CHAPTER XVII THEIR FAME AND TEACHING

It is very difficult to say what was exactly the curriculum of the early Irish colleges, and how far they were patronised by laymen. Without doubt their original design was to propagate a more perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and of theological learning in general, but it is equally certain that they must have, almost from the very first, taught the heathen classics and the Irish language side by side with the Scriptures and theology. There is no other possible way of accounting for the admirable scholarship of the men whom they turned out, and for their skill in Latin and often also in Irish poetry. Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and most of the Latin poets must have been widely taught and read. "It is sufficient," says M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, talking of Columbanus who was born in 543, and who was educated at Bangor, on Belfast Loch, "to glance at his writings, immediately to recognise his marvellous superiority over Gregory of Tours and the Gallo-Romans of his time. He lived in close converse with the classical authors, as later on did the learned men of the sixteenth century, whose equal he certainly is not, but of whom he seems a sort of precursor." From the sixth to the sixteenth century is a long leap, and no higher eulogium could be passed[Pg 216] upon the scholarship of Columbanus and the training given by his Irish college.[1] All the studies of the time appear to have been taught in them through the medium of the Irish language, not merely theology but arithmetic, rhetoric, poetry, hagiography, natural science as then understood, grammar, chronology, astronomy, Greek, and even Hebrew.

    "The classic tradition," sums up M. Darmesteter, "to all appearances dead in Europe, burst out into full flower in the Isle of Saints, and the Renaissance began in Ireland 700 years before it was known in Italy. During three centuries Ireland was the asylum of the higher learning which took sanctuary there from the uncultured states of Europe. At one time Armagh, the religious capital of Christian Ireland, was the metropolis of civilisation."

    [Pg 217]

    "Ireland," says Babington in his "Fallacies of Race Theories,"[2] "had been admitted into Christendom and to some measure of culture only in the fifth century. At that time Gaul and Italy enjoyed to the full all the knowledge of the age. In the next century the old culture-lands had to turn for some little light and teaching to that remote and lately barbarous land."

When we remember that the darkness of the Middle Ages had already set in over the struggles, agony, and confusion of feudal Europe, and that all knowledge of Greek may be said to have died out upon the Continent—"had elsewhere absolutely vanished," says M. Darmesteter—when we remember that even such a man as Gregory the Great was completely ignorant of it, it will appear extraordinary to find it taught in Ireland alone, out of all the countries of Western Europe.[3] Yet this is capable of complete and manifold proof. Columbanus for instance, shows in his letter to Pope Boniface that he knows something of both Greek and Hebrew.[4] Aileran, who died of the plague in 664, gives evidence of the same in his book on our Lord's genealogy. Cummian's letter to the Abbot of Iona has been referred to before, and, as Professor G. Stokes puts it, "proves the fact to demonstration that in the first half of the seventh century there was a wide range of Greek learning, not ecclesiastical merely, but chronological, astronomical, and philosophical, away at Durrow in the very centre of the Bog of Allen." Augustine, an un-identified Irish monk of the second half of the seventh century, gives many proofs of Greek and Oriental learning and quotes the Chronicles of Eusebius. The later Sedulius, the versatile abbot of Kildare, about the year 820 "makes parade of his Greek knowledge," to quote a French writer in the "Revue Celtique," "employs Greek words[Pg 218] without necessity, and translates into Greek a part of the definition of the pronoun."[5] St. Caimins's Psalter, seen by Bishop Ussher with the Hebrew text collated, convinced Dr. Reeves that Hebrew as well as Greek was studied in Ireland about the year 600. Nor did this Greek learning tend to die out. In the middle of the ninth century John Scotus Erigena, summoned from Ireland to France by Charles the Bald, was the only person to be found able to translate the Greek works of the pseudo-Dionysius,[6] thanks to the training he had received in his Irish school. The Book of Armagh contains the Lord's Prayer written in Greek letters, and there is a Greek MS. of the Psalter, written in Sedulius' own hand, now preserved in Paris. Many more Greek texts, at least a dozen, written by Irish monks, are preserved elsewhere in Europe. "These eighth and ninth century Greek MSS.," remarks Professor Stokes, "covered with Irish glosses and Irish poems and Irish notes, have engaged the attention of pal?ographers and students of the Greek texts of the New Testament during the last two centuries." They are indeed a proof that—as Dr. Reeves puts it—the Irish School "was unquestionably the most advanced of its day in sacred literature."

