The Anonymous Life and Bede

Everything known of Cuthbert depends on a small set of closely related texts: the anonymous Life of Cuthbert, written by a monk of Lindisfarne within a dozen years of the saint’s death; Bede’s Metrical Life, his earlier verse treatment; and Bede’s Prose Life (c. 721), a thorough reworking of the anonymous Life; together with the independent epitome in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History Book IV. This file sets out the relationship among these texts, the direction of dependence, the ways Bede reshaped his source — expanding the miracles, reordering the life, heightening the theology, and muting what did not serve his purpose — and how reliable the resulting tradition can be held to be.

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

The Anonymous Life

The earliest Life of Cuthbert was written by an unnamed monk of Lindisfarne, almost certainly between 699 and 705 — after the translation of 698, which it records, and before the death of King Aldfrith in 705, whom it appears to mention as living (Colgrave 1940, introduction; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). It is thus a document of the first importance: a Life composed within twelve to eighteen years of Cuthbert’s death, by a member of his own community, some of whom had known him. The anonymous author writes a plain, unpolished Latin, organizes the Life into four books, and draws on the memories of named witnesses and on the testimony of the community. He is candid about his sources and reverent toward his subject, and while his work is a hagiography, shaped by the conventions of the genre and by the Life of Antony and the Life of Martin of Sulpicius Severus that lay behind it, it preserves much that is circumstantial and credible — place-names, the names of witnesses, the texture of Northumbrian monastic life (Colgrave 1940; Stancliffe in St Cuthbert 1989). For the historian, the anonymous Life is in some respects the most valuable of the texts, precisely because it is the least worked-over.

Bede’s Two Lives

Bede — the great scholar of nearby Wearmouth-Jarrow, the foremost Latin author of his age (on whom see The Church Fathers) — took up Cuthbert as a subject twice. First he composed a Metrical Life (Vita metrica Sancti Cuthberti), in Latin hexameters, probably between about 705 and 716, an elaborate poetic meditation on the saint’s miracles in the tradition of Christian Latin verse, intended for devotional and literary delectation rather than for the record (ed. Jaager 1935; Lapidge and others in St Cuthbert 1989). Then, about 721, he wrote the Prose Life (Vita Sancti Cuthberti) at the request of the Lindisfarne community, a full and polished prose Life in forty-six chapters, which became the standard and most widely copied account and the basis of the medieval cult (Colgrave 1940). Bede also gave an independent, briefer treatment of Cuthbert in Book IV of his Ecclesiastical History (c. 731), drawing on the same materials but condensing them (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27–32; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The Prose Life is the text most readers mean by “Bede’s Life of Cuthbert.”

The Direction of Dependence

The relationship among these texts is, for the most part, clear, and it is fundamental to reading Cuthbert critically. Bede’s Prose Life depends directly on the anonymous Life: he had the earlier work before him, followed its order in the main, and took over its episodes, often verbally (Colgrave 1940, introduction, demonstrating the dependence in detail). This is not a matter of inference but of close textual comparison, which Colgrave laid out exhaustively in his edition of the Two Lives: the parallels are too many and too exact to be accidental. Bede acknowledges, in his preface, that he had the testimony of the Lindisfarne community and had submitted his draft to those who knew Cuthbert; he does not name the anonymous Life as such, but he plainly used it. The critical principle that follows is straightforward: where Bede and the anonymous Life agree, we have the early Lindisfarne tradition; where Bede differs, adds, or omits, we are seeing Bede’s own hand at work, and the difference is itself evidence — not of what Cuthbert did, but of what Bede wished to make of him.

