OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Author: Michele Ainley

  • Saint Thomian of Armagh, January 10

     

    On January 10 we commemorate Saint Thomian, a seventh-century successor to Saint Patrick at Armagh, whose ministry was dominated by the Paschal Dating Controversy. In his notes to the updated edition of Archdall’s Monasticon Hibernicum, Bishop P.F. Moran provides this summary of Saint Thomian’s life, noting with approval his appeal to Rome to settle the contentious matter of the correct dating of Easter:
    St. Thomian (Tomyn, Tomene, or Toimen) Mac-Ronan succeeded in 623. He was the most learned of his countrymen, in an age most fruitful of learned men. The “Martyrology of Donegal ” refers his feast to 10th January:
    10. C. QUARTO IDUS JANUARII 10.
    TOIMEN, Successor of Patrick, A.D., 660.
    The “Annals of Ulster” have, A.D. 660, “Tommene, Episcopus Ardmachse, defunctus est.” The “Four Masters,” at the same year, have, “St. Tomene, son of Ronan, Bishop of Ardmacha, died. ” One of the most important ecclesiastical questions that occupied the attention of the early Irish bishops occurred during the pontificate of St. Thomian. The Paschal controversy then agitated the entire island. The Synod of Magh-lene (A. D. 630) in which the Bishops of Leinster and Munster were assembled, under the influence of St. Cummian, decided that the Roman usage should be their guide; and Ven. Bede mentions that, in 635, the Southern Irish, “at the admonition of the bishop of the Apostolic See,” had already conformed to the Roman rite. Not so, however, the Northerns. St. Thomian, in order to secure uniformity, addressed, in conjunction with the Northern bishops and abbots, a letter to Pope Severinus, in 640. When their letter reached Rome, the Apostolic See was vacant, and the reply which came was written, as usual in such cases, by the Roman clergy. This fact is an admirable example of the fidelity with which the early Irish Church adhered to the statute of St. Patrick in the “Book of Armagh,” that difficult cases should be sent “to the Apostolic See, that is to say, to the chair of the Apostle Peter, which holds the authority of the city of Rome.”

  • Saint Ercnat, January 8

    On January 8 the Irish calendars record the name of a female saint, Ercnat ( Ercnat, Eargnat, Earcnad, Ergnata) known primarily from the hagiography of Saint Patrick. There she is depicted as one of the high-born female converts who receives
    the veil from the national apostle himself. Her father, Daire (Darius), is the local chieftain who grants the site of what later becomes the ecclesiastical capital of Armagh to Saint Patrick. Furthermore, Ercnat fulfills a
    designated role within the ‘household of Saint Patrick’, as one of his three embroideresses, according to the list found in the Tripartite Life.  The calendar entry in the Martyrology of Oengus records her as ‘Ercnat, chosen to the inheritance’ while the Martyrology of Donegal reads:

               8. A. SEXTO IDUS JANUARII. 8.
    EARGNAT, Virgin, of Dun-da-en in Dal-Araidhe.
    In the entry for Saint Ergnat in Volume I of his Lives of the Irish Saints Canon O’Hanlon depicts Ercnat as a pious nun whose admiration for the beautiful voice of another member of the
    Patrician household, Benen, the psalmist, leads to a case of unrequited love with potentially disastrous spiritual consequences. Fortunately, both the psalm-singer and his master are able to save Ercnat from herself:
    Article III. ST. ERGNAT, VIRGIN, OF TAMLACHT, COUNTY OF ARMAGH, AND OF DUNEANE, COUNTY OF ANTRIM [Fifth Century.]
     
