Accepting the Roman Easter

In 664, at the double monastery of Whitby ruled by the Abbess Hilda, King Oswiu of Northumbria heard the long-running dispute over the date of Easter argued out between the Ionan party and the Roman, and ruled for the Roman usage; Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne and the monks who could not accept the decision withdrew to Iona. Cuthbert, an Ionan-trained monk who had himself once been displaced for keeping the Celtic Easter, accepted the synod’s ruling without rancour and gave the rest of his life to making it take root. This file sets out the controversy, the synod, and Cuthbert’s conformity, with both-sides handling of a dispute of discipline and not of dogma.

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

The Easter Question

The controversy that came to a head at Whitby was not, it must be said plainly at the outset, a dispute about the faith. Both parties confessed the same creed, kept the same Pascha, and venerated the same Lord; what divided them was the method of calculating the date of Easter, together with the form of the monastic tonsure and certain lesser usages (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The Irish church, and Iona with it, kept an older 84-year paschal cycle inherited from an earlier stage of Western practice; the rest of the Western Church, and Rome, had by the seventh century adopted the more accurate Alexandrian 19-year cycle as transmitted through Dionysius Exiguus. The two reckonings could fall on different Sundays, so that — as Bede notes with evident discomfort — the king might be keeping the feast of the Resurrection while the queen, trained in the Roman usage, was still in the fast of Palm Sunday week (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). On the principle and the underlying issue, this is the same family of paschal-computus disputes that runs through the early Church; the matter is one of discipline and unity, and is treated as such here (see The Orthodox Reception).

For the Roman party, the divergence was intolerable: the whole Church ought to keep the Lord’s Resurrection on one day, and the Northumbrian peculiarity cut the English off from the unity of Western Christendom. For the Ionan party, the inherited cycle was the tradition of their fathers, of Columba and the holy men of Iona, and not lightly to be abandoned. The dispute had been simmering for years — it had broken the Ripon foundation (see The Ripon Episode) — and it was forced to a decision in 664.

The Synod of Whitby

The synod met in 664 at the double monastery of Streanæshalch, later called Whitby, presided over in its hospitality by the Abbess Hilda, herself of the Ionan party, one of the great figures of the Northumbrian church and the foster-mother of bishops. King Oswiu convened and judged it; his son Alhfrith, the patron of the Roman cause, was present (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). For the Celtic side spoke Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne and successor of Aidan and Finan, defending the usage of Iona as the tradition of Columba and, through him, claiming the authority of the Apostle John. For the Roman side spoke Wilfrid, abbot of Ripon, urbane and forceful, arguing that the Roman usage was that of Peter and Paul and of the universal Church, and that the practice of one remote island could not be set against the consent of Christendom.

The decision turned, in Bede’s telling, on the keys of Peter. Wilfrid pressed the point that the Roman usage rested on the authority of Saint Peter, “to whom the Lord said, Thou art Peter… and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18–19; Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). Oswiu asked Colman whether the Lord had indeed said this to Peter, and whether any such authority had been given to Columba; Colman acknowledged the words to Peter, and the king concluded that he would rather obey the keeper of the keys, “lest, when I come to the gates of the kingdom of heaven, there should be no one to open them” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). With that, Oswiu ruled for the Roman Easter, and the Northumbrian church conformed.

It must be remembered that this account is Bede’s — written sixty years later by a convinced partisan of the Roman cause, who shapes the synod into a vindication of his own party, and whose dramatization of the keys-of-Peter exchange is the work of a great historian with a thesis, not a neutral transcript (Stancliffe and Mayr-Harting, in the scholarship; Mayr-Harting 1991). The decision itself, and its outcome, are not in doubt; the rhetorical shape Bede gives it is to be read with that caution.

