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Venerable Bede Translating the Gospel of John, by JD Penrose

(Yellow bachelor’s buttons, Ranunculus acris plenus, is today’s plant, dedicated to this saint. These saints’ plants are provided by William Hone, The Every-Day Book, or a Guide to the Year, William Tegg and Co., London, 1878, who tells us that they were fixed upon by medieval monks. However he places Augustine’s Day and this plant at May 27, which is the Roman Catholic feast day of this saint.)

Bede, or Baeda (c. 672 - May 25, 735 CE) was an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk at the Northumbrian (today part of Sunderland), and of its daughter monastery, Saint Paul’s, in modern Jarrow.

He was born around the time England was finally completely Christianised, and his writings helped complete that process, including the ravages carried out on the older native pagan religions and ways of life. When Bede was born, Aelfwine, brother of King Ecgfrith, had recently been crowned king of Deira, one of the two kingdoms of Northumbria (northern England), and when he died, it was more than a century before the birth of the first true monarch of all England, King Alfred the Great (847? -  899).

Bede was a spiritual student of his abbey’s founder, St Benedict Biscop, and was ordained in 702 by St John of Beverley. Both teacher and author, he wrote about history, rhetoric, mathematics, music, astronomy, poetry, grammar, philosophy, hagiography, homiletics, and Bible commentary. He gained a well-earned reputation at the time as the most learned man alive. Of all the writers in Western Europe from the time of St Gregory the Great until Saint Anselm, Bede the Venerable was arguably the most famous and influential, particularly in his home country. Probably his influence would have been greater if not for the devastation inflicted upon the Northern monasteries by the Vikings less than a century after his death.

His writings

What we know of England before the 8th century is mainly the result of this one man’s writing, especially from his best-known work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (History of the English Church and People) which begins “Britannia is an island in the ocean and once was called Albion”.

A prodigious worker, over the years he taught 600 pupils and was the author of some 45 volumes, including commentaries, text-books, and translations. He had an encyclopaedic mind, turning out grammatical works and chronologies, hymns and poetry, letters, and homilies; Bede compiled the first martyrology with historical notes. Although an important historian and biographer (he wrote the Lives of five early abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow and lives in verse and prose of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who died in 687), most of his writings are theological, and consist of commentaries on the books of the Old and New Testaments, homilies, and treatises on portions of Scripture. While most of his writing was in Latin, Bede was also the first known writer of English prose, though, unfortunately, the manuscripts have not survived. For all his labours, until his last illness, when a boy scribe named Wilbert was assigned as his amanuensis, he had no assistance: “I am my own secretary; I dictate, I compose, I copy all myself.” In the days of parchment and quill, that alone was a great achievement.

His learning

Almost all that is known of his life is contained in a notice added by himself to his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (v. 24), which states that he was placed in the monastery at Wearmouth at the age of seven, that he became deacon in his nineteenth year, and priest in his thirtieth. He was trained by the abbots Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid, and probably accompanied the latter to Jarrow in 682. There he spent his life, finding his chief pleasure in being always occupied in learning, teaching, or writing, and zealous in the performance of monastic duties.

His works show that he had at his command all the learning of his time. He was proficient in patristic literature, and quotes from Pliny the Younger, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, and other classical writers, sometimes disapprovingly. He knew Greek and a little Hebrew. It is said his Latin is clear and without affectation, and he is a skilful story-teller.

Bede's writings are classed as scientific, historical, and theological. The scientific include treatises on grammar (written for his pupils), a work on natural phenomena (De rerum natura), and two on chronology (De temporibus and De temporum ratione). Interestingly, Bede wrote that the Earth was round ‘like a playground ball’, contrasting that with being ‘round like a shield’.

His Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum gives in five books the history of England, ecclesiastical and political, from the time of Caesar to the date of the book’s completion (731). The first twenty-one chapters, treating the period before the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury (d. May 26, 604), are compiled from earlier writers such as Orosius, Gildas, Prosper of Aquitaine, the letters of Pope Gregory I, and others, with the insertion of legends and traditions. After 596, documentary sources, which Bede took pains to obtain, are used, and oral testimony, which he employed not without critical consideration of its value.

