Columban

RANDOM NOTES ON COLUMBAN

by Rev. Professor Dr. Francis Nigel Lee

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1, Columban was born circa 543 near Leinster in Ireland, and died in 615 at Bobbio in Italy. He was "one of the greatest missionaries of the Celtic Church" who became "unpopular because of his attacks on degeneracy...among local clergy....

"He went to Italy and founded the monastery of Bobbio (c. 612-14). His influence became widespread.... Columban’s works include poems, letters and sermons, proving him a man of learning.... His writings were edited by G.S.M. Walker, with an introduction and English translation (1957)."

The strongly anti-papal Columban(us) of Ireland went as far as Switzerland -- and then even into Northern Italy itself. Only the expanding power of the papacy prevented his further advance.

Bobbio is a town in Piacenza province between Turin and Milan and Genoa. It is situated in the Ligurian alpine valley of the Trebbia River southwest of Piacenza -- just over 200 miles northwest of Rome.

"It became famous when the Irish missionary monk St. Columban founded a monastery there.... He died three years later, but the monastery flourished and became a centre of medieval culture and learning, especially renowned for its great library." 2 "Columban...by his individualism and austere puritanism came into conflict not only with the Merovingian rulers...but also with the local ecclesiastical administration" of Rome. 3

The Dutch Christian Encyclopedia states 4 that when earlier in French Fontaines, Columbanus built Irish-style communities without the permission of the Frankish Bishop. In Italy he founded a similar community in Bobbio among the Lombards.

There, his Irish-style monastic orders were for a long time more effective than that of the Benedictines, but through papal interference the latter gradually increased. Indeed, when the Romanists in English gained the victory over the Iro-Scots at the Synods of Streanes-Halch in 644 and Whitby in 664, the influence of Columbanus and his Puritans began to recede (from about 666 onward). Significant date!

Colombain alias Columban(us) the Iro-Celtic Missionary to Europe -- not to be confused with Iona’s Calumceile alias Columba (of similar doctrine) some twenty years his senior - stoutly resisted the papal claims and the monastic celibacy of the Romish Church. Columbanus was born in Leinster around 543, and educated at the great Culdee Irish Seminary at Bangor. As a Proto-Protestant Christian Missionary, he then went to France in 595 (and later to Austria and to Italy).

He went out as Culdee Missionary to France, Switzerland and Lombardy. He knew nothing of the papacy -- and Columbanus resisted the Bishop of Rome also while in Italy.

Rev. J.J.T. Campbell was for some time Lecturer in Church History at the Queensland Presbyterian Theological College. He has rightly stated 5 that several Missionaries left the British Isles, carrying the Gospel to areas of Europe. The Celtic Christian Iro-Scot Columban (A.D. 543-615), with a band of twelve men, went into Burgundy in A.D. 585.

Of Columbanus (and also of many others among his contemporaries), Werner rightly claims 6 that the idea of a papal primacy was entirely foreign to him. Indeed, Columbanus’s work on the Columbanic Rules -- is a thoroughly biblical movement towards a Christian life in evangelical freedom etc. For its own Celtic Culdee monastical organization and rules -- are clearly devoid of the Romish notions of mandatory ministerial celibacy (and other deviations). 7

As Columban on his own initiative carried the Gospel to the Germans and to the Swiss and indeed even to the Italians -- so too his older friend the A.D. 521-597 Columba neither sought nor received any papal sanction for his mission to the Picts and for the position as the ‘primate’ of the Church in North Britain.

Columban addressed 8 some of the Popes, but not submissively. One such letter was an A.D. 602 epistle to the very first person ever called sole pope (Gregory the First).

Stokes gives 9 an extract from the epistle of Columbanus on the question of Easter, written to Gregory the Great, the Bishop of Rome -- in defence of Columban’s own Irish rites and ceremonies, and in opposition to the Roman mode. From Columban’s very words therein, the unprejudiced student can draw his own conclusions -- adds Professor Stokes.

Even if not implying that Pope Gregory was a living dog, Columban’s remarks to that Pontiff were uncomplimentary! Professor Stokes himself then rightly remarks that, from the previously-mentioned words of Columban, it is very clear his ‘reverence’ for the Pope could not have been great. Otherwise, Columban would not have used such language as the above.

Still less does Columban here evidence a belief in any papal infallibility whatsoever. Indeed, Columban here accuses the Bishop of Rome of being "afraid" to "correct errors" which he might perhaps have done, if he had but listened to the "living saint" and Anti-Romanistic Culdee-Irish Christian Columban himself.

