In Search of Angels E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 550

Beschreibung

Longlisted for The Highland Book Prize 2020 Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland's Atlantic shore. These 'white martyrs' sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the world where they could fast, pray and move closer to an understanding of God: places where they could see angels. Columba, who founded the famous monastery at Iona, was the most well-known of these courageous men who rowed their curraghs towards danger and uncertainty in a pagan land, but the many others are now largely forgotten by history.  In this book, Alistair Moffat journeys from the island of Eileach an Naoimh at the mouth of the Firth of Lorne to Lismore, Iona and then north to Applecross, searching for traces of these extraordinary men. He finds them not often in any tangible remains, but in the spirit of the islands and remote places where they passed their exemplary lives. Brendan, Moluag, Columba, Maelrubha and others brought the Gaelic language and echoes of how the saints saw their world can still be heard in its cadences. And the tradition of great piety endures.

Leseprobe

In Search of Angels

First published in 2020 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2020

Part-title illustrations © copyright Andrew Crummy 2020

ISBN 978 178027 672 4ePUB ISBN 978 178885 304 0

The right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

’Son mo charaidean Gaidhealach uile

For all my Highland friends

Contents

Acknowledgements

Maps

Preface

Introduction

Part OneThe Word Must Be Spread

  1 The Lauras

  2 The Deserts of the North

  3 The Colours of Martyrdom

  4 The Land of Promise of the Saints

Part TwoThe Rock of the Saint – Eileach an Naoimh

  5 Setting off for the Edge of the World

  6 On Brendan’s Isle

  7 The Place of Penance

Part ThreeThe Great Garden – Lismore

  8 On the Feast of St Moluag

  9 Walking to the Cathedral

10 The Apostle of the Picts

11 Waiting for the Ferry

Part FourThe Isle of the Yew Tree – Iona

12 Founders

13 Beyond the Corncrake Meadow

14 The Graveyard of the Kings

15 The Night Before the Morning

16 The Scribes and the Scribbler

Part FiveInto Eden – Applecross

17 The Red Priest

18 Beyond the Pass of the Cattle

19 The Language of Miracles

20 The Sanctuary

21 The End of the Rainbow

Epilogue The Blood of Blathmac

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

When Hugh Andrew approached me with the idea of this book, I was immediately attracted. There is much more to the story of the Christian conversion of the west and north of Scotland than Columba. But sources for the lives and works of the other holy men who sailed amongst the islands and sea lochs from the sixth to the eight centuries are vanishingly scant. Sometime only names and the whispers of half-forgotten stories survive. And so it seemed to me that I should do what they did, go on a journey and try to discover something of their passing, and why they founded their communities on the islands and remote places of the Atlantic shore. Blessed with sun, calm seas and enough solitude, I spent a summer in the company of the saints who came to the Hebrides all that long time ago and who did so much to shape modern Scotland.

I’m grateful to Calum Macdonald for permission to reproduce the text of An Ubhal as Airde (copyright © C. & R. Macdonald and published by Chrysalis/BMG). The lines from Sorley MacLean’s ‘Hallaig’ are copyright © the estate of Sorley MacLean. The poem appears in A White Leaping Flame/Caoir Gheal Leumraich: Sorley MacLean, Collected Poems, edited by Christopher Whyte and Emma Dymock, published by Polygon in association with Carcanet Press.

Patricia Marshall is a mistress of her craft and edited this book with immense skill and sensitivity, while Andrew Simmons produced it with tact, patience and persistence. I would like to thank them both, kind and considerate professionals that they are. Jan Rutherford completes the quartet who brought this book to life. As ever, I am immensely grateful to her. My agent, David Godwin, also encouraged me greatly. And finally, for wonderful Highland hospitality, I would like to thank Mrs Flora MacRae.

Alastair Moffat

Summer 2020

Preface

Thirty years ago, in another life, I stopped for a moment to look up from the morning mist on Loch Awe and across to Ben Cruachan. Snow-crowned, majestic, its mass dominates the Pass of Brander, the dawning sun dazzling, glinting in the distance off the white summit. As the tide of yellow light slowly unfolded over the land, I put my briefcase on the back seat of my car, checked my inside pockets for wallet, passport and tickets, and drove away through the mountains to another world.

With friends from Edinburgh, we had hired the west wing of Ardbrecknish House on the eastern shore of Loch Awe. High on a ridge, it commands long vistas up and down the loch and across to the Argyll mountains. But early on Easter Sunday morning I had to leave all of these unfurling glories behind and drive to Edinburgh Airport to catch a plane bound for a very different landscape. In those days, I worked in television and, having recently been appointed Director of Programmes at Scottish Television, I had to attend the Marché International des Programmes de Télévision (MIPTV), the largest international market for buying and selling what was known as content – programmes. It is held each Easter at Le Palais des Festivals in Cannes on the French Riviera and I was to stay at the five-star Carlton Hotel on the long, curving seafront called La Croisette. I was not looking forward to it and, as I drove down through the twists and sudden turns of the Pass of Leny, where the Highlands suddenly becomes the Lowlands, I thought of my family and friends waking up in the peace of Ardbrecknish by the lochside.

In the windowless bowels of a concrete monstrosity at one end of the Croisette, misnamed a palace, hundreds of trade stands are set up by those with programmes to sell, and buyers cruise the aisles, often stopping to pick up brochures or look at excerpts. Producers and sales staff from all the major networks are there – ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, ITV, Disney, Warner Brothers and many more. Co-production deals are discussed, expensive gourmet dinners eaten, promises made and sometimes kept. For ITV we made several game shows for adults and for children, and my main purpose in going to Cannes was to consolidate those deals with American format owners and sometimes renegotiate terms. The cost of all this, the conspicuous consumption, was vast, as were the potential rewards. It was the market economy working at full throttle. To remind me of the scale of expenditure, I recently looked online at the cost of a room in the Carlton Hotel for one night and it was £500, probably more at MIPTV. I knew that our network production business depended on shaking the right hands at the right time and saying the right things but I found it all very uncomfortable, claustrophobic and ultimately repetitive.

