W. F. Skene

“ When it came then to the last hours for Colum Cille, and when the bell was rung for matins on the night of Whitsunday, he went before the others to the church, and made genuflexions and earnest prayers at the altar. At that time an angelic brightness filled the church about him on every side, and the venerable patron then resigned his spirit to heaven, to the joy and gladness of the people of heaven in general. His body, moreover, is in the earth here, with honour and veneration from God and men, attended with virtues and miracles every day of them. ”

“ Whatever may be the traces of a higher and more advanced mythology among the Irish, we can see from the questions of the king’s daughter that the objects of the popular belief were rather the personified powers of nature. Mysterious beings, who were supposed to dwell in the heavens or the earth, the sea, the river, the mountain, or the valley, were to be dreaded and conciliated. These they worshipped and invoked, as well as the natural objects themselves in which they were supposed to dwell; and this conception of them runs through the early history of Ireland during the pagan period. ”

“ Space will, of course, not admit of anything like a complete analysis of them, but a comparison of the lives, in the order in which they appear to have been compiled, will show the growth of the legendary and fabulous additions to the real facts of his life, and the process by which it passed, from the few leading features of it which can be extracted from his own authentic writings, to the extraordinary mixture of fact, legend and fable which now makes up the popular conception of his life. ”

“ Monachism reached the Irish Church through two different channels. From Martin of Tours the monastic influence reached the Irish Church through two different channels, and became the means of infusing a new life into that Church, imparting to it a character which harmonised better with the tribal organisation of the social system and exhibited itself in that marvellous burst of energy which not only filled Ireland with monasteries, but was carried by its monkish missionaries across the sea to Britain and the Continent. ”

“ No wonder if kings and nations became converted to Christianity and incorporated the church into their tribal institutions in a manner which now excites our wonder, if not our suspicion. The lives of the saints show us these missionaries, owing to their devoted and self-denying lives, first received with respect by some chief, then obtaining a grant of land to found their monastery, and the people soon after converted by the preaching of the Word of God. Their influence, however, was soon enhanced by a less legitimate feature. ”

“ When the Apostolic See, according to her practice in all the world, stationed us in these western parts to preach to the pagan nations here, and so it came to pass that we entered into this island which is called Britain, before we were acquainted with it, supposing that they walked in the ways of the universal church, we felt a very high respect for the Britons as well as the Scots, from our regard to their sanctity of character; but when we came to know the Britons, we supposed the Scots must be superior to them. ”

“ Twelve years had now elapsed since Columba first set foot on the island of Iona, and he had already to a great extent accomplished the task he had set before him. He had founded his monastery in the island, as the central point of his mission; and the exhibition of the Christian life, as alone it was possible to present it in the state of society which prevailed among these pagan tribes, as a colony of tonsured monks following a monastic rule, had its usual effect in influencing the population of the adjacent districts. ”

“ In the Monastic Church in Ireland, when land was given by the chief or head of a family, it was held to be a personal grant to the saint or missionary himself and to his heirs, according to the ecclesiastical law of succession. Heirs of his body such a founder of a monastery, who was himself under the monastic rule, of course could not have; but, as we have seen, when the tribe of the land and the tribe of the patron saint were the same, the former supplied the abbacy with a person qualified to occupy the position ”

“ It is not till after the expulsion of the Columban monks from the kingdom of the Picts, in the beginning of the eighth century, that the name of Culdee appears. To Adamnan, to Eddi and to Bede it was totally unknown. They knew of no body of clergy who bore this name, and in the whole range of ecclesiastical history there is nothing more entirely destitute of authority than the application of this name to the Columban monks of the sixth and seventh centuries, [431] or more utterly baseless than the fabric which has been raised upon that assumption. ”

“ The royal city was called Rymont, or royal mount, which King Hungus gave to God and the holy apostle. Those holy men who brought the relics of the blessed apostle having departed this life, as well as their disciples and followers, the religious service there died away, as the people were barbarous and uncultivated. There were kept up, however, by carnal succession, in the church of St. Andrew, such as it then was, thirteen, commonly called Keledei, whose manner of life was shaped more in accordance with their own fancy and human tradition than with the precepts of the holy fathers. ”

“ This influence was that increasing asceticism which led the monks to forsake the cœnobitical life for the solitary cell of the anchorite, and induced those who wished to pass from a secular to a religious life to prefer this more ascetic form of it. This form of the religious life had long existed in the Christian Church, and, from a very early period, there prevailed a feeling that the solitary life in the desert, or in the anchorite’s cell, was a higher form of the religious life than that afforded by the cœnobitical life of the monastery. ”

“ The great anachronism in Kentigern’s life is the tale that he was a disciple of Servanus, and the latter of Palladius, and as Palladius died in the year 432, one hundred and eighty years before the death of Kentigern according to the Cambrian Annals, this long life was given him in order to fill up the interval; but, if we drop the 198century which has been added to it, we shall find that a life of eighty-five years is more consistent with the narrative, and furnishes us with an unexceptionable chronology. ”

“ Then said Aidan, who was also present in the council, to the priest then spoken of, “I am of opinion, brother, that you were more severe to your unlearned hearers than you ought to have been, and did not at first, conformably to the apostolic discipline, give them the milk of more gentle doctrine, till, being by degrees nourished with the Word of God, they should be capable of greater perfection, and be able to practise God’s sublimer precepts.” ”

