Stones of Aran (11 page)

What item should one snatch to safety, as an ancient house collapses in flames? For some, it would be its archive, the
memorial
of its honoured founders. When Irish Catholicism was under siege by England and the Reformation, with its schools suppressed, monasteries going under grass and priests on the run, a group of exiles on the Continent dedicated themselves to the task of collecting, copying and printing the Lives of the Irish saints. One of the initiators of the project was Fr. Hugh Ward, of the Mac an Bhaird (son of the bard) family, hereditary scholars of Ulster. Like many sons of important Gaelic families he had left Ireland secretly to study abroad, first at Salamanca and then at the Franciscan college in Louvain in Belgium. Here he met Patrick Fleming, who similarly had fled the suppression of his faith in Ireland and had studied at Douai. Another recruit was Brother Michael O’Clery from Donegal, best remembered today as one of the four compilers of that stupendous synthesis of earlier records to which Colgan gave the name of the
Annals
of
the
Four
Masters.
During his travels in Ireland O’Clery collected several hundred Lives of saints, though only a small proportion of these survive in any form. The continental libraries yielded many more to Ward
and his network of correspondents; at Clairvaux, Bobbio, Rome, St. Gallen and many other foundations with Irish connections, manuscripts were patiently copied and sent off to Louvain. Fr. Francis Matthews, the Franciscan Minister Provincial in Ireland, arranged for a copy to be made of a manuscript from Saints’ Island, a monastery in Lough Ree on the Shannon; this contained, among thirty-nine Lives, that of St. Enda. Strangely enough, Fr. Matthews also had access to a most important collection of
manuscripts
in the library of the Protestant Primate of Ireland, Archbishop James Ussher. This man is remembered with a smile for his calculation of the date of the Creation (in 4004
BC
, as
mentioned
in the very beginning of my book), but he also played an important though two-faced role in the history of Gaelic culture. While he supported the strict enforcement of the law against Catholic clergy, and opposed Bedell’s translation of the Bible into Irish and the use of Irish in the Protestant Church, he carried on a dangerous correspondence, using pseudonyms, with the lurking Catholic hierarchy in Ireland on ecclesiastical history, and
assembled
the largest of the three surviving collections of
manuscript
Lives, now in Trinity College Library.

In 1631 Fr. Fleming was murdered by Protestant fanatics in Bohemia; Fr. Ward died a few years later, and the great work of publication was passed on to Fr. John Colgan. He was from
Inishowen
near Derry, had left the country as a youth and been ordained somewhere on the Continent, entered the Franciscan order at Louvain in 1620, and became Professor of Theology there soon after Fr. Ward’s death. The first massive tome of his
Acta
Sanctorum
Hiberniae,
the Lives of the Irish Saints, appeared in 1645. It covers, in date-order, those saints whose holy days fall in January, February and March; Enda appears near the end, at March 21st. A second volume dealt with just three pre-eminent saints, Patrick, Colm Cille and Brigid; after that, money ran out, Colgan fell ill, and the remaining five or six projected volumes never appeared.

Both the original manuscripts containing the Life of St. Enda
later came into the hands of the Protestant James Ware,
Auditor-General
of Ireland, who, encouraged by Ussher and advised by the Gaelic scholar Duald Mac Firbhisigh, had interested himself in Irish antiquities. The one from which a transcript was made for Louvain in 1627, according to a note written on it, belonged at that time to a nobleman “G.E.,” otherwise unidentified. It had already passed through many hands (one of its marginalia reads: “Jhon Monny his booke. God make him an old blinde thiefe as hee is.”) The other ms had belonged to the Franciscans of Dublin in late medieval times, but since then had been roughly treated and had collected in its margins a scribbled mass of contradictory evidence as to its successive owners. By the time of the Catholic rebellion of 1641 Colgan’s assistant Brendan O’Connor was
urging
that such manuscripts be gathered into the comparative safety of collections like Ware’s, and indeed much of what was not in Protestant keeping must have perished in the succeeding years of the Cromwellian holocaust. After Ware’s death, his library was sold to the Earl of Clarendon and went to London. It was acquired by the Duke of Chandos in 1707, and Dean Swift
appealed
in vain for it to be returned to Ireland; instead much of it was sold to an important antiquarian and collector of manuscripts, Dr. Richard Rawlinson, who bequeathed his library to the Bodleian in 1756. And that is the current resting-place of the two manuscripts known to scholars as Rawlinson B. 485 and 505.

