Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which severed the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the after fortunes of England.* Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later ecclesiastical history of England would probably have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid of that power of organization which was the strength of the Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the country as the basis of Church government. Tribal quarrels and ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably confounded; and the clergy, robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no element save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is the picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was from such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby.*
From ‘A Short History of the English People’, Vol. I (1902), by John Richard Green (1837-1883).
* Many who do not care for the Roman papacy have tried to play down this link between the English Church and Rome, but historian and Bishop of Peterborough Mandell Creighton urged them to acknowledge the facts without fear. “The attempts to minimise the connexion of the English Church with Rome do not lead to any good results”, Creighton wrote to the editor of the Newcastle Diocesan Chronicle in 1889. “Our position must be: the English Church had good reasons for its connexion with Rome, and had good reasons for breaking that connexion; but we gain nothing by trying to prove either that the connexion never existed, or was slight or was foolishly established”.
Green might also have mentioned the change in the temper of the Christian life. The reason Aidan succeeded in Northumbria, where so many others from Iona had failed, was that he had softened the punitive severity of Irish monasticism. Following the Synod, the much gentler Rule of St Benedict, as observed in Rome, gained ground at Lindisfarne and other Northumbrian monasteries, and the appointment in 669 of Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek, as Archbishop of Canterbury ushered in an altogether more humane, colourful, musical and approachable Church life, to which people of all classes and states of life felt they could aspire. See also How Benedict Biscop brought Byzantium to Britain.