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Catholic Saints
St. Bede the Venerable
00:24:38
Dr. Elizabeth Klein and Taylor Kemp sit down to discuss the holy life and witness of St. Bede the Venerable.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Catholic Saints. Today, I'm sitting down with Dr. Elizabeth Klein. Dr. Klein, thank you for being on.
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B
Once again, thanks for having me.
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A
You are building up your repertoire of Catholic saint episodes here.
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B
That is true, but you let me pick saints that I like to talk about. So.
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A
Yes. So who are we talking about today?
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B
So today we're talking about Bede, the Venerable, who, despite the name venerable, is a saint. Some people get a little confused because venerable is like a technical term for someone on the way to canonization. But this is just. First you're venerable, then you're blessed, and
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A
then any idea on how that happened to him? Why did he get assigned the name, be the Venerable?
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B
Yeah, so it seems like he got the name because someone referred to him that way in a collection of his homilies that then got spread around. So it could.
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A
I mean, he really stuck.
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B
Yeah, exactly. So it could just be a way of kind of classifying him with the fathers, you know, like he's a venerable teacher of the faith kind of thing. But, yeah, it just sucked. Bede, the venerable.
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A
Okay, where should we start? With Saint Bede.
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B
So for anyone who may have joined us for Saint Cuthbert, I can say that Bede lives in the generation after Cuthbert. He's the one who wrote the Life of Cuthbert that we talked a lot about in that episode. So Bede lived from 672 to 735, so kind of like the late patristic period. And he's from Northumbria, which is the northeast of England, which would have only been Christian for less than 100 years by Bede's life. So he's kind of a pioneer in Christianity in the faith. So, yeah, he's a monk and a scholar. One reason I love Bede is because he's basically a saint just for being a scholar.
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A
That is helpful. For those of you that are scholars, that are scholars, there is hope.
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B
They're actually, if you think about it, there's not that many saints who are saints just because they were scholars.
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A
St. Thomas.
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B
St. Thomas. But a lot of them were either bishops or martyrs in addition, or had some other thing going on. But Bede is just a regular monk. He's not the abbot. He's not anyone super special or important. He just was a writer. Yeah. His writings are so well known that he was made a doctor of the Church by Louis xiii.
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A
That's Awesome. I didn't know he was a doctor of the Church.
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B
He's not only a doctor of the church, he's a doctor of the English and the only English speaking doctor of the Church.
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A
That's amazing.
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B
Yeah. So us Anglos should pay attention to our doctor.
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A
To Bede St. Bede.
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B
So, yeah. So the main work he's famous for is this one. I brought it along with me.
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A
A Penguin classic.
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B
Yeah, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
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A
Okay.
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B
So for this work, Bede had to do a lot of research. So he wanted to write a history of the Church in England. His goal in writing it was, you know, to really fully evangelize his country, to inspire people to good deeds. And also for the sake of unity, he wanted to give the kind of picture of like, a unified England. You know, they're not so unified. There's lots of. Even to this day, you know, it's hard to be unified with your neighbors. And so he's kind of promoting, you know, Christianity as this, like, unifying force in union with Rome. And so he wrote this history.
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A
So you had said that England at this point had only been Christian for 100 years.
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B
At least.
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A
Bede's part of England, Bede's part of England. So this history goes beyond just the past hundred years for him.
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B
Yes, exactly. So this actually goes from Julius Caesar's invasion of the British Isles up until Bede's own time. So it really is a kind of like history of England, but focusing on its kind of Christianization and the spreading of the gospel through England. But it's still the kind of earliest, most comprehensive history of England. It's still considered one of the greatest works of history of all time. Really?
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A
Really?
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B
He's. Yeah. I mean, other than, you know, you have Eusebius, 4th century ecclesiastical history, but he's considered, you know, kind of more in the line of modern history in the sense that he always names his sources. He wrote to many bishops of England for the history of their various locales. He even sent a friend to Rome to get copies of the original letters sent between the Pope and Augustine of Canterbury, who kind of evangelized English people and find out about his mission and the Pope's correspondence with him. And he also, you know, it's not just kind of like one story after another. He really tries to craft, like a whole narrative and give you kind of like a picture of.
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A
Tell a story.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Not just facts after facts after facts.
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B
Right.
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A
That's nice.
