A visit to the relics of St Andrew the Apostle is a reminder of the Scottish Church’s stormy history, writes Phoebe Armstrong
Never has there been a more perfect place for a cathedral than where the Scottish medieval town of St Andrews now stands. The geography alone invites worship, instilling a fear of almighty God and an overwhelming sense of being at his mercy. The cathedral, now in ruins, and an ancient tower, still standing, were built to house the relics – three fingerbones – of a man who walked with Christ and, we can assume, from time to time held his hand between those very fingers. The thought itself is astonishing, and enough to bring me to this ruin, and this tower, in the hope of an encounter with the holy, as it must have done for many others in centuries past. An unassuming mound of land protrudes ever so slightly into the North Sea somewhere north of Edinburgh, laced with crisp, pale cliffs battered by the waves of a cold, dark inferno. It was known as Kinrimund, or “head of the king’s mount”, seat of the Pictish kings.
In the fourth century, according to legend, an angel instructed St Regulus (or St Rule) to bring the relics of St Andrew from Patras to a Pictish king for safe-keeping. A variation on this story tells that he was instructed to sail to the “ends of the Western lands” and lay the foundations of a church wherever his ship would be wrecked. Another tale is that of the Bishop of Hexham who, in the eighth century, was driven from his homelands, escaping to Kinrimund with the very same relics. Nevertheless, it is the legend of a Greek St Rule, in its various forms, that has prevailed in public consciousness, lending an ancient origin to the Scottish Church.
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Just as a future Scottish rebellion may, as previous ones have, been provoked by subjugation, it may not be unreasonable to speculate that the ‘anti-Catholic fire’ of John Knox and his contemporaries came as a result of similar subjugations, real or perceived, and that the reformation, brutal as it was, was as a result of brutality itself.
Perhaps, as an independent Scotland would not have involved itself in disastrous campaign in the middle east in 2003, an independent Scottish Church would not have been swayed by the command of Pope Urban II, which launched the crusades in a much earlier time, and as such, the ‘anti-Catholic fire’ was perhaps born from the embers of an ‘anti-Saracen’ one.
But the free spirit and will of the Scots, and any other people, cannot be ignored, and that determination is one that fuels the fires, upon the crucible of fate, that forges their destiny. Perhaps its Calvinistic to say so, but I would venture that almighty God allowed the Cathedral to become a ruin, to leave it as a metaphor, in its present state, as a symbol of the state of faith today and how far we are from his grace.