The Lives of the Saints, Volume III (of 16): March

Cuthbert returned with his countrymen to Melrose, resumed his life of missionary preaching, and again met his friend and master, the prior Boswell, at whose death, in the great pestilence of 664, Cuthbert was elected abbot in his place. He had been himself attacked by the disease; and all the monks prayed earnestly that his life might be preserved to them. When he knew that the community had spent the night in prayer for him, though he felt no better, he cried to himself, with a double impulse of his habitual energy, "What am I doing in bed? It is impossible that God should shut His ears to such men. Give me my staff and my shoes." And getting up, he immediately began to walk, leaning upon his staff. But this sudden cure left him subject to weakness, which shortened his life.

However, he had not long to remain at Melrose. The triumph of Wilfrid and the Roman ritual at the conference of Whitby, brought about a revolution in the monastic metropolis of Northumbria, and in the mother monastery of Melrose, at Lindisfarne. Bishop Colman had returned to Iona, carrying with him the bones of S. Aidan, the first apostle of the country, and followed by all the monks who would not consent to sacrifice their Keltic tradition to Roman unity. It was of importance to preserve the holy island, the special sanctuary of the country, for the religious family of which its foundress had been a member. Abbot Eata of Melrose undertook this difficult mission. He became abbot of Lindisfarne, and was invested with a kind of episcopal supremacy. He took with him the young Cuthbert, who was not yet thirty, but whom, however, he held alone capable of filling the important office of prior in the great insular community.

The struggle into which Eata and Cuthbert, in their own persons, had entered against Wilfrid, on the subject of Roman rites, did not point them out as the best men to introduce the novelties so passionately defended and insisted upon by the new bishop of Northumbria. Notwithstanding, everything goes to prove that the new abbot and prior of Lindisfarne adopted without reserve the decisions of the assembly of Whitby, and took serious pains to introduce them into the great Keltic community. Cuthbert, in whom the physical energy of a robust organization was united to an unconquerable gentleness, employed in this task all the resources of his mind and heart. All the rebels had not left with bishop Colman; some monks still remained, who held obstinately by their ancient customs. Cuthbert reasoned with them daily in the meetings of the chapter; his desire was to overcome their objections by patience and moderation alone; he bore their reproaches as long as that was possible, and when his endurance was at an end, raised the sitting without changing countenance or tone, and resumed next morning the course of the debate, without ever permitting himself to be moved to anger, or allowing any thing to disturb the inestimable gift of kindness and light-heartedness which he had received from God.

But his great desire was the strict observance of the rule when once established; and his historian boasts, as one of his most remarkable victories, the obligation he imposed for ever upon the monks of Lindisfarne of wearing a simple and uniform dress, in undyed wool, and thus giving up the passionate liking of the Anglo-Saxons for varied and brilliant colours.

During the twelve years which he passed at Lindisfarne, the life of Cuthbert was identical with that which he had led at Melrose. Within doors this life was spent in the severe practice of all the austerities of the cloister, in manual labour, united to the punctual celebration of divine worship, and such fervour in prayer that he often slept only one night in the three or four, passing the others in prayer, and in singing the service alone while walking round the aisle to keep himself awake. Outside, the same zeal for preaching, the same solicitude for the salvation and well-being, temporal as well as spiritual, of the Northumbrian people, was apparent in him. He carried to them the Word of Life; he soothed their sufferings, by curing miraculously a crowd of diseases which were beyond the power of the physicians. But the valiant missionary specially assailed the diseases of the soul, and made use of all the tenderness and all the ardour of his own spirit to reach them. When he celebrated mass before the assembled crowd, his visible emotion, his inspired looks, his trembling voice, all contributed to penetrate and overpower the multitude. The Anglo-Saxon Christians, who came in crowds to open their hearts to him in the confessional, were still more profoundly impressed. Though he was a bold and inflexible judge of impenitent vice, he felt and expressed the tenderest compassion for the contrite sinner. He was the first to weep over the sins which he pardoned in the name of God; and he himself fulfilled the penances which he imposed as the conditions of absolution, thus gaining by his humility the hearts which he longed to convert and cure.

