Venerable Biscop of Wearmouth, Benedict of the North

Saint Biscop (Baducing), Abbot of Wearmouth

The founder of the Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Monkwearmouth, Biscop (Baducing) of Wearmouth, is celebrated today on the Orthodox New Calendar, the Roman Catholic and the Anglican calendars. The patron of all English Benedictines, Saint Biscop was also the spiritual father and mentor of the Venerable Bede, whose writings had a profound influence on my own decision to join Orthodoxy. A point of clarification first: Biscop is the saint’s personal name, not his title; upon being tonsured he took the name of Saint Benedict the Venerable of Nursia, whose life and works he strove to his utmost to emulate, and whose religious rule he implanted in all of the monasteries in which he was involved.

Biscop was born in 628 in Northumbria to eldern of high birth; in his youth he was a þegn of Óswiu wæs Æþelferþing king of Northumbria. However, even as a young man of the world, he had no love for fighting or violence, held his lands and his worldly wealth at little value, and would not marry. At the age of twenty-five he was overcome with an urge to go on pilgrimage to visit the Tomb of the Apostles in Rome: a popular pilgrimage destination for English Christians in later generations as well. Along the way, he met another young man – Saint Wilfrid – who accompanied him on his pilgrimage as far as Lyons. This pilgrimage apparently was something of a conversion experience for Biscop. He fell in love with the manner of life among the Roman religious, and upon his return to Northumbria some years later strove to introduce aspects of it among the English.

Biscop made a second pilgrimage to Rome in 665; the æþeling of Northumbria, Ealhfriþ, desired to accompany him on this journey, but his father Óswiu forbade him. In Rome, Biscop made the acquaintance of Pope Vitalian; and on his return he stopped in Lérins, France, where he left the world and took the tonsure. The young þegn stripped himself of all worldly pretensions and made himself humble in the service of God, learning the monastic disciplines and taking upon himself without grumbling the lowest place among the brothers. Having spent two years there, the itch to go again to Old Rome came over him, and thither he went. This time, when he came into the city, he was in the company of another Englishman, Wigheard, who was coming before Pope Vitalian to receive the omophorion of Canterbury. Wigheard was stricken with an illness, however, and died: Vitalian instead appointed Saint Theodore of Tarsus to the position on the advice of Saint Hadrian. Pope Vitalian had the young monk Biscop accompany the saintly Greek hierarch and the Berber monk part of the way back to England as a native guide, and joined them there after an eventful winter. Biscop was made Abbot of St Peter’s in Canterbury, the abbacy which was soon to become Hadrian’s. Again he left after two years for Rome; only this time, he brought back with him books by the Church Fathers, and a great many of them, and returned with them to his home country of Northumbria, where he met with Óswiu’s son Ecgfrið. The new king was quickly impressed by the depth of Biscop’s learning and his great zeal for building the Church, and so gave him a gift of seventy hides of his own land, on which to build the monastery of St Peter at the mouth of the Wear.

Biscop hired masons and glassworkers from Francia – the latter being the first artisans in the country to produce stained glass – and undertook yet another trip to Rome to furnish his new abbey with relics; all manner of books both religious and sæcular, in both Latin and Greek; a monastic teacher of music – in particular, plainchant; and a letter from Pope Saint Agathon securing for his monastery full independence from sæcular political interference. So diligent was Biscop in establishing this monastery that the Divine Liturgy could be celebrated within its walls within a year of the land being blessed. He also brought icons in the Eastern Roman style, and used them to create (as Venerable Bede describes) an iconostasis in the nave of the Church: ‘so that 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, though it were but in a picture’. Ecgfrið King was so impressed by what Biscop had been able to accomplish that he augmented his earlier gift with a further forty hides of land out of his own store of wealth for an additional monastery, the monastery of St Paul at Jarrow – which would be joined for ever to that of St Peter in Wearmouth. To head this new monastery Saint Biscop chose Ceolfrið, a younger monastic who would be the closest mentor and spiritual father to the young Bede. He also chose Saint Eosterwine, his cousin who likewise had a fervent zeal for the Church, to help him take care of Wearmouth’s daily affairs and to act as prior and co-abbot of the monastery.

Biscop made yet another trip to Rome to acquire more books. When he returned, however, he found to his sorrow that Ecgfrið his king and friend had been slain in battle and his faithful helper Eosterwine had succumbed, along with many of his brother-monks, to a virulent plague. Ecgfrið was succeeded by his Irish half-brother Aldfrið; Saint Eosterwine was replaced as prior at Wearmouth, on the rede of Ceolfrið, with the gentle and knowledgeable deacon Saint Sigefrið. Aldfrið, a man who held learning in high est, had a good working relationship with Saint Biscop; in exchange for two fine silk omophors he had brought from Rome, Aldfrið sold Biscop three hides of ‘sundered land’ bordering Monkwearmouth on the south side of the river – a fishing village which in later times would grow into a city of some prominence.

Saint Biscop’s own time, however, was growing short. Sigefrið was smitten with a deadly wasting illness, and Biscop himself was lain out with a sickness that robbed him, slowly and sorely, of the use of his limbs, and crippled his body for three years – the pain came to be such that he could not sleep. However, he still took it upon himself to celebrate, without complaint, the Divine Liturgy and fulfil all the duties of his abbatial office; and though his body was wasted his mind was kept clear, pure and sane until the very end of his life. His final words to his brethren were to exhort them to remain united – both the Wearmouth Abbey and the Jarrow Abbey; to hold steadfast to the Benedictine Rule and way of life; to preserve and expand the massive library of books and holy writings he had procured from Old Rome; and never to overlook anyone among the monks on account of birth, however rude or poor or lowly, but to follow the man who showed the greatest meekness and spirit of love in his own life.In his last hours, on the fourteenth of January, the brethren of Wearmouth and Jarrow read the Holy Scriptures aloud for him, and also read from the Psalter. Saint Biscop reposed as the brethren were chanting the eighty-second Psalm, which was by Saint Bede taken as a sign that no spiritual enemy had laid hold upon him as he met his earthly journey’s end, but that he departed in blessedness.

