← Catholic Saints
Catholic Saints
St. Cuthbert
00:22:30
Dr. Elizabeth Klein and Taylor Kemp discuss the life of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne from Northern England, a lesser-known saint in the Church today but a beloved bishop of his time. Known for his amiable personality and unique relationship with otters, St. Cuthbert radiated persistent cheerfulness to those he met and modeled holiness throughout the various stages of his life. His feast day is March 20.
Loading summary
Transcript95 lines
- [00:02]
A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Catholic Saints. I am sitting down today with Dr. Elizabeth Klein. Hello, Dr. Klein.
- [00:28]
B
Hello, Taylor.
- [00:28]
A
Great to have you here. Today we're talking about a saint that I had never heard of until a few days ago named Saint Cuthbert. So maybe he's new to you as well, but he will not be after this episode. So, Dr. Klein, who is Saint Cuthbert?
- [00:45]
B
So Saint Cuthbert, who is a very beloved saint of mine, so I'm very happy you agreed to do St. Cuthbert. St Cuthbert was the third Bishop of Lindisfarne, and he lived from 634 to 687. So he's a kind of early Irish English saint. It's at the very, very northern part of England.
- [01:05]
A
Okay. And Lindisfarne, that is a location.
- [01:08]
B
Lindisfarne is a location. They called it the Holy Island. It is a tidal island off the coast of Northumbria. So it's again, almost in Scotland. A tidal island is an island that is accessible at certain times of day when the tide is low and inaccess when the tide is high. So at certain times.
- [01:27]
A
Sounds like a good place to be.
- [01:29]
B
Yeah. So at certain times, if you want
- [01:30]
A
to be around no one.
- [01:32]
B
Yeah, it's cut off. So they. So St. Aidan was sort of sent on mission to the further southern lands and established Lindisfarne. So maybe we can talk about St. Aidan another time. We have to do another one.
- [01:45]
A
Stay tuned.
- [01:46]
B
But Saint Cuthbert is the third bishop of Lindisfarne, which you might think, Bishop. I thought it was a monastery. So it's also a diocese.
- [01:55]
A
Is it just of the monastery? Diocese of the monastery?
- [01:59]
B
No, there are lots of villages around and people living up there. I mean, I'm sure it's not super heavily populated then as today.
- [02:06]
A
It's a small diocese boundary, but it
- [02:08]
B
was, you know, there is precedent, which the venerable Bee mentions in the life of comfort for someone to be both abbot and bishop.
- [02:15]
A
Okay.
- [02:15]
B
So they're both, which is a big responsibility of both abbot of the community and also bishop of the surrounding town, diocesan area.
- [02:22]
A
So, okay, he goes to this monastery. What is he doing?
- [02:28]
B
So, yeah, so Cuthbert, he's not. There's not a whole lot of information about his early life, you know, his conversion. I think there's like one little story about his youth, but essentially we kind of meet him as he rides up to Lindisfarne to enter the monastery. And sort of dedicate his life to Christ. And Cuthbert, you know, he, as you said, he's kind of maybe obscure. Seems obscure to you, but he is the patron of Northumbria, who is a really popular saint in his own time. His holy life was sort of well renowned all around the area. And actually three lives were written about him in living memory of him shortly after his death. And the.
- [03:05]
A
That's a lot.
- [03:06]
B
Yeah.
- [03:06]
A
I mean, when we're talking about that period of time, you'll get a life of a saint. We have three of Cuthbert, three of Cuthbert. And that's. So it's just an interesting thing that the saints kind of come in popularity and then fade out of popularity. But we're bringing him back.
- [03:21]
B
We're bringing him back. And one interesting fact about one of the lives is that the first life written of him, they think is the oldest thing written in English. Wow. So obscure. No more obscure.
- [03:34]
A
No more.
- [03:34]
B
The other thing that might make him a little less obscure is that the monastery Lindisfarne is probably most famous for the Lindisfarne Gospels, which you might not recognize by ear, but if you Google it, you might see some images, for example, of the opening illumination of the Gospel of Matthew that are probably very familiar. It's a very famous illuminated manuscript, and it is thought that that gospel might have been commissioned on the anniversary of Cuthbert's death, because they exhume Cuthbert to put him in a more sort of prominent place in the church to be venerated, and they find him incorrupt and his vestments incorrupt. And so this is kind of the end of the story first. But when the dissolution of the monastery happens during the reformation in the 16th century, Cuthbert's relics are some of the only ones that are not moved out
- [04:20]
A
of respect for him.
