THEIR FAME AND TEACHING
It is very difficult to say what was exactly the curriculum of the
early Irish colleges, and how far they were patronised by laymen.
Without doubt their original design was to propagate a more perfect
knowledge of the Scriptures and of theological learning in general,
but it is equally certain that they must have, almost from the very
first, taught the heathen classics and the Irish language side by
side with the Scriptures and theology. There is no other possible
way of accounting for the admirable scholarship of the men whom they
turned out, and for their skill in Latin and often also in Irish
poetry. Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and most of the Latin poets must have
been widely taught and read. "It is sufficient," says M. d'Arbois
de Jubainville, talking of Columbanus who was born in 543, and who
was educated at Bangor, on Belfast Loch, "to glance at his writings,
immediately to recognise his marvellous superiority over Gregory of
Tours and the Gallo-Romans of his time. He lived in close converse with
the classical authors, as later on did the learned men of the sixteenth
century, whose equal he certainly is not, but of whom he seems a sort
of precursor." From the sixth to the sixteenth century is a long
leap, and no higher eulogium could be passed upon the scholarship of
Columbanus and the training given by his Irish college.[1] All the
studies of the time appear to have been taught in them through the
medium of the Irish language, not merely theology but arithmetic,
rhetoric, poetry, hagiography, natural science as then understood,
grammar, chronology, astronomy, Greek, and even Hebrew.
"The classic tradition," sums up M. Darmesteter, "to all appearances
dead in Europe, burst out into full flower in the Isle of Saints, and
the Renaissance began in Ireland 700 years before it was known in
Italy. During three centuries Ireland was the asylum of the higher
learning which took sanctuary there from the uncultured states of
Europe. At one time Armagh, the religious capital of Christian
Ireland, was the metropolis of civilisation."
"Ireland," says Babington in his "Fallacies of Race Theories,"[2] "had
been admitted into Christendom and to some measure of culture only in
the fifth century. At that time Gaul and Italy enjoyed to the full all
the knowledge of the age. In the next century the old culture-lands
had to turn for some little light and teaching to that remote and
lately barbarous land."
When we remember that the darkness of the Middle Ages had already
set in over the struggles, agony, and confusion of feudal Europe,
and that all knowledge of Greek may be said to have died out
upon the Continent--"had elsewhere absolutely vanished," says M.
Darmesteter--when we remember that even such a man as Gregory the Great
was completely ignorant of it, it will appear extraordinary to find it
taught in Ireland alone, out of all the countries of Western Europe.[3]
Yet this is capable of complete and manifold proof. Columbanus for
instance, shows in his letter to Pope Boniface that he knows something
of both Greek and Hebrew.[4] Aileran, who died of the plague in 664,
gives evidence of the same in his book on our Lord's genealogy.
Cummian's letter to the Abbot of Iona has been referred to before,
and, as Professor G. Stokes puts it, "proves the fact to demonstration
that in the first half of the seventh century there was a wide range
of Greek learning, not ecclesiastical merely, but chronological,
astronomical, and philosophical, away at Durrow in the very centre of
the Bog of Allen." Augustine, an un-identified Irish monk of the second
half of the seventh century, gives many proofs of Greek and Oriental
learning and quotes the Chronicles of Eusebius. The later Sedulius, the
versatile abbot of Kildare, about the year 820 "makes parade of his
Greek knowledge," to quote a French writer in the "Revue Celtique,"
"employs Greek words without necessity, and translates into Greek a
part of the definition of the pronoun."[5] St. Caimins's Psalter, seen
by Bishop Ussher with the Hebrew text collated, convinced Dr. Reeves
that Hebrew as well as Greek was studied in Ireland about the year
600. Nor did this Greek learning tend to die out. In the middle of the
ninth century John Scotus Erigena, summoned from Ireland to France by
Charles the Bald, was the only person to be found able to translate
the Greek works of the pseudo-Dionysius,[6] thanks to the training
he had received in his Irish school. The Book of Armagh contains the
Lord's Prayer written in Greek letters, and there is a Greek MS. of
the Psalter, written in Sedulius' own hand, now preserved in Paris.
Many more Greek texts, at least a dozen, written by Irish monks, are
preserved elsewhere in Europe. "These eighth and ninth century Greek
MSS.," remarks Professor Stokes, "covered with Irish glosses and Irish
poems and Irish notes, have engaged the attention of palæographers and
students of the Greek texts of the New Testament during the last two
centuries." They are indeed a proof that--as Dr. Reeves puts it--the
Irish School "was unquestionably the most advanced of its day in sacred
literature."
