This is an exceptionally coherent collection of essays. The editors open with a general introduction and nine essays follow. All revolve around the theme of the future, concentrating on two things: the whys and wherefores of Bede's apocalyptic and eschatological thinking as these relate to various systems of time reckoning, and Bede's concerns about the immediate future of his double monastery and the north of England.
Darby and Wallis state that a “desire for salvation . . . drove Bede's intellectual programme” (2). Inevitably, therefore, Bede's work pointed to the future. They then break down Bede's life into chronological slices, array his major works within each slice, and introduce the essays that follow, themselves arranged chronologically.
Wallis asks, “Why Did Bede Write a Commentary on Revelation?” She notes that the work was not commissioned and argues that it was not intended to fill a gap in patristic exegesis. Instead, Bede was concerned with heresy. On the one hand, he stood with Jerome and Augustine in believing that it was heretical to predict the end of time. On the other hand, he was defending himself against charges of heresy. In his De temporibus he had demonstrated that the annus mundi dating system did not accord with the data of the Vulgate Bible. The sixth age, each age being one millennium long, was due to end in 800. Bede rejected that idea but in the process contradicted the teaching that Christ was born in the sixth age. His views had apparently brought down whispers, if not actual charges, of heresy from some in the circles of Wilfrid and Acca.
Alan Thacker asks, “Why Did Heresy Matter to Bede?” He answers that Bede was not concerned with the remote past. He understood the differences among heretics, false Christians, schismatics, and bad Catholics, but his rhetoric lumped them together as challenges to Christian unity and the peace of the Northumbrian church. For Bede, “heresy” was a code for a whole spectrum of contemporary problems. Bede's reflections on disunity come out in his commentaries on 1 Samuel, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
Thacker believes that Abbot Coelfrith's departure for Rome in 716 may have sparked Bede's concerns about unity since there was evidently tension in his own house. Christopher Grocock's “Separation Anxiety: Bede and Threats to Wearmouth and Jarrow” extends this argument. Grocock looks closely at the Historia Abbatum and particularly at Benedict Biscop's speech to his monks as he was dying. Grocock teases out Bede's meanings in part by some wonderful philological assessments of the text. Primarily, though, he says that Bede was concerned that the monks keep the Rule, maintain their library, and retain control of the monastery and its property. It was not, thus, the end of the world but the looming end of Wearmouth and Jarrow that exercised Bede at this time.
Different and fascinating is Calvin Kendall's “Bede and Islam.” Bede knew nothing of Islam as a religion and he had, it seems, never heard the name of Muhammad. So what did Bede know and how did his views influence the future? Jerome and Isidore knew of pre-Islamic tribes supposedly descended from Sarah's son Ishmael. Hence the name applied to those people was “Saracen.” From various sources Bede seems to have learned something about Saracen conquests in North Africa and perhaps the Near East (but not Spain). Bede had to think about the place of the Saracens in providential history in light of God's promise to make a great nation out of the descendants of Ishmael. Recent Saracen successes may have suggested to Bede that the end of time was indefinitely postponed and his view that Christian Europe was threatened by fierce and hostile forces prevailed for centuries.
Darby's “Bede's History of the Future” treats Bede's “consolidated eschatological program” (117). As noted, Bede kept company with those fathers who believed that it was impossible to predict the end of time. But Bede did think it was possible to spell out in detail how the end times would play out once they commenced. Assembled from a variety of sources, Bede's picture of the last seven years is too complicated to summarize here. That picture, nevertheless, confirms Bede's intellectual independence.
James T. Palmer's “The Ends and Futures of Bede's De temporum ratione” asks what was Bede's vision of the future and why did it provoke reaction. Bede wrote the work in an atmosphere of intense argument about systems of time reckoning. Bede was trying to reconcile and make choices among three different systems. The work was a polemic. Bede was trying to show his opponents the errors of their ways. Numerous manuscripts (57) of the work survive from the Continent and provide insights into how the book was received. In short, the work was received flexibly; surviving manuscripts display numerous variations. People apparently read and used the book in many different ways.
Máirín Mac Carron's “Christology and the Future in Bede's Annus Mundi” tackles some of the Christological and eschatological implications of Bede's shift to AD dating—a topic broached in a number of earlier essays. Bede knew many systems but chose AD dating, Mac Carron argues, because it is prospective, it opens to a not yet known future, and it avoids the tangles around annus mundi dating. Still, that point is not developed in detail here. Instead, the author looks at the controversy over the date of Easter and the issue of Christian unity. She notes that Bede never uses AD dates for people whose theology he deems unsound.
Paul C. Hilliard's “Quae res Quem sit Habitura Finem, Posterior Aetas Videbit” identifies a theological vision in Bede's commentaries that “comes alive” (184) in the Historia Ecclesiastica, whose ends seems optimistic after so much gloom and struggle in earlier works. But things are not so simple. Being Christian means facing adversity on the way to the heavenly kingdom. Spiritual warfare is a constant. How it will all end only a future generation will know.
Scott Di Gregorio's “Visions of Reform: Bede's later Writings in Context” argues that the reform program spelled out explicitly in the Letter to Ecgbehrt was actually anticipated in many of Bede's earlier writings. Why Bede finally chose to speak so plainly is hard to discern, but he did so and in the process advertised a keen concern for the future of the Northumbrian church.
