I am very glad to be here in St Cuthbert’s Church, and bring
you greetings from St Cuthbert’s people in Durham Cathedral. I may not make
friends by saying so, but to me, having made this Cuthbert journey from Durham
to Edinburgh, it does not feel as though I have crossed a national frontier. In
his day, Saxon Northumbria extended right up to the Forth, here to Edwin’s
Burgh which preserves the memory of its first Christian king. This part of
Scotland is as much part of Cuthbert’s Land as north-east England. Cuthbert is
believed to have halted on this site and preached here as he journeyed from
Melrose to Lindisfarne, and at time a church was founded here.
It is true that in later centuries, Durham Cathedral came to
be perceived as ‘half church of God, half castle ‘gainst the Scot’ as Sir
Walter Scott graphically put it. But when I went to Dunfermline Abbey ago to
celebrate our common memory of Queen Margaret at the time this nation was
honouring William Wallace, I said that I was glad as Dean of Durham to come to
Scotland in the spirit of peace and friendship.
Cuthbert, Margaret and David are among the many figures in our Christian
history who symbolise the deep sense of connection that we feel to this part of
Scotland. The ‘new foundation of St Cuthbert’s church is due either to Margaret
or perhaps more likely, her son David. If you visit Durham Cathedral, you will
find them both honoured by the altar of St Margaret in a striking painting
commissioned a few years ago by the Portugese artist Paula Rego.
I was installed at Durham on St Cuthbert’s Day 2003. That
date is now better known as the day the disastrous Iraq war broke out. I shall
never forget having to re-draft and re-draft my sermon throughout that day as
the news unfolded. I was aware of asking myself all day, what would the
peace-loving Cuthbert have said about Iraq?
But my most powerful memory of the liturgy itself was of kneeling with
the Bishop and Chapter at the shrine of St Cuthbert while the elegiac music of
the Northumbrian pipes wafted across the Cathedral. I knew then that I was back in the
north-east, in Cuthbertsland. And I
dared to hope and pray, knowing that with Cuthbert you can never take anything
for granted, that the north-east’s great saint would be with me as inspiration
and protector in the years that lay ahead.
I said I knew that I was back in the north-east. In the mid-1980s, I worked as an incumbent in
north Northumberland. I am not a native
northerner, but I grew to love that rough, rugged county and its people, and
its spiritual heart, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. I often went there, alone or with others, on clear
winter days when the sun shone out of a sky like opal and not a breeze ruffled
the clear blue sea, and the snow was bright on distant Cheviot; and on stormy equinoctial
days when the wind seemed to tear the clouds to shreds and shake the island to
its core and the sea rushed in to enclose it with unbelievable force. I have celebrated the eucharist with pilgrims
on the beach opposite St Cuthbert’s Island and
collected Cuddy beads and read aloud some of the stories Bede tells of Cuthbert.
From Northumberland, I often visited Durham and the shrine of St Cuthbert. When I
went back across the Tyne, they would tell me
that while Durham
had the body of Cuthbert, his soul was still on Lindisfarne. Behind this teasing rivalry, there is a
serious point about where we think the spiritual heart of the north-east
lies. Indisputably, Lindisfarne
is the mother of Durham Cathedral and the mother of us all. It was here that Aidan came from Ireland via Iona at the invitation of Oswald and established his
community of monks. It was from here
that he, Chad, Cedd and many others went out to reconvert England to the
Christian faith. We in the north need no
reminding that theirs was a mission that embraced most of what is now England. Only south-east England was the domain of
Augustine of Canterbury and those who came with him from Rome. Even there, the
Christianisation of Sussex owes everything to St Wilfrid, Lindisfarne’s best
travelled and most combative missioner.
What is more, the Irish missionaries from Iona
and Lindisfarne came with no less a European
ecumenical perspective as did the Latin missionaries like Augustine. Time does not allow me to go into how, for
example, Columbanus, an Irish Christian par excellence, travelled across
Europe, had close connections with the church
in Gaul, and brought this dimension into Irish
Christianity. But we need to remember
this when it is alleged, as it sometimes is, that the faith of Ireland and Iona
was no more than an episode, an eccentric, offshore aberration from the
European mainstream that the Synod of Whitby in 664 had to correct. Aidan had died in 651. Cuthbert, like Hild, lived through the
painful adoption of Latin ways in the north.
