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Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

But is there anything Beyond?

RUPERT BROOKE, ‘Heaven’, 1914

IN THE LATE ANTIQUE PERIOD, as we saw in Chapter 1, it was standard practice for Christian communities which had put down roots outside the frontiers of the Roman empire to be provided with bishops on request. To Patrophilus, bishop of Pithyonta in Georgia, who attended the council of Nicaea in 325 (see above p. 26) we can add others. There was Frumentius, for example, consecrated by Athanasius of Alexandria, author of the Life of St Antony, in about 350 as the bishop of a Christian community based at Axum in Ethiopia. There was Theophilus ‘the Indian’, apparently a native of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden, who was sent at much the same time to be the bishop of Christian communities in southern Arabia which seem to have originated as trading settlements. Patrophilus, Frumentius and Theophilus operated far to the east or south of the Roman empire. They are shadowy figures who have left but the faintest of traces. Most scholars, however, are agreed that they did exist and that they are witnesses to the flourishing of some very far-flung branches of the Christian church. They had western counterparts, marginally better documented, beyond the imperial provinces of the fourth and fifth centuries, who are the subject of this chapter. Among the earliest of them known to us was a man named Ulfila – or Wulfila, or Ulfilas; it is variously spelt. His name was Germanic and means ‘Little Wolf’ or ‘Wolf Cub’. Much later, he would come to be known as ‘the Apostle of the Goths’. This is not quite what he was, though his achievements were remarkable enough. To provide him with a background and a context we must go back for a moment to third-century Pontus and to Bishop Gregory the Wonder-worker.

The Canonical Letter of Gregory the Wonder-worker (above p. 35) was prompted by a crisis in the provinces of northern Asia Minor in the middle years of the third century. Upon this sleepy corner of the empire there had unexpectedly fallen the cataclysmic visitation of barbarian attack. Goths settled on the north-western shores of the Euxine (or Black) Sea had managed to requisition ships from the Hellenistic sea ports – such places, presumably, as Chersonesus (Sevastopol) in the Crimea – which enabled them to raid the vulnerable coastline of Asia Minor. The earliest raids took place in the mid-250s. The invaders came to pillage, not to settle. In their eyes human booty was as desirable as temple treasures or the jewel-cases of rich ladies; captives, some of whom might buy their release, others of whom would be carried off into a life of slavery. In the wake of these devastations and collapse of order Bishop Gregory was approached by a colleague, possibly the bishop of Trapezus (Trebizond), and invited to pronounce on the disciplinary issues which arose from the conduct of the Christian provincials during the disturbances. His reply has come down to us because its rulings came to be regarded as authoritative and were incorporated into the canon law of the eastern or Orthodox branch of the church.¹

Gregory’s letter casts a shaft of light upon the human misery and depravity occasioned by the raids as well as upon the responsibilities assumed by a bishop in trying to pick up the pieces of shattered local life in their wake. Had captives been polluted by eating food provided for them by the barbarians? No; for ‘it is agreed by everyone’ – Gregory had evidently made enquiries – ‘that the barbarians who overran our regions did not sacrifice [food] to idols.’ Women who had been the innocent victims of rape were guiltless, following the precepts of Deuteronomy xxii.26–7: ‘But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing … for he found her in the field, and the damsel cried, and there was none to save her.’ It was different, however, noted the bishop, with women whose past life had shown them to be of a flighty disposition: ‘then clearly the state of fornication is suspect even in a time of captivity; and one ought not readily to share in one’s prayers with such women.’ One can only speculate about the grim consequences of this ruling in the tight little communities of the towns and villages of Pontus. Gregory’s sense of outrage is vividly conveyed across the seventeen centuries that separate him from us. Prisoners of the Goths who, ‘forgetting that they were men of Pontus, and Christians’, directed their captors to properties which could be looted, must be excommunicated. Roman citizens, ‘men impious and hateful to God’, have themselves taken part in looting. They have ‘become Goths to others’ by appropriating booty taken but abandoned by the raiders. It was ‘something quite unbelievable’, but they have ‘reached such a point of cruelty and inhumanity’ as to enslave prisoners who had succeeded in escaping from their barbarian captors. They have used the cover of disorder to prosecute private feuds. They have demanded rewards for restoring property to its rightful owners. Gregory commended to his correspondent the measures which he had taken in his own diocese: enquiries, hearing public denunciations, setting up tribunals (‘the assembly of the saints’) and punishments meted out in accordance with the extremely severe penitential discipline of the early church. There are parallels here with the fate of all later actual or suspected collaborationists. Many, however, were beyond the reach of Gregory’s ministrations. These were the captives who did not escape, who were not wealthy enough to buy their freedom, who were of insufficient status to command a ransom payment from kinsfolk or neighbours left at home. Borne offinto slavery among barbarians, the captives took with them the solace of their Christian faith. In this fashion little pockets of Christianity struck root among the Goths outside the frontiers of the empire.

The Goths matter to us because their crossing of the Danube frontier in 376 and subsequent settlement inside the empire symbolize the beginning of the process which since the time of Edward Gibbon we have known as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Who were these barbarians?

Those whom Roman writers of the third and fourth centuries referred to as Goths were a variety of peoples who spoke a Germanic language, Gothic. Known to the Romans in the first century A.D., they were then living in the basin of the lower Vistula in what is now Poland. They migrated thence in a south-easterly direction towards the Ukraine in the latter part of the second century. At the time of the raids on Asia Minor they were settled most thickly in the lower valleys of the Dnieper and the Dniester. Some among them were expanding to the south-west, into what is now northern Romania. This brought them into proximity with the only province of the Roman empire which lay to the north of the Danube, namely Dacia; an area bounded on the south by the Danube between the Iron Gates and its confluence with the river Olt, spreading northwards to take in the uplands of Transylvania embraced by the Carpathian mountains. During the troubled middle years of the third century the Goths pressed hard on the frontiers of Dacia and launched raids into Thrace and even Greece. It was to some degree in response to this pressure that the Emperor Aurelian withdrew Roman rule from Dacia in the early 270s. Thenceforward this sector of the empire’s frontier lay along the Danube. The Goths moved into the abandoned but by no means deserted province. Dacia had experienced a century and a half of Romanization. Substantial elements of the Romano-Dacian population remained, and archaeological evidence suggests that a modest urban life with a modest villa economy to supply its needs limped along into the Gothic period. It is possible, though unproven, that there were Christian communities among the population of Dacia in the third century. The most extraordinary witness to the tenacity of Roman civilization is the survival there of the Latin language, the ancestor of modern Romanian.

