Gregory, Bede, and the Medieval Church¶

The medieval West is the weakest ground in this section: no Irenaeus appealing to healings his opponents could check, no Augustine with a dossier of sworn testimony. There are shrines, pilgrims, monks and vitae written to edify. A continuationist who calls this a golden age of the gifts is overclaiming, and this page will not do it.

But the cessationist has a difficulty here too. The church that produced this literature did not teach, or pray, as though the gifts had ended. It taught that the holy was local. That belief has costs. It is not a memory of Pentecost ending.

The claim¶

The medieval church did not teach that the gifts had ceased; it taught that they had moved to the shrines. Cessation is a claim about a divine decree: God has withdrawn the extraordinary gifts, and the church should not expect them. What the medieval West taught was a theology of mediation — God still acts, at particular places, through particular bones and particular prayers. That can be criticised on its own terms, but it cannot be read as a doctrine of absence. Bede says Gregory himself warned Augustine of Canterbury not to exult in the wonders reported in England (Ecclesiastical History I.31).

Gregory the Great: the Dialogues, c. 593¶

Gregory was bishop of Rome from 590 to 604; the Dialogues earned him, in some later hands, a reputation for credulity. Book II is the life of Benedict, framed as a conversation with his deacon Peter, who interrupts and objects.

He names his informants: four of Benedict's own disciples — Constantinus, Valentinian, Simplicius and Honoratus — the first of whom succeeded him as abbot. That is the strongest move a hagiographer can make: not "it is said," but "I asked the men who were there." Whether it is true we cannot test.

The most famous story is almost comic. Benedict's nurse broke a borrowed earthenware sieve; he prayed over the pieces and gave them back whole. Gregory says the mended sieve hung at the church door where visitors could see it — a miracle with an exhibit. The smallness is the point: the ordinary household life of a holy man is shot through with the power of God.

Bede: the English History, 731¶

Bede, a monk of Jarrow, finished the Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731 — the best history of the period, and incidentally one of the fullest medieval catalogues of healings, attached almost always to a saint's person or remains.

Oswald, king of Northumbria, set up a wooden cross before the battle of Heavenfield and prayed; afterwards, earth scraped from the spot, mixed with water, healed a boy whose arm was withered (III.2). At the place where Oswald was killed in 642 Bede reports a stream of cures (III.9-10), and when the king's bones were translated, a demoniac was freed (III.11). Aidan of Lindisfarne gets a portrait made mostly of holiness, and one healing: a young man with a growth on his eye was cured by touching the post against which Aidan had leaned at his death (III.17).

Cuthbert, monk-bishop of Lindisfarne, died in 687. Bede wrote his Life from an earlier Lindisfarne account and from what the brethren told him, and reports healings in his lifetime and at his tomb; translated in 698, the body was found incorrupt (Ecclesiastical History IV.30). The Life is a saints' life, written to edify, and should be read as one — but by a careful historian who says where his material came from.

The medieval proliferation¶

After Bede the gifts are not lost but institutionalised. Relics multiply, shrines become economies, and pilgrimage becomes one of the great facts of European life — above all Canterbury, after Becket was murdered in the cathedral in 1170 and canonised in 1173.

The church tried to police it. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) forbade venerating new relics without papal approval and forbade their sale — legislation that shows both that the trade flourished and that the authorities knew it was abused. Canonisation became a papal monopoly, conducted by inquiry with sworn witnesses examined on the life, the virtues and the miracles. That machinery is itself evidence: a church that had abolished the gifts would not have needed it.

The honest problems¶

1. Hagiography is written to edify¶

The vitae are sermons in narrative form, shaped by biblical patterns — Peter's shadow (Acts 5:15), Elijah's bones (2 Kings 13:21). A hagiographer who patterns his healing on Acts is not necessarily lying; he is preaching in a genre. But the genre is not a medical record, and the reports are usually our only evidence, so they cannot be checked.

2. The relic economy was real, and corrupt¶

Relics were translated, stolen, multiplied and sold. Patrick Geary's Furta Sacra documents the medieval theology of relic theft — a saint could consent to being carried off where he would be honoured more. The trade had a market price, the shrines revenues, the pilgrims expectations; Chaucer's Pardoner, with pigs' bones in a glass case, is a joke that landed because it was close to the truth.

3. The Reformers' critique was largely justified¶

Calvin's Treatise on Relics (1543) is a polemic and largely right. The churches claimed more pieces of the true cross than one cross could supply; several towns claimed the same saint's body; the trade was indistinguishable from a fair. His theological point is Deuteronomy's: a sign does not settle the truth of the teaching attached to it (13:1-5). The trouble is what he concluded. That the trade was corrupt does not establish that God had withdrawn his gifts. It establishes that religion can be sold.

What survives as evidence¶

First, the church never told itself that the gifts had ended: it legislated about them, prayed for healing in its liturgies, anointed its sick (James 5:14-15), kept an order of exorcists, and gave the "grace of miracles" a place in its theology. Aquinas treats it as a gratuitous grace for others' benefit, not a relic of the apostolic age (Summa Theologiae II-II q.178).

Second, there is a stream of particular claims, some examined at the time. Canonisation inquiries took evidence; bishops investigated shrines; the church had a vocabulary for fraud and used it. That does not make the claims true. It makes them claims, of a kind that can be graded.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the Western church between Gregory and the Reformation maintained healing prayer, the expectation of the miraculous, and a theology in which the gifts had a continuing place; and that cessation is not its doctrine, however much its practice needed reforming.

It does not prove: that Benedict mended the sieve, that Oswald's bones cured anyone, or that the shrine economy was anything but a scandal. It proves only that the church's memory of the gifts did not end here. What ended in the sixteenth century was the arrangement that carried the memory.