08 — East and West

Two questions bind David of Wales to the wider Church beyond the insular world. The first is historical: why does the monasticism attributed to him — water-drinking, manual labour, silence, and radical poverty — look so much like the asceticism of the Egyptian desert, and by what route did the desert ideal reach sixth-century Wales? The second is ecclesial: on what basis, and within what limits, does the Orthodox Church commemorate a pre-Schism Western saint known mainly through a Latin Life written five centuries after his death? This section answers both, soberly and from the sources.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)

David lived and died in the undivided Church, and his monasticism wears the colours of the Christian East. These two facts belong together. The desert character of the “Watermen” is best explained not as evidence of some exotic Celtic exception but as a Western reception of the desert ideal — carried to the insular world through Athanasius’s Life of Antony, through John Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences, and through the monasticism of Lérins and Gaul — and the same belonging to the one undivided Church that makes that reception intelligible is what grounds David’s commemoration in Orthodoxy today. This section treats the desert behind the rule and the Orthodox recovery of the pre-Schism Western saints, in both cases distinguishing the well-evidenced from the romantic, and pinning every hagiographical claim to its source.

Files in This Section

File Description
Welsh Asceticism and the Desert The Eastern-desert character of the Welsh monastic ideal; the transmission of Egyptian monasticism to the West through Athanasius’s Life of Antony, John Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences, and Lérins/Gaul; the parallels between the “Watermen” and the Desert Fathers; and the contested, romantic theory of direct Egyptian–Celtic contact (the “seven Egyptian monks buried in Ireland”), handled source-critically.
The Orthodox Reception David as a pre-Schism Western saint received by Orthodoxy: his repose (c. 589) within the undivided Church; the modern Orthodox recovery of the Western and Celtic saints (ROCOR, St John of Shanghai, parishes and menologia); his feast on 1 March; his patronage of Wales; and the both-sides cautions around venerating a saint known mainly through later Latin hagiography.

See Also

  • The Rule of the Watermen — the desert-style rule whose Eastern character this section accounts for
  • What Can Be Known — the secure historical core behind the cult and its reception
  • The Cult Records — the antiquity of the cult on which the commemoration rests
  • St John Cassian — the conduit of Egyptian monasticism to the Latin and Celtic West
  • Monasticism — the Orthodox monastic ideal within which the Welsh asceticism is read
  • Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church to which David belonged

References

  • Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (c. 1090). Ed. and trans. Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies in J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.
  • John Cassian. The Institutes (trans. Boniface Ramsey, ACW 58) and The Conferences (trans. Boniface Ramsey, ACW 57; older trans. Gibson, NPNF II/11). New York: Newman/Paulist Press, 1997–2000.
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
  • Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. London: Mowbray, 1975.
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Chadwick, Nora K. The Age of the Saints in the Early Celtic Church. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
  • Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Davies, Wendy. “The Myth of the Celtic Church.” In The Early Church in Wales and the West, ed. Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1992.
  • Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.