The Orthodox Reception

David of Wales died around 589, centuries before the schism between East and West conventionally dated to 1054, in the undivided Church that East and West then shared. On that basis the modern Orthodox recovery of the pre-Schism Western and Celtic saints has reclaimed David — among many others — for the Orthodox calendar, commemorating him on 1 March alongside the saints of the East. This file sets out the rationale for that reception, the channels through which it has proceeded (the work of Orthodox writers and parishes recovering the Western saints, the ROCOR and other calendars), and — both-sides and without polemic — the genuine cautions around venerating a saint known mainly through a Vita written some five hundred years after his death.

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

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The foundation of David’s Orthodox reception is chronological and ecclesiological before it is sentimental. David died around 589 — the traditional date is 1 March 589, though the year is uncertain and rests on later sources (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, 2013; on what can be securely known, see What Can Be Known). That places his death and his whole life within the period before the estrangement of East and West, conventionally dated to the mutual anathemas of 1054 and completed only over the following centuries. The British church of David’s day was in communion with Rome and with the Eastern patriarchates; it shared the faith of the seven Ecumenical Councils as those were received, the common creed, and the common sacramental life of the one Church (on the undivided Church of the period, see Pre-Schism Church; on the British church before the Roman mission, The British Church Before Augustine).

The Orthodox argument runs straightforwardly from this fact. A saint glorified within the undivided Church belongs to the whole Church, East and West, before the division; the later separation of the Western patriarchate does not retroactively un-make the holiness of those who lived and died in communion. The saints of the pre-Schism West — Martin of Tours, Patrick, Brigid, Columba, Cuthbert, Bede, and David among them — are therefore, on this view, Orthodox saints, not because the Orthodox Church has “adopted” foreign holy men but because they were always within the one Church to which Orthodoxy claims unbroken continuity. The reception of David is thus framed not as innovation but as recovery: the restoration to active veneration of saints who had simply fallen out of Eastern liturgical memory through the accidents of geography and the long centuries of estrangement.

The Modern Orthodox Recovery of the Western Saints

The active commemoration of the pre-Schism Western and Celtic saints is, as a movement, largely a phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, bound up with the spread of Orthodoxy in Western Europe and the English-speaking world. As Orthodox communities — Russian émigré, Greek, Antiochian, and convert — established themselves in Britain and the West, the question naturally arose of how to relate to the indigenous Christian past, and the answer many reached was to recover the local saints of the first Christian millennium as their own.

Several channels carried this recovery. In the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the impetus to commemorate Western pre-Schism saints was given formal encouragement: St John (Maximovitch), archbishop of Western Europe and later of San Francisco (1896–1966), is widely credited with urging the veneration of the ancient saints of the West and with seeking out their names for liturgical commemoration in the lands where Orthodox now lived (the biographical literature on St John of Shanghai and San Francisco; the ROCOR tradition of commemorating the Western saints). Out of this milieu came the compilation of Western pre-Schism saints into Orthodox calendars and the production of menologia, lives, and liturgical services in English for saints such as David. Parishes and monasteries — particularly in Britain — took local pre-Schism saints as patrons, and Orthodox writers produced collections of their lives for an Orthodox readership (for example, the genre represented by such works as Vladimir Moss’s compilations of the lives of the British saints, and the menologia and saint-of-the-day resources maintained by Orthodox bodies). The dedication of an Orthodox parish or the keeping of a saint’s feast is itself a form of reception, and David has been so received in the Orthodox communities of Wales and beyond.

It should be said plainly that this recovery has proceeded somewhat unevenly and without a single, universal conciliar act enrolling every Western saint by name; commemoration rests partly on local calendars, partly on the menaia and synaxaria of particular jurisdictions, and partly on the devotional practice of communities, rather than on one comprehensive pan-Orthodox decree. That unevenness is not a defect to be hidden but a feature to be reported: the reception of the Western saints is a living and still-developing process within world Orthodoxy (on the church calendar and the principles of commemoration, see The Church Calendar).

The Feast: 1 March

David’s feast is kept on 1 March, the traditional day of his repose, both in the Western (Roman Catholic and Anglican) calendars and in the Orthodox commemoration of him. The day is the great national festival of Wales, Dydd Gŵyl Dewi (St David’s Day), marked far beyond the bounds of any church (Charles-Edwards 2013; on the cult and its records, see The Cult Records). For Orthodox who keep the older (Julian) reckoning, the civil date of the commemoration shifts accordingly, but the liturgical day remains 1 March. David is venerated as a monastic saint and hierarch — an abbot-bishop of the early insular church — and, in the Welsh context, as the patron of Wales, a patronage of long standing that the Orthodox reception has inherited along with the feast.

