Patrick was a hard-bitten man who did not find his life’s purpose till his life was half over. He had a temper that could flare dangerously when he perceived an injustice—not against himself but against another, particularly against someone defenseless. But he had the cheerfulness and good humor that humble people often have. He enjoyed this world and its variety of human beings—and he didn’t take himself too seriously. He was, in spirit, an Irishman. “Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it.” This insight of William V. Shannon’s, if applied to Patrick, casts a peculiar illumination on his personality, and even suggests why his real achievements have remained historically obscure. It also puts Patrick at a further remove from his fellow bishop and confessor, the self-obsessed Augustine.
The exchange between Patrick and his adopted people is marvelous to contemplate. In the overheated Irish cultural environment, mystical attitudes toward the world were taken for granted, as they had never been in the cooler, more rational Roman world. Despite its pagan darkness and shifting insubstantiality, this Irish environment was in the end a more comfortable one for the badly educated shepherd boy to whom God spoke directly. His original home in Roman Britain had become an alien place to him. But the Irish gave Patrick more than a home—they gave him a role, a meaning to his life. For only this former slave had the right instincts to impart to the Irish a New Story, one that made new sense of all their old stories and brought them a peace they had never known before.
Patrick’s gift to the Irish was his Christianity—the first de-Romanized 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 became unthinkable, and warfare, though impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly. The Irish, in any case, loved physical combat too much for intertribal warfare to disappear entirely. But new laws, influenced by Gospel norms, inhibited such conflicts severely by requiring that arms be taken up only for a weighty cause. Ireland would not again see a battle on the scale of the Tain till Brian Boru would rout the Vikings in the eleventh century.
As these transformed warrior children of Patrick’s heart lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice, and cast aside the chains of slavery, they very much remained Irishmen and Irishwomen. 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, which they tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe’en.* To this day, there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat presides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing, and varieties of sexual indiscretion are the principal entertainments. It is this characteristically Irish mélange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel’s magnificent play Dancing at Lughnasa—Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster. Irish marriage customs remained most un-Roman. 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 magazine subscriptions or insurance policies. As late as the last century naked men (and, for all we know, women) raced horses bareback along Clare’s beaches through the surf at high tide, looking for all the world like their prehistoric warrior ancestors. But after Patrick the eviler gods shrank in stature and became much less troublesome, became in fact the comical gargoyles of medieval imagination, peering fearfully from undignified nooks, and the belief grew strong that the one thing the devil cannot bear is laughter.
Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan Jesuit who was martyred at Tyburn in 1581, has left us a description of the Irish that rings true to this day:
The people are thus inclined: religious, franke, amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinite, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, [sur]passing in hospitalitie…. They are sharpe-witted, lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventerous, intractable, kinde-hearted, secret in displeasure.
We can still make out in this Elizabethan group portrait not only the Irish of our own day but the lively ghosts of Irishmen long past—Ailil, Medb, Cuchulainn, Derdriu, and, after a fashion, Patrick himself. Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.
The one element in Campion’s description that we might not immediately associate with the characters of the Tain is his reference to scholarship—“lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves.” For it was Patrick’s Christian mission that nurtured Irish scholarship into blossom. Patrick, the incomplete Roman, nevertheless understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy.
THE DYING GAUL
The epitome of the Celtic warrior’s bravery, this is a Roman copy of a Greek statue made in the third century B.C. The great curved trumpet was one of the musical instruments that made a fearsome racket as part of every Celtic war party’s equipage.
CELTIC GODS
The god at bottom right is devouring a human. Note the details of a bracelet on the wrist of the victim, the severed heads of previous victims, and the erect phallus of the god, who is patently enjoying himself. (Bouches-du-Rhône, c. third century B.C.) The idol above left is a sheela-na-gig, a motif found throughout Britain and Ireland, although very difficult to photograph well because the surviving examples are in extremely inaccessible nooks and have usually been damaged by weather or censorship. The sheela parts her vulva both as an invitation to sex and as a reminder of her fertility. Her face, although sometimes smiling, is moronic and brutal, and usually skeletal. She is, like Kali of India, death-in-life and life-in-death. (Kilpeck, England.) The figure above right was found in Tanderagee, Armagh. The position of its arms, although difficult to interpret, is reminiscent of the traditional posture of some Indian deities.
CELTIC SANCTUARY
The skull niches in the remains of a prehistoric sanctuary at Bouches-du-Rhône are evidence of the centrality of human sacrifice in Celtic religion.
CLONFERT CATHEDRAL
The impassive heads above the doorway of eleventh-century Clonfert Cathedral are a kind of reprise of the display of severed heads at Bouches-du-Rhône and other prehistoric Celtic sanctuaries. As cathedrals go, Clonfert is tiny—even by Irish standards—and built in the middle of nowhere, thus suggesting that this place was chosen for its ancient druidic associations.
GUNDESTRUP CAULDRON
The gigantic cook-god on the inner left panel is dropping the human into a boiling vat.
GUNDESTRUP CAULDRON, INNER PANEL
The “Cernunnos” figure with animals and plants. The torque in the figure’s right hand is similar to the torque that the Dying Gaul wears around his neck.
GALLARUS
This Kerry oratory, shaped like an upturned boat, is typical of early Irish Christian architecture. In the wall opposite the door, a window faces east and provides light for a small altar, around which barely a dozen people could congregate. The drystone walls have—without any suggestion of mortar—maintained their delicate proportions for some fourteen centuries. Drystone technique, which depends on choosing just the right stone at the right place to achieve a permanent balance, was the same technique that the monks often used to build their individual cells, shaped like beehives.
OGHAM
Stones like this one were used as grave memorials in prehistoric and early Christian Ireland. The lines down one edge represent a man’s name. A single line to the left represents B; two lines to the left, L; a single line to the right, H; a slanted line across the edge, M; and so forth. Hardly a swift form of communication.
NEWGRANGE
A vast tumulus, built in the Boyne Valley in the third millennium B.C., contains numerous mysterious rock carvings, such as this one at the entrance.
SOMERSET BOX
A prehistoric bronze box, both mathematical and playful, found in Galway.
