The Shepherd Boy and the Vision

The Lives give Cuthbert no pedigree and little childhood, but they preserve two scenes that they present as foreshadowing his vocation: the playful eight-year-old rebuked for frivolity by a younger child who calls him to his destined dignity, and — the hinge of the whole story — the night on the hills near the river Leader when the young shepherd saw the soul of a holy man carried up to heaven by a host of angels, and learned afterward that Bishop Aidan had died in that very hour. This file sets out the Lives’ account of Cuthbert’s origins, the disputed question of his birth, and the vision that called him, with the attestation of each scene pinned to its source.

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

A Saint Without a Pedigree

For a figure so well documented in his maturity, Cuthbert’s origins are strikingly obscure, and the obscurity is itself significant. Neither the anonymous Lindisfarne Life nor Bede names his parents, his lineage, or with certainty his birthplace; he enters the record already a youth, in the care of a foster-mother named Kenswith whom he later called mother, in a village in the region of the Tweed (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.3–4; Bede, Prose Life 1–2; trans. Colgrave 1940). This silence is not the silence of ignorance only; it is also the deliberate humility of the hagiographic tradition, which presents Cuthbert as a saint whose nobility is of grace and not of blood — the opposite of the aristocratic Wilfrid, his great contemporary, whose Life by Stephen of Ripon makes much of his noble birth.

The date of his birth is not given directly but is calculated back from the firmer dates of his later life — his death in 687 in or near his fifty-third year, by Bede’s reckoning — yielding a birth of about 634, the very year of Oswald’s victory at Heavenfield and on the eve of the founding of Lindisfarne (Colgrave 1940, introduction; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, eds., St Cuthbert, 1989). He was thus an exact contemporary of the Christianizing of his country: he grew up as Northumbria was becoming Christian.

His origin has been the subject of an old and unresolved debate. [Disputed: the *Lives* present Cuthbert without comment as a Northumbrian Englishman, born in the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia, and this is the view of most modern scholarship (Colgrave 1940; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989); a later medieval Irish tradition, however, preserved in the twelfth- or thirteenth-century *Libellus de ortu Sancti Cuthberti*, claims him as Irish, the son of an Irish princess, a claim generally judged a late and tendentious appropriation rather than reliable evidence (Colgrave 1940, on the late *Lives*; Rollason in *St Cuthbert* 1989)]. The Irish claim is best understood as a measure of how much both traditions wished to own him; the sober conclusion is that he was an English boy of the Tweed valley, formed by an Irish-derived monasticism.

The Child Rebuked at Play

The first scene the Lives preserve from his childhood is a small, telling one. Cuthbert as a boy of about eight, the anonymous author reports, was lively, agile, and fond of games, outdoing his companions at running, jumping, and wrestling, so that he was often the centre of their play. One day, in the midst of such sport, a child of about three came to him and, with a gravity beyond his years, rebuked him: he should not be wasting himself in idle play but should remember the steadfastness of mind that God had given him and the rank to which he was destined. The infant burst into tears, would not be comforted, and was only quieted when Cuthbert left off his games; and the boy, the Life says, took the words to heart and grew thereafter in seriousness (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.3; Bede, Prose Life 1; trans. Colgrave 1940).

This episode is reported here as what the Lives attest, not as established biography (METHODOLOGY §3.5). It belongs to the recognizable hagiographic motif of the puer senex, the child wise beyond his years, and to the convention by which a saint’s future greatness is announced in his infancy. Bede, characteristically, develops the moral of it more fully than his source, drawing out the lesson that gravity and the fear of God ought to govern even childhood. Whatever its historical kernel, the scene’s function is clear: it marks Cuthbert as set apart from the beginning, his playfulness a thing to be outgrown for a higher seriousness.

The Shepherd on the Hills

In his youth Cuthbert was a shepherd. The Lives place him keeping sheep on the hills near the river Leader, a tributary of the Tweed, by night as well as day — a detail that matters, because it sets the scene for the vision that follows (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.5; Bede, Prose Life 4; trans. Colgrave 1940). The image of Cuthbert the shepherd-boy has had a long afterlife in his cult, partly for its evangelical resonance — the shepherd called to be a shepherd of souls, David taken from the sheepfolds — and partly because it sets his sanctity, like that of the desert fathers, in the open country and not in the city or the court. It is consonant with everything that follows: Cuthbert is throughout a saint of the wild places, the moors and the islands, more at home with the creatures of the sea and the hills than with the affairs of kings.

