SOURCE: Gerald Bonner, "Bede and Medieval Civilization," in Anglo-Saxon England, Vol. 2, 1973, pp. 71-90. [In the following essay, Bonner discusses the limitations of Bede's library and the subsequent ramifications for his writings.]

The mortal remains of the Venerable Bede rest today in the cathedral church of Christ and Blessed Mary the Virgin, Durham. They were brought there in the early eleventh century by one Ælfred Westou, priest and sacrist of Durham and an enthusiastic amateur of that characteristically medieval form of devotion expressed in the acquisition, by fair means or foul, of the relics of the saints to the greater glory of God. The removal of Bede's remains to Durham, involving as it did considerable preliminary planning and solitary nocturnal vigil before the final successful snatch, was one of his more brilliant coups, upon which he seems especially to have preened himself. The bones were first kept in the coffin of St Cuthbert, being subsequently removed to a reliquary near the saint's tomb. In 1370 they were placed in the Galilee Chapel, where they now lie under a plain table-tomb of blue marble, made in 1542 after the medieval shrine had been defaced. Bede himself would certainly have preferred that his body should have been left in its grave among his brethren at Jarrow, there to await the coming of Christ which he so ardently desired to see; but if a removal had to be made, we need not doubt that he would have been content to lie at Durham, near but not too near the shrine of St Cuthbert, the great saint and patron of the north, under a modest tombstone, so much more in keeping with his nature than the earlier and richer shrine, despoiled by the commissioners of Henry VIII.

Bede in his writings gives many accounts of miraculous happenings; but no cult of miracles was associated with his name. Rather, there was a spontaneous recognition of his quality, expressed in St Boniface's phrase: 'a candle of the church'. In him may be seen an outstanding example of that flowering of Christian culture in Northumbria produced by the encounter between the Irish tradition of Iona and Lindisfarne and the Latin order of Wearmouth and Jarrow in the seventh and eighth centuries. This flowering is an astonishing phenomenon, inviting exaggerated comparisons with Periclean Athens or the renaissance of the twelfth century in western Europe. But when all qualifications have been made and all proportions duly guarded, there remains an extraordinary cultural achievement, accomplished within a few generations from the time of the conversion to Christianity. Works of art like the Codex Amiatinus and the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses; vernacular poems like those of Cædmon and The Dream of the Rood; and Latin compositions like the anonymous lives of Gregory the Great and Cuthbert and Eddius Stephanus's biography of Wilfrid—all these are a testimony to a genius latent in the Northumbrians and brought into being by the inspiration of Christianity. To these must be added the work of Bede. Bede cannot, of course, be regarded simply as a Northumbrian, nor even as an English, figure. He is a European, writing in the international—or supranational—tradition of the Fathers of the Church; but even in this he may be said to exemplify Northumbrian tradition. After all, the uncial hand of the Codex Amiatinus and the inhabited vine-scroll ornamentation of the Ruthwell cross are themselves a reminder of continental associations.

The character of Bede—'vir maxime doctus et minime superbus' as William of Malmesbury called him¹—presents something of an historical anomaly. Our biographical information is scanty in the extreme, so that our knowledge of his personality has to be formed from his writings—and Bede is one of the least egotistical of authors. Yet in a strange fashion Bede reveals himself through his pages, disarming criticism and making his reader feel that he knows the writer as a man.² One may indeed believe that it is Bede himself, as well as his writings, who has attracted many of the scholars who have studied them. In Charles Plummer, one of the greatest of Bede's editors, whose personal life in no small measure resembled that of his author,³ Sir Roger Mynors has noted 'qualities of heart as well as head',⁴ and one may observe similar qualities in more recent students of Bede, like Max Ludwig Wolfram Laistner and Bertram Colgrave.

There is an historical cliché to the effect that St Augustine of Hippo resembles a man standing on the frontiers of two worlds: the ancient world that was passing away, and the medieval world that was coming into being. In a certain sense the same is true of Bede. In the circumstances of his life he was a man of the early Middle Ages, as surely as Augustine was a man of the later Roman Empire; but as a Christian teacher—and this would seem, from the circumstance of Bede's life and from his own words⁵ to have been his own view of his vocation—he stood in an unbroken tradition, descending from the Fathers of the Church. Indeed, as everyone knows who attempts to work on the text of Bede's scriptural commentaries, he has so thoroughly assimilated the patristic idiom and the patristic fashion of thought that it is often difficult to decide whether he is quoting from another author or expressing himself in his own words. There is no question here of conscious plagiarism, for Bede, more than most medieval authors, is anxious to acknowledge his indebtedness to other.⁶ Rather, he regarded his commentaries as elementary text-books for those unable or unwilling to read more distinguished authors and his own contributions as little more than glosses on what had already been said authoritatively by those greater than he. A good example of this is provided by his treatment of the verse: '[Ishmael] shall be a wild man, his hand against all and the hands of all against him; and he shall pitch his tents over against all his brethren' (Genesis XVI. 12). To explain this passage, Bede first quotes Jerome, without naming him: 'He declares that his seed will dwell in the wilderness—that is, the wandering Saracens with no fixed abode, who harry all the peoples dwelling on the borders of the desert and are assailed by them.'⁷ Bede then adds his own observation: 'But these things are of the past. For now is his hand against all and the hands of all against him to such a degree that they oppress with their domination the whole of Africa throughout its length and hold the greatest part of Asia too, and some part of Europe, hateful and hostile to all.'⁸ In this comment Bede makes no mention of the period of more than three centuries which had elapsed between Jerome's day and his own. He does not question the identification of the Saracens with the descendants of Ishmael, or with the Arab invaders of Syria, Egypt and Spain. He accepts the tradition and merely brings it up to date.⁹

Bede's sense of writing within the patristic tradition is exemplified in another way, in his detestation of heresy and schism. He denounces the 'Arian madness' which corrupted the whole world and even invaded Britain¹⁰ and sees it prefigured in the Pale Horse of the Apocalypse;¹¹ declares that the precepts and promises of Holy Scripture overturn both the Adoptionism of the Photinians and the Dualism of the Manichees;¹² and warns his readers that Donatists and all others who separate themselves from the unity of the Catholic Church will have their place with the goats at the left hand of Christ on the Day of Judgement.¹³ The menace of Pelagianism is recognized and its teaching denounced.¹⁴ Julian of Eclanum, the ablest of the Pelagian apologists, had written a commentary on the Songs of Songs which was apparently still extant in Bede's time and Bede, when writing his own commentary explaining the canticle as an allegory of Christ and his church, devoted the first book to a refutation of Julian's teaching.¹⁵ This concern with doctrinal error of the past seems to the modern reader somewhat surprising. Pelagianism, it is true, is often said to be a heresy to which the English are prone and Pelagian writings were still in circulation in Bede's day; but none of Bede's contemporaries was likely ever to see a Manichee,¹⁶ while Donatism had never had much appeal outside Roman Africa and by Bede's day was as dead as Arianism. But such considerations probably never entered Bede's mind. For him the faith of the Fathers was as his own and their enemies were to be regarded as his.