This remarkable knowledge of Greek was evidently derived from an early
and direct commerce with Gaul, where Greek had been spoken for four
or five centuries, first alongside of Celtic, and in later times of
Latin also.[7] The knowledge of Hebrew may have been derived from
the Egyptian monks who passed over from Gaul into Ireland. Egypt
and the East were more or less in close communication with Gaul
in the fifth century, and the Irish Litany, ascribed to Angus the
Culdee, commemorates seven Egyptian monks amongst many other Gauls,
Germans, and Italians who resided in Ireland. The close and constant
intercommunication between Greek-speaking Gaul and Ireland accounts
for the planting and cultivation of the Greek language in the Irish
schools, and once planted there it continued to flourish more or less
for some centuries. There is ample evidence to prove the connection
between Gaul and Ireland from the fifth to the ninth century. We find
Gaulish merchants in the middle of Ireland at Clonmacnois, who had
no doubt sailed up the Shannon in the way of commerce, selling wine
to Ciaran in the sixth century. We find Columbanus, a little later
on, inquiring at Nantes for a vessel engaged in the Irish trade--_quæ
vexerat commercium cum Hibernia_. In Adamnan's Life of Columcille
we find mention of Gaulish sailors arriving at Cantire. Adamnan's
own treatise on Holy Places was written from the verbal account of a
Gaul. In the Old Irish poem on the Fair of Carman in Wexford--a pagan
institution which lived on in Christian times--we find mention of the
"Great market of the foreign Greeks,
Where gold and noble clothes were wont to be;"[8]
the foreign Greeks being no doubt the Greek-speaking Gaulish merchants.
Alcuin sends his gifts of money and oil and his letters direct from
Charlemagne's court to his friends in Clonmacnois, probably by a vessel
engaged in the direct Irish trade, for, as he himself tells us, the
sea-route between England and France was then closed. If more proof of
the close communication between Ireland and Gaul were wanted, the fact
that Dagobert II., king of France in the seventh century, was educated
at Slane,[9] in Ireland, and also that certain Merovingian and French
coins have been found here, should be sufficient.
The fame of these early Irish schools attracted students in the
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries from all quarters to Ireland,
which had now become a veritable land of schools and scholars. The
Venerable Bede tells us of the crowds of Anglo-Saxons who flocked over
into Ireland during the plague, about the year 664, and says that they
were all warmly welcomed by the Irish, who took care that they should
be provided with food every day, without payment on their part; that
they should have books to read, and that they should receive gratuitous
instruction from Irish masters.[10] Books must have already multiplied
considerably when the swarms of Anglo-Saxons could thus be supplied
with them gratis. This noble tradition of free education to strangers
lasted down to the establishment of the so-called "National" schools in
Ireland, for down to that time "poor scholars" were freely supported
by the people and helped in their studies. The number of scribes
whose deaths have been considered worth recording by the annalists
is very great, and books consequently must have been very numerous.
This plentifulness of books probably added to the renown of the Irish
schools. An English prince as well as a French one was educated by
them in the seventh century; this was Aldfrid, king of Northumbria,
who was trained in all the learning of Erin, and who always aided and
abetted the Irish in England, in opposition to Wilfrid, who opposed
them. That the king got a good education in Ireland may be conjectured
from the fact that Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury, dedicated to him a
poetic epistle on Latin metric and prosody, in which, says Dr. Healy,
"he congratulates the king on his good fortune in having been educated
in Ireland." Aldhelm's own master was also an Irishman, Mael-dubh, and
his abbacy of Malmesbury is only a corruption of this Irishman's name
Maeldubh's-bury.[11] In another place Aldhelm tells us that while the
great English school at Canterbury was by no means overcrowded, the
English swarmed to the Irish schools like bees. Aldfrid himself, when
leaving Ireland, composed a poem of sixty lines in the Irish language
and metre, which he must have learned from the bards, in which he
compliments each of the provinces severally, as though he meant to
thank the whole nation for their hospitality.[12]
"I found in Inisfail the fair
In Ireland, while in exile there,
Women of worth, both grave and gay men,
Learned clerics, heroic laymen.
I travelled its fruitful provinces round,
And in every one of the five I found,
Alike in church and in palace hall,
Abundant apparel and food for all."
St. Willibrord, a Saxon noble educated in Ireland about the same time
with King Aldfrid, went out thence and ultimately became Archbishop of
Utrecht. Another noted scholar of the same period was Agilbert, a Frank
by birth, who spent a long time in Ireland for the purpose of study and
afterwards became Bishop of Paris.[13] We have seen how the Office of
St. Cathaldus states that the school of Lismore was visited by Gauls,
Angles, Scotti, Teutons, and scholars from other neighbouring nations.
The same was more or less the case with Clonmacnois, Bangor, and some
others of the most noted of the Irish schools.
