Books: The Hermits

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THE CELTIC HERMITS

It is not necessary to enter into the vexed question whether any
Christianity ever existed in these islands of an earlier and purer
type than that which was professed and practised by the saintly
disciples of St. Antony. It is at least certain that the earliest
historic figures which emerge from the haze of barbarous antiquity
in both the Britains and in Ireland, are those of hermits, who, in
celibacy and poverty, gather round them disciples, found a convent,
convert and baptize the heathen, and often, like Antony and
Hilarion, escape from the bustle and toil of the world into their
beloved desert. They work the same miracles, see the same visions,
and live in the same intimacy with the wild animals, as the hermits
of Egypt, or of Roman Gaul: but their history, owing to the wild
imagination and (as the legends themselves prove) the gross
barbarism of the tribes among whom they dwell, are so involved in
fable and legend, that it is all but impossible to separate fact
from fiction; all but impossible, often, to fix the time at which
they lived.

Their mode of life, it must always be remembered, is said to be
copied from that of the Roman hermits of Gaul. St. Patrick, the
apostle of Ireland, seems to have been of Roman or Roman British
lineage. In his famous "Confession" (which many learned antiquaries
consider as genuine) he calls his father, Calphurnius a deacon; his
grandfather, Potitus a priest--both of these names being Roman. He
is said to have visited, at some period of his life, the monastery
of St. Martin at Tours; to have studied with St. Germanus at
Auxerre; and to have gone to one of the islands of the Tuscan sea,
probably Lerins itself; and, whether or not we believe the story
that he was consecrated bishop by Pope Celestine at Rome, we can
hardly doubt that he was a member of that great spiritual succession
of ascetics who counted St. Antony as their father.

Such another must that Palladius have been, who was sent, says
Prosper of Aquitaine, by Pope Celestine to convert the Irish Scots,
and who (according to another story) was cast on shore on the north-
east coast of Scotland, founded the church of Fordun, in
Kincardineshire, and became a great saint among the Pictish folk.

Another primaeval figure, almost as shadowy as St. Patrick, is St.
Ninian, a monk of North Wales, who (according to Bede) first
attempted the conversion of the Southern Picts, and built himself,
at Whithorn in Galloway, the Candida Casa, or White House, a little
church of stone,--a wonder in those days of "creel houses" and
wooden stockades. He too, according to Bede, who lived some 250
years after his time, went to Rome; and he is said to have visited
and corresponded with St. Martin of Tours.

Dubricius, again, whom legend makes the contemporary both of St.
Patrick and of King Arthur, appears in Wales, as bishop and abbot of
Llandaff. He too is ordained by a Roman bishop, St. Germanus of
Auxerre; and he too ends his career, according to tradition, as a
hermit, while his disciples spread away into Armorica (Brittany) and
Ireland.

We need not, therefore, be surprised to find Ireland, Wales,
Cornwall, Scotland, and Brittany, during the next three centuries,
swarming with saints, who kept up, whether in company or alone, the
old hermit-life of the Thebaid; or to find them wandering, whether
on missionary work, or in search of solitude, or escaping, like St.
Cadoc the Wise, from the Saxon invaders. Their frequent journeys to
Rome, and even to Jerusalem, may perhaps be set down as a fable,
invented in after years by monks who were anxious to prove their
complete dependence on the Holy See, and their perfect communion
with the older and more civilized Christianity of the Roman Empire.

