08 — East and West
Cuthbert set in the wider tradition of the undivided Church: his asceticism as the Egyptian and Antonian ideal transplanted to the English north — the desert father of the North Sea, whose eremitism, spiritual warfare, and tamed creation place him in the lineage of Antony and the fathers of the desert; and his standing as a pre-Schism saint of the one Church, venerated across the Orthodox and Western traditions, commemorated on 20 March (his death) and 4 September (his translation).
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; wonderworker of Northumbria)
Cuthbert never read Greek, never saw Egypt, and almost certainly never heard the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in their own tongue; yet his life is unmistakably the desert tradition, carried west through Gaul and Iona and lived out on a northern rock. The Life of Antony and the Life of Martin lay behind the Lives of Cuthbert, and the ideal they enshrine — solitude as the summit of the monastic ascent, the cell as the arena of spiritual combat, the saint restored to the harmony of paradise — is the ideal Cuthbert embodied. This section traces that lineage and then sets out the basis of his veneration as a saint of the one undivided Church, of equal title to East and West.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers | The Egyptian and Antonian ideal in the English north: the eremitic summit, the spiritual warfare of the cell, the charisms of healing, prophecy, and discernment, the tamed creation; the transmission of Egyptian monasticism through Cassian, Martin, and Iona to Lindisfarne. |
| The Orthodox Reception | Cuthbert as a saint of the one undivided Church, four centuries before the Schism; the basis of his pan-Orthodox veneration; the recovery of the pre-Schism saints of the British Isles in the Orthodox world; the feasts of 20 March and 4 September. |
See Also
- The Inner Desert — the eremitic life that this section traces to its source
- The Creatures of Farne — the tamed creation as a desert motif
- Accepting the Roman Easter — the Easter dispute as a question within the one Church
- St. Antony the Great — the father of the desert tradition Cuthbert inherited
- St. John Cassian — the transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West
References
- Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
- Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.
- Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989.