SAINT FERGAL - UNCONVENTIONAL APOSTLE
by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS
Nihil est opertum, quod non revelabitur;et occultum quod non scietur - St Matthw, 10, 26
One of the consolations of Pope Zachary's life...was the filial friendship of Saint Boniface...Among their correspondence..of especial interest...in the light of all the conjecture...over the past few years...of the possibility of "inhabited planets" other than our own...in answer to Saint Boniface's complaint that an Irish priest named Virgilius was disturbing men's minds by teaching that there was another world, other men on another planet beneath the earth, another sun, and another moon...[Pope Zachary] ordered Saint Boniface to reprimand Virgilius, and...to send him to Rome so that his doctrine might be examined...[I]t was not necessary...to condemn Virgilius, for the priest completely yielded to correction...of his Holy Father and went on...to sanctify himself. He became Bishop of Salzburg, and lived such a life of holiness....that he was canonised by Pope Gregory IX. (The above piece of papolatrous fantasy comes from Our Glorious Popes by "Sister" Catherine MICM of the Feeneyite Slaves of the Immaculate Heart, itself condemned by St Zachary's more recent successors)
I ONCE attended Mass in a German city on September 24, feast of Ss Rupert and Virgil, the patrons of Salzburg. German-speakers principally know Salzburg at the birthplace of Mozart. For most Anglophones, it is better known as the setting of The Sound of Music. The city has ancient roots: its archbishop is the Primate of the Germans. Salzburg was Bavarian until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and rigid distinction between Germany and Austria only dates from 1945.
Ireland has an old association with Salzburg. Some claim its first archbishop, St Rupert, Apostle of Bavaria and Austria, was an Irishman named Robartach, but more reliable sources say he was Frankish. However, Irish monks largely provided his education and he brought many with him to Salzburg. The pre-eminent had yet to come. This was Rupert's successor, St Virgil or Fergal.
Abbot in Salzburg
Fergal was born in the south of Ireland around 700 and little is known of his early life. He became a monk and was educated on the Aran Islands, returning to the mainland to succeed St Canice as Abbot of Aghaboe, Co Laois in the Ossory diocese. In 739, he left Ireland for the Holy Land with two companions, Dobdagrecc and Sidonius. At first, they worked under King Pepin in France. In 745, Pepin commended them to his brother-in-law, Duke Odilo of Bavaria, who sent them to St Peter's Abbey in Salzburg.
Fergal became Abbot of St Peter's. He declined the episcopacy on the grounds of humility - Dobdagrecc, now Abbot of Chiemsee, was consecrated instead. Actually, Fergal implemented an Irish hierarchical model where the bishop was subject to the abbot. In Irish Church politics, Fergal was a conservative with little time for Roman innovations regarding the Easter date or ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The liturgy in Salzburg under Fergal included commemoration of the 15 Abbots of Iona from St Colmcille down to the contemporary abbot; and he brought relics of St Brigid and St Samthann of Clonbroney with him, inspiring devotion to the two in what is now Austria - the latter virtually forgotten in her own country.
St Boniface was unimpressed by Fergal's arrival in Salzburg. Odilo had promoted Fergal over Boniface's candidate. This was a challenge to Boniface's acknowledged German primacy. Boniface has been accused of racism in his opposition to Fergal and some have suggested this clash of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic temperaments foreshadows future enmity between Ireland and England. Boniface (né Wynfrith) came from Crediton, Devonshire, not far from the border between Celtic Cornwall and Saxon Wessex and he displayed no affection for his Cornish neighbours. But he had many Irish monks working under him, two of whom were martyred with him in 754.
We might call Boniface an ultramontanist today. Fergal may have had Gallican tendencies, but he was so from traditionalist grounds. Tháinig idir Pheadar agus Phól - the Irish proverb tells us even the apostles Peter and Paul quarrelled. The two had inevitable disagreements: each suspected the other of heresy. Boniface knew of Fergal's leanings, but needed something more substantial to go to Rome.
