The Line of Bishops

After Aidan’s death in 651 the see of Lindisfarne passed to two more Irish bishops of the Columban tradition — Finan, who governed it through the 650s and into the 660s, and Colmán, who held it at the Synod of Whitby in 664 and, when the synod decided for the Roman Easter, resigned and withdrew to Iona and Ireland with the Irish monks. For its first three episcopates Lindisfarne was thus an Irish, Ionan see, keeping the customs of Iona unbroken; the line ended, in its Columban form, with Colmán’s departure. This file follows that succession — Aidan, Finan, Colmán — and the continuity of tradition it carried.

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

Aidan: The Founder (635–651)

The line begins with Aidan, who held the see from its founding around 635 until his death on 31 August 651 (see Relics and the Cult). Aidan’s episcopate spanned the reigns of Oswald (to 642) and then, after a period of divided kingship, of Oswiu in Bernicia and Oswine in Deira; Bede records Aidan’s close and tender relations with the saintly Oswine, and notes that Aidan died only twelve days after Oswine was murdered, as though, Bede suggests, the bishop could not long survive the king he loved (HE III.14; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). For sixteen years Aidan governed Lindisfarne in the Columban manner — a monastic bishop, keeping the Ionan Easter and tonsure, sending out his monks and forming his English clergy — and he set the pattern his successors would follow.

Finan: The Builder and Defender (651–661)

On Aidan’s death the see passed to Finan, like Aidan an Irish monk sent from Iona, who held it for about a decade, from 651 to 661 [Disputed: the regnal-style dates for Finan's and Colmán's episcopates (Finan c. 651–661, Colmán c. 661–664) are derived from Bede's narrative and the fixed point of Whitby (664) rather than from precise dated statements; the handbooks give these years (Mayr-Harting 1991)]. Bede presents Finan as a vigorous and able bishop who consolidated and extended what Aidan had begun. It was Finan who built the cathedral church of Lindisfarne — though, in keeping with the Irish manner, not of stone but “after the Irish fashion, of hewn oak, thatched with reeds” — the church later dedicated by Archbishop Theodore to St. Peter (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Finan also carried the Lindisfarne mission far beyond Northumbria: he baptized Peada, son of the Mercian king Penda, and sent priests to begin the conversion of Mercia; and he consecrated Cedd for the mission to the East Saxons (Essex) after their king Sigeberht was won to the faith (HE III.21–22; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Under Finan, that is, the Ionan church of Lindisfarne became a missionary mother-church for much of central and southeastern England (see The School and the Saints).

Finan was also a staunch defender of the Columban Easter. Bede records that when a certain Rónán, an Irishman who had learned the Roman reckoning on the continent, pressed Finan to conform, the bishop — “of a hot and quick temper” — was only the more roused to defend the tradition of his fathers (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The Easter question was thus already live during Finan’s episcopate, sharpening toward the crisis that would come under his successor. Finan held the line, both the see and the custom, until his death around 661.

Colmán: The Last Irish Bishop (661–664)

The third bishop, Colmán, again an Irish monk of Iona, held Lindisfarne only some three years, but they were the decisive years (see St. Colmán of Lindisfarne). In 664 King Oswiu, faced with the intolerable situation of two Easters at one court and pressed by the rising Roman party, convened the Synod of Whitby at the monastery of Hild to settle the question (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). There Colmán spoke for the Ionan reckoning, defending it by appeal to Columba and the elders from whom he had received it, against Wilfrid, who argued the Roman case from the universal practice of the Church and the authority of Peter (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). When Oswiu decided for Rome — moved, in Bede’s telling, by the argument that Peter holds the keys of heaven — Colmán would not abandon the tradition of his fathers.

Bede records his departure with evident respect. Colmán resigned the see of Lindisfarne and withdrew, taking with him the Irish monks of the community and about thirty of the English who shared their way of life, first to Iona and then to Ireland, where he founded new monasteries (HE III.26, IV.4; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). With Colmán’s withdrawal the Ionan, Columban governance of Lindisfarne came to an end. The see did not lapse — it passed to Eata, one of Aidan’s original English pupils, and the community continued and indeed flourished — but it now kept the Roman Easter and tonsure, and the line of Irish bishops sent from Iona was closed.

Bede adds a detail about Colmán’s departure that is, in its way, the finest tribute the Roman party could have paid the defeated Irish. When Colmán left, he asked Oswiu’s permission and the new dispositions were made; and Bede pauses to praise the frugality and self-discipline of the bishop and his clergy, recalling that they left behind no wealth to be divided because they had accumulated none — the whole estate of the church of Lindisfarne, after three Irish episcopates, amounting to little more than its churches and the bare necessities of the monastic life (HE III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The poverty Aidan had practised had become the poverty of the whole see, and even in recording the triumph of the Roman cause Bede cannot refrain from holding up the departing Irish as a rebuke to the worldliness of his own day (see Bede’s Portrait). The line of Irish bishops ended, that is, exactly as it had begun: in the ascetic poverty Aidan had brought from Iona.

The Continuity the Line Carried

For its first three episcopates, then — some thirty years, from 635 to 664 — Lindisfarne was an Irish see in the fullest sense: governed by Columban monks sent from Iona, keeping the Ionan Easter and tonsure, organized on the monastic-episcopal model of the mother-house (see Monastic Evangelism). The succession Aidan–Finan–Colmán was a single unbroken transmission of the Columban tradition into the heart of England, and through it the influence of Iona reached far: to Mercia through Peada, to Essex through Cedd, to the whole north through the men Lindisfarne formed. That this Ionan period ended at Whitby does not diminish it; it was in these three episcopates that the decisive evangelization of much of England was accomplished, before the Roman use prevailed.

And the ending was not a rupture in holiness. Bede is careful to show that the sanctity Aidan had planted survived the change of custom: Eata, who succeeded after Whitby, was one of Aidan’s own English boys, and under him and his successors Lindisfarne remained a fountain of saints, above all in Cuthbert (see The School and the Saints and St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne). The Easter changed; the line of bishops changed; but the life Aidan had given the island endured, and the community he founded would become, with the Lindisfarne Gospels and the cult of Cuthbert, one of the great holy places of the English church (see Relics and the Cult).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.14, III.21–22, III.25–26, IV.4. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Aidan’s death twelve days after Oswine, III.14; Finan’s oak church, the baptism of Peada, and the sending of Cedd, III.21–22, III.25; Finan’s defence of the Easter against Rónán, III.25; the Synod of Whitby and Colmán’s defence, III.25; Colmán’s withdrawal to Iona and Ireland, III.26, IV.4.)
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 succession of Lindisfarne bishops and their dates; Finan’s mission to Mercia and Essex.)