EDINBBURGH FESTIVAL 2013-08-23
From ‘Just Festival’ Web Site:
Lindisfarne – its Gospels, Saint Aidan and its Spirituality
Celebrating the 1300th anniversary of the Lindisfarne Gospels -’the book that made Britain’ (Sunday Times) and Scotland’s undiscovered Saint, Aidan
Edinburgh’s contribution to the 1300th anniversary celebrationsof 'The Lindisfarne Gospels' which contain the earliest surviving translationof the Gospels into English, dedicated to St Cuthbert who established Edinburgh’s first church nearby, revealing an amazing blend of Scots, Saxon, Roman, Coptic and Muslim influences.
Ray Simpson of Lindisfarne, author and founding guardian of the internationalCommunity of Aidan and Hilda, tells the amazing story of the Gospels, discusseshow they may inform Scotland’s independence debate and inspire Christian-Muslim interface, leading into a meditationon the portraits of the Four Gospel writers as archetypes of the Warrior,Magus, Lover and King. Signed copies of Ray’s new book 'The Lindisfarne
Gospels' will be available.
RESUME OF RAY’S TALK:
Just next door is Edinburgh’s first Christian church, founded from Lindisfarne in the 7th c by Cuthbert, who was, in today’s terms, a Scot. During the two short years he was bishop of Lindisfarne, as a result of popular vote, this missionary church planter travelled far and wide north of here. Tradition has it that St. Andrew’s University grew out of the Christian cell Cuthbert planted there. The Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the supreme works of art that caused scholars to speak of a Golden Age bursting from Britain and Ireland into Europe’s Dark Ages, was dedicated to him.
I want to briefly tell the amazing story of the Gospels, whose 14th centenary is currently being gloriously celebrated, highlight the even more amazing discoveries that recent scholarship has made about the uniting of diverse strands of art and spirituality that its pages represent, the relevance of this to at least one element in the Scottish Independence debate, and an inter faith way to use the Gospels’ portraits of the four Evangelists in meditation. Then we will have a chance to share questions and insights.
The story of the Lindisfarne Gospels
Saxons invaded Britain, seized hill forts and created kingdoms. They were pagan and brutal. The men slew enemies in summer battles, and bragged about their exploits in winter booze-ups. The women, many of them indigenous, suffered.
When the Northumbrian boy and future King Oswald fled in the 7th c to the Scottish (i.e. Irish) colony of Dal Riada, which included Iona, he became a devout Christian. When he was able to seize the throne he was legally heir to, as a result of the alliance between the Scots and his Northumbrian Saxons, who became known as the English, he invited the Scots Irish to send a mission to convert his pagan people. This was led by Aidan. Largely as a result of that mission and Oswald’s alliances, four previously warring races, each with a different language, were united in the fellowship of the Gospel. Picts, Scots Irish, Celtic Britons, and English. It was the Gospel that united them.
The Scots Irish mission introduced to the four races in and around Northumbria (which stretched, at various times, from coast to coast and from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, Galloway and Fife) first the message of the Gospel – and therefore they built scriptoriums where Gospels could be copied – and secondly a model of the kingdom of God on earth, the monastic led villages of God such as had turned pagan Ireland into a land of saints and scholars.
Lindisfarne, though a mission monastery, not a university, nevertheless wa a kind of mother house to the many little church communities and villages of God that mushroomed everywhere. About 664 Cuthbert transferred from Melrose to become Lindisfarne’s prior. He was a spiritual giant – pastor, evangelist, healer, mentor, prophet, prayer warrior, missionary bishop. Over some period before the death of Lindisfarne’s Bishop Eadfrith in 721, Eadfrith transcribed and illuminated the Lindisfarne Gospels in honour of Saint Cuthbert. They were a glory to excite devotion in many who could not read its Latin script, and were no doubt used at great festivals.
When the Vikings, some 80 years after their first invasions, destroyed Lindisfarne in 875, its bishop, abbot and some brothers took Cuthbert’s shrine, with the Gospels in it, and started out on the most extra-ordinary walk-about that went on for years. According to Symeon of Durham, they initially went to the Solway Firth, in an attempt to sail to Ireland, but their boat capsized. Worse, the Gospels were lost overboard. In a vision a man told them to wait for a low tide at Whithorn, and they would find them. This they did, the pages miraculously preserved, no doubt on account of their quality wooden covers with metal clasp (which has now been lost). The brothers took the storm as a sign from God that they should stay in Britain. They walked, and walked, stopping at Chester-le Street and years later at Durham, in response to a prophetic word. They did not walk with a mere relic: the relic was a sign of the resurrection. They did not walk with a mere book: the Gospels were a sign of the ever-living Gospel.
