Dunstan of Canterbury

 

Saint Dunstan of Canterbury,

Archbishop of Canterbury, 19 May 988 CE

--The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

  

Today is the feast day of Saint Dunstan of Canterbury, Archbishop of Canterbury.  Dunstan was born in Glastonbury, the spiritual heart of England from pagan times and one of its  earliest Christian sites.  He was born in about 909 CE, a decade after the death of King Alfred the Great, who first sought to unify the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against the Danes who had invaded and taken over half the country in the 800s.   The pagan Danish invaders had destroyed nearly all Christian monasteries, and with them English monasticism.  Dunstan played the leading role in restoring monasticism to England.  Even after 1,000 years, Dunstan shines out as a fascinating, individual personality: gifted in the graphic, musical, and metallurgic arts and technologies, one sorely tried at times by what look like surprisingly modern temptations.  

 

Glastonbury Tor, with tower of ruined St. Michael's Church.

Born to a noble family, Dunstan was sent to court as a teenager.  He did not fit in well: He was too dreamy, too artistic, too much of a science and tech nerd. Because of his obvious gifts, he became a favorite of the king, but this only enraged his peers.  They accused him of reading pagan literature, using witchcraft to win the king’s favor, and practicing the evil arts.  They bullied him mercilessly, and finally prevailed on the king to send him away from court.  As Dunstan was departing, they attacked him, beat him severely, and threw him into a cess pit to drown.  Pretending to be dead, he managed to climb out and flee to Winchester.  There he entered the service of his uncle, Bishop Aelfheah the Bald (also known as St. Alphege.)  Aelfheah was not only bald, but short: his name means "elf-high" and probably refers to his stature.  Dunstan's uncle saw that the gifted youth would be a great asset for the Church, and tried to convince him to become a monk and a priest. But Dunstan was reluctant:  he did not think he was cut out for celibacy or a monk’s simple life. 

But a sudden outbreak of tumors and boils all over his body, identified by the healers of the age as “leprosy,” changed Dunstan’s mind.  Almost certainly cysts due to bacterial infection caused by having his open wounds immersed in raw sewage, his “leprosy” responded to proper washing, lancing, and bandaging. Dunstan saw his cure as a sign of God’s calling him to the life which his uncle said was for him.  He made his profession as a monk at the hands of his uncle and returned to Glastonbury to live the life of a hermit since few Abbeys existed.  He built a hut near the ruins of the old monastery, and devoted himself to study, music, metal working (particularly the technology of casting church bells). 

Here it was that the Devil is said to have appeared to Dunstan offering temptation, first as old man promising him money if used his metallurgy to fashion a chalice (perhaps for a “Black Mass?”).  When this did not work, the demon shifted shapes into an attractive young man (perhaps the object of homoerotic attentions?). Finally, the demon became a voluptuous and seductive woman (when all else fails, “Cherchez la femme!”).  Dunstan recognized the multi-formed personification of his illicit desires, and immediately took his red-hot blacksmith tongs, and grabbed the demon by the nose to expel it in torment.  In another version of the story, the devil appears in his classic mythological form, with horns, bat wings, and cloven hooves and all.  Dunstan uses a bellows to heat a horseshoe, beats it into proper shape, and then nails it through the hoof of the demon to the floor, demanding as the price of release a promise that demons never enter a house with a horseshoe over the doorway. (So that’s the origin of ‘the lucky horseshoe.’) These stories, as naive and quaint as they may seem to us moderns, probably reflected Dunstan's struggle to reconcile his Christian faith and monk's vows with his bodily urges, his love of pagan literature and arcane lore in general, as well as his desire for art, beauty, and technical prowess. 

 

In Glastonbury, in addition to working the forge and playing the harp, Dunstan honed his skills painting and copying and decorating manuscripts. 

A manuscript in the Bodleian Library includes one scene where a tiny monk kneels before an immense Christ praying “Merciful Christ, I beg that you protect me, Dunstan. Do not permit the Taenarian storms to swallow me.”  Probably a self-portrait, the illumination shows that Dunstan did indeed read pagan literature—”Taenarian storms” is how Ovid, that great erotic poet of first century Rome, described the descent into Hades.

 

As part of his efforts to restore the monasteries, Dunstan returned to court.  He again did not fit in and was asked to leave; but then King Edmund had a narrow escape from death while hunting, and attributed it to Dunstan’s prayers. In gratitude Edmund recalled Dunstan and in 943 CE ordered him to re-establish monastic life at Glastonbury. Under Dunstan's direction, Glastonbury Abbey became again an important center of learning, to last until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. 

 

The next king, Edred, adopted Dunstan's ideas for church reforms, including the control of cathedrals by monastic chapters.  He also followed Dunstan’s foreign policy advice: friendly relations with the Danish settlers rather than confrontation and war.  These policies made Dunstan popular in the North of England, but unpopular in the South. 

 

Edred was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old nephew Eadwig (Edwy).  On the day of his coronation in 956, Eadwig, drunk and hoping for a real sexual adventure to celebrate becoming king, left the banquet in his honor for the royal bedchamber with two women in tow–his foster-mother and her daughter! Shocked, Dunstan followed in a fury and, probably scolding all the while about how Christian kings shouldn't follow the chaotic lustful ways of the Danes, dragged the startled teenager back to the hall to continue the feast with his knights. The episode, no surprise, led to Dunstan’s exile and flight for his life.

 

The North rose in rebellion on Dunstan’s behalf. When the dust settled, Eadwig was dead, his brother Edgar was king, and Dunstan was Archbishop of Canterbury. The coronation service which Dunstan compiled for Edgar is the earliest English coronation service of which the full text survives, and is the basis for all such services since, down to the present. 

 

With King Edgar’s patronage and support, Dunstan re-established a dozen or so monastic Abbeys throughout England.  Around 970 he presided at a conference which drew up a nation-wide rule for monastic houses based on the rule of St. Benedict. For centuries thereafter the Archbishop of Canterbury was always a monk.  Monk-bishops became a fixture of the Church of England.  Benedictine spirituality became a hallmark of English Christianity, and, after the reformation, of the Book of Common Prayer.

 

In his old age, Dunstan retired from politics, concentrating on running Canterbury Cathedral’s school for boys, raising academic standards and minimizing corporal punishment. On Thursday, Ascension Day, in 988 CE, he told the congregation that he was near to death.  He died two days later, on Saturday, May 19. 

For St. Dunstan and all musicians, artists, scribes, tech people, and teachers,  Thanks be to God.