Columbanus: Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint

Title page

Columbanus

Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint

Carol Richards

imprint-academic.com

Publisher information

2015 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

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Copyright © Carol Richards, 2010, 2015

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by

Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally published in the USA by

Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center

PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA

Passages from Cardinal Tómas O’Fiaich, Columbanus in his Own Words, Veritas Publications, Dublin, 1974/1990; used with permission.

Copyright material from The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, translated with and Introduction by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974; used with permission.

Quotations from Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited by Judith McClure & Roger Collins, OUP, 1999; by permission of Oxford University Press.

Quotations from Lost Scriptures, by Bart D. Ehrman, OUP, 2003; by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

A Prayer from St Columbanus

Grant, O Lord, that the light of your love

may never be dimmed within us.

Let it shine forth from our warmed hearts to comfort others

in times of peace and in seasons of adversity

and in bright beams of your goodness and love

may we come at last to the vision of your glory

through Christ our Lord. Amen.

1 Columbanus: Father of the European Union

... to live without offence, each retaining what he has received and remaining wherein he has been called.

Columbanus, Letter to the newly elected Pope (604 or 607 AD)[1]

In seeking to explain the concept of modern European unity one of its founding fathers, Monsieur Robert Schuman, described a sixth century wandering Irish monk as the patron saint of those who seek to construct a united Europe (Lehane, 2005).

He was speaking of the saint known as Columbanus - although he referred to himself as Columba - which in Latin means The Dove - the Latin suffix was added later to distinguish him from his older contemporary Columba of Iona, whom for the sake of convenience we will hereafter refer to by his other name Columcille (The Dove of the Church).

The addition of the suffix to the name of Columba the Younger as he is also sometimes known indicates that a century after their deaths their lives had already become somewhat confused.[2] It is instructive that both men chose the same monastic name because the chances are they left Ireland under very similar circumstances to redeem themselves in missionary activities.

However, what we do know for certain is, that Columcille searched for his redemption in the western isles of Scotland and that significantly he did not go very far from Ireland or exile himself for life. Columbanus, on the other hand, went into permanent exile in peregrinatione. In the context of the life of a saint this is usually translated as on pilgrimage but peregrinaggio[3]-the Italian form of the word - is also translated as travels and adventures a description that might be better applied to the story of Columbanus’ life, although the spiritual element was never far from the surface, and one which might be of more use to us when examining the motives behind his mission.

His travels and adventures, in the course of a long life, took him from Brittany in the west right up the Rhine valley across the Swiss Alps into Lombardy - what is now northern Italy - finally coming to rest at Bobbio where, after creating his last foundation, he died at the age of seventy, for the time a very old man.

He was therefore the epitome of the wandering monks who carried across Europe their brand of Celtic Christianity which, even more interestingly, came back by more or less the same route many centuries later in the form of the Protestant Reformation.

For us, Columbanus holds the secret to the intellectual and spiritual schism that lies at the heart of the Europe M. Schuman[4] was so keen to unite. For many centuries attempts have been made to create a united Europe. Many times the attempt, however successful for a period, has ultimately failed. Its success or failure, even in the twenty-first century, may equally be laid at the door of this temperamentally volatile itinerant Irishman - typically Irish - a handsome man with a poetic temperament, volcanic temper and a mind rigorous in pursuit of intellectual satisfaction.

Columbanus, as father of the Protestant Reformation, may be said to have destroyed the European unity of the Middle Ages. It’s ironic that he is now said to be the inspiration for its unity in its modern form. However, in a sense both claims are perfectly justified as he continues to be revered as a saint by both Protestants and Catholics in roughly equal measures and I will try and unravel this paradox by telling his extraordinary and fascinating story.

1 This is what the holy fathers, namely Polycarp and Pope Anicetus taught - to live without offence to the faith, nay persevering in perfect charity - each retaining what he has received and ‘remaining wherein he has been called’ (O’Fiaich, 1990, p. 77). Cf. St Paul: Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called (1 Corinthians 7.20).

2 To further confuse matters another Columba the Younger was also among the group that accompanied Columbanus.

3 Cf the 1557 Venetian book Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figlivoli del Re di Serendippo by Christofero Armeno translated as The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Serendip (Merton & Barber, Princeton, 2004).

4 Robert Schuman (1886–1963), a French statesman and a driving force behind the European Coal and Steel Community that developed into the European Union.

2 Early Life

Spurn now the sweet deceits of life below

Soft Lust can upright virtue overthrow ...

Columbanus, To Hunaldus[1]

In the first place we should examine what is meant by a saint. Not all saints are martyrs who died for their faith.

A saint in the early days of Christianity was simply someone who belonged to the church - hence the I believe in the communion of saints in the Apostles’ Creed and the Puritan use of the term to indicate anyone who belonged to their sect.

By the early middle ages the term saint had come to be attached to anyone who had spent a lifetime in the service of Christianity, whether particularly saintly by modern standards or not. In the early lives we find saints indulging in some very unsaintly activities. The extent to which Christianity came to dominate the British Isles is evidenced by the large number of place-names which are dedicated to saints. It became the Land of Saints.

Some of these early saints can with certainty be identified as local pagan deities, spirits of nature, who were translated into Christian saints to legitimise their continued worship, a practice that in itself is consistent with the theology of Christian Druidism,[2] that brand of Christianity peculiar to the British Isles and Northern Europe and quite distinct from Roman Catholicism.

Since there was officially only one western church before the Protestant Reformation, at the outset both versions were essentially catholic. In reality, however, there were always two religions - two spiritual tempers - and the schism that took place, although a long time coming was pretty much inevitable.

St Columbanus was among those called a saint because he spent his life dedicated to the pursuit of intellectual excellence in the service of the church, not because he was particularly saintly by nature.

Of his early life not much is known. He was born around the year 543 AD somewhere on the Carlow-Wexford border in the south of Ireland (modern Eire).[3]

The society he was born into was based on a rural economy, a world of shepherds, cattle-herders, and, as we know from the tale of the Brown Bull of Cooley, cattle-rustlers.

It was essentially a feudal society ruled by a clutch of petty kings, many probably not much more than provincial chieftains, answerable to an overlord, the Ard Ri - the High King of Ireland - who held his court at Tara.

Below him came a warrior-caste who in turn acted as overlords to their tenants and serfs.

Somewhere in the middle came a professional class of brehons who were lawyers and administrators, doctors and most importantly poets.

The poet was not just an entertainer, although he was that too, but also a musician, and music was highly prized in the classical world as a form of higher mathematics. He was also a genealogist - a very important role in a society where everything is based on kinship - and an historian. A poet also had a certain licence to criticise his betters and a notable aspect of his work included the kind of comic verse and satire that later found its apogee in England in Chaucer.

The value placed on the poetic arts may be judged from the fact that poetry was also regarded as a royal, although at that level amateur, art. Both Columbas were accomplished poets as was the King of the Franks. The tradition of the gentleman poet continued well into the seventeenth century but the bards were professionals and, travelling from mead hall to mead hall in search of patronage, they were also an important conduit for communications.

Although as historians we make a clear distinction between the different racial groups of northern Europe and like to treat them as separate entities, this was probably not the case on the ground. The world Columbanus grew up in was very similar to that of the later Anglo-Saxons and Vikings and the neighbouring Franks. So when he went across the Irish Sea and the English Channel to carry his message to the German tribes, the Allemani and the Goths and the Sueves (who are the same people who became Swedes) he would have found himself socially in very familiar territory.

It was not quite the same as say a Victorian Scots missionary heading into Central Africa where he would have encountered a very different type of society from his own. Nor is it quite accurate to suggest that Ireland, which had not been conquered by the Romans, was entirely free of classical influence.

