Abstract
Miracles and wonders that testify to the power of the Christian God and his agents feature prominently in ancient and medieval missionary narratives and hagiography. A particularly dramatic example from the sixth century describes Columba vanquishing a river monster in Christ’s name to the wonderment of the heathen Picts. The conventions of modern historiography require that we demythologize a story like this. Yet a contemporary missionary narrative from Africa describes a similar encounter between an evangelist and a monster. By reading the two accounts analogously, this article challenges scholars of mission to move beyond limiting western intellectual postulates.
Introduction
In the most dramatic incident in the remarkable missionary life of Columba, the sixth-century monk, while journeying through northern Scotland, confronted a monster that was terrifying the local people. The telling of the story in the seventh-century Vita Sancti Columbae is tendentiously evangelistic: by the holy man’s vanquishing of the beast in the name of the Christian God, the heathen Picts were compelled to admit both the power of the new faith the Irish monks were propagating and the saintliness of Columba himself. The story strains credulity and offends modern historiographical conventions by its inclusion not only of a miracle, but also of a monster. Indeed, the story hearkens to a bygone era of Europe when even intelligent people saw supernatural wonders in everyday life in a created world haunted by spectral powers and threatened by hostile creatures. 1
Yet the medievalist Richard Fletcher has cautioned against scholarly contempt of this premodern age and its social imaginary: “Early medieval Europe was a world in which persons of every level of intellectual cultivation accepted without question that the miraculous could weave like a shuttle in and out of everyday reality. We need to remember this, and to resist the temptation to dismiss it out of hand as infantile credulity.” 2 Fletcher’s point should be taken seriously by scholars of the history of Christian mission: the geographical expansion of the early and medieval church across cultures and over frontiers is replete with stories featuring divine wonders and missionaries’ miracles that confirmed the nascent faith of new converts or challenged obstinate unbelief. 3 How does one avoid skepticism toward the kind of miracle stories told in Vita Sancti Columbae—and historical texts like it—without assigning credulity to such “facts” as that of a monster? Certainly paying critical attention to how modernity’s “hidden postulates” regarding the metaphysical and transcendent affect scholarly convention and practices is crucial for a more generous assessment of the miracle stories common to historic missionary narratives and hagiography. 4 Further, given that the spread of Christianity in the non-Western world in the last two centuries proliferates with the same sorts of signs, wonders, and miracles found in ancient and medieval missionary narratives, could a fair appraisal of miracles and wonders in ancient sources be by analogy to modern sources that feature the same—including monsters? 5
This article intends to do precisely that. After summarizing and analyzing the story of Columba and the river monster, a missionary narrative from late-nineteenth century central Africa that also features a conflict between a Christian evangelist and a monster will be summarized and analyzed. How are these two stories similar? How are they dissimilar? And could the “secular bias” that inclines many scholars to scorn the “infantile credulity” (Fletcher) of Columba’s age of monsters and miracles be challenged by the fact that some modern missionaries testify to the very same thing? 6
Columba
Motivated by the Irish monastic ideal of “peregrinatio in a foreign land” and a zeal to propagate Christian faith, Columba left his native land in the mid-560s to establish a monastery on the small island of Iona on Scotland’s southwest coast. 7 Iona served as a base for Columba’s personal missionary endeavors in the region—Bede claims Columba as the very first missionary to the Picts—and would become a bridgehead for Irish Christianity’s significant spiritual influence across northern Britain over the next two hundred years. 8 Columba’s life and missionary journeys were narrated a century after the fact by Adomnán, who served as abbot of the Iona community from 679 until his death in 704; Bede, who was Adomnán’s contemporary, praised him as an excellent scholar. 9
In Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae, the saint’s dramatic encounter with a monster follows a sequence of great deeds by Columba that revealed the goodness of the Christian God and his sovereignty over hostile forces natural, human and spiritual. 10 Water is changed into wine (for eucharistic purposes); stormy seas are calmed; demons are exorcized; a ferocious boar is (literally) stopped dead in its tracks. On a journey through northern Pictland, Columba and his companions came upon the burial of a man recently killed by a water beast (aquatilis bestia) as he attempted to swim across the River Ness. Undeterred, Columba instructed one of his acolytes to swim the Ness to retrieve a boat so that the party could cross the river. The beast (bellua) surfaced and with a mighty growl (cum ingenti fremitu) pursued the monk with open maw. Only a spear’s length separated the monster from the monk; all were stupefied, Adomnán reports, save Columba. Raising high a holy hand, the saint invoked God’s name and made the sign of the cross, banishing the fierce monster (feroci bestiae). Now it was the beast that was terrified, and it quickly fled! The monk arrived safe on the far shore and peacefully returned with the boat to his group. Even the barbarous heathens (gentiles barbari), concluded Adomnán with satisfaction, had no choice but to glorify the God of the Christians because of the great miracle they themselves had seen (quod et ipsi viderunt).