It is, therefore, difficult to exaggerate the extent of patristic influence on Bede and misleading to confine it to the Latin tradition or even to those among the Greek Fathers whose works we know to have existed in Latin translation. Two examples of occasions on which Bede draws on an unexpected Greek tradition are provided by his sermon on the Decollation of St John Baptist. In this, Bede remarks that we ought not to celebrate our birthdays with feasts or at any time indulge in carnal delights but rather anticipate the day of our death with tears, prayers, and frequent fastings.¹⁷ This rather depressing exhortation appears at first sight to be no more than a typical expression of claustral asceticism, and when a patristic source is discovered it comes as no surprise to find that Bede's immediate inspiration appears to be St Jerome who, with characteristic erudition, points out that the only persons recorded in scripture as having celebrated their birthdays were Pharaoh, who hanged his butler, and Herod, who beheaded John the Baptist.¹⁸ But behind Jerome, and the source upon which he drew, is Origen;¹⁹ and Bede here stands in a tradition of thought going back to the great Alexandrian exegete of the third century. Whether Bede had actually read Origen's homily for himself is not clear. It was available in Latin translation, and we know that the Latin version of another of Origen's homilies in the same series was used by Bede in his commentary on Samuel.²⁰ More than this we cannot say.

The second example is even more interesting. In the same sermon Bede refers to Herod's fatal promise to the daughter of Herodias, remarking that if we perceive that the performance of an incautious oath will entail a greater crime than its violation we should not hesitate to perjure ourselves and so avoid committing the worse offence—a piece of advice which directly contradicted the ethical assumptions of Bede's society, in which oath-breaking was one of the most shameful crimes that a man could commit.²¹ Now in this case, as in the preceding instance, Bede's obvious source of inspiration is Jerome who, however, merely says that he will not excuse Herod for keeping his oath, since if the girl had demanded the murder of his father or mother he would certainly have refused.²² It is Origen, in his commentary on Matthew, who says that the guilt of oath-keeping which led to the killing of the prophet was greater than the guilt of oath-breaking would have been.²³ Had Bede read Origen on Matthew? No Latin translation survives and the problem arises: is it possible that Bede had actually read the original Greek? Dom Hurst appears to think that he may have done so, judging from the reference in his edition of Bede's sermons.²⁴

I am not fully convinced of either Bede's ability or the availability of a Greek manuscript. Perhaps we should assume a Latin translation which has perished, or some reference in a florilegium? The problem remains; but the essential point is that Bede was drawing on a tradition which looks back to the third-century school of Alexandria. Dom Leclercq has emphasized the importance of the influence of Origen in determining the character of biblical exegesis in the west during the Middle Ages.²⁵ These examples, in indicating Bede's utilization of the past, also reveal his anticipation of the future.

It is not necessary to labour the theme of Bede's devotion to the Fathers, in view of his declared desire to walk 'iuxta vestigia patrum'²⁶ Nevertheless, it should be added that his attitude to patristic authority was in no way servile, and he was prepared to disregard patristic exegesis if it seemed to him unreasonable. Thus, in discussing why Cain's offering was rejected by God and Abel's accepted, he is concerned to defend the calling of the husbandman, and to see Cain's sin, not in his offering but in the mind in which he made the offering: 'Cain was not rejected on account of the humble nature of his offering, seeing that he offered to God from his habitual livelihood. It was rather on account of the impious mind of the man who offered that he was rejected together with his gifts by him who searches all hearts.'²⁷ The significance of this exegesis lies in the fact that it ignores the view of Ambrose, whose treatise De Cain et Abel Bede had used in composing his commentary, that Abel's sacrifice was preferred to Cain's because it consisted of living animals and not insensate vegetables.²⁸ Ambrose was, for Bede, a great authority. He had, indeed, for a time been deterred from writing his own commentary on Luke because of the existence of Ambrose's;²⁹ but when the need arose, he was prepared to maintain his own opinion.

Indeed, when full justice has been done to the influence of the Fathers upon Bede, it remains true that his life was lived in another world than theirs, and that his learning and culture, however profound, were not those of a man of the later Roman Empire but of the Middle Ages. Bede's very scholarship is of a different character from that of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine and, more important, his outlook is different. One obvious distinction is, of course, that they were all Latin speakers by birth, while Bede was not. For him Latin could never have the flavour and nuances of a mother tongue. This may explain why his Latin verses have never aroused much enthusiasm, even in the kindest critics³⁰—few men can hope to write poetry in a foreign tongue.³¹ Nevertheless, as we shall see, there are reasons for not laying too much stress on the alien character of Bede's Latin. Rather, the essential difference between Bede's Latin culture and that of the Fathers is that Bede had no foundation of classical literature such as they enjoyed. M. L. W. Laistner in a brilliant paper drew attention to Bede's limitations, and demonstrated how many of his citations from the classical authors were probably at second-hand, in contrast to those from Christian poets.³² Here is the great cultural change; and if we are to understand Bede, we must try to discover how it came about.

Some clue to the problem is provided by Dom Jean Leclercq in a beautiful and learned study of monastic culture in the west during the early Middle Ages.³³ which, although concentrating upon the period from the Caroline reform to the rise of Scholasticism, also throws light on the earlier period from the lifetime of St Benedict onwards and makes several references to Bede. Reading this work one is constantly carried into the world of Wearmouth and Jarrow. First, Leclercq emphasizes the significance of the Benedictine tradition in early medieval western monasticism.³⁴ Here, at first sight, some difficulty appears to arise. Was Bede in fact a Benedictine? We have been warned not to give too much credence to the belief that Wearmouth and Jarrow were centres of Benedictine monasticism or that Bede, from his earliest profession, was a Benedictine monk. 'Although the influence of the Benedictine Rule may have been considerable, especially as the eighth century advanced, the composite or mixed rule was probably characteristic of much of Anglo-Saxon monasticism during Bede's lifetime'³⁵— such is the judgement of one expert. For our purposes, however, the question is not whether the rule occupied 'a preponderant though not an exclusive position'³⁶ in Benedict Biscop's foundations, but rather to what degree Bede's mind and thought were shaped by it. It is generally agreed that there is only one direct citation from the Rule in Bede—that from ch. 7 in the commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah;³⁷ but Dom Justin McCann has identified two unmistakable citations in the History of the Abbots³⁸ and to these may be added the 'dura et aspera' of ch. 58, cited in the commentary on the First Epistle of John,³⁹ while the 'compunctione lacrimarum' of ch. 20 is quoted in Bede's sermon on St John the Evangelist and echoed in the De Tabernaculo.⁴⁰ There is, indeed, an opportunity for a detailed study of the influence of the Rule on the thought of Bede by some competent scholar. For the present we need only observe that Bede was plainly within the Benedictine tradition in the broad sense of the term, and it is easy to imagine him thoroughly at home in the company of Benedictine scholars like Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon. Now the attitude of the Rule to monastic scholarship, as interpreted by Dom Leclercq, is that while a knowledge of letters is regarded as being necessary and normally part of a monk's life, such knowledge forms no part of his vocation, his ideal, or of his monastery's ideal. For the monk the only values are those of eternal life, the only evil sin.⁴¹ Any approach to Bede as a scholar must be conditioned by this view. His concern with the study of scripture—the aspect of his work which most impressed his contemporaries—was determined by pastoral rather than academic considerations. Bede is a literary artist by nature rather than by intention.