It is probable enough, also, that Romans from Gaul, as well as from
Britain, often men of rank and education, who had fled before the
invading Goths and Franks, and had devoted themselves (as we have
seen that they often did) to the monastic life, should have escaped
into those parts of these islands which had not already fallen into
the hands of the Saxon invaders. Ireland, as the most remote
situation, would be especially inviting to the fugitives; and we can
thus understand the story which is found in the Acts of St. Senanus,
how fifty monks, "Romans born," sailed to Ireland to learn the
Scriptures, and to lead a stricter life; and were distributed
between St. Senan, St. Finnian, St. Brendan, St. Barry, and St.
Kieran. By such immigrations as this, it may be, Ireland became--as
she certainly was for a while--the refuge of what ecclesiastical
civilization, learning, and art the barbarian invaders had spared; a
sanctuary from whence, in after centuries, evangelists and teachers
went forth once more, not only to Scotland and England, but to
France and Germany. Very fantastic, and often very beautiful, are
the stories of these men; and sometimes tragical enough, like that
of the Welsh St. Iltut, cousin of the mythic Arthur, and founder of
the great monastery of Bangor, on the banks of the Dee, which was
said--though we are not bound to believe the fact--to have held more
than two thousand monks at the time of the Saxon invasion. The wild
warrior was converted, says this legend, by seeing the earth open
and swallow up his comrades, who had extorted bread, beer, and a fat
pig from St. Cadoc of Llancarvan, a princely hermit and abbot, who
had persuaded his father and mother to embrace the hermit life as
the regular, if not the only, way of saving their souls. In a
paroxysm of terror he fled from his fair young wife into the forest;
would not allow her to share with him even his hut of branches; and
devoted himself to the labour of making an immense dyke of mud and
stones to keep out the inundations of a neighbouring river. His
poor wife went in search of him once more, and found him in the
bottom of a dyke, no longer a gay knight, but poorly dressed, and
covered with mud. She went away, and never saw him more; "fearing
to displease God and one so beloved by God." Iltut dwelt afterwards
for four years in a cave, sleeping on the bare rock, and seems at
last to have crossed over to Brittany, and died at Dol.

We must not forget--though he is not strictly a hermit--St. David,
the popular saint of the Welsh, son of a nephew of the mythic
Arthur, and educated by one Paulinus, a disciple, it is said, of St.
Germanus of Auxerre. He is at once monk and bishop: he gathers
round him young monks in the wilderness, makes them till the ground,
drawing the plough by their own strength, for he allows them not to
own even an ox. He does battle against "satraps" and "magicians"--
probably heathen chieftains and Druids; he goes to the Holy Land,
and is made archbishop by the Patriarch of Jerusalem: he
introduces, it would seem, into this island the right of sanctuary
for criminals in any field consecrated to himself. He restores the
church of Glastonbury over the tomb of his cousin, King Arthur, and
dies at 100 years of age, "the head of the whole British nation, and
honour of his fatherland." He is buried in one of his own
monasteries at St. David's, near the headland whence St. Patrick had
seen, in a vision, all Ireland stretched out before him, waiting to
be converted to Christ; and the Celtic people go on pilgrimage to
his tomb, even from Brittany and Ireland: and, canonized in 1120,
he becomes the patron saint of Wales.

From that same point, in what year is not said, an old monk of St.
David's monastery, named Modonnoc, set sail for Ireland, after a
long life of labour and virtue. A swarm of bees settled upon the
bow of his boat, and would not be driven away. He took them,
whether he would or not, with him into Ireland, and introduced
there, says the legend, the culture of bees and the use of honey.

Ireland was then the "Isle of Saints." Three orders of them were
counted by later historians: the bishops (who seem not to have had
necessarily territorial dioceses), with St. Patrick at their head,
shining like the sun; the second, of priests, under St. Columba,
shining like the moon; and the third, of bishops, priests, and
hermits, under Colman and Aidan, shining like the stars. Their
legends, full of Irish poetry and tenderness, and not without
touches here and there of genuine Irish humour, lie buried now, to
all save antiquaries, in the folios of the Bollandists and Colgan:
but the memory of their virtue and beneficence, as well as of their
miracles, shadowy and distorted by the lapse of centuries, is rooted
in the heart and brain of the Irish peasantry; and who shall say
altogether for evil? For with the tradition of their miracles has
been entwined the tradition of their virtues, as an enduring
heirloom for the whole Irish race, through the sad centuries which
part the era of saints from the present time. We see the Irish
women kneeling beside some well, whose waters were hallowed, ages
since, by the fancied miracle of some mythic saint, and hanging
gaudy rags (just as do the half savage Buddhists of the Himalayas)
upon the bushes round. We see them upon holy days crawling on bare
and bleeding knees around St. Patrick's cell, on the top of Croagh
Patrick, the grandest mountain, perhaps, with the grandest outlook,
in these British Isles, where stands still, I believe, an ancient
wooden image, said to have belonged to St. Patrick himself; and
where, too, hung till late years (it is now preserved in Dublin) an
ancient bell; such a strange little oblong bell as the Irish saints
carried with them to keep off daemons; one of those magic bells
which appear, so far as I am aware, in no country save Ireland and
Scotland till we come to Tartary and the Buddhists: such a bell as
came down from heaven to St. Senan: such a bell as St. Fursey sent
flying through the air to greet St. Cuandy at his devotions when he
could not come himself: such a bell as another saint, wandering in
the woods, rang till a stag came out of the covert, and carried it
for him on his horns. On that peak, so legends tell, St. Patrick
stood once, in the spirit and power of Elias--after whom the
mountain was long named; fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty
nights, and wrestling with the daemons of the storm, and the snakes
of the fen, and the Peishta-More, the gigantic monster of the lakes,
till he smote the evil things with the golden rod of Jesus, and they
rolled over the cliff in hideous rout, and perished in the Atlantic
far below. We know that these tales are but the dreams of children:
but shall we sneer at the devotion of those poor Irish? Not if we
remember (what is an undoubted fact) that the memory of these same
saints has kept up in their minds an ideal of nobleness and purity,
devotion and beneficence, which, down-trodden slaves as they have
been, they would otherwise have inevitably lost; that it has helped
to preserve them from mere brutality, and mere ferocity; and that
the thought that these men were of their own race and their own kin
has given them a pride in their own race, a sense of national unity
and of national dignity, which has endured--and surely for their
benefit, for reverence for ancestors and the self-respect which
springs from it is a benefit to every human being--through all the
miseries, deserved or undeserved, which have fallen upon the Irish
since Pope Adrian IV. (the true author of all the woes of Ireland),
in the year 1155, commissioned Henry II. to conquer Ireland and
destroy its primaeval Church, on consideration of receiving his
share of the booty in the shape of Peter's Pence.

