Iona and the Lindisfarne Succession

St. Colmán of Lindisfarne was the third in an unbroken line of Irish monks sent from the monastery of Iona to govern the Northumbrian church of Lindisfarne — Aidan, then Finan, then Colmán — each formed in the monastic tradition of Columba. This file traces that succession and the Ionan mission to Northumbria invited by King Oswald, situates Colmán within his Irish and Columban formation, and acknowledges frankly how little Bede, our near-sole witness, tells us of Colmán’s life before he became bishop in 661.

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

The Ionan Mission to Northumbria

The church Colmán would one day lead was not founded by missionaries from Rome or Canterbury but by Irish monks from the island monastery of Iona, off the western coast of what is now Scotland. The decisive moment came under King Oswald of Northumbria (r. 634–642), who in his exile among the Irish of Dál Riata had been baptized and catechized in the Ionan tradition, and who on gaining his kingdom sent to “the elders of the Irish” (maiores natu Scottorum) asking for a bishop to convert his people (Bede, HE III.3; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede records that a first bishop was sent and failed — a man of “harsher disposition” who, meeting with no success, returned and reported the English to be intractable; at the conference that followed it was Aidan who gently suggested the failure lay in the missionary’s want of discretion rather than in the people, and who was himself consecrated and sent in his place (Bede, HE III.5; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

Aidan came to Northumbria in or about 635 and chose for his episcopal seat the tidal island of Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast near the royal fortress of Bamburgh — a deliberate echo of Iona’s own island monasticism (Bede, HE III.3; Mayr-Harting 1991, 96–97). From the outset the mission was Ionan in character: monastic rather than diocesan in the later Roman sense, ascetic in tone, and bound to the mother-house on Iona by ties of obedience and custom. Bede is explicit that Lindisfarne and the whole province it served looked to Iona for governance, “for that island always used to have as its ruler an abbot who was a priest, to whose authority the whole province, including even the bishops, had to be subject” — an arrangement Bede finds “unusual” (ordine inusitato) and which he reports with evident discomfort (Bede, HE III.4; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The Northumbrian church was thus, in its first generation, a daughter of Iona, and Iona in turn a daughter of the Irish church and of Columba.

This Ionan origin is the single most important fact for understanding Colmán. The customs he would defend at Whitby — the dating of Easter, the form of the tonsure, and other usages — were not his personal idiosyncrasies but the inherited discipline of Iona and the wider familia of Columba, carried into Northumbria as part of the mission itself (Bede, HE III.25; Corning 2006, 1–18). To read the later controversy rightly, one must hold from the start that both the Ionan and the Roman parties stood within one undivided Church; the dispute was over discipline and custom, not over the faith that united them (Corning 2006, 6–10; on the period, see Pre-Schism Church).

The Succession: Aidan, Finan, Colmán

Bede preserves the succession of the early bishops of Lindisfarne with care, and it is striking in its consistency: all three of the first bishops were Irish monks sent from Iona. Aidan, the founder, governed the see from his arrival around 635 until his death on 31 August 651 (Bede, HE III.14, III.17; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; the Irish annals notice Aidan’s death at this period — cf. Annals of Ulster, AU 651). Bede’s portrait of Aidan is one of the warmest in the entire History: he praises Aidan’s asceticism, his almsgiving, his habit of travelling on foot, and his freedom from avarice, even while disapproving of his observance of Easter (Bede, HE III.5, III.17; Mayr-Harting 1991, 97–100). That Bede — a convinced partisan of the Roman Easter — could write so generously of an Irish bishop who kept the “wrong” Pascha is itself a measure of how the Insular Church held communion across the customary divide (Bede, HE III.17; Stancliffe 1999, 107–110).

On Aidan’s death he was succeeded by Finan, likewise an Irishman and a monk of Iona, who held the see from 651 until 661 (Bede, HE III.17, III.25; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Finan continued the mission with vigour: under him the Middle Angles and the East Saxons received the faith, and he baptized Peada of the Middle Angles and stood as the church’s spokesman in the first stirrings of the paschal dispute, resisting the arguments of the Roman party with force of character (Bede, HE III.21–22, III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991, 103–104). Bede notes that it was already in Finan’s time that a certain Rónán, an Irishman who had himself adopted the Roman reckoning, contended sharply with Finan over Easter — so that the controversy Colmán would inherit was already alive a full episcopate before Whitby (Bede, HE III.25; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

When Finan died in 661, Colmán succeeded him as the third bishop of Lindisfarne, “sent from Ireland” — that is, from Iona — and so continued the line unbroken (Bede, HE III.25, III.26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede introduces him precisely at this point and chiefly in relation to the coming council, which is one reason so little of his earlier life is recoverable. The Irish character of all three bishops is not incidental: it meant that for the better part of three decades the senior bishopric of Northumbria was held by men formed at Iona, keeping Ionan custom, and answerable in spirit if not in strict jurisdiction to the Columban familia (Bede, HE III.3–4; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–315). The exact dates of accession are tied to Bede’s chronology and the notices of the Irish annals; where the annals and Bede can be aligned they broadly agree on the sequence, though the precise year of a given event is sometimes only approximate [Disputed: Bede places Finan's death and Colmán's accession in 661 (*HE* III.25–26); the Irish annals notice events of these years under adjacent annal-years and do not always permit an exact synchronization, so some scholars give Colmán's accession as 661 while allowing a margin of a year either side (cf. *Annals of Ulster* and *Annals of Tigernach* at this period; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–315)].

