A most distinctive class of ancient Irish literature, and probably the
class that is least popularly familiar, is the hagiographical. It is,
the present writer ventures to submit, as valuable as it is distinctive
and as well worthy of study as it is neglected. While annals, tales and
poetry have found editors the Lives of Irish Saints have remained
largely a mine unworked. Into the causes of this strange neglect it is
not the purpose of the present introduction to enter. Suffice it to
glance in passing at one of the reasons which has been alleged in
explanation, scil.:--that the "Lives" are uncritical and romantic, that
they abound in wild legends, chronological impossibilities and all sorts
of incredible stories, and, finally, that miracles are multiplied till
the miraculous becomes the ordinary, and that marvels are magnified till
the narrative borders on the ludicrous. The Saint as he is sketched is
sometimes a positively repulsive being--arrogant, venomous, and cruel;
he demands two eyes or more for one, and, pucklike, fairly revels in
mischief! As painted he is in fact more a pagan deity than a Christian
man.
The foregoing charges may, or must, be admitted partially or in full,
but such admission implies no denial of the historical value of the
Lives. All archaic literature, be it remembered, is in a greater or
less degree uncritical, and it must be read in the light of the writer's
times and surroundings. That imagination should sometimes run riot and
the pen be carried beyond the boundary line of the strictly literal is
perhaps nothing much to be marvelled at in the case of the supernatural
minded Celt with religion for his theme. Did the scribe believe what he
wrote when he recounted the multiplied marvels of his holy patron's
life? Doubtless he did--and why not! To the unsophisticated monastic
and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and
supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural.
If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish
peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of
shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as
composed the mind of the tenth century biographers of Declan and
Mochuda. Dreamers and visionaries were of as frequent occurrence in Erin
of ages ago as they are to-day. Then as now the supernatural and
marvellous had a wondrous fascination for the Celtic mind. Sometimes the
attraction becomes so strong as seemingly to overbalance the faculty of
distinguishing fact from fancy. Of St. Bridget we are gravely told that
to dry her wet cloak she hung in out on a sunbeam! Another Saint sailed
away to a foreign land on a sod from his native hillside! More than
once we find a flagstone turned into a raft to bear a missionary band
beyond the seas! St. Fursey exchanged diseases with his friend
Magnentius, and, stranger still, the exchange was arranged and effected
by correspondence! To the saints moreover are ascribed lives of
incredible duration--to Mochta, Ibar, Seachnal, and Brendan, for
instance, three hundred years each; St. Mochaemog is credited with a
life of four hundred and thirteen years, and so on!
Clan, or tribe, rivalry was doubtless one of the things which made for
the invention and multiplication of miracles. If the patron of the
Decies is credited with a miracle, the tribesmen of Ossory must go one
better and attribute to their tribal saint a marvel more striking still.
The hagiographers of Decies retort for their patron by a claim of yet
another miracle and so on. It is to be feared too that occasionally a
less worthy motive than tribal honour prompted the imagination of our
Irish hagiographers--the desire to exploit the saint and his honour for
worldly gain.
The "Lives" of the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material
of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church.
Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact
which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is
otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on
ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often
intricate operations of the Celtic mind.
By "Lives" are here meant the old MS. biographies which have come down
to us from ages before the invention of printing. Sometimes these
"Lives" are styled "Acts." Generally we have only one standard "Life"
of a saint and of this there are usually several copies, scattered in
various libraries and collections. Occasionally a second Life is found
differing essentially from the first, but, as a rule, the different
copies are only recensions of a single original. Some of the MSS. are
parchment but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely
fragments and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been
entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the
meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional
reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the
memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in
place names or is entirely lost.
There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"--possibly one
hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have
Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the
saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter--one in
Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and
of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and one
of these is in two recensions.
The surviving Lives naturally divide themselves into two great
classes--the Latin Lives and the Irish,--written in Latin and Irish
respectively. We have a Latin Life only of some saints, and Irish Life
only of others, and of others again we have a Latin Life and an Irish.
It may be necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin
by Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives.
Whether the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives
or the Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a
large extent, an open question. Plummer ("Vitae SSm. Hib.," Introd.)
seems to favour the Latin Lives as the originals. His reasoning here
however leaves one rather unconvinced. This is not the place to go into
the matter at length, but a new bit of evidence which makes against the
theory of Latin originals may be quoted; it is furnished by the well
known collection of Latin Lives known as the Codex Salmanticensis, to
which are appended brief marginal notes in mixed middle Irish and Latin.
