Saints and Scholars

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The third member of Ireland’s trio of patron saints is, of course, St Colmcille, sometimes known as Columba, who Fr Ó Ríordáin describes as “one of those magnetic figures that kind of transcends time”. Curiously, though, the monastic rule by which Columbanus’ monasteries at Annegray, Luxeuil, Fontaine, Bregenz and Bobbio lived did not last into the later Middle Ages and has left little imprint in wider Christianity. Was it too rigorous, and was so rigorous a rule the norm in Celtic Christianity?

His relevance is really the heart of the Christian message, namely a personal relationship with Christ as distinct from knowing about Christ,” he says, noting that Irish as a language points to different levels of knowledge, where ‘aithne’ means a basic familiarity, but ‘eolas’ and ‘fios’ point to a deeper understanding and an actual relationship.Music and the Stars : Mathematics in Medieval Ireland is in book shops or available from fourcourtspress.ie After decades of industrial peat-cutting to fuel Ireland's stoves, the bog was no longer nature's healthy blanket of saturated spongy moss it once was. But, several years since harvesting ended (due to green policies), it was encouraging to see flora gaining confidence over a largely drab landscape. After the 8th Century the Church here went into a period of decline that lasted up to about the 12th Century, which was a natural decline because if you have the early Irish Church pumping energy for hundreds of years, you’re bound to run out of steam sooner or later,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says. In around 470, Saint Brigid established the Convent of Cill-Dara in County Kildare and founded a school of art here which went on to produce the illuminated manuscript; the Book of Kildare. At a recent talk by Dr Immo Warntjes at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, I was surprised to learn the origins of Ireland's title as "the land of saints and scholars". I had thought that the beautiful artistry of manuscripts like the Book of Kells and stories of saints like Brigid were the source of this national title, but it seems this badge of pride comes, in fact, from the scientific habits of mind of our Irish monks. From the sixth to the 15th century the only science of import in western Europe was the computation of the date of Easter. As part of this science, known as "computus", algorithms had to be invented to calculate the time between Lent and Easter Sunday, which would also align with lunar cycles.

Cummian knows of 10 methods and [in the letter] he goes through all the details and compares them, and he finds that the system used in Rome was the most reliable. He replies to Iona, saying this is the right method,” says Kelly. I’m eternally working in a kind of multidisciplinary world where I’m drawing on resources from all kinds of sources, whether it be history or theology or hagiography or a whole range of other things. So, I would set out to find out first of all what do we know historically, and very often I would dip into Thesaurus Paleohibernicus, which is kind of a collection of primary sources,” he says.

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was a trailblazer. Leaving home at 16 on a donkey, bringing her younger sister Fíona with her, she set up a monastic school at Killeedy (Cell Íde) and later became the foster mother of the saints of Ireland. She was a mentor to St Brendan. Whereas, what is your relationship with someone like Jesus? Some of the martyrs in Egypt who were beheaded last year, and one of them muttering the name Jesus as they were about to take the head off him: he had relationship there.” Now, their literary output in the Middle Ages wasn’t very great, in terms of how their commentaries on the Bible were utterly boring,” he says. “They weren’t developing, if you like, they were just repeating. Whereas on the poetry they had some lovely little poems – a limited number, but nonetheless still lovely in terms of love of nature and so forth.” The celebration of St Brigid’s Day on February 1 – the pagan feast of Imbolc – was probably intended as a symbolic gesture, Fr Ó Ríordáin says, noting that with this being seen as a hinge of the year, with the worst of the winter being over, it was a fitting day to celebrate somebody who represented a new beginning for Ireland.

I was always impressed by the borrowing of technology from the Romans,” he says. “From the time Romans conquered Britain, and from the first century AD, the Irish borrowed a lot of technology. We see this in the artefacts but also in the words that were taken into Irish from Latin.” The Irish never took too much to that, in the sense that even as I sit here in the monastery garden now I’m looking down at the graveyard and I know several fellows who I pray to as saints but there’d be no question of them ever being canonised,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says, before adding with a laugh: “Whereas if they were in Italy they’d probably be universally known at this stage!”This seems to have been key to why so few of Ireland’s holiest people from the later Middle Ages and even since are familiar to us, he explains Renowned for her generosity and care for the poor, Saint Brigid famously converted a dying man by making up a cross with rushes she found on the ground to bless him with, something children in Ireland learn to make in school on her feast day 1st February. The Irish even borrowed the Roman alphabet so they could translate Latin documents and help themselves to the latest devices. This was Ireland's Golden Era as it became a burgeoning land of art and literature, culture and Christianity, and many of Ireland's most famous saints were plying their trade during this time. They were popularly canonised in the early church, where a person who was recognised as walking with God was a saint, but that kind of transferred in the later Middle Ages into being a more formal thing, namely something that had to go to the bishop or go to the Pope,” he says.