Books: The Hermits

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But to return. St. Malo, coming home with St. Brendan, craves for
peace, and solitude, and the hermit's cell, and goes down to the
sea-shore, to find a vessel which may carry him out once more into
the infinite unknown. Then there comes by a boat with no one in it
but a little boy, who takes him on board, and carries him to the
isle of the hermit Aaron, near the town of Aletha, which men call
St. Malo now; and then the little boy vanishes away, and St. Malo
knows that he was Christ himself. There he lives with Aaron, till
the Bretons of the neighbourhood make him their bishop. He converts
the idolaters around, and performs the usual miracles of hermit
saints. He changes water into wine, and restores to life not only a
dead man, but a dead sow likewise, over whose motherless litter a
wretched slave, who has by accident killed the sow with a stone, is
weeping and wringing his hands in dread of his master's fury. While
St. Malo is pruning vines, he lays his cape upon the ground, and a
redbreast comes and lays an egg on it. He leaves it there, for the
bird's sake, till the young are hatched, knowing, says his
biographer, that without God the Father not a sparrow falls to the
ground. Hailoch, the prince of Brittany, destroys his church, and
is struck blind. Restored to sight by the saint, he bestows large
lands on the Church. "The impious generation," who, with their
children after them, have lost their property by Hailoch's gift,
rise against St. Malo. They steal his horses, and in mockery leave
him only a mare. They beat his baker, tie his feet under the
horse's body, and leave him on the sand to be drowned by the rising
tide. The sea by a miracle stops a mile off, and the baker is
saved.

St. Malo, weary of the wicked Bretons, flees to Saintonge in
Aquitaine, where he performs yet more miracles. Meanwhile, a dire
famine falls on the Bretons, and a thousand horrible diseases.
Penitent, they send for St. Malo, who delivers them and their
flocks. But, at the command of an angel, he returns to Saintonge
and dies there, and Saintonge has his relics, and the innumerable
miracles which they work, even to the days of Sigebert, of Gembloux.

ST. COLUMBA

The famous St. Columba cannot perhaps be numbered among the hermits:
but as the spiritual father of many hermits, as well as many monks,
and as one whose influence upon the Christianity of these islands is
notorious and extensive, he must needs have some notice in these
pages. Those who wish to study his life and works at length will of
course read Dr. Reeves's invaluable edition of Adamnan. The more
general reader will find all that he need know in Mr. Hill Burton's
excellent "History of Scotland," chapters vii. and viii.; and also
in Mr. Maclear's "History of Christian Missions during the Middle
Ages"--a book which should be in every Sunday library.

St. Columba, like St. David and St. Cadoc of Wales, and like many
great Irish saints, is a prince and a statesman as well as a monk.
He is mixed up in quarrels between rival tribes. He is concerned,
according to antiquaries, in three great battles, one of which
sprang, according to some, from Columba's own misdeeds. He copies
by stealth the Psalter of St. Finnian. St. Finnian demands the
copy, saying it was his as much as the original. The matter is
referred to King Dermod, who pronounces, in high court at Tara, the
famous decision which has become a proverb in Ireland, that "to
every cow belongs her own calf." {283} St. Columba, who does not
seem at this time to have possessed the dove-like temper which his
name, according to his disciples, indicates, threatens to avenge
upon the king his unjust decision. The son of the king's steward
and the son of the King of Connaught, a hostage at Dermod's court,
are playing hurley on the green before Dermod's palace. The young
prince strikes the other boy, kills him, and flies for protection to
Columba. He is nevertheless dragged away, and slain upon the spot.
Columba leaves the palace in a rage, goes to his native mountains of
Donegal, and returns at the head of an army of northern and western
Irish to fight the great battle of Cooldrevny in Sligo. But after a
while public opinion turns against him; and at the Synod of Teltown,
in Meath, it is proclaimed that Columba, the man of blood, shall
quit Ireland, and win for Christ out of heathendom as many souls as
have perished in that great fight. Then Columba, with twelve
comrades, sails in a coracle for the coast of Argyleshire; and on
the eve of Pentecost, A.D. 563, lands upon that island which, it may
be, will be famous to all times as Iona, Hy, or Icolumkill,--Hy of
Columb of the Cells.