This remarkable knowledge of Greek was evidently derived from an early and direct commerce with Gaul, where Greek had been spoken for four or five centuries, first alongside of Celtic, and in later times of Latin also.[7] The knowledge[Pg 219] of Hebrew may have been derived from the Egyptian monks who passed over from Gaul into Ireland. Egypt and the East were more or less in close communication with Gaul in the fifth century, and the Irish Litany, ascribed to Angus the Culdee, commemorates seven Egyptian monks amongst many other Gauls, Germans, and Italians who resided in Ireland. The close and constant intercommunication between Greek-speaking Gaul and Ireland accounts for the planting and cultivation of the Greek language in the Irish schools, and once planted there it continued to flourish more or less for some centuries. There is ample evidence to prove the connection between Gaul and Ireland from the fifth to the ninth century. We find Gaulish merchants in the middle of Ireland at Clonmacnois, who had no doubt sailed up the Shannon in the way of commerce, selling wine to Ciaran in the sixth century. We find Columbanus, a little later on, inquiring at Nantes for a vessel engaged in the Irish trade—qu? vexerat commercium cum Hibernia. In Adamnan's Life of Columcille we find mention of Gaulish sailors arriving at Cantire. Adamnan's own treatise on Holy Places was written from the verbal account of a Gaul. In the Old Irish poem on the Fair of Carman in Wexford—a pagan institution which lived on in Christian times—we find mention of the

"Great market of the foreign Greeks,
Where gold and noble clothes were wont to be;"[8]

the foreign Greeks being no doubt the Greek-speaking Gaulish merchants. Alcuin sends his gifts of money and oil and his letters direct from Charlemagne's court to his friends in Clonmacnois, probably by a vessel engaged in the direct Irish trade, for, as he himself tells us, the sea-route between England and France was then closed. If more proof of the[Pg 220] close communication between Ireland and Gaul were wanted, the fact that Dagobert II., king of France in the seventh century, was educated at Slane,[9] in Ireland, and also that certain Merovingian and French coins have been found here, should be sufficient.

The fame of these early Irish schools attracted students in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries from all quarters to Ireland, which had now become a veritable land of schools and scholars. The Venerable Bede tells us of the crowds of Anglo-Saxons who flocked over into Ireland during the plague, about the year 664, and says that they were all warmly welcomed by the Irish, who took care that they should be provided with food every day, without payment on their part; that they should have books to read, and that they should receive gratuitous instruction from Irish masters.[10] Books must have already multiplied considerably when the swarms of Anglo-Saxons could thus be supplied with them gratis. This noble tradition of free education to strangers lasted down to the establishment of the so-called "National" schools in Ireland, for down to that time "poor scholars" were freely supported by the people and helped in their studies. The number of scribes whose deaths have been considered worth recording by the annalists is very great, and books consequently must have been very numerous. This plentifulness of books probably added to the renown of the Irish schools. An English prince as well as a French one was educated by them in the seventh century; this was Aldfrid, king of Northumbria, who[Pg 221] was trained in all the learning of Erin, and who always aided and abetted the Irish in England, in opposition to Wilfrid, who opposed them. That the king got a good education in Ireland may be conjectured from the fact that Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury, dedicated to him a poetic epistle on Latin metric and prosody, in which, says Dr. Healy, "he congratulates the king on his good fortune in having been educated in Ireland." Aldhelm's own master was also an Irishman, Mael-dubh, and his abbacy of Malmesbury is only a corruption of this Irishman's name Maeldubh's-bury.[11] In another place Aldhelm tells us that while the great English school at Canterbury was by no means overcrowded, the English swarmed to the Irish schools like bees. Aldfrid himself, when leaving Ireland, composed a poem of sixty lines in the Irish language and metre, which he must have learned from the bards, in which he compliments each of the provinces severally, as though he meant to thank the whole nation for their hospitality.[12]

"I found in Inisfail the fair
In Ireland, while in exile there,
Women of worth, both grave and gay men,
Learned clerics, heroic laymen.

[Pg 222]I travelled its fruitful provinces round,
And in every one of the five I found,
Alike in church and in palace hall,
Abundant apparel and food for all."

St. Willibrord, a Saxon noble educated in Ireland about the same time with King Aldfrid, went out thence and ultimately became Archbishop of Utrecht. Another noted scholar of the same period was Agilbert, a Frank by birth, who spent a long time in Ireland for the purpose of study and afterwards became Bishop of Paris.[13] We have seen how the Office of St. Cathaldus states that the school of Lismore was visited by Gauls, Angles, Scotti, Teutons, and scholars from other neighbouring nations. The same was more or less the case with Clonmacnois, Bangor, and some others of the most noted of the Irish schools.