Stokes might very well also have referred to two further 10 epistles of Columban -- written to the subsequent popes Boniface III (607-608) and Boniface IV (608-615). For those epistles evidence even less respect for the then-new institution of the papacy than does his earlier letter to Gregory. See too Columban’s Controversy anent the Three Chapters 11.

Indeed, Columban’s letter to Boniface lacks any submissive obedience. Instead, he is shocked by the widespread suspicion that heresy is countenanced by the papacy. And in contrast, Columban notes that "we Irish" have been constant in the Christian Faith.

Also the A.D. 521-97 Columba alias Calumceile of Iona was quite indifferent to the Bishop of Rome and his novel doctrines -- yet still sympathetic to some of the ancient teachings of Druidism. A fortiori, his younger contemporary the Irish Culdee Christian Columban of Leinster, was -- just like the druids themselves -- overtly hostile toward Rome (and her pope). Indeed, Rev. R.W. Morgan declares 12 that the Celtic Culdee Columban alias Colombain and his associates from the primitive colleges in Ireland evangelized even the barbarian Lombards of Northern Italy.

Now this A.D. 543-615 Irishman Columbanus alias Colombain of Leinster (and later of Bobbio in Italy) -- is not to be confused with his older contemporary the A.D. 521-597 Irishman Columba alias Calumceile of Donegal (and later of the island of Iona). For Colombain: was born twenty-two years after Calumceile; he came from Leinster, and not from Donegal; and he laboured in darkest Europe, and not in brightest Iona.

Columbanus was trained at St. Sinell’s Seminary in Cluain-innes -- as regards grammar, rhetoric, mathematics and theology. Later, he was trained even further at St. Comgall’s Seminary in Bangor (Ulster) -- as regards Latin, Greek and Hebrew. With twelve disciples, Columbanus sailed for Burgundy in A.D. 590; scolded the pope and the Church of Rome; and established a non-celibate Celtic monastery at Bobbio in Italy. 13

The Irish Presbyterian church historian Rev. Professor Dr. Stokes 14 gives a very interesting and most illuminating extract from the Epistle of Columbanus on the Easter question. It was, explains Stokes, written to one of the greatest of all the successive Bishops of Rome -- and indeed to the very first of them then to be called sole pope -- Gregory the Great. Columbanus wrote that epistle, in defence of his own Irish rites and ceremonies -- and in opposition to the Roman mode.

In that letter, one finds no trace of homage -- but only the utmost candour. Apparently disapproving of the Romish mass of Gregory the Great (Bishop of Rome), and also of that of his predecessor Leo the Great (Bishop of Rome) -- Columbanus asks Gregory: "How is it that you are induced to support this dark Paschal system?... You are afraid perhaps of incurring the charge of a taste for novelty -- and are content with the authority of your predecessors..., Leo in particular. In this affair, a living watchdog is better than a dead lion. For a living saint may correct errors that had not been corrected by another greater one."

Here, Columban amusingly compares the then Bishop of Rome (Gregory the Great) to a living watchdog -- and the previous Bishop of Rome (Leo the Great) to a dead lion. In this, Columban makes a clever word-play. For in Latin gregoricus, from the Greek greegorikos, means ‘watchful’ (and hence: having the qualities of a good "watchdog"). Leo, of course, means ‘lion’ in Latin. Hence, Gregory, still alive, was a living ‘watchdog’‘; but his expired predecessor at Rome, Leo, was then a dead ‘lion.’

Yet further. Not only does Columban fail to reverence Gregory. He actually accuses him of being "afraid" and fearful. Indeed, he also accuses him of being content with the authority of a previous Bishop of Rome -- instead of correcting the latter’s "errors."

As Rev. Professor Dr. Stokes himself rightly remarks: "I do not think that the ‘reverence’ of Columbanus for ‘the pope’ or his belief in ‘papal infallibility’ can have been very great, when he would use such language!" See too Columban’s various Letters. 15

But by what standard should Gregory have corrected the "errors" of Leo Bishop of Rome? Indeed, by what standard should Leo himself have rejected the "dark Paschal system" of the mass? By the same standard in terms of which Columba condemned Gregory’s support of Leo’s "errors" -- the standard of the Prophetic and Apostolic Scriptures!

Gregory Bishop of Rome had sinned, in not correcting the "errors" of Leo. Leo Bishop of Rome had sinned, in not reforming the "dark Paschal system" of the mass. Both fallible Gregory and fallible Leo had sinned -- though both were Bishops of Rome -- in not heeding the infallible Old and New Testaments.

