2. The Easter Controversy
INTRODUCTION
xxxv all nation^.'^ 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; Rom 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 (Ep 2:20) and of Christ himself (1 Co 3:ll): 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 of the Church as recorded in Acts. The historical narrative in Acts provided him with exemplifications of the 24 Ray 1982 19-20; Oisen 1982.
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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 evangelization 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' (Col 35). The text is quoted in De templo's account of the veil of the Temple at the entrance to the Holy of Holies which
INTRODUCTION
xxxvii 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 comment on Jews who do not submit to God's justice through Christ but seek to establish their own (Rm 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 151-6). 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 femplo'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' (113, 16.2, 18.14, 253).
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
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Christ (1 Co 10:1617).
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 post-Whitby 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 Anglomm. 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; Col 3:ll). The living stones of the Temple are cemented together 'for in Christ Jesus there is no circumcision nor lack of it', only 'the faith which works through love' (11.2; Ga 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; Col 3:ll). 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 evangelization of other Germanic gentiles (HE
5.9-1 1). The ancient chosen people of God mystically prefigured the universal Church but the Old Testament's historical account of their