SAINT COLUMBA

A summary of the paper given by Ian Bradley at the CA Lindisfarne Conference 1997

Columba had two very different sides to his personality. He belonged to the Irish warrior aristocracy - if he had not become a monk he would have almost certainly become king of his tribe, and quite possibly the High King of Ireland. He never lost the attributes of this upbringing and retained to the end of his life an autocratic imperiousness, a hasty temper, a fierce pride and a lingering attachment to the "fascinating rattle of a complicated battle". Yet he could also be gentle, humble and overflowing with Christian charity. This juxtaposition is perhaps the basis for the tradition, which appears in some later sources, that he had two names: first, Crimthann (the fox), and later, Columcille (the dove of the church). It is just conceivable that the earlier name may reflect pagan origins, and that he acquired the second on being baptised as a Christian, but this must be conjecture. The characteristics of both the fox and the dove continued to manifest themselves throughout his fife.

Ambiguity

If we are to encounter the true Columba, we need to acknowledge this ambiguity and to come face to face with Crimthann as well as Columcille. He was no plaster saint, but an intensely human figure with faults and weaknesses as weft as extraordinary depths of gentleness and humility. Alongside the excesses of the Celtic psyche, we can perhaps point to another aspect of early Irish monasticism which is the context in which Columbia grew up and was formed, to help explain one aspect of what might seem a double fife. This was an understanding of the rhythm of Christian fife, and the need to balance activity in the world with withdrawal from it.

The idea of pilgrimage, or peregrinatio, which was central to Irish monks and to Columba, involved a permanent sense of exile, renunciation and searching for one's own place of resurrection; one's desert. Except for those few called permanently to the solitary irenical life of the anchorite, however, it did not mean a complete withdrawal from the world and its wars. The monastic life was far from being one of retreat and escape. Indeed, monasteries were almost certainly the busiest institutions in Celtic society, constantly teeming with people and fulfilling the roles of school, library, hospital, guest house, arts centre and mission station. Most of the great Celtic saints alternated between periods of intense activity and involvement in administrative affairs, with lengthy spells of quiet reflection and months spent alone in a cell on a remote island or rocky promontory. In this, they were following the example of Jesus; one moment surrounded by crowds and engaged in preaching, teaching and healing, and the next, walking alone by the lakeside or engaged in quiet prayer in the mountains.

Columba’s life exemplified this balanced rhythm of engagement and withdrawal in the world. At times, he was busily engaged in founding monasteries, treating with kings, attending councils, going on missionary journeys and ruling his ever-expanding monastic family. Yet his biographers also portray him spending long periods praying or copying the Sciptures in his cell and he frequently took himself to the lonely and unidentified island of Hinba for solitary retreats.

To a considerable extent these two sides of Columba's character were the product of his noble birth and monastic training. He mixed as easily with warlords and princes as with monks and scholars. Through his veins coursed the blood of a long fine of fierce pagan warriors. It would hardly be surprising if this element in his make-up sometimes came to the surface and caused him to do things which he may have later regretted. It may, indeed, be as some sources suggest, that it was to atone for the blood that was on his hands as the result of his involvement in a dynastic battle that he left his beloved Ireland at the age of 42 in the year 563, on the journey that was to take him to Iona.

Early life

His upbringing, despite his noble birth was entirely monastic. Born in Donegal in 521, he seems to have been marked down by his parents from a very early age for the church, and he spent his boyhood and teenage years being tutored by priests in monastic foundations. This, in itself, was not particularly unusual. The children of the Irish warrior aristocracy were generally fostered out to tutors for their education and sixty years or so before Columba’s birth, Patrick had noted in his Confessions that "sons and daughters of Scottic chieftains are seen to become monks and virgins for Christ".

Apart from this, we know tantalisingly little about the forty years that Columba spent in Ireland. He seems to have belonged to several monastic communities in both the north and the south, and possibly to have founded some small houses himself Medieval sources claim that he set up some 300 monasteries in Ireland before his departure for Iona, but this is generally dismissed by historians as without any historical basis. The truth is that we do not know where Columba was based, or what he was doing before he made his fateful journey from Donegal in 563. Nor do we know why he made that journey, although many possibilities have been speculated upon.

What we do know is that Columba was by no means unusual as an Ulsterman in making the somewhat perilous crossing to the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the mid-sixth century. We do not know whether Columba set out to travel to Iona. Some historians argue that Columba did not actually move to Iona until 574, more than ten years after his departure from Ireland, possibly because until then the island was still in the hands of the native Picts and not safe for occupation. The picture is very unclear, and certainly more complex than the romantic story which has Columba sailing across in his coracle, landing first at Colonsay but finding that he could still see Ireland from there, and establishing his base at Iona only after climbing its highest hill and satisfying himself that he could no longer gaze back at his beloved homeland.

