The Young Monk Colum Cille

Before he was Columba of Iona he was Crimthann, a boy of the Cenél Conaill given over to the Church and fostered to a priest; the name by which Ireland remembers him, Colum Cille — “Dove of the Church,” Latin Columba, “dove” — was a by-name, attached to him (the Vita says) by God’s design. This file traces what can be said of his formation: his fosterage under the priest Cruithnechán, his study under a teacher named Finnian (which Finnian is itself contested), his training in Latin letters and the psalter alongside the native learned schools, his ordination, and the Irish monasteries he founded before his exile — Derry and Durrow above all, with Kells and others added by later tradition.

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

Crimthann: The Name Before the Name

The saint whom history knows as Columba was not so named at his birth. The early tradition preserved in the Irish lives gives his baptismal name as Crimthann — an ordinary, indeed slightly warlike, Irish personal name (it carries the sense of “fox” or, by extension, “raider”) of the sort a noble Cenél Conaill family might well bestow. It is the by-name Colum Cille, not the baptismal Crimthann, that became inseparable from him, and the early sources are aware of the distinction and feel the need to explain how the second name displaced the first (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988).

The substitution is itself a small witness to how the Church remade a man. The boy born to a kindred that produced kings, and given a name fit for such a kindred, is remembered instead by a name drawn from the gentlest of the creatures and bound to the Church — Colum Cille, the dove of the church or of the cell. The replacement of Crimthann by Colum Cille is, in miniature, the replacement of the prince by the monk that is the through-line of his whole story (see Ireland of the Saints).

“Dove of the Church”: The Meaning of Colum Cille

Of all the matters touching Columba’s early life, the one the chief source treats most deliberately is his name. In the Second Preface to the Vita Sancti Columbae, Adomnán pauses over it at length. He explains that the name Columba is the Latin for “dove” (columba), and he draws out its significance: the same word, he notes, names the bird that the Gospel shows descending upon the Lord — the Holy Spirit appeared “in the form of a dove” — so that the name given to the saint is no accident but a thing arranged by Providence, a sign that the grace of the Spirit rested upon him (Adomnán, VC Second Preface; trans. Sharpe 1995; ed. Anderson and Anderson 1991). Adomnán further observes that Columba is, in effect, a translation: the saint’s Irish by-name Colum Cille contains the same colum / “dove,” and Adomnán treats the Latin and Irish forms as two faces of one God-given name (Adomnán, VC Second Preface; Sharpe 1995). He even reaches for a Hebrew parallel, linking the name to Jonah, which in Hebrew likewise means “dove,” so that Columba’s name is set in a line of dove-names reaching back into Scripture (Adomnán, VC Second Preface; Sharpe 1995).

This is a hagiographer’s exposition, not a philological report, and it should be read as such: Adomnán is telling his readers what the name means for the holiness of the man, pinning the saint’s identity to the Spirit who descended as a dove. The reading of the dove-name as a providential sign is the testimony of the Vita, offered by Adomnán roughly a century after the saint’s death, and is reported here as the Life’s claim about its subject rather than as a verifiable fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5). What is not in doubt, and what the name plainly carries on its surface, is the lexical fact: Colum Cille / Columba means “dove (of the church),” and it is by this name — not his baptismal Crimthann — that the saint has always been venerated (Sharpe 1995, Introduction).

Fosterage and the Priest Cruithnechán

In early Irish society the rearing of children of good family was commonly entrusted to a foster-parent, and a child destined for the Church might be fostered to a cleric. The tradition consistently reports that the young Crimthann was fostered to, and brought up by, a priest named Cruithnechán, who is remembered as the one who baptized him and under whom he received his first nurture in the Christian life and letters (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988). Adomnán himself preserves an incident from these early years: he relates that when the boy was being reared by Cruithnechán, the foster-father once returned to find the cottage filled with light, and a ball of fire standing over the sleeping child’s face — a sign, the Vita says, of the grace of the Holy Spirit poured out upon him (Adomnán, VC 3.2; trans. Sharpe 1995). This too is a hagiographical claim, given by Adomnán a century later and reported here as the testimony of the Vita rather than as fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5); its interest for the historian is that it places the boy’s earliest formation firmly under Cruithnechán, in keeping with the wider tradition of his fosterage.

