18 february: st. colman

st. colman is remembered nowadays mostly, alas, as the "loser" at the council of whitby. as esther de waal reminds us in an essay she wrote for i have called you friends, in honor of frank t. friswold, "[whitby] was no more than a local council, common enough at the time, called by a politically motivated king for immediate practical reasons."* that is true so far as it goes. true enough, whitby was a local council, called mostly to allow domestic tranquility for oswy and his wife eanflaed. i myself have argued for an easter date corresponding to the actual equinox rather than to a mis-predicted one, and i follow neither of the customs of tonsure considered at whitby. what makes whitby so important, however, is not what was decided, but how it was decided.

to quote miss de waal: "when the saxon wilfred finished speaking, the king asked 'with a smile, that famous question: "tell me which is greater in the kingdom of heaven, columba or the apostle peter?"'"**

this morning's gospel reading for matins was peter's confession, according to mark (8:29=9:2). it is the tradition from the second century that mark's gospel is based on the recollections of peter, and in mark's account of peter's confession there is no basis for petrine primacy, no rock of the church, no keys. perhaps this is because peter well knew jesus' answers to the questions about greatness in the kingdom.

oswy asked the wrong question. wilfred gave the wrong answer. there is no "greater" in the kingdom of heaven, at least not knowable to us mortals. both peter and columba learned humility in their lives, and so both may be considered "great" in the kingdom. but neither would, i suspect, claim to be greater than the other, and certaitly any greatness they achieved was not inherited by future abbots of iona nor by bishops of rome.

unfortunately, rather than being a mark of unity, as miss de waal suggests, whitby came to be used as a precedent for the papal split of the church, resulting in lack of communion between the eastern and western church, and presenting a problem in the english church which has been only partially and painfully solved in the post-tudor english church.

*"a fresh look at the synod of whitby: a mark of unity and reconciliation," in i have called you friends (cambridge, massachussets: cowley publications), p. 31.

**bid, p. 39. de waal quotes bede, iii, 25.