Healing and Prophecy

The Lives fill Cuthbert’s career with wonders — healings of the sick and the plague-stricken, gifts of prophecy and the reading of hearts, the multiplication of provisions, the calming of storms — and present them as the visible signs of his sanctity. This file gathers the chief of them, reported as what the Lives attest under METHODOLOGY §3.5 and never certified as adjudicated fact, with particular attention to two: the meeting with the royal Abbess Ælfflæd at Coquet Island, and the prophecy of King Ecgfrith’s death at Nechtansmere, which Cuthbert is said to have known in the very hour it happened.

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

How the Miracles Are Reported

Cuthbert is, in the tradition, pre-eminently a wonderworker — the great thaumaturge of the English north, whose name was invoked for healing and protection for centuries after his death. The Lives are full of his miracles, and they are reported in this file as exactly that: the testimony of the anonymous Lindisfarne monk and of Bede, recounting what they and their informants believed Cuthbert had done, pinned to their texts and not asserted here as established history (METHODOLOGY §3.5). It is worth noting that the anonymous Life and Bede draw on named eyewitnesses for several of the wonders — Bede in particular took pains to gather his accounts from those who had known Cuthbert and to name them — so that the miracle tradition is unusually well anchored for a hagiography of its age, even as its claims remain claims (Bede, Prose Life, preface; Colgrave 1940; Ward 1990). The miracles cluster into a few recognizable types: healings, prophecies and discernment, and providential wonders.

Healings

The healing miracles run through Cuthbert’s whole life, from his days as a travelling preacher to his episcopate. During the great plague, the Lives report, he went among the sick and dying, and many were spared at his prayer and blessing; one notable account tells of his curing a dying child and assuring its mother that neither she nor any of her household would die of the pestilence (Bede, Prose Life 33; trans. Colgrave 1940). He healed, the Lives say, the wife of a gesith (a noble retainer) who was tormented by a demon, the affliction lifting as he approached (Bede, Prose Life 15). He cured a paralysed youth by anointing, and restored others given up by the physicians (Bede, Prose Life 45; Anonymous Life IV; trans. Colgrave 1940). Some of these healings are set during his episcopal journeys, when, the Lives say, he could scarcely pass through the country without the sick being brought to him. Each is reported as the Lives’ testimony; together they establish the reputation that made Cuthbert, in life and after death, the healer to whom the north turned.

Prophecy and Discernment

If healing is the most frequent of Cuthbert’s wonders, prophecy and the reading of hearts are the most characteristic. The Lives repeatedly present him as knowing things hidden from others — the secret sins of those who came to him, events happening at a distance, things to come. He is said to have known, while sitting at table far away, that a man had fallen from a tree and died, and to have foretold the manner of his own and others’ deaths (Bede, Prose Life 27, 31; trans. Colgrave 1940). The gift of discernment — the reading of the secrets of the heart — is the inward form of this, and it is closely tied to his work as a confessor: the Lives say men came to him because he saw what they had hidden, and could not be deceived (Bede, Prose Life 16, 23). These gifts belong to the same desert tradition as the rest of his sanctity; the discernment of spirits and the foreknowledge of events are among the classic charisms of the holy ascetic (see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers).

The Meeting with Ælfflæd

One of the most carefully told of the prophecy stories is the meeting with Ælfflæd, abbess of Whitby — daughter of King Oswiu, sister of King Ecgfrith, and successor to the great Hilda, one of the most powerful women in the Northumbrian church. The Lives recount that Cuthbert and Ælfflæd met on Coquet Island, off the Northumberland coast, at her request, and that she pressed him with questions about the future of the royal house. Cuthbert, the Lives say, foretold to her — guardedly, as such things are told — the death of her brother King Ecgfrith within the year, and, when she pressed him as to who would succeed (for Ecgfrith was childless), indicated that his successor would be one whom she would embrace as a brother no less than Ecgfrith, meaning Aldfrith, Ecgfrith’s half-brother, then in exile (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert III.6; Bede, Prose Life 24; trans. Colgrave 1940). He is also said, on this or a like occasion, to have spoken of his own coming elevation to the episcopate, which he foresaw and dreaded. The episode is told as a genuine exchange between two of the great spiritual figures of the kingdom, and it sets up the prophecy of Ecgfrith’s death that is its sequel.