One such note to the Life of St. Cuangus of Lismore (recte Liathmore)
requests a prayer for him who has translated the Life out of the Irish
into Latin. If one of the Lives, and this a typical or characteristic
Life, be a translation, we may perhaps assume that the others, or most
of them, are translations also. In any case we may assume as certain
that there were original Irish materials or data from which the formal
Lives (Irish or Latin) were compiled.
The Latin Lives are contained mainly in four great collections. The
first and probably the most important of these is in the Royal Library
at Brussels, included chiefly in a large MS. known as 'Codex
Salmanticensis' from the fact that it belonged in the seventeenth
century to the Irish College of Salamanca. The second collection is in
Marsh's Library, Dublin, and the third in Trinity College Library. The
two latter may for practical purposes be regarded as one, for they are
sister MSS.--copied from the same original. The Marsh's Library
collection is almost certainly, teste Plummer, the document referred to
by Colgan as Codex Kilkenniensis and it is quite certainly the Codex
Ardmachanus of Fleming. The fourth collection (or the third, if we take
as one the two last mentioned,) is in the Bodleian at Oxford amongst
what are known as the Rawlinson MSS. Of minor importance, for one
reason or another, are the collections of the Franciscan Library,
Merchants' Quay, Dublin, and in Maynooth College respectively. The
first of the enumerated collections was published 'in extenso,' about
twenty-five years since, by the Marquis of Bute, while recently the gist
of all the Latin collections has been edited with rare scholarship by
Rev. Charles Plummer of Oxford. Incidentally may be noted the one
defect in Mr. Plummer's great work--its author's almost irritating
insistence on pagan origins, nature myths, and heathen survivals.
Besides the Marquis of Bute and Plummer, Colgan and the Bollandists have
published some Latin Lives, and a few isolated "Lives" have been
published from time to time by other more or less competent editors.
The Irish Lives, though more numerous than the Latin, are less
accessible. The chief repertorium of the former is the Burgundian or
Royal Library, Brussels. The MS. collection at Brussels appears to have
originally belonged to the Irish Franciscans of Louvain and much of it
is in the well-known handwriting of Michael O'Clery. There are also
several collections of Irish Lives in Ireland--in the Royal Irish
Academy, for instance, and Trinity College Libraries. Finally, there
are a few Irish Lives at Oxford and Cambridge, in the British Museum,
Marsh's Library, &c., and in addition there are many Lives in private
hands. In this connection it can be no harm, and may do some good, to
note that an apparently brisk, if unpatriotic, trade in Irish MSS.
(including of course "Lives" of Saints) is carried on with the United
States. Wealthy, often ignorant, Irish-Americans, who are unable to
read them, are making collections of Irish MSS. and rare Irish books, to
Ireland's loss. Some Irish MSS. too, including Lives of Saints, have
been carried away as mementoes of the old land by departing emigrants.
The date or period at which the Lives (Latin and Irish) were written is
manifestly, for half a dozen good reasons, a question of the utmost
importance to the student of the subject. Alas, that the question has
to some extent successfully defied quite satisfactory solution. We can,
so far, only conjecture--though the probabilities seem strong and the
grounds solid. The probabilities are that the Latin Lives date as a
rule from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they were put into
something like their present form for reading (perhaps in the refectory)
in the great religious houses. They were copied and re-copied during
the succeeding centuries and the scribes according to their knowledge,
devotion or caprice made various additions, subtractions and occasional
multiplications. The Irish Lives are almost certainly of a somewhat
earlier date than the Latin and are based partly (i.e. as regards the
bulk of the miracles) on local tradition, and partly (i.e. as regards
the purely historical element) on the authority of written materials.
They too were, no doubt, copied and interpolated much as were the Latin
Lives. The present copies of Irish Lives date as a rule from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only, and the fact that the Latin
and the Irish Life (where there is this double biography) sometimes
agree very perfectly may indicate that the Latin translation or Life is
very late.
The chief published collections of Irish Saints' Lives may be set down
as seven, scil.:--five in Latin and one each in Irish and English. The
Latin collections are the Bollandists', Colgan's, Messingham's,
Fleming's, and Plummer's; the Irish collection is Stokes' ("Lives of
Saints from the Book of Lismore") and the English is of course
O'Hanlon's.
