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The century in which the central government in the West collapsed, and
whose close saw barbarian kings ruling in all the old provinces, was
not the most favourable time for propaganda and expansion. Western
Catholicism might be thought fortunate, if, amid the new chaos, it
contrived to hold what it had already gained. In two respects, however,
it did more than this. It converted the Irish and it produced the
Benedictine rule, thereby preparing all-unconsciously two of the chief
instruments for the future Catholicising of the Western peoples and for
the restoration of letters and thought when, after a century yet more
barbarian than the fifth, they seemed about to perish entirely from
continental Europe.
The agent of the conversion of the Irish was St. Patrick-about whose
life we know so much and so little. He was born, where exactly no one
knows and all the authorities dispute, somewhere in Britain towards the
close of the fourth century. Maximus, the commander of the legions in
Britain, had lately crossed with them to the continent to dispute
successfully with Gratian the sovereignty of the West, and, more
recently still, he had in his turn been defeated and destroyed by
Theodosius (388). These were years in which Britain was increasingly
the objective of pirate raids from the coasts of Germany and from
Ireland, and in one such raid Patrick, a lad of sixteen, was captured
by the Irish and sold into slavery. In Ireland he remained for six
years, a slave shepherding his master's sheep, and in the long nights
of vigil discovering the joys of union with God in prayer. In a vision
or dream he was bidden to make his escape, and after an adventurous
journey across the whole length of the country, and a sea voyage on a
pirate ship, he came to south-western Gaul-then in the throes of the
struggle between contending Roman armies. The interval of eighteen
years between this escape and the saint's return to Ireland in 432, as
a bishop commissioned to preach the faith, he employed in preparation
for the work to which already he knew himself divinely called. In
Italy, or in Gaul, he embraced the monastic life and, like many
another, wandered from one centre to another always seeking yet better
teaching. Amongst other places Lerins, then in the glory of its first
beginnings under St. Honoratus, almost certainly knew him, and
Marmoutier too where the memory of St. Martin, dead only twenty years
before, was still fresh. Later, for a long time, Patrick lived at
Auxerre. It was here that he was ordained deacon and here, under its
famous bishop, St. Germanus, he made his studies and perfected his
ascetical equipment. He was still at Auxerre when the great moment of
his life came and he was chosen-the first nominee Palladius having
seemingly died unexpectedly-to lead this new venture "to the Scots who
believed in Christ." [ ]
That there were already Catholics in Ireland before St. Patrick's
mission is certain, possibly even scattered groups of them, the fruit
of commercial relations with the already evangelised Britain and Gaul.
They were, however, so few as to be historically unimportant. Irish
Catholicism, henceforth an astonishingly permanent feature of the life
of the universal church, undoubtedly has St. Patrick for its founder.
And the foundation was his personal work. [ ] For the next thirty years
the saint unceasingly toured the country -- preaching and instructing,
establishing centres and ordaining from his converts bishops to rule
them. From the beginning the new conquest was markedly monastic in its
inclinations. The number of those of both sexes among the first
converts who sought to follow the apostle in the perfection of his own
monastic life moved his deepest admiration. In this willingness of the
first neophytes to embrace a life of ordered austerity, there lay
dormant a force which, in the next century, was to revolutionise the
new ecclesiastical organisation and produce a most singular anomaly in
Church government.
There was in Ireland nothing of that urban organisation of life which
characterised the empire in which Patrick was born. There were no
cities in which to place his numerous bishops. The seat of the
primitive see was a kind of clerical village, founded for the purpose,
where dwelt together bishop and clergy, catechists, monks and nuns, a
centre of administration and of further propaganda. The distance
between such settlements and monasteries of the Eastern type is not
very great. In a country already enthusiastic for the life of
perfection under a vow of obedience, and in an age of monastic
propaganda, that distance was soon bridged. It was from Britain that
the first impetus came of that new development, which, sixty years
after St. Patrick's death (461), began to sweep all before it and
transform the Irish Church. Here, in the dark century which followed
the Roman abandonment of the province, the church was organised on
strongly monastic lines and the personage to whom the new prestige of
monk over cleric, of abbot over bishop, owed its being was, apparently,
the British monk St. Gildas. Once this new influence had crossed the
Irish Sea with the British-trained Irish monks like St. Enda and St.
Finian of Clonard, the clerical settlements became monasteries and
their abbots the first ecclesiastical personages of the country. The
see is now lost to view behind the monastery. Jurisdiction is no longer
confined to bishops, nor even to bishops who are also abbots. It comes,
in the course of the sixth century, to be exercised by abbots who are
not bishops at all. The line of bishops continues, but, while the
government is in the hands of an abbot in priest's orders, the bishop
-- one of the monks, chosen for consecration by his abbot -- confines
himself to the ritual and sacramental functions proper to his order.
All the great names henceforward are abbots and if, at the same time,
the abbot is a bishop, it is as the abbot that he is celebrated. Even
the metropolitan see fixed by St. Patrick at Armagh ceased to function
as such, and the all-conquering prestige of monasticism is witnessed by
descriptions of the pope as the Abbot of Rome and, even, of the devil
as the Abbot of Hell.
For a hundred years after St. Patrick's death his work steadily
developed, and then, the country converted and the church "
monasticised," the zeal and asceticism of the Irish monks began to look
overseas for new objectives. So there began that astonishing missionary
odyssey of the race that is still with us. Upon Britain and Gaul and
Germany and Italy they poured out, taking with them much of their own
peculiar spirituality, and, through their own stark asceticism, scaring
into repentance the decadent Catholics of the now barbarised Roman
provinces.
