St. Columba, Warmonger

[c. 521–597] FEAST DAY: June 9

A traveler is hard put to find any monuments of early Christian Ireland. The passage of centuries, wave after wave of war and rebellion during England’s occupation of the island, and the English Protestant dismantling of the Catholic Church in Ireland have all combined to reduce even the most important sites to piles of old rubble. St. Columba may have been born a prince of the O’Donnells, but there is nothing in County Donegal to suggest the power that clan once exerted there. The Rock of Doon, where the O’Donnell kings were installed, is just one more stone pinnacle in a landscape full of such craggy landmarks. As for Columba’s birthplace, a Celtic high cross, erected in modern times, marks the site in an otherwise empty field. At the foot of the cross lies a slab of rock: legend says the saint’s mother gave birth on this stone.

Although physical traces of Columba are scanty, his fame has never faded away, particularly among the Irish and the Scots, who revere him as one of their greatest national saints.

Like so many of his countrymen, Columba was mad for poetry and books. He was a newly ordained priest visiting St. Finnian at his monastery at Clonnard when he saw a beautiful Psalter Finnian himself had just brought back from Rome. It was an edition of St. Jerome’s translation of the Psalms, rendered in flawless Latin. The book enchanted Columba. Night after night, after the monks had gone to sleep, Columba sat up copying the Psalter.

When Finnian discovered that Columba had been making a copy of his exquisite book, he demanded that Columba hand it over. Affronted, Columba refused. The quarrel grew so acrimonious that the two monks appealed to Diarmaid, Ireland’s high king, to settle the question. Like a Celtic Solomon Diarmaid ruled, “To every cow its calf, to every book its copy.” Columba was forced to surrender the copy he had toiled over through many long nights.

But this ancient case of copyright infringement did not end there. Columba returned home to his monastery, angry and humiliated, trying to suppress his desire for revenge.

Not long after Diarmaid had ruled against Columba, a man from Connaught named Curran entered a hurling match. By accident he killed one of his opponents, a man related to Diarmaid. In fear for his own life, Curran fled to Columba’s monastery for sanctuary. Columba sheltered the frightened man willingly and was just beginning the process that would clear Curran of a charge of homicide when the king’s men-at-arms arrived at the door. The monks tried to bar the soldiers’ way, but with weapons drawn the warriors scattered the holy men, then rushed right up to the altar where Columba held Curran in his arms, trying to shield the refugee with his own body. In the intense struggle that followed, Diarmaid’s men threw Columba aside, dragged Curran out of the church, and killed him.

Enraged by this second insult at Diarmaid’s hands, Columba appealed to his clansmen to avenge the family’s honor, not to mention the rights of God, since the law of sanctuary had been violated. The O’Donnells rallied around their kinsman, declaring war on the king. At a place called Cooladrummon, beneath the County Sligo landmark known as Ben Bulben (made famous in the William Butler Yeats poem), the two armies met. Columba stood behind his clan, his armies stretched in the form of a cross, praying to God for victory. Diarmaid had brought along Finnian, who assumed the same position behind the king’s troops. In the ferocious battle that followed three thousand men were slaughtered. The O’Donnells won the day; Columba felt vindicated.

The bishops and abbots of Ireland did not see it that way. At Telltown in Meath the leading churchmen of the country met to discuss the disgraceful incident. As the instigator of the battle, Columba was liable for excommunication. Only an appeal from his friend St. Brendan of Clonfert saved him from being excluded from the Church. Instead the synod voted for exile, ordering Columba to atone for his crime by bringing as many converts into the Church as died at Cooladrummon.

Columba’s first biographer, Adomnan, makes no mention of the dispute over the Psalter or the violation of the right of sanctuary. While he does mention the synod of Telltown’s threat to excommunicate Columba, Adomnan doesn’t say what Columba did to deserve such censure. To set his readers’ minds at rest, Adomnan assures us that the bishops and abbots were overreacting, that Columba’s fault was “trivial and very pardonable.” Then, for good measure, Adomnan says that besides, the process of excommunication discussed at Telltown would not have conformed to accepted ecclesiastical standards of due process.

If Adomnan sounds defensive, he was. Columba was a member of Adomnan’s family, and although they had never met (Columba died almost thirty years before Adomnan was born), kinship in Ireland could be, as we have seen, a very potent thing.

Obedient to the synod, Columba prepared to leave his homeland. Twelve monks, all blood relations, volunteered to go with him. It is likely that they sailed from the harbor of Derry, where Columba had founded a monastery. They steered their little boat north until they landed on the Scottish island of Iona, off the coast of the larger Isle of Mull. It wasn’t much of a place—flat, rocky, its soil too poor for farming—but to the early Irish monks enduring the rigors of exile in a harsh landscape was not only a praiseworthy act of penance, it was heroic. The monks called such exile “the White Martyrdom,” to distinguish it from the more commonly understood form, “the Red Martyrdom,” in which the Christian sheds his blood for Christ. Among the Irish at this time, to leave Ireland, to sever ties with one’s family, was a sacrifice so hard to make that God would most certainly take notice and shower the exile with blessings. Columba found his banishment so painful that he set up his cell on the side of the island where he could not see the coast of Ireland on the horizon.

As Columba and his monks began to build a monastery for themselves on Iona, a message came from Conall, the king of the Scottish province of Dalraida. He was deeding title of the island to Columba and his monks forever. (By the way, King Conall was also related to Columba.)

Some of the Scots in Dalraida were Christian, so for the first two years Columba and his companions focused their attention on building up the Church on the western edge of Scotland. Meanwhile, Columba prepared for a mission to the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, who were still pagan, still following their druids in the worship of a host of gods and spirits of the natural world.

Before he began this mission Columba sent to Ireland for help. Two distinguished monks joined him in Iona, St. Canice (or Kenneth) and St. Comgall. They decided to start by visiting the Pictish king, Brude of Inverness. The king, however, refused to see the missionaries and had the gates of his stronghold barred against them. But when Columba raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross, an unseen hand pulled back the bolts and pushed the massive gates open.

Impressed by the miracle, Brude gave the three Irishmen permission to preach in his kingdom. In later centuries Scotland’s kings would claim that Columba converted all the Picts. That is probably an exaggeration. Adomnan tells us Columba crossed Scotland, from east to west, two or three times, and that he preached the gospel in Skye, Kintyre, and along Loch Ness, where Columba had an interesting encounter.

He found a funeral in progress. The mourners said the dead man had been swimming in the loch when a sea monster attacked and killed him. As the mourners told their story, Columba observed another man swimming in the loch. As if on cue, the monster rose out of the water and lunged at the foolish swimmer. Columba made the sign of the cross, then commanded the beast to leave the man unharmed and return to the depths of the loch. To the amazement of everyone onshore, the monster obeyed.

Adomnan’s story is the first written account of a monster in Loch Ness.

In his later years Columba was too infirm to go on missionary journeys. He settled into a quiet life at Iona, a gentle, genial abbot who spent his days writing poetry and copying books for libraries. He was transcribing the Psalms when he reached the verse “They that seek the Lord shall not be deprived of any good thing” (Psalm 33:11). Setting down his pen he said, “Here I must stop; let Baithin do the rest.” Baithin was the monk Columba had named his successor. And, of course, Baithin was one of Columba’s cousins.

That night as the monks filed into the dark church for matins they discovered Columba collapsed before the altar. He could not speak, but he tried to bless his monks. With that final gesture, the old man died. “The whole church,” Adomnan says, “resounded with loud lamentations of grief.”