This Little I Know About... St Cuthbert - Parts I & II.

Part I.

I have St Cuthbert to thank for the happiest drop of whisky I’ve ever sipped.

One of the most famous stories about St Cuthbert tells how on a visit to Coldingham Priory he was spied walking down to the sea in the dead of night. He walked out into the sea (and remember, this is the North Sea we’re talking about here), literally up to his neck in it, and prayed. At daybreak he returned to the shore, and there two otters came up and dried the Saint’s feet with their fur, and warmed them with their breath.

About thirteen hundred years, I went to Lindisfarne on a retreat led by a decidedly butch priest. He thought it would be good for us all to strip down to our underwear and wade out into the water to recite a few psalms in honour of St Cuthbert; I think it was February. Obedient as ever I joined in with this lunacy: I was glad to discover that I didn’t feel the cold for very long, because it only took a few seconds to become numb. When we got back to our accommodation, a fine bottle of Talisker whisky appeared, a gift from one of the most marvellous nuns that Ireland has ever produced. No medicine has ever restored me to myself as rapidly as that dram of earthy gold.

St Cuthbert’s life encompasses a great historical turning point, because there were two Christian traditions alive in the British Isles in his time – the traditions of Ireland and the north and west of Britain, and the tradition brought to the south of England by St Augustine of Canterbury. These two traditions are usually described as ‘Celtic’ and ‘Roman’, and are portrayed as being quite distinct, but there was probably far more that united them than divided them, and generally speaking the ‘Celtic’ monasteries looked to and maintained strong links with the ‘Roman Church’.

On the night that St Aidan died, a young Cuthbert saw lights in the sky, and took this as a sign that he should enter the monastery Aidan had founded at Old Melrose. Thus, he grew up in the ‘Celtic’ tradition as a spiritual descendant of St Columba. However, thirteen years after he entered Old Melrose, the ‘Roman’ and ‘Celtic’ traditions were to collide and then separate.

One of the differences between the two traditions regarded the date of Easter. In 664, King Oswiu (who had been brought up in the ‘Celtic’ tradition) called a synod to resolve this difference, because he was fed up with celebrating Easter at a different time to his wife, Queen Eanfled (who had been brought up in the ‘Roman’ tradition). The Synod of Whitby witnessed a vigorous debate between the ‘Celtic’ Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne, and the rather odious Bishop Wilfrid, and once the arguments had been concluded King Oswiu ruled in favour of the ‘Roman’ date for Easter.

Bishop Colman and his monks moved out of Lindisfarne, and St Cuthbert moved in.

Part II.

There is much to love and admire in St Cuthbert’s life. Like St Aidan, he sought out the poorest and most needy. Like St Columba, he had a particular care for those who came to him as penitents.

There is also a complexity, a fragility perhaps, about St Cuthbert’s character – just as there was with Columba. On the remote island near Lindisfarne, where Cuthbert spent many years as a hermit, he built high walls for his cell so that all he could see was the sky, and he would not be ‘distracted’ by the view of the sea around him. Given the Celtic reputation for seeing so much of God in the ‘great book’ of Creation, this seems like an extreme kind of withdrawal.

Maybe his desire for complete solitude is not so strange though. It’s probable that the monastic community at Lindisfarne was a deeply divided one when Cuthbert became Prior, in the wake of the Synod of Whitby. Bede described how, ‘Some of the monks preferred their old way of life to the rule... At chapter meetings he was often worn down by bitter insults, but would put an end to the arguments simply by rising and walking out, calm and unruffled.’ I’ll keep that up my cassock sleeve for the next time a Church Council meeting gets a bit out of hand.

Just as my pilgrimage will end at St Cuthbert’s ‘home’ island of Lindisfarne, so some see Cuthbert himself as marking the end of a great journey of faith which began with the arrival of an exiled warrior-Saint on the island of Iona. To Ian Bradley of the University of St Andrews, St Cuthbert is ‘the last great representative of the heroic age of Celtic Saints.’