Reading Leclercq's study one is made aware how remarkably Bede's writings fit into the pattern of monastic culture as there described. Besides the bible and the Rule, those twin bases of early western monasticism, Leclercq points to St Gregory as the great doctor of monastic spirituality⁴²—and we remember Bede's devotion to the greatest of popes. He speaks of the desire for celestial contemplation as being characteristic of the medieval religious life⁴³—and we recall how often the theme of contemplation appears in Bede's writings. He tells of the importance of the Song of Songs as an influence on the theology of the medieval cloister⁴⁴—and Bede's commentary comes to mind. He refers to the debt owed by medieval monasticism to Latin patristic tradition⁴⁵—and we recall Bede's frequent quotation from Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine. He speaks of the importance of history as a monastic literary genre⁴⁶—and one remembers that the Ecclesiastical History is, in a sense, Bede's crowning achievement. In all these details, and in many others, Bede is wholly within the monastic culture described by Dom Leclercq.

It is in the light of these considerations that we can discuss the problem of how, and why, Bede differs from his predecessors the Latin Fathers. It has been remarked above that his Latin differed from theirs in being an acquired tongue and one that was not, like theirs, formed by a profound study of the pagan classics. Nevertheless, there are two considerations which suggest that too much stress should not be laid on the alien character of Bede's Latinity. First, the position of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbrian monasticism was peculiar, in that they represented a sophisticated and cosmopolitan community constantly in touch with the outside world in general, and with Rome and Italy in particular. In such a society the study and use of Latin was more than a mere liturgical, or even theological, exercise; and the presence of an Italian like John the Archchanter, brought to Northumbria to ensure the correct singing of the Roman chant, would require the use of Latin for the purpose of oral communication. The Latinity of Wearmouth and Jarrow was therefore influenced by the living tradition of the Roman church. But there is another, deeper reason why Bede's Latin should not be regarded as a foreign language, as we commonly use the term today. For a man like Bede, as for Alcuin, Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, Latin was not a foreign tongue at all; it was the tongue of the church. Dom Leclercq⁴⁷ refers to the question raised by Wolfram von den Steinen in his book Notker der Dichter und seine geistige Welt as to why Notker wrote his famous sequences in Latin and not in his German mother-tongue, to which von den Steinen replies that for Notker and for others like him—among whom he specifically mentions Bede—there was no choice. Their native language was inadequate to express their thoughts.⁴⁸ Latin was the language of the bible, the liturgy, and of Christian culture; and there was no other literary culture available to Bede in Northumbria.

Thus Bede learned Latin in order to be a monk and a priest. He learned it accurately enough from the standard grammars and, inevitably, read Vergil; but once he was trained it was to the study of the bible and the Fathers that he directed his attention. He had, of course, a number of stock quotations from classical authors at second hand, which he was prepared to employ for the purposes of literary embellishment or illustration;⁴⁹ but he had little inclination to add to this store and even less opportunity, in view of the resources available to him in the library of Wearmouth and Jarrow.

One of the most valuable of the many contributions made by the late Max Laistner to Bedan studies was the famous article on the library of the Venerable Bede.⁵⁰ Lacking as we do any contemporary catalogue of the library of Benedict Biscop's foundations, it is possible to estimate its resources only by reference to citations, either avowed or unacknowledged, in Bede's writings, and here Laistner's pioneering work is of fundamental importance. In the very nature of things it could not be definitive, and since its publication some additional works have been identified. For example, it would seem that we can add St Cyprian's De Unitate Ecclesiae and his fifty-sixth letter tO Laistner's list, together with Jerome's Letter 22.⁵¹ Furthermore, as we have seen, Bede may have had access to Origen's commentary on Matthew, either in the original Greek or in Latin translation. Further research will no doubt add more volumes to the total, though it is difficult to believe that Laistner's list will be enormously enlarged, so thoroughly did he do his work. It is, of course, impossible to be certain that any particular citation is necessarily given by Bede at first hand; but when due allowance has been made for intermediate sources, we are entitled to use Laistner's list with some confidence.

Now from this list it appears that the authors used by Bede are predominantly ecclesiastical, with the writings of the greater Latin Fathers being most abundant. Furthermore, the titles of the works identified lend support to Leclercq's view that monastic readers primarily looked in the Fathers for what would be most helpful in leading the monastic life.⁵² Overwhelmingly, Bede's library consists of commentaries on scripture, patristic treatises, or secular works like Pliny's Natural History, which would be of value in biblical exegesis. The standard grammaraians are there of course— Donatus, Charisius, Diomedes, Pompeius and the rest— but their function is to train men to read the bible and the Fathers; and if Vergil is present—and no one could have kept him out—he is balanced and indeed overwhelmed by Christian poets like Ambrose, Prudentius, Paulinus, Sedulius and Arator. This is understandable; Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith had not faced laborious and dangerous journeys to Rome to build up a classical institute. As a result, Bede's is a theological library, designed for a monastery inspired by the spirit of the Benedictine Rule rather than by the principles for study laid down by Cassiodorus for his monastery at Vivarium in the middle of the sixth century;⁵³ for Cassiodorus, although a sincere Christian, made far greater provision for the liberal arts in his programme of monastic studies than did St Benedict. In the second book of the Institutes Cassiodorus provides for a course of study which anticipates the later medieval trivium and quadrivium: first grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; then arithmetic, music geometry and astronomy. There is no hint in Bede of any such programme.⁵⁴ He knows Cassiodorus indeed; but he knows him as the former senator suddenly transformed into a teacher of the church and the author of a commentary on the psalms and not as an educational theorist.⁵⁵

