Adomnan of Iona

Origins and early life

Adomnan was born about 624 — the Annals of Ulster enter his nativity at that point, and the annals' statement that he died in his seventy-seventh year points to the same date, though Mac Firbis's annals say seventy-eight and later computations have preferred 626 or 627. The Martyrology of Donegal records his parentage: he was "son of Ronan, of the race of Conall Gulban, son of Niall, as to his stock," and his mother was Ronnat, of the race of Enna son of Niall. His father Ronan was son of Tinne, whence the patronymic Ua Tinne ("grandson of Tinne") occasionally coupled with his name; the descent from Conall Gulban, head of one of the two great races of the northern Uí Néill, made him kin to Columba and to many of the kings of Ireland. Reeves, the saint's nineteenth-century editor and biographer, finds good reason to place his birth in Tír Áeda — the barony of Tirhugh in the south-west of County Donegal — where his kindred was settled and where the church of Drumhome, of which he was patron, kept a vivid local recollection of him. Of his schooling and early monastic career the record says nothing certain, and nothing is asserted here.

Abbacy of Iona

In 679 Adomnan succeeded Failbe as abbot of Iona, the ninth in succession from Columba the founder — so the Martyrology of Gorman's gloss ("Adamnan, son of Ronán, ninth abbot of Iona, A.D. 679–704") and the marginal note in the Martyrology of Donegal. He governed the monastery and its widespread familia of churches among the Irish and the Picts for twenty-six years, as the Donegal martyrology counts them, until his death in 704.

The embassy to Northumbria and the sixty captives

In 684 a general of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria had raided the Irish plain of Brega and carried off captives. After Ecgfrith's death, Adomnan was sent by his nation as ambassador to the new king, Aldfrith — who had lived among the Irish and, the Irish tradition preserved by Mac Firbis calls him, Adomnan's own alumnus — to seek their release; the Annals of Ulster record under 687 the mission's success in one line: "Adomnan conducted sixty captives to Ireland." Adomnan himself mentions his visits to King Aldfrith in the Life of Columba (ii.46). On one of these journeys he stayed at Ceolfrith's monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, where — Ceolfrith's own letter, preserved by Bede, recalls — he showed "wonderful wisdom, humility, and religion in his words and behaviour," and bore with meekness Ceolfrith's blunt challenge over his Irish tonsure.

The Easter question

Bede devotes a chapter of the Ecclesiastical History (v.15) to Adomnan. Staying in Northumbria, "he observed the canonical rites of the church, and was earnestly admonished by many who were more learned than himself" not to set the custom of his few monks, "seated in so distant a corner of the world," against the universal Church in the observance of Pascha; and he was persuaded, "for he was a good and wise man, and remarkably learned in Holy Scripture." Returning home, he could not carry his own community of Iona with him; but crossing to Ireland he "reduced many of them, and almost all that were not under the dominion of those of Iona, to Catholic unity" in the keeping of the legal Easter. He returned to his island, urged the canonical observance on his own monastery without prevailing, and — Bede saw the mercy of God in it — "departed this life before the next year came round," spared the sharper conflict that the return of the paschal season would have forced upon him. Iona itself conformed only in 716, under the English monk Ecgberht.

Writings

Adomnan's Vita Columbae — written at Iona at the request of the brethren, in Reeves's judgement probably between his Irish journeys of the late 680s and 697 — is the fullest early monument of the Columban church and the principal source for the life of his patron; its three books of prophecies, miracles and visions rest, as Adomnan states in his prefaces, on the written and oral tradition of the community, including what his predecessor Failbe had heard from eyewitnesses. His second surviving work, De Locis Sanctis ("On the Holy Places"), he took down from the dictation of Arculf, a bishop of Gaul who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the East and, driven by storm onto the western coasts of Britain, came to Iona. Bede tells the story (v.15–17): Adomnan, finding his guest learned in the Scriptures and acquainted with the holy places, "committed to writing all that Arculf said he had seen," presented the book to King Aldfrith, "and through his bounty it came to be read by lesser persons"; Bede judged it "most useful to many readers," made his own abridgement of it, and inserted extracts into his History. Later Irish literature attached further works to his name, most famously the Fís Adomnáin ("Vision of Adomnan") preserved in Lebor na hUidre, in which the glory of heaven and the pains of hell are shown to him; the Martyrology of Donegal repeats this tradition, but the Vision is a later text bearing his name, not a work of the historical abbot.

