61 mins
The Saints of Scotland
Saint Andrew. iStock
THIS month, you may give or receive a Valentine’s card without giving much thought to the saint whose name the day bears.
In truth, he’s very hard to pin down, and there are several possible figures who might have gone on to become ‘St Valentine’. There is so little firm evidence to go on that truths, half truths and fantasy might well have become intertwined like the strands of a Celtic love knot.
His lack of background caused Valentine to be removed from the Roman Catholic Church’s General Roman Calendar that lists the saints and feast days associated with them even though the church still recognises him as a saint.
One story associated with Valentine is that he was a Roman priest who was imprisoned for marrying Christian couples and helping them, and was martyred during the reign of Claudius.
Another is that he would secretly marry couples so the husband didn’t have to go to war; yet another is that while he was imprisoned for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman Gods, he healed the blind daughter of his jailer – thus converting the household to Christianity.
There does seem to be a recurring theme of love running through the stories of St Valentine though, and perhaps this is where his ties with the modern day festival of all things romantic have their roots.
The other thing that seems to be generally accepted about St Valentine, is that he was martyred by being beaten to death and then beheaded – some say because he tried to convert the Emperor Claudius II – and after refusing to renounce his faith.
He was executed outside the Flaminian Gate on February 14, 269 AD though his death has also been claimed as late as 280 AD.
That emphasis on love and romance is cited as one reason the day devoted to St Valentine was fixed in mid-February, to coincide with the pagan festivals of Lupercalia and the even earlier Februa, both festivals devoted to purification, releasing health and fertility.
Not all saints though, are quite as hard to pin down as Valentine is. Some saints have a well-established back story and pedigree. They come from all walks of life and entered many professions before their deaths.
But they share a willingness to lay down their lives – usually in the face of the prospect of a terrible, ugly, painful death – rather than forsake their faith in God. Our relationship with saints and the idea of sainthood, as a Presbyterian, protestant church, can be problematic
“The Church of Scotland has a difficult relationship with saints”, says the Rev Dr Richard Frazer, minister at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh and Convenor of the Church and Society Council. “But we haven’t entirely spurned the practice of remembering our places by reference to ancient saints. Some Reformed figures get a look in, even if we’d be horrified at the idea of St John Knox!
“In the early church, all who were baptised were considered to be saints. However, as Christians were repeatedly persecuted in the first centuries, those who died in
‘imitation’ of Christ, were given an elevated status. The first of these was St Stephen, whose stoning is recounted in Acts 6 – 7.
“Following the adoption of Christianity as the ‘official’ religion of the Roman Empire, such martyrdom became less frequent and, instead, certain individuals were marked out for their piety and devotion. St Anthony of Egypt, who chose the ascetic life of a desert hermit, is perhaps one of the first of these to be remembered.
“When I was minister at Collace Parish in Perthshire in the early 1990s, we discovered we had a patron saint who had been all but forgotten, St Ucan. The Rev David Steel wrote to us about his research into the medieval church in Scotland. He was interested in the work of David de Bernham, Bishop of St Andrews, who had toured his diocese in the early 13th century, rededicating many churches that had their origins in Celtic times. In the margin of de Bernham’s ordinal which is housed in a Paris library, there was a date, “4th June 1242, St Ucan’s Church, Collace”.
On researching this, we discovered on an ancient map a reference to St Ucan’s well and a field named after him.
“These local saints and their feast days provided a focus for local identity and a rhythm to the year that marked the changing seasons and gave an excuse for celebration in the midst of a hard agricultural life. The Reformers might have had us believe it was all corruption and superstition to venerate local saints, but the Reformers were never shy of exulting their own heroes, such as Calvin, Luther and Knox too. The cerebral, urban and frequently drab ritual practices of the Reformed church often failed to speak to rural communities whose lives were so embedded in the changing patterns of the seasons, not just in propositions. “
Saint Valentine. Shutterstock
“Some saints have a well-established back story and pedigree… they share a willingness to lay down their lives – usually in the face of the prospect of a terrible, ugly, painful death – rather than forsake their faith in God.”
Saint Andrew. iStock
“Scotland has its own wealth of saints – Columba, Margaret, Serf, Mungo, Kessog, Monan, Cuthbert and Fillan, to name but a very few. Perhaps the principal saint people think of when they think of Scotland is St Andrew.”
“The great things in the life of the church are those that are local, rooted and owned by the people rather than things dictated from a central authority. The local makes things real and valued. Almost every parish in Scotland probably has a local saint and they can give us a sense of belonging to a witness to Christ who established a church in our community and who links us to the universal Christ.
“R S Thomas, the great Welsh poet has a line: ‘the parish has a saint’s name that time cannot unfrock’. In this time of great upheaval for the church, perhaps we need to get back to grassroots and remember our local saints.”
Scotland has its own wealth of saints – Columba, Margaret, Serf, Mungo, Kessog, Monan, Cuthbert and Fillan, to name but a very few. Perhaps the principal saint people think of when they think of Scotland is St Andrew.
