O Lord, Almighty God, open wide my heart and teach it by the grace of your Holy Spirit to ask for what is pleasing to you. Direct my thoughts and senses so to think and to act that by a worthy manner of life I may deserve to obtain the eternal joys of the heavenly kingdom. Direct my actions according to your commands so that, ever striving to keep them in my life, I may receive for my deeds the eternal reward. -From a Prayer of St. Bede
When you mention a date in history or refer to the current year, you pay unconscious tribute to St. Bede. For he popularized the system of using B.C. and A.D. The system had been devised, he himself tells us, by Dionysius (Denis), an aged Roman abbot, starting with the Feast of the Annunciation in 527 A.D. But it lay unused for 200 years, until adopted by Bede in his works on Time and in his histories. The Cycle of Dionysius, using Christ as the centerpiece of history, then took root in England; it went, by way of Bede's works and English missionaries and teachers, to the continent. Adoption by Charlemagne and, in the century following him by the popes, brought it into universal western use.
St. Bede had a universal interest and wrote voluminously about many subjects. Although he is best known today as a historian, four-fifths of his writing was in the field of Scripture commentary. His own contemporaries thought of him as a theologian. The statistics may vary, depending on how the summary is made, but we can count thirty-nine works of Bede, contained in seventy-nine books.
The Fathers at the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 835 called him "Venerable and an Admirable Doctor for Modern Times." The name Venerable Bede has clung to him through history-it is appropriate for this lovable, quiet teacher and monk, who describes himself as always "rejoicing to serve the Supreme Loving-Kindness."
When Bede was about fifty-nine, he finished The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It is considered his most important work and won him distinction as the Father of English History.
At the end of the fifth and final book, he gives a short summary of his life. Outside of this short notice and a report on his death by a pupil named Cuthbert, practically no details are known. It may be said, however, that the simplicity and goodness, the zeal, humility, and honesty of Bede show through his writings with unusual clearness.
Nothing whatever is known of his parents or family. At the age of seven he was brought by his relatives to the new monastery of St. Peter at Wearmouth, Northumbria, in northern England. His birthplace was within the territory of the monastery; Monkton in County Durham is often pointed to as the exact place. The little Bede was given as a child oblate into the care of the abbot, St. Benedict Biscop.
Bede would have many fellow oblates as companions. He would have his turn helping in the kitchen or barn, gathering eggs, or sometimes going with the monks who fished for their dinner in the nearby Wear river. From his descriptions of the paintings in the monastery church, we can almost see him as a thoughtful lad, drinking in their story and meaning. In his Lives of the Abbots, he says there were "likenesses of Blessed Mary ever Virgin and of the twelve apostles, also some figures from the Gospel story…from the Apocalypse so that…everyone who entered the church…wherever they turned their eyes, might have before them the amiable countenance of Christ and his saints…and with watchful minds might revolve on the benefits of our Lord's incarnation, and having before their eyes the perils of the last judgment might examine their hearts the more strictly on that account."
Benedict Biscop built a second monastery dedicated to St. Paul five miles north of the one at Wearmouth. Bede says that they were "one single monastery built in two different places." They were under one abbot. To St. Paul's at Jarrow, Bede went while still in his boyhood, and here he stayed for the rest of his life. Communication between Wearmouth and Jarrow was very free, so there were doubtless happy walks and visits back and forth.
In his nineteenth year Bede was ordained a deacon by Bishop John of Beverley; and in his thirtieth year he was ordained a priest, in each instance at the express wish of the abbot. King Alfred's translation of Bede's History calls him a Mass-priest. Besides offering the Holy Sacrifice, Bede exercised the office of preaching. His fifty authentic homilies that are preserved belong to the last period of his life.
In his later years Bede may have been blind. A story connected with this tells that once a boy took him out to preach and, as a practical joke, led him to a lonely, stony place. Bede preached, thinking there were people about. When he finished, the stones cried out: "Amen, Venerable Bede!"
