ABSTRACT
Adomnan’s visionary evocation of Iona as a holy land in the Vita Columbae, with the monastery as the earthly city foreshadowing the heavenly Jerusalem, has a historical counterpart in the archaeological evidence of the symbolic imitation of Jerusalem in early Irish monastic sites, including Clonmacnoise. An early disposition to spiritual maturity is shared by the three universally revered saints whose Lives offered particular models for Insular hagiography, including the Vita Columbae. The scriptural image of fear and trembling in the divine presence, or before the Lord’s chosen messenger, is a hagiographic motif used elsewhere in the Life of Columba. Columbanus, too, was familiar with the concept that ‘virtues are placed in the mean between extremes’ and taught that to avoid all excess, the virtues practised in the monastic life, ‘grown to a huge forest of names’, needed to be ‘weighed in the balance of discretio’.
