01 — Foundations

The world into which Columba of Iona (c. 521 – 597) was born and the man he was before exile: sixth-century Ireland with its uniquely monastic church, its mosaic of petty kingdoms (túatha) under the high-kingship of Tara, and the royal Uí Néill kindred to which Columba belonged. These files establish that the founder of Iona was a great-great-grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages — a man who, had he not become a monk, could have stood as a candidate for kingship — and trace his baptismal name Crimthann, his by-name Colum Cille (“Dove of the Church”), his fosterage and schooling, and the Irish monasteries he founded at Derry and Durrow before he ever crossed the sea.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)

Almost everything that can be said about Columba before his departure for Iona in 563 must be drawn from a single dominant source — the Vita Sancti Columbae written on Iona itself by his successor and kinsman Adomnán around the end of the seventh century — supplemented by the terse, near-contemporary notices of the Irish annals. Adomnán is a hagiographer, not a biographer in the modern sense, and his interest is in the holy man and his powers rather than in chronology; what he gives of Columba’s origins is concentrated in the Second Preface to the Life, where the saint’s pedigree and his “dove” name are set down. This section reads that material against the political and ecclesiastical shape of early Christian Ireland, and sets up the theme that runs through the whole collection: the saint who could have been a king.

The two files below treat, first, the country and its church — why Ireland, never urbanized on the Roman pattern, produced an abbot-led monastic church rather than a city-bishop’s church, and how Columba’s birth into the Cenél Conaill of the northern Uí Néill placed him at the centre of its dynastic politics — and second, the young monk himself: his name, his teachers, the contested “Finnian” under whom he studied, and his Irish foundations.

Files in This Section

File Description
Ireland of the Saints Sixth-century Ireland and its distinctively monastic church; the world of the túatha and the over-kingdoms; the high-kingship of Tara and the northern Uí Néill; Columba’s royal lineage in the Cenél Conaill as great-great-grandson of Niall Noígiallach (Niall of the Nine Hostages), born c. 521 at Gartan in Tír Conaill — and the theme of the saint who could have been a king (Adomnán, VC Second Preface; VC 3.1).
The Young Monk Colum Cille His baptismal name Crimthann and the by-name Colum Cille / Latin Columba, “dove”; fosterage under the priest Cruithnechán and study under the bishop-teacher Finnian (Clonard or Moville — contested); the bardic schools, Latin letters, and the psalter; his ordination; and the Irish monasteries he founded before exile — Derry (c. 546) and Durrow above all, with Kells and others added by later tradition.

See Also

  • The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne — the crisis that turned the Irish abbot-prince into the exile of Iona
  • Founding Iona, 563 — the sequel to the Irish foundations treated here
  • The Vita Columbae — the character and reliability of the one source on which this section chiefly depends
  • St. Patrick of Ireland — the apostle of the Irish whose mission lies a century behind Columba’s church
  • Monasticism — the wider Orthodox monastic tradition within which the Irish ascetic foundations stand
  • Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of which the Celtic west was a province

References

  • Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. (Translation with extensive introduction and notes; the Second Preface on the pedigree and the dove-name; VC 3.1 on the birth.)
  • Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (The standard critical edition of the Latin text.)
  • Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
  • The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Ed. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983.