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THE GOLDEN AGE OF IRELAND - A LAND OF SAINTS AND SCHOLARS

1) INTRODUCTION

This was the most incredible period of history for Ireland. It lasted for 500

years from the beginning of the 5th century to the end of the 9th. One great

tragedy about all of this is that the majority of the Irish People are not aware

of what took place in these centuries and what Ireland contributed to

Western civilisation. This is the equivalent of the Greeks deciding to ignore

the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, thinking it to be an irrelevant period

in Greek history. What madness and neglect that would be? Even worse, it is

my belief that that which produced that greatness has not been lost to the

Irish people but lies dormant within our hearts and minds. With the right

environment, there is no reason that Ireland could not rise to that greatness

again. By studying this period we can be inspired and more importantly come

to understand the factors which facilitated its flourishing thus allowing for the

possibility of creating these factors again so that, in the best context, history

might repeat itself.

Firstly, let us hear what certain respected foreign commentators have said

about the Golden Age of Ireland.

Renan, the French commentator, said, ‘Nowhere, perhaps, has God been

worshipped in spirit and in truth more than in the Great Communities of Iona,

Bangor, Clonard and Lindesfarne.’

Nora Chadwick said, ‘A golden age of innocence and piety which has never

been surpassed and perhaps been equalled only by the ascetics of the eastern

deserts’.

Kenneth Clarke wrote, ‘It is hard to believe that for quite a long time – almost

a hundred years (late 5th century to late 6th century) – western Christianity

survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen

miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea’.

This was a period in which great characters lived on earth. Pope Leo the

Great was elected about a dozen years after St. Patrick landed in Ireland. St.

Augustine of Hippo died about two years before St. Patrick started his

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mission. St. Columbcille was born in 521, 8 years before the inauguration of

the Benedictine order, the success of which order eventually brought about

the cessation of the Irish way of monastic living. Emperor Justinian died close

to when Columbcille went to Iona. St. Kevin predeceased Mohammed by 14

years. St. Fintan remained in his hermitage in Schaffhaussen on the Rhine for

27 years, a period which saw the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman

Emperor in 800 and his death in 814 and also the period in which Europe

enjoyed a brief renaissance.

Early medieval Ireland offers something unique and interesting to students of

history: the record of a people untouched by the Roman Empire. Ireland

alone of all the modern countries in Western Europe enjoyed a period of a

1000 years and more – until the first Viking raiders – during which she

evolved and developed an indigenous and unbroken culture different in many

ways from any that existed on the continent. The Roman Church romanised

most of Europe but the Irish took Christianity in its purity and gave it a unique

Irish flavour. So long before theological and political conflicts tragically

divided Christianity, one of the most ancient and creative churches grew to

prominence. During its time it kept classical learning alive while the so called

Dark Ages were casting their shadows across Europe.

2) BEFORE CHRISTIANITY

Ireland was rural in an almost absolute sense. There were no villages even. It

was still a country of isolated holdings, organised in a tribal, familial culture –

kinship binding these holdings together.

Irish society was divided into four classes. It was aristocratic, a hierarchical

system of individual, autonomous units. No single nation or state confronted

Patrick as there was no state, or nation, or king over all. There were,

however, kings, tribal chieftains; and under them warriors and as their equals,

"men of special gifts," - druids, bards, doctors, historians (for the most part in

one) - and finally there were ordinary freemen. The Druids whole system of

belief was based on the wonder of nature and so they were very much in

touch with the earth. The Druids were effectively the priests of their religion.

They were well educated, usually literate and had an excellent grasp of

matters environmental and astrological. The Druids used nature to see into

the future by reading signs. The bards were historians, legislators, judges,

poets and warriors. So great a force were they that they were able to

challenge the authority of the king himself.

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In the sixth century, the great Welsh bard Taliesin claimed: "Christ, the Word

from the beginning, was from the beginning our Teacher, and we never lost

his teaching. Christianity was in Asia a new thing; but there never was a time

when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrines.

Legend also tells us, for instance, that Irish sages attended the events on

Golgotha "in the spirit" and felt, by what means we cannot tell, "the groans

and travails of creation cease." Yeats notes a similar story in which on the day

of the Crucifixion King Conchubar and Bucrach the Leinster Druid are sitting

together. Conchubar notices "the unusual changes of the creation and the

eclipse of the sun and the moon at its full"; he asks the Druid the cause of

these signs, and Bucrach replies, "Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is now

being crucified by the Jews.

Though the society was an oral one, it nevertheless by any standards

embodied a “high” culture. There were schools, and a great body of

traditional knowledge and lore.

As Ludwig Bieler commented: “Ireland is unique in the medieval western

world in having not only a native literature but also a native tradition of

professional learning.” Thus, once having acquired a written script, the Irish

were culturally well prepared to preserve not only their own traditions, but

those of classical Greek and Latin literature also. This they did, thereby

ensuring the continuity of European culture.

3) ST. PATRICK’S MISSION

This thirty-year span of Patrick’s mission in the middle of the fifth century

encompasses a period of change so rapid and extreme that Europe will never

see its like again. By 461, the likely year of Patrick’s death, the Roman Empire

is careering in chaos, barely fifteen years away from the death of the last

western emperor. For as the Roman lands went from peace to chaos, the

land of Ireland was rushing even more rapidly from chaos to peace.

The origins of Christian Ireland are highly mysterious and we do not know

when or how Christianity was introduced into the island. When Saint Patrick

reached Auxerre in 415, he found an Irishman among the clerics of St.

Amator. There must then have already been Irish Christians, who had

perhaps been converted by the slaves captured on the shores of Britain.

Historically speaking, the Christian origins of Ireland go back to PALLADIUS who

came in 431 and died the following year. His mission was restricted to the south

of the country. Five bishops are often mentioned who were certainly of Irish

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birth and belonged to the days before Patrick – Ibar and his disciple Abban,

Declan, Ailbe and Ciaran the elder. It seems almost certain that SAINT IBAR,

whose activities were of a local kind, and did not stretch beyong the town of

Wexford, was consecrated bishop before Saint Patrick.

Patrick is calculated to be around 47 when he came to Ireland. He refers to a

sin he committed and this was probably around age 15. Let us say this was

400. He was kidnapped the following year and escaped perhaps in 407, but

was not ordained till about 430, since he did not return to Ireland till about

432, when he would have been-at least, according to this reckoning-forty-

seven.

It was Germanus who decided to consecrate Patrick as Bishop for Ireland,

who had been preparing for this hour in retreat, study and prayer for not less

than fifteen years. His mission initially concentrated on the north of the

country. The traditional chronology in regard to Saint Patrick is that died in

A.D. 461. There are however a number of objections to this which cannot be

easily set aside. Thus the Irish Annals, a document which in general deserves

to be accepted, tells us of the death of Patrick in 461, and then mentions him

again as living in 492! It has been thought that there may have been two

Patricks in succession to each other, and that legend may in consequence

have mixed up the facts about the two men and their actions, in order to

produce the fictitious figure of one, single Patrick, which would thus account

for his long life!

What is strikingly different about Patrick’s missionary activities is the fact that

he went, as he himself put it, ‘even to outlying regions beyond which no man

dwelt, and where never had anyone come to baptize or ordain clergy, or

confirm the people’.

By the time of his death Ireland had been fundamentally Christianized. What

is remarkable is that it is the only country in the history of Christianity in

which no blood was shed in its establishment. Why was this so?

Patrick’s main work, of course, was, that of conversion, establishing bishops,

churches and the seeds of monasticism. His success in this seems to have

resided in his willingness to accept the indigenous traditions and conform his

teaching to them. His description of God which follows is very much the God

of Nature which would have appealed to a people with a Druidic culture.

There is the story of the conversion in Connaught of the daughters of the High

King of Tara. When these questioned him as to who the New God was, and

where he dwelt, Patrick replied:

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“Our God is the God of all men, the God of Heaven and Earth,

of sea and river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and the

lowly valley,

the God above Heaven, the God in Heaven, the God under Heaven;

He has his dwelling round Heaven and Earth and sea and all that in them is.

He inspires all, he quickens all, he dominates all, he sustains all.

He lights the light of the sun; he furnishes the light of the light;

He has put springs in the dry land and has set stars to minister to the greater

lights.”

Patrick’s view is that reality is a continuum, and all God’s creatures are

theophanies of God himself, for God speaks in them and through them. St.

Patrick would have been impressed by the natural mysticism of the Irish

which told them that the world was holy – all of it, not just parts of it. For St.

Patrick God was both transcendent and immanent. This was in contrast to

Rome where increasingly God was only a transcendent God.

Everywhere in Celtic Ireland we find a holy intimacy of human, natural and

divine. In hermitages and monasteries, on rocky promontories and lonely

hillsides, we find everywhere a tremendous proximity of the human and

divine in nature, an abandonment to spiritual work and simultaneously a

cultivation of the earth.

Because Patrick established a church in perfect conformity with the existing

spirituality of Ireland, the Druids and Bards, being converted, learnt Latin and

incorporated their own traditions into the existing Christian ones. Like all

aristocratic societies they had set great store on memory, learning,

genealogy. Thus the bards now became synchronizers and so, by the seventh

century as Robin Flowers notes, “the monks had accepted the pagan

traditions and put it on one level with the historical material which came to

them from the Church.

We know that St. Patrick destroyed nothing in the national traditions save the

little that was vicious and erroneous. He had a tender regard for what was

genuinely human and natural in his converts, except in so far as it was

opposed to the faith he came to teach. And his fellow saints and their

successors followed suit, so that it is one of the glories of Irish monasticism

that it was tolerant and broadminded in the best sense of the words. Thanks

to this deep understanding, the heroic literature of the ancient regime was

never destroyed.

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Patrick held out to these warrior children, in his own person, that it is possible

to be brave-to expect "every day ... to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved-

what- ever may come my way" -and yet be a man of peace and at peace, a

man without sword or desire to harm, a man in whom the sharp fear of death

has been smoothed away. He was "not afraid of any of these things, because

of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God

Almighty."

Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity-the first deRomanized Christianity

in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the

Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the

Irish scene. Through the Edict of Milan, which had legalized the new religion

in 313 and made it the new emperor's pet, Christianity had been received into

Rome, not Rome into Christianity! Roman culture was little altered by the

exchange, and it is arguable that Christianity lost much of its distinctiveness.

But in the Patrician exchange, Ireland, lacking the power and implacable

traditions of Rome, had been received into Christianity, which transformed

Ireland into Something New, something never seen before-a Christian culture,

where slavery and human sacrifice to a large degree became unthinkable, and

warfare, though found impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished

markedly.

Indeed, the survival of an Irish psychological identity is one of the marvels of

the Irish story. Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled

themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences. The pagan

festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate

the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe'en. As late as the twelfth century-

seven centuries after the conversion of the Irish to the Gospel-a husband or

wife could call it quits and walk out for good on February 1, the feast of

Imbolc, which meant that Irish marriages were renewable yearly, like t.v.

licences or insurance policies.

This broadmindedness was, of course, in line with the attitude of official

Christendom; but, whereas, even in Rome, the important principle at stake

had to fight long and fight hard for recognition, its acceptance in Ireland

seems to have been as peaceful as it was widespread.

Celtic spirituality was very much the child of the pagan culture which

preceded it. It valued learning, science, literature, poetic imagination and

artistic creativity. It was spiritually profoundly affected by nature and its

beauty

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No race adopted Christianity with so much originality as did the Irish. The

fundamentals of the faith they received from outside like the rest of the

nations, but from the first they grafted this stem on the national stock with

extraordinary thoroughness. This is why Renan remarked that “the Irish

family of Christians drew everything out of itself; it lived entirely on its own

capital.”

From an initially standard administrative system adopted from the western

church, in which bishops ruled over dioceses whose territorial boundaries

were clearly defined, the Irish churches appear to have been transformed into

a quite different but distinctive organization in which most of the important

churches are monastic houses, united to lesser daughter houses in a

confederation or paruchia under the overall control of the abbot of the

mother church. In stark contrast to the earlier continental pattern, the

paruchia was not a territorial unit with fixed boundaries, for the monastic

churches comprising it might be widely scattered. This and another

distinctive feature marked off the Irish church as different: administrative

power was in the hands of the abbot, not the bishop. Bishops there were still,

of course, since the ecclesiastical dignities and sacramental functions of the

bishop could never be dispensed with. But his administrative jurisdiction was

apparently a thing of the past; that now rested in the hands of the

abbot.There were, of course no archbishops in the Celtic Church, and a bishop

had no authority in the economy or organization of the monastery which was

ruled by an abbot. There was nothing like this on the continent.

There is no denying the crucial importance of the fact that Ireland was never

a province of the Roman Empire and never acquired the apparatus of the Late

Roman government and administration which has left its stamp on Western

Europe and Christianity to this day.

3) THE MONASTIC SCHOOLS

"The Church has known days more resplendent and more solemn, days

better calculated to raise the admiration of sages; but I knew not if she has

ever breathed forth a charm more touching and pure than in the springtime

of monastic life."

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Thus said Montalembert in his great work “The Monks of the West”.

Nowhere, with the possible exception of Egypt, did the monastic idea develop

so rapidly or produce types so singular as in Ireland. For this we must take

into account that Ireland was evangelised, in the first instance, by one who

had been trained in a monastery and secondly, the liveliness and

independence of the Celtic temperament. Although St. Patrick was able to

speak of the multitude of his converts who had retired from the world, Irish

monasticism was not properly established until some fifty years after his

death. From that time onwards, dedication to a life of seclusion and prayer

was the chief feature of the national religious life.

