|
No two objects
of interest could be more absolutely dissimilar in kind than the two
neighbouring islands, Staffa and lona:—Iona dear to Christendom for more
than a thousand years;—Staffa known to the scientific and the curious only
since the close of the last century. Nothing but an accident of geography
could unite their names. The number of those who can thoroughly understand
and enjoy them both is probably very small. There can be no doubt which is
the more popular of the two. The Aspects of Nature will always be more
generally attractive than the History of Man. It requires no previous
knowledge, and no preparation of the memory or of the imagination, to be
impressed by "Fingal’s Cave." I have heard well-travelled men declare that
nothing they had seen in any part of the world had ever produced such an
effect upon them. There are many larger caverns—there are many more lofty
cliffs. But there is nothing anywhere like that great Hall of Columns
standing round their ocean-floor, and sending forth in ceaseless
reverberations the solemn music of its waves. This is a scene which
appeals to every eye, which all can understand, and which none are likely
to forget. With lona it is very different. Its interest lies altogether in
human memories. The stranger must bring with him the knowledge and the
reflection which can alone enable him to enjoy what is of real interest in
the associations and in the appearance of the place. What he sees upon the
Island will not help him much, and a great part of what has to be read
about it, will help him less. The buildings which have risen and have
decayed upon the ancient sites, and the controversies which have raged
around them, belong, one and all, to times far removed from that in which
the fame of Icolmkill arose. The most recent description of Iona, and
perhaps also one of the most eloquent, is altogether misleading, and gives
the traveller a very imperfect idea both of what he ought to remember and
of what he may expect to find. And yet no one, perhaps, ever visited the
Island who was in some respects better qualified to rejoice in its
associations than the distinguished author of the "Monks of the West." But
an indiscriminate admiration of mediaeval superstitions, and the absence
of all endeavour to sift fact from fiction in the narrative we possess of
Columba’s life, mar the reality of the picture which Montalembert gives us
of the Past. Nor does the present fare better in his hands. His
disposition to extol the self-sacrifice of his hero, and the incapacity of
every Frenchman to understand any forms of natural beauty except those to
which he has been accustomed, combine to make his description of Columba’s
adopted home in the highest degree fanciful and erroneous. It may well be,
however, that different minds should find themselves attached by very
different ties to the recollections of lona, and that there should be a
corresponding difference in the form which their impressions take. Its
history touches an immense variety of interests—the migration of
Races,—the rise of Nations,—.the conquests of Christianity - the
developments of Belief. Without venturing into very deep waters on any of
these subjects, something perhaps may yet be said of interest to those who
visit lona, and to some also, possibly, who will never see it.
The first great interest of lona
lies in the age to which it takes us back. More than thirteen hundred
years have now passed since Columba landed on its shores. It is very easy
to speak of such numbers, or to write them; but it is not quite so easy to
have before us a definite idea of the place occupied by the last thirteen
centuries in the history of the world. Does the year of our Lord 563 appear to us a very ancient or a very modern date? This will depend
entirely on the point of view from which we may choose to look at it. For
there is no difficulty in placing ourselves in imagination in a much more
distant age, and then, when we turn and look in this direction, the sixth
century of the Christian era will appear a long way on towards the present
time. On the banks of the Nile it would seem an hour ago. Even on the
banks of the Tiber it would not be old. On the other hand, when we measure
thirteen hundred years by the changes they have brought, the days of
Columba’s correctly the depths into which we look. For ministry will
appear remote indeed. And this method of taking our stand at different
points of past time, and turning our face alternately in opposite
directions, is the only way of estimating the tracts of Time are
foreshortened like the tracts of Space. Very often, in a landscape, some
difference, hardly perceptible, in the tints of blue, is all that
distinguishes between mountains which are really separated by wide valleys
or by whole gulfs of sea. In like manner we forget the long intervals of
unmemorable time that have elapsed between events which we look at across
the space of more than a thousand years. And then, as the sunlight falls very unequally on different parts of a
wide horizon, so does the light of History fall very unequally on
different epochs of the past. On the sayings and the doings of some men,
who are, nevertheless, among the Fathers of Mankind, it shines so brightly
that we hear them speak as if they were speaking at our side; whilst there
are many periods, some of them containing many centuries, which are much
closer to us, but which lie, as it were, in hollows. We look across them.
Columba’s age is one of these. The eye ranges over it to those
civilizations of the ancient world with which great historians and great
poets have made us so familiar. Thus, in some aspects the age of Ceasar,
or of Tacitus, may well seem nearer than the age of Adamnan or of Bede.
And yet, if we suppose ourselves to be standing at that point of the
history of Rome when her legions first landed in Britain, or a few years
later, when the long line of her Emperors began how far on, and how far
down that line, would the days of Columba seem! If a Roman of the time of
Augustus had seen Rome as she was to be five hundred years later, he would
have felt as if the end of the world had come. And so it was—the end of
the world which he knew and lived in. His eye would have ranged from Rome
pushing her conquests on the Nile, the Danube, and the Clyde, to Rome
deserted as the seat of government—taken and retaken by Northern hordes,
and pouring forth her senate and people to welcome with Imperial honours a
barbarian King. And yet, to us, on the other hand, looking back to the
days of Columba from the present time, they may well seem to belong to a
world which has passed away. We have only to remember that Columba was the
contemporary of Justinian and Belisarius: of the great Emperor, whose
genius, or whose fortune, restored for a time the splendour of Roman
government; and of the great General who re-established the supremacy of
the Roman arms. These events seem to belong altogether to the ancient
world. Not one of the great nations of modern Europe had yet been born.
The very elements of which they are composed were only then being brought
together. All Europe, and a large part of Asia, was one great encampment,
not of armies merely, but of Races on the march. Wave was following wave
from the exhaustless breeding grounds of the North, sweeping away the
dying civilizations of the world, but depositing a fruitful soil from
which later civilizations were to rise. It was the seed-time of all our
later harvests. Long before Columba’s time these movements had begun. The
first capture of Rome by the Gothic barbarians under Alaric, took place a
little more than one hundred years before his birth. When he was yet a
child, the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy had come to an end, and the body
of Theodoric had been laid in that massive tomb which still stands among
the marshy suburbs of sad Ravenna. The conquest of Italy by the ferocious
Lombards, which to this day connects their name ‘with one of the fairest
portions of that country, took place a few years later than Columba’s
settlement in lona. Such were
the times to which that settlement takes us back—times of overwhelming and
crushing calamity, in all the ancient centres of arts, of letters, and of
law. And yet, no sound of these calamities is heard in the calm narrative
of Columba’s life, as recorded by Adamnan. The petty quarrels of some
Irish tribes, and the obscure battles which they fought, seem more
important in the eyes of this biographer as fixing the date of the
transactions he records, than the most famous contemporary events
affecting the most famous countries of the world. It is as if he had never
heard of them—as if the sound of them had never reached his ears. But
equally unbroken is the silence he maintains on memorable events which
were passing much nearer home. It was only a hundred years before
Columba's birth that the Roman legions had been finally withdrawn from
Britain. During a great part of that time—probably, during the whole of
it—that country which was not yet known by the name of England, was still
in the main a Roman colony. Some, certainly—probably many—of the towns and
villas whose foundations and whose tesselated pavements are now uncovered
only by the plough, or which lie buried under existing cities, were still,
in Columba’s childhood, the luxurious habitations of a Roman people. But
the same great movements which had already overwhelmed the heart of the
empire, were now breaking with equal violence on its most distant shores.
The old inhabitants of the soil, who had been subdued by the power of
Rome, and in some degree also by her civilization and her laws, were now
harassed by the rude barbarians, who had with difficulty been kept at bay
even by Trajan, and Severus, and Theodosius. Then the same expedient which
everywhere marked the decline of Empire, the employment of barbarians to
resist barbarians, is said, in Britain also, to have been the immediate
cause of the calamities which followed. Whether the story be true or not,
that a British chief invited the Saxon stranger from across the German
Sea, certain it is that somewhere about seventy years before Columba’s
birth, there began the invasion and second conquest of Britain by Angles,
and Jutes, and Saxons. During the whole of his long life that conquest was
being carried on, and it was only finally completed as nearly as possible
about the period of his death. The Saxons had been then firmly established
from the German Ocean to the Severn, and from the English Channel to the
Frith of Forth. And this was a conflict more ruthless, and a destruction
more complete, than took place in any other Province of the Roman Empire.
