Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers

Cuthbert is the desert tradition in a northern key. He never saw Egypt, but his life — the graded ascent from the common life to the solitude of the cell, the spiritual warfare against the demons of his island, the charisms of healing, prophecy, and discernment, the creation grown tame around the holy man — is unmistakably the asceticism of Antony and the fathers of the desert, carried west through Cassian and Martin and Iona and lived out on a rock in the North Sea. This file traces that lineage: how the Egyptian monastic ideal reached the English north, and how Cuthbert embodied it, so that he stands in the one ascetic tradition that joins Lindisfarne to the desert of Scetis.

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

The Desert in the North Sea

There is a deep and genuine kinship between Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Antony of Egypt, and it is not a modern conceit but the conscious framework of his own biographers. When the anonymous monk of Lindisfarne and Bede sat down to write Cuthbert’s Life, the models before them were the Life of Antony by Athanasius — the foundational text of Christian hagiography and of the monastic ideal (see St. Antony the Great) — and the Life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus, which had carried the Antonian ideal into the West. They wrote Cuthbert as a new Antony, a new Martin: the saint who withdraws to the desert place, does battle with the demons who haunt it, is fed and served by the creation, and emerges with the gifts of the Spirit (Stancliffe, in St Cuthbert 1989; Ward 1990). The parallels are deliberate and structural. Cuthbert’s Inner Farne is Antony’s inner mountain; the demons he drives from the island are the demons Antony fought in the tombs; the otters that warm his feet and the ravens that do penance are the lions and the wild beasts that served the desert fathers; the barley that springs up where wheat failed is the desert miraculously made to yield. To read Cuthbert is to read the Life of Antony again, in a northern landscape (see The Inner Desert; The Creatures of Farne).

The Graded Ascent

The structure of Cuthbert’s monastic life follows exactly the pattern the desert tradition laid down and the eastern fathers codified: the ascent from the common life of the monastery (the cenobium) to the solitary life of the hermit (the eremitical life), with the latter understood as the higher and harder calling, to be attempted only by those proved in the former. Cuthbert does not begin as a hermit; he is formed for years in the cenobitic discipline of Melrose and Lindisfarne, tested in obedience, asceticism, and the active apostolate, before he is permitted to go out to Farne — and even there he first tries himself on the nearer islet before attempting the full solitude (see The Inner Desert). This is precisely the graded ascent of the eastern monastic tradition, from Antony through Pachomius and Basil to John Cassian and the Egyptian fathers Cassian transmitted to the West: the solitary life is the summit, not the starting-point, and it is reached through the school of the common life (on this transmission, see St. John Cassian; Monasticism). Cuthbert’s career is a textbook of it.

The Warfare of the Cell

At the centre of the desert ideal, and of Cuthbert’s eremitism, is the understanding of the cell as the arena of spiritual combat. The hermit goes into the desert not to escape the battle but to enter it at its sharpest, to stand alone against the powers of darkness, for the sake of the whole Church. Cuthbert takes the Inner Farne precisely because it is the haunt of demons, and his conquest of the island — driving out the evil spirits, enduring their assaults, holding the ground by prayer and the cross — is the same warfare Athanasius describes in Antony (Bede, Prose Life 17; Anonymous Life III; trans. Colgrave 1940; cf. Athanasius, Life of Antony). This is the heart of the eremitic vocation as the Orthodox tradition understands it: the solitary is not a man who has fled the world’s troubles but a soldier sent to the front line, whose hidden combat in the cell is a labour for all. Cuthbert’s nights of prayer in the cold sea, his vigils, his fastings, his contests with the demons of Farne, are the northern form of the desert warfare, and they win him the gifts that warfare bestows.

