Bede on corruption and plague

In that order.

From St Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book I, xiv, describing the situation of the British in the early 5th century just before the invasions of Germanic peoples (the English, eventually) from the Continent:

St Bede at work, from a 12th century manuscript of his Life of St Cuthbert in the British Library

When the depredations of its enemies had ceased, the land enjoyed an abundance of corn without precedent in former years; but with plenty came an increase in luxury, followed by every kind of crime, especially cruelty, hatred of truth, and love of falsehood. If anyone happened to be more kindly or truthful than his neighbors, he became a target for all weapons of malice as though he were an enemy of Britain. And not only the laity were guilty of these things, but even the lord’s flock and their pastors. Giving themselves up to drunkenness, hatred, quarrels, and violence, they threw off the easy yoke of Christ. Suddenly a terrible plague struck this corrupt people, and in a short while destroyed so large a number that the living could not bury the dead. But not even the death of their friends or the fear of their own death was sufficient to recall the survivors from the spiritual death to which their crimes had doomed them. So it was that, not long afterwards, an even more terrible retribution overtook this wicked nation.

I am not one to argue that natural disasters, pandemics, and other misfortunes are God’s punishments meted out to particular groups or for particular sins—that leads by a short road to callousness, boorishness, and buffoonery. I don’t doubt that God has his reasons and that he judges and punishes the nations, but that lies deep within the “for me to know and you to find out” zone of his will.

But the parallels between Bede’s description of post-Roman, pre-migration Britain and our own day are hard to set aside. A time of unbelievable plenty filled with discontent, licentiousness, consumption, and brutality, in which even the Church—both its people and its leadership—has proven complicit, and a culture actively hostile to truth and goodness and so smitten and hungry for its own evil that nothing can dissuade the people from pursuing it. And what phrase seems more pointedly relevant than Bede’s description of the people’s “hatred of truth, and love of falsehood”?

But notice that the plague only comes when the people are already corrupt. While God may have sent the plague upon the 5th century British as punishment or “retribution”—something about which Bede, notably, carefully avoids being dogmatic—they had already created many of their own problems. They had already compromised their own spiritual immune systems long before physical disease struck them down. And worse was coming, brought on by their own corrupted will:

For they consulted how they might obtain help to avoid or repel the frequent fierce attacks of their northern neighbors, and all agreed with the advice of their king, Vortigern, to call on the assistance of the Saxon peoples across the sea. This decision, as its results were to show, seems to have been ordained by God as a punishment on their wickedness.

Food for thought.

The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics. You can also read public domain translations at Project Gutenberg and Fordham’s excellent medieval source site. It’s worth your while. Penguin has another good volume called The Age of Bede that includes Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert and other saints’ lives and religious texts from his lifetime.