OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

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  • St Columbanus: 'A Man of Firsts'

    St Columbanus is a man of firsts in Irish history. The first Irish writer to leave a literary corpus, he is the first Irishman in the surviving literature to describe himself as Irish and to give an account of Irish identity…Considering his achievements and the example of sanctity that is his legacy, it is not surprising that Jonas of Bobbio’s Life of St Columbanus should have appeared less than a generation after the saint’s death. This is another first: Columbanus is the first Irishman to be the subject of a biography.

    Damian Bracken, Introduction, in Tómas Ó Fiach, ed, and trans., Columbanus in his Own Words, (2nd edition, Dublin, 2012), 5-6.

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  • Irish Devotion to Saint Martin of Tours

    November 11 is the feastday of one of the fathers of Gaulish monasticism, Saint Martin of Tours, whose Life by Sulpicius Severus influenced the future writing of hagiography. Martin was a saint much venerated by the early Irish Church. The Martyrology of Oengus pays him a glowing tribute in its entry for November 11:

    Saint Martin

    a noble simile
    the mount of gold

    of the western world.

    while the scholiast adds:

    Saint Martin of Tours, of Gaul was he.


    Martin a soldier, honour not slight, of Gallia Lugdunensis, a fully-gentle son of the race of the kings, son of Manualt and Abrasin.


    noble simile etc., i.e. noble for him is his resemblance to gold propter etc. Martin out of Martin’s Tours in the south of Frankland : of the Gauls was he, ut dixit quidam : Martin a soldier, honour without prohibition etc. Gold is he propter etc.

    Michael Richter has a chapter on the Irish devotion to Saint Martin in his book ‘Ireland and her Neighbours in the Seventh Century’. He takes as a starting point the early 9th-century Book of Armagh, a manuscript containing three distinct groups of material (1) A complete text of the New Testament, (2) A dossier of materials on Saint Patrick and (3) almost the complete body of writings on Saint Martin by Sulpicius Severus.

    Contemporaneous with the Book of Armagh was the Martyrology of Tallaght which records a special tribute to Saint Martin among the saints of Europe in its entry for 20 April:

    Communis sollemnitas omnium sanctorum et virginum Hiberniae et Britanniae et totius Europae et specialiter in honorem sancti Martini episcopi.


    So, it would appear that in the early 9th century, respect for Saint Martin was well-established in Ireland, but as such devotion would not have arisen from a vacuum, Richter is keen to track its history. He finds evidence for Saint Martin in other sources before 800:

    1. Jonas of Bobbio’s Vita Columbani. Jonas relates that the saint while travelling requested to be allowed to pray at the tomb of St Martin. His companions did not intend to make this possible for him and so it took a miracle to allow Columbanus to pay his respects to Martin. Richter wonders where Columbanus may have acquired this devotion to St Martin. Was it while on his travels in Gaul or did he become acquainted with the works of Sulpicius in Ireland? If the latter, then Bangor would be the obvious place.

    2. The Irish palimpsest sacramentary from the mid-7th century contains the text of a mass for St Martin.

    3. In the Life of Columba, Adamnan mentions in passing that St Martin was commemorated during Mass at Iona. We cannot be sure, of course, whether Adamnan is reflecting the practice of his own time in the late 7th century or that of St Columba a century earlier. Furthermore, in writing his Life of Columba, Adamnan was clearly influenced by The Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus.

    Richter then goes on to see just how far back in the history of Irish Christianity this devotion to Saint Martin might go. Traditionally, the earliest Gaulish connection was taken right back to Saint Patrick, who was said to have spent time training and travelling in Gaul, where he encountered the Life of Martin of Tours. Later sources, indeed, even claimed that Patrick’s mother was Martin’s sister! Richter, like other modern scholars, rejects this and suggests rather that the mission of Palladius to the Irish is a more likely conduit for the earliest transmission of the Martinian tradition. The mission of Palladius is now seen within the wider context of the mission of Germanus of Auxerre to Britain around 429. Thus, this could be the context in which the Life of St Martin was brought from Gaul to Ireland at an early date, and could explain how Columbanus was familiar with it before he ever left Ireland.

    Richter concludes:

    When taking all the fragments of information from Ireland altogether, textual, liturgical and hagiographical, it may be said that St Martin was a familiar and revered figure in Ireland in the mid-seventh century at the least. This would be easiest explained if the texts which praised him were known widely. The most plausible context for the arrival of the text of Sulpicius Severus remains the Palladian mission.

    Michael Richter, Ireland and Her Neighbours in the Seventh Century (Dublin, 1999), 225-230.

    Update for 2015: At my other site I have looked at another aspect of Irish devotion to Saint Martin: the tradition that Saint Colum Cille went to Tours and returned with the Gospel Book which had been buried with the saint. Read it here.

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  • Feast of All the Saints of Ireland, November 6

    November 6 is the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland and below is a tribute from the ‘Irish Bollandist’ himself, dear old Canon O’Hanlon, whose monumental efforts are such an inspiration to anyone who seeks to know and honour them. This paragraph would have marked the conclusion to his Lives of the Irish Saints, but he died before the December volume could be published. It has, however, been published in an anthology of O’Hanlon’s writings issued in 2005 to commemorate the centenary of his death:

    Our enumerated saints are known and commemorated by thousands, as we have shown in the course of the preceding pages; but festivals of many additional ones, whose memories and public invocation had been once preserved, no doubt face passed away from human thought, with the destruction of ancient ecclesiastical records. Their very names have been long since buried in oblivion. Although the virtues and merits of various holy persons have been crowned with distinction among admiring clients; and owing to the religious heroism of their examples and lives, still are there other sanctified Christians, who lived apparently unknown, and who died unhonoured among their fellow mortals, yet, whose names are written in the Book of Life. The Irish saints, in many instances, prayed that multitudes should arise with them from their burial places, where their own remains had been deposited, for the day of the final Resurrection. We cannot hesitate to assert that such prayers will be heard. Therefore, the faithful departed had first reason for desiring to repose in the old grave-yards that have received the relics of their former Saints, and the dust of their deceased ancestors. On the day of General Judgement, may we devoutly hope a vast number, that no man could count, shall be found from ‘the Island of Saints’, with the elect of all nations and tribes, without ceasing to proclaim ‘Benediction and glory, and wisdom and thanksgiving, honour and power, and strength to our God, for ever and ever. Amen.’

    P. Ó Machain and Tony Delaney, Like Sun Gone Down: Selections from the Writings of John, Canon O’Hanlon, ( Galmoy Press, 2005), 191-192.

    As the feast also marks the anniversary of this blog I would like to thank all those who read and support it. Orate pro nobis omnes Sancti Hiberniae!

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2015. All rights reserved.