On one occasion, he even returned to Ireland (never say never of an Irish saint) to plead before the national convention meeting in Drumceatt that the Irish kingdom of Dalriada (which covered Irish Scotland and part of Ulster—and to which Columcille owed allegiance) deserved exemption from tribute to the high king at Tara. Columcille prevailed; no man could stand up to him. Also on the agenda was a proposal to suppress the order of bards, admittedly a troublesome lot, whose satires were potent enough to kill and who took the most presumptuous advantage wherever they happened to camp. Poetry, said Columcille (who was himself the most accomplished poet of his day) was an essential part of Irish life: Ireland could not be Ireland without it. Do not banish the bards, only command that they widen their circle and teach others what they know. An irresistible proposal from an irresistible humanist. As Columcille’s proposal carried the assembly, twelve hundred merry bards crowded into the meeting, singing the praises of the saint, who, red-faced, pulled to his chin the cowl of his white wool cloak in order to hide his embarrassment.
Toward the end of his life, he began to have premonitions of his death. One day, he bade farewell to each of his brothers, who were out working the fields, and to the much-loved old packhorse that the monks used to cart their milk. For his last task on earth, he chose to sit down and continue his work of copying a manuscript. Writing out Psalm 34 he stopped after completing the words “But they that seek the Lord shall not want any thing that is good.” He set down his quill and whispered: “Let Baithene write the rest.” That night Columcille rose as usual from his spartan bed to join the brothers in singing the midnight office. As the monks reached the darkened church, they found Columcille in ecstasy before the altar. He blessed them all and died.
“He was,” wrote the British historian Kathleen Hughes, “a man of the very highest birth, with all the natural advantage of command which such a circumstance gave in an aristocratic society. He had the gift of second sight, combined with a power to control other men by the force of his own personality. He was a shrewd judge of character, and yet at the same time a man of warm sympathies. His monks, the laity, even the animals felt his attraction. He could terrify, he could comfort, he could delight.” This warrior-monk, this homme de fer, as the French monastic historian Jean Decarreaux has called him, had created by his singular determination a literate, Christian society among the Scots and Picts of northern Britain; and now, after his death, a fresh wave of his stout-hearted sons began to effect the same transformation among the pagan Angles of Northumbria from their new (but soon to be fabulous) island monastery of Lindisfarne, under the direction of Columcille’s greatest spiritual heir, Aidan. As Columcille had baptized Scotland—and taught it to read—Aidan would do the same for all of northern England.
And just as the unyielding warrior Cuchulainn had served as the model of prehistoric Irish manhood, Columcille now became the model for all who would earn the ultimate victory. Monks began to set off in every direction, bent on glorious and heroic exile for the sake of Christ. They were warrior-monks, of course, and certainly not afraid of whatever monsters they might meet. Some went north, like Columcille. Others went northwest, like Brendan the Navigator, visiting Iceland, Greenland, and North America, and supping on the back of a whale in mid-ocean. Some set out in boats without oars, putting their destination completely in the hands of God. Many of the exiles found their way to continental Europe, where they were more than a match for the barbarians they met. They, whom the Romans had never conquered (and evangelized only, as it were, by accident in the person of Patrick, the imperfect Roman), fearlessly brought the ancient civilization back to its ancient home.
One of these erratic travelers was Columbanus, twenty years or so the junior of Columcille, born in the province of Leinster about the year 540, and subsequently a monk at Bangor for twenty-five years. About 590 he departed, with the requisite twelve companions, for Gaul, where he founded in quick succession three forest monasteries among the barbarous Sueves—Annegray, Fontaines, and Luxeuil, one of the most important foundations of the early Middle Ages. Such astounding activity could only mean that Columbanus was having similar success to Columcille in attracting local talent.
But before long he clashes with the region’s bishops, who are nettled by his presence. Still employing the old Roman episcopal pattern of living urbanely in capital cities and keeping close ties with those who wear crowns, the bishops tend their local flocks of literate and semiliterate officials, the ghostly remnants of the lost society. It has never occurred to these churchmen to venture beyond a few well-tended streets into the rough-hewn mountain settlements of the simpler Sueves. To Columbanus, however, a man who will take no step to proclaim the Good News beyond the safety and comfort of his own elite circle is a poor excuse for a bishop. In 603 the bishops summon the saint to appear before them in synod at Chalon-sur-Saône. Columbanus, who cannot be bothered to take part in such a travesty, sends a letter in his stead—a letter calculated to send the bishops right up their well-plastered walls:
To the holy lords and fathers—or, better, brothers—in Christ, the bishops, priests, and remaining orders of holy church, I, Columba the sinner, send greeting in Christ:
I give thanks to my God that for my sake so many holy men have gathered together to treat of the truth of faith and good works, and, as befits such, to judge of the matters under dispute with a just judgment, through senses sharpened to the discernment of good and evil. Would that you did so more often!
