The Venerable Bede

Historian and Doctor of the Church, born 672 or 673; died 735. In the last chapter

of his great work on the "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" Bede has

told us something of his own life, and it is, practically speaking, all that we know.

His words, written in 731, when death was not far off, not only show a simplicity

and piety characteristic of the man, but they throw a light on the composition of

the work through which he is best remembered by the world at large. He writes:

Thus much concerning the ecclesiastical history of Britain, and

especially of the race of the English, I, Baeda, a servant of Christ

and a priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles St. Peter and

St. Paul, which is at Wearmouth and at Jarrow (in

Northumberland), have with the Lord's help composed so far as I

could gather it either from ancient documents or from the traditions

of the elders, or from my own knowledge. I was born in the territory

of the said monastery, and at the age of seven I was, by the care of

my relations, given to the most reverend Abbot Benedict [St.

Benedict Biscop], and afterwards to Ceolfrid, to be educated. From

that time I have spent the whole of my life within that monastery,

devoting all my pains to the study of the Scriptures, and amid the

observance of monastic discipline and the daily charge of singing in

the Church, it has been ever my delight to learn or teach or write. In

my nineteenth year I was admitted to the diaconate, in my thirtieth

to the priesthood, both by the hands of the most reverend Bishop

John [St. John of Beverley], and at the bidding of Abbot Ceolfrid.

From the time of my admission to the priesthood to my present

fifty-ninth year, I have endeavored for my own use and that of my

brethren, to make brief notes upon the holy Scripture, either out of

the works of the venerable Fathers or in conformity with their

meaning and interpretation.

After this Bede inserts a list or Indiculus, of his previous writings and finally

concludes his great work with the following words:

And I pray thee, loving Jesus, that as Thou hast graciously given

me to drink in with delight the words of Thy knowledge, so Thou

wouldst mercifully grant me to attain one day to Thee, the fountain

of all wisdom and to appear forever before Thy face.

It is plain from Bede's letter to Bishop Egbert that the historian occasionally

visited his friends for a few days, away from his own monastery of Jarrow, but

with such rare exceptions his life seems to have been one peaceful round of

study and prayer passed in the midst of his own community. How much he was

beloved by them is made manifest by the touching account of the saint's last

sickness and death left us by Cuthbert, one of his disciples. Their studious

pursuits were not given up on account of his illness and they read aloud by his

bedside, but constantly the reading was interrupted by their tears. "I can with

truth declare", writes Cuthbert of his beloved master, "that I never saw with my

eyes or heard with my ears anyone return thanks so unceasingly to the living

God." Even on the day of his death (the vigil of the Ascension, 735) the saint was

still busy dictating a translation of the Gospel of St. John. In the evening the boy

Wilbert, who was writing it, said to him: "There is still one sentence, dear

master, which is not written down." And when this had been supplied, and the

boy had told him it was finished, "Thou hast spoken truth", Bede answered, "it is

finished. Take my head in thy hands for it much delights me to sit opposite any

holy place where I used to pray, that so sitting I may call upon my Father." And

thus upon the floor of his cell singing, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and

to the Holy Ghost" and the rest, he peacefully breathed his last breath.

The title Venerabilis seems to have been associated with the name of Bede

within two generations after his death. There is of course no early authority for

the legend repeated by Fuller of the "dunce-monk" who in composing an epitaph

on Bede was at a loss to complete the line: Hac sunt in fossa Bedae . . . . ossa

and who next morning found that the angels had filled the gap with the word

venerabilis. The title is used by Alcuin, Amalarius and seemingly Paul the

Deacon, and the important Council of Aachen in 835 describes him as

venerabilis et modernis temporibus doctor admirabilis Beda. This decree was

specially referred to in the petition which Cardinal Wiseman and the English

bishops addressed to the Holy See in 1859 praying that Bede might be declared

a Doctor of the Church. The question had already been debated even before the

time of Benedict XIV, but it was only on 13 November, 1899, that Leo XIII decreed

that the feast of Venerable Bede with the title of Doctor Ecclesiae should be

celebrated throughout the Church each year on 27 May. A local cultus of St.

Bede had been maintained at York and in the North of England throughout the

Middle Ages, but his feast was not so generally observed in the South, where the

Sarum Rite was followed.

Bede's influence both upon English and foreign scholarship was very great, and it

would probably have been greater still but for the devastation inflicted upon the

Northern monasteries by the inroads of the Danes less than a century after his

death. In numberless ways, but especially in his moderation, gentleness, and

breadth of view, Bede stands out from his contemporaries. In point of scholarship

he was undoubtedly the most learned man of his time. A very remarkable trait,

noticed by Plummer (I, p. xxiii), is his sense of literary property, an extraordinary

thing in that age. He himself scrupulously noted in his writings the passages he

had borrowed from others and he even begs the copyists of his works to preserve

the references, a recommendation to which they, alas, have paid but little

attention. High, however, as was the general level of Bede's culture, he

repeatedly makes it clear that all his studies were subordinated to the

interpretation of Scripture. In his "De Schematibus" he says in so many words:

"Holy Scripture is above all other books not only by its authority because it is

Divine, or by its utility because it leads to eternal life, but also by its antiquity

and its literary form" (positione dicendi). It is perhaps the highest tribute to

Bede's genius that with so uncompromising and evidently sincere a conviction of

the inferiority of human learning, he should have acquired so much real culture.