The first occasion Boniface went to Pope St Zachary I concerned the sacrament of baptism. Two Bavarian priests under Fergal's jurisdiction baptised catechumens with this apparently feminine formula: Baptizo te in nomine patria et filia et spiritu sancta. This was ignorance, but when Boniface insisted the candidates be re-baptised, Fergal and Sidonius upheld the validity of the sacrament. Boniface denounced them to Zachary. The pope confirmed the baptisms were valid and rebuked Boniface instead.
Clash over geography
Fergal had been known for his interest in the natural sciences even in Aghaboe and he engaged in some scientific speculation. Boniface believed Fergal overstepped the mark, as he appeared to suggest men inhabited the Antipodes.
The confrontation between Boniface and Fergal over geography is still relevant to Catholic apologetics as it deals with the relationship between faith and science. Anticlerical polemicists hold the Church was staffed by flat-earthers until Columbus' day, by geocentrists until Galileo's and that now, at best, we grudgingly accept evolution (less of a problem for Catholics than sola scriptura Protestants, but this writer needs to see more evidence for macro-evolution).
Adherents of scientism put the Columbus and Gallileo cases very disingenuously. The objection to Columbus was not that the world was flat but that the round world was a lot bigger than he thought it was. Columbus extimated Japan was 2,800 miles from Spain. It is in fact 14,000 miles distant. Were it not for the hitherto unknown Americas, Columbus and his crew would have died at sea. As Luther and Calvin's attacks on Father Copernicus trouble nobody, the anticlerical faction point at Gallileo, omitting some details.
Firstly, the Church wrongly accepted the consensus of leading contemporary scientists that the universe was geocentric. Secondly, Gallileo unwisely strayed into philosophy and theology in self-defence. This implied the Church herself was heretical and thus brought the Inquisition on to his own case.
Regarding evolution, the only facet of the subject I know anything about is linguistic evolution. Asked to believe our complex languages developed from animal grunts when all the evidence shows language simplifies over time, I apply Occam's razor and find the Tower of Babel story more credible. However Occam's razor was first wielded not by the English Francisan William of Occam but by his contemporary, the Anglo-Norman Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitzralph, formally canonised by the Church of Ireland in Henry VIII's day as St Richard of Dundalk. But all this was in the future.
Excommunication threat
The showdown between Boniface and Fergal anticipated some aspects of the Gallileo case. Even in the eighth century, thinking people accepted the world was round. This proposition went back to Greek times. The problem was to state that men lived in the Antipodes. Pope Zachary told Boniface that if Fergal taught there were another sun, another moon and another race of men on the other side of the Earth, he would convene a council to investigate Fergal - and if it found him guilty of teaching heresy, he would be deprived of his priesthood and excommunicated.
Greek science held the world was round, but that the equator was in the Torrid Zone, a region of uncrossable heat. The intelligentsia held this view, and also that no descendent of Adam could have traversed this divide. This made the premise appear unbiblical: if there were a race of men on the far side, from whom were they descended?
To bring this into the 21st century, many people have an uninformed belief about the possibility of life on other planets. As it is highly improbable (I gave up using the term impossible a long time ago) that sons of Adam reached hypothetical life-sustaining planets elsewhere in the universe, one must conclude that any alien race differs in lineage.
The shots in Fergal's locker
C.S. Lewis, Irish Anglicanism's foremost apologist, suggested there might be life on other planets, which had not experienced the Fall. This was the challenge facing Fergal now. Did he posit there was another race of men on the other side of the world? Did they experience the Fall and Redemption? Simply put, the problem was not scientific but theological, though it only arose in the context of accepted science.
So Fergal had to account for this problem before the Pope. This is where the saint's erudition came into play. When Ptolomy insisted Africa could not be circumnavigated, he was reacting to an account in Heredotus that Phoenician sailors had already achieved this in the reign of Pharoah Necho, an adversary of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Modern research has confirmed both the possibility and plausibility of Heredotus' account of this incredible seventh century BC voyage. Other accounts hinting at undiscovered countries south of the equator exist in Greek and in the eighth century, Ireland led the west in its knowledge of Greek.
