St. Columba

Columba of Iona is one of the best-documented figures in early medieval Christianity, and the quality of his principal source makes the account unusually rich. Adomnán's Life of Columba, written about a century after his death, is not biography in any modern sense, but it is a work of remarkable particularity: the detail of the monastery at Iona, the texture of the daily round, the specific scenes of counsel and conflict and reconciliation that it preserves make it unusually valuable.

He was born in Donegal around 521, educated in the Irish monastic tradition under Finnian of Clonard and others, and founded several monasteries in Ireland before his departure for Scotland in 563. The reasons for that departure are genuinely obscure. The tradition preserves a story about a dispute over a psalter he had copied without permission from Finnian of Movilla, a subsequent appeal to the High King, a judgment against Columba, and the battle of Cúl Dreimhne that followed at enormous cost in Irish lives — after which Columba undertook the exile as penance. This narrative, whatever its historical accuracy, has the feel of authentic memory even if the details have been shaped by subsequent telling.

What is not in doubt is that Columba arrived on the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland and built there the monastery that became the centre of the Christianisation of northern Britain. He visited the Pictish king Bridei at Inverness, confronting the king's druid advisers and making converts. His monks spread from Iona to Lindisfarne and eventually, through the Columbanian current, across parts of the continent. Adomnán shows him working, copying manuscripts, counselling monks and visiting laypeople, conducting the full round of prayer with his community. On the evening of the ninth of June 597, Adomnán records, Columba was found slumped before the altar after Vespers; his face, the monks said, showed a radiance that the witnesses remembered all their lives.