Colmán’s Irish and Columban Formation

Colmán was an Irishman and a monk of Iona before he was a bishop, and everything in Bede’s account presupposes that he came to Northumbria already formed in the Columban tradition (Bede, HE III.25, III.26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). That tradition reached back to Columba (Colum Cille), the Irish noble-monk who had founded Iona about 563 and made it the mother-house of a wide monastic familia spanning Ireland and northern Britain (Bede, HE III.4; Charles-Edwards 2000, 282–290; see St. Columba of Iona). Iona’s monasticism was austere and learned: shaped by the rigorous ascetic ideals of the Irish church, organized around an abbot rather than a diocesan bishop, and marked by a strong commitment to peregrinatio — the ascetic exile for Christ’s sake that had carried Columba himself from Ireland to Iona and would carry Aidan, Finan, and Colmán on to Northumbria (Charles-Edwards 2000, 282–290; Mayr-Harting 1991, 96–99).

What this formation gave Colmán can be inferred with some confidence from Bede’s general portrait of the Ionan churchmen even where Bede tells us nothing of Colmán’s personal history. The Lindisfarne bishops lived frugally, owned little, gave away what they received, and devoted themselves to prayer, study of Scripture, and the discipline of the monastic life (Bede, HE III.5, III.17, III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991, 97–100). Colmán’s later conduct — his withdrawal rather than compromise after Whitby, and his founding of new monastic communities in Ireland on the Ionan pattern — is wholly consistent with a man formed in this school, and Bede, even while opposing him, never accuses him of the worldliness he reproaches in others (Bede, HE III.26, IV.4; Stancliffe 1999, 110–112). The customs Colmán defended he held not as innovations but as the tradition handed to him: Bede has him insist at Whitby that he kept the Easter “which my fathers… observed,” tracing it back through Columba to, as the Irish believed, the Apostle John (Bede, HE III.25; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). For the Ionan party, fidelity to this inherited custom was itself a form of faithfulness; the technical merits of the reckoning are the subject of The Two Easters.

What Bede Does Not Tell Us

It must be said plainly: of Colmán’s life before 661 we know almost nothing, and Bede — our principal and very nearly our only narrative source — supplies scarcely a fact. Bede introduces Colmán only as Finan’s successor and the antagonist of the Roman party at Whitby; he gives no birth-date, no account of Colmán’s parentage, no notice of where in Ireland he was born, and no narrative of his years at Iona before his sending to Lindisfarne (Bede, HE III.25–26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The very name “Colmán” is among the most common in early Irish records — borne by scores of saints and clerics — so that the later Irish material cannot be securely sorted to identify our Colmán’s origins, and modern scholars are cautious about the genealogical and hagiographical claims that attach to the name [Disputed: later Irish and Continental traditions supply details of Colmán's origin and earlier career, but these are late and weakly attested; the early sources (Bede; the Irish annals) give effectively nothing before 661, and historians such as Charles-Edwards (2000, 312–315) treat the pre-episcopal biography as largely unrecoverable]. His birth-year is likewise unrecorded and can only be inferred loosely from his being of an age to hold a senior bishopric in 661 [Disputed: no source gives Colmán's year of birth; estimates placing it in the first quarter of the seventh century are inferences from his episcopate (661–664) and death (676), not data from any early source].

This silence is not unusual for a seventh-century churchman, and it should temper any confident “life” of Colmán. What we can say securely begins in 661 and is framed almost entirely by the controversy that made him known to Bede; what comes before is reconstructed from the Ionan context rather than from any record of the man himself. It is worth adding that Bede writes as a committed adherent of the Roman Easter and of the Romanizing settlement that followed Whitby, so that his framing of Colmán — sympathetic in its way, yet always as the figure who lost the argument and departed — must be read with that allegiance in view (Bede, HE III.25–26; Mayr-Harting 1991, 107–113; the question of Bede’s partiality is treated in Bede as the Narrator). The Irish record, sparse but independent, partly offsets Bede’s perspective and is examined in The Irish Record. Within these limits, the foundation of Colmán’s story is clear enough: an Irish monk of Iona, heir to Columba and to two Irish predecessors at Lindisfarne, who in 661 inherited a thriving Ionan mission and, with it, an unresolved dispute over the keeping of Pascha.

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: the request for a bishop and Aidan’s coming, III.3, III.5; Iona’s governance “by an abbot,” III.4; Aidan’s death (651) and Bede’s eulogy, III.14, III.17; Finan’s episcopate and the early paschal dispute with Rónán, III.21–22, III.25; Colmán’s accession and the appeal to Columba and “John” at Whitby, III.25–26.)
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; notices of Iona, Lindisfarne bishops, and Irish ecclesiastics 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 for the seventh century.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The Ionan mission, the Lindisfarne bishops, and the character of Irish Christianity in Northumbria, esp. 96–113.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (Columba, Iona, the Columban familia, and the difficulty of the early Irish record, esp. 282–290, 312–315.)
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 inherited Ionan customs, esp. 1–18.)
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 customary differences.)