The Irishman goes on to take the bishops to task for their worldly laxity and lack of industry and for trifling with his mission. They have more than enough to concern them, without sticking their episcopal noses into his affairs, if only they took their own responsibilities seriously. He couches his criticisms in the language of deference (“if you are willing for us juniors to teach you fathers”), but there is no mistaking his meaning. He recommends his own way of life to their reverences (“if we all choose to be humble and poor for Christ’s sake”) and urges them, after “the Gospel saying,” to become as little children: “For a child is humble, does not harbor the remembrance of injury, does not lust after a woman when he looks on her, does not keep one thing on his lips and another in his heart.” It almost sounds as if the saint knows each bishop’s secret sin—and means to push it in his face.
Needless to say, he wins no friends at the synod, and when Columbanus attracts the enmity of Brunhilda, the wicked Visigothic princess who rules Burgundy, the bishops conspire with her to have Columbanus deported. Columbanus and his Irish monks are forced to bid farewell to their thriving communities, now populated with local Germanic monks, and to travel under royal escort to Nantes, the port from which they will be put on board a ship bound for Ireland. On their way to Nantes, one of their number, the aged Deicola, finds that he cannot keep up. He drops behind and builds himself a hut in the wilderness at a place called Lure, which will become in time another historic monastery. When Columbanus’s party is at last put on board the ship at Nantes, the ship sinks, and Columbanus and four companions escape. Now a double exile (from Burgundian Gaul as well as Ireland), Columbanus means to make his way to northern Italy to convert the Lombards. But while journeying over the Alps, he is forced to stop at Arbon, near Bregenz on Lake Constance, because Gall, his expert in Germanic languages, falls ill with fever and refuses to go farther. After a heated altercation, Columbanus leaves Gall behind, and with his remaining companions heads for the plain of Lombardy, where they will build at Bobbio the first Italo-Irish monastery. Vigorous Columbanus, now in his early seventies, takes his part in the construction, happily carrying wooden beams on his shoulders.
The year of Columbanus’s arrival in Lombardy was 612. In the following year, his old enemy Brunhilda is overthrown and brutally executed by the Frankish nobility. Clothaire of Neustria, who was always a friend to Columbanus and now holds sway among the Franks of Burgundy, sends a deputation over the Alps, carrying chests of gold to help in the construction of Bobbio
and an invitation begging Columbanus’s return to Luxeuil. But the vigorous old abbot declines. He will die at Bobbio—but not before sending more letters, including a long one to Pope Boniface IV, taking him to task for failing (as Columbanus saw it) to put a proper end to the Nestorian controversy, a complex Greek dispute about the “natures” of Christ that Columbanus may not have understood. He even makes a pun on the name of Boniface’s predecessor, Pope Vigilius: “Vigila, atque quaeso, papa, vigila, et iterum dico, vigila; quia forte non bene vigilavit Vigilius” (“Be vigilant then, I implore you, pope, be vigilant, and again do I say, be vigilant; since perhaps he who was called Vigilant was not”). This was not Columbanus’s first letter to a pope—nor even the first time he had made light of a pope’s name! In a letter to Pope Gregory the Great at the time of his disputes with the bishops, Columbanus had written most familiarly—as if he were an intimate old friend—and had made a pun on the name of Gregory’s predecessor Leo the Great, reminding Gregory of the scripture that “a living dog is better than a dead lion [Leo in Latin].” In response to each of these letters Columbanus received only cold pontifical silence.
This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up his attitude to his Irish-ness. (He even boasts to Boniface of “the freedom of discussion characteristic of my native land.”) In chilly, cityless Ireland, men worked in close cooperation by day and slept side by side at night. Even the king was one’s intimate—and the Irish word ri suggests an intimacy that could never be imagined of rex. To Columbanus, the pope was one of the brothers, a father abbot worthy of respect, by all means—but also in need, like any man, of an occasional jab in the ribs. The jab might even be one’s religious duty, in a manner of speaking.
Any question of Columbanus’s balance is swept away when you take a serious look at his achievements: at his death in 615 he left behind a considerable body of work—letters and sermons, notable for their playful imitation of such classical writers as Sappho, Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Martial, and even Ausonius; instructions for the brethren; poems and lyrics, including a jolly boat song; and the even larger legacy of his continental monasteries, busily engaged in reintroducing classical learning to the European mainland. At this great distance in time, we can no longer be sure exactly how many monasteries were founded in Columbanus’s name during his lifetime and after his death. But the number, stretching across vast territories that would become in time the countries of France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, cannot be less than sixty and may be more than a hundred—enough to fill a page or two of this book. He had been on the continent for just twenty-five years.
