Glastonbury Abbey
Following up on my slightly-renovated Saint Harold post, I feel like I need to append at least a partial justification for this hagiographical project that I kind of accidentally embarked on with a mini-bio of Saint Willibrord of Frisia.
Cataloguing and writing hagiographies for the pre-Schismatic saints of England, Frisia and northern Germany has taken me to some places I didn’t really expect to go. It has, to some degree, helped me sort out the feeling that I was merely going in circles both spiritually and intellectually – not so much by straightening me out and giving me a direction, as much as by letting me understand that going in such circles may not be such a bad thing to do. It’s also helping me sort through my Jennifer complex, this Œdipal hang-up I have over things British and old. That psycho-sexual feedback loop I’ve been caught in since my pre-teens still exercises quite a bit of power over me, but at least now I have a better sense of the shape of it. To be sure, there was a bit of navel-gazing about the whole thing. My ancestry being majority-English with infusions from Wales, southwestern Germany and Denmark, there was the danger of this turning into something of an ethnophyletist ‘vanity project’. I hope that was not the case.
This hagiographical project also, intriguingly, helped me sort out some of my hash of political convictions. It retrieved for me certain præmonitions of a democratic form of socialism ensconced within the Benedictine Rule. Though that, I could merely have gotten by way of Liz Bruenig and Chapo Trap House. The early Old English saints were rebelling, along with Saint Benedict, against an inhumane œconomic order that walled off the individual patrimonies of propertied men and proclaimed their lordship over the earth. Even more deeply than that: Benedict called for the renunciation of the individual will, particularly that will which strove to dominate others.
The socialism – I refuse to use scare quotes here; that’s what the Benedictine life was – of these early English and German saints, has some intriguing and tantalising overlaps and continuities with later developments. For example: the spirituality of Dr Lancelot Andrewes; the Platonic feminist anti-capitalism of Mary Astell; the liturgically-minded social-reformist Oxford Movement and the radical side of High Church Anglo-Catholicism in general; the religious æstheticism of John Ruskin and William Morris; the œconomic scholarship of Richard Tawney.
These unexpected eddies, visible even in the hagiographic language of the English saints, also revealed the profound receptivity of Old England to the Greek-speaking East. England, which was learning humility even in the tutelage of what Leont’ev would doubtless call its ‘primitive simplicity’, was not merely the passive pupil of Rome and Ireland. She was radically open to spiritual germination from the Eastern Christian world: from Greece (as shown in the scholarship of Saint Aldhelm and Saint Bede), from Palestine (as seen in the life of Saint Willibald), from Syria (in the person of Saint Theodore), from Ægypt (in the spirituality of Saint Gúðlác) and from Africa (in the person of Saint Hadrian). If there’s any heartening message for new, Western converts to the Orthodox faith: this is it. The Old English were every bit as foreign to that faith as we are today. Humility – personal humility and civilisational humility – is what is required of us. That civilisational humility, which came so naturally to the English of that five-hundred-year window of political independence, got very badly lost with the Hundred Years’ War and the advent of nationalism.
And then I started seeing in the context of this late-antique world these saints lived in, certain spiritual and physical challenges that we are likely to be facing again very soon, as we stand on the precipice of another climate crisis. The Old English saints lived on the very margins, at the figurative bottom of the known world. They were subject to poverty, hunger, desperation, violence which could come from anywhere. The Old English saints were called to great ascetic feats, not out of some feigned bourgeois piety, but out of love for their neighbours – deep, abiding, sincere. They suffered as their neighbours suffered. These reflections brought me back around, full circle, through the scholarly work of Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov to the wisdom of the Chinese new left.
Old English and Old Celtic spirituality offers us a great deal to learn from, if we would but listen. I’m not yet quite done with this series: the last English saint I’ll be treating here will likely come toward the end of December. But the insights – spiritual, cultural, political, even œcological – that these saints have to offer will, I am positive, take a great deal longer to unpack.
- Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne (31 Aug)
- Saint Alban of Britain (22 Jun)
- Saint Augustine of Canterbury (26 May)
- Saint Ælfhéah of Canterbury (19 Apr)
- Saint Æþelþrýð of Ely (23 Jun)
- Saint Æþelwold of Winchester (1 Aug)
- Saint Bede the Venerable (26 May)
- Saint Biscop of Wearmouth (12 Jan)
- Saint Boniface of Crediton (5 Jun)
- Saint Botwulf of Iken (17 Jun)
- Saint Ceadda of Lichfield (2 Mar)
- Saint Cuðberht of Lindisfarne (20 Mar)
- Saint Dúnstán of Canterbury (19 May)
- Saint Éadgýð of Wilton (16 Sep)
- Saint Éadmund of East Anglia (20 Nov)
- Saint Éadweard of England (18 Mar)
- Saint Éadwine of Northumbria (12 Oct)
- Saint Gúðlác of Crowland (11 Apr)
- Saint Hild of Whitby (17 Nov)
- Saint John of Beverley (7 May)
- Saint Óswald of Northumbria (5 Aug)
- Saint Ósweald of York (28 Feb)
- Saint Paulinus of York (10 Oct)
- Saint Swíþhún of Winchester (15 Jul)
- Saint Theodore of Tarsus (19 Sep)
- Saint Wilfrið of York (12 Oct)
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