Though Latin was to him a still living tongue, and though he does not seem to

have consciously looked back to the Augustan Age of Roman Literature as

preserving purer models of literary style than the time of Fortunatus or St.

Augustine, still whether through native genius or through contact with the

classics, he is remarkable for the relative purity of his language, as also for his

lucidity and sobriety, more especially in matters of historical criticism. In all

these respects he presents a marked contrast to St. Aldhelm who approaches

more nearly to the Celtic type.

WRITINGS AND EDITIONS

No adequate edition founded upon a careful collation of manuscripts has ever

been published of Bede's works as a whole. The text printed by Giles in 1884

and reproduced in Migne (XC-XCIV) shows little if any advance on the basic

edition of 1563 or the Cologne edition of 1688. It is of course as an historian that

Bede is chiefly remembered. His great work, the "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis

Anglorum", giving an account of Christianity in England from the beginning until

his own day, is the foundation of all our knowledge of British history and a

masterpiece eulogized by the scholars of every age. Of this work, together with

the "Historia Abbatum", and the "Letter to Egbert", Plummer has produced an

edition which may fairly be called final (2 vols., Oxford, 1896). Bede's remarkable

industry in collecting materials and his critical use of them have been admirably

illustrated in Plummer's Introduction (pp. xliii-xlvii). The "History of the Abbots" (of

the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow), the Letter to Egbert", the

metrical and prose lives of St. Cuthbert, and the other smaller pieces are also of

great value for the light they shed upon the state of Christianity in Northumbria in

Bede's own day. The "Ecclesiastical History" was translated into Anglo-Saxon at

the instance of King Alfred. It has often been translated since, notably by T.

Stapleton who printed it (1565) at Antwerp as a controversial weapon against the

Reformation divines in the reign of Elizabeth. The Latin text first appeared in

Germany in 1475; it is noteworthy that no edition even of the Latin was printed in

England before 1643. Smith's more accurate text saw the light in 1742.

Bede's chronological treatises "De temporibus liber" and "De temporum ratione"

also contain summaries of the general history of the world from the Creation to

725 and 703, respectively. These historical portions have been satisfactorily

edited by Mommsen in the "Monumenta Germaniae historica" (4to series, 1898).

They may be counted among the earliest specimens of this type of general

chronical and were largely copied and imitated. The topographical work "De locis

sanctis" is a description of Jerusalem and the holy places based upon Adamnan

and Arculfus. Bede's work was edited in 1898 by Geyer in the "Itinera

Hierosolymitana" for the Vienna "Corpus Scriptorum". That Bede compiled a

Martyrologium we know from his own statement. But the work attributed to him in

extant manuscripts has been so much interpolated and supplemented that his

share in it is quite uncertain.

Bede's exegetical writings both in his own idea and in that of his contemporaries

stood supreme in importance among his works, but the list is long and cannot

fully be given here. They included a commentary upon the Pentateuch as a whole

as well as on selected portions, and there are also commentaries on the Books

of Kings, Esdras, Tobias, the Canticles, etc. In the New Testament he has

certainly interpreted St. Mark, St. Luke, the Acts, the Canonical Epistles, and

the Apocalypse. But the authenticity of the commentary on St. Matthew printed

under his name is more than doubtful. (Plaine in "Revue Anglo-Romaine", 1896,

III, 61.) The homilies of Bede take the form of commentaries upon the Gospel.

The collection of fifty, divided into two books, which are attributed to him by Giles

(and in Migne) are for the most part authentic, but the genuineness of a few is

open to suspicion. (Morin in "Revue Bénédictine", IX, 1892, 316.)

Various didactic works are mentioned by Bede in the list which he has left us of

his own writings. Most of these are still preserved and there is no reason to doubt

that the texts we possess are authentic. The grammatical treatises "De arte

metricâ" and "De orthographiâ" have been adequately edited in modern times by

Keil in his "Grammatici Latini" (Leipzig, 1863). But the larger works "De naturâ

rerum", De temporibus", De temporium ratione", dealing with science as it was

then understood and especially with chronology, are only accessible in the

unsatisfactory texts of the earlier editors and Giles. Beyond the metrical life of

St. Cuthbert and some verses incorporated in the Ecclesiastical History" we do

not possess much poetry that can be assigned to Bede with confidence, but, like

other scholars of his age, he certainly wrote a good deal of verse. He himself

mentions his "book of hymns" composed in different meters or rhythms. So

Alcuin says of him: Plurima versifico cecinit quoque carmina plectro. It is

possible that the shorter of the two metrical calendars printed among his works

is genuine. The Penitential ascribed to Bede, though accepted as genuine by

Haddan and Stubbs and Wasserschleben, is probably not his (Plummer, I, 157).

Venerable Bede is the earliest witness of pure Gregorian tradition in England. His

works "Musica theoretica" and "De arte Metricâ" (Migne, XC) are found

especially valuable by present-day scholars engaged in the study of the primitive

form of the chant.

Herbert Thurston

Transcribed by Paul Knutsen

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume II

Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

The Catholic Encyclopedia: NewAdvent.org