by Tim Robinson
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 Annals 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 Martyrology of Tallaght, St. Enda is mentioned as follows:
Ennae Áirni mac Ainmire maic Ronain de Cremhthannaib,
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 Uí 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 r
ejuvenate 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:
… the saints were the fabulous pre-Christian ancestors of pre-Celtic and proto-Celtic tribes and amalgamations of tribes and, in their pilgrimages and pedigrees and in the multiplicity of their names, nicknames, cult-centres, we can read the true story of the wandering of tribes. But since on this early pattern of history writing later patterns have been superimposed, we have a palimpsest that is very hard to decipher.
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:
Opposite Aran on the Clare coast were the Grecraige or Crecraige [an early population group], with one ancestor called Grecus and another called Grec mac Arod. There are Grecraige on Lough Gara in Co. Sligo, and their territory is called the Gregories, so obviously Grecraige turns easily into Gregory and makes St. Grigoir-Gregory look like a Christian incarnation of the pagan ancestor Grecus. At the base of the Dingle Peninsula is Castle Gregory and inevitably I would claim it for St. Gregory, but an Anglo-Norman family called Hoare once lived nearby and it is alleged that one of their number was called Gregory. Yet St. Gregory’s claim is stronger because he was patron of a church at Glenbeigh in the next barony of Iveragh. But even here, like mocking spirits from pre-Celtic and pre-Christian past, the Grecraige are recorded in Inis Crecraige or Beare Island, a few miles off in Bantry Bay.
But of course Gregory has no imposing Vita Sancti Gregorii to back his claim to existence, and everything we read or hear of him is fabulous. What of St. Enda himself, then?
I have noted nine often saints called Enna or Eanda, but no doubt there are many more; the most illustrious of them is St. Enda of Aran…. Many famous saints were his pupils. He was vigorous and wordly and even brutal and dissipated, before he became a saint; at the moment he enjoys considerable favour, and jet-planes have been named after him. In spite of all this there is no denying that he is very odd. There is no mention of him in the Annals, though many impossible people have been chronicled there. I think his early wickedness derived from the fact that his monastic biographers failed to distinguish him from a secular Enna, who must have been his prototype and bequeathed to him his pedigree…. Plummer and Kenny try to persuade us that, owing to the misreading of a pedigree, a real and saintly Enda has got confused with a wicked and fictitious one. Yet everything we know of both is equally fictitious, and St. Enda’s former wickedness is an obsesson with all his biographers….
No modern scholar has questioned the existence of St. Enda, and Fr. Ryan attributes to him a certain originality of method. “He followed a rule of astonishing severity.” This is to be inferred from the story that on Aran he used to send out his monks in curraghs without any hide covering and that they all came back bone dry, except one, who had stolen some food. Thought on such lines is “corrupting to the mind.” Enda did not exist … I suggest that Enda’s travels by sea might be echoes of the voyages of the Veneti of Brittany, who were the most famous sea-travellers in Gaul. And there may be more distant echoes from the Eneti of Venice and Paphlagonia, from whom the Veneti were supposed to be descended, and whose travels were celebrated in Homeric legend. Some say that Aeneas was the ancestor of their tribe.
Julius Caesar claimed to have put to death all the “senate” of the Veneti and sold the rest for slaves after defeating their fleet of two hundred ships at Bordeaux, but as Hubert Butler points out it is possible that many of them escaped to Britain and Ireland, and some Irish place-names such as Fanad in Donegal and Fenit in Kerry have been said to reflect their presence here. However, Enda as an ancestor figure of the Veneti seems a shadowy hypothesis to me, much as I would like an excuse to welcome Aeneas to Aran.
Perhaps a vaguely syncretic agnosticism is the only rational attitude to the truth-value of the Lives of the Saints; they may contain reminiscences of the adventures and rivalries of the monks and hermits who founded Ireland’s thousands of churches, but they have been so hopelessly entangled with stories of many other sorts, including the origin-myths of hundreds of early tribal groups, and then exaggerated to magnify the prestige of much later civil and religious potentates, moralized to edify the credulous and fantasticated to entertain the simple, that all their assertions must be taken as unfounded.
However, I am reluctant to reduce the miraculous history of St. Enda to such tepidity. As cosmologists now sense through their radio-telescopes a faint radiancy that has been batting about an expanding universe for so long that it has cooled almost, but not quite, to absolute zero, so, when I pore over these strange pages—photocopied from the 1947 facsimile of Colgan’s 1645 printing of a transcript of a manuscript copied from another compiled in a fourteenth-century scriptorium from writings already then venerated as ancient records of extinct oral traditions—I feel some warmth of truth still emanating from them. The crackling of the unimaginable fire out of which our galaxies, suns and planet were born is itself only a rumour of the single point from which all things sprang; from his tower the inexistent saint’s bell recalls that dawn of terrible perfection. I need this chapter of Aran’s foundation-myth as reassurance that something more can always be founded on these stones. But absolute beginnings are too aflame with potentiality to contemplate with the naked eye, and only lapse of time and corruption of report makes them bearable. The abyssal upward perspective to the point of origin has to be clouded with fables and tales of false miracles, to celebrate and obscure the fact that there is only one true miracle, which itself is all-inclusive.
DARK ANGEL
Against the dazzle of its foundation myth and the pale ardour of monastic days, the Cill Éinne of the last century, huddled around the abandoned fort, has in my mind a broken and blackish silhouette. The relative nearness, the existence of documentation, of that darkening time lets us hear the sounds of those smoke-filled hovels, the hawking, coughing and sighing, enchained with laughter and the cries of new-born life. The angel Sarial who (according to Colm Cille) came to pour out God’s benificence on the bare flagstones of Aran each Thursday had long abandoned the task, Thursday as dole-day was yet to co
me, and the islanders were left to their own resources. The fateful cross-multiplication between potato and human being was mounting up towards the Great Famine. Large families could live off the bounty of a few small plots, and save all other income for the rent; the potato thrived on the plenteous labour of those families, the carting of sand and seaweed that created the plots out of rock, the spade-work that doubled up the shallow soil into ridges, the weeding and watering that could be done by children. Fecundity led to overcrowding: the ridges full of low-quality potatoes vulnerable to drought, pests, diseases and prolonged salty winds that scorched their stems; the cottages crammed with young and old forcibly habituated to this monotonous diet, and with no money to invest in any alternatives.