ST. BRIGIT
St. Brigit was--after St. Patrick himself--probably the most noted
figure amongst Irish Christians in the fifth century. She must have
attained her extraordinary influence through sheer ability and
intellectuality, for she appears to have been the daughter of a
slave-woman,[1] employed in the mansion of a chief called Dubhthach
[Duv-hach, or Duffach], who was himself tenth in descent from Felimidh,
the lawgiver monarch of Ireland in the second century. The king's
wife, jealous of her husband's liking for his slave, threatened him
with these words, "Unless thou sellest yon bondmaid in distant lands I
will exact my dowry from thee and I will leave thee," and so had her
driven from the place and sold to a druid, in whose house her daughter,
Dubhthach's offspring, soon afterwards saw the light. She was thus
born into slavery, though not quite a slave; for Dubhthach, in selling
the mother into slavery, expressly reserved for himself her offspring,
whatever it might be. She must have been, at least, early inured to
hardship, as St. Patrick had been. The druid, however, did not prevent
her from being baptized. She grew up to be a girl of exceeding beauty,
and many suitors sought her in marriage. She returned to her father's
house, but refused all offers of matrimony. She aroused the jealousy of
her father's wife, as her mother had done before her, and Dubhthach,
indignant at her unbounded generosity with his goods, decided upon
selling her to the king of North Leinster. Her father's abortive
attempt to get rid of her on this occasion is thus quaintly described
in her Irish life in the Leabhar Breac.
"Thereafter," says the life, "Dubhthach and his consort were minded to
sell the holy Brigit into bondage, for Dubhthach liked not his cattle
and his wealth to be dealt out to the poor, and that is what Brigit
used to do. So Dubhthach fared in his chariot and Brigit along with
him.
"Said Dubhthach to Brigit, 'Not for honour or reverence to thee art
thou carried in a chariot, but to take thee, to sell thee to grind the
quern for Dunlang mac Enda, King of Leinster.'
"When they came to the King's fortress Dubhthach went in to the king,
and Brigit remained in her chariot at the fortress door. Dubhthach had
left his sword in the chariot near Brigit. A leper came to Brigit to
ask an alms. She gave him Dubhthach's sword.
"Said Dubhthach to the King, 'Wilt thou buy a bondmaid, namely, my
daughter?' says he.
"Said Dunlang, 'Why sellest thou thine own daughter?'
"Said Dubhthach, 'She stayeth not from selling my wealth and from
giving it to the poor.'
"Said the King, 'Let the maiden come into the fortress.'
"Dubhthach went to Brigit, and was enraged against her because she had
given his sword to the poor man.
"When Brigit came into the King's presence the King said to her,
'Since it is thy father's wealth that thou takest, much more wilt thou
take _my_ wealth and my cattle and give them to the poor.'
"Said Brigit, 'The Son of the Virgin knoweth if I had thy might, with
all Leinster, and with all thy wealth, I would give them to the Lord
of the Elements.'
"Said the King to Dubhthach, 'Thou art not fit on either hand to
bargain about this maiden, for her merit is higher before God
than before men,' and the King gave Dubhthach an ivory-hilted
sword (_Claideb dét_), et sic liberata est sancta Virgo Brigita a
captivititate.[2]"
She at length succeeded in assuming the veil of a nun at the hands of
a bishop called Mucaille, along with seven virgin companions. With
these she eventually retired into her father's territory and founded a
church at Kildare, beside an ancient oak-tree, which existed till the
tenth century, and which gives its name to the spot.[3] Even at this
early period Kildare seems to have been a racecourse, and St. Brigit is
described in the ancient lives as driving across it in her chariot.