- [04:21]
B
Well, there's some kind of legendary stories surrounding it. Like they opened it and found him in corrupt still and were too afraid to move him, or I would be pretty afraid.
- [04:29]
A
I mean, seriously, you would just be like, I'm not touching that.
- [04:32]
B
But when it was reopened later, you know, the body was not incorrupt, at least in modernity, but it has some of the oldest really Christian relics from Britain. His coffin is some of the only surviving sort of carved Christian artwork from that period. There was also a really ancient illuminated manuscript called St Cuthbert's Gospel that was with him, as well as some old vestments and other, you know, like a pectoral cross and some really cool kind of artifacts that are Cuthbert's afterlife. So thought it Would, you know, help raise him out of obscurity a little bit before we talk about his kind of actual life story.
- [05:10]
A
That's awesome.
- [05:11]
B
So we started. We started. He rides up. So he rides up to Lindisfarne.
- [05:14]
A
He gets there.
- [05:15]
B
He gets there. He enters the monastery. He sees some priest who knows him. He's like, oh, yeah, Cuthbert. This guy's gonna be righteous. This is gonna be totally awesome. So they accept him into the monastery. And, you know, of course, there's lots of stories of his sort of holy way of life, his fasting, lots of miracle stories, his preaching, his care for the poor. And because there's these three lives, there's really so many stories about Cuthbert, I can't recount them all, but I thought I would kind of talk about a few things, why Cuthbert stuck out to me. Obviously, I'm a patristic scholar, so I spend a lot of time reading Lives of the Saints or whenever I can. I had a lot of fun rereading this one. But there's just a couple things that make Cuthbert's lives just kind of really special. And really, I remembered it when we were talking about more saints to do for the. One of the things I think is really special is the eyewitness character of the Lives of Cuthbert. So the one that I reread recently was Life by the Venerable Bede. And for every single miracle story he gives his source. And so it's just. It's just really. I don't know, there's just something about that, like, not only learning about the saint, but about all the people that he affected and how you really get this sense of, like, all the people who loved the saint. And so he'll say, like, and I got this story straight from this monk who was there that day, or I got this story straight from this nun, or I went and I got it from this priest who lived with the holy Cuthbert a long time.
- [06:35]
A
That's really cool.
- [06:35]
B
And he says in the preface of the Life that before he published it, he had one of the brothers who was a longtime friend of Cuthbert, read the whole thing over and correct and amend things. And so there's just, like, that. I don't know, it just makes you, like, that much closer, especially with early saints, you know, sometimes you get a lot of legendary material or stuff that just doesn't feel as well sourced. You can't know for sure. So just that, like, feeling of kind of being there.
- [06:59]
A
Yeah. Like, very concrete, kind of granular.
- [07:01]
B
Cuthbert's friends, and they're telling stories about it.
- [07:04]
A
Let's talk about our friend Cuthbert.
- [07:05]
B
Yes, exactly. So that's one thing that stuck out to me. Another is that being a sanguine myself, it's clear that Cuthbert was just, like, a really popular guy. So he's described as very pleasant and affable. That's something that Bede says about him.
- [07:19]
A
Old language for sanguine. Extrovert.
- [07:21]
B
Exactly. So he was very likable, apparently. And you can tell this by the way, in all of his stories that he deals with all of these people. So he, you know, he is. He's prior for a long time of Lindisfarne, then he's a hermit for a bit, and then he's the bishop. So he has a lot of dealings with a lot of different people, from very poor people all the way up to the queen and the king. And you just can tell he's, like, so patient with everybody from, like, cranky monks all the way to this, like, hysterical queen who's, like, asking who will succeed her husband after he dies, you know, and he has to deliver the bad news that her, like, husband's gonna be, like, slain in battle, you know? Cause he has a prophetic knowledge of this. And one of my favorite stories in the life about this is that he's trying to establish a certain rule of life partially in a line with Roman custom at this time. So there's a long history of kind of Celtic Christianity and Roman Christianity kind of coming into conflict at this time, because, as we know from sort of St. Patrick, Irish Christianity has a great antiquity already by the time of Cuthbert. And so when you have kind of the British and the kind of more Romanized Christianity coming into contact with this even older form, it's like the Romans are like, no, you can't do this and you can't do that, and you have to do this. And, like, well, we've been doing this for hundreds of years. And so there's a lot of back and forth with that. So Cuthbert is trying to kind of establish a more standardized Benedictine rule among his monks. And apparently he's, like, not going that well. And they're, like, not happy with him. And they're like, well, we've never done it that way. And they're, like, super cranky. So it's says they would, like, sit in meetings for long periods of time, and the monks would, be, like, really grumpy with Cuthbert. So he would just be like, all right, well, let's just be done for now. And he would just, like, get up and walk out perfectly happy. And then the next morning, he would just tell the same monk to do the exact same thing as if they had never talked about it the following day.
