St. Columba's Iona

The tale of Iona — Scotland's holiest island, the resting place of her earliest kings — is also the tale of her founder Columba, the Irish prince and saint. It is a tale of arrogance, of politics, of battle, and of death; and it is a tale of penance, of striving for God, and of peace. It is a tale that may actually be true.

Then again, it may not. Columba was born in the 520s and died in the 590s, the wild times when plagues and Saxons were sweeping over a still-Celtic Britain. The earliest book about Columba was written a hundred years after his death — a saint's life full of miracles and wonders, short on dates and facts. Many of the details on Columba's life come from a biography by the Irish prince and scholar Manus O'Donnell, written one thousand years after Columba's birth. Modern scholars are unimpressed by biographical "facts" that appear ten centuries after they were supposed to occur.

Let's start with undisputed facts: Columba was a real person, an Irish prince and abbot. In 561, Columba prayed for his family's side in a great battle between two branches of the Irish royal clan, and Columba's family won. In 562, Columba was excommunicated by a synod held on family lands of the losing side. And in 563, Columba left Ireland for good and founded the monastery on Iona. One more fact is accepted as true: Columba's founding of the Iona monastery was the central event of his life, and a key event in the history of Scotland.

Here is O'Donnell's tale. Columba was a prince of a competing wing of Diarmait's royal clan, and in direct line for the throne, a powerful man, an abbot and founder of Irish monasteries. In that year a monk named Finnian returned from a pilgrimage to Rome with a complete copy of the Gospels, the only one in Ireland. Columba copied it. Finnian objected and complained to Diarmait, in effect suing Columba for violation of copyright and demanding that Columba hand over his copy. Columba pleaded "Finnian's book is none the worse for being copied," but Diarmait ruled for Finnian, stating, "As the calf is to the cow, so the copy is to the book." Columba was furious. Later that year, Diarmait compounded his offense against Columba by violating a Columban monastery's right of sanctuary, dragging out and executing a murderer. The murderer's crime was undisputed; Diarmait was tough on crime, and did not like the Church protecting criminals from justice. However, Diarmait was showing disrespect to the Church and asserting his own supremacy in matters of civil law.

Columba raised an army to oppose Diarmait, recruiting among his own noble kin. In the ensuing battle, Columba prayed for his people while Finnian (the book owner) counter-prayed for Diarmait. God heard Columba's prayers, not Finnian's; Columba's side won, killing three thousand of Diarmait's men while losing only three of their own. "Columba made peace with the defeated king, and kept the book," stated O'Donnell. However, Columba's fellow churchmen were horrified at the loss of life. They excommunicated their leader, then stayed that sentence on the condition that Columba go into permanent exile, so that he might "win as many souls for Christ as he had caused to die in battle." Columba left Ireland for the pagan lands of the Scots and Picts, to live there for the remaining thirty-three years of his life.

There is nothing historically wrong with this story, apart from its nearly complete lack of corroborative evidence. It is completely consistent with the scant facts, with the known or inferred character of the people involved, and with the way things worked in early Christian Ireland. Did things actually happen this way, or was O'Donnell projecting Tudor politics onto a Dark Age Irish stage? We will never know.

Upon reaching Scotland, Columba's first task was to make contact with the local authorities. At the time of Columba's exile the western coast of modern-day Scotland was inhabited by colonies of Irish settlers known as the Dalriada, loosely governed by their own local High King at Dunadd, on the mainland coast south of today's ferry port of Oban. Today, Dunadd is a large, bare outcrop of hard volcanic rock, with little to indicate that it was once the seat of Scottish kings. Nevertheless, the site is wonderfully evocative, with superb views over the tiny, neat farm at its base, towards the great, wild mountains that arch around it — a good place to appreciate the barbaric new lands that greeted Columba.

The High King of the Dalriada gave Columba a choice of sites to settle, but Columba picked a flea-speck of an island at the furthest end of his domains: Iona. Iona had what Columba needed. It had a patch of land rich enough to grow the food required by the monastery, a tall hill to shelter it from the brutal sea winds, and a sandy cove to beach the sixty-foot skin-covered boats that Columba and his monks used to roam the Irish Sea. Part of the Inner Hebrides, Iona is a tiny island, covered in hard, bare rocks and deep bog, a rough rectangle a mile wide by three miles long. It sits off the large Isle of Mull, across a mile of rough water from a remote and barren peninsula known as the Ross of Mull. In this way it was (and is) isolated, not only from the mainland, but also from any part of Mull that anyone might want to inhabit in the 6th century.

Columba and his monks built a compound of simple wooden structures. They used a small timber church with a side chapel, which later monks rebuilt in stone; the side chapel still exists. The monks had quarters separate from the church, along with workshops and barns. Columba had his own separate sleeping room and copying room (for copying texts) on a rocky knoll in the center of the compound. The whole compound was surrounded by a roughly rectangular earthwork enclosure, parts of which still exist today. The monks would spend their time in prayer and contemplation, in copying books, and in the routine work of the monastery — growing food, constructing buildings and earthworks, gathering the harvest.

