OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Author: Michele Ainley

  • Saint Acobran of Kilrush, January 28

    January 28 is the feast of Saint Acobran of Kilrush, about whom not a great deal appears to be known. We have already met this saint, for in a post on a trio of saintly brothers commemorated on 28 November, I mentioned the contention of the English writer, Sabine Baring-Gould, that one of these brothers, also called Acobran, was to be identified with today’s saint. If our Acobran did indeed go off to Cornwall and later on to France as Baring-Gould claims, Canon O’Hanlon knows nothing of it, and it would not be like the good Canon to fail to claim such a career for an otherwise obscure Irish saint. On the contrary, in the Lives of the Irish Saints Acobran is depicted as a shadowy figure whose very location is the subject of doubt, with the Martyrology of Donegal initially identifying him with Kilrush, County Clare but then suggesting in the table appended to the Martyrology that this particular Kilrush is to be found in County Kildare. In the late 1830s when O’Donovan and his co-workers were carrying out their Ordnance Survey work in the parish of Kilrush, County Clare a letter noted ‘According to the Irish Calendar the Saints Mellan and Occobran were venerated at Cill Rois in the Termon of Inis Cathaigh on the 28th of January, but neither of them is now remembered in the Parish’. It may be that the cult of the most famous saint of Inis Cathaigh, Saint Senan, overshadowed and eventually displaced that of Saint Acobran. Canon O’Hanlon, as he often does when there is not much to say about a saint, goes into a description of church ruins associated with Saint Senan, but below are the essentials of what he has to tell us of Saint Acobran:

    St. Acobran of Kilrush, Probably in the County of Clare.

    …Without any other distinction, he is mentioned in the Martyrology of Tallagh, at the 28th of January, But we are not left in doubt regarding his locality, if we depend on the succeeding statement. According to the Martyrology of Donegal, we find Accobhran, of Cill-Ruis, in the Termon of Inis-Cathaigh, as having a festival celebrated on this day. In a table postfixed to this Martyrology, his place is thought to have been Kilrush, in the county of Kildare. He is said to have been otherwise called Occobhran, whence Ocobrus, Ocoras [Desiderius). The place usually designated for this saint is the present Kilrush, a parish in the barony of Moyarta and county of Clare. The present saint, to whatever place he belonged, appears to have lived in or before the eighth century. This is proved from the “Feilire” of St. Aengus the Culdee. With its English translation, Professor O’Looney has furnished the following stanza from the Leabhar Breac copy in the R. I. A.

    G. u. kl. With Acobran we celebrate
    The passion of eight noble virgins;
    They gained a triumph of righteousness,
    The great Miserian host.

    These latter seem to have been martyrs in Africa, and to have been part of a band, commemorated in St. Jerome’s ancient Martyrology….

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  • Saint Cróine, January 27

    January 27 is the feastday of an early female saint, Cróine, one of many Irish saints to have been recorded on the Irish calendars, but who has left no Vita to give further details of her life. As Canon O’Hanlon explains, there is even no certainty as to the locality in which she may have flourished, the Martyrology of Tallaght identifying her with Inuse Lochacrone which may suggest a County Sligo location, and the 19th-century scholar John O’Donovan placing her at Kilcroney, County Wicklow. The latest work on the Irish saints, Pádraig Ó Riain’s 2011 Dictionary of Irish Saints, places her instead at the County Carlow location of Ardnehue (Ceall Inghean nAodha) and sees her as one of three daughters of Aodh. Ó Riain acknowledges the confusion of this holy lady with others of the same name, including Cróine of Inis Cróine, who may be one of a number of possible doubles.

    St. Croine, Virgin, of Kill-Crony, in the County of Wicklow, or at Inishcrone, County of Sligo.

    A festival in honour of Croni of Inuse Lochacrone is entered in the Martyrology of Tallagh, at the 27th of January. The locality named is possibly identical with the present Inishcrone, near the River Moy, in Tireragh barony, county of Sligo. A strong castle of Eiscir-Abhann, stood here. Inishcrone town, with the ruined church and graveyard, is in the parish of Kilglass, and near the rocky shore, at Killala Bay. Again, there was a Cill-Cruain, now Kilcrone, an old church, giving name to a townland and parish in the barony of Ballymoe, in the county of Galway. We find that Croine, virgin, of Cill Croine, is recorded, likewise, in the Martyrology of Donegal, on this day. She is of the race of Máine, son of Niall. Her place has been identified with Kill-crony, in the county of Wicklow, and as giving no name to a modern parochial district, it may have been denominated from the establishment of a cell or nunnery here, by the present saint, while possibly clerical ministrations had been supplied by the religious community or pastor, living at Kilmacanoge, in remote times. More we cannot glean regarding this holy woman yet, we may conjecture, she must have flourished at a very early period.