Most striking, probably, of the characteristics of the "Lives" is their
very evident effort to exalt and glorify the saint at any cost. With
this end of glorification in view the hagiographer is prepared to
swallow everything and record anything. He has, in fact, no critical
sense and possibly he would regard possession of such a sense as rather
an evil thing and use of it as irreverent. He does not, as a
consequence, succeed in presenting us with a very life-like or
convincing portrait of either the man or the saint. Indeed the saint,
as drawn in the Lives, is, as already hinted, a very unsaintlike
individual--almost as ready to curse as to pray and certainly very much
more likely to smite the aggressor than to present to him the other
cheek. In the text we shall see St. Mochuda, whose Life is a specially
sane piece of work, cursing on the same occasion, first, King Blathmac
and the Prince of Cluain, then, the rich man Cronan who sympathised with
the eviction, next an individual named Dubhsulach who winked insolently
at him, and finally the people of St. Columba's holy city of Durrow who
had stirred up hostile feeling against him. Even gentle female saints
can hurl an imprecation too. St. Laisrech, for instance, condemned the
lands of those who refused her tribute, to--nettles, elder shrub, and
corncrakes! It is pretty plain that the compilers of the lives had some
prerogatives, claims or rights to uphold--hence this frequent insistence
on the evil of resisting the Saint and presumably his successors.
One characteristic of the Irish ascetics appears very clear through all
the exaggeration and all the biographical absurdity; it is their spirit
of intense mortification. To understand this we have only to study one
of the ancient Irish Monastic Rules or one of the Irish Penitentials as
edited by D'Achery ("Spicilegium") or Wasserschleben ("Irische
Kanonensamerlung"). Severest fasting, unquestioning obedience and
perpetual self renunciation were inculcated by the Rules and we have
ample evidence that they were observed with extraordinary fidelity. The
Rule of Maelruin absolutely forbade the use of meat or of beer. Such a
prohibition a thousand years ago was an immensely more grievous thing
than it would sound to-day. Wheaten bread might partially supply the
place of meat to-day, but meat was easier to procure than bread in the
eighth century. Again, a thousand years ago, tea or coffee there was
none and even milk was often difficult or impossible to procure in
winter. So severe in fact was the fast that religious sometimes died of
it. Bread and water being found insufficient to sustain life and health,
gruel was substituted in some monasteries and of this monastic gruel
there were three varieties:--(a) "gruel upon water" in which the liquid
was so thick that the meal reached the surface, (b) "gruel between two
waters" in which the meal, while it did not rise to the surface, did not
quite fall to the bottom, and (c) "gruel under water" which was so weak
and so badly boiled that he meal easily fell to the bottom. In the case
of penitents the first brand of gruel was prescribed for light offences,
the second kind for sins of ordinary gravity, and the "gruel under
water" for extraordinary crimes (vid. Messrs. Gwynne and Purton on the
Rule of Maelruin, &c.) The most implicit, exact and prompt obedience
was prescribed and observed. An overseer of Mochuda's monastery at
Rahen had occasion to order by name a young monk called Colman to do
something which involved his wading into a river. Instantly a dozen
Colmans plunged into the water. Instances of extraordinary penance
abound, beside which the austerities of Simon Stylites almost pale. The
Irish saints' love of solitude was also a very marked characteristic.
Desert places and solitary islands of the ocean possessed an apparently
wonderful fascination for them. The more inaccessible or forbidding the
island the more it was in request as a penitential retreat. There is
hardly one of the hundred islands around the Irish coast which, one time
or another, did not harbour some saint or solitary upon its rocky bosom.
The testimony of the "Lives" to the saints' love and practice of prayer
is borne out by the evidence of more trustworthy documents. Besides
private prayers, the whole psalter seems to have been recited each day,
in three parts of fifty psalms each. In addition, an immense number of
Pater Nosters was prescribed. The office and prayers were generally
pretty liberally interspersed with genuflexions or prostrations, of
which a certain anchorite performed as many as seven hundred daily.
