3. Pillars of the Church
INTRODUCTION
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 femplo 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; 223).
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). 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
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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
Co 1223-10; Ga 522). 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 as to 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 evangelize 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 fernplo 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
25 Thacker (1 983).
INTRODUCTION
xli 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 tendencies2G.
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 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 Tm 3:15). In the 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 exoner- " Olsen 1982,525-26 27 Gildas had used the scriptural architectural metaphor, quoting the whole of 1 Co
3:11-16. in denouncing the priests of his day who had violated the temple of God through neglect of their pastoral charge: Winterbottom 1978, 73, 7 8 cf. Gregory,
Regulaepastomlis liber 2.7, Davis 1950.71.
xlii
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
ates 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).
The Pauline image of the apostles and their followers as pillars of the Church (Gal 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 Gal 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' (Gal 2:11,13). Gregory upholds Paul's action and describes Peter's subsequent acknowledgement (in 2 P 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
INTRODUCTION
xliii 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 eulogized in the chapter immediatley 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 purposes29. 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 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 ch 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' (Gal 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
28 Homily 6, Gray 1990.221-22 29 Ray 1986.80.
30 L.T. Martin 1989, 130.
xliv
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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 remplo as a movement from the literal precepts of the Law to an understanding of its spiritual interpretation (113).
In De remplo 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 Co 3:l-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 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 tr~ths'~'. 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,
31 Gray 1990,246.
INTRODUCTION
XlV 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 Gal 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 Rv 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 Adamnan 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 hagi~graphy~~, and the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, makes particularly lavish
32 Anderson and Anderson 1991,15, 107,225,227,229.
33 Deshman 1986.273-78. For the use of the architectural metaphor elsewhere in early insular culture, including the Book of Kells, f 202~. see Farr 1989, 32-191; O'Reilly
1994.
xlvi
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
usc of thc 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 descrioes 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 applicd 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 cxample, was certainly known to insular writers.
'As Moses built an earthly tabernacle made with hands . . . according to the pattcrn 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 Bcde notes the building of stone churches as part of the cvangclization o f thc Anglo-Saxons and probably as one aspect of increasing Roman and Gaulish cultural influences in their further convcrsion. But, as Arthur Holder noted, for all Bede's interest in thc architectural metaphor for describing the Church, he never gives a church building an allegorical interpretati~n.~~
Again De templo and rclated scriptural exegesis can throw light on Bede's historical work.
Thc allcgorical cxposition of the figural ornament in Solomon's Tcmplc led Bcdc 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 3.1
Colgrave 1927. 35, 37; Connolly 19Y5 for the example of Cogitosus' description of Kildare as fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 2:2-3.
Holder 1989. 121-31.
INTRODUCTION
xlvii 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 says: "Heaven is my throne and earth my footstool. What house will you build me?" says the Lord' (Ac 4%-9 quoting Is 66:l). 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' (Ac 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' (Ac 17:28-9).
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 Ac
7:44,49 (the companion passage to Paul's speech to the gentiles in Ac
xlviii
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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 Co 3:lO-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 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 ofthe 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
3F Farmer 1965, 196.
INTRODUCTION
xlix 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 life'37.
Other insular churchmen could justify a different use of the Temple imagery. In invoking the models of Moses' 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 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 Ezk 45:l-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, (Ex 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 37 Homilies 2.24;25, L. Martin and D. Hurst 1991,242,267.
38 Colgrave 1927.33-87.45-1.
3D Bailey 1991.2Cb21.
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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'.4o By the sixth century various symbols, relics and even holy sitcs 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 schematized 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 sacrcd 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.
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 purpose4' 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 allegorize 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
40 Kuhnel 198647.150; Ousterhout 1990.44-7.
41 The monastic consolatory tradition used by Bede also appears in the correspondence of Anglo-Saxons in voluntary exile for Christ, who requested copies of Bede's exegetical works for teaching purposes 'and for our consolation in exile'. Parkes
1982. 15.
