His works fill several volumes in the Patrologia. His Morals, a commentary upon Job, is the very best of his books; but he was probably ignorant of both Hebrew and Greek, and hence his comments on Scripture are rather more homiletical and practical than scholarly. The Pastoral Rule was translated into Saxon by King Alfred, who admired its practical wisdom, and sent a copy to every bishop in his kingdom; under Charles the Great also it was much esteemed in France. His Letters are the great mine of information upon his personal opinions and methods. The Dialogues were addressed to Theodolinda, and in these we find some superstition; and indeed a fondness for saints’ miracles and a weakness for relics were characteristic of his otherwise sensible conduct. He wrote but nine hymns which are authentically traceable to his pen. They are the Primo dierum omnium; the Nocte surgentes vigilemus; the Ecce jam noctis; the Lucis Creator optime; the Clarum decus jejunii; the Audi benigne Conditor; the Magno salutis gaudio, the Jam Christus astra ascenderat, and the Rex Christe, factor omnium. With a lesser degree of probability he has been named as the author of the Aeterne Rex altissime; the En more docti mystico; the Lignum crucis mirabile; the Noctis tempus jam praeterit; the Nunc tempus acceptabile; and the Summi largitor praemii.
Of these the Rex Christe, factor omnium delighted Luther so much that he declared it in his impetuous way “the best hymn ever written”—an opinion which he would find few nowadays to endorse. Gregory disliked pagan literature and cultivated the style and prosody of Ambrose. It is possible, therefore, that among the Ambrosian hymns there may be those which he has written and which are credited to an earlier date. But the cause of hymnology suffers little by the loss. He was not a poet; but as the man who made the papacy a thing and not a name—as the man who evangelized Britain—and as the man who gave the Gregorian tones to the praises of the Church, he will be held in kindly and lasting remembrance. There was in him a vein of peculiar sarcasm as well as of deep earnestness and of great sagacity, yet his literary merits are not to be weighed against those words and actions written viewlessly on the air, but which still effectually vibrate through the polity of the Roman Catholic Church.
CHAPTER XI.
THE VENERABLE BEDE.
It happened with Bede as with some other Latin hymn-writers—there were several persons who had the same name as himself. Hilary and Fortunatus and Notker are not the only cases of confusion, for there were certainly three Bedes, and they were not long removed from each other in point of time. Beda Major—the elder or greater Bede—was a presbyter and monk of Lindisfarne, commemorated by his more celebrated namesake. Another was a holy man of the time of Charles the Great. But our own Beda or Bedan was a presbyter and monk of Jarrow, and is distinguished from the rest by the title of “Venerable,” which he shares with Peter the Venerable of Cluny.
There are few finer figures in early English history. Sprung from pagan and utterly illiterate ancestry, he has taken his place as an historian, a scholar, a natural philosopher, and a poet; and in every department of this varied knowledge he has shown his ability and industry. English literature recalls him; English history praises him; English scholarship has elaborately edited his writings, and English patriotism has affectionately honored his memory.
Cuthbert, his disciple, who wrote his life, begins his narration in the following words:
“The presbyter Beda, venerable and beloved of God, was born in the province of Northumbria, in the territory of the monasteries of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which is in Wearmouth and at Jarrow, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation the six hundred and seventy-seventh, which is the second year of the solitary life of St. Cuthbert.” It also was the ninth year after the reduction of Saxon England to the Roman obedience at the Synod of Whitby.
Bede himself relates that when he was seven years of age the care of his education was committed by his relatives to the Abbot Benedict and afterward to the Abbot Ceolfrid. He adds that from that date to the time at which he prepared the accompanying list of his works he had spent his days in the same place. His existence was passed in meditating upon the Holy Scriptures; and he “found it sweet,” in the midst of his observance of the conventual discipline and daily chanting in the church, “either to learn, or to teach, or to write.” The choice of this word “sweet” (dulce) is significant, for no man could more carefully have mingled the sweet with the useful. A gentle spirit breathes across his studious pages, as over the rough beards of the yellow grain a breeze moves and sways them, harsh though they are, in graceful waves. For he loved learning with a perfect avidity. His works reveal his desire to accumulate it—to teach it again in plain and simple fashions—and this benevolent desire redeems many a tedious discourse.
This life of his was devoid of personal incident. He includes nothing of his individual history in the little notices which he makes of contemporary events, and he is singularly silent even about the affairs of which we should think he would naturally speak. The light which we get upon his surroundings and circumstances we must, therefore, derive from other sources, but fortunately these are at hand. We know, for example, that Benedict Biscop, who founded those twin monasteries in which Bede dwelled all his life, was himself a remarkable person. He was of noble birth, and gave up place and ambition in the court of the king to proceed to Rome, there to be trained as a monk, and then to return and found Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 682. To the second of these religious establishments, situated upon the Tyne, Bede was transferred under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and there thenceforth he remained. We are even able to determine his usual food as a school-boy, for, says his latest biographer, Rev. G. F. Browne, “we have a colloquy in which a boy is made to describe his daily food in his monastery. He had worts (i.e., kitchen herbs), fish, cheese, butter, beans, and flesh meats. He drank ale when he could get it, and water when he could not; wine was too dear.” There is, indeed, in these Saxon monasteries the honest and hearty food which belonged to their age and people. Cedric the Saxon, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of Ivanhoe, represents very fairly the popular feeling on the subject. Chaucer, too, can be quoted upon this same profusion and the generosity of the time. Of the Franklin he says:
“It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”