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B
Not just facts and also not just stories. So one thing I Mentioned that I really liked about the life of Koffler, it was also written by Bede, is that he gives you the source he got all the stories from. And. And so it really does give this kind of character of like not only his own time, but the people who knew the saint and were influenced by him. And you get the same kind of sense from the ecclesiastical history.
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A
That's cool. Okay, so he is a monk. He is studying, he's writing to bishops, asking for what can you tell me so that I can fill out this history of English Christianity? What else is he doing? What else do we need to know about him?
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B
Yeah, so I actually, I thought I have a little quote from. So at the very end of the ecclesiastical history, he tells you a little bit about his own life. So I'll back up and tell you what we know about his early life, which isn't a lot, and then I'll give you his own words about the meaning of his sort of labors.
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A
Okay, I'm ready.
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B
So in his early life he was given to the monastery as an oblate. So this was a, you know, levitristic medieval practice. You give one of your children to the monastery sometimes this is just so they're to get education. It's not like it's a little different than what we think, but sometimes it is. They were vowed to the monastery. So it's unclear in Bede's case if he was intended to be a monk from the beginning or he was just sent for education, but he was likely from a noble family. And so he's in the monastery. And then there's kind of one really cool story from his early life, which is that a plague swept through the twin monasteries that he was near and killed everybody except for the abbot and Bede.
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A
What?
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B
And he was only 14. So they have. So only two monks survived to sing the office.
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A
Oh my gosh. 14 year old Bede and the abbot.
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B
So that's kind of like a cool. I don't know.
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A
Yeah, that is cool. There's something you're like, that's a sign from God, my friend. That'd be a confirmation of your vocation.
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B
I think you're meant to spend.
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A
Just spend some one on one time with the abbot for a while. Yeah, yeah.
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B
So this kind of sets the tone of his life. I mean, he saw himself as a monk whose job was to.
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A
He had to be. If he left, there's no more monastery. There's just an abbot with just an abbot with nobody around.
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B
Okay, so this is how he describes his life, what I find very moving as a scholar myself. This is from the end of ecclesiastical history, he says. I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures and amid the observance of the discipline of the rule and the daily task of seeing in the Church. It has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write. From the time I became a priest until the 59th year of my life, which is the year he's writing in. I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of the brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the Venerable Fathers on the Holy Scriptures or to add notes of my own to clarity their sense and interpretation.
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A
That's great.
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B
I know. Isn't that great?
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A
It is. It really is.
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B
I just think that, you know, this is someone who saw himself as a monk, who also had this special role as teacher of the faithful and as transmitting, as in transmitting the faith. You know, Bede was really. He was really the most. The best learned man of his time, which is remarkable, given that he's living on the edge of nowhere from everyone else's perspective. But he had a very good library at the monastery. He was at that. They took a lot of effort to build up. And he learned Latin and even some Greek, which is quite unusual for someone in the west, especially this far West. And so, I don't know, it's kind of lovely to think about the fruits of educational effort and labor as somebody, by somebody who teaches well.
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A
And if you try to, like, kind of distill down some of what he just said that you quoted, it's like, what are the things that are essential to his life? Study of the Scriptures, Obedience to a rule, worship, singing in the Church, teaching and writing, a veneration of the Fathers, The Church Fathers. And then his own work. It's just like that's. It's just like a very. You read that and you're like, oh, what a life. Like, honestly. And I'm sure it came with all different kinds of difficulties, too, but.
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B
Such as all of your friends dying
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A
of the pool, all of your friends dying, being alone. It was probably cold. He was probably hungry a lot. So there's surely lots of struggles, but you're like, man, the stuff that was central to his life, it's like, that's what. For any walk of life, for any Christian walk of life, those things could be applied in the same way.
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B
Right, Exactly. If you make those things central and keep at them. And I don't. He does refer to the Fathers as venerable in this quotation. And I don't know if that is the inspiration for calling him Venerable, Venerable Bede. But I wonder if that's like he sought to pass on the Fathers and then he himself was kind of considered a father for his efforts and labor.
