Bede, The Venerable

(b. Northumbria, England, a.d. 672/673; d. Jarrow-on-Tyne, England, a.d. 735), Philosophy.

At the canonical age of seven Bede was entrusted to the care of Benedict Biscop, founding abbot of the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow (near Newcastle). In Bede’s words, written in 731, “From that time, spending all the days of my life in residence at that monastery, I devoted myself wholly to Scriptural meditation. And while observing the regular discipline and the daily round of singing in the church, I have always taken delight in learning, or teaching, or writing.”¹ A disciple, Cuthbert, described his death in loving but not hagiographical terms.² There are no other biographical events of record, but from the twelve octavo volumes of his extant Latin writings emerges a consistent picture of a dedicated scholar and scientist.

Apparently Bede never traveled farther than fifty miles from his monastery, but he had unusual resources there. The English settlement of Britain in the fifth to the seventh centuries suggests the European settlement of North America in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Benedict Biscop, who founded his monastery two centuries after the first English settlement, had studied at Lerins (the most famous Western school of the period) and at Rome. He brought Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian from Rome to England. Hadrian came from culturally rich North Africa, via Naples. Theodore, whose home had been the “university city” of Tarsus in Cilicia, was schooled in Greek, law, and philosophy. Later, Benedict brought Jhon, the archchanter of St. Peter’s in Rome, to teach and to compose musical texts. In Northumbria, Benedict was surrounded by students from Ireland and Frankland, including, for example, the famous Abbess Hilda of Whitby, an English princess who had been educated in Ireland and Paris. In all, he made five trips to the Continent, importing examples of all the arts and crafts and “a very rich library.” His successor Ceolfrid, Bede’s master and abbot, was an author and the creator of the famous Codex Amiatinus. Bede himself was the primary voice of this flowering English culture.

Half of Bede’s volumes are scriptural exegesis, an art in which he excelled. Five of the remaining six volumes contain homilies, hagiography, history, a guide to holy places (derived from the pilgrim Arculf), religious and occasional verses, and letters. They include his renowned work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Cuthbert reports that he composed Anglo-Saxon verse and prose, but none has survived.

The remaining volume contains Bede’s several opera didascalica, textbooks designed for such courses in the emerging vocational curriculum of monastic schools as notae (scribal work), grammar (literary science), and computus (the art and science of telling time). For the study of notae Bede composed De orthographia (dealing with spelling, word formation, and so forth), in the tradition of Caper, Agroecius, and Cassiodorus. For grammar he composed De arte metrica (on versification) and De schematibus et tropis (on figurative language). The first contains the first known treatment of isosyllabic rhythm (De rhythmo), which was then supplanting quantity as the formative principle of Western verse, while the second is unique in maintaining, with evidence, that every Greco-Roman figure of speech had been anticipated in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The study of computus had arisen pragmatically to meet the needs of Christian monastic communities, in which time was of the essence. The migrations of different peoples, each of whom had a different mode of reckoning time in both short and long units, and the establishment among them of convents as models for living in which the residents emphasized cycles of psalms and prayers through ordained days and years, made the study of computus second only to that of the grammar necessary for studying the Scriptures. Eventually computus attracted, as part of its discipline, most of the content (although not in those categories) of what might later be deceptively called the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). As time passed, the science necessary to physicians (largely dietary regimens and periodic phlebotomy), to agriculturists, to mariners, to historians (chronology), to geographers and cosmologists, and to musicians and versifiers was incorporated. The basic pattern for Bede’s primary texts was a theoretical section (rules and formulas with explanations) and a practical section (a chronicle of world history emphasizing such “timely” events as eclipses, earthquakes, human and natural calamities), to which were appended a wide variety of calendars, tables, and formularies.

This pattern had begun to develop with Julius Africanus about a.d. 200. The Eusebius-Jerome Chronicle, which largely determined the medieval view of history, probably originated as part of such a text. Bede’s earlier text of this kind, De temporibus, was published in 703. At about the same time, he wrote De natura rerum, an ancillary text on the model of Isidore’s Liber rotarum, using sections of Pliny’s Natural History together with patristic lore. Cosmology and natural history were traditionally (after Origen, Basil, Ambrose) linked to hexamera, that is, to commentaries on the six days of creation as described in Genesis. Bede wrote such a commentary, in which he refined some earlier statements of his own and of the Fathers. In 725 he rewrote his earlier text On Times (De temporum ratione), lengthening it tenfold because, he said, “When I tried to present and explain it to some brothers, they said it was far more condensed than they wanted, especially respecting the calculation of Easter, which seemed most useful; and so they persuaded me to write somewhat more at length about the nature, course, and end of time.”³ Bede reproduced or created tables of calculation, Easter tables, calendars, formularies, mnemonic verses, and the like. A letter to Plegwin defended his chronology; another, to Wicthede, explained contradictions in a document later proved a forgery.⁴

In this area three particular contributions are noteworthy. He is the first to have created, or at least to have recorded, on the basis of the Metonic nineteenyear lunar cycle, a perpetual (532-year) cycle of Easters and to have tabulated it. True, Victorius of Aquitaine (fifth century) had created a 532–year table. and even earlier Christians had created an eightyfour-year cycle, but Bede practically reconciled the two. Bede built upon the work of Dionysius Exiguus (ca. 525) and took his anchor date, the annus Domini. Because annals were added in the margins of these tables and because Bede incorporated such annals with their anchor dates in his historical writing, he became the first historian to use the Christian era. His popular Historia ecclesiastica helped to spread the practice. Finally, he first stated the tidal principle of “establishment of port,” which has been described (e.g., by Duhem) as the only original formulation of nature to be made in the West for some eight centuries. Pseudo-Isidore’s De ordine creaturarum, almost certainly written in Bede’s time and region, uses Bede’s technical diction for tides, but not his principle. It is not surprising that scholars living by the North Sea, in or near Lindisfarne, an island at high tide and a peninsula at low tide, should have been concerned with observed tidal action.

