Celtic
Cross of St. Martin of Iona
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 Medival 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 seperate 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 probabaly 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.
Celtic
Cross of Iona replica cross in gold or silver
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