Celtic Monasticism and the Desert

Irish ascetic monasticism — the world that formed Columba and that he carried to Iona — was a transposition of the monasticism of the Egyptian desert into a land that had no deserts. The channel was overwhelmingly literary: the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian, Athanasius’s Life of Antony, and Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin carried the teaching of Antony, Pachomius, and the Desert Fathers from Egypt through Gaul to Ireland, where it was read, revered, and rebuilt. This file traces that transmission, the Irish remaking of literal martyrdom into the “red, white, and green martyrdoms” of the Cambrai Homily, and the supreme Irish ascetic act of peregrinatio pro Christo — the voluntary exile by which Adomnán frames Columba’s going to Iona.

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

A Monasticism Without Deserts

The monasticism that produced Columba and the familia of Iona was, at its root, the monasticism of the Egyptian desert — but received at the far western edge of the known world, in a green and rain-soaked island that had never seen sand. The paradox is the key to the whole subject. Irish monks revered the abbas of Scetis and Nitria, imitated the solitude of Antony and the communities of Pachomius, and called their own hermitages díseart — “desert” — and yet there was no desert in Ireland to go to. The ascetic ideals of Egypt had to be transposed into a landscape and a society utterly unlike the one that produced them, and the history of Celtic monasticism is in large part the history of that creative transposition (Clancy and Márkus 1995; Stancliffe 1982).

That the influence is real is not in doubt; the question is how it travelled. The solid, demonstrable answer is that it travelled in books. By the time monasticism took root in Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spirituality of the Egyptian desert had already been gathered into a small number of Latin works of immense authority, and it was these — not any direct contact with Egypt — that the Irish read.

[Disputed: the directness of Eastern influence on Irish monasticism. An older, romantic view held that Egyptian or Coptic monks reached Ireland directly, citing the litany that commemorates “seven holy Egyptian monks” buried at Disert Uilaig in the west of Ireland, and pointing to supposed parallels in art and liturgy. This direct-contact thesis is unprovable and is not accepted by current scholarship. The demonstrable channel is the literary one: the transmission of Egyptian monastic teaching to the Latin West, and thence to Ireland, through John Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences, Athanasius’s Life of Antony (in its Latin versions), and Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin — the consensus represented by Clare Stancliffe and T. M. Charles-Edwards. The “seven Egyptian monks” litany is a genuine medieval witness to how the Irish imagined their descent from the desert, but not evidence of physical contact.]**

Cassian: The Conduit of the Desert to the West

The single most important conduit was St. John Cassian (c. 360 – c. 435). Formed in the cells of Scetis and at Bethlehem, Cassian settled at Marseilles and there wrote the two works that carried the lived spirituality of the Egyptian desert into the Latin language: the Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum), on the outward life of the monk and the eight principal vices, and the Conferences (Conlationes), presented as the discourses of the Egyptian abbas themselves (Cassian, Institutes and Conferences; Stewart 1998). Through Cassian the West — and Ireland with it — received the teaching of the desert at one remove: in his pages an Irish monk could hear Abba Moses on the monk’s true goal of puritas cordis, purity of heart (Conferences 1), Abba Isaac on unceasing prayer (Conferences 9–10), and the whole discipline of fasting, vigil, renunciation, and the discernment of thoughts that the Egyptians had worked out in the sand (see St. John Cassian).

That the Irish actually read Cassian, and revered him, is well attested. His works were copied and studied in the Irish and Hiberno-Latin world; later Irish ascetic literature echoes his vocabulary and his schemes; and the rule and culture of the Irish monasteries presuppose the kind of coenobitic and eremitic teaching that Cassian had codified (Stancliffe 1982; Charles-Edwards 2000). The line that St. Benedict drew in his Rule — prescribing the Conferences of Cassian as required reading for monks (Rule of St. Benedict 73; see St. Benedict of Nursia) — runs in parallel in the Irish world: Cassian was the West’s textbook of the desert, in Ireland no less than in Italy. Whatever the Irish knew of Antony and the abbas, they knew it very largely through him.

