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.”
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,
_Hymnum canamus gloriae_,
in its abbreviated form, spread beyond the bounds of English use, and
found favor with the Churches of the Continent. It has simplicity and
directness, if not much poetic force and is too prolix for Church use in
its original form. Mrs. Charles’s version, “A hymn of glory let us
sing,” is well known. Next to it stands his
_Hymnum canentes martyrum_,
known to English readers by the admirable version in _Hymns Ancient and
Modern_, which begins, “A hymn for martyrs sweetly sing.” A third
notable hymn is that to the Cross:
_Salve tropaeum gloriae_,
in which he embodies the beautiful legend of St. Andrew’s death.
The notable thing about all Bede’s hymns is the influence which the old
forms of Teutonic poetry—the alliterative staff-rhyme—have exerted on
their construction. We can even trace an approximation to alliteration
in his verses, while rhyme is rather an accident than an object. The
verses of Beowulf and of Caedmon were in his mind when he wrote. That he
could use the classic metres also, we see from his poem in hexameters on
the life of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the great Scoto-Irish saint, whose
deeds still filled the North with their echoes.