Saint of the Week: The Venerable Bede

When we consider the recent weekly saints, we see a powerful evangelist in David Wilkerson, mystics in Mary, Evelyn Underhill, and John Climacus, a helper of the poor in Euphemia, and a Bible translator in Lancelot Andrewes. This week, our saint is … an historian?

The Venerable St. Bede (673-735) is most famous for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. This document is something to be rightly famous for, giving us some of our only references to persons of the life of Anglo-Saxon England, as well as documenting the lives of the bulwarks of the early English church such as Alban (saint of the week here) and Hilda (I’ve written of her here). This work is important for mediaevalists and church historians alike, including King Arthur fans (that’s how I first heard of it).

But our dear friend Bede was more than a historian — not that being an historian is something at which one should turn one’s nose up. He was also a hagiographer, as we see when St. Cuthbert was saint of the week, having composed both a prose and a a verse life of St. Cuthbert. He also wrote lives of Sts. Anastasius and Felix as well as a Martyrology.

Bede also wrote Bible commentaries and is the upper limit for IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, covering Acts, Revelation, the Catholic Epistles, the Pauline Epistles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Genesis, the prayer of Habakkuk, Luke, Mark, Proverbs, Samuel, Song of Songs, and Tobit as well as topical commentaries on the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple.

As well, Bede was a homilist, poet, hymnographer, letter-writer, writer of treatises on Latin metre and on scientific topics, and an editor of a Psalter for use by his fellow-monks. Bede, my friends, was a scholar.

He was, of course, a scholar-monk. He lived in the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Jarrow in the Kingdom of Northumberland. He entered the monastic life at Wearmouth, also in Northumberland, at age seven. He spent his life living in one of these two monasteries, and met some interesting people amidst the many, many books he read, including Adomnán of Iona, hagiographer of St. Columba (saint of the week here).

Bede does not seem to have travelled much, which is likely a common reality for most people of the pre-modern world. He visited his friend and former pupil Ecgbert at York in 733 and also visited Lindisfarne at some point as well as a couple of monasteries.

Bede left much to posterity, even if much of it is rarely read by his descendants here in Britain. Nonetheless, his life is a testament to what God can produce in someone with a keen mind and diligent work.

Huzzah for Bede and prolific scholars everywhere! May they continue to enlighten the world!