Such is the pressure on hotel accommodation in Cannes that some companies used to prefer to hire large luxury yachts that were moored at the jetty on the seaward side of Le Palais des Festivals, only a few hundred yards from the windowless basement and its suffocating atmosphere. In the yachts, television companies could both hold meetings and sleep in what was often a set of very well-appointed bedrooms. The year before I decided to leave my work in TV, I received an intriguing invitation. Would I like to join a group of American executives on their very fancy yacht for a series of meetings? These would take place not in the tranquil waters of the harbour but on a short cruise down the coast, the fabled Côte d’Azur. It sounded like a very welcome relief from the chatter and racket amongst the trade stands in Le Palais.

The size of a two-storey house, the yacht was white and the sundeck at the stern high above the water was very attractively shaded by bright striped awnings. We made our stately way out of Cannes harbour and, over coffee, as I talked with my American hosts, the mood amongst us was also bright, having left behind the hurly-burly for a few hours. We were bound for the Lérins Islands, a small, low, wooded archipelago only a few miles out to sea off Cannes. Having found a brochure in the Carlton Hotel the night before, I knew that one of the islands was the Île Sainte-Marguerite. It was the location of a citadel where the Man in the Iron Mask had been imprisoned at the end of the seventeenth century. Made world famous in Alexandre Dumas’s d’Artagnan sagas, there was, by coincidence, a film about this strange story made that year (1998) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Irons and Gerard Depardieu. When I asked if we were to visit the prison of the man rumoured to be the brother of Louis XIV, I was a little disappointed to hear that we would not. Instead, the giant white yacht glided around the Île Sainte-Marguerite and set a course for the smaller island of Saint-Honorat.

The island turned out to be a magical place – quiet, unhurried, peaceful. It is dominated by Lérins Abbey, which maintains its own vineyards. This imposing monastery was founded by St Honoratus around 410. Having tasted some pleasant white wine and been given a presentation pack of soap, liqueur and honey, we ate a simple lunch before dispersing to have a look around this beautiful little island. Finding myself alone and a little relieved not to have to make conversation with people I did not know well, I walked past the vineyards and through a green tunnel lined with tall trees to the coast of the Île Saint-Honorat. Behind me were the jagged littoral of the Riviera, the bustle of Cannes and the dense clusters of the bright and white buildings of other ports and towns. In front of me stretched the unbroken horizon of the Mediterranean.

I walked west along a brick-red path through pine trees and shaded by them was a bench. I sat for some time and felt my shoulders loosen, my back relax. It was as though I was exhaling a long breath. This corner of the little island seemed to me to be different, to have a palpable genius loci, to be a place of settled peace. As I gazed out over the rocky foreshore, my mind seemed to empty, surrendering itself only to what I could see or sense. I stopped thinking and, if the phrase had been current then, I found myself in the moment and only in the moment.

After a time, I seemed to wake from my reverie and began to wonder if my hosts might have been waiting for me, checking their watches, anxious to be back in Cannes for the next round of meetings. When we docked and tied up at the jetty below the Palais des Festivals in the late afternoon, we all shook hands and made our way back into the world of business. Less than a year later, I decided that I had had enough of corporate life and resigned from a highly paid, prestigious job to return home to the Scottish Borders to work alone as a writer and producer. But I never forgot that time amongst the pines on the Île Saint-Honorat and more than once I have wondered if its magic worked on me then.

Many years later, my publisher, Hugh Andrew, asked me if I would consider writing a book about the Irish monks who sailed to the Hebrides in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries to found communities on the islands and the Atlantic coast. The most famous is, of course, Columba but my preliminary reading told me that he was by no means the only missionary to sail from Ireland. Hugh was right – this was a rich and too-little-told story, and work began.

Like these pious mariners, I decided that, as far as was feasible, I would embark on a journey, a series of voyages of discovery that would take me to the remote islands, to the places of solitude they so eagerly sought. Instead of a seagoing curragh, I would plan my summer explorations with the help of the timetables of Caledonian MacBrayne ferries or hire local sailors to take me where I needed to go. In the spring, I began to read more widely and deeply. Very soon, I found myself again bringing to mind those few hours spent on the Île Saint-Honorat and discovering how important the life of Honoratus and the monastery he founded on that unexpected and atmospheric little island was.

Introduction

Eilean Mhartainn shimmers on the edge of eternity. A lost cathedral of the elements, the little island is also a recurring metaphor. When the sun rises over mighty Beinn Dearg, ‘the Red Mountain’, then splashes on to the sea, reaches the gently sloping eastern shore and breasts the rounded heights of the island’s hill, a tiny lochan sparkles like a natural font. Beyond it lies Nuill Dhuirch and the vast sweep of the ocean. It can mean ‘the Edge of Beyond’ and, below it, dark cliffs drop sheer into the ocean. Westernmost is Clach an Nuill Dhuirch, ‘the Great Rock of Beyond’, and it is where the unceasing waves of the Atlantic break at last and make landfall.

Isle Martin, in English, is a place where the everlasting can be compassed. Mariners know where waves come from – what they call the length of fetch. A westerly wind can blow up off the cold coasts of Labrador and make waves three thousand miles away – over the open water they roll endlessly towards the little island before breaking on the rock of beyond. North of Eilean Mhartainn, rising from the shores of Loch Broom, there is more metaphor – the mass of Beinn Mor Coigach looms. It translates as ‘the Great Mountain of the Hand’ and, above it, clouds billow across huge Hebridean skies spread like a vast canopy over sea and land.