At the Reformation it is assumed they were sold, and eventually landed up in the British Museum, now the British Library, in London. The Library has lent them to Durham for the great celebrations this year, at a cost to Durham of several million pounds.
Various intelligent guesses have been made as to the stopping places. Symeon of Durham, in 1828 James Raine, . Durham’s Professor David Rollason based his shorter list on the presumed used of the ancient Roman road system. In 2006 the Teesdale Record Society Journal, using local tradition and Google earth technology like a detective novel, came up with this longer list based on nine distinct stages:
Stage one: Lindisfarne, Norham, Tillmouth, Cornhill, Wark, Dryburgh, Melrose, Colinton?:
Stage two: Elsdon, Bellingham, Bewcastle, Haydon Bridge, Beltingham, Carlisle, Plumbland, Embleton, Mouth of Derwent.
Stage three: Up the coast seeking the lost Gospels, Holme Cultram, Kiklington, Isle of Whithorn (book found!)
Stage four: Carlisle, Great Salkeld, Edenhall, Dufton, Cliburn, Hawkeshead, Kirkby Ireleth, Aldingham, Over Kellet.
Stage five: Lytham, North Meols (Meles, Melus) Halsall.
Stage six: Ackworth, Fishlake, South Cave.
Stage seven: Bolton Abbey, Burnsall, York.
Stage eight: Marske, Forsett, Redmarshall, Darlington, Stokesley, Kirkleaton, Ormesby, Marton, Wilton, Chester-le-Street.
Final stage: Chester-le-Street, Ripon, Crayke, Durham.
Could these become new pilgrim routes for those who have often walked Saint Cuthbert’s Way?
The strands of the Lindisfarne Gospels
Scots Irish
The Scots Irish strand is best represented by the inclusive, primal circle and by interlacing curves that need never to be cut and chopped. The
Lindisfarne Gospels are full of curvilinear patterns that bring
the page to life. There are simple spirals and whorls where
two lines enter the spiral from opposite directions. Some of
these expand into different shapes such as a trumpet. The
system has extraordinary flexibility. A particularly good example
is the four panels of curves on the Saint Mark carpet page.
Celtic British
Michelle Brown writes that ‘the design context for much of
the Lindisfarne Gospels ornament lies firmly within
a British, and Celtic tradition which stretched back
to the Iron Age.
.
Rosemary Cramp points out that geometric aids in the Gospels,
such as the pectoral cross and the Lindisfarne sculptures,
form part of an ancient British and Celtic tradition.
Although Bede, the main historian of seventh-century
Northumbrian Christianity, tends to overlook the presence
of the Christian Britons who continued to live in the area,
Melrose, in whose monastery Cuthbert trained, is a British
name, and it is possible that some of those who trained
there, or indeed at Lindisfarne were ‘British boys’.
At the time of the Gospels, the Forth formed Northumbria’s northern
border. On the southern side of the Forth is Aberlady.
Archeologists believe that a small church existed there before
Aidan’s mission arrived, and that his mission team would
most likely have stopped there before journeying on to
Bamburgh. In 1863, a fragment of an early Christian cross
was found there. The carved designs are strikingly similar to illuminated artwork that characterises the Lindisfarne Gospels.
Pictish
Northumbria also briefly embraced Abernethy. Legend has it that Nectan, king of the Picts, founded a church on the site of the present Church of
Scotland in 460AD that was dedicated to Saint Brigid of
Ireland. It is recorded that the Picts’ King Gartnaidh built
the first stone. The recent discovery of vellum production at the monastic settlement in Portmahomack makes it clear that Christian Picts were producing manuscripts, probably highly colourful and ornately decorated. Michelle Brown identifies Pictishg elements in the Lindisfarne Gospeols.
Anglo-Saxon
According to Elizabeth Coatsworth, the design used for
Saint Cuthbert’s pectoral cross with its precise geometry
based upon grids and compass-drawn circles was also used
for the central motif of one of the Lindisfarne Gospels’ carpet
pages. She traces this tradition to items of Anglo-Saxon
metalwork such as the Ixworth and Wilton crosses.
