by Philip Hoare
There might not be much room in the modern world for monks and their miracles, but who could not love the story of St Cuthbert? His name alone sounds comforting, northern and true; he was also one of the most powerful men of his time. Born around 634, he grew up as an adopted child, and at one point seems to have served as a soldier. He entered holy orders in 651, partly as a result of the turbulent aftermath of Oswald’s defeat and the death of the bishop, Áedán, whose soul Cuthbert had seen in a vision as it was carried up to heaven.
This fair-haired, athletic man, ‘a conspicuous left-hander’, grew to be as great a lover of birds and beasts as he was a devoted missionary to the north of England and Scotland. Stories of remarkable miracles would grow up in his wake, as related by his hagiographer, the Venerable Bede. Once, when stranded by a storm on a Pictish beach for three days, Cuthbert and his hungry brothers found three pieces of dolphin flesh laid out and ready to cook. (Conveniently, cetaceans could be eaten on fast days: the porpoise itself got its name from the French, porc-poisson, pork fish, and was ordained a ‘royal fish’ by the Normans to reserve it for the religious and the nobility.) On another occasion, while staying at the aptly named abbey of Coldingham on the Scottish coast, Cuthbert went out into the night to pray, wading naked into the water. Such chilly immersions were often undertaken by other northern monks to sustain their long vigils. One would often break the ice on the river to enter it. ‘Is it not cold, brother Drycthelm?’ his brethren called out, to which the phlegmatic monk replied, ‘I have known it colder.’ St David, too, was said to stand in the freezing sea to test his faith.
After spending the dark hours up to his neck in the water, towards dawn Cuthbert returned to the shore, to be followed by two otters which began to play around his feet, warming his toes with their breath and drying them with their fur. Having done so, they received the saint’s blessing, then scampered back into the sea. (I wonder if the monks of Netley sought the spiritually-stiffening effects of Southampton Water? Perhaps if I were more saintly I might persuade a pair of marine mammals to perform a similar favour.) A twelfth-century illumination depicts the skinny-dipping Cuthbert cloaked by the waves, all the while spied upon by a curious fellow monk. Then, in a kind of time-lapse animation, the saint is seen seated on a rock, receiving his pedicure from the ghostly otters.
Northumbrian monasteries such as Coldingham, Whitby and Lindisfarne were built by the sea; it was their highway, their fastness, and their undoing, laying them open to Viking raids. Cuthbert sought somewhere less accessible, and found his desert island in an archipelago of thirty remote rocks, ‘sieged on this side and that by the deep and infinite sea’. Nowadays the Farnes are famed for their grey seals, puffins, and nesting terns that threaten to peck interlopers’ heads, but Inner Farne had been long haunted by dark-faced demons, clad in cowls and riding goats, ‘their countenances most horrible’. The saint soon drove them off, much as his predecessor St Patrick ordered the serpents out of Ireland.
‘Farne’ means traveller or pilgrim, and in his quest for solitude, Cuthbert was not satisfied by the surrounding sea or the island’s basalt buttresses. He built a circular enclosure of boulders and turf whose floor he lowered ‘by cutting away the living rock’, leaving him with a view of only the sky, so as not to be distracted in his contemplations. Out in the unyielding grey of the North Sea, he became an anchorite on his island, if not anchored to it, like the chained saints of the desert, or the chained books in a library, both free and imprisoned in his cell.
Within Cuthbert’s corral stood two structures: one an oratory, the other his house, roofed with rough beams and thatch. His settlement did not lack convenience: a third hut housed his toilet, handily flushed by the tides twice a day. And down in the island’s harbour he built a hospitium where visiting brethren could lodge. At first Cuthbert, who would stay on Inner Farne for nine years, came out to greet his callers and would wash their feet, not unlike his otters; but latterly, he’d merely wave a blessing from his window.
