The Orthodox Reception

St. Hilda of Whitby lived and died (c. 614–680) in the one undivided Church, more than three centuries before the conventional date of the Great Schism, and she is venerated by Orthodox Christians today as one of the Western saints of the common pre-Schism inheritance. This file sets out the ground of her cult — the holy death that Bede attests — and the modern Orthodox recovery of the saints of the British Isles and the West who lived before the division, soberly described as it actually stands, with formal liturgical commemoration varying by jurisdiction.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; abbess of Whitby)

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The first and governing fact about the Orthodox veneration of St. Hilda is chronological. She died in 680, while the Church of East and West was still one communion, and her whole life and labour fall within the period before the estrangement that is conventionally dated to the mutual excommunications of 1054 (on the period, see the anchor file on the pre-Schism Church). She belonged to no confession later than catholic Christianity itself; the Synod of Whitby over which she presided in 664 debated a disciplinary question — the dating of Pascha and the form of the tonsure — within the one Church, not between churches (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; IV.23; ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). (Bede’s chapter on Hilda’s death is IV.23 in the Colgrave–Mynors edition and IV.24 in Plummer’s older numbering; the dual numbering is noted here once and applies to all citations of Bede in this file.)

For Orthodox Christians this places Hilda among the saints of the common patrimony. The principle is simple and is the foundation of the whole modern recovery described below: a saint glorified and venerated in the undivided Church is the inheritance of the whole Church that descends from it, and the East has as much title to her as the West, because in her own day there was no division to apportion her between (cf. the anchor file on the pre-Schism Church). Hilda is venerated, then, not as a “Western” saint adopted into Orthodoxy from outside, but as one of the saints of the time when the Church was undivided and her holiness was the Church’s own.

The Ground of the Cult: Bede on Her Holy Death

The historical ground of Hilda’s veneration is the account of her holiness and her death given by Bede, writing within two generations of her repose and drawing on the memory of her own community. Bede reports that after governing Whitby in great sanctity she was afflicted for six years before her death by a wasting fever, which she bore without ever ceasing to give thanks to her Maker or to instruct her flock, “for by her own example she admonished all to serve God dutifully in health, and always to render thanks to Him faithfully in adversity or bodily sickness” (Bede IV.23; ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). On the night of her death — Bede gives the date as the seventeenth of November, in the year 680 — she received the viaticum and, having exhorted those present to keep the peace of the gospel among themselves and with all, peacefully fell asleep (Bede IV.23).

Bede attaches to her death two visions that became the foundation of her cult, and which are reported here as what Bede attests his witnesses said they saw, not as facts independently asserted (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5). In the first, a nun named Begu, in the monastery of Hackness some thirteen miles distant, was roused in the dormitory by the sound of the bell that was rung at a death and, looking up, saw the roof open and the soul of Hilda being borne up to heaven in the company of angels; she woke the sisters, and the community kept vigil in prayer until messengers came at dawn with the news that the abbess had died at the very hour of the vision (Bede IV.23; ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). In the second, a nun in the more remote part of Whitby’s own house was said likewise to have seen Hilda’s soul ascend (Bede IV.23). These death-visions — the bell, the opening roof, the soul borne up by angels — are the attestation, in Bede’s narrative, of her holy passing, and they are the ground on which her community remembered her as a saint.

Why She Is Venerated

The substance of Hilda’s sanctity, as Bede sets it out, is the substance that Orthodox veneration honours. She was the mother of monks and nuns, the foundress and ruler of houses, who trained no fewer than five men of her community to the episcopate and was sought as counsellor by kings and princes (Bede IV.23; ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). She was the discerning fosterer of the herdsman Cædmon, recognizing the gift of sacred song that had come upon him, receiving him into the monastery, and setting him to turn Scripture into English verse — an act of spiritual discernment that gave the English their first religious poet (Bede IV.24 [= IV.23 in some numbering schemes]; ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). She was a peacemaker, who died charging her community to hold the peace of the gospel; and she was, by every indication of Bede’s account, free of any taint of heterodoxy. When the Synod of Whitby — which she had hosted — ruled in 664 for the Roman computation of Pascha against the Ionan custom she herself had followed, she submitted to the decision and remained within the unity of the Church (Bede III.25, IV.23; on her submission, see the companion file on accepting the synod’s decision). It is this combination — holiness of life, fruitfulness in the formation of others, the gift of discernment, and obedience to the order and unity of the Church — that makes her a saint the East can receive without reservation.