In the eighth century, Boniface (Winfrid), apostle to the Germans, and innumerable other insular missionaries and wandering scholars (e.g., Alcuin), in cooperation with Carolingian rulers, developed Continental schools based on English Scholasticism. Bede’s writings were the staple texts. Among Carolingian epithets for Bede were “Doctor Modernus” and “Venerabilis.” From the eleventh century on, these texts were supplanted in diocesan schools by Boethian texts. Judging by extant manuscripts, the ninth century was clearly the Age of Bede on the Continent, whereas his works had virtually disappeared from England, a fact which may be explained in part by the raids of the Danes and the decline of English ecclesiastical vigor. An unknown author of the eleventh century thought Bede first a geographer, “Living in the very corner of the world, after death he lived renowned in every other corner through his books. In them he discriminatingly described at length the locations, resources, qualities of the different lands and provinces.”⁵ Bede’s manuscripts were more in demand in the twelfth century, but only in line with the increase for all standard authors. Another peak in the fifteenth century may reflect the reformers’ search for pristine purity. Bede’s greatest practical effect was on the Western calendar. His decisions (beginning the year, calculation of Easter, names of days and months, calculations of eras, and so forth) in most instances finally determined usage that was only refined, not changed, by Gregorian reform.

NOTES

1.Historia ecclesiastica, V,24

2.De obitu Bedae, trans. Plummer 1, 1xxii–1xxviii.

3.Praefttio, ed. Jones. p. 175.

4.The Liber Anatholi de ratione paschali, ed. Bruno Krusch, in Studien zur christlich-mittelalterlichen Chronologie (Leipzig, 1880). pp. 311–327. See E. Dekkers and A. Gaar, Clavis patrum Latinorum, Sacris Erudiri III, editio altera (Bruges, 1961), no. 2303, p 514.

5.Patrologia Latina, XC, 37C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Collected editions of Bede’s work include J. Hervagius, ed., Opera Bedae Venerabilis omnia... 8 vols. (Basel, 1563), the first collected edition: J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologia cursus completus... series Latina, XC–XCIV (Paris, 1850), useful reprints of earlier editions; C. Plummer, ed., Bedae opera historica, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), containing editions of Bede’s historical works and Cuthbert’s De obilu Bedae (I, clx–clxiv; translated I, lxxii–lxxviii), with valuable information about all works; and Fratres Abbatiae Sancti Petri, O.S.B., Steenbrugis, Belgiae, eds., Corpus Christianorum series Latina: Bedae opera omnia (Turnholt, Belgium, 1955– ).

Individual works include J. Sichardus, ed., Bedae... de natura rerum et temporum ratione (Basel, 1529); K. F. Halm, ed., Rhetores Latini minores (Leipzig, 1863), pp. 607–618 (De schematibus); H. Kiel, ed., Grammatici Latini VII (Leipzig, 1880), 227–294 (includes De orthographia and De arte metrica); P. Geyer, ed., linera Hierosolymitana saeculi IV–VIII, Vol. XXXIX in the series Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna, 1898), which contains De locis sanctis; Theodore Mommsen, ed., Bedae chronica maiora, chronica minora, XIII, 3 in the series Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi (Berlin, 1898), which contains Chronica; C. W. Jones, ed., Bedae opera de temporibus (Cambridge, Mass., 1943), pp. 175–303, 307–315, 317–325 (includes De temporibus, De temporum ratione, Ep. ad Plegwin, and Ep. ad Wichtede); and B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in the series Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1968).

II. Secondary Literature. Studies are the following: W. F. Bolton, A History of Anglo–Latin Literature, 597–1066, I (Princeton, 1967), 101–185 and an excellent bibliography, 264–287; C. W. Jones, “The ‘Lost’ Sirmond MS. of Bede’s Computus,” in English Historical Review, 52 (1937), 209–219, and “Manuscripts of Bede’s De natura rerum,” in Isis, 27 (1937), 430–440; M. L. W. Laistner, A Hand–list of Bede MSS. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1943); W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946); R. B. Palmer, “Bede as a Textbook Writer: A Study of his De arte metrica,” in Speculum, 34 (1959), 573–584; F. Strunz, “Beda in der Geschichte der Naturbetrachtung und Naturforschung,” in Zeitschrift für deutsche Geschichte, 1 (1935), 311–321; A. H. Thompson, ed., Bede; His Life, Times, and Writings (Oxford, 1935): and Beda Thum, “Beda Venerabilis in der Gesechichte der Naturwissenschaften,” in Studia Anselmiana, 6 (1936), 51–71.

Charles W. Jones