It was not in Greek attainments, nor in ecclesiastical studies, nor in Latin verses alone, that the Irish excelled; they also produced astronomers like Dungal and geographers like Dicuil. Dungal's attainments we have glanced at, but Dicuil's book—de mensura orbis terrarum—written about the year 825, is more interesting, although nothing is known about the author's own life, nor do we know even the particular Irish school to which he belonged.[14] His book was published by a Frenchman because he found Dicuil's descriptions of the measurements of the Pyramids a thousand years ago tallied with his own.

    "Antioch," writes Professor G. Stokes, "about A.D. 600, was the centre of Greek culture and Greek erudition, and the chronicle of Malalas, as embodied in Niebuhr's series of Byzantine historians, is a mine of information on many questions; but compare it with the Irish work of Dicuil and its mistakes are laughable."

[Pg 223]

A great deal of his work is founded of course upon Pliny, Solinus, and Priscian, but he shows a highly-developed critical sense in comparing and collating various MSS. which he had inspected to ensure accuracy. What he tells us at first-hand, however, is by far the most interesting. In speaking of the Nile he says that:—

    "Although we never read in any book that any branch of the Nile flows into the Red Sea, yet Brother Fidelis told in my presence to my master Suibhne [Sweeny]—to whom under God I owe whatever knowledge I possess—that certain clerics and laymen from Ireland who went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage sailed up the Nile a long way."

They sailed thence by a canal into the Red Sea, and this statement proves the accuracy of Dicuil, for this canal really existed and continued in use until 767, when it was closed to hinder the people of Mecca and Medina getting supplies from Egypt. The account of the Pyramids is particularly interesting. "The aforesaid Brother Fidelis measured one of them and found that the square face was 400 feet in length." The same brother wished to examine the exact point where Moses had entered the Red Sea in order to try if he could find any traces of the chariots of Pharaoh or the wheel tracks, but the sailors were in a hurry and would not allow him to go on this excursion. The breadth of the sea appeared to him at this point to be about six miles. Dicuil describes Iceland long before it was discovered by the Danes.

    "It is now thirty years," said he, writing in 825, "since I was told by some Irish ecclesiastics, who had dwelt in that island from the 1st of February to the 1st of August, that the sun scarcely sets there in summer, but always leaves, even at midnight, light enough to do one's ordinary business—vel pediculos de camisia abstrahere"!

Those writers are greatly mistaken, he says, who describe the Icelandic sea as always frozen, and who say that there is day there from spring to autumn and from autumn to spring, for the Irish monks sailed thither through the open sea in a month[Pg 224] of great natural cold, and yet found alternate day and night, except about the period of the summer solstice. He also describes the Faroe Isles:—

    "A certain trustworthy monk told me that he reached one of them by sailing for two summer days and one night in a vessel with two benches of rowers.... In these islands for almost a hundred years there dwelt hermits who sailed there from our own Ireland [nostra Scottia], but now they are once more deserted as they were at the beginning, on account of the ravages of the Norman pirates."

This is proof positive that the Irish discovered and inhabited Iceland and the Faroe Islands half a century or a century before the Northmen. Dicuil was distinguished as a grammarian, metrician, and astronomer,[15] but his geographical treatise, written in his old age, is the most interesting and valuable of his achievements.

Fergil, or Virgilius, as he is usually called, was another great Irish geometer, who eventually became Archbishop of Salzburg and died in 785. He taught the sphericity of the earth and the doctrine of the Antipodes, a truth which seems also to have been familiar to Dicuil. St. Boniface, afterwards Archbishop of Mentz, evidently distorting his doctrine, accused him to the Pope of heresy in teaching that there was another world and other men under the earth, and another sun and moon. "Concerning this charge of false doctrine, if it shall be established," said the Pope, "that Virgil taught this perverse and wicked doctrine against God and his own soul, do you then convoke a council, degrade him from the priesthood, and drive him from the Church." Virgil, however, seems to have satisfactorily explained his position, for nothing was done against him.

These instances help to throw some light upon a most difficult subject—the training given in the early Irish Christian schools, and the cause of their undoubted popularity for three centuries and more amongst the scholars of Western Europe.
********
[1] Here are a few lines from the well-known Adonic poem which he, at the age of 68, addressed to his friend Fedolius—
"Extitit ingens    Impia quippe
Causa malorum    Pygmalionis
Aurea pellis,    Regis ob aurum
Corruit auri    Gesta leguntur.
Munere parvo        *    *    *    *    *
C?na Deorum.
Ac tribus illis    F?mina s?pe
Maxima lis est    Perdit ob aurum
Orta Deabus.    Casta pudorem.
Hinc populavit    Non Jovis auri
Trogugenarum    Fluxit in imbre
Ditia regna    Sed quod adulter
Dorica pubes.    Obtulit aurum
Juraque legum    Aureus ille
Fasque fides que       Fingitur imber."
Rumpitur aure.