It is remarkable that there is scarcely any mention of St. Brigit in
the lives of St. Patrick, although, according to the usual chronology
they were partly contemporaries, St. Brigit having become a nun
about the year 467, and St. Patrick having lived until 492. About
the only mention of her in the saint's life is that which tells how
she once listened to Patrick preaching for three nights and days,
and fell asleep, and as she dreamt she saw first white oxen in white
corn-fields, and then darker ones took their place, and lastly black
oxen. And thereafter, she beheld sheep and swine, and dogs and wolves
quarrelling with each other, and upon her waking up, St. Patrick
explained her dream as being symbolical of the history of the Irish
Church present and future. The life of Brigit herself in the Book of
Lismore tells the vision somewhat differently:
"'I beheld,' said she, to Patrick, when he asked her why she had
fallen asleep, 'four ploughs in the north-east which ploughed the
whole island, and before the sowing was finished the harvest was
ripened, and clear well-springs and shiny streams came out of the
furrows. White garments were on the sowers and ploughmen. I beheld
four other ploughs in the north which ploughed the island athwart and
turned the harvest again, and the oats which they had sown grew up at
once and were ripe, and black streams came out of the furrows, and
there were black garments on the sowers and on the ploughmen.'"
This vision Patrick explained to her, saying--
"'The first four ploughs which thou beheldest, those are I and thou,
who sow the four books of the gospel with a sowing of faith and belief
and piety. The harvest which thou beheldest are they who come unto
that faith and belief through our teaching. The four ploughs which
thou beheldest in the north are the false teachers and the liars which
will overturn the teaching which we have sown.'"
St. Brigit's small oratory at Kildare, under the shadow of her
branching oak, soon grew into a great institution, and within her own
lifetime two considerable religious establishments sprang up there,
one for women and the other for men. She herself selected a bishop
to assist her in governing them, and another to instruct herself and
her nuns. Long before her death, which occurred about the year 525, a
regular city and a great school rivalling the fame of Armagh itself,
had risen round her oak-tree. Cogitosus, himself one of the Kildare
monks, who wrote a Latin life of St. Brigit at the desire of the
community, gives us a fine description of the great church of Kildare
in his own day, which was evidently some time prior to the Danish
invasion at the close of the eighth century,[4] but how long before is
doubtful. He tells us that the church was both large and lofty, with
many pictures and hangings, and with ornamental doorways, and that a
partition ran across the breadth of the church near the chancel or
sanctuary:
"At one of its extremities there was a door which admitted the bishop
and his clergy to the sanctuary and to the altar; and at the other
extremity on the opposite side there was a similar door by which
Brigit and her virgins and widows used to enter to enjoy the banquet
of the Body and Blood of Christ. Then a central partition ran down
the nave, dividing the men from the women, the men being on the right
and the women on the left, and each division having its own lateral
entrance. These partitions did not rise to the roof of the church, but
only so high as to serve their purpose. The partition at the sanctuary
or chancel was formed with boards of wood decorated with pictures and
covered with linen hangings which might, it seems, be drawn aside at
the consecration, to give the people in the nave a better view of the
holy mysteries."[5]
The two institutions--nuns and monks--planted by St. Brigit continued
long to flourish side by side, and Kildare is the only religious
establishment in Ireland, says Dr. Healy, which down to a comparatively
recent period preserved the double line of succession, of abbot-bishops
and of abbesses. The annalists always took care to record the names of
the abbesses with the same accuracy as those of the abbots, and to the
last the abbesses as successors of St. Brigit, were credited with, in
public opinion, and probably enjoyed in fact, a certain supremacy over
the bishops of Kildare themselves.
Amongst other occupations the monks and scholars of Kildare seem to
have given themselves up to decorative art, and a school of metal
work under the supervision of Brigit's first bishop soon sprang into
existence, producing all kinds of artistically decorated chalices,
bells, patens, and shrines; and the impulse given thus early to
artistic work and to beautiful creations seems to have long propagated
itself in Kildare, as the description of the church by Cogitosus shows,
and as we may still conjecture from the exquisite round tower with its
unusually ornamented doorway and its great height of over 130 feet, the
loftiest tower of the kind in Ireland.
