Veneration and the Orthodox Reception

St. Columba of Iona died in 597, some four and a half centuries before the schism of 1054 — a saint of the one undivided Church, and therefore a saint whom Orthodox Christians may venerate as part of their own inheritance rather than as a borrowing from a separated communion. His feast is kept on 9 June, the day of his repose. This file sets out the theology of that veneration — why a pre-Schism Western saint belongs to Orthodoxy — and gives a sober account of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Orthodox recovery of the Celtic and British saints, which is a real and growing movement but one whose liturgical commemoration still varies by jurisdiction and remains a developing reception rather than a universally fixed observance.

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

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The decisive fact about Columba’s place in Orthodoxy is chronological and ecclesiological at once: he lived and died within the one undivided Church. Adomnán’s Life and the Irish annals place his repose on Iona in 597 (the dating is treated in the sources for his life). That is roughly four hundred and fifty-seven years before the mutual excommunications of 1054 that are conventionally taken to mark the estrangement of the Latin West from the Orthodox East. Columba never knew a divided Christendom. The Church he served — in Ireland, in Dál Riata, among the Picts — was in communion with Rome, with Constantinople, with Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; it confessed the faith of the first ecumenical councils; its monasticism, as the companion file shows, was the desert’s own tradition carried west (Celtic Monasticism and the Desert).

This is why the Orthodox treatment of the saints of the pre-Schism West is not a matter of ecumenical courtesy but of inheritance. The principle is straightforward and is widely stated in Orthodox writing on the subject: the saints of the undivided Church — of the first millennium, before the breach — are the common possession of all who hold the faith of that Church, and the Orthodox East has as much right and reason to honour Columba, Patrick, Martin, or Augustine of Canterbury as it has to honour the Eastern fathers of the same centuries (on the era as such, see The Pre-Schism Church). The Western and Eastern saints of the first millennium stand on the same side of the schism; the line of 1054 runs after them, not between them.

Why an Orthodox Christian May Venerate Columba

The theological case rests on three convergent grounds.

First, communion. Sanctity in the Orthodox understanding is ecclesial — a saint is a saint of the Church, glorified within her communion. Columba’s whole life was lived in the communion of the undivided Church, before any division existed to put him on the “wrong” side of it. There is no schism in his biography to be overlooked; he is simply a saint of the Church that the Orthodox confess themselves to be (see The Church Fathers, on the Fathers of the undivided Church as the common patrimony).

Second, doctrine and asceticism. The content of Columba’s sanctity is recognizably and wholly patristic. His monasticism is the monasticism of Antony and Cassian, transposed to the Hebrides; his asceticism is the bloodless martyrdom of fasting, vigil, exile, and self-denial that the Cambrai Homily called white and green martyrdom; his missionary labour among the Picts is apostolic in the plainest sense. Nothing in the spirituality attested by Adomnán’s Life of Columba stands outside the ascetic and missionary tradition that the Orthodox East holds as its own. An Orthodox Christian venerating Columba is not venerating something foreign to Orthodoxy but recognizing Orthodoxy’s own ascetic tradition in a Western dress.

Third, the witness of his cult. Columba was venerated as a saint from the moment of his death, in an unbroken local cult attested by Adomnán within a century, and that veneration arose within the undivided Church and on its authority. The Orthodox recovery of his memory is therefore not the creation of a cult but the reception of an ancient one — the gathering back into conscious Orthodox memory of a saint the Church had always had.

The Feast: 9 June

Columba’s feast is kept on 9 June, the day of his repose on Iona in 597 — the saint’s dies natalis, his birthday into heaven, in the ancient pattern by which the Church keeps the day of a martyr’s or confessor’s death as his feast (on the principle, see The Church Calendar). The date is shared across the traditions that honour him: it is his day in the medieval Irish and Scottish calendars, in the Roman Martyrology, in the Anglican and Roman Catholic calendars, and in the Orthodox commemorations of the Celtic saints that keep his memory. (As with all first-millennium dates, the Julian/Gregorian distinction applies where a jurisdiction follows the old calendar; the proper day of the feast, 9 June, is constant.)

His Irish and Gaelic name, Colum Cille — “the dove of the church” — is itself part of his veneration: the dove of Genesis and of the Holy Spirit, fixed on a man whose life was given to the founding of churches. He is honoured as abbot of Iona, as one of the patrons of Ireland and of Scotland, and — in the framing this collection follows — as apostle to the Picts.

The Orthodox Recovery of the Western Saints

The conscious Orthodox reclamation of the pre-Schism saints of the British Isles and Ireland is a real movement, and it is a comparatively recent one. For most of Orthodox history the Celtic and British saints of the first millennium, though never formally repudiated, simply lay outside the living liturgical memory of the Eastern Churches, whose calendars had been shaped by the East’s own saints. Their recovery belongs largely to the twentieth century and to the Orthodox diaspora in the West.

