The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne

Aidan and the church of Lindisfarne kept the Easter of Iona — a reckoning of the date of Pascha that diverged from the one then used at Rome and Canterbury, and that the rest of the Western Church had by the seventh century abandoned. Lindisfarne thus became the chief Northumbrian stronghold of the Celtic paschal practice, and with it the distinctive Irish tonsure. This file explains what the Celtic reckoning was, why it diverged, and how the fidelity to Iona that Aidan embodied became, after his death, the seed of the conflict that erupted at the Synod of Whitby in 664 under his successor Colmán.

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

The Question of the Date of Pascha

The whole early Church agreed that Pascha — Easter — was to be kept on a Sunday, in connection with the Jewish Passover and the spring equinox, and after the Council of Nicaea (325) the principle was settled that it should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon on or after the equinox, and not with the Jews. But translating that principle into a usable calendar required a computus — a cycle correlating the solar year, the lunar months, and the days of the week — and on the details of the computus the churches did not all agree. Different cycles, different reckonings of the equinox, and different lunar limits could, in a given year, place Easter on different Sundays. The “Easter question” of the seventh-century British Isles was not a dispute about doctrine but about computation: which cycle correctly identified the Sunday of the Resurrection (Mayr-Harting 1991; on the feast and its reckoning, see The Church Calendar).

What the Celtic Reckoning Was

The Irish churches, and the Columban familia of Iona with them, used an older paschal cycle that the continental Church had by the seventh century superseded. The precise technical history is debated among specialists, but the essential point, on which the sources and the scholarship agree, is this: the Ionan reckoning rested on an 84-year cycle and an older calculation of the lunar limits and the equinox, where Rome had moved to the more accurate 19-year (Alexandrian/Dionysiac) cycle (Mayr-Harting 1991) [Disputed: the exact form of the "Celtic" 84-year cycle (the *latercus*) and its lunar limits were long uncertain and partly reconstructed by modern scholarship from later evidence; the older view that the Irish were simply "Quartodeciman" (keeping Easter on the 14th of the moon regardless of the Sunday) is mistaken — Bede himself is clear they kept Sunday — and the divergence was one of computus, not of the day of the week (Mayr-Harting 1991)]. Bede is careful, in fact, to defend the Irish against the charge of being Quartodecimans: he insists they did keep Easter on a Sunday, and that their fault lay in keeping it sometimes on the wrong Sunday, within a lunar range that diverged from the Roman (HE III.4, III.17, III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). In some years the two reckonings coincided; in others they did not, so that — as Bede notes with discomfort — the king might be keeping Easter while the queen, following the Roman use, was still in the Lenten fast (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

Bound up with the paschal difference was a second, more visible mark of the Columban tradition: the tonsure. The Irish monks wore a tonsure different in form from the Roman “crown” of St. Peter — shaved across the front of the head from ear to ear, rather than in a circle on the crown — and this too became a token of the divide, attacked by the Roman party as the “tonsure of Simon Magus” and defended by the Irish as the tonsure of their fathers (HE III.26, V.21; Mayr-Harting 1991). Easter and tonsure together marked the Columban familia as a distinct observance within the one Church.

Why Lindisfarne Was the Stronghold

Lindisfarne kept these customs because Lindisfarne was a Columban foundation, planted from Iona and bound to Iona by the deepest ties of filial loyalty (see Monastic Evangelism). Aidan had been formed at Iona; his successors Finan and Colmán were likewise Irish monks of the Columban tradition (see The Line of Bishops); and the whole authority of the Lindisfarne church flowed from its descent from Columba. To keep Columba’s Easter was, for them, to keep faith with their father in God and with the saints of their tradition. Bede, even while faulting the reckoning, understands this perfectly and presents it as the heart of the matter: the Irish kept their Easter not from obstinacy but from reverence for the tradition handed down from Columba and the elders, “thinking that they ought to follow the example of so great and holy a father” (cf. HE III.4, III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The strength of Lindisfarne and the tenacity of its Easter were thus the same loyalty seen from two sides.

This is why Lindisfarne, more than anywhere else in Northumbria, became the centre of resistance to the Roman reckoning. The see was the head of the Ionan mission in England; its bishops were Iona’s men; and so long as the Columban tradition governed the Northumbrian church, the Celtic Easter governed it too. Aidan kept it all his life, without — so far as Bede records — any controversy reaching a crisis in his own day. The conflict came later, when the growing presence of the Roman use in Northumbria, carried by figures such as Wilfrid and supported within the royal family itself, made the coexistence of two Easters at one court intolerable.

The Seeds of Whitby

Aidan died in 651. The confrontation came thirteen years later, in 664, at the Synod of Whitby, convened by King Oswiu at the double monastery of Hild (Hilda) of Whitby to settle which Easter the Northumbrian church would keep (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). By then the see of Lindisfarne was held by Colmán, the third Irish bishop in Aidan’s line, who at Whitby defended the Ionan reckoning by appeal to Columba and the tradition of the elders, against Wilfrid, who argued the Roman case by appeal to the universal practice of the Church and the authority of Peter (HE III.25; on Colmán, see St. Colmán of Lindisfarne). The synod decided for Rome, and Colmán, unwilling to abandon the tradition of his fathers, resigned his see and withdrew with the Irish monks and some of the English, first to Iona and then to Ireland (HE III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). With his departure the Ionan governance of Lindisfarne ended, though — as Bede is at pains to show — the holiness it had planted did not (see The Line of Bishops and The School and the Saints).

Aidan himself never stood at Whitby; the controversy that broke there belongs to the story of his successors. But the synod was, in a real sense, the delayed consequence of his work: it was because Aidan had so successfully planted the Columban church in Northumbria, with its Columban Easter, that there was a Celtic party of such weight and sanctity to be reckoned with at all. The strength of Lindisfarne created the very conflict that Whitby resolved. That is the irony, and Bede feels it: the holiest church in Northumbria was the one keeping the Easter he believed wrong.

Both Positions, Without Polemic

The methodology of this collection requires that the dispute be stated both-sides and without taking the part of either against the other (METHODOLOGY §4). The Roman party held that the date of so central a feast ought to follow the practice of the universal Church, that uniformity in Pascha was a matter of catholic communion, and that the more accurate computus should prevail; they could appeal to the overwhelming consensus of Christendom and to the authority associated with Peter and Rome. The Celtic party held that they kept the Easter handed down to them by Columba and the holy fathers of their tradition, that this Easter had been hallowed by manifest sanctity and miracles, and that fidelity to the saints who had given them the faith was itself a sacred obligation; they could appeal to the holiness of the men who had kept it — Aidan first among them. Each side reasoned from real goods: the one from catholic unity, the other from filial fidelity. Whitby decided the calendrical question for Rome, and the whole British Isles eventually conformed; but the holiness of the Celtic saints was never in question, and Bede, the Roman partisan, is the chief witness to it (see Holiness Across the Divide). From the Orthodox vantage this is a dispute within the undivided, pre-Schism Church over the computus of a feast — exactly the kind of liturgical diversity the early local churches sometimes carried without rupture — and the saints on both sides are saints of that one Church (see The Orthodox Reception).

See Also

References

  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.3–4, III.17, III.25–26, V.21. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The Irish kept Sunday but on a divergent reckoning, III.4, III.25; the king feasting while the queen fasted, III.25; the Synod of Whitby and Colmán’s defence, III.25; Colmán’s withdrawal, III.26; the tonsure dispute, V.21.)
  • 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 Celtic and Roman computus; the 84-year cycle; the tonsure; the Synod of Whitby.)
  • Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s handling of the Easter controversy.)