3. To illustrate the activities of Ulfila during the fourth century.

Much has been revealed about Gothic culture in this period by the archaeologists. To the evidence of the so-called Sîntana de Mureş/Černjachov culture, so named from sites respectively in Transylvania and the Ukraine, may be added a little information from Roman writers. What these combined sources have to tell us is as follows. The Goths were settled agriculturalists who practised both arable and pastoral farming. They lived in substantial villages but not in towns. Their houses were of wood, wattle-and-daub and thatch; sometimes they had stone footings or floors. Traceable artefacts are pottery, wheel-thrown, of good quality clay; iron tools and weapons; buckles and brooches of bronze or silver; and objects made of bone such as combs. These artefacts, commonplace enough in themselves, suggest a degree of specialization and division of labour. The Goths disposed of their dead by both cremation and inhumation, and the remains were frequently though not always accompanied by grave-goods. Variations in quantity and quality of personal possessions (in graves), and in the size of dwellings, suggest communities wherein were marked differences of wealth and status. A few hazardous inferences about the religious beliefs of the Goths may be essayed by the imprudent on the basis of the archaeological materials. The written sources tell us of sacrificial meat – if not among raiding parties in Asia Minor – and of wooden images or idols. We hear of a war god and of seasonal festivals. Gothic political organization is scarcely documented at all, and therefore fiercely controversial among scholars. However, it is likely that among the group of Goths settled to the west of the Dniester and termed by a Roman contemporary the Tervingi there existed in the fourth century a hereditary monarchy and a nobility of tribal chieftains. The Goths cannot be said to have had a written culture, though they did possess a runic alphabet. Runic inscriptions have been found on some grave-goods and, most famously and enigmatically, on a great gold torque, or neck ring, found in the treasure of Pietroasa in Romania, unearthed in 1837. Finally, we must observe that their interactions with the Roman world across the Danube were close and not always hostile. Goths left their native land to serve in the imperial armies, sometimes rising to high rank. Large amounts of Roman coin circulated in Gothia. Archaeologists have found remains of the tall, narrow Mediterranean pots called amphorae in Gothic contexts: they were used for the transport of wine or oil, commodities more likely to be trade goods than plunder.

In sum, the Goths were in no sense ‘primitive’ peoples. The Tervingi in Dacia (who are our main concern) were neighbours of the Romans, living in a Romanized province, with Roman provincials – whether native or captive – living under their rule. On the periphery of the Roman world, they experienced cultural interactions with their imposing neighbour. Like all the other Germanic barbarian peoples, the Goths in peacetime found much to admire, to envy and to imitate in Roman ways. When the pressure of Roman might bore down on them too heavily, they defended themselves by adopting those political and military usages which they had correctly identified as buttressing Roman imperial hegemony. It is a familiar pattern: peripheral outsiders tend to model themselves upon the hegemonic power on whose flanks they are situated. When the defences of the Roman empire gave way the Germanic barbarians entered upon an inheritance for which they had long been preparing themselves. They came not to wreck but to join. In this manner the decline and fall of the western empire was to be not destruction but dismemberment, a sharing out of working parts under new management.

Matters did not present themselves in such a rosy light to the provincials who lived to the south of the Danube in closest proximity to the Tervingi in the fourth century; nor to the imperial government whose job it was to protect them. Although there would seem to have been uneasy peace for a generation or so after the Gothic settlement in Dacia, pressure on the imperial borders started up again during the first quarter of the new century. The lower Danube frontier was impressively defended. There was a string of forts along the southern bank whose garrisons numbered at least 60,000 men. Detachments of the imperial fleet regularly patrolled the river. There were arms and clothing factories a little way behind the frontier to supply the troops. A spirit of invention and experiment is attested to by a curious anonymous work from this period and, quite possibly, this region which sought government sponsorship for, among other things, a paddledriven warship powered by oxen, a piece of mobile field-artillery, a portable bridge made of inflated skins and a new and improved version of the scythed chariot drawn by mail-clad horses. In the 320s Constantine built a colossal bridge over the Danube – it was 2,437 metres long – a little above its confluence with the Olt and used it to reoccupy Oltenia, the land in the angle between the two rivers. From this base a campaign was mounted against the Tervingi in 332. It was completely successful: the Tervingi were defeated and reduced to client status, their ruler’s son carried off to Constantinople as a hostage. This peace lasted for thirty-five years with only small-scale violations, notably in the late 340s. In the 360s it broke down, and the Emperor Valens fought a less decisive war in the years 367–9 which brought about a further pacification. There matters rested until the arrival on the scene shortly afterwards of a terrifying new enemy, the Huns.

The Huns changed the terms of Romano-Gothic relations for ever. A nomadic people from central Asia, wonderfully skilled with horse, bow and lassoo and with a reputation as pitiless enemies, they began to move westwards – no one really knows why – in the second half of the fourth century. In the early 370s they collided with the Greuthingi, the eastern group of Goths settled between the Dniester and the Dnieper. The Greuthingi were defeated, the survivors among them enslaved. In the wake of these events the Tervingi sought asylum within the Roman empire. Reluctantly, Valens agreed to this request. In 376 the Tervingi crossed the Danube on to imperial territory. Relations between Goths and Romans broke down in the following year when the imperial government failed to keep its promises about supplying foodstuffs to the refugees. War followed in 378. A decisive battle was fought near Adrianople in August; the Roman army was defeated and the Emperor Valens killed at the hands of the Tervingi under their leader Fritigern. There ensued four years of confusion during which the Goths failed to take Constantinople and pillaged Thrace. In 382 a settlement was reached with the new emperor, Theodosius I: Fritigern and his followers were permitted to settle peacefully in the province of Moesia, south of the Danube and just west of the Black Sea. There they remained until 395 when a new leader, Alaric, would start the Goths on further travels which would take them to Italy, where they would sack Rome in 410; then to Aquitaine, where they were again settled under treaty arrangements in 418; and finally to Spain, where the Gothic monarchy would flourish until overthrown by the forces of Islam early in the eighth century.

Among those who were carried off into permanent captivity in the course of the Gothic raids into Pontus in the middle of the third century were the ancestors of Ulfila. The family evidently retained a memory of its origins. Ulfila knew that his ancestors had lived in a village called Sadagolthina, near Parnassus in Cappadocia, about fifty miles south of modern Ankara. (This is at least 150 miles from the nearest point on the Black Sea coast: it shows how far inland the Gothic raiders had penetrated and explains something of the terror they inspired.) We know too that this band of displaced persons in Gothia not only retained but also diffused their faith. ‘They converted many of the barbarians to the way of piety and persuaded them to adopt the Christian faith,’ tells the fifth-century historian Philostorgius, one of the principal sources for what little we know of Ulfila. It may be that the family intermarried with Goths; so much is suggested by Ulfila’s Gothic name: we do not know. Indeed, it must be stressed that we know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the conditions in which captives and their descendants lived among the Goths. This is one of several areas of puzzlement and uncertainty which necessarily render our understanding of Ulfila so hazy. Another concerns his education. Ulfila had been ‘carefully instructed’, recorded his pupil Auxentius. He was fluent in Greek, Latin and Gothic, in all three of which languages he composed ‘several tractates and many interpretations’. His translation of the Bible into Gothic was a towering intellectual achievement. In the world of late antiquity education to anything beyond the most elementary level was only for the rich, or those who could find a rich patron. How and where did Ulfila get his education? We have not the remotest idea.

At the age of thirty, when he had attained the rank of lector or reader, one of the minor orders of the church, Ulfila was sent to Constantinople by the ruler of the Tervingi as a member of a diplomatic mission. This would have been in about 340 or 341, some years after the peace of 332. The imperial throne was now occupied by Constantius II (337–61), son of the great Constantine. Again, we wonder why Ulfila was chosen to serve in this capacity. While in Constantinople he was consecrated a bishop by the patriarch. (There are formidable difficulties about the date of his consecration, which I here pass over.) His commission was to be ‘bishop of the Christians in the Gothic land’; to serve, that is, an existing Christian community – by whom indeed his episcopal consecration had presumably been requested – not to undertake specifically missionary activities.

His episcopate ‘in the Gothic land’ lasted for seven years, which takes us to 347/8. At the end of this period the ‘impious and sacrilegious’ (but unnamed) ruler of the Tervingi initiated ‘a tyrannical and fearsome persecution’ of the Christians under his rule. Ulfila evidently judged that discretion was the better part of valour and led a large body of refugee Christians across the Danube and into asylum on Roman soil. Welcomed by the authorities with honour and respect, Ulfila and his flock received from the emperor land on which to settle near the city of Nicopolis (Veliko Tǔrnovo in the north of modern Bulgaria), some thirty miles south of the frontier in the province of Moesia Inferior. We are told that Constantius held Ulfila ‘in the highest esteem’ and would often refer to him as ‘the Moses of our time’ because through him God had liberated the Christians of Dacia from barbarian captivity.

