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Fragments of Letters · English translation 1:19Gildas the Wise1. Loco viliore. The word locus by itself stands not rarely for " monastery," as in Columbanus' letter, primae conversionis loca reliquunt, where also conversio means the assumption of the monastic life. The Welsh compound, mynach- log , shows the same word (monachi locus).Fragments of Letters · English translation 2:1Gildas the Wise5. Principalium vitiorum. The fourth of the Instntctiones of Columbanus treats of "The eight leading vices" (De octo vitiis principalibus). Octo sunt vitia principalia, quae mergunt hominem in interitum; gula, fornicatio, cupiditas, ira, tristitia, accedia ( a)khdi=a , in old English accidie), vana gloria, superbia; that is, gluttony, fornication, covetousness, anger, dejection, bitterness, vain glory, pride. The list is first met with in Cassian's Institutes, bk. v , i, and Collat., v, 2, which formed the basis for all similar lists current in the Celtic Churches. We have the same also in the Regula of Columbanus, c, 8.Fragments of Letters · Introduction 1:12Gildas the WiseThere were thus extant Letters of Gildas that held a high place in the estimation of the Churches of Britain and Ireland early in the seventh century. Of this we have confirmatory evidence in a letter of Columbanus, written about A.D. 595-600, to Pope Gregory the Great. (See the letter in full before Vita I.) In that letter, while requesting the opinion of Gregory on three points, he mentions the interesting fact that Gildas, or Giltas as he calls him, had written of those bishops that were irregularly ordained, because guilty of Simony. These words may be regarded as describing the second main part of Gildas' De Excidio (cc. 62-110). But Columbanus further mentions a correspondence between Vennianus and Gildas, respecting the monks who were abandoning their monasteries for the better seclusion of desert places. Seebass, in Zeitschrift f. Kirchengeschichte, xiv, 437, concludes that Vennianus must be, not Finnian, the founder of Clonard, who died about 549, but Finnian of Maghbile (Moville), whose death is placed by some in 588, by others in 610. The question is an exceedingly difficult one, as the evidence seems conflicting and confused; yet one is certainly safe in the assertion that a considerable time must have intervened between the writing of the De Excidio and the penning of letters that would supply such |257 extracts as these. The whole perspective is changed. Further, if Finnian, the founder of Clonard, died about 549, then it is natural that we should find Gildas' correspondent in the later Finnian of Moville. One is almost tempted to seek the sources of some of these extracts in writings of a different kind: there were published at Louvain, in 1667, a collection of the writings of Columbanus made some five years previously by Fleming, and these contain short sermons or addresses to monks, called Instructions. They have been lately edited separately by Seebass, in the Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, xiv, 76-92. We know how faithfully Columbanus clung in Gaul to the usages of his native Ireland; so that in these very Instructiones, we may discern a usage which originally came from Wales, whence the newer monastic institutions of Ireland had been, directly or indirectly, inspired. Such addresses by Gildas, if preserved might furnish matter for quotation to a writer who was drawing up a collection of Canons.Penitential · English translation 2:11Gildas the Wise1. In the book of Columbanus we have a similar beginning, Incipit de poenitentia: the title POENITENTIALE VINNIAI precedes that of Vinnian (or Finnian). The first rule refers to monks who have been ordained as presbyters or deacons; it is strange that we have no provision for bishops.Penitential · English translation 2:19Gildas the Wise6. Semper ex intimo corde defleat culpam suam. The moral character and motive of the time, and of the discipline of penance, is revealed in these words: it is made still more prominent in the Penitentials of Finnian and Columbanus. The latter begins with the following words, which have a peculiar force in their very simplicity: "True penitence is not to yield to things that one must be penitent for, but if we have yielded, to weep for them. Yet, because the weakness of many, one may almost say of all, disturbs this penitence, we must recognise measures of penance (poenitentiae). And of these the following order is sanctioned by our holy fathers, in such a way that the length of penances should be in accordance with the magnitude of sins (culparum)."Penitential · English translation 2:25Gildas the WiseThe whole tone of ecclesiastical procedure, in the fourth and fifth centuries, against offending clerics, bishops, presbyters and deacons, as may be seen by a perusal of Thomassinus, Vetus et Nova Ecclesiae Disciplinae, Part II, Lib. i, cc. 56-58, or Hinschius, Kirchenrecht, iv, § 247, is different from what is implied in the present rule of a specified time of penance. When, therefore, we find that .in the writings of Columbanus, the frequent reference to patres and magistri nostri, leads us solely to think of eminent Irish (and Welsh) abbots, such as Finnian, Comgall, and Gildas, we naturally conclude that a similar implication is to be deduced from the words of this rule. Then we are carried further, that is, to suspect that some parts of this Penitential belong