Saint Cuthbert (c. 634–687)

The shepherd who became bishop in spite of himself

The story of Cuthbert is, in many respects, the mirror of Aidan's who preceded him by a generation: the same taste for walking and poverty, the same authority won by gentleness rather than constraint, the same attraction to the secluded Isle of Farne. But Cuthbert's most singular trait is his resistance to every office: a monk, he flees towards the eremitical life; named bishop, it takes a king and a whole synod in supplication to tear him from his cell. This flight from honours, joined to an intense pastoral and thaumaturgic activity as soon as he is called upon, sketches the portrait of a man who seeks only God and whom ecclesiastical offices find, rather than the reverse.

A name become a place, a people, a cathedral

Few saints have given their name to so many tangible realities: the Isle of Lindisfarne remains for ever associated with his name; a whole wandering monastic community bears, for more than a century, the name of the "Community of Saint Cuthbert" (Haliwerfolc, "the people of the holy man"); and the entire city of Durham is born, in 995, from the need to give his body a final tomb^[5]. French Catholics generally know this saint less well than the English of the North, for whom he remains, thirteen hundred years after his death, a cultural and spiritual self-evidence.

A child of Northumbria

Cuthbert was born about 634, probably in the neighbourhood of Melrose, in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria — a region corresponding today to south-eastern Scotland and north-eastern England^[6]. His origins were humble: as a child, he kept sheep on the hills near the future monastery^[7]. The earliest sources report, from his youngest age, signs foretelling his future vocation.

About the age of eight, while playing with companions at tumbling games, a very young child came up to him and declared to him, in a grave tone, that it was unworthy of a future bishop to behave so^[8]. Cuthbert, struck, took the remark seriously and began to lead a more recollected life. Another tradition reports the miraculous healing of a badly infected knee: a horseman clothed in white, met on the road, pointed out to him a remedy which cured him at once — Cuthbert would later understand that he had received the visit of an angel^[9].

The vision of Saint Aidan's death (31 August 651)

The decisive event of his youth occurred on the night of 31 August 651. Cuthbert, then an adolescent, was keeping flocks on the hills when, in the midst of a vigil of prayer, heaven opened before him: a light came down from it, and in the midst of that brightness angels bore heavenwards a soul radiant as fire. In the morning, he learned that Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne had died that very night, at the precise hour of the vision. Overwhelmed, the young shepherd understood that he had beheld the soul of the holy bishop ascending to God, and resolved on the spot to become a monk^[10].

"He suddenly saw heaven opened, and a company of angels descending, who returned bearing with them a soul resplendent with light." — Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti, ch. 4^[11]

Thus Aidan's death begets, the same night, the vocation of the one who would become the greatest saint of Lindisfarne after him — as already reported in the Ignispedia article on Saint Aidan. The "little fire" come from Iona, in going out, lights a second torch.

The horseman with the spear and military service

Cuthbert did not, however, take the road to the cloister at once: the wars then opposing Northumbria to the pagan kingdom of Mercia delayed his entry into religion, and some sources show him bearing arms in his king's service^[12]. It was only in the following years that he presented himself at Melrose Abbey, "mounted on a war-horse, a spear in his hand, and followed by an esquire"^[13] — a striking image of a future saint entering the monastery in a soldier's garb, before coming out of it in a monk's habit.

A disciple of Saint Boisil

At Melrose, Cuthbert placed himself under the direction of Prior Boisil, a man of great holiness who recognised in him from the outset an exceptional disciple. Tradition reports that Boisil, reading Saint John's Gospel with Cuthbert one day, foretold to him — without then wishing to explain himself further — that he would one day be a bishop^[14]. Cuthbert kept the word to himself, in silent compunction, without revealing it to anyone until the event fulfilled it.

The bread brought by an angel, at Ripon

Sent for a time as guest-master to the newly founded monastery of Ripon, Cuthbert one day received there an unknown traveller, chilled with cold. He washed his feet according to monastic custom, prepared him food, then stepped out a moment to fetch fresh bread. On his return, the stranger had vanished without leaving a trace in the snow, but three loaves of extraordinary whiteness and savour awaited him on the table. Cuthbert then understood that he had accomplished, unknowingly, the word of the Epistle to the Hebrews on hospitality towards angels^[15]:

"It was an angel of God whom I received, come to feed me, and not to be fed." — Cuthbert, according to Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti, ch. 7^[16]

Ripon adopted, however, in 661, the Roman usage for reckoning the date of Easter; Cuthbert and the monks who remained faithful to the Celtic observance then returned to Melrose^[17].