In his lovely loneliness, Cuthbert sought only the company of non-human neighbours who, in return, performed services for him. Once, reading a psalter by the sea, the saint dropped his book into the water – I imagine its glittering illuminated and unchained pages fluttering as they tumbled into the murky depths, an expensive loss in an age when books were more precious than almost anything. At that moment, a seal dived down and returned with the book in its mouth. It too received a blessing for its efforts, although I suspect a little fresh fish would have been as welcome.
And in his self-sufficiency, Cuthbert discovered that sometimes the local wildlife had to be taught a lesson. When a flock of birds began to raid his newly planted field of barley, he reproved them, ‘And why are you touching a crop you did not sow?’ They were followed by a persistent pair of ravens, who stole from his roof to line their nest. The saint asked, patiently, that they should return what they had taken, only to be scoffed at by the birds. That roused him to anger. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘be off with you as quick as ye may, and never more presume to abide in the place which ye have spoiled.’ They flew away, with a dismal look, ashamed of what they’d done.
Three days later, as Cuthbert was digging in his field, one of the pair returned, ‘with his wings lamentably trailing and his head bowed to his feet, and his voice low and humble’, as Bede relates. The bird begged forgiveness, and Cuthbert gave the pair permission to return. When they did, they brought with them ‘a good sized hunk of hog’s lard such as one greases axles with’, which Cuthbert gave to his visiting brothers to waterproof their shoes. ‘Let no one think it absurd to learn virtues from birds,’ he declared, ‘for as Solomon says, “Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways, and learn wisdom.” ’ The reformed ravens remained for many years on the island, rebuilding their nest each year without recourse to Cuthbert’s roofing materials, nor ‘wrought annoyance upon any’.
Ravens were not the only feathered inhabitants of the Farnes that Cuthbert took into his care. Eiders, with their pistachio-green necks and wedge-shaped bills, their oddly reassuring call – a-hoo, a-hoo – and their solemn, sturdy presence, became particular favourites because of their seeming tameness: Cuthbert’s successor on Inner Farne, Bartholomew, would allow the birds to lay their eggs beside the chapel’s altar, and even under his bed. In fact, eider females appear approachable only because they remain at the nest to protect their brood no matter how close a predator may get; it is one reason why raiders were able to steal their soft down. But Cuthbert’s ascetic life had no need for feather quilts; instead, he instituted a law to protect the birds, the first such legislation in England.
At least, that’s the story. It is not mentioned in either of the two earliest hagiographies of Cuthbert, although a fourteenth-century manuscript does refer to twelve pence paid to a Newcastle artist for painting volucer S. Cuthberti (medieval Latin for ‘Cuthbert’s bird’) on Durham cathedral’s reredos, perhaps prompted by Reginald’s chronicle of the saint, in which he mentions ‘certain creatures … named after the blessed Cuthbert himself’. Yet the legend suited what we knew, or wanted to know, of the man. It has persisted for a thousand years, earning the eider its endearment, Cuddy’s duck, in honour of this northern St Francis.
After doing his duty as bishop of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert returned to Inner Farne, where he died in 687. Reluctant to leave the island in life, in death his remains, like Oswald’s, were rendered refugee by invading Vikings, wandering from place to place in the care of his fellow monks. When Cuthbert’s body finally came to rest at Durham in 1104, it was found to be miraculously intact, with his gold and garnet pectorial cross concealed in the folds of his cloak. It was even said that the saint’s blood still ran fresh in his veins, and that he was gently breathing. His bird-entwined legend would remain potent, to be commemorated by another Newcastle artist, the Pre-Raphaelite William Bell Scott, whose mural at Wallington Hall depicted Cuthbert with terns hovering over his tonsured head and a loyal
eider at his feet.
By that point, birds had assumed the shape of new familiars, from Coleridge’s ominous albatross to Poe’s gothic corvid, created by an author who took on the persona of The Raven, forever clad in black from frock coat to silk cravat and, according to Tennyson, ‘the most original genius that America has produced’. Poe’s ‘ghastly, grim and ancient raven’, always croaking ‘Nevermore,’ was invested with the same sense of foreboding as Melville’s White Whale. Both were inspired by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and both acted as fated antidotes to muscular Christianity or evolutionary rationality.
