Saints and Scholars

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This seems to have been key to why so few of Ireland’s holiest people from the later Middle Ages and even since are familiar to us, he explains The celebration of St Brigid’s Day on February 1 – the pagan feast of Imbolc – was probably intended as a symbolic gesture, Fr Ó Ríordáin says, noting that with this being seen as a hinge of the year, with the worst of the winter being over, it was a fitting day to celebrate somebody who represented a new beginning for Ireland.

In the most recent research investigating Europeans’ attitudes towards science, 70 per cent of people surveyed agreed that having an interest in science leads to improvements in culture. But what role does science have to play in Irish culture? It is easy to associate music, language, dance, art or story-telling with our national heritage, but does science belong there too? Renowned for her generosity and care for the poor, Saint Brigid famously converted a dying man by making up a cross with rushes she found on the ground to bless him with, something children in Ireland learn to make in school on her feast day 1st February. Another Irish saint from this era with some interesting legends was Saint Brendan. Known as the navigator it is said he discovered the Americas, sailing from his home county of Kerry, sometime in the 5th Century. Curiously, though, the monastic rule by which Columbanus’ monasteries at Annegray, Luxeuil, Fontaine, Bregenz and Bobbio lived did not last into the later Middle Ages and has left little imprint in wider Christianity. Was it too rigorous, and was so rigorous a rule the norm in Celtic Christianity? You always have to keep a focus on where does Christ fit into the picture, and the Christian way of life, so I would be looking out for anything that would be pointing in that direction, from whatever century is might be,” he says. “The ‘New Age’ stuff doesn’t do a lot for me, and I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to it. I know it goes on and it’s available and so on, but I don’t delve much into that world.”

Then in the 12th Century you had the reform of the Church which meant the transition from a monastic church to a diocesan structure,” he continues. “That’s basically the Norman Church – even though they had reform before the Normans came but that’s another matter, but from about the 12th century onwards you didn’t have the same approach towards the canonisation of saints.”

A family feud set Gobnait on her spiritual journey, which led her first to study with St Enda. (She was his only female student.) One story tells of how St Gobnait stopped the spread of plague by using honey as a cure; another states that she used her stave to draw a white line that prevented the plague entering her parish. Things had reached a very constricted pitch in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Centuries in terms of how you had one opportunity of repenting after baptism, and if you blew that you were gone,” he says. “The Irish come along then, when they’re going to the continent, and they had this notion of the ‘anam cara’, the soul friend or spiritual director, and they would hear, if you like, the confession of a fellow monk, people admitting their faults and failings, and then gradually the tradition coming in of letting it go, and going ahead and living your life. Somehow along the way to modern times, however, we released our grip on this expertise, allowing others to make the breakthroughs and take the lead on the advance of mathematics, science and engineering. Some of the new technologies had originally come from the first century, says Charlie Doherty, a retired lecturer and researcher in early Irish history at University College Dublin.Piecing the lives together from strictly historical texts and hagiographies – saints’ lives intended to provoke wonder and provide models for holy life – entails some thoughtful and creative work, Fr Ó Ríordáin continues. Many of Yeats’s life milestones happened here: he became a father, a politician, won the Nobel prize for literature and published poetry collection The Tower. The Winding Stair, which followed in 1933, is named after the moon-shaped stone steps that curve their way to the top of the keep. His friend (and the co-founder of Dublin’s Gaiety theatre) Augusta Gregory lived nearby at Coole Park, where he signed the Autograph Tree along with JM Synge, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey. Yeats also mounted a plaque on the castle walls for posterity with the words: “I, the poet William Yeats/With old mill boards and sea-green slates/And smithy work from the Gort forge/Restored this tower for my wife George;/And may these characters remain/When all is ruin once again.” While in the area, don’t miss Kilmacduagh, an impressive monastic ruin with the highest round tower in the world, which, some say, leans more acutely than Pisa’s. If you’re staying, drop by for mussels at Moran’s on the Weir. One key area where the Irish came to excel was in Computus, and the Irish monk Cummian, thought to have been based in Munster, was a leading researcher on the subject. “By the early seventh century there are three ways to calculate when Easter occurs. It is the Irish who develop this into an entire new genre of literature on Computus,” Kelly says.

Christianity first came to Ireland between the 3rd and 5th Centuries and while much of Europe was plunging into the Dark Ages, Ireland provided a beacon of light. Something said briefly, as Nietzsche once pointed out, can be the fruit of much long thought, and Fr John J. Ó Ríordáin’s Early Irish Saints is eloquent testimony to this. A slim book, drawing together 15 pen pictures of holy men and women from the era when Ireland was known as ‘the land of saints and scholars’, its brevity conceals an extraordinary depth of understanding. I started to do research into this. I wanted to know what were the sums and were they right, and what was the standard of education at Glendalough,” she says. “I discovered it was extremely high. The book is advanced maths, mathematical philosophy – much more than one and one is two.” Derrynaflan is not a typical island. This tiny 44-acre, privately owned mound, in Ireland's biggest inland county, isn't surrounded by an ocean or a lake. Unusually, it pops from the Bog of Lurgoe in Tipperary's vast brown swampy peatlands like a vibrant green mirage. Nevertheless, by dictionary standards, an island it categorically is. The manuscript is written in Latin but in complicated parts it has embedded Irish where there is a need for detailed explantation. The author of the text has intentionally included Irish, incontrovertible truth it is of Irish origin. We have these beautiful numbers from the Swiss Alps. It is really magic to see these.”I think that’s important – when you reflect on that it makes total sense, because you’re establishing a new tradition,” he says, recalling Chesterton’s line that pagans were wiser than paganism, which was why they became Christian. It strikes him as plausible too, he adds, that Brigid may have deliberately Christianised an earlier pagan shrine, as St Gregory the Great would later advise St Augustine to do in his mission to the English. There are many stories and tales about the saints’ bold and brave deeds, including Lí Ban transforming into a mermaid, Colmcille confronting the Loch Ness Monster, Gobnait setting a swarm of bees on raiders and Ciarán’s spirit returning to smote raiders with his crozier! The Irish even borrowed the Roman alphabet so they could translate Latin documents and help themselves to the latest devices. was a trailblazer. Leaving home at 16 on a donkey, bringing her younger sister Fíona with her, she set up a monastic school at Killeedy (Cell Íde) and later became the foster mother of the saints of Ireland. She was a mentor to St Brendan.

Ancient manuscripts show that Ireland was a major centre for the study of mathematics centuries ago. We had some of the foremost practitioners of the fine art of Computus, the difficult business of calculating the date of Easter far into the future.Given how strict Celtic monasticism could be, it’s striking that in the development of penitential books and personal Confession it took major steps towards realising the Church’s capacity to be a channel of God’s mercy. In Killenaule, a small town about 9km from Derrynaflan, where you can still get your groceries and a pint of draught Guinness in the same store, people will happily tell you everything you need to know about their beloved treasure island and how you can get there. Expect the lowdown to be wrapped in legendary banter and generations of folklore. But that's another cherished story for locals to tell. The basic tradition with that you entered a monastery, illiterate, presumably, and the first thing is you got a slate to scribble on or a bit of wax that you could write on, and you learned the alphabet,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says. “And then from the alphabet they learned the psalms in Latin, and it seems that they probably learned the whole psalm book off by heart – a number of them did, anyway.” This was Ireland's Golden Era as it became a burgeoning land of art and literature, culture and Christianity, and many of Ireland's most famous saints were plying their trade during this time. Their iterary output in the Middle Ages wasn’t very great, in terms of how their commentaries on the Bible were utterly boring”