Looking Beyond the Obvious: Scripture in Irish Myth

LOOKING BEYOND THE OBVIOUS: SCRIPTURE IN IRISH MYTH
by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature, Kim McCone, An Sagart, Maynooth, 1990, 287 pp

SOME BOOKS HAVE a long afterlife. This is why I am returning to a book I read on publication nearly a quarter century later. Not that Professor McCone’s thesis was new. Essentially he presents arguments already advanced by the late James Carney in the course of a lifetime, but especially in his 1955 book, Studies in Irish Literature and History. I was reminded of the significance of these, and other writings by students of Professor Carney from the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies when I penned my review of Donald Meeks’ The Quest for Celtic Christianity in the Brandsma, no. 132. Given the praise Professor Meeks heaped on Pagan Past and Christian Present, I revisited the text.

The Romantic movement generated a new interest in the Celts throughout Europe. James MacPherson’s dubious Ossian poems and the whole Arthurian cycle made an imprint on the art and music of 19th century Europe. Meanwhile, studies in Sanskrit beginning in the 18th century initiated serious scientific study of ancient languages across a continent and a half. This meant that from the 1850s on, a great many of the earliest texts in Irish and Welsh were widely available. The effects this had on cultural and subsequently political history in Ireland is well-known (though perhaps less isolated than we imagine. The birth of many nations after 1918 did not just happen). This article will follow the intellectual developments within the
discipline since its emergence, all well documented in the book under review.
Psychological messages
In intellectual circles, the first reaction to the new study was to regard the material in Old and Middle Irish and Welsh as historical, or at least having a historical basis. The stories do give us an insight into the history of the Celts prior to Christianity and literacy, but it became quickly apparent that they could not be treated as historical. The second phase was to regard the tales as mythological, which is correct, and to subject them to the various interpretations of mythology, which yields a myriad of results. In the earlier days, this read as an attempt to explain or come to terms with natural phenomena, such as the weather or earthquakes. More recently, it has been popular to read psychological messages into myth. There is a point to this; Dr Theodore Dalrymple is fond of stating there are good reasons why the stepmother is the resident villain in many fairytales, but this can be carried too far.

In Ireland, a century of scholarship went into analysing the texts for evidence of paganism. The objective was to reconstruct the culture of primeval Ireland. This was fueled by nationalism which followed from the 19th century continental romantic movement, but there was an international context for this too. The growth in Indo-European studies inspired a seeking of connexions between Ireland and several other related cultures in Europe and Asia in a realm stretching as far East as India and including much of the Middle East and Central Asia. There is no doubt that similarities do occur, but some serious Celtic scholars went overboard. The premise that the corpus of Irish literature, almost exclusively committed to writing in monastic scriptoria, was essentially reflective of a much older oral tradition which extended deep into the Iron Age to a time before
either classical civilisation or Christianity made a mark. If obvious “monkish interpolations” were disregarded,
this is what you got.

This is reflective of literary criticism in general, when applied to ancient literatures. Biblical studies, for example, routinely break Genesis down into three or four strands, while parsing the Gospels of Matthew and Luke for evidence of what they borrowed from Mark and what came from the hypotethical Q document. The problem with reading texts for evidence of long oral traditions or traces of lost documents is that the text itself is neglected. The first two chapters of Genesis may well come from a less ancient source than the rest of the book, but the fact they are put first is part of the reason why Genesis has come down to us in its present shape and the first point of reference is what we have rather than what might have been. Likewise, the Táin Bó Cuailgne is first a text composed in the later part of the first millenium. It certainly does reflect strongly on what went before it, but it should be first dealt with on its own terms. Just consider how far we would get if we were to read this morning’s editorials by asking about the writer’s personal history, background or possible prejudices. We could conjecture a lot, rightly or wrongly, and it would be fascinating, but we would have ignored the point he was trying to make. We also might remember that oral tradition, folklore, is not a static but a dynamic process; folktales change over time to reflect new realities.
Collective imagination
James Carney was aloof of all this. Professor Carney proposed that the most obvious reference for the monks dealing in Irish legends were biblical and classical themes. He didn’t always get it right. The story of Cormac Mac Airt begins with the future high king being suckled by a wolf, before being rescued by shepherds and only later realising his true birth as a prince. Professor Carney naturally saw Romulus in this tale, but wider studies in Indo-European myth shows Cyrus of Persia (Farsi is an Indo-European language) going through the same pattern, the transition from the animal environment through humble human society to regal splendour. Greek and Germanic sagas show the same thing. But to see how deeply ingrained this sequence is on humanity, look no further than the Nativity. St Luke says nothing about ox or ass; he just says Our Lady wrapped the Christ Child in swaddelling clothes and laid Him in a manger (Luke 2,7); it is collective imagination that has us see Our Lord born with the dumb beasts keeping Him warm, then adored by the Shepherds (Luke 2, 8-20), before finally being worshipped by the Magi, whom we see as the kings from the East (Matthew 2, 1-12). As in the case of Cormac, Romulus and Cyrus, when Christ is identified as a king, His life is in danger (Matthew 2, 13-18). The ancient heroic life is so powerful that when modern scriptwriters deal with Superman or Luke Skywalker, the screenplay is not much different.

