Legacy and Assessment

A sober reckoning of Cuthbert: what can be securely said of the historical man, what the Lives made of him, and why the English north has remembered him, above even Aidan who first planted the faith there, as its own great saint. This file weighs his legacy — the bridge between the Celtic and the Roman, the desert father of the North Sea, the wonderworker whose body and cult shaped the religious life of a region for a thousand years — and sets out his meaning for the Orthodox tradition and for the Church, with the candour about the sources that the whole guide has practised.

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

What Can Securely Be Said

Begin with the firm ground. Cuthbert was a real man, born about 634 in the Anglian north, who became a monk at Melrose, prior of Lindisfarne, a hermit on the Inner Farne, and, for two reluctant years, bishop of Lindisfarne, dying on Farne on 20 March 687 and being translated in 698. This outline rests on early, multiply attested, and internally consistent testimony — the anonymous Life written within a dozen years of his death, Bede’s reworking of it, and the independent epitome in the Ecclesiastical History — and is as secure as anything in seventh-century English history (see The Anonymous Life and Bede). The events to which his life is tied — the Synod of Whitby, the battle of Nechtansmere, the Viking raids, the foundation at Durham — are firmly dated from other sources. We know, too, the shape of his sanctity: an ascetic of extraordinary rigour, a tireless pastor and preacher, a man of prayer drawn always to solitude, who accepted the Roman Easter for the Church’s unity and reconciled others to it by patience rather than power. So much the critical historian can affirm.

The miracles — the healings, the prophecies, the nature wonders, the incorruption — are reported throughout this guide as what the Lives attest, pinned to their texts under METHODOLOGY §3.5, never certified as adjudicated fact; they are the testimony of the early community and of Bede’s named informants, held with reverence and with sobriety (see Healing and Prophecy). And the Lives themselves, as Section 07 shows, are a constructed portrait, Bede’s especially — the historical Cuthbert overlaid by the saint his greatest biographer made of him for his own edifying and ecclesiastical ends. To read Cuthbert honestly is to hold both: the man the sources let us glimpse, and the saint the tradition built.

The Bridge Between Celtic and Roman

Cuthbert’s first and deepest historical significance is that he reconciled in a single life the two traditions that clashed in his age. Formed wholly in the Ionan, Celtic-monastic Christianity that Aidan brought from Iona, once displaced for keeping its Easter, he accepted the Roman usage decided at Whitby and gave himself to making it take root — not as a partisan triumphing over the defeated, but as a peacemaker who kept the whole inheritance of Iona, the asceticism, the apostolate, the love of solitude, within the unity of the Western Church (see Accepting the Roman Easter; Prior of Lindisfarne). In him the Celtic sanctity and the Roman order were shown not to be finally opposed; the breach that Whitby might have left was healed in his person. This is why the English north came to love him above even Aidan: Aidan planted the faith, but Aidan belonged wholly to the losing side of Whitby; Cuthbert held both sides together, and so could be the saint of the whole reconciled church (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989; Thacker in St Cuthbert 1989). He is the figure in whom seventh-century English Christianity found its unity.

The Desert Father of the North Sea

His second significance is as the supreme English instance of the eremitic, desert ideal — a Northumbrian Antony, who carried the asceticism of the Egyptian desert to its summit on a North Sea island (see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers). The cell on Farne, walled to shut out everything but the sky; the nights of prayer in the cold sea; the warfare with the demons of the island; the charisms of healing and prophecy and discernment; the tamed creation, the otters and the eiders — all of this places him in the front rank of the ascetic saints of the West, and in the one desert tradition that joins Lindisfarne to Scetis. He is the proof that the monastic ideal of the Christian East took root and bore its proper fruit at the far edge of the world, in the one undivided Church. For this he is recognized, East and West alike, as a father of the contemplative and ascetic life.

The Saint of the North

His third significance is the sheer scale and endurance of his cult. Through the incorrupt body, carried for a century rather than abandoned, and the great shrine at Durham, Cuthbert became the patron of the whole English north — the saint whose banner was carried in war, whose church ruled a palatinate, whose name was a power in the land, whose shrine was one of the chief goals of English pilgrimage until the Reformation, and whose cult preserved, through the Viking age, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the coffin-reliquary and the relics that are among the supreme treasures of early medieval Europe (see The Wanderings of the Coffin; Durham and the Shrine; The Cuthbert Cult and the Gospels). Few saints have so shaped the religious, cultural, and even political life of a region for so long. The north of England is, in a real sense, Cuthbert’s country, and Durham Cathedral his monument.

The Man Behind the Legend

What, behind the constructed saint, was the man? The sources, read with care, let us glimpse a recognizable person: humble to the point of refusing office, weeping when fetched from his rock to be made a bishop; ascetic to an extreme that left his body broken; tender with the poor, the sick, and the half-converted of the upland villages; patient past all provocation with the murmuring monks of Lindisfarne; drawn always, irresistibly, to solitude, and most himself in the cell open to the sky. There is in this portrait a consistency and a particularity that the conventions of hagiography do not fully account for, and that suggest a real and remarkable holiness underneath. Cuthbert was not, like Wilfrid, a builder of churches and an empire of sees; he left no writings, founded no order, fought no battles. His greatness was of another kind — the greatness of a life given wholly to God in obscurity and solitude, which the world could not help but notice, and which drew kings to their knees on a bare rock. That such a life should be remembered for thirteen hundred years is itself a kind of vindication of the values it embodied.

Cuthbert for the Orthodox Tradition

For the Orthodox reader, Cuthbert is a gift and a witness. A gift, because he is one of the great ascetic saints of the undivided Church, a desert father of the North Sea whose holiness is the holiness the Orthodox tradition most reveres, recoverable now as a father of the one Church (see The Orthodox Reception). A witness, because his life testifies to the catholicity of Orthodox holiness — that the asceticism of Antony and the fathers took root and bore the same fruit at the far western edge of Christendom, in the one Church to which East and West then both belonged; that the saints of Britain and the saints of Byzantium are of one Spirit; and that the dividing of Christendom, which came four hundred years after his death, could not divide the holiness he shared with the East. To venerate Cuthbert is to claim the saints of the undivided West as fathers and brothers, and to confess the unity of the Church in its saints.

The final word is best left sober. Cuthbert was a seventh-century Northumbrian monk and bishop of genuine and extraordinary holiness, whose life we know through devoted and accomplished hagiographers who shaped it to their ends, and whose cult became one of the great forces of the medieval English Church. The wonders are the testimony of the Lives, held with reverence and with care; the man behind them is glimpsed but real; the significance — as the bridge between Celtic and Roman, the desert father of the north, the saint of Durham — is large and well founded. He takes his place among the great saints of the one Church: the shepherd boy called by the sight of Aidan’s ascending soul, the hermit of Farne, the reluctant bishop who went back to his rock to die, the wonderworker whose incorrupt body the north would carry for a hundred years and venerate for a thousand more.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (The secure outline of Cuthbert’s life and the constructed portrait of the Lives.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The independent epitome and the dated events of Cuthbert’s world.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The assessment of Cuthbert as the bridge between Celtic and Roman; Thacker on the making of the saint; the cult and its significance.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s portrait of Cuthbert and its purposes; the historical man and the saint.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991. (Cuthbert in the religious history of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria.)