May Christ be our compass,
May the Holy Spirit fill our sails
And may the Father make us fishers of souls.
Amen.
We are gathered together to begin the celebration of the feast of St Bede and to celebrate him as a humane, inspired human being, as well as a saint (and we are all called to be saints). Those of you who remember ‘1066 and all that’, or its successor ‘Horrible Histories’, may also know him as the ‘Venomous Bede’, a pun on the title Venerable bestowed upon him officially by the Pope in 1899, although he was already being hailed as ‘the candle of the Church’ by St Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, in the 740s an acclaim which was endorsed at Carolingian councils in the early ninth century. For Bede is the only learned Doctor of the Church to have officially originated in these islands and which has led to him becoming the patron of scholars, at the heart of this great university city and its cathedral.
This is a tribute to a prolific and diligent scholar who wrote at least 40 books – some scholars say as many as sixty – between his birth around 673, on land given to the monastery about to be founded by Benedict Biscop at Monkwearmouth to which he was entrusted by his kin at the tender age of seven, and his death in 735 at its twin monastery at Jarrow. Bede wrote that his greatest joy during his 62 years had lain in studying, teaching and writing – a vocation of witness and ministry that he pursued faithfully and energetically. A lifelong monastic vocation may not seem the most exciting life, but Bede would have begged to differ. He may only have travelled some 65 miles or so to Lindisfarne and York, but his book ‘On the Holy Places’, based upon his biblical research and his reading of the ancients and patristics as well as more recent sources, was fired by his own spiritual fervour and imagination and was still being used as a practical pilgrimage guide to the sacred sites of the Near East in the early twentieth century! In his mind and spirit Bede traversed the world and the universe, studying the world and its place in time and the solar system (although like everyone until Copernicus he thought it revolved around us) to draw closer to God.
Around 1020 Bede’s relics were acquired from Jarrow by the new cathedral at Durham and were placed, fittingly, in the tomb of St Cuthbert, whose memory and ministry he had done so much to perpetuate. In 1370 he was translated to his own tomb in the Galilee Chapel at the western end of the cathedral, where it was given to him to welcome and care for the women and the poorer and more ailing pilgrims who were not, then, permitted onto cathedral floor. His physical remains rest there still, welcoming pilgrims and visitors to this place of cumulative holiness and beacon of faith.
That we know anything about Bede or, indeed, of early England and the English which he was the first to conceptualise, is due to his Ecclesiastical History of the English People which he completed in 731. It represents his integration of his own people into the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, which charted the early history of Christianity to the late fourth century. Bede is known as the ‘Father of English History’ and it is because he was an Angle, rather than a Saxon, Frisian or Jute, that England got its name. He also wrote of its Celtic neighbours and of the key contribution of Irish missionaries such as Saints Columba, Aidan and their English follower Cuthbert, as well as those sent from Rome via southern England, to the conversion of the pagan Germanic peoples who flooded into what had been the Roman province of Brittania and became the Anglo-Saxons.
Bede was responsible for establishing in general use a single dating system from the birth of Christ. He was not the first to experiment with this; an eastern churchman known as Dionysius Exiguus (or Denis the Little, although we do not know if he was vertically challenged or excessively humble) had made some progress with it but Bede was the human computer who did much of the hard number crunching to reconcile the multitude of different dating systems in use. You could leave York in the year 700 and arrive in Hexham in 695 – some might say that this is still the case!
But let us return to Bede, the boy of seven who saw himself as dedicated to God from the womb, who drew analogies between himself and Samuel, the Old Testament kingmaker, and identified his mentor Eli with Bede’s own beloved Abbot Ceolfrith. When Bede was around thirteen the twin monasteries of Wearmouth-Jarrow were struck by the plague that cruelly ravaged the land, leaving only he and Ceolfrith alive to sing the daily offices – imagine if only the youngest chorister and the Dean were able to do so today! The mortality rate was even more frightening than Covid and considerable risks were taken by men and women of faith to care for those who suffered.
Imagine young Bede running around the monastic building sites – the daring equivalent of Zaha Hadid’s avant garde architecture – getting under foot and trying his hand at mixing mortar and blowing glass and annoying everyone with his incessant questions. For Bede wanted to know about the physical world and what made it tick. His observations of the lunar phases as part of his calculation of the moveable feast of Easter would even lead him to work out the gravitational pull of the moon and to write the first tide timetables.