    …This noble lady flourished in the very dawn of Christianity in our island, and about the year of Christ, 460. The places of her veneration are called Clauin-da-en or Dun-da-en, in the Feevah or wood of Dalaradia, and also in the Church of Tamlacht-bo. The parish of Duneane is situated in the diocese of Connor. Its church was an ancient one, standing within Lisnaclosky townland. We, find in the Martyrology of Donegal, as having a feast on this day, Eargnat, Virgin, of Dun-da-en, in Dal-Araidhe. This holy penitent’s acts have been written by Colgan. Her place is now called Duneane, in the county of Antrim. There is a St. Herenat, Virgin, of this same locality, entered at the 30th of October. It appears most probable, they are identical; in which case, this virgin had a double festival in the year. One of the Irish saints introduced to us this day, in the Felire of St. Aengus, is the present St. Ercnait. The etymology of Dun-da-en, contracted to Duneane, has been interpreted to signify “the fort of the two birds.” The four towns  of Duneane on one of which the Protestant church stands are surrounded by that part of Lord O’Neill’s property, known as ” the estate of Feevah.” From the Irish Apostle’s Lives, it would seem, that Ercnata was the daughter of Darius, and that she flourished as a contemporary of St. Patrick. Darius, surnamed Derga, was the son of Finchod, son to Eugene, son to Niell. This latter seems to have been the distinguished founder, from whom the family and territory of Hy-Niellain, near Armagh, derived origin. Colgan thinks the charming and celebrated locality, known as Drumsailech belonged to him, and that afterwards it was made over to the great Irish Apostle, St. Patrick, to found the noble city of Armagh, the Ecclesiastical Metropolis of Ireland. Among the noble ladies, who received the veil from St. Patrick, St. Ercnata or Ergnata is enumerated. Her love of God was earnest and sedulous. Her pure-mindedness and observance of charitable and pious works served to single her out from among other pious women, to make and keep in repair, as also to wash, the sacred vestments. These offices accorded with the tastes and zeal of St. Ergnat, while nothing on her part was left undone to promote that splendour and decency becoming the Divine Mysteries. At these she attended with rapt devotion. But her love for sacred music furnished an opportunity to the enemy of her soul to excite a momentary feeling, which soon developed into a strong temptation. Her admiration for the exquisite voice of St. Benignus, who sang sacred music with great pathos, presented a dangerous occasion of sin. Thus, even the holiest mortals may have reason to fear the unguardedness of a spiritual friendship, contracted through the purest motives. But, the Almighty saves from the blast of temptation those who fondly love Him, and so was the holy virgin Ergnat rescued from a temporal and spiritual death, through the instrumentality of St. Patrick  and St. Benignus. Rendered more cautious by her escape from a great danger,and increasing her labours with sole trust in the sustaining grace of God, she bewailed with abundance of tears in after-life the frailty of a short time. As a penitent, she afterwards obtained that Divine aid, which caused her perfectly to regard only the love of God and to despise that towards created beings. Her closing years were rendered illustrious by signs and miracles. About the middle of the fifth century she is thought to have flourished; but the exact year when or place where she died does not appear to have been discovered. She was buried at Tamlachta-Bo.  Probably her death took place about the close of the fifth century. Our hagiographers assign two different festivals to honour her. One of these occurred on the 8th of January, and the other on the 30th of October. The first denotes the day of her natalis; the other feast probably marks some particular event during her life, or a translation of her relics after death. In the Lives of the Saints, nothing engages more our human sympathies than a fall from grace and a subsequent return to its Divine Author; while our own trembling hopes of salvation are encouraged, when so many feeble mortals have bravely resisted the assaults of Satan and escaped from his wiles. The remote occasions of guilt are to be dreaded, since the fires of deceitful passion are seldom wholly extinguished. Sometimes transforming himself into an angel of light, the devil designs our destruction the more dangerously, because his approaches are insidious. He does not desire to sound the note of alarm, when his unseen snares are drawn closely around us.

    The Martyrology of Donegal gives some further detail on how Ercnat was saved from her inappropriate doomed love, in its entry for the feast of Saint Benen on November 9:

    The holy Benen was benign, was devout; he was a virgin without ever defiling his virginity; for when he was psalm-singer at Ard-Macha along with his master, St. Patrick, Earcnat, daughter of Daire, loved him, and she was seized with a disease, so that she died suddenly; and Benen brought consecrated water to her from Patrick, and he shook it upon her, and she arose alive and well, and she loved him spiritually afterwards, and she subsequently went to Patrick and confessed all her sins to him, and she offered her virginity afterwards to God, so that she went to heaven; and the name of God, of Patrick, and of Benen, was magnified through it.