BOOK OF KELLS, “CHI-RHO” PAGE
The intricate interlacings at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel are full of surprises for those who take the time to examine them—such as the scene to the lower left of the Rho in which two mice play tug-of-war over a piece of bread, observed by two cats, each surmounted by a mouse. The great letters are the Greek monogram for Christ: Chi, Rho (i.e., X, P in Greek—the sounds ch and r in English), followed by I. “Chr(ist)i”—meaning “Of Christ”—is the word with which Matthew’s Gospel begins.
ARDAGH CHALICE
The acme of Irish Christian metallurgy, seventh-eighth century. Even the underside of the base, right, is richly ornamented.
And so the first Irish Christians also became the first Irish literates.
Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. There are no Irish martyrs (at least not till Elizabeth I began to create them eleven centuries after Patrick). And this lack of martyrdom troubled the Irish, to whom a glorious death by violence presented such an exciting finale. If all Ireland had received Christianity without a fight, the Irish would just have to think up some new form of martyrdom—something even more interesting than the wonderfully grisly stories they had begun to learn in the simple continental collections, called “martyrologies,” from which Patrick and his successors taught them to read.
The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution, 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.
There is a charming poem in Irish, attributed to one of Patrick’s converts, Saint Manchan of Offaly, in which we can almost trace the history of this movement of the Green Martyrs. In it, the would-be martyr enumerates his simple needs, the first being a lonely hermitage:
Grant me sweet Christ the grace to find—
Son of the living God!—
A small hut in a lonesome spot
To make it my abode.
But the saintly recluse does not intend to wall himself off from holy intercourse with his fellow humans. A little out of the way, he will still be available to those who walk the extra mile to find insight, instruction, and baptism. Thus, the second stanza—and request number 2:
A little pool but very clear
To stand beside the place
Where all men’s sins are washed away
By sanctifying grace.
The hermit now turns his attention to his eremitical environment, which results in these further requests:
A pleasant woodland all about
To shield it [the hut] from the wind,
And make a home for singing birds
Before it and behind.
A southern aspect for the heat
A stream along its foot,
A smooth green lawn with rich top soil
Propitious to all fruit.
Having established himself as local guru, the typical hermit was soon joined by like-minded seekers, who wished to build their own huts and sit at the master’s feet. Thus, the “hermit” continues with his list of godly requests:
My choice of men to live with me
And pray to God as well;
Quiet men of humble mind—
Their number I shall tell.
Four files of three or three of four
To give the psalter forth;
Six to pray by the south church wall
And six along the north.
Two by two my dozen friends—
To tell the number right—
Praying with me to move the King
Who gives the sun its light.
The Irish, who had always been fascinated by numbers and their magical properties, thought twelve, the biblical number that signifies completeness, to be the right count for a religious community, so imitating the arrangement of Christ and his Twelve Apostles. The humble hermit, who began by asking for so little, is now the abbot of a monastery of men who live in small beehive-shaped huts, surrounding a conventual church. As abbot, father to his flock, standing in the place of Christ himself, the former hermit must of course begin to think of his exalted role and of the proper dignity of his church. Thus, a further request:
A lovely church, a home for God
Bedecked with linen fine,
Where over the white Gospel page
The Gospel candles shine.
Having come this far, the “hermit” perceives the need for a common dwelling, ample enough to house the diverse functions of a large, well-established monastery. But the poet still manages to imagine this edifice as diminutive in this request:
A little house where all may dwell
And body’s care be sought,
Where none shows lust or arrogance,
None thinks an evil thought.
In the poet’s final items, we almost catch a glimpse of monastic culture in full swing, the bustling, wealthy—and untaxed—center of a new Irish civilization, where solitude and quiet may be relatively rare:
And all I ask for housekeeping
I get and pay no fees,
Leeks from the garden, poultry, game,
Salmon and trout and bees.
My share of clothing and of food
From the King of fairest face,
And I to sit at times alone
And pray in every place.
The change in tone and content from the bloodletting of the Tain to the quiet delights of “The Hermit’s Song” is worthy of consideration. Humor is abundant in both literatures, but the harsh humor of the mythological cycle has been transmuted into a kind of self-deprecatory, monastic mirth. And even though the gentle rhythm of self-deprecation cannot entirely suppress the clang of heroic egotism (for the poet surely thinks quite highly of himself), the characteristic size of men and their possessions has decreased: everything about Cuchulainn was outsized; everything about the hermit is endearingly small. Whereas the colors of the Tain were gleaming metals and inconstant shadows, the world of the hermit shines with a light that bathes each object, so that all items stand out distinctly and substantially in their own rich colors, like miniature pictures in an early Gospel book. Brightness is the central experience here, and such concepts as clarity, cleanliness, illumination, and fairness suffuse the poem.
So the wished-for extremes of the Green Martyrdom were largely—and quickly—abandoned in favor of monasticism, a movement which, though it could support and even nurture oddity and eccentricity, subjected such tendencies to a social contract. Since Ireland had no cities, these monastic establishments grew rapidly into the first population centers, hubs of unprecedented prosperity, art, and learning.
Ireland was still Ireland, so we should not overemphasize the new unity of its culture. There was still plenty of tribal warfare: sometimes even monasteries took the field against one another. Tales of solitary ecstatics and madmen remained as abundant as ever, whether of Sweeney, the king who thought he was a bird and lived his life in treetops, or of Kevin of Glendalough, a sixth-century hermit who lived in a hole in the rock wall of a cliff, emerging in winter to stand for hours stark naked in the icy waters of the lough*or in summer to hurl himself—again naked—into a bush of poisonous nettles.
PLAN OF AN EARLY IRISH MONASTERY
But even Kevin eventually gave in and allowed a monastic community to form around him. They couldn’t all fit into the hole in the cliff (which may still be seen today, four feet wide, seven feet deep, three feet high), so Kevin agreed reluctantly to move to the level shore, where his disciples built a tiny church and for their master a drystone hut shaped like a beehive, a wonder of intuitive Irish engineering that stands to this day, and for themselves daub and wattle huts that have long since disappeared. Though they lived singly, they gathered together to chant the Psalms at the appointed monastic hours, rising twice each night and trundling along to the chapel in the cold and dark to sing their office. This picture of the monks’ devotion is preserved for us because one of them used it as his example to explain some archaic words in an Irish grammar he was copying:
The wind over the Hog’s Back moans,
It takes the trees and lays them low,
And shivering monks o’er frozen stones
To the twain hours of nighttime go.