“ After Reformation Scotch Gaelic becomes a written language. The Reformation, however, soon after gave rise to a religious literature, which was printed for the use of the Gaelic-speaking people; but here too it became necessary to resort to Ireland for the written language. Bishop Carsewell printed, in 1567, a translation of John Knox’s liturgy, with a prefatory epistle, in which he says that ‘we, the Gael of Alban and Erin, have laboured under the want that our dialects of the Gaelic have never been printed;’ and the language he uses is unquestionably the written Irish of the time. ”

“ Thus we are told that Findchan, a priest and founder of the monastery of Artchain in Tiree, brought with him from Ireland, under the clerical habit, a certain Aid the Black, who was of a royal family and of the race of the Irish Picts, that he might remain in pilgrimage in his monastery for several years, for Aid had been a very bloodthirsty man, and had slain even the king of Ireland; and that, after Aid had spent some time in his retirement, Findchan, having called in a bishop, had him improperly ordained a priest. ”

“ We get a glimpse into the state of the church in this reign too in the Life of St. Cadroë. Having been fully instructed at Armagh, he returned to Beanus, his uncle, and ‘scatters the seeds of wisdom throughout the whole of Scotland; for, though the Scots have had many teachers, they have not had many fathers. He here trained them in the knowledge of the arts, whence, because he instructed many with his lips, he had no associates; for, from the time of his arrival, none of the wise men had crossed the sea, but still remained in Ireland. ”

“ In his nineteenth conference, an abbot called John, who had been an anchorite and had entered a monastery, is asked which of the two orders was to be preferred, and replies that he thought the life of the cœnobites best for those who were not absolutely perfect, and shows that none but those who have attained to a degree of eminent perfection are capable of living the life of a hermit. ”

“ Probus, however, seems to have preserved one incident which is true of the historic Patrick, when he states that, after he was ordained priest by a bishop, whom he calls St. Senior, he preached to the Irish before the mission of Palladius, and before his own consecration as a bishop. This short analysis of the lives of St. Patrick will be sufficient to show how the real events in the life of the historic Patrick, so far as they can be ascertained, were gradually overlaid by spurious additions, till at length the legendary life of a spurious Patrick, as we now have it, was developed out of it. ”

“ Bede tells us that, when the great pestilence devastated Ireland in the year 664, ‘many of the nobility and of the middle ranks of the Anglic nation were there at that time, who, in the days of the bishops Finan and Colman, forsaking their native island, had retired thither, for the sake either of divine studies or of a more continent life; and some of them presently devoted themselves faithfully to a monastic life, others chose rather to apply themselves to study, going about from one master’s cell to another. ”

“ There is then the usual deadly sickness of the king, and the cure through the prayers of the saint; and the king gives him the place where he inhabits as an offering for ever. Servanus then founds and dedicates the church and cemetery at Culenros, or Culross. Then he goes to Lochleven to see Adamnan, who receives him there, and shows him an island in that lake well adapted for his religious community which is granted him. Servanus founds a monastery in that island in which he remains seven years, and from thence he goes about the whole region of Fife, founding churches everywhere. ”

“ For centuries her clergy were entirely Scottish, and the instruction of the people and the education of the young was in the hands of the Scottish monks of the Columban Church. By them the standard of the written Irish was introduced. It became the language of the church, the monastery and the school. There was, probably for generations, not a Pictish child, who secured any education at all, who had not learned his alphabet and been taught to read by a Scottish monk. ”

“ We see it first as a Culdee church, founded shortly before the accession of the Scottish kings to the Pictish throne; then as a Scottish monastery, its abbot filling the high office of bishop of Fortrenn, the new kingdom acquired by the Scots. Then the bishopric passes to Abernethy, and the successor to the abbot who was first bishop, appears as ‘princeps,’ or superior, of Dunkeld, a term which leaves it doubtful whether he was a cleric or a layman. Then we find Duncan, abbot of Dunkeld, slain in battle while fighting for one of the kings in a war of succession—evidently a layman. ”

“ But, if the great name in the Cumbrian Church was that of Kentigern, that which left its greatest impress in Lothian, and one with which the monastery of Mailros was peculiarly connected, was that of Cudberct, popularly called Saint Cuthbert. Several Lives of him have come down to us; but undoubtedly the one which, from its antiquity, is most deserving of credit, is that by the venerable Bede. In this respect Cudberct was more fortunate even than Columba, for this Life was written within forty years of his death. ”

“ The monasteries were repeatedly laid waste and destroyed, and her clergy had either to fly or to take up arms in self-defence; her lands, with their ruined buildings and reduced establishment, fell into the hands of laymen, and became hereditary in their families; until at last nothing was left but the mere name of abbacy applied to the lands, and of abbot borne by the secular lord for the time. The external change produced in the church was the result of the policy adopted towards it by the kings of the race of Queen Margaret. ”

“ To them the Christian community offered an asylum in which there was comparative rest and relief from danger at the cost of observing the monastic rule. An anecdote in Columba’s early life, told us by Adamnan, will show clearly enough what must have been the state of early society in Ireland in this respect. ‘When the holy man,’ he says, ‘while yet a youth in deacon’s orders, was living in the region of Leinster, learning divine wisdom, it happened one day that an unfeeling and pitiless oppressor of the innocent was pursuing a young girl, who fled before him on a level plain. ”

“ Anything like a territorial church, with a central jurisdiction, was hardly possible among them. Patrick tells us nothing of the mode in which he was consecrated a bishop; but the expression in his epistle to Coroticus, that he was constituted the bishop in Ireland, seems to imply that he regarded himself as chief bishop for the whole people. He founded churches wherever he could obtain a grant from the chief of the sept, and appears to have placed in each Tuath or tribe a bishop, ordained by himself, who may have had one or more presbyters with him. ”