No one lives on Isle Martin. Only the gulls and divers fish its shores and, hidden in the abandoned fields, the croak of corncrakes can be heard in June. Now the island is a place of ghosts and echoes. Carried on the westerlies off the wastes of the Atlantic come whispers of prayers and psalms and hints of an ancient sanctity. In the eighth century and probably long before, a community of solitaries lived here – monks who built cells on the sheltered eastern shore – and their sole relic is a strange stone cross that stands in the graveyard of a much later chapel. It has been described as a triple Latin cross and is unique in Scotland.

These hermits sailed to this lonely little island because they believed that there, cut off from the tumult of the world, they might move closer to God. Living lives of extreme privation, shivering at their prayers in small, draughty, beehive cells, they fasted and induced trance-like visions. These tiny, cramped spaces were anterooms to eternity. Often too small to stand up in, they were places for kneeling in prayer. With only the music of the winds, the monks sang the early psalmody and recited the creed. On many days, they climbed the hill behind their cells, looked out to the west, past a scatter of small islands, and watched the sun set on Creation. Some gratefully suffered many hours of shivering discomfort as they mortified their flesh by immersing themselves in the chill waters of the lochan on the hill’s summit and in the seas around the island. These men suffered all this so that they might know the mind of God and so that, when death came racing across the oceans of eternity to take them, they would be born aloft over God’s Great Mountain of the Hand. They prayed they would be gathered up in the arms of angels at the gates of Heaven to begin the glories of life ever after.

Isle Martin is named after their inspiration and exemplar, St Martin of Tours, one of the first in the West to embrace and adapt the beliefs and practices of a group of Middle Eastern ascetics known as ‘the Desert Fathers’. To escape the periodic persecutions of the Roman Empire and to lead hermetic lives, these men fled into the deserts and remote regions to worship, meditate, pray and fast. Most famous was St Anthony of Egypt and a brief biography of him by St Athanasius of Alexandria began to circulate widely in the fourth century.

St Martin also understood that the complete and perfect faith sought by the hermits was impossible without departure. The temporal world and all its temptations and distractions had to be left behind. Anthony entered the empty vastness of the desert so that he could do battle with his demons, give himself entirely to prayer and privation and find perfect communion with God. His suffering would be rewarded with the gift of eternal life. Martin substituted the woodlands of the Loire Valley for the deserts of the East and founded the first monastery of solitaries in Western Europe at Marmoutier near the town of Tours. It derives from the Latin Maius Monasterium, ‘the Great Monastery’.

This initiative made Martin deeply unpopular with the bishops of the established Church. Gaul was still part of the Roman Empire and Christianity was almost exclusively urban. He appalled his urbane contemporaries by insisting on missions of conversion, preaching in the countryside to those who still held pagan beliefs. In Latin, the word paganus meant ‘a country person, a peasant’ and, as now, it had pejorative overtones – ‘a bumpkin’, ‘a yokel’. When he came upon a pagan shrine, the saint showed great physical courage by breaking it down and setting up a cross in its place. His behaviour scandalised the wealthy bishops of Gaul and they branded him as unfit for his holy office as well as sniffing grandly at his ‘insignificant appearance, his sordid garments and disgraceful hair’.

Just as with Anthony and most saints who became famous and the focus of a cult, a biography of Martin was written soon after his death in 397 and, again, it was widely circulated. St Ninian had certainly seen a copy for, when he founded his monastery at Whithorn in the early fifth century, he called it Taigh Mhàrtainn, ‘the House of Martin’. In fact, it may have been a more direct tribute to a mentor, for scholars now believe that Ninian studied and worked at Marmoutier before he ventured west on his mission to Galloway. Not far from Whithorn, Kirkmadrine, ‘the Church of Martin’, was founded, near Stranraer. In his biography, Sulpicius Severus described the community at Marmoutier near Tours:

He [Martin] made himself a hermitage about two miles from the city. The place was so secluded and remote that it had all the solitude of the desert. On one side it was walled in by the rock-face of a high mountain, and the level ground that remained was enclosed by a gentle bend of the River Loire . . . His own cell was built of wood as were those of his brethren; but many of them hollowed out shelters for themselves in the rock of the overhanging mountain.

Almost three centuries later, when St Aidan came east from Iona to become Bishop of Lindisfarne, he founded another monastery on a site in the Scottish Borders that is closely similar to Marmoutier. Bounded on three sides by the Tweed, Old Melrose is further enclosed by a high and sheer river cliff carved out by an ancient glacier. When Aidan first set eyes on this place, it must have seemed like God’s will that a monastery should be built there.

In a small yard by the River Lee, opposite the Beamish brewery in the city of Cork, I watched Padraig O’Duinnin build a boat in a morning. In the midst of the clutter of half-finished repairs to rowing boats, bundles of tree branches and sheets of canvas, he had lain on the ground two curved lengths of timber and arranged them into an oval shape, like a flat rugby ball. In what would become the gunwales of his boat, Padraig had bored a dozen small holes on each side. A fluent Irish speaker, he flecked his talk with Gaelic words. ‘Craobh nan sithean – magic wood,’ he said, when he picked up a bunch of green hazel rods of differing lengths. Whittling one end to fit, he jammed them in the holes in the gunwales before bending them and tying them together with twine. When all twenty-four rods were in place (with Padraig constantly measuring and adjusting by eye alone – I never saw him with a tape or a rule), the skeleton shape of the boat became clear.

Laths were then tied lengthwise from bow to stern and then black canvas stretched over the frame. So that the boat stayed rigid and did not fold under the pressure of water, benches were fitted crosswise to act as thwarts. Only wood, twine and canvas were used, and no metal fittings of any sort were needed. In only a few hours, Padraig had built a seagoing curragh. The sole change from those that sailed the coasts of Ireland two thousand years ago was the substitution of canvas for cowhide. With a broad smile, its builder picked up his curragh and, through a gap in the wall, shot it out on to the River Lee before clambering aboard.