He would go on to write encyclopaedic works on the nature of things, the nature of time and its calculation, as well as on grammar, rhetoric and the composition of poetry. A gifted teacher, who was also fast tracked as a deacon at nineteen and a priest at thirty, he became expert in Latin composition, as well as knowing Greek and some Hebrew, and also left us some of the earliest poetry in his native Old English language. He also loved pop songs in the vernacular and wrote both verse and prose lives of St Cuthbert, dedicating the latter to his friend, Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, the architect of the cult of St Cuthbert and maker of the Lindisfarne Gospels. It was probably due to Bede that Eadfrith obtained a good Vulgate exemplar for the Gospels text on inter-library loan from the magnificent library and scriptorium established at Wearmouth-Jarrow. This had allowed them to play a crucial role in salvaging some of the wreckage of the learning of late Antiquity and the Early Church and in editing and publishing the Bible. Bede himself served as a ‘scribe of Scripture’ (like the Jewish priestly sofer) and took his turn in writing parts of the Codex Amiatinus, one of the three massive reference Bibles commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrith from the Wearmouth-Jarrow scriptorium
Bede’s commentaries on Scripture are among the deepest and most nuanced, exploring layers of meaning. For Bede knew that you could not comprehend what an onion was just by looking at it. You needed to peel away and savour its layers, to cry, to bite into it and determine how to cook with it, how to heal with it, how to make the pigments to make beautiful artworks with it – but ultimately to know that the onion and all its propensities came from God and to give thanks. For knowing the how of physics, of time and of space was only part of the equation – Bede had a longer vision and joined-up thinking. He knew that the why was also essential in beginning to fathom the mind of God. Given the early stages of scientific thought in Bede’s age, his integration of the sciences, the arts and faith contained the seed of a theory of everything that would continue to elude thinkers such as Hawkins and Einstein, who could not grasp the quantum of spirituality.
Despite his appreciation of the bigger picture, Bede’s writings show him to have cared for others close at hand. He liked women and children – empathising with the toddler Aesica who was entrusted to the Church when young, as he had been, and who cried out for his favourite mother-figure nun at his death. Bede knew about human relations – as a boy he would have seen the animals in the farmyard and heard the human noises of the night in the communal hall in which he slept in his childhood home. He exhibits a concern with social justice, casting Saints Aidan and Cuthbert as its champions, and at the end of his life was taking risks, writing to archbishops in defence of pastoral and sacramental priesthood and the need to make the creed and the ‘Our Father’ available to local priests and people in their own language. It was Bede who sought to defend the eastern eremitic style of monasticism at Lindisfarne and its Celtic engagement with rural communities and the service of the poor in the face of an increasingly hierarchical diocesan system and who defended the deposed king of Northumbria, Ceolwulf, who had protected it. It was Bede who was accused of the heresy of innovation by St Wilfrid’s coterie, which was less widely read and did not appreciate his sources (Bede got his revenge by inventing footnotes). And it was Bede whose writings and collaboration helped Eadfrith to envision an eternal harmony of Creation, sustained and healed by Christ’s sacrifice, when he designed the beautiful cross-carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels and honoured Logos on the facing decorated openings of each Gospel. These are as much a visualisation of the Divine, its Creation and of eternity as those generated by the Hadron Collider -but they are so very much more.
And so, let us leave Bede in his final hours, sitting upon the cold stone floor of the room in which he taught and prayed, having spent his last days translating the Gospel of the visionary St John into his own tongue, to share it more readily with his people – the earliest translation of a part of the Bible into English or indeed into any western vernacular language (other than Latin and Greek). His words survive still, as I have shown, as part of the Old English gloss added by Aldred, a monk of the community of St Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street in the mid-tenth century, between the lines of the Lindisfarne Gospels which formed a focal point of the shrine of St Cuthbert from its origins on Holy Island, through its sojourn at Chester-le-Street and here in Durham Cathedral.
Bede’s translation work was interrupted by his death, at the point where Jesus is about to feed the 5000, for Bede was hastening to be fed by Christ himself. His own work for God (opus dei) has gone on to feed far more than 5000 souls hungry to know God.
- Dr Michelle P. Brown, Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.