Bede's account of the Life of St Cuthbert has intriguing references to sleep: is it a blessing or a curse?
There are different ways of
responding to the gift of grace. One way is to welcome it and succumb to it
(always alert to the distortions of that: sleep becoming sloth; eating becoming
gluttony and so on). If sleep is a gift given by God, then it should be
enjoyed. Another way to respond is to cherish the gift in such a way that
prompts a disciplined response. This is the sort of response that fasting is
about. It acknowledges scarcity in the face of abundance, as well as solidarity
with the hungry, for whom scarcity is a reality. This way of receiving grace is
also grace-ful, but is also open to being characterised as grace denying.
This latter approach is
something that the Life of Cuthbert
by St Bede opens up. The question of the disciplining of the body in the
context of that verse becomes harder to bring together in some of the ascetic
practices associated with sleep. However, what this excursus into Anglo-Saxon
piety will reveal is how the gift of sleep can be understood through
deprivation. It will further prepare the ground for a consideration of
vigilance.
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| The incorrupt body of Cuthbert from Bede's Life of Cuthbert, 12th century. |
The first miracle concerns a
servant, Baldhelm, who was ailing to such an extent that, as Bede records, King
Ecgfrith’s bodyguards reported that, ‘his extremities look dead already and he
is only just breathing’.[2]
Cuthbert blessed some water and gave the sick man to drink. Bede continues:
The third time it was poured down his throat he
fell into a deep sleep – a complete contrast to his previous condition. This
happened in the evening. He passed a quiet night and the following morning the
master found him restored to full health. Baldhelm is still alive and now a
priest of the church at Lindisfarne.
Bede says of this incident,
‘it is sweeter than honey to [Baldhelm] to recount Cuthbert’s miracles to any
who care to know them; he told me this one himself’. On one level the account
is simply of rehydration and rest. Nevertheless in terms of what Cuthbert told
Bede, and what Bede recorded, sleep plays a not incidental part, and Bede chose
to render the sleep a ‘deep sleep’. The phrase ‘deep sleep’ echoes the ‘deep
sleep’ induced, or bestowed by God upon Adam. Baldhelm’s sleep was a
restorative sleep given by God. As well as demonstrating Cuthbert’s holiness
and wisdom Bede is also pointing to the divine agency of the healing through
the gift of sleep.
In another instance Bede
recounts how Cuthbert and some companions were stranded, ‘languishing’, on an
island following a violent storm, ‘Cuthbert, however, did not waste this
leisure time in idleness, nor did he merely sleep through. Night after night
was spent in prayer’.[3]
Bede relates, ‘One night when his companions had gone to sleep he was keeping
watch and praying as usual, he suddenly saw light steaming from the skies,
breaking the long night’s darkness, and the choirs of the heavenly host coming
down to earth’.[4]
The angels had come to receive the soul of St Aidan, not that Cuthbert was
aware that at the time that Aidan had died. There are echoes, perhaps
deliberate, in Bede’s account of the shepherds seeing the angelic host at the
nativity of Christ. More illuminating in terms of Cuthbert’s attitude to sleep
is not that he was rejecting the gift of God to his beloved by being the only
one staying awake but that he was awake to witness something others missed, and
as shepherd, a lookout, it is always necessary that someone is awake whilst
others sleep. Cuthbert’s own account runs as follows:
‘What
wretches we are, given up to sleep and sloth so that we never see the glory of
those who watch with Christ unceasingly! After so short a vigil what marvels I
have seen! The gate of Heaven opened and a band of angels led in the spirit of
some holy man’.[5]
Cuthbert’s emphasis is more on
the account of Jacob at Bethel, when he declares ‘this is the gate of heaven’
(Genesis 28.17) as he sees a vision of angels ascending and descending. Yet, it
is worth noting that Jacob was asleep in that instance. Nevertheless the
question remains: is Cuthbert hostile to sleep or pro watching and waiting
awake? Bede’s Life suggests the
latter, as he says later, ‘[Cuthbert] watched, prayed, worked, and read harder
than anyone else’.[6]
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| Cuthbert ministered to by otters after spending a night in the sea without sleep |
[Cuthbert]
was in the habit of rising at the dead of night, while everyone else was
sleeping, to go out and pray, returning just in time for morning prayers. One
night…he went towards the beach beneath the monastery and out into the sea
until he was up to his arms and neck in deep water. The splash of the waves
accompanied his vigil throughout the dark hours of the night.[7]
Again this suggests that
denial of sleep may be because of a loathing of sleep or subjugation of the
body. Cuthbert does not appear to have regarded it that way. When he
encountered a monk who had been watching him he asked him, ‘Have you been
spying on my night’s work?’ For Cuthbert denial of sleep was akin to fasting.