Unlike St Valentine, the life of St Andrew is fairly well documented. Also known as Andrew the Apostle he was the brother of St Peter and was a fisherman called by Jesus to be a disciple.
He is said to have been present during some of the most important occasions in the Bible, such as the feeding of the 5000 with the loaves and fishes and of course, the Last Supper.
After Jesus’ resurrection, Andrew travelled widely, preaching in Scythia, (the ancient Greek name for the lands in the north-east of Europe and part of the coast of the Black Sea) round the Black Sea and as far as Kiev.
For that reason he became the patron Saint of Ukraine, Romania and Russia. Tradition has it he founded Byzantium (later Constantinople), and preached in Thrace (encompassing parts of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey) before his martyrdom by crucifixion on the famous X shaped cross, or saltire, in Achaea, Greece. Legend has it he deemed himself unworthy to be crucified on the same cross as Jesus, and so was killed on the saltire – afterwards known as St Andrew’s Cross.
“There was a long posthumous battle between St Columba and St Andrew for the claim to be Scotland’s saint” says the Rev Dr Ian Bradley, Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at St Andrews University. “St Columba was essentially the patron saint of the Gaels with his Iona, Dalriada and Argyll connections, and he was eventually effectively trumped by the Picts of the East and the ecclesiastical establishment with an apostolic saint.
“In the Middle Ages there was a widespread cult of Andrew in the Eastern and Western Church churches”, Dr Bradley points out. “It was certainly present in Anglo-Saxon England and particularly in Northumberland, and it was probably from there in the eighth or ninth century that the cult of St Andrew gained a foothold in Scotland, and specifically in north east Fife.
It may be around then, or quite possibly later – since the earliest documented account of it is from the eleventh century – that the story of St Regulus bringing some of Andrew’s relics to the east coast of Scotland arose. As late as the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the relics of St Columba were still being paraded in front of the Scottish army. He was in many ways the people’s saint, the popular saint and I confess in many ways I would like to see him as Scotland’s patron saint, although I also have considerable sympathy for the candidature of Margaret, the English princess who grew up in Hungary and came to Scotland as an exile and became wife of Malcom III. She was a figure of considerable spiritual depth and power and her profile will, I hope, be raised with the opening of the Fife Pilgrim Way, in which I am much involved. As well as raising the profile of Dunfermline, the site of her shrine, this new pilgrim route will also highlight the importance of two other early Scottish saints associated with Culross, Serf and Mungo, St Kenneth who is commemorated at Kennoway, Drostan at Markinch and finally Andrew at St Andrews”.
St Margaret of Scotland established the ferry across the Forth for pilgrims travelling to St Andrews. Her piety is credited with having a civilising influence on Malcolm III and she was considered a shining example of a ‘just ruler’, influencing her husband and children – three of whom would go on to become Kings, to be just and holy rulers.
Her husband and oldest son Edward were killed in 1093 at the Battle of Alnwick, and when she was given the news her life of austerity rebounded on her. Already weak, Margaret died three days later. She was buried in Dunfermline Abbey and canonized in 1250.
Many of the early Scottish Saints were originally priests or monks who came from Ireland bringing the gospel with them. St Donan, Adrian, Finan, Kessog, Modan and others fall into this category. Some were high born and some have an unclear ancestry. Many came to sticky ends and some died of old age.
Some were hermits and some were travellers. There’s no doubt that the saints of Scotland were a diverse and interesting group of people whose influence extended the length and breadth of the country, from Columba with his strong connections to the west to Drostan, disciple of Columba who went to Buchan, Fillan, a Scottish Benadictine monk and his strong connections with Pittenweem in Fife, Modan in Dryburgh, Falkirk and Stirling, Mungo and his tight association with Glasgow, William of Perth and Moluag of Argyll.
The saints of Scotland were not insignificant characters. Saints like St Andrew had a worldwide appeal and drew people from across the world to pilgrimage to where his relics were supposed to be enshrined.
“The saints of Scotland were not insignificant characters. Saints like St Andrewhad a worldwide appeal and drew people from across the world to pilgrimage to wherehis relics were supposed to be enshrined.”
“St Andrews was the foremost place of pilgrimage in medieval Scotland and one of the main pilgrim destinations in Europe, at its height perhaps being eclipsed only by Rome, Santiago and Canterbury in terms of the numbers it attracted”, says Dr Bradley.
“Its cathedral was the largest in Scotland and one of the largest in Europe, being twelve metres longer than the cathedral of Santiago di Compostela and only ten metres shorter than York and Durham.”
The country is rich in churches, cathedrals associated with its better known Saints – but it’s also very rich in the stories and traditions with connections to the lesser known saints who have local wells, caves and hermitages spread out across the country.
Dr Bradley says: “There have always been Church of Scotland dedications of saints, and though we, as a church, don’t venerate their relics or pray for intercession by them or through them, it is good to remember and honour our ancestors, and especially those who played a significant role in preaching the Gospel and who led lives of Christian devotion and charity. In the case of the early saints, it is what they did to bring Christianity to Scotland. As the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, we are surrounded by the cloud of witnesses, those who have gone before us in the faith.”
This article appears in the February 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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