No doubt several attributes of the pagan Brigit,[6] who, as we have
seen, was accounted by the ancient Irish to have been the goddess of
poets, passed over to her Christian namesake, who was also credited
with being the patroness of men of learning. On this, her life in the
Book of Lismore contains the following significant and rather obscure
passage:
"Brigit was once with her sheep on the Curragh, and she saw running
past her a son of reading,[7] to wit Nindid the scholar was he.
"'What makes thee unsedate, O son of reading?' saith Brigit, 'and what
seekest thou in that wise?'
"'O nun,' saith the scholar, 'I am going to heaven.'
"'The Virgin's son knoweth,' said Brigit, 'happy is he that goeth that
journey, and for God's sake make prayer with me that it may be easy
for me to go.'
"'O nun,' said the scholar, 'I have no leisure, for the gates of
heaven are open now and I fear they may be shut against me. Or, if
thou art hindering me pray the Lord that it may be easy for me to go
to heaven, and I will pray the Lord for thee, that it may be easy
for thee, and that thou mayest bring many thousands with thee, into
heaven.'
"Brigit recited a paternoster with him. And he was pious
thenceforward, and it is he that gave her communion and sacrifice when
she was dying. _Wherefore thence it came to pass that the comradeship
of the world's softs of reading is with Brigit, and the Lord gives
them through Brigit every perfect good they ask._"[8]
As St. Patrick is pre-eminently the patron saint of Ireland, so is
Brigit its patroness, and with the Irish people no Christian name
is more common for their boys than Patrick, or for their girls than
Brigit.[9] She was universally known as the "Mary of the Gael," and
reverenced with a certain chivalric feeling which seems to have been
always present with the Gaelic nation in the case of women, for, says
her Irish life, her desire "was to satisfy the poor, to expel every
hardship, to spare every miserable man.... It is she that helpeth
every one who is in a strait or a danger; it is she that abateth the
pestilences; it is she that quelleth the anger and the storm of the
sea. She is the prophetess of Christ: she is the queen of the south:
_She is the Mary of the Gael_." The writer closes thus in a burst of
eloquence:
"Her relics are on earth, with honour and dignity and primacy, with
miracles and marvels. Her soul is like a sun in the heavenly kingdom,
among the choir of angels and archangels. And though great be her
honour here at present, greater by far will it be when she shall arise
like a shining lamp, in completeness of body and soul at the great
Assembly of Doomsday, in union with cherubim and seraphim, in union
with the Son of Mary the Virgin, in the union that is nobler than
every union, in the union of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit."
As of St. Patrick, so of his great co-evangeliser St. Brigit, there
exist quite a number of various lives; the most ancient being probably
a metrical life in Irish contained in the Book of Hymns, of which there
still exists an eleventh century MS. It consists of fifty-three stanzas
of four lines each, and is ascribed to St. Broccan or Brogan Cloen,
who seems to have lived at the beginning of the seventh century.[10]
This life does little more than expatiate upon Brigit's miracles and
virtues. The next life of importance is that already mentioned, by
Cogitosus, the Kildare monk, whose date is uncertain, but is clearly
prior to the Danish invasions. This life, which is in very creditable
Latin, and four others, were printed by Colgan. The first of these four
is--probably falsely--attributed to St. Ultan, who died in the middle
of the seventh century; the next is by a monk who is called Animosus,
but of whom nothing is known, though, as St. Donatus, who became
bishop of Fiesole in 824, alludes to his works, he must have been an
early author; the third is a twelfth-century work, by Laurence of
Durham, an Englishman; and the last is in Latin verse, taken from a MS.
which the unwearied Colgan procured from Monte Cassino, and which is
attributed to Coelan, a monk of Iniscaltra, who probably lived in the
eighth century, while a prologue to this life is prefixed by a later
writer, the celebrated Irish bishop of Fiesole, Donatus, who, in the
early part of the ninth century, worked with great success in Italy.