Thus had Columba, if the tale be true, undertaken a noble penance;
and he performed it like a noble man. If, according to the fashion
of those times, he bewailed his sins with tears, he was no morbid or
selfish recluse, but a man of practical power, and of wide humanity.
Like one of Homer's old heroes, St. Columba could turn his hand to
every kind of work. He could turn the hand-mill, work on the farm,
heal the sick, and command as a practised sailor the little fleet of
coracles which lay hauled up on the strand of Iona, ready to carry
him and his monks on their missionary voyages to the mainland or the
isles. Tall, powerful, handsome, with a face which, as Adamnan
said, made all who saw him glad, and a voice so stentorian that it
could be heard at times a full mile off, and coming too of royal
race, it is no wonder if he was regarded as a sort of demigod, not
only by his own monks, but by the Pictish chiefs to whom he preached
the Cross. We hear of him at Craig Phadrick, near Inverness; at
Skye, at Tiree, and other islands; we hear of him receiving visits
from his old monks of Derry and Durrow; returning to Ireland to
decide between rival chiefs; and at last dying at the age of
seventy-seven, kneeling before the altar in his little chapel of
Iona--a death as beautiful as had been the last thirty-four years of
his life; and leaving behind him disciples destined to spread the
light of Christianity over the whole of Scotland and the northern
parts of England.

St. Columba, at one period or other of his life, is said to have
visited a missionary hermit, whose name still lingers in Scotland as
St. Kentigern, or more commonly St. Mungo, the patron saint of
Glasgow. The two men, it is said (but the story belongs to the
twelfth century, and can hardly be depended on), exchanged their
crooked staves or crosiers in token of Christian brotherhood, and
that which St. Columba is said to have given to St. Kentigern was
preserved in Ripon Cathedral to the beginning of the fifteenth
century. But who St. Kentigern was, or what he really did, is hard
to say; for all his legends, like most of these early ones, are as
tangled as a dream. He dies in the year 601: and yet he is the
disciple of the famous St. Servanus or St. Serf, who lived in the
times of St. Palladius and St. Patrick, 180 years before. This St.
Serf is a hermit of the true old type; and even if his story be, as
Dr. Reeves thinks, a fabrication throughout, it is at least a very
early one, and true to the ideal which had originated with St.
Antony. He is brought up in a monastery at Culross: he is tempted
by the devil in a cave in the parish of Dysart (the Desert), in
Fifeshire, which still retains that name. The daemon, fleeing from
him, enters an unfortunate man, who is forthwith plagued with a
wolfish appetite. St. Serf cures him by putting his thumb into his
mouth. A man is accused of stealing and eating a lamb, and denies
the theft. St. Serf, however, makes the lamb bleat in the robber's
stomach, and so substantiates the charge beyond all doubt. He works
other wonders; among them the slaying of a great dragon in the place
called "Dunyne;" sails for the Orkneys, and converts the people
there; and vanishes thenceforth into the dream-land from which he
sprung.

Two great disciples he has, St. Ternan and St. Kentigern; mystery
and miracle hang round the boyhood of the latter. His father is
unknown. His mother is condemned to be cast from the rock of
"Dunpelder," but is saved and absolved by a miracle. Before the
eyes of the astonished Picts, she floats gently down through the
air, and arrives at the cliff foot unhurt. St. Kentigern is
thenceforth believed to be virgin-born, and is reverenced as a
miraculous being from his infancy. He goes to school to the mythic
St. Serf, who calls him Mungo, or the Beloved; which name he bears
in Glasgow until this day. His fellow-scholars envy his virtue and
learning, and try to ruin him with their master. St. Serf has a pet
robin, which is wont to sit and sing upon his shoulder. The boys
pull off its head, and lay the blame upon Kentigern. The saint
comes in wrathful, tawse in hand, and Kentigern is for the moment in
serious danger; but, equal to the occasion then as afterwards, he
puts the robin's head on again, sets it singing, and amply
vindicates his innocence. To this day the robin figures in the arms
of the good city of Glasgow, with the tree which St. Kentigern, when
his enemies had put out his fire, brought in from the frozen forest
and lighted with his breath, and the salmon in whose mouth a ring
which had been cast into the Clyde had been found again by St.
Kentigern's prophetic spirit.

The envy of his fellow-scholars, however, is too much for St.
Kentigern's peace of mind. He wanders away to the spot where
Glasgow city now stands, lives in a rock hollowed out into a tomb,
is ordained by an Irish bishop (according to a Celtic custom, of
which antiquaries have written learnedly and dubiously likewise),
and has ecclesiastical authority over all the Picts from the Frith
of Forth to the Roman Wall. But all these stories, as I said
before, are tangled as a dream; for the twelfth century monks, in
their loyal devotion to the see of Rome, are apt to introduce again
and again ecclesiastical customs which belonged to their own time,
and try to represent these primaeval saints as regular and well-
disciplined servants of the Pope.