And this paved the way for the golden age of Lindisfarne,
the late 7th and early 8th century, which saw the
production of the Lindisfarne Gospels. The
Gospel Book is coming to Durham for a 3 month exhibition next summer, an event
organised by the Cathedral and University as the major presences on the World
Heritage Site. That book shows in its supreme art and craftsmanship that there
as a close connection between Northumbria and other parts of Europe where
elaborate sacred texts were being created. And in so far as the relics of St
Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels found their way from Holy Island to
Durham, it is true to say that Lindisfarne is the mother of Durham Cathedral.
But if it is mother, it is also daughter. And this needs to be said just as
clearly. In the year 875 the community
of Lindisfarne left the island, taking with them the relics of St Cuthbert and
the Lindisfarne Gospels. Over a century later in 995, they installed themselves
at Durham. Although they returned to the
island at least once in that time, they did not settle there. The usual reason given is the threat of
Viking raids and the need to find a better defended site. Whatever it is, by the end of the 10th
century, Durham
was where Cuthbert and the Gospels had come to rest. In 1083, after the Norman Conquest, the Saxon
community of St Cuthbert was replaced by Benedictine monks from
Wearmouth-Jarrow. It was these who went
out from Durham to found cells across the north of England, priories such as
Finchale, Coldingham and the one on Holy Island. Where there had been a Christian presence
before, it had disappeared and needed to be re-established, certainly the case
on Holy Island. In all these places, the ruined priories show
some striking similarities to the mother house, Durham Cathedral Priory. The incised drum piers and the Romanesque
‘rainbow’ arch at Holy Island make it seem
like a scaled-down version of Durham
in red sandstone. The point I am making
is that the ruins there that we find so evocative are of the Benedictine
daughter house of Durham,
not the original mother house of the monks of St Cuthbert.
This chicken-and-egg relationship between Durham and
Lindisfarne is politically important today when it comes to the Lindisfarne
Gospels and whether they should be permanently returned to the north-east. I am not going to go into that debate now,
but I do want to draw attention to the logic of the issue. If we think they should ‘come home’, as popular
rhetoric has it, then where should they go?
The claims of Holy Island and Durham are both
strong. Durham Cathedral is where they
are presumed to have been kept and honoured for about 600 years, longer than
they have been anywhere else. And because
the Gospels were created ‘in honour of God and St Cuthbert’, as the dedication
says, and because the Community of St Cuthbert would have thought it
inconceivable to separate the books from the saint’s relics, there has to be a
case for saying that they belong to the place where Cuthbert’s relics lie. However a similar argument leads to the
conclusion that Lindisfarne, their place of origin, would be the natural and
best place for them to be kept. What is
more, that argument would point to sending Cuthbert’s remains back there too,
and not only that, but returning the relics of Bede to Jarrow from where they
were stolen by an unscrupulous monk and brought to Durham in 1022. These issues are perhaps more difficult than
they at first seem.
All this is by way of illustrating how, now that I am at Durham, and in a sense
the guardian of Cuthbert’s shrine, I am pondering the rather different
perspective from which I now see and experience the saint. For Durham
‘inherited’ a Cuthbert who was already a distant memory coloured by a long
history after his death that was at least as extraordinary as his career while
he was still alive. Most saints are left
alone in their resting places when they die as no doubt Cuthbert was intended
to. But chance, circumstance, providence
– call it what you will – decreed otherwise for him. Cuthbert probably travelled further when dead
than he ever did in his lifetime. Only three
centuries after his death did he reach his final resting place at Durham. So by the time he arrived there, a vast
quantity of collective memory, reverential myth, legend and folk tale had
coalesced around the three primary sources for his life, the anonymous Life of
about 700, and the two Lives by Bede, one in prose and one in poetry. And once installed in Durham, in a context so
different from the one from which he had come, his presence came to acquire yet
more layers of meaning that are intriguing in themselves, and to some extent
paradoxical for the way in which they represent a very different vision from
the one he himself had embraced.