to a date subsequent to Gildas. In his time there were no venerable patres to sustain a judgment; he himself became one of them for the next generation, who lived about A.D. 600-650.Penitential · Introduction 1:4Gildas the WiseIT may be well here to remind the reader of a few points that are treated of at greater length in the Introduction. The Church, for purposes of discipline, had developed various modes of correction in the case of lapses into sin, as well as of reconciliation by absolution. As we approach the sixth century, we find a long development of very varying procedures along independent lines, and ending in the very reverse of agreement throughout the Churches of different countries. In one point, however, there seems to have been universal agreement, viz., that acts of contrition and confession, together with the reconciliation which followed, were purely ecclesiastical. While, for the most part, such acts of penance were, in the West, not public but private, they certainly were subject to the judgment of the bishop; he, or the presbyter representing him, was always the ministrant. Yet in Britain and Ireland there had grown up a different system; the disciplinary measures were conducted from the cloister. Different sins began to be catalogued after the manner of penal enactments, with the corresponding penance to be undergone before reconciliation. In the opening words of the Penitential of Columbanus, "there must be a mensura paenitentiae" calculated according to the magnitude of the sins committed. What this missionary did not quite find in Gaul, according to the words of his biographer Jonas, viz., poenitentiae medicamenta et mortificationis amor, he brought to that country from his Irish home. People from all parts soon flocked to his monastery at Luxeuil to partake of the benefit of the "medicine of penance" ( Vita Col., 2). Books containing such rules, by which sins and the appointed penances were thus arranged in order, were called PENITENTIALS (Libri Poenitentiales). They seem to have had their origin in Britain and Ireland, but, after the seventh century, they are found both in the English Church, and in Churches far and wide over the Continent. Some who read the present Penitential, assigned to Gildas, for the first time, may be surprised, if not shocked, at some of the rules contained in it; but let them reflect that what they read here might be | 273 found almost anywhere in the seventh century, under the direction of men of singularly pure and saintly lives. The student of history will look upon them as phases of a life that is gone for ever; he is not called upon to censure what is embodied in Penitential Books, nor to set up a defence of them. It is simply necessary that he should take a right position to view their strange and elaborate directions. These must be looked upon as means through which men of deep moral earnestness, such as Dewi Sant and Gildas in Wales, Finnian, Comgall and Columbanus in Ireland and France, sought to take away the curse of uncleanness out of the lives of man. In their method, they mention things to which we hardly ever allude, but so does St. Augustine in his " Enquiries of Pope Gregory," and so before him did St. Jerome, in his celebrated letter to a young lady of the highest family connections at Rome. We feel that no pastor would now even think of what is detailed in Interrogatio Augustini VIII, as given by Beda (1,27); that Epistola 22 of Jerome "handles, without the slightest reserve, sins and temptations of the flesh to which we now hardly allude. It is absolutely inconceivable that any moralist or preacher of our times, however earnest or fanatical, should address a woman in such a style." The writer from whom I quote these words adds: "The difference of tone between the ancients and ourselves should never be forgotten in studying the character of a distant past. By keeping it in mind we may be saved alike from pharisaism, and from an ungenerous judgment of times which have made a self-revelation of which we should be incapable."Penitential · Introduction 1:5Gildas the WiseTo me, these Penitentials are reminders of the fierce conflict waged against the wild immorality of olden times: a conflict which, with many failures, proved that the clumsy method of these rules turned out to be for good. Haupt, in his Kirchengeschichte Deutsch-lands, describes the results of the method in the hands of Columbanus in Gaul as "blissful" (segensreich). Yet it was doomed to die; in no way could it continue, however useful for a time.Penitential · Introduction 1:6Gildas the WiseReferences will be made in the Notes to several Penitentials, such as the Penitentials of Finnian, of Columbanus and others; on that account it may be of advantage to place here the following brief resume of facts.Penitential · Introduction 1:8Gildas the WiseBennchor, or Bangor (in county Down), was founded by Com-gall, who in his early training had come in contact with the same Welshmen and Welsh traditions as Finnian. When, therefore, we remember that Columbanus was a monk of Bangor, as he with twelve companions left his native island for France, pro Deo peregrinantes, we are led to connect him also with that band of Welshmen. For the use of his monastery at Luxeuil he drew up a Rule that was notably Irish in its strictness; but besides this Regula, there goes under his name a Penitential, which, with |275 characteristic modifications and enlargements, is based