Mythical History or Historical Mythology?

MYTHICAL HISTORY OR 

HISTORICAL MYTHOLOGY? 

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Erat autem nox - St John, XIII, 30

I have always regarded tales of de Valera's Catholic theocracy as mythical.  In 1941, he founded the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies to promote scholarship in the two disciplines that fascinated him: Mathematical Sciences and Celtic Studies.

Professor Erwin Schrödinger, a refugee from Austria who later won the Nobel physics prize, gave the inaugural lecture in the School of Mathematical Sciences, in which he proposed that theoretical physics could explain the existence of the universe without reference to a creator-God.  Professor T. F. O'Rahilly gave the inaugural lecture in the School of Celtic Studies and proposed that St Patrick may have been a composite character of two historical personalities.  Myles na gCopaleen found himself in the libel court for suggesting that all Mr de Valera's Institute had done was prove there was no God and two St Patricks.  But de Valera had no inquisition.

Major weakness

As more recent history is enveloped by myth, more ancient history is subject to a myriad of interpretations, not only by scholars, but by anyone with an interest.  One such work, How the Irish Saved Civilization was a runaway bestseller in Irish America.  One might be sympathetic to Thomas Cahill's basic thesis, but one should have problems with many aspects of his arguments.

Mr Cahill brings us on a whirlwind tour of Europe from the last days of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Middle Ages.  He writes in a very engaging style and the book is very easy to read.  He displays a good knowledge of Latin and of the world of antiquity.

A Spiritual Hitler?

These are the positive points.  The major weakness is that though his central thesis - that the Irish saved civilisation by copying the works of classical literature for posterity - is clear, he does not show how, when or where, for example, the text of the Aeneid was found in Irish manuscripts.  I rather think the attitude of a mediaeval Irish monk to posterity qua posterity was akin to that of one of the members of the Irish House of Commons who voted for the Act of Union in 1800 and exhorted the House to do so with the words "What has posterity ever done for us?"

Mr Cahill spends some time on the fall of Rome, first by caricaturing the poet Ausonius and then by giving us a guided tour of St Augustine's Confessions.  He is very positive about the young Augustine, but not enthusiastic about the older St Augustine.  Could the author of The City of God have brought the dusk of the Dark Ages on the Roman world single-handedly?

This again reminds me of Myles na gCopaleen.  St Augustine appears as a character in The Dalkey Archive, written under the satirist's other pseudonym, Flann O'Brien.  Myles (né Brian Ó Nualláin) described St Augustine as a spiritual Hitler in a radio interview in the 1950s - in de Valera's Ireland.

Then Mr Cahill moves on to Ireland, with St Patrick.  The picture of St Patrick is based on the Confession and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus exclusively, without reference to the Lives.  The St Patrick that emerges is like a cross between Frederick Douglas (the 19th century American abolitionist who was himself an escaped slave) and Abraham Lincoln.

There is no doubt what St Patrick thought of slavery, and that his views were probably stronger than those expressed by any churchman until Blessed Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote against it in the 16th century.  But St Patrick did not bring slavery to an end.  A few generations after St Patrick, aristocratic hierarchs were ashamed the Irish Church was founded by a fugitive slave.

Amchurch tendency

Mr Cahill leaves little time to the Church founded by St Patrick.  He covers Ss Bridget, Colmcille and Columbanus and gives a thumbnail sketch to a Church independent of Rome, uninterested in sexual mores and affirmative of feminism.  All this while Europe was in the Dark Ages.  If his sketch seems to resemble Amchurch (as the fading liberal wing of the American church is sometimes called), it is probably a bit more that coincidental.

As Mr Cahill believes the Irish monks copied classical texts for the sake of posterity, he also believes they wrote down Irish folklore exactly as it was.  Folklore is very difficult to deal with.  It is very rare for folklore to remain fossilised, as any of us who have experienced the circulation of "folklore" about ourselves can testify: for, like gossip, folklore is a dynamic process.  It tends to have some relevance to current situation.

In terms of modern Irish political history, until very recently stories about de Valera tended to be coloured by the narrator's view of the Civil War.  At present, such stories tend to reflect the narrator's view of Church/State relations.  Archbishop McQuaid is another victim of the current trend, as John Cooney's biography will illustrate (another repository of folklore).

The caricature of Archbishop McQuaid raises another question: why have the ecclesiastical historians not raised a voice in his defence?  Could it be that the late Archbishop represents a Church the current hierarchy would prefer to move away from, so they leave charges by secularist historians unopposed?  Is this also why Father Pierre Blet is alone in defending Pope Pius XII?

Repulsive Queen Medb

On the basis of vicissitudes of folklore within living memory, I would challenge the proposition that the Táin Bó Cuailgne, written in the eighth or ninth century was essentially unchanged from the version allegedly told in the first.  Mr Cahill quotes Kinsella's translation of the Táin (he has no Old Irish).  Even reading the poetical English translation, I could see that much of the language referred to Latin or Christian concepts, and therefore could not come from the first century without major alteration.  The character Queen Medb is no heroine; she has many repulsive traits and certainly does not reflect historical reality.