Missionary and evangelist?

The question has been asked as to how far Columba was a missionary and an evangelist. In my book, 1 argue - and I think the evidence for this is really irrefutable - that he was certainly not what he is sometimes portrayed as - the evangelist of Scotland who converted the native Picts who occupied most of the northern, eastern and central mainland. Once on Iona, he actually spent most of the rest of his fife there, occasionally retreating to Hinba, occasionally going back to Ireland on political or ecclesiastical business, sometimes venturing up to Skye, and perhaps just once, perhaps on a number of occasions, crossing the Highlands; going up the Great Glen to Inverness. Significantly this journey was to meet with the pictish King Brude. His biographers do not write of him converting great numbers of people across Scotland. Rather, the picture is of someone who exercises a largely pastoral ministry on Iona, perhaps being involved in the conversion of one or two Scots (and remember, they were the Irish) but who is basically involved with founding monasteries and directing them from his base on Iona.

Columba's ministry

There are many stories told of Columba’s abilities to reconcile people both to themselves and to others from whom they have become distant or estranged. This pastoral gift is often portrayed as being exercised through the medium of penance. Many of those who visited Iona came as penitents, seeking to atone for some crime or to come to terms with feelings of guilt or remorse.

Columba was active as a teacher and scholar as well as a priest and pastor. He spent much time working in his cell on copying, annotating and interpreting the Scriptures. It is also quite possible that Columba wrote poems and hymns - there are four that can perhaps be attributed to him more certainly than others. Alongside priestly, pastoral and scholarly tasks, there was always the recurring manual work of the community - building, fishing, farming, distributing food to the poor.

In his last hours on earth, Columba is portrayed as engaging in many of the activities that have characterised his fife-long ministry. He goes round the island in a cart, visiting the brothers at work in the fields and telling them of his forthcoming death. He attends Sunday Mass and has a vision of "an angel of the Lord flying above actually inside the house of prayer". He blesses the heaps of grain stored in the barn ready for the communities use through the winter. Then, after his poignant encounter with the old horse which used to carry the milk pails, and which now puts its head against its bosom and weeps, he climbs the little hill overlooking the monastery and blesses the island, prophesying that it will come to be reverenced by Christians and non-Christians far round the world.

Death

Returning to his hut, he sits copying out the Psalms, stopping when he reaches the tenth verse of Psalm 34: "Those that seek the Lord shall not want for anything that is good." He then goes to Vespers and returns to sleep on the bare rock floor of his hut, with a stone for his pillow. After briefly resting, he summons the brethren, telling them to "love one another unfeignedly" and commanding them to God's infinite mercy. As the bell rings out for the midnight office, he runs ahead of them into church and kneels alone in prayer before the altar. At that moment, the whole church is filled with angelic light around the saint. Helped by his faithful servant Diarmait, he raises his right arm to bless the choir of monks, and, at that the moment the venerable abbot gives up the ghost, his face transfixed with a wonderful joy and gladness for he could see the angels coming to meet him".

Columba's passing from the world, like his arrival into it, was accompanied by signs and wonders, miracles and angelic apparitions. In death, his powers of prophecy, pastoral aid and protection were to be undiminished. Indeed, his stature as a saint grew steadily as the cult of Columba spread far beyond the bounds of the tiny island on which he had chosen to spend the last thirty-five years of his fife.

Columba's legacy

There is much that we could say about the way that the church Columba founded and centred on Iona grew and developed in the centuries after his death - notably, how it played a key role in the evangelisation of northern England through the daughter house of Lindisfarne. There is too, the whole question of Columba’s legacy and what he has to say to us today - all these points are considered at some length in my book.

How should we remember and celebrate Columba, 1400 years after his death? It is, I think, highly appropriate that this event is being marked by pilgrimages across the length and breadth of the British isles. For it is as a pilgrim people, walking, talking, praying and sharing together that we most clearly carry the legacy of the Columban past into our own Christian futures.

Pilgrimage was central to the Christian life and experience of Columba and his Christian contemporaries. Pilgrimage involves journeying back as well as forwards. back, not just into the recesses of our own individual souls with their rich store of memories and experiences and their untidy bits of unresolved and unfinished business, but also into our collective roots and traditions. One of our great modem malaises is that so many people have lost touch with their roots.

Through exploring and celebrating the life and thoughts of Columba and his near-contemporaries in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England we are able to connect with a common tradition that has nurtured and influenced nearly all who live in these lands today, and which has, to some extent, made us what we are. We can connect too in a mysterious and meaningful way with the communion of saints, that great and silent company who have gone before us in the faith and with whom we are bound in the tone body of the Church, militant on earth and triumphant in heaven.