Someone of Fergal's learning and interests would have been aware of this corpus as well as extensive writings in Irish and Hiberno-Latin on the same topic. The Navigatio Brendani is the best known, but it is not unique. Like the tale from Heredotus, it was only conclusively shown to be possible in the 20th century. The Venerable Bede, St Isidore of Seville and St Jerome all mention the Antipodes. It was on the authority of the latter that St Fergal based his defence.
There was a work in circulation at the time named the Cosmographia by Aethicus Ister. This alluded to life in the Antipodes in sections attributed to St Jerome, though Jerome's authorship of any of the book is now disputed. Fergal returned to Salzburg vindicated, but many now hold he was the sole author of the Cosmographia, which is also unlikely.
First Austrian school
Fergal was eventually consecrated as Archbishop of Salzburg in 766. He astonished his contemporaries by undertaking a 33 by 66 metre cathedral in 769 which was completed in 774. Following Irish practice, he established a cathedral school. This was the first known school on what is now Austrian territory and its foundation precedes the Bavarian Council's decree on schools in 774.
At this stage, Fergal was well advanced in what proved to be his life's work: the conversion of the Slavs in the Carinthian Alps. This area, inhabited by peoples we now call Slovenes, extended from southern Austria to Slovenia to northeastern Italy.
The Slavs came into contact with Christianity as they moved westward. St Columbanus preached to them in the seventh century. Fergal began his earnest mission. He baptised Duke Chetimar in Chiemsee. He consecrated Modestus and sent him with 13 companions to Carinthia. Modestus established his diocese at Maria Saal, dying in 763, but Fergal continued to supervise the missionary work until his own death.
After that, not even a heathen rebellion following Chetimar's death could reverse evangelisation. Fergal's successor Arno came to an agreement with Patriarch Paulinus II of Aquileia on diocesan boundaries enabling the completion of this work, but Fergal was known as the Apostle of Carinthia ever after. He also sent missionaries to many unknown parts - including what is now Hungary.
Fergal maintained an active life into old age, falling ill while preaching near the River Dravo in Carinthia. He died on November 27, 784. He might well have been forgotten as Bavaria was absorbed into the Frankish kingdom in 788. However, St Fergal's tomb was rediscovered when the cathedral was destroyed in 1181. This renewed interest and devotion to the dead archbishop who was canonised by Pope Gregory IX in 1233. More relics of St Fergal were discovered after the Allied bombing of Salzburg during the Second World War. His feast is on 27 November, though some Germany dioceses commemorate him with St Rupert on September 24.
The Brandsma Review, Issue 77, March-April 2005
Ireland has an old association with Salzburg. Some claim its first archbishop, St Rupert, Apostle of Bavaria and Austria, was an Irishman named Robartach, but more reliable sources say he was Frankish. However, Irish monks largely provided his education and he brought many with him to Salzburg. The pre-eminent had yet to come. This was Rupert's successor, St Virgil or Fergal.
Abbot in Salzburg
Fergal was born in the south of Ireland around 700 and little is known of his early life. He became a monk and was educated on the Aran Islands, returning to the mainland to succeed St Canice as Abbot of Aghaboe, Co Laois in the Ossory diocese. In 739, he left Ireland for the Holy Land with two companions, Dobdagrecc and Sidonius. At first, they worked under King Pepin in France. In 745, Pepin commended them to his brother-in-law, Duke Odilo of Bavaria, who sent them to St Peter's Abbey in Salzburg.
Fergal became Abbot of St Peter's. He declined the episcopacy on the grounds of humility - Dobdagrecc, now Abbot of Chiemsee, was consecrated instead. Actually, Fergal implemented an Irish hierarchical model where the bishop was subject to the abbot. In Irish Church politics, Fergal was a conservative with little time for Roman innovations regarding the Easter date or ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The liturgy in Salzburg under Fergal included commemoration of the 15 Abbots of Iona from St Colmcille down to the contemporary abbot; and he brought relics of St Brigid and St Samthann of Clonbroney with him, inspiring devotion to the two in what is now Austria - the latter virtually forgotten in her own country.