Another penitential action which accompanied prayer was the
'cros-figul.' This was an extension of the arms in the shape of a
cross; if anyone wants to know how difficult a practice this is let him
try it for, say, fifteen minutes. Regarding recitation of the Divine
Office it was of counsel, and probably of precept, that is should not be
from memory merely, but that the psalms should all be read. For this a
good reason was given by Maelruin, i.e. that the recitation might engage
the eye as well as the tongue and thought. An Irish homily refers to
the mortification of the saints and religious of the time as martyrdom,
of which it distinguishes three kinds--red, white, and blue. Red
martyrdom was death for the faith; white martyrdom was the discipline of
fasting, labour and bodily austerities; while blue martyrdom was
abnegation of the will and heartfelt sorrow for sin.
One of the puzzles of Irish hagiology is the great age attributed to
certain saints--periods of two hundred, three hundred, and even four
hundred years. Did the original compilers of the Life intend this?
Whatever the full explanation be the writers of the Lives were clearly
animated by a desire to make their saint cotemporary and, if possible, a
disciple, of one or other of the great monastic founders, or at any rate
to prove him a pupil of one of the great schools of Erin. There was
special anxiety to connect the saint with Bangor or Clonard. To effect
the connection in question it was sometimes necessary to carry the life
backwards, at other times to carry it forwards, and occasionally to
lengthen it both backwards and forwards. Dr. Chas. O'Connor gives a
not very convincing explanation of the three-hundred-year "Lives,"
scil.:--that the saint lived in three centuries--during the whole of one
century and in the end and beginning respectively of the preceding and
succeeding centuries. This explanation, even if satisfactory for the
three-hundred-year Lives, would not help at all towards the Lives of
four hundred years. A common explanation is that the scribe mistook
numerals in the MS. before him and wrote the wrong figures. There is no
doubt that copying is a fruitful source of error as regards numerals.
It is much more easy to make a mistake in a numeral than in a letter;
the context will enable one to correct the letter, while it will give
him no clue as regards a numeral. On the subject of the alleged
longevity of Irish Saints Anscombe has recently been elaborating in
'Eriu' a new and very ingenious theory. Somewhat unfortunately the
author happens to be a rather frequent propounder of ingenious theories.
His explanation is briefly--the use and confusion of different systems
of chronology. He alleges that the original writers used what is called
the Diocletian Era or the "Era of the Martyrs" as the 'terminus a quo'
of their chronological system and, in support of his position, he
adduces the fact that this, which was the most ancient of all
ecclesiastical eras, was the era used by the schismatics in Britain and
that it was introduced by St. Patrick.
As against the contradiction, anachronisms and extravagances of the
Lives we have to put the fact that generally speaking the latter
corroborate one another, and that they receive extern corroboration from
the annals. Such disagreements as occur are only what one would expect
to find in documents dealing with times so remote. To the credit side
too must go the fact that references to Celtic geography and to local
history are all as a rule accurate. Of continental geography and
history however the writers of the Lives show much ignorance, but
scarcely quite as much as the corresponding ignorance shown by
Continental writers about Ireland.
The missionary methods of the early Irish Church and its monastic or
semi-monastic system are frequently referred to as peculiar, if not
unique. A missionary system more or less similar must however have
prevailed generally in that age. What other system could have been
nearly as successful amongst a pagan people circumstanced as the Irish
were? The community system alone afforded the necessary mutual
encouragement and protection to the missionaries. Each monastic station
became a base of operations. The numerous diminutive dioceses,
quasi-dioceses, or tribal churches, were little more than extensive
parishes and the missionary bishops were little more in jurisdiction
than glorified parish priests. The bishop's 'muintir,' that is the
members of his household, were his assistant clergy. Having converted
the chieftain or head of the tribe the missionary had but to instruct
and baptise the tribesmen and to erect churches for them. Land and
materials for the church were provided by the Clan or the Clan's head,
and lands for support of the missioner or of the missionary community
were allotted just as they had been previously allotted to the pagan
priesthood; in fact there can be but little doubt that the lands of the
pagan priests became in many cases the endowment of the Christian
establishment. It is not necessary, by the way, to assume that the
Church in Ireland as Patrick left it, was formally monastic. The clergy
lived in community, it is true, but it was under a somewhat elastic
rule, which was really rather a series of Christian and Religious
counsels. A more formal monasticism had developed by the time of
Mochuda; this was evidently influenced by the spread of St. Benedict's
Rule, as Patrick's quasi-monasticism, nearly two centuries previously,
had been influenced by Pachomius and St. Basil, through Lerins. The
real peculiarity in Ireland was that when the community-missionary-
system was no longer necessary it was not abandoned as in other lands
but was rather developed and emphasised.