Aidan of Lindisfarne
Our Father among the Saints Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, Enlightener of Northumbria
Bishop · Venerable · b. late 6th or early 7th century, in Ireland — d. 31 August 651, at Bamburgh in Northumbria
Commemorated 31 August — Repose at the royal vill of Bamburgh
Aidan was an Irish monk of Iona sent in 635 at the request of King Oswald of Northumbria to convert the English of the north, who made his see on the tidal island of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast and governed it for sixteen years until his death on 31 August 651. He is the founder of the Northumbrian Church and, through the disciples he trained, of a good deal of the Christianity of England. Our knowledge of him comes almost entirely from Bede, who disapproved of his Easter reckoning and admired everything else about him without reserve: that he travelled on foot so as to be able to speak with everyone he met, that he gave away whatever the rich gave him, that he bought slaves out of slavery and educated some of them for the priesthood, and that he told a king to his face that a poor man mattered more than a horse. On the night he died, a shepherd boy on the hills saw a soul carried up by angels, and went and became a monk: that boy was Cuthbert.
Iona, and the mission that failed
Aidan was an Irishman, a monk of the community of Columba on Iona in the Inner Hebrides. Of his birth, family and earlier years nothing whatever is transmitted; a late Irish tradition makes him a native of Connacht, and it is no more than a tradition.
In 633 the Northumbrian prince Oswald, who had spent his exile among the Irish of Dál Riata and been baptised at Iona, recovered his father's kingdom by the victory at Heavenfield near the Roman wall, fought under a wooden cross he had set up with his own hands. Wanting his people brought to the faith he had received in exile, he sent to the elders of Iona for a bishop.
They sent a man whom Bede does not name — later tradition calls him Corman — and he came back before long, reporting that he had achieved nothing, that the English were ungovernable, hard and barbarous, and that it was useless to labour among them. At the conference called to consider what should be done next, one of those present said quietly to him: "It seems to me, brother, that you were harsher with your ignorant hearers than you should have been. You did not first offer them the milk of gentler teaching, as the Apostle counsels, until little by little, nourished on the word of God, they should be strong enough to take in what is more perfect." Every face in the assembly turned to the speaker, and they judged that the man who had said it was the man to go. So Aidan was consecrated bishop and sent into Northumbria, in the year 635.
The story is the best single thing said about Aidan, and Bede knew it: the whole of his method is in that sentence, and so is the temper that made him beloved by Britons, Irish and English alike in a century that was not gentle.
Lindisfarne
Aidan chose for his see the island of Lindisfarne — Holy Island — a few miles south of the royal fortress of Bamburgh, cut off from the mainland by the tide twice a day and joined to it twice a day. The choice was deliberate and it was Ionan: a monastery-bishopric on a tidal island beside a royal seat, at once withdrawn and at hand. From it, in the century that followed, came the Lindisfarne Gospels and the cult of St Cuthbert, and the community that would carry Cuthbert's body about the north for a hundred years before the Danes.
The see was monastic in the Irish manner. Aidan was bishop and abbot together; his authority was personal and pastoral rather than territorial, and his clergy lived under rule. He kept the fast of Wednesdays and Fridays through the year except in the Paschal season; he lived on what the community lived on; he had no possessions but his books.
Oswald himself acted as his interpreter. Aidan at first had little English, and the king, who had learned Irish in his exile, would stand beside the bishop in the hall and put his preaching into the West Saxon-Northumbrian speech of the thegns and ealdormen. Bede reports the scene with evident delight, and it is one of the most attractive images in early English history: the converted warlord translating for the Irish monk.
The manner of his mission
Bede's summary of Aidan's way of life (Historia Ecclesiastica III.5, III.17) is a set-piece written to reproach the clergy of his own eighth century, and it should be read as such — but it is built of concrete detail:
He went everywhere on foot, never on horseback, unless compelled; and he did so precisely so that as he walked he might turn aside to anyone he met, rich or poor, and speak with them: to the heathen, to invite them to the faith; to the baptised, to strengthen them and stir them to almsgiving. Those who walked with him, whether monks or laymen, were required to study — to learn the psalms or to read the Scriptures as they went.
