Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series on Natality, a conversation about child-bearing, family life, birth rates, and the presence or absence of children in churches.
In Western societies, especially among Anglicans, we are in a valley of decline: demographic decline mirrored in church attendance decline (sometimes called “precipitous”). There is also the decline (let’s be honest, neglect) of catechesis, of confidence in the church’s structures, in the church’s dogmas, in the church’s relevance altogether. These are interrelated and mutually magnifying crises. Hence, the decline of birth — of people having babies — is part of something larger, pointing to a deeper reality than a mere phenomenon of numbers and habits. Addressing the first can only involve confronting this second, and more fundamental decline. I would argue that what sits beneath the diverse ‘declines’ we observe in the West today is actually the decline, or dissolution, of our worldview. And in order to discern and read these deeper movements with a Christian mind we must be standing firmly in the stream of our own history. We must look back in order to recognize what has been lost.
Let me, then, tell a story about Saint Bede, or “Bede the Venerable.”
If we know the names of English saints like Alban, Columba, Hilda, and the like, we have in large part St. Bede to thank. Likewise, if we still think of B.C. and A.D. (Before Christ and Anno Domini), we also have Bede to thank. Bede (673-735) was an English monk who spent his life in the northeast of England, in the coastal town of Jarrow. He was a remarkable scholar with far-ranging interests. He wrote numerous works; his most famous being the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, that indispensable and inspiring story of the spread of Christianity throughout Britain, filled with tales of heroes of the faith. He wrote over 40 additional works, including scriptural commentaries, hagiographies, works of natural philosophy, along with hymns and poetry. He is the only English person counted among the Doctors of the church.
The story I want to tell, however, occurs long before Bede becomes the great scholar-monk, later considered the father of English history. At the age of 7, Bede was sent to live at St. Peter’s Monastery in Monkwearmouth. He was placed under the care of the Abbot, Benedict Biscop. Benedict had founded the dual monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul (located at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow), and it very quickly became a beacon of holiness and Christian learning, boasting a remarkable library of manuscripts housed in beautifully constructed buildings. The monastery cultivated and fed back into church and culture alike the gifts of sacred study on account of their unrivalled library, which was accompanied, naturally, by a busy Scriptorium.
The monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow fueled a fire of holy learning that illuminated England in the midst of the so-called Dark Ages. And they did this by leaning into, inhabiting, and building upon the wisdom of the ages that went before: the Greek and Roman classical tradition, and the riches of patristic theology and biblical interpretation. Their pursuit of study, artistry, architecture, manuscript illumination and so forth were all informed by and oriented back toward the life of prayer that persisted, always, as the beating heart of monastic life. Prayer and study were interlaced in a continuous, coherent, Christocentric whole. The ultimate raison d’etre of the Scriptorium was identical with that of the Sanctuary: to glorify the one Lord of All.
You can hear this sentiment in the prayer Bede writes as the epilogue of his Ecclesiastical History:
I pray you, noble Jesu, that as you have graciously granted me joyfully to imbibe the words of your knowledge, so You will also of Your bounty grant me to come at length to Yourself, the Fount of all wisdom, and to dwell in Your presence forever.
Bede spent his young childhood under the tutelage of the scholarly bibliophile Benedict. He was then placed under the care of Ceolfrid, who had been appointed Abbot of the monastery at Jarrow. The anonymous Life of the Abbot Ceolfrid tells of a disaster that befell the monastery in the year 686. Bede was about 13. The chronicler tells us that a terrible plague hit the region, devastating the monastery. At one point, St. Paul’s was left with only two monks still alive or well enough to pray the hours: the Abbot and “one little lad” (scholars agree this was the young Bede).
At first, Ceolfrid made the decision to omit the antiphons in their praying of the Psalms since the pestilence had entirely wiped out the choir. They tried this for a week, but it grieved Ceolfrid so deeply — the writer says it brought him to tears — that he rescinded the order and reinstated the whole liturgy, with only Bede to assist him. Two lonely, faithful voices, old and young, praying the hours while all seemed lost.
The epidemic waned, and Ceolfrid instructed a new generation of cantors and new monks to sing the divine office again, antiphons and all. The monastery was reborn; and their Christ-centred, integrated life of prayer and study was re-established. At its height, the monastery grew to 400 brothers. Bede grew up in this new generation and continued to be formed by its rhythm. He was ordained a deacon a few years later, then a priest, and always a scholar, allowing Christ to make his life into an icon of that continuity between liturgy and learning.
