The Columban Tradition and Whitby

The Ionan mission carried into Northumbria not only the faith but the customs of Columba’s house — most visibly the older reckoning of Easter that Iona retained when most of the West had moved on, and the distinctive ear-to-ear tonsure of the Celtic monks. In Northumbria the Ionan and Roman observances came to coexist within one kingdom and even one royal household, until the Synod of Whitby (664) resolved the calendar for Northumbria in favour of Rome; Colmán of Lindisfarne, an Iona man, defended the Columban Easter and, when King Oswiu decided against him, withdrew with his monks to Iona and Ireland. This file sets out both customs and both cases — the Ionan appeal to apostolic antiquity and fidelity to the fathers, and the Roman appeal to universal uniformity and Petrine authority — as a disciplinary difference within the one pre-Schism Church, without adjudicating who was right.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)

A Disciplinary Difference, Not a Heresy

Before the particulars, the nature of the dispute must be fixed, because everything in its handling depends on it. The disagreement between the Ionan (“Celtic”) party and the Roman party over the date of Easter and the form of the tonsure was a difference of discipline and custom, not of dogma. No article of the creed was at stake; both sides confessed the same Trinity, the same Christ, the same sacraments, and both kept the resurrection of Christ on a Sunday — the question was only which Sunday, computed by which table. This is a difference within the one undivided Church of the pre-Schism centuries, and it is to be presented as such: the positions named, the appeals on each side set out, and no verdict pronounced as to which party was “right” in the eyes of God (METHODOLOGY §4; and see The Pre-Schism Church). The model for such even-handed treatment in this repository is the second-century Pascha controversy between Polycarp and Anicetus, who “agreed to differ in peace” — two apostolic customs held in communion across their difference (cf. the treatment of the Quartodeciman dispute in the Polycarp collection). Bede himself, for all that he writes as a committed partisan of Rome, never doubts the sanctity of the Ionan saints; he laments their calendar and venerates their holiness in the same breath (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 3.3, 3.5, 3.17; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

The Columban Easter: The 84-Year Reckoning

Easter is a movable feast governed by a calculation: it falls on the Sunday following the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which requires a table reconciling the solar year, the lunar month, and the seven-day week — the science the medievals called computus. Because the sun and moon do not keep step in whole numbers, different Easter tables, built on different cycles and different fixed equinoxes, will sometimes assign Easter to different Sundays in the same year. The dispute was a dispute between tables.

The Irish and Ionan churches kept an older reckoning, an 84-year cycle transmitted in a table known to scholars as the latercus (the Insular 84-year Easter table). Its cycle, its assumed date of the equinox, and its limits for the Paschal full moon differed from those of the cycle that had by the seventh century become standard in Rome and most of the West — the 19-year (Alexandrian / Dionysian) cycle, fixed by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century and propagated through the continental and Roman churches (general computus scholarship; Sharpe 1995, introduction). The practical effect was that in certain years the Ionan Easter and the Roman Easter fell on different Sundays, and in some years the Ionan reckoning could place Easter on a date the Roman party regarded as falling outside the permissible lunar limits — within, as they saw it, the range proper to the Jewish Passover rather than after it (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). [Disputed: Bede repeatedly characterizes the Celtic Easter as "Quartodeciman" or as keeping Easter "with the Jews" (*HE* 3.4, 3.25), but this is a polemical mischaracterization: the Insular churches always kept Easter on a Sunday and were not true Quartodecimans (who kept 14 Nisan whatever the weekday); modern scholarship (e.g. the *computus* literature; Sharpe 1995) identifies the real difference as the 84-year *latercus* versus the 19-year cycle, with differing equinox and lunar limits, not a keeping of Easter on a fixed weekday].

The crucial point for the Ionan self-understanding is that this reckoning was not an innovation or a carelessness but an inheritance — the table their fathers had used, received as part of the tradition of their house and defended precisely as tradition. Iona retained it after most of the West had conformed to the newer cycle, and retained it not from ignorance of the alternative but from fidelity to what had been handed down (Sharpe 1995; Herbert 1988; HE 3.4).

The Tonsure: Peter Against Simon Magus

The second visible mark of the Celtic clergy was the form of the tonsure — the shaving of the head by which a monk or cleric was distinguished. The Roman and continental clergy wore the coronal tonsure: the crown of the head shaved, leaving a circle of hair, understood as a symbol of the crown of thorns and traced by its keepers to the authority of St Peter. The Celtic clergy wore a different form — described in the sources as a shaving across the front of the head from ear to ear, leaving the hair at the back, sometimes called the tonsure of St John by its defenders (general scholarship on the Insular church; HE 5.21 for the contrast and the Petrine claim of the Roman form). The exact shape of the Celtic tonsure is not certainly known: [Disputed: the precise geometry of the Celtic tonsure is not described in detail by any contemporary source; the common reconstruction is a shaving of the front of the head from ear to ear (leaving the rear hair), but the sources give the polemical labels more clearly than the physical form, and the reconstruction remains partly inferential].