The earliest influences in Irish Monasticism were, it seems agreed,
Egyptian, passing to Ireland through such Western centres as Lerins.
Obedience to a superior, publicly vowed for life in an explicit
formula, is the foundation on which it rests. The earliest rule that
has survived -- in the modern sense of a code of regulations -- is that
of St. Mochuta (637). The most famous of all, that of St. Columbanus,
drawn up for continental monks, reflects Irish conditions and is
inspired by the Irish spirit. The-monasteries were of the utmost
simplicity, collections of tiny huts of wood or stone with one or more
oratories, a kitchen, and a common refectory; the whole enclosed by a
wall. There were convents too for women, the oldest known of which is
St. Brigid's (450-525) famous foundation at Kildare. The novices were
recruited almost exclusively from the higher and middle classes.
Monastic life as these Irish founders conceived it, and as their
disciples practised it, was a life of continuous, incredible severity
-- the " white martyrdom," it was called, in contradistinction to the
more suddenly ended "red" martyrdom of persecution. The standard for
all was not merely high but heroic: in Irish Monasticism there was no
place for mediocrity. Obedience, of course, was absolute, nor could the
monk own. There was an absolute avoidance of the other sex, and
generally no communication at all with one's family. Prayer, manual
work and study filled the monk's day. Prayer, the recitation day by day
of the psalter interspersed with readings from Holy Scripture and the
Fathers; and prayer, too, as a penance -- with peculiarities that were
to mark the Irish and their converts throughout Europe, with endless
prostrations and genuflections, and the Endurance of the "crossfigel,"
prayer, that is to say, with the hands stretched in the form of a
cross: prayer too with the pray-er immersed in icy water. Manual work
might be agricultural, and it took in all the crafts and the arts
necessary to provide for the community's needs. Mass was celebrated,
with much diversity of rite, on all Sundays and feasts, and the monks
communicated.
Almost every day the monk fasted. His one meal he took about three in
the afternoon, vegetables, eggs and fish. Meat he never ate. For drink
there was milk, whey and a beer that is likened to whey, and water. To
drink nothing but water was a special asceticism, and for the practice
of it tradition honoured St. David of Wales as "the Waterman." Silence
held the monastery all day. On the rare feast-days there was a milder
regime. The tale of the rule's austerity ends with the mention that it
allowed as little sleep as was necessary. Breaches against the rule
were punished by corporal punishment liberally administered. The monk
who broke the silence received six strokes, for leaving the monastery
without the abbot's blessing twelve strokes, for needless gossiping
conversation fifty, for speaking to a woman a hundred. This particular
austerity was all the more shocking in a country where flogging had no
place in the civil law. The sick of course were exempted from these
rigours and tenderly cared for. The dead were buried with special
office and mass for three days-suffrages repeated annually at the
anniversary of their death. For the repose of their souls the brethren
offered prayers and fasts and alms. By the year 600 there was a certain
uniformity of observance along these lines, and we can speak of Irish
Monasticism as a definite recognisable force.
The monks also studied. "To the Irish mind an illiterate monk was a
contradiction in terms. [ ] The summit and crown of their learning was
the knowledge of Holy Scripture. It was for this that, in the conning
centuries, students were to cross to Ireland in their thousands. All
other study was, originally, ancillary to this. The Gospels, the
epistles of St. Paul and the Psalms -- these, above all, were the
objects of this devoted meditation. The monks learned the text by heart
and gave themselves lovingly to the commentaries -- allegorical, in the
fashion of the time. It is impossible to exaggerate their familiarity
with the Bible. Its imagery, its histories, passed into the common
treasury of the writers; and in one saint's life after another the
re-appearance of the biblical stories in a new dress witnesses to the
lore in which the hagiographers were steeped.
But the Latin bible which they studied was written in a foreign tongue.
Western Catholicism was, for the first time, faced with the problem of
converting a people to whom its own language was unknown. Whence in
these Irish schools a preliminary course of Latin studies, the
essential grammar alone at first and with it the Fathers. Then,
inevitably, with the study of those last great products of the
ancient-classical culture something, little by little, of that culture
itself, the Latin poets and orators, the Hellenistic mathematicians and
natural philosophers. The accident that for the study of Sacred
Scripture -- the aliment without which no monk could live -- the Irish
monk must learn the classic Latin language, and learn it, necessarily,
in the masterpieces, made the Irish monk something of a cultured
scholar at a time when, in the monasteries of the Latin culture itself,
such scholarship was frowned on as worldly, and the masterpieces
banned.
The accident had thereby another important effect. It did much to
preserve for the later centuries a knowledge of the Latin language that
was scientific, for it was taught and learnt in Ireland as a dead
language, carefully and, if at times pedantically, correctly -- where,
universally, throughout the continent, its purity was suffering
violence from the tongues of the new Barbarian kings. In the religious
homes of this remote isle the light still painfully burned from which,
a little later, the continental church was to be re-illumined. The old
native Irish culture was at first most carefully shunned as a Pagan
thing. Then, as the new faith showed itself unquestionably victorious,
this, too, began to influence the monks, and from the end of the sixth
century a certain fusion is evident and a mixed
Biblical-Classical-National culture is in process of formation. A
system of orthography was devised and now, for the first time, the
ancient Irish language began to be written with letters.
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