Irish Nationality

								

the work depreciates the Author."
For a hundred years before Columbanus there had been Irish pilgrims
and bishops in Gaul and Italy. But it was his mission that first
brought the national patriotism of Ireland into conflict with the
organisation of Rome in Europe. Christianity had come to Ireland from
the East--tradition said from St. John, who was then, and is still,
held in special veneration by the Irish; his flower, St. John's wort,
had for them peculiar virtues, and from it came, it was said, the
saffron hue as the national colour for their dress. It was a national
pride that their date for celebrating Easter, and their Eastern
tonsure from ear to ear, had come to them from St. John. Peter loved
Jesus, they said, but it was John that Jesus loved--"the youth John,
the foster-son of his own bosom"--"John of the Breast." It was with a
very passion of loyalty that they clung to a national church which
linked them to the beloved apostle, and which was the close bond of
their whole race, dear to them as the supreme expression of their
temporal and spiritual freedom, now illustrious beyond all others in
Europe for the roll of its saints and of its scholars, and ennobled by
the company of its patriots and the glory of Columcille. The tonsure
and the Easter of Columbanus, however, shocked foreign ecclesiastics
as contrary to the discipline of Rome, and he was required to renounce
them. He vehemently protested his loyalty to St. John, to St.
Columcille, and to the church of his fathers. It was an unequal
argument. Ireland, he was answered, was a small island in a far
corner of the earth: what was its people that they should fight
against the whole world. The Europe of imperial tradition had lost
comprehension of the passion of national loyalty: all that lay outside
that tradition was "barbarous," the Irish like the Saxons or the Huns.
The battle that was thus opened was the beginning of a new epoch in
Irish history. St. Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury (597),
was ordered (603) to demand obedience to himself from the Celtic
churches and the setting aside of their customs. The Welsh and the
Irish refused to submit. Augustine had come to them from among the
English, who were still pagan, and still fighting for the
extermination of the Celts, and on his lips were threats of slaughter
by their armies to the disobedient. The demand was renewed sixty years
later, in a synod at Whitby in 664. By that time Christianity had been
carried over England by the Irish mission; on the other hand, the
English were filled with imperial dreams of conquest and supremacy.
English kings settled on the Roman province began to imitate the
glories of Rome, to have the Roman banner of purple and gold carried
before them, to hear the name of "Emperor of the whole of Britain,"
and to project the final subjugation to that "empire" of the Celt and
Pictish peoples. The Roman organisation fell in with their habits of