    Archbishop John Healy, shares Canon O’Hanlon’s relief that Ercnat’s love for Benen was transformed from the earthly into the spiritual, commenting:

    It is a very touching and romantic story, which has caught the fancy of our poets and chroniclers, and, as the scribe in the Martyrology declares, gave glory to Patrick and to Benen after God: but none the less is the holy maiden’s name glorified also, whose young heart was touched by human love, which, in the spirit of God, was purified and elevated to the highest sphere of sinless spiritual love in Christ. It has often happened since.

    Most Rev. J. Healy, The Life and Writings of St. Patrick, (Dublin, 1905),  p. 578.
    Modern scholar, Pádraig Ó Riain in his 2011 Dictionary of Irish Saints notes ‘Earcnad (Latin Archanta/ Ergnata) of Dál nAraidhe, who was associated with the Antrim parishes of Doagh Grange  (29 October) and Duneane (8 January)’ but does so within the entry for yet another member of Saint Patrick’s household, ‘Bishop Earc, his judge’. Earc of Slane , feast day November 2 was an important early saint who may have been commemorated in the form of various namesakes, for example at 27 October as Earc of Donaghmore. Ó Riain therefore suggests that our saint Ercnat could be this same Saint Earc ‘in female guise’. 
    Note: This post on Saint Ercnat, first published on January 8 2105 has been revised and republished on January 8, 2022.
    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2022. All rights reserved.

  • Irish High Crosses and the Baptism of Christ

    On January 6 there is something of a divergence in the celebration of the feasts of the Epiphany  between Eastern Christianity and that of the west. In the West, the Epiphany commemorates the recognition of the infant Christ by the Magi and their honouring of His divine person and kingship by their gifts. In the East, however, the Magi are commemorated as part of the Nativity feast itself and today is given over to the commemoration of the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan by Saint John the Forerunner and the showing forth of the Holy Trinity. O’Hanlon, in a footnote to his Lives of the Irish Saints, seems surprisingly unaware of this feast’s history and appears to learn of it only from the following entry in the 9th-century Martyrology of Oengus:

    To Brian O’Loony, Esq., M.R.I. A., Professor of Irish History and Archaeology in the Catholic. University, the writer is indebted for the following Irish stanza of the Felire of St. Oengus (extracted from the Leabhar Breac, p. 79, Vellum MSS. of the R.I.A.,) with the accompanying English translation. As will be seen no Irish Saint’s name has been introduced at this day, on which the great Festival of the Epiphany or Manifestation of Our Lord to the Gentiles takes place. It is most interesting to learn from this valuable old Irish Hymnology, that our forefathers in the Faith seem to have had a tradition that Our Divine Redeemer had been baptized by St. John on the 6th day of January. The Julian mentioned must be Julius the Martyr, who is commemorated on this day in the MS. Martyrology of St. Jerome. See ” Acta Sanctorum Januarii.” tomus i., p. 324.

    F. uiii. id.
    “To his noble chosen king went forth
    Julian of abounding purity
    Tis not meet to asperse the perfect joy
    Of the baptism of the great son of Mary.”

    O’Hanlon’s clerical contemporary, John Healy, an Anglican rector in County Meath, contributed a most interesting paper on the depiction of The Baptism of Christ on the high crosses of Kells and Monasterboice to The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1893. I have reproduced the first of his illustrations above, but for the others and for the footnotes to the paper please consult the original volume. I have no idea to what extent Healy’s conclusions are still upheld by archaeologists today, but he feels that the Kells representation is directly influenced by Byzantine art, which I am sure will be of interest to Orthodox readers.

    “THE BAPTISM OF OUR LORD,” AS REPRESENTED AT KELLS AND MONASTERBOICE.

    BY REV. J. HEALY, LL.D., HON. LOCAL SECRETARY, N. MEATH.