He took nothing from the rich and gave away at once whatever kings and wealthy men pressed on him. What money came to him he spent in redeeming captives and slaves; a number of those he redeemed he afterwards educated, ordained, and set to the work of the Church — which is to say that some of the first native English clergy were freedmen bought out of slavery by an Irish bishop.
He rebuked the powerful without flattery. When invited to the king's table he would take a little food and leave quickly to read or pray with his clergy; he would not be a court chaplain. And he asked from his converts a real catechumenate, teaching before baptism.
The king and the horse
The most famous story of Aidan concerns Oswine, king of Deira (Oswin), Oswald's kinsman and successor in the southern half of Northumbria, whom Bede calls a man of exceptional beauty, courtesy and generosity.
Oswine had given Aidan a fine horse, with a royal harness, so that the bishop might cross rivers and travel quickly on urgent business, though he preferred to walk. Aidan met a beggar on the road who asked alms, and gave him the horse, harness and all. When the king heard of it he said, as they were going in to dinner: "My lord bishop, why did you give away the royal horse that was meant for you? Have we not many less valuable horses that would have done for a beggar, without giving away the one I chose for you?" Aidan answered at once: "What are you saying, O king? Is that son of a mare more precious to you than that son of God?"
They went in. The king, who had come in from hunting, stood warming himself at the fire with his thegns; then suddenly he unbuckled his sword, gave it to a servant, and threw himself at Aidan's feet, asking pardon — "I will never speak of this again, nor judge what or how much of my money you give to the sons of God." Aidan raised him up, promised he would be cheerful, and told him to sit down to his dinner; but the bishop himself grew sad and began to weep. His priest asked him in Irish, so the English should not understand, why he wept. "I know," Aidan said, "that the king will not live long. I have never before seen a humble king; and I perceive that he will soon be taken from us, for this people is not worthy of such a ruler."
Oswine was betrayed and murdered by order of King Oswiu on 20 August 651. Aidan died twelve days later.
Farne, and the wind against Penda
Aidan withdrew when he could to the Inner Farne, the barren island off Bamburgh where Cuthbert would afterwards live as a solitary, and it is there that the one miracle-story of his lifetime is set.
Penda of Mercia, the great pagan king who had killed Oswald in 642, came up against Bamburgh and, unable to take the rock by assault or siege, tore down the villages round about and heaped beams, rafters, wattle and thatch against the landward wall of the fortress, and set it alight when the wind was blowing towards the town. Aidan, on Farne, saw the smoke and flames go up over the walls, lifted his eyes and hands to heaven and said, in tears: "Lord, see what evil Penda does!" The wind turned at once, drove the fire back on those who had lit it, and they gave up the siege.
Repose
In the summer of 651, twelve days after the murder of Oswine, Aidan was at the royal vill of Bamburgh, and fell ill. A tent had been pitched for him against the west wall of the church, so that the wall itself formed one side of the shelter — the arrangement suggests he was in the habit of lodging so, and not in the hall. He died there, leaning against a buttress that shored up the outside of the church wall, on 31 August 651, in the seventeenth year of his episcopate.
The church at Bamburgh was afterwards burned twice by Penda's men, and both times the whole building perished except that one beam against which Aidan had died. The third time it was rebuilt the beam was set inside as a support of the roof; splinters were cut from it and put in water, and the water healed the sick. Bede records the tradition soberly and names the wonders as still current in his own day.
His body was carried to Lindisfarne and buried in the monks' cemetery; when his successor Finan built there a church of St Peter in the Irish manner, of hewn oak thatched with reeds, Aidan's bones were translated into it and laid on the right side of the altar. In 664, after the Synod of Whitby went against the Irish party, Colman left the see and took part of Aidan's relics back with him to Iona, so that the founder's bones were divided between the two islands.
Cuthbert's vision
On the night of Aidan's death, a boy who was watching sheep on the hills — the tradition places it in the Lammermuirs or on the Leader Water — saw in the sky a stream of light, and in it a company of angels descending and going up again, carrying a soul of surpassing brightness to heaven. He learned in the morning that the bishop of Lindisfarne had died in that hour. The boy was Cuthbert; the vision decided him, and he went not long afterwards to Melrose and took the habit.
