Legacy and Assessment

A sober final estimate. Aidan is best understood as the true apostle of the English north — the man whose mission, more than any other, converted Northumbria and through it much of central and northern England — standing beside, and in instructive contrast to, the Roman mission of Augustine of Canterbury in the south. The contrast is not one of rivalry but of method and temper, and the English church drew on both. This file offers a measured assessment of Aidan’s achievement, weighs it against the Roman mission, and reckons honestly with both the greatness and the limits of what can be claimed.

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

The Apostle of the North

The plainest and best-grounded judgment on Aidan is the one Bede’s whole narrative supports: that he was the effective apostle of Northumbria, and through Northumbria of much of the English north and midlands. The first, Roman conversion of Northumbria under Paulinus had collapsed with the death of its royal patron (see Northumbria and the Ionan Mission); it was Aidan’s mission, beginning in 635, that took root and held. From his island base he and his clergy evangelized the kingdom; from his school came the native English clergy that made the church self-sustaining; and from his foundation, under his successors, the mission spread outward — to Mercia, to Essex, across the north — carried by men he and his community had formed (see The Mission on Foot and The School and the Saints). When Bede looked back on the conversion of his own people, the church he knew in the north was, in its descent and its sanctity, Aidan’s church.

This is not an inflated claim. It is the sober reading of the evidence: that the Christianity which finally took hold in Northumbria, and which produced the saints and the culture of the golden age of Northumbrian Christianity — Cuthbert, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and ultimately Bede himself, the greatest scholar of the early medieval West — grew from the seed Aidan planted (see Relics and the Cult). Aidan is the apostle of the English north in the precise sense that he is the founder from whom that whole flowering descends.

Beside Augustine of Canterbury

It is illuminating to set Aidan beside the other great missionary founder of the English church, Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597 to convert the English from the south (see St. Gregory the Dialogist). The two missions are the two poles of the English conversion, and the contrast between them is real, but it is a contrast of method and temper, not of rivalry or of orthodoxy.

The Roman mission of Augustine came from the papacy, by deliberate initiative; it planted itself in a former Roman city, Canterbury, on the continental model of the city-see; it worked from the throne down, beginning with the conversion of King Æthelberht of Kent and proceeding by royal authority; and it brought with it the order, the law, the liturgy, and the universal communion of Rome (Mayr-Harting 1991). Its strengths were structure, continuity, and catholic uniformity; its weakness, as the Northumbrian collapse showed, was that a mission tied to a king could fall with him.

The Ionan mission of Aidan came from a monastery, at a king’s request but not by papal direction; it planted itself on a remote tidal island on the monastic model; it worked from the road up, by itinerant ascetic preaching and the patient formation of individuals and of a native clergy; and it brought the holiness and the missionary energy of Irish monasticism (see Monastic Evangelism). Its strengths were sanctity, flexibility, and the power to reproduce itself in saints; its weakness was the isolation that left it keeping an Easter the rest of the West had abandoned (see The Celtic Reckoning at Lindisfarne).

The English church that emerged drew on both. The Synod of Whitby (664) decided the disputed customs in favour of the Roman use, and the church was reorganized, under Archbishop Theodore, on Roman administrative lines; but it kept, in its spirituality and its saints, much of what the Irish mission had given it (Mayr-Harting 1991). Bede himself is the proof of the synthesis: a monk of a Roman house, keeping the Roman Easter, who nonetheless honoured Aidan and the Irish as the holy fathers of his church. The two missions were not finally competitors but complements — Rome giving order and unity, Iona giving sanctity and fire — and the English church was the richer for both.

A Measured Estimate

Honesty requires marking the limits of what can be claimed for Aidan, as well as the greatness.

On the side of greatness: Aidan converted, or set in motion the conversion of, the most important kingdom of northern England; he founded a see that became one of the holy places of Christendom; he formed a school of saints whose influence reached across the country; and he did it by a method — ascetic, charitable, humble, itinerant — that the tradition has held up ever since as a model of how the gospel should be carried. His personal holiness is as well attested as anything in the early English church, and attested, remarkably, by the witness who most disapproved of his Easter (see Bede’s Portrait). For all these reasons he stands among the very greatest of the saints of the British Isles.

On the side of limits: almost everything we know of him comes from one later, partisan source (see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History); the Aidan of history is to a high degree the Aidan of Bede; and the personal life, the inner chronology, and the years before the sending are simply lost (see The Thin Record). The geographical extent of his personal reach cannot be precisely mapped, and some of the most beloved episodes — the failed first bishop, the verbatim speeches — are edifying tradition as much as documented fact (see The Sending from Iona). The honest estimate honours the greatness without overstating the certainty: a saint of the first rank, known to us through a single generous window.

The Final Word

Perhaps the truest assessment is the one implicit in the whole shape of his story. Aidan left no writings, no personal cult to rival Cuthbert’s, no monument of his own making. What he left was a community, a method, and a line of saints — and that was exactly what he meant to leave. He was a man who walked rather than rode, who gave away what he was given, who formed others and sent them out, and whose holiness was the kind that reproduces itself in other lives rather than monumentalizing itself in stone or text. The apostle of the English north is honoured not for what he wrote or built but for what he was and for whom he formed: the gentle Irish bishop whose island became a fountain of sanctity, and whose memory the Church, East and West, keeps on the last day of August (see The Orthodox Reception). In the end the measure of Aidan is the measure Bede gave him: a holy man, to be loved and imitated — and that, for a saint, is the whole of what matters.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People I.23–26, II.1–3, III.3–17, III.25–26. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The Roman mission of Augustine, I.23–26, II.1–3; Aidan’s mission and its fruits, III.3–17; the Synod of Whitby and the reorganization, III.25–26.)
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 Roman and Irish missions compared; the synthesis of the English church; Aidan’s achievement.)
Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (Aidan as apostle of Northumbria; his cult and assessment.)