In an industrial era, the raven had come to embody a new, unnerving myth. In 1813 Caspar David Friedrich painted The Hunter in the Forest, a diminutive figure dwarfed by massive firs while a raven sits on a stump as an augury of defeat; Friedrich’s Raven Tree, a tangle of branches and black wings against a lurid sky, conjured up a similarly gloomy scene. And in one of my favourite, if obscure, paintings, an 1868 watercolour by another Pre-Raphaelite and naturalist, Robert Bateman, the body of a dead knight lies in a shadowy forest glade in whose dark branches perch three ravens, ‘as blacke as they might be’, one saying to the others, ‘Where shall we our breakefast take?’ The story comes from an old English ballad, but the strangely submerged scenario could be set in some undefined future as much as in a romantic past.
Modern art was in no mood for cheery birds. Corvids appear as scurrying shapes in Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, painted in the last weeks of his life in 1890, before madness and death overcame him, leaving his friend Gauguin to retreat to Tahiti, where in 1897 he painted his own dream vision of a nubile native girl overlooked by Poe’s raven. Meanwhile, in Henri Rousseau’s War of 1894, all the more macabre for its naïveté, a childlike figure rides a black horse over a field of dead bodies, among them one that resembles the artist himself. In the clutter of flesh, the crows peck and forage as if their bare and bloody beaks were descrying in entrails the Armageddon to come. Perhaps it was no coincidence that by 1918 there was only one raven left at the Tower of London, and its flock had to be replenished from the Dartmoor village of Sourton, over whose abandoned quarry the birds still swoop and soar, huge and black against the blue sky.
A thousand years after Cuthbert retreated to Inner Farne, Thomas Merton, monk and poet, sought to step outside the world to see it better, to find God within himself and within nature. Like Cuthbert, he had led a worldly life until then; a dissolute one, even, in the teeming streets and seedy dives of downtown Manhattan.
Born in France in 1915, son of a New Zealand painter and an American Quaker, Merton had an itinerant upbringing. His mother died when he was young, leaving his artist father to take him travelling: to the Cape Cod towns of Provincetown and Truro – ‘a name as lonely as the edge of the sea’ – where he first saw the ocean from windswept dunes; and to Rome and the south of France, where he felt his soul come alive.
After his father’s early death from a brain tumour, Merton studied at Cambridge, where he drank and was said to have fathered a child. He left England in 1934, regarding it as a decadent place ‘full of forebodings’, ‘a vast and complicated charade’ whose people were ‘morally dead’. His ship ‘sailed quietly out of Southampton Water by night’, leaving behind ‘the silence before a storm … all shut up and muffled with layers of fog and darkness … waiting for the first growl of thunder as the Nazis began to warm up the motors of a hundred thousand planes’.
In New York, Merton enrolled at Columbia University, became a Communist under the assumed name of Frank Swift, and in between visiting nightclubs and playing ‘hot’ jazz records, studied William Blake (to whom he swore allegiance, perhaps on account of the fact that the poet saw angels in the trees of south London) and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Among his friends was the avant-garde artist Ad Reinhardt, who sought to create entirely black canvases – the ultimate artistic gesture of the age.
Veering from dissolution to devotion, Merton was twenty-three years old when he became a Catholic in 1938 – at the same time that my mother, then a teenager, was being received into the Church in Southampton. One morning, after staying up all night with friends drinking in a club, he suddenly realised, ‘I am going to be a priest.’ With war raging in Europe, Merton gave up his one-room flat in Greenwich Village for a cell in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani deep in rural Kentucky, where he had watched a novice inducted into the order. ‘The waters had closed over his head, and he was submerged in the community,’ Merton wrote. ‘He was lost. The world would hear of him no more. He had drowned to our society.’ Having been rejected by the military draft, Merton burned all the manuscripts of his novels, gave away his possessions and money, and exchanged his 1940s suit for fifteenth-century underwear. He left modern America for a medieval enclave; the one-time Communist was given a new communal name, Frater Louis.