But neither the life of a cenobite, nor the labours of a missionary could satisfy the aspirations of his soul after perfection. When he was not quite forty, after holding his priorship at Lindisfarne for twelve years, he resolved to leave monastic life, and to live as a hermit in a sterile and desert island, visible from Lindisfarne, which lay in the centre of the Archipelago, south of the holy isle, and almost opposite the fortified capital of the Northumbrian kings at Bamborough. No one dared to live on this island, which was called Farne, in consequence of its being supposed to be the haunt of demons. Cuthbert took possession of it as a soldier of Christ, victorious over the tyranny of evil, and built there a palace worthy of himself, hollowing out of the living rock a cell from which he could see nothing but the sky, that he might not be disturbed in his contemplations. The hide of an ox suspended before the entrance of his cavern, and which he turned according to the direction of the wind, afforded him a poor defence against the intemperance of that wild climate. His holy historian tells us that he exercised sway over the elements and brute creation as a true monarch of the land which he had conquered for Christ, and with that sovereign empire over nature which sin alone has taken from us. He lived on the produce of a little field of barley sown and cultivated by his own hands, but so small that the inhabitants of the coast reported among themselves that he was fed by angels with bread made in Paradise.

The legends of Northumbria linger lovingly upon the solitary sojourn of their great national and popular saint in this basaltic isle. They attribute to him the extraordinary gentleness and familiarity of a particular species of aquatic birds which came when called, allowed themselves to be taken, stroked, caressed, and whose down was of remarkable softness. In ancient times they swarmed about this rock, and they are still to be found there, though much diminished in number since curious visitors have come to steal their nests and shoot the birds. These sea fowl are found nowhere else in the British Isles, and are called the Birds of S. Cuthbert. It was he, according to the narrative of a monk of the thirteenth century, who inspired them with a hereditary trust in man by taking them as companions of his solitude, and guaranteeing to them that they should never be disturbed in their homes.

It is he, too, according to the fishers of the surrounding islands, who makes certain little shells of the genus Entrochus, which are only to be found on this coast, and which have received the name of S. Cuthbert's Beads. They believe that he is still to be seen by night seated on a rock, and using another as an anvil for his work.

The pious anchorite, however, in condemning himself to the trials of solitude, had no intention of withdrawing from the cares of fraternal charity. He continued to receive frequent visits, in the first place from his neighbours and brethren at Lindisfarne, and in addition from all who came to consult him upon the state of their souls, as well as to seek consolation from him in adversity. The number of these pilgrims of sorrow was countless. They came not only from the neighbouring shores, but from the most distant provinces. Throughout all England the rumour spread, that on a desert rock of the Northumbrian coast there lived a solitary who was the friend of God, and skilled in the healing of human suffering. In this expectation no one was deceived; no man carried back from the sea-beaten island the same burden of suffering, temptation, or remorse which he had taken there. Cuthbert had consolation for all troubles, light for all the sorrowful mysteries of life, counsel for all its perils, a helping hand to all the hopeless, a heart open to all who suffered. He could draw from all terrestrial anguish a proof of the joys of heaven, deduce the certainty of those joys from the terrible evanescence of both good and evil in this world, and light up again in sick souls the fire of charity – the only defence, he said, against those ambushes of the old enemy which always take our hearts captive when they are emptied of divine and brotherly love.

To make his solitude more accessible to these visitors, and above all to his brethren from Lindisfarne, he had built some distance from the cave which was his dwelling, at a place where boats could land their passengers, a kind of parlour and refectory for the use of his guests. There he himself met, conversed, and ate with them, especially when, as he has himself told, the monks came to celebrate with him such a great feast as Christmas. At such moments he went freely into all their conversations and discussions, interrupting himself from time to time to remind them of the necessity of watchfulness and prayer. The monks answered him, "Nothing is more true; but we have so many days of vigil, of fasts and prayers. Let us at least to-day rejoice in the Lord." The Venerable Bede, who has preserved to us the precious memory of this exchange of brotherly familiarity has not disdained to tell us also of the reproaches addressed by Cuthbert to his brothers for not eating a fat goose which he had hung on the partition-wall of his guest's refectory, in order that they might thoroughly fortify themselves before they embarked upon the stormy sea to return to their monastery.