But what is it that has been, through such effort, excepted from oblivion? Both manuscripts are in a Gothic script that
experts
date to the early fourteenth century. Colgan states that the one from which he drew the Life of St. Enda was written by a well-known scribe, Aughuistin Magraidhin, Canon of Saint’s Island, who was born in 1350. A recent study suggests that both manuscripts originated in the Lough Ree area rather earlier than Maghraidin’s time, but that the one Colgan refers to was indeed associated with Saint’s Island and may perhaps have been borrowed by Maghraidhin from elsewhere and not returned, for he was a great translator of Latin lives into Irish—not that an Irish
version of St. Enda’s is known of—and many manuscripts must have passed through his hands.

So the number of centuries intervening between the saint, in the fifth, and the scribe, in the fourteenth, is greater than that between the scribe and ourselves. The Life we have may be based on earlier written sources, but the great era of this genre was
several
centuries later than the Age of the Saints it celebrates, and very nearly all Irish saints’ Lives were dealing with the distant past even when they were first put on paper. Historical truth was not the prime concern of the hagiographers; nevertheless
historians
try to elicit truth from them. The old-fashioned way of doing this was to ignore all the obviously fabulous and miraculous stuff, and take the residue seriously; thus the various clerics who wrote on the saints fifty and a hundred years ago, took care to distance themselves from “monkish credulity” and “medieval superstition” (while feeling no difficulties, one supposes, with the equally
surprising
events reported from Cana and Galilee). The late Hubert Butler satirized this method as equivalent to saying, “While the cow certainly did not jump over the moon, we have no grounds for denying that Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet and Jack Horner in a
corner
.” This is a sharp stroke; but when one thinks of all the
indubitably
historical figures around whom absurd legends have accrued—Aristotle is one I will bump into most unexpectedly in my
explorations
of Aran—it is not totally convincing. So it still seems worthwhile trying to apply the old-fashioned method to St. Enda.

Jettisoning the obviously counter-factual in his Life, we are left with these skeletal assertions: that Enda was the son of Conall Dearg, ruler of Oriol; that one of his four sisters married Oengus mac Nadfroích, king of Cashel, that he studied probably at Whithorn, was ordained in Rome, was granted Aran by Oengus and founded a monastery there. And since (according to the
An
nals
of
the
Four
Masters)
Oengus died in 489, we have some
indication
of the date of that foundation.

However, in the calendar of saints known as the
Martyr
ology
of
Tallaght,
St. Enda is mentioned as follows:

that is, “Enda of Aran, son of Ainmire son of Rónán of the
Crem-thanna
,” who were a people associated with Meath rather than Oriel. This text dates from about
AD
800, and according to
Zimmer
the genealogy it records is the correct one; the other was first given in a later martyrology which confused our St. Enda with another Enda, one of three sinful brothers who repented and
undertook
a sea-pilgrimage, as told in the fabulous tale, the
Voyage
of
the
Currach
of
the
U
í
Corra;
it is because of this confusion of the saint with the navigator that medieval narratives about St. Brendan of Clonfert have him visiting St. Enda to obtain his blessing before departing on his own equally fabulous voyages. But if this is so, the family connection with Oengus of Cashel falls away (it is in any case inconsistent with other old material relating to this king), and with it the only evidence for the date of Enda’s arrival in Aran. (It is fair to say, however, that Zimmer does piece together from the thicket of references to the two
Endas
’ ancestors in the Martyrology, the Voyage, the Life, and
various
commentaries on them, a coherent-looking family tree that brings Enda into contemporaneity with Oengus—but it seems to me that he does so by picking and choosing what to accept and what to dismiss, guided mainly by the result he wants to achieve; in this he was probably acting in the spirit of the medieval compilers of these “facts.”) If sources so ancient disagree, there is no probability of the question being settled today. St. Enda and his family reduce to mere names, none of which mean anything outside the contradictory genealogies and histories in which they are inscribed. The very question of the existence of St. Enda seems empty of content.