These ancient boats were the vessels of the Lord. The monks who prayed on Isle Martin came there in curraghs. They and many other holy men came from Ireland in these simple craft, their voyages themselves acts of faith. ‘When the sea is big,’ Padraig told me, ‘you must have faith, must not panic or move around. At times like that I imagine a seagull sitting quiet on the waves, letting the swell carry it up and down. The curragh is so light that it sits like a bird on top of the water. When we go out on choppy seas, I tell my crew that we should think of it as a treat that we are sailing like those brave old monks.’

1

The Lauras

In the beginning the Word was in the East. Across Judaea, where Christ had lived and died, there were seven flourishing Christian communities by ad 100 and, through the energetic missions of St Paul, many more in Asia Minor and Greece. In the western Roman Empire, the new faith was barely represented. There were active communities only in Rome itself and nearby Puteoli (present-day Pozzuoli) and Pompeii. By the end of the fourth century, thousands of churches had been established across Egypt, Judaea, Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, while in the provinces, in what are now France, Belgium and England, there were only thirty. The rise and subsequent triumph of Islam in the East has induced a variety of historical amnesia and we forget that, for the first six centuries since Anno Domini, the cradle of Christianity was in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. The fundamentals of the Nicene Creed were formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 in Asia Minor and there were major churches in the cities around the shores of the Aegean at Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Athens and Corinth. After the conquests of the Rashidun Caliphate between 632 and 661, when Arab armies overran the old provinces of Egypt, Judaea and Syria, and much later Turkey and then Greece, many of these communities faded from prominence and their stories were forgotten. Only Jerusalem was remembered.

The early expansion of the Christian Church was spasmodic, inhibited by periodic bouts of persecution that drove worship and membership underground. Perhaps most famously the Emperor Nero made Christians scapegoats for the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 and probably martyred St Paul and St Peter at around that time. The public torments meted out to hundreds of martyrs in the amphitheatres were hideous. After torture, Christians were crucified or hung on poles to be set on fire while they still lived or torn apart by starved and goaded wild animals such as bears and lions. But most emperors ignored what they saw as the followers of only one of several oriental cults. By the middle of the third century, conversion had gathered pace and the kinder, more forgiving precepts of the Gospels had persuaded many in the ruling classes to become believers. Not all emperors were tolerant. Decius saw Christianity and its principles as a threat to the state, and in 250 he issued an edict requiring all citizens to sacrifice to the traditional gods of Rome.

Many of those Christians who could not comply suffered martyrdom, sometimes after torturers had attempted to force them to recant their beliefs. Here is a moving passage from Ecclesiastical History, an early account of the beginnings of Christianity, written by the historian, theologian and bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius:

Ammonarium . . . a virgin of irreproachable life, endured unheard-of torments without opening her mouth, only to declare that no arts or power should ever prevail with her to let drop the least word to the prejudice of her holy profession. She kept her promise inviolably, and was at length led to execution, being, as it seems, beheaded. The second of these holy women was named Mercuria, a person venerable for her age and virtue; the third was Dionysia, who, though a tender mother of many children, cheerfully commended them to God, and preferred his holy love to all human considerations; the fourth was another Ammonarium. The judge blushing to see himself shamefully baffled and vanquished by the first of these female champions, and observing the like fortitude and resolution in the countenances of the rest, commanded the other three to be beheaded without more ado.

Ever more appalling cruelties were inflicted before many died as martyrs for their faith. Their resolve to endure unspeakable pain and a grateful death was kept in place by a certainty that their sacrifice would earn them a place in the Kingdom of Heaven and the glories of everlasting life. It was a straightforward understanding and it fostered a faith that was often unbreakable. In 303, Emperor Galerius abandoned the policy of toleration that had been followed by his immediate predecessors and enforced more edicts against Christians. Churches were destroyed and, once again, the grisly spectacles of more public martyrdoms could be seen all over the empire. But it turned out to be the last such spasm.

On 28 October 312, the army of Emperor Constantine met that of Emperor Maxentius, his rival for power in the western empire, at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber, not far from Rome. Eusebius recounted a much-repeated tale. The day before battle was joined, Constantine saw a vision sent by God. He looked up at the sun and, above it, saw a cross of light with the Greek words ‘En touto nika’, taken to mean ‘In this [sign] you will conquer’. Banners and shields were painted with the chi-rho symbol. Of course, those carrying them triumphed and the godless Maxentius drowned in the Tiber. Eusebius claimed to have heard this story from Constantine himself even though the chi-rho symbol (which comprises the first two upper case letters of the Greek form of Christ – chi and rho ☧) was used by persecuted Christians as a secret sign to identify each other during dangerous times of the persecutions.

The political and cultural consequences of this for Christianity were epoch-making. After victory at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine converted and, in the Edict of Milan, he and his co-emperor in the East, Licinius, agreed that Christianity should become the state religion. It was a decision that would transform the simple, unadorned beliefs of Christ, his disciples and St Paul. An indelible link was forged between Church and State and, very importantly for some, it removed the possibility of blood or red martyrdom, as persecution seemed to have been consigned to history.

Genuinely interested in the story of Christ’s life and in Church doctrine – he presided over two Church councils – Constantine appointed his mother, Helena, as Augusta Imperatrix and furnished her with lavish funds to find relics relating to the stories of the New Testament. Eusebius listed the beautiful churches she had raised in Bethlehem and Jerusalem and in Sinai at the place where the Bush had burned. But, most spectacularly, Helena claimed to have found the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. A pagan temple had been built over the site of his tomb in Jerusalem, and when it was destroyed, workmen, who seemed more like archaeologists, found three crosses. A terminally ill woman was brought to the site: when she touched two of the crosses, her condition remained unchanged, but when she laid hands on the third cross, she made a miraculous recovery. Over the place where the True Cross had been found, Constantine decreed that the splendid and ornate Church of the Holy Sepulchre should be built.

