Prior of Lindisfarne

After Whitby, Eata became abbot and bishop of Lindisfarne and brought Cuthbert with him from Melrose to be prior of the mother-house — and to do the hardest work of all: to reconcile a grieving, divided community, bereft of its bishop Colman and compelled to abandon the usages of its fathers, to the new Roman order. This file follows Cuthbert’s years as prior of Lindisfarne: his patience with murmuring and resistance, the rule he introduced and the discipline he asked, and above all the way he won the community not by argument or authority but by the manifest holiness and meekness of his own life.

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

A Wounded Community

When Colman departed for Iona after the Synod of Whitby, he left behind at Lindisfarne a community in distress. The mother-church of Northumbrian Christianity had lost its bishop and a portion of its monks; it had been required to give up the paschal reckoning and the tonsure of Aidan and Columba; and many who remained did so in obedience rather than conviction, grieving the change and resentful of those who had imposed it (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26, on the aftermath; Bede, Prose Life 16; ed. and trans. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Into this wounded house King Oswiu and the church set Eata — Cuthbert’s old abbot from Melrose, a man trusted by both parties, one of Aidan’s English boys — as abbot, and Eata brought Cuthbert with him as prior, the officer responsible for the daily discipline and inner life of the community (Bede, Prose Life 16; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The choice was inspired: to reconcile Lindisfarne to the Roman usage, the church sent not a Roman partisan but two of its own Ionan-trained sons, who could ask conformity without seeming to triumph over the defeated.

The Work of Reconciliation

Cuthbert’s task as prior was the patient, unglamorous work of leading a reluctant community into a new discipline. The Lives report that he taught the brethren the catholic, that is the Roman, observance — not only the Easter reckoning but the whole rule of monastic life — and that he did so against real resistance (Bede, Prose Life 16; trans. Colgrave 1940). Bede preserves a vivid detail: when, in the daily chapter-meetings, certain of the monks would oppose Cuthbert’s exhortations with bitter words and rise up in anger against the new ways, he would master his own feelings, rise calmly from his seat with serene face, and dismiss the assembly — only to return the next day, as if nothing had happened, to the same patient teaching, until at last he wore down their obstinacy and brought them round (Bede, Prose Life 16; trans. Colgrave 1940). This portrait of unwearied gentleness under provocation is one of the most attractive in the whole Cuthbert tradition, and it is reported here as the Lives’ own testimony to his character (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What is striking — and what the hagiographers, Roman in sympathy, do not disguise — is that the conformity was achieved not by coercion but by attrition of holiness. Cuthbert had no power to compel; he had only the authority of a manifestly holy life and an inexhaustible patience, and these, the Lives say, were enough. He won the community as he had been formed to win souls in the villages of the Tweed: by persistence, meekness, and the visible weight of his own asceticism.

The Rule and the Discipline

Cuthbert is associated by the tradition with the introduction at Lindisfarne of a stricter and more regular monastic rule. The exact content is not preserved, and there is scholarly debate about how far the later “Rule of Cuthbert,” referred to in subsequent generations, reflects his own legislation as against accretion; [Disputed: Bede and the later community ascribe to Cuthbert the establishment of a rule of life at Lindisfarne still observed in Bede's day (Bede, *Prose Life* 16); whether this was a written rule of his own composition, an adaptation of existing Irish and Benedictine norms, or a body of custom later attributed to him cannot be determined from the sources, and scholars differ (Colgrave 1940; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989)]. What is clear is that under Cuthbert the observance at Lindisfarne was tightened and regularized, drawing the community toward the common discipline of the Western Church while retaining much of the ascetic spirit of its Ionan origins. The result was a house neither purely Celtic nor purely Roman but a fusion — which is what Lindisfarne would remain, and what made it a fitting cradle for the Lives and the Gospels that would carry Cuthbert’s fame (see The Cuthbert Cult and the Gospels).

The Confessor and Spiritual Father

It was in these years at Lindisfarne, the Lives make clear, that Cuthbert’s gift for the cure of souls came fully into its own, and this gift was as important to the reconciling of the community as any discipline he introduced. Bede describes the crowds that came to Cuthbert to lay bare their consciences — not monks only but laity from the surrounding country — confessing their sins, weeping at his words, and going away amended; he had, Bede says, so great a power of compunction, and so penetrating a discernment of what lay hidden in men, that none could conceal their thoughts from him, and all were drawn to disclose what they had done (Bede, Prose Life 16; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). This is the ministry of the spiritual father — the abba of the eastern tradition, the elder to whom the soul opens itself for healing — exercised by Cuthbert in the form it would take in the West, and it is one of the constants of his life, from the villages of his youth to the cell on Farne, where men still came to him for counsel (on this charism of discernment in the ascetic tradition, see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers).

For the reconciliation of Lindisfarne this pastoral gift was decisive. A community wounded by the loss of its bishop and the overturning of its usages was not to be healed by argument alone; it needed a physician of souls, one who could take the grief and resentment of individual men and turn it, in confession and in the chapter, toward peace. Cuthbert was that physician. He won the house not by imposing a rule from above but by drawing each soul, one by one, toward the obedience and charity that the rule expressed — the same patient, personal method by which he had always worked. The prior who reconciled Lindisfarne to Rome did it as a confessor and father, not as an administrator, and this is of a piece with the whole character the Lives give him.

The Witness of His Own Life

Throughout his priorate, the Lives insist, Cuthbert reconciled the community above all by example. He kept the strictest discipline himself — the long vigils, the meagre food, the labour — and tempered it with a warmth and accessibility that drew people to him; Bede describes the crowds that came to confess to him and be counselled, weeping at his words, so that he became a confessor and spiritual father to monks and laity alike (Bede, Prose Life 16; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). It was in these years, too, that the longing for solitude that had always been in him grew stronger, and that he began to withdraw, first to a more solitary spot near the monastery and then, at last, to the Inner Farne — the eremitic vocation that is the subject of the next section (see The Inner Desert).

The priorate of Lindisfarne is thus the bridge in Cuthbert’s life between the active and the contemplative, and between the Celtic and the Roman. He had accepted the Roman Easter at Whitby; now he made it take root in the very heart of the Ionan church in England, and did it so gently that the community came to love him for it. When he laid down the office of prior to become a hermit, he left behind a Lindisfarne reconciled to the unity of the Western Church but still recognizably the house of Aidan — ascetic, monastic, a nursery of holiness. That reconciliation, achieved by patience rather than power, is one of his enduring legacies, and the ground on which the later cult would build.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Bede, Prose Life 16: Cuthbert as prior of Lindisfarne; the teaching of the catholic rule; his patience with angry opposition in the chapter; the establishment of a rule of life; his role as confessor.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (III.26: the state of Lindisfarne after Colman’s departure; IV.27: Cuthbert’s priorate, preaching, and spiritual fatherhood.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Eata and Cuthbert at Lindisfarne; the question of the “Rule of Cuthbert”; the fusion of Celtic and Roman observance.)