Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Lindisfarne & Missionary
August 31 · d. 651
Aidan (died 651) was an Irish monk of Iona who became the first bishop of Lindisfarne and the apostle of Northumbria. Sent at the request of King Oswald in 635, he won the north of England to Christ not by force but by gentleness, walking the kingdom on foot, giving away whatever he was given, and ransoming slaves to make them priests. Out of his island monastery came the golden age of Northumbrian Christianity. Bede, who disagreed with his dating of Easter, could not praise the man himself enough.
Aidan was an Irish monk of Iona, the island monastery off the west coast of Scotland, when the king of Northumbria, Oswald, sent across the sea to ask for a bishop to bring his people to Christ. Iona sent a stern man first, who found the rough English unteachable and went home discouraged, complaining at the community's council that they were an obstinate and barbarous people. And Aidan said to him, gently, that perhaps he had been too hard, and should have given them the milk of plainer teaching before the strong meat, and led them on step by step. The brothers looked at the man who had said it, and knew they had found their bishop, and sent Aidan instead.
He chose for his seat the tidal island of Lindisfarne, within sight of Oswald's fortress at Bamburgh but cut off twice a day by the sea, so that he could keep both the silence of a monastery and the work of a mission. And he went out on foot, always on foot, walking the length of Northumbria to preach in the villages; and in the early days, before he had mastered the English tongue, the king himself stood beside him and turned his Irish into English for the people. He gave away whatever was given to him. When the king handed him a fine horse, Aidan gave it to the first beggar he met. He used the gifts of the powerful to ransom slaves, and then he taught the freed slaves, and made some of them priests.
Bede, who wrote a century later and disapproved of Aidan on one point, the old Irish way of reckoning Easter, could not say enough good of the man himself. He praised his love of prayer and study, his care for the poor, his courage before the rich and powerful, his refusal of every comfort, and above all his gentleness, and he held Aidan up as a rebuke to the soft and worldly clergy of his own day. Out of Aidan's Lindisfarne came the great age of Northumbrian Christianity, its saints and its scholars and the glory of its painted gospels.
The church told wonders of him. When the pagan king Penda heaped timber against the walls of Bamburgh to burn the fortress down, Aidan, the story goes, saw the smoke from his island, lifted his hands, and prayed, and the wind turned and drove the fire back upon the attackers. And on the night Aidan died, far off in the hills, a young shepherd named Cuthbert saw the sky open and angels carrying a soul up to heaven in a great light; when he learned that it was Aidan who had died that night, Cuthbert left his sheep and gave himself to God, and became in time the most loved of all the saints of Lindisfarne. The torch passed in the very hour it was set down.
Aidan died on the last day of August in 651, leaning against the wall of a little church at Bamburgh, worn out with walking and with giving. The kingdom he had found half pagan he left Christian, and the island he had chosen became, for a hundred years, the holiest and most learned place in England. The gentle Irishman who would not ride when he could walk, and would not keep a gift he could give away, had built, out of milk before meat and patience and prayer, a church that outshone them all.
Aidan is known almost entirely from one source, but an excellent one: Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English PeopleEcclesiastical History of the English People (Book III, on Aidan) — Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics, written at Jarrow about 731, less than a century after Aidan's death and within the same Northumbrian church he had planted. Bede devotes much of his third book to Aidan, and his account is unusually revealing of its author, for Bede held the Roman calculation of Easter and thought Aidan plainly wrong to keep the Irish one, yet he could not contain his admiration for Aidan's holiness, and said so at length; the early Lives of Cuthbert supply the vision at Aidan's death.
Aidan came from Iona at the request of King Oswald and was made bishop, with his seat at Lindisfarne, about 635; he served some sixteen years, through the reign of Oswald and into that of Oswin of Deira, and died on 31 August 651, leaning against the church at the royal stronghold of Bamburgh. The Easter question he embodied, the divergence between the Irish and Roman reckonings, was not settled in Northumbria until the Synod of Whitby in 664, after his death; Bede's treatment of Aidan is the classic instance of his own method, reporting a man he judged mistaken on a point of discipline while honoring without reserve the sanctity of his life. From Aidan's foundation came Lindisfarne's age of gold, its line of saints from Cuthbert onward and the masterpiece of its scriptorium, the Lindisfarne Gospels.
Aidan is commemorated on 31 August, the day of his death, in the calendars of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, and the other Anglican churches, and is honored in the Irish and the Roman calendars as well; his liturgical color is white. He is counted, with Cuthbert, among the patrons of the north of England, and of the Northumbrian and Celtic Christian revival that has drawn so many to Lindisfarne in modern times.
His monument is Lindisfarne itself, the Holy Island, which his choice made the cradle of English Christianity in the north and which remains a place of pilgrimage; and the whole tradition of Celtic-flavored, monastic, gentle mission that the English church has never forgotten he embodied. In art Aidan is shown as a bishop in the simple habit of a monk, very often with a lighted torch, the emblem the church gave him for the light of the gospel he carried into the dark of the north, and sometimes with a stag, from a later legend of his protecting a hunted deer. He is remembered, in the end, for the quality Bede most loved in him, the gentleness that won a kingdom the sword had failed to hold.
Some links below are Amazon affiliate links. Commontide may earn a small commission from purchases; the public-domain links beside them are always free.
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Book III, on Aidan)(Latin, c. 731)
Recommended: Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics
Bede is the one full source for Aidan, and his warm portrait of a bishop he thought mistaken on Easter is among the finest things in his History; the Oxford World's Classics is the standard in-print translation, Sellar's the freely readable one.
Public domain: Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Book III
Further reading. Bede's account of Aidan, in the third book of the Ecclesiastical History, listed above, is the indispensable source and a small masterpiece of sympathetic portraiture. For the world Aidan made, Max Adams's The King in the North and the wider literature on Lindisfarne and Northumbria set him in context.
Online resources. Bede's chapters on Aidan are freely readable in A. M. Sellar's translation at the Internet Sacred Text Archive and at Fordham's Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
As an Amazon Associate Commontide earns from qualifying purchases.
British (Received Pronunciation): Lindisfarne /ˈlɪndɪsfɑːrn/
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Aidan to preach the Gospel to the people of Northumbria: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11