But the stones of Cill Éinne—solid evidence of some act of origination, surely? There was a monastery here; therefore there must have been a first monk here, one would suppose. But is even so much knowable? The ruins extant today are probably of
twelfth-century
buildings; these probably replaced earlier structures of
which no evidence as to their date survives. The christianization of Ireland was a gradual process; there must have been stages in which it would have been hard to say whether or not the people of a certain locality understood and accepted the Christian
message
to the exclusion of their native polytheism. The
interpretation
of acts of worship in Aran may have fluctuated for centuries; a community that eventually came to regard itself as a community of Christian monks may have been consolidated out of
intermittences
and ambivalencies over generations, and having recognized its own stability called for a history of its origins. Foundation is often a retrospective, not a prospective, act. Enda, like nearly all the other saints, is a projection if not of the imagination then of
post-facto
rationalization of ill-remembered gossip.

If this is so in the typical case of St. Enda, then the Lives of the Saints, preserved with such diligence and bravery by those seventeenth-century clerics, are valuable only as illustrating the beliefs and customs of the times of their composition many
centuries
after the so-called Age of the Saints, and the
misappropriation
of tradition by rivalrous monasteries and petty kingdoms. But, just as their pages seem to be crumbling to dry dust, comes a bold and passionate attempt to rejuvenate them, to assert the importance of their testimony—and from a surprising quarter, the liberal and Protestant essayist Hubert Butler, whose sarcasm at the expense of modern hagiographers I have quoted above. The thesis of his book
Ten
Thousand
Saints
(which, whether it is right or wrong, does not seem to have been given the attention it deserves from the experts) is that the thousands of saints mentioned in ancient sources—the twenty-seven St. Fintans, the fifty-eight St. Mochuas, the forty-three St. Molaises, the saints with bizarre epithets to their name like “dirty-fist” or “badger-faced,” or whose vomit turns to gold, who slay enemies with a blow from an
eyelash
, and who are, collectively considered, incredible—never
existed
as individuals; instead:

Also, since the names of many of these population groups would have been in some non-Celtic language, they were
interpreted
by the Celts of a later time through word-play; the names and epithets of the saints and the weird biographies concocted to explain these names are, Butler suggests, elaborate puns on the underlying tribal names.

Although two or three saints, most notably St. Brigid, are
generally
admitted to have originated in Celtic mythology rather than in Christian history, Butler is the first to cast such a
disillusioned
eye on the whole lot of them—though for him the obscure picture that emerges of Ireland’s prehistoric politics is intrinsically more exciting than the traditional tale of fifth-and sixth-century fanatics thrashing their way through the forests of paganism. He is even brave enough to apply his pun-craft to such eminent figures as St. Fursey, well known in Ireland, England and Gaul, and whose Life was written by one of his disciples only a decade or two after his death, according to the traditional view; Fursey, he asserts, was Forseti, the ancestor-god of the Frisians. He does not undertake to repaganize St. Colm Cille, though. In a later article, Butler pursued the saints of Aran in particular, and on St.
Gregory
or Grigóir he is very convincing. This saint, celebrated in the islands on either side of Gregory’s Sound, is said to be a native of Kerry, where the strait between the Blasket Islands and the
Dingle
Peninsula is another Gregory’s Sound: