Leinster and Bangor

Columbanus was born in the Irish province of Leinster about 543, was schooled in letters and Scripture, and after a struggle with the temptations of his youth withdrew first to an anchorite named Sinell and then to the great monastery of Bangor in Ulster, where he was formed under its founder Comgall for many years before leaving for the Continent. Almost everything known of these decades comes from Jonas of Bobbio, writing a generation after the saint’s death, and is reported here as Jonas’s testimony rather than as documented fact.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; missionary to the Continent)

The Problem of the Irish Years

Columbanus is, paradoxically, both one of the best-documented and one of the most obscure of early Irish saints. He left a substantial body of authentic writing — Letters, sermons, monastic rules, a penitential — but almost none of it touches his early life, and what we know of his Irish decades descends through a single channel: the Vita Columbani of Jonas of Bobbio, written about 640, a quarter-century after the saint’s death, by a monk who entered Bobbio around 618 and never met Columbanus (Jonas, Vita Columbani, preface; trans. O’Hara and Wood 2017; O’Hara 2018). Jonas drew on the memory of older monks and on the traditions of Luxeuil and Bobbio, and his account of Ireland is the thinnest and most stylized part of the Life — a fact that must govern every statement made about these years (Charles-Edwards 2000; on Jonas’s reliability in general, see The Life by Jonas of Bobbio).

The date of birth is itself an inference. Jonas gives no year; the conventional c. 543 is reckoned backward from the chronology of the Continental career, in particular from his death in 615 and Jonas’s statement that he was an old man at the end, and the figure is an estimate, not a datum [Disputed: most modern scholars place the birth c. 543, reckoning from the Continental chronology (O'Hara 2018; Charles-Edwards 2000); some older accounts give c. 540 or 550, and the *Vita* supplies no year, so any figure is approximate]. What can be said with more confidence is the province: Jonas names Leinster (Latin Lagenorum terra), in the south-east of Ireland, as the region of his birth (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.2; O’Hara and Wood 2017).

Birth and Early Formation

Jonas frames the birth with the conventional hagiographical signs. He reports that before the child was born his mother saw in a dream a brilliant sun rising from her bosom and giving light to the world — a portent, in the Life‘s telling, of the radiance the son would shed abroad (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.2; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Such a maternal vision is a standard topos of the genre, and is reported here as Jonas’s literary frame rather than as an event (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The boy, Jonas says, was given a good education in grammar and the liberal arts and in the Scriptures, and showed an early gift for letters — a claim borne out, at least, by the dense scriptural and classical learning of his later writings, which presuppose a thorough Latin schooling somewhere in Ireland (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.3; Walker 1957, introduction).

The most-quoted episode of these years is the youth’s struggle with temptation. Jonas reports that Columbanus, grown into a handsome young man, was much sought after by women, and that, troubled, he went to consult a holy and devout woman, a recluse, who counselled him to flee — reminding him that men had been ruined by feminine beauty and urging him to escape the way of perdition (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.3; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Resolved to leave home, he met the opposition of his mother, who, Jonas says, threw herself across the threshold to bar his going; Columbanus stepped over her prostrate body, telling her she would not see him again in this life, and departed (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.3; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The scene is built on the Gospel demand that the disciple love Christ above father and mother (cf. Matthew 10:37; Luke 14:26), and it foreshadows the greater leaving — the peregrinatio — that would take him from Ireland altogether (see The Call to Peregrinatio).

Sinell and the Monastery of Cluain Inis

Columbanus’s first monastic home, in Jonas’s account, was not Bangor but the cell of an anchorite named Sinell, on an island in Lough Erne (the site usually identified with Cluain Inis / Cleenish), a teacher renowned for learning in the Scriptures (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.3; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Under Sinell, Jonas says, the young man made such progress in the study of Scripture that while still a youth he composed a commentary on the Psalms — a work now lost, and not certainly to be identified with any surviving text [Disputed: Jonas credits the young Columbanus with an early exposition of the Psalms (Vita I.3); no such commentary survives under his name, and attempts to identify it with later Hiberno-Latin psalm material are speculative (Walker 1957; Lapidge, in Lapidge 1997)]. The notice is valuable chiefly as evidence of the biblical, and specifically psalter-centred, character of the Irish schooling Columbanus received — a formation whose fruit is visible in the saturation of his authentic prose with the Psalms.

Bangor and Comgall

From Sinell Columbanus passed to Bangor (Irish Bennchor) in Ulster, on the southern shore of Belfast Lough, the monastery founded about 558 by Comgall, and it was Bangor, more than any other place, that formed him (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.4; O’Hara and Wood 2017; Charles-Edwards 2000). Bangor under Comgall was one of the great ascetic schools of the Irish church, famed for the severity of its discipline and the size of its community, and Comgall himself was remembered as a master of the monastic life of rare strictness (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.4; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The reputation of Bangor for unbroken liturgical prayer — the laus perennis of choirs relieving one another so that the praise of God never ceased — belongs to the later memory of the house, but the centrality of the divine office and of a heavy psalmody is everywhere presupposed in the rule Columbanus would later write (see The Columban Rule; on the wider ascetic world, Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

Jonas says Columbanus remained at Bangor for many years, advancing in virtue and learning until he was himself a leading figure of the community, and that it was from Bangor, with Comgall’s reluctant blessing, that he eventually set out for the Continent (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.4; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The length of the Bangor years is not given a figure by Jonas; the common statement that he was about fifty when he left rests on the same backward reckoning as the birth-date and shares its uncertainty (O’Hara 2018; Charles-Edwards 2000). What matters is the formation itself. The discipline Columbanus imposed on Luxeuil and Bobbio — the tariffed penance, the unremitting psalmody, the radical obedience, the fasting — was Bangor’s discipline carried abroad; the Regula coenobialis in particular reads as the customary of an Irish house transplanted (Walker 1957, introduction; Stancliffe in Lapidge 1997). And the confidence of the man who would tell a pope that the Irish kept the truer Easter was the confidence of one formed in a church that knew itself fully orthodox and catholic, owing Rome honour but answerable, in its customs, to its own tradition (see Rome and the Celtic Churches).

What Bangor Gave Him

Three things, above all, Columbanus took from his Irish formation and carried to the Continent. The first was a conception of the monastic life as combat — a discipline of obedience, fasting, vigil, and confession of an austerity that astonished the Franks, and which his own rule codified (see The Columban Rule). The second was the Irish practice of frequent, private, repeatable confession with assigned penance, the system his Penitential would help fix upon the West (see The Irish Penitential System). The third was the learning — a Latinity steeped in Scripture, in the Fathers, and in a surprising range of classical poetry, the equipment of a man who could write to popes as their equal in argument and quote Vergil from memory (Walker 1957, introduction; Lapidge 1997). The Irish years are obscure; their product is not, and the product is the measure of what Bangor was.

References

Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Translated Texts for Historians 64. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (Book I, chapters 2–4: Leinster birth, the maternal vision, the temptation and departure, Sinell, Bangor, and Comgall.)
Walker, G. S. M., ed. and trans. Sancti Columbani Opera. Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 2. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957. (Introduction on Columbanus’s learning and Latinity; the rules.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The Irish monastic milieu; Bangor and Comgall; the chronology.)
O’Hara, Alexander. Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (Jonas’s composition and reliability; the chronology of Columbanus’s life.)
Lapidge, Michael, ed. Columbanus: Studies on the Latin Writings. Studies in Celtic History 17. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997. (The learning, the lost psalm-commentary, and the authenticity questions.)