The Charisms

The desert tradition holds that the ascetic who is purified in this combat receives the charisms of the Spirit — apatheia, the freedom from disordered passion; diakrisis, the discernment of spirits and the reading of hearts; prophecy and foreknowledge; the gift of healing; and that harmony with the creation which is the sign of paradise regained. Every one of these is ascribed to Cuthbert by the Lives. He reads the secrets of those who come to him; he foretells the future, most strikingly the death of Ecgfrith at Nechtansmere; he heals the sick and casts out demons; the wild creatures serve and obey him (see Healing and Prophecy; The Creatures of Farne). These are not random wonders but the recognized fruits of the ascetic life as the eastern tradition catalogues them, and their presence in Cuthbert marks him as a full heir of the desert: a man in whom the Antonian ascent has borne its proper harvest (Ward 1990; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989).

The Restored Creation

The motif that most captures the popular imagination — the tamed creatures of Farne — is, in the desert tradition, one of the surest signs of sanctity. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the lives of the Egyptian and Palestinian monks, the wild beasts grow gentle before the holy man: lions serve Gerasimus, the hyena brings her blind cub to be healed, the creatures recognize in the saint the lordship Adam lost. The theology is that the saint, restored by grace toward the condition of unfallen man, recovers something of Adam’s harmony with the creation, which answers his holiness with obedience and service. Cuthbert’s otters and eiders and penitent ravens are the northern instance of this universal monastic motif, and the Lives tell them with full awareness of their meaning (see The Creatures of Farne; Ward 1990). The desert father at peace with the lion and the hermit of Farne at peace with the seabirds are one figure: the holy man who is the first-fruits of the world’s healing.

The Channels of Transmission

How did the Egyptian ideal reach a shepherd-boy of the Tweed? By well-traceable channels. The asceticism of the Egyptian desert was carried to the West above all by John Cassian, whose Institutes and Conferences translated the wisdom of the desert fathers into Latin and shaped all subsequent Western monasticism (see St. John Cassian); by the example and Life of Martin of Tours, the soldier-monk-bishop whose pattern — ascetic, miracle-working, drawn from solitude to the episcopate — Cuthbert’s own life so closely follows; and, for Northumbria specifically, by the Irish monasticism of Iona, itself deeply formed by the desert ideal and by the eremitical impulse that drove the Irish peregrini to seek their own “deserts” on the islands and in the wild places (on the Ionan tradition, see St. Columba of Iona; St. Aidan of Lindisfarne). The Irish monks who came to Lindisfarne brought with them the desert ideal in its Celtic form — the love of solitude, the harsh asceticism, the disert or hermitage on the island — and Cuthbert received it from them and carried it to its summit on Farne. The line runs unbroken: from Antony in Egypt, through Cassian and Martin in Gaul, through Columba and Iona and Aidan, to Cuthbert on the Inner Farne. He is the far western, far northern outpost of the one desert tradition.

A Saint of the One Ascetic Tradition

This lineage is why Cuthbert belongs, in the deepest sense, to the whole Church and not only to the West. The asceticism he embodied is not a peculiarly Western or Celtic thing but the common inheritance of Christian monasticism, born in the Egyptian desert and shared by East and West before the Schism divided them. An Orthodox reader recognizes in Cuthbert not a foreign figure but a brother of the eastern ascetics — a Northumbrian Antony, a Farne anchorite of the same Spirit that moved the fathers of Scetis and the Thebaid. That a saint formed by the desert tradition should arise on a rock in the North Sea, in the one undivided Church, and be remembered there for thirteen centuries, is itself a witness to the catholicity of that tradition. The basis of his veneration as a pan-Orthodox, pre-Schism saint, and the recovery of the British saints in the Orthodox world, is the subject of the companion file (see The Orthodox Reception); but the ground of it is here, in the kinship of Cuthbert and the desert fathers, the one ascetic holiness that the dividing of the Church could not divide.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Bede, Prose Life and the anonymous Life: the eremitic ascent, the conquest of Farne, the charisms, the nature wonders, modelled on the Life of Antony and the Life of Martin.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (The desert tradition behind Bede’s Cuthbert; the Life of Antony and the Life of Martin as models; the theology 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 hagiographic models; the desert ideal in Northumbrian and Irish monasticism.)
Athanasius. The Life of Antony. (The foundational text of the eremitic ideal, the conscious model behind the Lives of Cuthbert.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991. (The transmission of the monastic ideal to Northumbria through Iona and the Irish church.)