The Prophecy of Nechtansmere

The most famous of Cuthbert’s prophecies, and the one with the most precise synchronism, concerns the death of King Ecgfrith at the battle of Nechtansmere (Dunnichen), fought against the Picts on 20 May 685, only weeks after Cuthbert’s consecration. The Lives recount that Cuthbert was at Carlisle (Roman Luguvalium), visiting the city in the company of the queen, Iurminburg, who had taken refuge there while her husband campaigned in the north. As Cuthbert was being shown the Roman walls and a fountain of the old city, he suddenly grew troubled, leaned on his staff, and gazing toward the ground said that the issue of the war was even now being decided — and shortly after, more plainly, that the king was slain. He charged the queen and the clergy to pray, and warned her to leave the city; and the news, when it came, confirmed that Ecgfrith had fallen with his host at the very hour Cuthbert had spoken (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert IV.8; Bede, Prose Life 27; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.26; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

This prophecy is reported, like the rest, as the testimony of the Lives (METHODOLOGY §3.5); but it is worth observing how firmly it is anchored. The battle of Nechtansmere is one of the best-attested events of seventh-century Northumbria, recorded by Bede in his History as a national catastrophe (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.26); the Lives tie Cuthbert’s foreknowledge of it to a specific place (Carlisle), specific witnesses (the queen, the clergy, the reeve Waga who was showing him the city), and a specific moment. The story functions in the Lives both as the supreme proof of Cuthbert’s prophetic gift and as a theological comment on the catastrophe: the king who had compelled the holy man from his rock, and who had launched the rash campaign against the warnings of his counsellors, is struck down, and the saint knows it in the hour it happens. The prophecy of Nechtansmere is, in the tradition, the high point of Cuthbert as seer.

Providential Wonders

Beyond healings and prophecies, the Lives record a class of providential wonders — the calming of a storm at sea, the changing of contrary winds, the multiplication of food, the provision of water — that show God ordering nature for His servant. Cuthbert is said to have stilled a storm by prayer so that a ship’s company was saved; to have foretold and then received provision when he and his companions were stranded and hungry; to have caused the tide to spare or to provide. These overlap with the nature wonders of Farne (see The Creatures of Farne) and with the providential feedings already noted, and they round out the picture of a saint about whom the very elements were obedient (Bede, Prose Life 3, 11, 36; trans. Colgrave 1940).

The Meaning of the Wonders

For the Lives, and for the tradition that received them, these miracles are not the point of Cuthbert’s holiness but its overflow — the visible radiance of an invisible sanctity won in the warfare of the cell. They are reported, throughout this guide, as what the Lives attest, and the Orthodox reader holds them as the Church has always held the wonders of its saints: not as the ground of veneration, which is the saint’s union with God, but as signs of it, received with reverence and with the sobriety the sources themselves invite (METHODOLOGY §3.5). That Cuthbert was remembered, above all his contemporaries, as the wonderworker of the north — the healer, the seer, the friend of the creation — is itself a historical fact about the cult, whatever one makes of any single miracle; and the wonders of his life prepared the way for the greatest wonder the tradition would claim of him, the incorruption of his body, to which the next section turns (see The Translation of 698).

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life III.6 and IV.8 and Bede, Prose Life 3, 11, 15, 16, 23, 24, 27, 31, 33, 36, 45: the healings, prophecies, and providential wonders; the meeting with Ælfflæd at Coquet Island; the prophecy of Ecgfrith’s death at Carlisle; Bede’s preface on his eyewitness sources.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.26: the battle of Nechtansmere and the death of Ecgfrith, 20 May 685; IV.27–28: Cuthbert’s wonders and ministry.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s handling of the miracles; his concern for eyewitness testimony and the meaning of the wonders.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Cuthbert as wonderworker; the prophecy of Nechtansmere and its setting.)