********
Cuthbert died on 20 March 687. He
had wanted a simple burial on the Inner Farne, but the monks of Lindisfarne had other ideas. He was taken back to Lindisfarne
where he was given a burial fit for a king.
His body was wrapped in precious cloths and placed in an elaborate
sarcophagus together with his presumed pectoral cross and a copy of his beloved
Fourth Gospel, the ‘Cuthbert Gospel Book’ that has recently been purchased for
the nation by the British Library.
Eleven years later, the sarcophagus was opened, then the accepted route
to canonisation. Miraculously it was found to be intact with no evidence of
decay. This was taken to be a sign of
sainthood, and from then on his relics were venerated in a shrine above
ground. When the community abandoned
Holy Island, they set off around the north of England, looking for a permanent
home. The issue here was not simply the
need to live as a community in safety.
It was first and foremost to identify a final resting place for their
beloved saint, probably a conscious imitation of the patriarchs of the Old
Testament gathering up the bones of their ancestors and taking them for burial
in the place of God’s choosing, the promised land. The wanderings of this faithful band of
pilgrims carrying the relics of their beloved saint and their precious gospels
is to me one of the most moving stories to come from our part of Britain.
The places where the saint’s body rested on its long journey
became indelibly associated with his memory.
Already, the community had acquired estates across the north of England through
the donations of kings and noblemen. The
churches built on these sites were obvious safe stopping points on the pilgrimage,
and the recollection that Cuthbert had lain in these places often provided the
impetus to found small monastic cells there and enlarge their churches. Norham on the Tweed,
Bedlington in Northumberland, and Crayke in North
Yorkshire are among many places that were part of what came to be
known as the Patrimony of St Cuthbert, Cuthbertsland. Wherever you find a pre-Conquest church
dedicated to St Cuthbert, you can always presume a link to the Patrimony and
often to this period of wandering. Even
today, the memory of this defining époque is perpetuated in the fact that many
of these parish churches dedicated to Cuthbert remain within the patronage of
Durham Cathedral, the lineal successor to Lindisfarne. And this extends to the estates that this
increasingly prosperous community acquired thanks for benefactions of those who
came to treasure the memory of Cuthbert. Yesterday, we were in Whitekirk near North
Berwick, a beautiful church I had not visited before. Inside there was a photograph of a medieval document
which recorded the donation of the lands of that parish to the monks of Durham
in virtue of its ancient connection with St. Cuthbert, either because he had
preached there or because his body had rested there.
The memory of how Cuthbert’s body had travelled around and rested
at certain stopping-places created a strong sense of what we might call ‘sacred
geography’ in the north of England and in the Scottish borders. It reinforced the notion of ‘Northumbria’ as
not simply a political entity but a ‘kingdom of the mind’ with an emotional and
spiritual dimension. This built on the
connections already established in his lifetime between Cuthbert and the
northern part of Northumbria,
the kingdom of Bernicia. In this he was building on the partnership
Bede describes in his History between Aidan and King Oswald. By the time of the Norman Conquest, the inhabitants
of the far north were known as haliwerfolk, the people of the
saint. This ability of a saint’s memory to
bond a people and define a sense of place is comparable to the role of St
Martin or Joan of Arc in France. In north-east England, Cuthbert provided
precisely the kind of ‘glue’ that 1300 years later is perhaps still able to
affirm something like a common history and set of values in the
north-east.
In about 883 the community settled at Chester-le-Street
where they rested for more than a century and a church was built in honour of
Our Lady and St Cuthbert. In 995, they
decided to move to a more secure site up river.
We all know the legend of how they recognised the place where Cuthbert
wished to lie. As they drew near to the
peninsula, the coffin unaccountably stuck fast in the ground. It was impossible to lift it. Clearly the saint wished the community to pay
attention. Then they overheard two women
talking about a lost cow, and pointing to a place on top of the hill, Dun Holm,
where she would be found. The community took this to indicate the saint’s
wishes. Now they found they could move
the coffin again. They brought it on to
the peninsula where they built a church to house the relics. It is only a story, of course, what the
experts call an aetiology that explains the carving of a cow on the
exterior north wall of the Cathedral.
