History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis

Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket

Jennifer O'Reilly, Máirín MacCarron, Diarmuid Scully, Máirín MacCarron, Diarmuid Scully

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429588617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When she died in 2016, Dr Jennifer O'Reilly left behind a body of published and unpublished work in three areas of medieval studies: the iconography of the Gospel Books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England; the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona; and the early lives of Thomas Becket. In these three areas she explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis.

This volume is a collection of 16 essays, old and new, relating history and exegesis in the writings of Bede and Adomnán, and in the lives of Thomas Becket. The first part consists of seven studies of Bede's writings, notably his biblical commentaries and his Ecclesiastical History. Two of the essays are published here for the first time. The five studies in the second part, devoted to Adomnán, discuss his life of Saint Columba (the Vita Columbae ) and his guide to the Holy Places ( De locis sanctis ). One essay (' The Bible as Map '), published posthumously, compares his presentation of a major theme, the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem, with the approach adopted by Bede. The third section consists of two essays on the lives of Thomas Becket that were composed shortly after his death. They examine, in the context of patristic exegesis, the biblical images invoked in the texts in order to show how the saint's biographers understood the complex relationship between hagiography and history. With the exception of the Jarrow Lecture on Bede and the essays on Becket, the studies in both parts were published originally in edited books, some of them now hard to come by. (CS1078).

Bede

1
INTRODUCTION TO BEDE. ON THE TEMPLE

The theme of the Tabernacle and Temple recurs throughout Bede’s exegetical writings and provides the main subject for three homilies and three of his biblical commentaries, De tabernaculo (c. 721–25), In Esram et Neemiam (c. 725–31) and De templo (c. 729–31)’.¹ At first sight this interest in defunct Jewish buildings and their associated cultic ritual and priesthood may seem antiquarian and strangely at variance with the vital contemporary concerns of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731), with which his reputation is identified for most modern readers. During the past twenty years or so, however, scholars have shown that Bede inherited rhetorical traditions from Late Roman Christian historiography and that his historical writings share some of the preoccupations and even the techniques of his Old Testament commentaries.² Henry Mayr-Harting has argued that the description of the universal Church in De templo and the account of the building of the Church among the gens Anglorum in Historia Ecclesiastica (HE) in particular ‘form a kind of diptych’.³

1 De tabernaculo, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969); tr. A. G. Holder, Translated Texts for Historians Series (Liverpool University Press, 1994). De templo, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turn-hout, 1969). In Esram et Neemiam, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119A (Turnhout, 1969). Homiliae euangelii 2.1, 2.24, 2.25, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 122 (Turnhout, 1965); tr. L.T. Martin and D. Hurst, 2 vols. Cistercian Studies Series, 110–11 (Kalamazoo, 1991). A. G. Holder, ‘New Treasures and Old in Bede’s De tabernaculo and De templo’, in Revue Bénédictine, 99 (1989) pp. 237–49.

2 R.D. Ray, ‘Bede, the Exegete, as Historian’, in Famulus Christi, ed. G. Bonner (London 1976) pp. 125–40; idem., ‘What do we know about Bede’s Commentaries?’, in Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médièvale, 49 (1982) pp. 5–20; idem., ‘Augustine’s De Consensu Evangelistarum and the historical education of the Venerable Bede’, in Studia Patristica, 16 (1985) pp. 557–63; C.B. Kendall, ‘Imitation and the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. M.H. King and W.M. Stevens (Collegeville, 1979) pp. 161–90; J. Davidse, ‘The Sense of History in the works of the Venerable Bede’, in Studi Medievali, 23 (1983) pp. 647–95; A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983) pp. 130–53; J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Old Testament Kings’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983) pp. 76–98.

3 H.M.R.E. Mayr-Harting, The Venerable Bede, the Rule of St Benedict, and Social Class (Jarrow Lecture, 1976) p. 13.

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

The key to understanding the significance of the Temple image for Bede and his monastic contemporaries lies in the huge importance of the image in Scripture itself where its Christian interpretation is already well established. An indication of the major links in the chain of biblical texts concerning the Temple (which are all in some way used or assumed in De templo) may therefore give some idea of the scale and complexity of the materials at Bede’s disposal and of the allusive subtlety with which he used Scripture to comment on Scripture in the light of his patristic reading.

