ST MARTIN’S CELTIC CROSS
Iona
is a small island off the Isle of Mull in western
Scotland. It has been a "Holy Isle" from time
immemorial. An early Gaelic name for it was "Isle of
the Druids". In the sixth century St. Columba (Columkille)
went there from Ireland and founded a monastic
settlement; still later there was a Medieval
Beuedietine Abbey on the same site; in the 1930's
this was rebuilt by Sir George MacLeod for the newly
founded Iona Community - a centre for prayer,
reflection and reconciliation.
We know a great deal about the life of St. Columba.
He went to Iona in 563. The settlement there would
have been in the Celtic style, the monks living in
separate cells, coming together for meals and
community prayer. From Iona the monks went to
mainland Scotland, preaching the Gospel and setting
up other foundations.
Columba went back to Ireland in 575AD where he
defended the poets of Ireland at the council of
Drumcaet. From there he travelled on, visiting some
of his earlier foundations and founded the monastic
settlement at Drumcliffe. He returned to Iona, which
was now his home, and died there in 597.
Iona continued to grow and flourish, and during the
7th Century it had the largest library in Europe and
there are supposed to have been 300 crosses. The
Viking invasions meant the total destruction of the
library and almost all the crosses - there are now
only three left, the most famous being the cross
dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. This cross was
probably carved towards the end of the 8th Century.
Martin lived in France in the last years of the 4th
Century. He was a soldier, a member of the Roman
Imperial Army. He became a Christian but remained in
the army to complete his appointed term. There is a
famous painting by El Greco narrating a story from
this period of his life - the sharing of his cloak
with a beggar. At some time in his life he had read
about St. Antony of Egypt who had left city life to
live as a hermit in the desert. This appealed to
Martin and when he left the army he set up a
hermitage near Poitiers in France. He gathered other
men around him on an organised basis. Each
monk/hermit had his own cell but they all met for
meals and communal prayers and were bound in
obedience to the head of the settlement. When Martin
was chosen Bishop of Tours he moved his fellow
hermits to a settlement just over a mile from Tours
and continued to live as a monk among them. It is a
matter for conjecture how a cross on Iona in
Scotland, an island that had such close and
continuing connection with the Columban monasteries
in Ireland, is dedicated to this French saint.
In fact many churches in Scotland and England are
named after him and it is thought that St. Ninian of
Scotland visited Tours. Also St. Martin's life by
Sulpican Severus is reproduced in the "Book of
Armagh:, one of the great Irish Manuscripts now in
Trinity College, Dublin. Certainly the early Irish
monks also knew about St. Antony and St. Paul, the
desert fathers, reproducing the story of the raven
who fed them in the desert as a allegory for the
Eucharist, on several of the Irish High crosses. It
is easy then to see how the story of St. Martin and
his monastic settlement would have appealed to them
as a man to be admired and venerated
