Intellectual Serfs and Ideological Masters

INTELLECTUAL SERFS AND IDEOLOGICAL MASTERS

Uses and Abuses of Celtic and Indo-European Studies

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Quia filii hujus saeculi prudentiores filiis lucis sunt - Luke, 16:8

Since the middle of the last century, Celtic Studies has been a relatively esoteric discipline.  It is of interest only to the Celts and some academics of other fields, such as mediaevalists and philologists.  Those who directly involve themselves in the study of Celitica are few.  Much scope is give to scholars of dubious credentials to make mischief as a result.

The systematic investigation of Celtic languages and literature began about 150 years ago.  The English poet Matthew Arnold and the French critic Ernest Renan were among its earliest enthusiasts.  Renan was a student of Blessed Frédèric Ozanam, but was more impressed by the latter's romanticism than by his Catholicism.  One of his best-known works is the Vie de Jésus (reading this was one of the reasons Stalin lost his faith and was expelled from seminary).

Neither Arnold nor Renan was orthodox in his religious beliefs. Their view of Celtica was based on an idealisation of the Celt.  They saw the Celt as intuitive, artistic and unfettered by reason, while they regarded the Germanic mind, though logical and industrious, as lacking creativity of any sort.  So the 19th-century precursors of the hippies looked to the Celt, on industrialised Europe's western fringe, for their new paradigm.  It is significant that neither Arnold nor Renan was burdened by the knowledge of even one Celtic language.  It made stereotyping so much easier.

The Würzburg glosses

At the same time, Johann Caspar Zeuss (1806-56) was deciphering the Würzburg glosses.  The glosses, found in manuscripts of a commentary on the Pauline epistles in Würzburg, on the Psalter in Milan and on Priscian's Latin grammar at St Gallen are as important to Celtic Studies as the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptology.  The texts are in Latin, but the margins are cluttered heavily by explanatory notation in Old Irish for the benefit of students.

Zeuss, a classical philologist, did the opposite and used the Latin to learn Old Irish.  His Grammatica Celtica is a seminal world and should establish Zeuss as the father of Celtic Studies.

St Kilian brought Christianity and classical learning to Würzburg, Milan was close to St Columbanus' Bobbio and St Gallen is named after St Gall.  And it is from these places that we derive our first knowledge of early mediaeval Ireland.  But the foundational work was grammatical and tedious - and the lay enthusiasts preferred ready-made translations and commentaries.

Nationalist fervour

The lay enthusiasts were impatient.  They had from O'Donovan's and O'Curry's ideas that the tales were historical.  The spirit of the Gaelic Renaissance and the Anglo-Irish literary revival was the spirit of Arnold and Renan.  Even the scientific scholars, such as Professor Eoin MacNéill, sought to explain away the old sagas as myths concerning the rising and setting of the suns.  Patrick Pearse had an uncommon insight into the discipline for his day, due to his competancy in French and German, but was not above manipulating this knowledge for political purposes in the latter years of his life.  It could be said that the popular presentation of Celtica contributed to the nationalist fervour which brought about the Easter Rising and subsequent events.  Militant nationalists continue to draw from this source, up to the present day.

One side-effect of the Celtic Renaissance was the publication of the lives of many early Irish saints.  These books and pamphlets, with their emphasis on monastic life and asceticism, held up a Celtic spirituality for the admiration and not for the imitation of the readers.  For who would sleep on a plank and keep those impossible fasts anyway?

The Venerable Matt Talbot did!  But when one hears of Celtic spirituality nowadays, Matt Talbot is not a name that comes to mind.

Indo-European Studies

After the First World War, Germany was still the centre of Celtic Sudies.  Scholars were now looking east, to India.  The Germans wholeheartedly embraced the study of Sanskrit.  Thus emerged the new discipline of Indo-Germanistik, rendered Indo-European Studies in most other languages.

The juxtaposition of Arnold's and Renan's "Far West" (the Celtic fringe) with the orient did not go unnoticed.  Irish scholars, having devoured the new Sanskrit grammars, presented Ireland and India as the ultimate peripheries of the Indo-European domain; and therefore, if one could isolate the ancient customs both had in common, one could reconstruct the mores which prevailed in Europe and much of Asia at the dawn of history.  Gandhi borrowed the hunger strike from Terence McSwiney and each believe they were following a tradition known in Ireland and India in primeval times, and therefore practised everywhere between the two.

