Here, then, as Christians in the West began to go their own way, was a deep paradox: that the more distinctive a vision of the afterlife they came to have, the more it bore witness to its origins in the East. Jewish scripture and Greek philosophy, once again, had blended to potent effect. Indeed, across what had once been Roman provinces, in lands pockmarked by abandoned villas and crumbling basilicas, few aspects of life were as coloured by the distant past as the dread of death. What awaited the soul after it had slipped its mortal shell? If not angels, and the road to heaven, then demons black as the Persians had always imagined the agents of the Lie to be; Satan armoured with an account book, just as tax officials of the vanished empire might have borne; a pit of fire, in which the torments of the damned echoed those described, not by the authors of Holy Scripture, but by the poets of pagan Athens and Rome. It was a vision woven out of many ancient elements; but not a vision that Christians of an earlier age would have recognised. Revolutionary in its implications for the dead, it was to prove revolutionary as well in its implications for the living.
Powerhouses of Prayer
There were places wilder than Gargano where those with a sufficient love of God could hope, perhaps, to glimpse angels. Yet it was dangerous. At the limits of the world, where the grey and heaving ocean stretched as far as the eye could see, monks served as Christ’s vanguard, and by their prayers kept sentry against the Devil and his legions. Tales would be told of those who sailed beyond the horizon, and found there both mountains of eternal fire, where burning flakes of snow fell on the damned, and the fields of Paradise, rich with fruit and precious stones. True or not, it was certain that some monks, taking to the treacherous waters of the Atlantic, had made landfall on a jagged spike of rock – or sceillec, as it was called in the local language – and there lived in bare cells. Cold and hunger, which kings built great feasting-halls to keep at bay, were valued by those who settled on Skellig as pathways to the radiant presence of God. Monks who knelt for hours in sheeting rain, or laboured on empty stomachs at tasks properly suited to slaves, did so in the hope of transcending the limitations of the fallen world. The veil that separated the heavenly from the earthly seemed, to their admirers, almost parted by their efforts. ‘Mortal men, so people believed, were living the lives of angels.’28 Nowhere else in the Christian West were saints quite as tough, quite as manifestly holy, as they were in Ireland.
That the island had been won for Christ was a miracle in itself. Roman rule had never reached its shores. Instead, sometime in the mid-fifth century, Christianity had been preached there by an escaped slave. Patrick, a young Briton kidnapped by pirates and sold across the Irish Sea, was revered by Irish Christians not just for having brought them to Christ, but for the template of holiness with which he had provided them. Whether working as a shepherd, or fleeing his master by ship, or returning to Ireland to spread the word of God, angels had spoken to him, and guided him in all he did; nor had he hesitated, when justifying his mission, to invoke the imminence of the end of the world. A century on from Patrick’s death, the monks and nuns of Ireland still bore his stamp. They owed no duty save to God, and to their ‘father’ – their ‘abbot’. Monasteries, like the ringforts that dotted the country, were proudly independent. An iron discipline served to maintain them. Only a rule that was ‘strict, holy and constant, exalted, just and admirable’29 could bring men and women to the dimension of the heavenly. Monks were expected to be as proficient in the strange and book-learned language of Latin as at felling trees; as familiar with the few, ferociously cherished classics of Christian literature that had reached Ireland as toiling in a field. Like Patrick, they believed themselves to stand in the shadow of the end days; like Patrick, they saw exile from their families and their native land as the surest way to an utter dependence upon God. Not all headed for the gale-lashed isolation of a rock in the Atlantic. Some crossed the sea to Britain, and there preached the gospel to the kings of barbarous peoples who still set up idols and wallowed in paganism: the Picts, the Saxons, the Angles. Others, heading southwards, took ship for the land of the Franks.
Columbanus – ‘the Little Dove’ – arrived in Francia in 590: the same year that Gregory was elected pope. The Irish monk, unlike the Roman aristocrat, came from the ends of the earth, without status, without pedigree; and yet, by sheer force of charisma, he would set the Latin West upon a new and momentous course. Schooled in the ferociously exacting monasticism of his native land, Columbanus appeared to the Franks a figure of awesome and even terrifying holiness. Unlike their own monks, he consciously sought out wilderness in which to live. His first place of retreat was an old Roman fort in the Vosges, in eastern Francia, long since lost to trees and brush; his second, the ruins of a city burned a century and a half before by invading barbarians. Luxeuil, the monastery he founded there, was built as a portal to heaven. Columbanus and his tiny band of followers, clearing away brambles, draining marshes, building an enclosure out of the shattered masonry, seemed to the Franks men of supernatural fortitude. When hungry, they would gnaw on bark; when weary after a long day of physical labour, they would devote themselves to study, and prayer, and penance. This routine, far from scaring away potential recruits, was soon attracting them in droves. To enter the monastery enclosure, and to submit to Columbanus’ rule, was to know oneself in the company of angels. The discipline imposed on novices was designed not merely to break their pride, to annihilate their self-conceit, but to offer them, sinners though they were, the hope of paradise. Columbanus had brought with him from Ireland a novel doctrine: that sins, if they were regularly confessed, were manageable. Penances, calibrated in exacting detail, could enable sinners, once they had performed them, to regain the favour of God. Punitive though Columbanus’ regime was, it was also medicinal. To those who lived in dread of the hour of judgement, and of the Devil’s accounting book, it promised a precious reassurance: that human weakness might be forgiven.