The Seed of Lindisfarne

When the exiled prince Oswald regained the throne of Northumbria after his victory at Heavenfield in 634, he sent to Iona — the monastery of his own conversion years — for a bishop to evangelize his people. Iona answered, after a first and unsuccessful attempt, by sending Aidan, who in 635 founded the monastery of Lindisfarne on a tidal island off the Northumbrian coast as a daughter-house of Iona, modeled on it in discipline and life. This file traces how Columba’s island became, a generation after his death, the spiritual mother of English Christianity, and how Bede — though a Roman-rite Northumbrian — preserved a portrait of Aidan and the Ionan mission of striking warmth.

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

Iona Outliving Its Founder

Columba died on Iona in 597, the year, as it happened, in which Augustine and his monks landed in Kent to begin the Roman mission to the English (Adomnán, Vita Sancti Columbae, on the saint’s death; trans. Sharpe 1995; Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 1.25 for Augustine’s arrival; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Columba’s own mission had been to the Picts of the north and to his own Irish kin in Dál Riata, not to the Anglo-Saxons (see The Vita Columbae). The evangelization of Northumbria that this file describes is therefore not Columba’s personal work but the work of the monastic familia he founded — Iona acting, two generations on, as the head of a federation of houses and a school of monks (see The Familia of Columba). That a Hebridean monastery should become the mother-church of a kingdom in eastern England is the measure of how far Columba’s foundation had grown beyond him, and it is the central fact this section sets out to honour.

The bridge between Iona and Northumbria was built first by politics and exile, and only then by mission. To understand how a Northumbrian king came to send to a monastery in the Inner Hebrides for his bishops, one must begin with the wars of the Northumbrian dynasty and the long years its princes spent among the Irish and the Scots of Dál Riata.

Oswald: Exile, Baptism, and Heavenfield

When the pagan Northumbrian king Æthelfrith was killed in 616 and Edwin took the throne, the sons of Æthelfrith — among them the boy Oswald — fled into exile in the north and west, into the Irish-speaking world of Dál Riata and the Scots, the same world to which Iona belonged. There, Bede tells us, Oswald and his companions “were instructed according to the doctrine of the Scots, and received the grace of baptism” (HE 3.1; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The young prince thus became a Christian not at home and not from Rome, but among the Irish, and very probably within the orbit of Iona itself — a formation that would decide where he turned when, as king, he sought to convert his people (HE 3.1–3; Herbert 1988). Bede does not name Iona as the place of Oswald’s baptism in so many words, and the exact house cannot be fixed: [Disputed: Bede (*HE* 3.1, 3.3) places Oswald's exile and baptism among "the Scots" / Irish and makes Iona the source of his later appeal for a bishop, but does not explicitly state that he was baptized on Iona itself; some scholars (e.g. Herbert 1988) treat Iona or its familia as the likely setting, while the precise monastery of his baptism remains unrecorded].

Edwin, who had himself been converted by the Roman mission under Paulinus, fell in battle in 633 against the pagan Mercian Penda and the British king Cædwalla (Cadwallon), and Northumbria relapsed into a season of slaughter and apostasy that Bede recounts with horror (HE 2.20, 3.1). It was into this ruin that Oswald returned to claim his inheritance. In 634 he met the British army of Cædwalla near Hexham, at a place Bede calls Heavenfield (Hefenfelth, “the heavenly field”), and there he won the victory that gave him the kingdom. Bede dwells on the manner of it: before the battle Oswald set up a wooden cross, holding it himself with his own hands while the earth was packed around its base, and called his whole army to kneel and pray to the living God for deliverance (HE 3.2; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The victory at Heavenfield, won under the sign of the cross by a king baptized among the Irish, is the hinge of the whole Northumbrian story: it placed on the throne a Christian who looked not to Canterbury but to Iona for the conversion of his realm (HE 3.2–3).

The Request to Iona — and the First, Failed Mission

Established in his kingdom, Oswald moved at once to bring his people to the faith in which he had been raised. Bede is explicit about where he turned: “Oswald, as soon as he came to the throne, being desirous that all the nation under his rule should be imbued with the grace of the Christian faith … sent to the elders of the Scots, among whom he and his companions, when in exile, had received the sacrament of baptism, requesting that they would send him a bishop, by whose teaching and ministry the English nation which he governed might learn the privileges and receive the sacraments of the faith of our Lord” (HE 3.3; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The “elders of the Scots” were the community of Iona, and the request was answered by the sending of a bishop into England (HE 3.3; Herbert 1988).