Aryan brothers

The Germans were more interested by parallels between their own peoples and the Indians.  This too found popular expression.  The National Socialists thought the idea fascinating.  It is no mere coincidence that the Hakenkreuz is an Indian symbol and that the Aryans were a prehistoric race who occupied the region between India and Persia.  Iran and Aryan are derived from the same word.  The Nazis' enthusiasm for Indo-Germanistik is not so extraordinary when one sees it provided them with an origin myth conveniently devoid of the perfidious Jew, and perfectly consistent with Mr Darwin's theory.

It was highly embarrassing to the Indian Congress Party leadership - particularly Nehru - that some of their members swallowed the Indo-European myth.  Thus for many Indian nationalists, Hitler was a hero, and the Nazis their Aryan brothers.  Gandhi (not unlike de Valera) had good reasons for keeping the Congress aloof from India's war effort.

Faulty analysis

The look to the East received a more sophisticated veneer after the war.  Suddenly structuralism, functionalism and formalism - or any combination of these - were the buzz-words.  Georges Dumézil provided a new set of theories, substantially based on the functions of a member of any given Hindu caste.

He had two willing disciples in the Rees brothers, whose book Celtic Heritage* is something of a classic.  Personally, I would warmly recommend Celtic Heritage to any novice, provided they concentrate on the narrative to the old Irish and Welsh tales and ignore the analysis of them.  The Dumézillians seem to have forgotten that India was a highly developed, urban and literate society for some millennia before Christ, while the Celtic and Germanic peoples remained rural and illiterate until they were evangelised.  It makes a difference.

At present, there is a tendency among some professional Celtic scholars to regard the Irish and Welsh sagas as mediaeval Christian literature.  As such, they owe as much to Christian sources as they do to allegedly extensive pagan lore in the Celtic regions prior to their christianisation.  Of course, it is easier to see the Christian influence when the extant material is compared with classica, patristic and apocryphal sources, not to mention Scripture itself.  The existence of this school of thought is a well-kept secret.

Ideology or ideolatry?

Just as scholars are coming to a new appreciation of the Christianity of Celtica, the pseudo-scholars are using it to construct a neo-paganism.  In appealing to the archaic, they seek to give legitimacy to new philosophies such as feminism and New Ageism.  These speak of a matriarchal society in which the earth was worshiped and humankind was at one with nature.  Women, naturally, held sway.

This is not the first time that scholarship is being twisted to serve ideology.  And where an obscure discipline such as Celtic Studies is thus abused, what would one expect of something like history or theology?

I wonder if ideology is the right word to describe feminism or Marxist-Leninism or any of the other philosophies that accommodate themselves so well to the Zeitgeist.  Ideology suggests discussion of an idea; and these fundamentalisms admit no dissension in any form, but rather involve worship of the idea - equivalent of the worship we would give to God, and probably contrary to the First Commandment.

Would the word ideolatry not be more appropriate?  And are the adherents of an ideolatry not ideolaters?

* A. and B. Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition of Ireland and Wales, 1961

The Brandsma Review, Issue 36, April-May 1998

On Tongues of Men and Angels

ON TONGUES OF MEN AND ANGELS

Esperanto, PIE in the Sky and Linguistic Devolution

By PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Et incirco vocatum est nomen ejus Babel, quia ibi confusum est labia universae terrae 

et inde dispersit eos Dominus super faciem cunctorum regionem. - Genesis 11:9

IN 1887, Dr L.L. Zamenhoff published Lingvo Internacia, which outlined the grammar and structure of a proposed universal language.  The artificial language was called by Zamenhoff's nom-de-plume, Esperanto - the word for "one who hopes" in the new language.  Appropriate, as Zamenhoff was a dreamer. 

He also tried to invent a universal religion based on the Golden Rule.  To date, the language has been more successful; but there are other dreamers out there working on a common denominator creed.

In his Etymologiae, St Isidore of Seville lists 72 languages, which he says came into being at Babel.  Of these, Latin, Greek and Hebrew are pre-eminent, sanctified, as it were, on the Cross.  This highly influential mediaeval work caused some embarrassment here: Irish was excluded in some version of the text.  But this became an opportunity to suggest that the common ancestor of the Gael, Fénnius Farsaid, took the finest elements of the 72 languages and concocted a new tongue which he named after his grandson, Góedel.  Gaelic.  There is a subtle hint that Irish is a reconstruction of the common language spoken from Creation to Babel.

