The Letters to the Popes

Attacked by the Frankish bishops for keeping the older Irish Easter, Columbanus appealed over their heads to Rome itself, in letters that are among the most remarkable documents of the early medieval West: Epistula 1 to Pope Gregory the Great (c. 600), defending the Irish 84-year computus and asking the pope’s judgement; and Epistula 3 to Pope Boniface IV, written from Italy after a Gallic synod had pressed him. The letters combine genuine reverence for the see of Peter with a freedom of address — even reproof — toward its occupants that has astonished readers ever since. This file sets out the computus, the letters, and their tone, from both sides.

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

Why the Easters Diverged

The dispute was about the calendar, not the creed. Determining the date of Pascha required a cycle reconciling the solar year, the lunar month, and the seven-day week so as to find the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox — and several cycles had been devised, which did not always agree. The Irish church used an older 84-year cycle (the latercus), once current in the West but by Columbanus’s day abandoned by Rome and Gaul in favour of newer reckonings — the Victorian cycle of Victorius of Aquitaine (used in Gaul) and the Alexandrian 19-year cycle (championed by Dionysius Exiguus and ultimately victorious) (Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018). Because the cycles diverged, the Irish in some years kept Easter on a different Sunday from their Continental neighbours — a visible, scandal-giving difference, since one community might be feasting while the other still fasted. It was over this, not over any article of faith, that the Frankish bishops attacked Columbanus as a keeper of a false Easter (see The Frankish Bishops and Queen Brunhild).

A point of substance must be registered to avoid a common error. The Irish were not Quartodecimans — they did not keep Pascha on the 14th of the moon regardless of the day of the week, as the second-century Asian churches had; they kept it on a Sunday, like everyone else, but reckoned which Sunday by an older cycle (Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018). Columbanus himself indignantly rejects the charge of Quartodecimanism in his letters, and the modern scholarly consensus agrees with him: the Celtic difference was computistical, not a survival of the Quartodeciman practice [Disputed: some medieval and early-modern polemic (and the rhetoric of Columbanus's opponents) tarred the Irish Easter as "Quartodeciman"; modern scholarship (Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018) firmly rejects this, holding the Irish kept a Sunday Easter by the 84-year cycle and were not Quartodecimans].

Epistula 1: To Gregory the Great (c. 600)

The first of the surviving letters, Epistula 1, is addressed to Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great; see St. Gregory the Dialogist), and was written about 600, soon after Columbanus had come under attack from the Gallic bishops (Columbanus, Epistula 1; Walker 1957). Its occasion is the Easter question: Columbanus lays the Irish case before the pope, defends the 84-year reckoning, criticizes the Victorian cycle then used in Gaul as defective, and asks Gregory’s judgement — appealing to Rome, in effect, over the heads of the Frankish bishops who were condemning him (Columbanus, Epistula 1; Walker 1957; Stancliffe 2018).

What has always struck readers is the tone. Columbanus writes with deep courtesy and reverence — he addresses Gregory in the most exalted terms, praises his fame and his writings, and calls himself a poor foreigner — and yet he argues with him as an equal in learning, does not hesitate to tell the pope that the cycle Rome and Gaul follow is in error, and even gently reproves Gregory for tolerating, as Columbanus saw it, simoniacal and lax bishops (Columbanus, Epistula 1; Walker 1957). He quotes Scripture and the Fathers, deploys the computus with evident mastery, and makes a famous plea that the pope not despise his lowliness, citing the living dog of Ecclesiastes who is better than the dead lion (cf. Ecclesiastes 9:4; Columbanus, Epistula 1; Walker 1957). No reply from Gregory survives, and it is uncertain whether the letter ever reached him; Gregory died in 604 (Stancliffe 2018).

Epistula 3: To Boniface IV

The Easter question pursued Columbanus into Italy. After his expulsion from Burgundy and his arrival in the Lombard kingdom (see Into Italy and the Lombards), and after a Gallic synod — convened, it seems, around 603 at Chalon-sur-Saône — had pressed him on the Easter difference, Columbanus addressed Pope Boniface IV in Epistula 3, written from Italy probably about 613 (Columbanus, Epistula 3; Walker 1957; Stancliffe 2018). Here he asks the pope to vindicate the Irish position and to clear the Irish of the slur of heresy, again maintaining the legitimacy of his church’s custom while professing communion with Rome (Columbanus, Epistula 3; Walker 1957). This letter shades into the other great controversy of his Italian years, the Three Chapters, and is treated again from that angle (see The Three Chapters and Arianism); the two questions converge in his Italian correspondence with the papacy.

