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St Columban

c. 543–615

 

In the age when Ireland was 'the island of Saints and Scholars', St Columban was one of its leading figures, a personality of international reputation.

      Also known as Columbanus, Columban was born in Leinster about 543.  He studied at the monastic school of St Sinell at Cluaninis, on the shores of Lough Erne in Ulster.  He then entered the monastery of St Comgall at Bangor, which was renowned for both its sanctity and learning.  Here he taught for some thirty years, wrote a commentary on the psalms, and composed poems.

      About 583 he was sent by St Comgall with twelve others to conduct a mission to Europe.  He preached in Brittany and the Vosges, having been invited there by the Merovingian kind Childebert.  He settled in Burgundy and founded the monasteries of Anegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaines.  From these three motherhouses some two hundred other monasteries were later established.  (From Anegray, St Killian later travelled to Germany to Wurtzburg and founded a monastery in 742; St Emmeram went up into Regensburg and founded one in 739.)  St Columban also composed sets of rules and regulations for both monks and hermits.

      Coming from Ireland, he was dismayed with what he found in Burgundy.  He thought the local clergy were degenerate, the Frankish court immoral, and some of the local customs shocking.  With missionary zeal he introduced the strict Irish system of penance, which involved auricular confession - personal confession to an individual priest, an innovation which the church has maintained.

      He also kept to the Celtic style of tonsure and celebrated Easter by a different calculation than the rest of the church.  He had difficulties with the local bishops about this confusing matter, and tried to enlist the support of Pope Gregory I to his position.  In this letter he used the term totius Europae, 'the whole of Europe', to express the Irish concept of the West as a common cultural unit.

      Columban was eventually expelled in 608 from Burgundy by King Theudric, whom he had attacked for maintaining a concubine (these Irish monks were nothing if not strict).  He passed through Neustria, where he had been invited by King Clothar, and settled near Zurich in what is now Switzerland, where his companion St Gall founded the monastery of St Gallen.  But he was driven out by the natives for his attack on their paganism.

      He passed over the Alps into what is now northern Italy and founded yet another monastery at Bobbio in 612.  From this new foundation his influence spread over all of Europe.  He died at Bobbio on 23rd November 615, and was buried in the church abbey, now dedicated to St Columban.

      Columban's letters, monastic rules, and poetry belong to the great canon of Irish medieval literature.  One of these is a song of encouragement to his companions rowing against the current of the Rhine.  Austere though their religion may have been, these monks found new delight in nature, and the margins of the manuscripts for which their monasteries are famous have scribbled in them delightful little verses about the birds and trees and waters that surrounded them.

      They had a lasting effect on the high culture of the Middle Ages.  In Ireland, the culture of Christian civilization was preserved during the long night of the barbarian invasions.  It was then carried back to rekindle the civilization of Europe as a whole - the totius Europae of St Columban.

      His successors at Bobbio, however, ameliorated the strictness of the Irish rule he had introduced with less severe elements from the rule of St Benedict, and exercised important influence on Western civilization.  for centuries to come, the Irish monasteries, from Clonmacnoise in the West to Vienna in the east, provided Europe with its scholarship.

      St Columban's work marked the dawn of a new age and the rise of Charlemagne and the Carolingian empire, which gave Europe a new sense of its identity, to which the new European Union looks back.