‘Let us, since we are travellers and pilgrims in this world, keep the end of our road always in our minds – for the road is our life, and its end is our home.’30 Not to journey, not to live in exile from the world, was to spurn heavenly rewards for earthly ones. Columbanus, when he preached this message, did so as a man who had literally turned his back on his family and his native land. As a result, he was able to serve his Frankish admirers as a living embodiment of the potency of religio: of a life utterly committed to God. A shimmer-hint of the supernatural attached itself to almost everything he did. Miraculous stories were told of him: of how bears would obey his commands not to steal fruit, and squirrels sit on his shoulders; of how the simple touch of his saliva could heal even the most painful workplace accident; of how his prayers had the power to cure the sick, and to keep the dying alive. Favoured by kings, who knew authority when they saw it, Columbanus nevertheless disdained to play by the rules. In 610, asked to give his blessing to four princes who had been fathered by the local king on various concubines, he refused. Instead, he pronounced doom on them; and as he did so, a great clap of thunder sounded from the heavens. Even confronted by soldiers, Columbanus did not back down. Escorted to the coast, and put on a ship bound for Ireland, his prayers saw violent winds three times blow the ship back onto the mud-flats. Freed by his guards, who had come to fear his potency far more than that of their king, he crossed the Alps and descended into Italy. News came to him that, just as he had prophesied, the four princes had met with miserable deaths. Columbanus, though, did not turn back. Instead, as he travelled, he continuously sought out the wildest places that he could, remote spots haunted by wolves and pagans, far from the temptations of the world; and wherever he paused, there he would plant a monastery. The last of his foundations, built in a river-scored defile named Bobbio some fifty miles south of Milan, was where, in 615, the aged exile finally died.
Life itself, though – for the sinner adrift from heaven – was an exile. For all that, Columbanus’ departure from his homeland struck Franks and Italians as a peculiarly drastic gesture of penance, and a distinctively Irish one at that, the resonances that it stirred in them reached back deep into the past of the Latin West. Augustine, looking about him at the great cities of the world, at Rome, and Carthage, and Milan, had imagined the City of God as a pilgrim, unshackled by worldly cares. ‘There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.’31 This, when supplicants ventured through the woods that surrounded Luxeuil and approached the settlement founded by Columbanus, was what they hoped to find. The very wall that enclosed the monastery, raised by the saint’s own hand, proclaimed the triumph of the City of God over that of man. The shattered fragments of bath-houses and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum. The word had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly, though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection. Throughout Rome’s history, from its earliest days to the time of Constantine, games to mark the passing of a saeculum had repeatedly been held: ‘a spectacle such as no one had ever witnessed, nor ever would again’.32 This was why Augustine, looking for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God, had seized upon it. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.33
The potency of Columbanus’ mission lay in the vivid way that he gave physical expression to the conception of these twin dimensions: of religio and of the saeculum. Even after his death, stories told of the men and women who submitted to his rule left admirers in no doubt that it could indeed open the gates to heaven. In Columbanus’ own lifetime, a dying brother had told him of seeing an angel waiting by his sickbed, and begged him to cease his prayers, which were only serving to keep the angel at bay; in a nunnery founded by one of his disciples, a sister on the point of death had ordered the candle in her cell snuffed out. ‘For do you not see what splendour approaches? Do you not hear the choirs singing?’34 Stories like these, told wherever Columbanus or one of his followers had established a foundation, gave to their monasteries and convents a charge, and a sense of potency, that not even the greatest basilicas could rival. Those who dwelt in them were living embodiments of religio: religiones. To pass their walls, to cross the ditches and palisades that marked out their limits, was to leave the earthly behind, and approach the heavenly.
No surprise, then, that in time the wings of the most powerful angel of them all should have been heard beating golden over Columbanus’ native land. Almost certainly, it was Irish monks studying in Bobbio who brought home with them the cult of Saint Michael. From Italy to Ireland, the charisma of the warrior archangel came to radiate across the entire West. In time, even the furthermost spike of rock, as far out into the ocean as it was possible for monks to go and not vanish beyond the horizon, would end up under his protection. Skellig became Skellig Michael. There was nowhere so remote, it seemed, nowhere so far removed from the centres of earthly power, that the presence of an angel – and perhaps even his voice – might not be experienced there.
The summons to be born anew, to repent and be absolved of sin, was one that would prove to have many takers.
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* ‘As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity’ (Lavan and Mulryan, p. xxiv).
VII
EXODUS
632: C
ARTHAGE
In the spring of 632, a ship bearing a letter from Caesar glided into the great harbour at Carthage. So ships had been doing since the time of Augustus. Generations after the disintegration of Roman rule in the West, the shadows of the ancient past still lay deep over Africa. Carthage, like Rome, stood on the periphery of a great agglomeration of provinces that still spanned the eastern Mediterranean, and had as their capital Constantinople, the second Rome. Lost for decades, as Rome had been, to barbarian conquerors, Carthage had been recaptured for the Empire – again, just as Rome had been – almost a century previously. Unlike Italy, though, where imperial rule was moth-eaten and embattled, the province of Africa lay securely under Roman control. The emperor himself, a battle-hardened Cappadocian named Heraclius, had seized the throne after launching a coup from there. By 632, he had been in power for twenty-two years. The commands of such a man were not lightly set aside. The prefect of Africa, opening the imperial missive, certainly had no hesitation in scrabbling to obey them. On 31 May, Heraclius’ command was put into effect. All the Jews in Africa – ‘visitors as well as residents, their wives, their children, their slaves’1 – were forcibly baptised.
Here was a brutal solution to what had always been a source of frustration. Ever since the time of Paul, Christians had been fretting over the obdurate refusal of God’s original chosen people to accept his Son as the Messiah. Their perplexity was compounded by the fact that the Jews, according to the unimpeachable evidence of the gospels, had willingly accepted responsibility for the death of Christ. ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’2 Why, then, confronted by this transparent act of deicide, had the Almighty not exacted a terrible vengeance? The response of theologians was to insist that he had. The Temple was no more, after all, and the Jews’ ancient homeland – its name long since changed by the Romans from Judaea to Palestine – reconsecrated as a Christian ‘Holy Land’. Meanwhile, the Jews themselves lived as exiles, ‘witnesses to their own iniquity, and to the truth’.3 Clear and awful were the proofs of divine disapproval; and so the imperial authorities, eager to serve the will of the Almighty, had naturally made sure to add some refinements of their own. The site of the Temple had been converted into a rubbish tip, a dumping-ground for dead pigs and shit; Jews themselves – except for one day a year, when a delegation was permitted to climb Mount Moria, there to lament and weep – were banned from Jerusalem; legal restrictions on their civic status grew ever more oppressive. It was forbidden them to serve in the army; to own Christian slaves; to build new synagogues. In exchange, Jews were granted the right to live according to their own traditions – but only so that they might then better serve the Christian people as a spectacle and a warning. Now, with his abrupt new shift of policy, Heraclius had denied them even that.