INTRODUCTION
li 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 symbolized in the restoration of that Temple, because the very renewing of the Temple symbolizes 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 K 7 5 1 the earthly masterbuilder, 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 tempfo 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 K 751): 'there is one house of the Father not made with hands that will last eternally in heaven (2 Co 5:1), but many mansions in it (Jn 14:2) to receive all who fear him, and, the Lord blesses those that love him, both little ones and great' (Ps 113:13).
42 City ofGod 18.48, Bettenson 1972,830-31.
lii
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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 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 tabemaculo 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 Temple4' 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 Ps 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
43 Florence, Biblioreca Medicea Laurenziana MS Amiatinus I; Alexander 1978, cat. 7, pl 23-27; Bruce-Mitford 1967; Webster and Backhouse 1991, cat. 87-88.
44 Hisforiu ahhaticm aicctore anonym0 (=Life of Ceolfnth) 20.
45 Historia nhhntiim, 15.
46 Expositiopsulmonim, 789-90; Henderson 1980,545.
INTRODUCTION
liii 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 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 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 rubernaculo; 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 K 7:39), not for the Tabernacle. Moreover, Bianca Kiihnel 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.5o 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 47 Meyvaert 1979.71-2. n 7; Ferber 1976,27,29,41 also points to other Jewish sources probably underlying Cassiodorus's work.
48 Corsano 1987 9-11; Holder 1994.92 n 1.
" Kiihnel 198687, 164166. For early Christian and insular pictorial exegesis of the 50 Kuhnel 198687,166.
Tabernacle-Temple theme see Farr 1989 OReilly 1994; Verkerk 1995.
I iv
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
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 (Jn 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 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 bookcupboard 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 Insfifufiones and has persuasively suggested they could include a considerable element of Northumbrian editing and interpretati~n.~~
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, iuxfu hebruicos), was an astounding feat of scholarship and scribal activity.53 It may well have been completed before Bede began his biblical commentaries and certainly
51 Berschin 1989,95-102; for Adam's name as a cosmic tetragrammaton in the Fathers,
McNally 1971, 115-16.
52 Henderson 1993 82-6; Bruce-Mitford 1967, pl2,7,9-12, C.
53 Life ofCeo/frirh, 37; Ward 1994.6; Parkes 1982.3-6.
INTRODUCTION
lv 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 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 femplo.
I wish to thank Alan Thacker for his helpful reading of this introduction.
Jennifer O'Reilly University College Cork
PROLOGUE Prol. 1 The vessel of election and teacher of the gentiles exhorts us to read the word of God, affirming truthfully that whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction so that by steadfmtness and the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. l 2 In this passage he quite rightly declares that to secure the hope of heavenly goods we must have patience, and contemplate the consolation of the scriptures; patience, that is, to bear with an attitude of humble submission the adversities that befall us as punishments imposed by a just judge and compassionate father whether for the enhancement of [143] our virtue and increase of merit, should we be punished, even though upright and innocent, or for the correction of our conduct should we be enmeshed in vice; on the other hand, we need the consolation of the scriptures so that by frequent meditation on them we may call to mind how much dark affliction those eminent Fathers of the Church and the bright luminaries of the Church have often borne even during this life, how much glory they have enjoyed with their master in the life to come through the merits of their fidelity and patience, and how much unfailing praise and fame they have left behind among the faithful even in this life; as scripture says, the memory of the righteous is a blessing, l 3 and again, Their bodies were buried in peace and their name lives to all generations, l4 and the apostle James, Behold, we call those happy who were steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord.15 Now it is not for nothing that, after mentioning the afflictions of the just, he added: and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, because even he who lived his life here below without fault, did not depart from this life without chastisement, and he who appeared in the world to heal the sick and raise the dead, chose to return from the world in the weakness of l2 Rm 154 l3 Pr107 l 4 ~ i r ~ 1 4 l 5 Jm 5:11
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
death to set us an example of patience. Hence after saying, Our God is a God of salvation, the psalmist directly added in wonder or rather in astonishment, and to the Lord belongs escapefrom death.16
/144/ Prol. 2 Therefore, through patience and the consolation of the scriptures may we also have hope of consoling ourselves after the afflictions of our distress when we too have been patient in tribulation and call to mind the actions of those who have far excelled us in righteousness and merit and borne far greater trials of adversity than we. For they, on account of the righteousness in which they were quite exemplary, often suffered the persecution of the unrighteous, in order that, by their exercise of righteousness, they might receive the crown of invincible patience, and might, moreover, leave behind for all who followed them the glorious footprints of their perseverance to mark their way. We, on the other hand, are more often chastised for our transgressions by the merciful providence of our creator. Let us look into our conscience again with wholesome compunction and earnestly wash away with a bath of tears what in our laxity we have committed by yielding to insidious allurements, and so, corrected and restored to the hope of eternal life with the Lord's assistance, may we merit to attain the fellowship of those who suffered in innocence.