Where the dispute turned bitter was in the genealogy each side claimed for the other. The Roman party derided the Celtic tonsure as the tonsure “of Simon Magus” — that is, as deriving not from an apostle but from the arch-heretic of Acts 8 — while honouring their own as the tonsure of St Peter (the charge is reported in the computus and conciliar literature; cf. HE 5.21, where the Roman case for the Petrine tonsure is set out). The Celtic side traced their form, like their Easter, to apostolic authority — to St John the Evangelist, the disciple from whom the churches of Asia and, through them as they believed, their own usages descended. The tonsure dispute thus mirrors the Easter dispute exactly: two parties, each claiming an apostolic pedigree for its custom (John for the Celtic, Peter for the Roman), and each tempted to read the other’s custom as a deviation. As with the calendar, the matter is one of discipline and not of faith, and the polemical labels — “of Simon Magus” on the one side, the implied novelty of the other — are reported here as the rhetoric of the dispute, not endorsed (METHODOLOGY §4).

A House Divided: Easter in the Northumbrian Court

In Northumbria the two reckonings did not merely coexist in the abstract; for a time they ran side by side in the royal household itself, with a consequence that Bede records as the scandal that forced the question to a head. King Oswiu of Northumbria, Oswald’s brother and successor, had been formed like Oswald among the Irish and kept the Ionan Easter; his queen, Eanflæd, a daughter of the Roman-baptized Edwin, had been brought up in the Kentish (Roman) observance and kept her Easter by the Roman table, attended by a priest, Romanus, of the same persuasion (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Because the two tables sometimes diverged, Bede writes, “it is said that the confusion in those days was such that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one 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” (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). A single court celebrating the Resurrection and keeping the Great Fast on different days, year by year, was an anomaly that could not be left to stand; it was, in Bede’s telling, the immediate occasion of the synod (HE 3.25). (On the liturgical reckoning at issue, see The Church Calendar.)

The Synod of Whitby (664)

The assembly met in 664 at the monastery of Streanæshalch — Whitby — the double house ruled by the Abbess Hild, and Bede gives it a set-piece account in the form of a debate before King Oswiu, who presided and who would decide (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The two cases were put by two champions.

For the Ionan / Columban party spoke Colmán, bishop of Lindisfarne and an Iona man, who held that his church’s Easter was the Easter “which my fathers and their predecessors, men beloved of God, are known to have kept,” and which, he urged, derived from the authority of St John the Evangelist and through the unbroken practice of the holy fathers of his tradition, Columba foremost among them (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Colmán’s argument was an argument from antiquity and fidelity: the custom was apostolic in its pedigree, sanctified by the saints who had kept it — and Columba’s own holiness, attested by signs, stood behind it. To abandon it would be to convict his fathers, and Columba himself, of error (HE 3.25; Herbert 1988).

For the Roman / Petrine party spoke Wilfrid, who answered that the Easter he and the catholic Church kept was the Easter observed at Rome, “where the blessed apostles Peter and Paul lived, taught, suffered, and were buried,” and throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Egypt — in a word, throughout the whole world wherever the Church of Christ was spread, the one exception being “only these and their accomplices in obstinacy, … the Picts and the Britons, who foolishly, in these two remote islands … oppose all the rest of the universe” (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Wilfrid’s argument was an argument from universality and authority: the Roman usage was that of the whole Church, founded on the chief of the apostles, and a small and remote custom could not stand against the consent of the world. As for St John, Wilfrid contended that the Johannine and Petrine practices, rightly understood, did not in fact conflict, and that in any case the keys of the kingdom had been given to Peter (HE 3.25; Matt 16:18–19, on which Wilfrid leaned).

The decision turned, in Bede’s dramatic telling, on Peter and the keys. Oswiu asked Colmán whether it was true that the Lord had said to Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and to thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” and Colmán granted that it was; the king then asked whether any like authority had been given to Columba, and when no such word could be alleged, Oswiu concluded that he would obey the door-keeper of heaven, “lest, when I come to the gates of the kingdom of heaven, there should be none to open them, he being my adversary who is proved to hold the keys” (HE 3.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). With that the king decided for the Roman Easter, and the assembly, save for the Ionan party, assented.

Colmán’s Withdrawal

Colmán would not conform. Rather than abandon the Easter of his fathers he resigned the see of Lindisfarne and departed, taking with him those who shared his conviction — the Irish monks of his community and a number of the English brethren who chose to follow him — back first to Iona and then to Ireland, where he eventually settled and founded houses, among them Inishbofin off the western coast (HE 3.26, 4.4; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede records the withdrawal without rancour and indeed with a measure of admiration for the austerity and integrity of the departing community; he uses the occasion to praise the frugal and unworldly life of the Ionan monks at Lindisfarne, who had owned almost nothing and lived wholly for God (HE 3.26). Colmán’s departure was the end of the Ionan ascendancy in Northumbria: Lindisfarne passed to others, the Northumbrian church conformed to Rome, and the daughter-house of Iona was severed, on the point of the calendar, from its mother (HE 3.26; Herbert 1988). His own story is treated in his collection (see St. Colmán of Lindisfarne).