How Bede Reshaped His Source

Bede did not merely copy; he rewrote, and the ways he rewrote are revealing. Scholars — above all Clare Stancliffe and Walter Berschin — have analyzed his reshaping, and several tendencies stand out (Stancliffe and Berschin, in St Cuthbert 1989; Ward 1990):

He polished and amplified. The plain Latin of the anonymous author becomes, in Bede, a finished literary Latin; episodes are filled out, motives supplied, morals drawn. The Prose Life is a more artful and more edifying book than its source.
He multiplied the miracles and the meaning. Bede adds wonders not in the anonymous Life (drawn, he says, from further inquiry), and he expounds the theological significance of the miracles more fully, drawing out their typology and their lessons. The nature wonders in particular are developed into vehicles of teaching about humility, providence, and the restoration of paradise (see The Creatures of Farne).
He muted what did not serve. Most tellingly, Bede omits or softens certain things in the anonymous Life. He passes over the episode of Cuthbert’s youthful military service, present in the anonymous Life (I.7), which did not fit his portrait of a saint marked from infancy (Stancliffe in St Cuthbert 1989; see The Shepherd Boy and the Vision). And, writing as a partisan of the Roman cause, he handles the Easter controversy and Cuthbert’s Celtic formation with care, presenting Cuthbert as a model of catholic conformity and avoiding anything that might set his hero against the Roman order (see Accepting the Roman Easter).
He pursued his own programme. Bede had purposes of his own — the promotion of an ideal of the holy, ascetic, pastorally engaged bishop, against the worldliness he saw in the church of his own day; the integration of the Celtic sanctity of Lindisfarne into the Roman order; the edification of his readers. Cuthbert, in Bede’s hands, becomes the vehicle of that programme, the model bishop and monk Bede wished to hold up (Thacker, in St Cuthbert 1989; Ward 1990).

None of this means Bede falsified; he worked, by the standards of his age, with unusual care, naming witnesses and submitting his text for correction. But it means that the Prose Life is a constructed portrait, shaped by Bede’s art and his aims, and that the critical reader must distinguish the early Lindisfarne tradition (where Bede and the anonymous Life agree) from Bede’s own contribution (where he diverges). This is the discipline METHODOLOGY §2–4 requires, and it is the heart of reading Cuthbert honestly.

The Reliability of the Tradition

How much, then, can be known? More than for most seventh-century saints, and less than the Lives’ confident narration suggests. The broad outline of Cuthbert’s career — the formation at Melrose, the priorate of Lindisfarne, the eremitism on Farne, the brief episcopate, the death and the translation — rests on early, multiply attested, and internally consistent testimony, and is as secure as anything in the period; the independent notice in the Ecclesiastical History, drawing on the same well-anchored tradition, confirms it. The historical events to which the Lives attach Cuthbert — the Synod of Whitby, the battle of Nechtansmere, the Viking raids — are firmly dated from other sources. The miracles, by contrast, are reported throughout this guide as what the Lives attest, pinned to their texts under METHODOLOGY §3.5: they are the testimony of the early community and of Bede’s informants, received with reverence and with the sobriety the source-critical relationship of the texts demands, never certified as adjudicated fact (see Healing and Prophecy). The incorruption of the body (see The Translation of 698) is the claim of the Lives and the medieval cult, and its relation to the modern tomb-openings is handled as a structured dispute (see Durham and the Shrine).

The layering of the Lives is thus not an embarrassment to be hidden but the very means of reading Cuthbert well. We possess, uniquely for an early English saint, an early Life and a master’s reworking of it side by side, and by reading them against one another we can see both the saint his community remembered and the saint his greatest biographer made of him. That double vision — the historical Cuthbert and the Cuthbert of Bede — is what the careful student of the sources is given, and it is a richer gift than a single, unexamined narrative could be.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (The anonymous Life and Bede’s Prose Life edited and translated together, with the introduction demonstrating the dating of the anonymous Life (699–705) and Bede’s direct dependence upon it; the parallels set out in detail.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.27–32: the independent epitome of Cuthbert’s life and death.)
Jaager, Werner, ed. Bedas metrische Vita sancti Cuthberti. Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1935. (The critical edition of Bede’s Metrical Life.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Stancliffe and Berschin on Bede’s reshaping of the anonymous Life; Thacker on Bede’s purposes; the dating and relationship of the texts.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s Lives of Cuthbert; his aims, method, and theology.)

The Anonymous Life and Bede