St Boniface was unimpressed by Fergal's arrival in Salzburg. Odilo had promoted Fergal over Boniface's candidate. This was a challenge to Boniface's acknowledged German primacy. Boniface has been accused of racism in his opposition to Fergal and some have suggested this clash of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic temperaments foreshadows future enmity between Ireland and England. Boniface (né Wynfrith) came from Crediton, Devonshire, not far from the border between Celtic Cornwall and Saxon Wessex and he displayed no affection for his Cornish neighbours. But he had many Irish monks working under him, two of whom were martyred with him in 754.
We might call Boniface an ultramontanist today. Fergal may have had Gallican tendencies, but he was so from traditionalist grounds. Tháinig idir Pheadar agus Phól - the Irish proverb tells us even the apostles Peter and Paul quarrelled. The two had inevitable disagreements: each suspected the other of heresy. Boniface knew of Fergal's leanings, but needed something more substantial to go to Rome.
The first occasion Boniface went to Pope St Zachary I concerned the sacrament of baptism. Two Bavarian priests under Fergal's jurisdiction baptised catechumens with this apparently feminine formula: Baptizo te in nomine patria et filia et spiritu sancta. This was ignorance, but when Boniface insisted the candidates be re-baptised, Fergal and Sidonius upheld the validity of the sacrament. Boniface denounced them to Zachary. The pope confirmed the baptisms were valid and rebuked Boniface instead.
Clash over geography
Fergal had been known for his interest in the natural sciences even in Aghaboe and he engaged in some scientific speculation. Boniface believed Fergal overstepped the mark, as he appeared to suggest men inhabited the Antipodes.
The confrontation between Boniface and Fergal over geography is still relevant to Catholic apologetics as it deals with the relationship between faith and science. Anticlerical polemicists hold the Church was staffed by flat-earthers until Columbus' day, by geocentrists until Galileo's and that now, at best, we grudgingly accept evolution (less of a problem for Catholics than sola scriptura Protestants, but this writer needs to see more evidence for macro-evolution).
Adherents of scientism put the Columbus and Gallileo cases very disingenuously. The objection to Columbus was not that the world was flat but that the round world was a lot bigger than he thought it was. Columbus extimated Japan was 2,800 miles from Spain. It is in fact 14,000 miles distant. Were it not for the hitherto unknown Americas, Columbus and his crew would have died at sea. As Luther and Calvin's attacks on Father Copernicus trouble nobody, the anticlerical faction point at Gallileo, omitting some details.
Firstly, the Church wrongly accepted the consensus of leading contemporary scientists that the universe was geocentric. Secondly, Gallileo unwisely strayed into philosophy and theology in self-defence. This implied the Church herself was heretical and thus brought the Inquisition on to his own case.
Regarding evolution, the only facet of the subject I know anything about is linguistic evolution. Asked to believe our complex languages developed from animal grunts when all the evidence shows language simplifies over time, I apply Occam's razor and find the Tower of Babel story more credible. However Occam's razor was first wielded not by the English Francisan William of Occam but by his contemporary, the Anglo-Norman Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitzralph, formally canonised by the Church of Ireland in Henry VIII's day as St Richard of Dundalk. But all this was in the future.
Excommunication threat
The showdown between Boniface and Fergal anticipated some aspects of the Gallileo case. Even in the eighth century, thinking people accepted the world was round. This proposition went back to Greek times. The problem was to state that men lived in the Antipodes. Pope Zachary told Boniface that if Fergal taught there were another sun, another moon and another race of men on the other side of the Earth, he would convene a council to investigate Fergal - and if it found him guilty of teaching heresy, he would be deprived of his priesthood and excommunicated.