The Celtic inhabitants and the Roman colonists seem alike to have been
destroyed. Their laws, their manners, their Christianity, their language,
to a great extent even the very names of places, were swept away before a
Pagan race. We know only the general results; we know very little of the
details. It, is an obscure time—a time of which there is no authentic
contemporary record. When we think of it, we think of Caerleon, and of
Camelot, and of Usk. Out of its broken memories, its traditions of heroic
effort, and its sense of sad discomfiture, there arose, in later times,
that noble cycle of romance touching the deeds of King Arthur and his
Knights, which delighted our ancestors in the Middle Ages, and which again
in our own time, and in a purer form, has been revived by Tennyson in
immortal verse:-
"For when the Roman left us, and
their law
Relax’d its hold upon us, and the ways
Were fill’d with rapine, here and there a deed
Of prowess done redress’d a random wrong.
But I was first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their Head,
In that fair order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time."
And the sad work done by internal
feuds in bringing in the Heathen and the Stranger is well embodied in the
words addressed by the king to Guinevere:-
"Well is it that no child is born of
thee.
The children born of thee are sword and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws,
The craft of kindred, and the godless hosts
Of heathen swarming o’er the Northern Sea."
So much for the place in secular
history, to which we are taken back by the memories and associations of
lona. Let us now, standing on the same spot, lay down similar bearings in
the history of the Church. And here the impression of antiquity is less
striking. The days of the Saxon conquests and of the Picts and Scots are
days which, in all secular matters, belonged to a world altogether
different from our own; but the relation in which they stand to the later
history of the Church is by no means equally remote. There have been,
indeed, many subsequent developments of doctrine and of practice. In the
main, however, the theology and government of the Western Church had come,
or was then just coming, to be very nearly what, until the Reformation, it
subsequently remained. The first great battles of orthodoxy had been
fought and won. Athanasius—and Ambrose—and Jerome—and Augustine, had lived
and died. They had given form and consistency to that system of discipline
and belief which was finally accepted, both by the Latin and Teutonic
nations. The Priesthood had firmly established its power, on the gratitude
and in the superstitions of mankind. In proportion as the civil power
declined, the spiritual power had risen on its decay. The organization
through which this power was exerted had risen also by slow and insensible
development. Like all strong things, it was not invented. It simply grew.
An Order and an Office had been established in the Church, and was
accepted as of divine origin, for which, in the narratives of the New
Testament, there is not even a distinctive name. In and out of the
Christian ministry the Episcopate had emerged, and out of the Episcopate
the Papacy was emerging too. Both these powers arose by a natural, if not
by a necessary, process of development. All over the East the chief
Pastors in the great cities, which were the centres of the old
civilization, had assumed positions always of influence, and sometimes of
command. Among those cities, neither lapse of time nor accumulated
misfortunes had destroyed the pre-eminence of the greatest Name of all;
and in support of the Bishops of Rome, the ascendancy due to personal
character had on some memorable occasions come in aid of the ascendancy
due to traditional position. Under such circumstances, equality among
provincial Bishops was not more likely to endure than equality among local
clergy. The same motives of convenience in respect to government, and in
respect to the centralization of authority which operated in each
particular community, would operate not less powerfully to establish some
one Head in the organization of the universal Church.
