Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  But perhaps King-Bishop Cormac was warming his hands at a residual fervour from earlier centuries, for to these men the church in Ireland was already immensely old, and even before the Viking invasions it had been in decline for a slothful, greedy, contentious, century. Maoltuile, the Abbot of Inis Oírr who died in 865, having seen a previous High King of Tara taking hostages from the island in a campaign against the Eoghanacht in 856, had perhaps been brought up in the reforming generation of the Céli Dé, the servants of God, who looked back to and sought to emulate the exorbitant spirituality and asceticism of the founder saints. In a famous manuscript called the Martyrology of Tallaght, written in the Céli Dé monastery of Tallaght in about 800 (before the Dublin that now includes Tallaght had been founded by the Norsemen), Maoltuile could have read what for us is the first and remarkably early mention of St. Enda, and which to him would have been a rehearsal of things deep in the past.

  The names of just two abbots of Aran, Gaimdibla and St. Nem, have to cover the eighth and the seventh century, and that originary radiance behind them is as full of darkness as the empty summer sky when one stares up into it. If Nem died in 654, and if, as the medieval Vita St. Endei states, Enda got permission to settle in Aran from a king of Cashel who died in 491, then there were “successors of Enda” before Nem, who are today unknown and likely to remain so for ever. The majestic tower of history tapers into nothingness, leaving the earliest lifetimes of the monastery lost like stars in the day sky somewhere above the vertex of its roof. Was there in fact a St. Enda? In what space of the mind are we to site his miraculous life?

  ORIGIN AND VANISHING-POINT

  Let us first listen to the story, calling like a matins bell in a dawn of astringent simplicity, before reconsidering it in this complicated age, so long after Cill Éinne has had its day.

  Aureo illo saeculo quinto…. In that golden century, the fifth, in which the saints of Ireland almost equalled in number the stars of the heavens, began the wonderful conversion and wonder-working acts of St. Enda, abbot, a man illustrious by the nobility of his race and more so by the splendour of his heavenly virtues.

  So begins the Latin Life of St. Enda compiled by John Colgan from much earlier manuscripts and published at Louvain in 1645. It goes on to detail the saint’s ancestry: his father was Conall Dearg (red) the son of Daimen, Lord of Oriel (a territory comprising the present counties of Louth, Armagh and Monaghan, in Ulster), and his mother was Briga, the daughter of Anmir the chief of Ard Ciannachta (now called Ferrard, in Louth). Of his four sisters, three were saints—Fanchea, Lochein and Cairech—and the fourth, Darenia, married a king, Oengus mac Nadfroích of Cashel. On the death of his father Enda became leader of his people; he was still very young, and, having grown “like a rose among thorns,” was ignorant of the ways of the flesh.

  One time, when he was importuned by his comrades to go with them to take revenge on some enemies, he, as one knowing nothing of wrong or evil-doing, agreed. They killed one of their enemies there and were returning home when they came to the hermitage where the holy virgin Fanchea lived, and they were singing a song asserting their victory over the enemy. When Christ’s virgin heard their voices she said to her sisters, “Be sure, my sisters in Christ, that this frightful din is not pleasing to Christ.” In the spirit, she recognized the voice of the leader, Enda, and spoke in prophecy to the other sisters. “He whose voice that is is the son of the kingdom of heaven.” The holy virgin Fanchea and another holy virgin went out to meet him, and standing at the door of the monastery, Saint Fanchea said to him, “Come no closer, because you are defiled by the blood of a slaughtered man.” Enda replied, “I am innocent of the blood of this slaughtered man. Not only am I free from the sin of murder, but I am, so far, free from the other vices of the flesh.” And again the virgin said to him, “Why, wretched man, do you thus provoke the Lord God to anger? Why, by diverse crimes, do you plunge your soul into the depths of evil?” Enda replied, “I am keeping my father’s inheritance and therefore I have a duty to fight against my enemies.” Then his sister said to him, “Your father is in hell, and your inheritance from him is sin and crime. The punishment for these is hell.”

  Enda, mistaking the holy virgin’s words, said, “Give me for my wife the royal maiden whom you are fostering and I will do what you urge.” The holy virgin replied, “I will soon give you a reply to your request.” And at once she came to the place where the aforementioned maiden was and said to her, “You are now given a choice, whether you wish to love the bridegroom I love or a fleshly one.” The maiden replied, “I will love the bridegroom you love.” The holy virgin said to her, “Come with me into this chamber so that you may rest there awhile.” The maiden came, and lying on the bed there she breathed her last, and gave her soul to God, the bridegroom she had chosen. Then the holy virgin covered the face of the dead maiden with a veil, and returning to Enda said to him, “Young man, do you wish to see the maiden whom you desire?” Then Enda went with the virgin into the chamber where the dead maiden was. Uncovering the dead girl’s face the virgin said to him, “See now the face of her whom you desired.” Enda said, “She is not fair now, but deathly pale.” “So also will your face be,” said the holy virgin. Then Saint Fanchea preached to him about the punishments of hell and the joys of heaven until the young man wept. O wonderful mercy of God, in the conversion of this man to the true faith!….Therefore, having listened to the discourse of the holy virgin, he rejected the vanities of the world and took the habit and tonsure of a monk.