There is something touching in the language with which this great and
successful child of the Gael reverts in his prologue to the home of his
childhood:--
"Far in the west they tell of a matchless land,[11] which goes in
ancient books by the name of Scotia [_i.e._, Ireland]; rich in
resources this land, having silver, precious stones, vestures and
gold, well suited to earth-born creatures as regards its climate, its
sun, and its arable soil; that Scotia of lovely fields that flow with
milk and honey, hath skill in husbandry, and raiments, and arms, and
arts, and fruits. There are no fierce bears there, nor ever has the
land of Scotia brought forth savage broods of lions. No poisons hurt,
no serpent creeps through the grass, nor does the babbling frog croak
and complain by the lake. In this land the Scottish race are worthy to
dwell, a renowned race of men in war, in peace, in fidelity."
Whitley Stokes has published the Irish lives of St. Brigit from the
Leabhar Breac and the Book of Lismore, and Donatus alludes to other
lives by St. Ultan[12] and St. Eleran, so that Brigit has not lacked
biographers. She herself is said to have written a rule for her nuns
and some other things, and O'Curry prints one Irish poem ascribed to
her--in which she prays for the family of heaven to be present at her
feast: "I should like the men of heaven in my own house, I should like
rivers of peace to be at their disposal," etc.--which appears to be
alluded to in the preface to the Litany of Angus the Culdee, as the
"great feast which St. Brigit made for Jesus in her heart."[13]
[1] Cogitosus, who probably wrote in the beginning of the eighth
century, makes no allusion to her slave-parentage, but this was to be
expected.
[2] _See_ Stokes, "Three Middle Irish Homilies."
[3] Cill-dara, the "Church of the Oak-tree," now Kildare.
[4] He himself says, "Et quis sermone explicare potest maximum decorem
hujus ecclesiæ et innumera illius civitatis quî dicemus miracula ...
[hic] nullus carnalis adversarius nec concursus timetur hostium, sed
civitas est refugii tutissima ... et quis ennumerare potest diversas
turbas et innumerabiles populos de omnibus provinciis affluentes, alii
ad epularum abundantiam, alii languidi propter sanitates, alii ad
spectaculum turbarum, alii cum magnis donis venientes ad solemnitatem
Nativitatis S. Brigitæ quæ in die Calendarum est," etc. These are the
evident outcome of the piping times of peace which Ireland enjoyed in
the seventh and eighth centuries. It would have been impossible to have
written in this way after the close of the eighth century. See chap. 36
of Cogitosus's life, "Trias Thaumaturga," p. 524 of the Louvain edition.
[5] Thus well summarised by Dr. Healy from the more diffuse Latin of
Cogitosus. His description of the church is as follows: It was "solo
spatiosa et in altum minaci proceritate porrecta ac decorata pictis
tabulis, tria intrinsecus habens oratoria ampla, et divisa parietibus
tabulatis." One of the walls was "decoratus, et imaginibus depictus, ac
linteaminibus tectus."
[6] This has not escaped Windisch. "Während," he writes, "Patrick nur
der christlichen Hagiologie angehört, scheint Brigit zugleich die Erbin
einer alten heidnischen Gottheit zu sein. Ihr Wesen enthält Ziige die
mehr als eine heilig gesprochen Nonne hinter ihr vermuthen lassen."
Windisch bases this chiefly upon the expressions in Broccan's hymn,
which calls her the mother of Christ, and calls Christ her son, and
equates her with Mary. The passage which I have adduced from the Irish
life is even more remarkable:
"Brigit," writes Whitley Stokes "(cp. Skr. _bhargas_) was born at
sunrise neither within nor without a house, was bathed in milk, her
breath revives the dead, a house in which she is staying flames up to
heaven, cow-dung blazes before her, oil is poured on her head; she
is fed from the milk of a white red-eared cow; a fiery pillar rises
over her head; sun rays support her wet cloak; she remains a virgin;
and she was one of the two mothers of Christ the Anointed. She has,
according to Giraldus Cambrensis, a perpetual ashless fire watched by
twenty nuns, of whom herself was one, blown by fans or bellows only,
and surrounded by a hedge within which no male could enter" ("Top.
