Monastic Evangelism

What Aidan planted in Northumbria was not simply a diocese but a distinctively Irish institution: the monastery as the engine of mission and the bishop as a monk among monks. In the Ionan system, governing authority lay with the abbot, the bishop’s sacramental office was exercised within and for the monastic community, and evangelism flowed outward from the monastery rather than down from a metropolitan see. This file examines that monastic-episcopal model — the union of contemplation and apostolate at the heart of the Lindisfarne church — and how its transplantation shaped the conversion of the English north.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle of Northumbria)

The Monastery as Mission

The Christianity Aidan brought from Iona was organized differently from the Christianity of Rome and the Mediterranean world. In the patristic and continental pattern, the basic unit of the Church was the diocese, governed by a bishop seated in a city; monasteries existed within that structure but did not define it. In the Irish world, and pre-eminently in the Columban familia of Iona, the basic unit was the monastery, and the most important office was that of the abbot. Bishops were necessary — only a bishop could ordain — but in the Columban system the bishop did not hold the governing jurisdiction; the abbot of Iona, who was a priest and not a bishop, ruled the whole familia, and bishops within it were honoured for their order yet subject to the abbatial authority in matters of governance (Mayr-Harting 1991; on Iona, see St. Columba of Iona).

Bede, looking back from his Roman standpoint, found this arrangement remarkable enough to explain it to his readers. He notes with evident puzzlement that Iona “is always ruled by an abbot who is a priest, to whose authority the whole province, including even the bishops, are subject, contrary to the usual custom” (HE III.4; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). He traces the custom to Columba, “who was not a bishop but a priest and monk,” and is careful — characteristically — both to record the irregularity and to honour the holiness of the men who lived under it (HE III.4; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The remark is invaluable, because it tells us exactly what kind of institution Aidan was: a monastic bishop, formed in a system where the monastery, not the city see, was the centre of gravity.

Lindisfarne as a Columban Foundation

When Aidan established himself on Lindisfarne (see The Island See (635)), he reproduced this model on Northumbrian soil. Lindisfarne was a monastery that was also the bishop’s seat; its life was the common monastic life of prayer, study, fasting, and labour; and from it the mission radiated outward. Bede’s retrospective description of the community in HE III.26 — written to shame the laxity of his own day — paints the picture: the clergy kept no estates or wealth beyond what they needed; when the king and nobles came, they came only to pray or to hear the word, and went away again; the brethren gave themselves to reading and to prayer; and the whole place was marked by a frugality and discipline that Bede frankly held up as a rebuke to his contemporaries (HE III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991).

The monastic foundation gave the mission three things a city-see could not have given it so readily. First, a reservoir of personnel: a monastery trains and holds men, and can send them out two by two as need arises, then receive them back. Second, a rhythm of return: the itinerant preacher (see The Mission on Foot) was not a lone wanderer but a member of a community to which he came home for the seasons of prayer, especially in Lent and at the great feasts, so that the apostolate was continually renewed from the contemplative centre. Bede notes that Aidan was accustomed to withdraw to the nearby island of Inner Farne for prayer, especially in the days before Easter — a smaller island still, off Bamburgh, to which the bishop retreated for solitary devotion (HE III.16; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The monastery sent men out; the hermitage drew the bishop further in; the two motions were one life. Third, a model that reproduced itself: because the unit of mission was the monastery, the way to extend the church was to found more monasteries, each a new centre — which is exactly what Aidan’s disciples and successors did (see The School and the Saints).

Contemplation and Apostolate

The deepest feature of the model is the union it effects between contemplation and mission. In Aidan, as Bede presents him, there is no opposition between the monk who withdraws to pray and the apostle who goes out to convert; the one feeds the other. The bishop who walks the roads teaching is the same bishop who retreats to Farne for solitary prayer before Easter, and the same who keeps the fasts and the psalmody of his community on the journey (HE III.5, III.16, III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede’s whole portrait insists that Aidan’s apostolic effectiveness flowed from his ascetic life — that the gentleness, the discernment, the freedom from avarice, and the power to move kings and commoners alike were the overflow of a man wholly given to God (Ward 1990).

This is the Eastern and desert pattern, mediated through Ireland: the holy man whose authority is charismatic and ascetic rather than administrative, whose word carries because his life is transparent to God (on this affinity, see Irish Monastic Mission and the East). The Ionan mission was, in this sense, a missionary monasticism — the energy of the desert turned outward to the conversion of a people, without ceasing to be the energy of the desert. That is what Aidan planted at Lindisfarne, and it is why the see he founded became not merely an administrative centre but a fountainhead of sanctity.

The Model’s Strength and Its Limit

The monastic-episcopal model was extraordinarily fruitful for mission — flexible, reproductive, and capable of producing saints — and it converted Northumbria where the city-see model of Paulinus had failed. But it also carried, built into it, the customs that would later bring the Lindisfarne church into conflict with the wider Western Church: above all the Ionan reckoning of Easter and the distinctive Irish tonsure, which marked the Columban familia as out of step with Rome and Canterbury (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne). The same loyalty to Columban tradition that made Lindisfarne what it was also made it the stronghold of a paschal practice the rest of the West had abandoned. The strength and the eventual crisis of the Ionan church in England were thus two sides of one thing: a profound, integral fidelity to the monastic tradition of Iona. Aidan embodied that fidelity at its best — and Bede, who loved the holiness and faulted the Easter, would spend his most careful pages holding the two together (see Holiness Across the Divide).

See Also

References

  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.3–5, III.16–17, III.26. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Iona ruled by an abbot-priest to whom even bishops are subject, “contrary to the usual custom,” III.4; Aidan’s retreats to Farne for prayer before Easter, III.16; the frugality and discipline of the Lindisfarne community, III.26.)
  • Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The Columban monastic-episcopal structure; the monastery as the engine of mission; Bede on Iona’s governance.)
  • Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (The union of contemplation and apostolate in Bede’s Aidan.)