II

ST. COLUMBAN

 

One of the most important and interesting features of Celtic Christianity was the Irish apostolate on the continent of Europe. It began with St. Columban, a contemporary of St. Augustine.

St. Columban (543-615) was born in Leinster and studied assiduously at the monastery of Bangor in Down. He appears to have learned Greek, and even Hebrew, as well as Latin. Longing to be a missionary, he started with twelve companions to preach the Gospel in Gaul and made his home in Burgundy. He founded successively monasteries at Anegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaine. His name is especially associated with Luxeuil, the site being that of a deserted Gallo-Roman town where he found the images of the heathen gods still standing amid the ruins and the thickets. Here he composed his famous and rigid monastic rule in two parts, one for the solitary ascetics and the other for those who led the “common life”. Zealously attracting the people to 'the medicines of penitence', he made private confessions become more frequent, and drew up penitential rules for that purpose. For a time he enjoyed the friendship of Theodoric II, King of Burgundy, and nearly persuaded him to lead a virtuous life. But when the king’s grandmother, the formidable Brunhild, pointedly asked him to bless the king’s illegitimate children, she met with a rebuff more peremptory than polite, and resolved to take revenge. He had previously had trouble with the Frankish bishops on account of his observance of the Celtic Easter. They intended to pass judgment on him at a Council held in 602. He had written letters to Pope Gregory defending his custom, and, as he was then in favor at the royal court, the matter was dropped. Now, however, Brunhild stirred up the bishops to find fault with his monastic rule, and the king forced him to leave Burgundy.

ST. GALL

Among the faithful companions of St. Columban was St. Gall. Together they went to Switzerland and preached at Arbon and Bregenz. St. Gall took especial pleasure in burning heathen temples and throwing idols into convenient lakes, but his combined fearlessness and knowledge of the language of the country helped him to escape the doom which he had courted. Columban determined to go to Italy; but Gall stayed in Switzerland, where he made a cell and lived in retirement. Over that cell there was built in the eighth century a prodigious monastery and church of Saint Gall, a church replaced in the eighteenth century by the gorgeous rococo building designed by Peter Thumb.

Columban, with the remainder of his flock, descended the Alps and found rest for his feet, and soon also for his soul, at Bobbio, in a valley of the Apennines. Here are still preserved the dust of his bones, his knife, and other relics. Bobbio continued for some time to be frequently visited by Celtic pilgrims, and in modern times is always associated in the minds of students with the famous Missal of Bobbio, a priceless liturgical treasure of Gallican character with traces of Irish influence. A signal indication of the spirit of the early inmates of Bobbio is to be found in the fact that they not only, like other Irish monks, claimed exemption from Episcopal control, but were the first to obtain from the Pope a license for such exemption. The monastery was placed directly under the Pope, a privilege of grave omen for the future history of the Church.

FIRST PERSECUTION OF THE CATHOLICS BY ENGLISH IN ENGLAND’S HISTORY

It is in Northumbria that we best observe the activity of Celtic and of Anglo-Roman missions side by side. Early in the seventh century Edwin, King of Northumbria, was the most powerful man in the country since the departure of the Romans. The King of the West Saxons hated him and sent men with a poisoned dagger to kill him. The dagger passed through the body of a faithful attendant and Edwin’s life was saved. It was an Easter Eve at the royal palace near Aldby, and that night Edwin’s Kentish wife safely bore her first child, a daughter. Deeply moved, Edwin promised Paulinus, the bishop who had accompanied the queen to her new home, that he would become a Christian if he conquered the West Saxons. He conquered and returned.

He no longer worshipped idols, but he hesitated to receive baptism. Pope Boniface V wrote to him, but still he hesitated. Then he called a council and asked each magnate in turn what he thought of the new religion. First a heathen priest, Coifi, gave a cynical reply. Then a layman began to speak of the mystery of human life and added the famous simile, “The king and his captains are sitting at supper on a dark winter’s day; rain or snow are without, a bright fire is in their midst. Suddenly a little bird flies in, a sparrow, in at one door and then out at another. It passes out of the winter into the winter and vanishes from your sight. So is the life of man. As to what follows it or what went before it we know absolutely nothing. If the new religion will tell us anything of these mysteries, the before and the after, it is the religion that is wanted”. Then Coifi begged that Paulinus might be heard. And Paulinus, who had known how to wait, then had his opportunity, and he spoke with such effect that Coifi was the first to destroy the shrines at which he had led the worship of his heathen tribesmen. Edwin and many of his people were baptized, and York became a cathedral city.

The new converts were soon exposed to a cruel test. Mercia, the middle kingdom in England, was under King Penda, a champion of the old gods. Hemmed in by Christian states, he resolved to break the powers that were closing round him, and went forth to war. He defeated and killed Edwin at the battle of Hatfield in 633, and Christianity was reduced to such straits that Paulinus returned to Kent.

Man’s necessity proved to be God’s opportunity, and the desertion of his flock by Paulinus made the way plainer for a mission which accomplished more than had been done by the Roman missions in the south of England. St. Oswald came to the throne of Northumbria in 634. Like Alfred at a later time, he presents to us almost an ideal of royal sanctity. Seeking to restore the fallen Church, he applied not to Rome or to Kent, but to the monastery of Iona, the isle of saints. The learning of the Irish-Scottish monks of Iona was united with fervent missionary zeal, and that zeal was seen at its best in the bishop who came to the island of Lindisfarne near to Oswald’s royal castle of Bamborough.