Soon enough, even the level shore of the Upper Lake proved inadequate to Kevin’s community, for people began to come from all over Ireland to sit at the feet of the monks and learn all they had to teach. 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 first from all over Ireland, then from England, and at last from everywhere in Europe. Never forgetting the prehistoric Irish virtue of heroic hospitality, the monks turned no one away, as is confirmed in this description of a typical university city, given to us by the Venerable Bede, first historian of the newly emergent English* people:
Many of the nobles of the English nation and lesser men also had set out thither, forsaking their native island either for the grace of sacred learning or a more austere life. And some of them indeed soon dedicated themselves faithfully to the monastic life, others rejoiced rather to give themselves to learning, going about from one master’s cell to another. All these the Irish willingly received, and saw to it to supply them with food day by day without cost, and books for their studies, and teaching, free of charge.
From the careful Bede we learn, therefore, that the Irish monastic universities accepted commoners as well as noblemen and those who wished for learning but not the cloister.
Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas. 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. 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. A learned British ecclesiastic, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, who had himself been educated by the Irish (and so knew whereof he spoke), wrote to warn a young Saxon student against the “ancient fables” and other temptations of an Irish education: “What advantage does it bring to the sacrament of the orthodox faith to sweat over reading and studying the polluted lewdness of Proserpine, or Hermione, the wanton offspring of Menelaus and Helen, or the Lupercalia and the votaries of Priapus?” Aldhelm—you can almost hear the sniffy intake of breath—had learned his lessons well and could still, apparently, break out in a sweat when one of the racier classical tales danced through his monkish head.
It was not that the Irish were uncritical, just that they saw no value in self-imposed censorship. They could have said with Terence, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” (“I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me”). To John T. McNeill, that most balanced of all church historians, 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 the timeworn tales of Greece and Rome were fresh and fascinating to them, the Irish monks could occasionally take a dimmer view of their own literature, which we have only because they copied it down, either from childhood memories or from the performance of wandering bards. In the Book of Leinster, which contains a florid version of the Tain, the epic ends with a monastic “Amen,” after which the scribe wrote down in Irish the earlier oral culture’s bardic formula: “A blessing on everyone who will memorize the Tain faithfully in this form, and not put any other form on it.” Just after this in Latin the same scribe left this succinct critique: “I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.”
So, though he disapproved of its contents, he copied out the Tain. It is thanks to such scribes, however cranky their glosses may sometimes be, that we have the rich trove of early Irish literature, the earliest vernacular literature of Europe to survive—because it was taken seriously enough to be written down. 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 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 thought that all language was a game—and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery.
Here and there in the surviving manuscripts—at the tail end of a convoluted Latin translation of a Pauline letter, in the margins of an impenetrable Greek commentary on scripture—we find the bored scribblings of the Irish scribes, who kept themselves awake by writing out a verse or two of a beloved Irish lyric—and so, by accumulation, left for our enjoyment a whole literature that would otherwise be unknown. Sometimes the scribe may be composing his own lyric, for all we know; and often enough he is likely to have been a student—not always, given the character of his daydreams, a boy headed for a monastic vocation. “The son of the King of Moy,” writes one scribbler,
Found a girl in the greenwood in Midsummer.
She gave him lapfuls of blackberries.
She gave him armfuls of strawberries.
Another is even more direct:
He is a heart,
An acorn from the oakwood:
He is young.
Kiss him!
And a third is in real danger of failing to complete his studies:
All are keen
To know who’ll sleep with blond Aideen.
All Aideen herself will own
Is that she will not sleep alone.
One scribe will complain of the backbreaking work of book-copying, another of a sloppy fellow scribe: “It is easy to spot Gabrial’s work here” is written in a beautiful hand at the margin of an undistinguished page. A third will grind his teeth about the difficulty of the tortured ancient Greek that he is copying: “There’s an end to that—and seven curses with it!”
But for the most part they enjoy their work and find themselves engrossed in the stories they are copying. Beneath a description of the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy, one scribe, completely absorbed in the words he is copying, has written most sincerely: “I am greatly grieved at the above-mentioned death.” Another, measuring the endurance of his beloved art against his own brief life span, concludes: “Sad it is, little parti-colored white book, for a day will surely come when someone will say over your page: ‘The hand that wrote this is no more.’”
Perhaps the clearest picture we possess of what it was like to be a scribal scholar is contained in a four-stanza Irish poem slipped into a ninth-century manuscript, which otherwise contains such learned material as a Latin commentary on Virgil and a list of Greek paradigms:
I and Pangur Ban my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
’Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
’Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
These were happy human beings, occasionally waspish, but normally filled with delight at the tasks their fate had set for them. They did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling hew culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual—glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him. No one would see their like again till James Joyce would writeUlysses.
At the center of this new Irish universe, the “Gospel candles shine” on the “white Gospel page,” as in “The Hermit’s Song.” Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page, shining in all the little oratories of Ireland, acted as a pledge: the lonely darkness had been turned into light, and the lonely virtue of courage, sustained through all the centuries, had been transformed into hope.
The Irish received literacy in their own way, as something to play with. The only alphabet they’d 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 we have seen already, they devised Irish grammars, and copied out the whole of their native oral literature. All this was fairly straightforward, too straightforward once they’d got the hang of it. They began to make up languages. The members of a far-flung secret society, formed as early as the late fifth century (barely a generation after the Irish had become literate), could write to one another in impenetrably erudite, never-before-spoken patterns of Latin, called Hisperica Famina, not unlike the dream-language of Finnegans Wake or even the languages J. R. R. Tolkien would one day make up for his hobbits and elves.
Nothing brought out Irish playfulness more than the copying of the books themselves, a task no reader of the ancient world could entirely neglect. At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. Even at their grandest, these were simple, out-of-doors people. (As late as the ninth century an Irish annotator describes himself as writing under a greenwood tree while listening to a clear-voiced cuckoo hopping from bush to bush.) But they found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did? Could it look some other way? Was there an essential B-ness? The result of such why-is-the-sky-blue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world had ever seen.