It may therefore be said that the cultural activities of Wearmouth and Jarrow were, in the last resort, determined by utilitarian motives; the highest utilitarianism, it is true—the salvation of souls—but utilitarian nevertheless. In the long run this utilitarianism was to have important cultural consequences, as is clearly seen by G. P. Fedotov, in his classic study The Russian Religious Mind, when he comes to discuss the problem of why there was no flowering of culture in medieval Russia as there was in France, Germany and England, finding the answer, rather unexpectedly, in the fact that in the ninth century the Slavs received the bible and the liturgy in Slavonic translations, to which were later added some works of theological and scientific content. As a result, there was no intellectual stimulus for the Slavs similar to that supplied in the west by the study of Latin, and the Slavonic bible and liturgy, priceless endowment as they undoubtedly were for Russia's spiritual life, were also an ambiguous gift, in that the Russian intellect was for a long time stunted by the absence of external occasions for exercise. On the other hand, says Fedotov:

The western barbarians, before they were able to think their own thoughts and to speak their own words—about 1100 AD—had been sitting for five or six centuries on the school bench, struggling with the foreign Latin language, learning by heart the Latin Bible and the Latin grammar with Virgil as the introduction to the Bible. Men of the dark ages had no independent interest in culture. They were interested only in the salvation of their souls. But Latin gave them the key to salvation. As the language of the Church, Latin was a sacred tongue and everything written in it became invested with a sacred halo. Hence the popularity of Ovid in medieval monasteries, and the Latin versifying of Irish saints, such as Columban, who in their severe asceticism and primitive rudeness of life did not yield to the anchorites of Egypt and Syria. For the Irish the Trivium and Quadrivium were the way to the Latin Bible.⁵⁶

Fedotov's judgement agrees very well with the estimate which has just been attempted of the character of study at Wearmouth and Jarrow, and it may be remarked in passing that, in the light of what he says about the effect of a vernacular literature on medieval Russia, it may be counted fortunate that the development of an Old English literature went hand-in-hand with, and not to the exclusion of, the study of the universal Latin. Bede, we know, was familiar with the poems of his own English tongue, and enthusiastically praised the poetry of his fellow-countryman Cædmon, and it is certainly a matter for regret that no examples of his own vernacular writing survive;⁵⁷ but we may be thankful that his legacy to posterity was written in the international language of the medieval west.

The monastic and utilitarian character of the library available to Bede explains the character of his work. His great contribution to computistical studies—a contribution of such importance that as late as 1537 it was possible to publish his writings for their practical, and not for their historical, value⁵⁸—was inspired by the practical issues of his day. This does not mean that Bede was lacking in scientific curiosity. A modern historian of science has said of the De Temporum Ratione that 'it contains the basic elements of natural science', pointing out that Bede, in his discussion of tides, was the first writer to enunciate the principle known as 'the establishment of a port';⁵⁹ but while computistical arithmetic, astronomy and cosmography engaged Bede's attention, he was not concerned with the more abstract discipline of geometry.⁶⁰

Furthermore, the nature of Bede's education and the character of the literature available to him helps to shed some light on his attitude to the pagan classics. Notoriously, he is hostile, more hostile than his master, Gregory the Great. An often cited example is his comparison of those who leave the heights of the word of God to listen to worldly fables and the teachings of the demons to the men of Israel who went down to the Philistines unarmed to have their agricultural implements sharpened (I Samuel XIII.20), and another is his identification of the honey which Jonathan ate, in ignorance of his father's orders (I Samuel XIV.27), with pagan literature.⁶¹ These are in marked contrast to Gregory, who considered both passages as furnishing a justification for secular studies.⁶² It should however be observed that when Bede comes to expound the significance of the episode of Jonathan, the great warrior who climbed the rocky crag and smote the Philistine, he wishes to use it as an example of how a teacher of the church may be led astray by the enticements of pagan literature, citing the famous story of how St Jerome was scourged in a vision before the judgement seat of God for having been a Ciceronian rather than a Christian.⁶³ Bede's object, however, is less to condemn pagan literature than to demonstrate that even great Christian saints continue to be tempted to small sins in order that they may be reminded that their virtues are a gift of God.⁶⁴ Pagan eloquence may legitimately be employed to support and sweeten authority;⁶⁵ and Bede is aware that neither Moses nor Daniel nor St Paul utterly eschewed pagan learnings or letters.⁶⁶ Bede's recognition that the reading of the pagan classics may be of value is clear, if grudging, and was in full accord with the teaching of the Fathers of the Church. Like them, however, he was in his heart doubtful about the reading of the pagan authors by a Christian; and his basic hesitation and suspicion could only be confirmed by the fact that he was unable to take the vision of Jerome other than seriously. Indeed, from the theological viewpoint it taught an unquestionable truth. The demands of Christ are absolute, and if a concern for Cicero leads a man to neglect them, then Cicero must be rejected as giving occasion for sin.

There is, however, one important difference between Bede and the Fathers. For them, the temptation offered by the pagan classics was a very real one. As children their minds had been formed by Vergil and Cicero, Plautus and Terence, and however hard they might try they could never entirely break the spell. Bede's education, on the other hand, had been a progress from the grammarians directly to the bible, without any intervening stage of concentrated literary study. Indeed, apart from Vergil and Pliny, his classical reading seems to have been slight, and his learning mostly from other men's quotations. In describing the dangers of the classics he was denouncing a peril to which he had never been exposed. And this held true, not only in respect of the danger of distraction from the heavenly to the temporal, but also in respect of a reversion to paganism. For the Fathers the classics were, in a very obvious fashion, a temptation to apostasy. For Bede and his age they could never be that. The classical deities might be demons, masquerading as gods; but fundamentally they were literary fictions, without any power to move to adoration. The paganism of Bede's world was German heathenism, not the literary paganism of classical antiquity. This fact may help to explain the revival of classical studies in the Carolingian period. They were no longer, in themselves, a danger to a man's soul.

We have, then, suggested a way in which Bede, although inspired by and thinking within the tradition of the Fathers, nevertheless inhabits another intellectual world from theirs, even within the confines of his monastery of Jarrow. The world of Bede is a monastic world, his culture a monastic culture, designed to bring men to heaven. Of course, the Fathers were equally concerned to bring men to heaven, and many of them were monks; but the majority of them received their education not in the cloister but in the secular schools. Thus Bede's world, although not a narrow one, was narrower than theirs.

