04 — The Hermit of Farne
The heart of Cuthbert’s ascetic life: his withdrawal from the priorate of Lindisfarne to the solitude of the Inner Farne, the bare rock in the North Sea where he built a cell sunk into the ground so that he could see nothing but the sky, and gave himself wholly to prayer and the warfare of the spirit — the Egyptian desert transplanted to a northern island. And the nature wonders for which he is most loved: the eider ducks that nested fearlessly about his cell, “St Cuthbert’s birds,” and the otters that came up from the sea to warm and dry his feet after a night of prayer in the cold water.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; wonderworker of Northumbria)
Cuthbert’s eremitism is the centre of his sanctity and the point at which he stands closest to the desert fathers of Egypt whom he never knew. The longing for solitude had been in him from the vision on the hills; the priorate had given it scope and then constrained it; at length, with his abbot’s leave, he went out to the Inner Farne to take up the highest form of the monastic life, the single combat of the hermit. There he won, the Lives say, his greatest victories — over the demons of the place, over the wildness of the island, over his own body — and there the creation itself grew tame around him, the birds and the beasts obeying the man restored to the harmony of Eden. The nature miracles are reported here as what the Lives attest, pinned to their texts; they are not whimsy but theology, the sign of a holiness that heals the breach between man and the creation.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Inner Desert | Cuthbert’s withdrawal to the Inner Farne; the cell sunk in the rock open only to the sky, the oratory, the well struck from the stone; the eremitic ideal as the summit of the monastic life; the conquest of the island and its demons — the Egyptian desert in the North Sea. |
| The Creatures of Farne | The nature wonders, pinned to the Lives: the otters that warmed and dried his feet after his night vigils in the sea; the eider ducks — “St Cuthbert’s birds” — that nested about his cell under his protection; the ravens that did penance; the obedient creation as a sign of restored Eden. |
See Also
- Prior of Lindisfarne — the office Cuthbert laid down to become a hermit
- The Reluctant Bishop — his being drawn from this solitude to the episcopate
- Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers — the eremitic ideal traced to its Egyptian and Antonian source
- St. Antony the Great — the father of hermits whose desert solitude Cuthbert’s life echoes
- Monasticism — the eremitic life as the summit of monastic asceticism
References
- Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
- Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.