His death

Bede died on this day in 735, aged about 63, a long life in those days; the day was the moveable feast of the vigil, or eve of the Ascension. His disciple, Cuthbert (not the aforementioned saint), wrote of how Bede at the end of his life, sick and weakened by age, struggled to complete his translation of the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon. He laboured day and night with little sleep, taking every care in comparing the text and preserving its accuracy. “I don't want my boys,” he said, “to read a lie or to work to no purpose after I am gone.” His friends begged him to rest, but he would not let up.

According to this Cuthbert, on Ascension eve and close to death, the great scholar was still writing, and by now he had the assistance of a scribe, a young monk named Wilbert, who said to the Abbot, “There is still one sentence, dear master, which is not written down.”  Bede gave him the sentence, and when the boy had told him it was finished, saying “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.”  On the floor of his cell he sang, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost” and peacefully breathed his last breath.

Bede became known as ‘Venerable Bede’ soon after his death, but was not for centuries approved for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church. His scholarship and importance to Catholicism were recognised on November 13, 1899 when Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church, as Beda Venerabilis, ‘Saint Bede The Venerable’. However, the title Venerabilis (worthy of veneration; honourable) seems to have been associated with the name of Bede within two generations after his death – already by 853 a church council in Aachen, Germany referred to him as ‘the venerable’. To St Boniface, Bede was “a light of the church”, and Alcuin, himself the ‘schoolmaster of his age’, referred to him as “blessed Bede, our master”. (Alcuin claimed Bede's relics worked miraculous cures.) Bede is the only Englishman whom Dante names in Paradiso.

The centre of Bede’s cultus is Durham, where his shrine is located, and York. He is usually represented in art as a monk writing at a desk, or else an old monk dying amidst his community, and old monk with a book and pen, or an old monk with a jug.

Much further information on Saint Bede is available on the Internet, including his Life of St Cuthbert. 

Bede, anno domini, and the Common Era

As a chronicler and calendar maker (his works contain two metrical calendars), the Venerable Bede was also influential in ways he might not have foreseen. His works De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione established the idea of dating events anno domini (AD, or 'Year of the Lord', now often called CE, for 'Common Era'), although the first historian or chronicler to use AD as his primary dating mechanism was Victor of Tonnenna, an African chronicler of the 7th Century.

He adopted AD dating as a way of keeping track of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and trying to bring their dates into line with the fragmentary evidence he had for the regnal years of the Roman emperors. He was also the first to use BC and established the standard for historians of there being no year zero, even though he used zero in his computus.

Wilson’s Almanac uses the designations CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era) rather than AD and BC (Before Christ, now often called BCE, or 'Before the Common Era'). The intention is not to be blindly politically correct, but rather because BC and AD are far too religion-specific in this world of thousands of faiths.

There is nothing new or radical in this, for the term Common Era has been in use since the late 19th Century. Indeed, in its article on ‘Chronology’, the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia has the following: “Foremost among these [dating eras] is that which is now adopted by all civilized peoples and known as the Christian, Vulgar, or Common Era, in the 20th Century of which we are now living”.

This usage is preferred in much academic writing, particularly among historians, because it is perceived to dispel the ethnocentric bias; in particular, historians writing on non-Christian cultures, regardless of their own religious backgrounds, often feel it is inappropriate to date events with a Christian statement of faith. Some religious groups within Christianity also prefer CE dating; for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses find the terms BC and AD objectionable because they imply that Christ was born in 1 BCE, which they dispute.

This terminology is seen by some Christians, and others, as a move by non-believers to make Christianity less visible. The argument is sometimes made that English names for the months commemorate Roman deities, while the names for the days of the week commemorate Norse deities; dating years according to yet a third religious tradition should not therefore be an issue of concern. Because of this debate, the choice of whether to use AD or CE dating may often be construed as a political statement against or in favour of secularism.

This article derives in part from the public domain Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge and Wikipedia; The Patron Saints Index, Catholic Encyclopedia and For All the Saints Index were also helpful.

Bede says “Amen”
William Hone tells us: Bede was blind – on one occasion, his servant carried him to a pile of stones. Thinking he was speaking to a congregation, the Venerable Bede  preached, and the stones said “amen” at the end of the sermon.
William Hone, The Every-Day Book, or a Guide to the Year, William Tegg and Co., London, 1878; 1825-26 edition online

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