St. Patrick's influence was established earliest in the north, the monastic

movement first entered the country from the south. There is reason to think

that whereas the Patrician Church passed directly from Britain to Ireland,

perhaps under stimulus from the Church in Gaul, the monastic Church

penetrated from Munster, where powerful monasteries were founded at an

early date. This area, and in particular the monastery of Lismore and others

on the Blackwater and the Barrow, were evidently in direct intellectual

intercourse with the Continent in the sixth century, especially with Aquitaine

and most probably with Spain also. It is from these progressive Munster

centres that the prominent anchorite foundations of the following period,

notably Tallaght, Finglas, and Terryglas, drew their founders and their origin.

There were both external and internal factors which brought about

manasticism in Ireland.

Externally, after Patrick, with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Irish

experienced an influx of anchorites and monks fleeing before the barbarian

hordes. "All the learned men on this side of the sea," claims a note in a

Leyden manuscript of this time, "took flight for transmarine places like

Ireland, bringing about a great increase of learning"-and, doubtlessly, a

spectacular increase in the number of books -"to the inhabitants of those

regions." But not a few of these men were ascetics from such Roman

hinterlands as Armenia, Syria, and the Egyptian desert. The Ulster monastery

of Bangor, for instance, claimed in its litany to be "ex Aegypto transducta"

("translated from Egypt"); and the convention of using red dots to adorn

manuscript initials, a convention that soon became a mark of Irish

manuscripts, had first been glimpsed by the Irish in books that the fleeing

Copts brought with them.

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The primary internal factor which facilitated the flourishing of monasticism in

Ireland was that the Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries had a thing

which they called the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red

Martyrdom by blood. The Green Martyrs were those who, leaving behind the

comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, retreated to the woods, or

to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island-to one of the green no-man's-lands

outside tribal jurisdictions-there to study the scriptures and commune with

God. For among the story collections Patrick gave them they found the

examples of the anchorites of the Egyptian desert, who, also lacking the

purification rite of persecution, had lately devised a new form of holiness by

living alone in isolated hermitages, braving all kinds of physical and

psychological adversity, and imposing on themselves the most heroic fasts

and penances, all for the sake of drawing nearer to God.

The monasteries emerged because of an impulse for religiously-minded men

to escape from the real world. They wanted time by themselves, and started

living as hermits. In many cases these hermits developed a popular following,

and these groups often formed the basis of the monastery and thus, the

wished-for extremes of the Green Martyrdom were largely-and quickly-

abandoned in favor of monasticism. Since Ireland had no cities, these

monastic establishments grew rapidly into the first population centers, hubs

of unprecedented prosperity, art, and learning.

These austere ascetics, without intending it, conferred a boon upon their age

which has no parallel in the history of any other country. This boon was the

establishment of the Termons ( from which we have nameplaces such as

Termon feckin today) or districts recognised alike by law and custom as

sacred, immune from legal imposts, and from all invasion even in the course

of a civil war. Termon was a sanctuary and these sanctuaries were so

revered by the body of the Irish nation that they were unmolested for three

hundred years, their violation being regarded as infamous as well as unlucky.

To this" Truce of God," Ireland owed the comparative repose that enabled

students and scholars from every land to come and go at their pleasure.

Monasteries of a thousand men were no rarity and three thousand was not

unknown. St. Finnian found his famous monastic school near the Boyne and

became known as the Tutor of the Irish Saints and at one period had three

thousand pupils. Many of these left him in order to set up monasteries of

their own, so that Clonard became " a mighty tree with innumerable

branches." In Glendalough, there were said to be 2000 monks at one stage.

On a plain to the east of the Lower Lake, the monks built what would become

in time a kind of university city, to which came thousands of hopeful students

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first from all over Ireland, then from England, and at last from everywhere in

Europe. There was certainly no family in the country which had no monks

amongst its sons, and the women rivalled the men in their pious ardour.

One of the first famous monasteries was established by Enda. Enda was born

in Meath, and had been a military man until his sister St Fanchea convinced

him that he should give his life to God. Enda founded his first monastery in

Ireland on the Aran Islands, and his followers would spread out and set up ten

further monasteries in his name. He had many disciples who would be key

figures in Irish religious life, such as Colum Cille, Brendan, Ciaran, Kevin and

Finnian.

The big three monasteries, and the most famous, appeared during the sixth

century: Clonard, Clonmacnois, and Clonfert. These became famous as the

leading educational monasteries that trained Irish men (and foreigners) to be

brilliant scribes, artists, and thinkers. These were the religious equivalents of

the Ivy League Colleges: only the best and brightest went there, and once

trained, they went round the world to spread the word. The great

monasteries were headed by remarkable and powerful abbesses or abbots,

such as Brigit of Kildare, Columcille of Iona, Finnian of Clonard, Ita of Killeedy,

Brendan of Clonfert, Kevin of Glendalough, Ciaran of Clonmacnois, and David

of Wales. Many of the first male founders and abbots of these monasteries,

as the early hagiographies maintain, were probably celibate priests and

bishops. Women founders and abbesses also lived celibate lives within

religious communities. The male monastic leaders who followed the early

pioneers might have been either ordained or lay. Many were evidently

married, since the marriage of priests throughout the entire early church was

commonplace and the Celtic church was no exception. In some Irish

monasteries, in fact, the abbacy descended from father to son.

The monasteries were estates, small farms with livestock and fields. They

were publishing houses, with scriptoria; and finally they were schools.

Thus the work of compilation, and spiritual investigation, were both carried

out in the monasteries. Whereas Egyptian monasticism produced nothing but

naked sanctity, its Hibernian counterpart from first to last clothed itself in the

graceful garment of art, and became a veritable citadel of culture throughout

the Dark Ages again reflecting the belief in both a transcendent and

immanent God as opposed to a God who was only transcendent. The primary

purpose of these, of course was contemplation and the practice of the

presence of God but more "scholarly" activity was not seen to conflict with

this. "Live in Christ, that Christ may live in you." Columbanus told his students:

"Taste and see, how lovely, how pleasant is the Lord." Continuous prayer was

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the ideal, to "pray in every position." A gloss asks, "What is prayer without

ceasing?" and it replies: "The answer is not difficult. Some say it is celebrating

the canonical hours, but that is not the true meaning. It is when all the

members of the body are inclined to good deeds and evil deeds are put away

from them.

Though ascetic, then, the Irish monks were hostile to neither learning nor

nature and practised greatly the contemplation of both of these. Indeed,

these two - Scripture and nature - were according to John Scottus Eriugena

the two shoes of Christ, whose latchet John the Baptist was not yet ready to

undo. Without over emphasising it, this reflects once more the transcendent

and immanent God.

Here, the Seven Liberal Arts were practised while the rest of Europe was still

in the "dark ages" of transition; the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic

(which in practice meant Latin and Greek) and the Quadrivium of arithmetic,

geometry, astronomy and music. These, however, were not ends in

themselves, but were merely the preliminaries and prerequisites for the study

of Scripture and theology.

"What is best in the world?" asked Columbanus, author of the most severe

and ascetical Rule, and he answered: To do the will of its maker. What is this

will? That we should do what he has ordered, that is, that we should live in

righteousness and seek devotedly what is eternal (note: righteousness to

have the proper relationship with the immanent God and seeking devotedly

the eternal so that we may have the true relationship with the the

transcendent God). How do we arrive at this? By study. We must therefore

study devotedly and righteously. What is our best help in maintaining this

study? The Intellectus, which probes everything and, finding none of the

world's goods in which it can permanently rest, is converted by reason into

the one good which is eternal.

Thus, the monasteries assimilated and superseded the ancient bardic and

druidic foundations. They welcomed people into the monastery who wanted

to learn from the resident monks. The picture of native scholars imparting

their learning to foreign students from Britain and the Continent, free of

charge, is one of the most oft-cited passages in the Venerable Bede's History

of the English Church and People:

“The Irish welcomed them all gladly, gave them their daily food, and also

provided them with books to read and with instruction, without asking for

any payment.” From the careful Bede we learn, therefore, that the Irish

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monastic universities accepted commoners as well as noblemen and those

who wished for learning but not the cloister.

From the top to the bottom of the social scale, all ranks and classes are

represented. St. Cormac of Cashel was a king as well as a bishop. Adamnan

was eighth in descent from the immortal Niall himself. Fintan could make a

similar though not quite so strong a claim. St. Columcille, had royal blood in

his veins. On the other hand, St. Dichu, Patrick's first convert, was originally a

swineherd. Tassach, who gave St. Patrick the Last Sacraments, had been a

sort of smith or mechanic.

Padraic Pearse wrote of these schools:

“It seems to me that there has been nothing nobler in the history of

education than this development of the old Irish plan of fosterage under a

Christian rule, when to the pagan ideals of strength and truth there were

added the Christian ideals of love and humility. And this, remember, was not

the education system of an aristocracy, but the education system of a people.

It was more democratic than any educational system in the world today. At

Clonard Kieran, the son of a carpenter, sat in the same class as Columcille, son

of a king. To Clonard or to Aran or to Clonmacnoise went every man, rich or

poor, prince or peasant, who wanted to sit at Finian's or at Enda's or at

Kieran's feet and to learn of his wisdom.”

Most of the monasteries and convents had a bard attached to the

community, and St. Brigit used to make him play and sing whenever her nuns

showed signs of depression. Not infrequently these monastic singers and

players were to be found amongst the members of the community. St.

Colman of Cloyne was a bard before becoming a monk, and the oldest bardic

composition extant is the Psalter of Cashel which was compiled by Cormac

MacCullenan, bishop of Cashel and king of Munster. As for Columcille, he was

the Troubadour of Ireland, who made music and poetry an integral part of

religion.

The plain historical fact is that the monastic enclosures of these detached

ascetics became the sanctuaries of cultivation at a time when it stood in

desperate need of an asylum in which to recuperate its failing energies. It

was by means of their culture that the spiritual susceptibilities of the ancient

Greeks were prepared for the reception of the Gospel. The same may be said

of Ireland, whose accomplishments earned for her the title of the Christian

Greece. When all seemed lost, salvation was imminent; and it came chiefly

through the monasteries, and first of all through the Irish monasteries. When

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the walls of the Eternal City were being breached by the battering rams of the

barbarians, either destroying culture or bringing it to a standstill, the Muses

sought and found an asylum in Ireland.

These teachers left a lasting impression on their own and succeeding

generations. Not only were they the chief professors of grammar, poetry,

astronomy, music and geography, when these branches had no other, or

scarcely any representatives elsewhere, but also they profoundly influenced

the course of thought in matters of philosophy and theology. Of course, the

two oldest of Europe’s universities, Paris and Pavia, may almost be said to

have been founded by Irishmen.

As Christopher Dawson says: "If the culture of the Dark Ages was a culture of

schoolmasters, they were the schoolmasters of Europe." The work

accomplished was educational rather than literary, the transmission of the

classic and patristic literature to the new peoples. Ireland is the outstanding

instance of this work. Before her conversion she possessed a very vigorous

native culture, a vernacular culture which she did not lose in her contact with

Latin Christianity. Moreover the Irish missionaries started the ball of

vernacular culture rolling elsewhere-in Northern England and in Germany.

The monks were among the first people to start researching and writing a

history of Ireland.

The suddenness and vigour with which monasticism took root in the newly-

converted island is usually traced in some part to the clan system. Irish

society had been organised on a tribal basis under paganism, and it remained

so organised for more than ten centuries after the country had been

Christianised. Very wisely, the first missionaries exploited this organisation

for their purposes, addressing themselves first of all to the head of the clan,

and through him getting at the people. Usually, when a chief was converted,

he set aside part of his territory as a monastic enclosure which was recruited

from the clan. These new monks found themselves living under much the

same social condition, the abbot being the chieftain to whom they swore

obedience and allegiance. When later new communities branched off from

the mother house, they were grouped under the name of the original founder

in a free federal union identical with that of the clan system.

The monasteries in Ireland advanced a rational and reasoned approach to

understanding the Bible that had previously been lacking. There are some

things that might have raised a flutter in continental circles, for the Irish were

still using biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha long since lost or forgotten

in the rest of Europe. They had a deep love for St. John’s gospel considered to

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be the mystical gospel and containing the highest teachings of Christ. As

unconcerned about orthodoxy of thought as they were about uniformity of

monastic practice, they brought into their libraries everything they could lay

their hands on. They were resolved to shut out nothing. Not for them the

scruples of Saint Jerome, who feared he might burn in hell for reading Cicero.

Once they had learned to read the Gospels and the other books of the Holy

Bible, the lives of the martyrs and ascetics, and the sermons and

commentaries of the fathers of the church, they began to devour all of the old

Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way. These monks respected

the classics, especially Virgil. The writings of St. Columban are enlightened by

classical quotations and allusions. He seems to have been particularly fond of

the poems of Sappho.

In their unrestrained catholicity, they shocked conventional churchmen, who

had been trained to value Christian literature principally and give a wide berth

to the dubious morality of the pagan classics.

It was not that the Irish were uncritical, just that they saw no value in self-

imposed censorship. To John T. McNeill, the church historian, it was precisely

"the breadth and richness of Irish monastic learning, derived from the

classical ... authors" that was about to give Ireland its "unique role in the

history of Western culture."

Though these early Irish literates were intensely interested in the worlds

opened up to them by the three sacred languages of Greek, Latin, and-in a

rudimentary form-Hebrew, they also loved their own tongue too much ever

to stop using it. Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be

caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish were very happy to do so.