Both practices are about denial of a gift that God has given to a particular
purpose.
Speaking of fasting David
Brown refers to, ‘the strangeness of the extreme asceticism that characterized
the lives of so many of the Church’s saints’.[8]
Sara Maitland is blunter about this suggesting that, ‘fasting and sleep
deprivation, for example, produce some very particular physiological results
that have little or nothing to do with holiness as we understand it’.
Maitland’s concern seems more to be ‘eating disorders’ but poor sleep hygiene
over a prolonged period can be said to fall into the same category. This
strangeness of practice was evident in Cuthbert. One of Bede’s accounts tells
of him fasting for five days using only an onion to relieve his mouth. After
five days he had nibbled a third of one onion.[9]
Cuthbert may have been aware of the traditions of the Egyptian Desert which set
something of a paradigm for the eremitical life. Verna Harrison cites Poemen’s
account of the practice of St Antony and other desert monks in their rigours
and by staying awake at night.[10]
In notes to directors and exercitants of the Spiritual Exercises Michael Ivens commends that,
it
is not a penance to go without the superfluous, the finer quality and more
comfortable, but penance begins when we go without what is in itself suitable
in the way we sleep. Again, the more this is done the better, as long as the
constitution is not harmed and no serious illness results, and provided nothing
is retrenched from needful sleep, except in order to arrive at a just mean, if
we have the bad habit of sleeping too much.[11]
Ivens’
approach to sleep, in the spirit of St Ignatius of Loyola, is demanding yet
humane. In contemporary church life and spirituality fasting is often
associated with subjugation of the body, even if accompanied by prayer, and the
conquering a bodily need. Yet, as Brown comments, fasting was (and is) more than
just a physical act. Food, sexual intercourse and sleep have been subject to
this ‘fasting’ or self-denial. Brown believes it would be wrong to think of
even the medieval extremes of ascetic as hatred of the body.[12]
Radcliffe
suggests that the point of fasting is to appreciate the food one does have
rather than punish the body for the food one does not have. The same may be
said of sleep. Deprivation of sleep is not to punish oneself, but to enable the
self to be thankful for the gift of sleep.[13] In the
way that Jesus multiplied food in the wilderness so abundance is powerfully
expressed in the context of scarcity, so intentional creation of scarcity of
sleep, sleep deprivation becomes a means of receiving God’s grace.
Bede concludes the Life
saying, ‘such is the grace of the almighty God whose property is to cure
many even in this world, and to heal all infirmity of body and mind in the
world to come, satisfying our desires with good things and crowning forever
“with loving kindness and tender mercies”’.[14]
That is an affirmation of the healing of body and soul, and not a repudiation
of them. Bede’s Life of Cuthbert is
an account of a graced body whose relationship with sleep and the body was
deeply ambiguous in many ways to contemporary sensibilities, and was even
noteworthy in the exacting standards of his own day. In Cuthbert three key
lessons are learnt: the value of sleep, in partnership with healing, as
illustrated in the story of Baldfrith; the vigilant attentiveness of seeing the
things of heaven on earth, as in the death of Aidan; and, that deprivation of
sleep, even though it is a gift, heightens the gratuity of the gift and does
not repudiate it. For Bede, ‘the sublimity of the saint’s earthly was well
attested by his numerous miracles’ and no further proof of Cuthbert’s sanctity
was required.[15]
Whilst post-mortem miracles are recorded by Bede, more striking is account of
the state of Cuthbert’s body when it was exhumed by his erstwhile brethren
eleven years after his death. His body was found to be uncorrupted and, ‘it
seemed not dead but sleeping’.[16]
© Andrew Bishop, 2018
[1]
David H. Farmer ed. Introduction to, The
Age of Bede, (London: Penguin, 1965/1983), 17.
[2]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, The Age of
Bede, (London: Penguin, 1965/1983), 78.
[3]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, 59.
[4]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, 49.
[5]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, 50.
[6]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, 53.
[7]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, 58.
[8]
David Brown, God and Grace of Body:
Sacrament in Ordinary, (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 202.
[9]
Bede, “The Life of Cuthbert”, 92-3.
[10]
Nonna Verna Harrison, God’s Many Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian
Formation, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 109.
[11]
Michael Ivens, Understanding the
Spiritual Exercises, (Leominster: Gracewing, 1998,) 84.
[12]
Brown, God and Grace of Body, 203.
[13] Radcliffe, T,.
2012. Taking the Plunge: Living Baptism
and Confirmation. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. p. 108.
[14]
Bede, Life of Cuthbert, 103-4.
[15]
Bede, Life of Cuthbert, 98.
[16]
Bede, Life of Cuthbert, 98, my
italics.
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