Good historians

Daily Reading for May 25 • The Venerable Bede, Priest, and Monk of Jarrow, 735

Bede seems to have two major purposes in writing his History. . . . First of all, he is desirous of writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People just as his title indicates, and this involves such concerns as chronological development, comprehensive treatment, fairness, accuracy, and attention to sources and to details that have usually been the objective goals and characteristics of good historians, but always under the subjective influence of his own perspectives and within the limitations under which he worked. His second major purpose is to relate the gradual movement of the peoples of his land from diversity to unity that he sees reflected in the decision for the Roman tradition of Christianity over the Celtic one, including the Roman way for calculating the date of Easter, that was made at the Synod of Whitby in the year 664. Bede had been born only a few years after that synod, and still by the time that he was completing his History in 731 there remained many traces of Celtic individualism that, to his orderly mind, militated against God’s unitary purpose and intended destiny for the land and its people. . . . As Bede saw things, there had long been much chaos and confusion, with Celtic monks and bishops still observing Celtic rites and the wrong date of Easter, thus placing themselves, in effect, out of communion with the See of Canterbury, which observed the Roman rites and kept the one true date of Easter. . . . This state of affairs had even gotten to the point, he says, that “it sometimes happened that Easter was celebrated twice in the same year, so that the king had finished the fast and was keeping [Celtic] Easter Sunday, while the queen and her people were still observing Lent and observing [Roman] Palm Sunday”! . . .

The debates at Whitby were conducted between Colman, bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne, representing the Celtic tradition that had come by way of Iona and Ireland from the north, and Wilfrid, abbot of Ripon and later archbishop of York, representing the Roman tradition of Christianity that had come from the southeast by means of St. Augustine, who had been sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great. . . . The Celtic argument, upheld by Colman and supported by Abbess Hilda and her community, focused on antiquity, individual choice, and decentralized authority, whereas the Roman argument, championed by Wilfrid, called for universality, discipline, and an understanding of doctrinal development under centralized, international leadership. Here at the Synod of Whitby the triumph of Roman Christianity over Celtic was sealed as the English Church was formally united by the decision of King Oswiu of Northumbria in favor of Rome. The political factors that had brought him to power also made possible this firm decision. Beded understandably makes this event, this synod, the pivotal turning-point of his entire History, . . . although it is possible that the lines between “Celt” and “Roman” were not as finely drawn as his account suggests.

From A Companion to Bede: A Reader’s Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by J. Robert Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

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