It was not in Greek attainments, nor in ecclesiastical studies, nor
in Latin verses alone, that the Irish excelled; they also produced
astronomers like Dungal and geographers like Dicuil. Dungal's
attainments we have glanced at, but Dicuil's book--_de mensura orbis
terrarum_--written about the year 825, is more interesting, although
nothing is known about the author's own life, nor do we know even
the particular Irish school to which he belonged.[14] His book was
published by a Frenchman because he found Dicuil's descriptions of the
measurements of the Pyramids a thousand years ago tallied with his own.
"Antioch," writes Professor G. Stokes, "about A.D. 600, was the centre
of Greek culture and Greek erudition, and the chronicle of Malalas,
as embodied in Niebuhr's series of Byzantine historians, is a mine of
information on many questions; but compare it with the Irish work of
Dicuil and its mistakes are laughable."
A great deal of his work is founded of course upon Pliny, Solinus,
and Priscian, but he shows a highly-developed critical sense in
comparing and collating various MSS. which he had inspected to ensure
accuracy. What he tells us at first-hand, however, is by far the most
interesting. In speaking of the Nile he says that:--
"Although we never read in any book that any branch of the Nile flows
into the Red Sea, yet Brother Fidelis told in my presence to my
master Suibhne [Sweeny]--to whom under God I owe whatever knowledge
I possess--that certain clerics and laymen from Ireland who went to
Jerusalem on pilgrimage sailed up the Nile a long way."
They sailed thence by a canal into the Red Sea, and this statement
proves the accuracy of Dicuil, for this canal really existed and
continued in use until 767, when it was closed to hinder the people
of Mecca and Medina getting supplies from Egypt. The account of the
Pyramids is particularly interesting. "The aforesaid Brother Fidelis
measured one of them and found that the square face was 400 feet in
length." The same brother wished to examine the exact point where Moses
had entered the Red Sea in order to try if he could find any traces of
the chariots of Pharaoh or the wheel tracks, but the sailors were in
a hurry and would not allow him to go on this excursion. The breadth
of the sea appeared to him at this point to be about six miles. Dicuil
describes Iceland long before it was discovered by the Danes.
"It is now thirty years," said he, writing in 825, "since I was told
by some Irish ecclesiastics, who had dwelt in that island from the 1st
of February to the 1st of August, that the sun scarcely sets there in
summer, but always leaves, even at midnight, light enough to do one's
ordinary business--_vel pediculos de camisia abstrahere_"!
Those writers are greatly mistaken, he says, who describe the Icelandic
sea as always frozen, and who say that there is day there from spring
to autumn and from autumn to spring, for the Irish monks sailed thither
through the open sea in a month of great natural cold, and yet
found alternate day and night, except about the period of the summer
solstice. He also describes the Faroe Isles:--
"A certain trustworthy monk told me that he reached one of them by
sailing for two summer days and one night in a vessel with two benches
of rowers.... In these islands for almost a hundred years there dwelt
hermits who sailed there from our own Ireland [nostra Scottia], but
now they are once more deserted as they were at the beginning, on
account of the ravages of the Norman pirates."
This is proof positive that the Irish discovered and inhabited
Iceland and the Faroe Islands half a century or a century before the
Northmen. Dicuil was distinguished as a grammarian, metrician, and
astronomer,[15] but his geographical treatise, written in his old age,
is the most interesting and valuable of his achievements.
Fergil, or Virgilius, as he is usually called, was another great Irish
geometer, who eventually became Archbishop of Salzburg and died in
785. He taught the sphericity of the earth and the doctrine of the
Antipodes, a truth which seems also to have been familiar to Dicuil.
St. Boniface, afterwards Archbishop of Mentz, evidently distorting his
doctrine, accused him to the Pope of heresy in teaching that there was
another world and other men under the earth, and another sun and moon.
"Concerning this charge of false doctrine, if it shall be established,"
said the Pope, "that Virgil taught this perverse and wicked doctrine
against God and his own soul, do you then convoke a council, degrade
him from the priesthood, and drive him from the Church." Virgil,
however, seems to have satisfactorily explained his position, for
nothing was done against him.
These instances help to throw some light upon a most difficult
subject--the training given in the early Irish Christian schools, and
the cause of their undoubted popularity for three centuries and more
amongst the scholars of Western Europe.
[1] Here are a few lines from the well-known Adonic poem which he, at
the age of 68, addressed to his friend Fedolius--
"_Extitit ingens_ _Impia quippe_
_Causa malorum_ _Pygmalionis_
_Aurea pellis,_ _Regis ob aurum_
_Corruit auri_ _Gesta leguntur._
_Munere parvo_
_Cœna Deorum._ * * * * *
_Ac tribus illis_
_Maxima lis est_ _Fœmina sœpe_
_Orta Deabus._ _Perdit ob aurum_
_Hinc populavit_ _Casta pudorem._
_Trogugenarum_ _Non Jovis auri_
_Ditia regna_ _Fluxit in imbre_
_Dorica pubes._ _Sed quod adulter_
_Juraque legum_ _Obtulit aurum_
_Fasque fides que_ _Aureus ille_
_Rumpitur aure._ _Fingitur imber_."
