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Bede, Monasticism, And Scripture 63
Chapter 2 Bede, Monasticism, and Scripture
Part 1. The Monastic Life and Scripture’s Moral Teachings
1 Introduction
For Bede, the Bible was fundamental to every area of human inquiry. The roots of this conviction are not hard to find. Near the close of his Historia ecclesias- tica, finished c.731 when he was near sixty or soon thereafter, he recalls how at the age of seven:1
… I was, by the care of relatives, given to the reverend Abbot Benedict and then to Ceolfrith to be educated. And from then on, spending all my life in this monastery, I have applied myself entirely to meditating on scrip- tures; and amidst the observance of the discipline of the rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been sweetness for me to learn or to teach or to write.
In school under the tutelage of Biscop, Ceolfrith, and Trumberht, a teacher mentioned earlier in the Historia ecclesiastica;2 in the lections, recitations, and psalmody of the Wearmouth–Jarrow liturgy; and at the other times of the day that the monastery’s rule allowed monks to read, study, or meditate on their own, Bede’s growing-up was structured by and around encounters with scrip- ture. Immediately after the passage quoted above, he notes that he began writ- ing for his brethren after he was ordained to the priesthood at the age of thirty (702/03). From then until his death in 735, his deepening knowledge of scrip- ture and other literature that elucidated its meaning provided him with build- ing blocks for teaching and preaching and a voluminous output of writings on exegesis, history, cosmology, and other subjects. Those works constitute the principal sources available today to illumine the religious and intellectual
1 HE 5.24 (p. 357): “… cura propinquorum datus sum educandus reuerentissimo abbati Benedicto, ac deinde Ceolfrido; cunctumque ex eo tempus uitae in eiusdem monasterii habi- tatione peragens, omnem meditandis scripturis operam dedi; atque inter obseruantiam dis- ciplinae regularis, et cotidianam cantandi in ecclesia curam, semper aut discere, aut docere, aut scribere dulce habui.” On the date of this work: Goffart, Narrators, p. 242, n. 36; Grocock and Wood, Abbots, p. xliii. 2 HE 4.3 (p. 210).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004391321_003 64 Chapter 2
environment in which scripture was copied, read, and heard read at Wear- mouth–Jarrow in the early eighth century. The present chapter examines elements of Bede’s thought and his use of scripture as background to the further investigations in following chapters of Amiatinus, its sister Bibles, and the circumstances in and for which they may have been produced. A recurring theme in Bede’s writings is that religious and clergy, who he believed should live like monks, ought to devote substantial time to reading of, listening to, or reflection on sacred texts, especially scrip- ture, both for the sake of their own souls and to assure the quality of the pasto- ral care that could help the church grow in the wider world.3 My examination of this and other aspects of Bede’s vision of ideal monasticism in the first sec- tions below is much indebted to studies published by Alan Thacker, Scott De- Gregorio, and other historians in the last several decades, but in illustrating Bede’s ideas, I give greater weight than usual to writings by him probably or certainly composed during his “early career” of the first two decades or so of the eighth century.4 His work throughout his career reveals notable intellec- tual consistency; while there are differences in emphasis and some ideas to which he only briefly alludes in earlier texts are more fully developed later, the core lines of thought remain constant. Nonetheless, I focus here mainly (albeit not exclusively) on his early career writings as defined above, since these are especially likely to mirror aspects of his teachers’ instruction. In particular, since these texts were likely in planning or preparation – if not finished – by the time of Ceolfrith’s departure in June 716, they offer insight into ideas and values that Bede probably shared with the abbot for whom Amiatinus and the recorded two sister Bibles were made.
3 I use the terms religious (as a noun), monasteries (when not referring to specific houses), and monasticism in this chapter to encompass female religious (nuns) and foundations for them as well as monks and their monasteries. Bede was concerned about both groups, even though his writings mainly focus on male religious (monks). See Alan Thacker, “Bede’s Ideal of Reform,” in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1982), pp. 130–53, at 131–32; Bede, Expositio in Canticum Abacuc Prophetae, ed. J.E. Hudson, CCSL119B (Turnhout, 1983), pp. 377–409, a work written for an unidentified spiritual sister (soror), probably an abbess or nun (see p. 379). 4 The foundational study of Bede’s monastic vision is Thacker, “Bede’s Ideal,” pp. 130–53. Scott DeGregorio has built on Thacker’s work; of special note for my purposes in this chapter are the following articles by DeGregorio: “‘Nostrorum socordiam temporum’: The Reforming Impulse of Bede’s Later Exegesis,” Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002), 107–22; “Bede’s ‘In Ezram et Neemiam’ and the Reform of the Northumbrian Church,” Speculum 79 (2004), 1–25; “Bede and Benedict of Nursia,” in Early Medieval Studies in Memory, pp. 149–63; “The Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great: Exegetical Connections, Spiritual Departures,” Early Medieval Europe 18 (2010), 43–60. Additional scholarship is cited below.