Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop & Missionary to the Picts
September 16 · d. 432
also known as Ninian of Whithorn, Saint Ninian, Nynia
The earliest named Christian missionary to what is now Scotland. Bede tells us, in a single spare paragraph, of a British bishop trained at Rome who built a white stone church at Whithorn called Candida Casa and preached to the southern Picts. Almost everything else about Ninian is legend layered over that one notice. But the spade has confirmed an early Christian settlement at Whithorn, and the place has drawn pilgrims for fifteen hundred years.
Sometime in the fifth century, on the windswept peninsula of Galloway in the far southwest of what is now Scotland, a British bishop named Ninian built a church of stone and whitened its walls so that it gleamed against the grey of sea and moor. The Britons did not build in stone, and the strangeness of it gave the place its lasting name: Candida Casa, the White House, Whithorn in the later English tongue.
The Venerable Bede, writing three hundred years afterward, is the first to tell the story, and he tells it briefly. Ninian was a Briton, he says, regularly instructed at Rome in the faith, and he dedicated his church to Saint Martin of Tours, the soldier-monk whose fame had spread across the West. From Whithorn, Bede reports, Ninian preached to the southern Picts and turned them from the worship of idols.
Around that paragraph the later centuries wove a fuller tapestry. A medieval Life sent the young Ninian to Rome for his training, brought him home by way of Tours to sit at Martin's feet and gather masons for his church, and credited him with healings, a miraculous shelter from rain in a field of leeks, and the conversion of kings. How much is memory and how much is devotion, no one can now untangle. But pilgrims have walked the road to Whithorn since before England was a single kingdom, and at the heart of all the legend stands one stubborn fact: the gospel reached these northern shores early, carried by a man whose name the people would not let go.
Ninian is at once the despair and the delight of historians. The despair, because the written evidence is so thin. Everything early hangs on a single paragraph in Bede's Ecclesiastical History (Book III, chapter 4), written around 731, more than three centuries after Ninian is supposed to have lived, from sources Bede does not name:
The southern Picts had long before, as is reported, forsaken the errors of idolatry, and embraced the true faith, by the preaching of Bishop Ninian, a most reverend and holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed at Rome. The place is commonly called the White House, because he there built a church of stone, which was not usual among the Britons.
An eighth-century poem, the Miracula Nynie Episcopi, adds wonders but no firm history, and Aelred of Rievaulx's twelfth-century Life is largely pious invention, complete with journeys and miracles Bede never mentions.
The delight, because the ground itself has spoken. Excavation at Whithorn has uncovered an early Christian site reaching back to the fifth century, and there stands the Latinus Stone, a memorial pillar of about 450, the oldest Christian monument in Scotland. It does not name Ninian, but it proves that organized Christian life flourished at Whithorn in exactly the era the tradition assigns to him. The man is shadowy; the church he is said to have founded is solid stone and certain fact.
Ninian is commemorated on September 16. He is honored as the apostle of the southern Picts and, in popular reckoning, as the first to bring the faith to Scotland, a generation or more before Columba landed on Iona. The Irish mission to the north is the better documented chapter; Ninian is the dim and venerable opening one.
Whithorn became one of the great medieval pilgrimage shrines of Britain, visited by kings and commoners alike, and St. Ninian's Cave on the nearby shore, where he is said to have withdrawn to pray, still draws the devout. Churches from Galloway to Antrim to the far side of the world carry his name.
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Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Book III, chapter 4)(Latin, c. 731)
Recommended: Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics
The single early witness to Ninian; the Oxford World's Classics is the standard in-print translation.
Public domain: Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Book III
Whithorn and St Ninian: The Excavation of a Monastic Town(English, 1997)
The archaeological report that grounds the tradition in fifth-century fact.
Further reading. The one early source is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book III, chapter 4. The medieval embellishments are Aelred of Rievaulx's Life of Ninian and the anonymous poem Miracula Nynie Episcopi. For the archaeology that anchors the legend, see the reports of the Whithorn Trust excavations and Peter Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian: The Excavation of a Monastic Town (Sutton, 1997).
Online resources. Bede's Ecclesiastical History is free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and the Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
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Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Ninian to preach the Gospel to the people of southern Scotland: 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.