Dr. Sigerson in "Bards of the Gael and Gaul," p. 407, prints as
Jubainville also does, the whole of this noted poem, and points out
that it is shot through and through with Irish assonance. "Not less
important than its assonance," writes Dr. Sigerson, "is the fact that
it introduces into Latin verse the use of returning words, or burthens
with variations, which supply the vital germs of the rondeau and the
ballad." I am not myself convinced of what Dr. Sigerson considers marks
of _intentional_ assonance in almost _every_ line.
His chief remaining works are a Monastic Rule in ten chapters; a book
on the daily penances of the monks; seventeen sermons; a book on the
measure of penances; a treatise on the eight principal vices; five
epistles written to Gregory the Great and others; and a good many Latin
verses. His life is written by the Abbot Jonas, a contemporary of his
own.
[2] P. 122.
[3] "Grössere oder geringere Kenntniss klassischen Alterthums, vor
allem Kenntniss des Griechischen ist daher in jener Zeit ein Mazstab
sowohl für die Bildung einer einzelnen Persönlichkeit als auch fur den
Culturgrad eines ganzen Zeitalters" (Zimmer, "Preussische Jahrbûcher,"
January, 1887).
[4] He plays on his own name Columba, "a dove," and turns it into Greek
and Hebrew, περιστερά and הנוי.
[5] Dr. Sigerson prints an admirably graceful poem either by this or
another Sedulius of the ninth century at p. 411 of his "Bards of the
Gael and Gaul." It shows how far from being pedants the Irish monks
were. This poem is a dispute between the rose and lily.
[6] This translation which Charles sent to the Pope threw Anastasius,
the Librarian of the Roman Church, into the deepest astonishment.
"Mirandum est," he writes in his letter of reply, dated 865, "quomodo
vir ille barbarus in finibus mundi positus, talia intellectu capere
in aliamque linguam transferre valuerit" (_See_ Prof. Stokes, "R. I.
Academy Proceedings," May, 1892).
[7] St. Jerome tells us that the people of Marseilles were in his day
trilingual, "Massiliam Phocæi condiderunt quos ait Varro trilingues
esse, quod et Græce loquantur, et Latine et Gallice" (Migne's edition,
vol. vii. p. 425).
[8] _See_ appendix to O'Curry's "Manners and Customs," vol. iii. p.
547--
"Margaid mor na n-gall ngregach
I mbid or is ard étach."
[9] He is said to have spent eighteen or twenty years there and to
have acquired all the wisdom of the Scots. The reason why he was sent
to Slane, as Dr. Healy well observes, was, not because it was the most
celebrated school of the time, but because it was in Meath where the
High-kings mostly dwelt, and it was only natural to bring the boy to
some place near the Royal Court. ("Ireland's Schools and Scholars," p.
590.)
[10] "Quos omnes Scotti libentissime suscipientes victum eis
quotidianum sine pretio, libros quoque ad legendum, et magisterium
gratuitum, præbere curabant" ("Ecc. Hist.," book iii. chap. 27).
Amongst these were the celebrated Egbert, of whom Bede tells us so
much, and St. Chad.
[11] He is called Mailduf by Bede, and Malmesbury Maildufi urbem, which
shows that the aspirated "b" in _dubh_ had twelve hundred years ago the
sound of "f" as it has to-day in Connacht.
[12] O'Reilly states that the poem consisted of ninety-six lines, but
Hardiman, in his "Irish Minstrelsy," vol. ii. p. 372, gives only sixty.
Hardiman has written on the margin of O'Reilly's "Irish Writers" in my
possession, "I have a copy, the character is ancient and very obscure."
Aldfrid may well have written such a poem, of which the copy printed by
Hardiman may be a somewhat modernised version. It begins--
"Ro dheat an inis finn Fáil
In Eirinn re imarbháidh,
Iomad ban, ni baoth an breas,
Iomad laoch, iomad cleireach."
It was admirably and fairly literally translated by Mangan for
Montgomery. His fourth line, however, runs, "Many clerics and many
laymen," which conveys no meaning save that of populousness. I have
altered this line to make it suit the Irish "many a hero, many a
cleric."
[13] "Natione quidem Gallus," says Bede, "sed tunc legendarum gratiâ
scripturarum in Hibernia non parvo tempore demoratus."
[14] Probably Clonmacnois. _See_ Stokes, "Celtic Church," p. 214, and
Dr. Healy's "Ireland's Schools and Scholars," p. 283.
[15] His astronomical work, written in 814-16, remains as yet
unpublished.