From its earliest manifestations literacy had a decorative aspect. How could it be otherwise, since implicit in all pictograms, hieroglyphs, and letters is some cultural esthetic, some answer to the question, What is most beautiful? The Mesoamerican answer lies in looped and bulbous rock carvings, the Chinese answer in vibrantly minimalist brush strokes, the ancient Egyptian answer in stately picture puzzles. Even alphabets, those most abstract and frozen forms of communication, embody an esthetic, which changes depending on the culture of its user. How unlike one another the carved, unyielding Roman alphabet of Augustus’s triumphal arches and the idiosyncratically homely Romano-Germanic alphabet of Gutenberg’s Bible.
For their part, 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 hold the reader in awe. 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.”
For the body of the text, the Irish developed two hands, one a dignified but rounded script called Irish half-uncial, the other an easy-to-write script called Irish minuscule that was more readable, more fluid, and, well, happier than anything devised by the Romans. Recommended by its ease and readability, this second hand would be adopted by a great many scribes far beyond the borders of Ireland, becoming the common script of the Middle Ages.
Irish majuscule or half-uncial, Book of Durrow, seventh century
Irish minuscule in the Saint Gall manuscript of Priscian’s Grammar (c. 850)
As decoration for the texts of their most precious books, the Irish instinctively found their models not in the crude lines of Ogham, but in their own prehistoric mathematics and their own most ancient evidence of the human spirit—the megalithic tombs of the Boyne Valley. These tombs had been constructed in Ireland about 3000 B.C. in the same eon that Stonehenge was built in Britain. Just as mysterious as Stonehenge, both for their provenance and the complexity of their engineering, these great barrow graves areIreland’s earliest architecture and are faced by the indecipherable spirals, zigzags, and lozenges of Ireland’s earliest art. These massive tumuli, telling a story we can now only speculate on,* had long provided Irish smiths with their artistic inspiration. For in the sweeping lines of the Boyne’s intriguing carvings, we can discern the ultimate sources of the magnificent metal jewelry and other objects that were being made at the outset of the Patrician period by smiths who, in Irish society, had the status of seers.
Brooches, boxes, discs, scabbards, clips, and horse trappings of the time all proclaim their devotion to the models of the Boyne Valley carvings. But this intricate riot of metalwork, allowing for subtleties impossible in stone, is like a series of riffs on the original theme. What was that theme? Balance in imbalance. Take, for instance, the witty cover on the bronze box that is part of the Somerset Hoard from Galway: precisely mathematical yet deliberately (one might almost say perversely) off-center, forged by a smith of expert compass and twinkling eye. It is endlessly fascinating because, as a riff on circularity, it has no end. It seems to say, with the spirals of Newgrange, “There is no circle; there is only the spiral, the endlessly reconfigurable spiral. There are no straight lines, only curved ones.” Or, to recall the most characteristic of all Irish responses when faced with the demand for a plain, unequivocal answer: “Well, it is, and it isn’t.” “She does, and she doesn’t.” “You will, and you won’t.”
This sense of balance in imbalance, of riotous complexity moving swiftly within a basic unity, would now find 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.
Codex was used orginally to distinguish a book, as we know it today, from its ancestor, the scroll. By Patrick’s time the codex had almost universally displaced the scroll, because a codex was so much easier to dip into and peruse than a cumbersome scroll, which had the distinct disadvantage of snapping back into a roll the moment one became too absorbed in the text. The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts. (The “white Gospel page” of “The Hermit’s Song” is undoubtedly vellum.) It is interesting to consider that the shape of the modern book, taller than wide, was determined by the dimensions of a sheepskin, which could most economically be cut into double pages that yield our modern book shape when folded. The scribe transcribed the text onto pages gathered into a booklet called a quire, later stitched with other quires into a larger volume, which was then sometimes bound between protecting covers. Books and pamphlets of less consequence were often left unbound. Thus, a form of the “cheap paperback” was known even in the fifth century.
The most famous Irish codex is the Book of Kells, kept in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, but dozens of others survive, their names—the Book of Echternach, for instance, or the Book of Maihingen—sometimes giving us an idea of how far they traveled from the Irish scriptoria that were their primeval source. 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. How did they get there? The answer lies with the greatest Irish figure after Patrick, Columcille, prince of Clan Conaill, born in the royal enclosure of Gartan, on December 7, 521, less than ninety years after Patrick’s arrival as bishop.
Though he could have been a king, maybe even high king, Columcille chose to become a monk. His real name, Crimthann, or Fox, holds an echo of the ancient mythology, and he was probably red-haired. The name Columcille, or Dove of the Church, was his later monastic nickname. This may be ironic, as we shall soon see (and it was, in any case, Romanized as Columba, the name under which he usually appears in accounts written outside Ireland). Educated in the bardic traditions of his ancestors and then—under Bishop Finian of Clonard—in the new tradition of Christian learning, he journeyed as far as Gaul to visit the tomb of Saint Martin of Tours, whose sensible monastic rule was finding favor on the continent not only with bishops who feared the movement of single-minded, wild-eyed anchorites, but with men who wished to escape the increasing uncertainties of an age of upheaval. Returning to Ireland, the energetic Columcille began founding monasteries with a will—at Durrow, Kells, and many other places—so that, by the time he reached the age of forty-one, forty-one Irish foundations could claim him as their royal patron.
An intense man, Columcille loved beautiful things, the heritage no doubt of his privileged childhood, and was especially sensitive to the genius loci of Derry—“angel-haunted Derry,” he called it—where he founded his first monastery (even before his pilgrimage to Tours) and of which he sang in sensuous poetry that can stand beside any in the early Irish canon. But if Columcille loved anything more than his native place, he loved books, especially beautifully designed manuscripts. As a student, he had fallen in love with his master’s psalter, a uniquely decorated book of great price. He resolved to make his own copy by stealth, and so we find him sitting in Finian’s church at Moville, hunched over the coveted psalter, copying it in the dark. According to legend, he had no candle, but the five fingers of his left hand shone like so many lights while his right hand assiduously copied. The legend is embellished with many such details; but the sum and substance of it is that Columcille was found out and brought before King Diarmait, who issued his famous decision: “To every cow her calf; to every book its copy.” It was history’s first copyright case.
