The Reluctant Bishop

Cuthbert had withdrawn to Farne to be a hermit to the end, but the church would not leave him there. A synod under Archbishop Theodore, with King Ecgfrith present, elected him bishop in 684; and when he would not come, the king and a bishop sailed to Farne and knelt before him on the rock until, weeping, he yielded. Consecrated at York at Easter 685, he took by exchange the see of Lindisfarne — his own monastery — and gave the two years left to him to a tireless pastoral ministry before returning to his island to die. This file sets out his reluctant elevation and the character of his short episcopate.

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

The Election

By the early 680s Cuthbert’s fame as a holy man and wonderworker had spread far beyond his island, and the church of Northumbria, reorganizing its dioceses under the great Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus of Canterbury, judged that such a man must be made a bishop. A synod was held — the Lives place it at a spot near the mouth of the river Aln (Alnmouth), with Theodore presiding and King Ecgfrith of Northumbria present — and Cuthbert was unanimously elected, the sources say, to the bishopric (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert IV.1; Bede, Prose Life 24; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.28; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The election was, in form, to the see of Hexham; but Cuthbert, unwilling to leave Lindisfarne and Farne, would afterward arrange an exchange so as to take Lindisfarne instead, his own monastery and the church of Aidan.

Fetched from the Rock

Cuthbert did not want the office, and the Lives make his reluctance one of their themes — the genuine, not the conventional, reluctance of a man who had given his life to solitude and the warfare of prayer and had no wish for the burdens and dignities of a bishopric (on Boisil’s old prophecy of this very elevation, see Monk Under Eata and Boisil). When the synod’s choice was made known to him, he refused to leave Farne. So, the Lives report, King Ecgfrith himself, together with Bishop Trumwine and a company of devout men, sailed out to the Inner Farne, and they knelt before Cuthbert on the rock and adjured him in the name of the Lord, with tears, until at last, weeping himself, he was drawn out of his hermitage and submitted to the yoke, “compelled against his will,” as Bede puts it (Bede, Prose Life 24; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.28; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The scene of the king kneeling on the bare rock before the weeping hermit is one of the most memorable in the Lives, and it expresses with great force the inversion the tradition loves: the worldly power humbling itself before the holiness it needs.

The Consecration

Cuthbert was consecrated bishop at York, at Easter (27 March) 685, by Archbishop Theodore and a number of other bishops, in the presence of King Ecgfrith (Bede, Prose Life 24; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.28; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). By the arrangement that had been made, Cuthbert and Eata — his old abbot, now bishop — exchanged sees, so that Eata took Hexham and Cuthbert took Lindisfarne, the church he had served as prior and the heart of his world (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.28). Thus Cuthbert came at last, the Lives note with satisfaction, to sit on the episcopal seat of Aidan, the founder, and of Colman, the last Ionan bishop — the heir of the whole Lindisfarne succession, now holding it by Roman consecration. The man called to the monastic life by the sight of Aidan’s ascending soul now held Aidan’s see.

The Two Years

Cuthbert’s episcopate was brief — about two years, from his consecration at Easter 685 to his resignation late in 686 and his death in March 687 — but the Lives present it as a model of the apostolic bishop. He did not let the dignity of the office change the manner of his life: he kept his ascetic discipline, his humility, and his accessibility, and he gave himself above all to the pastoral care of his diocese, travelling through it on foot and on horseback to preach, to confirm, to heal, and to counsel, just as he had gone out from Melrose to the villages in his youth (Bede, Prose Life 25–32; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27–28; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The hermit became once more the apostle of the north; the gifts of healing and prophecy that had marked his solitude were now exercised in the open service of his people. The miracles of these episcopal journeys — the healings, the prophecies, the meeting with Ælfflæd, the foreknowledge of Ecgfrith’s death — are gathered in the companion file (see Healing and Prophecy).

It was during these years that the great calamity of the Northumbrian kingdom fell. In May 685, only weeks after Cuthbert’s consecration, King Ecgfrith led an army north against the Picts and was destroyed with most of his host at the battle of Nechtansmere (Dunnichen) — a disaster from which Northumbrian power never fully recovered (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.26). The Lives connect Cuthbert directly to this event through the prophecy he is said to have uttered in the very hour of the king’s death, the most famous of his prophetic wonders (see Healing and Prophecy). The bishop who had been fetched from his rock by the king now outlived him by less than two years, and saw the kingdom’s glory broken.

The Model of the Monk-Bishop

Cuthbert’s episcopate, brief and reluctant as it was, embodies an ideal that both Bede and the wider tradition held dear and that the Orthodox East would recognize at once: the bishop who is first and last a monk. In the ancient understanding, shared by East and West before the Schism, the episcopate was not a promotion or an honour to be sought but a burden of service laid upon a man for the good of the Church, and the worthiest bishop was often the one most unwilling — the ascetic dragged from his solitude, who brought to the office the detachment, the purity, and the spiritual authority won in the cell. This is the pattern of Martin of Tours, the soldier-monk made bishop against his will; of Gregory the Great, who called his elevation a fall from the heights of contemplation; of countless monk-bishops of the Christian East. Bede, who wrote his Life of Cuthbert partly as a reproach to the worldly and ambitious prelates of his own day, holds Cuthbert up as the very model of this ideal: the bishop who keeps the monk’s discipline on the throne, who seeks not the dignity but the service, who governs by holiness rather than by power (Bede, Prose Life 26; Ward 1990; Thacker in St Cuthbert 1989).

What makes Cuthbert’s episcopate so apt an image of this ideal is precisely its reluctance and its brevity. He did not change when he was consecrated; he remained the ascetic of Farne, fasting, watching, praying, accessible to the poor, indifferent to the trappings of office. And he laid the office down the moment he could, returning to his cell to die. The lesson Bede draws, and the tradition received, is that the highest dignity in the Church sits most rightly on the man who least desires it, and that the pastoral office is best filled by one whose heart is set on God alone. Cuthbert is the great northern instance of the monk-bishop, and the inversion at the heart of his elevation — the king kneeling on the rock before the weeping hermit — is its perfect emblem.

The Return to Farne

Cuthbert knew his own death approaching, and he would not die a bishop in the world. Late in 686, feeling his end near, he resigned the see of Lindisfarne and returned to the Inner Farne, to the cell open to the sky, to die as he had lived, a hermit (Bede, Prose Life 37; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.29; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The episcopate, then, was an interruption in his eremitic life, undertaken in obedience and laid down as soon as he could; the cell, not the throne, was his home, and to the cell he went back to make his end. The account of his last illness and death on Farne, in March 687, and of the burial at Lindisfarne that began the cult, belongs to the next section (see The Translation of 698).

The portrait that emerges is of a bishop wholly without ambition, who took the office as a cross and bore it faithfully but briefly, and whose deepest desire was always for the solitude he had been forced to leave. This combination — the reluctant, ascetic, pastoral bishop who is most himself in the hermit’s cell — is exactly the model the Orthodox tradition most honours in its monastic-episcopal saints, the bishop drawn from the desert who never ceases to be a monk (on this pattern, see Monasticism; and for its eastern roots, Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers). Cuthbert is the great northern instance of it, and the brevity and reluctance of his episcopate are not a footnote to his sanctity but part of its very shape.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life IV.1 and Bede, Prose Life 24–37: the synod and election; the king kneeling on Farne; the consecration at York and the exchange of sees with Eata; the episcopal ministry; the resignation and return to Farne.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.26: the disaster at Nechtansmere; IV.27–29: Cuthbert’s election, consecration, episcopate, and return to Farne.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The episcopate of Cuthbert; Theodore’s reorganization of the Northumbrian sees.)