  The immediate task of this “new athlete of Christ” was to raise defences around his sister’s nunnery, digging the earth with his bare hands. Then he turned to the first of his many future foundations, a monastery called “Killaine” (which is perhaps Killanny in Monaghan). While he was at work on it he nearly fell from grace; some robbers attacked the place, and he seized a timber from the construction to help his people defend it. Fanchea rebuked him severely for this and ordered him to leave his country and become a humble disciple in the monastery of Rosnat (probably the famous Whithorn or “Candida Casa” in Galloway, Scotland). Enda asked how long he should remain there, and she answered, “Until your good fame shall have reached us.” So Enda left Ireland, and after a time at Rosnat went to Rome to be ordained, and founded a monastery called Latium somewhere in Italy. Eventually Fanchea heard an account of her brother from pilgrims coming from Rome, and she set out with three of her virgins to see him, sailing on her mantle spread on the sea. And she said to him, “When you come to Ireland, do not first enter your native land but seek an island in Ireland’s western sea, the name of which is Aran. There you will serve your God faithfully.” (The Life here gives an interpretation of the name “Aran” that has become traditional: The island is called Aran, that is “kidney,” because it is like the kidney in an animal, being narrow in the middle and wide at the ends.)

  In fact on his return Enda landed in Meath at the mouth of the Boyne, with a hundred and fifty disciples, and founded a number of churches on either bank of the river. Then he went to Cashel in Munster, where his brother-in-law Oengus mac Nadfroích was king:

  St. Enda asked the king for the aforesaid island, which is called Aran. The king replied, “Saint Patrick ordered me to offer to the Lord my God only good and fertile land, near me. I grant you therefore, to choose for your self a place for building a monastery near my royal town, Cashel, and I will give you the surrounding lands for your monastery.” Enda replied, “Grant me the island I spoke of, and that is enough, since it has been granted to me by the Lord as my inheritance on earth, for my resurrection will be there.” The king replied, “How can I offer an island which I have not seen?” Enda replied, “Follow me south from your town.” The king did so, and they stood in a place called Ysel. Enda said to the king, “Bend your knees, O king, and put your face over my feet.” The king thought that St. Enda wanted to re-baptize him, since St. Patrick had baptized him before. But this was not St. Enda’s intention. Therefore, as the sain
t had commanded, the king, bending down on his knees, put his face over the feet of St. Enda. Then a marvellous and utterly astonishing thing happened. The ground rose up high beneath them until it nearly touched the sky. And then they saw easily the often-mentioned island, called Aran. The king said, “This is a good land which I see.” And St. Enda said, “Offer it then, as a sacrifice, to God and to me.” Then the king offered the island to God and St. Enda.

  After this, the king asked and received St. Enda’s blessing, and returned to his town. The saint returned to his holy company, and took them with him to a suitable harbour, where they could conveniently get onto the island. Then, because they had no other boat for getting onto the island, the saint ordered eight of his brothers to carry down to the sea a great stone which was on the shore. What more? Through the virtue of him who walked with dry feet over the waves of the sea, the saint climbed onto that rock, and soon, from his storehouse, Christ produced a favourable wind, and thus, with all good success, brought his saint to the island. How great is the power of this, our God, whom the winds and the sea and even the rocks obey, so that, setting aside their own natures, they offer wonderful obedience to his saints!

  There were some pagans in the island at that time, of the race of Corcu Modruad (Corcomroe, in the east of the Burren); they fled from Enda “like darkness when daylight appears.” But their leader Corban, “a second Pharoah hardened in evil,” remained and set a trap for Enda, whom he took to be a magician until he saw the saint shut himself in the cleft of a rock, and said to himself, “That magician is no human being with a body, but has a body made of air.” When Enda asked Corban to grant him the island, the pagan agreed to retire to Corcomroe for forty days. After he had gone, the saint saw Corban’s horses grazing in a place called Ard na gCaorach, the height of the sheep, and drove them into the sea; they swam to the middle island and landed at the place called Trá na nEach (nowadays called Trácht Each), the strand of the horses; and then they swam on to the place of the same name in the third island. Meanwhile Corban, on the mainland, ordered a barrel to be made and filled with seed-corn, and said, “If that God whom Enda preaches wishes him to possess that island, let him send this barrel to him.” And by the ministry of angels that barrel sailed to Aran (as I have already told in my first volume), leaving in its wake a path of perpetual calm.