Although the set-up in Arthur’s Britain according to the chronicles we find in Malory was more or less the same as Ireland, the Irish did not have the continuity of settled Roman occupation and administration that we find in Britain and Gaul. Even so, there were strong trading links between the Irish and the British and a constant exchange of personnel and ideas as well as material goods.

In the first half of the fifth century, just before Columbanus was born, both Arthur, the High King of Britain, and the half-British High King of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages as he was known, attempted to follow in the footsteps of Constantine and Maximus and make military expeditions to Rome.[4] In neither case were they successful, the chaos of the Italian peninsula and the onset of plague spreading from the Eastern Empire putting an abrupt end to their bids to become Emperor.

Niall, we are told, made it as far as the Alps and was persuaded, probably by a large bribe, by a Roman mission sent to intercept him to return to Ireland. Arthur spent three years in Rome, according to the chronicle, and left prudently just as the plague was reported to be sweeping through Constantinople. Neither of them succeeded in resuscitating the Empire in the West.

However, the fact that they are reported to have made the attempt suggests that the Irish were not as isolated from the rest of Europe as is sometimes claimed. It appears their royal families at least were as much involved in European affairs as everyone else and Niall’s half-British ancestry indicates how closely connected the royal families of northern Europe were through intermarriage and kinship ties.

If Columbanus had an aristocratic upbringing and connections with a royal court, it would explain how it is that he exhibits a natural power of command and in his correspondence with popes and kings shows no hint of humility - indeed he might otherwise be regarded as impudent. (He apologises himself for addressing the Pope with as some call it, my arrogant insolence.)[5]

That it was not regarded so, and that he felt no inclination to seek refuge in deference can probably be explained by the fact that he was of the same social class as his correspondents and so felt no stigma of inferiority when addressing them. He writes to them as equals. Such deference as he manages to summon up is usually tongue-in-cheek. Either he is being humorous or heavily ironic. There’s nothing to suggest he meant it.

To such an aristocratic background we could also trace the origin of his formidable diplomatic skills.

His habit of command might also be put down to a military training. Unlike monastic foundations in the rest of Britain, where monks were by and large expected to live peacefully, until the ninth century the Irish monks were still required to serve in the military and keep up their martial arts on a daily basis. They were warrior-monks which in the case of both Columbas led to a flashpoint in their careers but must have come in useful when they embarked on missionary activity to essentially warrior-societies.

These wandering monks were battle-hardened men, not wimps. They knew how to take care of themselves.

So from what we know of Columbanus’ later career - that he became an Abbot, was a brilliant scholar, an able diplomat and an accomplished poet - we can speculate that he was the younger son of a royal family of Leinster.

The Irish kings, like all the kings of Northern Europe, did not practice primogeniture. A king at the end of his life was expected to divide his estates between his sons and provide for his daughters.

Although on the face of it this appears a fair distribution of their lands and wealth in practice it led to political instability. Either the kingdom became too fragmented to retain economic and military viability and was swallowed up by a stronger neighbour or, more commonly, it led to the sort of murderous family feuds that we will later see erupting among the Frankish kings of mainland Europe.

In Ireland, as elsewhere, this inherent political instability was mitigated slightly by the practice of placing younger sons as novices in the fast growing monasteries paying a substantial dowry to ensure that they would one day become Abbot and control the Abbey’s considerable estates.[6]

Indeed the practice was partly the cause of their rapid growth. It meant the royal and aristocratic families of the region had a stake in the success of monastic foundations. Brendan Lehane explains,

It was not so much simony as a divine right of kingly families. Once under a family’s appointment, the abbacy would stay that way, sometimes for as much as five hundred years. From this local patronising there developed a more ambitious empire-building. Monasteries founded, or ostensibly shown to have been founded, by the same man, were grouped in unions of which the most influential abbot became a minor primate (Lehane, 2005, p. 103).