The Irish in the sixth century were in a position unique in the history of

western Europe: their conversion to Christianity had forced upon them the

necessity for learning a foreign language with which they were not in

frequent contact'." Unlike their continental counterparts, who at least spoke

Vulgar Latin as their everyday language, the Irish were confronted with an

entirely new language: 'an Italian or Spaniard who had studied no grammar

would write bad Latin; an Irishman without grammar could write no Latin at

all'.

A knowledge of Latin was essential for the understanding of church liturgy

and ritual, for reading and interpreting the Scriptures, as well as for the day-

to-day business of ecclesiastical administration in a church which saw itself as

part of the international community of western Christendom. But with the

15

exception of the occasional British clerics they might come into contact with,

the Irish had no regular exposure to spoken or written Latin; they had to start

from scratch. In these circumstances the only available source of information

about Latin grammar was in books.

There was no such thing as a latin grammer (so far as we know) at the

beginning of the sixth century. By the end of that century, however, a new

kind of Latin grammar, the elementary grammar designed specifically for

beginners with no previous knowledge of Latin, had come into being, and the

credit for producing it is due in large part to the Irish.

The monks of the time were recognised as some of the best people at writing

and speaking Latin. They developed a set of new graphic conventions

designed to make it easier for non-Latin-speakers to read manuscripts written

in that language. This 'grammar of legibility', as it has been called led them to

introduce for the first time word-separation, capitalization of initial letters,

and punctuation, together with a system of signs which they used to indicate

the grammatical relationship of the words in Latin.

Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish and

illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literature

without the example of the Irish who, as said before, were the first to write

down their literatures in their native tongue. Beyond that, in the West, there

would have most likely perished not only literacy but perhaps all the habits of

mind that encourage thought. And when Islam began its medieval expansion,

it would have encountered scant resistance to its plans – just scattered tribes

of animists, ready for a new identity. The title of the book “ How Ireland

saved civilisation” may, in fact be not too off the mark.

The only alphabet the Irish had ever known was prehistoric Ogham, a

cumbersome set of lines based on the Roman alphabet, which they incised

laboriously into the corners of standing stones to turn them into memorials.

These rune-like inscriptions, which continued to appear in the early years of

the Christian period, hardly suggested what would happen next, for within a

generation the Irish had mastered Latin and even Greek and, as best they

could, were picking up some Hebrew. As has been said, they devised Irish

grammars, and copied out the whole of their native oral literature.

In terms of writing, the Irish combined the stately letters of the Greek and

Roman alphabets with the talismanic, spellbinding simplicity of Ogham to

produce initial capitals and headings that rivet one's eyes to the page and

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hold the reader in awe. Although the art of illumination was foreign to

Ireland, they brought it to as high a degree of perfection as it attained

anywhere. As late as the twelfth century, Geraldus Cambrensis was forced to

conclude that the Book of Kells was "the work of an angel, not of a man."

Even today, Nicolete Gray in A History of Lettering can say of its great "Chi-

Rho" page that the three Greek characters-the monogram of Christ-are "more

presences than letters.

This sense of balance in imbalance, of riotous complexity moving swiftly

within a basic unity, found its most extravagant expression in Irish Christian

art-in the monumental high crosses, in miraculous liturgical vessels such as

the Ardagh Chalice, and, most delicately of all, in the art of the Irish codex.

Astonishingly decorated Irish manuscripts of the early medieval period are

today the great jewels of libraries in England, France, Switzerland, Germany,

Sweden, Italy, and even Russia.

THE MONASTIC RULES

The practice of penance was one of the most definite contributions which the

puzzling spectacle of Irish monasticism brought to the Church and to

Christianity. In order to fix the customs, the leaders of the Irish Church had

special treatises drawn up, regular catalogues of sins and faults and the

necessary acts of expiation, the famous Penitentials, which have always been

proverbial for their severity. It is certainly true that the penances laid down

were heavy and bear no relation to the ten Hail Marys with which the

confessors of our day are satisfied! For being drunk once the penalty was a

forty days' fast on bread and water, and one lustful look at a pretty woman

had to be paid for in the same way!

For the monastic rules of the period which follows let us turn to that of

Luxeuil, which owes its direct inspiration, under the guidance of Saint

Columbanus, to the Rule of Bangor. The latter, which has disappeared, seems

to have been a synthesis of the best Irish Regulae of the sixth century. It is

dominated by the three fundamental requirements of prayer, manual labour

and study, with the addition of fasting and various ascetic practices. The aim

of the Rule is to support souls who are seeking after perfection; the idea

underlying it all the time is that self-denial is the most certain road to sanctity.

Herewith are three examples from the Rule of Luxeuil.

1) the food be frugal and taken in the evening; it should never lead to over-

eating or the drink to inebriation; the object is to restore one's strength, not

to make oneself ill.

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2) The perfect monk should live in the monastery, under the rule of one

Father, in the company of numerous brothers, so that he may learn his

examples of humility or of patience from others, of silence from one, of

gentleness from another; he should never follow his own will; he should eat

what is set before him and not withhold for himself that which is entrusted to

his care; he should complete his tasks with exactness; he should be subject to

one whom he has not chosen; by the hour of rest he should be dropping with

fatigue; at the hour of waking he should still have the desire to sleep, rather

than be driven from his bed by excessive slumber; he should bear in silence

any injuries he receives; he should respect the superior of the monastery as

his master and love him as a father, and should have confidence in him that

he has good reasons for the orders which he gives; he should never permit

himself to pass judgement on the commands of his superiors; his duty is to

obey, to do that which is right.

3) He who, when he has received the blessing, has not made the sign of the

cross, and has not turned towards the cross, shall be punished with twelve

strokes. In the same way, he who has forgotten to pray before or after work,

deserves to receive twelve strokes. He, who eats without asking a blessing,

shall receive twelve strokes. He, who, at the beginning of the psalm, does not

adequately control his cough, deserves to receive six strokes. In the same

way, he who touches the Chalice of salvation with his teeth, shall have six

strokes. He, who does not respect the order of the Sacrifice as it should be

followed, shall receive six strokes. The priest who has not clipped his nails

properly before celebrating, and the deacon who is not well shaved, shall

receive six strokes. He who replies to a remark from one of his brothers 'this

is not true' (except in the case of a senior monk saying it gently to one of the

young men) shall be sentenced to silence or to fifty strokes. "

THE PENITENTIALS

Alongside the Rules strictly so called, the Penitentials came to have a

recognized status, the famous Irish penitentials, which exerted an influence

throughout the whole of Christendom, and also provoked violent reactions on

the Continent, to the point of being met with strongly worded interdicts. The

Councils of Chalon in 813 and of Paris in 829 formally condemned them.

Professor Gabriel Le Bras concluded that with these writings "the Irish have

contributed more than any other people in the Dark Ages to the progress of

the moral conscience in the West."

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The earliest of these penitentials is that of Finnian of Clonard, which takes us

back to the first half of the sixth century. Closely connected with it are the

directions attributed to two companions of the holy Abbot, Gildas and David.

These three monks directly inspired the celebrated Regula Coenobialis, which

was drawn up at Luxeuil by Saint Columbanus. This penitential, which is

divided into two parts, is of the first importance, since he it was who

introduced the Irish penitential customs to the Continent, where penalties for

fairly serious offences were concerned. Below are a translation of extracts

from various penitentials.

"35. If a layman is converted to the Lord from evil deeds, and if he has

formerly committed some grave sin, such as fornication or murder, he shall

do penance for three years and shall travel without arms, though he may

carry a stick in his hand; and he may not live with his wife. Only during the

first year must he live on bread and water, but he may not live with his wife.

After three years' penance, he must give some money for the redemption of

his soul, placing the price of his repentance in the hands of the priest, and he

shall give a feast for the servants of God on the day when his penance ends.

He shall then receive Holy Communion and may resume relations with his

wife.

"47. If a child dies without Baptism, owing to negligence, great is the guilt of

those who have caused the loss of its soul. Expiation by penance is possible,

however, for there is no guilt which penance cannot expiate. The parents

must do penance for a whole year on bread and water, and may not sleep in

the same bed. "

From the Penitential of Columbanus , we have:

"12. Gossips shall be sentenced to silence, disturbers of the peace to gentle

behaviour, gluttons to fasting, sluggards to keeping vigil, the proud to

imprisonment, the unjust to banishment: all as they deserve, in proportion to

their offences, so that they may make good and live once again in the right

way.

"31. If a layman steals an ox, a horse, a sheep, or any other animal: should

this offence have been committed once or twice, he must compensate his

neighbour for the loss he has undergone, and do penance for three periods of

forty days on bread and water. If, however, he has been guilty of more

frequent thefts, and is not in a position to make restitution, he must do

penance for a year and three periods of forty days, and then promise to steal

no more. He will then be able to receive Holy Communion once in two years;

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he must give alms to the poor, and give an offering to the priest who acts as

judge in his case; he will then be given absolution.

"32. If a layman has committed perjury: if he has acted out of covetousness,

he must sell all his property, distribute the money among the poor, offer

himself to God, receive the tonsure, and serve God in a monastery for the rest

of his life. If he has not acted out of covetousness, but under the threat of

death, he must go into exile for three years and live on bread and water; for

the next two years he must abstain from meat and wine; then, for two further

years (when he may eat anything except meat), he must set a soul at liberty in

payment for his own, that is to say he must free a male or female slave, and

at the same time distribute alms. At the end of seven years he may receive

Holy Communion.

5) THE WANDERING SCHOLARS

Irish spirituality spread throughout Western Europe. This happened because,

instead of remaining confined within their enclosures of bare stones, the

Celtic monks were from the start, and throughout the centuries, great

travellers, the most astonishing wanderers for Christ. "The monasteries",

says Georges Goyau, "were mission stations. Scarcely were men baptized

than they wished to become monks, and this was in order to preach, to bring

in more candidates for Baptism, to raise up more monks." This was certainly

a feature of the Irish character, a people in whom one cannot fail to see a

wandering tendency but with whom the spirit of the apostolate was also very

strong. For six centuries these Irish monks can be seen engaged in endless

adventures, setting up their crosses everywhere, first in the islands near their

own, then moving further and further from their bases, always tireless,

always fearless, real heroes of legend, bearing a likeness to the prophets of

Israel and to Saint John the Baptist, whose dress they wore.

From the fifth century to the ninth, Celtic monks travelled to seek in the

unknown after solitude for their prayer. On Achill and the Arans, on the

Great Skellig of St. Michael and the Great Blasket, on countless islands and

lonely rocks off Ireland's western coast; on the Hebrides and the Orkney Isles

of northern Scotland; on the English islets of the Bristol Channel, Steepholm

and Flatholm; off England's northern shores, on the Farnes and on the Isle of

Man; on tiny islands in the English Lakes; on islets near the coast of Wales,

they made hermit homes, their cells with rounded roofs, like old-fashioned

beehives, their distant communities. As late as the ninth century, when Irish

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wandering saints were turning into Irish wandering scholars and the ascetic

life of solitude was giving way to resounding debate and controversy on

matters of doctrine and of grammar, we find three Irishmen drifting over the

sea from Ireland for seven days in a boat without any oars ( so that they could

not direct its course but surrendered to the will of God), its framework made

secure by hides tightly drawn, coming to shore in British Cornwall and going

thence to King Alfred of Wessex, to tell him that" we stole away because we

wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where."

For the Celtic peoples the primary impulse, the depth of the spirit of

wandering is reached in the word peregrinatio. To become a peregrinus, a

stranger and an exile, was " for the love of Christ" to leave one's home, to

strip oneself of family and possessions, to root out from heart and mind all

one's own aims and desires, and - for a Celt the uttermost self-denial-to

forsake one's native land for some lonely, far remote spot, there to abide

with no thought of return, with no plan, not even a plan of mission of

penance or of pilgrimage. It was to hear in one's own ears the words spoken

by the Lord to Abraham: "Go forth from thy land and thy kin and thy father's

house into a land which I shall show thee of." Nothing must stay the

adventurer; not even his entire ignorance of the time or place at which his

wandering was to end. Such wandering into exile was, it was said, born in the

Irish spirit so common was it among their men of sterner discipline. The Irish

had never known the constraint of Roman governors and their officials and

cohorts; the Celtic British developed their monastic life in its fullness amid

their mountains, valleys, and moors in Wales and Cornwall, after the Romans

had abandoned Britain. The monk trained in Roman ways of order and

government, in Italy, in Gaul, might well attain what he sought for his life in a

community disciplined by a common rule. The Celt dedicated to religion felt

himself, instead, an individual free to wander. And not only was he free. He

was inspired by the voice of God Himself, bidding him to travel from place to

place, over earth and sea, pursuing new knowledge, new love of things

spiritual. Release from the world; solitude for the following of the ways of

prayer; a lively seeking after knowledge; a passion for sacrifice and self-

denial; a driving concern for the souls of their fellow-men-these were the

marks of early medieval saints. For these ends they wandered wherever their

time called them.

Heiric of Auxerre exclaimed in 870, “Almost all Ireland, despising the sea, is

migrating to our shores with a herd of philosophers." Decade after decade

the stream of learned immigrants continued, bringing with them "divine and

human wisdom." "White martyrdom" was when a man for God's sake parted

from everything he loved, and suffered and fasted thereby. Thus came into

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being the consuetudo peregrinandi. The kings and chieftains of Europe loved

these peregrini; they were as welcome at court as at church or in the

monastery. Their habits of thought in science, music, literature, as well as

theology, were to have far-reaching and profound effects. Alcuin and John

Scotus Erigena are only the brightest of these lights and the lesser lights were

probably equally effective in the immediate transformation of European

culture. "If anyone desires wisdom, we have it to sell," announced two

peregrini arriving at the court of Charlemagne, who called them into his

presence and inquired the price of their wisdom. The two's answer was

"suitable places and ready students, and food and clothing without which our

peregrination cannot continue." These two are described as "incomparably

erudite both in secular matters and in Holy Scripture.

Dicuil, an Irish scholar of this same ninth century, dwelling in France at the

Court of Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, tells that he himself knew of

anchorites who had made their way to the islands of northern Europe before

the Vikings of Scandinavia descended upon these to plunder and to settle.

These islands near the Arctic Ocean allowed them the solitude for which they

longed. When at last the coming of the Vikings drove them out, Dicuil writes

that" they left behind them books and bells and pastoral staffs, from which

one could conclude that they were Irishmen." The Celtic heritage formed the

Golden Age of Europe - monasteries, cathedrals, universities - upon whose

riches we all still feed.

The western empire was scarcely a memory now. The last Latin emperor had

fallen just a few years after Patrick died all the great continental libraries had

vanished. The first three public libraries had been established at Rome under

the reign of Augustus, and by the time of Constantine there were twenty-

eight. By the end of the fourth century, if we are to believe one writer,

Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote "The libraries, like tombs, were closed

forever". By the end of the fifth century, at any rate, the profession of copyist

had pretty much disappeared, and what books were copied were copied

personally by the last literate nobles for their own dwindling libraries. In the

sixth century, Pope Gregory established a kind of library at Rome. His library

was a poor one. Even so, the resentful, illiterate mob tried to destroy its few

books during a famine, for by now the Catholic bishops had become like

islands in a barbarian sea. In Italy and Gaul, some book trading continued-

much of it with wandering Irish monks-and by century's end Isidore was

building a real library in Seville, which consisted of about fifteen presses (or

book cabinets), containing perhaps some four hundred bound codices, an

amazing number for the time. The only other continental library known to us

in this period was in Calabria at Cassiodorus's monkish estate, which he called

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Vivarium, but the fate of this library is lost in the blood and smoke of the sixth

century. Gregory of Tours wrote this sad epitaph on sixth-century literacy: "In

these times when the practice of letters declines, no, rather perishes in the

cities of Gaul, there has been found no scholar trained in ordered

composition to present in prose or verse a picture of the things which have

befallen."

Ireland, at peace and furiously copying, thus stood in the position of

becoming Europe's publisher. While Rome and its ancient empire faded from

memory and a new, illiterate Europe rose on its ruins, a vibrant, literary

culture was blooming in secret along its Celtic fringe. It needed only one step

more to close the circle, which would reconnect Europe to its own past by

way of scribal Ireland. St Columba or Columcille, perhaps the greatest of

these or at least the best loved of these, provided that step. Columcille was

born in 521, in Donegal, probably on December 7, a Thursday, for tradition

holds Thursday to be the day of Columcille. His father was the local chieftain,

his grandmother the daughter of King Ere, his mother the daughter of the

ruling house of Leinster. Columbcille was thus of royal blood, and it is always

said that he could have been King of Ireland. But he was great in other ways

also; Patrick had prophesied his coming while baptizing a chieftain of his tribe:

A manchild shall be born of his family,

He will be a sage, a prophet, a poet,

A loveable lamp, pure, clear.

Who will not utter falsehood.

He will be a sage, he will be pious,

He will be King of the royal graces,

He will be lasting, and will be ever good,

He will be in the eternal Kingdom for his consolation.

Just before he was born, his mother was visited by an angel bearing a

beautiful coloured mantle; she took it from him, but the angel took it back,

and it seemed to expand until it crossed and covered valleys, mountains and

even seas. Columcille's mother was sad at losing such a gift, but the angel

comforted her, saying she would have a son who would "blossom for heaven

and lead innumerable souls into heaven's own country. "

Though he could have been a king, maybe even high king, Columcille chose to

become a monk. His real name, Crimthann, or Fox and he was probably red-

haired. The name Columcille, or Dove of the Church, was his later monastic

nickname. It was, in any case, romanized as Columba, the name under which

he usually appears in accounts written outside Ireland.

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After studying reading and writing with a local teacher, Columcille went to

Finian of Clonard, one of the masters of Scripture and the saintly life at that

time; thence to Gemman, Bard of Leinster, master of the ancient ways.

Indeed, in his youth, Columcille was as much poet as monk. But then he

travelled to Clonard on the Boyne where he was ordained. He journeyed as

far as Gaul to visit the tomb of St. Martin of Tours. Returning to Ireland, he

founded a monastery in 545, at Derry: prayer, fasting, charity, agriculture

were the order of the day. But Columcille realized that the times required

something more. He began to travel, preaching, healing, teaching and

founding churches at Durrow, Kells and many other places- about three

hundred are ascribed to him. And so he continued until his fortieth year took

him across the sea

to Scotland.

Why exactly he went is unknown. One tradition is as follows: Columba was a

great scribe and lover of sacred writing. Finian of Clonard, returning from

Italy, brought with him a rare and beautiful book - perhaps a manuscript of

Jerome - and kept it to himself. However, finally Columcille managed to

obtain permission to read it - and not only read it, but surreptitiously made a

copy. When Finian found out about this, he demanded the copy as his by

right. But Columcille refused to comply. Thereupon, Diarmait, King of Meath,

ruled: "To every cow her calf, to every book its copy." But Columcille still

would not return the copy he had made and war broke out. The men of

Ulster slew three thousand men of Meath at the Battle of Cooldrevny with

the loss of one on their side..

But Columcille's victory had less pleasant consequences for him. For a time

he was excommunicated, the customary punishment for a monk who takes

up arms, and his penance was permanent exile from his beloved Ireland: he

must now reach heaven by a voyage of no return, and in his exile he must

save as many souls as perished in the battle he precipitated. Columcille set

out with twelve doughty companions, sailing north beyond the horizon and

finally reaching the island of Iona, off the west coast of the land we call

Scotland - just far enough north so that (as Columcille insisted) there is never

a view of Ireland. By stepping into the coracle that bore him beyond the

horizon, he entered the Irish pantheon of heroes who had done immortal

deeds against impossible odds. As he sailed off that morning, he was doing

the hardest thing an Irishman could do, a much harder thing than giving up

his life: he was leaving Ireland. All who followed Columcille's lead were called

to the White Martyrdom, they who sailed into the white sky of morning, into

the unknown, never to return.

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Columcille arrived on Iona on the eve of Whitsun in 563 with his twelve

companions. His first act on landing was to climb to high ground to make sure

that Ireland was no longer visible. Seeing that it was not, the monks then dug

a deep tomb and buried their coracle. Upon this rock Columcille and the

twelve built their monastery, church and guest - house, and set about

cultivating the earth. The fame of the place grew, and soon Columcille's

family contained upwards of 150 souls. These were of three ranks: the

seniors, who transcribed, chiefly, and studied; the working brethren, who

tilled the fields and took care of the animals; and the juniors, who were still

on probation. There was no personal property, and humility and compassion

were continuously exercised in both human and natural companionship.

The most perfect story of Columcille, however, is the telling of his death.

Columcille knew he was to die, and he knew when. And on the day that he

was to die, he told the brothers he was about to leave them, and then went

out onto the road to return to the monastery, stopping to rest halfway back:

And while the Saint, feeble with age, as I said before, sat down for a little'

while and rested in that place, behold! there comes up to him the white

horse, that faithful servant, mark you, that used to carry the milk-pails

between the cow-pasture and the monastery. This creature then coming up

to the Saint, wonderful to say, putting its head in his bosom, as I believe

under the inspiration of God, in Whose sight every animal is endowed with a

sense of things, because the Creator Himself hath so ordered it; knowing that

his master would soon depart from him, and that he would see his face no

more, began to utter plaintive moans, and, as if a man, to shed tears in

abundance into the Saint's lap, and so to weep, frothing greatly. Which when

the attendant saw, he began to drive away that weeping mourner; but the

Saint forbad him, saying, "Let him alone! As he loves me so, let him alone;

that into this my bosom he may pour out the tears of his most bitter

lamentation.

Behold! thou, even seeing that thou art a man, and hast a rational soul,

couldest in no way know anything about my departure, except what I myself

have lately shown to thee; but to this brute animal, destitute of reason, in

what way so ever the Maker Himself hath willed, He hath revealed that his

master is about to go away from him." And, so saying, he blessed his

sorrowing servant the horse, then turning about to go away from him.

Columcille then went and blessed the Island; blessed the granary; blessed the

animals, blessed the monks and passed away, by the altar:

Then, in the next place, in the middle of the night, at the sound of the ringing

of the bell, he rises in haste and goes to the church; and, running more

quickly than the rest, he enters alone, and on bended knees falls down in

25

prayer beside the altar. Diarmit his attendant, following more slowly, at the

same moment sees from a distance that the whole church is filled within, in

the direction of the Saint, with angelic light. But when he approaches the

door, the same light that he has seen, which was also seen by a few other of

the brethren, as they were standing at a distance,

quickly disappeared. So Diarmit, entering the church keeps on asking, in a

lamentable voice, "Where art thou, father?" And feeling his way through the

darkness, the lights of the brethren not yet being brought in, he finds the

Saint prostrate before the altar; and, lifting him up a little and sitting beside

him, he placed the holy head in his bosom. And meanwhile, the congregation

of monks running up with the lights, and seeing their father dying, began to

weep.

And, as we have learnt from some who were there present, the Saint, his soul

not yet departing, with his eyes opened upward, looked about on either hand

with a wonderful cheerfulness and joy of countenance; doubtless seeing the

holy angels coming to meet him. Then Diarmit lifts up the holy right hand of

the Saint so that he may bless the choir of monks. But also the venerable

man himself, so far as he could, at the same time moved his hand, so that,

mark you, he might still be seen, while passing away, to bless the brethren by

the motion of his hand, though he was not able to do so with his voice. And,

after his holy benediction thus expressed, he immediately breathed out his

spirit. Which having left the tabernacle of the body, his face remained ruddy,

and wonderfully gladdened by an angelic vision; so that it appeared not to be

of one dead, but of one living and sleeping. Meanwhile, the whole church

resounded with mournful lamentations.

In the way of Columcille, the Irish monastic tradition began to spread beyond

Ireland. Already, the Irish monasteries had hosted many thousands of foreign

students, who were bringing back Irish learning to their places of origin. Now,

Irish monks would themselves colonize barbarized Europe, bringing their

learning with them. Scotland, their first outpost, was peopled by indigenous

Picts and Irish colonists who had already established themselves in Patrick's

time. Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend

their time in study, prayer, farming - and, of course, copying. So the basic

plan of the Iona monastery was quickly executed: a little hut for each monk;

an abbot's hut, somewhat larger and on higher ground; a refectory and

kitchen; a scriptorium and library; a smithy, a kiln, a mill, and a couple of

barns; a modest church-and they were in business. Soon they found they

needed one more building, the surprising addition of a guesthouse, for the

never-ending stream of visitors had begun - Scots, Picts, Irish, Britons, even

Anglo-Saxons-attracted by the reputation of the larger-than-life abbot of lona.

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They began to pour into this remote island, and many of them never went

home again.

From here Columcille himself effected the conversion of the Picts and had his

famous contests with the Druids. Among the rugged Scots and the scary Picts,

especially, Columcille's reputation spread like wildfire. There were one

hundred and fifty monks in the Iona community, and after they had exceeded

that, twelve and one monks would set off to establish another foundation in a

new setting. Fresh applicants kept arriving in droves. Typical among these

was Cormac, who was the first to bring the Gospel to the wild people of the

Orkneys.

Later, in the eighth century, other monks from Iona, according to Dicuil,

reached the Shetlands or even the Faroe islands. Finally, we are told by the

same geographer, there were once again monks from Ireland who discovered

Iceland about the year 795, some three-quarters of a century before the date

claimed by the Scandinavians for its discovery. Whatever the true facts may

be, the presence of Irishmen in Iceland is confirmed by Icelandic documents.

Meanwhile the victorious pagan princes had brought ruin to Christianity in

England. From the time of their arrival, Oswald, who was in exile with the

Scots and had been baptized by the monks of Iona, had set his heart on

restoring Christianity in his states. When he was finally able to return to

Northumbria, therefore, his first act was to send to lona for a bishop. Corman

came first, but he was too hard; so Aidan, an Irishman, went, a gentle,

beautiful figure, who was immediately consecrated Bishop. Dom Gougaud

says of Aidan's monastery that it "was the most powerful centre of religious

influence in England." When Aidan died in 651 another Irishman, Finan,

succeeded him. Aidan in a way is the last pure Celt: his successors were

already part of the Roman-European venture.

On the day of his death a young boy herding sheep on a lonely hillside had a

vision of a great stream of light breaking through the sky, and a choir of

angels descending and gathering up a soul of exquisite brightness. The boy

was Cuthbert. Cuthbert, in fact, was the first Roman Bishop of Lindisfarne,

presiding over the monastery in the period of adjustment following the Synod

of Whitby. Though he took little part in ecclesiastical disputes, his position

seems to have been that the unity of the Church was primary.

St Augustine of Canterbury, the missionary from Rome, landed the year

Columcille died, AD 597. By 664 and the Synod of Whitby, the Celtic Church

as a visible entity was over. But this is not to say that its work was done.