Columcille, forced to return the copy to Finian, was too much the aristocratic pagan to forget his humiliation. (Remember, it was his own Clan Conaill that continued to mate a new king with a mare.) When, sometime later, one of Columcille’s followers was killed on Diarmait’s orders, the princely monk seized his opportunity. God, he claimed, who protected all monks, had to be avenged. Mobilizing his powerful kinsmen, he took the field against Diarmait’s forces and beat them decisively. When the clash of battle had subsided, three thousand and one lay dead, only one of them on princely Columcille’s side. The contested psalter, which, needless to say, came to Columcille among the spoils of victory, was ever after called the Cathach, or Warrior.
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. As Columcille makes his journey, which would forever change the course of western history, let us pause for a moment to reflect on the world he leaves behind and the world that he and his disciples are sailing toward.
The Green Martyrdom had been a failure, both because of the apparently unquenchable Irish tendency to sociability and, perhaps even more important, because of the natural fertility of Ireland itself, which possessed nothing resembling an Egyptian desert and almost no place that did not, with a little foresight, abound in “leeks from the garden, poultry, game, salmon and trout and bees.” In the early days, soon after the time of Patrick, the anarchistic anchorites sought out rocky islands for their hermitages, places like Inis Murray and Skellig Michael off the western coast. “It is hard to believe,” wrote Kenneth Clark, “that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—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.” (The hundred years of which he speaks stretch from the late fifth century, after Patrick’s death, to the late sixth century, by which time, as we shall see, the Irish monks had reconnected barbarized Europe to the traditions of Christian literacy,) But the anchorites survived only too well, even in this rocky terrain, by dining on seabirds and cultivating small, rich gardens, fertilized by seaweed. They added to their numbers, built their beehive huts, copied their books, and thrived—as did, at least in these far-flung Irish places, western Christianity.
Soon enough, cityless Ireland altered, without quite meaning to, the political structure of Christianity, which had been based on bishoprics that had mimicked Roman urban administrative units, called dioceses. Lacking cities, Ireland didn’t quite see the point of bishops, and gradually these were replaced in importance by abbots and—in a development that would make any self-respecting Roman’s blood run cold—abbesses. Though our sources are imperfect and incomplete, there is little doubt that bishops turned into something like chaplains to various royal families, whose own power in the new Christian dispensation was somewhat on the wane, while abbots and abbesses came to rule over increasingly large and powerful monastic communities. 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.
In these new monastic city-states, a woman could reign as Medb had once done over Connacht. Brigid of Kildare, a convert of Patrick’s (and, perhaps, the noblewoman he describes as “pulcherrima”), ruled as high abbess of an immense double monastery—that is, a foundation that admitted both men and women, another irregularity that would have deeply offended Roman Catholic sensibility, which to this day imagines rule by a woman over men as a perversion of the natural order. Brigid’s druidical associations would also have been troubling to such a sensibility. She is reputed to have taken the veil on the Hill of Uisnech, Ireland’s primeval navel and the mythical center of its cosmic mandala. Her monastery began as a sort of Green Martyrdom under a huge oak, the sacred tree of the druids—thus, Kildare, which means “Church of the Oak.”
As with Columcille, much of the material surrounding Brigid is too suffused with miraculous happenings to be mistaken for history (she is said, for instance, to have been able to hang her cloak from a sunbeam), but a personality comes through as palpable as Medb’s. She even delivers her lines with Maevian pithiness. When, for example, her charioteer, attempting a shortcut, overturns their vehicle, poker-faced Brigid rises from the wreck, dusts herself off, and remarks only: “Shortcuts make broken bones.”
Following her conversion, her father, an extremely wealthy man, was appalled to find his beautiful daughter giving away his stores to beggars. Quite out of control, he threw Brigid into the back of his chariot, screaming: “It is neither out of kindness nor honor that I take you for a ride: I am going to sell you to the King of Leinster to grind his corn.” Arriving at the king’s enclosure, the father “unbuckled his sword, leaving it in the chariot beside Brigid, so that—out of respect—he could approach the king unarmed.” No sooner had the father gone off than a leper appeared, begging Brigid for her help. Since the only thing handy was her father’s sword, she gave it to him. Meanwhile, the father was making his offer to the king, who must have smelled something fishy, and insisted on meeting the girl before accepting. When king and father came out to the chariot, the father noticed immediately that his sword was missing and demanded to know where it was. When Brigid told him, “he flew into a wild rage” and began to beat her.
“Stop,” cried the king, and called Brigid to him. “Why do you steal your father’s property and give it away?”
“If I had the power,” answered Brigid, “I would steal all your royal wealth, and give it to Christ’s brothers and sisters.” The king quickly declined the father’s kind offer because “your daughter is too good for me.”
It is not surprising that, after she escaped from her father and became abbess, Brigid’s monastery was famous for its hospitality. This is the table grace associated with her name:
I should like a great lake of finest ale
For the King of kings.
I should like a table of the choicest food
For the family of heaven.
Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith,
And the food be forgiving love.
I should welcome the poor to my feast,
For they are God’s children.
I should welcome the sick to my feast,
For they are God’s joy.
Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place,
And the sick dance with the angels.
God bless the poor,
God bless the sick,
And bless our human race.
God bless our food,
God bless our drink,
All homes, O God, embrace.
However unorthodox Brigid’s rule by Roman standards, it is easy to see from the tales about her how Christian faith, which was strong enough to deprive a tyrant of his sword, unman a king, and empower the powerless, impressed this warrior society. It would be reckless overstatement to claim that women possessed equality in Irish society; but their larger presence here ensured a greater stress on physical amenities (“a clean house, a big fire, and a couch without sorrow” were among the many requisites of monastic hospitality) and on the value of intimacy (Ita, a sixth-century hermit-foundress was thought to have been granted the ecstatic privilege of nursing the Christ Child at her own virgin breasts). This larger female presence also contributed to the teeming variety of Irish religious life—a variety that would have distressed the Romans, had they known of it. They would have been even more disturbed had they known of the wide-ranging activities of the high abbesses, whose hands had the power to heal, who almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass.
