6 - Bede and Gildas

Summary

While the compilers of the Hibernensis had drawn on Gildas's letter to Finnian to support an episcopal approach to exhorting moral behaviour and reinforcing church discipline in an Irish context, a different perspective on Gildas was evolving in Britain. This perspective shared a common approach to the issues of Easter and the tonsure but did not draw on the image of Gildas as a contributor to canon law. Rather, it focussed on a specific aspect of his prophetic authority as expressed in the De excidio, that of the providential historian. The advocate of this distinct image of Gildas was the English scholar, Bede (ca 673–735).

Bede was aware that of those few writers who had touched on the history of Britain prior to his own time, none was more important than Gildas. As he moved toward the end of his life and compiling his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede increasingly turned his attention to what Gildas had to say, not only about that most singular moment from an English perspective, the adventus Anglorum sive Saxonum, but also about the role of history and its relation to providence. In constructing a new vision of the history of Britain, Bede, as we saw in Chapter 1, referred to Gildas's admonitions in the De excidio to shade the legitimacy of the Christian culture of the British Isles prior to the arrival of Augustine of Canterbury with uncertainty.

Bede's pointed reference to the De excidio has often been seen to stress Gildas's criticisms of the secular and ecclesiastical failings of the Britones, emphasising a terminal decline in the Christian culture of the British Isles prior to the triumphant conversion of the English to continental orthodoxy. The present exploration, however, will highlight Bede's evolving understanding of the De excidio as an intervention in the eschatological landscape. In constructing a providential history of Britain, Gildas created an image of an ordered, tolerant, and exclusive Britannia (based on a single chosen people) as a bulwark against sin and divine punishment. This understanding of Gildas's reaction to crisis in Britain encouraged Bede to also construct his Historia ecclesiastica as an intervention in the eschatological landscape.