But it is exactly the kind of miracle story frequently resorted to in
the middle ages to legitimise a religious shrine. It demonstrated both that Cuthbert had lost
none of his potency in death, and that although Durham had enjoyed no direct
connection with him, nevertheless this was the place where he wished to be
honoured.
The Norman Conquest brought far-reaching change across England. The new order was proud, confident and
ruthlessly efficient. In Durham, there was an
early consequence for religious life at a time of conflict and rebellion in the
north-east. In 1083, the Norman bishop William
of St Carileph brought 400 years of Saxon religious history to an end by
suppressing the Community of St Cuthbert because the monks had been allowed to
marry and, it was alleged, their discipline had become lax. He re-founded it as
a Benedictine Cathedral Priory whose monks were required to live strictly
according to the Rule of St Benedict. Monastic
‘cathedral priories’ like Durham, Canterbury and Norwich provided for their bishops
to be titular abbots who, no longer monks, delegated the running of the
Cathedral to their priors. These curious
institutions were unique to England, and in this respect, the Normans simply
carried over a well-tried Saxon model.
However, they transformed it on the basis of the Benedictine pattern
familiar to them from hundreds of existing foundations in France. Here, the model was Cluny, whose Abbot Hugh
of Cluny was at this time completing the construction of the great third Abbey
Church, then the largest church in Christendom.
This watershed in the life of the monastery was given
outward expression a decade later. In
1093 the first Cathedral, the White Church, the last visible survival of the
Saxon community of St Cuthbert, was pulled down and a new Cathedral begun under
Bishop William of Saint-Calais and Prior Turgot. As historians and lovers of architecture
know, it is not only the pinnacle of Romanesque church building in Europe, but
also pioneered new structural techniques.
It was the first building in Europe to
be stone vaulted throughout with rib vaults that would provide one of the
foundations on which the gothic style could emerge. Along with the vault there were two other
pioneering innovations at Durham:
the flying buttress and the pointed arch.
Work proceeded quickly and by 1104, the sanctuary, quire and transepts
had been completed. In that year, Bishop
Ranulf Flambard consecrated the feretory behind the high altar as the new shrine
to St Cuthbert, and his remains, together with the head of St Oswald, were
interred there.
The significance of that event would be hard to exaggerate. It launched a golden age for the Priory when
pilgrims flocked to the shrine in their millions, bringing with them endowments
and estates that made Durham
the wealthiest cathedral in the land. For most of the 12th century
it was the unrivalled pilgrimage centre of England. Only with the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in
1170 and the growth of his cult at Canterbury
did Cuthbert lose his pre-eminence in England. Durham’s
response was to promote itself as a pilgrimage church even more
energetically. The late 12th
century saw the creation of a beautifully illustrated life of Cuthbert, and the
construction of Bishop Puiset’s exquisite Galilee Chapel. In the next century followed the building of
the Chapel of the Nine Altars at the east end of the Cathedral, a clear
enlargement of the church around the shrine to allow pilgrims to gather and
circulate more freely. Despite Thomas a
Becket, Cuthbert’s shrine at Durham continued to be a focal point for the
devotion and loyalty of the people of the north of England and southern
Scotland throughout the middle ages.
********
Several things were taking place at this time, and it is the
meaning of these events that I want to explore in the remainder of this lecture.
First, we need to understand the nature of the Cathedral as
a building. It was not a case of constructing
a church and then placing a shrine within it.
It was the opposite: building a great church in order to house a
shrine, indeed we could say, building it around the shrine. This had been true of the White Church. It was pre-eminently true of the Norman Cathedral. It only exists because of the need to build a
new and magnificent home for St Cuthbert. This was a shrewd move
politically. Through the wanderings of
his coffin and now through the shrine, Cuthbert was already a focal point for
people across the north of England.
To affirm his cult by the construction of a church on a scale hitherto unknown
in this country was a way of pulling that wayward, indeed backward, part of
England into consenting with, even welcoming, its new Norman overlords. To make friends with Cuthbert was a way of
making friends with the people of Cuthbertsland. This is one reading, a more benign one, of
the events in Durham
after the Norman Conquest.
