The Book-Hunter
commending his friend and fellow-labourer St Cormac to the good offices
of the Regulus of the Orkney Islands, who is also at the court of Brud,
to whom he owes something akin to allegiance; for Columba looks to Brud
as well as to the Orcadian guest for the proper attention being paid to
Cormac. Still, honoured and respected as he is in the court of the
Pictish monarch, Columba is not that omnipotent person which he finds
himself to be in Dalriada and in Ireland. There still sits an unpleasant
personage at the king's gate. A Magus, as he is called--a priest of the
old heathen religion--is in fact well received at court, where, although
doomed to be superseded by the Christian missionary, he yet seems to
have been retained by the king, as a sort of protest that he had not put
himself entirely under the control of the priests of the new doctrine.
It was indeed among their own people, the Celts of Ireland and of the
Irish colony in the west of Scotland, that the reign of these saints was
absolute. But if we count this ecclesiastical influence a feature of the
Celtic nation, either the Welsh must not be counted as Celts, or they
must be looked on as exceptions from this spiritual dominion. They were
the people among whom, of all the tribes who inhabited Britain between
the days of Julius Caesar and those of William of Normandy, it might
have been primarily expected that we would find the most vital
Christianity and the greatest missionary force. They professed to have
carried with them into their mountains the traditions and the
nationality of that very important portion of the Christianised Roman
Empire which was called Britannia. When the heart of the Empire became
paralysed, this branch, doubtless after a long harassing contest with
the Picts and the Irish of the north, was broken, and partly subjected,
partly driven away by the Saxons. That they should have failed, through
all their revolutions and calamities, to preserve any remnants of Roman
social habits, is not perhaps wonderful. But that they should have
failed to preserve enough of Christian influence to second and support
the missions sent to the Saxons, so soon after these had superseded the
British power, looks like an exception to the usual rule of Christian
progress. The Welsh antiquaries, through meritorious efforts, strive in
vain to establish the existence of Welsh ecclesiarchs during the time
when the countless saints of Ireland were swarming over Scotland and
penetrating into England. They point to a stone said to commemorate a
victory gained over the Picts and the Saxons by the Britons, not through
their courage or their skill in fight, but by the Halleluiahs raised by
two saints who were present in their host. These saints, however,
Garmon and Lupus, were, as Bede tells us, Frenchmen, missionaries from
the Gallican Church to correct the errors of the Britons. The venerable
Bede scolds these Britons roundly for not having kept up the faith
planted among them, and for not having been prepared to help Augustin
and his followers in the very hard task of converting the Saxons. It is
a pity that we do not know something more of Roman Christianity, and
indeed of Roman civilisation generally in Britain, before the Saxon
days. There appears to have been among the Romanised British Christians
little zeal and a good deal of controversy and dissent, and we hear a
great deal more of the influence of the Pelagian heresy among them than
of the influence of Christianity itself.
The scantiness of our acquaintance with Roman Christianity in Britain is
the more to be regretted, because it would have been very interesting to
compare its manifestations with those of the Church which found refuge
in the West during the dark days of Rome--the days when the temporal
empire was crushed, and the spiritual empire had not arisen. As we might
expect from the ecclesiastical conditions already noticed, the persons
who first exercise ecclesiastical authority in the two islands did not
derive their strength from any foreign hierarchy, and had no connection
with Rome. Any reference, indeed, to the influence of a Roman pontiff,
either actual or prospective, in the life of any of our early saints,
will prepare the critic for finding that the life has been written
centuries after the era of the saint, or has been tampered with. In
Adamnan's Life of Columba, Rome is mentioned once or twice as a very
great city, but there is no allusion throughout that remarkable
biography to any spiritual central authority exercised by the bishop
there over the presbyters in Scotland and Ireland. This is, of course,
nothing more than the statement of what the reader of a book has not
found in it. Any other reader may find allusions to the supremacy of the
popedom over these early Christian communities, if he can. But I think
he is likely to find none; and any one who desires to study the real
history of the rise and progress of the spiritual dominion of Rome
would, with more profit, take up the books and records referring to
events three or four hundred years after the age of Columba.
Self-sustained as they were, these isolated communities had a very
strong vitality. The picture exhibited in the hagiographies is truly the
reign of the saints. Their power was of an immediate, abrupt, and purely
despotic kind, which would have been neutralised or weakened by anything
like a central control. Prompt and blind obedience to the commands of
the saint-superior was the rule of Hy or Iona, and of all the other
religious communities of the West. Perhaps there were even here feuds,
disputes, and mutinies of which no record has been preserved. The
hagiographer can only commemorate those which were suppressed by some
terrible manifestation of Divine power, for the person whose life he
commemorates is only conventionally and nominally to be spoken of as a
mortal; he is in reality superhuman, wielding, whenever he pleases, the
thunderbolts of the Deity, annihilating dissent and disobedience to
himself, as if it were blasphemy in the Deity's own presence, and
crushing by an immediate miracle any effort to oppose his will, were it
even about the proper hour of setting off on a journey, or the dinner to
be ordered for the day.