A few miles east of Jerusalem, God was being sought in a very different place. During the Emperor Aurelian’s persecution of Christians in 275, a man named Chariton had been cruelly tortured and then flung in prison to rot. Aurelian was murdered and Chariton was unexpectedly released. His principal emotion had not been one of blessed relief but disappointment. Chariton had wished fervently to die as a red martyr for Christ. To console himself, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem but was captured by bandits and taken to their cave in the Pharan Valley, a dramatic, sheer-sided cleft now called Wadi Qelt. The stream that runs through the valley joins the River Jordan near Jericho. Miraculously, all of the bandits died after they had drunk wine poisoned by a snake.

Chariton realised that divine providence had placed him alone in this cave so that he could become a hermit and embark on a life of extreme austerity mixed with prayer, psalm singing and fasting. He had discovered another form of martyrdom, what later became known as white martyrdom, second only to red martyrdom as the highest form of sacrifice. Chariton had abandoned all comforts, renounced all the pleasures of the senses and left the temporal world behind to lead a solitary life in the presence of God. It could scarcely have been a more different approach than the contemporary co-option of Christianity by the imperial family and its vast empire, as money was lavished on opulent churches and gilded reliquaries.

Chariton was not alone for long. Because his hermetic life in the extremes of the desert echoed the wanderings of the Old Testament prophets, of St John the Baptist’s voice crying in the wilderness and of Christ’s forty days and forty nights of fasting as he endured Satan’s temptations, others began to join him at the ‘laura’ or ‘lavra’ in the Pharan Valley. Laura is a Greek word that means ‘a narrow lane’ and it may have been adopted as a metaphor for the straight and narrow path to an understanding of the mind of God. The well-worn phrase comes from the Gospel of Matthew, 7:14, ‘Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there are who find it.’ Nevertheless, many sought it and groups began to cluster in communities that became known as ‘lauras’ or ‘lavras’. For a time, Chariton coped with intrusions but so many were attracted to the starkness of the hermetic life that he eventually abandoned his cave. Near Jericho, he found more silence and solitude, but when that was broken he moved once more.

Most famous of these early ascetics was St Anthony of Egypt. Profoundly affected by a sermon around 270, he believed that spiritual perfection might be achieved if the material world was entirely renounced. Anthony was modestly wealthy, and he sold his farm and possessions, giving almost all of the proceeds to the poor. In summary fashion, he kept aside a little money and used it to bundle his sister into a nunnery. Once all had been disposed of, the young man walked out of the lushness of the fertile Nile Valley and into the dust and heat of the desert. Like Chariton, he lived a life of extreme privation, spending many solitary years in the ruins of a Roman fort, but, unlike him, Anthony became the subject of a biography, more precisely a hagiography. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote that so many followed the hermit in pursuit of white martyrdom that ‘the desert had become a city’.

The early Church was often riven with controversy as doctrine took time to settle. Arius of Alexandria believed that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were materially distinct beings and it therefore followed that there was more than one God. The Arians were opposed, vehemently, by the Trinitarians, who held the more orthodox view that all three were a single entity. During the debates between the followers of each party, the urbane bishops of the cities of Egypt were shocked when large bands of hermits suddenly appeared in the streets of Alexandria, having walked out of the desert to make their views known. Many were unnerved at the sight of so many ragged, wild-haired, wide-eyed scarecrows prowling the streets.

However, most of them agreed – bishops and hermits – that early Christianity was transactional, a relatively uncomplicated system of sacrifice and reward. If a mortal life was given to God alone, however uncomfortable that might be, then the reward of everlasting life could be expected. The more the flesh was mortified, the purer the soul became and, as a result of prayer and contemplation, the closer to God one could approach. Some of the sayings of these hermits have been preserved and they believed that the repetition of prayer was effective. And the simplest and best prayer was known as the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

By the early decades of the fourth century, the informal communities that had clustered around charismatic ascetics, such as Anthony, Chariton and others, began to become more organised. Pachomius had been conscripted into the Roman army around 310, as recruiters scoured the city of Thebes on the upper reaches of the Nile. It may have been his military service that instilled a need for order. Having converted to Christianity, the veteran soldier founded a monastery at Tabennisi, not far from Thebes, and he laid down rules and a structure that eventually formed the foundations of western monasticism.

Adopting the Hebrew word abba for father and amma for mother – nuns were admitted to the new monastery – Pachomius insisted on discipline, obedience, manual labour for all, silence, fasting and long periods of prayer. Men and women lived in separate quarters and, unlike the caves and cells of Anthony and Chariton’s followers, several monks might live together. Each was taught how to weave baskets from willow withies or cloth from local yarn and these were sold or traded in exchange for essential supplies. All property was held communally. In a central building all of the monks came together to eat in silence and, at least twice a week, they fasted for a day, taking only water. Simple clothing was worn and the monk’s habit with a hood was adopted. At prescribed times each day, the community came together to pray and to hear readings, but each member was also required to spend time alone meditating on what they had heard and on the scriptures. These communities were described as coenobitic, from the Greek for ‘common life’. They may have been better organised than the informal clusters of hermits in the Pharan Valley or those who flocked to Anthony, but life was not designed to be comfortable. Sleeping on hard, earthen floors covered only with a prayer mat, monks will have shivered through the cold nights of the desert or baked in the noonday sun.

As abba, Pachomius was responsible for the spiritual welfare of the monks and nuns, and the choice of this title made clear that when they left their birth families they were admitted into another – the family of the devout. Even though they spent much of their time alone, they had the consolation of being part of a close group, united by a deep faith. But admission was conditional. New monks and nuns had to complete a three-year probation before becoming full members of the community. For those who were illiterate and innumerate, Pachomius organised classes and also invented a method of counting that entered Christian tradition.

Made from twisted strands of wool, the prayer rope originally had thirty-three knots, one for each year of Christ’s life. Later versions could have as many as one hundred or one hundred and fifty. The rope and its knots were used to keep count of the number of repetitions of the Jesus Prayer and other devotional formulae. Not only did innumerate monks find this useful, it helped others meet their quotas, as they passed each knot through their fingers when they closed their eyes and offered up the sonorous, almost hypnotic repetitions of piety. The prayer rope is still used in the Orthodox churches; for Catholics, it became the rosary with beads rather than knots.

