Studies in Sanctity
[We propose to publish during the next few weeks a series of studies of saintly characters who have in different ages and different manners exorcised a transforming influence on the life of their day. Next week Miss Olive Wyon will write on St. Hildogerde.]
IV.—St. Columba of Iona, A.D. 521-597
By Lucy MENZIES.
AITC:ULLAIt beauty of holiness seems to cling about the homes of the Saints. Assisi of St. Francis has it ; Siena of St. Catharine has it ; Iona of St. Columba has it perhaps most of all. The natural beauties of the island, the white sands, the wonderful depths- of clear green waters changing over rocks and sea-tangle to rich blues and purples, the flowery meadows, the rocky uplands this is irradiated by the beauty of a holy life once lived there by St. Columba. He comes early in the story of the Saints. It helps us to place him, if we remember that St. Gregory the Great was still a student at Rome when St. Columba landed at Iona ; that St. Benedict had died only twenty years before. From his birth a halo of poetry and romance was woven round him. A Celt of the Celts, a Priest of kingly race, a scholar, a poet who wrote both Irish and Latin verse, a statesman, a patriot, he was alive in every fibre to a sense of the supernatural ; his religion was his whole life. He began with a difficult temperament from which to achieve sanctity, and the chief reason for his coming to Iona gives us some idea of it. He was an eager student of the Scriptures in days when there were no hooka and when manuscripts were rare and precious. So that when his master, St. Finnian of Moville, brought hack from Rome a manuscript copy of the Vulgate—the first known in Ireland—St. Columba felt he must possess it for himself. He did not ask his master's permission because he knew it would be refused. He copied the manuscript secretly at night in the church ,where it was kept " . . . the five fingers of his right hand were as candles which shone like very bright lamps whose light filled the entire Church."
But owing to that illumination he was discovered.. Finnian was angry ; Columba refused to give up his transcript, and the High-King of Ireland, called upon to settle the dispute, gave the celebrated judgement : To every cow its calf, to every book its transcript. Those were tribal days ; Columba's clansmen thought the honour of their clan had been impugned and a battle re- sulted in which " over three thousand Men laid down their lives to save for Columba a little book into which he had copied the Gospels." The legend may be exaggerated, but the main facts of the story are true, and remorse for . the lives lost on his behalf was probably the chief reason that led Columba to banish himself to an island from which he could no longer see Ireland. HoW heroic 6 punishment it was we see froM the passionate love for his native land which burned in his heart all his days and from an Irish poem he wrote on the voyage, made with twelve disciples in a hide-covered wicker coracle.
In May, 563, Columba and his followers landed in Iona. The world was in a state of chaos, but no echo of the con- flict -disturbed the peace of that Island of Saints and Dreams whence- Christianity was to spread not only over Scotland, but through Lindisfarne, over northern and central England, to the borders of Sussex.
The people Columba found in Scotland believed in the Unseen ; they lived so close to the heart of Nature that their eyes seemed able to penetrate material barriers and apprehend a spiritual world hidden from the Sass- enach. They were Nature-worshippers ; every beauty of Nature seemed to them a deity personified. And so Columba, himself possessed of the Second Sight, proceeded with consummate wisdom, not to attempt to root out Celtic heathenism, but to graft on to it the religion of Christ. He had to overcome the Druids, the Wizards or Wise Men, and he did that not by denying their powers but by showing that he possessed similar powers to a much greater degree through Jesus Christ. His life was in the hands of God, he said, and no evil
could touch him so long as God was on his side. ' -
We have a delightful picture of the life of the monastery in Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, a chronicle not without likeness to the Fioretti.. Out of the time set apart for the Opus Dei and for private prayer and meditation, the monks tilled the ground; practised various handicrafts and made copies of the Scriptures, the AbbOt sharing in all their labours, and thus setting before the people of Scotland the ideal that religion and civilization 'must go hand in hand, for while he broil& them the Gospel, he also improved their methOds of agriculture and their whole mode of life. Hospitality was one of -the great features of the Monastery, and that not only to human beings but to birds aridhcasts.
Columba used the Saving Sign or Sign of the' Cross to keep away evil in every form, from the purifying of haunted well to the sanctifying of the smallest domestic matters. Before the cows were milked, the SaVing Sign was made over the milk pail lest any demon should be left
lurking in it ; the tools were blessed with the Saving Sign ; the pen was crossed that the writing might be to the Glory of God, and sailors when putting to sea were directed to " hoist their sail-yards " in the form of a cross.
All Columba's missionary journeys had perforce to begin by sea, and few of the islands round Iona have not some traditional connexion with him. To sail those seas as Columba must so often have done, out through the Torren Rocks " westwards towards Erin," or north towards Lungs, that sanctuary of sea-birds, or Tiree, the granary of Iona in his day—that is to enter into his spirit which had in it something of the grandeur and freedom of theses. For hundreds of years after his death the mariners of the Hebrides used to call on " Kind Columeille " to protect them.
Thinking. of the analogy between the voyages of St. Columba and the eternal voyage of the Christian soul on the vast Ocean of the Divine, a modern mariner sat down at the helm" some weeks ago to sail across those great lonely waters. The whole horizon was aglow as the boat sped along the golden path marked out for it by the setting sun ; an indescribable beauty of holiness seem to shine through all that intense beauty of Nature. It seemed as if the life Columba lived on that island and on those seas had indeed created and established there so close a con- nexion with God that His Presence now dwelt there and irradiated the lives of modern mariners just as fifteen hundred years ago it irradiated the life of St. Columba. As the old Gaelic prophecy has it : On the Isle of Dreams God shall yet fulfil Himself anew.
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