The Inner Desert

The longing for solitude that had drawn Cuthbert since the vision on the hills found its fulfilment on the Inner Farne, a treeless rock in the North Sea two miles from Bamburgh, where he built a cell sunk into the ground and walled so high that he could see nothing but heaven, dug a well from the dry stone, and gave himself to the single combat of the hermit. This file sets out Cuthbert’s withdrawal to Farne, the form of his eremitic life, the conquest of the island and its demons as the Lives report it, and the meaning of his solitude as the Egyptian desert transplanted to the English north — the summit, in the tradition he inherited, of the monastic ascent.

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

The Longing for Solitude

For Cuthbert, as for the whole monastic tradition descending from Egypt, the solitary life of the hermit was not a flight from the duties of the community but the highest stage of the ascetic ascent — the place where, having been proved in the common life, the monk goes out to meet God and the powers of darkness alone (on this graded ideal, see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers; Monasticism). The Lives present this longing as constant in Cuthbert from his youth, deepening through the years of mission and the priorate. At Lindisfarne he had already begun to withdraw, the anonymous author reports, to a more solitary place — a small islet near the monastery, later called St Cuthbert’s Isle — to test himself in solitude before attempting the greater isolation of Farne (Bede, Prose Life 17; Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert III.1; trans. Colgrave 1940). When he judged himself ready, and with the leave of his abbot and brethren, he went out to the Inner Farne.

The Island

The Inner Farne is the nearest and largest of the Farne Islands, a low, treeless outcrop of rock about two miles off the Northumberland coast, opposite the royal fortress of Bamburgh. It had a fearsome reputation: no one, the Lives say, had been able to dwell there before Cuthbert because of the phantoms and evil spirits that haunted it, and it lacked fresh water, crops, and shelter — a place fit only for demons and for the kind of warrior who came to fight them (Bede, Prose Life 17; trans. Colgrave 1940). The choice of such a place is deliberate and traditional: like Antony going out to the tombs and the inner mountain (see St. Antony the Great), Cuthbert sought the haunt of demons precisely in order to do battle there, to claim the wilderness for Christ. The Lives’ language of conquest — Cuthbert driving out the evil spirits and taking possession of the island as a soldier of God — is the language of the Life of Antony applied to a northern rock (Stancliffe, in St Cuthbert 1989; Ward 1990).

The Cell

The form of Cuthbert’s hermitage is described with a precision that has interested both theologians and archaeologists. He built, the Lives report, a dwelling almost circular, of unworked stone and turf, dug down into the rock so that the wall on the outside was higher than a standing man, and so contrived that within it he could see nothing but the sky above — shutting out, by this deliberate device, the sight of the sea and the land and even the temptation to let the eyes wander, that the mind might be lifted wholly to heaven (Bede, Prose Life 17; trans. Colgrave 1940). Within this enclosure he made two buildings, an oratory for prayer and a small dwelling-room; and at the landing-place, for the use of the brethren who visited him, he built a larger guest-house. Where there was no water, the Lives say, he prayed and dug, and a spring rose in the dry floor of his cell — one of the wonders of the place (Bede, Prose Life 18; trans. Colgrave 1940; reported here per METHODOLOGY §3.5 as the Lives’ testimony).

The detail of the wall built high enough to shut out everything but the sky has become emblematic of Cuthbert’s eremitism. It expresses, in stone, the whole purpose of the solitary life as he understood it: not the enjoyment of nature or the picturesque, but the single-minded ascent of the soul to God, undistracted by the world. The hermit walls out the visible that he may attend to the invisible.

The Labour of the Hermit

Cuthbert’s life on Farne was one of unremitting labour, prayer, and fasting. He tried at first to live by the labour of his own hands, asking the brethren to bring him seed; barley, sown late, miraculously sprang up and ripened where wheat had failed, and the Lives dwell on this as a sign of God’s provision for His servant (Bede, Prose Life 19; trans. Colgrave 1940). He kept long vigils through the night, often in prayer until dawn; he ate sparingly; he received the visitors who came to him for counsel, but withdrew increasingly into silence, at the last keeping his window shut and speaking only rarely (Bede, Prose Life 18–22; trans. Colgrave 1940). The Lives fill these years with wonders of provision, prophecy, and the obedience of the creatures — the last of which, the most beloved of all the Cuthbert stories, are treated in the companion file (see The Creatures of Farne).

This is the warfare of the desert: the hermit alone with God, the demons, and his own body, wresting from the wilderness and from himself a holiness that the community could only approximate. The Lives present Cuthbert’s years on Farne as the summit of his ascetic life, the place where he attained the fullness of the gifts — prophecy, discernment, the working of wonders, the obedience of nature — that mark the saint who has been restored, in some measure, to the condition of Adam before the fall (Ward 1990; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). The nature miracles, in particular, are read in this light: the tameness of the creatures around the hermit is the sign of paradise regained.

The Demons and the Combat

The spiritual warfare of Farne is, in the Lives, both literal and constant. Cuthbert had taken the island from the demons that haunted it, and they did not depart without a struggle; the Lives speak of his contests with the evil spirits, of temptations and assaults endured and overcome by prayer and the sign of the cross (Bede, Prose Life 17; Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert III; trans. Colgrave 1940). The pattern is again that of Antony in the tombs, beaten by demons and rising again to fight; Cuthbert’s biographers, steeped in the Life of Antony, present the Inner Farne as a northern arena of the same combat (Stancliffe in St Cuthbert 1989). For the Orthodox reader, this is the heart of the eremitic vocation as the tradition understands it: the hermit goes into the desert not to escape the warfare but to enter it at its sharpest, to stand in the front line of the Church’s battle against the powers of darkness, for the sake of the whole body (see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers).

The Hermit Drawn Out

Cuthbert intended to die on Farne, a hermit to the end. He was not permitted to. The fame of his holiness, and the need of the church, reached even his island; a synod and a king would call him from his cell to the see of Lindisfarne, and he would yield, weeping, to the summons (see The Reluctant Bishop). Yet even as bishop he kept the spirit of the hermit, and at the end, when he knew death was near, he returned to Farne to die there, in the solitude he had never ceased to love (see The Translation of 698). The Inner Farne is the place of Cuthbert’s deepest sanctity and his truest home; the bishop’s throne was a duty laid upon him, but the cell open to the sky was where his heart was. That a man could be both the wonderworking hermit of the desert and the reconciling bishop of a divided church — and be most himself in the cell — is the particular shape of his holiness, and the reason the tradition holds him among the greatest of the ascetic saints of the West.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Bede, Prose Life 17–22 and Anonymous Life III: the withdrawal to St Cuthbert’s Isle and then to Inner Farne; the haunted island and its demons; the cell sunk in the rock open only to the sky; the well struck from the stone; the barley harvest; the vigils, fasting, and silence.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.27–28: Cuthbert’s solitary life on Farne.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (The eremitic ideal in Bede’s Cuthbert; the restoration-of-paradise reading of the nature wonders.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Stancliffe on the Life of Antony as the model for Cuthbert’s Farne; the archaeology of the cell.)