upon that of Finnian. I do not now touch upon the question of the non-genuineness of certain parts of the Penitential in the form preserved to us, but refer to the fact that we have certainly, in a large section of it, a code of rules closely connected with the Irish Penitential of Finnian, and the Welsh Penitential of Gildas.Penitential · Introduction 1:10Gildas the WiseWho this Cummean was, is not known, though the influence of his collection appears to have spread over a very large area. Of many so-called, the best known is one that was Abbot of Iona from 657 to 665, who is also the author of the oldest Life of Columba. Another of the name, styled bishop, is found at Bobbio (an Irish monastery at the foot of the Apennines, founded by Columbanus in 612), about the first half of the eighth century, during the reign of the Longobard King Luitprand. Wasserschleben is inclined to regard the latter as the author of the Penitential that was so very extensively used on the continent.The Ruin of Britain · Introduction 3:8Gildas the WiseIN the present edition, it is intended to publish in a collected form the works ascribed to Gildas for which, roughly speaking, a date is assigned during the twenty years that elapsed between A.D. 540 and 560. The earliest references to Gildas that have come down to us are the two made by Columbanus in his letter to St. Gregory the Great, which must have been written between thirty and forty years after the death of the British writer ( i.e., A.D. 595-600). In the first passage, he is mentioned as Gildas auctor who has written against simony in bishops; in the second, as having been engaged in correspondence, respecting the monks who were leaving their convents to become hermits, with Vennianus, probably Finian, the abbot of Clonard in Meath, to whom Gildas sent "an exceedingly noble answer" ( et eligantissime illi rescripsit ). Gildas is thus widely known, not very long after his death, as a writer on ecclesiastical abuses, and as a correspondent whose opinion on new and doubtful movements was highly valued in Ireland.The Ruin of Britain · Introduction 3:11Gildas the WiseI. The DE EXCIDIO BRITANNIAE. This work has been mistakenly read as history; it is, really, in no way a history, nor written with any object a historian may have. It may be regarded as a kind of "Tract for the Times" of the sixth century. Ebert ( Gesch. der Literatur des Mittelaltcrs) correctly terms the "De Excidio" a Tendenzschrift; it is a message or a sermon addressed to rulers and ecclesiastics by a fervent monk, containing historical portions which are of undoubted value, because we possess no other for a part of the period to which they refer, but which in the whole setting of their narration are coloured by the author's main |vi purport as a Christian moralist. We may regard it as extremely probable that this is the very work to which Columbanus refers, when writing shortly after A.D. 595.The Ruin of Britain · Introduction 3:12Gildas the Wise2. A series of FRAGMENTS. These Fragments appear in a collection of rules or canons for church order, belonging to the early Irish Church. The whole consists of LXVII books, divided into chapters which give extracts from many ecclesiastical writers; e.g. Origenes, Hieronimus, Augustinus, Gregorius, Isidorus, also Sinodus Hibernensis, &c. Among these appear extracts made probably from letters, now lost, of Gildas, such as that mentioned by Columbanus as written to Finian. These will be printed from the text of Wasserschleben's Irische Kanonensammlung, 2nd edition (Leipzig, 1885).The Ruin of Britain · Introduction 3:17Gildas the WiseAn unprejudiced student of Gildas comes back to his writings with the feeling that something of value may, and ought to, be got out of them; my own frequent reading of these has led me to a higher appreciation of the man and his work. To my mind, it is a grave mistake to call Gildas a "historian": neither Columbanus, writing about forty years after his death, nor Alcuin, in the last quarter of the eighth century, regard him in this light. The fashion began with the Venerable Beda; for him, in the early parts of his Historia Ecclesiastica, and, for the writers of the Saxon Chronicle also apparently, Gildas was the sole "historian" ( historicus eorum ). Mediaeval writers, who invariably term him historiographss, helped to make the idea a fixed one. But Gildas would never have regarded himself as a "historian": he is a preacher, a revivalist, who will "attempt to state a few facts" ( pauca dicere conamur ), by way of illustrating his message, that divine anger must visit with punishment a sinning people and priesthood.Register of Epistles · Book 9 61:2Gregory the DialogistFrom S. Columbanus TO Pope Gregory .Book 2 4:3Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England"To our most dear brethren, the Lords Bishops and Abbots throughout all the country of the Scots, Laurentius, Mellitus, and Justus, Bishops, servants of the servants of God. When the Apostolic see, according to the universal custom which it has followed elsewhere, sent us to these western parts to preach to pagan nations, and it was our lot to come into this island, which is called Britain, before we knew them, we held both the Britons and Scots in great esteem for sanctity, believing that they walked according to the custom of the universal Church; but becoming acquainted with the Britons, we thought that the Scots had been better. Now we have learnt