Mid-Argyll Theme
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Saints' Lives
As literacy emerges in northern Europe in the
first millennium AD, for the first time in their
history the people of the past can speak to us in
their own words, in their own voices.
There are many genres of such communication -
poetry, annals, histories. But one of the most
interesting - and one of the most difficult to read
- is that of hagiography: the writing of the lives
and stories of the saints.
People wrote saints' Lives for all kinds of
reasons. The primary motive was to encourage
devotion to their patron saint. This probably
combined their own personal sense of devotion with
a more institutional ambition. A writer would, for
example, write a saint's Life to encourage
pilgrimages to the shrine where the saint's relics
were kept, which would bring revenue and
prestige.
Or a Life might emphasise how the saint had
founded many churches, persuading the reader that
those communities now owe some kind of allegiance
to the saint's mother church. For example, Armagh
clerics in the seventh century wrote stories about
Patrick founding huge numbers of churches, all to
persuade readers that Patrick's church at Armagh
should be the supreme church of the Irish.
We have to be careful, therefore, when reading
these Lives, remembering that they are works of
propaganda as well as of devotion. As historians,
we have to remind ourselves constantly of the
limitations of this genre of literature.
Saints' Lives are full of miracle stories -
though we don't read these as evidence that the
medieval world was constantly being disrupted by
actual miraculous occurrences. It is rather
evidence of the medieval reader's interest in such
miracle-stories, the importance of miracles as a
sign of holiness and a guarantee that the saint
could be an effective patron for his or her
devotees.
Furthermore, the kind of miracle a saint
performed is also important. The miracles performed
by the saint in Adomnán's Life of Columba
tell us something not about Columba in the sixth
century, but about Adomnán in the seventh.
He shows Columba miraculously helping women in
various ways, but this reflects Adomnán's
interest in the welfare of women, which is most
clearly manifested in his Law
of the Innocents of 697 AD.
Adomnán also paints a picture of his
patron, Columba, as a man who ordains kings. There
is some dispute about whether or not Columba did
any such thing, but what is beyond doubt is what it
tells us about Adomnán: he wanted to
persuade his readers that Iona was God's chosen
instrument for the anointing and inauguration of
kings. He wanted to persuade his readers of the
new ideology of
kingship that Iona was promoting from the late
seventh century.
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There were other churches in Dál
Riata which were not part of Columba's
family of monasteries. Adomnán's
Life of Columba shows them failing in
various ways, or he simply ignores them.
There is an agenda of inter-church rivalry
going on here, perhaps.
In short, if we read a saint's Life as
revealing something about the seventh
century author rather than about the sixth
century patron saint, we can discover a
great deal about contemporary social and
ecclesiastical life.
Finally, if we look at the background
information conveyed by such texts we can
discover a lot about the material
conditions of existence. The Life of
Columba describes monks harvesting on the
west side of Iona. It mentions a
seal-breeding ground where Iona had the
exclusive right to take the animals. We
hear of people sailing on the sea in boats
with very thin coverings - the curraghs of
wood and skin which Gaels still use in
some areas. By looking at these incidental
pieces of information, peripheral to the
main thrust of the stories, we can learn
much about the ordinary and everyday in
seventh century Argyll.
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Early Christian
slab in a Lochaber graveyard,
possibly an early non-Columban
church.
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Key
References
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This
project has been supported by the EU as part of the Culture
2000 programme.