Modern endeavour and mediaeval legend fly in the face of the reality of the diversity of tongues.  The Bible and the Church's tradition teach this to be a curse on man, even after the Fall.  Modern scientists and linguists see things differently.  Languages are held to be the products of millenia of evolution, from animal grunts to the sophisticated jargon we employ today.

 Becoming simpler

Observation does not bear this out.  Five thousand years of written records show that language is simplifying.  Anyone who has studied an ancient tongue, even very superficially, will tell you a dead language is more complex and exact than a living language.

In Europe, most languages appear to be interrelated. Scholars abandoned the notion that Sanskrit was the mother-language.  It is now believed our Indo-European ancestors spoke a common tongue which predates even Sanskrit.  So if you take Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavonic, Old Irish, Old Welsh, Old Lithuanian, Gothic and many others, you can work out how the first Caucasians spoke.  Thus you can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

These alleged Aryans occupied most of the lands between these islands and Central Asia.  The Old Irish rí and the Old Welsh rhi have the Gaulish suffix  -rix(e.g Vercingetorix) as their cousin.  The Latin rex is more distant and the Sanskrit ráj-á is even further removed.  These point to the PIE *rék-s (king).  Likewise, Old Irish fer (now fear) and Latin vir possibly derive for the PIE wiros.  So if we recall the word werewolf, we see an Old English equivalent frozen in Modern English.

Fruitless investment

It is not always so direct.  Our Irish antecedents had a difficulty with the sound "p".  So én(éan=bird) is *petnos in PIE.  This suggests the Latin penna (feather), which we see in English pen, Old Irish penn (peann).  Penna is the word for both pen and feather in Italian (like French plume, German feder and Russian перо). See what you get served if you order penne in an Italian restaurant.  Of course a pen is also a female swan.

The Latin palma, Greek παλαμη and Old English folm mean "palm".  The Old Irish lám (lámh) and Old Welsh llaw (hand) are similar enough to give *plhma (palm).  To find out what our forebears called their hands would involve going to Armenian and Hittite.  Much money is invested in the reconstruction of PIE, especially in Germany and Austria, in spite of the fact there will never be a shred of evidence anyone ever spoke it.

Courtesy of Attila

Not every European language is Indo-European.  Finnish, Estonian, Magyar and Turkish form a group on their own.  Their closest relatives are found in the Central Asian former Soviet republics (and also in Manchuria).  These were imported into Europe in the Dark Ages, courtesy of one Attila the Hun.

This leaves two unaccounted for: Basque and Georgian.  Recent research has suggested the two are distantly related and may be classified as Pre-Indo-European tongues.  There may well have been a common language across the continent, displaced by invaders from the Caucasus.  Perhaps the monuments of the pre-Celtic languages in Ireland might give us some direction as to language - as might the Pictish inscriptions in Scotland.  But where does that leave PIE?  And what did each language develop from?

Other coincidences exist which the scientific community ignore.  I know of a Basque who tried to buy onions at a market in the Himalayas..  He exhausted his range of major European languages, and the Nepalese vendor only knew what he meant when he used his native Basque.  Researchers into the Welsh tale of Prince Madoc reaching America in a coracle (before Columbus) stumbled upon similarities between Welsh and Pawnee.  A regular Brandsma Review reader told me much of the similarities between many words in Irish and Arabic.

I will not dwell on these suggested links between Basque and Nepalese, Welsh and Pawnee or Irish and Arabic.  But can the construction of PIE be beneficial?  Contrast PIE and Esperanto.  Both are artificial languages created from the existing vocabularies of "Indo-European" tongues - Esperanto from the living, to produce a simple language anyone could learn to speak; PIE from the dead, to arrive at a putative common ancestor.

In effect, PIE is an élitist Esperanto providing intellectual stimulation for etymologists.  Both experiments mock evolution, for if PIE is the alpha and Esperanot the omega, we would have a highly complex tongue devolving into a simple language.

Anarchy and dictatorship

It might be said language is being debased, that Gresham's Law applies to language as to money (or religion).  Let the doubtful listen to teenagers speaking among themselves.  It appears that television, inter alia, has speeded up the process of simplification.