The Tabernacle and Temple in Scripture

1. The Old Covenant house of God

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

The Exodus story was recalled and appropriated in the early liturgy for the Easter vigil and baptism of catechumens so that the new [xviii] chosen people, gentile as well as Jewish converts to the Church, became the spiritual inheritors of the covenant made between God and his people in the desert and of the divine promise that they would become ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19.6; 1 Peter 2.9–10). That deliverance and covenant had been graphically epitomised in the Tabernacle which God had instructed Moses to build, a tentlike structure in which the sacred shrine of the Ark of the Covenant could be housed during the long sojourn in the desert. Two golden cherubim were placed over the Ark in the innermost Holy of Holies and God promised, ‘I will speak to you over the propitiatory and from the midst of the two cherubim’ (Exodus 25.22).

When the Jews became a settled people in the Promised Land, the Ark was transferred to the Holy of Holies in the Temple which David’s son Solomon had been divinely inspired to build in Jerusalem (3 Kings 8.1–20). Both the Tabernacle and its successor the Temple were seen as the house of God, the place of God’s presence with his people. As well as the detailed accounts of the Tabernacle in Exodus 25–30, 35–40 and of the Temple in 3 Kings 5–8, the image of God’s dwelling-place recurs right through the Old Testament in supplementary descriptions of the two successive buildings and their cults, in many allusions in the psalms and the prophets and in historical accounts of the fortunes of the Israelites typified in foreign desecrations and subsequent rebuilding of the Temple. The image carries the whole history of God’s relationship with his people.

In a homily, Bede chronicles this process from the construction of Solomon’s Temple to its destruction by the Babylonians four hundred and thirty years later; from the return of the chosen people after their seventy-year exile, and the rebuilding of the Second Temple in forty-six years under Zerubbabel and Joshua, to its profanation with idolatrous images by Antiochus the Greek three hundred and fifty-six years later and its subsequent purification and re-dedication under Judas Maccabeus. Bede’s summary ends with a quotation from St Paul: ‘“All these things were done as an example for us” (1 Corinthians 10.11) and were written down for us, and so we must scrutinise them carefully for their spiritual meaning.⁴ Paul’s text, originally applied to the account of the Exodus, encapsulates an entire methodology of interpretation and was frequently cited in exegesis and applied to the whole of the Old Testament. It is quoted at the opening of De [xix] tabernaculo to explain why Bede’s exposition extends to all the circumstantial details of time, place, objects, deeds and words contained in the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus. Similarly, immediately after the introduction to De templo, Bede explains he will be discussing all the details of the Temple’s construction contained in the biblical account of Solomon’s Temple ‘for these matters too are pregnant with scriptural mysteries according to the testimony of the apostle: “All these things happened to them (in the Old Testament) by way of example, and they were recorded in writing to be a lesson for us”’.

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

2. The New Covenant and the heavenly sanctuary

While the magnificent Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, filled with the glory of the Lord, is a powerful image of Isaiah’s experience of the presence of God (Isaiah 6.1–6), the prophet was also aware that the Creator of heaven and earth could not be circumscribed (Isaiah 66.1, cf. Psalm 10.5) and his words were taken up in the New Testament to show that God who made the world ‘dwells not in temples made with (human) hands’ (Acts 4.8–9; 17.24; John 4.21–24). The Epistle to the Hebrews gives an extended exegesis on the replacement of the entire Old Covenant by the New which greatly influenced patristic expositions of the Tabernacle and Temple. The ‘former Tabernacle’ (including, by extension, the Temple) is revealed to have been but an earthly shadow or copy of the heavenly reality shown to Moses (Hebrews 8.5, 9; 10.1), its priesthood and blood sacrifices now superseded by Christ’s priestly offering of himself which has enabled him to pass through the veil of the Holy of Holies, not into the inner sanctuary reserved for the High Priest in the earthly Tabernacle, but into the heavenly sanctuary ‘not made with hands’ which is the abode of God (Hebrews 9.11–12, 24).

A roll-call of honour reviews Old Testament history and heroes, including Abraham and other faithful patriarchs from even before the Mosaic Law, who desired not simply a homeland but a city ‘whose builder and maker is God’ (Hebrews 11.10); these are the spiritual ancestors of all Christians (cf. Galatians 3.5–29). As in the prophetic visions of the Temple in Isaiah, Ezekiel, the psalms and the Apocalypse, the image of the heavenly sanctuary here broadens and merges with that of the walled citadel of the heavenly Jerusalem to which all the faithful will eventually be drawn (Hebrews 12.22). For the faithful there can [xx] be no lasting earthly tabernacle or city: ‘We seek one (yet) to come’ (Hebrews 13.14); when ‘the earthly house of this habitation be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’ (2 Corinthians 5.1). The text forms part of the closing image in De templo.

The idea that the Church has already, since the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, spiritually replaced the Tabernacle and Temple on earth but is itself incomplete, awaiting its future fulfilm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Bede
• Adomnán
• Thomas Becket
• Index