A famous earlier letter, Epistula 2, addressed to a synod of Gallic bishops (probably the synod of c. 603) rather than to a pope, belongs to the same campaign: in it Columbanus asks to be left in peace to keep his own Easter and to live under his own rule, pleading the precedent of his elders and the principle that diversity of Easter custom need not break the unity of faith (Columbanus, Epistula 2; Walker 1957; Stancliffe 2018).

Both Sides of the Dispute

How the letters should be read has divided interpreters, and METHODOLOGY §4 requires both sides.

On the one hand, the letters can be read as evidence of robust Celtic independence: a churchman who, while honouring Rome, flatly refused to abandon his church’s ancient practice at the demand of either the Gallic episcopate or, implicitly, of Roman usage, who told a pope to his face that Rome’s calendar was wrong, and who treated the unity of the faith as compatible with a real diversity of custom not subject to coercion (this is broadly the reading emphasized in much Celtic and some Orthodox treatment; cf. Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018).

On the other hand, the letters can be read as evidence of deep communion with the see of Peter: for Columbanus does not declare independence of Rome — he appeals to Rome, asks the pope to judge, professes the Roman Church the head of the churches, and frames his very defence as a plea to be vindicated by papal authority, so that the episode shows a Celtic church firmly within the Roman communion and looking to the pope as arbiter (this is broadly the reading emphasized in much Roman Catholic treatment; cf. the framing in older Catholic scholarship and the qualifications in Stancliffe 2018).

The fair conclusion is that both are true and that the modern scholarship resists collapsing them. Clare Stancliffe and T. M. Charles-Edwards both stress that Columbanus held together, without any sense of contradiction, a genuine reverence for Rome and a tenacious attachment to Irish custom — that for him the honour due to Peter’s see and the right of his own church to its tradition were not in conflict, because the Easter question was a matter of custom and not of faith, and unity of faith did not, in his ecclesiology, require uniformity of custom (Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018). The fuller working-out of that ecclesiology is the subject of the companion file (see Rome and the Celtic Churches).

The Latinity of the Letters

A final feature deserves note because it bears on authenticity and on the man. The letters are written in a Latin of remarkable learning and force — packed with Scripture, studded with quotation from the Fathers and even from classical poets, capable of wordplay (Columbanus puns on his own name, Columba, the dove) and of passages of real rhetorical power (Columbanus, Epistulae 1–5; Walker 1957; Lapidge 1997). They are the surest window we have into Columbanus’s mind, and their authenticity is not seriously doubted; they anchor the corpus against which the disputed poems must be measured (see The Sermons, Letters, and Poems).

See Also

• Rome and the Celtic Churches — the ecclesiology of the letters, both sides
• The Three Chapters and Arianism — the Italian letter to Boniface IV in its other controversy
• The Frankish Bishops and Queen Brunhild — the episcopal attack that provoked the appeals
• The Sermons, Letters, and Poems — the letters as the authentic core of the corpus
• St. Gregory the Dialogist — the recipient of Epistula 1
• Orthodoxy: Orthodox vs Catholic — the primacy question the letters bear on

References

• Columbanus. Epistulae 1–5. In Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S. M. Walker. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957. (Epistula 1 to Gregory the Great; Epistula 2 to the Gallic synod; Epistula 3 to Boniface IV; the computistical arguments, the rejection of Quartodecimanism, the tone.)
• Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The 84-year cycle and the computus; the Irish were not Quartodecimans; the ecclesiology of custom.)
• Stancliffe, Clare. “Columbanus’s Letters to the Popes.” In Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe, ed. Alexander O’Hara. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (The letters, their dating and occasions, and the both-sides reading of reverence and independence.)
• Lapidge, Michael, ed. Columbanus: Studies on the Latin Writings. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997. (The Latinity and authenticity of the letters.)