27

The Irish monks launched a spiritual invasion of England from their island

monastery of Lindisfarne in the northeast corner of Northumbria, establishing

new monasteries in brisk succession. On account of this activity, Aidan,

Columcille's beloved disciple and first abbot of Lindisfame, has far better

claim than Augustine of Canterbury to the title Apostle of England, for, as the

Scottish historian James Bulloch has remarked, "All England north of the

Thames was indebted to the Celtic mission for its conversion." Lindisfarne in

its turn sent its monks across England. The monasteries of Coldingham,

Mailros, Lastingham, Ripon, Whitby and Saint-Bees in Northumbria, Burgh

Castle in East Anglia, Basham, founded by Dicul, in Sussex, Malmesbury,

founded by Maeldub, and Glastonbury "of the Gaels" in Wessex, are usually

placed to its credit.

The Irish monks were on good terms with the British Celts and began to set

up bases in the western territories as well.

After Scotland and England, monks from Ireland began to set off in every

direction, bent on glorious and heroic exile for the sake of Christ. They were

warrior-monks, of course, and certainly not afraid of whatever adversities

they might meet. Where did they go? Better to ask where did they not go?

Some went north, like Columcille. Others went northwest, like Brendan the

Navigator, visiting Iceland, Greenland, and North America, and, as it is asaid in

legend, supping on the back of a whale in mid-ocean…. St. Brendan of course

went here, there and everywhere. Fordun, the chronicler, says that the Island

of Bute derives its name from the old Gaelic word for a cell, the cell being the

one erected by Brendan. At Eassie in Forfarshire there is a church dedicated

to him.

One of these amazing travelers was Columbanus (c. 543-615), twenty years or

so the junior of Columcille, born in the province of Leinster about the year

543, and subsequently a monk at Bangor for twenty-five years. About 590 he

departed, with the requisite twelve companions, for Gaul, where he founded

in quick succession three forest monasteries among the barbarous Sueves-

Annegray, Fontaines, and Luxeuil, one of the most important foundations of

the early Middle Ages. Such astounding activity could only mean that

Columbanus was having similar success to Columcille in attracting local talent.

But before long he clashed with the region's bishops, who were upset by his

presence. Still employing the old Roman episcopal pattern of living urbanely

in capital cities and keeping close ties with those who wear crowns, the

bishops tend their local flocks of literate and semiliterate officials, the ghostly

remnants of the lost society. These churchmen never ventured beyond a few

28

well-tended streets into the rough-hewn mountain settlements of the simpler

Sueves. To Columbanus, however, a man, who took no step to proclaim the

Good News beyond the safety and comfort of his own elite circle, is a poor

excuse for a bishop.

In 603 the bishops summon the saint to appear before them in synod at

Chalon-sur-Saone. Columbanus, who cannot be bothered to take part in such

a travesty, sends a letter in his stead “To the holy lords and fathers-or, better,

brothers-in Christ, the bishops, priests, and remaining orders of holy church, I,

Columba the sinner, send greeting in Christ

I give thanks to my God that for my sake so many holy men have gathered

together to treat of the truth of faith and good works, and, as befits such, to

judge of the matters under dispute with a just judgment, through senses

sharpened to the discernment of good and evil. Would that you did so more

often!”

The Irishman goes on to take the bishops to task for their worldly laxity and

lack of industry and for trifling with his mission. He couches his criticisms in

the language of deference ("if you are willing for us juniors to teach you

fathers"), but there is no mistaking his meaning. He recommends his own

way of life to their reverences ("if we all choose to be humble and poor for

Christ's sake") and urges them, after "the Gospel saying," to become as little

children: "For a child is humble, does not harbor the remembrance of injury,

does not lust after a woman when he looks on her, does not keep one thing

on his lips and another in his heart." It almost sounds as if the saint knows

each bishop's secret sin-and means to reveal it to him.

Columbanus and his Irish monks are forced to bid farewell to their thriving

communities, now populated with local Germanic monks, and to travel under

royal escort to Nantes, the port from which they will be put on board a ship

bound for Ireland. On their way to Nantes, one of their number, the aged

Deicola, finds that he cannot keep up. He drops behind and builds himself a

hut in the wilderness at a place called Lure, which will become in time

another historic monastery. When Columbanus's party is at last put on board

the ship at Nantes, the ship sinks, and Columbanus and four companions

escape. Now a double exile (from Burgundian Gaul as well as Ireland),

Columbanus means to make his way to northern Italy to convert the

Lombards. But while journeying over the Alps, he is forced to stop at Arbon,

near Bregenz on Lake Constance, because Gall, his expert in Germanic

languages, falls ill with fever and refuses to go farther. After a heated

altercation, Columbanus leaves Gall behind, and with his remaining

companions heads for the plain of Lombardy, where they will build at Bobbio

the first Italo-Irish monastery. Vigorous Columbanus, now in his early

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seventies, takes his part in the construction, happily carrying wooden beams

on his shoulders.

At Columbanus’s death in 615 he left behind a considerable body of work-

letters and sermons, notable for their playful imitation of such classical

writers as Sappho, Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Martial, and even Ausonius;

instructions for the brethren; poems and lyrics, including a jolly boat song;

and the even larger legacy of his continental monasteries, busily engaged in

reintroducing classical learning to.the European mainland. At this great

distance in time, we can no longer be sure exactly how many monasteries

were founded in Columbanus's name during his lifetime and after his death. If

we may believe Jonas, the biographer of Saint Columbanus, no less than 620

missionaries must have left Luxeuil, in Germany, to concentrate on Bavaria

alone! They naturally would not all have been Irish, but a large number of

them must have been.

At least, two hundred abbeys owed their existence to his labours, and we

cannot tell how many souls were brought to Christ. In France alone, more

than two hundred places of worship, mountains and local populations bear

the name of the great Irishman. And how many more throughout Western

Europe!

One monastery on which we have some information is that of Saint Gall in the

Alps, founded by the monk Columbanus had quarreled with and' who went

on to become the central figure in the founding of the Swiss church. Finding

himself, after Columbanus's departure, alone among wolves, bears, and

illiterate Alemans, Gall, a more patient man than Columbanus, went about

visiting his neighbors, instructing them in faith and letters. We possess only

one work from his hand, a sermon of such honesty, simplicity, and generosity

that we can still grasp what touched the Germans. In 615, as Columbanus lay

dying, there came a knock on Gall's door: brethren from Bobbio had arrived

with Columbanus's abbatial staff, Columbanus's apology and implicit

acknowledgment that Gall was the greatest of all his spiritual sons. In 616,

Gall, whose labors were becoming well known, refused the offer to become

bishop of Constance and in 627 the invitation to return to flourishing Luxeuil

as its abbot. Thinking no doubt of his Irish home, the scribe also writes down

this sentence from Horace: "Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare

current" ("They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean"). A

good maxim for all exiles and, in this context, a reminder of the constancy of

the Irish personality.

On the Continent there were scores of Irish settlements reaching from

Cologne in Germany to Taranto in the south of Italy. The White Martyrs,

fanned out cheerfully across Europe, founding monasteries that would

30

become in time the cities of Lumieges, Auxerre, Laon, Luxeuil, Liege, Trier,

Wiirzburg, Regensburg, Rheinau, Reichenau, Salzburg, Vienna, Saint Gall,

Bobbio, Fiesole, and Lucca, to name but a few. "The weight of the Irish

influence on the continent," admits James Westfall Thompson, "is

incalculable."

According to St. Bernard's testimony, given six centuries later, St. Luan, the

Irishman, a contemporary of St. Colomcille, lived to establish no fewer than

one hundred monasteries in Scotland. Saint Fursa the Visionary went from

Ireland to East Anglia, then to Lagny, just east of Paris, then to Peronne,

which would be known in time as Peronna Scottorum, Peronne of the Irish

and City of Fursey. Virgil the Geometer, an Irish satirist, became archbishop of

Salzburg. Saint Cathal (or Cahill, to use the modern spelling), widely venerated

to this day in southern Italy as San Cataldo, was surprised on his way back

from pilgrimage in the Holy Land to find himself elected bishop of Taranto, a

city on the arch of Italy's boot.

Brittany received numbers of them and at their behest was converted. So,

also, did the Champagne of Saint Tresain, the Poitou of Saint Fridolin, the Ile

de France of Saint Fursy, the Brie of Saint Fiacre, the Picardy of Saint Algis and

Saint Gobain. But they went further yet, Saint Fridolin set out for Baden,

Saint Killian for Thuringia, Saint Foillan for Belgium, Saint Donat for Tuscany,

St. Sunnifa, daughter of a 10th

century Irish king, for Norway,

while Saint Cathaldus (Cathal) from Lismore went as far as Taranto.

St. Findan went to Rome, returning, stopped at Schaffhausen on the Rhine

and tarried there for twenty-seven years until his death in 878. St. Gunifort

got as far as Pavia, St. Fiacre as far as Meaux, St. Kilian as far as Arras; while it

is said of St. Cathal that his effigy was painted on one of the pillars of the

Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. If St. Begh did not actually make her

way to Norway, her cult reached that country alright. There and elsewhere

she was famed in folk-lore for her charity to the poor St. Briach was born in

Ireland, was a monk in Wales, built a monastery in Brittany and died at

Bourbiac. St. Colman met his death near Vienna and is venerated yet as one

of the martyr patrons of Austria. The memory of St. Erentrude is still

cherished at Salsburg, that of St. Erkemloden at St. Orner, and that of St.

Fintan on the island in the Rhine which he sanctified with his presence. St.

Malachy died at Clairvaux; and the village of Ecclefechan, where Thomas

Carlyle was born, derives its name from the Irish abbot St. Fechin. Boys in

Scotland are still christened Angus, thanks to St. Aengus, and Adam, thanks to

St. Adamnan.

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Of Italy, Fra Tomassini writes that, even in remote and obscure villages,

traditions and legends of the Irish Saints still linger. No fewer than thirty-four

parishes in that country are dedicated to St. Columbanus.

Women exiles went forth as well; and though we know even less about them

than we know about the men, the continental churches dedicated to Brigid in

France, Germany, Austria, and Italy offer some evidence of their presence.

More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were

written by Irishmen. Before the end of the eighth century, the exiles had

reached Modra in Moravia ( in the Czech Republic), where an old church has

been dug up that looks just like the little church at Glendalough; and there

are traces of the White Martyrs as far as Kiev. But an adequate list of

missionaries and their foundations would fill another chapter.

By the second half of the seventh century the Irish missionary impulse was at

high tide, supplemented in its force by fresh waves of English missionaries,

who in imitation of their elder brothers burst upon the Germanic lands

whence their ancestors had once come. Wilfrid, the leader of the winning

party at Whitby, turned his zeal on Frisia. Willibrord founded the monastery

of Echternach in Luxembourg (whence the Echternach Gospels, spectacular

companion to the Lindisfarne Gospels, would spring), and he and Boniface

established sees at Utrecht, Wiirzburg, Erfurt, Eichstadt, and Passau. Boniface

founded the great abbey at Fulda, established other monasteries at

Disbodenburg, Amoenaburg, Fritzlar, Buraburg, and Heidenheim, and

restored the see of Mainz, of which Boniface became archbishop. By the

middle of the eighth century most of Frisia, Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, and

part of Denmark had received the Gospel.

To many of these new foundations came the books of the insular scribes.

Boniface and Alcuin (the Northumbrian monk at Charlemagne's court who in

782 took over direction of the Palatine School, which would one day turn into

the University of Paris) could never find the books they needed on the

continent and were always sending urgent requests to British foundations for

basic works. In truth, the art of the scriptorium was virtually unknown in the

indigenous monasteries of Italy and Gaul. Monastic manuscript art had

traveled from the workshops of Syria and Egypt by way of Ireland and Britain

and, at last, to the continent of Europe. But now, the depleted store of

continental codices rose steadily. By the middle of the eighth century, Fulda,

in Germany, for instance, was employing forty full-time scribes.

32

The Irish connections of these English monks were not incidental. Besides

having profited substantially from the intellectual atmosphere that the Irish

foundations had established in Britain, many had studied in Ireland

(Willibrord had spent twelve years there) or were assisted in their labors by

Irish monks (such as Kilian and his eleven companions, who evangelized

Franconia and Thuringia). Alcuin's first master, Colgu, had been Irish, as was

his best friend, Joseph, who accompanied him to France and died beside him;

and he was succeeded at the court school by the Irish scholar Clement Scotus.

Charlemagne, after his surprise coronation by the pope on Christmas Day 800

as Holy Roman Emperor, presided over medieval Europe's first Renaissance, a

short-lived cultural flowering that barely outlasted his reign. His enduring

influence lay in the gradual revival of literacy, for he repeatedly urged (and

supported) the raising of standards in the few poor continental schools that

remained. That he himself was an illiterate, who late in life laboriously

learned to decipher some simple texts but could never get the hang of

writing, is proof enough of the standards of the age. Without the previous

(and continuing) influx of Irish codices, the Carolingian Renaissance would

have been impossible. For this reason, as Charlemagne's biographer Einhard

tells us, Charlemagne "amabat peregrines" ("loved the wandering monks").

6) CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CELTIC CHURCH

The nature of the Irish is perhaps excellently epitomized by the spirits of

Newgrange. “There is no circle; there is only the spiral, the endlessly

reconfigurable spiral. There are no straight lines, only curved ones. For the

Romans there were only straight lines and circles. And so, by the seventh

century a distinct form of Christianity had emerged. While there was much

diversity within the universal church from its earliest days - differences rooted

in racial, cultural, and historical developments which affected the leadership

of the local churches and their understanding of Christianity-the early Celtic

church was unique.

The Celtic church was made up of a great variety of churches in such places as

northern England, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Brittany, the Isle of Man, and of

course, all of Ireland. Although these churches were never united

administratively into one externally visible church, they experienced a large

measure of unity among themselves through their monastic lifestyle,

33

friendship among the early saints, respect for women's gifts, and common

spirituality.

Renan admitted that in losing the monastic institution the world had lost a

great school of originality. Certainly Irish monasticism was original in the

fullest sense of the word. Columba, Kevin, Finnian, Aidan, Gall and Columban

were all originals.

Influenced greatly by the values of the Celtic pagan culture that preceded the

arrival of Christianity on its shores, as well as the ideals of the early desert

Christians who valued simplicity of life and the equality of all in the eyes of

God, this Celtic church frequently found itself in conflict with other churches,

including the church in Rome, over issues specifically related to church

governance and sexuality.

1) Many of the other Western churches, adopting the social structures of

the declining Roman Empire as their own, divided church territory into

dioceses, headed by bishops who lived primarily in urban areas. The early

Celtic church, however, was located more often in rural or remote areas and

influenced by the tribal system of the pagan Celts. Monastic leaders who

emerged at the great Celtic monasteries were eventually more powerful than

the bishops who lived in their midst.

2) Education, pastoral care, and liturgical leadership were provided by the

monks or religious women; in turn, lay people and their families helped the

monasteries grow their crops, manage their farms, fish, plant trees, and keep

their bees. All benefited from this mutual sharing of gifts, including those who

only came for a short stay.

It was largely owing to the example and precepts of the great national saints

that hospitality came to be regarded throughout Ireland as one of the first of

virtues. In all the monastic writings it is inculcated as a religious duty.

One of the Brehon laws states that the reception of strangers is incumbent on

'every servant of the Church, and an old poem in one of the Irish manuscripts

preserved at Brussels conveys a warning note to the churlish and the

34

inhospitable.

"0 King of Stars!

Whether my home be dark or bright,

Never shall it be closed against anyone,

Lest Christ close His home against me."

As one of the earliest hagiographers, Cogitosus, writes about those who

visited the monastery of St. Brigit at Kildare: "Who can list the chaotic crowds

and countless folk who flock in from all the provinces: some for the

abundance of food, others who are feeble seeking health, others just to look

at the mobs, and still others who come with great gifts to the festival of Saint

Brigit."

3) While other ecclesial bodies came to value large churches and basilicas

for their communal liturgies, the Celtic church’s noble austerity was

manifested even in their building activities-a particularly heroic exercise of

restraint. The new-born monasteries of the Irish were of the greatest

simplicity. Walls of withes or branches supported upon wooden props

formed the chief element in their architecture; and, to serve the purpose

alike of protection and of ornamentation, creepers were planted, particularly

ivy. Celtic monastic construction in general disdained the use of stone, at any

rate for a long time.

Even when the membership in the monasteries increased, the Celtic

Christians, wanting to maintain greater intimacy among their members,

continued to build more numerous and smaller church dwellings rather than

larger structures for worship e.g. Glendalough.

4) Also, as the continental churches grew increasingly more materialistic,

dressing their bishops in fine vestments and having them ride on golden

thrones, the Celtic church valued a more ascetic lifestyle. Inspired by the

stories of the desert father St. Antony (251-356) and of the anchorite bishop

of Tours, St. Martin (316-97), the Celtic church was characterized by intense

missionary outreach, a pastoral ministry among the common people, and

leaders who ate sparsely and spent long hours in prayer, sometimes

immersed nightly in the ocean's frigid waters. The early Celtic monastic

35

bishops themselves, such as David of Wales and Aidan of Lindisfarne, dressed

simply, clad in coarse robes in the manner of St. John the Babtist, usually

carrying with them on their pastoral visits only a walking-stick and a bell,

which, as they approached, would be rung loudly to alert the local people.

5) Differences between the churches related to sexuality arose. While the

other Christian churches increasingly isolated women from positions of

authority and relationships of friendship with males, the Celtic church,

influenced by the pagan Celts' belief that women were equal to men and had

similar legal rights, encouraged their leadership. Contrary to the prevailing

dualistic tendencies found among desert Christians and the inhabitants of

countries bordering the Mediterranean, the early founders of the Celtic

church "did not reject," according to a ninth-century manuscript, Catalogue of

the Saints in Ireland, "the service and society of women." Women were

valued and not ignored, judging from one of the earliest Irish martyrologies,

that of Gorman, which lists over two hundred female saints. Monastic

communities, which arose in Ireland shortly after the death of Patrick in 461,

were also headed by women. The oldest and best known of the monasteries

of women recorded in Ireland are those of Brigit of Kildare, Moninne at

Killeavy, and Ita at Killeedy.

Many of these women leaders held powerful ecclesial positions in

communities consisting of both women and men. These "double

monasteries" were evidently a normal feature of the earliest monastic life in

Ireland and England. The most well-known abbesses over these double

monasteries were Brigit of Kildare, Ireland, and Hild of Whitby, Northumbria.

(Hild, of Anglo-Saxon origins, received her religious formation from Aidan of

Lindisfarne). The origins of these double monasteries of monks and nuns is

unclear although Cogitosus, the seventh-century biographer of Brigit,

describes the one at Kildare as a double monastery that must have originated

at least one hundred years before he wrote. There the monks and nuns lived

in separate quarters, but worshipped together in a common church in which

the lay people joined them for liturgies.

St. Moninna went first of all to submit herself to the spiritual direction of

Saint Ibar at Wexford; several years later, however, followed by fifty nuns, she

36

left Leinster and established herself at Killeavy, near Newry, in the County

Armagh. It was at the very time when Brigid had just founded Kildare; in the

course of her journey Moninna visited her young imitator who was to become

so famous. The story of Moninna does not come to an end there, because

after Killeavy, where "the rule was strict," she is said to have founded at least

six more monasteries in Ireland, seven in Scotland, and again others in Great

Britain, notably at Calvechif near the Trent.

6) The power of the druids, who had lived and worshiped in sacred groves,

had been easily handed over to the Green Martyrs, who also lived and

worshiped in sacred groves. But the access of the new, literate druids (the

monastic successors of the Green Martyrs) to the books of the Greco-Roman

library - that is, to the whole of the classical sciences and the wisdom of the

ancients - gradually created new centers of knowledge and wealth such as

Ireland had never known. Christian Ireland, in particular, was the place where

monastic schools flourished and where the original pagan Celtic legends and

stories of the saints were first written down in the monastic scriptoria. We

can see this respect for study and yearning for wisdom in the frequent

references to books in the hagiographies of the early Celtic saints. We also

find those characteristics in specific stories; for example, in Aidan's

encouraging all those who travelled with him to study for some time each

day, and in Columcille's spending so much time alone in his cell to study and

write. Irish missionaries, like Columbanus (c. 543-615), brought this love of

learning to France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, where they founded

other great monastic schools that kept Celtic wisdom alive for generations

after the deaths of the original saintly pioneers.

6) Respect for differences was written into the rule books of the Irish

monasteries. And though the abbacy often passed from father to son,

another irregularity that would have alarmed the Romans, the Irish balanced

the aristocratic preoccupation with lineage by a refreshingly democratic

principle: "A man is better than his descent," insists a law of this period, thus

asserting the primacy of individual spirit over common blood. Perhaps

nothing would have distressed the Romans as much as the way these monks

shrugged off the great Roman virtue of Order. In an instruction to his

brothers, Columbanus, whom we shall soon meet, affirmed the great Gospel

37

virtue over all else: Love has nothing to do with order".

7) The Celtic Church is especially remarkable for the austere form of its

discipline. In those days monks everywhere claimed to be Christ's Standing

Army - Milites Christi. Of these soldiers, the Irish were the Spartans par

excellence. St. Kiaran of Clonmacnoise slept on the bare clay with a stone for

his pillow. He would wear nothing soft next his skin, drank neither ale nor

milk, and his daily bread was one-third sand - a kind of permanent war-time

ration. The Rule of St. Columbanus required even the sick to thresh the corn,

and no one was allowed to rest until he actually fell asleep from exhaustion.

His followers were bound to an almost perpetual silence, to restrict

themselves to one meal taken each evening and to confine their diet to pulse,

meal, bread and water. This one meal a day seems to have been the common

practice in the Irish monasteries, an exception being made in favour of the

farm labourers. Of St. Columcille we are told that his weekly allowance

collected on one plate was just about enough to make a square meal for a

pauper. This was in his palmy days; towards the end his sole nourishment

was nettle soup, a restriction which he imposed upon himself in consequence

of his meeting with an old woman gathering the herb, who assured him that

her poverty was such as to forbid her all other food. Burning with shame, he

returned to tell his startled monks that they were living in luxury.

St. Finnian added a chain around the body until it sank into the flesh. We do

not know what sort of pillows St. Brigit favoured, but the metrical Life,

written by St. Breccan Cloen remarks in passing that" she was not given to

sleep." "Persuade the angels to go to sleep," was the reply of a monk to

those who advised him to take just a little nap. Of St. Kevin the chronicle says

that no man knew what he lived on for none had ever seen him eat, and he

kept the secret to himself. St. Aengus made three hundred prostations daily

and there was the custom of praying with arms wide outstretched. St. Kevin is

supposed to have remained in this difficult posture for seven years without

closing an eye, while the birds nested in his open palms-a legendary tit-bit

which indicates the importance attached to this form of penance, the" Cross

Figell."

As for the practical side, here are a few items from the so-called Rule of St.

Columcille:

38

"Forgiveness from the heart for everyone.

Follow almsgiving before all things.

Take not food till thou art hungry.

Sleep not till thou hast to.

Speak not except on business.

Thy measure of prayer shall be until thy tears come.

Thy measure of labour shall be until thy sweat comes.

Three labours in the day-prayer, work, reading."

It was to one of the greatest extremists amongst them, St. Dicuil, that

Columbanus addressed the question:

"What makes you be always smiling?" The answer was: "Because no one can

take God from me."

It is important to note that all this discipline within the Celtic Church was

directed not to the detriment of nature, but rather to the healing of its

wounds, to its perfecting.

8) The Irish are also distinctive in their liking for Pelagius, the 'reluctant

heretic'. Pelagius, after all, was Morgan, a Welshman; he was the first English

Christian to write a book, his Commentary on Romans; and the Irish always

provided, as did the Orthodox east, something of a refuge for Pelagianism in

its semi-Pelagian form. Best known for his views on predestination and

original sin, Pelagius was the last of the great heresiarchs, doing battle in

titanic struggle with Augustine, Jerome, and their followers. Jerome indeed

appears to have thought that his arch-rival was Irish, and snorted that

Pelagius was 'stuffed with Irish porridge'. But Pelagius's belief that children

are born innocent without the stain of original sin; that baptism is

consequently not necessary for salvation, but that man's inherent good

nature and reason could lead him to God (so that even pagans might be

saved) proved too much for St. Augustine of Hippo. With Pelagius finally

succumbing to the combined blows of his opponents, his writings and

doctrines were condemned in AD418, but his commentary on the Letters of St

Paul was still widely read and highly regarded by Irish scholars, and in fact he

retained his popularity in Irish schools from the seventh century to the

39

twelfth; this is striking evidence of the Irish ability to see the good and useful

elements in a work which was doctrinally suspect.

In addition,, there are some things that might have raised a flutter in

continental circles, for the Irish were still using biblical apocrypha long since

lost or forgotten in the rest of Europe.

In many ways this Celtic spirituality has a great affinity with the spirituality of

the Eastern Orthodox. Thus, the spirituality of the Christian Celts has great

ecumenical value, for it transcends the differences which have divided

Christians in the East and the West since before the Reformation. It also has

special appeal for those today that are concerned about the ecological

survival of our planet, the revitalization of the churches, and the quality of

spiritual life.

9) Love of and respect for the physical environment.

Their daily life was lived in close proximity to nature, and their spirituality

reflected a sense of wonder and awe at the divine residing in everything.

Their pagan ancestors had a deep respect for nature, regarding the earth as

mother. Their spiritual leaders, the druids and druidesses, believed that the

spiritual pervaded every aspect of life: in ancient trees and sacred groves,

mountaintops and rock formations, rivers, streams, and holy wells. Influenced

by that pagan spiritual heritage, Celtic Christians found it natural to address

God as "Lord of the Elements," and to experience communion with God in

their natural surroundings. In the stories of the saints, they are often found

establishing their monasteries and oratories in places where the druids and

druidesses had once taught and worshipped - in the midst of oak groves or

near sacred springs, on the shores of secluded lakes, or on misty islands far

out at sea.

And in a little poem traditionally ascribed to a poet who died in 665 we have a

picture of the ideal monastery as he conceived it:

I wish, 0 Son of the living God, 0 ancient, eternal King,

For a hidden little hut in the wilderness that it may be my dwelling.

An all-grey lithe little lark to be by its side,

40

A clear pool to wash away sins through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

A southern aspect for warmth, a little brook across its floor,

A choice land with many gracious gifts such as be good for every plant

A pleasant church and with the linen altar-cloth, a dwelling for God from

Heaven;

Then, shining candles above the pure white Scriptures

This is the husbandry I would take, I would choose, and will not hide it:

Fragrant leek, hens, salmon, trout, bees.

Raiment and food enough for me from the King of fair fame,

And I to be sitting for a while praying to God in every place.!

For all the poetry that was in him, Columba loved still better the things that

inspire poets. At Derry he rose up in wrath and forbade them to lay the axe

to the roots of his precious oaks, on the plea, no doubt, that

"A poem is made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree."

Speaking alike of the legends and the authentic facts connected with St.

Brendan, the Frenchman Renan declared in a fine outburst of admiration:

"never has a gaze so gentle and tender been cast upon

this earth of ours. All is lovely, pure and innocent."