The Law of the Innocents (Cáin Adomnáin)

Under 697 the Annals record of Adomnan, with enigmatic brevity, dedit legem innocentium populis — "he gave the Law of the Innocents to the peoples." The Cáin Adomnáin, the Old Irish tract that transmits the law, states that it was enacted at Birr, on the border of the Uí Néill and Munster, and enjoined "on the men of Ireland and Britain"; its guarantor list — thirty- nine ecclesiastics headed by Fland Febla of Armagh, together with Ecgberht the Englishman and the kings — is, as its editor Kuno Meyer observed, a historical document in its own right, and every guarantor whose death-date is known was alive in 697. The law took women, children and clerics — those who do not bear arms — under protection from war and violence, with heavy penalties for their injury; the tract's own homily frames it as Adomnan's deliverance of women from bondage. The law was associated with his name ever after, and was renewed in Ireland in 727 by the bringing over of his relics.

Repose

Adomnan died on September 23, 704, in his seventy-seventh year — the Annals of Ulster and the Four Masters enter the year as 703, which Reeves corrects to 704 by the annals' reckoning; the reformed Easter he did not live to keep fell on March 30 of the following spring, as Bede's chapter implies. The Martyrology of Donegal says of his end: "Seventy-seven years was his age when he sent his spirit to heaven... His body was interred with great honour and respect at Iona."

Relics and translations

The Annals record that the reliquiae Adomnani were brought over to Ireland in 727 for the renewal of his Law, and taken back to Iona in 730 — the Martyrology of Donegal's simpler statement is that "his body was removed to Erin after some time." A record copied by Michael O'Clery in 1629 from "an old black and difficult manuscript" gives a different account of the shrine carried on that circuit: that it held not Adomnan's bones but "the great collection of the relics of the saints" which Adomnan himself had gathered, brought to Ireland by Cilline Droichtech son of Dicolla "to make peace and friendship." The two traditions are recorded here without resolution.

Veneration and later cultus

September 23 is Adomnan's day "in both the Irish and Scotch calendars" (Reeves): the Martyrology of Gorman sings on that day of "the lofty abbot Adamnan of Iona — what devout practice did he not lovingly increase in Alba, in Erin?", glossing him as "abbot of Colomb Cille's Iona, of the Kindred of Conall Gulban," and the Martyrology of Donegal gives him its long September 23 notice, praising him as "a vessel of wisdom... a burning lamp which illuminated and enlightened the west of Europe with the light of virtues and good morals, laws, and rules." Among his churches the Donegal martyrology names Raphoe and Drumhome in Cenél Conaill and the Skreen in Tír Fhiachrach; at Raphoe, which became an episcopal see, he is venerated under the Donegal form of his name, Eunan, as patron of the diocese. His fame among the learned was immediate and lasting: Bede and Ceolfrith praise him in his own generation; Alcuin, later in the same century, ranks him in a verse epigram with Patrick, Ciaran, Columbanus and Comgall among the "preclari patres" of the Irish; the Four Masters sum up: "Adamnan was a good man, according to the testimony of St Beda; for he was tearful, penitent, given to prayer, diligent, ascetic, temperate... and, moreover, he was wise and learned in the clear understanding of the Holy Scriptures of God."

Miracles and traditions

The later Irish Life of Adomnan (preserved at Brussels) supplied the martyrologies with their best-loved story of him, repeated in the Martyrology of Donegal under his day: that remaining three days and nights alone at prayer in his church at Iona, he was seen through the keyhole with "a little boy with brilliance and bright radiance" in his bosom — the monks "were certain that it was Jesus who was in the shape of an infant, delighting Adomnan." The same Life tells of the body of Bruide son of Bile, king of the Picts (†693), brought to Iona and watched over by the grieving Adomnan, who was dissuaded from praying the dead king back to life and gave his blessing instead to body and soul. These are legends of the later cultus and are given as such.