Life of St Columba

"I put this on the list because I think when people are interested in the Celts and the early Middle Ages, what a lot of people are unaware of is that there are four or five beautiful books that came down from the Dark Ages, still very interesting to read today. Perhaps the very best of these books is this one, Life of Columba by Adomnán. Columba lived in the sixth century, an Irish saint who ended up on Iona in the Hebrides in a monastery there. And Richard Sharpe has translated this seventh-century text, written a century after Columba’s death, from Latin into English, and he’s done it with enormous style. The end of the book has copious notes as well for the curious reader. If people are really keen on this subject, the best thing they can do is find a book like this that tells it as it was, very much in the voice and language of those times. It’s to Richard Sharpe’s great credit that he’s managed to pull off a translation that’s very simple to read – you can sit down with it and read it in an afternoon, and it takes you all the way back to the very heart of the Dark Ages. Well, the Irish had been familiar for many years with the idea that the early Christian fathers, the Desert Fathers as we call them, in Syria and Egypt, had gone out into the desert to look for God. So they found themselves here in Ireland desperately looking for wildernesses, but really Ireland doesn’t have any deserts. So they came up with two solutions: one solution was to find little bits of wilderness on the tops of mountains and many Gaelic names in Ireland to this day are called disirts, referring to these attempts by early Christian hermits to turn these boglands into deserts where they could pray to God. The other thing they’d do was to go out in boats and look for deserted islands, and they did this in the most extraordinary fashion. In some cases they were actually dragged out into the ocean, blown by the wind, and they would interpret the wind as God’s will telling them where they should land. So it’s very probable that Columba simply stumbled upon Iona. In any case, it was a depopulated island that he could give over to himself and his monks for the service of God. Well, one of the interesting things is that when the Celts became Christian – in the early centuries AD – they brought over a lot of their pagan beliefs into their Christian beliefs. For example, the Life of Columba refers to several pagan Celtic customs that had actually been absorbed into mainstream Celtic Christianity. We can use the phrase ‘Celtic Christianity’ to refer to the churches in the fourth to the seventh century. We sometimes refer to the ‘Celtic Mediterranean’, the Irish Sea, with Irish saints and British saints going backwards and forwards with their very distinctive form of Christianity. For example, they had a very unusual tonsure; they had a kind of skinhead haircut at the back and a Tintin tuft at the front. And they also practised various other customs. When you’re looking at Dark Age Christianity, if you ever come across a strange custom the chances are it’s one that the Celts have introduced."