Venerable Bede Quotes

As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the whole world will fall.

It has ever been my delight to learn or to teach or to write.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle. (--from The Spectator Bird)

You can’t read any genuine history—as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede—without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man,—on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius—a Shakespeare, for instance—would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.

Above all else, he was afire with heavenly love, unassumingly patient, devoted to unceasing prayer, and kindly to all who came to him for comfort. He regarded as equivalent to prayer the labour of helping the weaker brethren with advice, remembering that he who said, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’, also said, ‘Love thy neighbour’. His self-discipline and fasting were exceptional, and through the grace of contrition he was always intent on the things of heaven. Lastly, whenever he offered the sacrifice of the Saving Victim of God, he offered his prayers to God not in a loud voice but with tears welling up from the depths of his heart.

When he became a bishop he adopted as his episcopal motto miserando atque eligendo. It comes from a comment by the Venerable Bede on the gospel passage in which Jesus met the despised tax collector Mark. Translated it means unworthy but chosen, though Bergoglio likes to translate it rather more cumbersomely as ‘by having compassion and by choosing’. He now sees in that motto the moment he uncovered his vocation. ‘That was how I felt that God saw me during that conversation. And that is the way he wants me always to look upon others: with much compassion and as if I were choosing them for him; not excluding anyone, because everyone is chosen by the love

So my pleasure in addressing you will keep pace with the joy in my heart at the glad news of the complete conversion of your people. ‘I have sent some small presents, which will not appear small to you, since you will receive them with the blessing of the blessed Apostle Peter. May Almighty God continue to perfect you in His grace, prolong your life for many years, and after this life receive you among the citizens of your heavenly home. May the grace of heaven preserve Your Majesty in safety. ‘Dated the twenty-second day of June, in the nineteenth year of our most pious lord and Emperor Maurice Tiberius Augustus, and the eighteenth after his Consulship: the fourth indiction.

God stirs the air and raises the winds; He makes the lightning flash and thunders out of heaven, to move the inhabitants of the earth to fear Him, and to remind them of judgement to come. He shatters their conceit and subdues their presumption by recalling to their minds that awful Day when heaven and earth will flame as He comes in the clouds with great power and majesty to judge the living and the dead. Therefore we should respond to His heavenly warnings with the fear and love we owe Him,’ said Chad. ‘And whenever He raises His hands in the trembling air as if to strike, yet spares us still, we should hasten to implore His mercy, examining our inmost hearts and purging the vileness of our sins, watchful over our lives lest we incur His just displeasure.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION P. 19 The unusual antiquity and reliability of the earliest surviving manuscripts at Leningrad and Cambridge and the surprisingly large number of medieval manuscripts

Here our best guide is once again the Venerable Bede,

Cyclical Models The pattern of rise and fall: this is the general shape of history outlined by both Herodotus and Thucydides that is generically common to practically all the other cyclical models. The degenerative cycle of the four ages: this is the Gold–Silver–Bronze–Iron model of Hesiod, the Zoroastrians, and the Hindu Yuga cycles in which a state of initial perfection degenerates by ages to a final barbarism before the cycle starts again. The Anacyclosis: this is the political pattern of constitutional cycles outlined by Polybius which follows the sequence monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before a period of barbarianism resets the cycle. The providential cycle (judgement–retribution–restoration): this follows the pattern of the Book of Jeremiah and the ‘alternative’ Christian tradition of the Venerable Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Phoenix cycle (birth–death–rebirth): this is Petrarch’s model which posits a Dark Age between two better periods and in which the New Age will look to Antiquity for inspiration.

replying to Dennster Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire If you knew anything about history, you’d know the world’s leading thinkers have all believed the earth is round since Pythagoras in the 6th century BC. Plato said the earth was a globe. So did Euclid. So did Archimedes and Aristotle 1/... RT 8 L 90 Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes used geometry to calculate the earth’s circumference in about 250BC and got it nearly right. The Romans believed the earth was round. So did St Augustine, the Venerable Bede and Thomas Aquinas 2/... RT 7 L 84 Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire You can disagree with all those learned historical figures if you want, but don’t tell me everyone was a flat-earther before Columbus. That’s a downright lie 3/3 RT 5 L 79 Dennster @true_earth_matters Sorry, Terg, but you don’t know what you’re talking about RT 8 L 118 Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire Actually I have a doctorate in the history of science. What’s your qualification? RT 6 L 89 Dennster blocked Trent Meyer Sally Jenkinson @saljenk07342 STFU Terg RT 0 L 57

Unlike Gildas, Bede wrote history, and the name of “the Venerable Bede” still carries with it a proud renown. He alone attempts to paint for us, and, so far as he can, explain the spectacle of Anglo-Saxon England in its first phase: a Christian England, divided by tribal, territorial, dynastic, and personal feuds into what an Elizabethan antiquary called the Heptarchy, seven kingdoms of varying strength, all professing the Gospel of Christ, and striving over each other for mastery by force and fraud. For almost exactly a hundred years, from

First we have the tract of Gildas, upon whom the gratitude of the Middle Ages bestowed the title of “the Wise”. The tract was written in approximately A.D. 545, and therefore a hundred years after the curtain fell between Britannia and the Continent. Nearly two hundred years later the Venerable Bede, whose main theme was the history of the English Church, lets fall some precious scraps of information, outside his subject, about the settlement itself. A compilation known as the Historia Britonum contains some documents earlier than Bede. Finally, in the ninth century, and very likely at the direction of King Alfred, various annals preserved in different monasteries were put together as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Of all the tribes of the Germanic race none was more cruel than the Saxons. Their very name, which spread to the whole confederacy of Northern tribes, was supposed to be derived from the use of a weapon, the seax, a short one-handed sword. Although tradition and the Venerable Bede assign the conquest of Britain to the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons together, and although the various settlements have tribal peculiarities, it is probable that before their general exodus from Schleswig-Holstein the Saxons had virtually incorporated the other two strains.

...there are countless boys and girls, young men and virgins, old men and women, all of chaste life, who could without any shadow of doubt receive communion every Sunday and on feasts of the holy apostles and martyrs, as you yourself have done in the holy Roman and Apostolic Church. Married people also, if each shows a measure of continence and professes the virtue of chastity, may lawfully and gladly do the same.

The idea that time could be granular, that there could be minimal intervals of time, is not new. It was defended in the seventh century by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae, and in the following century by the Venerable Bede in a work suggestively entitled De Divisionibus Temporum (“On the Divisions of Time”). In the thirteenth century, the great philosopher Maimonides writes: “Time is composed of atoms, that is to say of many parts that cannot be further subdivided, on account of their short duration.”53 The idea probably dates back even further: the loss of the original texts of Democritus prevents us from knowing whether it was already present in classical Greek atomism.54 Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use—or confirmation—in scientific inquiry.

An old saying went back to the time of the Venerable Bede: “As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall.”11 The Roman people seemed sorely neglectful of this vital harbinger of the world’s fate. It was used as a limestone quarry, as an open-air market, and, in the case of the Frangipane and Annibaldi clans, as a fortified palace from which to wage violent feuds against their enemies.

A further complication is encountered due to the length of the year itself. The historical ramifications of the inability of man to exactly measure this length have been appalling. The trouble began when Julius Caesar, advised by a Greek astronomer, established the Julian Calendar, based on the assumption that the year was exactly three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter days long, and that all we had to do was add an extra day every fourth year. This was discovered to be wrong by none other than the Venerable Bede (a medieval English historian) who announced to the world in the eighth century that the Julian year was eleven minutes and fourteen seconds too long.