For this too we find in the consolation of the scriptures that he hm blessed those who fear the Lord, both little and great, '' and declared that there are many mansions in store for us in his Father's house.ls
Prol. 3
I have no doubt that now, thanks to the consolation they afford, you too, most beloved of bishops, daily gain relief fromlg the present worries of temporal affairs,20 and are fired with a lofty am- '' Ps 67:21
'I Ps 113:21 cf. Jn 14:2. It is worth noting how Bede uses these two texts John 14:2 and Psalm
113:21 as an inclusio or catchword with which to articulate the entire text; or to put it in terms of symphonic composition. these texts in juxtaposition form a theme one hears at key points in the opus, viz. here in the Prologue, again at chapter 18.14, a little over half way, and then significantly, in the very last two sentences by way of finale. l9 The text here has alleuare, lit. 'lighten', 'ease', which I have rendered by the phrasal verb 'gain relief from' as being more in accord with English usage while safeguarding the original meaning.
*' The 'present worries' here alluded to are assumed to refer to 'Acca's trials and
PROLOGUE
bition to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the 1iving:l having risen above the evils of human beings which reign in the land of the dying, inasmuch as (this consolation) is to be found in abundance not only in the pages of God's word but also in the devout expositions which the revered writing of the Fathers has left us. But because what is novel is sometimes more appealing, it seemed good to me to send to your holiness for perusal the little work that I had recently written in the allegorical style on the construction of the temple of God, following in the footsteps of the great treatises. If you read it attentively, then the more you find the mysteries of Christ and the Church contained in its ancient pages and the more liberally you see there the gifts of God bestowed upon us in this present time or promised us in the future, the more tolerable and less worthy of concern will you consider both the favourable and unfavourable vicissitudes of perishable things, after the example of blessed John who, held captive as he was by a wicked emperor within the confines of a tiny island, was immediately introduced by the merciful creator through the Spirit to the contemplation of the unfathomable mysteries of the heavenly mansions; and in the very place where the deluded enemy imagined him to be deprived of the help and companionship of human friends, he was privileged to enjoy the sight and conversation of angelic friends. By these he was taught and the more he learned that the allurements and bitter experiences of the world are to be despised, the more loftily did he contemplate the things
(1451 persecutions' which are recorded in the Historiu Ecclesiusticu as having arisen at the beginning of Ceolwulf's reign in 729 (cf. D. Whitelock, 1976. p.27). However, this interpretation of the expression 'present troubles' is not the only possible one.
'Present' in Bede is often used in the eschatological rather than the historical sense.
Which is particularly true of De templo. So the expression 'present troubles' could arguably mean simply the trials of this present life as in De templo 1.2; 8.2; or 10.
In 8.2 he writes: '. . . after thepresent hardships of the faithful, and after their souls receive their rest in the life to come, the complete happiness of the whole Church will be achieved in the glory of the resurrection.' Again in 1 0 'this number (i.e. forty cubits) is often used to signify the present labour of the faithful, just as the number fifty stands for the rest and peace to come.' Indeed, of the twenty-seven Occurrences of 'present' as an attributive adjective in De templo, the sense is eschatological in at least twenty-five, twelve or more of which apply to the Church and the rest to its members. Admittedly the analogy with John's exile on Patmos is striking, but there is nothing in the context to show conclusively that the phrase 'the present worries of temporal affairs' is to be understood as an allusion to the contemporary situation.
21 cf. Ps 26:13
BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
which, because of their magnitude and eternity, everyone knows are far more worthy of being feared or loved. Farewell my ever most beloved friend and intercede for us.