    …The Baptism of Our Lord is not a favourite subject in very early Christian art. Rarely once or twice at the most is it represented in the Roman catacombs. It is completely absent from our Irish illuminated manuscripts. I cannot remember it in connexion with any of our Irish metal work, and I am not aware of any Irish representation in stone beyond the two which I am now about to bring under your notice.

    The first representation to which I wish to direct attention is that found on the shaft of a cross, which stands in the churchyard of Kells. It is in such excellent preservation that some very minute details may be easily recognised. Here we may notice the river issuing from its two sources, the Jor and the Dan; the Dove descends, not on the Head of our Saviour, but on the river ; Saint John the Baptist stands in the river, but is fully clothed, has a book in one hand and pours water from a kind of ladle with the other. It will be observed that the Baptism, although represented as taking place in the river, is by aspersion not by immersion. The figure of our Lord appears to be nude, and on the bank are the two disciples, whose dress is well worthy of notice as a study in the ecclesiastical vestments of the day. Somewhat similar vestments are represented on the other crosses in Kells as worn by bishops, but they are completely different from the bishop’s dress as represented on the Cross of Tuam. Three garments seem to be depicted the outermost, in the form of a cloak, being fastened with a brooch of that ring shape of which so many examples are found in all our museums.

    Now it is evident that when this sculpture was executed the curious etymology was known in Ireland by which the name Jordan was derived from the two streams Jor and Dan, which are supposed to unite and form in name as well as in reality the one river, Jordan. The early commentators on Scripture, it may be remarked in passing, spoke for the most part Greek or Latin, and Hebrew etymologies were not with them a very strong point.

    Another peculiarity worthy of notice is the nudity of the figure of our Lord. In early times the rule was often observed that those who were to be baptized should be nude, and this rule was followed even when a font was used for the baptism. In all the early representations of our Lord’s Baptism the figure is so represented. It is remarkable, however, that the Sacrament is administered by pouring water on the head not by immersion. In J. Romilly Allen’s recent work on “Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland” there are several representations of the Baptism taken from Runic fonts. In every case, however, the rite is represented as being administered by immersion.

    We have, therefore, in this a fundamental difference between the Irish and the Runic representations. On the other hand, in a catacomb fresco lately recovered by De Rossi and copied from him by Lundy in his work on “Monumental Christianity,” baptism is represented as being administered to a nude figure standing in the river, but the method employed is that of pouring water on the head. In other respects the catacomb painting has not much resemblance to the Irish sculpture, so that although this comparison leads us to conclude that the Roman artist and the Irish had the same ideas as to the facts to be represented, we are also led to conclude that this agreement was theological rather than artistic. The teaching was the same, but the conventional representation of it was different. It has been held by many that immersion was the method employed by the ancient Irish Church in baptism, the principal reason adduced being the great size of some ancient fonts. The sculpture we are now considering does not, it is true, decide the question, but as far as its testimony goes it favours aspersion rather than immersion.

    The conclusions we have arrived at so far are important, but they are negative. We can see that the artist of the Kells cross had not the same ideas as to the incidents of the scene to be presented, as had the sculptor of the Runic fonts, and we can see, too, that they drew their artistic inspiration from different sources. On the other hand, the Irish sculptor agreed as to the incidents to be represented, but had no artistic connexion with the painter of the catacombs. Happily we can go a step further, and this time in a positive direction. We can trace the source whence this Irish design has been derived, for we have in fact practically the same design repeated in several of the Byzantine and Italian ivories. In the museum at South Kensington, for example, are three panels of a casket in carved ivory, of the Byzantine school. The subjects represented are all scenes from the life of our Lord. They are interesting to Irish archaeologists in other ways besides that on account of which I now direct attention to them. For example, on one of them is represented a church at one end of which are two round towers which seem to be identically the same as those of our own country. Miss Stokes in her work on ” Early Christian Architecture in Ireland ” gives a picture of the church and two round towers of Deerness. This Byzantine ivory might be taken as a picture of the very same building. On another panel of the same casket we have the Baptism of our Lord represented, and in such a way as to suggest that the artist had learnt in the same school as did the sculptor of Kells. The partially unclothed figure of the Baptist, and the fact of only one source of the river being represented, speak of a more modern date; but notwithstanding these differences, the general treatment and style is the same. The ivory is said to be of the eleventh century. Here then we have a proof tangible and visible that those Greek artists whose influence was being felt all through Western Europe, extended that influence as far as Ireland ; and the question, whence did the Irish artist obtain his inspiration is, as far as this sculpture is concerned, satisfactorily answered. He followed a Byzantine model.