As for St. Patrick’s breast- plate:

"I bind unto myself to-day

The virtues of the star-lit heaven;

The glorious sun's life-giving ray,

The whiteness of the moon at even;

This attitude of deep respect for the environment was also manifest in their

quiet care for all living things. As we will see, the Celtic saints seem to have

had a special affinity and reciprocal relationship with animals: Kevin shelters

in his hands a blackbird which probably sang for him; Ciaran meets a wild

boar that helps him clear land for his monastery; Animals are portrayed as

41

fellow creatures of the earth, and once befriended, they become helpers to

the saints.

Again, as said previously, Columcille's white horse sheds great tears at his

master's approaching death.

This white horse which had been employed to carry milk from the dairy to the

monastery, came towards him and put its head upon his shoulder as if to take

leave of him. The eyes of the old horse had an expression so pathetic that

they seemed to be bathed in tears. Diarmid would have sent the animal

away, but the good old man forbade him. "The horse loves me," he said,

"leave him with me : let him weep for my departure. The Creator has

revealed to this poor animal what He has hidden from thee, a reasonable

man." Upon which, still caressing the faithful brute, he gave him a last

blessing.

Fra Tommassini remarks the similarity of the story of St. Gall's encounter with

the bear to that of St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. The former had chosen

a place of solitude in the forest and proceeded to pass the first night in

prayer. Towards morning a bear descended from the mountain to collect the

remains of the hermit's meal. Gall threw him a loaf, and on the strength of it

entered into a compact with him. "Do you in Christ's name withdraw from

the valley. As for the mountains, we shall share them in common, but on

condition that you do no further harm to man or beast." So well was the

compact observed that the bear fetched and carried all the wood needed for

the winter's fire which, no doubt, explains the presence of this animal in

pictures of the Saint.

Tradition has it that St. Domnoc or Modomnoc, who died at Kilkenny, brought

the bees from the East and over the sea to Ireland- his feast is kept on

February 8th. His life, we are assured, was spent between the chapel and the

garden, where he had care of the hives. This was in Wales. When he was

ordered back to his own country, he blessed each hive and took leave of his

charges with a heavy heart. When the boat was far out at sea, however, the

sky suddenly became dark. The bees had followed and alighted on the boat.

Three times the Saint returned to Wales and discharged the contraband

42

cargo; three times the bees got the better of him. At last the abbot, like a

sensible man, told him to be off bees and all. And so they reached the Irish

coast and lived happily together ever after.

Never surely was the choice or selection more strange than that of St.

Colman. His pets were a cock, a mouse, and a fly-the cock to waken him for

matins, the mouse to bite his ear in case he over-slept, and the fly to settle on

the line of the Psalter where he had left off and so serve as a book-marker.

The three departed this life together it seems; and what does Colman do? He

sits down, takes a sheet of paper - whether black-edged or no is not stated -

and writes to break the sorrowful news to St. Columba. At Iona the far-famed

abbot receives the doleful tidings, and with good-humoured sarcasm pens a

reply more or less to the effect that human nature is a mystery, since here is a

man who renounced all the ties of this world breaking his heart over a cock, a

mouse, and a fly.

10) Innate yearning to explore the unknown.

As said before, in the Celtic Church there are three kinds of martyrdom which

are counted as a cross to man, that is to say, white martyrdom, and green

martyrdom, and red martyrdom. White martyrdom is when when he

separates for the sake of God from everything he loves, although he suffer

fasting or labour thereat. Green martyrdom is when by means of them

(fasting and labour) he separates from his desires, or suffers toil in penance

and repentance. Red martyrdom is when he endures the cross or destruction

for Christ's sake, as has happened to the apostles in the persecution of the

wicked and in teaching the law of God.

Perhaps this wanderlust was due to the migratory nature of their pagan

ancestors, who in the third century B.C.E. had been the dominant race of all

of Europe; perhaps it was their living in such close proximity to the sea and

the natural rhythm of its tides; perhaps their Christian spiritual heritage

unconsciously inspired them with its own stories of of Abraham and Sarah's

travel to a foreign land, of Moses' exodus out of Egypt, and of Peter's and

Paul's missionary journeys. Whatever the reason, many of them shared the

43

desire to travel and, in contrast to the" red martyrdom" of giving one's life up

for Christ or the" green martyrdom" of participating in severe penitential

practices, they faced the "white martyrdom" of living far from home and

hearth for the sake of the gospels. (The Celts had a specific word, hiraeth, for

the extreme yearning for home associated with this latter form of

martyrdom; because of their deep love of family, it was considered the

hardest of all to endure.) Beginning with St. Patrick, Celtic missionaries

(called peregrini) chose this way of life out of deep devotion to Christ, but

also perhaps because of their own desire to see the holy places and meet

people different than themselves.

Whatever the reasons for their travel, the theme of pilgrimage is one of the

key elements of the early saints' spirituality. For them, to make a journey for

Christ brought - despite the hardships - unexpected blessings, increased

intimacy with God, and the healing of body and soul.

11) Love of silence and of solitude.

Considering the widespread travel of so many peregrini and the extensive

pastoral work of all the Celtic saints, it is intriguing and somewhat paradoxical

how much the early Christian Celts also valued solitary places and times of

silence. An atmosphere of silence was encouraged within their monasteries

and certain quiet times were strictly observed-as we find in the stories of

David of Wales. It may be that they sought out places of solitude precisely

because of their intense involvement with people.

Many of the Celtic monasteries also had a place apart - a cell, retreat, or

dysert-in which a monk or nun could retire when he or she needed to be

alone. Sometimes the Celtic saints chose a cave for shelter and reflection, as

did Columban and Ninian of Whitham (362-432). Others moved to a hill or

mountaintop to fast and pray. Many, as is clear in the stories of Aidan,

Columcille, and Cuthbert, seemed especially drawn to be near the ocean's

waves. Whatever their reasons for treasuring silence and seeking the solitary

life, the early Christian Celts shared what the scholar John Ryan calls a

"surprising" combination of" apostolic and anchoretical ideals."

44

The Rule of Columban calls silence "the practice of justice," a curious

definition which provides abundant food for thought. It adds, that this

"practice of justice" must be preserved at every task and in every place, and it

requires even the abbot, when he has to speak, to do it sparingly and without

beating about the bush.

"It seems to me," Carlyle lamented, "that the finest nations of the world are

going all away into wind and tongue," through repudiation of that reticence

which is "the eternal duty of man."

Here is a quaint record found in the Silva Gadelica. Three penitents, it seems,

resolved to dedicate themselves to this life of solitude. After one year of

silence the first whispered to the other: "This is a good life we lead."

However, it took Number Two twelve months to make up his mind to answer.

"That is so," he whispered a year later. Another twelve months pass and this

time the silence is broken by Number Three: "If I can't find peace here, I shall

go back to the world."

The distant places to which they had been first led by a love of solitude

changed rapidly into rural colonies and served as centres of culture and

civilisation. "To this day," says Dr. Healy, "the land about a monastic site is

known to be the greenest and best in the district." Like many another town,

Cork originated in the cells the monks built on piles in the marshes of the river

Lee.

12) Understanding of time.

The early saints appreciated time as a sacred reality blessed and already

redeemed by God's overflowing compassion. This awareness of the sacred

dimension to time is not the same as modern Western culture's frantic

preoccupation in which" every minute counts." Rather, the Celts' perception

was that there is a fullness now to all of time. With this perception of time as

a gift from God, time in a chronological sense (with one historical event

following another) was disregarded by the early Celts. For them, the present

contains within itself both past events, which continue to live on, as well as

the seeds of future events waiting to be born.

45

Without clear demarcations between past, present, and future, Celtic

Christians interpreted history differently than we do. They made

contemporaries of those who historically could never have been. In some of

the early legends, for example, Brigit and Ita are portrayed as midwives to

Mary, the mother of Jesus. As soul friends they help bring Jesus to birth and

they nurse him. In certain stories Brigit and Patrick are described as intimate

friends-when in fact they probably never met. (If the traditional dates of their

lives are relied upon, Brigit would have been about six years old at the time of

Patrick's death.) That did not matter to the early Christian Celts, for, from

their point of view, people with the qualities and holiness of Patrick and Brigit

would naturally be friends - even if they lived at different times in the

chronological sequence of history.

In many ways Celtic Christians saw the larger truths of myth and the lasting

effects of relationships of love standing outside of time, having an eternal

quality that certainly cannot be understood fully by considering chronological

time alone.

13) Appreciation of ordinary life.

The Celtic saints valued the daily, the routine, the ordinary. They believed

God is found not so much at the end of time when the reign of God finally

comes, but now, where the reign is already being lived by God's faithful

people. Theirs was a spirituality characterized by gratitude, and in their

stories we find them worshipping God in their daily work and very ordinary

chores.

Another quality, their joy, is apparent in the last words of David of Wales to

his friends: "My brothers and sisters, be joyful, keep your faith and belief, and

perform the small things which you have learned from me and have seen in

me."

14) Belief in the great value of kinship relationships, especially the spiritual

ties of soul friends.

The pagan Celts in Ireland and throughout Europe valued their families and

their tribal affiliations. They developed a fosterage system in which children

46

of one family were brought up by another family or tribe. They believed that

such exchanges not only strengthened alliances but introduced each child to a

wider world of learning. The pagan Celts' druids and druidesses also acted as

teachers of the tribes and advisers to the kings. They functioned as mediators

between the tribes and the spiritual realm: the world of tribal gods,

goddesses, and spirits. These types of mentoring relationships survived when

Christianity arrived.

The hagiographies tell numerous stories about younger people being guided

and educated by the Celtic saints at their monasteries or cells. As the story of

Ciaran of Clonmacnois and his mentor Enda shows, each of the early saints

seems to have had at least one personal mentor, a wiser, more experienced,

sometimes older teacher, confessor, or spiritual guide. Holiness, not age, was

a more important criterion of such a person. This soul friend was not

necessarily male or ordained. Some of the greatest and most well-known of

the soul friends in the early Celtic church were women, such as abbesses Ita,

Brigit, Samthann, and Hild. Not only were these women teachers,

administrators, guides, preachers, and confessors who, as in the stories of Ita,

did not hesitate to give out penances, but at least two of them, according to

early hagiographies, had in their possession religious articles traditionally

associated with a bishop. Brigit, in Cogitosus's Life, receives a pallium (a

bishop's mantle), and in a later hagiography, she is said to have been

ordained; Samthann had a marvelous crozier (a bishop's staff), which was

able to perform miracles.

One of the greatest discoveries of the Christian Celts, according to scholar

Nora Chadwick, is "the range and significance of individual experience, and

the interest and the humor of little things, and how exciting and valuable it is

to share them with one another." This, of course, is what many would equate

with the value and joy of having a soul friend, a person with whom we can

share the significant and often insignificant experiences of our lives and

discover, often in the telling, that the seemingly insignificant events are really

the most important of all, the times when and places where God speaks.

15) The Irish also developed a form of confession that was exclusively

private and that had no equivalent on the continent.

47

In the ancient church, confession of one's sins - and the subsequent penance

(such as appearing for years by the church door in sackcloth and ashes) - had

always been public. Sin was thought to be a public matter, a crime against the

church, which was the Mystical Body of Christ. Some sins were even

considered unforgivable, and the forgivable ones could be forgiven only once.

Penance was a once-in-a-lifetime sacrament: a second theft, a second

adultery and you were "outside the church," irreversibly excommunicated,

headed for damnation. By Patrick's day, a kind of private confession was not

entirely unknown, but it was still linked to some form of public revelation and

liturgical penance. The Irish innovation was to make all confession a

completely private affair between penitent and soul mate-and to make it as

repeatable as necessary. This adaptation did away with public humiliation

out of tenderness for the sinner's feelings, and softened the unyielding

penances of the patristic period so that the sinner would not lose heart. But

it also emphasized the Irish sense that personal conscience took precedence

over public opinion or church authority. The penitent was not labeled by

others; he labeled himself His sin was no one's business but God's.

Though one's confession was made to a human being, he or she was chosen

by the penitent for qualities of true priestliness - holiness, wisdom,

generosity, loyalty, and courage. So one did not necessarily choose one's

"priest" from among ordained professionals: the act of confession was too

personal and too important for such a limitation. One looked for an

anmchara, a soul-friend, ·someone to be trusted over a whole lifetime. Thus,

the oft-found saying "Anyone without a soul-friend is like a body without a

head," which dates from pagan times. The druids, not the monks, had been

the first soul-friends.

In a discipline where eremitism and penance played so large a part it is not

surprising to find that as early as the seventh century- a system of private

penance had already developed, though it is believed that it was not

instituted on the Continent till much later. In the Celtic Church, as a part of

this system of private penance, a monk living an eremetical life had as a

companion sharing his cell his anmchara, or 'soul-friend' to whom he made

his confession and who prescribed his penance.

48

The system, which does not appear in the Roman Church of the period, would

seem to be a natural development among the desert solitaries of the East,

and may possibly be related to the syncellus, 'one who shares a cell' in the

Greek Church.

To the Irish, the pope, the bishop of Rome who was successor to Saint Peter,

was a kind of high king of the church, but like the high king a distant figure

whose wishes were little known and less considered. Rome was surely the

ultimate pilgrim's destination-especially because there were books there that

could be brought back and copied! But if your motive was holiness:

To go to Rome

Is little profit, endless pain;

The Master that you seek in Rome,

You find at home, or seek in vain.