Ulfila spent the rest of his life at Nicopolis, ministering to his congregations, studying, teaching, translating the Bible. He was also drawn into the principal theological controversy of the day, the Trinitarian debate arising from the teachings of the Alexandrian priest Arius (d. 336). Arianism was the doctrine that the Son of God was created by the Father. Its opponents, who claimed the name of Catholic which literally means ‘general’ or ‘universal’ – taught that Father, Son and Holy Spirit were co-eternal and equal in Godhead. To put this in another way, Arius sought to avoid any dilution of monotheism by stressing the indivisibility, the majestic one-ness and omnipotence of God, and the subordination to Him of the Son. To those not attuned to theological debate, the relationship between the three Persons of the Trinity is an unrewarding topic. We must accept, first, that it was long and keenly debated in the fourth century and that it nourished some of the finest minds of the age. Second, we should bear in mind that at the time – whatever the dispute might have been made to look like by later commentators – it was not a simple matter of a straight fight between orthodoxy and heresy. Trinitarian orthodoxy was not something given, like the doctrines of the Resurrection or the Ascension. It was in the process of being hammered out by recourse to difficult scriptural texts which could yield diverse interpretations. The problem was to find a doctrinal formula which would satisfy several different theological factions. Third, the debate was one which necessarily had a political dimension. With the arrival on the scene of imperial patronage of the Christian church, theological controversy could no longer be simply a matter of intellectual debate. What was now also at stake was access to huge and unprecedented material resources, legal privileges and influence at the imperial court. The penalties of finding yourself on the losing side were therefore substantial. Constantine, having once publicly associated himself with Christianity, had taken an assertive if not always instructed role in ecclesiastical controversy. He it was who had summoned and presided over the council of Nicaea in 325, the first major attempt to find a doctrinal formulation which would be widely acceptable; the Nicene creed was the result. This settlement of the dispute held the field, though not unchallenged, until Constantine’s death in 337. But his son Constantius favoured the Arian tendency and under his patronage successive councils – Antioch in 341, Sirmium in 351, Rimini in 359, Constantinople in 360 – drafted credal statements which, though necessarily in the circumstances somewhat fudgy, leant away from the Nicene position towards the Arian one. Ulfila was consecrated a bishop by one of the leading spirits of this ‘court Arianism’, attended the council of Constantinople in 360 and was on close terms with an emperor who was widely held to be sympathetic to Arianism. The successor of Constantius in the eastern half of the empire, after the brief resign of Julian the Apostate (361–3), was Valens (364–78), who proved another protector of the Arians. One fifth-century historian, Sozomen, tells us that Ulfila was chosen to head the embassy to Valens which sought permission for the Tervingi to enter the empire in 376. If true, this report would suggest that Ulfila had contrived to maintain the connections with the imperial court which he had enjoyed in the time of Constantius. But the tide was turning against the moderately Arian or non-Nicene party. The Emperor Theodosius I (379–95) was an unswerving partisan of the doctrinal formulations of Nicaea. Decrees enjoining the acceptance of the Nicene creed were issued in 380. In the following year Arian churches were confiscated and handed over to the Catholics, and all meetings of the heretics were banned. The last glimpse we have of Ulfila is in 383, travelling to Constantinople to attend another church council in the company of two Danubian bishops, deposed for Arianism, whose cause he was going to plead with the emperor. He died in Constantinople shortly afterwards.

The main reason why we know so little of Ulfila lies in the victory, never to be reversed, of Nicene orthodoxy in official circles in his last years. It is a good example of the adage that history is written by the victors. The memory of Arius and his followers was systematically vilified, their writings hunted down and destroyed. Ulfila was too big to be ignored; but he could be, and was, belittled. Had the moderateArian creed to which he adhered come out on top, Ulfila would be remembered as one of the giants of the fourth-century church. As it is, we have to struggle with fragmentary and ambiguous texts to discern even the shadowy outline of a notable career.

What then was the significance of Ulfila? He was not a missionary in the generally accepted sense of the word. He did not go off to live among a heathen people in order to convert them to Christianity. Instead, he went as the bishop of an existing Christian community beyond the imperial frontier, a community which no doubt included persons of Gothic birth but which was principally composed of displaced foreigners living under Gothic rule. We need not doubt that this community made converts among the Goths in Ulfila’s day as it had done before; but conversion of the heathen was not perceived as its prime function. The Christians in Gothia were, in Gibbon’s words, ‘involuntary missionaries’.²

Ulfila was almost certainly not the first churchman to have been sent to serve Christian communities among the Goths beyond the imperial frontiers. Among the bishops who attended the council of Nicaea in 325 was a certain Theophilus ‘of Gothia’; it has been conjectured that he ministered to Christian communities among the Goths settled in the Crimea. A letter of St Basil of Cappadocia written in about 375 refers to a certain Eutyches, who had evidently lived at some time past but of whom nothing further is known, in terms which suggest ministry in Gothic lands. However, as we have already seen in the course of discussion in Chapter 1, there was at that period no sense that it was the duty of the Romano-Christian world to evangelize pagan barbarians beyond its borders. Christianity was not for outsiders. So we are told: yet the question may be probed a little further. The adhesion of Constantine to Christianity was followed by an ever more strident and assertive trend towards the near-identification of empire and church. Christianity thus became a part of the empire’s cultural armoury. Did it occur to the imperial establishment of the fourth century, as it would in later centuries, that the faith could be used to tame threatening barbarians in their homelands? We do not know, but it looks as though the Goths thought so. Each of the two known outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution by the Gothic authorities in the fourth century coincided with periods of military hostilities between Goth and Roman. The first of these was in 347–8, when Ulfila left Gothia to cross the Danube and settle at Nicopolis. The second came in the wake of Valens’ Gothic war of 367–9. We are rather well informed about it owing to the survival of an account of the sufferings of a Gothic martyr, Saba, who perished on 12 April 372. A recent authority has commented that ‘the Goths would seem to have been afraid that Christianity would undermine that part of Gothic identity which was founded in their common inherited beliefs, so that religion was not just an individual spiritual concern, but also a political issue standing in some relation to GothoRoman affairs.’³

All of which prompts further speculation about the role of Ulfila. His relations with the imperial Christian establishment were close: he was consecrated a bishop in Constantinople, given land near Nicopolis by his admirer Constantius, attended councils within the empire, was apparently confident of his intercessory powers with Theodosius I. It is impossible not to reflect that when he returned to the empire in 347–8 Ulfila must have been in a position to furnish the government with a good deal of useful intelligence concerning goings-on in Gothia: possibly on other occasions too. Does this mean that in going to Gothia as a bishop Ulfila was undertaking what has been called an ‘imperially-sponsored mission’? That is perhaps to go too far. Ulfila was not a Roman agent. We must remember that he was so far trusted by the Gothic authorities as to be commissioned to negotiate on their behalf on two occasions that we know of, possibly on others of which we are ignorant. Ulfila faced both ways. Missionary or quasi-missionary churchmen often do.

