The Cornish Saints

I AM STANDING on the edge of the land, on a huge dome of rock, yellow with lichen, called Lizard Point, looking out over the sunny sea, which is lilac and full of high surf. Behind me is all Cornwall, and then all England: this exact spot is the absolute southernmost point of Britain, and for a few minutes I am the southernmost man in the whole island. Only wind breaks up the silence; the sky is almost Scandinavian in its clear high pale blue; the ocean churns away beneath me and around me: it flows all the way to America and to Africa. Off to my right is the Irish Sea, which runs north toward the Arctic.

The landscape is weird in its breezy beauty: small black canyons parting mossy treeless meadows thick with pink and cobalt wildflowers. Even the local place-names are outlandish: Predannack Wollas, Gweek and Cuby and Drym, Coverack, Relubbus, Chyanvounder.

Christian heartland

You would think we are at one of the perpetually remote sites of Christendom, but that is not so. What seems so far-flung was, for a few centuries long ago, the creative heart of the Catholic world. If we had stood on this spot exactly 1500 years ago, we would have thought ourselves in the well-spring of the Church.

For here (we would have reflected), here is Cornwall the land of saints, mother of missionaries, and hope of the Christian West; and from the Lizard we could imagine the Faith replenishing itself from across the Irish Sea, then going out to redeem the savage places of France and Britain and Germany, even to Spain and Italy itself.

The strange sweet land named Cornwall is a peninsula sticking out southwest-ward from England. It is warmer than anywhere else in Britain, and, perhaps, more beautiful.

I should confess at once that I am not a neutral on this question: I am lucky enough to have a Cornish address – Nansough Manor, a handsome house standing in its own lush valley. The house was first mentioned almost a thousand years ago, and although the Earl of Cork added an imposing façade in the eighteenth century, Nansough still feels like a mediæval home. Not long ago a priest was summoned to exorcise a ghost!

And there is another grand story: a bachelor judge who had the place after the Corks was rich enough to keep his own pack of hunting dogs. He piously sent all his servants home one Christmas; then drank himself into oblivion. On New Year’s Eve he revived enough to remember his hounds needed feeding, went out to the stone kennels –and was devoured. Even now on the last night of the year it is said you can hear terrible baying…

Amazing quickening

Cornwall was at the uttermost edge of the world – although four centuries before Christ a bold Greek geographer named Pytheas made his way where I have gone, to the Lizard and beyond, reporting a weird pyramidical island named Ictis at the final extremity of the land. This sounds like a myth, but you can still visit it: the captain of the angelic armies later had a shrine and monastery on it, and it is even now called St Michael’s Mount, topped with a castle, separated from Cornwall every day as the tide rises over the stone causeway. The Roman Empire in its fullness reached even as far as Ictis, but no doubt few people in Italia had heard of it, or even of Cornwall (Cornubia), that final verge and last outcrop of Rome.

Then, at the beginning of the fifth century, the Empire in the West collapsed, and heathen tribes swept down even as far as Africa. It seemed that Christianity must perish in the universal ruin of civilisation. The Roman Church, though, survived, shaken and shrivelled.

Far away, however, far beyond the ken of the Roman papacy, in the Celtic area round the Irish Sea, and especially in Cornwall, a Christianity sprang up that was fresh and youthful. These were lands which had been on the periphery of the Empire, or even beyond its frontiers. The peoples had been pagan and illiterate.

Now, within a few generations, they were Christianised, and an amazing quickening occurred: it was as if the Holy Ghost breathed new life into them. The Celts became the cultural light of the world. All over the Celtic world, in simple dry-stone buildings, you could find monks painting the most exquisite sacred images, chanting the praise of God literally without ceasing, reading and writing, studying the Scriptures and the Greek and Latin classics, preserving both the Faith and the civilisation of Europe when it seemed both were submerged.

They did not only preserve, they developed. It was the Celtic Church that developed the idea of great monasteries exempt from diocesan control, it was the Celtic Church that popularised veneration of Saint Peter; most of all, it was the Celtic Church that first invented the practice of private confession to a priest and private penance, the system which was eventually adopted by the universal Church.

Galaxy of heroes

This is the sort of history that sets the imagination on fire. Even now, the joy and the energy of Celtic Christianity stagger us. The Celts were not outlandish: the paradox is that they were so remote from Rome they were not even troubled by the barbarians who threw down Rome. This was many centuries before a new wave of pagan barbarians, the sea-going Vikings, began to ruin Celtic civilisation; and by then the Celts had done their work in the great pattern of Christian history. For Celtic Christianity was not content merely to flourish and to rejoice. It was so dynamic it sprang out toward the darkened lands of the Continent.