Among these Irish saints, two names stand out as especially
interesting: that of St. Brendan, and that of St. Columba--the
former as the representative of the sailor monks of the early
period, the other as the great missionary who, leaving his monastery
at Durrow, in Ireland, for the famous island of Hy, Iona, or
Icolumbkill, off the western point of Mull, became the apostle of
Scotland and the north of England. I shall first speak of St.
Brendan, and at some length. His name has become lately familiar to
many, through the medium of two very beautiful poems, one by Mr.
Matthew Arnold, and the other by Mr. Sebastian Evans; and it may
interest those who have read their versions of the story to see the
oldest form in which the story now exists.

The Celts, it must be remembered, are not, in general, a sea-going
folk. They have always neglected the rich fisheries of their
coasts; and in Ireland every seaport owes its existence, not to the
natives, but to Norse colonists. Even now, the Irishman or Western
Highlander, who emigrates to escape the "Saxons," sails in a ship
built and manned by those very "Saxons," to lands which the Saxons
have discovered and civilized. But in the seventh and eighth
centuries, and perhaps earlier, many Celts were voyagers and
emigrants, not to discover new worlds, but to flee from the old one.
There were deserts in the sea, as well as on land; in them they
hoped to escape from men, and, yet more, from women.

They went against their carnal will. They had no liking for the
salt water. They were horribly frightened, and often wept bitterly,
as they themselves confess. And they had reason for fear; for their
vessels were, for the most part, only "curachs" (coracles) of
wattled twigs, covered with tanned hides. They needed continual
exhortation and comfort from the holy man who was their captain; and
needed often miracles likewise for their preservation. Tempests had
to be changed into calm, and contrary winds into fair ones, by the
prayers of a saint; and the spirit of prophecy was needed, to
predict that a whale would be met between Iona and Tiree, who
appeared accordingly, to the extreme terror of St. Berach's crew,
swimming with open jaws, and (intent on eating, not monks, but
herrings) nearly upsetting them by the swell which he raised. And
when St. Baithenius met the same whale on the same day, it was
necessary for him to rise, and bless, with outspread hands, the sea
and the whale, in order to make him sink again, after having risen
to breathe. But they sailed forth, nevertheless, not knowing
whither they went; true to their great principle, that the spirit
must conquer the flesh: and so showed themselves actually braver
men than the Norse pirates, who sailed afterwards over the same seas
without fear, and without the need of miracles, and who found
everywhere on desert islands, on sea-washed stacks and skerries,
round Orkney, Shetland, and the Faroes, even to Iceland, the cells
of these "Papas" or Popes; and named them after the old hermits,
whose memory still lingers in the names of Papa Strona and Papa
Westra, in the Orkneys, and in that of Papey, off the coast of
Iceland, where the first Norse settlers found Irish books, bells,
and crosiers, the relics of old hermits who had long since fasted
and prayed their last, and migrated to the Lord.