By the time Abba Pachomius died in 348, there were many lauras in the desert places of Egypt and Judaea where thousands of monks and nuns had left behind lives in the towns and cities of the late Roman Empire. These communities of hermits doubted that religion mixed with imperial politics could ever bring about a truly Christian society. Instead, they began to embrace a mystical tradition known in Greek as hesychasm. It means ‘stillness, rest, quiet, silence’ and it was seen as a necessary precondition for prayer. These ideas were at first transmitted orally in Coptic, the late Egyptian language spoken by most of the hermits. By the end of the fourth century, a Greek translation called The Apophthegmata Patrum, ‘The Sayings of the Desert Fathers’, had begun to circulate. These brief pieces of advice were very influential: ‘Take care to be silent. Empty your mind. Attend to your meditation in the fear of God, whether you are resting or at work. If you do this, you will not fear the attacks of demons. Sit in thy cell and thy cell will teach thee all.’

Around 400, the Greek text was translated into Latin, the language of the western empire, by Pelagius. A pivotal figure in the early Church, he was almost certainly a Celt from the west of the province of Britannia, perhaps what we might think of as a Welshman. Pelagius is a Greco-Roman calque of his original name, probably Morgan, and it means ‘Son of the Sea’. Also known by his friends as ‘Brito’, he was a theologian much involved in doctrinal disputes, especially those that revolved around the notion of free will as opposed to divine grace. These debates were complex, ferocious and fascinating, but the importance of Pelagius in the early history of British and Irish monasticism lies in his origins. It seems very likely that the ideas of the Desert Fathers first made their way westwards through his translation of The Apophthegmata Patrum, but because Pelagius eventually fell on the wrong side of doctrine and was seen as a heretic, his influence has been submerged.

Another earlier and very likely conduit for the transmission of the ideas of the laura may have been St Athanasius, the biographer of St Anthony. Sometime before 336, he was expelled from his bishopric at Alexandria, having been on the losing side of the debate between the Trinitarians and the Arians. Banished to the farthest ends of the Roman Empire, Athanasius arrived at Augusta Treverorum, modern Trier, on the banks of the River Moselle. What the Egyptian bishop made of the Rhineland winters is not recorded but he did find himself close to power.

Trier became one of the capital places of the later empire, a much-used residence for the western emperors and the imperial court. From 318 onwards, the city was the seat of the Gallic prefecture, the central government of all of the western provinces, from Britain in the north to Morocco in the south. Constantius II, the son of Constantine I, ruled the west from there from 328 to 340, and Trier grew into the largest city north of the Alps. As such it was the centre of an extensive and extremely busy communications network, one that certainly could have carried the ideas and the influence of a prominent and exotic churchman such as Athanasius all over the western empire.

The fame and sanctity of the lauras certainly seem to have reached the Loire Valley in France. Like Pachomius, St Martin of Tours was a soldier before he converted to Christianity and his most famous act of charity supplied another of the staple terms of the spreading faith. A cavalryman, Martin took pity on a ragged beggar he came across while travelling through the depths of winter and, with his sword, he cut his cloak in half. The Latin term for a small cloak is capella and it came to mean ‘a chapel’. The more precise original meaning was a shrine, the place where this relic of St Martin was placed as his cult grew and people flocked to the places made sacred by his tread.

Like Anthony, Martin had a near-contemporary biographer who recorded incidents such as the halving of the military cloak, and Sulpicius Severus’s writings contributed greatly to the saint’s renown. When he left the cavalry, Martin became a follower of St Hilary of Poitiers, but their relationship was cut short by the imposition of exile to Asia Minor. A Trinitarian, Hilary opposed the Arian beliefs of the imperial court and was banished to Phrygia – what is now central Turkey. While he appeared to continue to rule his bishopric at Poitiers from an immense distance, Hilary almost certainly became aware of the monasticism of the lauras. The austerity and purity of a life apart from the world and the turns and twists of imperial politics may have appealed to him at that time.

It certainly attracted Martin. The exile of his patron persuaded the young convert to leave the Loire Valley and make his way to Italy. After a series of miraculous incidents faithfully reported by Sulpicius Severus, Martin sought the peace and silence of the hermetic life on Isola d’Albenga in the Ligurian Sea, off the coast of north-west Italy. A humped, rocky outcrop, the home of a huge colony of herring gulls, it was uninhabited and some low, ruined walls on the southern side of the island may once have been all that sheltered Martin as he followed the precepts of hesychasm and the advice of the Desert Fathers.

Two unlikely snapshots of how outsiders saw the hermetic life can be found in the long poem ‘De Reditu Suo’, ‘On His Return’, by Rutilius Claudius Namatianus. In 416 he sailed from Rome to his home in Gaul and, on the voyage, passed by two more islands off the Italian coast where communities of ascetics had established themselves. Rutilius’s view of them may be more highly charged because he himself had converted to Christianity but did not admire the hermits’ total withdrawal from secular society.

As we advance at sea, Capraia [part of the Tuscan Archipelago, not far from Elba] now rears itself – an ill-kept isle full of men who shun the light. Their own name for themselves is a Greek one, ‘monachoi’ [monks], because they wish to dwell alone with none to see. They fear Fortune’s boons, as they dread her outrages: would anyone, to escape misery, live of his own choice in misery? What silly fanaticism of a distorted brain is it to be unable to endure even blessings because of your terror of ills? Whether they are like prisoners who demand the appropriate penalties for their deeds, or whether their melancholy hearts are swollen with black bile . . .