One instance does not invalidate the professor’s thesis. What Professor McCone does is to show the ingenuity that the monastic scribes put into constructing what we now identify as early Irish literature. As St Augustine divided the history of mankind into six (or seven) ages, the Irish did likewise with their own history in Lebor Gabala (the Book of Invasions). The Old Testament is broken into five ages; there are five invasions of Ireland which correspond to these: the Partholonians; the Nemed; the Fir Bolg; the Tuatha Dé (Danann); and the Milesians. The extent to which this is shaped by the Old Testament is fascinating in its own right. The invaders from the sea, the Formorians, who bear more than a passing resemblance to the contemporary Vikings, are made to look like the Philistines. This is brought out very clearly when the tiny Lugh of the Tuatha Dé (Danann is usually omitted in the texts) kills the Formorian giant Balor of the Evil Eye with a sling. The wanderings of the Milesians over 40 years in the desert is very similar to the experience of the Children of Israel in the desert. The wisdom of Cormac MacAirt is contrasted with that of Solomon. The presentation of the druid is not too distant from that of the sons of Aaron in the Old Testament, but as these priests are villains in the Gospel, so too are the druids in the lives of St Patrick, whose coming heralds the dawn of the sixth age in Ireland, that of the Gospel. The confrontation between Patrick and druids resembles Moses’ clashes with Pharoah’s priests in Exodus (eg 7, 8-13) and that of Elias with the priests of Baal in 1 Kings (18, 20- 46). In terms of narrative, St Patrick ushers in the New Testament period in Ireland.
Advanced monastic schools
To put this in context, Ireland’s monastic schools developed very fast and absorbed a sizeable amount of classical literature, the Scriptures, the apocrypha and the works of the Fathers. The quality of Latin was very high and the speed with which learning was relayed was fast. Within 50 years of the death of St Isidore of Seville in 636, Irish authors were frequently quoting him, which isn’t found commonly in continental Europe outside Spain prior to 700. The degree to which ecclesiastical influence pervaded can be astonishing. The early Irish church recognised seven minor and major orders between porter and bishop (acolyte was not included); the various secular ranks of society were similarly stratified. If one analyses the linguistics of many of the old Irish tales without looking for biblical or classical themes, one will find that much of the language is either a direct borrowing from Latin or a calque, which is the compounding of two Irish words to translate a Latin concept based on the fusion of two Latin words. Much of the work in Irish followed the Irish monks wherever they went in Europe. The decoding of Old Irish points out where: commentaries on the Pauline Epistles in Würzburg (associated with St Kilian); on the Psalter in Milan (near St Columbanus’ Bobbio) and Priscian’s Latin grammar in San Gallen (named after St Gall). These texts are all in Latin, but the marginal notation in Old Irish enables us to construct the language.
A very different picture
What this book does is celebrate the breath-taking achievements of Irish monasteries in the period between St Patrick and the Norman invasion. This was an extremely erudite and self-confident Church, one which carried the Gospel and learning with it throughout western Europe. What makes this different from the scholarship before is that it does not try to speculate on the type of culture which dominated Ireland in the centuries prior to Christianity–I cannot even say with certainty if there was only one such culture. What Professor McCone does is focus on the culture of those writing these texts and who their readers were. This presents a very different picture; he himself cites the example of studies in Icelandic sagas which led to reading them as an early Christian literature as a pattern for Irish studies to follow.

This book is for specialists, though it could be read with profit by scholars outside the area of Celtic Studies interested in the mediaeval period, whether from literary, historical, philosophical or theological angle. I have to praise Monsignor Pádraig Ó Fiannachta who went out on a limb to publish this work and many others like it. The author, Kim McCone, was professor of Old and Middle Irish in Maynooth for a couple of decades. He is of a high Anglican background and is married to the late Archbishop George Otto Simms’ daughter. Whatever of his personal religious convictions, he emphasised to his mainly lay students that he was teaching from the perspective of an agnostic and also that this was his current view, which was subject to revision. I cannot tell what the overall effect was, but I know a good proportion of his students found they had little option but improve their biblical knowledge to appreciate the lectures which were the basis of this book. I was one of these myself.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 135, November-December 2014