Adanman, in his life of St. Columba, tells of more than one such
voyage. He tells how one Baitanus, with the saint's blessing,
sailed forth to find "a desert" in the sea; and how when he was
gone, the saint prophesied that he should be buried, not in a desert
isle, but where a woman should drive sheep over his grave, the which
came true in the oak-wood of Calgaich, now Londonderry, whither he
came back again. He tells, again, of one Cormac, "a knight of
Christ," who three times sailed forth in a coracle to find some
desert isle, and three times failed of his purpose; and how, in his
last voyage, he was driven northward by the wind fourteen days'
sail, till he came where the summer sea was full of foul little
stinging creatures, of the size of frogs, which beat against the
sides of the frail boat, till all expected them to be stove in.
They clung, moreover, to the oar blades; {256} and Cormac was in
some danger of never seeing land again, had not St. Columba, at home
in Iona far away, seen him in a vision, him and his fellows, praying
and "watering their cheeks with floods of tears," in the midst of
"perturbations monstrous, horrific, never seen before, and almost
unspeakable." Calling together his monks, he bade them pray for a
north wind, which came accordingly, and blew Cormac safe back to
Iona, to tempt the waves no more. "Let the reader therefore perpend
how great and what manner of man this same blessed personage was,
who, having so great prophetic knowledge, could command, by invoking
the name of Christ, the winds and ocean."

Even as late as the year 891, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
"Three Scots came to King Alfred, in a boat without any oars, from
Ireland, whence they had stolen away, because for the love of God
they desired to be on pilgrimage, they recked not where. The boat
in which they came was made of two hides and a half; and they took
with them provisions for seven days; and about the seventh day they
came on shore in Cornwall, and soon after went to King Alfred. Thus
they were named, Dubslane, and Macbeth, and Maelinmun."

Out of such wild feats as these; out of dim reports of fairy islands
in the west; of the Canaries and Azores; of that Vinland, with its
wild corn and wild grapes which Leif, the son of Eirek Rauda, had
found beyond the ocean a thousand years and one after the birth of
Christ; of icebergs and floes sailing in the far northern sea, upon
the edge of the six-months' night; out of Edda stories of the
Midgard snake, which is coiled round the world; out of reports, it
may be, of Indian fakirs and Buddhist shamans; out of scraps of
Greek and Arab myth, from the Odyssey or the Arabian Nights, brought
home by "Jorsala Farar," vikings who had been for pilgrimage and
plunder up the Straits of Gibraltar into the far East;--out of all
these materials were made up, as years rolled on, the famous legend
of St. Brendan and his seven years' voyage in search of the "land
promised to the saints."

This tale was so popular in the middle age, that it appears, in
different shapes, in almost every early European language. {257} It
was not only the delight of monks, but it stirred up to wild voyages
many a secular man in search of St. Brendan's Isle, "which is not
found when it is sought," but was said to be visible at times, from
Palma in the Canaries. The myth must have been well known to
Columbus, and may have helped to send him forth in search of
"Cathay." Thither (so the Spanish peasants believed) Don Roderic
had retired from the Moorish invaders. There (so the Portuguese
fancied) King Sebastian was hidden from men, after his reported
death in the battle of Alcazar. The West Indies, when they were
first seen, were surely St. Brendan's Isle: and the Mississippi may
have been, in the eyes of such old adventurers as Don Ferdinando da
Soto, when he sought for the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, the very
river which St. Brendan found parting in two the Land of Promise.
From the year 1526 (says M. Jubinal), till as late as 1721,
armaments went forth from time to time into the Atlantic, and went
forth in vain.

For the whole tale, from whatever dim reports of fact they may have
sprung, is truly (as M. Jubinal calls it) a monkish Odyssey, and
nothing more. It is a dream of the hermit's cell. No woman, no
city, nor nation, are ever seen during the seven years' voyage.
Ideal monasteries and ideal hermits people the "deserts of the
ocean." All beings therein (save daemons and Cyclops) are
Christians, even to the very birds, and keep the festivals of the
Church as eternal laws of nature. The voyage succeeds, not by
seamanship, or geographic knowledge, nor even by chance: but by the
miraculous prescience of the saint, or of those whom he meets; and
the wanderings of Ulysses, or of Sinbad, are rational and human in
comparison with those of St. Brendan.

Yet there are in them, as was to be expected, elements in which the
Greek or the Arab legends are altogether deficient; perfect
innocence, patience, and justice; utter faith in a God who prospers
the innocent and punishes the guilty; ennobling obedience to the
saint, who stands out a truly heroic figure above his trembling
crew; and even more valuable still, the belief in, the craving for,
an ideal, even though that ideal be that of a mere earthly Paradise;
the "divine discontent," as it has been well called, which is the
root of all true progress; which leaves (thank God) no man at peace
save him who has said, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

And therefore I have written at some length the story of St.
Brendan; because, though it be but a monk-ideal, it is an ideal
still: and therefore profitable for all who are not content with
this world, and its paltry ways.

