The Call to Peregrinatio

The engine of Columbanus’s whole career was the Irish ideal of peregrinatio pro Christo — voluntary, often permanent, exile from one’s homeland for the love of Christ, understood as a “white martyrdom” and a stripping-away of every earthly tie. About 590, in middle age and with Comgall’s reluctant leave, Columbanus sailed from Ireland with a band of companions, traditionally twelve, and crossed Gaul not as a planned missionary but as a self-exile whose mission grew out of his exile. This file sets out the ideal, the Irish theology behind it, and the departure.

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

The Irish Ideal of Exile-for-Christ

To understand why Columbanus left Ireland one must understand a spirituality peculiar to the early Irish church: peregrinatio pro Christo, “pilgrimage” or, more exactly, exile for Christ. The Latin peregrinus meant a stranger, a foreigner, one who lived outside his own patria; and the Irish ascetic tradition took the call of God to Abraham — “Go forth from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1) — as a pattern for the monk who would renounce not only property and marriage but the homeland itself, the kin-bonds that in Irish society defined a person’s very identity and protection (Charles-Edwards 2000; Wood 2001). To leave Ireland was to cut oneself off from the tribe, the law that protected one, the graves of one’s fathers — to become, deliberately and permanently, a stranger and a sojourner on the earth (cf. Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11).

The Irish sources distinguish degrees of this self-offering. A famous Old Irish homily speaks of three “martyrdoms”: red martyrdom, the shedding of blood; white martyrdom, the renunciation of all that one loves for God’s sake, which the homily explicitly connects with going into exile; and a third, “blue” or “green” martyrdom of penance and ascetic labour (the Cambrai Homily, late seventh / early eighth century; Charles-Edwards 2000). In a church that, unlike the church of the Roman world, had never known a persecution and so had produced no martyrs of blood, peregrinatio offered a way to imitate the martyrs by another road — to die to the world by exile rather than by the sword. This is the spiritual logic that sent Columbanus, and many Irish after him, abroad; it was not, in the first instance, a strategy for converting the heathen but an ascetic act of self-denial whose missionary consequences followed almost incidentally (Wood 2001; O’Hara 2018).

Columbanus’s own writings show the ideal as the air he breathed. In one of his sermons he develops at length the theme of human life as a road, the Christian as a traveller (viator) who must not mistake the road for his home: “let this principle abide with us, that on the road we so live as travellers, as pilgrims, as guests of the world … loving not the road for the homeland” (Columbanus, Instructio 8, “On the Tedium and Misery of This Life”; trans. Walker 1957). The sentiment is at once a commonplace of Christian asceticism and the precise theology of his own life: a man who had made himself a stranger on principle, and who taught his monks to feel the same homelessness in the depths of the spirit.

The Departure, c. 590

Jonas reports that Columbanus, after his long years at Bangor, was seized by the desire to go into exile, in obedience (as Jonas frames it) to the Lord’s command to Abraham, and that he sought Comgall’s permission to leave (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.4; O’Hara and Wood 2017). Comgall, grieved to lose so valued a monk, is said to have resisted but at last to have yielded, commending him to God; and Columbanus set out with a band of companions (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.4; O’Hara and Wood 2017). The number of his companions is traditionally given as twelve, an apostolic figure, but the count belongs to the hagiographical shaping of the story and is not a secure datum [Disputed: the tradition of twelve companions is widespread and reflects the apostolic symbolism of the band, and Jonas names several of them (e.g. Gall, Domoal); whether the precise number is historical or a hagiographical convention is uncertain (O'Hara and Wood 2017; Wood 2001)]. Jonas does name individual disciples who went with him or joined him, among them the Gall who would give his name to Sankt Gallen, and Domoal his attendant (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.4, I.7; O’Hara and Wood 2017).

The date of the crossing, like the birth-date, is an inference rather than a record. The conventional c. 590 is reckoned from the chronology of the Continental foundations and the reigns of the Frankish kings who received him, and is approximate [Disputed: the departure is usually dated c. 590, occasionally a year or two earlier or later; Jonas supplies no year, and the figure depends on synchronizing the foundation of Luxeuil with Merovingian regnal chronology (O'Hara 2018; Wood 2001)]. Jonas has the band cross by sea — landing, in the usual reconstruction, on the coast of Brittany or the Channel — and then make their way across Gaul, where the desolation of the church after the disorders of the age moved Columbanus to settle and labour (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.5; O’Hara and Wood 2017).

Exile First, Mission Second

A point of interpretation has become central in recent scholarship and bears directly on how Columbanus should be understood. He did not leave Ireland in order to evangelize the Continent. Gaul was already Christian; the Franks had been Catholic since the baptism of Clovis a century before, and Columbanus’s earliest foundations lay in long-settled, nominally Christian country, not in pagan mission-fields (Wood 2001; O’Hara 2018). His primary act was ascetic — the peregrinatio itself, the self-exile — and the monasteries he founded were houses of Irish discipline meant first of all for the salvation of those who entered them, including the many Frankish aristocrats who flocked to him. The missionary dimension, the preaching to half-Christian populations and (later, around Bregenz) to actual pagans, grew out of the exile rather than preceding it as its purpose (Wood 2001; O’Hara, ed., 2018).

This matters for two reasons. First, it corrects the older picture of Columbanus as a planned apostle of the heathen and sets him where the sources do: in the ascetic tradition of Irish self-exile. Second, it explains the shape of his Continental conflicts. A man who had come not to be a bishop’s auxiliary but to live the radical monastic life on his own terms, under his own rule and his own Easter, was bound to collide both with the Frankish episcopate, who expected monasteries to fall under diocesan authority, and with the court, when his discipline cut across royal interests (see The Frankish Bishops and Queen Brunhild). The independence that made him a great founder and a thorn to bishops and kings alike was, at bottom, the independence of the peregrinus who had already given up everything and had nothing left to lose but Christ.

See Also

References

  • Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (Book I, chapters 4–5: the desire for exile, Comgall’s leave, the companions, the crossing and the entry into Gaul.)
  • Walker, G. S. M., ed. and trans. Sancti Columbani Opera. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957. (Instructio 8, the pilgrim/traveller theme.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (Peregrinatio as ascetic exile rather than planned mission; the Frankish context.)
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The theology of peregrinatio; the Cambrai Homily and the three martyrdoms.)
  • O’Hara, Alexander. Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018; and O’Hara, ed., Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (Chronology; the exile-first interpretation.)