- [09:15]
A
And so I just thought that was holy perseverance.
- [09:17]
B
Yeah, I just thought that was such a, like, delightful story to have. Some, like, he. They saw, like, you know, his inner peace was not destroyed by this. He just, like, kept telling him to do the same thing the next day as if they had never talked about it.
- [09:29]
A
Yeah.
- [09:29]
B
Giving the guy, like, a totally fresh chance.
- [09:31]
A
I like something that I've always loved about the saints is how human they are. And I always think about. I believe it's the line in the Hebrews, in the letter to the Hebrews, where Christ became like us in all things except sin, which obviously we reflect on that of, like, he shares our experience. But we think about that in particular to, like, our struggles and our sufferings. But I also think about that in the way of, like, in a mix with Paul's hymn to love. Love is patient, love is kind. That the saints are, like, they're. That they're pleasant and affable. They're. They have a way of accepting people as they are and not letting it completely throw them off and. And continuing on. And I've always found in, like, our Christian lives, it's. It's. It's always a struggle. Like, you get mad at people and you get. You hold grudges or you don't. You know, we're petty, we're selfish, and there's something about the saints where they just let stuff kind of roll off of them and they just do it again, and you're like, okay. Like, you're not bothered by that. They're like, no, you just keep going. But there's something that's Christ, like, about that, that he Love. Love is patient, love is kind. It is gentle, does not boast. Like, it just. It just kind of keeps going.
- [10:37]
B
And Cuthbert, another similar story that stuck out to me is that he's kind of. He's described as being like, a good confessor. And I don't know if this is the earliest example of this, because our modern practice of confession comes from the Irish tradition.
- [10:50]
A
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [10:51]
B
Yeah, it does. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly on the history and dating, but it talks about people confessing their sins very honestly to him. Him knowing if they've held something back, which is, you know, it's something. A kind of saintly mark we see later. But another thing that I thought was very beautiful is that he would be so moved by other people's penitence that he would weep for them and with them for their sins and that he would do penance with them. That's a good priest. Which is just really amazing. So that's just something that stuck out to me as this kind of like.
- [11:22]
A
That's inspiring.
- [11:23]
B
Yeah. He's just a likable person who really liked people and cares about them and is patient with them.
- [11:30]
A
And he can be your heavenly friend, too.
- [11:31]
B
That's right.
- [11:32]
A
We can be in friendship with saints.
- [11:34]
B
And you will want to be his heavenly friend even more when you found out his awesome miracles to do with animals.
- [11:38]
A
Ready?
- [11:38]
B
Which is another thing that really stuck out to me. This is one of my absolute favorite miracle stories of all time from Penny Cuthbert.
- [11:46]
A
I'm ready.
- [11:47]
B
Okay. So Cuthbert is at a convent preaching a mission, you know. Cause he got asked to come talk to the nuns. So he's there giving them sort of holy encouragement. But he still needs his quiet prayer time with the Lord. So he's sneaking out of the monastery in the middle of the night to pray. And one of his other brothers, who's with him there on the mission, like, notices Cuthbert's missing in the middle of the night. And he's like, where's this guy going? So he follows him, and he finds that Cuthbert is wading out into the sea. You know, this is the north of England. Very cold.
- [12:13]
A
Very cold.
- [12:13]
B
And praying there for hours. And then when he gets out of the sea. Otters. Sea otters come out of the sea to warm his feet and dry him off. And rereading the miracle story today, it actually says the otters attempted to dry him off. Which makes me think that, like, it was a failed. It wasn't very good. It was kind of like a failed attempt. But, like, the otters were.
- [12:34]
A
It's not the otters fault. They tried homage.