It may be remarked that St. Serf is said to have come into a
"dysart" or desert. So did many monks of the school of St. Columba
and his disciples, who wished for a severer and a more meditative
life than could be found in the busy society of a convent. "There
was a 'disert,'" says Dr. Reeves, "for such men to retire to,
besides the monastery of Derry, and another at Iona itself, situate
near the shore in the low ground, north of the Cathedral, as may be
inferred from Portandisiart, the name of a little bay in this
situation." A similar "disert" or collection of hermit cells was
endowed at Cashel in 1101; and a "disert columkill," with two
townland mills and a vegetable garden, was endowed at Kells, at a
somewhat earlier period, for the use of "devout pilgrims," as those
were called who left the society of men to worship God in solitude.

The Venerable Bede speaks of as many as three personages, Saxons by
their names, who in the Isle of Ireland led the "Pilgrim" or
anchoritic life, to obtain a country in heaven; and tells of a
Drycthelm of the monastery at Melrose, who went into a secret
dwelling therein to give himself more utterly to prayer, and who
used to stand for hours in the cold waters of the Tweed, as St.
Godric did centuries afterwards in those of the Wear. Solitaries,
"recluses," are met with again and again in these old records, who
more than once became Abbots of Iona itself. But there is no need
to linger on over instances which are only quoted to show that some
of the noblest spirits of the Celtic Church kept up wherever they
could the hermit's ideal, the longing for solitude, for passive
contemplation, for silence and perpetual prayer, which they had
inherited from St. Antony and the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert.

The same ideal was carried by them over the Border into England.
Off its extreme northern coast, for instance, nearly half-way
between Berwick and Bamborough Castle, lies, as travellers northward
may have seen for themselves, the "Holy Island," called in old times
Lindisfarne. A monk's chapel on that island was the mother of all
the churches between Tyne and Tweed, as well as of many between Tyne
and Humber. The Northumbrians had been nominally converted,
according to Bede, A.D. 627, under their King Edwin, by Paulinus,
one of the Roman monks who had followed in the steps of St.
Augustine, the apostle of Kent. Evil times had fallen on them.
Penda, at the head of the idolatrous Mercians (the people of Mid-
England), and Ceadwalla, at the head of the Western Britons, had
ravaged the country north of Tweed with savage cruelty, slain King
Edwin, at Hatfield, near Doncaster, and exterminated Christianity;
while Paulinus had fled to Kent, and become Bishop of Rochester.
The invaders had been driven out, seemingly by Oswald, who knew
enough of Christianity to set up, ere he engaged the enemy, a cross
of wood on the "Heavenfield," near Hexham. That cross stood till
the time of Bede, some 150 years after; and had become, like Moses'
brazen serpent, an object of veneration. For if chips cut off from
it were put into water, that water cured men or cattle of their
diseases.

Oswald, believing that it was through the mercy of him whom that
cross symbolized he had conquered the Mercians and the Britons,
would needs reconvert his people to the true faith. He had been in
exile during Edwin's lifetime among the Scots, and had learned from
them something of Christianity. So out of Iona a monk was sent to
him, Aidan by name, to be a bishop over the Northumbrians; and he
settled himself upon the isle of Lindisfarne, and began to convert
it into another Iona. "A man he was," says Bede, "of singular
sweetness, piety, and moderation; zealous in the cause of God,
though not altogether according to knowledge, for he was wont to
keep Easter after the fashion of his country;" i.e. of the Picts and
Northern Scots. . . . "From that time forth many Scots came daily
into Britain, and with great devotion preached the word to these
provinces of the English over whom King Oswald reigned. . . .
Churches were built, money and lands were given of the king's bounty
to build monasteries; the English, great and small, were by their
Scottish masters instructed in the rules and observance of regular
discipline; for most of those who came to preach were monks." {290}

So says the Venerable Bede, the monk of Jarrow, and the father (as
he has been well called) of English history. He tells us too, how
Aidan, wishing, it may be supposed, for greater solitude, went away
and lived on the rocky isle of Farne, some two miles out at sea, off
Bamborough Castle; and how, when he saw Penda and his Mercians, in a
second invasion of Northumbria, trying to burn down the walls of
Bamborough--which were probably mere stockades of timber--he cried
to God, from off his rock, to "behold the mischief:" whereon the
wind changed suddenly, and blew the flames back on the besiegers,
discomfiting them, and saving the town.