Saint Brendan, we read, the son of Finnloga, and great grandson of
Alta, son of Ogaman, of the race of Ciar son of Fergus, was born at
Tralee, and founded, in 559, the Abbey of Clonfert, {260a} and was a
man famous for his great abstinence and virtues, and the father of
nearly 3,000 monks. {260b} And while he was "in his warfare," there
came to him one evening a holy hermit named "Barintus," of the royal
race of Neill; and when he was questioned, he did nought but cast
himself on the ground, and weep and pray. And when St. Brendan
asked him to make better cheer for him and his monks, he told him a
strange tale. How a nephew of his had fled away to be a solitary,
and found a delicious island, and established a monastery therein;
and how he himself had gone to see his nephew, and sailed with him
to the eastward to an island, which was called "the land of promise
of the saints," wide and grassy, and bearing all manner of fruits;
wherein was no night, for the Lord Jesus Christ was the light
thereof; and how they abode there for a long while without eating
and drinking; and when they returned to his nephew's monastery, the
brethren knew well where they had been, for the fragrance of
Paradise lingered on their garments for nearly forty days.

So Barintus told his story, and went back to his cell. But St.
Brendan called together his most loving fellow-warriors, as he
called them, and told them how he had set his heart on seeking that
Promised Land. And he went up to the top of the hill in Kerry,
which is still called Mount Brendan, with fourteen chosen monks; and
there, at the utmost corner of the world, he built him a coracle of
wattle, and covered it with hides tanned in oak-bark and softened
with butter, and set up in it a mast and a sail, and took forty
days' provision, and commanded his monks to enter the boat, in the
name of the Holy Trinity. And as he stood alone, praying on the
shore, three more monks from his monastery came up, and fell at his
feet, and begged to go too, or they would die in that place of
hunger and thirst; for they were determined to wander with him all
the days of their life. So he gave them leave. But two of them, he
prophesied, would come to harm and to judgment. So they sailed away
toward the summer solstice, with a fair wind, and had no need to
row. But after twelve days the wind fell to a calm, and they had
only light airs at night, till forty days were past, and all their
victual spent. Then they saw toward the north a lofty island,
walled round with cliffs, and went about it three days ere they
could find a harbour. And when they landed, a dog came fawning on
them, and they followed it up to a great hall with beds and seats,
and water to wash their feet. But St. Brendan said, "Beware, lest
Satan bring you into temptation. For I see him busy with one of
those three who followed us." Now the hall was hung all round with
vessels of divers metals, and bits and horns overlaid with silver.
Then St. Brendan told his servant to bring the meal which God had
prepared; and at once a table was laid with napkins, and loaves
wondrous white, and fishes. Then they blessed God, and ate, and
took likewise drink as much as they would, and lay down to sleep.
Then St. Brendan saw the devil's work; namely, a little black boy
holding a silver bit, and calling the brother aforementioned. So
they rested three days and three nights. But when they went to the
ship, St. Brendan charged them with theft, and told what was stolen,
and who had stolen it. Then the brother cast out of his bosom a
silver bit, and prayed for mercy. And when he was forgiven and
raised up from the ground, behold, a little black boy flew out of
his bosom, howling aloud, and crying, "Why, O man of God, dost thou
drive me from my habitation, where I have dwelt for seven years?"

Then the brother received the Holy Eucharist, and died straightway,
and was buried in that isle, and the brethren saw the angels carry
his soul aloft, for St. Brendan had told him that so it should be:
but that the brother who came with him should have his sepulchre in
hell. And as they went on board, a youth met them with a basket of
loaves and a bottle of water, and told them that it would not fail
till Pentecost.

Then they sailed again many days, till they came to an isle full of
great streams and fountains swarming with fish; and sheep there all
white, as big as oxen, so many that they hid the face of the earth.
And they stayed there till Easter Eve, and took one of the sheep
(which followed them as if it had been tame) to eat for the Paschal
feast. Then came a man with loaves baked in the ashes, and other
victual, and fell down before St. Brendan and cried, "How have I
merited this, O pearl of God, that thou shouldest be fed at this
holy tide from the labours of my hand?"

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