The Orthodox Reception

Cuthbert lived and died in the seventh century, nearly four hundred years before the Great Schism of 1054, in the one undivided Church of East and West. He is therefore a saint of the whole Church, of equal title to Orthodox and to Western Christians, and the Orthodox East — which has in recent generations warmly recovered the saints of the pre-Schism British Isles — honours him among the holy fathers of those lands. This file sets out the basis of Cuthbert’s veneration as a pre-Schism saint, the recovery of the British saints in the Orthodox world, and the feasts on which he is commemorated: 20 March (his death) and 4 September (his translation).

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

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The first and most important thing to be said of Cuthbert’s place in the Orthodox tradition is chronological. He died in 687 and was translated in 698; the Great Schism that divided the Roman West from the Orthodox East is conventionally dated to 1054. Cuthbert thus belongs wholly to the period of the undivided Church — the one Church of the first millennium, before the estrangement of East and West, in which the saints of Britain and the saints of Byzantium were members of a single communion (on this period, see The Pre-Schism Church). He is not a “Western” saint whom the Orthodox have adopted, nor an “Orthodox” saint whom the West has borrowed; he is a saint of the one Church to which both East and West then belonged, and his sanctity is the common inheritance of all who hold the faith of that undivided Church. This is the ground of his pan-Orthodox veneration, and it is the same ground on which the Orthodox honour Aidan, Columba, Patrick, Benedict, Martin, and all the saints of the West before the Schism.

It is worth dwelling on this, because it is sometimes misunderstood. The Orthodox veneration of pre-Schism Western saints is not a modern ecumenical courtesy but a recognition of historical and ecclesial fact: these were saints of the undivided Church, glorified by God within the communion the Orthodox Church holds itself to continue. The Easter controversy in which Cuthbert was caught up — the very question of Whitby — was, as the Church always insisted, a matter of discipline and not of dogma, and the saints stood on both sides of it (see Accepting the Roman Easter); it did not divide the Church or unchurch either party. Cuthbert held the apostolic faith, the seven councils’ faith (those then held), the faith of the one Church; nothing in his belief or his life sets him outside the Orthodox communion of his own age.

The Asceticism the East Recognizes

Beyond the chronological fact, there is a deeper reason the Orthodox East receives Cuthbert as its own: the form of his sanctity is the form the East most reveres. Cuthbert is, as the companion file shows, a desert father in a northern key — an ascetic, a hermit, a wonderworker, a man of prayer and spiritual combat in the lineage of Antony and the fathers of the desert (see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers). The eremitic life he embodied, the warfare of the cell, the charisms of discernment and prophecy and healing, the tamed creation, the incorrupt body — all of this is the very pattern of holiness the Orthodox tradition has always held highest in its monastic saints. An Orthodox Christian reading the Life of Cuthbert is on familiar ground: this is the holiness of the Lausiac History and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, of Sergius of Radonezh and Seraphim of Sarov and the elders of Athos, lived out on a North Sea island in the seventh century. The recognition is immediate, and it is one of the reasons the British saints have been so warmly received in the Orthodox world.

The Recovery of the British Saints

In recent generations the Orthodox Church — and especially Orthodox Christians in the British Isles, the English-speaking world, and the Russian and other diaspora communities there — has undertaken a conscious recovery of the pre-Schism saints of these lands. Where once the calendars of the Orthodox Church included few of the Western saints by name, the saints of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Christianity — Cuthbert, Aidan, Columba, Hilda, Bede, Patrick, David, and many more — have been increasingly commemorated, their lives translated and retold for Orthodox readers, churches dedicated in their honour, and their feasts kept (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989, on the modern revival of the cult; and the wider movement of Orthodox recovery of the Western saints). This recovery is part of a broader Orthodox embrace of the holiness of the undivided Church wherever it was found, and Cuthbert — as the greatest saint of the English north, the desert father of Northumbria — stands near its centre. He is venerated today both in the Western churches that have kept his cult unbroken since the seventh century and in the Orthodox communities that have recovered him as a father of the one Church.

