EPIPHANY · 12 JANUARY Abbot & Confessor
Saint Benedict Biscop
Abbot & Confessor · Founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow · c. 628–690
Biscop — BIS-kop · Wearmouth — WEER-muth · Ceolfrith — CHAY-ol-frith
O God, who didst bestow upon thy servant Benedict Biscop the wisdom to build thy Church not only in stone and timber but in learning and beauty; Grant that we may so lay firm foundations in faith and knowledge that those who come after us may build thereon, and the work of thy praise be never wanting in this land; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
There is a kind of saint whose glory is entirely hidden in what he makes possible for others. Benedict Biscop is the root of the Northumbrian tradition: not the flower, not even the stem, but the thing buried in the ground from which the whole visible growth ascends. Aidan and Cuthbert are the saints the world knows; Bede is the scholar who preserved them; but Benedict Biscop is the man who made Bede. Without his library there is no learning; without his learning there is no history; without his history there are no saints — or none, at least, that we can name or love or imitate. He is the foundation that must be laid before anything else can stand.
He was a Northumbrian nobleman, a thane of King Oswiu, who at the age of twenty-five abandoned a royal grant of land and set out for Rome. He made the journey five times in his life. Each time he returned laden with books, relics, paintings, vestments, and craftsmen — glaziers who introduced the art of stained glass to England, a precentor from Rome who taught the Northumbrian monks the proper chant of the Roman rite. On his third journey he brought back a library of incomparable richness, the finest collection of theological and classical texts north of the Alps. On his fourth he obtained from the Pope a privilege of exemption for his monasteries, securing their independence from local episcopal interference. On his fifth, already weakened by the illness that would kill him, he returned with more books and more paintings, including a series of panels depicting the life of the Virgin and the Apocalypse of John to be hung in the church at Jarrow, so that even those who could not read might see and understand. He understood that beauty is a form of theology — that the eye that rests on a painted angel is being instructed as surely as the mind that reads a commentary.
The monastery he founded at Wearmouth in 674 and its sister house at Jarrow, established seven years later under his friend and prior Ceolfrith (CHAY-ol-frith), became together one of the great intellectual centres of the Western world. It was into this community that a seven-year-old boy named Bede was placed in 680, and it was in this library — Benedict Biscop’s library — that Bede read everything he ever read and wrote everything he ever wrote. The books that Benedict carried on his back from Rome became the roots from which the entire Bedan tradition grew: the commentaries, the histories, the computus, the homilies, everything that would in turn preserve the memory of Aidan and Cuthbert and the Northumbrian saints for all subsequent generations. Bede is the stock that rises from those roots; and the saints whose lives Bede transmitted to the world — Aidan, Cuthbert, Columba, Hild, Chad, Oswald — are the leaves that caught the light and are seen and loved to this day. None of the leaves exist without the stock; the stock does not stand without the root; and the root is Benedict Biscop, carrying books through the Alpine passes on his way home from Rome.
He died in January 690, paralysed for the last three years of his life and unable to rise from his bed. Bede tells us that he bore his paralysis not with resignation merely but with active gratitude, meditating on scripture and instructing his monks to the last, reminding them that the Rule he had drawn up for them — compiled from the best elements of the seventeen different monastic rules he had encountered on his travels — was not his own invention but the inheritance of the Fathers, and was to be kept faithfully after his death. He asked that his library be kept intact and not broken up or dispersed: the books were the community’s most precious possession, the living memory of everything they had been given. It is the last request of a man who knew exactly what he had built and why it mattered. The Epiphany season, in which his feast falls, is the season of manifestation — of things hidden being made visible, of light breaking through the darkness. Benedict Biscop spent his life gathering light. He could not have known, carrying his manuscripts over the mountains, that what he bore would illuminate the whole of the English Church for a thousand years and more. The root does not see the leaves. But the leaves live by what the root has done.
O God, who art the giver of all wisdom and the source of all beauty; We bless thee for the life and labours of thy servant Benedict Biscop, who brought the treasures of learning and art from the ancient world and laid them as an offering at the feet of thy Church in the North; Grant that we, inheriting the fruit of his labours, may be faithful stewards of all that has been entrusted to us, and pass it on undiminished to those who shall come after; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.