With such a patron as Biscop the monasteries never lacked any good thing. He brought back from the Continent the best matters of the period—books, pictures, relics, skilled mechanics, makers of stained glass, and choir-masters. He saw before him a land in which the monk was to be the conservator and promoter of learning. And in carrying out this purpose he did more than plant a monastery, for he planted and reared a man. We have the word of that historian whose life and death so nearly approach those of his favorite author, when we declare that “prose took its first shape in the Latin history of Baeda.” For John Henry Greene closed his history of the English people much as Bede ended his own career, weary with his labor and yet completing what he had begun.
That which lies before us is what Greene finely styles “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge.” It was no hoarding, avaricious, trilobite life to be fossilized for future ages in the dead strata of ecclesiastical records. Instead, it concerned itself with all learning; and though it perished in the blackness of a general ignorance, it is a source of light and force to-day.
But let us return to Bede’s brief points of change. While he was still a boy, the monastery was desolated by one of the great plagues which followed the Synod of Whitby, and every monk who knew how to sing in the choir, except the Abbot and Bede, were among the victims. Unaided these two struggled with the double task of teaching the others to sing and keeping up the monastic services in the mean time. The antiphons they had to abandon, but they struggled through the Psalms, often weeping and sobbing as they sang. At nineteen—six years before the usual age—he became a deacon; at thirty he was a priest; at fifty-nine he died. He acquired his Greek through the agency of Archbishop Theodore, who had come from Paul’s city of Tarsus in Cilicia. There were many in England who actually spoke in that tongue, owing to his encouragement of it. And Bede was no mean nor small factor in its diffusion, for he taught at Jarrow a school of six hundred monks, besides an uncounted number of strangers who sought his instruction. The genealogy of school masters is truly suggestive. From Bede to Alcuin, from Alcuin to Rabanus Maurus, from Rabanus and his liberal methods on to the times of Abelard and the free inquiry; so the torch of learning passes down the generations. And when we remember Alcuin’s commendation of Bede and Rabanus Maurus’s instruction by Alcuin, we cannot doubt the close connection of these three earliest names. Abelard really revived the bolder and broader style which had been opposed at first in the Abbey of Fulda.
How the monk ever found time for his accomplishment of study and writing among his constant labors—his chanting and his teaching and his frequent preparation of homilies—it is indeed hard to discover. But he wore away the thin scabbard of the body by the keen edge of his sheathed and unsheathed mind, until he died before his days were truly done. How often must we lament the incredible monotony and weary routine of these noble lives! How much more, we say to ourselves, they could have achieved under better and freer conditions! But perhaps not. Perhaps this very constriction was a source of strength; and perhaps the severe stress which finally broke this noble student was, after all, the creator of his best powers and the director of his finest energy.
Did he ever visit Rome? Monks from the Anglo-Saxon monasteries went on pilgrimage back and forth, but if he went with them neither he nor they have mentioned it. Yet there is a letter of Pope Sergius to Ceolfrid which hints at such a journey, and might easily furnish a ground for the opinion. On the whole, we must consider Bede as an unflickering light, burning itself away at Jarrow, but illuminating all England with its rays. It is not because of deficiency in acquirement that we deny these traditions. He knew all that was then current. His writings are an encyclopaedia of universal learning. Honorius of Autun says of him, scripsit infinita—he wrote incalculably much. Lanfranc cites his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Alcuin compares him to the Younger Pliny, and quotes him with great delight as “Magister Beda.”
The hymns ascribed to the Venerable Bede, on what appears to be good authority, are the following:
Adesto, Christe, vocibus, Apostolorum gloriam, Emitte, Christe, Spiritum, Hymnum canamus gloriae, Hymnum canentes martyrum, Illuxit alma seculis, Nunc Andreae sollemnia, Praecessor almus gratiae, Praecursor altus luminis, Primo Deus coeli globum, Salve tropaeum gloriae.
Also, but more doubtfully:
Apostolorum passio, Inter florigeras.
His Ascension hymn,