Prior of Melrose, then of Lindisfarne (664)

In 664, an epidemic of plague ravaged Northumbria and carried off Prior Boisil; Cuthbert succeeded him at the head of Melrose monastery^[18]. The same year, the Synod of Whitby decided in favour of the Roman usage for all Northumbria — a decision already recounted in the Ignispedia article on Saint Wilfrid. Cuthbert, while never disowning the memory of Aidan or of the Celtic tradition that had formed him, loyally rallied to the synodal decision and received the delicate charge of introducing the Roman usages into the monastery of Lindisfarne, where he became prior, alongside Bishop Eata^[19].

This transition could have been a trauma for the monks of Celtic obedience; it took place, under Cuthbert's guidance, in a patience and charity recalling Aidan's very method: convincing rather than constraining. Bede praises the manner in which Cuthbert "tamed, by his persevering gentleness, those whom he could not turn from their ancient customs by authority alone"^[20].

The itinerant pastor and the gifts of healing

As prior, Cuthbert imitated Aidan even in his missionary method: he travelled on foot through the remotest and poorest villages of his diocese, where no priest dared go because of difficult access or the roughness of the inhabitants, remaining sometimes a week or two, even a whole month, to preach and catechise^[21]. His reputation as a wonder-worker began in this very period: Bede and the anonymous author of the first Life attribute to him healings of the possessed, the sick and the dying, worked by the laying on of hands, holy water or a simple prayer.

The Coldingham vigil: the otters that warmed his feet

The most famous of Cuthbert's animal tales is set not on Farne, but many years earlier, during a visit to the monastery of Coldingham, founded by Abbess Æbbe: invited to exhort that community, Cuthbert slipped away each night to pray in the icy sea. A brother of the monastery, intrigued to see him go out alone, followed him discreetly and discovered the saint entering the sea up to his neck, spending the whole night there praising God:

"Now one night, a brother of the monastery, seeing him go out alone, followed him privately to see what he should do. But he, when he left the monastery, went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reached his neck and arms, spent the night in praising God. When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two quadrupeds, called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with their hair, after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element." — Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti, ch. 10^[22]

The watching monk, seized with fear, revealed himself the next day and asked pardon for having spied on the saint; Cuthbert, more grieved to know his secret discovered than angry with the spy, made him promise to say nothing of it while he lived^[23]. This scene, where creation obeys the man of God as in paradise regained, would become one of the most repeated iconographic motifs of the whole Anglo-Saxon tradition.

The choice of solitude

In 676, at the height of his pastoral activity, Cuthbert withdrew towards greater solitude: he first obtained leave to live on a small island near Lindisfarne, before settling definitively on the Isle of Farne (Inner Farne), off Bamburgh — the same desert rock where Saint Aidan had been wont to withdraw to pray^[24]. Bede explains this desire by a thirst for contemplative perfection: after years of fighting for the souls of others, Cuthbert now wished to fight for his own, in the silence and trial of the sea desert^[25].

Farne had been before him but a barren rock haunted, according to popular legend, by demons and evil spirits; Cuthbert settled there, built with his own hands a cell and an oratory surrounded by a wall of earth and stone so high that he could see nothing but the sky, "so that his eyes as his thoughts could turn only upwards"^[26]. He at first admitted no visit, save in extreme necessity, and fed himself on barley which he grew himself on that thankless soil.

The miracle of the spring and the barley

Two wonders accompanied his settling on that rock with neither fresh water nor arable land. First, Cuthbert had the ground dug in the middle of his cell and, against all geological expectation, a spring of fresh water gushed from it, which would never run dry^[27]. Then, having sown barley out of season, for want of having been able to procure wheat, he obtained despite all an abundant harvest — until birds came to devour it; Cuthbert then ordered them, with quiet authority, to cease harming a good they had not sown, and the birds obeyed at once and never returned^[28].

The protected birds of Farne

A later tradition, popularised above all in the following centuries, attaches to Cuthbert the protection of the eiders, those sea-ducks that nest in great numbers on the Farne archipelago and are still called today, in the Northumberland dialect, "Cuddy's ducks" — "Cuddy's ducks", Cuddy being the popular diminutive of Cuthbert^[29]. It is told that the saint forbade that they be done the least harm or that their eggs be gathered on his island. It must be noted, in historical honesty, that this precise association between Cuthbert and the eiders appears in writing only several centuries after his death, and not in Bede's Lives themselves^[30]: it is a late popular tradition rather than a fact attested by the 8th-century primary sources — but it faithfully prolongs, in popular memory, the spirit of the animal miracles reported by Bede — like the birds of the barley obeying his voice on that same rock.