The Principle of Pre-Schism Western Veneration

It is worth setting out the principle on which this veneration rests, because it governs the Orthodox reception not only of Cuthbert but of the whole company of pre-Schism Western saints. The Orthodox Church understands itself to be the continuation of the one Church of the apostles and the seven councils — the undivided Church of the first millennium. The saints glorified by God within that Church before the estrangement of East and West are therefore, by the Orthodox reckoning, saints of the Orthodox Church, whatever the later history of the lands in which they lived. There is no need to “convert” Cuthbert retroactively to Orthodoxy; he was a member of the one Church the Orthodox hold themselves to continue, and his glorification by God — attested by his life, his cult, and the witness of his incorrupt body — was a glorification within that communion. The recovery of such saints is thus an act of recognition, not of adoption: the Orthodox Church receiving back into conscious veneration its own forgotten fathers and mothers of the West.

This principle has a practical theology behind it. The unity of the Church before the Schism was real, and the holiness it produced was one holiness, East and West; the saints of Rome and the saints of Constantinople, the saints of Egypt and the saints of Northumbria, were of one communion and one Spirit. The later divisions of Christendom — the Schism of 1054, the further fractures of the Reformation — fell long after Cuthbert’s death and have no bearing on his standing. To venerate him is to confess that the Church was, and in her saints remains, one; that the dividing of Christendom could not unmake the holiness of the undivided age; and that the Orthodox Church, in honouring the pre-Schism saints of the West, is honouring her own past. This is why the modern Orthodox calendars, especially in the British Isles and the diaspora, have increasingly added the names of Cuthbert, Aidan, Hilda, Bede, and their company: not as a courtesy to the West, but as the recovery of a heritage the Orthodox Church regards as her own.

The Feasts

Cuthbert is commemorated on two principal days, both well established in the tradition (see The Church Calendar):

20 March — the day of his death (dies natalis, his heavenly birthday) on the Inner Farne in 687. This is his principal feast, kept in the Western calendars and by the Orthodox who honour him.
4 September — the feast of his translation, commemorating the raising of his incorrupt body in 698 (and associated also with the later translation to Durham). This second feast marks the discovery of the incorruption on which his cult was built (see The Translation of 698).

These feasts, kept for thirteen centuries, are the liturgical expression of the Church’s reception of Cuthbert — the regular, recurring honour by which a community keeps a saint present in its life. That they are kept today by Orthodox as well as by Western Christians is the practical sign of his standing as a saint of the one Church.

Cuthbert and Orthodox Self-Understanding

For the Orthodox, Cuthbert is more than an interesting figure of a distant church; he is a witness to the catholicity and continuity of Orthodox holiness. He shows that the asceticism of the desert, the monastic ideal of the Christian East, took root and bore the same fruit at the far western edge of the world, in the one undivided Church; that the saints of Britain and the saints of Byzantium are of one Spirit; and that the holiness the Orthodox tradition reveres is not the property of one culture or one half of Christendom but the gift of God to His whole Church. To venerate Cuthbert is, for an Orthodox Christian, to claim the saints of the undivided West as fathers and brothers, and to confess that the Church of Antony and the Church of Cuthbert were, and in their saints remain, one. The wonderworker of Northumbria, the hermit of Farne, the reluctant bishop who was most himself in the cell open to the sky, takes his place among the great ascetic saints of the one Church — a desert father of the North Sea, honoured East and West, four hundred years before the dividing of Christendom and beyond it.

References

Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The cult of Cuthbert from the seventh century to the modern revival; his standing as a saint of the undivided Church.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (III.25–26: the Easter controversy as a matter of discipline within the one Church; the holiness of saints on both sides.)
Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (The death of Cuthbert, 20 March 687, and the translation of 698, the basis of the two feasts.)