The School and the Saints

The truest measure of Aidan’s mission is the holiness it reproduced. The Lindisfarne school he founded, and the wider Ionan mission he led, formed or shaped a remarkable generation of English saints: Cedd, who evangelized the East Saxons, and his brother Chad, apostle of the Mercians and bishop of Lichfield; Eata, one of the original twelve English boys, later abbot of Melrose and bishop of Lindisfarne; and, in the next generation, Cuthbert, the greatest of all the Lindisfarne saints, formed in the ascetic tradition Aidan had planted and called to the monastic life, in the Anonymous Life, by a vision on the night Aidan died. This file follows the saints Aidan’s foundation produced.

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

A Seedbed of Sanctity

Aidan’s foundation was designed to reproduce itself (see Monastic Evangelism), and its fruitfulness in saints is the clearest sign that the design worked. From the school of English boys he gathered at Lindisfarne (see The Mission on Foot), and from the wider mission he and his successors directed, came a generation of holy men who carried Christianity across England and were themselves venerated as saints. Bede, writing the history of the English church, found that he could hardly tell that history without telling the story of Lindisfarne’s children — which is itself a measure of how central Aidan’s foundation became.

Cedd and Chad: The Mission Carried Outward

Among the most important of these were two brothers, Cedd and Chad (Ceadda), trained in the Lindisfarne tradition and sent out to carry the mission far beyond Northumbria. Cedd was one of four brothers, all priests; he was sent by bishop Finan to evangelize the East Saxons (Essex) after their king Sigeberht was converted, and was consecrated bishop for that mission, founding monasteries — among them Lastingham, in the Northumbrian moors — and labouring among a people who had lapsed from the earlier Roman mission of Mellitus (HE III.22–23; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Cedd was present at the Synod of Whitby, where Bede says he acted as a careful interpreter for both parties, having a foot in both worlds (HE III.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969); he died of plague at Lastingham shortly after.

His brother Chad (Ceadda) became the more famous. Also formed in the Irish tradition — Bede says he had studied under Aidan and later in Ireland — Chad became abbot of Lastingham, briefly bishop of York, and then, under Archbishop Theodore, bishop of the Mercians, with his see at Lichfield (HE III.28, IV.2–3; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede’s portrait of Chad deliberately echoes his portrait of Aidan: Chad too went about his diocese on foot, in the apostolic manner, until Theodore — who admired his humility — compelled him to ride; and Chad’s humility, asceticism, and holiness made him one of the most beloved of the English bishops, venerated as a saint after his death at Lichfield (HE IV.3; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991). In Chad the Aidan-method — the going-on-foot, the humility, the ascetic mission — is visibly handed on a generation later, now carrying the faith to the Mercians.

Eata: The English Boy Made Bishop

A direct link to Aidan’s own teaching runs through Eata. Bede names Eata as one of the twelve English boys whom Aidan first took and instructed when he began his mission — the very school of native clergy that was the seed of an English church (HE III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; see The Mission on Foot). Eata became abbot of Melrose, the daughter-house of Lindisfarne in the Tweed valley, and after the Synod of Whitby — when the Irish Colmán withdrew (see The Line of Bishops) — it was Eata, an Englishman raised in the Irish tradition but now conforming to the Roman use, who was set over Lindisfarne, later becoming bishop of Hexham and then of Lindisfarne (HE III.26, IV.12, IV.27–28; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Eata embodies the continuity across the Whitby divide: a man formed by Aidan himself, who carried the holiness and discipline of the Ionan school into the reorganized, Roman-Easter church, and who was Cuthbert’s own abbot and superior (Colgrave 1940).

Cuthbert: The Later Glory

The greatest of all the saints downstream of Aidan was Cuthbert (c. 634–687), who would become the most venerated saint of northern England and whose incorrupt body would make Lindisfarne, and later Durham, one of the great shrines of the medieval church (see St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Relics and the Cult). Cuthbert did not know Aidan personally as a master, but he was formed in the ascetic, monastic tradition Aidan had planted, entered the Lindisfarne familia through its daughter-house at Melrose under Eata and the prior Boisil, and lived the Ionan ideal of withdrawal and mission to its fullest — itinerant preaching, then the hermitage on Inner Farne, the very island to which Aidan had retreated for prayer (Anonymous Life of Cuthbert; Bede, Life of Cuthbert; Colgrave 1940; on Farne, see Monastic Evangelism).

There is a striking link between the two men in the earliest source. The Anonymous Life of Cuthbert, written at Lindisfarne around 700, records that Cuthbert was first called to the monastic life by a vision: as a young shepherd keeping watch by night, he saw the soul of a holy bishop carried up to heaven by angels in a great light, and learned afterward that Aidan had died that very night — and it was this vision, of Aidan’s soul ascending, that turned Cuthbert to the monastic life (Anonymous Life of Cuthbert I.5; Bede, Prose Life of Cuthbert 4; Colgrave 1940) [Disputed: the synchronism of Cuthbert's vision with the night of Aidan's death (31 August 651) is given by the *Anonymous Life* and followed by Bede; it is a hagiographical synchronism pinning the call of the later saint to the death of the founder, and is reported as such per METHODOLOGY §3.5, not as an independently dated coincidence]. Whatever the historical precision of the synchronism, its meaning is exact and deliberate: the earliest Lindisfarne tradition itself made Cuthbert the spiritual heir of Aidan, called to the life at the very hour the founder entered glory. The community understood its greatest saint as Aidan’s successor in holiness, and told its own story that way.

The Measure of the Founder

Taken together, these saints are the answer to the question of what Aidan accomplished. He did not write; he left no rule, no treatise, no surviving word of his own (see The Thin Record). What he left was a community and a way of life that bred holiness — and the names of Cedd, Chad, Eata, and Cuthbert, with the many lesser-known monks and clergy around them, are the visible harvest of that planting. The Ionan model reproduced itself exactly as it was meant to: the monastery formed men, the men founded monasteries and carried the mission outward, and the holiness passed from generation to generation. A founder is judged by his successors, and by that measure Aidan stands very high: the apostle of Northumbria was also the father of a school of saints.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.22–23, III.25–26, III.28, IV.2–3, IV.12, IV.27–28. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cedd and the East Saxons, III.22–23; Cedd at Whitby, III.25; Eata among Aidan’s twelve English boys, III.26, and as bishop, IV.12, IV.27–28; Chad’s mission to the Mercians and his Aidan-like humility, III.28, IV.2–3.)
Colgrave, Bertram, ed. and trans. Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (The Anonymous Life of Cuthbert and Bede’s Prose Life; Cuthbert’s vision of Aidan’s soul ascending on the night of Aidan’s death; the Melrose and Lindisfarne context under Eata and Boisil.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Chad, Cedd, and the spread of the Lindisfarne mission; the continuity of the Irish tradition across Whitby.)