An Orthodox reflection draws the threads together. In Hilda the Church sees the abbatial and maternal sanctity it has always honoured in the East — the holy woman who is mother and teacher to a community, of whom Macrina the Younger is the great Cappadocian type (see the companion file on the double monastery East and West). It sees the gift of spiritual discernment, in her recognition and fostering of Cædmon’s charism. And it sees obedience to the Church’s order, in her acceptance of the Synod’s ruling and her refusal to make a party of her own preference. These are not Western virtues or Eastern virtues but the virtues of the one Church, and they are why Orthodox Christians today number Hilda among the saints (cf. the anchor file on women in Orthodoxy).

The Modern Orthodox Recovery of the Western Pre-Schism Saints

Hilda’s place in the Orthodox calendar belongs to a wider movement that must be described soberly and accurately. Over the twentieth century, and especially among the English-speaking Orthodox — within the Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR) and other jurisdictions with a presence in the British Isles and the Western world — there grew a deliberate recovery and veneration of the saints of the West who lived before the Schism: the saints of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Britain and Ireland and of the early Western Church more broadly. Hilda stands within this company alongside Aidan of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, Bede the Venerable, Columba of Iona, Patrick of Ireland, and many others (cross-linked below). The animating principle is the one stated above: that the saints glorified in the undivided Church are the common patrimony of Orthodoxy, and that their inclusion in Orthodox calendars — together with the composition of Orthodox liturgical services for them, including the Western-rite usages — is a feature of the English and Western Orthodox revival of the modern period.

This movement should not be overstated or misrepresented. It is a real and growing devotion, but it is not uniform: formal liturgical commemoration of the Western pre-Schism saints varies by jurisdiction and by parish, and a saint honoured with a full service in one calendar may be commemorated more simply, or chiefly in private devotion, in another. The recovery is best understood not as a single act of canonization — these saints were never “added” by a modern decree, for they were never lost to the undivided Church — but as the Orthodox world’s reappropriation of holy men and women who were always its own. Hilda is one of the more prominent figures of that reappropriation, both for the stature Bede gives her and for the appeal of an abbess whose sanctity so plainly echoes the Eastern tradition of the holy woman as mother and teacher.

The Feast

Hilda is commemorated on the seventeenth of November, her dies natalis — the day of her death in 680, when she was, in the language of the martyrologies, born into heaven — which Bede gives explicitly as the date of her repose (Bede IV.23; ed./trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). This is her feast in the general Western reckoning and in most Orthodox observance.

[Disputed: the feast is given as 17 November in most reckonings, following Bede's date for her death (IV.23), and the Western and general commemoration falls on that day; but some Orthodox calendars list her commemoration on 18 or 19 November. The variation reflects calendar differences (the thirteen-day divergence between the Julian and Gregorian reckonings) and jurisdictional usage rather than any disagreement about the date of her death, which the sources agree was 17 November 680.] For this reason her feast is here presented as 17/19 November, the range encompassing the Western/general date and the variant Orthodox listings. No attempt is made here to reproduce a service text or troparion, which differ by jurisdiction and rite; the reader is referred to the calendar and service-books of the particular Orthodox jurisdiction that keeps her memory (cf. the anchor file on the Church calendar).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Hilda’s death on 17 November 680, after a six-year illness, at IV.23 [= IV.24 in Plummer’s older numbering]; the death-visions of the nun Begu at Hackness and of the sister at Whitby; her final exhortation to keep the gospel peace; the five bishops, her counsel to kings, and the fostering of Cædmon; the Synod of Whitby at III.25.)
The Orthodox calendar and the modern commemoration of the Western pre-Schism saints (general). (The twentieth-century recovery, especially among English-speaking Orthodox and within ROCOR, of the saints of the British Isles and the West who lived before the Schism — Hilda among them, with Aidan, Cuthbert, Bede, Columba, and Patrick; the feast of Hilda kept on 17 November, with some calendars giving 18 or 19 November; formal liturgical commemoration varying by jurisdiction. Cited generally; no single service text is reproduced.)