Bede and the Cosmos

Theology and Nature in the Eighth Century

Eoghan Ahern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429773884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Bede and the Cosmos examines Bede's cosmology—his understanding of the universe and its laws. It explores his ideas regarding both the structure and mechanics of the created world and the relationship of that world to its Creator. Beginning with On the Nature of Things and moving on to survey his writings in other genres, it demonstrates the key role that natural philosophy played in shaping Bede's worldview, and explores the ramifications that this had on his cultural, theological and historical thought. From questions about angelic bodies and the destruction of the world at judgement day, to subtle arguments about free will and the meaning of history, Bede's fascinating and unique engagement with the natural world is explored in this comprehensive study.

1 Background and context

Bede spent his life in the pursuit of learning. Born somewhere in the region of the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the kingdom of Northumbria in north-eastern Britain, he was given by his relatives into the care of that monastery at the age of seven. ‘From that point on’, as he would later put it, ‘I devoted myself to the contemplation of the Scriptures, and, in between the observance of regular discipline and the daily task of singing in church, I always held it a delight to learn or to teach or to write’.¹ His fame in the modern day is mostly derived from his having authored the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’), a magisterial work that is still our best source for early medieval British history, but he was a productive writer in many other genres as well. By the time of his death, on the 26th of May 735, he had produced over 40 separate works, among them commentaries on Scripture; uitae of holy men; treatises on time reckoning and on the makeup of the universe; handbooks of grammar, orthography and rhetoric; a guide to the Holy Land; and numerous letters to his contemporaries in the Northumbrian Church. According to one witness, he was working on two further projects—an English translation of the Gospel of John and a selection of the writings of Isidore of Seville—at the time of his death.² Most of his writings have survived into the present day, and there are few early medieval figures for whom we have comparably rich bodies of primary material. Bede’s importance to the historian of ideas lies partly in this productivity, which allows us to trace particular ideas or beliefs across texts, genres and spans of time.

The present study is concerned with Bede’s cosmology—that is to say, his knowledge of the structure and mechanics of the created world and of the relationship of that world to the Creator. This focus may require some words of explanation as, at first glance, such subject matter does not appear particularly prominent in Bede’s corpus of writings. Early in his career, when he was only 30 years old, Bede composed a short work entitled De natura rerum (‘On the Nature of Things’) which provided a straightforward and clearly written overview of the structure of the cosmos as Bede understood it. After that, however, he never dedicated another work to this subject; for the next three decades, he concentrated on the production of exegetical commentaries, histories, hagiographies and texts in other genres. One short work from the beginning of Bede’s writing career does not, then, immediately suggest itself as an essential component of his oeuvre. Furthermore, although Bede has been of some interest to scholars exploring the medieval history of science and philosophy, this has been more for his mathematical and computistical achievements than for his understanding of what we might call physics or biology.³ As this book will demonstrate, however, De natura rerum was only the beginning of Bede’s interest in questions about nature, physics and cosmology. Again and again over the course of his career he returned to the themes and preoccupations that he had first approached in that early work—and much of his exegetical, historical and theological thinking was shaped by his understanding of the cosmos and of the way it operated. De natura rerum, and the cosmological schema so clearly laid out in its pages, is not then a dispensable piece of juvenilia but the key to an entire facet of Bede’s thought.

It is worth noting, at the outset, some issues of terminology. When modern scholars discuss the picture of the cosmos depicted in De natura rerum, they often do so under the heading ‘science’. However, this modern term has no direct counterpart in the early medieval period.⁴ De natura rerum contains much material that a modern audience might categorize as science but also much that might instead be assigned to the realms of theology, history, biblical criticism or moral instruction. This generic inexactitude has not escaped the notice of scholars. Faith Wallis, in particular, has discussed the difficulties in delineating the exact boundaries of Bede’s ‘science’, a category ‘both uncertain in its boundaries and unclear in its definition’.⁵ One important aspect of Bede’s worldview onto which we must be careful not to project modern assumptions is the division between the material and the spiritual. The dualistic break between physical and metaphysical realities might seem to us a self-evident division, but the clear conceptual break between these two realities is a product of the early modern period.⁶ All cosmological texts from the early medieval period deal with the spiritual realms to some extent (Bede devoted a number of chapters of De natura rerum to the heavenly realms) and, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7 of this book, the divide between the corporeal and the spiritual was a porous one.