And then the claim of Right and of Hereditary Succession
which arose in the one case was sure to arise also in the other. The
growth of opinion, out of which these two kinds of Primacy arose, has been
perhaps, as natural in the larger as in the smaller sphere. Theories are
never wanting to account for facts; and those facts, which are in
themselves only phenomena of Thought and developments of Belief, never
fail to gather round them congenial interpretations of the Past. Traces of
some special prominence in Peter, among the other Apostles, had been
discerned or imagined in certain incidents connected with the early
Church. Tradition had designated Rome as the scene of his last ministry,
and of his martyrdom. The supposed spiritual Primacy of Peter, and the
undoubted secular Primacy of Rome, had conspired to re-act upon each other
in the minds of men. And so, at the beginning of the fifth century,—that
is, about 120 years before Columba’s birth,—the lineal spiritual descent
from St Peter of the Bishops of Rome had become widely accredited in the
Christian world.’ The tremendous claims, indeed, which this tenet was made
to bear were as yet appearing only in the germ; but during that century,
immediately preceding Columba’s time, the two Pontificates of Innocent I.
(A.D. 402—417) and of Leo the Great (440—461) had laid deep the
foundations of the Papal power. The last years of Columba’s own life were
contemporary with the Pontificate of the third great man by whom that
power was consolidated, and from whose time forwards we are in the
presence of the Medimval Papacy. Gregory the Great was elected Pope in
590; that is, when Columba was seventy years of age, and after his
ministry among the Picts and Scots had been carried on from lona, for
seven-and-twenty years. Before he died in 597, Columba must have heard
much of that famous mission of the Roman Monk who came to convert the
heathen People which had destroyed Christianity in so large a part of
Britain, and from whose country such lovely fair-haired slaves had been
brought to the market-place of Rome.
And here we come upon another point
of immense interest at which lona touches the general history of the
Church. Columba represents one of the earlier forms of the monastic life,
which seems to have materially differed from that which it assumed in the
great Orders of mediaeval times. And yet the first of those great Orders
was founded in his day. As Columba was a contemporary of Justinian, and of
Gregory the Great, so also he was a contemporary of the famed St.
Benedict. Twenty-six years before Columba’s birth, this remarkable man,
then a youth of fourteen, flying from the corruption of Rome, had taken
refuge in the caves of Subiaco. There he had moulded into a lasting form
the Rule out of which arose the first great Orders of the West.
Thirty-five years later, when Columba was still a child, Benedict had
removed from holes in a precipice, to the summit of a mountain,—fit emblem
this migration, of the larger prospects which had opened to his gaze, and
of the wide dominion which his Rule was destined to subdue. On the sunny
ridge of Monte Casino, which rises above the valley of the Liris, and
commands a splendid panorama among the hills of Samnium and over the
valleys of Campania, he had founded in 494 that retreat which for more
than 1,300 years has been one of the most famous Monasteries of the world.
But rapid as was the spread of the great monastic Order which poured forth
its legions from this centre, more than a century elapsed before they
reached the distant shores of Britain. For aught we know, Columba, though
he survived him more than fifty years, never heard of the Rule of
Benedict. What then was the monastic system in which Columba himself
lived, and which he brought with him to Iona? This is a question
respecting which there has been much controversy, but which mainly the
patient research of Irish antiquarians has solved with tolerable
clearness. The interest which attaches to this question is considerable,
but its importance may be very easily exaggerated or misunderstood. No
special value can be set on the customs of religious life in the sixth
century as necessarily affording any indication whatever either of the
doctrine or of the practices of Primitive Christianity. Five hundred years
is a time long enough for almost any amount of drift. We know what abuses
had arisen even in the lifetime and under the eyes of those who had seen
the Lord. We know more than this—we know those tendencies of our nature
which make it impossible that corruptions should not arise. We know that
one of the chiefest of the Apostles warned the clergy of Ephesus, and
through them the whole Church, that they enjoyed no miraculous protection
against the growth of error. In the same breath in which he told them they
had all been made Overseers of the church by the Holy Ghost, he told them
also that out of their own number men would arise speaking perverse
things. Accordingly the very earliest Christian writings which have come
down to us after those of the Apostles, bear upon their face the
unmistakeable marks of deviation and decline. It cannot be too constantly
remembered, or too emphatically repeated, that there are no "Apostolic
Fathers" except the Apostles. But later writers, in the several centuries
to which they belong, are of immense interest in enabling us to trace the
developments of belief and of practice which arise out of all those
influences, external and internal, by which our conceptions of truth and
of duty are so much determined. And so the life of St. Columba is of
special value in enabling us to judge of the intervals that elapsed
between certain waves of opinion which at successive periods were
propelled from the ancient centres of Christendom, and which, each in
turn, finally overspread the whole.