Reluctance and the Synod of Twyford (684)

In 684, a synod assembled under the presidency of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, in the presence of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, elected Cuthbert to the episcopate. The hermit at first obstinately refused: neither messengers nor letters could make him leave his rock^[31]. The king himself, accompanied by Bishop Trumwine and a numerous suite of clerics, had to cross the sea to Farne to beg him in person:

"Although they sent many messengers and letters to him, he could not by any means be drawn from his habitation, until the king himself [...] sailed to the island [...]; they all went down on their knees before him, and adjured him by the Lord, with tears and entreaties, until they drew him away from his retirement with tears in his eyes." — after Bede, quoted by the Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "St. Cuthbert"^[32]

This scene — a king and bishops kneeling, begging in tears a hermit to consent to become their bishop — is the exact inverted mirror of ordinary ecclesiastical ambitions: here, it is the Church that runs after humility, and not the reverse.

Consecration at York (Easter 685)

Cuthbert was consecrated bishop at York, on the feast of Easter 685, by Archbishop Theodore, in the presence of six other bishops^[33]. He first received the see of Hexham, which he exchanged almost at once, by common accord with Bishop Eata, for that of Lindisfarne, more in keeping with his monastic heart and his memory of Aidan^[34].

A missionary pastor despite illness

Once bishop, Cuthbert resumed with the same energy as in his days as prior the pastoral visits on foot, the confirmations, the preachings in the remotest countryside, despite already declining health^[35]. He continued to work remarkable healings — on sick children, on possessed nuns, on paralytics — which Bede reports with the precision of an investigator careful to name his witnesses^[36].

The gift of prophecy: the queen, the battle and the friend of Derwentwater

Bede attributes to Cuthbert as bishop a gift of prophecy on several occasions. Receiving hospitality from the queen at Carlisle Abbey, he foretold, at the very moment when the Battle of Nechtansmere against the Picts was being fought, the death of King Ecgfrith and the disaster of his army — news confirmed a few days later^[37].

The most moving account concerns his friend Herbert, a priest-hermit withdrawn on a small island in Derwentwater lake, in Cumbria, who had been wont to come each year to receive spiritual counsel from Cuthbert. At their last meeting, Cuthbert revealed to him that his own death was near; Herbert, distraught at the thought of being separated from his friend in the hereafter, begged him to obtain from God that they die the same day, so as to meet again at once in heaven. Cuthbert prayed, and his prayer was heard: the two men, separated by hundreds of kilometres, died indeed at the same hour, on 20 March 687^[38].

"After imploring the mercy of the Lord, he had the assurance that his request would not be refused." — Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, IV, 29, on Cuthbert's prayer for Herbert of Derwentwater^[39]

Resignation of office (Christmas 686)

Feeling his end near, Cuthbert resigned his episcopal office at Christmas 686, after less than two years of effective exercise, and regained his Farne hermitage to prepare there for death in the solitude he had always preferred^[40].

The last days as told by Herefrid

The account of his end is known to us with exceptional precision, for Bede holds it directly from the priest Herefrid, then Abbot of Lindisfarne, who assisted him to his last breath and passed on his first-hand testimony^[41]. Cuthbert, afflicted with a painful illness, at first refused all outside help, before consenting, at the insistence of the monks who came to visit him by boat despite the storm, to receive their care and the last sacraments.

The last words: peace and Catholic unity

To one of his brethren who asked him for a last farewell word for the community, Cuthbert addressed a brief exhortation on peace and charity, joined with a warning against any breach of Catholic communion:

"Have peace, and Divine charity ever amongst you [...]. Let concord be mutual between you and other servants of Christ [...] have no communion with those who err from the unity of the Catholic faith, either by keeping Easter at an improper time, or by their perverse life." — Cuthbert, last words reported by the priest Herefrid to Bede^[42]

This final insistence on Catholic unity, in a man formed in the Celtic tradition who had accepted only with regret the change of Easter reckoning decided at Whitby, shows the depth of his adherence — uncoerced but matured — to the visible communion of the Church.

Death on 20 March 687

Cuthbert died in the night of 20 March 687, after receiving the viaticum, reciting the last verses of a psalm with his brethren present. His body was at once carried to Lindisfarne to be buried there in a stone tomb, to the right of the church altar, with the honours due to so great a bishop^[43].

