COLUMBA
521 - 597
Columba who still, after fourteen
hundred years, exerts an appeal upon our imaginations.
Born in Ireland, in Donegal in the year 521,
he was of the blood royal, and might indeed
have become High King of Ireland had he not
chosen to be a priest. His vital, vigorous
personality has given rise to many legends,
and it is a little hard to sift fact from
what is more probably fiction. We do know
that he was a man of tremendous energy, probably
somewhat headstrong in his youth, but with
his tendency to violence curbed by a gentle
magnanimity.
It seems certain that he
left Ireland as an act of penance, although
it is less certain how far this was connected
with his quarrelling over a copy of the Gospels
he had made, a dispute that led to a bloody
battle. He came from Ireland to Sctoland,
to the colony of Dalriada founded on the west
coast by his fellow Irish Scots who were at
that time somewhat oppressed by the dominant
Picts. With twelve companions he founded his
monastery on Iona in the year 563. These Celtic
monks lived in communities of separate cells,
but Columba and his companions combined their
contemplative life with extraordinary missionary
activity. Amongst his many accomplishments,
Columba was a splendid sailor. He sailed far
amongst the islands and travelled deep inland,
making converts and founding little churches.
In Ireland he had already, it is said, founded
a hundred churches.
Of all the Celtic saints
in Scotland, Columba's life is much the best
documented, because manuscripts of his Life,
written by St Adamnan, one of his early successors
as abbot of Iona, have survived. Iona itself
remains a place of the greatest beauty, a
serene island set in seas that take on brilliant
colors in the sunshine, recalling the life
and background of this remarkable man whose
mission led to the conversion of Scotland
and of the north of England, and indeed carried
its influence far further afield. It later
became the site of a Benedictine Abbey and
of a little cathedral. These were dismantled
by the Scottish reformers in 1561, and part
of Columba's prophecy was fulfilled:
In Iona of my heart, Iona
of my love,
Instead of monks' voices shall be lowing of
cattle,
But ere the world come to an end
Iona shall be as it was.
When Dr Samuel Johnson visited
the island in 1773 he observed, 'That man
is little to be envied, whose patriotism would
not gain force upon the plain of Marathon,
or whose piety would not grow warmer among
the ruins of Iona!'
Columba was a poet as well
as a man of action. Some of his poems in both
Latin and Gaelic have come down to us, and
they reveal him as a man very sensitive to
the beauty of his surroundings, as well as
always, in St Adamnan's phrase, 'gladdened
in his inmost heart by the joy of the Holy
Spirit.' He died in the year 597.