We hear no more of Columba starting wars over books; instead, we get glimpses of Columba setting up missions and monasteries, stabilizing borders, acting as a trusted go-between. Columba legitimized the Dalriada dynasty, ordaining its High King with a Christian ceremony; the Dalriadans went on to establish the modern kingdom of Scotland five centuries later. He was on excellent terms with the pagan Pictish king (who controlled the area around modern-day Inverness), who gave him permission to travel extensively, setting up missions and converting the people. Other near-contemporary accounts show Columba on close terms with the Welsh king at Dumbarton (near modern Glasgow). These kings so respected Columba and Iona that they chose to be buried in its monastic graveyard — a tradition that continued for seven more centuries, the King of Man being buried there in 1261.

Columba's successor extended Iona's influence to the pagan English kingdom of Northumbria, setting up a monastery at Landisfarne and doing extensive missionary work. A century after Columba's death Iona reached the zenith of her diplomatic influence, when its abbot Adomnan negotiated the first international law prohibiting wartime atrocities against civilians — the Law of the Innocents, signed by fifty kings and princes of Ireland, Dalriada Scotland, Pictland, Britain, and England, and enforced by the Church through excommunication.

In those centuries Iona became one of Europe's great centers of the arts. Its scribes created two of the most beautiful books known — the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow (both later moved to Ireland for protection against Vikings). The Ionan monks also developed a remarkable style of carving stone crosses that remains familiar to us fifteen centuries later — the "Celtic Cross", very tall with a short cross-arm surrounded by a circlet or halo. The Ionan crosses are elaborately carved with biblical scenes and abstract animal shapes, particularly intertwining snakes, a symbol of resurrection (snakes shed their skins). Four of these archetypal crosses survive at Iona, one proudly upright and in its original location, the other three as fragments displayed in the abbey's museum.

From this high point, Iona took centuries to decline. The Celtic monks, deeply conservative, found themselves on the wrong side of the 7th and 8th century monastic debates; this caused them to lose their influence in Pictland and Northumbria. Then the Vikings came. As a seaside repository of rich reliquaries and fabulously expensive manuscripts, Iona was particularly attractive to Viking attack; Iona's riches were transferred to other Columban houses for safekeeping, and never returned. Prone to Viking attack, stripped of their influence in adjacent lands, lacking the library of a scholar's haven or the relicts of a pilgrim's destination, Iona declined for four centuries.

Then, in the 13th century, the Hebrides again became a center of European culture. The Viking-Scottish leader Somerled united all the lands on the Scottish sea lanes into one kingdom, later known as the "Lordship of the Isles." His son Reginald set about restoring Iona to its old glory, a great center of religion and culture at the heart of a great kingdom. Reginald took what was left of the Iona monastery from the Irish Columbans and turned it over to the Benedictines. He then showered it with money. The Benedictines launched a major building program, putting up a huge new abbey at the site of the old simple stone structure, preserving only the original abbey's side chapel, ancient grave yard, and high crosses. They also relaunched the carving programme, developing a strong, vital style associated with the Lords of the Isles.

Not surprisingly, Iona's newfound glory did not long outlast the Lordship of the Isles. By the 16th century the abbey was in disrepair, and the newly protestant Scottish Presbyterian Church had no need of such a grand structure at the back of beyond. Iona was abandoned, and the abbey and its buildings collapsed into picturesque ruins.

In 1899 Iona's owner, the Duke of Argyll, donated the abbey ruins to a foundation which set about restoring the abbey to its 13th century appearance. The foundation completed this in 1910, dedicating the newly rebuilt structure as a retreat center in 1938. Since then the Iona Cathedral Foundation has restored or rebuilt much of the 13th century abbey as part of the retreat, with the abbey itself remaining a public space for contemplation and prayer.

In modern Iona, Columba's 6th century monastery remains elusive. Its village is delightfully old-fashioned, a row of whitewashed stone cottages by the sandy beach on which Columba's monks landed their boats. The reconstructed abbey and other 13th century ruins stand adjacent. It all seems very old, until you contemplate the immense gap of time between these historic structures and Columba's original monastery. Nevertheless, sections of Columba's abbey survive. Its earthworks walls are obvious in spots, and their entire sweep is apparent from the nearby heights of Iona's rocky hill, Dun I. The low rock where Columba kept his cell stands in front of the 13th century abbey, and the tiny stone building that flanks the abbey's entrance dates from the original Columban foundation. A small museum holds the slim remains of the Dark Age monastery — surprisingly, the site has not been systematically excavated.

Most impressive are the two stone crosses at the front of the abbey, each richly carved with its swirling abstract patterns. Nothing else will get you quite so close to this royal saint, carrying a burden of sin and death to a Scottish exile, than their simple forms, stern biblical scenes, and intertwining snakes.