But Bede's world differs from that of the Fathers in another way which is more difficult to describe. Put briefly and misleadingly, it is a world in which Christianity has triumphed. Clearly, in the most literal sense of the words this statement is untrue, for the Fathers, after the legal suppression of paganism had begun in earnest at the end of the fourth century, were accustomed to think of themselves as living in Christian times, while the age of Bede was a harsh and barbarous one, as appears all too clearly in the atrocities of nominally Christian kings like Cædwalla of Wessex on the Isle of Wight or Egbert of Northumbria in Ireland;⁶⁷ while across the Channel, in the Low Countries and Germany, paganism flourished and the work of the English mission to the continent, begun in Bede's lifetime, was ultimately to be accomplished only by the ruthless extirpation of heathenism wherever the Frankish armies got the upper hand. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of the alarm for the future of Northumbria expressed at the end of the Ecclesiastical History and the Letter to Egbert, there is in Bede a note of optimism. The night of infidelity has been dispersed by the Sun of Righteousness,⁶⁸ and now Christ and his bride the church go forth to the vineyards: 'In the morning, therefore, he says, let us go forth to the vineyards, as though he should say openly: Because the night of ancient unbelief has passed, because the light of the bright gospel already begins to appear, let us, I pray, go forth to the vineyards, that is, let us labour in establishing churches for God throughout the world.'⁶⁹

It is in the spirit of this passage that we should, I think, understand St Boniface's famous reference to Bede as a candle of the church in the letter sent to Archbishop Egbert of York in 746-7, asking him to send copies of Bede's scriptural commentaries.⁷⁰ It is easy when we read it today to impose our own preconceptions upon it, and to think of Bede's life shining with a small but clear flame in a waste of great darkness, the early Middle Ages; but such a romantic image was surely far from Boniface's thought. Rather, our image should be of some great basilica ablaze with brightness, with the great candles of the apostles and the saints and the lesser lights of humbler Christians, all afire with the love of God; and among them Bede, shining with a light hardly less than that of the apostles, a great candle in the house of God. What we somewhat condescendingly call the Dark Ages did not necessarily seem so dark to those who lived in them. Rather, they seemed the age of the triumph of Christ and his church.

Such an interpretation of the mood of the age will explain certain features of Bede's thought which are otherwise puzzling. Let us consider first the Ecclesiastical History. It has been observed of this work:

No single term will describe Bede's book. It includes a great deal of material quoted from papal and episcopal letters, concilia, epigraphic and verbal accounts; it ignores and thus condemns to oblivion, the greater part of the history of the period with which it deals, yet it repeats in detail the lives of monks who took no part in the public affairs of their day … As an ecclesiastical history—and no event without ecclesiastical relevance is mentioned in the book—Bede's work is an adjunct to scriptural study, that study which he elsewhere described as his life's occupation.⁷¹

With all this we may agree, except the first sentence. The work is, as Bede says, an ecclesiastical history, composed in the tradition of Eusebius of Caesarea, whom Bede knew in the Latin version of Rufinus. Eusebius was aware, when he embarked upon his History, that he was in effect creating a new type of historiography, unknown to the pagan,⁷² and the novelty of his enterprise is reflected by his lengthy citations from his authorities. Professor Momigliano, in an important article, has drawn attention to this particular feature of Christian history, destined to make a peculiar contribution to the technique of scientific historiography, though without actually abolishing the style of the classical historians. 'We have learnt', he says, 'to check our references from Eusebius …'⁷³— though we have contrived to secularize him by the use of footnotes. Bede, in the Ecclesiastical History, followed the Eusebian tradition. Where he differs from Eusebius is not in his method but in his ability to exploit his materials—Sir Frank Stenton's comment that 'in an age when little was attempted beyond the registration of fact, he had reached the conception of history'⁷⁴ is not likely to be applied to the Father of Church History. Yet so far as the philosophy which underlies their work is concerned, Eusebius and Bede are in agreement. Both saw ecclesiastical history as a struggle between the new nation, the Christians, and the devil.⁷⁵ Both wrote to record the victory of the church: Eusebius in the conversion of Constantine, Bede in the conversion of the English. The difference between them—a difference fraught with portentous consequences—is that while Eusebius took for his field the Roman Empire, Bede confined his to a particular race within a limited locality. In so doing he was, of course, only following a trail already blazed by Gregory of Tours and Cassiodorus in his lost work on Gothic history; but the very fact that he did is significant. Here, as in his biblical commentaries, Bede stands in the tradition of the Fathers but points the way to another age.

Let us consider another aspect of this idea of the triumph of Christianity. Perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most distinctive, contrast between the culture of Bede and that of the Fathers—and one which also helps to explain his attitude to the pagan classics—is to be found in the fact that he had at his disposal a corpus of Christian poetry, as distinct from the literature of theological works composed according to the rules of literary composition, which he shared with the Fathers. In this respect the two treatises De Arte Metrica and De Schematibus et Tropis, regarded by Bede as constituting a single treatise and dated by Laistner to 701 or 702,⁷⁶ are instructive. In the De Arte Metrica not only are Bede's examples taken overwhelmingly from Christian poets—this, after all, was determined by the resources of his library—but when he lists the three types of poetry, dramatic, narrative, and mixed, he gives examples both from pagan authors and from the Old Testament. Vergil's ninth eclogue is matched by the Song of Songs; to the Georgias and the De herum Natura of Lucretius are opposed Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; the Odyssey and the Aeneid have the book of Job as their Christian equivalent. Apud nos—'our authors'—is Bede's theme.⁷⁷ The Christians have their own literature and do not need the pagans any more. Similarly in the De Schematibus et Tropis Bede observes that Holy Scripture surpasses all other writings, not only by authority, because it is divine, or by utility, because it leads to eternal life, 'sed et antiquitate et ipsa positione dicendi'— by age and style.⁷⁸ We have come a long way from the days when Jerome found the language of the prophets barbarous, or the young Augustine, excited to the pursuit of philosophy by reading the Hortensius, found himself repelled by the style of the bible, so inferior to that of Cicero.⁷⁹ Some three centuries before Bede's lifetime Augustine of Hippo had produced, in the De Doctrina Christiana, a theory of a Christian culture in which the scriptures would take the place of the pagan classics and secular studies would be pursued insofar as they provided material for the Christian exegete. At about the same time Prudentius, the first great Christian poet, and Paulinus of Nola were beginning to provide the church with a corpus of poetry in addition to the liturgical hymns which had already been composed by Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan, and Prudentius and Paulinus would be supplemented by the works of Sedulius, Arator and Venantius Fortunatus, all known to Bede. The question whether these writers were, in respect of literary quality, the peers of the great pagan poets is for our purposes irrelevant. So far as Bede was concerned, both the resources of his library and his own writings represent the embodiment of the programme of study proposed by Augustine, even to the extent of his warning expressed—ironically enough in a phrase of Terence!—against any excessive pursuit of learning beyond the bounds of the church of Christ: 'Ne quid nimis!'⁸⁰ Thus Bede's attitude to the classics was not simply determined by the consideration that they might be harmful; rather they had, in a certain sense, become unnecessary, in view of the existence of a specifically Christian literature.

This particular assumption of Bede was not shared by the scholars of the Caroline renaissance, who decided that Christian writings alone could not provide the norms of the Latinity which they desired. Few will doubt that they were right in their decision; but Bede's position, granting his premises, was unassailable, and most of us, it may be added, would be well content if we could emulate Bede's Latin style, formed as it was on the grammarians and the Fathers.

We have hitherto considered Bede as a writer who is a key figure in the transmission of patristic tradition and who also modifies that tradition and adapts it to the conditions of his own age. In this respect no one could have been better fitted to be one of the great teachers of the early Middle Ages, in which his influence was immense, as is demonstrated in the most obvious way by the great quantity of manuscripts of his writings which have survived.⁸¹ A few examples of the range of his influence may be given, without any claim to be comprehensive. His De Arte Metrica was still in use at the cathedral school of Fulbert of Chartres in the eleventh century,⁸² while the De Temporum Ratione (described by a leading modern authority as being still 'the best introduction to the ecclesiastical calendar')⁸³ was, as we have seen, published in the sixteenth century for practical, and not historical, reasons. Again, the Ecclesiastical History enjoyed a popularity which was not confined to England⁸⁴ where, in the twelfth century, it was to be a source of inspiration to the historian William of Malmesbury.⁸⁵ Yet again, Bede's biblical commentaries, the part of his work which his contemporaries most highly valued, enjoyed a remarkable renaissance of popularity during the fifteenth century, if the number of manuscript copies which have survived is any indication.⁸⁶ We are not here concerned to give a description of the diffusion of Bede's writings⁸⁷ or to give a detailed account of his influence in any particular field. Rather, if we are to regard Bede as an outstanding representative of early medieval culture and a teacher who exercised a decisive influence on the development of the civilization of the Middle Ages, it would be well to conclude this paper by a consideration of what he did not contribute, to note his deficiencies as well as his achievements, and to establish what was lacking in the Christian culture of Northumbria, of which he was the outstanding representative, which later thinkers and scholars would have to supply.

In the Ecclesiastical History when he comes to describe the Council of Hatfield of 679, Bede gives part of its confession of faith, declaring its adhesion to the doctrine of the first five ecumenical councils and of the council 'which was held in the city of Rome in the time of the blessed Pope Martin, in the eighth indiction, in the ninth year of the reign of the most religious Emperor Constantine',⁸⁸ that is, the Lateran Synod of 649, convened by Pope Martin I under the influence of St Maximus the Confessor, who was probably present at it, to condemn the Monothelite heresy. Now Bede in his writings makes very little mention of Monothelitism, and none at all of St Maximus, one of the greatest of the later Greek theologians, who had lived in exile in the west, at Carthage from 632 onwards, and then at Rome from about 646 until about 655. It seems curious that Bede should know nothing about this great theologian and catholic Confessor, whose teaching was later to influence the thought of St Bernard,⁸⁹ but such is apparently the case. Now if one turns from the thought of Bede to that of Maximus, one enters another world,⁹⁰ the sophisticated world of Greek patristic theology in which all the resources of Greek philosophy and Christian experience were applied to the solution of the mystery of the union of the two natures, divine and human, in Christ. To this world, Bede is a stranger. This is not to say that he was intellectually inferior to Maximus—one cannot fairly compare the biblical scholar and historian with the dogmatic and philosophical theologian—but rather, that there was a department of Christian theology which was unfamiliar to Bede as it would not be, for example, to St Anselm at a later date.

How did this come about? Here again, an examination of Bede's library as established by Laistner is revealing, always allowing for the omissions and errors of such a reconstruction. If one looks at the titles of the works available to Bede, one is struck by the absence of books of philosophical theology or of a metaphysical content. Bede did not, apparently, have access to Augustine's early philosophical writings, the Contra Academicos, the De Beata Vita or the De Ordine, nor did he have the De Trinitate, perhaps the greatest of Augustine's theological works, nor any of the treatises of the fourth-century Latin Christian Platonist Marius Victorinus. Again, he did not have a copy of Chalcidius's commentary on part of the Timaeus, one of the very few Platonic sources available in the Latin west in the early Middle Ages, or of a work like that of Apuleius, De Deo Socratis. One can understand the absence of such works from a monastic library; but what is surprising is the lack of any work of Boethius, either the Consolatio—an omission so remarkable as to cause Laistner to remark upon it in his article on Bede's library⁹¹—or of the theological tractates and translations.

The implications of this deficiency in his library are clear: Bede was deprived, through no fault of his own, of precisely the sort of works needed by a Latin divine to whom the writings of the Greek Fathers were not available, if he aspired to be in any sense of the term a dogmatic theologian. To suggest that, had such works been available, Bede would have produced great works on dogmatic theology would be wholly unwarranted; and in any case such an achievement, however admirable and desirable in itself, would have been of less value to the church of his day in England or on the continent of Europe than what he actually achieved. The process by which the barbarian kingdoms, established after the ending of Roman rule in the west, were turned into the civilized states of the Middle Ages was a gradual one, requiring several centuries of diligent scholarship to prepare the way for the renaissance of the twelfth century. To that renaissance Bede contributed much; but there are some things—its philosophy and its humanism—in which he had no share. The cultural achievement of Northumbria was a limited one, the work of a small élite of monks and clerics and a few cultured laymen within a restricted field, and it was within that field that Bede made his great contribution to medieval civilization. Bede was, without question, a great intellect, a great teacher, and a great Christian; but it is important in any evaluation of his work to maintain a sense of proportion. Bede served later generations as a commentator, a grammarian, an historiographer and a computisi. This is his achievement, and it is enough to establish his greatness.

Yet having said this, it does not seem enough; for a man's performance is, after all, dependent upon his opportunities, and when all reservations have been made it is astonishing that Bede, a 'grandchild of pagans' and a 'child of barbarians'⁹² should have become a Doctor of the Church and provide, in Plummer's words, 'the very model of the saintly scholar-priest'⁹³ In attempting to determine the place of Bede in medieval civilization, it would be well to remember the words of Fedotov previously quoted, that 'the western barbarians, before they were able to think their own thought and to speak their own words … had been sitting for five or six centuries on the school bench'. It is a measure of his greatness that for more than three of those centuries they sat under the instruction of the Venerable Bede.