The belief in the virtues of a
monastic life was one of these. The idea of it was indeed older than
Christianity. In the far East, many centuries before the Christian era,
Buddhism had devoted its thousands to dreamy contemplation. It had found a
home also among the sects of Judaism, and the description given by Pliny
of the Essenes who retired to the deserts of the Dead Sea, seems almost as
if it had been drawn from the monks of a later age. In the earliest
records of the Church, which are the records of the New Testament, we hear
nothing of it. The community of property practised among the few first
disciples, and the command addressed to the young man of great possessions
to sell all and to follow Christ, have indeed been quoted as the beginning
of, and the authority for, the life of monks. And certainly if it were
true that Christ’s life in any way resembled that life, then indeed in the
command to follow Him we might see the authority to become an Anchoret or
a Cenobite. But there does seem to be an essential difference between the
life of Him who went about doing good, and of whom His enemies complained
that He "ate and drank with publicans and sinners," and the life of men
who stood on the top of pillars or hid themselves in the dens of beasts.
Nevertheless it is easy to understand how even so grotesque a parallelism
as this has arisen and was sure to arise. Self-sacrifice was the spirit of
all Christian service. It was only in the natural course of things that
men should forget the essential distinction between self-sacrifice for a
good and wise purpose, and self-sacrifice for its own sake, or for
purposes neither wise nor good. And the moment this distinction was
forgotten, and religious enthusiasm took a wrong direction, there were
powerful causes operating to cut deep and wide this new channel for the
devotion of the Church. Many were disgusted by the frightful pollution of
the Roman world. Many more were terrified by its overwhelming calamities.
Perhaps, all things considered, no period in the history of the human race
has been so widely miserable as the fourth and fifth centuries of the
Christian era—when the Empire was breaking up, and when amidst an
universal dissolution of manners, and famines, and the ruthless invasions
of barbarous hosts, men looked for the end of the world and the terrors of
the Judgment. No wonder if even wise and good men should have concluded,
in such a world, that to leave it was the best thing to do. And so it had
come to pass that whole populations had poured themselves into the Desert,
and at one time in the course of the fourth century it was said that there
were more men and women in the monasteries of the Thebaid than remained in
all the cities of Egypt.
A great name in the history of the
Church is connected with the spread of this passion in the West. When
Athanasius came to Rome, he planted its fervour there; and when exiled to
the far banks of the Moselle, he imparted it into the rising Christianity
of Gaul. We must not confound, however, under one common name, the very
great varieties of life which prevailed under different forms of the
monastic system. It seems always to have been a life more active—less
merely contemplative—in the West than in the East. The differences of
natural character and genius are almost enough to account for this. It is
difficult to conceive of any Roman, or of any Goth, or of any Celt,
leading the life of Simeon Stylites. The early Monks of the West abjured,
no doubt, domestic life, and they generally chose for their head-quarters
some retired spot among the mountains or in the forest, or some rock
surrounded by the waves. "The bleak and barren isles," says Gibbon, "that
rise out of the Tuscan sea from Serino to Lipari, were chosen by the
Anchorets for the place of their voluntary exile." In some cases it may be
true that they lived as Anchorets. But in many more they issued forth from
their huts or cells to engage in the great work of their time—the work of
spreading Christianity in the world. We know almost nothing in detail of
the conversion of the Northern nations. But it is certain that in this
conversion the various religious communities of Cenobites were active
agents. Like all other systems which involve any violation of natural
laws, the monastic life was from the very first full of the element of
corruption, and the gross abuses which everywhere arose became very soon
intolerable. Montalembert complains in melancholy tones, and with touching
candour, of that relaxation of morals "which the Religious Orders, by a
mysterious and terrible judgment of God have never been able to resist."