The body found intact (698)

Eleven years after his death, in 698, the monks of Lindisfarne decided to raise Cuthbert's body from its tomb to place it in a reliquary, according to the custom then in use for recognised saints. On opening the coffin, they discovered, amazed, a body entirely incorrupt, limbs supple, as asleep rather than dead^[44]. This discovery, reported in detail by Bede, triggered an influx of pilgrims and made Cuthbert — within the lifetime of the very generation that had known him — a saint whose holiness was visible in his own flesh.

"His body was found altogether uncorrupted after it had been buried eleven years." — Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, IV, 30^[45]

It was in those same years that the first Anonymous Life of Cuthbert was composed in his honour by a monk of Lindisfarne — the very text Bede would use as a source for his own writings^[46].

The Lindisfarne Gospels, "for God and Saint Cuthbert"

It was in memory of this growing cult that the monk Eadfrith, future Bishop of Lindisfarne, illuminated about the year 700 the famous Lindisfarne Gospels, a masterpiece of Insular art today kept in the British Library. The colophon added two centuries later by the priest Aldred specifies the scribe's intention:

"He wrote this book for God and St Cuthbert and also for all the Saints whose relics are on the island." — Aldred's colophon on the Lindisfarne Gospels^[47]

This manuscript would accompany the saint's body through all its later wanderings, as far as Durham.

Flight from the Vikings and the "Community of Saint Cuthbert"

In 793, a first Viking raid devastated Lindisfarne; in 875, faced with the growing threat of the Danish invasions, the monks decided to evacuate the island, carrying away the saint's body, his wooden reliquary, and the Gospels illuminated in his honour. There began a wandering of more than a century across the whole north of England and present-day southern Scotland, under the guidance of a community that took the name of the "Community of Saint Cuthbert"^[48]. The longest halt was made at Chester-le-Street, where the body rested from about 883 to 995.

Durham, the city born of a tomb (995)

According to tradition, it was supernatural signs — the coffin become impossible to move, then a vision indicating the place — that finally led the wandering community to found, in 995, a new shrine on the rocky hill of Durham, surrounded on three sides by the River Wear^[49]. A cathedral was built there from 1093; Cuthbert's body became there, for more than four centuries, the centre of one of the greatest pilgrimages in England, making him the most venerated patron of the whole north of the country^[50].

The translation of 1104: a body still intact

When the new Norman cathedral was completed, a fresh solemn translation took place from 24 to 29 August 1104. Prior Turgot and a commission of monks opened the coffin to verify its contents before the ceremony: Cuthbert's body was again found undecayed, supple and intact after more than four centuries, in the presence, in the same coffin, of the skull of Saint Oswald — the martyr-king of Aidan's days — placed there for its protection during an earlier translation^[51]. It is this attribute, the royal skull held between his hands, that thenceforth became Saint Cuthbert's characteristic iconographic emblem. A copy of Saint John's Gospel (the Stonyhurst Gospel, today in the British Library) was also found in the coffin on that occasion^[52].

The Reformation and the destruction of 1538-1539

In the autumn of 1538 and then in 1539, the commissioners of King Henry VIII proceeded, in the framework of the dissolution of the monasteries, to dismantle the Durham shrine: the gold, silver and jewels adorning the feretory were confiscated, and the monument was razed^[53]. A local tradition, not universally verifiable but constant in Durham's memory, holds that the commissioners, on opening the coffin in the hope of finding hidden treasures there, again discovered the saint's body intact — and that, struck, they had it reburied beneath the very floor of the old shrine rather than dispersing it^[54]. A simple marble slab, engraved with the single word CUTHBERTUS, marks that spot in the cathedral to this day.

The rediscovery of 1827

On 17 May 1827, Canon James Raine reopened the tomb for archaeological study and found there several exceptional funerary objects, kept ever since in Durham Cathedral's treasury^[55]:

These objects, today displayed in the Museum of the Treasures of St Cuthbert at Durham, remain the oldest and best-preserved material testimony of an Anglo-Saxon bishop to have reached us.

Compunction and tears

The sources insist on Cuthbert's compunction: his prayer was frequently accompanied by tears, a sign for the monastic tradition of a heart touched by compunction and repentance, not by superficial emotiveness. Bede reports that at the celebration of Mass, he often could not contain his weeping, moved to tears by the consciousness of his own unworthiness before the mystery he celebrated^[56].

The balance between solitude and pastoral zeal

Cuthbert's whole life oscillates between two seemingly contrary poles: the irresistible attraction to the contemplative solitude of Farne, and a pastoral zeal that drives him, as soon as he is called upon, to travel on foot through the remotest parts of his diocese. Far from contradicting each other, these two movements illuminate each other: it is from his solitude that he draws the strength of his zeal, and it is his exhausted zeal that brings him back to seek, in solitude, a spiritual renewal. This alternation rejoins that already observed in Saint Aidan, who likewise withdrew to the Isle of Farne between missionary tours — Cuthbert, as a child, had seen the example; as a man, he became its most radical heir, even to settling there definitively.