There is no reason to believe that Bede ever went to Rome. His life passed in a very limited radius of about fifty miles. Yet he accurately described events and places at a distance. John A. Giles, who edited and translated some of Bede's works into English in the last century, says regarding this ability: "There is but one other recorded in history who possessed it in equal perfection-the immortal Homer."
Bede summed up his own life in one sentence. "All my life I spent in the same monastery, giving my whole attention to the study of the Holy Scriptures, and in the intervals between the hours of regular discipline and the duties of singing in the church I always took delight in learning, teaching, and writing." The old Benedictine breviary capsuled the life of Bede: "He always read, he always wrote, he always taught, he always prayed."
His diocesan bishop, Acca of Hexham, once wrote, telling Bede to hurry with his commentary on St. Luke. "I am sure the Author of Light will aid a student who works as hard as you do, night and day." Bede replied: "I don't really work 'night and day' but it is quite true that I do toil hard to reach a right judgment on all that I read." Bede shows an amazing scientific approach in gathering and classifying information, carefully distinguishing it as being direct evidence, second-hand, or hearsay. He was careful in quoting: "Since I do not want to be thought a thief in putting down as mine what is really theirs, I have decided to place the first letter of the name of each authority in the margin, against each passage taken from his writings."
Bede's writing proceeded originally from his teaching at Jarrow, as he compiled manuals for his pupils. Then at the urging of the abbot, Ceolfrid, and of Bishop Acca, "dearest and best-loved of all bishops on this earth," he wrote that he might teach a wider group. He spent much effort in trying to bring the teachings of the four great Western Doctors-Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory-in a simplified form to Englishmen.
One historian has said, "It is in the monk of Jarrow that English literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who gathered around him…he is the father of our national education."
Egbert, one of Bede's pupils, became the Bishop of York and founded its famous school. It was Alcuin, a pupil of Egbert, who carried the torch of learning to the court of Charlemagne. They and hundreds of other missionaries and teachers owed much to the quiet scholar at Jarrow, whose flowing, simple Latin brought them the sum of the day's knowledge.
It has often been pointed out that Bede is an unusually valuable witness for Church teaching and practice. He had a fine library of manuscripts; he labored to know the past; his whole effort was bent to teach history and doctrine exactly.
A book published at Antwerp in 1650 counted up forty-nine items of belief and practice held by Bede, which were at this time rejected by the new English Church. The book went through several editions despite the fact that to be found with it meant imprisonment. Among the items listed as held by Bede are: praying to the Blessed Virgin and the saints, the use of holy water and holy oil, the hearing of confessions, with absolution being given or deferred, the offering of Mass, reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and praying for the dead.
Bede may possibly have been the first to use the word purgatory as a noun. In a homily he says, "But some…on account of various faults with which they departed from the body are received by the flames of the fire of purgatory (or the purgatorial fire) to be severely chastised after death."
In a letter written to Egbert in 732, Bede advises frequent Communion. The bishop should tell his people "how salutary it is for all classes of Christians to participate daily in the body and blood of our Lord, as you well know is done by Christ's Church throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Greece, and the countries of the East."
About two weeks before Easter, 735 A.D., Bede was much oppressed by shortness of breath. But he rallied and continued a full schedule. He continued to translate the Gospel of St. John into the vernacular. Because he died doing this, Bishop Lightfoot calls Bede's death the "opening scene of the long, glorious, and eventful history of the English Bible."
On Wednesday evening May 25, 735 the day before the Ascension, Bede dictated a sentence. The young man named Wilbert who wrote, said shortly: "Now it is finished." Bede replied: "Good, you have said the truth, it is finished." And he sang, as the young man held his head, "Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." At the last words he breathed forth his soul.
On November 13, 1899, Leo XIII made Bede a Doctor of the Church, and made official and universal the title of Saint. May 25 is his feast day. As his fellow countryman, St. Boniface, said, Bede was "the candle of the Church, lighted by the Holy Spirit in the English lands."
Text by Fr. Christopher Reninger, OFM Cap.