The Vision of Aidan’s Soul

The decisive scene of his youth — the scene the Lives present as the hinge of his vocation — comes during this shepherding. One night, while his companions slept and Cuthbert kept watch over the flock and prayed, as was his habit, he saw the sky suddenly open and a light pour down, and in the light a stream of angels descending to the earth and then ascending again, bearing up with them in their midst a soul of surpassing brightness, a holy soul carried in glory to heaven (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.5; Bede, Prose Life 4; trans. Colgrave 1940). Waking his companions, Cuthbert told them what he had seen and was filled with longing to follow such a life. Only afterward did he learn what the vision had meant: that in that very hour a holy man had died — and the Lives identify him as Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne, whose death the records place on 31 August 651 (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.5; Bede, Prose Life 4; and Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.17 for Aidan’s death; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

This vision is reported here, under METHODOLOGY §3.5, as the claim of the Lives — pinned to the anonymous Lindisfarne Life and to Bede, who took it from his source. It is the earliest miracle in the Cuthbert tradition and the most theologically loaded, for it binds Cuthbert directly to Aidan: the founder of Lindisfarne, dying, is as it were handed on to the boy who will one day be Lindisfarne’s greatest bishop, and the moment of one saint’s death becomes the moment of another’s call. The literary effect is to make Cuthbert Aidan’s spiritual heir, the continuator of the Ionan holiness even across the coming change of usages — a point the hagiographers, especially Bede, were keen to make, since Cuthbert would be claimed for the Roman party while embodying the sanctity of the Celtic one (Stancliffe, in St Cuthbert 1989; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, eds., 1989). On Aidan’s death and the soul-borne-to-heaven motif as it appears in his own Life, see the companion collection on St. Aidan of Lindisfarne.

The synchronism of the vision with Aidan’s death is the kind of detail that source-criticism handles with care: the Lives offer it as a true correspondence revealed to Cuthbert after the fact, and it functions to date his call precisely to 651, when he would have been about seventeen. Whether the boy in fact saw such a thing in that hour is not a question history can settle; what can be said is that the earliest Life, written at Lindisfarne within fifty years, already tells the story this way, and that the whole subsequent tradition received Cuthbert as the one called by the sight of Aidan’s ascending soul.

From the Hills to the Monastery

The vision, the Lives say, settled Cuthbert’s resolve, though some years passed — and, in the anonymous Life, a period of military service in his youth, which Bede notably omits — before he acted on it (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.7; on Bede’s omission, Colgrave 1940; Stancliffe in St Cuthbert 1989). At length he came on horseback, armed and with a servant, to the monastery of Melrose on the Tweed, where the saintly Boisil was prior under Abbot Eata, and there gave himself to the monastic life. Boisil, seeing him approach, is said to have foreseen his sanctity and greeted him with the words of the Lord concerning Nathanael, “Behold a servant of God” (cf. John 1:47; Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.7; Bede, Prose Life 6; trans. Colgrave 1940). With his entry into Melrose the foundations are laid and the life proper begins — the subject of the next section.

The first paragraph of Cuthbert’s story, then, is the story of a vocation: a fatherless boy of the Tweed, formed in the years his country was becoming Christian, called by the sight of Aidan’s soul to take up Aidan’s life. That he was the heir of the Celtic-monastic holiness, and that he would carry it intact through the great change of his age, is written into the very scene of his calling.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life I.3–7: childhood, the rebuking child, the shepherding, the vision of Aidan’s soul, the early military service, and the coming to Melrose; Bede, Prose Life 1–6, parallel; introduction on dating, origin, and the late Irish Lives.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (III.17: the death of Aidan, 31 August 651.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Cuthbert’s origin and the English/Irish question; Stancliffe on Bede’s reshaping of the early life.)
The Holy Scriptures. (John 1:47, Nathanael, echoed in Boisil’s greeting.)