OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Voyage of Saint Brendan

  • 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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  • East Meets West – The Irish Saint Paul

     

    Canon O’Hanlon notes that the early Irish church celebrated the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul on January 25th:

    The Felire of St. Oengus contains no festival for an Irish saint at the 25th of January, as may be seen in the following Irish extract, and its English translation, furnished by Professor O’Looney; but, instead, it thus alludes to the conversion of St. Paul the Apostle:—

    D.uiii.kl.—Not insignificant the festival,
    A festival on which solemnity is made
    To Christ multitudes repaired
    Paul in the judgment of baptism.

    It also seems that because of this feastday, the great seventeenth-century hagiologist Father John Colgan decided to publish the Acts of Blessed Paul the Hermit at this date. It was claimed that this Irish Paul was one of the early disciples of Saint Patrick, converting, according to Colgan, around the year 442.

    His story, however, continues in the Voyage of Saint Brendan, when the intrepid sailors encounter a hermit straight out of the eastern tradition of the Desert Fathers. Saint Brendan has already forewarned his brethern on the approach to a small island, that they will see a ‘holy hermit, called Paul the Spiritual, who has dwelt there for sixty years without corporeal food, and who for twenty years previously received his food from a certain animal.’ Saint Brendan respectfully goes ashore first to seek permission to disembark his crew, who are in for some further surprises:

    When they came he gave each of them the kiss of peace, calling him by his proper name, at which they all marvelled much, because of the prophetic spirit thus shown. They also wondered at his dress, for he was covered all over from head to foot with the hair of his body, which was white as snow from old age, and no other garment had he save this.

    Saint Brendan protests his own unworthiness in the spiritual life when faced with this extreme ascetic witness:

    Woe is me, a poor sinner, who wear a monk’s habit, and who rule over many monks, when I here see a man of angelic condition, dwelling still in the flesh, yet unmolested by the vices of the flesh.’ On this, the man of God said: ‘Venerable father, what great and wonderful things has God shown to thee, which He has not revealed to our saintly predecessors! and yet, you say in your heart that you are not worthy to wear the habit of a monk; I say to you, that you are greater than any monk, for the monk is fed and clothed by the labour of his own hands, while God has fed and clothed you and all your brethren for seven years in His own mysterious ways; and I, wretch that I am, sit here upon this rock, without any covering, save the hair of my body.

    The hermit goes on to tell the visitors something of his earlier life and it is here that Saint Patrick makes a reappearance:

    For forty years I lived in the monastery of St Patrick, and had the care of the cemetery. One day when the prior had pointed out to me the place for the burial of a deceased brother, there appeared before me an old man, whom I knew not, who said: ‘Do not, brother, make the grave there, for that is the burial-place of another.’ I said’ ‘Who are you, father?’ ‘Do you not know me?’ said he. ‘Am I not your abbot?’ ‘St Patrick is my abbot,’ I said. ‘I am he,’ he said; ‘and yesterday I departed this life and this is my burial-place.’ He then pointed out to me another place, saying: ‘Here you will inter our deceased brother; but tell no one what I have said to you. Go down on to-morrow to the shore, and there you will find a boat that will bear you to that place where you shall await the day of your death.’ Next morning, in obedience to the directions of the abbot, I went to the place appointed, and found what he had promised. I entered the boat, and rowed along for three days and nights, and then I allowed the boat to drift whither the wind drove it. On the seventh day, this rock appeared, upon which I at once landed, and I pushed off the boat with my foot, that it may return whence it had come, when it cut through the waves in a rapid course to the land it had left.

    On the day of my arrival here, about the hour of none, a certain animal, walking on its hind legs, brought to me in its fore paws a fish for my dinner, and a bundle of dry brushwood to make a fire, and having set these before me, went away as it came. I struck fire with a flint and steel, and cooked the fish for my meal; and thus, for thirty years, the same provider brought every third day the same quantity of food, one fish at a time, so that I felt no want of food or of drink either; for, thanks to God, every Sunday there flowed from the rock water enough to slake my thirst and to wash myself.

    After those thirty years I discovered these two caves and this spring-well, on the waters of which I have lived for sixty years, without any other nourishment whatsoever. For ninety years, therefore, I have dwelt on this island, subsisting for thirty years of these on fish, and for sixty years on the water of this spring. I had already lived fifty years in my own country, so that all the years of my life are now one hundred and forty; and for what may remain, I have to await here in the flesh the day of my judgment.
    (Section 26 of the Voyage of Saint Brendan)

    Canon O’Hanlon remains politely unconvinced:

    Besides the legendary cast of this narrative, and a want of apparent connection between the Paul there named with the holy hermit who lived so long as a companion of St. Patrick; the period for extension of his life must preclude all reasonable probability, that the great apostle’s disciple could have survived and have borne the rigours of his isolated position until the time of St. Brendan’s supposed visit to him.

    An earlier writer, Father John Lanigan, who published a three-volume ecclesiastical history of Ireland in the 1820s, was rather more blunt:

    Colgan has (at 25 Jan.) what he calls the Acts of this Paul. The greater part of them is nothing else than a corrupt and ridiculous imitation of the history of St. Paul of Egypt, the first hermit; with this difference that, instead of a continental desert, the Irish Paul is made to pass his lonely days in a desert island.

    Ecclesiastical History of Ireland, vol. i., chap, ix., § xiii., n. 186, 495.

    The Life of Saint Paul of Thebes was written by Saint Jerome in the fourth century, and in it the eremetic ideal that Saint Paul embodies, by withdrawing to the desert and subsisting on the fruit of a palm tree and on bread supplied by a raven, is held up as superior to the ‘worldliness’ of other forms of monasticism.

    A more recent commentator suggests that there may thus have been another agenda underlying the encounter between Saint Brendan and the hermit:

    Paul the Hermit makes a surprise cameo appearance in the anonymous Navigatio Sancti Brendani; though in that work the hermit has been a disciple of Patrick and now subsists on nothing. Although shards of Jerome’s Latin remain, the author seems consciously to reverse Jerome’s message: Brendan complains that his life is nothing like the hermit’s, but Paul contradicts him, pronouncing Brendan’s particular care of his monastic familia to be the more blessed calling. It almost seems as if the author of the Navigatio were attempting to champion a native Irish community of monks over the eremetic ideal.

    Kevin Roddy, ‘Saint Paul of Thebes’ in P.G. Jestice, ed, Holy People of the World – a Cross-cultural Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2004), 679.

     

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