Indeed, allegedly-infallible Bishops necessarily undermine their own ability to recognize the true infallibility of the Bible. Conversely, the infallible Word of God necessarily implies the fallibility of all bishops except the One Who was also God Himself -- Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd and Chief Bishop of our souls. First Peter 2:21-25.

Alice Stopford Green explains in her book Irish Nationality 16 that Columba alias Calumceile had been some dozen years in Iona, when Columbanus alias Colombain (around A.D. 575) left Bangor on the Belfast Lough, leading twelve Irish monks with books in leathern satchels. Crossing Gaul to the Vosges, Columbanus founded a monastery in Luxeuil among the ruined heaps of a Roman city. Finally, he founded another monastery at Bobbio in the Italian Appenines, where he died in 615. Only eternity will show to what extent the later Waldensians near that region, were influenced by Columban!

For Columban was aflame with religious passion. He was a finished scholar -- bringing from Ireland a knowledge of Celtic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, geometry, poetry, and a fine taste. He battled for twenty years against the vice and ignorance of a half-pagan Burgundy. Scornful of ease; indifferent to danger; astonished at the apathy of Italy as compared with the zeal of Ireland in teaching; he argued and denounced -- as he himself declared -- with "the freedom of speech which accords with the custom of my country."

The passion of his piety so awed the peoples, that for a time it seemed as if the rule of Columban might outdo that of St. Benedict -- so that not the Latin but instead the Celtic rite would have conquered Western Europe. Indeed, Columban even repudiated the Bishop of Rome -- Gregory the Great himself. Thus Green.

The American Calvinist Rev. Professor Dr. J.T. McNeill, in his book The Celtic Churches, explains 17 that Columban had left Ireland long before the adoption there of the Roman date for Easter. He had followed the Celtic practice in this, and had imparted it to his converts. He has, by Romanists, been accused of insolence; and, by Protestants, been commended for his independence.

Columban’s letter to Pope Boniface, is very revealing. Certainly it lacks the note of submissive obedience due to an infallible judge and ruler. Columban is shocked by a widespread suspicion that heresy is countenanced by the papacy. By way of contrast, he notes, "we Irish" have been constant in the faith.

As Professor John Richard Green rightly remarks in his Short History of the English People 18 -- before the landing of the Anglo-Saxon English in Britain in A.D. 435f, the vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a bare struggle for life. Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders, drew an energy from its conversion. Christianity had been received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm; and letters and arts sprang up in its train. The science and knowledge of the Bible which fled from the Continent, took refuge in famous schools which made Durrow and Armagh the great Universities of the West.

The new Christian life soon beat too strongly to brook confinement within the bounds of Ireland itself. Patrick as the first real Missionary to visit Ireland, had not been dead half a century -- when Irish Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into battle with the mass of heathenism which was rolling in upon the Christian World. Irish Missionaries laboured among the Picts of the Highlands and among the Frisians of the northern seas.

The Irish Missionary, Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the Apennines. The canton of St. Gall in Switzerland still commemorates in its name another Irish Missionary, before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a time, it seemed as if the course of the history of the World was to be changed -- as if the older Celtic race that Roman and German had swept before them, had turned to the moral conquest of their conquerors; as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould the destinies of the Churches of the West. Thus Professor Green.

It was still half a century before the Synod of Whitby, in A.D. 664f. Thus McNeill. Indeed, we ourselves would add that even the A.D. 664 Whitby -- was not yet A.D. 666f. Only then would the Papacy seek to inflict its magisterial mark even upon the British Isles.

Schaff adds in his History of the Christian Church: 19 "After the expulsion of the Columban monks...in the eighth century, the term Culdee or Ceile De or Kaledei first appears.... There is no doubt that the Columban or the Keltic church of Scotland as well as the early Irish and early British churches differed in many points from the mediaeval and modern church of Rome, and represent a simpler and yet a very active missionary type of Christianity. "

The leading peculiarities of the ancient Keltic church, as distinct from the Roman, are: 1. Independence of the Pope.... 2. Monasticism...mixed with secular life and not bound by vows of celibacy.... [3.] It had also been asserted that the Kelts or Culdees were opposed to auricular confession, the worship of saints and images, purgatory, transubstantiation, the seven sacraments, and that for this reason they were the forerunners of Protestantism....

"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.... We still find them in the eleventh century, and frequently at war with the Roman clergy about landed property, titles, and other matters.... Married Culdees were gradually supplanted by CanonsRegular. They lingered longest in Brechin.... The decline of the Culdees was the opportunity of Rome....