To those who believe that the laws of nature are God’s laws, and cannot
with impunity be disobeyed, however high may be the motives with which
that disobedience is begun, this result will present no mystery at all.
But where the impulses of religious zeal were kept pure by contact with
the duties of an active public life, and by the noble work of missionary
labour, the tendencies to corruption may long have been kept in check. And
so it was, that at a time when monastic life in Italy had already become
thoroughly corrupt, and when the Rule of Benedict was being established as
a great measure of reform, the early religious communities of the far West
were still obedient to the rules of a virtuous discipline and of useful
labour. This is the stage at which, and the aspect in which, the monastic
life appears in the early history of lona. Ireland had never been subdued
by the Roman arms, and its early Church thus came to occupy a somewhat
isolated position in the world. It did not move under the same influences
of development as those which determined the ecclesiastical system in
other countries. In the time and in the country of Columba, the Celtic
monasteries were not only the great missionary colleges of the Church, but
they seem to have embraced and absorbed almost all that existed then of an
ecclesiastical organization. Something of a Clan connection under the rule
of hereditary families is discernible in the different foundations, and
the innate propensity of the Irish Celts to tribal feuds seems to have
made these Bodies, in a very literal sense indeed, active members of the
Church militant. And yet their religious zeal after its own type and
fashion appears to have been of a genuine kind. The study of the
Scriptures was universal, and the transcription of them was a passion.
Manuscripts still remain which are believed on probable evidence to belong
to this time, and tradition ascribes the exile of Columba to fierce
contentions for a favourite copy. Nothing altogether like those old
Monasteries existed elsewhere then, or has existed anywhere since that
time. There were among the brethren members capable of discharging
whatever varieties of function had as yet become distinctively assigned to
the different branches of the Christian ministry. How far the more
definite rules which now divide those functions, and which elsewhere had
been long firmly established, had as yet reached the remote communities of
"Scotia," there are, to say the least, serious doubts—doubts which have
been very embarrassing to those who depend, in the highest matters, upon
the perfect regularity of early times. Such priests as were called Bishops
had no local spheres of jurisdiction. There were crowds of them; and
although Columba seems to have treated with great respect such wanderers
from among them as came to lona, they were everywhere entirely subordinate
to the Monastic leaders, and they do not themselves appear to have been
set apart in the manner which over the rest of Christendom had come to be
regarded as necessary to the right constitution of the office. Long after
the death of Columba, the Community he founded in Iona seems to have
"ordained and sent forth bishops" under circumstances which look very much
as if their mission was conferred by the collective authority of the
brethren. If any Bishop was present at the consecration, which is a matter
of inference only, he appears to have been regarded as the mere organ of
the supreme authority of the Abbot and of the Body over which the Abbot
presided. All these things have been terrible scandals to later
ecclesiastical Historians, and have much exercised the ingenuity of
Presbyterian and Episcopal controversialists. It is vain, however, to
look, in the peculiarities of the Scoto-Irish Church, for the model either
of Primitive practice, or of any modern system. As regards the theology of
Columba’s time, although it was not what we now understand as Roman,
neither assuredly was it what we understand as Protestant. Montalembert
boasts, and I think with truth, that in Columba’s Life we have proof of
the practice of auricular confession, of the invocation of saints, of
confidence in their protection, of belief in transubstantiation, of the
practices of fasting and of penance, of prayers for the dead, of the sign
of the cross in familiar—and it must be added—in most superstitious use.
On the other hand there is no symptom of the worship or "cultus" of the
Virgin, and not even an allusion to such an idea as the universal
Bishopric of Rome, or to any special authority as seated there.