Here is an analogy, and an exhortation, for today’s situation in the church. It’s prescient for us because we English-speaking Christians are in a real sense the living continuation of that same ecclesiastical history of the English people that Bede grows up to write. The story of their faith continues in us, declining birthrates and all. Here is a young child born into a cruel world, yet one filled with Christian hope, who lives through disaster in the posture of prayer, maturing under the stalwart faithfulness of his elder who bequeaths to him the whole Christian heritage: Sanctuary and Scriptorium, inter-dependent, professing the One Lord.
The analogy is admittedly loose, but we could say that Christianity in the West is experiencing a catastrophe, much like the plague that hit Northumbria in the late seventh century. I feel, from my vantage point in the Church of England, a little like this sometimes: look at us, reduced to two monks. We are watching many parishes die a death of attendance attrition, aging out of viability, losing zeal for or even knowledge of the gospel, reducing Christian worship to a nominal performance of public culture.
We stagger too, under a mist of theological amnesia and contradiction, and under the shadow of grievous scandal. Of course, vitality, integrity, theological literacy, and gospel zeal still truck along in various corners; it’s not all doom and gloom. But we must face that the forecast for “established” Western Anglicanism is dire.
Nor is deploying the word catastrophe extravagant. As with Alasdair MacIntyre’s use of the term in After Virtue (1981), catastrophe is the wiping out of a thought-world. There is a crucial difference, however, between us and the monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow: our disaster has not befallen us like a plague. Ours is, above all, a metaphysical disaster. We, Western Christians, have rather permitted and, I would argue, at times perpetrated the decimation of our own metaphysical constitution.
We have allowed a fissure to separate the Scriptorium — that is, a living and coherent Christian worldview — from the Sanctuary. We have kicked down a good number of load-bearing walls; I mean those theological and philosophical convictions that structure an authentically Christian vision of reality, truth, meaning, and morality. We have faltered in our understanding and teaching of, to name a few, Christian realism, sacramental ontology, the nature and authority of Scripture, the continuity of tradition.
The challenges of today’s anti-natalism emerge just here: an impoverished metaphysics that looks upon the coherent and normative meaningfulness of creation with profound suspicion and scepticism. We may have kept the liturgy, the prayers of the Sanctuary, but we have jettisoned and forgotten the metaphysical gifts of the Scriptorium which are wedded to those very prayers.
I find it poignant, and symbolic again in a loose way, that if you visit the site of St. Peter’s Wearmouth, where little Bede entered into the care of Benedict Biscop, you will still find a church standing there — a beautiful church, where people still worship today. And, amalgamated into later bits of architecture, there will still be elements from the original chapel. But you will not find the Scriptorium. It once apparently (and appropriately) stood above the church on the second floor. Learning built upon prayer. The rest of the monastic complex fell into ruin, victim to a string of later depredations.
All through that plague that very nearly wiped out the whole monastery, Ceolfrid and young Bede remained faithful to the office of the hours. They prayed with Christ’s church through time and space when there were all but two. But later — and this is the piece we need to pay attention to — they also recovered the vision that is indigenous to that worship: the integrated, Christocentric perspective that reads the cosmos as an intelligible moral whole. They did not surrender metaphysics as collateral damage. Neither should we.
If our demographic prognostications sound a bit like “only two monks left,” let us be like Bede and Ceolfrid: navigating to the far side of today’s decline with our eyes on the whole we must recover. First, we must persist in faithfulness to the prayers of the Sanctuary: redeeming the time, praying the daily office, praying the liturgy handed down (and handing it down), administering the sacraments, interceding for the world. And second, we must not neglect the Scriptorium. To recover from a metaphysical malady, a retrieval of authentically Christian ways of reading the world must commence. Ceolfrid and Bede (as saints and archetypes) must re-acquaint us with that lost world so that, restored to the wider, deeper, and older integrity of Christian truth, we will live to see the “ecclesiastical history of the English people” enter the renaissance we long for.
Hanna J. Lucas, PhD is a Guest Writer. She has taught theology and church history at Durham University and College of the Resurrection in Mirfield UK, and is currently working with Lindisfarne College of Theology in their Ministry Experience Volunteer Program. She is a Research Fellow of the Catechesis Institute and editor of Koinonia, the Journal of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association. Her research is in late patristics. Originally from Canada, Hanna now lives with her husband and four children in Sedgefield, UK, where her husband serves as a priest in the Church of England.