    We now come to look at another representation of the same subject, found at Monasterboice. Unfortunately, the sculpture here is much more weather-worn than at Kells; the details, therefore, are not made out so easily. We can see enough, however, to recognise that the two pictures belong to an entirely different school. Our Lord here stands in the river, the water of which reaches to the waist, whereas in Kells it reached only to the ankles. The side at which Saint John the Baptist stands is very indistinct, but the high position of the figure sufficiently indicates that he is standing on the bank, not in the river, as at Kells. There is no appearance of pouring water on the head; indeed, the mode of baptism seems to be by immersion. The Dove descends upon the Saviour’s head, not upon the river. The Lord is represented in the attitude of prayer. In all these respects it resembles the Runic designs to which I have already directed attention. An entirely new feature common in ancient art, but one for which there is no warrant in the account which the Evangelists give is also introduced. There is an attendant angel who holds our Lord’s tunic ; this again being not uncommon in Runic representations.

    We can trace this design still further, and find in Continental models the original from which both it and the Runic examples have been copied. Bosio has reproduced a picture taken from a catacomb fresco which is in all essentials the same as that which we have now under consideration. In it we have Saint John the Baptist standing on the bank, while our Lord is partially immersed in the river; we have the Dove descending on the Saviour’s head, and the angel holding the tunic. Still more nearly approaching the Irish sculpture, and again embodying all these peculiarities, are the ivory carvings, especially those of the Byzantine School, several of which may be seen in the Dublin Museum. See specially Nos. 450, 461, 472, and 735. One of these, taken from the front cover of the Sacramentaire de Metz, is here reproduced. It will be seen that in the elevated position of the Baptist, in the figure of our Lord being partially immersed, and in the presence of an angel holding the tunic, it agrees with the sculpture on the cross at Monasterboice.

    It will thus be seen that we have two essentially different modes of treating this same event. “What explanation can be given of this difference? I think that a careful statement of the facts of the case supplies the answer. The sculpture at Kells is like some examples that exist on the Continent, but it is utterly unlike any that are to be found in England. Hence it tells us of a direct influence exerted by the Byzantine Masters on Irish art. The sculpture at Monasterboice is also like some Continental examples, but it follows the same design as was adopted by sculptors in England. Here I conclude that the design was only indirectly copied from the original, and that the artistic influence of which it is the expression reached Ireland through Britain. From its position Monasterboice would be a place where British influence would be felt, perhaps, more than anywhere else in Ireland. Not only is it near the coast, but it is also not far from the River Boyne, which was one of the best known approaches to the interior of the country ; and, if I am not mistaken, this is not the only token we have of Saxon, or, perhaps, rather of Scandinavian influence. Where, except at Monasterboice, do we see the figures all decorated with luxuriant mustachios ? Well, in Kells, on the street cross, we have one such figure ; but as the individual so decorated is also represented with horns and a tail, we can scarcely think that the distinction is meant to be complimentary. In Monasterboice, however, the saints all wear mustachios ; and in England you have the same. The font at Castle Froome, Herefordshire, as figured in Mr. Allen’s book, looks as if it were simply a panel from Monasterboice.

    Many other reflections might be made, but I trust I have said enough not only to explain the two sculptures of which my Paper particularly treats, but also to draw attention to the importance of the study of our stone crosses, and to enlist some workers in a field which will require much labour and many labourers before that knowledge is gained which will enable us rightly to understand the subject.

    JRSAI Volume 23 (1893), 1-6.

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