There is, however, one other aspect of Columba’s
religious life which is thoroughly mediaval, and that is, the atmosphere
of miracle in which the whole is presented to us. This is a subject which
is full of real mystery. Adamnan wrote his famous Life within a hundred
years after the great Abbot’s death. He had spoken in his youth with men
who had seen Columba. It is after an interval of time so short as this
that a Biography is written, almost the sole object of which is to record
the miracles, the prophecies, and the inspired sayings of the Saint. Some
of the stories told are not only childish and utterly incredible, but of a
character which makes it very difficult to understand how they could ever
be seriously believed even in a very ignorant and a very superstitious
age. To shut the book and never to open it again might well be our first
impulse, when we are told, for example, of a Staff (Pastoral?)
accidentally left upon the shore of lona, being transported across the sea
by the prayers of Columba, to meet its disconsolate owner when he landed
somewhere on his way to Ireland. What are we to make of stories such as
this? Did Adamnan himself believe them? Or had the pestilent doctrine been
already established that frauds can be pious, and that falsehoods can be
safely told in the interests of the Faith? It is the fashion now to deal
with this difficult subject only by evasion. Montalembert himself repeats
all his narratives without letting us clearly understand whether he
accepts all, or only some,—or whether he narrates them simply as part of
the belief of the times,—as such and as nothing more. Perhaps devout Roman
Catholics do not choose to put any question to themselves upon the
subject. Believers of picturesque narratives care for the picturesqueness
and for nothing else. Philosophical historians have recourse to such
generalities as this: "History to be true must condescend to speak the
language of legend. The belief of the times is part of the record of the
times." This is all very well, but it is no explanation of the phenomena
with which we have to deal; nor can it satisfy any mind which desires to
understand them. To believe nothing of the truth of a narrative, and to
believe everything of the truthfulness of the narrator, is rather a
difficult mental operation. Yet this is very much what is generally
offered to us now-a-days by way of compromise. I do not think it possible
to explain all the narratives of Adamnan, and other narratives of the same
kind, without ascribing much to the effect of deliberate invention. We
know indeed what slight additions and alterations made in the telling of a
story will transform its whole character after it has passed for a very
short time from mouth to mouth, and we know, too, how this tendency to
growth may be nourished to an almost unlimited degree in an atmosphere of
credulity where nothing is considered as in itself improbable. It is to be
observed, too, that Adamnan cannot have been an eye-witness of any of the
wonders he records. But the minute and circumstantial details given by him
in the story of the Staff, and in many others equally childish, can hardly
be referred to mere traditionary legend. There is indeed another class of
stories which are of a different character, and must be regarded from a
very different point of view. I refer to those in which the wonder lies
not so much in the facts alleged, as in the interpretations which are put
upon them. These altogether depend on the predispositions of the mind, and
the predisposition then was to see in all events nothing but their
subserviency to the interests of the Christian Church. The escapes
effected by Columba from perils by sea and land through the efficacy of
his prayers belong to this class. Adamnan’s Life is full of them. Putting
aside the exaggerations of detail which transform the Providential into
the Miraculous, this is to be remembered—that not only may such
interpretations be sincere, but what is more, they may be true. Not even
the fullest belief in what men vaguely call "The Supernatural" compels us
to accept every manifestation of it which a puerile fancy or a
superstitious purpose may invent. We are not shut up to the alternative of
denying the possibility of Divine Power becoming unusually visible among
men, or else of believing that it is exerted without reason, without
measure, and without proportion of Means to Ends. The agencies which work
in and through the characters of great men at great epochs of human
history, and in the great achievements of their lives, are agencies which
may either be called natural or supernatural according to our conception
and definition of the term. They are spiritual agencies, and sometimes
work in almost a visible manner, through unusual combinations of ordinary
laws. Who can measure the power of minds endowed with extraordinary gifts?