Antony and Martin: The Lives That Made Monks

Cassian taught the method of the desert; two great Lives gave it a face. The first was Athanasius’s Life of Antony (Vita Antonii), written shortly after the saint’s death in 356 and translated into Latin — most influentially by Evagrius of Antioch — within a generation. The Life of Antony did more than any other single book to make the desert ideal portable: it presented the hermit of the Egyptian wilderness as the new athlete of Christ, whose withdrawal (anachoresis), warfare with demons, and victory through ascesis became the template of monastic sanctity for the whole Church, East and West (Athanasius, Life of Antony; Brown 1971). Augustine famously records, in the Confessions, how the story of Antony — heard at second hand — shook him toward conversion (Confessions 8.6.14–15), a measure of the book’s power in the Latin West. The Irish inherited Antony through this Latin transmission as the archetype of the solitary, and the Irish anchorite — the anchara who withdrew to a remote cell or island — is his descendant.

The second Life domesticated the desert in the West itself. Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin (Vita Martini, c. 397) presented St. Martin of Tours (d. 397) as a Western Antony — soldier turned monk, founder of the community of Marmoutier, ascetic, wonder-worker, and bishop — and so proved that the heroism of the Egyptian desert could be lived in Gaul (Sulpicius Severus, Life of Martin; see St. Martin of Tours). The Life of Martin was a runaway success across the Latin world and reached Ireland early; Martin’s name and cult are woven into Irish tradition, which made him a kinsman and forerunner of Patrick himself (see St. Patrick of Ireland). For the Irish, Martin was the proof that one need not go to Egypt to be a monk of the desert — the desert could be founded wherever a man renounced the world.

Together these works — Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences, Athanasius’s Antony, Sulpicius’s Martin — formed the curriculum of the desert in the Latin West. They are the demonstrable foundation of Irish monastic spirituality, and they explain how a Church at the edge of the ocean came to live by the wisdom of Scetis (on the desert tradition as such, see Monasticism).

Red, White, and Green: The Three Martyrdoms

The deepest transposition the Irish made was of martyrdom itself. The monasticism of the desert had grown up, in part, as the heir of the age of persecution: when the blood-martyrdom of the persecutions ended with the peace of the Church, the radical self-offering it embodied was carried on by the ascetics, whose renunciation was understood as a “daily martyrdom.” The Irish, who had never known a persecution — Ireland was Christianized without an age of martyrs — inherited this ascetic-martyr ideal and gave it a famous threefold form.

The classic statement is the Cambrai Homily, the earliest surviving piece of continuous Old Irish prose (compiled probably in the late seventh or early eighth century, and preserved — by a Continental scribe who did not understand the Irish he was copying — in a manuscript at Cambrai). Commenting on the taking up of the cross, the homily distinguishes three kinds of martyrdom, naming them by colour:

Red martyrdom (dercmartre) — the literal shedding of blood for Christ, the martyrdom of the persecutions: enduring “the cross or destruction for Christ’s sake,” as in the suffering of the apostles.
White martyrdom (bánmartre) — the martyrdom of renunciation: when a person “separates for the sake of God from everything he loves,” undergoing fasting and labour, even though this does not lead to bloodshed or death.
Green or glas martyrdom (glasmartre) — the martyrdom of penance and self-denial: when “by means of fasting and labour” a person “separates from his desires, or suffers toil in penance and repentance,” subduing the body and the will.

(The Cambrai Homily, ed. and trans. in Stokes and Strachan, Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, vol. 2; the threefold scheme is the subject of the standard study by Clare Stancliffe, “Red, White and Blue Martyrdom,” in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe, 1982.) The colour glas in Old Irish covers a range from green to grey-blue, which is why Stancliffe’s classic essay renders the third colour “blue”; the underlying idea — the bloodless martyrdom of ascetic mortification — is the same whichever rendering one prefers, and “green martyrdom” is the form by which the concept is most widely known.

The scheme is a precise theological tool. It allows the Irish ascetic to claim the crown of the martyr without persecution: the monk who fasts, keeps vigil, renounces what he loves, and leaves his home for Christ dies a real, if bloodless, death to self, and so stands in the succession of the red martyrs of the early Church. The whole ascetic programme of Irish monasticism — its severe fasting, its night offices, its penitential discipline, its love of the remote hermitage — is to be read in this light: not as mere rigour, but as white and green martyrdom, the desert’s answer to a world that no longer killed Christians (Stancliffe 1982; Clancy and Márkus 1995).

Peregrinatio pro Christo: Exile as the Supreme Ascesis

Of all the forms the bloodless martyrdom took, the Irish exalted one above the rest: peregrinatio pro Christo, “pilgrimage for Christ” — the voluntary, often permanent, exile from one’s homeland and kin for the love of God. To grasp its force one must understand what kindred and túath meant in early Irish society: a person’s identity, security, legal standing, and very life were bound up in family and home territory. To leave them deliberately and forever was a kind of social death — to make oneself a stranger, with no protection and no return. That is precisely why the Irish made it the highest ascesis. The peregrinus abandoned the most fundamental of natural goods, his place among his own people, and so enacted the white martyrdom of the Cambrai scheme in its most complete form (Charles-Edwards, “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio,” 1976; Charles-Edwards 2000).