Abbots were powerful landowners, keepers of the important libraries, masters of scholarship and close relatives of kings. They exerted considerable influence and wielded spiritual power quite the equal of that of the temporal and military power of their rulers.

For a young prince it provided a perfect career path, power, status and land which in no way depleted the estates of his family. At the same time it took him out of the line of succession and reduced the danger of sibling rivalry destroying the kingdom. In this way Abbots like the Bishops before them were quite literally princes of the church.

It seems likely that Columbanus was one such little prince.

His Life was written (unusually for the time) by a near contemporary, Jonas of Susa, who entered the monastery of Bobbio only three years after Columbanus’ death in 615 AD, which makes his account one of the most reliable of early mediaeval hagiographies. Even so, it endows his birth with the usual evidence of divinely ordained predestination customary in the biography of a holy man.

His mother, it is said, dreamed shortly before his birth that the sun rose from her breast and illuminated the whole world with its rays (Jonas, p. 1).

This story, like many a mediaeval biographical detail, is not insignificant colour but rather intended to illustrate what makes the individual worthy of note. In Columbanus’ case we should focus our attention on his contribution to the enlightenment, not only of the so-called Dark Ages but of all subsequent ages. His mother’s prescient image gives us an indication what to look out for.

The year of his birth is worth noting too. Columbanus was born in the same year that the final battle between Arthur and Mordred signalled the end of Romano-Celtic Britain and the beginning of the main Saxon invasion. Britain was changing and the Roman church took full advantage. Along with the Saxons came the papal legate Augustine, also later designated a saint, who appears to have sought to counter the growing influence and strength of the Celtic Church by conspiring with the pagan Saxons.

Augustine is credited with the conversion of the English. What did he convert them to? Not Christianity. That had been knocking around the British Isles since the first century AD. The British were already Christian and in large numbers.

At Bangor Iscoed near Wrexham where Augustine was implicated in engineering the massacre of twelve hundred British monks we are told there were two thousand four hundred monks in residence.

Augustine’s mission was not to convert the British - nor even the Saxons, since there were more than enough priests in Britain to satisfy their needs - but to curb the influence of Columbanus and the wandering Irish and British monks who were in their turn converting the pagan Germans, Goths and Sueves to their own brand of Christianity, regarded by some members of the Roman church as pernicious and heretical.

To be fair to Pope Gregory, who had sent Augustine to Britain in the first place, after this massacre of Celtic Christians (indignation at which was still being expressed many centuries later, so one can imagine the outrage it must have provoked at the time) he recalled Augustine back to Gaul. Although he was subsequently revered as the Saint of Canterbury, Gregory never allowed him to undertake any missionary work again while he lived. Augustine’s companion Laurentius later mentioned Columbanus as an example of uncompromising nonconformity indicating that however much Gregory was annoyed to find Augustine had exceeded the brief he had given him, he was in a manner of speaking acting on orders. The battle lines between Celtic and Roman (and their later manifestations Protestant and Catholic) were already drawn up within the church and the conflict was only just beginning.

The massacre at Bangor Iscoed came towards the end of Columbanus’ career so we are jumping ahead here, but it’s as well to bear it in mind as we follow the course of his life’s journey.

His first studies were at Clun-inis (Cleenish Island) on Lough Erne in Fermanagh. The abbot there was St Sinell, a disciple of Finnian of Clonard, regarded as one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland who taught the other Columba - Columcille.

The influence of Finnian is of great importance not only in relation to the two Columbas but also to the development of the Celtic church throughout the British Isles because he came from St David’s and was therefore a Welshman. (Being of Welsh extraction myself, I am bound to point out that Thomas Cahill’s title How the Irish Saved Civilisation is something of an exaggeration.) In the late fifth and early sixth centuries it was not Ireland but South Wales that was the power-house of Christian scholarship producing a string of great names from Illtud and Cadoc to their pupils Samson of Dol, Paul Aurelian, Gildas and many others who spread their particular version