08 — East and West
Columba stands at the meeting of East and West. His monasticism was the monasticism of the Egyptian desert, carried to a land that had no deserts; and he himself is a saint of the one undivided Church, venerated — slowly, recently, and rightly — in the Orthodox East as part of its own inheritance. This section traces both halves of that double bond: the Eastern roots of Irish asceticism, and the Orthodox reception of a pre-Schism Western saint.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)
The two files in this section answer two questions that belong together. The first is historical: where did Columba’s monasticism come from? The answer is the Egyptian desert — Antony, Pachomius, the Desert Fathers — transmitted to the Latin West and thence to Ireland through a small canon of authoritative books, above all the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian, with Athanasius’s Life of Antony and Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin. The Irish read these, revered them, and rebuilt the desert ideal on their own terms: the threefold “red, white, and green martyrdom” of the Cambrai Homily, the bloodless martyrdom of fasting and exile, and above all peregrinatio pro Christo — voluntary exile from homeland for Christ, precisely the act by which Adomnán frames Columba’s going to Iona.
The second question is theological: can an Orthodox Christian venerate Columba, and how? He died in 597, some four and a half centuries before the schism of 1054 — a saint of the undivided Church, whose asceticism, monasticism, and missionary sanctity are wholly within the patristic tradition the Orthodox East holds as its own. His feast is 9 June, the day of his repose. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century Orthodox recovery of the pre-Schism saints of the British Isles is a real and growing movement, handled here soberly: the principle — that the saints of the undivided Church are Orthodoxy’s common inheritance — is firm, while the liturgical commemoration still varies by jurisdiction and is a developing reception, not a universally fixed feast.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Celtic Monasticism and the Desert | The Eastern/Egyptian roots of Irish ascetic monasticism: its transmission to the West through Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences, Athanasius’s Life of Antony, and Sulpicius’s Life of Martin; the “red, white, and green martyrdom” of the Cambrai Homily; and peregrinatio pro Christo — exile as the supreme ascesis, the frame Adomnán gives Columba’s going to Iona. |
| Veneration and the Orthodox Reception | Columba as a pre-Schism saint of the undivided Church (d. 597), his feast on 9 June, the theology of why an Orthodox Christian may venerate him, and a sober account of the recent and still-developing Orthodox recovery of the Celtic and British saints, with commemoration varying by jurisdiction. |
See Also
- Founding Iona (563) — the departure framed as peregrinatio pro Christo
- The Familia of Columba — the monastic community that lived the desert ideals and carried the cult
- St. John Cassian — the conduit of Egyptian monasticism to the Latin West
- St. Martin of Tours — the Western Antony whose Life reached Ireland
- St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Benedict of Nursia — the wider company of pre-Schism Western saints
- Monasticism — the desert tradition behind Irish asceticism
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church to which Columba belongs
- The Church Calendar — the feast on 9 June and calendar variation among jurisdictions
References
- Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995. (Second Preface, Columba “wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ”; the repose of 597.)
- John Cassian. The Institutes and The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58, 57. New York: Newman/Paulist Press, 2000, 1997.
- Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
- Sulpicius Severus. Life of St Martin of Tours. Trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives. London: Penguin, 1998.
- The Cambrai Homily. Ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903.
- Stancliffe, Clare. “Red, White and Blue Martyrdom.” In Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe, ed. Whitelock, McKitterick, and Dumville, 21–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
- Charles-Edwards, T. M. “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio.” Celtica 11 (1976): 43–59; and Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.