Aidan's true monument is that succession. From Lindisfarne and its daughter-houses came Chad and Cedd, who evangelised the Mercians and the East Saxons; Eata, one of the twelve English boys Aidan took and taught from the beginning; the great abbess Hilda of Whitby, whom Aidan called back from Gaul and set over the community at Hartlepool; and, at one remove, Cuthbert himself. Within two generations the north of England was Christian, and the Church that converted the English midlands was in large part a colony of Iona.
Feast and commemoration
August 31 (church date; New Calendar civil August 31, Old Calendar civil September 13), the day of his repose, and the last day of the church year.
Aidan is a saint of the undivided Church, and his commemoration reaches Orthodox usage by way of the calendars of the British Isles rather than through the Greek or Slavonic Menaia, in which he has no office. He is kept by the Orthodox parishes of Britain and Ireland and by the Antiochian, Russian and Greek jurisdictions there, and is entered on this day in the OCA calendar; the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England also keep him on August 31. Because the Byzantine day belongs to the Placing of the Cincture of the Theotokos, where he is served he is served from the common.
Lindisfarne, Bamburgh and Iona are the three places of his cultus, and modern Northumbrian devotion has made August 31 something of a national day of the north.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a hierarch and ascetic)
In thee, O father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image: for taking up thy cross, thou didst follow Christ; and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O holy Aidan, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 4 (common)
Thou didst leave the island of Columba for a harder island, and wouldst not ride where thou couldst walk and speak with the poor; the wealth of kings thou didst turn into the freedom of slaves, O father Aidan: entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Aidan is shown as a bishop of the Celtic north: a monk's face, tonsured in the Irish manner across the front of the head from ear to ear — the tonsure that his opponents held against him and that iconographers of the British Isles use as his mark — vested as a hierarch, holding a torch or a lighted candle in modern English renderings (from the image of the light seen at his death, and from the Northumbrian tradition of Aidan as the flame that kindled the north), or holding the Gospel book in the Byzantine manner. A stag appears in some late English depictions, from a legend of his protecting a hunted deer. The commonest narrative subject is Aidan dying against the buttress of the church at Bamburgh, and the second commonest is the giving of the king's horse to the beggar.
No pre-1900 image of Aidan has been located for this collection. The depictions that exist — the well-known statue on Holy Island, the windows and paintings of the Northumbrian churches, and the modern Orthodox icons written for the parishes of Britain — are all of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or later, and none is free-licensed at the level of the underlying work. He is accordingly entered in the the list of icons still being sought list.
Disputed questions
- Aidan and the Easter question. Bede is unusually explicit. Having praised Aidan's love of peace, charity, continence, humility, his zeal, his study, his authority over kings and his care for the poor, he adds that he wrote all this "by no means commending or approving his imperfect knowledge concerning the observance of Easter" — for Aidan, like all the Irish of the Ionan tradition, kept the Paschal cycle of eighty-four years and the Irish form of the tonsure, and the Roman party regarded both as error. Bede's solution is that Aidan kept Pascha on the Lord's Day always, and was ignorant rather than obstinate, and that a man of such charity was to be honoured. The Synod of Whitby (664), thirteen years after Aidan's death, decided the question against his tradition; the Church honours him as a saint, and the disagreement is part of the record rather than a stain on it. This entry follows Bede: the calendrical error is stated, and the sanctity is not qualified by it.
- The name of the failed missionary. Bede does not name Aidan's predecessor. "Corman" comes from later Irish and Scottish tradition and should be reported as such.
- Aidan's Irish origin and family. The Connacht origin, the identification of his relatives, and any connection with the Aidans of Irish genealogy are all late and unsupported. Bede knew only that he was a monk of Iona.
- The date of his consecration. 635 is Bede's, counting from Oswald's accession; some reckonings give 634 or 636.
- Not to be confused with Aidan (Áedán) of Ferns (†632), the Irish bishop of Wexford whose feast is January 31, nor with the several other Irish Áedáns of the sixth and seventh centuries — the name was extremely common.