My position on the Táin is that it is not folklore, but composed literature with a flavouring from folklore, and it was meant to be didactic.  Its moral is that women are unfit to rule: Medb's paramour, Fergus MacRóich says as much at the end - that a herd of stallions led by a mare is bound to stray.

Schoolboyish treatment

Claims for the independence of the Irish Church from Rome are really based on only two factors: the date of Easter and the tonsure.  Mr Cahill rightly says the Irish monks never fought these issues.  His other more serious assertion, that sexual morality meant nothing in Ireland until Victorian times, is patently false - but unsurprising given Mr Cahill's schoolboyish treatment of the subject.  In many of the earliest tales of the death of a hero, infidelity or fornication spelt doom, and the only evidence for homosexuality is in bad translations.

Mr Cahill rejoices that returning to being what he alleges we were until recent years: sexual hedonists.  If the post-Christian age is a return to heathen ways, we are also returning to crimes against person and property, and I would love to see some bourgeois advocate of promiscuity trying to refute the charge that these things are connected.

When I began to study Old Irish, I was told that the classical world viewed its mythology historically and the Celtic world view its history mythologically.  It is not always easy to tell the difference, but I suspect the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies have a lot of fun in the area (although this tendency if far from confined to the Celtic period alone).  While they labour slowly, people like Mr Cahill make money.

I would say he is in fact describing himself when, in the book, he calls Ausonius a master of a good tunr of phrase for the kudos of the audience.  And in Mr Cahill's case, the audience are those cultural Irish Catholics - principally but not exclusively in the United States - who are somewhat estranged from Church teaching on sexual ethics.

Lifting Shadows?

The influence of Mr Cahill's book outside the United States surely had its zenith in Leinster House shortly before Christmas (1999).  It was one of the major sources for Mary McAleese's address to the other two Houses of the Oireachtas entitled Ireland's Lifting Shadows - something for posterity.  Mrs McAleese directly quoted Mr Cahill's assertion that St Patrick brought, let us say, a benignly ecumenical Christianity to Ireland:

As Thomas Cahill says: "Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity - the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history."  It was a Christianity that fused easily into Irish life, growing side by side with the old pagan culture, with no anxiety to obliterate it.

This is nonsense, but a nonsense calculated to elicit desired responses to the Northern Irish peace process and the refugee crisis.  To this end, Mrs McAleese paints a dim picture of the generation of independence, and a bright picture of the European Union, all in a language of lifting shadows, with relevant quotations from recent literature to show a modern dark age has been dispelled.  An incredibly naïve view of present day Irish life.

As for "lifting shadows", just one quotation strikes me.  It's from St John's Gospel, when Judas leaves the Upper Room:

And it was night.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 47, February-March 2000.

  

Anamchara: Soul's Friend or Foe?

ANAMCHARA:SOUL'S FRIEND OR FOE?

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

 Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem - 1 Corinthians XIII, 12

JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU has a lot to answer for.  As a writer of ghost stories, he incorporated many themes from Irish folklore into his tales and was widely read in the Victorian great house.  His best known story is the novella Carmilla which appears in his collection In a Glass Darkly.

Carmilla is a chilling vampire story and was among the models Le Fanu's compatriot Bram Stoker used for Dracula.  Those who like to talk of Ireland's literary tradition should know that no Irish written work has made quite the impact on the world as Dracula.

Carmilla - which I find scarier than Dracula - is set in Carinthia ( an Austrian province where Jörg Haider is currently governor), but Le Fanu draws on Irish tradition here too.  The female vampire Carmilla is like a banshee insofar as she is attached to certain families and draws her victims from among their daughters.

Off on a tangent

Rev John O'Donoghue has also drawn on Irish folklore, among other sources, to write an international bestseller: Anamchara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World.  (Please excuse my typography: Father O'Donoghue puts a dot above the c in anamchara rather than using a ch.  That is dreadfully pretensious).  Some years ago, one Sunday Independent journalist described it as one of the creepiest books she knew, though Father O'Donoghue did not intend it as such.

An anamchara is literally a soul-friend, and in early Irish monasticism was a confessor, who was the fore runner of the modern spiritual director.  Perhaps the старец (elder) in the Russian monastic tradition provides a counterpart; both ultimately derive from the same source.  But Father O'Donoghue's Anamchara does not tap into any type of recognisable Irish spiritual tradition.  It goes off on its own distinct tangent.  Before one even starts the book, nothing draws attention to Father O'Donoghue's status as a priest of the Galway & Kilmacduagh diocese.  His photograph, in mufti, appears on the jacket cover which lists his academic achievements and publications.  These are considerable, though one would question the wisdom of his then bishop in sending him to do a doctorate in philosophical theology in Tübingen, home of Rev Professor Hans Küng.  Long before Father Küng, the Catholic Theological Faculty there (Tübingen is the international academic centre of the Lutheran Churches, but nevertheless had a Catholic theological faculty there for two centuries) had a history of blazing trails.  Anamchara, however, does not blaze any trails.