Greek science held the world was round, but that the equator was in the Torrid Zone, a region of uncrossable heat. The intelligentsia held this view, and also that no descendent of Adam could have traversed this divide. This made the premise appear unbiblical: if there were a race of men on the far side, from whom were they descended?
To bring this into the 21st century, many people have an uninformed belief about the possibility of life on other planets. As it is highly improbable (I gave up using the term impossible a long time ago) that sons of Adam reached hypothetical life-sustaining planets elsewhere in the universe, one must conclude that any alien race differs in lineage.
The shots in Fergal's locker
C.S. Lewis, Irish Anglicanism's foremost apologist, suggested there might be life on other planets, which had not experienced the Fall. This was the challenge facing Fergal now. Did he posit there was another race of men on the other side of the world? Did they experience the Fall and Redemption? Simply put, the problem was not scientific but theological, though it only arose in the context of accepted science.
So Fergal had to account for this problem before the Pope. This is where the saint's erudition came into play. When Ptolomy insisted Africa could not be circumnavigated, he was reacting to an account in Heredotus that Phoenician sailors had already achieved this in the reign of Pharoah Necho, an adversary of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Modern research has confirmed both the possibility and plausibility of Heredotus' account of this incredible seventh century BC voyage. Other accounts hinting at undiscovered countries south of the equator exist in Greek and in the eighth century, Ireland led the west in its knowledge of Greek.
Someone of Fergal's learning and interests would have been aware of this corpus as well as extensive writings in Irish and Hiberno-Latin on the same topic. The Navigatio Brendani is the best known, but it is not unique. Like the tale from Heredotus, it was only conclusively shown to be possible in the 20th century. The Venerable Bede, St Isidore of Seville and St Jerome all mention the Antipodes. It was on the authority of the latter that St Fergal based his defence.
There was a work in circulation at the time named the Cosmographia by Aethicus Ister. This alluded to life in the Antipodes in sections attributed to St Jerome, though Jerome's authorship of any of the book is now disputed. Fergal returned to Salzburg vindicated, but many now hold he was the sole author of the Cosmographia, which is also unlikely.
First Austrian school
Fergal was eventually consecrated as Archbishop of Salzburg in 766. He astonished his contemporaries by undertaking a 33 by 66 metre cathedral in 769 which was completed in 774. Following Irish practice, he established a cathedral school. This was the first known school on what is now Austrian territory and its foundation precedes the Bavarian Council's decree on schools in 774.
At this stage, Fergal was well advanced in what proved to be his life's work: the conversion of the Slavs in the Carinthian Alps. This area, inhabited by peoples we now call Slovenes, extended from southern Austria to Slovenia to northeastern Italy.
The Slavs came into contact with Christianity as they moved westward. St Columbanus preached to them in the seventh century. Fergal began his earnest mission. He baptised Duke Chetimar in Chiemsee. He consecrated Modestus and sent him with 13 companions to Carinthia. Modestus established his diocese at Maria Saal, dying in 763, but Fergal continued to supervise the missionary work until his own death.
After that, not even a heathen rebellion following Chetimar's death could reverse evangelisation. Fergal's successor Arno came to an agreement with Patriarch Paulinus II of Aquileia on diocesan boundaries enabling the completion of this work, but Fergal was known as the Apostle of Carinthia ever after. He also sent missionaries to many unknown parts - including what is now Hungary.
Fergal maintained an active life into old age, falling ill while preaching near the River Dravo in Carinthia. He died on November 27, 784. He might well have been forgotten as Bavaria was absorbed into the Frankish kingdom in 788. However, St Fergal's tomb was rediscovered when the cathedral was destroyed in 1181. This renewed interest and devotion to the dead archbishop who was canonised by Pope Gregory IX in 1233. More relics of St Fergal were discovered after the Allied bombing of Salzburg during the Second World War. His feast is on 27 November, though some Germany dioceses commemorate him with St Rupert on September 24.
The Brandsma Review, Issue 77, March-April 2005
No comments:
Post a Comment