Obedience to the Church despite attachment to the received tradition

Formed in the Celtic current inherited from Aidan and Iona, Cuthbert yet accepted, after the Synod of Whitby, to make himself the patient artisan of Lindisfarne's rallying to the Roman usage — without ever disowning or despising the memory of his fathers in the faith. This attitude, made of affectionate fidelity to a particular tradition and of resolute obedience to the universal Church's decision once it has spoken, would remain until his last word the most constant trait of his spiritual life: his ultimate recommendations to his brethren bear precisely on maintaining Catholic unity^[57].

Charity towards the poor and the sick

Like Aidan, Cuthbert did not distinguish bodily charity from spiritual charity: tending the sick, consoling the dying, feeding the poor or catechising an isolated hamlet all belonged for him to one and the same service of God in one's neighbour. His reputation as a healer, abundantly attested in the sources, was never separated, in the witnesses' eyes, from his reputation as a preacher and director of souls.

A sanctity recognised by the early Church, before the modern procedure

As with nearly all saints of the early Middle Ages, Cuthbert knew neither a canonisation trial nor a formal pontifical decree: such processes, reserved by law to the authority of the Apostolic See, were only codified much later in the Church's history^[58]. His sanctity was recognised, in the manner then in use, by the official elevation of his body eleven years after his death (698), by the documented and verified testimony of direct witnesses gathered by Bede, by the healings attested at his tomb, and by the repeated incorruption of his remains observed centuries apart (698, 1104, and according to local tradition again in 1539). This early recognition, confirmed by centuries of unbroken liturgical cult throughout the ecclesiastical province of York and then in the universal Church, counts as full canonisation in the eyes of Catholic law and tradition, on the same footing as Saint Aidan, Saint Hilda or Saint Bede.

Liturgical feast and patronages

Saint Cuthbert's feast is celebrated on 20 March, the day of his death, by Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans^[59]. He is venerated as the great patron of the north of England and, more specifically, of the Diocese of Durham and the former Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, of which he remains the emblematic protector.

Memory today

St Cuthbert's Way, a modern pilgrimage trail linking Melrose to Lindisfarne across the Cheviot Hills, today retraces the saint's footsteps for thousands of walkers and pilgrims each year. On the Isle of Farne itself, managed today by the National Trust as a nature reserve, the eider colonies continue to be protected — perpetuating, whether or not rigorously historical in its origin, the memory of a saint who lived at peace with wild creation. At Durham, his simple tomb, marked with the single word CUTHBERTUS, remains a place of unbroken prayer for thirteen centuries.

Thirteen centuries after his death, Cuthbert remains a master for our time. He teaches first that the flight from honours is not false humility but often the sign of a real fitness to receive them without being corrupted by them: it was because he did not seek the episcopate that he could exercise it without ambition or compromise, solely out of obedience to what the Church — through a suppliant king and a synod — asked him to bear.

He teaches next that solitude and apostolic action do not oppose but nourish each other: neither an activism that exhausts itself far from God, nor a contemplation that evades one's neighbour, but a constant movement from one to the other, like the sea around his Farne rock, now withdrawing from it, now flooding it.

"Have peace, and Divine charity ever amongst you." — These last words of Cuthbert to his brethren, spoken at the point of death, remain a programme for every Christian community: unity and charity kept to the end, when all the rest — office, health, life itself — passes away.

• Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne (590-651) — the bishop whose death, seen in vision, made Cuthbert a monk, and the model of his missionary method.
• Saint Bede the Venerable (672-735) — the historian and hagiographer to whom we owe almost all we know of Cuthbert, whose two Lives he wrote.
• Saint Hilda of Whitby (614-680) — the contemporary abbess whose death was likewise accompanied by a heavenly vision reported by Bede.
• Saint Wilfrid (c. 633-709) — the champion of the Roman usage at the Synod of Whitby (664), to which Cuthbert loyally rallied.
• Saint Columba (521-597) and Saint Patrick (385-461) — the founding figures of Celtic monasticism of which Cuthbert is the spiritual heir.
• Saint Columbanus (540-615) — the same Irish monastic stock, carried to the continent.
• Saint Augustine of Canterbury (550-605) and Saint Gregory the Great (540-604) — the parallel Roman mission, whose usage ended by prevailing at Lindisfarne in Cuthbert's lifetime.