Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

pletely won to the Christian faith. Many monasteries had come into existence; but the greatest development in this direction seems to have taken place in Columba's own time, mainly through the efforts of those who are called the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, one of whom was Columba himself. These monasteries, such as the one at Clonmacnoise, founded by St. Kiaran, became great schools of learning, which made Ireland famous throughout Christendom.

It is not however as a founder of monasteries in Ireland that Columba is chiefly remembered. Rather is it for founding the one on the island of Iona, whence he effected the conversion of the Picts of Scotland, and sent missionaries throughout England and to the continent.

It is interesting, as illustrating the love of learning that characterised the Irish monasteries of the time, to recall the story that it was a dispute as to the possession of a book which resulted in Columba's leaving Ireland. In his thirty-ninth year, we are told, while visiting Clonard, he secretly made a copy of a beautiful Psalter, kept by the Abbot Finian in the church. The Abbot however discovered the fact, and demanded the copy as his right. The book had cost Columba some sleepless nights, and he stoutly refused to surrender it. Unable to agree, the disputants appealed to Diarmit, the chief king of Ireland; and his judgement was: To every cow her calf, and to every book its copy." unjust decision, O Diarmit, and I will be avenged," exclaimed Columba; and avenged he was on the battlefield of Culdremhe, where Diarmit was defeated. But Columba nevertheless found it necessary or at least expedient to leave the country.

"

"

This is an

Columba must be numbered among the real makers of the world. In the year 563, impelled partly by political circumstances and considerations, including sympathy with the Irish colonists in what is now called Argyleshire, but inspired also by true missionary zeal for the spread of the Christian faith, he set sail from Derry in a coracle for the west coast of Scotland, accompanied by a band of twelve disciples. It was with much sorrow they left their own country, and we are told how in the course of the voyage they landed on an island from which they could still see the Irish coast, and of their saying to one another: "We must not make our abode here, lest, with our fatherland always in sight, we should be tempted to go back, and the work that God has given us to do be left undone." And so they set sail again, and came at last to the ocean-swept little island of Iona, which is divided by a narrow strip of sea from the Isle of Mull. In Iona they settled down, so far as a life like theirs of constant going to and fro on their missionary labours can be thought of as settled; and they learnt to love the island because of the happy comradeship in work and prayer of which it was the scene and centre, and because of its own wild beauty.

In the whole vast range of mediaeval hagiology there is probably no more interesting and delightful book than Adamnan's Life of St. Columba. It has been said by Prof. Bury that the hagiologist of the middle ages "may be compared to the modern novelist; he provided literary recreation for the public, and he had to consider the public taste." It is evident that many of the lives of the saints were written by men who let their imagina1 Life of St. Patrick, p. 205.

1

tions work quite freely and invented miracle stories in response to the popular demand. There was, of course, a readiness on the part of the writers to believe any tales they heard of marvellous things done, or predictions made by their heroes, and to record such things without submitting them to critical enquiry; but it is not, as a rule, difficult to distinguish between the bona fide biographer, whose desire is to give a true life of his saint, and the mere romancer. And I think we may take it that Adamnan's Life of St. Columba is as faithful a record as could have been written in that time when belief in the miraculous was so universal, so unquestioned.

Columba died in 597-the year that Augustine and his monks set foot in England. Adamnan was born only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years later; so that, when he became a monk at Iona there were some around him who had known Columba, and from them he gathered much of the information that he put into the Life. The stories which he relates, he had heard again and again by the monastery fire and elsewhere; and the facts and incidents that form the foundation of them had probably all received their miraculous setting before he began to write. More and more had every detail of the saint's life come to be seen through an atmosphere of miracle and in a spirit of wondering love. So the methods of historical criticism need to be applied to such a work as Adamnan's, just as they have been applied to the Gospels; and, as in the case of the Gospels, they enable us to distinguish to a large extent between the core of truth and the covering of myth and legend, and to gain from the miracle stories much valuable light on the personality about whom they are told. Take, for

D

instance, Adamnan's beautiful story about Columba and the crane. Here it is as Adamnan tells it.

[ocr errors]

Once when the saint was living in the isle of Iona, calling one of the brethren to him, he thus addresses him: On the third day from this now dawning, thou must keep a look out on the western part of this isle, sitting on the sea-shore; for from the northern region of Ireland a certain guest, a crane, driven by the winds through long, circling aerial flights, will arrive very weary and fatigued after the ninth hour of the day; and, its strength almost exhausted, it will fall and lie before thee on the shore, and thou wilt take care to lift it up kindly and carry it to a neighbouring house, and there wilt hospitably harbour it and attend to it for three days and three nights, and carefully feed it. At the end of three days, refreshed, and unwilling to sojourn longer with us, it will return with fully regained strength to the sweet region of Ireland whence it originally came. And I thus earnestly commend it to thee for that it came from the place of our own fatherland.' The brother obeys, and on the third day, after the ninth hour, as commanded, he awaits the coming of the expected guest; and when it comes he raises it from the shore where it fell; carries it, weak as it was, to the hospice; feeds it in its hunger. And to him, on his return to the monastery in the evening, the saint, not by way of enquiry but of statement, says, 'God bless thee, my son, because thou hast well attended our stranger guest; and it will not tarry long in exile, but after three days will return to its country.' And just as the saint predicted the event also proved. For having been harboured for three days, raising itself on

high by flight from the ground in the presence of its ministering host, and considering for a little while its course in the air, it returned across the ocean to Ireland in a straight line of flight, on a calm day." (I. xlviii.)

Now we may be sure that Columba cared for this bird, not only for the sake of Ireland, his fatherland, whence it had come, but also because his heart was full of love and sympathy for all God's creatures, and especially for all helpless and hapless and suffering things. And we may assume that the real facts in the story are something like these that the bird, after being driven from its home by the storm, and vainly struggling to get back, had landed quite exhausted on the shore of Iona. There one of the monks picked it up, and brought it to the monastery; and Columba, seeing it, and taking pity on it, gave instructions that it should be cared for as a

stranger guest" until it should have recovered sufficiently to resume its journey, which indeed it was able to do in a few days. Such, we take it, was the origin or substance of the story; but the prediction that the bird would come in three days, stay three days and then depart, belongs to the miraculous setting or embroidery, which hearers and readers of the sixth and seventh centuries demanded in all that was told them of their saints.

Columba and his monks in Iona found incitements to devotion in the mists and in the roar of the sea. The discipline of the monastery was strict, and the life hard as became a true Militia Christi. Columba believed, like St. Benedict, that idleness is the enemy of the soul; and the brethren were all set to some form of manual labour as well as to their specially religious duties; or

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »