Anglican Commemoration
Abbot of Iona & Missionary to the Scots
June 9 · d. 597
Columba was an Irish prince who became a monk, left his homeland, and founded the monastery of Iona, a small island off the west of Scotland that became the spring of Christianity in the north. From Iona he carried the gospel to the Picts and trained generations of monks and missionaries. With Patrick and Brigid he is counted one of the three patrons of Ireland, but his enduring work was Scottish. He died on Iona in 597.
Columba was born around the year 521 at Gartan in the north of Ireland, into the royal kindred of the northern Uí Néill, a lineage that could have made him a king. His name in Latin means "dove," and in Irish he was called Colum Cille, the dove of the church. He chose to be a monk instead of a prince, and by his early forties he had founded monasteries across Ireland at Derry and Durrow and Kells. Then, around 563, he left his country, and he did not come back to live in it.
Why he left is the one shadow over his story, and his earliest biographer and his later countrymen tell it differently. The gentle account, given by Adomnán, is that he sailed out as a pilgrim for Christ. An older and harder tradition says he had been caught up in a quarrel that ended in a battle and much blood, and that he took the loss of his homeland upon himself as a penance, vowing to win for Christ as many souls as had fallen in the fight. Whichever drove him, he crossed the sea with twelve companions to a small island off the coast of the kingdom of Dál Riata, an island called Iona, today in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, and there he built the monastery that would light the north.
From Iona, Columba walked up the Great Glen to the stronghold of Bridei, king of the Picts, near what is now Inverness, and won from him leave to preach. For thirty-four years he prayed and ruled and copied books, which he loved to a fault, and sent his monks out across Scotland and back into Ireland. When his last day came, he knew it. He told his servant that this was his Sabbath, his true day of rest. In the words his biographer Adomnán set down, this day is truly a Sabbath day for me, because it is for me the last day of this present laborious life, the day on which he would rest from his labors. As he made his slow way back to the monastery, the old white horse that carried the milk pails came up to him, laid its head against his breast, and began to weep. His attendant moved to drive the beast away, but Columba would not let him: Let him alone, let him alone, for he loves me.
He spent his last strength as he had spent his life, bent over the psalter, copying out the psalms. He reached a verse in the psalm we now number thirty-four, where it is written that they who seek the Lord shall want no manner of thing that is good, and there he laid down his pen. "Here I must stop," he said; "what follows, let Baithene write." He died at midnight, as the Lord's Day began. The dove of the church had given away a kingdom and a country and kept nothing for himself but Christ, and the last words he ever wrote were a promise that those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
How we know Columba is chiefly through one book: the Life of Saint Columba written on Iona around the year 697 by Adomnán, the monastery's ninth abbot, roughly a century after Columba's death and within a remembered chain of his predecessors. It is hagiography rather than biography, arranged not as a life story but in three books of prophecies, miracles, and angelic visions to show the saint's holiness, so its wonder-tales, the calmed storms and the beast in the loch, follow the conventions of the genre and are best read in that light. An even earlier witness is the Amra Choluimb Chille, an Old Irish elegy traditionally composed soon after his death and among the oldest datable Irish poems, which testifies to the reputation he left. What is most secure is his royal Uí Néill descent, the founding of Iona around 563, his mission to the Picts and their king Bridei, and his death in 597. What is later legend is the story that a battle and a penance drove him into exile; Adomnán does not tell it, and modern scholars caution against treating it as the reason he left.
Columba gathered to himself one of the richest bodies of legend in the insular church, much of it preserved in Adomnán's three books of marvels and more still in the later Irish lives. He is honored as one of the three patron saints of Ireland alongside Patrick and Brigid, and as the founder of Iona he stands at the head of a monastic family that shaped the Christianity of Scotland and the north of England for centuries; the mission of Aidan to Northumbria went out from his island. The Cathach, a worn psalter traditionally said to be in his own hand, survives as one of Ireland's oldest manuscripts, and the Book of Kells may have been begun at Iona under his successors. His feast is kept on June 9, the day he died. He is remembered as the scholar-saint who loved books, the prince who gave up a crown, and the missionary whose small island carried a light far out of proportion to its size.
Further reading. The one indispensable source is Adomnán of Iona, Life of St Columba, best read today in Richard Sharpe's Penguin Classics translation (1995), whose long introduction is also the most accessible modern study of Columba and his world.
Online resources. Wentworth Huyshe's 1905 translation of Adomnán is at the Internet Archive, and William Reeves's edition and translation is also online there; the Latin text and an English translation are at CELT (University College Cork) and in the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook.
British (Received Pronunciation): Colum /ˈkɒləm/; Amra Choluimb Chille /ˈɑːmrə ˈxɒləv ˈxɪlə/; Dál /dɑːl/
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Columba to preach the Gospel to the people of Scotland: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11