Saint Benedict Biscop

He was born about 628 into a noble Anglo-Saxon family, and spent his youth at the court of Oswy, King of Northumbria. ¹ Bede calls him "the minister of King Oswy", who held an estate by the king's gift suitable to his rank. ² Bede names him in two ways, "Biscop, called Benedict" in one book and "Biscop, or otherwise Benedict" in another; Catholic Culture gives his birth name as Biscop Baducing. ²⁴⁶

At twenty-five he gave it up. Bede, borrowing the words in which Pope Gregory praised the other abbot of the same name, says he was "blessed (Benedictus) both in grace and in name", and that he left home, kinsmen and country for the sake of Christ, and refused marriage. ² He set out for Rome, where he wanted to pray at the tombs of the apostles. ¹²

Bede's Ecclesiastical History adds that on the way he fell in with another young Northumbrian bound for Rome, Wilfrid, and that the king of Kent sent the two on together. ⁴ At Lyons the bishop kept Wilfrid with him, and Benedict hurried on alone. ⁴

When he came home he set about teaching what he had seen of the Church's life in Rome. ¹² Soon he went back, in the time of Pope Vitalian, and after some months moved on to the island monastery of Lérins, off the coast of Gaul, where he received the tonsure and took vows. ¹²⁶ Ott dates this to 666. ¹ Bede says he spent two years there learning the monastic life before deciding to return to Rome. ²

He arrived as Vitalian was choosing Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury, with the abbot Adrian as his counselor. ¹² The pope, Bede says, saw what kind of man Benedict was, and told him to give up his pilgrimage and take Theodore home to England as his interpreter and guide. ² He did. In Canterbury he governed the monastery of Saint Peter for two years, until Adrian took it over. ²

His third journey to Rome brought back a large number of books, some bought and some given by friends. ¹² When he presented them, with relics of the apostles and martyrs, at the court of King Egfrid of Northumbria, the king gave him seventy hides of land at the mouth of the river Wear, and in 674 he began the monastery of Saint Peter there. ¹²

A year later he went to Gaul for masons to build a church "in the Roman style, which he had always admired", and Bede says the roof was on and Mass celebrated in it within a year of the foundation. ² Then he sent to Gaul for glassmakers, unknown in Britain at the time, who glazed the windows of the church and the monastery and taught the English their craft. ² Ott calls him the first to bring stone church building and glass windows to England. ¹ What could not be had in England, the sacred vessels and vestments, he bought abroad. ²

His fourth journey to Rome brought what Bede calls "more abundant spiritual merchandise than before". ² First, a great many books of every kind; second, relics; third, Roman chant, for Pope Agatho let him bring back John, archchanter of Saint Peter's. ¹²³ John taught the monks at Wearmouth the order of singing and reading for the whole year, wrote it down, and drew singers from almost every monastery in the province to hear him. ³ Fourth, a letter of privilege from Pope Agatho for the monastery, which King Egfrid had asked him to obtain. ²³

Fifth were pictures. ² He hung images of the Virgin Mary and the twelve apostles across the nave, scenes from the Gospels on the south wall and from the Book of Revelation on the north, so that, in Bede's words, "every one who entered the church, even if they could not read, wherever they turned their eyes, might have before them the amiable countenance of Christ and his saints". ² On his fifth journey he brought pictures that set the two Testaments side by side: Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice beside Christ carrying his cross, and the serpent Moses raised in the desert beside the Son of Man lifted up on the cross. ²

Egfrid was pleased enough to give forty more hides, and Benedict built a second monastery on them, dedicated to Saint Paul, at Jarrow. ² He meant the two to be one house in two places, and said no one should ever try to divide them. ² Ott dates Jarrow to 682; Catholic Culture says the second endowment came in 681. ¹⁶ He made Ceolfrid, his helper from the first, abbot of Jarrow, and his cousin, the priest Easterwine, abbot of Wearmouth, because he was so often away. ²

The rule he gave the brothers was not, he told them later, his own invention. "I learnt it from seventeen monasteries, which I saw during my travels, and most approved of, and I copied these institutions thence for your benefit." ² The Roman Martyrology says the monks gathered under the Benedictine rule, enriched by the masters and books he brought home, were to acquire from it the perfect charity of Christ for the good of the Church. ⁷

He came home from his fifth journey to find that King Egfrid had been killed in his absence, and that Easterwine and many of the brothers had died of plague. ² Not long after, he was struck by a palsy that grew on him for three years, until he was dead in all his lower limbs. ² He spent the nights he could not sleep having Job read aloud to him, and because he could no longer sing the psalms at the hours, he had brothers sing them in two choirs at his bedside and sang along. ²

He had two charges for the community. The great library he had brought from Rome was to be kept whole. ² And they were never to choose an abbot for his birth: he said he would rather the place became a desert than that his own brother, "who, as we know, walks not in the way of truth", should succeed him. ² When he and Sigfrid, Easterwine's successor, were both dying, Sigfrid was carried in to see him; laid with their heads on one pillow, they could not kiss each other without help. ² Benedict made Ceolfrid abbot of both houses. ²

He died on a winter night, in the sixteenth year after the founding of Wearmouth, while the brothers sang the psalter in the church, and was buried in Saint Peter's near its altar. ² Giles's translation of Bede gives the date as January 14; Ott and Catholic Culture give January 12, 690. ¹²⁶

At the end of his Ecclesiastical History Bede says that he was born on the monastery's land and given at seven years old "to be educated by the most reverend Abbot Benedict, and afterwards by Ceolfrid". ⁴ Benedict XVI, speaking about Bede in 2009, noted that his learning rested on the precious manuscripts his abbots brought back from their frequent journeys to the continent and to Rome. ⁵ Catholic Culture makes the same connection: the library and the art Benedict gathered turned the monastery into a center of scholarship, and Bede grew up in it. ⁶

Catholic Culture names Saint Benedict Biscop patron of English Benedictines, of musicians, of painters and of the city of Sunderland. ⁶ None of the other sources consulted for this page lists a patronage. ¹²⁷ The chant he brought from Rome and the pictures he hung at Wearmouth are the obvious background to the second and third. ²³

Saint Benedict Biscop's feast is kept on January 12, the day the Roman Martyrology enters him, at Wearmouth in Northumbria. ⁷ Catholic Culture lists him on the same day. ⁶ Ott's 1907 article gave a different date: "His festival is observed on 12 February." ¹

He chose pictures for a church so that people who could not read could still see the face of Christ, and he paired the sacrifice of Isaac with the cross so that the Old Testament and the New would explain each other on the wall. ² Beauty, for him, was a way of teaching.

He was a traveler who founded a stable community. He crossed to Gaul and Rome again and again, and what he built at home was meant to stay put and stay whole, two houses that no one should divide and a library that no one should scatter. ²

The last three years were spent paralyzed. Bede does not make it into a lesson; he records that Benedict had Job read to him in the night and sang the psalms with his brothers when he could no longer sing them alone. ² Even his warning against his own brother, which is hard to read, was about the community and not about himself. ²

The boy he took in at seven became the Venerable Bede, and Benedict XVI traced Bede's learning in part to the manuscripts his abbots carried home from Rome. ⁴⁵ A reader of Bede is, at one remove, still reading Benedict's library.