Bede tells us, too, how Aidan wandered, preaching from place to
place, haunting King Oswald's court, but owning nothing of his own
save his church, and a few fields about it; and how, when death came
upon him, they set up a tent for him close by the wall at the west
end of the church, so that it befell that he gave up the ghost
leaning against a post, which stood outside to strengthen the wall.

A few years after, Penda came again and burned the village, with the
church; and yet neither could that fire, nor one which happened soon
after, destroy that post. Wherefore the post was put inside the
church, as a holy thing, and chips of it, like those of the Cross of
Heaven Field, healed many folk of their distempers.

. . . A tale at which we may look in two different humours. We may
pass it by with a sneer, and a hypothesis (which will be probably
true) that the post was of old heart-of-oak, which is burnt with
extreme difficulty; or we may pause a moment in reverence before the
noble figure of the good old man, ending a life of unselfish toil
without a roof beneath which to lay his head; penniless and
comfortless in this world: but sure of his reward in the world to
come.

A few years after Aidan's death another hermit betook him to the
rocks of Farne, who rose to far higher glory; who became, in fact,
the tutelar saint of the fierce Northern men; who was to them, up to
the time even of the Tudor monarchs, what Pallas Athene was to
Athens, or Diana to the Ephesians. St. Cuthbert's shrine, in Durham
Cathedral (where his biographer Bede also lay in honour), was their
rallying point, not merely for ecclesiastical jurisdiction or for
miraculous cures, but for political movements. Above his shrine
rose the noble pile of Durham. The bishop, who ruled in his name,
was a Count Palatine, and an almost independent prince. His sacred
banner went out to battle before the Northern levies, or drove back
again and again the flames which consumed the wooden houses of
Durham. His relics wrought innumerable miracles; and often he
himself appeared with long countenance, ripened by abstinence, his
head sprinkled with grey hairs, his casule of cloth of gold, his
mitre of glittering crystal, his face brighter than the sun, his
eyes mild as the stars of heaven, the gems upon his hand and robes
rattling against his pastoral staff beset with pearls. {292} Thus
glorious the demigod of the Northern men appeared to his votaries,
and steered with his pastoral staff, as with a rudder, the sinking
ship in safety to Lindisfarne; received from the hands of St.
Brendan, as from a saint of inferior powers, the innocent yeoman,
laden with fetters, whom he had delivered out of the dungeon of
Brancepeth, and, smiting asunder the massive Norman walls, led him
into the forest, and bade him flee to sanctuary in Durham, and be
safe; or visited the little timber vine-clad chapel of Lixtune, on
the Cheshire shore, to heal the sick who watched all night before
his altar, or to forgive the lad who had robbed the nest which his
sacred raven had built upon the roof, and, falling with the decayed
timber, had broken his bones, and maimed his sacrilegious hand.

Originally, says Bede, a monk at Melrose, and afterward abbot of the
same place, he used to wander weeks together out of his monastery,
seemingly into Ettrick and the Lammermuirs, and preach in such
villages as "being seated high up among craggy, uncouth mountains,
were frightful to others even to look at, and whose poverty and
barbarity rendered them inaccessible to other teachers." "So
skilful an orator was he, so fond of enforcing his subject, and such
a brightness appeared in his angelic face, that no man presumed to
conceal from him the most hidden secrets of their hearts, but all
openly confessed what they had done."