But there is another reading which puts Cuthbert in a more
paradoxical context. The suppression of
the Saxon community and the installation of Benedictine monks was not simply a
religious act. It was an expression of
Norman hegemony, an act of power and control.
In the Wars of Religion of later centuries, a principle was established
that largely created the map of modern Europe. It was expressed in the tag cuius regio,
eius religio: whoever your ruler, you follow his religion. In the 16th century, whether you
were catholic or protestant depended for most people not on personal choice but
on whether your prince was catholic or protestant. It was the same in Norman England. The importing of the Benedictine rule was a
way of imposing Norman religious attitudes and assumptions on to the life of
the church in the north-east.
And these Norman ways were very different from the customs of
the Saxon church which Cuthbert and his community knew. St Benedict, who had been educated in Rome, drew up his rule
for monks in about 540, a century before Cuthbert’s lifetime. His rule emphasised order, stability and
pattern, a vision of a Christian society that drew on the remembered order,
stability and pattern of the dying Roman Empire. Its spirituality was grounded on the practical
realities of life in community based on the three priorities of prayer, study
and work. This was the coenobitic
way that proved so outstandingly successful in medieval Europe,
especially in France,
and that demonstrated time and again its capacity for self-renewal and reform,
particularly in its Cistercian form. So
to the Benedictines, St Cuthbert must have struck a rather odd figure. Not for them the extremes of ascetic devotion
he was given to, like praying in the sea all night until the tide swirled up to
his neck, or living in solitude on Inner Farne in an enclosure with walls so
high that all he could see was the sky. In
fact, Cuthbert has much more in common with the Irish saints, and before them,
with the ascetic hermit traditions of St Anthony and the desert fathers than
with the coenobitic way of the Benedictine rule. For this reason, the Benedictine Cathedral
Priory at Durham
would have struck Cuthbert as an unlikely, even an alien, place to lie.
And this is mirrored in how the building was intended to be
read. Durham Cathedral is historically
more than a great pilgrimage church. The
power of the building is not only its consummate mastery of form, scale and proportion,
or of the engineering principles of rib vault, flying buttress and pointed
arch. It is also a symbol of the power of the Norman Conquest and of the
William’s bloodthirsty adventures in the north of England. The Cathedral, sitting on its acropolis along
with the Castle, was in the strict sense of the word an offensive structure
before it was defensive. It
identified who England’s
new masters were and on whose side God and St Cuthbert now belonged. It stood for the political as well as the
religious role of the church and particularly of the Norman bishops. It was a massive statement of Norman
rule. It was an unambiguous symbol of
power.
In this conflicted, power-obsessed world of the 11th
century, the saint of Lindisfarne cuts a
strange figure. It is hard to imagine a
greater contrast between these two worlds: Durham Cathedral, in one sense a
worldly symbol of sword and crown, frequented by kings and knights and armies,
and the lonely cell on Inner Farne battered by wind and sea, and home only to
birds and otters and one solitary hermit.
We know that Cuthbert found even Lindisfarne
too busy and crowded for him to realise his God-given vocation. This required remoteness and solitude: not
for ‘retreat’ in the sense we understand it, a way of withdrawing from the
world to find refreshment and renewal, but on the contrary, to enable him to
focus in a concentrated way without distraction on the spiritual work of prayer
and combating evil, not least his own demons.
This was the reason he chose to live and die on the Farne.
There are many traditions about Cuthbert that testify to his
feeling for the natural world. Bede
tells the story of a visit to Coldingham Priory, a mixed community of men and
women where Aebba, a friend of Cuthbert’s, was abbess. One night one of the monks saw Cuthbert leave
the convent when he thought everyone was asleep, and go down to the beach. He entered the water and prayed there through
the night. As he came out of the water
at dawn, two otters were seen breathing on the saint’s legs to warm him. Episodes like these have earned Cuthbert the
epithet of England’s
St Francis. But I believe that
Cuthbert’s choice of Inner Farne was motivated by more than a love of
nature. When you visit the Farne Islands,
you are struck by the fact that dominating the Northumberland shore to the west
lies Bamburgh Castle, the historic seat of the kings
of Northumbria. That tells us that Cuthbert deliberately
chose a site for his hermitage in full view of the political authorities of his
day, as if to remind them daily that in ordering the affairs of human kingdoms,
there is a heavenly kingdom to consider, a God to reckon with who claims the
allegiance of all human subjects.