from Bishop Dagan, who came into this aforesaid island, and the Abbot Columban, in Gaul, that the Scots in no way differ from the Britons in their walk; for when Bishop Dagan came to us, not only did he refuse to eat at the same table, but even to eat in the same house where we were entertained."Book 2 19:3Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England"To our most beloved and most holy Tomianus, Columbanus, Cromanus, Dinnaus, and Baithanus, bishops; to Cromanus, Ernianus, Laistranus, Scellanus, and Segenus, priests; to Saranus and the rest of the Scottish doctors and abbots, Hilarus, the arch-presbyter, and vice-gerent of the holy Apostolic See; John, the deacon, and elect in the name of God; likewise John, the chief of the notaries and vice-gerent of the holy Apostolic See, and John, the servant of God, and counsellor of the same Apostolic See. The writings which were brought by the bearers to Pope Severinus, of holy memory, were left, when he departed from the light of this world, without an answer to the questions contained in them. Lest any obscurity should long remain undispelled in a matter of so great moment, we opened the same, and found that some in your province, endeavouring to revive a new heresy out of an old one, contrary to the orthodox faith, do through the darkness of their minds reject our Easter, when Christ was sacrificed; and contend that the same should be kept with the Hebrews on the fourteenth of the moon."Book 5 24:507Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandClonard, Abbot of, see Colman or Columbanus.Book 5 24:524Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandColman, or Columbanus, Irish bishop, 128, 129 n.Book 5 24:529Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandColumban Monasteries, Egbert's mission to, 318, 319, 375 n.Book 5 24:530Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandColumbanus, Irish missionary to the continent, 92.Book 5 24:531Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandColumbanus, see Colman.Book 5 24:752Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandEgbert, English monk in Ireland, probably bishop, xxx, xxxi, 143, 203, 205, 316; account of, 143 n.; seized with the plague, 204; his vow and recovery, 205; his attempted mission to Frisland, 161 n., 316; dissuaded by a revelation, 317, 318; sends Wilbrord instead, 320; saved from shipwreck, 319; his good example, 205, 206; his account of Ceadda's death, 223, 224; advises Egfrid against the war with the Scots, 286; his mission to the Columban monasteries, 318, 319, 375, 376, 386; death, on Easter Day, 205, 376, 377, 378, 386.Book 5 24:1327Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandNaiton, or Nechtan mac Derili, King of the Picts, xxx, xxxi; adopts Catholic usages, 359, 360, 374; asks Ceolfrid for advice and builders, 359; builds a stone church, 359; expels the Columban clergy, 359 n.; receives Ceolfrid's letter, 374.Book 5 24:2235Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England267 These bishops have been identified as follows: Tomianus is Tomene, Abbot and Bishop of Armagh; Columbanus is Colman, Abbot of Clonard (also a bishop); Cromanus is Cronan, Bishop of Nendrum, or Inishmahee; Dinnaus is probably Dima, Bishop of Connor; Baithanus has not been identified with any certainty. With regard to the priests the proposed identifications are more conjectural. Saranus is a certain Saran Ua Critain. Two vice-gerents of the Papal see are associated with the Pope elect in writing this letter. The arch-presbyter and the "primicerius notariorum," with the archdeacon, acted as vice-gerents during a vacancy, or in the absence of the Pope (cf. Plummer ad loc.).Book 5 24:2913Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England945 In 710. Naiton, or Nechtan mac Derili, succeeded in 706. The northern Picts had received Christianity through Columba (III, 4). Naiton is said to have been converted to Roman usages by a missionary named Boniface, who was probably an Irishman, St. Cuiritin. Naiton did not succeed in forcing all his people to adopt them, but in 717 he expelled the Columban clergy who refused to conform.Book 5 24:2958Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England990 Or, perhaps, "bishop;" cf. III, 4, note. For the circumstances which led Egbert to undertake his work among the Columban monasteries, v.s. c. 9. As the events narrated there were prior to 690 (Wilbrord's mission to Frisia), we may, perhaps, assume that he had been labouring during this long interval among the Columban monasteries in Ireland. In III, 4, Bede places Egbert's arrival in Iona a year earlier.January 18:7The Roman MartyrologyIn Brittany, holy Deicola, Abbot (of Lure,) (in the year 625,) a disciple of blessed Columbanus.March 29:7The Roman MartyrologyIn the monastery of Luxeuil, [diocese of Besançon, in the year 625,] the holy Abbot Eustacius, a disciple of holy Columbanus. He was the father of nearly six hundred monks, and was famous not only for the holiness of his life, but also for miracles.October 16:12The Roman MartyrologyAt Arbon, in Switzerland, (in the seventh century,) the holy Abbot Gall, a disciple of blessed Columbanus.November 21:10The Roman MartyrologyAt Verona, the holy Confessor Maurus, Bishop (of that see.) At the monastery of Bobbio, deceased the holy Abbot Columbanus, the founder of many monasteries, and the Father of many monks, who fell asleep in a good old age, bright with many graces.