The Rationale, and Its Limits

The case for David’s Orthodox veneration is strong on its principal point — that he is a saint of the undivided Church — and it is reinforced by the unmistakably Eastern character of the monasticism attributed to him: the desert-style asceticism of the “Watermen,” with its water-drinking, manual labour, silence, and poverty, reads as a Western expression of the very ideal the Orthodox East holds dearest in its own monastic tradition (see Welsh Asceticism and the Desert and The Rule of the Watermen). A saint whose recorded holiness is the holiness of the desert is, for Orthodoxy, peculiarly recognisable and peculiarly welcome.

But honesty requires that the limits of what can be known be stated as clearly as the rationale. The difficulty is a source-critical one, and it is real:

[Disputed: how much of the venerated David is historically recoverable — (A) the cautious-historical position notes that almost nothing of David is securely attested before Rhygyfarch's *Vita Sancti David*, written around 1090, roughly five centuries after the saint's death and for frankly partisan purposes (the metropolitan claims of St Davids against Canterbury), so that the detailed portrait — the rule, the miracles, the synods, the Jerusalem pilgrimage — is late hagiography rather than contemporary record and cannot be treated as biography (Richard Sharpe and the contributors in Evans and Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013; see [The Vita Davidis](../04-rhygyfarchs-life/the-vita-davidis.md)); (B) the position that this does not undermine the veneration holds that the *cult* is far older than the *Vita* — David's name appears in the early-ninth-century *Annales Cambriae* and in Irish and Welsh sources well before Rhygyfarch, and the Church's commemoration rests on the antiquity and continuity of the cult, not on the historical reliability of any one Life (the cult evidence in Evans and Wooding 2007; see [The Cult Records](../07-sources-and-transmission/the-cult-records.md)).]

Three points hold this together soberly. First, the antiquity of the cult is much better attested than the details of the Life: David was venerated in Wales and Ireland long before Rhygyfarch wrote, and it is the cult, not the Vita, that the Church receives (see The Cult Records). Second, the methodological discipline of this repository applies with full force: the miracle accounts and the rule are reported as what Rhygyfarch’s Vita attests, pinned to their c. 1090 source, and are never asserted as independently established historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Vita Davidis). Third — and this is the properly theological point — the Church’s veneration of a saint has never depended on the historical reliability of his vita. The Church venerates the person whom it has received as holy and whom it believes to stand before God; the literary record, with all its later accretions, is the occasion of memory, not its ground. A saint known chiefly through a late and tendentious Latin Life is venerated for the holiness the Church confesses in him, while the historian is left free — indeed obliged — to weigh the Life critically.

Cautions Particular to a Western, Latin-Hagiography Saint

Two further cautions belong to the Orthodox reception of a saint like David. The first concerns the medium of transmission: David is known mainly through Latin, and latterly Roman Catholic and Anglican, hagiography and devotion, and the Orthodox reception necessarily works through and around that later Western framing. The discernment required is to receive the pre-Schism saint without importing the post-Schism theological developments that his later Latin biographers may have read back into him; the Orthodox commemoration claims David as he was in the undivided Church, not as later Western piety may have re-imagined him. The second concerns enthusiasm: as with the broader “Celtic Christianity” movement, there is a temptation to romanticise the Celtic saints into something they were not, and Orthodox writers have not always been immune to it. The sober course — and the one this collection takes — is to receive David genuinely and gladly as a saint of the undivided Church, recognisable above all in the desert character of his monasticism, while declining both the historical credulity that would treat Rhygyfarch as biography and the romantic enthusiasm that would make of the Celtic saints a separate, quasi-Eastern church (on the “Celtic Church” cautions, see Welsh Asceticism and the Desert; on the both-sides handling of contested claims, Methodology).

Held thus, the Orthodox reception of David is neither uncritical nor grudging. It rests on the firm ground that he died in the one Church; it is confirmed by the Eastern shape of his recorded holiness; it inherits his feast on 1 March and his patronage of Wales; and it carries, openly, the acknowledgment that the man behind the Vita is known to history only in outline — which is, in the end, true of a great many of the saints whom the Church has always loved.

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. Studies in Celtic History 24. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (The Life on which most later devotion draws; its c. 1090 date and partisan purpose.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (Richard Sharpe and others on the date and tendency of the Vita; the evidence for the antiquity of the cult, including the pre-Rhygyfarch attestations.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The dating of David’s repose, the early notices of his name, and the place of the British church within the wider Church.)
Annales Cambriae. (The early-ninth-century Welsh annals; among the earliest notices of David.)
Moss, Vladimir. The Saints of Anglo-Saxon England and related compilations of the lives of the British saints. (Representative of the modern Orthodox literature recovering the pre-Schism Western and Celtic saints.)
The Life of St John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco. (For St John’s encouragement of the veneration of the ancient Western saints; the ROCOR tradition of commemorating the pre-Schism saints of the West.)
METHODOLOGY.md (this repository). (§3.5 on reporting hagiographical and miracle claims as what the source attests; §4 on the both-sides handling of disputed and sensitive matters.)