Notes

1. William of Malmesbury, De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series (1887-9) 1, 1.
2. W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (Edinburgh and London, 1923): 'The reputation of Bede seems always to have been exempt from the common rationalist criticism, and this although his books are full of the things a Voltairian student objects to' (pp. 141-2).
3. See the memoir by P. S. A[llen], 'Charles Plummer 1851-1927', Proc. of the Brit. Acad. 15 (1929), 463-76 (pub. sep. 1931): 'The keynote of his life was to take as little as possible for himself in order to have the more to give to others' (p. 466).
4. Bede's Ecclesiastical History, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. lxxiii.
5. HE v. 24.
6. See E. F. Sutcliffe, 'Quotations in the Venerable Bede's Commentary on St Mark', Biblica 7 (1926), 428-39 and M. L. W. Laistner, 'Source-Marks in Bede Manuscripts', JTS 34 (1933), 350-4.
7. Hieronymus, Hebraicae Questiones in Libro Geneseos XVI. 12, ed. P. Antin, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 72, 21, lines 1-4.
8. Bede, Libri Quatuor in Principium Genesis IV (XVI. 12), ed. C. W. Jones, CCSL 118A, 201, lines 250-6.
9. On this, see R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 16-18; but note the qualification by C. W. Jones, CCSL 118A, ix, n. 19.
10. HE 1. 8.
11. Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis VI. 7, ed. Migne, Patrologia Latina 93, col. 147 C and D.
12. Bede, In Cantica Canticorum Allegorica Expositio VI (PL 91, col. 1205 A and B).
13. In Cant. V (PL 91, col. 1183 B); cf. In Primam Epistolam S. Iohannis (PL 93, col. 90 A and B).
14. Bede, In Ep. I Ioh. (PL 93, cols. 88B, 98B and C and 100A).
15. Bede, In Cant 1 (PL 91, cols. 1065 C-77B).
16. I assume the virtual extinction of Manichaeism in western Europe between the end of Roman rule and its reintroduction from the east in the eleventh century; see Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee (Cambridge, 1955), p. 118.
17. Bede, Homeliarum Evangelii Libri II II. 23, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 122, 351, lines 92-5.
18. Hieronymus, Commentariorum in Evangelium Matthei Libri Quatuor II (XIV. 7) (PL 26, col. 97 B and C).
19. Origen, In Leviticum Homilia VIII. 3, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller, Origenes Werke VI, 396, line 20-397, line 4.
20. Bede, In Priman Partem Samuhelis Libri IIII I (I Reg. IV. 18; CCSL 119, 45, lines 1420-3), citing Origen, In Lev. Hom. II. 2-4 (GCS, Origenes Werke VI, 292, line 4-296, line 22).
21. I am grateful to Mr Christopher Ball of Lincoln College, Oxford, for pointing this out to me.
22. Hieron., In Matt II (XIV. 7) (PL 26, col. 97 C).
23. Origen, Matthäuserklärung X. 22, ed. E. Klostermann, GCS, Origenes Werke X, 30, lines 20-3).
24. Bede, Hom. II. 23 (CCSL 122, 352, lines 108-15).
25. The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, The Cambridge History of the Bible II, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 194-6.
26. Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, ed. M. L. W. Laistner (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 3, line 9; In Regum Librum XXX Quaestiones, Prolog. (CCSL 119, 293, line 23); and In Cant VII (PL 91, col. 1223 A).
27. Bede, In Gen. IV (IV. 3-4; CCSL 118A, 74, lines 42-6 and 49-52).
28. Ambrose, De Cain et Abel, IV, IV. 3-4 (PL 14, col. 337B).
29. Acca, Epistola ad Bedam, apud Bede, In Lucae Evangelium Expositio (CCSL 120, 5, lines 5-18).
30. Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, 7th ed. (London, 1934): 'He is a greater critic than craftsman; there are cadences in his prose lovelier than anything in his poetry' (pp. 38-9); and F.J.E. Raby, A History of Christian-Latin Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1953): 'His was not a poetic nature' (p. 146).
31. A fact of which Bede was aware. See his remark on Cædmon's hymn: 'Neque enim possunt carmina, quamvis optime composita, ex alia in aliam linguam ad verbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri' (HE IV. 24).
32. M.L.W. Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and a Patristic Scholar', TRHS 4th ser. 16 (1933), 69-94, repr. The Intellectual Heritage of the Early Middle Ages: Selected Essays by M.L. W. Laistner, ed. Chester G. Starr (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957), pp. 93-116 (to which all references are made); see esp. pp. 95-9.
33. J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: a Study of Monastic Culture, trans. C. Misrahi (New York, 1962).
34. Ibid. pp. 19ff.
35. Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (London, 1970), pp. 197 and 199.
36. Justin McCann, Saint Benedict (London, 1938), p. 233. Dom McCann notes that not only were abbatial elections governed by the Rule (Bede, Historia Abbatum, chapters 11 and 16, ed. C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica (Oxford, 1896) 1, 375 and 381; and Vita Ceolfridi auctore Anonymo, ch. 16, ed. Plummer, Bede 1, 393) but also Bede, Hist. Abbat. contains unacknowledged borrowings from the Rule: 'vero regi militans' (Ch. 1 (Plummer, Bede, p. 365) from Benedicti Regula, Prolog., 3, ed. R. Hanslik, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 75, 2) and 'in pistrino, in orto, in coquina' (Ch. 8 (Plummer, Bede, p. 371) from Reg XLVI. I (CSEL 75, 112-13)).
37. Bede, In Ezram et Neemiam Libri III III (CCSL 119A, 350, line 466-351, line 473); Reg VII. 6 and 7 (CSEL 75, 40-1).
38. See above, n. 4.
39. Bede, In Ep. I Ioh.: "Quae enim natura dura sunt et aspera, spes coelestium praemiorum et amor Christi facit esse levia' (PL 93, col. 113 C); Reg LVIIL 8: 'Praedicentur ei omnia dura et aspera, per quae itur ad deum' (CSEL 75, 134).
40. Bede, Hom. 1. 9: 'Contemplativa autem vita est cum longo quis bonae actionis exercitio edoctus diutinae orationis dulcedine instructus crebra lacrimarum conpunctione adsuefactus a cunctis mundi negotiis vacare et in sola dilectione oculum intendere didicerit' (CCSL 122, 64, lines 163-7), and De Tabernaculo III: 'Duobus namque modis lacrimarum et compunctionis status distinguitur' (CCSL 119 A, 137, lines 1700-2); Reg. XX. 3: 'Et non in multiloquio, sed in puntate cordis et conpunctione lacrimarum nos exaudiri sciamus' (CSEL 75, 75). It is, however, to be noted that this expression is to be found in Cassian, Collationes, IX. 28 (CSEL 13, 274, line 18), which was available in Bede's library, and cannot therefore constitute a decisive argument.
41. Leclercq, Love of Learning, p. 31.
42. Ibid pp. 33-43.
43. Ibid. pp. 57-75.
44. Ibid. pp. 90-3.
45. Ibid. pp. 103-5.
46. Ibid. pp. 156-60.
47. Ibid. p. 57.