It is entirely appropriate, in the light of this, that his most enduring achievement should have been the translation of the Bible into Gothic, giving to his people, or his people by adoption, the holy writings of the Roman faith in their own Germanic tongue. Here is Philostorgius again: ‘He was the inventor for them of their own letters, and translated all the Scriptures into their language – with the exception, that is, of the books of Kings. This was because these books contain the history of wars, while the Gothic people, being lovers of war, were in need of something to restrain their passion for fighting rather than to incite them to it.’ Ulfila was not the first to undertake biblical translation; the so-called ‘Old Latin’ and Syriac versions were already in circulation. But these were existing literary languages current within the Roman empire. To no one had the notion occurred of translating the scriptures into a barbarian tongue which had never been written down before. Perhaps, as is often the case with simple but revolutionary and liberating ideas, it could only have come to one who was himself in some sense an outsider.

4. To illustrate the activities of Ninian and Patrick in the fifth century.

If we now direct our attention to the western extremities of the empire at a time a couple of generations or so after Ulfila’s day we shall meet two further instances of the same phenomenon, the sending of bishops to existing Christian communities outside the imperial frontier. We shall also encounter something altogether unexpected in a late-antique context: a churchman who experienced a missionary vocation to take the faith to heathen barbarians and who has left a precious account of how he came to engage himself in such an eccentric activity.

Our first instance is a very shadowy one, about whom we know far less than we do about Ulfila. Ninian, or Nynia, was the name of a British bishop sent to minister to a community of Christians in what is now Galloway in the south-west of Scotland. His episcopate is most probably to be placed somewhere in the middle years of the fifth century. By this time the Roman provinces of Britain were no longer part of the empire. As with Dacia in the 270s, so in 410 the government of the Emperor Honorius had taken the decision to withdraw the apparatus of Roman rule from Britain. It is unlikely that contemporaries imagined that this state of affairs would be permanent; both the imperial government and the British provincials probably anticipated that at some stage in the future, when times were easier, Roman control would be reimposed. Meanwhile, life in Britain seems to have gone on in much the same way until well into the fifth century.

Galloway was within reach, by way of the easily navigable Solway Firth, of the contiguous parts of what had been Roman Britain: the town of Lugubalium (Carlisle), the forts of the Cumbrian coast, and the farms of the Eden valley. A scatter of small finds – coins, pottery – of Romano-British material in south-western Scotland indicates that connections were established. How a Christian community grew up there we have no means of knowing, but that one was in existence by the fifth century is certain. It is attested by the so-called ‘Latinus’ stone at Whithorn, datable to c. 450, whose enigmatic Latin inscription may record – the latest suggestion by a leading authority – the foundation of a Christian church there by a man named Latinus.⁴ We have a context for Bishop Ninian. We might also have the names of two of his successors. Some twenty miles west of Whithorn, at Kirkmadrine in the Rhinns of Galloway, another inscribed stone, possibly of the early sixth century, commemorates ‘the holy and outstanding sacerdotes Viventius and Mavorius’. (Sacerdotes could mean either ‘priests’ or ‘bishops’: in the Latin of that period the second meaning was more common than the first.)

Ninian himself is not mentioned by name until the eighth century, when Bede devoted two passing sentences to him in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede was, as I have said in Chapter 1, a very conscientious scholar who in this instance dutifully reported what he had heard from persons whom he regarded as reliable sources. Among them was quite probably the English Bishop Pehthelm of the recently revived see of Whithorn. However, Bede was careful to qualify his report with a hint of uncertainty: ‘as they say’. What Bede had been told was that Ninian was a Briton who had received religious instruction at Rome, had gone as a bishop to Whithorn, where he had built a church of stone dedicated to St Martin of Tours, had converted the southern Picts to Christianity and had on his death been buried at Whithorn. This report presents all sorts of difficulties. It is generally though not universally agreed that some of what Bede tells us is more likely to represent what the eighth century wanted to believe about Ninian than any historical reality. As we shall see in due course, the eighth century was more interested in Roman connections and missions to barbarians than was the fifth. It may not be irrelevant that Bishop Pehthelm was a correspondent of the great St Boniface, strenuous upholder of Roman direction of the church’s overriding duty of mission to pagan barbarian peoples. All that is reasonably certain is that a Christian community had grown up beyond the imperial frontier in Britain and that Ninian had been appointed its bishop.

Our second instance of a bishop sent beyond the western extremities of the empire is a mite less shadowy. The contemporary chronicler named Prosper of Aquitaine – he whose De Vocatione Omnium Gentium occupied us briefly in Chapter 1 – informs us in his annal for the year 431 that (in his own words) ‘Palladius, consecrated by Pope Celestine, is sent as their first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ.’ Here at last is some ‘hard’ information. Prosper had visited Rome in that very year, 431, to consult Pope Celestine on a matter of theological controversy. He could even have met Palladius on the occasion of the latter’s visit to Rome for episcopal consecration. We may be as certain as we can be of anything in this period that in the year 431 an Irish Christian community received Palladius as its first bishop.

Ireland, notoriously, had never formed a part of the Roman empire. But as with Gothia or Galloway there was a degree of cultural interaction between Ireland and the neighbouring provinces which may plausibly be invoked in an investigation of Irish Christian origins. There were trading relations of long standing between Britain and Ireland. As long ago as the first century Tacitus could observe in his memoir of his father-in-law Agricola that Ireland’s harbours were known to the Roman forces in Britain ‘through trading and merchants’. A variety of artefacts provides archaeological confirmation of lively commerce between eastern and southern Ireland and her neighbours to the east, Britain and quite possibly Gaul too, throughout the Roman period and beyond. Irish mercenaries served in the Roman army in Britain. Refugees from Britain sought asylum in Ireland. Pirates from Ireland were raiding the western seaboard of Britain from the third century onwards, for the same reasons that Ukrainian Goths were striking deep into Asia Minor. Forts such as those at Cardiff, Caer Gybi on Anglesey, Lancaster and Ravenglass were built to protect civilian Britain from these predators. In 367 an unprecedented alliance of Irish, Picts (from Scotland) and Saxons (from north Germany) overcame the defences of Britain and plundered the provinces for nearly two years. A chieftain remembered in Irish legend as Niall Noígiallach, Niall ‘of the Nine Hostages’, was raiding Britain in the late fourth century.

There was in addition Irish settlement in south-western Wales, the modern Dyfed, then known as Demetia, from perhaps as early as the fourth century. The evidence for this comes from three different types of source. There are memorial stones in the area inscribed with Irish names, often in the linear script known as ogham, which seems to have originated in the south-east of Ireland at about this period. There are place-names with Irish elements, hard to date, whose distribution to a great degree overlaps with the inscribed stones. And there are legends, which may contain a kernel of historical truth, about the fourth-century migration of a tribe called the Déisi from south-eastern Ireland to Wales. It is by means of these settlers, presumed to have maintained contact with their kinsfolk in Ireland, that elements of Romano-British culture are most likely to have seeped back there. One such element was language, the borrowing of a number of Latin loanwords into Old Irish. Another was religion: the Irish settlers were near neighbours of Caerleon-on-Usk with its Diocletianic martyrs Aaron and Julius, and its Christian landed gentry in the villas of Gwent and Glamorgan. It was probably from south Wales that Christianity first came to Ireland.

It was to these Irish Christians that Palladius was sent in 431. Who was he? A person of the same name is mentioned in an earlier annal in Prosper’s chronicle, that for 429, which runs as follows: ‘Agricola, a Pelagian, the son of the Pelagian Bishop Severianus, corrupts the churches of Britain by the insinuation of his teaching. However, at the suggestion of the Deacon Palladius, Pope Celestine sends Bishop Germanus of Auxerre as his legate and he guides the Britons back to the Catholic faith after routing the heretics.’ The mission of Bishop Germanus to Britain in 429, and another one a few years later (perhaps 435/6), are attested in other sources. It is plain moreover from remarks made by Prosper in another of his works that there was anxiety that the taint of heresy might infect the Irish Christian community too.

Now the name Palladius was not particularly common in the western provinces of the empire. It is almost inconceivable that there were two different men called Palladius who both concerned themselves with the spiritual welfare of the Christian communities of the British Isles in the second quarter of the fifth century. We assume that there was a single Palladius, and we further assume that he held the office of deacon in one of the churches of northern Gaul, probably but not necessarily Auxerre, from which he was despatched to Rome in 429. That is all we know of Palladius. We do not know where the seat of his bishopric was, though we may suspect that it was in the south-east quarter of the island. We do not know how long his episcopate lasted, nor the names and doings of his successors (if any). But there he stands: the first known figure in the history of organized Irish Christianity. It is his misfortune to have been overshadowed by the next: Patrick.

Patrick is a famously difficult subject for the historian. It might be easiest to start by indicating some of the things which he did not do. He did not expel snakes from Ireland: the snakelessness of Ireland had been noted by the Roman geographer Solinus in the third century. He did not compose that wonderful hymn known as ‘Saint Patrick’s Breastplate’: its language postdates him by about three centuries. He did not drive a chariot three times over his sister Lupait to punish her unchastity: the allegation that he did first occurs in a life of Patrick which is a farrago of legend put together about 400 years after his death. He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the Persons of the Trinity for his converts: true, he might have done; but it is not until the seventeenth century that we are told that he did.

It would be possible to list many more things that Patrick did not do. Enough has been said to indicate that we are dealing with a figure whose reality has to a great degree been obscured by the accretion of later legend – and, one might add, of later controversy, whether sectarian or nationalistic. It cannot be too strongly urged that in studying Patrick it is absolutely essential to focus attention upon the earliest texts only: all others are suspect because their authors had axes to grind of one sort or another – the primacy of the church of Armagh, the ultra-Catholic character of Patrick, the ultra-Protestant character of Patrick, the claim that there were two Patricks, the claim that there was no Patrick because he was Palladius, and so forth. The earliest texts are two, both of them securely attributed – despite some doubts by hyper-critical scholars – to Patrick himself. In chronological order of composition they are the Epistola (or ‘Letter’) and the Confessio (or ‘Declaration’). The Epistola is a letter addressed to the troops serving under the command of a certain Coroticus, denouncing them for the massacre of some of Patrick’s converts. The Confessio is a justification of his career and conduct, apparently in answer to critics or accusers. Both works contain autobiographical materials of which Patrician scholars have wrestled to make sense.⁵

The wrestling is necessary because Patrick’s writings are exceedingly difficult to interpret. This is partly because the texts might have been garbled in transmission, but above all it is owing to the language in which they are written. Patrick wrote in Latin, but of a very peculiar kind; indeed, his Latin is unique in the whole vast corpus of ancient or early Christian Latin literature. He had received little formal education – it was to cause him shame all his life – and he did not handle the Latin language with any facility. He longs, passionately longs, to make himself clear to his readers but has the utmost difficulty in so doing. His Latin is simple, awkward, laborious, sometimes ambiguous, occasionally unintelligible. It follows that there is a large latitude for debate about what his words actually mean, a latitude of which Patrician scholars have shown no bashfulness in liberally availing themselves.

All that is necessary here is to furnish a concise indication of what is generally agreed, except on the lunatic fringes of Patrician studies, about Patrick’s career. I deliberately refrain from entering into questions of chronology, which present the thorniest of all problems for those in quest of the historical Patrick. It is accepted that his adult life fell within the fifth century. His episcopate in Ireland must postdate 431 because Prosper tells us that Palladius was Ireland’s first bishop. Beyond that we need not go.

Patrick tells us in the Confessio that he was of British and landed birth. His family owned an estate at an unidentified place called Bannaventa. They were not only Christians but ecclesiastics: Patrick’s grandfather Potitus was a priest and his father Calpornius a deacon.^* Patrick was brought up a Christian but on his own admission was not a good one during his childhood. When he was nearly sixteen he was taken captive by Irish raiders and carried off into slavery in Ireland. For six years he worked as a herdsman at a place which he refers to as ‘the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea’ (tentatively identified as the region of Killala in County Mayo). It was during this period of slavery that his Christian faith deepened. At the end of six years he managed to escape, and after much danger and hardship found himself in Gaul, where he appears to have spent some time. Then he returned to Britain and rejoined his family. It was at home that he had the most important of all the dreams through which, as he believed, God guided his life: he experienced a call to undertake the conversion of the pagan Irish to Christianity. After (presumed) preparation he was consecrated a bishop and returned to Ireland. Although this has to be inferred, the likelihood is that the zone of his missionary labours was the northern half of the island. He spent the rest of his life in Ireland, despite perils and privations making converts and establishing a church. He also had to face accusations and misrepresentations about the conduct of his mission, to which the Confessio seems to have been the reply.

Patrick recalled his vocation in a well-known passage which yet can bear repetition because it is such an extraordinary piece of writing. It occurs in Chapters 23 to 25 of the Confessio.

Again a few years later I was in Britain with my kinsfolk, and they welcomed me as a son and asked me earnestly not to go off anywhere and leave them this time, after the great tribulations which I had been through. And it was there that I saw one night in a vision a man coming from Ireland (his name was Victoricus), with countless letters; and he gave me one of them, and I read the heading of the letter, ‘The Voice of the Irish’, and as I read these opening words aloud I imagined at that very instant that I heard the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea; and thus they cried, as though with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us.’ And I was stung with remorse in my heart and could not read on, and so I awoke. Thanks be to God, that after so many years the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry. And another night (I do not know, God knows, whether it was within me or beside me) I was addressed in words which I heard and yet could not understand, except that at the end of the prayer He spoke thus: ‘He who gave His life for you, He it is who speaks within you,’ and so I awoke, overjoyed. And again I saw Him praying within me and I was, as it were, inside my own body, and I heard Him above me, that is to say above my inner self, and He was praying there powerfully and groaning; and meanwhile I was dumbfounded and astonished and wondered who it could be that was praying within me, but at the end of the prayer He spoke and said that He was the Spirit, and so I awoke and remembered the apostle’s words: ‘The Spirit helps the weaknesses of our prayer; for we do not know what to pray for as we ought; but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with unspeakable groans which cannot be expressed in words.’

No one can doubt the authenticity of the experience or fail to be moved by the writer’s efforts to describe it. In another passage Patrick linked his vocation to the missionary imperatives of the Bible.

For He granted me such grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God and afterwards be confirmed and that clergy should everywhere be ordained for them, to serve a people just now coming to the faith, and which the Lord chose from the ends of the earth, as He had promised of old through His prophets: ‘The nations will come to you from the ends of the earth and will say, “How false are the idols which our fathers made for themselves; they are quite useless.” ‘ And again, ‘I have put you as a light among the nations, to be a means of salvation to the ends of the earth.’

And I wish to wait there for His promise (and He of course never deceives), as He promises in the gospel: ‘They shall come from the east and from the west and shall sit down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’, as we believe that believers will surely come from the whole world. And so then, it is our duty to fish well and diligently, as the Lord urges and teaches us, saying: ‘Follow me, and I shall make you fishers of men;’ and again he says through the prophets, ‘See, I send many fishers and hunters, says God.’ And so it was our bounden duty to spread our nets, so that a vast multitude and throng might be caught for God and there might be clergy everywhere to baptise and exhort a people that was poor and needy, as the Lord says – He urges and teaches in the gospel, saying: ‘Go now, teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.’