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A
There's something in this too, that he understands. It seems to me that he understands that his study and his desire to try to transmit the tradition in some extent is also that he says that it's for my own benefit and that of my brothers, that he knows that he's doing something that is an offering to God in a sense. And it's like, that's a really good way. I mean, here at the August Institute, I feel like that was taught to us as students, is that your life of study is not one that is supposed to be divorced from like growth in the spiritual life in a sense. Like, it is not. It's not like prayer and study are the same thing at all. However, you can offer your study to God knowing that like, this is being done for your own sanctification, but then also, of course, for to go out
- [09:44]
B
to others and this like, intellectual effort, this monastic intellectual effort. You know, certainly sometimes the Scholasticists are characterized as being kind of like Poindexters who just push pencils around in their offices for no one's benefit. But actually it's an incredibly. I don't know, it's laborious because it's not only about receiving the tradition and learning it, but it's about making it your own and making it for the people in your time. So the Scholastics are working very much in a mode that's recognizable to the people around them. It's taking the tradition and synthesizing it in a way that's comparable to the up to date academic methods. And Bede, he's not just doing the ecclesiastical history for funsies. He really thinks that by putting this together, it will be an inspiration to the people and by drawing that tradition. So if I back up a bit, Bede is living at a pretty tumultuous time for Celtic Christianity because Christianity entered the British Isles in the third century. And it's kind of been kicking around. It's very ancient. St Patrick is there much earlier in the 4th and 5th century in Ireland, but then sort of the north part of England and there's the Anglo Saxons. They have to get reconverted. It's kind of a mess. And there's this older form of Celtic Christianity that sort of precedes Augustine of Canterbury being sent by the Pope. And you have this clash of what's standard as Roman Christianity and then the kind of older Celtic traditions. And one of the big controversies is over how to date Easter. Okay, So I know this sounds. Sounds silly, but if you think about it, even today, this is a point of division between us and the Orthodox. We don't celebrate Easter at the same time. And this is, like, actually kind of painful.
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A
Yeah, it is.
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B
It's a really important point of unity. And so Bede is sort of on the forefront of, like, let's get in line with Rome. And so writing this history of the English people is also about the continuity of their lives with that of the fathers and importance of being in communion with that tradition and with the past. And this is not an easy sell. Right. You have monks who've been living ascetic lives in parts that have been Christian for longer than Bede's own part of England. And they're saying, like, no, you're doing it wrong. And, you know, that's. People get mad about that kind of stuff.
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A
Yeah. And it's hard. Like, yeah, that would be hard.
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B
So he's kind of part of that program. And even you get the sense from Cuthbert, who's this saint, that he's kind of like, he's adopting the Roman ways, and it's taking a lot of time to kind of win his monks over. And I just think, isn't that so true? Like, unity and coming around? It takes a long time. It often takes a lot of intellectual effort and faith to these things. It isn't a quick fix. You're not even always friends with the people who are on your side that happen to be with some other people, you know, so. But for him to just kind of characterize his life as like a benim at the monastery, praying, worshiping, writing, and teaching, and then to leave such a legacy from that kind of, like, faithful work is. I don't know. It's inspiring.
- [12:54]
A
It is inspiring, and it's. I feel like it gives a lot of confidence for God's providence, as it should, but that there's a. Always, in every age, there's. There's points of division, there's disagreements about whatever, but God is always sending saints to be kind of these flag bearers who carry things forward for the sake of unity, for the sake of orthodoxy. Like, I think of Saint Athanasius when there was all the creedal disagreements and the beat is one of these. That in this time in which there's monks more senior than him, they're like, what are you talking about? It's like I find myself asking, like, oh, I wonder how he did that? And it's like, well, of course, God is always calling forth his saints to evangelize.
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B
And in this way, kind of very. Like, in a very subtle way and in a very human way. Because he's not only writing this history, but he's also reaching out to bishops from all over England to find out their stories and find out their saints and these kinds of things. And he also wrote, of course, many other works. This is the one he's most famous for. I think he has about 60 works in total.
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A
Wow, that's a lot.
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B
So he. Although he's known in our age as a historian, he also wrote just books for the general education of the people. You know, he's highly educated. That's not super common in England at this time, even among sort of pre Simonastics. So he wrote basic, like, textbooks on, like, grammar and kind of translating some of the.
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A
He's just a teacher.
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B
Yeah. Some of the, like, classical stuff that's not even really necessarily known that well, as well as, of course, works of scriptural exegesis and theology as well.
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A
Yeah, he sounds great. Is there anything else, biographically speaking, to discuss for Bede?
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B
No, I think his summary of I was a monk and wrote stuff and then died.
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A
I mean, it's true. And we remember him down to this day. Okay, so what are some lessons that we can take from Saint Bede for today?
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B
So one big lesson, I think, is just recognizing the value of a good teacher and how important the teaching office is in the church, because I feel
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A
like all of us can reflect on that totally. We all had a good teacher, and
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B
we all teach our own children. Some of us may teach in parishes or whatever. Bede was not a formalized teacher. He's not a priest, or, you know, he's a priest, but he's not. He's in a monastic context. You know, he's not teaching the lay people. He's not outside the monastery preaching the word. But the fact that he is such a good and dedicated teacher really has a ripple effect. And I think that we have all experienced that, where a good teacher will often kind of have generations of good teachers that follow them and really affect many, many people. So one of Bede's students became the Bishop of York, which was an important. And then. So he was the Bishop of York, and Bede would write letters to him. One of the things he advocated. His name was Egbert.
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A
Excellent name.
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B
Yeah. One of the things he advocated was general better education for both priests and laity to this bishop. And so kind of affected Richter.
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A
So what all of us are saying needs to happen today. It was happening back then, too. There's a lot of, we need better education. People don't know how to pay.
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B
So he's writing to Egbert of York. And then Egbert has a student named Alcuin. And Alcuin is a very famous figure who worked in the court of Charlemagne for church reform and sort of theological reform. And Alcuin was actually one of the people who really promoted Bede's cult. So this is kind of like Bede's grandson in terms of teaching. So I just think that's really cool that, you know, as a teacher myself, I like to think, you know, if my students don't think I'm worthy of candidate, maybe the student students will think I'm worthy. You know, my legacy will pass down. But we've all experienced this where we have had a good teacher who was a really good inspiration, who we still maybe bore on when we teach ourselves. And we think about, like, beat Station is pretty humble. He doesn't leave the monastery of Jaro from when he's like, literally a little kid. That's not true. He travels around, but that's basically where he is. That's where he's doing his activity. You might think of his sphere of influence as being small, but if you do what you do well, like, that can really make an enormous difference. And you don't always see, you know, he doesn't see that he's going to be universal doctor of the English people, working away in his monastery, teaching the brothers. But it really just has this kind of cumulative effect through the generations of his teaching, both his personal teaching and then his writings. Another cool story I thought I learned about Bede with regard to the ripple effect, is that king Alfred the great, who's a king about 200 years after Bede. 100. 200 years. He's only one of two English kings who have the title of the great. So very well respected king, very good to his people. One of the things that kind of inspired him to become more educated himself was the example of Bede.
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A
No way.
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B
So he's like, look, guys, I can't read Latin. Our priests can't read Latin. We don't know anything. We're ignorant. Bede used to live in this country. Okay? We have to, like, do better. So he, like, writes to the pope and is like, you need to send me Some guys. You need to send me some guys to teach us some stuff. And he ended up, this king, ended up learning Latin, translated some of Gregory the Great. And so he was kind of inspired by the academic prestige for his people. So that's one thing that is a good thing.
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A
And I like your example, too, that Bede wasn't necessarily a formal teacher, because I think we hear about, oh, we've all had great teachers, and most of us are probably thinking of, like, a formal teacher in school or maybe even a coach, but that especially for parents, we are all the primary educators of our kids, and they're going to look up to us, hopefully more than anyone else. And just how important it is. As Bede, he clearly drank deeply from these sources of the Fathers and Scripture, and he had a deep prayer life. And that. That is transformative to pass on to other people. And that that is just a good thing to remind, you know, remind ourselves.
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B
Absolutely. And even as, like, a layperson, if you do Bible study or teaching catechesis, you don't know, one of those people might end up being the Bishop of York. Probably not. Probably not.
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A
It could happen.
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B
Someone, you know, one of those students in the class, they might end up being a priest. They might end up being a high school teacher. And even if you're not thinking of yourself as this having this huge effect with your teaching, every student you teach could themselves become a teacher. And it really does have a large effect when you kind of teach well.
