Ireland of the Saints

Sixth-century Ireland was a Christian country without cities, and so it produced a church organized not around the bishop of a town but around the abbot of a monastery — a development without parallel in the Roman world to the south. Into this society of many small kingdoms (túatha), bound loosely under regional over-kings and the symbolic high-kingship of Tara, Columba was born around 521 into the Cenél Conaill, a ruling branch of the northern Uí Néill and a kindred descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages. This file sets that political and ecclesiastical ground and introduces the theme that governs the whole life: the monk who was also a prince, the saint who could have been a king.

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

A Church Without Cities

The single fact that shapes everything about the Irish church of Columba’s age is that Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. The legions never crossed the Irish Sea; there were no Roman towns, no civitates, no municipal administration on which an episcopal structure could be hung. When Christianity reached Ireland — by the fifth century, the mission of Palladius “to the Irish believing in Christ” recorded under the year 431 by Prosper of Aquitaine, and then the more famous mission of Patrick — it arrived in a society organized along wholly different lines from the urbanized Mediterranean world that had produced the city-bishop (on Patrick’s mission see St. Patrick of Ireland).

In the Roman world the bishop was the bishop of a place — of a city, with its surrounding territory — and the diocese took its shape from the civil map. Patrick himself, a Romano-Briton, plainly envisaged and began to build an episcopal church of that kind. But over the late fifth and sixth centuries the organizing unit of the Irish church became not the territorial diocese but the monastery, and its dominant figure not the city-bishop but the abbot. The great churches of Ireland — Clonard, Clonmacnoise, Bangor, Kildare, and in time Iona and its dependencies — were monastic familiae, federations of houses bound together by their common descent from a single founder-saint and governed by the founder’s abbatial successors (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988). Bishops did not vanish — episcopal orders were necessary for ordination, and a monastery might have a bishop within its community — but ecclesiastical authority and property came to follow the monastic, kin-based pattern rather than the diocesan one. The older scholarly model that imagined a clean replacement of an “episcopal” by a “monastic” church in the sixth century has been considerably qualified in recent decades, but the distinctive prominence of the abbot-led monastery in Irish church life is not in doubt (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988).

This is why Columba is remembered above all as the founder and abbot of monasteries rather than as a bishop, and it is the precondition for the whole later history of Iona as the head of a far-flung monastic confederation (see Iona as a Monastic Powerhouse). The Irish ascetic foundations belong recognizably to the wider monastic movement of the undivided Church — the same impulse that filled the deserts of Egypt and Syria and that came west through figures such as John Cassian — even as Ireland gave it a form of its own (on the wider tradition see Monasticism; for the western transmission see St. John Cassian, and for the contemporary Latin monastic legislator St. Benedict of Nursia).

The World of the Túatha

The society into which this church grew was politically fragmented to a degree that has no Roman analogue. Early Ireland was divided among a great number of small kingdoms called túatha (singular túath) — perhaps on the order of a hundred and fifty of them at any one time — each a petty kingdom ruled by its own king (rí) and corresponding less to a province than to a people, a kindred-group occupying its own territory (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland). The túath was the basic political unit, and its king was a small king indeed by Continental standards: a ruler of a single people, bound into a dense web of clientship, tribute, and hostage-giving with his neighbours.

Above the kings of the individual túatha stood over-kings, who exacted submission and tribute from a number of lesser kings, and above some of these stood greater over-kings again, so that kingship in Ireland was layered — a hierarchy of overlordship rather than a single throne. The highest and most prestigious of these claims was the high-kingship of Tara, associated with the ancient royal site of Tara in the plain of Mide. By the sixth and seventh centuries the kingship of Tara had become the great prize and symbol of supremacy in the northern half of Ireland, claimed above all by the dynasties of the Uí Néill (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988; Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland). How real or how merely honorific the “high-kingship of all Ireland” was at this early date is a question scholars have long debated, and the developed ideology of a single high-king ruling the whole island is now generally recognized as in large part a later, propagandistic construction; but the kingship of Tara as the dominant prize of the Uí Néill in Columba’s own century is well grounded.

What matters for Columba is that he was born into the very kindred that controlled this prize. He was not a man at the margins of this political world but at its dynastic centre.

The Uí Néill and the Cenél Conaill

The Uí Néill — “the descendants of Niall” — were the dominant dynastic federation of the northern half of Ireland, claiming descent from Niall Noígiallach, Niall of the Nine Hostages, a (semi-legendary) king of the fifth century whose by-name advertised the hostage-tribute that was the currency of overlordship. By the sixth century the Uí Néill had split into a number of branches, conventionally grouped as the northern Uí Néill (in the northwest, in what is now Donegal and the surrounding country) and the southern Uí Néill (in the midlands, in Mide and Brega), among whom the kingship of Tara circulated (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988).

