Likelihood and cynicism revisited
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Æthelberht, King of Kent, listens to the preaching of St Augustine of Canterbury
I’m wrapping up a blessedly long and relaxed summer vacation, my college’s Independence Day break and an annual family get together having finally coincided this year. I’m thankful for some time away with family.
As has become my wont during the summer, I’ve been reading some books on Anglo-Saxon England and the Early Middle Ages more generally. Last year’s mostly excellent reading inspired this post on modern historians’ tendency to strip the weirdness and human interest out of history, a post that was part of a longer, multipart reflection on the roles of “likelihood” and cynicism in historical judgment. This year one of the books I read at the beach caused me to revisit those themes—which are never far from my mind, anyway.
As with last year’s post on likelihood and keeping history interesting, I’m quoting from a good book that I’ve certainly benefited from reading, and so I omit the title and author’s name. These are simply recurring niggles, signs of a broader pattern undergirding the otherwise excellent research and writing.
At the beginning of a chapter on the efforts of Oswald of Northumbria to convert his people to Christianity, the author quotes a longish passage from Bede (Ecclesiastical History III, 3) on Oswald’s request to the elders of the Irish church to provide a bishop for his kingdom. The man chosen for the task is Aidan, “a man of outstanding gentleness, devotion, and moderation…”
The author breaks in thus:
This is all very well. It sets up Bede’s account of Lindisfarne, of Colm Cille and the founding of Iona and Aidan’s ministry. But two chapters later Bede admits that Aidan was not, in fact, the first missionary of the Irish church to Northumbria; that the original mission had not gone according to plan.
He goes on to summarize Ecclesiastical History III, 5, in which Oswald, prior to Aidan’s arrival, had requested and received an Irish bishop who disliked the Anglo-Saxons and returned to Iona.
The word admits caught my attention here, especially since Bede does not claim that Aidan was “the first missionary of the Irish church to Northumbria” and therefore seems to me to have nothing to “admit.” He’s telling a story and backtracking to fill in context, not shamefacedly confessing a coverup. But this kind of narrative rouses the suspicions of a certain kind of contemporary scholar, and so we get a thorough examination of Bede’s arrangement of the material, especially Bede’s motives:
Bede, I think, told the story about the initial failure [i.e. of the bishop before Aidan] for two reasons. First, he took his duties as a historian seriously; he knew the story and felt he ought to tell it. Second, it redounded to Aidan’s great credit that he overcame the difficulties of the challenge, just as Augustine [of Canterbury] had forty years previously. It made that mission, and Aidan, all the more special. As to how these two accounts came into his possession, the questions to pose are these: in whose interest was it to cultivate a story about a failed initiative, and in what circumstances did that earlier mission try its hand?
The first reason given above should be where the paragraph stops. That reason—that Bede was a good historian and did the best he could, sincerely and seriously—also answers the two questions the author poses at the end, especially the tedious cui bono? speculation. As I’ve written before, imposing this hermeneutic of suspicion smacks of the faculty lounge, of a limited hothouse world obsessed with power, and of a failure to imagine other minds.
One more example, and the first serious one to catch my eye as I read. This comes earlier in the book, in a passage on Bede’s account of St Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to the heathen king of Kent:
Æthelberht, he says, was at last persuaded to convert although the suggestion that he was ‘attracted by the pure life of the saints’ does not really ring true.
To you, perhaps. Get out and talk to some religious converts, sometime.