It is worth marking what the withdrawal was and was not. It was not an excommunication or a schism over the faith; it was a man declining to give up a discipline he had received as holy, and removing himself rather than betray his fathers. Bede, who thought Colmán mistaken, does not call him a heretic and does not unchurch him; he honours his integrity even while regretting his error (HE 3.26). That is the temper this section seeks to preserve.

Iona’s Own Conformity (716)

Whitby decided Northumbria, not Iona. The mother-house held to its older Easter for another half-century, and the conformity of Iona itself, when it came, came slowly and from within. Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona and the biographer of Columba, had himself been persuaded of the Roman Easter — Bede says he was “led … to the catholic observance of Easter” while visiting Northumbria — and tried to bring his own community over, but could not prevail upon the monks of Iona in his lifetime (HE 5.15, 5.21; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). [Disputed: Bede (*HE* 5.15) states that Adomnán adopted the Roman Easter and "almost all" who were subject to him conformed, yet that he failed to win over his own monastery of Iona; some accounts read this as Adomnán bringing many Irish houses over while Iona alone resisted, but the extent of his success and the reasons Iona held back are not detailed in the sources and remain partly uncertain]. It was only in 716, after Adomnán’s death, that Iona at last accepted the Roman reckoning, brought over — Bede tells us — chiefly through the patient persuasion of Ecgberht, an English monk long resident in Ireland, who came to Iona and “by his pious and frequent exhortations … reduced them to the canonical observance” of Easter, and afterwards of the tonsure as well (HE 5.22; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede dwells on the symmetry he sees in it: the very year, as he reckons, in which Iona conformed was near the time of other providential orderings, and he reads the long-delayed reconciliation as the gentle gathering-in of the last holdouts to the unity of the whole Church (HE 5.22).

That Iona was reconciled not by compulsion but by an Englishman’s long persuasion, and that the change came peacefully and from within the community’s own deliberation, is a detail Bede preserves with evident satisfaction, and it closes the controversy on the note with which it should be read: a difference of custom, long held in good faith, at last composed without rupture to the communion of the Church.

How an Orthodox Reader Holds the Whole

The Easter and tonsure dispute is a disciplinary difference within the undivided Church, and it should leave an Orthodox reader’s veneration of the Ionan saints wholly intact. The Ionan case — the apostolic antiquity claimed for their custom, their fidelity to the fathers who had handed it down, their refusal to convict Columba and the saints of error — is a real and honourable case, and Colmán’s withdrawal was an act of conscience, not of rebellion against the faith (HE 3.25–26). The Roman case — the value of a single, universal observance so that the whole Church might keep the Lord’s Resurrection together, and the appeal to the see and the apostle around whom that unity was gathered — is likewise a real and honourable case (HE 3.25). The repository does not adjudicate between them as to who was right before God; it sets out both, as the methodology requires (METHODOLOGY §4). What is not in dispute, and was not in dispute even to Bede, is the sanctity of Columba and of the Ionan fathers: the calendar by which they kept Easter neither made nor unmade their holiness. Columba’s own sanctity “was never in question” in the controversy his successors carried into England (cf. HE 3.25, where even Wilfrid does not deny it). The dispute is, in the end, a chapter in the long story of how the one Church held unity and diversity together — and how, on this point, it eventually chose uniformity, without thereby casting out the saints who had kept the older way.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (HE 3.4 for the presbyter-abbot custom and Bede’s “with the Jews” characterization; 3.17 on Aidan’s sanctity; 3.25 for the divided court of Oswiu and Eanflæd and the full debate at Whitby — Colmán’s appeal to John and Columba, Wilfrid’s appeal to Rome and Peter, Oswiu’s decision on the keys; 3.26 for Colmán’s withdrawal and the praise of the Ionan monks; 4.4 for Colmán in Ireland and Inishbofin; 5.15 and 5.21 for Adomnán’s adoption of the Roman Easter and his failure to win Iona; 5.22 for Iona’s conformity in 716 through Ecgberht.)
Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995. (Iona’s self-understanding; Adomnán as abbot and author.)
Sharpe, Richard. Introduction to Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba. London: Penguin, 1995. (The 84-year latercus versus the 19-year cycle; the nature of the Easter difference and the case against the “Quartodeciman” label; Iona’s retention and eventual abandonment of its Easter.)
Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (The Columban familia, Lindisfarne’s place within it, and the consequences of Whitby for the federation.)
Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. (The Ionan community’s own tradition and self-presentation.)