Festum: Die XXVII Maii — Duplex
Vita et Conversatio — His Life and Manner of Living
Among the brightest ornaments of the early English Church shines Saint Bede, surnamed Venerabilis — the Venerable — a title given him not by the caprice of later ages but, as pious tradition holds, by angelic dictation itself. Born in the year of Our Lord 672 or 673 in the territory of the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria, Bede was offered to God at the tender age of seven by his kinsmen, who entrusted him to the holy Abbot Benedict Biscop. There, beneath the disciplined Rule of Saint Benedict, the child grew into a monk wholly given to the opus Dei, to sacred study, and to the meditation of Holy Writ.
He himself, in the closing pages of his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, leaves us this luminous testimony of his hidden life:
Cunctumque ex eo tempus vitae in eiusdem monasterii habitatione peragens, omnem meditandis Scripturis operam dedi; atque inter observantiam disciplinae regularis, et quotidianam cantandi in ecclesia curam, semper aut discere, aut docere, aut scribere dulce habui.
(“All the time of my life since then I have spent dwelling in that monastery, applying all my care to the meditation of the Scriptures; and amid the observance of regular discipline and the daily care of singing in church, ever was it sweet to me either to learn, or to teach, or to write.”)
He was ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty by the holy Bishop John of Hexham — that same John of Beverley whose own sanctity the Church venerates. From the cloister of Jarrow, which he scarcely left throughout his earthly pilgrimage, his renown nevertheless went forth into all the West; for what the Apostle Saint Paul accomplished by travels, Bede accomplished by the labour of his pen.
De Operibus Eius — Of His Works
The sacred labours of Bede are vast beyond easy reckoning. He composed commentaries upon the greater part of Sacred Scripture — upon Genesis, the Books of Samuel and Kings, the Tobit, Esdras, the Canticle of Canticles, the holy Gospels of Saint Mark and Saint Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, the seven Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse of Saint John. In these expositions he drew with filial humility upon the four great Latin Doctors — Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory — selecting, harmonizing, and transmitting their wisdom to the Latin West, that the faithful of the northern lands might drink from the same patristic streams that watered Rome and Africa.
His Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum — the Ecclesiastical History of the English People — completed in 731, remains the foundational chronicle of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon nations and a work of incomparable charity, gravity, and historical precision. He gave to Christendom the consistent use of the Anno Domini reckoning, dating all things from the Incarnation of Our Lord; and by this single innovation he sanctified the very measurement of time, that the years of men might number themselves from the coming of the Word made Flesh.
He composed also works on chronology (De Temporum Ratione), on orthography, on metre, on the holy places of Jerusalem, on the nature of things (De Natura Rerum), homilies for the liturgical year, and lives of the saints — including a metrical and a prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti in honour of that great Northumbrian bishop and hermit.
De Doctrina Eius — Of His Doctrine
Bede’s theology is wholly traditional, wholly Catholic, wholly received. He is no innovator but a faithful transmitter — traditor fidei in the noblest sense. Saint Boniface, the Apostle of Germany and his near contemporary, called him lumen Ecclesiae — a light of the Church — and besought copies of his works for the missionary lands beyond the Rhine.
His exegesis is allegorical and mystical in the patristic mode, ever seeking the spiritual sense beneath the literal, ever drawing the soul from the littera to the spiritus. In his commentary on the Tabernacle and Temple he discerns figures of Christ and His Church; in the Canticle he beholds the nuptial union of the Word and the soul; in the historical books he reads the providential ordering of salvation.
Pope Leo XIII, in declaring him Doctor of the Universal Church on the 13th of November 1899, by the Apostolic Letter Urbis et Orbis, praised him as Doctor Ecclesiae Anglorum — the Doctor of the English Church — and held him forth as a model of the union of sacred learning with monastic sanctity.
De Obitu Eius — Of His Holy Death
The death of Saint Bede, on the Vigil of the Ascension in the year 735, is one of the most affecting and edifying transitus in all hagiography. The account is preserved in the Epistola de Obitu Bedae of his disciple Cuthbert, afterwards Abbot of Jarrow, who writes as one whose hand still trembles from the loss.