So he laboured for many years, till his old abbot Eata, who had
become bishop and abbot at Lindisfarne, sent for him thither, and
made him prior of the monks for several years. But at last he
longed, like so many before him, for solitude. He considered (so he
said afterwards to the brethren) that the life of the disciplined
and obedient monk was higher than that of the lonely and independent
hermit: but yet he longed to be alone; longed, it may be, to recall
at least upon some sea-girt rock thoughts which had come to him in
those long wanderings on the heather moors, with no sound to
distract him save the hum of the bee and the wail of the curlew; and
so he went away to that same rock of Farne, where Aidan had taken
refuge some ten or fifteen years before, and there, with the deep
sea rolling at his feet and the gulls wailing about his head, he
built himself one of those "Picts' Houses," the walls of which
remain still in many parts of Scotland--a circular hut of turf and
rough stone--and dug out the interior to a depth of some feet, and
thatched it with sticks and grass; and made, it seems, two rooms
within; one for an oratory, one for a dwelling-place: and so lived
alone, and worshipped God. He grew his scanty crops of barley on
the rock (men said, of course, by miracle): he had tried wheat,
but, as was to be expected, it failed. He found (men said, of
course, by miracle) a spring upon the rock. Now and then brethren
came to visit him. And what did man need more, save a clear
conscience and the presence of his Creator? Certainly not Cuthbert.
When he asked the brethren to bring him a beam that he might prop up
his cabin where the sea had eaten out the floor, and when they
forgot the commission, the sea itself washed one up in the very cove
where it was needed: when the choughs from the cliff stole his
barley and the straw from the roof of his little hospice, he had
only to reprove them, and they never offended again; on one
occasion, indeed, they atoned for their offence by bringing him a
lump of suet, wherewith he greased his shoes for many a day. We are
not bound to believe this story; it is one of many which hang about
the memory of St. Cuthbert, and which have sprung out of that love
of the wild birds which may have grown up in the good man during his
long wanderings through woods and over moors. He bequeathed (so it
was believed) as a sacred legacy to the wild-fowl of the Farne
islands, "St. Cuthbert's peace;" above all to the eider-ducks, which
swarmed there in his days, but are now, alas! growing rarer and
rarer, from the intrusion of vulgar sportsmen who never heard St.
Cuthbert's name, or learnt from him to spare God's creatures when
they need them not. On Farne, in Reginald's time, they bred under
your very bed, got out of your way if you made a sign to them, let
you take up them or their young ones, and nestled silently in your
bosom, and croaked joyfully with fluttering wings when stroked.
"Not to nature, but to grace; not to hereditary tendency, but only
to the piety and compassion of the blessed St. Cuthbert," says
Reginald, "is so great a miracle to be ascribed. For the Lord who
made all things in heaven and earth has subjected them to the nod of
his saints, and prostrated them under the feet of obedience."
Insufficient induction (the cause of endless mistakes, and therefore
of endless follies and crimes) kept Reginald unaware of the now
notorious fact that the female eider, during the breeding season, is
just as tame, allowing for a little exaggeration, as St. Cuthbert's
own ducks are, while the male eider is just as wild and wary as any
other sea-bird: a mistake altogether excusable in one who had
probably never seen or heard of eider-ducks in any other spot. It
may be, nevertheless, that St. Cuthbert's special affection for the
eider may have been called out by another strange and well-known
fact about them of which Reginald oddly enough takes no note--
namely, that they line their nests with down plucked from their own
bosom; thus realizing the fable which has made the pelican for so
many centuries the type of the Church. It is a question, indeed,
whether the pelican, which is always represented in mediaeval
paintings and sculptures with a short bill, instead of the enormous
bill and pouch which is the especial mark of the "Onocrotalus" of
the ancients, now miscalled pelican, be not actually the eider-duck
itself, confounded with the true pelecanus, which was the mediaeval,
and is still the scientific, name of the cormorant. Be that as it
may, ill befell any one who dare touch one of St. Cuthbert's birds,
as was proved in the case of Liveing, servant to AElric, who was a
hermit in Farne after the time of St. Cuthbert. For he, tired it
may be of barley and dried fish, killed and ate an eider-duck in his
master's absence, scattering the bones and feathers over the cliffs.
But when the hermit came back, what should he find but those same
bones and feathers rolled into a lump and laid inside the door of
the little chapel; the very sea, says Reginald, not having dared to
swallow them up. Whereby the hapless Liveing being betrayed, was
soundly flogged, and put on bread and water for many a day; the
which story Liveing himself told to Reginald.

Not only the eider, but all birds in Farne, were protected by St.
Cuthbert's peace. Bartholomew, who was a famous hermit there in
after years, had a tame bird, says the chronicler, who ate from his
hand, and hopped about the table among him and his guests, till some
thought it a miracle; and some, finding, no doubt, the rocks of
Farne weary enough, derived continual amusement from the bird. But
when he one day went off to another island, and left his bird to
keep the house, a hawk came in and ate it up. Cuthbert, who could
not save the bird, at least could punish the murderer. The hawk
flew round and round the island, imprisoned, so it was thought, by
some mysterious power, till, terrified and worn out, it flew into
the chapel, and lay, cowering and half dead, in a corner by the
altar. Bartholomew came back, found his bird's feathers, and the
tired hawk. But even the hawk must profit by St. Cuthbert's peace.
He took it up, carried it to the harbour, and there bade it depart
in St. Cuthbert's name, whereon it flew off free, and was no more
seen. Such tales as these may be explained, even to their most
minute details, by simply natural causes: and yet, in this age of
wanton destruction of wild birds, one is tempted at moments to wish
for the return of some such graceful and humane superstition which
could keep down, at least in the name of mercy and humanity, the
needless cruelty of man.

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