This tender charity and courteous activity were united in him to treasures of humility. He would not allow any one to suspect him of ranking the life of an anchorite above that of a member of a community. "It must not be supposed," he said, "because I prefer to live out of reach of every secular care, that my life is superior to that of others. The life of good cenobites, who obey their abbot in everything, and whose time is divided between prayer, work, and fasting is much to be admired. I know many among them whose souls are more pure, and their graces more exalted than mine; especially, and in the first rank my dear old Boswell, who received and trained me at Melrose in my youth."

Thus passed, in that dear solitude, and among these friendly surroundings, eight pleasant years, the sweetest of his life, and precisely those during which all Northumberland was convulsed by the struggle between Wilfrid and the new king Egfrid.

Then came the day upon which the king of the Northumbrians, accompanied by his principal nobles, and almost all the community of Lindisfarne, landed upon the rock of Fame, to beg, kneeling, and with tears, that Cuthbert would accept the episcopal dignity to which he had just been promoted in the synod of Twyford, presided over by archbishop Theodore. He yielded only after a long resistance, himself weeping when he did so. It was, however, permitted to him to delay his consecration for six months, till Easter, which left him still a winter in his dear solitude, before he went to York, where he was consecrated by the primate Theodore, assisted by six bishops. He would not, however, accept the diocese of Hexham, to which he had been first appointed, but persuaded his friend Eata, the bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne, to give up to him the monastic bishopric, where he had already lived so long.

The diocese of Lindisfarne spread far to the west, much beyond Hexham. The Britons of Cumbria who had come to be tributaries of the Northumbrian kings, were thus included in it. King Egfrid's deed of gift, in which he gives the district of Cartmell, with all the Britons who dwell in it, to bishop Cuthbert, still exists. The Roman city of Carlisle, transformed into an Anglo-Saxon fortress, was also under his sway, with all the surrounding monasteries.

His new dignity made no difference in his character, nor even in his mode of life. He retained his old habits as a cenobite, and even as a hermit. In the midst of his episcopal pomp he remained always the monk and missionary of old. His whole episcopate, indeed, seems to bear the character of a mission indefinitely prolonged. He went over his vast diocese, to administer confirmation to converts, traversing a crowd more attentive and respectful than ever, lavishing upon it all kinds of benefits, alms, clothing, sermons, miraculous cures – penetrating as of old into hamlets and distant corners, climbing the hills and downs, sleeping under a tent, and sometimes indeed finding no other shelter than in the huts of branches, brought from the nearest wood to the desert, in which he had made the torrent of his eloquence and charity to gush forth.

Here also we find illustrations, as at all previous periods of his life, of the most delightful feature of his good and holy soul. In the obscure missionary of Melrose, in the already celebrated prior of Lindisfarne, and still more, if that is possible, in the powerful and venerated bishop, the same heart, overflowing with tenderness and compassion is always to be found. The supernatural power given to him to cure the most cruel diseases was wonderful. But in his frequent and friendly intercourse with the great Anglo-Saxon earls, the ealdormen, as well as with the mixed populations of Britons, Picts, Scots, and English, whom he gathered under his crosier, the principal feature in the numerous and detailed narratives which remain to us, and which gives to them a beauty as of youth, always attractive, is his intense and active sympathy for those human sorrows which in all ages are the same, always so keen, and capable of so little consolation. The more familiar the details of these meetings between the heart of a saint and true priest, and the simple and impetuous hearts of the first English Christians, the more attractive do they become, and we cannot resist the inclination of presenting to our readers some incidents which shew at once the liveliness of domestic affections among those newly-baptized barbarians and their filial and familiar confidence in their master. One of the ealdormen of king Egfrid arrived one day in breathless haste at Lindisfarne, overwhelmed with grief, his wife, a woman as pious and generous as himself, having been seized with a fit of violent madness. But he was ashamed to disclose the nature of the attack, it seemed to him a sort of chastisement from heaven, disgracing a creature hitherto so chaste and honoured; all that he said was that she was approaching death; and he begged that a priest might be given him to carry to her the viaticum, and that when she died he might be permitted to bury her in the holy isle. Cuthbert heard his story, and said to him with much emotion, "This is my business; no one but myself can go with you." As they rode on their way together, the husband wept, and Cuthbert, looking at him and seeing the cheeks of the rough warrior wet with tears, divined the whole; and during all the rest of the journey consoled and encouraged him, explaining to him that madness was not a punishment of crime, but a trial which God inflicted sometimes upon the innocent. "Besides," he added, "when we arrive we shall find her cured; she will come to meet us, and will help me to dismount from my horse, taking, according to her custom, the reins in her hand." And so the event proved; for, says that historian, the demon did not dare to await the coming of the Holy Ghost, of which the man of God was full. The noble lady, delivered from her bondage, rose as if from a profound sleep, and stood on the threshold to greet the holy friend of the house, seizing the reins of his horse, and joyfully announcing her sudden cure.

