Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac

Britton Elliott Brooks is assistant professor of English at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He was raised on the island of Oahu, Hawaii; traveled the hills of Wales; and attained his PhD in medieval English literature at the University of Oxford. He brings to this study of two early medieval English saints, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Guthlac of Crowland, an appreciation of landscape, the environment, and animals. As he states in the introduction to Restoring Creation, his present study “seeks to bring medieval literature into dialogue” with contemporary ecological concerns, expressing “how medieval peoples actively reflected upon their own engagement with the non-human world, structured in great part by their theology and philosophy, and articulated through the artistry of their literature” (p. 1). The two saints’ lives were chosen “because of their direct and transformative interaction with Creation” and “focuses on the saints’ living relationship with Creation” (p. 15).Saint Cuthbert (634–687), one of England's most popular saints in the Celtic tradition, was a monk, bishop, and hermit associated with the monasteries of Melrose, Lindisfarne, and Farne Island in northern England where he was a much-sought-out spiritual guide of ordinary Christians. His tomb, along with that of the storyteller Bede, is in Durham Cathedral, an extremely popular pilgrimage site. Saint Guthlac (673–714) of Crowland, less popular and well known, was a Christian hermit and saint from Lincolnshire, especially venerated in the fens of eastern England. Like Cuthbert, he too was sought after by many for spiritual guidance. Both expressed concerns for animals and the environment in which they were found.Brooks's book Restoring Creation explores their lives as expressed in the hagiographies about them and their relationship to the environment and the animals that were a significant part of their daily lives. (A hagiography is a biography of a saint meant to inspire through the stories found there. While not always “historical” in the sense that we understand history today, most are rooted in historical aspects that can reveal much about saints and their times.) Brooks focuses upon an anonymous early hagiography of Cuthbert and then two others written by the Venerable Bede (672/673–735), considered one of the greatest teachers and writers of the Middle Ages, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which gained him the title “the father of English history.” The writings on Guthlac examined in Brooks's book are those of Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, an Old English Prose Life of Guthlac, and a work called Guthlac A.There are many stories of Saint Cuthbert found in Bede's writings that reflect his love of animals and their love for him. Perhaps the most well-known one discussed in Brooks's book (e.g., pp. 27–28) is that of his frequent praying in the ocean at night (a form of devotion as well as demonstrating his asceticism), wading up to his neck in deep water. At daybreak, when he would emerge shivering from the cold and kneel on the sand and pray, two sea otters would jump out of the sea and curl themselves around his ankles. They warmed his feet with their breath and even tried to dry them with their fur. When they had finished, they received Cuthbert's blessing and would then slip back to their watery home. Cuthbert would return to the monastery after their demonstration of their love for him and was back in the choir with the rest of the monks at the proper time, they unaware of his praying in the ocean at night. Brooks examines other stories of Cuthbert with animals for their meaning and significance, along with those found in the works about Guthlac, and quotes Sally Shockro on how they both express that animals are “colleagues in God's creation that are able to participate in productive relationships with saints,” and the saints with them (p. 22). Brooks discusses Bede's “lifelong fascination with Saint Cuthbert,” providing evidence of refashioning Cuthbert as a saint with “wide appeal,” and how his holiness and relationship to all of creation was an example of how others might, like him, restore creation to the original vision of it found in the beginning, as expressed in the Book of Genesis (pp. 124–125).Felix's hagiography of Saint Guthlac shows how Felix is “more interested in the active role of Creation itself in the spiritual development of the saint” (p. 175). Here he describes the fens (the wetland) around Crowland as the place of marshes, bogs, and “black waters overhung with fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands and traversed by the windings of tortuous streams” (p. 175). The fens are the landscape of demons and inimical spirits where Guthlac faces the temptations of Satan and despair. Here, for the saint, animals are both demonic and helpful to his spirituality. But it is his great patience and charity that is beneficial not only to humans but even to birds and free-living animals. All benefit, and, again, creation can experience healing and union as it was meant to be if humans follow the example of Guthlac in their actions toward all of creation, including the animals. As a result, “creation has been restored in elemental and animate form through Guthlac's sanctity, and in the apogee of his saintly career the delineated physical landscape is transformed as well, the fens and Crowland becoming part of the prelapsarian space [characteristic of the innocent and unspoiled time before the Fall in the Garden of Eden] (p. 228). The other two hagiographies on Guthlac, Old English Prose Life and Guthlac A, contain further stories of the saint's struggles for holiness, with the latter focused on his time as a hermit when two ravens caused him so much suffering. “Guthlac's willingness to suffer, to bear the ravens’ destructive deeds, sets an example of saintly endurance for humanity” (p. 257).Like Cuthbert, Guthlac's perseverance and holiness transform all of creation, setting examples of what might happen if more people today imitated the lives of the saints in their own lives, creating in effect a new, yet ancient, harmony that humanity, animals, and all of creation deeply long for.