And who can say how extraordinary these gifts may not sometimes be? Over
and over again in the history of the world, they have achieved apparent
impossibilities, and have seemed as if yoking to their service the whole
natural course and current of events. Many of the stories of Adamnan turn
upon the possession by Columba of the gift of prophecy. There is nothing
impossible in this. One prediction of Columba recorded by Adamnan, to
which, in the next Chapter, I shall have occasion to refer, has been in
course of fulfilment during 1,300 years, and is being fulfilled now by
every pilgrim who lands upon lona. We must remember as a fact that Columba
was an agent, and a principal agent, in one of the greatest events the
world has ever seen, namely the conversion of the Northern Nations. It is
not surprising that in such times the providential ordering of events
should make a deep impression on the minds of succeeding generations, and
that almost every transaction connected with such men should be read in
the light which shines from behind the veil. We are almost entirely
ignorant of the natural means by which that conversion of the Northern
Nations was effected. Such historians as survived the centuries during
which it was going on, are as silent as Adamnan on all the details which
we should most desire to know. And yet in order to appreciate how
marvellous this event was—how extraordinary the agencies must have been by
which it was accomplished—we have only to remember that nothing of the
same kind has happened for more than a thousand years. The world is still
in large proportion heathen. Christianity is indeed still spreading, but
mainly by the spread and migration of those races whose conversion was
completed then. Converts are made here and there in our own time. But
nowhere now—nowhere during a long course of centuries—have we seen whole
nations accepting the Christian faith, and casting their idols to the
moles and to the bats. What were the predisposing causes which led to this
great movement among the Gothic and Celtic tribes? What was the condition
of their own beliefs? What were to them the attractive elements in the new
religion? What were the arguments addressed to them by Columba? Could he
quote to them as Paul did at Athens to the Greeks some things which "even
their own poets had said"? It is really afflicting that Adamnan gives us
no ray of light on these questions, so interesting, and so profoundly
dark. One, at least, of the explanations so often given of the influences
under which Christianity was extended, cannot apply to the Picts of
Caledonia. Christianity was not presented to them in alliance with the
impressive aspects of Roman civilization. The tramp of Roman legions had
never been heard in the Highland glens, nor had their clans ever seen with
awe the majesty and the power of Roman government. In the days of Columba,
whatever tidings may have reached the Picts of Argyll or of Inverness,
must have been tidings of Christian disaster and defeat. All the more must
we be ready to believe that the man who, at such a time planted
Christianity successfully among them, must have been a man of powerful
character and of splendid gifts. There is no arguing against that great
monument to Columba, which consists in the place he has secured in the
memory of mankind.
The imperishable interest of Adamnan’s book lies in the
vivid though incidental touches of life and manners which he gives us in
the telling of his tales—of life and manners as they were in that obscure
but most fruitful time, when the light of ancient history had died away,
and before the light of modern history had arisen. As regards Scotland, we
get behind the age of History, and not only behind it, but behind it by
many centuries. The history of Scotland, properly so called, begins with
Malcolm Canmore; and before he was born, Columba had been gathered to his
fathers for more than 400 years. Those who are very rigorous in the
definition of History, and who demand for it as essential the existence of
contemporary records, will hold that a much wider gap remains to be filled
between the days of Columba and the true beginning of Scottish history.
Fordun and the other chroniclers, who are considered the fathers of that
history, lived no less than 700 years later than the great apostle of the
Picts. In the days of Adamnan, Scotland was not Scotland, but "Albyn."
"Scotia" was then the familiar name for that island which we now call
Ireland. In like manner, England was not yet England, and the very
foundation of its national life had not yet been laid.
It is in close contact with this dreamland of our
national annals, this legendary and almost mythic age, that we find in
Columba’s Life, not only the firm foothold of history, but the vivid
portraiture of an individual man. In regard to many contemporary events of
the deepest interest, we have to grope our way to nothing better than
probable conclusions, through the obscure data of philological research.
Not one historical character of the time, in connection with any one of
the races contending for the mastery in Britain, is in any similar degree
known to us. On one spot, and one spot only, of British soil, there shines
in this dark time a light, more vivid even than the light of common
history—the light of personal anecdote and of domestic narrative. When we
land upon lona, we can feel that we are treading in the very footsteps of
a man whom we have known in voice, in gesture, in habits, and in many
peculiarities of character; and yet, of a man who walked on the same
ground before the Heptarchy, when Roman cities still stood in Britain, and
when the ancient Christianized Celts of Britain were maintaining a
doubtful contest with Teutonic heathenism.
In these memories the interest of lona lies. In the
next chapter we shall land upon its shores, and see what is to be seen
upon them. |