That Columba’s adversary has been co-opted by some to prove the existence of the famous Loch Ness Monster has not helped the credibility of the story. Indeed, modern scholarship has not taken Adomnán earnestly as a reliable recorder of facts; he wrote hagiography, not history, deemed an eminent Scottish historian. 11 The story of Columba and the monster is clearly “made up” or, at least, “greatly exaggerated,” with an errant walrus or seal from the North Sea proposed as the beast Columba scared off in the Ness. 12 Scholars influenced by postcolonial theory have detected an “insidious process of ideologically-driven anachronism and obfuscation” in this story, with Adomnán depicting Columba’s wonders in conscious mimicry of Patrick of Ireland, thereby justifying the imposition of Irish culture and Christianity on the Picts. 13 Indeed, immediately after vanquishing the water monster, the Vita portrays Columba as blessing the land to deliver it from poisonous serpents [II.29] just as Patrick purportedly did in Ireland. Nor is this the only echo in the Vita of an earlier miracle by a missionary-saint. In Martin of Tours’s fifth-century biography—a book the Iona monastery possessed—the great saint was accosted by an aggressive river serpent on one of his missionary journeys. “In the name of the Lord,” said Martin, “I command thee to return.” Subsequently, the “venomous beast” promptly swam away. That Columba’s encounter with the monster at the River Ness bears “a suspicious resemblance” to this earlier miracle appears to be further proof of its creative adaptation or even outright fabrication by Adomnán. 14
A more generous reckoning of this story (and Vita Sancti Columbae in general) is by the Dutch historian Jacqueline Borsje. She professes unease with scholars’ hasty demythologizing of the monster story, pointing out that the Picts were very familiar with seals and walruses and not likely to fear one as a “beast.” She also notes how Adomnán used Latin with precision in Vita to describe hostile creatures that were familiar to his audience like boars (apri) or snakes (viperae) as well as unfamiliar: hence, beast/monster (bestia, bellua). 15 It is important for Borsje to preserve the “sense of wonder” that is the very point of medieval miracle stories; but to do so she must account for the transcendent dimension of Columba and the monster through a literary approach to the text, due to the “empirically perceptible, historical reality” of historiography. 16 Borsje consequently reads the story with sympathy and skill but at the cost of severing the literary text from both historical (and spiritual) reality. So even as she admits and appreciates the “wonder” and the evangelistic persuasiveness of the story, for Borsje, the story of Columba and monster at the River Ness reflects a hagiographical literary trope whose origin lay in a more modest iteration found in Vita Sancti Martini.
Yet it is precisely the historical and spiritual dimensions that medieval historiographers did not separate. In their “enchanted” world, clear lines between the physical, spiritual, empirical, and transcendent were not drawn. 17 As such, it is exceedingly difficult for modern and postmodern scholars to read with integrity a story like Columba and the monster, steeped as it is in a premodern world porous to the mysterious and transcendent. For this reason, reading this story analogous to a recent account of a non-western missionary encounter with a monster that has emerged from a similarly porous social imaginary is challenging and rewarding. Some decades ago, Andrew Walls encouraged the reciprocal study of conversion processes in the modern majority world and early medieval Europe in order to enrich the understanding of both.
The conversion process which led to the formation of Northern Christianity is worth renewed study for the sake of understanding the current formation of new Southern Christianity. Indeed, at some points the observation of the Christian presence in primal societies in twentieth-century Africa, Asia or the Pacific may cast light on the pages of Gregory of Tours and Bede and Snorri. The resemblances should never blind us to the differences.
18
Could the missionary narrative of a nineteenth-century Malawian convert, Augustine Ambali, cast light on the pages of Vita Sancti Columbae in such a way that precludes condescension or suspicion of the saint’s encounter with the monster?
Ambali
Augustine Ambali’s 1916 memoir Thirty Years in Nyasaland is one of several firsthand narratives by new Christians emerging from what would become the nation of Malawi (British Nyasaland). 19 Writing in “broken English, it is not good English” (15), Ambali recounts that he was born around 1856 in (present-day) eastern Tanzania, kidnapped around 1862 and sold to a local Muslim, where he was circumcised and raised in that religion. 20 He managed to escape but was soon recaptured. “For as you know in those days all over Africa there was terrible trouble for all black men; war everywhere and raiding, and no peace at all. . . slave-traders everywhere, and they sold men like fowls” (15-16). Impounded onto a slaving vessel, Ambali was set free when the ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy off the coast of east Africa (17). He found his way to the mission school of the Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) near Zanzibar, where he converted to Christianity and was baptized in due course. Recognizing his aptitude and potential, UMCA superiors seconded him to a group of British clergy and African converts commissioned to preach “the good news of the Gospel” (19) along the northern shores of Lake Malawi, where the UMCA had been active for decades. Ambali spent the rest of his life in that region and holds the great distinction of being one of the first two ordained African clergy in the Anglican Church in Malawi.