In his final illness, Bede laboured to complete a translation of the Gospel of Saint John into the vernacular English tongue and certain extracts from the works of Saint Isidore. On the morning of the Feast of the Ascension, his young scribe Wilberht said to him:
“Magister dilecte, adhuc unum capitulum deest; videturne tibi molestum, ut plus te interrogem?”
(“Beloved master, there is yet one chapter wanting; does it seem grievous to thee that I should question thee further?”)
And the dying Doctor replied: “Non est molestum. Sume calamum tuum, et tempera, et velociter scribe” — “It is not grievous. Take thy pen, and sharpen it, and write swiftly.”
When at evening the boy said, “Magister, una sententia adhuc restat non descripta” — “Master, there yet remains one sentence not written down” — Bede answered, “Bene, scribe” — “Well, write it.” And after a little while the boy said, “Iam descripta est” — “It is now written.” And Bede answered:
“Bene, dixisti: consummatum est. Accipe caput meum in manus tuas, quia multum me delectat sedere contra sanctum locum meum orationis, in quo sedens invocare Patrem meum solebam.”
(“Well hast thou said: it is finished. Take my head into thy hands, for it greatly delights me to sit facing the holy place of my prayer, wherein sitting I was wont to call upon my Father.”)
And being placed upon the pavement of his cell, he chanted the Gloria Patri — Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost — and at the naming of the Holy Ghost, he breathed forth his soul to God. Thus did the great teacher of the West die as he had lived: in the act of prayer, in the work of Scripture, in the confession of the Most Holy Trinity.
Virtutes ad Imitandum — Virtues for Our Imitation
The life of Saint Bede holds forth to the Christian soul a fourfold lesson:
The sanctification of intellectual labour. Bede teaches that the patient, humble, daily toil of study — undertaken in the cloister, ordered to God, subordinated to prayer — is itself a sacred work. He did not despise the small things: grammar, metre, chronology, orthography. He laboured at them as one labouring at the altar.
Fidelity to tradition. Bede invented nothing; he transmitted everything. He is the perfect exemplar of quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus — that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all, as Saint Vincent of Lerins defined the Catholic rule. In an age that exalts novelty, his example reproves us.
Stability of place. Bede dwelt nearly the whole of his sixty-three years within a few acres of Northumbrian soil, and yet his mind ranged over the whole of Scripture, the whole of Christian antiquity, the whole providential history of the nations. The Benedictine stabilitas loci did not narrow him but deepened him.
Holy death. That a man should die translating the Gospel and chanting the Gloria Patri is itself a sermon of incomparable power. Pretiosa in conspectu Domini mors sanctorum eius — Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints (Ps. cxv. 15).
Oratio Collecta — The Collect of the Feast
Deus, qui Ecclesiam tuam beati Bedae Confessoris tui atque Doctoris eruditione clarificas: concede propitius famulis tuis; eius semper illustrari sapientia, et meritis adiuvari. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, Filium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
(“O God, who dost glorify Thy Church by the learning of blessed Bede, Thy Confessor and Doctor: mercifully grant unto Thy servants; that we may ever be enlightened by his wisdom and assisted by his merits. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son: Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”)
Ad Devotionem — For Devotion
The faithful soul who would honour Saint Bede on this his feast may fittingly:
Read a portion of Sacred Scripture with attention and recollection, in union with the spirit of one who counted the meditation of the Word as the sweetness of his life.
Offer the Veni Creator Spiritus before any work of study, that the Holy Ghost who illumined Bede may illumine the mind of the disciple.
Recite the Gloria Patri with deliberation and faith, remembering that this was the last utterance of the dying Doctor.
Embrace some hidden, humble, daily duty — a translation, a transcription, a lesson, a letter — and offer it to God ut docere, ut discere, ut scribere be made an instrument of sanctification, as it was for the Venerable Bede.
Sancte Beda, Doctor Venerabilis, ora pro nobis.