Bishop of Lindisfarne (661)

On the death of Finan in 661, Colmán came from Iona to become the third Irish bishop of Lindisfarne, inheriting a Northumbrian church at the height of its Ionan mission under King Oswiu. This file describes the island community he led, the frugal and ascetic character of Lindisfarne monastic life, and the ecclesial situation on the eve of the Synod of Whitby — when the question of the two Easters was already a live tension in Oswiu’s own household, though the technical substance of that dispute is reserved for section 02.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)

Accession in 661

Colmán became bishop of Lindisfarne in 661, succeeding Finan, who had died after a decade in the see (Bede, HE III.25, III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Like Aidan and Finan before him, Colmán was an Irish monk sent from Iona, and his coming continued without break the line of Columban bishops who had governed the Northumbrian church since Aidan’s arrival nearly thirty years earlier (Bede, HE III.3, III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991, 96–97, 104). Bede introduces him at exactly this juncture, and almost entirely with a view to the council that would follow three years later — a framing that tells us much about the shape of Bede’s History and little about Colmán’s first years in office (Bede, HE III.25–26; on Bede’s framing, see Bede as the Narrator).

The accession is dated 661 on Bede’s chronology, and the date is broadly secure, though the Irish annals, which record events by annal-year and do not always synchronize exactly with Bede, leave a small margin [Disputed: Bede dates Finan's death and Colmán's accession to 661 (*HE* III.25–26); the Irish annals notice the deaths of Lindisfarne and Iona churchmen of this period under adjacent annal-years, so a strict synchronization is sometimes only approximate (cf. *Annals of Ulster* and *Annals of Tigernach*; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–315)]. What is certain is that Colmán entered upon a flourishing inheritance. By 661 the Ionan mission had been at work in Northumbria for a generation; it had planted the faith not only among the Northumbrians but, through Finan, among the Middle Angles and the East Saxons, and it commanded the prestige of having converted and sustained the royal house itself (Bede, HE III.21–22, III.24; Mayr-Harting 1991, 103–105). Colmán received the senior bishopric of the most powerful kingdom in Britain at the moment of the Ionan church’s widest reach.

The Community He Led

Lindisfarne was not a cathedral establishment in any later sense but a monastery that was also an episcopal seat — an Irish-style foundation in which the bishop lived as one of the brethren under a discipline of common life (Bede, HE III.4, III.5, III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991, 96–100). Bede’s description of Lindisfarne under Colmán is among the most valuable evidence we have for the texture of the community, precisely because Bede offers it as a retrospective ideal even as he records the church’s departure from Roman custom. He writes that the place over which Colmán presided was marked by such frugality that, apart from the church and the simplest dwellings, there was almost nothing in the way of possessions; the monks kept only what their rule required, and “the whole care of those teachers was to serve God, not the world — to feed the soul, not the belly” (Bede, HE III.26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

The same chapter records that wherever a cleric or monk of Lindisfarne went, he was received gladly as a servant of God; that the people flocked to hear the word; and that when a bishop came to a village the inhabitants gathered for instruction rather than for hospitality, for the clergy “came to the village for no other reason than to preach, baptize, visit the sick, and, in brief, to care for souls” (Bede, HE III.26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede notes too that the church possessed so little land and money that it could not have been a burden to the king who endowed it, and that this poverty was itself a witness (Bede, HE III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991, 100–101). This is Bede the Roman partisan describing the Ionan community he believed to be in the wrong on Easter — and praising its sanctity all the same, which is a measure both of the community’s real holiness and of Bede’s own honesty (Bede, HE III.26; Stancliffe 1999, 110–112). The number of monks at Lindisfarne under Colmán is not given by any source; later notices of the size of the community that withdrew with him after Whitby give a partial and indirect indication, but no firm count for 661 survives [Disputed: no early source gives the size of the Lindisfarne community in 661; Bede reports only the numbers Colmán took with him on his withdrawal after 664 (the Irish brethren and a portion of the English — *HE* IV.4), which is not a census of the monastery at his accession].

The Height of the Ionan Mission under Oswiu

Colmán’s episcopate fell under King Oswiu of Northumbria (r. 642–670), brother and successor of the Oswald who had first invited the Ionan mission, and himself a king raised in the Irish tradition (Bede, HE III.14, III.24, III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991, 104–107). Oswiu had been baptized and brought up among the Irish, “instructed by the Irish (Scotti) and baptized by them,” and he kept the Easter of the Ionan church as the custom in which he had been formed (Bede, HE III.25; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Under Oswiu the political and ecclesiastical fortunes of the Ionan mission stood at their height: in 655 Oswiu had defeated and killed the pagan Penda of Mercia at the Winwæd, breaking the last great heathen power in England and opening Mercia itself to Christian mission; and in thanksgiving he had dedicated his infant daughter Ælfflæd to God and endowed monasteries, several of them in the Ionan tradition (Bede, HE III.24; Mayr-Harting 1991, 105–106). The church Colmán led was thus allied to a victorious and devout king at the summit of Northumbrian power.

