The Book-Hunter / A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author

by John Hill Burton

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 Cæsar 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preserve enough of Christian influence to second and support the missions sent to the Saxons, so soon after these had superseded the British power, looks like an exception to the usual rule of Christian progress.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 Britanniæ—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 outbreaks against the imperial government have been led by people of Norman or Saxon descent.

Still there is no doubt, difficult as it may be to realise the idea, that at the times with which we are dealing, Ireland enjoyed a kind of civilisation, which enabled its princes and its priests to look down on Pictland, and even on Saxon England, as barbarian. The Roman dominion had not penetrated among them, but the very remoteness which kept the island beyond the boundaries of the Empire, also kept it beyond the range of the destroyers of the Empire, and made it in reality the repository of the vestiges of imperial civilisation in the north. Perhaps the difference between the two grades of civilisation might be about the same as we could have found ten years ago between Tahiti and New Zealand.

An extensive and minute genealogical ramification, when it is authentic, is a condition of a pretty far advanced state of civilisation. Abandoning the old fabulous genealogies which went back among the Biblical patriarchs, the rigid antiquaries of Ireland find their way through authentic sources to genealogical connections of a truly marvellous extent. Such illustrious men as the saints can, of course, be easily traced, as all were proud to establish connection with them; while Columba himself and several others were men of royal descent. But of the casual persons mentioned in the Life of Columba, Dr Reeves hunts out the genealogy—fully as successfully, one would say, as that of any person of the country-gentleman class in Britain, living at the beginning of this century, could be established. There are, indeed, many characteristics in the hagiologic literature bearing an analogy to modern social habits so close as to be almost ludicrous; and it is not easy to deal with these conditions of a very distant age, brought to us as they are through the vehicle of a language which is neither classical nor vernacular, but conventional—the corrupt Latin in which the biographers of the saints found it convenient to write. It would appear that when he was in Ireland, St Columba kept his carriage, and the loss of the lynch-pin on one occasion is connected with a notable miracle. Dr Reeves, as appropriate to this, remarks that "the memoirs of St Patrick in the Book of Armagh make frequent mention of his chariot, and even name his driver." It is difficult to suppose such a vehicle ever becoming available in Iona; but there Columba seems to have been provided with abundance of vessels, and he could send for a friend, in the way in which MacGillicallum's "carriage," in the form of a boat, was sent for Johnson and Boswell.

There are many other things in these books which have a sound more familiar to us than any sense which they really convey. Here the saint blesses the store of a "homo plebeius cum uxore et filiis"—a poor man with a wife and family—a term expressively known in this day among all who have to deal with the condition of their fellow-men, from the chancellor of the exchequer to the relieving-officer. In the same chapter we are told "de quodam viro divite tenacissimo"—of a very hard-fisted rich fellow—a term thoroughly significant in civilised times. He is doomed, by the way, to become bankrupt, and fall into such poverty that his offspring will be found dead in a ditch—a fate also intelligible in the nineteenth century. In another place we have among the saint's suitors "plebeius pauperrimus, qui in ea habitabat regione quæ Stagni litoribus Aporici est contermina." The "Stagnum Aporicum" is Lochaber; so here we have a pauper from the neighbourhood of Lochaber—a designation which I take to be familiarly known at "the Board of Supervision for the Relief of the Poor in Scotland." We are told, too, of the saint being at a plebeian feast, and of a plebeius in the island of Raghery quarrelling with his wife.