His richly detailed memoir bristles with interesting observations and dramatic incidents, including tense encounters with hostile Arab traders and Portuguese soldiers. Thirty Years in Nyasaland also features a monster. While on a hunting trip to secure food for the mission, Ambali was attacked by a serpent of mythic repute in Bantu tradition—one prominent in many legends and tales: a cockatrice. 21 A snake of enormous size, with the crested head, wattle, and crow of a rooster, it was greatly feared; the deep forests in which it lurked were to be avoided. Serpents with these characteristics show up in folklore and anecdotes across this region of Africa, and even Livingstone heard the night-time bleat of a similar serpent on his Zambezi journey in the 1850s. 22 Ambali depicts what happened carefully and soberly with attention to time, place, and witnesses, as well as to the physical appearance of the monster.
In 1894, it was the year my second son William Joseph was born I remember, I went hunting and I saw the big snake. One day we went hunting game and there were thirteen of us and we left here about half-past six in the morning and we went about eight miles and we saw a large big serpent the greatest in all the world that I ever saw in my life and its name they call it Songo. . .The snake was very near me that day and nearly bit me and killed me all at once, but we escape safely; and this serpent her form is this: she has a golden colour on her body and her head it is like a big cock and she had a cock’s comb and a cock’s wattles and she crow like a cock. It is not very occasional to be seen, this serpent, not very often can you see her; she can kill ten men in a minute and she bites as quickly as she can; she is very cruel and bad serpent indeed (50-51).
While Ambali’s tale is not the only example from this era by a Malawian writer of an encounter with a legendary beast, his is remarkably detailed. 23 That he lists the various ethnic nomenclatures for the serpent (51) as well as distinctions between this serpent and normal snakes evinces an intent to accurately report what was for him a terrifyingly real encounter. It is also clear — if somewhat implicit in the telling— that Ambali believed that he was delivered from the serpent by the power of God. By re-telling the story in the immediate context of his missionary endeavors in northeastern Nyasaland, Ambali was testifying to the God who had “called me from my birth to be Christian and has sent me here to Nyasaland” (63) and then saved him from many dangers (55) for the sake of the spread of the gospel. And not even the hostile presence of a much-feared serpent of traditional lore could overcome the Christian God and his message of forgiveness and peace that was transforming the warring ethnic groups of the area (38, 53).
A few aspects of his story are worth drawing out for the sake of comparative argument. Ambali’s story is clearly being presented as a factual report: “It is all absolutely true not invented matters at all” (15). And the cockatrice story is almost certainly not literarily dependent on Vita: Ambali’s rudimentary education at the mission school would not have exposed him to Celtic hagiography, and, thus, the monster story of Columba (or Martin). At the same time, his story shares similarities with them and with other medieval missionary precursors. For example, one cannot miss the resonance of Ambali’s repeated apologies for his broken English—at one point even calling himself “stupid” (15, 49, 52)—with Patrick’s embarrassment at his lack of erudition and the “rustic Latin” in which he wrote his Confessio. 24 Further, the retelling of the story has an evangelistic aim. Confronted by a monster that symbolized and embodied evil and cruelty in the traditional cosmology of the culture around him, Ambali is protected by God, thereby witnessing to the non-Christians among whom he served to the fact that, as a medieval missionary chronicle puts it, “Christ is the strongest of the gods” and the one in whom salvation from evil is found. 25 In the words of the Bible that Ambali had learned to read for himself: “And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den” (Isaiah 11:8). 26
It is also worth noting how Ambali’s story aligns with what Gareth Griffiths calls the “classic release narrative” of indigenous Christian converts of the 1870s to 1920s. Against the backdrop of war and social unrest, the protagonist is enslaved or captured, but then providentially escapes to the mission where they experience liberation of body and soul at the hands of the European Christians; baptism follows soon after, and then service to the mission. 27 Griffiths is critical of this genre, arguing that conversion narratives by indigenous voices were often heavily censored by mission authorities to justify the imperial enterprise that brought Christian civilization to a “barbaric” society. Yet Griffiths’ criticisms are not entirely convincing in reference to Ambali’s story. Ambali’s ecclesiastical superiors in the UMCA who published the memoir did not expunge a story about a cockatrice that they themselves would have found incredulous. Second, Ambali's victorious encounter with a beast that was deeply embedded in the African worldview underscores the very continuity between his new Christian faith and past African identity that Griffiths accuses this genre of seeking to obliterate. 