Bede then preserves a revealing anecdote about the mission’s beginning. The first bishop Iona sent, he reports, was a man “of harsher disposition” (austerioris animi) who, meeting with no success among the English, “returned home, and in an assembly of the elders reported that he had not been able to do any good to the nation he had been sent to preach to, because they were intractable men, and of a stubborn and barbarous disposition” (HE 3.5; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). At the council that followed on Iona, while the brethren debated what to do, one of them — Aidan — turned to the failed missionary and said that he had been too hard on his untaught hearers, and had not first, after the manner of the apostles, given them the “milk” of gentler doctrine before bringing them to the harder teaching; whereupon all eyes turned to Aidan as the man fit for the task, and he was consecrated and sent (HE 3.5; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The story should be received as Bede reports it — as a tradition he records, not as an independently documented fact: [Disputed: the episode of the first, "harsher" bishop who failed and was replaced by Aidan rests solely on Bede (*HE* 3.5), writing nearly a century later from Northumbrian tradition; it carries an obvious moral and hagiographical shaping (gentleness versus rigour) and cannot be checked against any earlier source, so its precise historicity is uncertain even as it preserves the community's memory of why Aidan in particular was chosen]. Even as a tradition, however, it tells us something the section is concerned to mark: that the Ionan mission understood its own method as one of gentleness and gradual nurture, and chose its missionary accordingly.

Aidan and the Founding of Lindisfarne (635)

The monk whom Iona sent was Aidan (Irish Áedán), consecrated bishop and dispatched to Oswald’s kingdom about 635 (HE 3.3, 3.5; Herbert 1988). For his episcopal seat he chose not a Roman-style city but an island: Lindisfarne, a tidal isle off the Northumbrian coast near the royal fortress of Bamburgh, cut off from the mainland by the sea at high tide and joined to it at the ebb. Bede notes the choice and its fitness: “as the tide ebbs and flows, this place is twice a day enclosed by the waves of the sea like an island, and twice, when the shore is left dry, becomes again contiguous to the land” (HE 3.3; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The selection of a tidal island as the base of mission was a deliberate transplanting of the Ionan pattern — a monastery set apart by water, a place of withdrawal from which the monks went out to preach and to which they returned — onto Northumbrian soil. Lindisfarne was, in institution and spirit, a daughter-house of Iona: founded by an Iona monk, governed in the Ionan manner, and bound into the Columban familia, so that its abbot-bishops looked to Iona as their mother and kept the customs Iona kept (HE 3.3–5; Herbert 1988; and see The Familia of Columba).

The model carried over even in the peculiar government that had so struck Bede on Iona itself, where a presbyter-abbot ruled bishops (HE 3.4). At Lindisfarne the bishop was at the same time a monk under the monastic discipline, and the house was a monastery first and a cathedral second; the Ionan fusion of episcopal office with monastic life was reproduced on the Northumbrian coast (HE 3.4–5; Herbert 1988). This was the “seed” of Lindisfarne: a single Iona monk and his companions planting on an English shore a monastery that would become, in Bede’s own century, one of the great centres of Northumbrian Christianity and learning.

“He Was Wont to Traverse All”: Aidan’s Character and Method

Bede’s portrait of Aidan is the most sustained tribute he pays to any figure of the Ionan party, and it is given with a warmth all the more notable because Bede disapproved of Aidan’s Easter. He sets down the praise and the reservation together: Aidan, he writes, taught the clergy and people “no otherwise than as he himself lived with his clergy”; he loved “to give to the poor whatsoever he received from kings or rich men of the world”; he traveled everywhere on foot, not on horseback, so that he might meet and speak with whomever he encountered along the road, “rich or poor,” and call them to the faith or build them up in it (HE 3.5; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). He used what kings gave him to ransom captives and to educate the freed for the Church. He kept the fasts and the discipline of his rule strictly, and his sober and continent life was, Bede says, a standing rebuke to the slackness of the times (HE 3.5; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

