I’m interested in Bede because of the way his writing and faith connects the Christian faith to the land, and for his understanding of reality as a premodern and more specifically pre-Norman Conquest Christian.
His account of the martyrdom of Saint Alban - Britain’s protomartyr - provides a really good example for what I’m on about. Alban isn’t born a Christian, but shelters a priest from the Romans and ends up emulating the priest's comitted life of prayer and devotion. When the soldiers come to arrest the priest, Alban clothes himself in the priest’s cloak and presents himself in the place of his guest.
There is a lovely symmetry here; Alban first chooses to clothe himself in the priest’s spiritual habits, of prayer and night vigils, before eventually becoming priestly in the physical sense when he takes on the man’s clothing. In later versions of the story the priest is referred to as Amphibalus, which is Latin for cloak.
Of course by offering himself up in his place, Alban is condemned to suffer everything the priest would have been subject to (sound familiar?) unless he returns to the pagan rites. Alban says;
I worship and adore the true and living God who created all things.
These words are still used in prayer at St. Alban’s Cathedral today. Alban is scourged and sentenced to beheading. At this stage Bede’s story takes on another level as we are treated to a vivid description of the landscape of Alban’s martyrdom.
He is led to a hill (sound familiar?) surrounded by a river which parts at his arrival. The hill is described as being unbroken with a gentle, grassy slope, filled with all kinds of wildflowers and overlooking a beautiful meadow.
Alban’s appointed executioner repents on the spot and requests that he suffer with Alban or in his place. Alban gets thirsty after climbing the hill (sound familiar?) and a spring breaks forth from underneath his feet. He gets beheaded with the executioner, and the replacement executioner’s eyes drop out onto the grass.
But the story doesn’t end there. Later in Bede, St. Germanus of Auxerre travels to Britain from Gaul in an attempt to re-evangelise the region and put down a Pelagian heresy. He brings relics of many continental martyrs with him in a casket he wears round his neck and cuts some turf from Alban’s hill (supposedly still containing droplets of the saint’s blood) to take back to Gaul.
Lots of very modern debate has been put into whether Alban was a real historical person, whether he was an invention of Germanus’ or not and to what extent Bede embellished the story with additions he would have known to be false.
All of which assumes that in order for the story of St. Alban and the Ecclesiastical History to bear weight as tales, they must have materially happened in history in exactly the way that they are described and that this was the intended purpose of writing them down in the first place.
What us moderns often struggle to grasp is that placing the weight of meaning on raw material fact and fiction is a fairly recent invention, and that the continued appeal of hagiography and myth arises from something much deeper and weirder. To paraphrase GKC on Alfred, to affirm the legend of St. Alban isn’t to say that Alban, like King Arthur, was probably a lie - only that the the stories and legends are the most important things about him.
The symbolism involving the natural world is some of the most beautiful and moving in this story - and one of the elements sorrowfully absent from most modern Christian tradition. We have become a people who have reduced the evangelion from an all-encompassing reality to an idea that can be understood and contained within one’s head.
Christ the logos is obviously bigger than that, and even this little story can barely seem to contain Him. Springs break from beneath our feat. Rivers stop in their tracks. Many-coloured flowers fill the field to recieve a martyr’s blood.
My engagement with this story coincided with my discovery of the poem Earth Dweller, by William Stafford. Stafford writes;
It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.
If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for somewhere inside, the clods are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.
Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.
I think Stafford’s clods affirm the same thing as the one Germanus cut from St. Alban’s hill. No chapel will be large enough to contain the vaults God wants to build - and in that case our heads certainly aren’t fit for the task either.
Perhaps more so than ever, despite our very best intentions, the Earth is nevertheless seen as a backdrop, as something other that we must protect and conserve and advocate on behalf of, but which we don’t truly belong in or too.
Yes, it is certainly strange and other, but if I am honest with myself, so is my interior landscape most of the time. The images and stories Bede and Stafford provide us with suggest a different way of seeing - an exterior landscape that is alive, wild and with which we and the saints and All Things can sing forever.