This, to me, underlines the paradox of Cuthbert’s tomb at
the heart of our Norman Cathedral. In
one way, his entire career was profoundly counter-cultural to all that the
Norman Conquest stood for. He would have
been much troubled at the thought that his body would be imprisoned beneath the
heavy stone vaults of a place so compromised by the principalities and powers
of this world. His holiness and simplicity
were fundamentally at odds with the sophisticated complexities of Anglo-Norman
life, with the Priory’s accumulation of wealth and status, and with the violent
history with which it was associated. The powerful sense of permanence that the
Cathedral evokes, its confidence that it will last for ever, exude a spirit
very different from the lowly wooden churches and monasteries that Cuthbert and
his peers inhabited.
Yet there is another perspective on this. Cuthbert was not unused to dealing with those
in his day who wielded sword and sceptre in the royal courts. His was a spirituality of engagement with
this world’s agenda, not withdrawal from it.
And to my mind, it is precisely the presence of Cuthbert in the midst of
this marvellous yet ambiguous building that perhaps redeems it from being what
it might have become: a temple to the hubris its builders, forever
driven by the need to build bigger, higher, stronger and better than their
rivals. No doubt there is
something of William Golding’s Dean Jocelyn in those who set out to build the
great cathedrals of medieval Europe (I am thinking of his brilliant novel The
Spire, an imaginative re-telling of the completion of Salisbury Cathedral,
in which he explores how the motive of spiritual aspiration becomes fatally
corrupted by vanity and self-aggrandisement in the building of England’s
highest medieval spire).
Cuthbert’s shrine, then, puts a theological question to the Durham project. It gives it a conscience, a soul. Some would say that there is a contradiction
between what he stood for and what the building consciously represented when it
was built, that the shrine by its very existence subverts the meaning of a
great church. I do not think that it
does, but by criticising human self-assertion against the claims of God it does
put the building of the Norman church into a larger context. It is as if the shrine is a kind of Inner Farne
within the Cathedral, a constant and necessary reminder of where our true and
ultimate accountability lies. In the
real world, we all have to deal with priors and deans, with bishops and princes
and warriors, but there is only one ultimate loyalty that we owe: to the living
God himself. If we do not perceive and
serve him in and through our negotiations with the ebbs and flows of human
institutions, if we are blinded by those who wield power and hold our destinies
in their hands, if we give our absolute allegiance to sword and crown, then we
betray his trust.
I am aware of the risk, in saying this, that we romanticise
the saints of the Saxon era and their Irish forebears. Those who lament the Synod of Whitby in 664,
and its ruling in favour of the Roman tradition over the Irish, see the Norman
Conquest as the last nail in the coffin whereby a holier, simpler, more beautiful
form of Christianity was suppressed by an insitutional church that was worldly,
corrupted and domineering. The label of
‘Celtic’ Christianity is often attached to that nostalgic vision of the
spirituality of these islands when the church was young. As we all know, there is these days a
considerable industry around ‘Celtic’ spirituality that is attractively and
fragrantly packaged and marketed. Without
criticising what many have found helpful, we do nevertheless need to recognise
it for what it is: a re-invention for a postmodern generation of a way of faith
that in its day was unbelievably, indeed for our day, an impossibly severe, astringent
and demanding.
I doubt if we would easily find ourselves at home in the
world inhabited by Patrick, Columba, Aidan, Oswald and Cuthbert. That world, from our vantage point, would
seem bizarre, not to say extreme or even mad.
So much the worse for us, we may say.
But we can recognise that this process of ‘reinventing’ the saints was
precisely what the Normans
were doing with Cuthbert by placing his shrine at the heart of Durham Cathedral. What is more, we can see that this is not
only inevitable but necessary. For as I
have already said, Cuthbert had already become a distant memory by the time the
Cathedral was built. Placing him within
the frame of a Benedictine Cathedral Priory was a way of ‘claiming’ his
universal significance for times very different from his own. It was, as I have said, a paradoxical thing
to do. But it rescued him from the fate
of being locked up in the remote past.