"St. Columbanus is the pioneer of the Irish missionaries to the Continent. His life has been written with great minuteness by Jonas, a monk of his monastery at Bobbio.... Christian virtue and discipline were almost extinct. He travelled for several years, preaching and giving an example of humility and charity.... He adhered tenaciously to the Irish usage.... His extreme severity of life was a standing rebuke of the worldly priesthood.... He wrote several letters to Pope Gregory.... There is no record...of any answer of the Pope."

Kenneth Scott Latourette says 20 in his History of Christianity: "The most famous of the Irish missionaries in the Frankish domains, was Columban. He was a contemporary of Gregory the Great.... From the famous monastic community of Bangor in what is now County Down [in Columban’s native Ireland], he led a band of twelve across the sea and preached in the Merovingian realms more earnest faith and living.... Monasteries which followed his rule multiplied in the lands of the Franks."

He adds in his History of the Expansion of Christianity: 21 "The most famous of these [Irish] missionaries, was Columban. He was born...in South-eastern Ireland.... He seems to have been reared from childhood in the atmosphere of religion.... He studied the Scriptures with one Sinell.... The standard early life of Columban is by Jonas, a monk of Bobbio, the monastery which Columban founded in his later years, and was written about a generation after Columban’s death.... An English translation of Jonas (Life of St. Columban) by D.C. Munro was published in Philadelphia in 1902....

"He was received with honour by the Lombards and, with faithful followers, established a monastic community at Bobbio, in the [Ligurian Alps] mountains between [Turin,] Milan and Genoa, where after a few more years he died, probably in 615.... Columban attracted to him clergy and laymen.... Columban himself, so it is said, won some of the Suevi-- and at one time contemplated going to the pagan Wends (Slavs)."

For starters, consider the following from Dr. J.A. Wylie’s History of Protestantism: 22 "The diocese of Milan...included the plain of Lombardy, the Alps of Piedmont, and the souther provinces of France.... ‘The Bishops of Milan,’ says Pope Pelagius I (555), ‘do not come to Rome for ordination’.... ‘The Ambrosian Church was not subject to the laws of Rome.... It had been always free.... "

"Ambrose, who died A.,D.397, was Bishop of Milan.... The Bible alone was his rule [and he was the mentor of Augustine from whose order Luther later emerged].... The mantle of Ambrose descended on Claudius, Archbishop of Turin.... Of the Eucharist, he writes in his Commentary on Matthew (A.D. 815) in a way which shows that he stood at the greatest distance from the opinions which Paschasius Radbertus broached [proto-transubstantiationistically] eighteen years afterward.... Claude refutes [images]...on the same ground taken by Protestant writers still.... The second Commandment forbids.... The Scripture condemns as idolatry.... About thirty miles west of Turin, there opens before one what seems a great mountain portal. This is the entrance to the Waldensian territory."

Note the connection made between the Waldensians and Bobbio by Wylie! 23 Strangely, Wylie does not then from Bobbio go back through Columban to the Irish Culdee Church.

What is urgently needed are definitive studies linking Columban in Bobbio to the early Independents in Milan and Turin and later Waldensians of that same area -- as well as the impact of those Waldensians on Wycliffe and Huss and then on Luther. Who shall grace us by writing his Ph.D. on this subject?

Too, what is required is for Neo-Culdee enthusiastic AND learned modern missionaries to go forth today into the thick jungles of Romanism -- all the way from the Vatican and darkest Southern Europe, to the hopelessness of Latin America. There, they must go and turn cynical and sceptical Romanists not as at present toward arcane and world-flight Neo-Anabapticism and/or brain-dead and otherworldly Neo-Montanistic Pentecostalism -- but toward the undiluted fervour and catholic orthodoxy of Culdee Proto-Protestantism and rational and relevant Reformational Calvinism.

4) Christelijke Encyclopaedie voor het Nederlandsche Volk, Kok, Kampoen, 1925, I:486.

7) See too in F.N. Lee’s Roots and Fruits of Common Law, ch. 15 at its nn. 78f, 148f & 231.

10) See Lee’s op. cit.’s Addendum: Rev. Professor Dr. J.T. McNeill on the Early Celtic Churches nn. 35 & 36.

11) A Werner: Columbanus, in Schaff-Herzog’s Enc. Relig. Knowl., Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1891, I:517.

13) Hanna: A History of the Celtic Church from its Inception to 1153, Edwards, Ann Arbor, 1963, p. 31.

15) Columban’s Letters, in Epistles of the Merovingian and Carolingian Age, I:156-60, in Monuments of German History (as cited in Duke’s op. cit. pp. 134f).

22) Op. cit., Mourne Missionary Trust, Cardinagh, Kilkeel, Down, N. Ireland, 1985, I:19f. 23) Ib., II:431-38.