Such goings-on, though of great antiquity, still have the power to shock the more piously orthodox. The Old Life of Brigid claims that Brigid was consecrated bishop “by mistake.” Another biography, written in the seventh century by the somewhat simpering Cogitosus, who seems to be trying to curry favor with his superior, omits this information, but one can read between the lines that Cogitosus knew the old story and chose to omit it, for he shows us Brigid preaching—an apostolic or priestly act—and Brigid “on God’s business” making “her pontifical way.” In his introduction, he effectively admits her to have been bishop in all but name. We know for certain that Brigid and her successor abbesses had a coadjutor bishop who reported to them; and we also know that at this period deacons, not just priests and bishops, offered Mass in parts of Gaul. So a woman bishop may not have appeared as singular as she would today.
Respect for differences was written into the rule books of the Irish monasteries. “Different is the condition of everyone,” cautions the Rule of Saint Carthage, “and different the nature of each place.” Irish abbots suggested; they did not enforce. And though the abbacy often passed from father to son, another irregularity that would have alarmed the Romans, the Irish balanced their 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 virtue over all else: “Amor non tenet ordinem” (“Love has nothing to do with order”).
The Irish also developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent. 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 (remember Patrick’s pain in this regard) and liturgical penance. The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest—and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.) 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. No one could ever pry knowledge gained in confession from such a priest, who knew that every confession was sealed forever by God himself. To break that seal was to imperil one’s salvation: it was practically the only sin the Irish considered unforgivable. 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.
It is a shame that private confession is one of the few Irish innovations that passed into the universal church. How different might Catholicism be today if it had taken over the easy Irish sympathy between churchmen and laymen and the easy Irish attitudes toward diversity, authority, the role of women, and the relative unimportance of sexual mores. In one of Cogitosus’s best stories, tenderhearted Brigid makes the fetus of a nun (whose womb had, “through youthful desire of pleasure, … swelled with child”) magically disappear (“without coming to birth, and without pain”), so that the nun won’t be turned out of her convent. Lucky nun, “returned … to health” and no longer pregnant. The story is reminiscent of one told in later times on the continent about a restless young nun who, having escaped her convent, lives a riotous life in the world and returns at the end of her days expecting the worst, only to find that the Virgin Mary has kindly taken her place during her long absence—and no one is the wiser. But it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine Cogitosus receiving an episcopal imprimatur for the disappearing fetus nowadays.
Cogitosus is on firmer historical ground when he describes Brigid’s foundation of Kildare as it appeared in the mid-seventh century when he himself was a monk there and the church, built after her death to accommodate the masses of pilgrims, was the largest structure in Ireland:
But who could convey in words the supreme beauty of her church and the countless wonders of her city, of which we would speak? “City” is the right word for it: that so many people are living there justifies the title. It is a great metropolis, within whose outskirts—which Saint Brigid marked out with a clearly defined boundary—no earthly adversary is feared, nor any incursion of enemies. For the city is the safest place of refuge among all the towns of the whole land of the Irish, with all their fugitives. It is a place where the treasures of kings are looked after, and it is reckoned to be supreme in good order.
And who could number the varied crowds and countless people who gather in from all territories? Some come for the abundance of festivals; others come to watch the crowds go by; others come with great gifts to the celebration of the birth into heaven of Saint Brigid who, on the First of February, falling asleep, safely laid down the burden of her flesh and followed the Lamb of God into the heavenly mansions.
February 1 is also Imbolc, a feast dedicated to the Irish fertility goddess, also named Brigid.
Why were the Romans unaware of these Irish developments? Were the Irish heretics without standing? The year of Columcille’s departure for Iona was 564, roughly a century after the death of Patrick, and the truth is that there were few Romans left in western Europe. The vast hordes of Vandals, Sueves, and Alans who had broken through Roman ranks and crossed the frozen Rhine in the first decade of the fifth century had spread throughout Gaul, pillaging and destroying as they went, stopping only when they reached the barrier of the Pyrenees. From there they poured east and west into the neighboring provinces; and this invasion was to be followed by many others. By the early sixth century, successive waves of German barbarians had altered the map of western Europe irrevocably. By mid-century, Salvian is writing that Trier, the center of Roman military government, has been four times laid waste, that Cologne is “overflowing with the enemy,” that Mainz is rubble. Not only are the Roman provinces gone, the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.
The Irish did not especially mean to be deviant, but their world hardly abounded in models of Christian orthodoxy. After Patrick, they experienced an influx of anchorites and monks fleeing before the barbarian hordes, and these no doubt provided them with some finer points on eremitical and conventual life. “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 bone-thin 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. The steely zealotry and peculiar practices of such men had already merited the suspicion of orthodox bishops on the continent, who much preferred the rule of Saint Martin of Gaul, whose foundations were all alike and readily subservient to the desires of the local bishop. Soon they would find even greater virtue in the rule of Benedict of Nursia, whose foundation at Monte Cassino would become in time the motherhouse of western monasticism, a monasticism of disciplined uniformity, enforced—through floggings, if necessary— by an autocratic abbot. Blessed by successive popes, the Rule of Saint Benedict would in the end obliterate all memory of the pluriform Irish.
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.
The western empire was scarcely a memory now. The last Latin emperor had fallen just a few years after Patrick died. And though there was still a Greek emperor in the east at Constantinople, where a small, defensible state was long established on the Bosporus, he might as well have been at Timbuktu for all his law was known in western lands. All the great continental libraries had vanished; even memory of them had been erased from the minds of those who lived in the emerging feudal societies of medieval Europe. 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 may be indulging in hyperbole, “Bibliotecis sepulcrorum ritu in perpetuum clausis” (“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. Gregory, the most towering continental figure of his time and rightly called “the Great,” took as dim a view of the pagan classics as Aldhelm, and could read no Greek. 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 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.”