And there is much more in the same vein. Patrick could describe himself as ‘a slave in Christ to a foreign people’ and could pray that God should ‘never allow me to be separated from His people whom He has won in the ends of the earth.’

Patrick’s originality was that no one within western Christendom had thought such thoughts as these before, had ever previously been possessed by such convictions. As far as our evidence goes, he was the first person in Christian history to take the scriptural injunctions literally; to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. Patrick crossed that threshold upon which, at the end of Chapter 1, we left Augustine and Prosper hesitating.

It is very difficult to assess Patrick’s achievement. We have his own word, which we do not need to doubt, that he made ‘many thousands’ of converts. These included persons of every social rank from the nobility to slaves. He travelled widely: evangelization took him ‘to the remote districts beyond which there was no one and where no one had ever penetrated to baptise’. He encouraged the adoption of the monastic way of life. He ordained priests, presumably after instruction. So much he tells us. It is reasonable to infer a little more: for example, that he established places where worship might occur, even if he did not build any churches (though he may have done); or that he encouraged his priests to acquire literacy in Latin and to multiply Christian texts.

Patrick initiated the conversion of the pagan Irish to Christianity and in so doing set an example to his successors in Ireland. A church which looked to Patrick as its founder would come to set a high value upon foreign missionary enterprise. This lay in the future. The immediate task of Patrick’s successors was to continue the work which he had begun. It is unfortunate for us that the century following the floruit of Patrick is the most obscure in the history of Christianity in Ireland. When the surviving evidence becomes more robust, begins to increase, to diversify and to gain in reliability – that is to say, roughly speaking, from the latter part of the sixth century – we find ourselves on the threshold of the great age of the Irish saints, of Irish Christian scholarship and Irish Christian art. Even if we had no other sources of information we should be able to infer that much had happened since the time of Palladius and Patrick. Happily we do have a little information about the growth and consolidation of Christian culture in sixth-century Ireland.

There survives a list of decisions taken by a synod or gathering of bishops known as the ‘First Synod of St Patrick’.⁶ This is misleading: the attribution to Patrick comes from a later period and is erroneous. It is impossible to pinpoint the real date of the synod with any degree of accuracy, though a plausible case can be made for somewhere in the first half of the sixth century. The interest of the rulings for us is that they display an Irish church in a society which was still to a great degree pagan. We hear of Christians taking oaths before soothsayers ‘in the manner of pagans’, of Christian clerics standing as legal sureties for pagans, and of pagans who attempt, intriguingly, to make offerings to Christian churches – they are to be refused. We get a sense of Christianity and paganism co-existing and in some sense interpenetrating in the Ireland for which the bishops legislated.

Two of the rulings concern the building of churches and two more seem to assume that episcopal visitation of the churches in a diocese will occur at least from time to time. No surviving church structures in Ireland may be assigned to so early a period as the sixth century. Place-names, however, come to our aid. Several Irish place-names derive from the Old Irish word domnach; for example Donnybrook, Dublin, or Donaghmore in Co. Tyrone. The word domnach is a loanword from the Latin dominicum, meaning ‘a church building’. Now dominicum in this particular sense was current in ecclesiastical Latin only between the years c. 300 and c. 600. It follows that placenames of this type indicate churches built before the seventh century. Another category of Irish names derives from Late Latin senella cella, Old Irish sen chell, meaning ‘old church’; this has yielded modern names such as Shankill. The term sen chell as a place-name element was current by about 670 at latest. It follows that ‘new churches’ were being founded in large numbers in the course of the seventh century; and that the ‘old churches’ which had preceded them were plentiful enough to be a recognizable category of building.

Christian churches imply Christian texts. Patrick was soaked in the Bible, as may be readily seen from passages in his Confessio quoted above, and he would have seen to it that the priests he ordained were too. Familiarity with the Bible and the Christian liturgy presupposed two things: learning Latin and acquiring the technology of writing. Ancient Ireland had a rich oral repertoire of poetry and narrative but early Christian leaders there seem to have been reluctant to translate Christian texts into the vernacular and write them down; possibly the Irish vernacular was held to be tainted by association with paganism. (It should be said that these inhibitions were overcome at a later stage and that in the course of time Ireland developed a rich Christian literature in Old Irish.) Whatever the reason, early Irish converts, unlike Ulfila’s Goths, were not presented with a vernacular Bible. So Patrick’s clerical disciples had to learn Latin. Moreover, they had to learn Latin as a foreign language. The Provencal audiences of Caesarius, the flock of Bishop Martin in Touraine, even the rustics of Galicia, all spoke Latin of a sort. The Irish did not. Learning Latin, for them, meant schools and grammar and a lot of hard work. It was the need to acquire facility in Latin – in an environment which lacked the educational system which was such a central feature of late-antique literary culture in the Roman empire – which made the pursuit of learning an essential feature of Irish Christian communities in the early Middle Ages. Much was to follow from this. Early results were impressive: the first Irishman who has left us a substantial body of Latin writings was St Columbanus. He was born in about 545 and devoted his youth to ‘liberal and grammatical studies’, in the words of his earliest biographer: this would have been in the 550s and early 560s. The Latin of Columbanus was confident, supple and elegant, altogether different from the raw uncouth Latin of Patrick. It is plain that by the middle of the sixth century it was possible in Ireland to acquire a really good Latin education.

The earliest Irish Latin texts that have survived to the present day date from about the year 600. The so-called Codex Usserianus Primus is a copy of the gospels, now preserved in Trinity College, Dublin, written in ink on parchment with a quill pen. The so-called Springmount Tablets, discovered in a peat bog in County Antrim and now in the National Museum of Ireland, are six little wooden tablets measuring about 7.5 x 20 cm, each of which has one face recessed and filled with a light coating of wax; on to the surface of the wax has been incised with a stylus the text of Psalms xxx-xxxii. Materials, script and technique differ as between the codex and the tablets, but in each case the writing is assured and accomplished. These artefacts are the product of an Irish clerical community which took writing in Latin for granted.

These diverse sources, a selection only, have something to tell us of the Christianization of Ireland: new disciplines, new buildings, new learning, new artefacts, were imported and naturalized. And subtly changed in the process? The church imported into Ireland had to adapt itself to Irish conditions. There was nothing surprising about this. Missionary Christianity has to have both resilience and adaptability if it is to be widely acceptable. In the Ireland of Palladius and Patrick, Christianity entered a social world which was rural in its economy, tribal and familial in its organization and pre-literate – ogham excepted – in its culture. These characteristics of Irish society were bound to affect both the way in which Christianity could be presented and the way in which it would be received. Despite the trading and other connections with Roman Britain, the characteristic tell-tales of Roman dominion and civilization were absent: towns, roads, coinage, written law, bureaucracy, taxation. One might reasonably guess that Patrick’s Irish congregations were a good deal less touched by Romanitas than the Tervingi of Dacia among whom Ulfila had ministered.

In Ireland the fundamental political unit – the very word ‘political’ is perhaps something of a misnomer in this context – was the tuath (plural tuatha): a human grouping held together partly by kinship, partly by clientage, in occupation of a shifting zone of territory under the presidency of a dynasty of kings maintained by tribute in kind. The role of the king was religious as well as secular. He had to defend his people and win fame and plunder in warfare with other kings (not unlike Edwin of Northumbria after him, though on a smaller scale); he also had to mediate between his people and the gods to ensure fat cattle and plentiful harvests. Tuatha varied greatly in area and population, but it may safely be said that none was very big for there were perhaps 150–200 of them in early medieval Ireland. There was nothing systematic and nothing static about authority in the Ireland of St Patrick. Like biological cells, tuatha were constantly on the move, splitting, fusing, splitting again, as one king achieved a temporary supremacy over his neighbours only to lose it after a few years.