Other strands
Roman, Byzantine, Coptic and Oriental strands are identified bby Michelle Brown. The carpet pages of the Gospels remind us of the oriental and
Islamic tradition. Islam impacted the Middle Eastern
countries at the very time that the emerging English Church
made contact with those countries. Early Islam drew from
ascetic forms of Christianity that originated in the Byzantine
Levant but whose influence spread both to the Celtic north
as well as to the Arabian south. Michelle Brown points out
that Northumbrian, Celtic and Byzantine monks all used to
pray on decorated prayer carpets, known as oratorii, just as
Muslim and certain Eastern Christian Churches have always
done, and still do. She speculates how these prayer mats may
have influenced the carpet pages of manuscripts such as the
Lindisfarne Gospels as well as early Islamic sacred texts.40
The relevance of The Lindisfarne Gospels to the Scottish Independence debate
History is about how we shape memory and draw on it to find identity.
The debate about possible independence of what is now embraces many elements:
Money (the economy); Power (politics); Geography (that leaves my town of Berwick in a tricky situation – independence would mean the shire town of Berwickshire would be in a foreign country); Religion (the 1638 Covenanters who rebelled against the claimed divine right of Stuart Kings to interfere in the affairs of Presbyterians in Scotland, who because they recognised only Jesus as King were horribly oppressed – though the laws that oppressed have long gone the clash of mind-sets festers still); History – much of which is wounded history. And this raises a question about the need to deal with healing of wounded history); Civic pride, identity and freedom to swim or sink on one’s own – these are all issues.
But the Gospel – and in particular The Lindisfarne Gospels – do they point to a birthright of unity in diversity, the sum being greater than its parts? William Dalrymple calls the Gospels the first great work of multi-cultural Britain.
Prof Euan Clayton speculates that the Gospels may be a manifesto of a British church
Three highlighted passages..
Beatitudes – how different for Prots and Catholics alikes..
Desert - desert places …
Lost son – hospitality ‘’ can the spirit of hospitality – of making room for the other – be part of out identities?
The four Evangelists and their Symbols
– archetypes for a fully human spirituality
Based on the Lindisfarne Gospels portraits
An illustrated meditation followed based on pages 60 – 69 of the speaker’s book The Lindisfarne Gospels (Kevin Mayhew Ltd)
A tool used by pioneers of authentic spirituality is the four archetypes, drawn from the work of C. G. Jung. Jung, Carl G., Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London, 1996).Jung has observed that 'Our symbols explain the world around us, our relationships with each other and our relationship to the universe. These symbols, these essences of pure being, are the primordial qualities of the truly real.'[1]
Four archetypes that are increasingly used as a basis for meditation by Christian mentors are the Warrior, Magus (Shaper), Lover and King. Spirituality coaches such as Fr Richard Rohr relate these archetypes to aspects of Christ. Each of the four Gospel writers portrays a distinctive aspect of Christ, In art, each of these four Evangelists is represented by a symbol. The symbols are drawn from two visions: that of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel (1: 1-14) and that of the New Testament Book of Revelation (4:7). The lion, the man, the eagle and the calf. They found their way into illustrations of the Gospels from early centuries, including the Lindisfarne Gospels.
I have found that the method known as Lectio Divina, widely used for reflecting on the text of the Gospels, may also be used to reflect on the symbols, in a similar way to people who pray with ikons.
Before the text of each Gospel in the Lindisfarne Gospels is a page which introduces us, in visual form, to its author. The Gospels are the first such book in Britain and Ireland to portray the human author. I have related each of the four portraits to one of the four archetypes. Christ lived each of the archetypes to the full. One archetype was perhaps more dominant than others in each of the four Evangelists. Reflection on each of them therefore offers us a tool whereby we may live each of the archetypes more fully ourselves..
The Warrior (Mark)
The warrior is always alert, focused and clear thinking. He accepts that he may soon die, so he lives each moment to the full. The warrior is fit for purpose: he uses all his energy and skill to maximum effect. This involves self-control and the ability to take initiative at the right moment. A warrior completes the task he is given. Every part of his being, all his energy, is expended.
The warrior in Jesus is seen in his all-out self-giving from the beginning of his life to his last breath – and beyond it. The purpose of his birth, trials, teachings, signs, death, resurrection, ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit is that three evils may be overcome by good: sin, death and the devil. This seamless victory procession is known in Latin as Christus Victor. 'He has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power' (1 Corinthians 15:24).