  Then St. Enda established ten monasteries in the island, each with its superior, his own monastery being at what is now called Cill Éinne, the church of Enda. Half the island he gave to his own monastery, and the rest was divided among the others. The other superiors thought this arrangement was unjust, and they fasted for six days, that the Lord might show them what to do in the matter. Their prayer was heard, and on the conclusion of the fast an angel appeared to St. Enda bearing two gifts from God, a book of the four Gospels, and a “casula of priestly ministry”—perhaps a chasuble is meant—implying that he was worthy above the others of the double honour of teaching and governing.

  There is another version of this last story, which Colgan gives although he remarks that it appears to be apocryphal. In this version, three Irish monks, Helueus, Pupeus and Enda, went to Rome after a period in Rosnat, and while they were there the Pope died, and a wonderful white dove alighted on Pupeus as a sign that he would be a worthy successor. But Pupeus declined the honour and a St. Hilarius was chosen in his place. When the three Irishmen set off for home, Hilarius blessed them and gave them a gift of vestments. But they had not gone far when, to test their obedience, he sent a messenger after them demanding the return of the vestments. Helueus and Pupeus were angry at this, but Enda said, “Let us thank God for the time they were give to us, and likewise we should thank God when they are taken back from us”—which example of saintliness persuaded the others to accept him as their superior. They then proceeded to the island granted to Enda by heaven. On their arrival, Enda and his one hundred and fifty monks fasted for three days, until God sent a fish big enough to feed them all into “the spring of Leamhchoill” (Roderic O’Flaherty argues that this is an error for Eochaill, Leamhchoill being on the mainland), and a wonderful cow, the legend of which I gave in Pilgrimage. Seeing these miracles, the people together with all the saints gathered together to choose a chieftain over the island. Enda proposed Pupeus, but he said that he was old and feeble and had only come there on pilgrimage, and that if, having spurned the headship of the universal Church he should now hold sway over the worldly, he would only make a fool of himself. So three monks, Jarlath, Maccrethe and Finnian the younger, were sent off to Rome to get a decision on the question. The Pope sent them back again with instructions to gather all the people together to receive God’s judgment. And when all were gathered, three white birds came flying from the east; one of them carried in its beak the Gospel of Christ and laid it in Enda’s lap; the others brought a most precious casula and placed it at his feet. Then, flying three times round the island, they disappeared. And all accepted Enda as their abbot.

  The next miracle is that of the angel who cleft the channel into the harbour at Cill Éinne, as told in Pilgrimage. There follows an account of St. Ciarán’s seven years of service under St. Enda, which I will retail when we come to Mainistir, the site of his labours, and of an excursion with Ciarán to places around Loch Corrib, where various miracles were performed. Finally, Ciarán leaves Aran for his great work of the founding of Clonmacnois. They all go down to the shore to see him off, and return weeping bitterly.

  But St. Enda went a little way back from the shore and burst into tears again, saying, “Not without reason, my brothers, do I now shed tears, because, as it has been revealed to me, today rigour of learning and vigour of religion have begun to depart from this island.” When they heard this, the brothers who were present likewise wept. Going a little from there, he wept again. When asked by the brothers why he wept so much, he replied, saying, “Now I weep because, as my God has revealed to me, the day will come when no pious monks will dwell in these neighbouring islands, but laymen and men of no religion, who serve the desires of the flesh.” When they heard these words of the true prophet, the followers of the man of God were exceedingly sorrowful. After this, the saint, coming to another place, was inspired with sudden joy and said, “We must give thanks to our God. For before the consummation of the world, when wrongdoing will abound and the charity of many will grow cold, many will come to these islands in flight, that they may not themselves perish with the unbelievers.” After prophesying this and other things of this kind about the end of the world, he returned to his monastery, and commending his soul into the hands of Almighty God, he breathed his last.

  A word on the context and transmission of this strange document. Medieval Ireland was prolific in the writing of saints’ Lives, both in Latin and Irish. Over a hundred Latin Lives, treating of about sixty saints, are still extant, and there are about fifty in Irish, of about forty saints; some saints are celebrated in both languages. Other sources include nearly a hundred and twenty short tracts and anecdotes, and a number of martyrologies, lists of saints’ names and genealogies. Local oral traditions celebrate many hundreds of saints unrecognized by the written word. Of St. Enda, there is no Irish Life, and one Latin Life. This is preserved in two manuscript collections of saints’ Lives in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, one of which is a copy of the other, and the printed version edited by John Colgan, who worked from a transcript made on his behalf of the second of the two manuscripts now in Oxford; that transcript is also still extant, in the hands of the Franciscan House of Studies in Killiney. Thus it seems that the story of St. Enda comes down to us through a single channel and might very easily have been irrecoverably lost, for not a single medieval Irish library has been preserved as a whole, and the survival of such fragments as we still have of the corpus of Irish hagiography is due to a few scholars whose hands remained steady through dangerous times.

  What item should one snatch to safety, as an ancient house collapses in flames? For some, it would be its archive, the mem
orial 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.