Missions, Lindisfarne & Christian England

The first missions from Iona converted the Gaelic clans of Scotland from their Druidic practices to faith in God and his Son Jesus Christ. When the King was crowned and sanctified on Iona in 564, Scotland became the first and oldest Christian nation beyond Rome – and until the Acts of Union in 1707, the longest lived.

In 634 Aiden was called to mission from Iona by Oswald, King of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria.  Oswald had been exiled to Iona as a Princely youth, where he was baptized a Christian and studied along with Aiden.  Christianity had entered Gaeldom along with the Roman province of Britain during the 1st Century, but the Faith died in Britain with the retreat of Rome, what Gildas called “the groans of the Britains,” followed by the advance of the pagan Anglo-Saxons.  Never subject to Rome, pure Apostolic Christianity flourished among the Gaels and Oswald wanted the One True Faith for his people, inviting Aiden from Iona to establish a daughter Abbey on the island of Lindisfarne off the eastern shore. 

Lindesfarne became the first and foremost Christian center in Angle Land – what would become England.  Aiden converted pagans, built Abbeys, established schools and trained initiates establishing a strong, deep and long-lived Gaelic Christian tradition within Anglo-Saxon culture, especially focused on worship, schools and missionary journeys.  Aiden and his students, both men and women, lived lives of quiet piety eschewing worldly customs and trappings and established the numerous influential Abbeys and schools that characterize Christian England.  The name of Cuthbert recalls Melrose, Lindisfarne and Durham.  The Venerable Bede was raised and educated at the Aidenic Abbey of Monkwearmouth Jarrow, becoming the “Father of English History.”  Bede’s pupil Alcuin built at York the greatest library in Western Christendom from where the Frankish King Charlemagne recruited him to establish the Palace School at Aachen, Germany.  It was Columba and Aiden from Iona that developed the culture that unified England and delivered a Christian Britain onto the world stage by their faithful examples, Abbeys, students and missions.

Scotus

photo credit:  The Holy Island