The present study, then, will touch upon ideas and beliefs that might be grouped with scientific thought (specifically the geocentric, elemental model of the universe inherited by early medieval Christianity from Graeco-Roman philosophy); other topics that cross over with religious or theological understanding (such as heaven and hell, angels and demons, the soul and God); and moral or ethical ideas (such as the reading of meaning into human history and belief in a Last Judgement). For this reason I have elected to avoid the term ‘science’, preferring instead ‘cosmology’,⁷ in the sense that this term is used by anthropologists: a set of beliefs and explanations related to the origins, laws, mechanisms and overall moral meaning of the universe, as well as the role and meaning of human life within this framework (I will also make use of the further terminological sub-divisions ‘cosmography’, to refer to the spatial layout of the universe, and ‘cosmogony’, to refer to the beginnings of the universe).⁸ This definition of cosmology encompasses theology, providing for theories of the universe that apprehend a divine purpose to the cosmos or that understand the universe to be the product of a Creator. It also differs from science in that it incorporates not only understandings of the mechanical aspects of nature and physics but also the moral and ethical values that are implied by—or deeply interwoven with—said understandings.⁹ The cosmos which will be the focus of this book comprises both corporeal and incorporeal realities, as well as matters of moral and religious character that would be quite alien to the work of a modern scientist.

Bede’s world: Wearmouth-Jarrow, Northumbria and beyond

Bede lived and worked in the twin-monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in the kingdom of Northumbria. Wearmouth, founded in 674 by Benedict Biscop, and Jarrow, founded in 681 or 682 by Ceolfrith, had been brought together in the late seventh century under Biscop and Ceolfrith’s co-abbacy.¹⁰ The two sites were closely situated—barely 7 miles separated them—and we do not, in fact, know in which location Bede himself was based or whether he moved frequently between the two. The surrounding kingdom of Northumbria was a relatively recent invention, the result of the political consolidation of two kingdoms—Bernicia in the north and Deira in the south—which had been incorporated under one king.¹¹ The kingdom was officially Christian, as indeed were its neighbours to the north, west and south; we might question to what extent this had percolated down to the general populace, but the world in which Bede grew up was a self-consciously Christian one and the Church was the dominant force in his life, education and worldview.¹² Though Bede and his contemporaries presented Northumbria as a land at the far reaches of the world, and Wearmouth-Jarrow as a secluded centre of contemplation, we should not be fooled: he moved in a cosmopolitan and affluent world with links to monastic foundations all over the Insular world and the continent, stretching as far as Rome.¹³

The figure of Bede so dominates the intellectual landscape of early-eighth-century Northumbria that, from a distance, it can appear that he sprang from nothing, but it is clear that Wearmouth-Jarrow was home to a vibrant scholarly community of which Bede was only a part.¹⁴ Those who Bede described as his teachers—Biscop, Ceolfrith and Trumberht—were surely responsible for shaping Bede’s remarkable erudition.¹⁵ Certainly Ceolfrith, to whom Bede was clearly especially close, was a formidable intellectual force—the evidence of his letter to the Pictish king, Nechtan, speaks to a keen mind and a clear inspiration for Bede’s own learned activities.¹⁶ One of Ceolfrith’s most lasting cultural accomplishments was the production at Wearmouth-Jarrow of three great pandects, one of which, the Codex Amiatinus, was intended as a gift for St. Peter’s in Rome from an ‘abbot of the farthest reaches of the English’ (Anglorum extremis de fin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Background and context
• 2 De natura rerum and the topography of the cosmos
• 3 Bede’s cosmogony: creation, perfection, decline
• 4 Soul and body
• 5 Aetherial angels and aerial demons
• 6 God and creation
• 7 Heaven, hell and the interim
• 8 The end of the world and after
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index