48. Steinen, Notker der Dichter und seine geistige Welt (Berne, 1948) I, 76-80, esp. 79-80.
49. Ruby Davis, 'Bede's Early Reading', Speculum 8 (1933), 179-95 and Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and a Patristic Scholar', pp. 93-8.
50. 'The Library of the Venerable Bede', Bede: his Life, Times and Writings, ed. A.H. Hamilton Thompson (Oxford, 1935), pp. 237-66; repr. Intellectual Heritage of the Early Middle Ages, pp. 117-49.
51. Bede, Hom. 11. 22 (CCSL 122, 347, lines 205-9) citing Cyprian, De Unitate, 4 (on which see Maurice Bévenot, The Tradition of Manuscripts (Oxford, 1961), pp. 53 and 89, n. 7); and In Apoc. 11. 9: 'sicut Beatus Cyprianus sub Deciana contigisse conquestus: "volentibus," inquit, "mori non permittebatur occidi"' (PL 93, col. 158 B) citing Cyprianus, Epistulae, LVI. 2; 'maxime cum cupientibus mori non permitteretur occidi' (CSEL 3(2), 649, line 20). I am indebted to Fr Bévenot for this reference.
52. Leclercq, Love of Learning, p. 104. His remark that Augustine's 'polemics against the Manichaeans or the Neoplatonists had lost all timeliness for the medieval monks and therefore did not claim their attention' is only partly true of Wearmouth and Jarrow, since there were a number of Augustine's anti-Manichaean treatises in Bede's library. It is however significant that they were all concerned with scriptural exegesis and not with a direct attack on Manichaean doctrines.
53. Ibid pp. 28-31.
54. See Pierre Riché, Éducation et Culture dans l'Occident Barbare, 6e-8e Siècle, Patristica Sorbonensia 4 (Paris, 1962), 434 ff.
55. Bede, In Ez. et Neem. II (CCSL 119A, 295, lines 283-5).
56. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (New York, 1960), p. 39. For a more reserved comment on Irish classical studies see Riché, Education et Culture, pp. 371-83.
57. I can see no safe grounds for regarding the Death Song as Bede's own composition. Only a small and late group of the manuscripts of the Epistola de Obitu Bedae assigns the poem to Bede himself, and so the evidence for his authorship is at best weak. See Colgrave and Mynors, p. 580, n. 4.
58. The Cologne ed. of Noviomagus, 1537. See C. W. Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha: Scientific Writings Falsely Attributed to Bede (Ithaca, N.Y., 1939), pp. 1 and 7.
59. A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 2nd ed. (London, 1969) 1, 41.
60. Riché, Éducation et Culture, pp. 434-6.
61. Bede, In I Samuhelem II (I Reg. XIII. 20 (CCSL 119, 112, lines 1853-9) and XIV. 27 (ibid. p. 120, lines 2169-96).
62. Gregory, In Librum Primum Regum, ed. P. Verbraken, CCSL 144, 470-2.
63. Bede, In I Samuhelem II (I Reg. XIV. 27): 'Ionathan igitur qui prius seopulorum dentes et ictus devicerat ensium qui hostis audacia compressa suis victoriae salutisque praebuerat improvisa subito blandientis gastrimargiae culpa consternitur. Et nobiles saepe magistri ecclesiae magnorumque victores certaminum ardentiore quam decet oblectatione libros gentilium lectitantes culpam quam non praevidere contrahebant adeo ut quidam eorum se pro hoc ipso scribat in visione castigatum obiectumque sibi a domino inter verbera ferientia quod non ch ristianus sed Ciceronianus potius esset habendus' (CCSL 119, 120, lines 2170-9); Hieronymus, Epistulae, XXII. 30, ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54, 189-91.
64. Ibid.: 'Sed et auditorum fidelium non pauci magna virtutum gratia pollentes minoribus vitiis temptari non desinunt quod divina geri dispensatione non latet ut qui minora certamina per se superare nequeunt in magnis quae habent non sibi aliquid tribuere sed solo patri luminum gratias agere discant' (CCSL 119, 120, lines 2179-84).
65. Ibid (lines 2186-94).
66. Ibid (XIV. 28-9; CCSL 119, 121, lines 2209-16).
67. Bede, HE IV. 16 [14] and 26 [24].
68. Bede, In Cant. II: 'Sicut enim tenebras noctis, sic etiam recte per austeritatem hiemis et imbrium, tempestas exprimitur infidelitatis, quae totum orbem usque ad tempus regebat Dominicae incarnationis. At ubi Sol iustitiae mundo illuxit, abscedente mox ac depulsa prisca brumalis infidelitatis perfidia, flores apparuerunt in terra, quia initia iam nascentis Ecclesiae in sanctorum fìeli ac pia devotione claruerunt' (PL 91, col. 1110 C and D).
69. Ibid IV (col. 1202A).
70. Boniface, Ep. 91, ed. M. Tangl, Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Selectae 1, 207, line 17; cf. Ep. 75 ibid. p. 158, lines 8-11) and 76: 'quem nuper in domo Dei apud vos vice candellae ecclesiasticae scientia scripturarum fulsisse audivimus' (ibid. p. 159, lines 13 and 14).
71. W. F. Bolton, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature (Princeton, New Jersey, 1967) 1, 171 and 172.
72. Eusebius, Ecclesiastica Historia, l.i.5 (GCS, Eusebius Werke II (I), 8, lines 17-21). On this see Arnaldo Momigliano, 'Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Forth Century A.D.', The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963), p. 90.
73. Ibid p. 99.
74. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1947), p. 187.
75. Momigliano, 'Pagan and Christian Historiography', p. 90.
76. Laistener, A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1943), pp. 131-2.
77. Bede, De Arte Metrica, 25, ed. H. Keil, Grammatici Latini VII (Leipzig, 1880), 259-60.
78. Bede, De Schematis et Tropis (PL 90, col. 175 B).
79. Hieron., Ep. XXII. 30 : 'si … prophetam legere coepissem, sermo horrebat incultus' (CSEL 54, 189, lines 17-18); and Augustine, Confessiones, III. 9 (CSEL 33, 50, lines 4-14). Both these works were apparently available to Bede.
80. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II. XXXIX 58 (CSEL 80, 74, line 12). On all this, see H.-I. Marrou Saint Augustin et la Fin de la Culture Antique, 4th ed. (Paris, 1958) and esp. pt 3, ch. 3: 'La Formation de l'Intellectuel Chrétien'.
81. For which see Laistner, Hand-List.
82. See H. O. Taylor, The Medieval Mind, 4th ed. (London, 1925) 1, 300.
83. C. W. Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus (Cambridge, Mass., 1943), p. 4.
84. Laistner, Hand-List, p. 94.
85. De Gest. Reg. Angl., ed. Stubbs 1, 1 and 59.
86. Laistner, Hand-List, p. 7.
87. For which, see Dorothy Whitelock, After Bede, Jarrow Lecture 1960.
88. Bede, HE IV. 17 [15].
89. See E. Gilson, The Mystical Theology of St Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London, 1940), pp. 25 ff.
90. See the excellent study by Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: the Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund, 1965).
91. Laistner, 'The Library of the Venerable Bede', p. 264.
92. Leclercq, Love of Learning, p. 45.
93. Plummer, Bede I, lxxviii-lxxix.