From the priest’s instruction the young Columba passed to the higher schooling of the Irish church — to the scriptoria and teaching of the great monastic schools, where the Latin learning of the Church and the native learning of Ireland met.

The Schools: Finnian, the Psalter, and Latin Letters

The sources agree that Columba, having been reared by Cruithnechán, went on to study under a master named Finnian, one of the towering teacher-saints of the sixth-century Irish church. Here, however, the tradition runs into a genuine difficulty, because there were two famous Finnians, and the sources do not make it certain which one Columba sat under.

The two are Finnian of Clonard (Cluain Iraird, in the midlands), the founder of the great school of Clonard, who in later tradition is styled the “teacher of the saints of Ireland” and reckoned the master of a whole generation of monastic founders; and Finnian of Moville (Mag Bile, in the north, in the territory nearer Columba’s own), founder of the monastery of Moville. The early lives and the later tradition variously assign Columba’s schooling to one or the other, and the names are easily confused in the manuscripts; modern scholars have not been able to settle the question with confidence, and some hold that the figure of “Columba’s Finnian” may even conflate traditions belonging to both men (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988). The famous later legend that makes a quarrel between Columba and “Finnian” over a copied psalter the seed of the battle of Cúl Dreimhne depends on resolving exactly this ambiguity, and the legend’s own uncertainty about which Finnian is meant is one of the reasons for treating it cautiously (see The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne).

[Disputed: the “Finnian” under whom Columba studied. The sources name a Finnian, but two famous teachers bore the name — Finnian of Clonard (Cluain Iraird) and Finnian of Moville (Mag Bile) — and which one taught Columba is not securely determinable; the early tradition and the manuscripts confuse the two, and scholars differ, some assigning him to Clonard, some to Moville, and some judging that the traditions of the two Finnians have been conflated (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988).]

Whichever Finnian it was, the content of the formation is clearer than the name of the teacher. Columba was trained in the Latin learning of the Church — the Scriptures, and above all the Psalter, which stood at the centre of monastic education and of the daily round of prayer. The later tradition makes him an ardent copyist and lover of the Psalms; the famous (and legendary) tale of the surreptitiously copied psalter, however it is judged, at least testifies that Columba was remembered as a man of the book, formed on the Psalter and devoted to the labour of the scriptorium (Sharpe 1995, Introduction; Herbert 1988). Alongside this Latin and scriptural training stood the native learning of Ireland: the early tradition associates the young Columba with the bardic schools and the learned orders, and a strand of the tradition has him study under a fili (a master-poet) named Gemmán. This connection to the native learned class accords with his royal birth and with his later fame as a poet and a protector of the poets, and it is the root of the tradition treated elsewhere in this collection of Columba as a maker of verse (see The Attributed Poems). The picture, then, is of a man formed in both learnings at once — the Latin letters, Scripture, and Psalter of the Church, and the poetry and learning of his own people — which is exactly what one would expect of a cleric of high Uí Néill birth, and which prepared the ground for Iona’s later eminence as a centre of manuscripts and learning (see Manuscripts and Learning).

Ordination

Columba was ordained, in due course, to the priesthood — and, as later tradition emphasized, to the priesthood only, not to the episcopate. There is a much-repeated story, found in the lives, that Columba had been intended for consecration as a bishop and was sent to a bishop for that purpose, but that through some confusion (in one telling, the bishop ordained him priest instead, whether by error or by divine arrangement) he received priestly rather than episcopal orders — a tale that functions to explain, and to sanctify, the fact that the great founder of Iona was an abbot-priest rather than a bishop (Sharpe 1995, Introduction). The historical residue beneath the legend is simply that Columba was a priest and an abbot, never a bishop — which is, again, entirely characteristic of the abbot-led Irish church described in the companion file (see Ireland of the Saints). His authority over the Columban familia would be the authority of an abbot, transmitted to abbatial successors of his own kindred, and it is as abbot of Iona that he stands in history (Herbert 1988).