On another occasion, a certain count Henma, from whom he sought hospitality during one of his pastoral journeys, received him on his knees, thanking him for his visit, but at the same time telling him that his wife was at the point of death, and he himself in despair. "However," said the count, "I firmly believe that were you to give her your blessing, she would be restored to health, or at least delivered by a speedy death from her long and cruel sufferings." The saint immediately sent one of his priests, without entering into the sick room himself, to sprinkle her with water which he had blessed. The patient was at once relieved; and herself came to act as cupbearer to the prelate, offering him, in the name of all her family, that cup of wine which, under the name of the loving cup, has continued since the time of the Anglo-Saxons to form a part of all solemn public banquets.

A contagious disease at another time broke out in one part of his diocese, to which Cuthbert immediately betook himself. After having visited and consoled all the remaining inhabitants of one village, he turned to the priest who accompanied him, and asked, "Is there still any one sick in this poor place, whom I can bless before I depart?" "Then," says the priest, who has preserved this story to us, "I showed him in the distance a poor woman bathed in tears, one of whose sons was already dead, and who held the other in her arms, just about to render his last breath. The bishop rushed to her, and taking the dying child from its mother's arms, kissed it first, then blessed it, and restored it to the mother, saying to her, as the Son of God said to the widow of Nain, 'Woman, weep not; have no more fear or sorrow; your son is saved, and no more victims to this pestilence shall perish here.'"

No saint of his time or country had more frequent or affectionate intercourse than Cuthbert with the nuns, whose numbers and influence were daily increasing among the Anglo-Saxons, and especially in Northumberland. The greater part of them lived together in the great monasteries, such as Whitby and Coldingham, but some, especially those who were widows or of advanced age, lived in their own houses or with their relatives. Such was a woman devoted to the service of God, who had watched over Cuthbert's childhood (for he seems to have been early left an orphan), while he kept his sheep on the hills near Melrose, from the eighth year of his age until his entrance into the convent at the age of fifteen. He was tenderly grateful to her for her maternal care, and when he became a missionary, took advantage of every occasion furnished to him by his apostolic journeys to visit her whom he called his mother, in the village where she lived. On one occasion, when he was with her, a fire broke out in the village, and the flames, increased by a violent wind, threatened all the neighbouring roofs. "Fear nothing, dear mother," the young missionary said to her; "this fire will do you no harm;" and he began to pray. Suddenly the wind changed; the village was saved, and with it the thatched roof which sheltered the old age of her who had protected his infancy.

From the cottage of his foster-mother he went to the palaces of queens. The noble queen of Northumberland, Etheldreda, the saint and virgin, had a great friendship for Cuthbert. She overwhelmed him and his monastery with gifts from her possessions, and wishing, besides, to offer him a personal token of her close affection, she embroidered for him, with her hands (for she embroidered beautifully), a stole and maniple covered with gold and precious stones. She chose to give him such a present that he might wear this memorial of her only in the presence of God, whom they both served, and accordingly would be obliged to keep her always in mind at the holy sacrifice.