28 Indeed, Ambali represents well how new African Christians on the missionary frontier “still made sense of their lives within a cosmology that had expanded to include the Christian god and his emissaries but which still accepted as reality ancestral spirits, sacred areas, witchcraft, magic, ancient genealogies, and founding mythologies.” 29 Lastly, Griffiths’ postcolonial critique overlooks the extent to which Ambali’s story also partakes of a tradition of missionary historiography, going back (at least) to Patrick of Ireland, that utilizes a narrative arc from slavery to freedom to baptism/conversion to, finally, evangelistic work in what Ambali calls “a strange country” (63), i.e. cross-culturally. This tradition sits outside the de-colonizing interpretative grid favored by many contemporary scholars. 30
A final point to be considered in assessing Ambali’s story is that he wrote the story with full knowledge that both the ecclesiastical superiors who were to edit his memoir and the British readership of Thirty Years in Nyasaland would not believe that a cockatrice attacked him. He writes bluntly: “Perhaps many white men they never believe there is this serpent called Songo, but she was very close to me that day but she did not bite me and both I and all my companions we escape from harm” (51). This is a significant admission on Ambali’s part. It shows that his mission-school education and Anglican ministry training had already exposed him to the skeptical cast of the modern mind (even among the High Church UMCA) but that he rejected their worldview. Throughout his memoir Ambali is reflective and perfectly willing to condemn “superstitious” behavior and practices among Africans (e.g. 34-35), but the cockatrice was evidently not of this type. In an article on early twentieth-century Malawian writers schooled at the Scottish Livingstonia Mission, Jack Thompson described this cohort as making “the African side of the case” they believed European missionary narratives neglected or suppressed. 31 Ambali was also making “the African side of the case” for the triumph of the Christian God over an evil reality that Africans knew better than to dismiss as superstition or nonsense.
Conclusion
Considering the memoir of a new Christian evangelist from the Global South sheds light on a classic account of a missionary in early medieval Europe and vice-versa. Both missionary texts describe the risk of evangelistic peregrination over cultural and geographical frontiers; both texts point to the power and attraction of the Christian gospel as rescue from sin, evil, and slavery for individuals and societies. And although the authors of the two texts are separated by twelve centuries and distinguished by race, culture, and a host of other traits, they both indwell “a larger, more populated universe” than that inhabited by the modern West, “with a permanently open frontier between the empirical world and the world of spirit, constantly being crossed in either direction.” 32 They share this universe with the Bible, which also testifies to the reality and historical agency of God and other spiritual beings. Specifically, Columba and Ambali share in the Bible’s “mythological universe” whereby the evil that blights God’s creation and threatens his people with chaos and death is symbolized by monstrous creatures like dragons, serpents, snakes, and beasts: “Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death. . .” (Psalm 44:19). 33 And yet the God of the Bible is powerful to save, defeating the dragon in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (e.g. Revelation 12:9) and promising victory to those who follow Jesus in faith: “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you” (Luke 10:19).
Scholars who inhabit what Walls calls the “little universe” of the post-Enlightenment are hard pressed to account for Christian narratives that have emerged from a more expansive mythological universe in which biblical images of evil like monsters and dragons are not merely symbolic. 34 Gregory of Tours (d. 594) narrates in his Vita Patrum how his near contemporary Portianus vanquished an enormous serpent at the court of the Merovingian ruler, setting in motion events that would bring many to salvation from sin and release from slavery. 35 How does one comprehend this story—or comparable missionary narratives like the story of Columba and the river monster or Ambali and the cockatrice—with critical discernment and with generous openness to the religious faith and cultural postulates that shaped the authors? While Columba’s river monster safely recedes from (a sense of) credibility into the mists of a long-ago, far-away Celtic world, Ambali’s cockatrice is disarmingly close and, indeed, contentiously set in the narrative by the author to provoke the secular mind. Perhaps it suffices to remain ambivalent. Scholars of mission need not ultimately accept Columba’s beast or Ambali’s serpent as real as much as they need to remain open to the challenge of a larger universe beyond “modernity’s hidden postulates” of what is normal and possible. 36 By doing this, as the historian Bruce Hindmarsh wisely stated in reference to the study of conversion narratives, one gives every effort “to read with the grain before reading against the grain.” 37
