01 — Foundations
The ground from which Columbanus came: the Leinster of his birth, the great monastic school of Bangor where Comgall formed him in the Irish ascetic discipline, and the ideal of peregrinatio pro Christo — voluntary, permanent exile for the love of Christ — that drove him, in middle age and against his mother’s pleading, to leave Ireland for the Continent c. 590. These files establish what can be said of his Irish formation, almost all of it from Jonas, and the spiritual logic that turned an Irish monk into the most consequential missionary of his age.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; missionary to the Continent)
Before Columbanus founded a single monastery in Gaul he had already spent the larger part of a long life inside the Irish monastic system: first under an anchorite named Sinell, then for many years at Bangor in Ulster under its founder Comgall. What he carried to the Continent — the severity of the discipline, the centrality of confession, the computus, the very Latinity of his prose — was Bangor’s, and the bold confidence with which he confronted Frankish bishops and Roman popes was the confidence of a man formed in a church that regarded itself as fully catholic and owed Rome reverence but not obedience in matters of custom. This section sets that Irish background, drawn almost entirely from Jonas (Section 07), and examines the ideal of peregrinatio that is the key to his whole career.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Leinster and Bangor | The birth in Leinster (c. 543) and the youth’s early temptations; the formation under Sinell and then under Comgall at Bangor; the Irish monastic school and the discipline Columbanus absorbed there — the foundation of everything he later carried to Gaul and Italy. |
| The Call to Peregrinatio | The Irish ideal of peregrinatio pro Christo, exile-for-Christ as a form of “white martyrdom”; Columbanus’s departure from Bangor with twelve companions and the crossing to the Continent c. 590; the spiritual logic that made him a missionary almost by accident. |
See Also
- The Gallic Foundations — what the peregrinus built once he reached the Vosges
- The Call to Peregrinatio — the ideal that sent him out
- The Life by Jonas of Bobbio — the source from which nearly all of this Irish material descends
- Orthodoxy: Monasticism — the wider ascetic tradition in which Bangor stood
References
- Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017.
- Walker, G. S. M., ed. and trans. Sancti Columbani Opera. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957.
- Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Stancliffe, Clare. “Columbanus and the Gallic Bishops.” In Auctoritas: Mélanges offerts à Olivier Guillot, ed. Giles Constable and Michel Rouche. Paris: PUPS, 2006.