And a little further on in the text, more of Rutilius’s own bile:

There rises in the midst of the sea the wave-girt Gorgon [Isola Gorgona, further north than Capraia and now a prison] with Pisa and Corsica on either side. I shun the cliffs, which are memorials of recent disaster; here a fellow-countryman met his doom in a living death. For lately one of our youths of high descent, with wealth to match, and marriage-alliance equal to his birth, was impelled by madness to forsake mankind and the world, and made his way, a superstitious exile, to a dishonourable hiding-place. Fancying, poor wretch, that the divine can be nurtured in unwashen filth, he was himself to his own body a crueller tyrant than the offended deities. Surely, I ask, this sect is not less powerful than the drugs of Circe? In her days men’s bodies were transformed, now ’tis their minds.

On Bishop Hilary’s return from exile in Phrygia, both he and Martin came back to the Loire and founded Ligugé Abbey, now the oldest monastery in Europe. In keeping with the urban Roman traditions of institutional Christianity, Martin was consecrated Bishop of Tours (rather than abba or abbatus) in 371 and he began a vigorous campaign against paganism. Eventually, the lure of the hermetic life proved too strong and he set up the community at Marmoutier a few years later. But even then, Martin continued to involve himself in the doctrinal battles of the Church and he travelled to the imperial court at Trier to plead for mercy for Priscillian. He was the leader of an ascetic sect that owed much to the legacy of Anthony, Chariton and the other hermits of Judaea and Egypt. Sulpicius Severus was at pains to make clear that Martin did not agree with the Priscillianists but he did not think they should die for their beliefs.

At the same time as Martin was searching for his God in the skies above Isola d’Albenga and listening to the cries of the herring gulls, another hermit prayed on a small island about seventy miles to the west. Caprasius had built a shelter on the smaller of the two large islands of Lerina, later the Lérins Islands, before he was joined by the young man who would eventually give his name to it. Honoratus rowed across the bay with his brother, Venantius, to join the hermit and imitate his exemplary life. Perhaps in pursuit of even more understanding and inspiration, the three men decided to board a ship at Marseilles that was bound for the ports of Judaea. They had embarked on a pilgrimage, fervently wishing to visit the famous laura of the desert. In the event, they travelled only as far as Greece before turning back. Venantius died there and his brother and Caprasius decided to go no further. With the permission of Bishop Leontius, the two men built a hermitage in the hills near Fréjus in modern Provence. Eventually they abandoned it and returned to the wild islands of Lérins so that, surrounded by the wastes of the sea rather than the sands of the desert, they could live in closer imitation of the laura and, as a community developed, they adopted the rules of Pachomius.

Amongst those who joined Honoratus and the ageing Caprasius was Lupus, the son of a wealthy patrician and a recent convert. Like Anthony, he had sold his estate and given the money to the poor. An outstanding young man of great piety, Lupus was soon appointed Bishop of Troyes, probably in 427. Two years later, with Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, he was sent to Britain by the Council of Arles to help the bishops there combat the spread of the heretical teachings of Pelagius. Such was the spite and hatred for what was seen as heresy, the mild-mannered St Augustine of Hippo raged against this British theologian as ‘a fat hound weighed down by Scotch porridge’. For the times, the visit of Germanus and Lupus was well documented and, even though accounts of the events were undoubtedly salted with propaganda, it appears to have been successful. And it seems a historical irony that, through the journeying of both heretical and orthodox admirers of the hermits of the lauras, their ideas and sayings were probably transmitted to Britain and eventually to Ireland.

A year after Lupus and Germanus returned, Pope Celestine I ordained Palladius as a bishop and sent him ‘to the Irish believing in Christ’. This mission of conversion may well have been pre-emptive since the Pope and his councils of bishops seemed constantly anxious about the spread of Pelagianism. It is possible that Germanus of Auxerre sent Palladius to Rome to receive a commission directly from Celestine. The later Irish annalists recorded that the new bishop made landfall at Arklow in County Wicklow, where he began the labour of conversion.

Palladius’s role in the creation of Christian Ireland has been submerged by the fame and promotion of Patrick, thought of as the sole ‘Apostle of the Irish’. It is likely that this earlier mission was much more successful than has been allowed. The ‘Irish believing in Christ’ may have been led by St Ciaran of Saighir. Pushed into the background by the hagiographers of Patrick, his work probably predates his mission and some scholars believe he was active in the late fourth century. Tradition holds that he went to Marmoutier to learn directly from St Martin. On his return, Ciaran retreated into the wooded hills of Ossory, an ancient kingdom in south-eastern Ireland. There, in the Slieve Bloom Mountains, he lived the solitary life of a hermit, wearing animal skins, perhaps in imitation of St John the Baptist. But soon, like Anthony and Martin, Ciaran was joined by others and a monastery of cells grew up around him. It was said that his mother, Liadan, led a group of devout women into the mountains.

Palladius probably brought three men with him. Auxilius, Secundinus and Iserninus are obscure figures but later sources associate them with origins in France and even Italy. It seems likely that they were well aware of the teachings of St Martin and others and that may be the reason Pope Celestine was anxious to send a bishop to Ireland. In 428, the pope wrote an irritated letter to the bishops of Vienne and Narbonne in Gaul, objecting to the election of a monk to the vacant see of Arles. He wished to see the local clergy promoted and not ‘wanderers and strangers’. Here is part of the text of the letter that show how sniffy he was about sainted solitaries:

They who have not grown up in the church act contrary to the church’s usages . . . coming from other customs they have brought their traditional ways with them . . . clad in a cloak and with a girdle round their loins . . . Such a practice may be followed . . . by those who dwell in remote places and pass their lives far from their fellow men. But why should they dress in this way in the churches of God, changing the usage of so many years, of such great prelates, for another habit?

The urban, Roman church had been organised along clear, hierarchical lines, following the example of imperial civil administration. Order, custom and practice, to say nothing of clean clothes and bathing, were being threatened by what seems to have been the growing reputation of these unkempt and unwashed holy men who emerged from the woods and the deserts.