One monastery on which we have some information is that of Saint Gall in the Alps, founded by the monk Columbanus had quarreled with and who went on to become the central figure in the founding of the Swiss church. Finding himself, after Columbanus’s huffy departure, alone among wolves, bears, and illiterate Alemans, Gall, a more patient man than Columbanus, went about visiting his neighbors, instructing them in faith and letters. We possess only one work from his hand, a sermon of such honesty, simplicity, and generosity that we can still grasp what touched the Alemans. In 615, as Columbanus lay dying, there came a knock on Gall’s door: brethren from Bobbio had arrived with Columbanus’s abbatial staff, Columbanus’s tardy apology and implicit acknowledgment that Gall was the greatest of all his spiritual sons. In 616, Gall, whose labors were becoming well known, refused the offer to become bishop of Constance and in 627 the invitation to return to flourishing Luxeuil as its abbot. He stuck to his task, and by his death in 645 all of the Alemans had received the Gospel. But he could little know that after he was long dead there would rise on the site of his labors one of the greatest of all medieval monasteries, named in his honor. In the ninth century, one of his spiritual sons, a Leinsterman, sitting in the now enormous scriptorium of the towering monastery on Lake Constance, would put together a commonplace book containing bits of all his favorite reading—notes from a commentary on the Aeneid, excerpts from Jerome and Augustine, some Latin hymns, a little Greek, some idiosyncratic natural history, and in Irish his own perfect poem about his cat, Pangur Ban. Thinking no doubt of his Irish home, the scribe also writes down this sentence from Horace: “Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current” (“They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean”). A good maxim for all exiles and, in this context, a reminder of the constancy of Irish personality.
There is much we do not know about these Irish exiles. Their clay and wattle buildings have long since disappeared, and even most of their precious books have perished. But what they knew—the Bible and the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Ireland—we know, because they passed these things on to us. The Hebrew Bible would have been saved without them, transmitted to our time by scattered communities of Jews. The Greek Bible, the Greek commentaries, and much of the literature of ancient Greece were well enough preserved at Byzantium, and might be still available to us somewhere—if we had the interest to seek them out. But Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down. Beyond that, there would have perished in the west not only literacy but all the habits of mind that encourage thought. And when Islam began its medieval expansion, it would have encountered scant resistance to its plans—just scattered tribes of animists, ready for a new identity.
Whether this state of affairs would have been better or worse than what did happen, I leave to the reader to ponder. But what is certain is that the White Martyrs, clothed like druids in distinctive white wool robes, fanned out cheerfully across Europe, founding monasteries that would become in time the cities of Lumièges, Auxerre, Laon, Luxeuil, Liège, Trier, Würzburg, Regensburg, Rheinau, Reichenau, Salzburg, Vienna, Saint Gall, Bobbio, Fiesole, and Lucca, to name but a few. “The weight of the Irish influence on the continent,” admits James Westfall Thompson, “is incalculable.” Saint Fursa the Visionary went from Ireland to East Anglia, then to Lagny, just east of Paris, then to Péronne, which would be known in time as Peronna Scottorum, Péronne of the Irish and City of Fursey. Caidoc and Fricor advanced on Picardy. Virgil the Geometer, an Irish satirist, became archbishop of Salzburg. The scholar Donatus, according to his epitaph, “Scottorum sanguine creatus” (“born of Irish blood”), was chosen in a popular election to be bishop of Fiesole, where he ruled for nearly fifty years. Saint Cathal (or Cahill, to use the modern spelling), widely venerated to this day in southern Italy as San Cataldo, was surprised on his way back from pilgrimage in the Holy Land to find himself elected bishop of Taranto, a city on the arch of Italy’s boot. Women exiles went forth as well; and though we know even less about them than we know about the men, the continental churches dedicated to Brigid in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy offer some evidence of their presence. At Amay in Belgium there was even discovered in 1977 a sarcophagus, ornamented in the Celtic manner and showing the image of a woman (mysteriously labeled “Saint Chrodoara”) who carries a bishop’s crozier. More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen. Before the end of the eighth century, the exiles had reached Modra in Moravia, where an old church has been dug up that looks just like the little church at Glendalough; and there are traces of the White Martyrs as far as Kiev. But an adequate list of missionaries and their foundations would fill another chapter. Suffice it to say that as late as 870 Heiric of Auxerre can still exclaim in his Life of Saint Germanus: “Almost all of Ireland, despising the sea, is migrating to our shores with a herd of philosophers!”
The most important centers of Irish-Christian influence
By this point, the transmission of European civilization was assured. Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish h
eroes had once tied to their waists their enemies’ heads. Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.
And that is how the Irish saved civilization.
* The first day of May, called Beltaine, was a spring celebration distinguished by bonfires, maypoles, and sexual license; the last night of October, called Samain, marked the beginning of winter, and was a night on which ghosts and other unfriendly creatures from the Otherworld were allowed to frighten the living.
* A glen in Irish is a valley created by cliffs or rocky hillsides. Glendalough is the Glen of the Two Loughs (or Lakes). Kevin preferred to stand in the Upper Lake because it was more remote—and probably chillier.
* In Patrick’s time the island of Britain was peopled by Romanized Celts, whom we call Britons, and, in its northern reaches, by the un-Romanized and ferocious Picts, who painted pictures all over their bodies, horrifying the Romans, who called them Picti (Painted People). Patrick was a Romanized Celtic Briton—not an Englishman. The German Angles, who in Patrick’s day were—with their Germanic cousins the Saxons and Jutes— harrying the southern and eastern coasts of Britain, soon settled in Britain, pushing the Romanized Celts into Wales and Cornwall. These new people, pagan at first but evangelized in the seventh century by a Roman librarian named Augustine (not of Hippo), gave their name to their new home, which came to be called Angland, or England.
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