'Wonderful', 'lovely'...

Anamchara is written in a very readable style.  So readableI would describe it as positively patronising.  He punctuates the work with quotations and references to literature, art, philosophy and to Irish folklore, normally qualifying either the phrase or the writer with adjectives such as "beautiful", "wonderful" or "lovely".  For example:

A beautiful example is Berninis's Teresa in Ecstasy 

The wonderful Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz describes the difficulty of writing good poetry

 There is the lovely story of Oisín who was one of the Fianna, the band of Celtic warriors.

This can sometimes be more than a little ridiculous, e.g.:

The phrase from Edith Piaf, Je ne regrette rien, is wonderful in its free and wild acceptance.

Sometimes, Father O'Donoghue totally misses the mark:

There is nothing as near as the eternal.  This is captured in the lovely Celtic phrase: tá tír na n-óg ar chul an tí - tír álainn trina chéile, i.e. the land of eternal youth is behind the house, a beautiful land fluent within itself.  (sic).

What he is in fact quoting here is the opening line of a very modern poem written by Seán Ó Ríordáin (1917-1977).  Ó Ríordáin suffered from tuberculosis, and for part of his life lived in isolation in a pre-fabricated building at the back of the family home in Ballyvourney, Co Cork.  This was tír na n-óg ar chúl an tí, the land of youth at the back of the house, so-called because the resident was fated to live a short life.  It is a terrifying thought, really; though in the context of what Father O'Donoghue has to say about death, I think he would see beauty in it.

The book goes through six chapters on friendship, the senses, solitude, work, ageing and death.  Father O'Donoghue writes authoritatively on each of those subjects, almost as if he has direct personal experience of each.  Well, Father is not yet aged, nor has he worked in the work environment he describes - except perhaps briefly - nor has he ever died.  And I find how he writes about conjugal love and sex very disconcerting.  Had he been a married man of his age (he is still very young), I would have been incredulous; for a priest to write of marriage, I would expect decades of pastoral experience, which was certainly not acquired in the academic groves of Tübingen.  As for sex, the question of experience or lack of it is immaterial; it is quite disedifying to see a priest writing about sexuality as Father O'Donoghue does in this book.  In this context, one might wonder whether Anamchara would have had such a roaring success if the author were identified as a priest.

Living dog and dead lion

As for solitude, he has never lived an eremetical lifestyle.  Though I can identify with a lot of what he has to say about the workplace, there seems to be something very cynical in the way it is put.  (Just as in the way he describes marriage and sex).  And I will believe his sincerity about this liberating force of death, if he is able to confirm it to me after he has in fact died.  I thought of the phrase in Ecclesiastes 9,4: melior est canis vivus leone mortuo (a living dog is better than a dead lion).  This was a reaction to Father O'Donoghue's peculiar treatment of death and the hereafter, rather than my actual view on the subject of both.

Aside for the occasional citation, which in at least one case is quite wrong, for the most part Father O'Donoghue's case for "Celtic Spirituality" is based on hearsay evidence, which is encapsulated in a very misogynistic Irish saying which denotes gossip: Dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean léi (a woman told me that a woman told her).  In many incidents he talks of people he knows to illustrate his point.  This is fine, but it is hardly something on which to construct a model for spirituality.

He cites many philosophers, notably Hegel, but his references to Christianity are few.  Johannes Scottus Eriugena is notable by his absence, though he is one of the few indisputably Celtic philosophers in the textbooks.  Father O'Donoghue's view of the cosmos seems to suggest pantheism: in his reaction against dualism, he comes very close to monism.

He has little time for a spiritual world apart from the material world.  So it is not surprising his approach is very post-modernistic.  Philosophers appear alongside ordinary people and superstition is juxtaposed with both science and theology without any qualification.  So he mentions alleged phenomena such as the banshee and fairies quite positively.  Personally I prefer Sheridan La Fanu's treatment of the same.

What the author seems to prove is that we only see things "through a glass in a dark manner", and he seems to provide an even darker glass through which to look at and beyond the world.

A 'feel-good' book

On the positive side, I agree totally with Father O'Donoghue on the topic of television and its effect on the world.  But the book is written for television consumers.

Essentially, it is a "feel-good" book.  The spiritual counsel offered is to do nothing, to follow your heart, to go along with your feelings.  Any effort to "improve" yourself is doomed to failure, and Father O'Donoghue insists that we were made the way we were for a purpose, that we are naturally good.  It is difficult to see where either Fall or Redemption fit in here, but that does not mean they are absent.  I wonder whether a true soulfriend would advise anyone to relax and do nothing.  In my opinion that counsel is more consistent with the behaviour of a soulfoe - I suppose an anamnamhaid.

As I have said earlier, Father O'Donoghue does not say anything new or original in this book.  There is nothing challenging in it, though it is the work of a man with a gifted mind and an ability to communicate.  It was written to be a bestseller and the author succeeded in that aim.  A pity.  Father O'Donoghue could have used his talents to advance the teaching of the Gospel and the Church.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 48, April-May 2000.