Yet the very breadth of the mission’s success brought it into closer and more constant contact with the Roman observance carried by the Canterbury mission in the south and by Frankish and Roman-trained clergy in Northumbria itself (Bede, HE III.25; Corning 2006, 19–35). The Ionan church had flourished in relative isolation; by Colmán’s day it was meeting, on the same English soil and within the same kingdom, a Christianity that kept Pascha by a different reckoning and wore a different tonsure, and the two could no longer simply ignore one another (Bede, HE III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991, 103–107). The mission was at once at its strongest and at its most exposed.

On the Eve of Whitby

The most acute sign of that exposure lay within the royal household itself. Oswiu kept the Ionan Easter; but his queen, Eanflæd, a Kentish princess raised in the Roman observance brought to Kent by the mission of Augustine, kept the Roman Easter together with her chaplain Romanus (Bede, HE III.25; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The consequence, Bede records, was a scandal that could not be hidden: it sometimes happened that Easter was kept twice in the one royal household in a single year, so that “when the king had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the queen and her people were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday” (Bede, HE III.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). That the king and queen of Northumbria should feast and fast on different days, in the same hall, made the difference of custom impossible to leave unresolved — a domestic anomaly that crystallized a divergence the whole Insular Church had so far tolerated (Bede, HE III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991, 107–108).

This tension was already live when Colmán became bishop in 661; it had been building since Finan’s time, when Rónán had pressed the Roman case against the Lindisfarne church (Bede, HE III.25; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). By the early 660s a further pressure had emerged in the rise of younger Northumbrian churchmen who had travelled to Gaul and Rome and returned convinced of the Roman observance — above all Wilfrid, and the king’s own son Alhfrith, sub-king of Deira and Wilfrid’s patron, who had come to favour the Roman reckoning and would press it at the coming council (Bede, HE III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991, 108–112). The lines of the dispute that would be argued at Whitby in 664 were thus already drawn around Colmán within a few years of his accession: an Ionan bishop and an Irish-trained king on the one side, a Roman-keeping queen and a Roman-trained party led by Wilfrid and backed by Alhfrith on the other (Bede, HE III.25; Corning 2006, 19–48).

It bears emphasizing that this was a dispute over custom and discipline within a single, undivided Church, not a contest between two churches or two faiths. Both parties confessed the same creed, venerated the same Scriptures, and held communion in all but the calendar and a handful of usages; the calculation of the day of Pascha was a matter on which the early Church had not yet achieved full uniformity, and the Ionan reckoning was an old and respectable computation, not a heresy (Corning 2006, 1–18; Charles-Edwards 2000, 391–415; on the broader question, see Pre-Schism Church). To project onto 661 the much later rupture between East and West, or to cast Whitby as “Rome against Orthodoxy,” would be a serious anachronism: the men who would argue at Whitby were brethren disputing the right keeping of a common feast (Corning 2006, 6–10; see also The Paschal Question and the Orthodox Calendar).

The technical heart of the matter — how the two Easters were calculated, why they diverged, the question of the tonsure, and the arguments each side would marshal — belongs to the next stage of the story and is reserved for The Two Easters and The Tonsure and Other Customs. What matters for the foundation laid here is the situation Colmán held in 661: a flourishing Ionan mission, a holy and frugal island community, a king who kept his Easter — and, already pressing upon all of it, the unresolved question that would within three years bring him to the Synod of Whitby (Bede, HE III.25–26; see The Gathering of 664).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (HE). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cited by book.chapter: Iona’s governance and Lindisfarne as monastery-see, III.4–5; Oswiu’s Irish formation and the two Easters in the royal household, III.25; the victory over Penda and Oswiu’s endowments, III.24; the frugality and pastoral life of Lindisfarne under Colmán, III.26; Colmán’s accession, III.25–26; the numbers Colmán took on his withdrawal, IV.4.)
The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Ed. and trans. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (Cited by annal-year; deaths and notices of Iona and Lindisfarne churchmen of the mid-seventh century.)
The Annals of Tigernach. Ed. Whitley Stokes, Revue Celtique 16–18 (1895–1897). (Cited by annal-year, in parallel with the Annals of Ulster.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Lindisfarne under the Irish bishops, Oswiu’s reign and the rise of the Roman party, esp. 96–113.)
Corning, Caitlin. The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (The two traditions within one Church and the build-up to Whitby, esp. 1–18, 19–48.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The Columban familia, the chronology of the period, and the paschal question, esp. 312–315, 391–415.)
Stancliffe, Clare. “The British Church and the Mission of Augustine.” In St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson, 107–151. Stroud: Sutton, 1999. (The Insular churches and the sanctity of the Irish mission.)