Columba

Columba, known in Irish as Colum Cille (“dove of the church”), was born in 521 at Gartan in what is now County Donegal, in the north of Ireland. He belonged to the Cenél Conaill, a leading kindred of the Northern Uí Néill, and was thus of royal stock: his father Fedlimid mac Ferguso was a descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages, and his mother Eithne is traditionally linked to a Leinster family. Raised in a Christian aristocratic setting in sixth-century Ireland, he received a monastic education, studying under Finnian of Movilla in County Down and later at Clonard in County Meath under Finnian of Clonard, where later tradition numbered him among the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. He was ordained a priest and in the following years founded several monasteries in Ireland, most notably Derry in the mid-sixth century, together with Durrow and, according to later accounts, Kells.

A famous but historically debated episode in the medieval lives concerns a copied psalter. Later tradition holds that Columba transcribed a manuscript belonging to Finnian of Movilla without permission; the quarrel, entangled with Uí Néill politics, is said to have contributed to the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne (the so-called Battle of the Book) around 561, in which many were killed. Whether as penance imposed by a synod or by his own decision, he left Ireland in 563 with twelve companions and sailed to the west of what is now Scotland. Conall mac Comgaill, king of Dál Riata, granted him the island of Iona, where he established a monastery that became one of the most influential religious centres in the Insular world. From Iona he and his community undertook missionary work among the Picts. Adomnán’s late seventh-century Life of Columba, the principal early source, describes a visit to the Pictish king Bridei son of Maelchon near the River Ness, together with miracles, prophecies, and pastoral activity that later tradition credited with the conversion of much of Pictland, though Christianisation was in reality more gradual and collective.

Columba remained a figure of political as well as spiritual weight. He attended the Convention of Druim Cett in the 570s, an assembly involving the king of Dál Riata and the Northern Uí Néill, at which questions of tribute, the standing of the poets of Ireland, and relations between the Irish and Scottish Gaels were addressed. He continued to found or oversee daughter houses and to exercise authority over the Columban familia of monasteries spanning Ireland and Britain. He died on Iona on 9 June 597 and was buried there. In the ninth century, amid Viking raids, his relics were divided, some being taken to Ireland and others to Dunkeld in Scotland, which helped to spread his cult. Adomnán’s Vita Columbae, written about a century after the saint’s death, presents him as abbot, prophet, and miracle-worker and remains the foundation of his historical reputation.

Venerated from an early date in Ireland, Scotland, and among the Gaels more widely, Columba became one of the three patron saints of Ireland, together with Patrick and Brigid, and is also honoured as a patron of Scotland, of Derry and its diocese, of the Diocese of Raphoe, of Iona, and of poets and bookbinders, as well as against floods. His feast is kept on 9 June. The monastery of Iona continued as a major centre of learning, art (including later manuscripts associated with the Columban tradition), and missionary outreach long after his death, and his name remained attached to a distinctive strand of Insular Christianity.