This great and zealous Benedict of the European north displayed in his life the most admirable traits of his order. He was dissatisfied with the warlike and acquisitive society into which he had been born, and sought to change its character starting within himself. He was peaceful, meek and kind; he treated the poor (Sigefrið) and rich (Eosterwine) brother-monks alike; he sought learning of all sorts, but especially that holy learning which came from the Church Fathers.

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So my gentle readers may be wondering by this point (or perhaps not – is it any wonder The Heavy Anglo Orthodox has a thing for English Benedictines?) why I have been highlighting the hagiographies of all these early English, Frankish and German saints: Willibrord, Hilda, Bernward, Éadmund, Eanflæd, Ælfríc, Botwulf, Berin, Eadburga, Sturm, Hildalíþ, Ecgwine, Hadrian and Beorhtwald. Well, the short answer is and deserves to be: because they are Christlike, and because they are ours – as Westerners we ought to be looking to such a paradigm anyway.

But I feel like I can’t and shouldn’t stop there – particularly not after I was led to go back and read the Rule in the spirit of Liz Bruenig. These hagiographies form a pattern, and certain subtle – or perhaps not-so-subtle – golden threads begin to emerge from it to those with eyes to see them. These men and women who took Benedict as their rôle model did indeed set their faces against the prevailing winds of their cultural moment, but it behoves us to consider precisely what kind of cultural moment that was. As Peter Heather’s books on the subject bear witness, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire saw the wealthy and propertied gather up and stockpile as much wealth as they could, build their own private infrastructure, and barricade themselves behind gates to be barred against not only the Vandals and Goths and Huns – the heretics and heathens – raging outside, but also against the poor and dispossessed. Bereft of its legal structural safeguards, in the waning days of Western Rome, the impulse of the patrician (steeped in the legal principles of dominium proprium, the absolute right of Roman man to his lands, his money, his wife and kept women, his children) was to save his own skin and let the world burn.

Following up on a point broached by Sam Rocha a year ago, it was this particular tendency of the Roman sæcular culture in crisis that so thoroughly repulsed the historical Saint Benedict. A careful reading of his Rule shows that the world it tries to build within the walls of his community is a systematic dismantling of the legal principle of dominium proprium and its replacement with a diametrically dissimilar way of living. A Benedictine monk gives up all manner of private and personal property. He gives up any claim of ownership or control over other people – particularly women or children. He gives up his right to eat and drink what he likes, or sleep when he likes. And – this is the most important part – he gives up his self-will and submits to obey Jesus Christ, the Law of Love in the flesh, in the person of the Abbot and in the persons of the poor who appear before him at the abbey door.

That’s the thing about these Benedictines in their monastic communities: they may have a porter, but they are not barred against the sick, the suffering, the sorrowful, the afflicted, the captives, the needy and the poor of the world. It was a direct rebuke to the way the gates of the dominus of the post-collapse Italian latifundium was barred. The monks are there together to do what is needed first to help the least of these, with love and hospitality and real solidarity being their second law (the first being to put their self-will to death and obey God in love). So, listening to the representatives of the Tallahassee DSA talk about the localized, decentralised, caritative, put-yourself-second and do-what-you-have-to ethos behind what they are calling ‘disaster socialism’ – getting needed supplies, services and free pizza to the victims of flooding when the state wouldn’t help – I couldn’t help but think: that’s our real Benedict option, right there. That’s what we need to be doing to bear witness against the sickness of our culture.

Look closely at the hagiographies, read them with care – not the truncated ones on my blog, but the actual ones written under a discipline by later monastics. And you find that that’s what Abbot Biscop was actually promoting in Northumbria. That’s what Ecgwine was actually preaching in Worcester that angered the rich so much that they sent him to Rome in leg shackles. That’s what Willibrord actually did in the Low Countries when he led his weary, hungry and thirsty companions into the fields of wealthy landowners. That’s what Botwulf in Suffolk and Hilda in Whitby actually did, to the point of giving away all their food stores and goods to the poor when disaster struck. Were they preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, risen from the tomb? Uh, yes. Were they evangelising heathens? You bet. Did they keep the Great Commission at the front of their minds? No question. But these early English monastic saints were often to be seen going out of their way to be generous to the people who needed it most, and using the word of Christ not as a fearful exercise in withdrawal from a hostile and callous culture, but instead as a bold call to leaven it.

And leaven it they did. King David, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, was wise to say that ‘the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done’. One of the innovations that came with the flooding of the poor and dispossessed into the margins of Empire, was the adoption (particularly along the Upper Rhine) of the open-field system, a communal institutional arrangement adopted in towns and rural settlements which pooled communal land resources so that all the members of the community could use them. Contrary to the conventional wisdom put forward by the Encyclopædia Britannica, this socialistic-looking agrarian system was not an age-old way-things-have-always-been-done, but instead a deliberate institutional response to the agrarian crisis of mounting population pressures on dwindling marginal land resources. The adoption of open-field structures was also no doubt aided, abetted and blessed by the spread of Christianity and the presence of monastic communities like the Benedictines who adopted communal property as a rule, and who served the poor as a rule. The option promoted by the historical Saint Benedict, and Saint Biscop who took his name, was one which emphasised equally a refusal to countenance ‘the way things are’ in the world, and one which sought to transform the world by example.