Hib." chaps. 34, 35 and 36), from all which Stokes declares that one
may without much rashness pick out certain of her life-incidents, as
having "originally belonged to the myth or the ritual of some goddess
of fire." (_See_ preface to "Three Middle Irish Homilies.")
[7] "Mac-léighinn," which is to this day a usual Irish term for student.
[8] Thus translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes in his "Lives of the Saints
from the Book of Lismore," p. 194. In the original: "Conid assein
dorala cumthanus mac leighinn in domuin re Brigit, co tabair in coimdhi
doibh tria atach Brigte gach maith fhoirbhthi chuinghid."
[9] Or to speak more accurately no names _were_ more common, but owing
to the action of various influences, particularly of the National
Board, with unsympathetic persons at its head, and of the men who
direct the modern education of the Irish, the people who are not
allowed by the National Board to learn history, and who are taught to
despise the Irish language, are gradually being made ashamed of any
names that are not English, and Patrick and Brigit almost bid fair to
follow the way of Cormac, Conn, Felim, Art, Donough, Fergus, Diarmuid,
and a score of other Christian names of men in common use a century
ago, but now almost wholly extinct, and of Mève, Sive, Eefi, Sheela,
Nuala, and as many more female names now nearly or completely obsolete.
A woman of some education said to me lately, "God forbid I should
handicap my daughter in life by calling her Brigit;" and a Catholic
bishop said the other day that too often when an Irish parent abroad
did pluck up courage to christen his son "Patrick," he put it in, in
a shamefaced whisper, at the end of several other names. This is the
direct result of the teaching given by the National Board.
[10] He is said to have written this hymn at the instigation of Ultan,
who died in 653, but, as Windisch remarks, mention is probably made of
Ultan only because he is said to have been the first to collect the
miracles of Brigit--"die Sprache," adds Windisch, "ist alterthümlich;
besonders beachtenswerth sind die ziemlich zahlreichen Perfectformen."
It is remarkable that the miracles attributed to Brigit are given in
the same order in this hymn and in Cogitosus' life of her. The metre is
irregular.
"Ni bu Sanct Brigit suanach
Ni bu húarach im seirc Dé,
Sech ni chiuir ni cossena
Ind nóeb dibad bethath che."
The life by Cogitosus is evidently pre-Danish, and it is more likely to
be an extension of the short metrical one, than that the metrical one
should be a _résumé_ of it. If this is so it bespeaks a considerable
antiquity for the Irish verses.
[11] There is a fragment in the Irish MS. Rawlinson, B. 512, quoted
somewhere by Kuno Meyer, which reminds one of this passage. It begins:
"Now the island of Ireland, Inis Herenn, has been set in the west. As
Adam's Paradise stands at the sunrise, so Ireland stands at the sunset,
and they are alike in the nature of their soil," etc.
[12] St. Ultan wrote a beautiful Irish hymn and also a Latin hymn to
her--at least they are attributed to him--beginning--
"Christus in nostra insola
Que vocatur hibernia
Ostensus est hominibus
Maximis mirabilibus.
Que perfecit per felicem
Celestis vite virginem
Precellentem pro merito
Magno in mundi circulo."
See Todd's "Liber Hymnorum," vol. ii. p. 58. The Latin orthography of
the Irish is seldom quite perfect.
[13] This poem begins:
"Ropadh maith lem corm-lind mór
Do righ na righ
Ropadh maith lem muinnter nimhe
Acca hol tre bithe shír."
_I.e._, "I would like a great lake of ale for the King of the
kings, I would like the people of heaven to be drinking it through
eternal ages," which sounds curious, but Brigit probably meant it
allegorically.