In 731 a monk named Bede published a history book. He called it “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People”. It documented how the many Anglo Saxon small kingdoms took their first steps down the road to becoming one people, the English, by uniting around Christian Identity. (“Ecclesiastical” means “concerning Christian leaders and church”).

The purpose of this blog is to restore Bede to our modern understanding. It is a close companion to a previous blog in which I recovered for you the world which shaped John of Beverley. It was John of Beverley who first ordained the young Bede into Christian service. So the world which shaped John also shaped Bede.

Now, Bede’s history records many examples of Christian revelatory and miraculous phenomena. He intertwines them with the secular history. However, in our modern secular culture, there is no experience of the more phenomenal elements which intertwine within Bede’s history. Many with Christian background today have none either. The attitude, therefore, tends towards this: “Tut, tut, Bede will insist on interweaving the miraculous and the prophetic into the history. If only he would stick to the facts.”

This attitude is a problem in two ways:

1. The English united into a people around the culture of Christian expression as recorded by Bede. If you cut out the phenomena, you become blind to the dynamism of the Christian driving force. Rulers, not just clergy, embraced it and built their worlds on it.
2. In Bede’s time, the miraculous and the prophetic were the facts.

The effect is to make us half-blind to what actually shaped Bede and what his world was really like. I might put it like this. We recreate the farmyard smells. We omit the fragrance of heaven.

Firstly then, let me summarise again what shaped John of Beverley, Bede’s sponsor:

• John developed under the oversight of Abbess Hild of Whitby. Two different major Christian Awakenings had earlier shaped Hild: the first from Latin and the second from Gaelic sources, each of them strong in Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God.
• Highly educated Greek/North African Christian sources were added into the life of John when he also studied at Canterbury.
• So John, Bishop of York as he would become, was a product of a fusion of Latin/Gaelic/Greek/North African Christian sources, all of them as dynamic as it gets in terms of Christian gifting.
• There was creative-inspirational Christian worship life within Hild’s monastic group too.
• All these things were expressed in Christ-modelled ways in the life of John himself: he led a Christ-like life in a Christ-hungry culture.

Bede was ordained by John into a world which drew upon all these sources. The resulting familiarity with Christian Life in the Holy Spirit – which can, in any generation, give rise to phenomena of the revelatory and miraculous – permeates all of Bede’s history. We must also note what shaped the person who was Bede’s most direct mentor, Benedict Biscop. I note this in my book, but will repeat it here. Many histories emphasise how educated Benedict was, his love of books, and how he passed them on to Bede. But few if any of them explore one other great Christian fact: Benedict Biscop spent time at Lerins. This was where you went in those days to “Get the Anointing” (a modern phrase meaning, spiritual empowerment). What a vista opens up once you look into this.

Lerins was a monastery on an island off what is now the French Riviera. The island is now called St Honorat after the founder of the monastery. It was the place to which the powerful Christian spirituality which had been in St Martin of Tours migrated after his death in 397. You can read much about St Martin in my book. Suffice to say just this here:

• St Martin had profound Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God.
• Many a powerful modern Christian ministry of the same would recognise a kinship with his ways in our own times.

Now, Lerins was the place where, to use the modern Christian phrase, Christian monks or clerics would go to “Get the Anointing”. This does not mean “get rubbed with holy oil”, although that might happen too. It means to take on a mantle of Christ’s own powers for ministry.

In my book, I trace the golden chain of northern Celtic saints back to St Martin. The chain began with St Ninian, early 400’s. He detoured via Lerins before starting out. Then in 432, it was the place St Patrick also stayed at to “Get the Anointing” before embarking on his ministry to what would become Ireland. In an earlier blog about St Patrick, and in my book, you can discover how St Patrick went on, through his spiritual descendants, to become a lost spiritual ancestor not just of the Irish but all of what is now the United Kingdom including the English. Then in 596/7, en route to Canterbury in southern England, St Augustine of Canterbury went via Lerins not once but twice… in the footsteps of Ninian and Patrick… And we can see from the ministry that ensued – 10,000 converted voluntarily in his first year, and Pope Gregory telling him not to let his many miracles go to his head – that St Augustine of Canterbury appears to have “Got the Anointing” too.

So: St Ninian, St Patrick, St Augustine of Canterbury, Benedict Biscop: Celtic, or Latin, or Anglo Saxon; northerner, or southerner: were empowered from a common source. However, the history of the time, especially its Christian history, can get emphasised these days as division and hostility, north versus south, Celt versus Latin, and Celt versus English. I already showed you in the blog about John of Beverley how misrepresentative that is. You can see the same in the blog about St Patrick too. Now here, you can see it again. Bede was another fusion Christian, and he wrote out of that fusion.

But, poor Bede: he can get put down as a weaver of tall tales within facts. Or even as smugly anti-Celtic on behalf of the Latin and the English. Well, Bede did have a more sheltered life than most, and certain biases. But, for me, he comes across mainly as kindly and wise; and the “tall tales” tend to be authenticable against the Christian Bible. His writings breathe fusion Christian sources which arose at least as much from the Celtic Saints as anywhere else. And they would do: after all, his Roman church mentor, Benedict Biscop, went to the same place as St Patrick, spiritual ancestor of the northern Celtic saints, for the same empowering.

Then again, consider Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury 668-689. I reference him in the John of Beverley blog and recover him in my book. Theodore was the architect of a Latin/Gaelic/Greek/North African fusion Christian church. He built it as a uniting institution within every small kingdom of the Anglo Saxons. The nation of what became the English developed around Theodore’s fusion Christian church. And Theodore was not at odds with the Celtic. He appointed Gaelic-Celtic-derived Christians as bishops when he could. He ordained St Cuthbert, for example, sublime expression of Celtic Iona, as a bishop. He ordained St John of Beverley, Christian fusion personified. So: away with spinning fragmentation and enmity into the Christian history. Uniting Christian dynamism was the core truth of it. And this culture of uniting Christian dynamism was at the heart of Bede, first historian of what became the English Speaking World.

Now, therefore, what are we left with as regards Bede? The richest possible fusion Christian Identity was in both him and his world. His culture lived and breathed the Christian revelatory and the miraculous dimensions as fact, not fiction. Benedict Biscop would most certainly have passed on The Anointing to Bede in the process of mentoring him. Which I think you can detect in Bede’s writings as well: a Christian familiar with Life in the Holy Spirit of the Christian God wrote the first history of the Early English. All that John of Beverley stood for and bequeathed was interwoven into it.

Bede deserves to be restored to us in his Christian spirituality, I think. I like to think that in my book I have set the record straight. His influencers were not dissimilar to the most vibrant modern streams of Christian life today.