36, 252–53 islands in Bede 41–45, 60–64 Jerome on martyrdom 340, 344 Vulgate of 73, 114, 123, 221, 237, 243, 306 Jerusalem Adomnán on 303–6 see also under Temple John aux Bellesmains 345 John of Salisbury 341–43, 345, 348, 351–52, 354–55 John the Baptist 332, 341 Jonah, biblical 114–20, 140–42, 242 Joshua, biblical 5, 71, 295, 311 and Vita Columbae 190–94 Langton, Stephen 353 lapis angularis see angulus lectio devina 346 Lives of Becket Anonymous IV 323, 326, 330, 340 Anonymous X 319, 322–23, 326, 340 Anonymous of Lambeth 346, 373, 380 FitzStephen, William 323–26, 330–32, 336–47, 339–41, 346, 349–51, 358–62, 375–76 Garnier of Pont-Ste-Maxence 319, 322–23, 340, 345, 350–51 Grim, Edward 317, 319–23, 326, 331, 335–36, 339–42, 344, 353, 379 Herbert of Bosham 325–26, 330–31, 335–37, 344–51, 358–59, 367–68, 373–75, 380–82 Thomas Saga 320, 322–23, 326, 340, 349–50, 370n117, 371n121 mansiones, forty-two 68–71 Martin 146–47, 149–51, 153, 158, 160, 166, 173, 189, 216, 224, 261, 285, 289–91, 344–47

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Rufinus of Aquilea 9, 40, 69, 123n25, 124, 218, 265, 269, 294, 344, 357

Mediator 107–9, 138, 164–66, 203 in Bede 167–76 monothelitism Bede and 145–51 commentary on Mark 151–56, 161–66 Eutyches and 158–61 Mediator image 167–76 pastoral concern 156–58 Montmirail 355–56, 381 multitude of isles in Historia Ecclesiastica 92–98

Sabbath 25, 64, 144, 181, 220 and Vita Columbae, 205–10 Saxones 99, 102–5 Sebastian 344 spiritual alphabet 227–38, 243, 254, 261, 279 Stephen of Rouen 349–50 St Gregory see Gregory St Wilfrid see Wilfrid Sulpicius Severus 189, 216, 285, 290 on martyrdom 344–45

Northampton Council of 349–52, 354 Northumbria see Wearmouth-Jarrow octave and Vita Columbae 205–10 Odo, Prior 344 Origen 8–9, 69–71, 79, 197, 250, 294 Paul 15, 17, 19, 23–26, 28, 38, 40–45, 56, 59, 63–64, 67, 69, 73–75, 80, 90–102, 105–07, 113–44, 179–81, 195–97, 203–04, 206, 221, 241–42, 244–45, 250, 262, 268, 271, 289–90, 293–94, 307, 311, 343, 348, 351, 366–67, 372 in Bede 114–20 peregrinatio 86n79, 257 and martyrdom 345 pilgrimage Jerome’s letters on 306–8 see also peregrinatio psalter 72 in Adomnán 211, 221–23, 236–43, 259–61, 263–64, 270–71, 276–77 Eadui Psalter 276, 278 Hebrew Psalter 73, 110–11n75, 296 Roman Psalter 73, 127n33, 264n36, 296 Stuttgart Psalter 270, 272, 273, 277 Quartodecimanism 19, 138, 169, 175, 184n52 Rockingham Council of 350, 361 Roger of York 331, 354, 363–64, 371, 377 Rome primary conversion from, 53–60, 66, 91 Roman Britain 41, 52–53, 118, 126

Tabernacle and the Bible as map 301–3 and see Codex Amiatinus; Temple tegorium 225–27, 261 Temple biblical in Jerusalem 4–7, 9–11, 13–16, 27–31, 33–34, 87–88, 123n25, 168, 296 Holy of Holies in 5–7, 19, 28, 201, 303 Second 4–5 thematic and the Bible as map 301–3 of Christ’s body 7–10, 12–13, 33–34 of the Church 7–11, 19–24, 30–32 in patristic exegesis 8–12 see also Codex Amiatinus Theobald, Archbishop 343, 364–65, 377 topography in Historia Ecclesiastica 89–92 Tours 216, 289, 342, 350, 368 Council of 349–50, 365, 367 Vezelay 346, 355 Wearmouth-Jarrow 4, 29, 32, 42, 45, 67, 75–79, 113, 256–57, 293, 297, 303, 306 Westminster 343, 363–65, 369 Council of 347, 363–65, 368 Whitby, synod of 24, 44, 49n48, 50, 56n65, 91, 110, 116, 137–40, 167n1, 176, 178, 183, 185, 259 and the dating of Easter 176–85 Wilfrid 23–24, 29–30, 148, 149n14, 180–85 and the double martydom of Becket 329–30, 346, 356 William of Canterbury 330, 334, 339, 346, 357–59, 379

388