It made him a contemporary of pilgrims of all ages. It enacted a constant theme of religious faith
which is that what we receive, we hand on but not without contributing to it
our own insight, devotion and meaning. This is the true meaning of traditio:
a living body of faith that is given new significance through the act of
cherishing it, and proclaiming it, and discerning new meanings in it in the
light of altered circumstances and times.
********
In 1537, Henry VIII’s Commissioners for the north of England came to
Durham as part
of the programme of dissolving the monasteries.
Always with an eye to the acquiring wealth for the crown, they stripped
Cuthbert’s shrine of its jewels and precious metals and levelled it to the
ground with their axes and crow-bars. Then one of their stooges set about
opening up the coffin in order to smash the relics and destroy all trace of the
saint. A remarkable record of the
Cathedral Priory, The Rites of Durham, tells us that he found, instead
of dust and ashes, that the body was ‘lying whole uncorrupt with his face bare
and his beard as it had been a fortnight’s growth’. An altercation followed, the Commissioners
standing below the feretory wondering why the man had not completed the work of
a few minutes and thrown down a pile of Saxon bones and detritus. The intact skeleton caused them to stop their
work, leave the remains where they were and seek advice from London.
We can be grateful that the advice ever came.
The relics remained where they were and subsequent openings
in 1827 and 1899 confirmed that they had not been tampered with. In 1827 the superb Saxon artifacts now housed
in our Treasury were removed: the pectoral cross of St Cuthbert, a stole,
maniple and girdle, the silk wrappings, an ivory comb, a portable altar and
pieces of the coffin itself. The great
black slab, huge, primitive and unadorned identifies his resting place in crude
unembellished letters: CUTHBERTVS.
Its sheer starkness and simplicity are profoundly moving: the best
tribute we can offer as we honour a man whose extraordinary career in both life
and death have endeared him to so many.
Millions still come to Durham
to bring to his place their hopes, their longings, their joys, their fears,
their pain. He is, I think, as close as England has
ever come to begetting a national saint.
What he is to us is no doubt very different from what he has been to
past generations, and I have tried to show how Durham Cathedral played a large
part in the process of reinterpreting his significance to subsequent
generations.
Cuthbert is the emblem of so much that our churches today
need to cultivate. Here are some reasons why.
First, for his askesis or
spiritual discipline. It is not that others did not also practise
‘spiritual training’: rather, it is the lengths to which he took it, his
complete devotion to the way of a disciple.
It never faltered, even in the midst of a life fully taken up with the
evangelistic, pastoral and organisational duties of a bishop. From this
self-offering, going right back to the night on the hills around Melrose where
he had his vision of Aidan’s soul being carried up to heaven and resolved at
once to enter monastic life. Then we honour the memory of a man who lived close to the natural world, who not only
respected it and treated it with courtesy but befriended it, England’s St
Francis 600 years earlier. If we were looking for a patron saint of
environmental responsibility, we could not do better. We celebrate him as an evangelist for his perseverance in
preaching the gospel and the lengths to which he went in order to bring the
love of Jesus Christ to communities in remote places. As a bishop he is an inspiration to all called to public office in the
church, not simply in the complete commitment he brought to it, but in managing
the boundaries of his public role and personal spiritual disciplines. As a spiritual guide and companion he models
wise ‘accompaniment’ in the path of wisdom and discipleship. I could go on and
on. Whether it is on his windswept Holy Island or Inner Farne, washed by
the surf of the bleak grey North Sea under the wide Northumberland sky, or kneeling
by his simple black slab beneath the soaring vaults and arcades of Britain’s
best-loved building, we find ourselves drawn back to his story in ways that
continue to inspire us, and put to us the inescapable questions of what it
means to be human and to be Christian in the complex century, so different from
Cuthbert’s, in which we live and seek to bear Christian witness to our
generation as he did in his.
Michael Sadgrove
Dean of Durham
Lecture to the Society of the Friends of St Cuthbert’s
Edinburgh, October 2012