Western Europe in the early sixth century
Ireland, at peace and furiously copying, thus stood in the position of becoming Europe’s publisher. But the pagan Saxon settlements of southern England had cut Ireland off from easy commerce with the continent. 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.
Columcille provided that step. 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. If the Green Martyrdom had failed, here was a martyrdom that was surely the equal of the Red; and henceforth, 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.
In this way, 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 Iona. They began to pour into this remote island, and many of them never went home again.
Thus, the indefatigable Columcille began to dream of opening new monasteries. Among the rugged Scots and the scary Picts, especially, Columcille’s reputation spread like wildfire. (There wasn’t, after all, much going on up that way.) He made one hundred fifty monks the cutoff number for 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. By the time of Columcille’s death in the last days of the sixth century, sixty monastic communities had been founded in his name along the jagged inlets and mountainy heights of windswept Scotland. He had long since passed his quota of three thousand and one souls saved.
No mention of Patrick is made in Columcille’s Life, which is not so surprising when you consider that it was written by Adomnan, abbot of Iona a hundred years after Columcille’s time, when Iona, Kildare, and other early Christian establishments were hotly contending with Patrick’s Armagh for the primacy of Christian Ireland. But the personality of Columcille, which gleams through all his works and all the tales we know of him, convinces us that he is Patrick’s spiritual son and worthy successor. He is full of fellow feeling, healing the sick by his touch, casting “down into hell” the despoilers of his friend’s house, even stopping to restore a wife’s lost affection for her husband through protracted conversation and prayer. He is hard on himself, sleeping each night, like Jacob, with a rock for his pillow. He lives in easy communion with nature, speaking to forest animals and nicely managing our first recorded encounter with the Loch Ness Monster (who takes one look at Columcille’s upraised arm and makes a quick exit for the lake).
On one occasion, he even returned to Ireland (never say never of an Irish saint) to plead before the national convention meeting in Drumceatt that the Irish kingdom of Dalriada (which covered Irish Scotland and part of Ulster—and to which Columcille owed allegiance) deserved exemption from tribute to the high king at Tara. Columcille prevailed; no man could stand up to him. Also on the agenda was a proposal to suppress the order of bards, admittedly a troublesome lot, whose satires were potent enough to kill and who took the most presumptuous advantage wherever they happened to camp. Poetry, said Columcille (who was himself the most accomplished poet of his day) was an essential part of Irish life: Ireland could not be Ireland without it. Do not banish the bards, only command that they widen their circle and teach others what they know. An irresistible proposal from an irresistible humanist. As Columcille’s proposal carried the assembly, twelve hundred merry bards crowded into the meeting, singing the praises of the saint, who, red-faced, pulled to his chin the cowl of his white wool cloak in order to hide his embarrassment.
Toward the end of his life, he began to have premonitions of his death. One day, he bade farewell to each of his brothers, who were out working the fields, and to the much-loved old packhorse that the monks used to cart their milk. For his last task on earth, he chose to sit down and continue his work of copying a manuscript. Writing out Psalm 34 he stopped after completing the words “But they that seek the Lord shall not want any thing that is good.” He set down his quill and whispered: “Let Baithene write the rest.” That night Columcille rose as usual from his spartan bed to join the brothers in singing the midnight office. As the monks reached the darkened church, they found Columcille in ecstasy before the altar. He blessed them all and died.
“He was,” wrote the British historian Kathleen Hughes, “a man of the very highest birth, with all the natural advantage of command which such a circumstance gave in an aristocratic society. He had the gift of second sight, combined with a power to control other men by the force of his own personality. He was a shrewd judge of character, and yet at the same time a man of warm sympathies. His monks, the laity, even the animals felt his attraction. He could terrify, he could comfort, he could delight.” This warrior-monk, this homme de fer, as the French monastic historian Jean Decarreaux has called him, had created by his singular determination a literate, Christian society among the Scots and Picts of northern Britain; and now, after his death, a fresh wave of his stout-hearted sons began to effect the same transformation among the pagan Angles of Northumbria from their new (but soon to be fabulous) island monastery of Lindisfarne, under the direction of Columcille’s greatest spiritual heir, Aidan. As Columcille had baptized Scotland—and taught it to read—Aidan would do the same for all of northern England.
And just as the unyielding warrior Cuchulainn had served as the model of prehistoric Irish manhood, Columcille now became the model for all who would earn the ultimate victory. Monks 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 monsters they might meet. Some went north, like Columcille. Others went northwest, like Brendan the Navigator, visiting Iceland, Greenland, and North America, and supping on the back of a whale in mid-ocean. Some set out in boats without oars, putting their destination completely in the hands of God. Many of the exiles found their way to continental Europe, where they were more than a match for the barbarians they met. They, whom the Romans had never conquered (and evangelized only, as it were, by accident in the person of Patrick, the imperfect Roman), fearlessly brought the ancient civilization back to its ancient home.
One of these erratic travelers was Columbanus, twenty years or so the junior of Columcille, born in the province of Leinster about the year 540, 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 clashes with the region’s bishops, who are nettled 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. It has never occurred to these churchmen to venture beyond a few well-tended streets into the rough-hewn mountain settlements of the simpler Sueves. To Columbanus, however, a man who will take 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-Saône. Columbanus, who cannot be bothered to take part in such a travesty, sends a letter in his stead—a letter calculated to send the bishops right up their well-plastered walls:
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. They have more than enough to concern them, without sticking their episcopal noses into his affairs, if only they took their own responsibilities seriously. 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 push it in his face.
Needless to say, he wins no friends at the synod, and when Columbanus attracts the enmity of Brunhilda, the wicked Visigothic princess who rules Burgundy, the bishops conspire with her to have Columbanus deported. 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 seventies, takes his part in the construction, happily carrying wooden beams on his shoulders.