- [12:36]
B
And I just think this is, like, so delightfully English and just awesome. So there are. I have seen at least one stained glass window in Northumbria that depicts Cuthbert with honors. No way. So there's that one. And there's also a whole bunch of miracle stories involving him with birds. And there is actually a species of duck named after Saint Cuthbert the Cuddy duck. Sweet. And so there's a number of ones with birds. Mostly it's like, birds kind of like acting naughty and then Cuthbert, like, reproaching them. So he's on his hermitage. So after he's prior for a while, he gets permission to go out to a further island even further from Lindisfarne, to live, like, the truly hermetic. So he builds this, like, you know, shambly hermitage. And he decides after a couple years of that, that, like, he shouldn't depend on the brothers of the monastery to bring him food. He should grow his own food.
- [13:22]
A
Okay.
- [13:22]
B
So he tries to plant wheat. That doesn't work. So he tries to plant barley. It goes great, but the birds start coming and, like, eating his barley. And he says to them, like, okay, well, maybe you need the food more than I do. So if God lets you have the food, that's fine, but otherwise, like, keep your hands off my barley. And so the birds apparently obey him and they flee. And another time, some nasty crows are, like, stealing hay out of, like, the roof of his guest house and to build their nest. And he, like, chastises them, and they come and, like, like, bow before him and, like, do.
- [13:53]
A
That's awesome. He's like, penance, St. Francis before St. Francis.
- [13:57]
B
Yeah, he doesn't preach the birds, he chastises.
- [13:58]
A
Yeah, even better.
- [13:59]
B
Tells the birds who's boss. So those are.
- [14:02]
A
Instead of a wolf, it's an otter. I mean, it's just.
- [14:04]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's, like, very enculturated, which is, I don't know, just delightful to my mind. So there's. Bede makes a comment that there's nothing more natural than, for those, like, those people who are truly dedicated to our Creator, that creation should obey them, listen to them, because they know they can't get away with anything. When you're so aligned with the Creator, that's great. And so another example of this is that his little hermitage island, like, the seas around it seem to kind of like, flow according to Cuthbert's will, or if people disobey him, they, like, can't get to his island or can't get off his island. And my favorite example of this is he asks some. The monks from Lindisfarne to bring him out beams of a certain size so he can, like, repair something or build something on his island. And they come out and they forget, and he's like, don't worry about it. The Lord will provide. And then the sea, like, throws up, tosses and beams that are of the right size. And that's when he makes a comment about, like, you know, even. Even the winds and seas obey him is kind of a Christ.
- [14:59]
A
Yes, Christ figure, but.
- [15:01]
B
But in an English setting, which I thought was.
- [15:04]
A
That's awesome. So what can we. From our delightful friend St. Cuthbert. What are some things that we can Learn from him. That can inspire our spiritual lives today.
- [15:16]
B
Yeah. I think the story that we are talking about, both with him being kind of a good confessor and also him being a kind of persistent friend to his monks and accompanying them, I think that that's just. It's just a very important lesson. It's like, it's difficult for people to change, and there's lots of people in our lives that we want to guide them on the right path. We want them to change this about the way that they're behaving or that it may be people we have direct authority over. Like, we're talking about someone who's the prior and the bishop. Like, this monk should do what he says, even more so than parents and children. But these are real people, and they're real people who actually are trying their best. And so for him to be just so patient and so winning and so charming towards them persistently and to win them over is really wonderful. There are other figures of this period who had a lot more difficult time with the sort of Roman imposition of certain church laws on their ancient faith. And Cuthbert, he just seems to be seamless in his community because of his sort of persistence and cheerfulness. And it actually reminds me a little bit of the little flower, you know, of like, just being persistently pleasant to people who you don't actually.
- [16:32]
A
Very small ways like.
- [16:33]
B
Or that aren't doing what they ought to do and to sort of go out of your way to be pleasant. And another way that he does this is he's just very present.
- [16:44]
A
Yeah.
- [16:44]
B
So one story is just the fact that even though he's sort of prior and then bishop and he's like, really busy and spends a lot of time in prayer, is that he, like, walks around the island and talks to all the monks. So he just likes to, like, walk around and see what everyone's doing and just be with people. And, you know, sometimes we want, like, obedience without commitment. You know, we want people to do what we say, but we don't necessarily want to take the time to be like, hey, how was your day? And actually, like, listen and really listen.
- [17:12]
A
Yeah.