Columba belonged to the Cenél Conaill, the “kindred of Conall” — one of the principal branches of the northern Uí Néill, named for Conall Gulban, a son of Niall, and seated in Tír Conaill (“the land of Conall,” roughly modern County Donegal). This is no later inference: it is set down at the head of the chief source for Columba’s life. In the Second Preface to his Vita Sancti Columbae, Adomnán gives the saint’s pedigree, tracing him through the Cenél Conaill back to Niall, and naming his father as Fedelmid and his mother as Eithne (Adomnán, VC Second Preface; trans. Sharpe 1995; ed. Anderson and Anderson 1991). Reckoned through this pedigree, Columba was a great-great-grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages — that is, of the eponymous ancestor of the whole Uí Néill federation, and a near kinsman of the kings who contended for Tara (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988).

The point is not genealogical antiquarianism. Adomnán himself, who wrote the Vita a century after Columba’s death, was also of the Cenél Conaill and a kinsman of the saint, and one of the purposes of his Life is precisely to present Columba as a figure of royal stock and royal dignity, a holy man whose blessing made and unmade kings (the kingmaking theme runs through the Vita; Herbert 1988; Sharpe 1995, Introduction). The pedigree at the head of the Life is doing work: it tells the reader that the founder of Iona was a prince of the most powerful kindred in the north of Ireland.

“The Saint Who Could Have Been a King”

Here the governing theme of the whole collection is set. Columba was born to a kindred from which kings were drawn. Irish royal succession did not pass automatically from father to eldest son; the kingship was open, within limits, to a wider group of royal kinsmen — the derbfine, the descendants of a common great-grandfather — among whom a successor was chosen. By that reckoning Columba, a great-great-grandson of Niall and a member of the ruling Cenél Conaill, stood within the pool of men from whom a king of his kindred might in principle be raised: had he not become a monk, he could have been a candidate for kingship (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; on the dynastic standing of his family, Herbert 1988). Later medieval tradition would press this much harder, casting Columba as a man who renounced an all-but-certain crown; the soberest that the primary evidence will bear is the more modest and more secure statement — that he was of royal kindred and within the kin-group eligible for kingship.

That fact colours everything that follows. It explains why Adomnán can plausibly portray Columba as a maker of kings; it stands behind the dynastic entanglements that, in the later tradition, lie at the root of his quarrel and his self-exile (see The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne); and it gives the renunciation of “the white martyrdom” of exile its peculiar weight. The man who sailed for Iona in 563 left behind not only his country but a place near the summit of its politics. The convert’s surrender of the world, in his case, had a quite literal and dynastic content.

Born at Gartan, c. 521

Adomnán reports the place and the manner of Columba’s birth in the language of prophecy rather than of record. He tells that the saint’s coming was foretold before his birth — relating, among other portents, a vision granted to his mother and a prophecy that her son would be “a man who would lead innumerable souls to the heavenly country” (Adomnán, VC 3.1, with the birth-prophecies of Book 3; trans. Sharpe 1995). These are hagiographical claims, set down by Adomnán roughly a century after the events, and are to be received as the testimony of the Vita — what the Life attests of its saint — rather than as independent fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5). The tradition firmly localizes the birth at Gartan, in Tír Conaill (Donegal), in the territory of his Cenél Conaill kindred (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988).

The conventional birth-date of c. 521 is not given in any early source as such; it is a modern calculation. The Irish annals record Columba’s death (his obit) at the end of the sixth century — the Annals of Ulster enter it at 595, though the true date is generally reckoned to be 597 — and they also preserve a notice of his age. Working back from the death and the recorded length of his life, scholars arrive at a birth around 521 (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Annals of Ulster, s.aa. 595/597). The figure is therefore an inference, secure only to the degree that the annalistic obit and the age-figure are secure, and it should be cited as approximate.

[Disputed: the conventional birth-date c. 521 is not directly attested but back-reckoned from Columba’s recorded death and age. The Annals of Ulster enter his death under the year 595, while the genuine date of death is generally taken to be 597 (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; cf. Anderson and Anderson 1991); the resulting birth-date is accordingly given as c. 521 rather than as a fixed year.]

It is on this ground — a Christian island without cities, an abbot’s church rather than a bishop’s, a politics of small kingdoms crowned by the Uí Néill claim to Tara, and a saint born a prince of the Cenél Conaill — that the life of Columba begins. The next file turns from the country to the man: his names, his teachers, and the monasteries he raised in Ireland before he ever saw Iona.

See Also

References

  • Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. (Sharpe’s Introduction on the Irish monastic church, the túatha and over-kingships, the Uí Néill and the kingship of Tara, and Columba’s Cenél Conaill descent; the Second Preface for the pedigree from Niall; VC 3.1 and the Book 3 birth-prophecies.)
  • Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (Critical Latin text; the Second Preface pedigree and the dating of Columba’s death.)
  • Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (Columba’s Cenél Conaill / Uí Néill background; the dynastic and kin-based character of the Columban familia; Adomnán’s royal presentation of the saint.)
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The structure of the túatha, over-kingship, the Uí Néill, and the kingship of Tara.)
  • The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Ed. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (The obit of Columba, entered s.a. 595; the basis for the back-reckoned birth-date.)