Saint James the Deacon

Saint James the Deacon

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate a ‘man of great energy and repute in Christ’s Church’, the missionary deacon James who accompanied Saint Paulinus to Northumbria. His feast day also, notably, follows that of Saint Paulinus – fittingly, as his tenure was largely keeping the embers of the Christian faith alive in the dark night of Northumbria’s heathen interregnum.

Saint James was part of the Kentish mission. Nothing is known for certain about James’s birth, though it is believed – but not directly attested – that James was a companion of Saint Paulinus from the Continent, and may very well have been an Italian cleric in close connexion with the Abbey of Saint Andrew. He thereafter accompanied Paulinus north with Saint Æþelburg to the court of her groom, Éadwine King of Northumbria, who converted to Christianity. When Éadwine fell in battle against Penda and Cadwallon, his kingdom too fell into the wreck of anarchy. The year 633 was called in subsequent Northumbrian annals, ‘the hateful year’, on account of the political power vacuum and turmoil that accompanied Éadwine’s death, and the plagues and famines which followed hard on. Neither Paulinus nor Æþelburg stayed in Northumbria: both of them went south into Kent that year.

But James stayed on, as the sole representative of the Church hierarchy in Northumbria. He was tasked with pastoral care – and often physical care – of the northern English flock, and he served them with dogged faithfulness. Despite there being plenty of contenders, there was no English chieftain strong or well-known enough to wrest the kingship of either Deira or Bernicia away from Penda. Disasters both social and environmental accompanied a violent resurgence of heathenry there. And yet James tended to those who stayed faithful, and would not flee from them or leave them to the wolves. James took up residence in a hamlet near Catterick in what is now North Yorkshire, teaching and comforting and giving encouragement to his flock. Despite the many hardships he faced, he was nonetheless able to keep the Church alive and even grow it some – such that when a Christian king again reigned, there was still evidence of an active Christian Church in Northumbria.

James had a particular knack for music, and was fond of the chants produced by Pope Gregory Dialogos which were then used in the Church in Kent. He taught these chants especially to the Christians of Northumbria, such that when the churches could again hold the Liturgy in broad daylight, it was given the sweet angelic sound of the chant that Saint James had taught.

Saint James continued to minister in Northumbria even after the arrival of Saint Óswald and Saint Aidan. Even though it’s clear he had good relations with the Celtic Christian missionaries at Lindisfarne, he kept the Roman date for Pascha rather than the Celtic date, and celebrated Eastertide together with Æþelburg’s daughter Éanflæd (who too kept to the Roman custom). In his old age, the deacon James attended the Synod of Whitby in 664, at which he took the side of the Roman date for Pascha. He may have died shortly thereafter, in 668, but the exact date is not known to us.

Saint Bede had a magnanimous opinion of the holy deacon James, praising his holiness, steadfastness and wide knowledge, and the ability with which he was able to keep and grow the Church during a time of severe trials. Historian of Old England Frank Stenton calls Saint James ‘the one heroic figure in the Roman mission’: probably with some slight criticism implied of Saints Mellitus, Justus, Laurence and even Paulinus who ended up leaving (or trying to) when the political situation for Christianity got a bit sticky. It is also noteworthy that, unlike the other known saints of the early Gregorian mission, James was not a monk: his cultus as a saint was therefore preserved not by monastic record, but instead by folk memory.

Even though James was not a native-born Englishman, there is something peculiarly English about his life and missionary work. I’m not merely talking about the ‘stiff upper lip’ he kept in staying there – though that’s not unrelated. Think of it this way: James was left in charge of a Church without celebrating clergy, a nearly-dead Church, in a hostile political atmosphere: very similar to what the Orthodox Church in China went through during the Cultural Revolution. At that point in his labours Saint James had no reason to hope that Saint Óswald would appear and that things would turn out for the best, this side of the Parousia. The fact that he continued to teach and baptise as he had done before was a testament not only to a personal faithfulness, but to an attitude not uncommon even among the heathen Germans of stoicism (in the vernacular, rather than the technical philosophical sense of the word) in the face of a long defeat. For such boldness of soul we need to exercise ourselves in the daily struggle.

Holy Deacon James, steadfast keeper of the Faith in times of anarchy and darkness, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!