Cuthbert was on still more intimate terms with the holy princesses, who, placed at the head of great communities of nuns, and sometimes even of monks, exercised so powerful an influence upon the Anglo-Saxon race, and particularly on Northumbria. While he was still at Melrose, the increasing fame of his sanctity and eloquence brought him often into the presence of the sister of king Oswy, who then reigned over the two Northumbrian kingdoms. This princess, Ebba, was abbess of the double monastery of Coldingham, the farthest north of all the religious establishments of Northumbria. Cuthbert was the guest for several days of the royal abbess, but he did not intermit on this occasion his pious exercises, nor, above all, his austerities and long prayers by night on the sea-shore.

To the end of his life he maintained a very intimate and constant friendship with another abbess of the blood-royal of Northumbria, Elfleda, niece of S. Oswald, and of king Oswy, who, though still quite young, exercised an influence much greater than that of Ebba upon the men and the events of her time. She had the liveliest affection for the prior of Lindisfarne, and at the same time an absolute confidence in his sanctity. When she was assailed by an alarming illness, which fell into paralysis, and found no remedy from physicians, she cried, "Ah! had I but something which belonged to my dear Cuthbert, I am sure I should be cured." A short time after, her friend sent her a linen girdle, which she hastened to put on, and in three days she was healed.

Shortly before his death, and during his last pastoral visitation, Cuthbert went to see Elfleda in the neighbourhood of the great monastery of Whitby, to consecrate a church which she had built there, and to converse with her for the last time. They dined together, and during the meal, seeing his knife drop from his trembling hand in the abstraction of supernatural thoughts, she had a last opportunity of admiring his prophetic intuition, and his constant care for the salvation of souls. The fatigue of the holy bishop, who said, laughingly, "I cannot eat all day long, you must give me a little rest" – the eagerness and pious curiosity of the young abbess, anxious to know and do everything, who rushes up breathless during the ceremony of the dedication to ask from the bishop a memento for a monk whose death she had just heard of – all these details form a picture complete in its simplicity, upon which the charmed mind can repose amid the savage habits and wild vicissitudes of the struggle, then more violent than ever, between the Northumbrians and the Picts, the Saxons and the Kelts.

But the last of all his visits was for another abbess less illustrious and less powerful than the two princesses of the blood, but also of high birth, and not less dear to his heart, if we may judge by the mark of affection which he gave her on his death-bed. This was Verca, abbess of one of that long line of monasteries which traced the shores of the Northern Sea. Her convent was on the mouth of the Tyne, the river which divided the two Northumbrian kingdoms. She gave Cuthbert a magnificent reception; but the bishop was ill, and after the mid-day meal, which was usual in all the Benedictine monasteries, he became thirsty. Wine and beer were offered to him, yet he would take nothing but water, but this water, after it had touched his lips, seemed to the monks of Tynemouth, who drank the remainder, the best wine they had ever tasted. Cuthbert, who retained nothing of the robust health of his youth, already suffered from the first attacks of the disease which carried him off. His pious friend was no doubt struck by his feebleness, for she offered him, as the last pledge of spiritual union, a piece of very fine linen to be his shroud. Two short years of the episcopate had sufficed to consume his strength.

After celebrating the feast of Christmas, in 686, with the monks of Lindisfarne, the presentiment of approaching death determined him to abdicate, and to return to his isle of Farne, there to prepare for the last struggle. He lived but two months, in the dear and pleasant solitude which was his supreme joy, tempering its sweetness by redoubled austerities. When his monks came to visit him in his isle, which storms often made inaccessible for weeks together, they found him thin, tremulous, and almost exhausted. One of them, who has given us a narrative of the end of his life, revived him a little by giving him warm wine to drink, then seating himself by the side of the worn-out bishop upon his bed of stone, to sustain him, received from his beloved lips the last confidences and last exhortations of the venerated master. The visits of his monks were very sweet to him, and he lavished upon them to the last moment proofs of his paternal tenderness and of his minute care for their spiritual and temporal well-being. His last illness was long and painful. He fixed beforehand the place of his burial, near the oratory which he had hollowed in the rock, and at the foot of a cross which he had himself planted. "I would fain repose," said he, "in this spot, where I have fought my little battle for the Lord, where I desire to finish my course, and from whence I hope that my merciful Judge will call me to the crown of righteousness. You will bury me, wrapped in the linen which I have kept for my shroud, out of love for the abbess Verca, the friend of God, who gave it to me."