The rank which those primitive clergy of Ireland and the Highlands
occupy is almost invariably that of the saint, a rank as far separated
from that which can be conferred by any human hierarchy as heaven is
from earth. They were, as we have seen, independent of Rome from the
beginning, and this great host of saints had lived and left their
biographies to the world long before the system of judicial
canonisation. How a boundary is professed to be drawn between the
genuine and the false among these saints of the North, cannot be easily
understood. No one seems to object to any of them as spurious. Many of
them are so very obscure that only faint and fragmentary traces of them
can be found, yet it seems never to be questioned that they occupied the
transcendent spiritual rank usually attributed to them. Of others
nothing is known but the bare name, yet it is never doubted that the
owner was entitled to his attribute of saint.
The brethren at Iona seem sometimes to have lived well, for we hear of
the killing of heifers and oxen. A pragmatical fellow declines to
participate in the meal permitted on the occasion of a relaxation of
discipline--the saint tells him that since he refuses good meat at a
time when he is permitted to have it, it is to be his doom to be one of
a band of robbers who will be glad to appease their hunger on putrid
horse-flesh. The ruling spirit, however, of this first Christian
mission, as we find it recorded, is undoubtedly asceticism. The
mortification of the flesh is the temporal source of spiritual power.
Some incidents occur which put this spirit in a shape bordering on the
ludicrous. A saint is at a loss to know how his power is waning. There
is some mysterious countervailing influence acting against him, which
manifests itself in the continued success of an irreverent king or
chief, whom he thought he had taken the proper spiritual methods to
humble. He at last discovers the mystery; the king had been _fasting_
against him--entering the field of asceticism with him, in short, and
not without success.
The biography of an Asiatic despot, so far as other persons are
concerned, is merely the history of his commands and their obedience. It
is only incidentally, therefore, that one is likely to acquire any
information from it about the people over whom he rules. In like manner,
the life of an Irish saint is the history of commanding and obeying; yet
a few glimpses of social life may be caught through occasional chinks.
The relation which the spiritual held towards the temporal powers is
sufficiently developed to give ground for considerable inquiry and
criticism. The more eminent of the saints had great influence in state
affairs, ruling in some measure the monarchs themselves. Some monarch is
occasionally mentioned as the friend of Columba, much as a bishop might
allude to this or that lay lord as among his personal friends. We find
him settling the succession of Aidan, the king of the Dalriadic Scots,
through an influence to which any opposition was utterly hopeless. Send
your sons to me, he says to Aidan, and God will show me who is to be
your successor. The sign falls on Eochoid Buidh, and the saint tells the
king that all his other sons will come to a premature end, and they drop
off accordingly, chiefly in battle. This power of fixing the evil eye,
of prophesying death, is found in perpetual use among the early saints.
It is their ultimate appeal in strife and contest, and their instrument
of vengeance when thwarted or affronted; and a terrible instrument it
must have been. Who could gainsay those believed to hold in their hands
the issues of life and death?
In our conception of the kings with whom these saints were familiar, it
may be well not to be misled by words. We shall realise them better at
the present day by looking to Madagascar or the Marquesas Islands than
among the states of Europe. The palace was a shanty of log or wattle,
protected, perhaps, by a rampart of earth or uncemented stones, and the
king had a stone chair with a few mystic decorations scratched on it,
which served for his throne on state occasions. The prospect of
acquiring a gold torque or a silver drinking-cup would have a material
influence over his imperial policy. Were we to believe the fabulous
historians, Ireland was for centuries a compact kingdom under one
imperial sovereign, who presided over subsidiary rulers in the
provinces. But although sometimes one provincial king was powerful
enough to keep the others in subjection, old Celtic Ireland never was a
kingdom, properly speaking, for it never had a nationality. Some people
maintain, not without reason, that the facility with which a nationality
resolves itself into existence depends much, not only on race, but on
geological conditions. The Celtic Irish seem to have always been too
busy with local feuds and rivalries to achieve any broad nationality.
And the nature of their country--a vast plain intersected by morasses
and rivers, and here and there edged with mountain ranges--is
unfavourable to the growth of a nationality, since it presents no
general centre of defence against a foreign enemy, like that great
central range of mountains in Scotland, which Columba's biographers call
the Dorsum Britanniae--the Backbone of Britain. Ireland, indeed, seems to
have had no conception of a nationality until such a thing was suggested
by the Normans and the Saxons, after they had been long enough there to
feel patriotic. And so it has generally happened that any alarming