How could a Christian ecclesiastical organization build its house upon such shifting sands? This was a question that had not arisen before. Within the Roman empire it had been normal for the church to graft itself on to the existing framework of civil administration. Thus, for example, the civil province of Gallia Narbonensis, administered from Narbo (Narbonne), turned into an ecclesiastical province: its chief bishop (or archbishop, or metropolitan) came to reside in Narbonne and his subject (or suffragan) bishops were those of the various towns within the civil province – Béziers, Carcassonne, Lodève, Nimes, Uzès, Toulouse and so forth. But in Ireland there were no towns, no provinces, no fixed boundaries. So what was to be done? One answer was to associate bishoprics with sites connected with particularly prominent dynasties which might be expected to show stamina and continuity. Armagh, for instance, was an early ecclesiastical foundation, whether correctly or not attributed to Patrick does not matter here; it is suggestively close to the secular stronghold of Emain Macha, ancient seat of Ulster kings. At Cashel in County Tipperary association is closer still; the cathedral stands right on top of the Rock of Cashel, seat of Munster kings.

Kinship and clientage, mentioned above as the cement of the tuatha, were the strongest social forces in early medieval Ireland. Patrick’s accommodation to one of these may perhaps be seen in his reference to ‘the sons of kings who travel with me’. Setting out the rights and obligations of kings, lords, kinsmen, the whole ordering (sometimes idealized) of a graded, complex, status-conscious society, was the responsibility of a class of specialists (brithem, plural brithemin) who memorized, pronounced and handed down the law. There were specialists in another branch of learning too, which cannot strictly be called literature because like the law it was orally transmitted: the bards (fili, plural filid) who recited poems, genealogies, stories, works such as the great Irish epic the Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). Together the lawyers and bards buttressed the sense of identity, the custom and morality of early Ireland. How were Christian identity, custom and morality to infuse themselves into so stout and immemorial a texture?

There was one distinctive Christian institution which proved itself brilliantly capable of meshing and marrying with Irish social habits: monasticism. Despite the references to monks in Patrick’s writings it is likely that the implanting of monasticism in Ireland on any serious scale was a development of that crucial but obscure sixth century. It is also likely that the monastic impulse, though it could have reached Ireland by more than one route, was felt particularly strongly from south Wales. One of the decrees of the ‘First Synod’ concerns British clergy who travel to Ireland. The south Welsh St Samson, whom we encountered in the last chapter, was a famous monastic founder and traveller. His earliest biographer shows him visiting Ireland and making monastic recruits there: though the passage is now thought to be a later interpolation into the text (above, p. 60) it may preserve a reliable tradition of a Hibernian visit by Samson.

We must remember that we are in an age when there were many shades of monasticism. A time would come when to be a monk meant to follow the monastic rule compiled by St Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 550). But the gradual coming to dominance of Benedict’s Rule in the western church at large was a very slow business, spread over several centuries. The late antique and early medieval periods were characterized by a ceaselessly proliferating diversity of rules. A monastic founder devised his own rule for his own monks to follow. Monasticism was therefore extraordinarily adaptable and transplantable, an institution with a marked degree of flexibility. In this respect it contrasted with the ‘Roman’ structure of organization in the secular church.

In Ireland monasticism made its appeal largely because it proved capable of accommodating itself to the structures of kinship and clientage. Ancient Irish law did not know of individual property. Land belonged to a family and could not be alienated. Founders and benefactors wishing to endow monastic houses with land could not do so by outright grants of absolute rights in perpetuity such as were known to Roman law. Instead, monasteries endowed with family land became family concerns, family possessions. The founder’s kin would supply the abbot and more than a few of the monks; the community would service the kin by praying for them, furnishing hospitality to them, leasing land to them on easy terms, looking after them in old age. A successful monastery could give birth to daughter houses or could acquire a following of houses which chose to opt for its customs and fellowship, just as a king acquired lordship over retainers or over other tuatha. In their physical appearance monasteries even looked like the fort-farms of the secular aristocracy with their dry-stone enclosing walls and their scatter of buildings within for human and animal inmates.⁷ An exceptionally fine example, Inishmurray off the coast of Sligo, may be seen in plate 7.

These were not of course the only reasons why the Irish took to monasticism with such zest. The appeal of a life of ascetic self-denial was felt as strongly in Ireland as in other parts of Christendom. In an insecure and often violent world monastic communities were, or were intended to be, havens of security. They were rightly perceived as agents for the diffusion of Christianity in society. They were places where ‘sacred technology’ was practised, the crafts of writing and decorating books, of working in wood and stone and metal; places therefore where exchange could occur. In this respect the bigger monasteries came to be the closest thing to towns in early medieval Ireland.

There can be no doubting the fact that monasticism became enormously significant in Irish Christianity. Some historians have even gone so far as to claim that the Irish church became almost exclusively monastic in character. The argument is further advanced that branches of the Christian church in close proximity to Ireland, such as Wales, developed in the same manner; and that this distinctive model was exported to further neighbouring areas – from Wales to Brittany, from Ireland to western Scotland. Thus, the argument concludes, there came into existence a Celtic church which differed in its organization and customs from the Roman church.

It is now recognized that this is misleading. No church can be wholly monastic. The sacramental functions of a bishop (confirmation, ordination, consecration of churches, etc.) cannot be performed by an abbot, however holy and revered. The preponderance of writing generated in and for monasteries among the surviving written sources has given a biased impression of the standing of monasticism in Ireland. It is possible to detect – and some of the evidence has been glanced at above – the vitality of the secular, non-monastic church in the sixth and seventh centuries. There never was a ‘Celtic church’. Irish churchmen repeatedly and sincerely professed their Roman allegiances: and if there were divergent practices between Rome and Ireland, well, so there were between Rome and Constantinople – or Alexandria or Carthage or Milan or Toledo. The terms ‘Roman’ and ‘Celtic’ are too monolithic. In terms of custom and practice there were many churches in sixth- and seventh-century Europe, not One Church. Christendom was many-mansioned.

The sixth century saw the foundation of a number of communities which were to achieve great renown in the history of Irish spirituality and learning – Bangor, Clonard, Clonfert, Clonmacnois, Durrow, Kildare, Monasterboice, to name but a few. A feature of special significance for us is the appearance of monastic confederations spread over a wide area, chains of houses which owed their existence to a single founder and followed the rule drawn up by him. The founder best known to us is Columba (c. 520–597), who established three famous monasteries, at Derry, Durrow and Iona, and a number of lesser ones as well. A deservedly celebrated life of Columba was composed about ninety years after his death by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona and a member of the founder’s kin. It is to this wonderfully spirited and informative document that we owe most of what we know about Columba and the monastic regime which he favoured.⁸

Columba’s chain of monasteries crossed the sea: Iona lies off the island of Mull, itself off the western coast of Scotland. But it did not cross cultures. Iona was in the kingdom of Dalriada, which comprised the western islands and coastal hinterland from the Clyde to Ardnamurchan. This area had been settled by Irish migrants at a slightly later date than their settlements in Dyfed. In founding a monastery on Iona, therefore, Columba was among people of his own language and culture. There has been a good deal of discussion about his motives for the move to Iona, traditionally dated to 563, which need not delay us here. Adomnán, and the Iona community for whom he wrote, were clear about the principal reason: ‘In the forty-second year of his age Columba sailed away from Ireland to Britain, wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ.’ We have already met the idea of the Christian’s life as one of exile or pilgrimage in the writings of St Augustine of Hippo. Patrick had described himself in the Epistola as ‘an exile (profuga) for the love of God’. We encounter here another point of contact between Christian idealism and Irish social custom. Exile was one of the most severe penalties known to Irish law – severe because it removed the person so punished from the supportive network of kinsmen, lords, retainers and dependants. The exile was quite literally dis-integrated from the protective social and emotional fabric in which he had been cocooned and turned into a defenceless individual.

