EASTERTIDE / TRINITY · 27 MAY Confessor & Doctor of the Church
The Venerable Bede
Priest, Confessor & Doctor of the Church · c. 673–735
Bede — BEED, one syllable, rhyming with creed or need · from Old English Bæda (BAY-da), sometimes rendered Baeda in Latin texts
O God, who didst adorn thy servant Bede with the gifts of learning and devotion, and didst make him a faithful interpreter of thy holy Scriptures and a loving chronicler of thy saints; Grant that thy Church may never want for such patient scholars, who place all their knowledge at the feet of truth, and count no labour wasted that is offered in thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Bede entered the monastery of Wearmouth at the age of seven and never left. He was transferred to the sister house at Jarrow when it was founded in 682, and there he remained for the rest of his life — a span of more than fifty years in the same cloister, at the same desk, beside the same North Sea. He travelled nowhere. He saw nothing of the world beyond the Northumbrian coast. And yet from that fixed and narrow place he produced the work by which the entire early history of the English Church was preserved: the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731 and still, thirteen hundred years later, the foundation upon which everything we know about Aidan and Cuthbert and the age of the saints is built. The scholar who never moved gave us the world that moved around him.
He was not merely a historian. He wrote biblical commentaries on nearly every book of the scriptures, treatises on chronology and the reckoning of time, homilies for the liturgical year, lives of the abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow, and a life of Cuthbert in both prose and verse. He computed the date of Easter according to the Roman method — the very question that had divided the Celtic and Roman traditions at the Synod of Whitby — and his calculations became the standard for the Western Church. He gave us the system of dating years from the Incarnation, Anno Domini, which the Western world still uses. He is in this sense the invisible architect of how we measure time itself. When we write a date at the head of a meditation, we are writing in Bede’s hand.
He knew Greek and some Hebrew as well as Latin, and his scriptural commentaries show a mind that moved between languages with the ease of a man who has so thoroughly inhabited the text that translation ceases to feel like labour. But what distinguishes his scholarship from mere erudition is its orientation: everything he wrote was written for the instruction and edification of the Church, not for the demonstration of his own learning. He tells us in the preface to the Ecclesiastical History that if history records the good deeds of good men, the thoughtful reader is encouraged to imitate them; and if it records the evil deeds of wicked men, the devout reader is moved to shun what is harmful and pursue what is good. He was a moralist who happened also to be a genius, and the combination is what gives the History its peculiar warmth — the sense of a man who loves the people he is writing about and wishes us to love them too. We would not have Aidan without Bede’s love for Aidan. We would not have Cuthbert without Bede’s tenderness for Cuthbert. The historian’s affection is itself a form of grace, preserving what would otherwise be lost.
He died on the Eve of the Ascension, 735, dictating to the last. His pupil Cuthbert — named for the saint of Lindisfarne — has left us an account of the final hours: Bede completing his translation of the Gospel of John into English, pausing to distribute among his brethren his small store of pepper and incense and linen, weeping and singing the antiphons of the season. O King of glory, Lord of might, who didst this day ascend in triumph above all the heavens. When his scribe told him that one sentence remained unfinished, Bede dictated it, and then said: It is finished. Truth is completed. He died, as he had lived, entirely within the liturgical year — the man who had spent his life explaining the feasts expired on the eve of the greatest feast of Ascensiontide, the chapter closed, the work given back to the God from whom it had come. He is buried in Durham Cathedral, in the Galilee Chapel at the west end, not far from Cuthbert’s shrine at the east. The historian lies at the feet of his subject. It could not be more fittingly arranged.
O Almighty God, who hast called us to faith in thee, and hast compassed us about with so great a cloud of witnesses; Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of thy servant the Venerable Bede, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, through thy mercy, we, with him and all thy saints, may attain to thine eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.