Colman’s Departure

Not all could accept the ruling. Bishop Colman, unable in conscience to abandon the usage of his fathers, resigned the see of Lindisfarne and withdrew, taking with him to Iona, and afterward to Ireland, those monks — both Irish and English — who shared his conviction; he carried with him also, at his request, some of the bones of Aidan, that the founder’s relics might not be left behind (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26, IV.4; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede, who judged the Celtic reckoning mistaken, nonetheless writes of Colman and his monks with deep respect, praising the frugality and holiness of the life they led, and his portrait of the departing Ionans is one of the most generous things in his History — a holiness, again, that he honours across the divide (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26). The departure of Colman is treated in the companion collection on Colman of Lindisfarne, who is honoured as a saint precisely for the integrity of his conscience.

Whitby thus did not divide the saints from the sinners; it divided holy men from holy men over a question of discipline. Aidan, who had kept the Celtic Easter, was a saint; Colman, who left rather than abandon it, was a saint; Hilda, who hosted the synod and grieved the change, was a saint; and Cuthbert, who accepted the new usage, was a saint. This is the both-sides handling the question requires (METHODOLOGY §4): the dispute was real and was rightly resolved for unity’s sake, but sanctity was not the possession of either party.

Cuthbert’s Conformity

Where did Cuthbert stand? He was at Whitby’s time a monk and soon prior of Melrose, formed wholly in the Ionan tradition, and — as the Ripon episode shows — he had personally borne the cost of the Celtic Easter. Yet he accepted the synod’s decision, and the Lives present this acceptance as wholehearted and untroubled. He did not follow Colman to Iona; he stayed, conformed, and gave himself to commending the Roman usage to others (Bede, Prose Life 16; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The hagiographers, Roman in sympathy, are naturally pleased to claim him; but there is no reason to doubt the substance, for it is of a piece with everything else in his character — his obedience, his hatred of contention, his readiness to subordinate his own preference to the peace of the Church.

The significance of Cuthbert’s conformity lies exactly in who he was. Had a Roman partisan like Wilfrid accepted the Roman Easter, it would have meant nothing; that an Ionan-trained ascetic, the heir of Aidan’s holiness, accepted it meant a great deal. It showed that the Celtic sanctity and the Roman order were not finally opposed — that one could keep the whole inheritance of Iona, the asceticism, the apostolate, the love of solitude, and yet stand within the unity of the Western Church. In Cuthbert the two things that had clashed at Whitby were reconciled in a single life. This is the deepest reason the English north would come to love him above even Aidan: he embodied the healing of the breach (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, eds., St Cuthbert, 1989, introduction; Thacker, in the same volume).

A Conformity Without Rancour

What the Lives are at pains to stress is the spirit of Cuthbert’s conformity. He did not triumph over the defeated party; he did not, like some, treat the Celtic usage with contempt. He accepted the change as obedience, and then bent himself to the patient, thankless task of bringing a wounded community along with him — work that would occupy him at Lindisfarne and that is the subject of the next file (see Prior of Lindisfarne). His was the conformity not of a victor but of a peacemaker, and it is in that capacity, far more than as a controversialist, that he served the unity Whitby had decreed. The man who had been turned out of Ripon for the Celtic Easter became the man who reconciled Lindisfarne to the Roman one — and did it not by force of argument, which was Wilfrid’s way, but by the force of a holy life.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (III.25: the Easter controversy and the Synod of Whitby; the keys-of-Peter argument; Oswiu’s decision. III.26 and IV.4: Colman’s departure for Iona with Aidan’s bones; Bede’s praise of the Ionan life. IV.27: Cuthbert’s commending of the catholic usage.)
Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Bede, Prose Life 16: Cuthbert teaching the Lindisfarne community the catholic rule and usage.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Cuthbert as the reconciler of Celtic and Roman; Thacker on the cult and the making of the saint.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991. (The Synod of Whitby and Bede’s shaping of it.)
The Holy Scriptures. (Matthew 16:18–19, the keys of Peter, on which Oswiu’s decision turned in Bede’s account.)