That the Ionan mission won Northumbria by this method — itinerant, ascetic, gentle, modeled on the apostolic going-out on foot — is the burden of Bede’s account, and he attributes to it the rapid spread of the faith under Oswald and his successor Oswiu (HE 3.3–6). King Oswald himself, Bede records, would interpret for Aidan in the early days, for the bishop “was not perfectly skilled in the English tongue,” so that the king translated the Irish monk’s preaching to his ealdormen and thegns — a vivid image of the partnership between the Iona-formed king and the Iona-sent bishop (HE 3.3; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Out of Lindisfarne the mission radiated: monks and priests trained in the Ionan way founded churches, baptized, and taught across Northumbria, and from there the influence reached into Mercia and the kingdoms of the Middle Angles and East Saxons in the following decades (HE 3.21–22, on the later Ionan-trained missions). The whole of this northern Christianity, in its first generation, was Iona’s offspring.

Bede’s Reservation, and How to Read It

Bede does not hide that he thought Aidan and his fellow Ionans wrong on the central disciplinary question of the Easter reckoning, and he says so even in the midst of his praise. He admires Aidan’s “love of God, … continence, humility … and similar virtues” and his apostolic life, but adds that he “did not keep Easter at the proper time” — though, Bede is careful to say, Aidan kept it as his fathers had taught him, out of no contempt for the truth but in the conviction, inherited and sincere, that he was keeping it rightly (HE 3.3, 3.5; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede frames the whole as the error of a holy man, not the malice of a heretic: he laments the calendar while venerating the saint, and he goes out of his way to record that Aidan’s sanctity was attested by signs and by the testimony of the whole northern church (HE 3.5, 3.15–17). The Easter question itself — what was at stake in it, and how it was resolved at Whitby — belongs to the companion file (see The Columban Tradition and Whitby).

For an Orthodox reader the point to hold is the one Bede himself, despite his partisanship, makes unmistakable: the difference over Easter was a difference of custom within the one undivided Church, not a difference of faith, and it did not place the Ionan saints outside the communion of the holy (see The Pre-Schism Church; METHODOLOGY §4). Aidan, sent from Columba’s island, evangelized Northumbria in poverty and gentleness and is honoured as a saint in both the Western and the Orthodox reckoning; that he kept his fathers’ Easter neither earned nor cost him that honour. The fuller treatment of Aidan’s life and cult is reserved to his own collection (see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne).

Iona as the Mother of English Christianity

The historical claim that this file exists to make is a large one and is worth stating plainly. The Christianization of Northumbria — and through Northumbria a great part of the English midlands and north — was carried out in its first and decisive generation not by the Roman mission of Augustine working out from Canterbury, but by the monastic mission of Iona working out from Lindisfarne (HE 3.3–6, 3.21–22; Herbert 1988). Canterbury’s mission had faltered in the north after the death of Edwin and the flight of Paulinus; it was Iona’s monks who rebuilt the northern church and gave it its enduring shape (HE 2.20, 3.3). For the better part of thirty years, until the Synod of Whitby, the Northumbrian church looked to Iona as its mother and kept Iona’s customs (HE 3.25; and see the companion file).

This is Columba’s legacy reaching England a generation and more after his repose. The saint who never preached to the English nonetheless became, through the familia he founded and the school of monks it formed, the spiritual ancestor of English Christianity in the north. When Bede — a Northumbrian and a beneficiary of that very church — sat down to write its history, he could not tell the story of his own people’s conversion without telling the story of Iona; and for all his disagreement over the calendar, he told it with reverence. That, in the end, is the seed of Lindisfarne: a single monk sent from a Hebridean island, planting a monastery from which a nation’s faith grew.

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 1.25 for Augustine’s landing; 2.20 for the relapse after Edwin; 3.1 for Oswald’s exile and baptism among the Irish; 3.2 for Heavenfield and the cross; 3.3 for the request to Iona, Aidan’s sending, Lindisfarne, and Oswald interpreting; 3.4 for the presbyter-abbot custom; 3.5 for the first failed bishop, the choice of Aidan, and Aidan’s character; 3.15–17 for Aidan’s signs; 3.21–22 for the later Ionan-trained missions.)
Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995. (Columba’s death in 597; Iona’s self-understanding.)
Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (Iona as head of the familia; the Northumbrian mission and the standing of Lindisfarne within the Columban federation.)
Sharpe, Richard. Introduction to Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba. London: Penguin, 1995. (Iona’s place in the seventh-century Insular church.)