The Irish Foundations: Derry and Durrow

Before ever he left Ireland, Columba was already a founder of monasteries — and this is essential to understanding what kind of man crossed to Iona in 563. He did not go into exile as an untried young monk but as an established head of churches, a builder of monastic communities within his own country.

The two foundations most securely associated with the Irish Columba, and the two that mattered most in the later history of his familia, are Derry and Durrow:

Derry (Irish Daire, “oak-grove”), in the north, in the territory of his own Cenél Conaill, is traditionally reckoned his earliest and most beloved foundation, conventionally dated to around 546. Derry remained one of the principal houses of the Columban federation, and the later tradition is full of Columba’s special love for the place and its oaks (Herbert 1988; Sharpe 1995, Introduction).
Durrow (Irish Dair Mag / Daurmag, “oak-plain”), in the midlands, in the territory of the southern Uí Néill, became the chief Columban house in Ireland and a great centre of learning; Adomnán, writing on Iona, speaks of Durrow (which he calls Dairmag) as Columba’s monastery and as a flourishing house of the familia (Adomnán, VC Second Preface and passim; trans. Sharpe 1995; Herbert 1988). Adomnán’s own references make Durrow the most prominent of the Irish Columban monasteries.

To these two the later medieval tradition added a longer list of Columban foundations — most famously Kells (Cenannas), together with various others scattered across the country — but Kells in particular did not become a major Columban centre until the early ninth century, when the community of Iona, under pressure from Viking raids, transferred much of its life and treasure (including, in the tradition, the great gospel-book that bears its name) to Kells; its ascription to Columba’s own hand is a retrospective extension of his memory rather than a securely sixth-century foundation (Herbert 1988). The soberest statement of the evidence is therefore this: Columba founded monasteries in Ireland before his exile, of which Derry and Durrow are the firmly grounded core, while the fuller catalogue of “Columban” houses — Kells among them — accrued to his name as his familia grew and as later generations claimed his patronage for their own churches.

[Disputed: the date and earliest associations of Columba’s Irish foundations. Derry (Daire) is conventionally dated c. 546 and Durrow (Dair Mag) treated as his chief Irish house — and Adomnán names Durrow as Columba’s monastery — but the early tradition’s fuller list of pre-exile foundations is uncertain, and houses such as Kells were added to the Columban familia only later (Kells becoming a principal centre in the early ninth century after the flight from Iona), so the catalogue of “Columban” monasteries reflects the later growth of the federation as well as the saint’s own activity (Herbert 1988; Sharpe 1995, Introduction).]

It was this man — Crimthann renamed Colum Cille, the dove of the church; prince of the Cenél Conaill; pupil of Cruithnechán and of one of the Finnians; priest and abbot; founder already of Derry and Durrow — who, around the year 563 and in circumstances the next section examines, took ship for the islands of the Picts and Scots and made the small Hebridean island of Iona the centre of his life and the heart of his familia (see The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne and Founding Iona, 563).

References

Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. (The Second Preface on the name Columba / Colum Cille, “dove,” the dove-of-the-Spirit and Jonah parallels, and on Durrow as the saint’s monastery; VC 3.2 on the ball of fire over the child reared by Cruithnechán; Sharpe’s Introduction on Crimthann, the fosterage, the Finnian question, the ordination story, and the Irish foundations.)
Adomnán’s Life of Columba. Ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (Critical Latin text of the Second Preface and of the early-life chapters.)
Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (Derry and Durrow as the core Irish foundations; the later accretion of Kells and the ninth-century transfer from Iona; the abbatial, kin-based character of Columba’s authority; the two Finnians.)
The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Ed. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (Early notices of Columba and of the Columban churches.)