7) THE END OF THE CELTIC CHURCH

The stricter Roman Christianity of St. Augustine of Canterbury was slowly

spreading north and west through the English territories, and was bound

eventually to meet Celtic Christianity, marching in the opposite direction. A

clash of custom and sensibility was as unavoidable as it had been between

Columbanus and the Burgundian bishops. The "Romans" did not even trouble

to draw up an extended list of charges, as would once have been the case in

the church's great councils – but confined themselves to such issues as when

Easter should be celebrated and what form of tonsure or hairstyle should be

worn by the ordained.

The Romans had adopted the tonsure of St Peter, which left a circle, symbolic

of the crown of thorns, around the top of the head. The Irish, however, used

what they took to be the tonsure of St John, from ear to ear, which their

opponents called the tonsure of Simon Magus, perhaps because it was

associated with the Druids who were, in Latin, called Magi. Then there were

differences in baptism and rites of episcopal confirmation, but all these,

though of symbolical importance, were not what really counted.

However, the overall ethos, which was reflected in organizational habits

arising from the tribal background, was the true bone of contention. These

made the Celtic Church independent. threatening the growing organizational

49

power of the Romans. In Ireland the spiritual adviser or soul friend

(anamchara) was primary, rather than the ecclesiastical authority of the

bishops. The authority of the bishops was threatened further by the fact that,

though the bishops still held all ecclesiastical jurisdiction. the actual power lay

with the abbots. Connected to this, Irish monasteries had a large lay, and non-

celibate, family population attached to them.

Also, the Irish had many peculiar customs, encouraged diversity, enjoyed

pagan literature, were unconcerned about uniformity of monastic rule, and,

perhaps worst of all, sometimes allowed a woman to rule over them. Most

important, however, was the fact that these habits gave extreme autonomy

and individuality to each foundation: they were more like Zen monasteries,

one-pope Churches. Rites, customs and so forth differed locally, and there

was no central organization.

The clash between the two Churches was bound to come. The form of

Christian organization introduced into Kent by St. Augustine was unlike that

of the Celtic Church. It made no claim to be either independent or self-

governing. It was in all matters directly under obedience to Rome. But while

the Celtic countries shared to the full the orthodox views of the Church of

Rome, their remote position made them conservative. They were failing to

keep pace with modifications in the Continental Church.

It came to a head at a synod, held in 664 at the Abbey of Whitby in

Northumbria, at which the Northumbrian king ruled in favor of the "Roman"

party-that is, the party who were heirs to Augustine's papal mission. This

ultimately resulted in the submersion of the Celtic church in Ireland by the

Roman ecclesial system in the twelfth century.

Still, despite that" reform," which was a triumph for ecclesial administrators

but a tragedy for Irish culture and creativity, Celtic Christian spirituality

survived in various geographical locations where the saints had once lived or

journeyed. It is said to have deeply affected directly or indirectly certain

religious traditions and wisdom figures, including Hildegard of Bingen, Francis

of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Joan of Arc, Evelyn Underhill, and Thomas

Merton.

8) THE GREAT IRISH THINKERS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

A section needs to be dedicated at this stage to those Irishmen who have had

a definite influence on medieval thought and have really contributed

50

something of value to learning in the eighth and ninth centuries. Irishmen

were in fact to be found among the most brilliant minds of that time. From

the first days of Christianity in Ireland, bishops and priests gave a high place

to study. We must above all remember that the majority of the native Irish

clergy mainly belonged to the class of the filidh, who were the learned men of

the country. Saint Patrick, as if with a magic wand, had transformed their

druids and the filidh, into priests of the true faith. These filidh were already

well versed in the sciences and the arts, at least as much as the druids. They

preserved the tradition and, from the time of Saint Patrick, the earliest

monastic foundations had a school attached.

As men of their age, the great Abbots of Ireland, Finnian of Clonard, Ciaran of

Clonmacnois, Fintan of Clonenagh, Comgall of Bangor, Brendan of Clonfert,

Columcille of Iona, all have a high reputation as men of learning. It was in the

schools of these men that Clement Scotus, Joseph Scotus, Dunchad, John

Scotus Eriugena, Sedulius Scotus and other Irishmen who emigrated to the

Continent and soon became celebrated, received their formation. The Anglo-

Saxons and the Continentals were quite ready to attend these schools, such

as Agilbert the Frank, who became Archbishop of Paris.

Charlemagne did not fail to include several Irishmen among the foreign

masters whom he collected together in order to restore studies.

VIRGIL

Among these learned men from Ireland there are six whom we specially have

in mind. The Irishman Fearghal, his name had by then been latinized to

Virgilius became Abbot of a Bavarian monastery, then Administrator of the

diocese of Salzburg, and eventually becoming Bishop. His disputes with

Boniface, the apostle of Germany, are quite famous; the least we can say is

that the two prelates never agreed with each other.

In any case, Virgil appears on the scene as a forerunner. In the middle of the

eighth century he seems to have already had an idea that the earth is round,

at least that it has another side, which is inhabited, from which the sun and

moon are also to be seen.

DICUIL

Dicuil belongs both to the eighth and the ninth centuries, for he died in 825.

He came of completely Irish stock, and had received his formation in the

school of Clonmacnois under the rod of Abbot Suibhne. His great work,

written in Latin, as may be imagined, bears the title De Mensura Orbis

51

Terrarum. It is a treatise on geography. He makes use of the works of the

ancient geographers, both in Greek and Latin, and also the accounts given by

the Irish monks who had been travellers and navigators. He is the first writer

to mention Iceland, which he calls Thule, and of which he gives a description.

He is also the first to provide us with reliable information about the Faroe

Islands.

This geographer, astronomer and poet, who died as Abbot of Pahlacht, had a

wide influence on the revival of education in the Carolingian age.

DUNGAL

Not much is known of the life of Dungal, another Irish master of the ninth

century. He probably came from the school of Bangor. He was an

astronomer of distinction, and in 811 wrote a letter to Charlemagne

announcing a double eclipse of the sun and explaining the process by which

this took place. In 825 the Emperor Lothair placed Dungal at the head of the

great school of Pavia, the ancestor of the famous university, which was

attended by students from all over Northern Italy. He is still celebrated for his

controversy with Claudius, the Spanish Bishop of Turin, who was an

iconoclast. With spirit and also with authority, Dungal came forward as the

defender of the holy images, and in doing so gave proof of his sound

theological learning.

SEDULIUS THE YOUNGER

Sedulius the younger belonged to the Irish colony at Liege, in the reign of

Lothair. A talented prose-writer, he was also a poet and a grammarian. His

chief work, De Rectoribus Christian is, is a treatise on the theory of political

government which prepares the way for Saint Thomas, Colonna and Dante. It

was written at Liege in 855. With Lothair II in mind, he explains his views as

to the duties of every Christian sovereign.

JOHN SCOTUS ERIUGENA

There can be no question that the most famous of these Irish thinkers and

learned men in the Middle Ages is the man known as Iohannes Scotus

Eriugena. His name means John the Irishman who was born in Ireland. He

was a great philosopher, well in advance of the ideas of his age and at the

same time very bold in his conceptions. He was born about the year 807 or

808 and is said to have died in 877. From 845 onwards he was to be found at

the court of Charles the Bald, who placed him in charge of the palace school.

52

Charlemagne's grandson also wished to follow in the footsteps of his

renowned ancestor, and he greatly encouraged the immigration of scholars

from Ireland. Colonies of Irish were so numerous on the Continent in those

days that hostelries, and even monasteries, had to be built in order to house

them. Eriugena had made his mark from the start owing to his remarkable

knowledge of languages and of palaeography. He was able to translate,

without difficulty the works of the Pseudodionysius the Areopagite, which

nobody up to then had succeeded in doing. His translation was so elegant

and so exact that the pontifical librarian, Anastasius, wrote specially to the

king of France expressing his admiration. He was, in fact, wondering, not

without some amazement, how this "barbarian", born at the far ends of the

world, could be so well versed in the subtleties of the Greek language!

John Scottus first came to fame in his use by the church to refute of the

teachings of Gottschalk. Gottschalk boldly claimed that men were

predestined not only to good but also to evil. There was consternation

among the bishops and in the ensuing uproar scholars across Europe took

sides, some for some against. Faced with the prospect of victory for

Gottschalk's party Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims commissioned John, who

had been teaching at the palace school, to refute the heresy, but 'before the

Irish philosopher could be checked, he had refuted Sin and Hell'. John Scottus

said that as everything arises from the One it is predestined to return to the

one. Thus, there was no eternal damnation. Also, the concept of heaven,

where man returned to the presence of God but did not fully unite with Him

remaining separate from him and worshipping him, was rejected by John

Scottus. He said that it did not make sense that man would stop just short and

not complete the journey by uniting with That from which he had originated.

There followed further writings: a commentary on Luke and another on John,

poems in Greek and Latin, a commentary on Martianus Capella and extracts

from Macrobius. It was not in philology, however, but in philosophy that

Eriugena was to excel. His chief work, written in 866, bears the title De

divisione naturae and consists of fIve books. He wrote another treatise, De

egressu et regressu animae ad Deum, of which only a fragment remains to us

and a commentary on the De nuptiis Mercuri et philologiae of Martianus

Capella,.

It was his chief work, De divisione naturae, which provoked most discussion,

and in this he really gives us what we may call his philosophic doctrine. In

Book I he lays out a plan, proposing a division of nature into four parts: nature

which creates and is not created (which means God who is both uncreated

and creator); created nature which creates (primary causes, ideas); created

53

nature which does not create (creation); un created nature which does not

create (God, seen as the end of all things, to which they all return).

His wine soaked dinners with the emperor were full of parrying wit. When

sitting opposite John Scottus at the the dining table, the emperor asked

playfully “What seperates a fool (sottum) from an Irishman ( scottum)?

“Only the table” came John Scottus’s reply.

9) THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF IRELAND

The standard answer given for the reason for the ending of the Golden Age of

Ireland is the relentless attacks of the Vikings on the monasteries and it

certainly was severe in its effects.

Attacks on magical Lindisfarne began in the last decade of the eighth century.

Monks were stripped and tortured; and the raiders came again in 801 to set

the buildings afire, in 806 to kill scores of monks, in 867 to burn the rebuilt

abbey. In 875 the harried survivors left Lindisfarne for good. In the first

decade of the ninth century it was the turn of Columcille's lona, where "a

great number of layfolks and clerics were massacred" in repeated raids. The

great foundation had at last to be abandoned. Inis Murray was destroyed in

802, never to rise again. Even remote Skellig Michael was raided repeatedly,

its harmless abbot Etgal carried off for ransom but dying "of hunger on their

hands." Glendalough was pillaged on countless occasions and, between 775

and 1071 , destroyed by fire at least nine times. Bangor, Moville, Clonfert,

Clonmacnois, Brigid's Kildare-each was laid waste in turn. In 840, even the

extensive buildings of Patrick's Armagh were burned to their foundations.

As a second reason for the end of the Golden age of ireland, it is also said that

the lack of organisation, uniformity and centalised power as compared to the

Roman church is what cost the Celtic church its existence.

However, if that was true, then both Hinduism and Buddhism which have

these same features as the Celtic church would also have ceased to exist.

I have a personal theory, for which I have no evidence, that the end of the

Golden Age has to have been for more subtle and powerful reasons: that the

extinction of something so great must have occurred not by physical causes

but because of some deep hidden spiritual flaw. The theory is that, because

of the belief in both the transcendent and immanent God, the Irish had in

effect one eye on the transcendent ( the formless spirit) and one eye on the

immanent (the creation) which is obviously excellent. However, with the

passage of time, the eye on the transcendent began to weaken and more

value was given to the immanent. This is intimated in how “White Martrdom”

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was valued by the Irish as the supreme sacrifice. I cannot believe that with

both eyes equally on the transcendent and the immanent such a valuation

would have come about. The one who finds the transcendent finds Him

everywhere and equally everywhere and not more in Ireland than in any

other place on earth. If what is proposed is true, as the source of the

immanent is the transcendent, the Irish thus lost their strong contact with the

source of all which they had enjoyed and it is this spiritual and not physical

reason that the Golden Age of Ireland came to an end. If true, the significnce

of this is that it shows the way back for the Irish to re-establish a new Golden

Age of Ireland in today’s modern world. What a contribution this would be to

the world.

10) WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN?

1) A church that was individual centred rather than Rome centred with the

strength in the individual and not the institution of the church.

2) A mystical based religion where direct experience or communication

with God was the emphasis rather than a relationship with clerics or the

church. Thus, a spirituality based on experience much more so than

faith.

3) Through the belief in both a transcendent and immanent God, the

absence of a division between God and the creation.

H.J. Massingham wrote, ‘If the Celtic Church had survived, it is possible

that the fissure between Christianity and nature widening through the

centuries would not have cracked the unity of western man’s attitude

to God and the world.

4) The love of mother earth, the strong value of ecology, etc, etc. The

state of the earth, the level of greed and excess might have been

markedly different.

5) The practice of everybody having an anamcara or spiritual direction

(somewhat like the guru/disciple relationship) with which to find one’s

way back to God.

6) A spirituality/religion that was absolutely in harmony with the

fundamental nature of the Irish people, where spirituality mattered

more than loyalty to the institutional aspect of a church.

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7) Ireland may have remained a leading spiritual light and a living example

to the rest of the world as to how man might live on this earth in

harmony with mother earth, his fellow man and in union with his

Creator.

There is no reason why a new Golden Age of Ireland should not come into

being. It is my belief that this is our destiny as yet unfulfilled. We will never be

an economic giant: we will never be a political giant but it is our destiny to be

a spiritual giant, an educational giant and a cultural giant in this world.