Matters finally came to a head when he incurred the displeasure of the secular rulers also. Theuderich, the new young king of Burgundy, although married, installed concubines in the royal household, and soon had four illegitimate children. When the king’s grandmother, Brunhilde, instructed Columbanus to confirm her grandson’s illegitimate children, he refused, and from then on she was to prove his bitter enemy. Brunhilde may have inspired the story of Brynhildr, the shieldmaiden and valkyrie in the mythology of the Vikings, when she appears in the Völsunga saga and the Eddic poems. As Brünnhilde she also appears in the Medieval German masterpiece, the Nibelungenlied, a heroic epic of equal stature to Homer’s Iliad, and thus in Wagner’s magnificent Der Ring der Nibelungen, though some would deprecate Wagner’s alterations to the story. Attila the Hun also appears in the epic as Etzel, husband of Kriemhild.
This confrontation may have been embellished somewhat by Columbanus’ biographer, for, as Ian Wood points out, Columbanus “was not the first to criticise Merovingian concubinage; it would, in fact, be curious if an Irishman, coming from an island where royal concubinage was even more entrenched than in Francia, had been the first to condemn the practice.”
Whatever the actual details, in 610 Brunhilde succeeded in having Columbanus expelled from his beloved monastery, never to see it again. He and his party of Irish monks then embarked on a 600 mile journey westwards to the coast. Once there, they boarded a vessel which was to take them back to Ireland. However, a great storm arose and drove the boat back to the shore, where for the next three days it then became becalmed. The captain, believing all these events were a sign from God that he was not to co-operate in the expulsion of the Irish monks, set them back onto the shore again.
Another great journey now lay ahead of Columbanus and his party, made longer by the need to take a wide detour whereby they would avoid contact with their Burgundian adversaries. Finally, after much hardship they established their new headquarters close to Lake Constance at Bregenz (which lies in present-day Austria close to its borders with Switzerland and Germany). Here they built a small cloistered monastery, laid out a garden and planted fruit trees. But nature proved more yielding to their efforts than the local people, many of whom were deeply resentful of these intruders who had the effrontery to smash their pagan images and throw them into the lake.
When some of the monks were murdered, Columbanus realised that once again he must uproot himself and his community and seek elsewhere for a sanctuary. However, not all his monks were prepared to embark on further travel into the unknown, including Gall, who throughout these years of hardship had probably been Columbanus’ closest companion. When Gall broke the news to his aging friend, their parting must have been one of the most sorrowful occasions in both their lives.
Although by now more than seventy years of age, Columbanus crossed the snow-covered Alps through the St Gothard’s pass and made his way to the court of the Lombard king, who granted him a suitable place, at Bobbio, where he could found a new monastery. Columbanus was to die a year later but Bobbio was to grow in stature, attracting some of the finest scholars of the time and containing a splendid library of over 700 books, and became the most important monastic centre in Northern Italy. Several dozen manuscripts, some lavishly illuminated, have survived from the first three centuries of Bobbio’s existence. The largest extant body of Old Irish glosses passed through the monastery before ending up in Milan.
Before he died Columbanus sent a messenger to seek out his old friend Gall, to let him know that the bitterness of their parting had been finally set aside. The great emperor Charlemagne was to build one of his most famous foundations — the Monastery of St Gall — near the spot where Columbanus’ old travelling companion had lived the austere life of a hermit. A modern monastery now stands there today, of which it has been written: “The monastery… has in its library beautiful Irish manuscripts made by some of these travelling scholars.
The library has also preserved a fine plan of Charlemagne’s monastery with its sties and stables, its sheepfolds and fowl houses, threshing floors and market gardens… As well as this farm neatly laid out in a great rectangle around the central church, the monastery of St Gall had a hostel and a kitchen for its guests, schools and accommodation for the abbot and his monks, a doctor’s clinic, an infirmary and a cemetery. Such settlements formed the high culture of Europe in the reign of Charlemagne.”
G.S.M. Walker wrote of Columbanus: “A character so complex and so contrary, humble and haughty, harsh and tender, pedantic and impetuous by turns, had as its guiding and unifying pattern the ambition of sainthood. All his activities were subordinate to that one end and with the self-sacrifice that can seem so close to self-assertion he worked out his sole salvation by the wondrous pathway that he knew. He was a missionary through circumstance, a monk by vocation, a contemplative, too frequently driven to action by the world, a pilgrim on the road to Paradise.” Pope Pius XI has said, “The more light that is shed by scholars in the period known as the Middle Ages the clearer it becomes that it was thanks to the initiative and labours of Columbanus that the rebirth of Christian virtue and civilisation over a great part of Gaul, Germany and Italy took place.”
The French poet Leon Cathlin concurs in saying, “He is, with Charlemagne, the greatest figure of our Early Middle Ages,” and Daniel-Rops of the French Academy has also said that he was “a sort of prophet of Israel, brought back to life in the sixth century, as blunt in his speech as Isaias or Jeremias… For almost fifty years souls were stirred by the influence of St Columbanus. His passing through the country started a real contagion of holiness.” More recently, Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister who was a driving force behind the establishment of the European Economic Community, said: “Columbanus is the patron saint of those who seek to construct a united Europe.”
In 2012 we celebrated the 1400th anniversary of Bobbio’s foundation.. Having started with the Farset Steps of Columbanus Project in the mid ’80’s with the help of Tomas Cardinal O’Fiaich and Archbishop Robin, now Lord, Eames the Ullans Academy continued with Feast of Columbanus events with Dr Ian Paisley (Lord Bannside), Baroness Eileen Paisley, and President Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins. Through Pretani Associates, on 22nd November, 2015, they commemorated the 1400th anniversary of Columbanus’s death in 615 by honouring him as the Patron Saint of Bikers. This event was held under the auspices of Eddie Irvine at his Sports Centre in Bangor. Eddie himself attended with Biker legends Jeremy Mc Williams and Alistair Seeley and the Bikers of Dalaradia. The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins sent a message of support.
It isn’t just for their religious impact that the Irish monks are renowned, but for the manner in which they inscribed and illuminated their magnificent manuscripts. “Drawing upon the traditional art of their pagan past, Irish monks decorated their great manuscript books and the accoutrements of their churches with designs that are a breathtaking reminder of the art of their forebears… Margins overflow with patterns of swirling, interlocking lines, and entire pages are given over to scriptural pictures that are a kaleidoscope of colour and restless patterns. Perhaps the most famous of these Bible pages are the dazzling ‘carpet pages’, covered in their entirety with patterns that rival the delicacy of the finest metalwork and the brilliance of enamel or precious stones.” Some of these manuscripts, notably the Book of Kells, the Book of Durrow, and the Lindisfarne Gospels, are considered to be among the world’s greatest art treasures.
To be continued