ST. AIDAN

St. Aidan (d. 651) and some of his companions seem to have possessed exactly those qualities which were undeveloped in the character of St. Augustine. They were very simple, homely, and gentle, as well as rigorous in their self-denial. The result was a personal influence over others which was deep and lasting. Their external methods also differed from the methods of the Roman missionaries. The Celtic monks were recluses from whom kings sought direction in spiritual matters: the Roman monks moved in royal courts. The former built small rude churches or worshipped in caves near the sound of the sea. The latter built stately basilicas that recalled the splendor of the Italian churches in Rome and Milan. Both were truly men of God; but the typical Celtic monk was a man of feeling, and the typical Roman monk was a man of affairs. The good qualities of both were needed for the permanent life and perfection of the Church. But the Celts were unrivalled as pioneers. The people whom they made Christian remained Christian, and wherever they went they planted convents of men and women which became fresh centers of missionary work.

St. CUTHBERT

St. Cuthbert (d. 687), who absorbed these diverse influences, is one of the first of thoroughly English saints. Probably a Northumbrian, he was born in the Lothians, and was a shepherd when in 651 he believed he saw a vision of the soul of Aidan. He entered the monastery at Old Melrose, of which the first abbot was Eata, one of the twelve Northumbrian boys instructed by St. Aidan. Cuthbert had loved wrestling and running and boyish pranks; and a story, which has been rather refined than refuted, tells us that when he was eight years of age a child of three rebuked him for standing on his head naked. He also suffered from a swelling on his knee, a malady well known to athletes, but was cured by a hot poultice of flour and milk.

After leading a life of great piety at Melrose, he accompanied Eata to the monastery at Ripon. When King Alchfrith, who built the monastery, adopted the Roman Easter, Cuthbert went back to Melrose, and preached the Gospel with great success to the ignorant country folk in the neighborhood. After the Synod of Whitby, in 664, he himself decided to abandon the Celtic Easter, and Eata, then Abbot of Lindisfarne, appointed him prior of the house.

Resolving to lead a more strictly ascetic life, Cuthbert in 676 first retired to a lonely cave, and then built for himself a cell on the island now known as House Island. He passed nine years in this cell, withdrawing more and more completely from all human intercourse until he only opened the window to give his blessing or accept some necessary food. More against his will than otherwise, he was persuaded to become Bishop of Lindisfarne, being consecrated at York by Archbishop Theodore and seven bishops in 685. Two years later he died in his cell, hardly sixty years of age, and worn out by his austerities and an internal tumor which was an evil legacy of the plague which attacked him at Melrose. He was neither a great reformer nor a man of great intellectual gifts, but his sincerity, gentleness, and humility won for him a veneration little, if at all, inferior to that which has been paid to martyrs and doctors of the Church. In 999 his relics were placed in Durham Cathedral, where they were found, together with the head of St. Oswald, in 1827.

THE CELTIC CHISTIANITY

No exhaustive account can here be given of the causes which led to the decline of Celtic Christianity. But among those causes are two which can be easily understood. The first is the adoption of the Latin language by the Celtic missionaries. This was a step which certainly was in the direction of a higher civilization, and assisted the formation of the schools of learning for which Ireland became famous. But it brought the Celtic Churches within the orbit of Roman ideas. In the east of Europe Cyril and Methodius, the apostles of the Slays, provided their converts with the Bible and the liturgy in Slavonic. And the Arian Goths, in the fourth century, were provided by Ulfila with the Bible in Gothic. The result in each case was a degree of vitality and power of resistance which could not have otherwise been attained. If St. Patrick and St. Columba had provided their people with a Gaelic Bible and a Gaelic missal the struggle with Rome would have been indefinitely prolonged. But the diffusion of Latin among the Celts inevitably meant a closer communion with the heart of Latin Christendom.

A second cause of the Celtic decline can be found in the character of the Celtic monastic rules. Those rules found their fullest expression in the scheme of St. Columban. They were terrible in their severity. Obedience “even unto death” was required of his monks. The penal code was minute, the least negligence, the least sin of omission or commission, was to be punished with strokes of the rod. But there were no proper regulations for the administration of the monastery or for the employment of time in daily life. Now very near the time when St. Columban was born there died the great monk St. Benedict, who had profited by observing the mistakes of others, and had drawn up a rule which was both less impetuous and more precise than the rule of the great Celtic saint. St. Benedict knew that too harsh a system defeats itself, and knew that for “idle hands” work is always found by the powers of evil. He therefore resolutely determined to be gentle, and carefully prescribed what was to be done hour by hour. The Benedictine rule was not known in France until after the death of St. Columban, but when it was known it quickly won its way, and before the ninth century was victorious because it was intrinsically better. Here as elsewhere the Celtic genius, so potent in attracting and stimulating the individual, was less able than the Latin to organize and govern a community. It taught men to confess their sins to a priest who was anmchara, friend of the soul, it urged them to endure in journeying often, in order to spread the Gospel, but it did not inspire them with a sense of the religious value of unity and cohesion.