The setting for this recovery was the establishment of Orthodox communities — Russian, Greek, Antiochian, and others — across Western Europe and the English-speaking world, especially after the upheavals of the twentieth century. Orthodox Christians living in Britain, Ireland, France, and North America found themselves on soil that had its own first-millennium saints, saints of the undivided Church whose shrines and place-names surrounded them, and a natural impulse arose to honour these local saints of the one Church. Within the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and other jurisdictions, clergy and parishes worked to gather the pre-Schism Western saints into Orthodox consciousness — researching their lives, composing or adapting liturgical services (akolouthiai) in their honour, founding parishes and monasteries under their patronage, and petitioning for their inclusion in calendars and menaia used in the West.

The most influential single figure associated with this recovery in the English-speaking world was the priest-monk Seraphim Rose (1934–1982) of the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, whose periodical The Orthodox Word devoted sustained attention to the Western saints of the first millennium, and whose work helped fix the principle — that the saints of the undivided Church are the common inheritance of Orthodoxy — in the mind of a generation of English-speaking Orthodox (see Seraphim Rose’s place in the twentieth-century Orthodox engagement with the West). Parallel labours in Britain — by Orthodox clergy and writers under various jurisdictions — produced lives, services, and parish dedications to Celtic and British saints, Columba prominent among them, the “dove of the church” being a natural patron for Orthodox communities in Scotland and the Hebrides.

Sober Limits: A Developing Reception

Here the methodology of this repository requires precision (METHODOLOGY §4). It would misrepresent the situation to assert that Columba enjoys a single, universally established, pan-Orthodox liturgical feast in the way that, say, St. Basil or St. John Chrysostom does. He does not — or not yet, and not uniformly. The reality is more textured, and honesty about it is part of honouring him well:

Formal commemoration varies by jurisdiction. Whether, and on what calendar, Columba is liturgically commemorated depends on the local Orthodox Church and even the individual parish. Some jurisdictions and local synods have given formal blessing for the veneration of named pre-Schism Western saints and have published services for them; in other jurisdictions such commemoration is encouraged or permitted but not formally enacted; in still others it is largely the devotional practice of individual parishes and faithful with their bishop’s blessing. There is no single Orthodox act that has “added” Columba to the universal calendar, because Orthodoxy has no single universal calendar to add him to — calendars are the responsibility of each local Church.
The reception is recent and still developing. This is a movement of roughly the last century, and it is ongoing. New services are still being composed and approved; parishes are still being dedicated; the place of the Celtic saints in Orthodox liturgical life is being worked out in practice, not received as a finished settlement. To describe it as a developing reception is accurate; to describe it as a long-established universal observance would not be.
The principle is firmer than the practice. What is not in serious dispute among the jurisdictions engaged with this question is the principle — that Columba, as a saint of the undivided Church, is rightly venerable in Orthodoxy. The variation is in liturgical implementation: which saints, on which day, in which service-books, by whose formal act. The principle is the inheritance; the calendars are catching up to it at different speeds.

Stated plainly, then: an Orthodox Christian may with full warrant venerate St. Columba as a saint of the one undivided Church, keep his memory on 9 June, ask his prayers, and dedicate a church to him; and in a growing number of Orthodox parishes and jurisdictions this is done with the blessing of the local bishop. But the form and universality of his liturgical commemoration are not uniform across world Orthodoxy, and any claim about a specific jurisdiction’s calendar entry should be made as a claim about that jurisdiction, not about Orthodoxy as a whole.

Columba Among the Common Saints

Set in this frame, Columba takes his place in a wide company. He stands with the other great pre-Schism saints of the West whom Orthodoxy receives as its own — Patrick and Brigid of Ireland, Martin of Tours, Benedict of Nursia, Augustine of Canterbury, Cuthbert and Bede of Northumbria, and the Desert Fathers’ Western heir John Cassian, who carried the desert to the Latin world (St. John Cassian; St. Martin of Tours; St. Patrick of Ireland; St. Benedict of Nursia). These are not borrowed saints. They are the saints of the millennium when the Church was one, and they belong, by right of communion and of doctrine, to the Orthodoxy that confesses the faith of that one Church.

To venerate Columba as an Orthodox Christian, then, is to do something both old and new: old, because the man and his sanctity are of the undivided Church and have been honoured since 597; new, because the conscious gathering of such Western saints back into the living memory and liturgy of the Orthodox East is a work of the last hundred years and is still going forward. The dove of the church, set down on his island at the edge of the world, is being recognized again — soberly, gradually, and rightly — as one of the saints the whole Church holds in common.

References

Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995. (The repose of Columba on Iona in 597; Sharpe’s Introduction on the saint, his cult, and the dating of his death.)
Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. (Columba’s cult and commemoration at Iona.)
The Roman Martyrology and standard Western calendars (feast of St. Columba, 9 June).
Rose, Seraphim (Hieromonk), and the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. The Orthodox Word (periodical, Platina, CA). (Sustained twentieth-century Orthodox attention to the pre-Schism saints of the West; the principle that the saints of the undivided Church are the common inheritance of Orthodoxy.)
Note on liturgical reception: the commemoration of pre-Schism Celtic and British saints in Orthodoxy varies by jurisdiction (ROCOR and others) and is a recent and developing reception; claims about a specific calendar or service should be sourced to the particular local Church or parish that enacts them, per METHODOLOGY §4. This file makes no assertion of a single universal Orthodox feast.