The Orthodox Reception

Aidan lived and died in the seventh century, four hundred years before the Great Schism of 1054, in the one undivided Church of West and East. He is therefore a saint of the whole Church, venerated across its traditions, and the Orthodox East — which has in recent generations warmly recovered the saints of the pre-Schism British Isles — honours him as one of the holy fathers of those lands, keeping his feast on 31 August. This file sets out the basis of Aidan’s veneration as a pre-Schism saint, the place of his feast, and the Orthodox reception of the Celtic and English saints to which he belongs.

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

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The first and decisive fact about Aidan’s place in the Church is chronological: he belongs to the era before the schism between East and West. He died in 651; the formal rupture between Rome and Constantinople is conventionally dated to 1054, and the deeper estrangement unfolded over the centuries on either side of that date (see The Pre-Schism Church). Aidan therefore lived in the period when there was, in the full sense, one Church — when the great sees of East and West were in communion, when the saints of Ireland and Northumbria belonged to the same body as the saints of Egypt and Constantinople, and when no choice between “Eastern” and “Western” Christianity could even be posed. He is not an Eastern saint or a Western saint but a saint of the undivided Church, and that is the ground on which the Orthodox receive him.

This is why the Easter question, which loomed so large in his own church’s later history (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne), is no barrier to his veneration. The Celtic reckoning concerned the computus of a feast, not the deposit of the faith; it touched the calendar, not the creed. Aidan held the orthodox faith of the undivided Church in everything that bears on doctrine, and his divergence from Rome was a matter of paschal calculation that the West itself later resolved. From the Orthodox vantage, such liturgical and computational diversity among the local churches of the first millennium is a known feature of the period, carried — within limits — without breach of communion; it does not unmake a saint (see Holiness Across the Divide). The very man who faulted Aidan’s Easter, Bede, nonetheless honoured him as holy — and the Orthodox reception simply ratifies Bede’s own deeper judgment.

The Feast of 31 August

Aidan is commemorated on 31 August, the day of his death at Bamburgh in 651 (see Relics and the Cult). The date rests on Bede’s notice of the day of his death (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969) and has been kept in the Western calendars from the early medieval period; it is the day on which Orthodox Christians who venerate the saints of the British Isles likewise keep his memory (on the structure of the calendar, see The Church Calendar). The feast falls, fittingly, at the very end of the liturgical-civil summer, on the eve of the September that opens the Byzantine church year — Aidan’s commemoration standing, as it were, on the threshold.

It is worth noting the soberly historical character of this dating. Unlike many early dates in Aidan’s story, which are reconstructed from the regnal framework (see The Thin Record), the day of his death — and so of his feast — is directly attested by Bede and is the firmest point in the whole chronology. The cult is anchored where it should be: on the day the saint entered glory.

The Orthodox Recovery of the Western Saints

Aidan belongs to a wider company whose veneration the Orthodox Church, and especially Orthodox Christians in the British Isles and the West, have in recent generations recovered with particular warmth: the saints of the pre-Schism West — the Celtic saints of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and the early saints of Anglo-Saxon England. Columba of Iona, Patrick of Ireland, David of Wales, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, Hild of Whitby, and many others are honoured as saints of the undivided Church, and Aidan stands among the greatest of them as the apostle of Northumbria (on the company, see St. Columba of Iona, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne).

The basis of this reception is precisely the pre-Schism principle set out above. These saints lived before the division; they held the common faith; their holiness was attested in their own time and has been venerated continuously since. The Orthodox recovery of them is not an annexation of Western figures to an Eastern cause but a recognition that the saints of the undivided Church are the common patrimony of all who hold its faith. In Aidan the Orthodox East finds a holiness it recognizes as its own — the desert’s asceticism in a northern bishop (see Irish Monastic Mission and the East), the gentleness and discernment of the holy fathers, the union of contemplation and mission that marks the great monastic saints of every age and place.

This recovery has practical liturgical expression. Orthodox parishes and monasteries in the British Isles and beyond — within the various jurisdictions that minister in the West — keep the commemorations of the local pre-Schism saints, Aidan among them, and in some places services and akathists have been composed in their honour, drawing on the historical material in Bede and on the Orthodox hymnographic tradition. The principle governing such compositions is the one this collection has followed throughout: the historical record is handled soberly (the single source, the thin biography, the contested dates), while the veneration rests on the saint’s manifest holiness and his place in the undivided Church. There is no tension between critical history and devout veneration here; the same Aidan whom the historian knows only through Bede is the Aidan whom the Church loves, and the discipline of distinguishing what is attested from what is legend (see The Thin Record) serves the veneration rather than undermining it, by keeping it honest.

What the Reception Honours

It is worth being precise about what, in Aidan, the Church venerates. It is not his Easter, which the Church (East and West alike, in the end) did not follow. It is the man Bede described and the holiness Bede could not help but honour: the bishop who walked rather than rode so as to meet the poor on the road; who gave away whatever the rich gave him and ransomed the enslaved; who formed a native clergy from English boys and freed slaves; who kept the fasts and retreated to his island to pray; who rebuked kings to their faces and comforted the weak; and whose sanctity, in Bede’s telling, God Himself sealed with wonders (HE III.5, III.14–17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; see Bede’s Portrait and The Mission on Foot). This is the Aidan the Church receives: not a partisan of a paschal cycle but an apostle and an ascetic, one of the holy fathers of the British Isles, whose feast on 31 August keeps green the memory of the man who gave the English north its faith.

See Also

References

  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.5, III.14–17. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The day of Aidan’s death, III.17; the portrait of his holiness, III.5, III.14–17.)
  • 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. (Aidan’s sanctity and its reception; the pre-Schism context of the early English saints.)
  • Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (The feast of Aidan on 31 August and the basis of his cult.)