Merton’s retreat was about being lost and finding a new home, a rebirth. Clad in brown cowl and white robe, rather like a bird, he declared, ‘I desire to be lost to all created things, to die to them and to the knowledge of them.’ The Trappists obeyed the rule of St Benedict, observing silence, speaking only when necessary. At first Merton was even forbidden from writing poetry, although by 1948 he had published his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which brought him to the world’s attention, appearing in England under the title Elected Silence, edited by Evelyn Waugh and championed by Graham Greene.
Enclosed in his new order, Merton withdrew from the world and its problems so as to address them in the silence of his calling. Yet he could not resist speaking out. A contemporary of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Watts riots, he was the first Catholic cleric to protest publicly against the Vietnam War. He saw it as his duty to be, and in being, to reflect, in the manner of an artist. ‘The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness,’ he wrote. ‘In a certain sense he is supposed to be “useless” because his mission is not to do this or that job but to be a man of God. His business is life itself.’
Out of the contemporary cacophony – literally, shit sound – Merton listened to the voices around him. Hugin and Munin had gathered the news for Odin; this modern monk was God’s radio receiver for what was going on in the world, and what was going wrong with it. When the marine biologist Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring in 1962, exposing the terrible effect that pesticides were having on the natural environment, Merton wrote in support. He bore the same witness in his poetry and his photographs – ‘The monk is a bird who flies very fast without knowing where he is going’ – and increasingly looked east to Buddhism. In his book Zen and the Birds of Appetite, published in 1968, he drew comparisons between the Zen masters and the Desert Fathers, with their own relationships with animals. And reading Moby-Dick, he declared it had ‘a great deal to do with the monastic life and perhaps a great deal more than the professedly spiritual books in the monastic library’.
The only known photograph of God
To Thomas, the raven – emblem of St Benedict – was the symbol of both salvation and mortality. Its black wings, as black as Reinhardt’s canvases, might as well have been an augury of the nuclear explosions now taking place in another desert.
May my bones burn and ravens eat my flesh
If I forget thee, contemplation.
Merton’s own end was abrupt, fiery, and shocking. He died while visiting Thailand in 1968, accidentally electro-cuted by a faulty electric fan. He was fifty-three, the same age as Cuthbert when he died. Witnesses described his corpse in exact detail – the fearsome burns to his torso, contrasting with the placid expression on his face – as if he might be incorrupt too. His body was flown back to the United States on a plane carrying GIs killed in Vietnam. It seems a violent conclusion for a man of peace, for all that he’d appeared to predict his fate in the last line of his autobiography: ‘That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.’ There were even rumours that dark forces had conspired to do away with this trou
blesome priest.
By the mid-twentieth century the symbol of the raven had been perverted. In Norman Bates’s motel, the shape of a stuffed raven looms over the shoulder of Miss Crane, an omen of her imminent murder at the hands of a psycho dressed as his own dead mother. But people did not need Hitchcock to scare them witless with scenes of psychotic corvids and gulls turning on the inhabitants of a seaside town. For generations they had suspected birds, and declined to have pictures of them in their houses. They were spooky, unpredictable creatures out of the shadowy past; lurking, dark-feathered contradictions; not symbols of beauty, but faintly repulsive and reptilian creatures, ready to turn back time and become the terrible lizards they once were.
Here, on the clear, pure heights of the island, is a landscape left to the birds. Up close and in reality, its ravens are huge, made bigger by their fluffed-up ruffs and feathered legs. I stalk one bird as it stabs at the earth, making myself look as ravenly as possible in my black anorak. If ravens are so clever, says a friend who lives on the island, how come they occupy such a limited niche, when you’d expect them to reign supreme? Having been forced from its inland home to more remote coasts, this alpha corvid is slowly recolonising the southern country it once knew well; and as with human beings, intelligence is not always a sign of success.