The year of Columbanus’s arrival in Lombardy was 612. In the following year, his old enemy Brunhilda is overthrown and brutally executed by the Frankish nobility. Clothaire of Neustria, who was always a friend to Columbanus and now holds sway among the Franks of Burgundy, sends a deputation over the Alps, carrying chests of gold to help in the construction of Bobbio and an invitation begging Columbanus’s return to Luxeuil. But the vigorous old abbot declines. He will die at Bobbio—but not before sending more letters, including a long one to Pope Boniface IV, taking him to task for failing (as Columbanus saw it) to put a proper end to the Nestorian controversy, a complex Greek dispute about the “natures” of Christ that Columbanus may not have understood. He even makes a pun on the name of Boniface’s predecessor, Pope Vigilius: “Vigila, atque quaeso, papa, vigila, et iterum dico, vigila; quia forte non bene vigilavit Vigilius” (“Be vigilant then, I implore you, pope, be vigilant, and again do I say, be vigilant; since perhaps he who was called Vigilant was not”). This was not Columbanus’s first letter to a pope—nor even the first time he had made light of a pope’s name! In a letter to Pope Gregory the Great at the time of his disputes with the bishops, Columbanus had written most familiarly—as if he were an intimate old friend—and had made a pun on the name of Gregory’s predecessor Leo the Great, reminding Gregory of the scripture that “a living dog is better than a dead lion [Leo in Latin].” In response to each of these letters Columbanus received only cold pontifical silence.
This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up his attitude to his Irish-ness. (He even boasts to Boniface of “the freedom of discussion characteristic of my native land.”) In chilly, cityless Ireland, men worked in close cooperation by day and slept side by side at night. Even the king was one’s intimate—and the Irish word ri suggests an intimacy that could never be imagined of rex. To Columbanus, the pope was one of the brothers, a father abbot worthy of respect, by all means—but also in need, like any man, of an occasional jab in the ribs. The jab might even be one’s religious duty, in a manner of speaking.
Any question of Columbanus’s balance is swept away when you take a serious look at his achievements: at his 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. But the number, stretching across vast territories that would become in time the countries of France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, cannot be less than sixty and may be more than a hundred—enough to fill a page or two of this book. He had been on the continent for just twenty-five years.
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 huffy 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 Alemans. 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 tardy 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. He stuck to his task, and by his death in 645 all of the Alemans had received the Gospel. But he could little know that after he was long dead there would rise on the site of his labors one of the greatest of all medieval monasteries, named in his honor. In the ninth century, one of his spiritual sons, a Leinsterman, sitting in the now enormous scriptorium of the towering monastery on Lake Constance, would put together a commonplace book containing bits of all his favorite reading—notes from a commentary on the Aeneid, excerpts from Jerome and Augustine, some Latin hymns, a little Greek, some idiosyncratic natural history, and in Irish his own perfect poem about his cat, Pangur Ban. 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 Irish personality.
There is much we do not know about these Irish exiles. Their clay and wattle buildings have long since disappeared, and even most of their precious books have perished. But what they knew—the Bible and the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Ireland—we know, because they passed these things on to us. The Hebrew Bible would have been saved without them, transmitted to our time by scattered communities of Jews. The Greek Bible, the Greek commentaries, and much of the literature of ancient Greece were well enough preserved at Byzantium, and might be still available to us somewhere—if we had the interest to seek them out. But Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down. Beyond that, there would have perished in the west not only literacy but 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.
Whether this state of affairs would have been better or worse than what did happen, I leave to the reader to ponder. But what is certain is that the White Martyrs, clothed like druids in distinctive white wool robes, fanned out cheerfully across Europe, founding monasteries that would become in time the cities of Lumièges, Auxerre, Laon, Luxeuil, Liège, Trier, Würzburg, 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.” Saint Fursa the Visionary went from Ireland to East Anglia, then to Lagny, just east of Paris, then to Péronne, which would be known in time as Peronna Scottorum, Péronne of the Irish and City of Fursey. Caidoc and Fricor advanced on Picardy. Virgil the Geometer, an Irish satirist, became archbishop of Salzburg. The scholar Donatus, according to his epitaph, “Scottorum sanguine creatus” (“born of Irish blood”), was chosen in a popular election to be bishop of Fiesole, where he ruled for nearly fifty years. 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. 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. At Amay in Belgium there was even discovered in 1977 a sarcophagus, ornamented in the Celtic manner and showing the image of a woman (mysteriously labeled “Saint Chrodoara”) who carries a bishop’s crozier. 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, 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. Suffice it to say that as late as 870 Heiric of Auxerre can still exclaim in his Life of Saint Germanus: “Almost all of Ireland, despising the sea, is migrating to our shores with a herd of philosophers!”
The most important centers of Irish-Christian influence
By this point, the transmission of European civilization was assured. Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies’ heads. Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.
And that is how the Irish saved civilization.
* The first day of May, called Beltaine, was a spring celebration distinguished by bonfires, maypoles, and sexual license; the last night of October, called Samain, marked the beginning of winter, and was a night on which ghosts and other unfriendly creatures from the Otherworld were allowed to frighten the living.
* A glen in Irish is a valley created by cliffs or rocky hillsides. Glendalough is the Glen of the Two Loughs (or Lakes). Kevin preferred to stand in the Upper Lake because it was more remote—and probably chillier.
* In Patrick’s time the island of Britain was peopled by Romanized Celts, whom we call Britons, and, in its northern reaches, by the un-Romanized and ferocious Picts, who painted pictures all over their bodies, horrifying the Romans, who called them Picti (Painted People). Patrick was a Romanized Celtic Briton—not an Englishman. The German Angles, who in Patrick’s day were—with their Germanic cousins the Saxons and Jutes— harrying the southern and eastern coasts of Britain, soon settled in Britain, pushing the Romanized Celts into Wales and Cornwall. These new people, pagan at first but evangelized in the seventh century by a Roman librarian named Augustine (notof Hippo), gave their name to their new home, which came to be called Angland, or England.
* A surprisingly coherent theory, found in Martin Brennan, The Boyne Valley Vision (Portlaoise, 1980), is that the carvings on the Boyne tombs constitute an ancient sky map and calendar, predictive, like Stonehenge, of celestial events.
* In late antiquity and through the Middle Ages, the Irish were called Scotti or Scoti in Latin, and Scotus at the end of a name denoted Irish ancestry. Ireland was called Hibernia, sometimes Scotia in Latin. Scotia Minor, the name applied to the Irish colony in northern Britain, was eventually shortened to Scotia, or Scotland.