- [19:14]
A
Yeah. And I feel like it's often you just kind of have to put yourself out there, and you never know what works. Like, I'm sure you've had the experience of a student coming up to you eight years later. It's like, you said that one thing in that one class, and you're like, I don't remember that at all. I don't remember that at all. And it, like, really impacted someone. It's like in the mystery of God, like, things hit people at certain times. Maybe it wasn't even your main point. And you're like, okay, like, yeah.
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B
And, you know, like, if we take the example of Bede, what kind of opens those opportunities up is, as you said, drinking from the well of the tradition, reading, praying, those things. We all have those teachers that we remember who not only were good at teaching, but were also holy. And you knew they believed what they were saying.
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A
And it makes a huge difference.
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B
It makes a huge difference when it's coming from that place. So be good teachers, all of you.
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A
Good. Yep.
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B
Love your teachers. Another Thing I think that be kind of exemplifies is sort of striving for unity in a polarized situation. I mean, we think that, like, we're polarized today, but we're talking about countries that are literally killing each other or have been killing each other in very recent memory, who don't necessarily even share a common language. And Bede is trying to unify them in one faith and give this kind of unified picture. And that those things take a long time.
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A
It's arduous work.
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B
It's hard work. And, you know, a lot of prayer in Bede's case, I'm sure praying for unity, but also to. To do it kind of responsibly in intellectually credible way, to kind of do the work of understanding history and trying to present, in his case, trying to present a compelling case for why communion with Rome is important, why following the Roman calendar is important, why this is significant for the English people to follow the faith in this way. It's not necessarily an easy sell. And so it's something he had to work at.
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A
And that it's something, as you said, that you.
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B
He.
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A
His study was necessary in order for that to happen. Because when people have disagreements, a lot of the times that's based on a different way of thinking. And so you have to do that hard work of understanding the problem in order to help people navigate. And it's always going to create tension. But it makes me think of St. Paul's work where he says that he has to break down all bad arguments, basically, before there can be reconciliation. It seems that Bede is trying to do that, that he probably wouldn't have been able to try to work for unity if he hadn't studied to be like, here's what. I don't know what he said, but, like, here's our roots. This is.
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B
And history and the stories we tell about ourselves are incredibly important. I mean, we see that today. But history is often kind of a blood sport and a battleground about understanding where we've come from. And this is true of church history as much as it is of anything. If we don't have a sensitivity to history and honestly, the complex complexities of history, sometimes it's very easy to just paint this, like, very straight line. And it's usually much more complicated than that. And so taking the kind of time to ask other people and think about it.
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A
All right, any more lessons for us?
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B
So one last thing I wanted to talk about was Bede's death song.
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A
Great.
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B
So we know about Bede's final days because of one of his pupils who was with him. And he wrote a letter about Bede's, you know, Bede's last hours. And apparently Bede on his deathbed composed like a little verse. He's a poet. He composes.
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A
He's not only a scholar, he's a poet.
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B
He's a poet. And this became one of the most copied sort of English pieces of verse. So I just thought I would read.
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A
Yes, please. You could sing it if you'd like.
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B
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if it was put to music. And it's not poetic as it's translated. But he says, I have lived a long time, said Bede, and the righteous judge has well provided for me all my life long. The time of my departure is at hand. And my soul longs to see Christ my king and his beauty.
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A
I mean, come on. That's awesome.
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B
It's beautiful.
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A
It is. It's beautiful. It's simple. It's short.
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B
I do think too, like, if we could all have the strength and foresight to be able to say something like
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A
this, oh, amazing in our last days.
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B
And yeah, I think it just comes from being faithful to the Lord for a long period of time in his state of life.
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A
Yep, it is. Yeah. That is beautiful. This was wonderful. And I feel like this was a somewhat hidden promotion for the graduate school talking about scholarship and the value of passing on the tradition and the beauty of teachers and how good they can be in their heroic witness. So if you've ever considered the Augustine Institute or have not considered the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology, please give it a Google. It's awesome. I went there. Dr. Klein teaches there. It's a wonderful place in which you can participate in some sense the patrimony of Saint Bede and his heritage. So thank you, Dr. Klein, for joining us. Yes, and informing us and increasing devotion to the great Saint Bede. Well, we thank you for joining us on Catholic Saints. We will see you next time. You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting form.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press. With award winning studies and parish programs, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustine institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.