Columba’s exile was not lifelong. There is plentiful evidence in Adomnán’s biography that he went to and fro between Scotland and Ireland in the years after the foundation of Iona. But some went further down the path of lifelong pilgrimage or exile, cutting loose more decisively from earthly ties in the fashion which the author of Hebrews had commended in Abraham. The pioneer was Columbanus.^*

We last glimpsed Columbanus (above, p. 88) receiving an excellent grounding in Latin in the middle years of the sixth century. In about 565 he entered the monastery of Bangor in County Down, recently founded by St Comgall. This was already a fairly considerable step on the road to exile. Columbanus was a native of Leinster, and in betaking himself to Bangor he was, as his biographer Jonas of Bobbio noted, ‘leaving his native country’.⁹ At Bangor he would have been well placed to hear the news of Columba’s exploits in Dalriada. His abbot, Comgall, was another founder who presided over a network of monastic houses, including at least one on the island of Tiree (though the source for this is late and perhaps doubtful), where there was also a monastery of the Iona network. However, exile to Bangor was not enough for Columbanus: as Jonas explained, he wanted to live out to the letter the commands uttered to Abraham. Accordingly, after gaining the reluctant assent of Comgall, he set off for Gaul, probably in the late 580s. There, helped by royal and aristocratic patronage, he founded three monastic houses at Annegray, Luxeuil and Les Fontaines on the edge of the Vosges mountains about thirty miles west of the modern town of Mulhouse. After a series of somewhat stormy brushes with the Frankish episcopate and Queen Brunhilde, Columbanus moved on to Bregenz, at the eastern end of Lake Constance, where he planned to found another monastery but in the event did not. His last move took him over the Alps to Italy, where he founded his last monastery at Bobbio, in the Apennines inland from Genoa. There he died in the year 615.

Pilgrimage, in the sense of ascetic renunciation of homeland and kinsfolk, is of special importance in our understanding of the phenomenon of conversion in the early Middle Ages. Pilgrimage merged insensibly into mission. The monasteries that were founded by the exiled holy men had something of the character of mission stations. It was not that they were established primarily among pagans; indeed, they could not have been, dependent as they were on wealthy patrons, necessarily Christian (if we except the case of the pagan would-be benefactors in Ireland), for their endowments. Columba settled among the Christian Irish of Dalriada, Columbanus in the Christian kingdom of the Franks. But their monastic communities were situated on the margins of Christendom, and had what might be called ‘diffusive potential’ among nearby laity who were Christian only in the most nominal of senses.

The point may be illustrated from episodes in the careers of Columba and Columbanus. Bede tells us that Columba came to Britain ‘to preach the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts’, that is, to the peoples who inhabited north-eastern Scotland between (roughly speaking) Inverness, Aberdeen and Perth. It is unlikely that this was in fact Columba’s motive. He came as a pilgrim or exile. Columba was no more the apostle of Pictland than Ulfila was the apostle of the Goths. Bede’s comments on Columba fall in the same chapter as his two sentences on Ninian and like them may reflect the preoccupations of his own day more than they do the realities of Columba’s. However, we have the evidence of Adomnán that Columba had dealings with the Picts and that he did make some conversions among them. He visited the Pictish King Bridei at his stronghold near Inverness on more than one occasion and converted two households of (apparently) the Pictish aristocracy to Christianity. Here is the story of one conversion as told by Adomnán.

At one time when the holy man [i.e. Columba] was making a journey on the other side of the Spine of Britain [Adomnán’s term for the western Grampians which divided Dalriada from Pictland] beside the lake of the river Ness, he was suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and said to the brothers who travelled along with him: ‘Let us hasten towards the holy angels that have been sent from the highest regions of heaven to conduct the soul of a pagan, and who await our coming thither so that we may give timely baptism, before he dies, to that man, who has preserved natural goodness through his whole life, into extreme old age.’ Saying this, the aged saint went as fast as he could, ahead of his companions, until he came to the farmland that is called Airchartdan [Urquhart]. And a certain old man whom he found there, Emchath by name, hearing and believing the word of God preached by the saint, was baptised; and thereupon, gladly and confidently, with the angels that came to meet him he departed to the Lord. And his son Virolec also believed and was baptised, with his whole house.

As the story of a conversion, it leaves something to be desired. We should not blame Adomnán for this: what he was interested in was (in his own words) ‘the manifestation of angels coming to meet the soul of Emchath’. For our purposes the tale is of interest in showing that Columba the monastic founder was also, on occasions, an evangelist.

From Jonas’ biography of Columbanus we may quote an episode of somewhat similar drift that occurred during his sojourn at Bregenz in or about the year 611.

And then they came to the place where they were going [i.e. Bregenz]. The man of God said that it did not really meet his requirements, but in order to sow the Christian faith in the heathen thereabouts he would stay there for a while. The peoples there were called the Suevi. And while he was there working among the inhabitants of that place he found them preparing to make a profane offering: and they placed a great barrel which in their language they called a cupa, which holds twenty measures or more of ale, in the midst of them. The man of God went up to them and asked what they proposed to do with it. And they said that they were going to sacrifice to their god Woden. He hearing their evil project blew on the cask and it burst with a mighty crack and the ale poured out. It was quite clear that there was a devil hidden in the barrel who by means of the evil drink took captive the souls of those who sacrificed. The barbarians saw this and were astonished and said that they had a great man of God among them who could thus dissolve a barrel fully bound with hoops as it was. He rebuked them and preached the word of God to them and urged them to refrain from these sacrifices. Many of them were persuaded by his words and turned to the Christian faith and accepted baptism. Others who had already been baptised but remained in the grip of pagan error heeded his admonitions as a good shepherd of the church and returned to the observance of gospel teaching.

Of course, we may again wonder – but did Jonas? – in what sense these Suevi had become Christians and what happened to their spiritual life after Columbanus had moved on to Bobbio in the following year. We do know that Columbanus’ disciple Gallus was left behind as a hermit beside Lake Constance and undertook evangelizing operations there. The site of his hermitage was to become one of the most celebrated of all medieval monasteries, taking its name from him – St Gallen.

We do not have to rely on his biographer to sense the apostolic impulse in Columbanus. It is attested in his own writings. In a letter written in 610 he spoke of ‘my vow to make my way to the heathen to preach the gospel to them’. Was Columbanus a monk or was he a missionary? The antithesis is misplaced. To be the kind of monk he was, in the age in which he lived, was also to be an evangelist.

* It should be borne in mind both here and in later chapters that clerical celibacy, though from a very early date regarded as praiseworthy, was not widely enforced within the western church before the twelfth century; and thereafter only with difficulty.

* It is tiresome that we have two near-contemporary saintly Irishmen with the same name, Columba, the Latin word for ‘dove’. The older of the two, Columba of Iona, is sometimes called Columba the Elder, sometimes by his Irish name Columcille, ‘Dove of the Church’. The younger is usually known by his Latin name in its masculine form, Columbanus, sometimes Englished as Columban. In this book I follow the convention of referring to the elder as Columba and to the younger as Columbanus.