The model behind it is the call of Abraham — “Go forth from your country and from your kindred and from your father’s house” (Genesis 12:1) — read as the charter of monastic exile, and behind that the desert’s own anachoresis, the withdrawal of the Egyptian solitary from the inhabited world. The Irish gave this its own intensity, and it produced the great age of Irish wandering: Columbanus to Gaul and Italy, the peregrini who seeded monasteries across Europe, the anchorites who set out in skin boats to find a “desert in the ocean,” and — supremely for this collection — Columba’s own going to Iona.

For it is exactly as peregrinatio that Adomnán frames the founding act of Columba’s life. In the Second Preface of the Life of Columba, Adomnán writes that Columba, “in the forty-second year of his age, sailing away from Ireland to Britain, chose to be a pilgrim for Christ” — pro Christo perigrinari volens enavigavit (Adomnán, Vita Columbae, Second Preface; trans. Sharpe 1995). The phrase is not incidental decoration; it is the interpretive key Adomnán hands his readers to the whole departure. Whatever the tangled circumstances that lay behind Columba’s leaving Ireland — the synod, the battle of Cúl Drebene, the politics of his Uí Néill kindred (treated in Founding Iona (563)) — Adomnán presents the leaving itself, theologically, as the supreme Irish ascetic act: the abandonment of homeland and kin to become a pilgrim and stranger for Christ. The island of Iona, in this reading, is Columba’s desert: his place of exile and ascesis, his Scetis at the edge of the Atlantic.

Iona as Desert

The hermit’s cell in the wilderness has its Irish echo in the island and the díseart. Where the Egyptian withdrew into the sand, the Irish ascetic withdrew across water — to a remote island, a sea-girt rock, a lonely promontory — and the very word the Irish used for such a hermitage, díseart (from Latin desertum), is the desert transplanted, surviving today in dozens of Irish place-names beginning Dysart- and Disert-. The island monastery of Iona is itself a kind of desert: cut off by the sea, austere, given over to prayer, labour, vigil, and the copying of books, the whole life of Columba’s familia (see The Familia of Columba) organized around the ascetic disciplines that Cassian had carried west from Scetis. Adomnán’s Iona, with its round of offices, its fasting, its manual labour, its anchorites withdrawing to even remoter cells and islands for stricter solitude, is recognizably the desert of Antony and the Conferences, transposed to the Hebrides.

This is the meaning of saying that Columba is a saint of the desert tradition. He did not invent Irish monasticism; he received it — its books, its ideals, its threefold martyrdom, its exalting of exile — and embodied it on Iona with such authority that his island became one of the great radiating centres of that tradition in the British Isles. Behind the green island and the grey northern sea stand Antony in the Egyptian sand, Cassian in his cell at Marseilles, and Martin at Marmoutier: the desert, carried by books to a land that had no deserts, and made to live again at the edge of the world.

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,” pro Christo perigrinari volens; Sharpe’s Introduction and notes on peregrinatio.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony. (Vita Antonii; Greek text c. 357; Latin trans. of Evagrius of Antioch.) Trans. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
Sulpicius Severus. Life of St Martin of Tours (Vita Martini, c. 397). Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 11; and Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives, London: Penguin, 1998.
John Cassian. The Institutes and The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 58 and 57. New York: Newman/Paulist Press, 2000, 1997. (Conferences 1 on purity of heart; 9–10 on prayer.)
The Cambrai Homily. Ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholia, Prose, and Verse, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. (The earliest continuous Old Irish prose; the threefold red / white / green (glas) martyrdom.)
Stancliffe, Clare. “Red, White and Blue Martyrdom.” In Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville, 21–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (The standard study of the Cambrai Homily’s three martyrdoms and the desert roots of Irish asceticism.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio.” Celtica 11 (1976): 43–59. (The legal and social meaning of voluntary exile in early Irish society.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The wider context of Irish monasticism, peregrinatio, and asceticism.)
Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. (Iona’s monastic culture and its ascetic ideals.)
Brown, Peter. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. (The desert ascetic as the new model of sanctity in the Latin world.)
Rule of St Benedict, ch. 73 (prescribing the Conferences of Cassian).