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  • The Meeting of Paul and Brendan

    In 2013 I looked at an Irish Saint Paul, assigned January 25 as a feast day by Colgan because this date was the commemoration of the baptism of Saint Paul the apostle. This Irish Paul was said to have been a disciple of Saint Patrick who later pursued the eremitical life on a lonely island. There the intrepid voyager, Saint Brendan, discovers him, an encounter related in chapter twenty-six of the Navigatio. The episode appears to be a retelling of the famous ‘meeting of Paul and Anthony’ from the Life of Saint Paul of Thebes. I remain fascinated by the translation of the eastern Saint Paul the Hermit into an Irish context, and have been enjoying a paper on the subject by scholar Éamonn Ó Carragáin. He begins by discussing the place of honour held by the two saints in the Irish church:

    When the saints are mentioned in the Irish sources, it is primarily as the exemplars and prototypes of the eremitic life, and hence of monasticism. Thus the Life of St Columcille in the Book of Lismore gives the monastic life as the first way by which men are summoned to knowledge of God; and the monastic vocation is described as ‘the urging and kindling of men by the divine grace to serve the Lord after the manner of Paul, and of Anthony the monk, and of the other faithful monks who used to serve God in Egypt.’ In the Stowe Missal, likewise, Paul and Anthony are named as the exemplars of the eremitic life.

    Ó Carragáin goes on to contrast this appreciation for the pair among the Irish with the attitude of the Anglo-Saxons:

    Saints Paul and Anthony seem to have been popular in Celtic lands because the Irish, and their Scottish settlements, revered them as prototypes of monasticism. For Anglo-Saxon monks, St Benedict of Nursia would usually have occupied this position of pre-eminent reverence. Wandering anchorites who met, however providentially, in the desert could not be honoured with unqualified reverence by communities founded on a vow of ‘stabilitas loci’. For later Anglo-Saxon homilists, ‘instability of place and wandering from place to place’ was a product of sleacnes (sloth), one of the eight capital sins.

    Saint Brendan finds ‘Paul the Spiritual Hermit’ living on a small circular-shaped island. For thirty years he has been fed by an otter, which brings him a fish and firewood for cooking every three days. When Saint Brendan arrives, however, the hermit has moved to occupy ‘two caves, the entrance of one facing the entrance of the other, on the side of the island facing east’. The otter no longer brings food, as the hermit now subsists entirely on the waters of ‘ a miniscule spring, round like a plate, flowing from the rock before the entrance to the cave…when this spring overflowed, the rock immediately absorbed the water’.

    Ó Carragáin comments:

    We clearly have here, not another version of the life of Saint Paul the First Hermit, but a different figure, set in a new landscape which develops in an original way the themes of the desert scene in the Vita Sancti Pauli. This Irish Spiritual Hermit inhabits a landscape which is entirely symbolic; and its symbolism is primarily eucharistic. We have already seen the eucharistic significance of the symbol ‘fish’. The eucharistic significance of water that is miraculously given from a rock is equally central to Christian tradition. St. Paul’s gloss on the ‘wandering rock’ which accompanied the Israelites in the desert [1 Corinthians 10:1-4] is relevant to the island-rock which sustains this Spiritual Hermit. [In a footnote the author also says: in his use of the spring as an image for Christ’s giving of himself as drink, the author of the Navigatio is probably thinking also of such texts such as John 7:37-8 and John 19:34.]

    The writer argues that the point of all this eucharistic imagery is revealed at the end of the chapter when the hermit gives Brendan and his crew a supply of water from the spring to act as the sole sustenance for their next forty-day voyage. The symbolism is further brought into focus when we note that Saint Brendan’s voyage comes to an end on Holy Saturday and thus the meeting with the hermit must have taken place on or close to the first Sunday of Lent.

    Ó Carragáin has many more interesting points to make on the meeting of Paul and Brendan, but for now I will conclude with his tribute to the writer of the Navigatio and his use of the Vita Sancti Pauli:

    The wit of the Navigatio depends on an unobtrusive mastery of paradox: the author demonstrates that the famous scene of the meeting of Saints Paul and Anthony can be re-enacted, not with bread alone, but with other images of how man is fed by God’s word. He transforms the famous scene in the Vita in such a way as to suggest that fasting gives sustenance to the spirit, and that the contemplative vocation (the vita theorica) can provide fulfillment even on stony ground.

    The details of chapter xxvi of the Navigatio can thus be seen to interact, as it were in a form of counterpoint, with the corresponding details in the Vita Sancti Pauli; and it can be seen that to appreciate the sophisticated virtuosity of the Navigatio it is necessary to have some recollection of the Vita. No doubt the author of the Navigatio felt he could depend on his monastic readership for such a recollection. In the scene in which St Brendan meets St Paul the Spiritual Hermit, the author clearly was just as preoccupied with the eucharistic themes of the recognition of and union with Christ as Jerome had been in the Vita Sancti Pauli. The Navigatio therefore provides strong confirmatory evidence that for Irish audiences the meeting of St Paul and St Anthony had primarily a eucharistic significance. The way in which the Spiritual Hermit is made to greet St Brendan with the verse ‘ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum habitare fratres in unum’ suggests that the author of the Navigatio is making explicit another theme which he saw Jerome’s account of the meeting of Paul and Anthony to imply: that friendship and community could, miraculously, be found even in the desert. This theme may also be relevant to the ‘Paul and Anthony’ panels on the high crosses, those monastic scenes of courteous friendship which the sculptors consistently placed in eucharistic contexts.

    Éamonn Ó Carragáin ‘The Meeting of Saint Paul and Saint Anthony: visual uses of a Eucharistic motif’ in G. Mac Niocaill and P.F. Wallace, eds. Keimelia – studies in medieval archaeology and history in memory of Tom Delaney (Galway University Press, 1988), 1-58.

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