- [17:12]
B
You know, just check up on them and be really invested in what they're doing, because then they know that his hope, his attempt to change is really coming out of a place of love and of wanting to govern well. So I think that's just one very relatable thing about Cuthbert. I think another thing is that Cuthbert has a lot of sort of changes of responsibilities, you know, from being sort of lowly monk where he's praying to prior to being a hermit for many years. And he, after his election of bishop, doesn't not want to leave his island. Actually. The king and another current bishop have to come out to his far off island. They arrive on a boat and like prostrate themselves before him and say like, you've been elected bishop, you have to come. And so that there are very few saints who have this kind of like perfect story of like, well, I wanted to do this and then I did it and then I died and went to heaven. It's often a very circuitous path. He's away from Lindisfarne for a bit and he's a monk in a kind of satellite community that gets taken from them for some reason. And then he's back at Lindisfarne. He spends a lot of time preaching, but then also hermiting. So I think it's just an openness to being at different stages of our lives and how holiness is gonna look in those different stages, but also having that confidence that God knows our heart's desire to be with him. And, and Cuthbert really has that confidence as bishop. He says with great confidence that like, God will permit me to die on this island. And so even though he's bishop, he is able to go out and spend the last couple of his months of his life as a hermit, which is his true desire, and to spend that time with God. And there's a storm that prevents anybody from bothering him for five days while he prepares himself for death. And so I think that's kind of a.
- [18:53]
A
He should be the patron saint of weather. I feel like it's Saint Scholastica because she calls down the thunderstorm. But Cuthbert might take it.
- [19:01]
B
Yeah, the seas, maybe some sailors could benefit from Cuthbert.
- [19:05]
A
But yeah, I feel like I like your point a lot about how his responsibilities were changing and that that's just a general feature of life that things are always changing and that we discover in those changes there's always areas in which like you can feel your heart trying to stretch and you're just like, oh, like this hurts. But yeah, just a willingness to trust in God in every new situation that we find, whether that's be a new job or a lost job or children or like whatever it may be, that God is always going to take care of us and that everything he is doing in our hearts is for the sake of us being more close to him or can be if we're willing to participate. But he is a good example of that.
- [19:43]
B
Yeah.
- [19:43]
A
Do we know anything about his death.
- [19:46]
B
Yeah. So they have the story of his death. Actually, when Bede writes about his death, he says he's including something written in the hand of somebody who actually was there for Cuthbert's death. So there's a couple. If, you know, you go out and get so excited about Cuthbert, you buy the life of Bede.
- [20:01]
A
I saw it and there was a note that this is now a national park. You can go there.
- [20:04]
B
Yeah. You can also go to Lindisfarne.
- [20:05]
A
Sweet.
- [20:06]
B
So the national park pilgrimage. But, yeah, there's a little volume called the Age of Bede that includes. It's a penguin volume, so it's not super expensive. Then it contains this life. So they set it off in smaller types so that, you know, Bede is saying this is kind of directly from him. So he's able to go to his island because he tells them, like, he can feel that his death is approaching. And so he goes out onto the island and. And the storm comes up for five days to prevent. Because they beg to stay with him, and he says no. He really wants to be sort of alone with the Lord to prepare himself. So then as soon as the storm lets up, they go out to see him, and he says that he's been struggling with the worst possible illness that he could imagine for five days, and he hasn't moved from his chair. And the monk is like, well, like, why did you. We really wanted to be there for you. Like, we should have been ministering to you. And. And he says, like, no, this is what. This is what God wanted for me to, like, go to him prepared with this, like, final struggle. And so he's, like, very grateful to God that he's able to have this kind of last trial to kind of, as he sees, purifying himself. Yeah. And then he. He tells the brothers, like, not, like, just bury me on the island. Don't bring me back. Because if you bring me back, everyone from all over is going to come and, like, they're going to want to visit my body, and it's going to be like a nuisance to the monastery because, like, I have this big reputation. So he's just like, leave me out here. And they beg him for that not to be. And he finally acquiesces, which is another example, I think, of him really, really open to Providence, where he doesn't insist on his own will. And so, yeah, then he dies with one of his brothers there. And then they take him back and bury him. And then I told the story about them exhuming the body a year later.
- [21:41]
A
Awesome. That was great. Thank you Dr. Klein. Hopefully we're spreading some devotion to the great.
- [21:46]
B
Thank you all of St. Cuthbert like
- [21:48]
A
I did St. Cuthbert Y Wonderful. Thank you very much everyone and we will see you next time on Catholic Saints. You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting form.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press with award winning studies and parish programs, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustan institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.