The oral transmission of ideas and experiences is very difficult to trace with any certainty. Men like Pelagius, Hilary, Martin, Honoratus, Caprasius and Lupus certainly admired the Desert Fathers and imitated their beliefs and customs in the West, but the most emphatic link was a fascinating figure known as John Cassian. Some scholars believe that his origins were on the western shores of the Black Sea, others that he came from a wealthy, patrician family in Gaul, modern France. Fluent in Latin and Greek, Cassian was certainly well educated.

As a young man, he travelled to Judaea and entered a hermitage near Bethlehem. After three years in that community, he moved on to the Desert of Scetis – now known as Wadi El Natrun – west of the Nile delta. Doctrinal disputes divided the different laura and, in search of resolution, presumably in some sort of leadership role, Cassian went first to Constantinople to plead for the interpretations he had come to believe in and, from there, he travelled to the papal court in Rome. What took place there is unclear but it is certain that his experience and interpretation of the laura impressed those who listened to him.

In 415, John was invited to found a monastery at Marseilles that would follow the teachings of the Desert Fathers and be a laura in the west. The Abbey of St Victor still stands, much changed from the simple cells and communal buildings of the first monastery. It was to become a fount of ecclesiastical wisdom, not only enormously influential in the western provinces of the decaying empire but also in places where Rome had never ruled, principally Ireland. Cassian also began to write. Sometime after 420, he produced two major devotional works – The Institutes of the Coenobia and The Conferences of the Desert Fathers. The first focused on detailed advice on how to set up and manage a monastery and the second concerned ‘the training of the inner man and the perfection of the heart’.

It seems that John Cassian was critical of Marmoutier and the work of St Martin as it had been recorded by Sulpicius Severus. He believed the movement was indeed inspired by the example of the Eastern hermits but that the new foundation was chaotic. The Institutes were an attempt at a prescription for much greater order, in particular insisting on the central importance of manual labour. But Cassian did admire the community at Lérins, presumably because it followed the precepts of Pachomius more closely and certainly because he was impressed by the pious example of Honoratus. Part of The Conferences was dedicated to the Abba of Lérins.

This work was based on recollection. Cassian recorded what he had learned from the elders of the Egyptian laura at Scetis and The Conferences were to prove immensely influential. In the late sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, an Italian monk who founded several communities before he died at Monte Cassino in 547, was inspired. He based much of his famous monastic rule on what Cassian remembered and wrote down. These principles of the spiritual and ascetic life were read aloud in later Benedictine monasteries after the evening meal and from the Latin subtitle of Collationes comes the term ‘collation’ for a meal.

According to the Desert Fathers, hermits and monks who wished to move closer to God should follow a process of three stages. In the long hours of solitude in their cells or while they practised mortification of the flesh, novices had first to clear the high hurdle of purgatioin Latin. Through prayer and self-denial, they needed to triumph over the temptations of the flesh by purging their gluttony, banishing their lust and dismissing all desire for possessions. This was a long and often arduous journey and it relied heavily on a moral strength that might be bolstered by grace, with the help of the Holy Spirit.

The second stage was illuminatio. Using the New Testament and in particular Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, monks attempted to build a life based on holiness and on charity as they looked after the poor and the sick, sharing all they possessed unstintingly. If they had the will and power to move on, these men and women could expect at last to come to the final stage of unitio, a union of their soul with God. If this level of understanding was attained, it often came towards the end of a life of prayer and mortification and many would retreat into the desert or into uninhabited or remote places so that they could meet their maker in perfect solitude.

In common with other contemporary theologians, John Cassian believed that Christians were constantly at war. Satan and his demonic armies were everywhere. Here is a characteristic extract from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: ‘It happened that as Abba Arsenius was sitting in his cell that he was harassed by demons. His servants, on their return, stood outside his cell and heard him praying to God in these words, “O God, do not leave me. I have done nothing good in your sight, but according to your goodness, let me now make a beginning of good.”’

In The Institutes, Cassian wrote of what became known as the laus perennis, ‘perpetual praise’. In each community, groups of monks would take turns to pray out loud or recite or sing psalms or read scripture at all times, even through the night. It was believed that demons loved the darkness and were especially active at night, so the unceasing recital of the Word of God would create the best barrier against the assaults of the hellish hosts of Satan.

Cassian’s work offers the clearest sense of how these early communities of ascetics were run, or aspired to be run, and what their daily lives were like. The spiritual heft of The Institutes and The Conferenceswas clear and compelling; both undoubtedly influenced two men who were central to the growth of the early Church in Britain and Ireland and, in particular, the holy men who sailed their curraghs in the sixth and seventh centuries to the western islands and the Atlantic shores of Scotland in search of angels.

2

The Deserts of the North

‘My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many.’ So begins The Confession of St Patrick. Probably composed around 470, this very rare example of contemporary written record appears to be authentic, a clear and vivid voice, and its contents offer precious insights, unravelling some mysteries and deepening others. These self-effacing opening lines may be more than a formula. The Confession can be read as a defence against some undisclosed sin or offence, but it is also a declaration of faith that hints at the influence of John Cassian’s Conferences.

Patrick continues: ‘My father was Calpurnius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae.’ These two sentences are central, critical to any clear understanding of Patrick, his origins and the nature of his faith. In the summer of 2002, I visited a remarkable man, a very great scholar and archaeologist, and, on an evening I shall never forget, their meaning was explained to me. Professor Charles Thomas had written an elegant account of Celtic Britain and I had been commissioned to make a television series called The Sea Kingdoms. A journey up the western coasts of Britain and Ireland that began in Cornwall, at Penwith, on the high and windy cliffs of the Lizard Peninsula, the programmes would pick up many of the themes in Thomas’s book. He had agreed to do an interview and, after some wrong turnings, we found his very beautiful house near Truro. It was wonderful, warm and inviting, a place where I learned a great deal.

There seemed to be several sitting rooms, all furnished with deep, comfortable sofas, warmed by crackling fires, and every wall was