Dr. Sigerson in "Bards of the Gael and Gaul," p. 407, prints as Jubainville also does, the whole of this noted poem, and points out that it is shot through and through with Irish assonance. "Not less important than its assonance," writes Dr. Sigerson, "is the fact that it introduces into Latin verse the use of returning words, or burthens with variations, which supply the vital germs of the rondeau and the ballad." I am not myself convinced of what Dr. Sigerson considers marks of intentional assonance in almost every line.

His chief remaining works are a Monastic Rule in ten chapters; a book on the daily penances of the monks; seventeen sermons; a book on the measure of penances; a treatise on the eight principal vices; five epistles written to Gregory the Great and others; and a good many Latin verses. His life is written by the Abbot Jonas, a contemporary of his own.

[2] P. 122.

[3] "Gr?ssere oder geringere Kenntniss klassischen Alterthums, vor allem Kenntniss des Griechischen ist daher in jener Zeit ein Mazstab sowohl für die Bildung einer einzelnen Pers?nlichkeit als auch fur den Culturgrad eines ganzen Zeitalters" (Zimmer, "Preussische Jahrb?cher," January, 1887).

[4] He plays on his own name Columba, "a dove," and turns it into Greek and Hebrew, περιστερ? and ????.

[5] Dr. Sigerson prints an admirably graceful poem either by this or another Sedulius of the ninth century at p. 411 of his "Bards of the Gael and Gaul." It shows how far from being pedants the Irish monks were. This poem is a dispute between the rose and lily.

[6] This translation which Charles sent to the Pope threw Anastasius, the Librarian of the Roman Church, into the deepest astonishment. "Mirandum est," he writes in his letter of reply, dated 865, "quomodo vir ille barbarus in finibus mundi positus, talia intellectu capere in aliamque linguam transferre valuerit" (See Prof. Stokes, "R. I. Academy Proceedings," May, 1892).

[7] St. Jerome tells us that the people of Marseilles were in his day trilingual, "Massiliam Phoc?i condiderunt quos ait Varro trilingues esse, quod et Gr?ce loquantur, et Latine et Gallice" (Migne's edition, vol. vii. p. 425).

[8] See appendix to O'Curry's "Manners and Customs," vol. iii. p. 547—

"Margaid mor na n-gall ngregach
I mbid or is ard étach."

[9] He is said to have spent eighteen or twenty years there and to have acquired all the wisdom of the Scots. The reason why he was sent to Slane, as Dr. Healy well observes, was, not because it was the most celebrated school of the time, but because it was in Meath where the High-kings mostly dwelt, and it was only natural to bring the boy to some place near the Royal Court. ("Ireland's Schools and Scholars," p. 590.)

[10] "Quos omnes Scotti libentissime suscipientes victum eis quotidianum sine pretio, libros quoque ad legendum, et magisterium gratuitum, pr?bere curabant" ("Ecc. Hist.," book iii. chap. 27). Amongst these were the celebrated Egbert, of whom Bede tells us so much, and St. Chad.

[11] He is called Mailduf by Bede, and Malmesbury Maildufi urbem, which shows that the aspirated "b" in dubh had twelve hundred years ago the sound of "f" as it has to-day in Connacht.

[12] O'Reilly states that the poem consisted of ninety-six lines, but Hardiman, in his "Irish Minstrelsy," vol. ii. p. 372, gives only sixty. Hardiman has written on the margin of O'Reilly's "Irish Writers" in my possession, "I have a copy, the character is ancient and very obscure." Aldfrid may well have written such a poem, of which the copy printed by Hardiman may be a somewhat modernised version. It begins—

"Ro dheat an inis finn Fáil
In Eirinn re imarbháidh,
Iomad ban, ni baoth an breas,
Iomad laoch, iomad cleireach."

It was admirably and fairly literally translated by Mangan for Montgomery. His fourth line, however, runs, "Many clerics and many laymen," which conveys no meaning save that of populousness. I have altered this line to make it suit the Irish "many a hero, many a cleric."

[13] "Natione quidem Gallus," says Bede, "sed tunc legendarum gratia scripturarum in Hibernia non parvo tempore demoratus."

[14] Probably Clonmacnois. See Stokes, "Celtic Church," p. 214, and Dr. Healy's "Ireland's Schools and Scholars," p. 283.

[15] His astronomical work, written in 814-16, remains as yet unpublished.