Celtic Christianity was spread by a galaxy of heroes, the Celtic saints. These were monks and nuns – but not in the sense as these understood in the Mediterranean world. The Church had grown up differently in the remote Celtic lands. There were no towns in this part of the world, there were hardly even villages. There was nowhere for a bishop to establish his see and cathedral. Christian organisation took another form. Authority lay with the abbot, who was almost always a member of the local royal family. The Celtic abbot was a leader, a prophet, a poet, a seer, a natural wanderer – the Celts were always voyagers, passing over the seas to Spain and Iceland and, according to one plausible story, to America itself. The travelling abbot was heroic; he was so awesome that the simple people he came across were often inclined to worship him as a god; and when he had taught them of the One God, they did not forget him as the centuries ran on. These saints had such intense personalities that their mark is still tangible.

Celtic Renaissance

From Ireland to Wales they travelled, from Wales and Ireland to Cornwall, and thence to the whole West.

In AD 575 Saint Columbanus, the greatest of them all, crossed from Cornwall to Brittany with a ship full of monks. Their heads were full of the Bible and Saint Augustine and indeed Ovid, but they had nothing but their long white habits, their curved staves, and Missals in waterproof leather bags round their necks, perhaps flutes hanging from their girdles. They were patient and self-reliant as demigods. Within Columbanus’ lifetime they had renewed Gaul and half Italy, planting Celtic monasteries from Belgium to the Italian central region of Umbria. Greatest of all, they founded the monastery of Bobbio, one of the pillars of the Church for generations: a bulwark against heresy, with perhaps the greatest library in the West. In the pit of the Dark Ages, its Cornish and Irish monks were reading Aristotle and Demosthenes in the original Greek; Bobbio is the indeed the original of the great learned monastery described in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose. At the end of the tenth century Bobbio’s scientist-abbot was elected Pope as Sylvester II: he gave Europe Arabic numbers, the abacus, the astrolabe, the hydraulic pump for organs.

So every time you hear an organ in church, or read about astronomy, or visit a monastery, or use Aristotle’s logic (perhaps without knowing it), or when you add up a bill – not to mention every time you make your confession – you increase your debt to the great wave of Christian civilisation that came out of Cornwall and the Celtic lands, and brought the Dark Ages to an end.

Uncanny atmosphere

That wave has long since passed out of Cornwall, and spread itself over every Christian country. The Duchy of Cornwall is a gentle, far-flung land, lovely, perhaps still a little uncanny: I cannot commend it too highly to visitors. There are no big cities. The modern world does not much intrude. The early Middle Ages, the time of Cornish greatness, seem oddly close. Almost every village has its saint, and its church dedicated to that saint – usually built on the site of his hermitage. As often as not, the village itself bears the hero’s wonderful name: St. Ive, St. Endellion, St. Minver, St. Issey; Morwenstow, where St. Morewenna had her quiet cell; Perranporth, where St. Perran landed from Ireland, where he founded a church, the famous ‘Lost Church’: for the sands of the shore have covered it, and only its cross shows bravely above the dunes. St Enodoc is another lovely ancient church and hamlet engulfed by dunes for centuries – but it has been dug out, and now the great poet Sir John Betjeman lies in the holy ground where Enodoc taught and prayed.

For not all the Cornish saints passed like Columbanus over the sea to the reconquest of Europe. Some remained to make this sweet land sweeter with the Gospel.

We are in an almost secret place now, quite different from the Lizard: St. Mylor, a soft folded valley dropping into the great river Fal. Here a saint called Mylor and his monks built their little wattle hermitage, and all the folk clustered around the holy man to be taught and healed. He took their pagan stone pillar and re-carved it as a cross. After he died, a church rose on the spot; it was rebuilt and rebuilt, but still feels ancient. The cross still stands in the mossy churchyard. Behold it! It looks so old it can never topple; it looks as if it will last to the end of the world. Perhaps it will. News reached St. Mylor here, singing his poems in praise of Christ to the wondering locals, that Rome had fallen. Shaggy worshippers of Thor and Woden, the ghastly old gods of the Baltic, were massacring bishops in the Forum; the palaces of the world’s capital were burning; the aqueducts were coming down. Was it the end? It is never the end for Catholic truth. Mylor went on singing and praying, and before too long the rich, happy faith of his went out from Cornwall, and made the world young again.