Simultaneously, I can see two trends from the academic ivory towers.  One is towards linguistic anarchy - the neologism or Newspeak.  Write your own tongue as you go along, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass.  Secondly we have the Thought Police, taking a leaf out of George Orwell's 1984.  It's called PC.  The intellectual Mandarin class have successfully imposed "gender" in place of "sex" (though I am waiting to hear charges of "genderism" levelled against those who used to be "male chauvinists").

Though it is now acceptable to use four-letter words and take the Holy Name in vain, there are a great many words which may no longer be used.  So much for freedom of expression.

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift describes a race of talking horses, the Houyhnhms.  These noble creatures ask how one could pervert such a magnificent gift as the spoken word by telling a lie.  One wonders what the Dean would make of those who use language games to bully the masses into accepting a political agenda, as Mussolini did in Fascist Italy.

Thus the Church chooses her time to venacularise the Mass.  It is no surprise that there is an analogue of Babel among Catholics.  We no longer understand each other as we used to.  Moreover, the abandonment of a sacral tongue for the secular has left the language of the Mass open to the petty political demands of the vocal few, and to the cultural swing to the banal which has no place in something so venerable and so sacred.

Whereas the original Pentecost was marked by and understanding of diverse tongues, the promised second Pentecost has brought the opposite.  It is time to sit down and meditate upon Babel and Pentecost.  Veni, Sancte Spiritus!

The Brandsma Review, Issue 37, June-July 1998

The Irish - The Lost Tribe?

THE IRISH - THE LOST TRIBE?

By PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Vos autem genus electum, regale sacerdotium, gens sancta, populus acquisitionis - 1 St Peter, 2:9

A combination of material wealth and religious poverty is invariably followed by on of those immense 

catastrophes, which write themselves forever on the memory of man.  - Donoso Cortez 

MY FAVOURITE NOVEL in Irish is Monsignor Breandán Ó Doibhlin's Néal Maidine agus Tine Oíche.*  The title "Morning Cloud and Night Fire"is based on Exodus 40:36.  In fact the novel closely follows the delivery of the enslaved Hebrews from Egypt andd their subsequent journey town the promised land.  But the book is written about the Irish, and it is made difficult for the average Irish reader by his frequent references to an older form of the Irish tongue.

Mgr Ó  Doibhlin was not the first.  When I read the book for the second time a number of years ago, I wondered how much the author knew about the fascination of the early Irish monks with ancient Israel and also how shocked those monks would be with modern scholarly attitudes.

Biblical influence crucial

The literature of early mediaeval Ireland has to date been analysed in a strictly Aryan construct.  Parallels are forever sought within the overall Indo-European (indo-germanisch) context.  This can be fruitful. For, example, Cormac mac Airt is suckled by a wolf in infancy.  We could safely assume this to be a direct borrowing from the story of Romulus and Remus, were it not for the fact that a similar tale is told of Cyrus the Persian and the same theme emerges in Greek and Germanic lore.  Though valuable, the Indo-European view is not the last word on the matter.

The early Irish monks had little interest in India or Persia.  Their only interest in Germany was to convert the place.  In general, their only interest in an alleged Caucasian heritage was a belief that were are all descended from Noah's son Japheth.  The early Irish monks were more interested in Israel than in India.

Most of the writings now seen as mythological can be read as a retelling of a distinctly Irish folklore, subject to biblical influence.  So the puny Lug Lám Fata slays Balor of the evil eye with a sling shot.

But the monastic scribes went a lot further than that.  Lebor Gabála (The Book of Invasions) describes the primaeval history of Ireland.  It shows the influence of St Isidore of Seville and St Augustine in its view of history.  But it is interesting to see the lengths to which the monks went to parallel the Irish experience with that of the Hebrews.  In ways quite reminiscent of the Boers in South Africa or the Mormons, the first Irish Christians appear to have latched on to the conviction that they were a unique people, to whom God had allotted a special destiny.

Egyptian link

The common ancestor of the Gael was a Scythian.  (Here - and only here - would mediaeval and modern scholar find consensus.)  The lawyer and linguist, Fénius Farsaid, finds his way to Egypt where he founds a school of law.  His son married the Pharaoh's duaghter, that the father names  the language he invents after her son, Góedel, so we have Gaelic.  It is strongly hinted that young Góedel had Moses for a foster brother and Fénius taught both of them law.

Anyway, the time comes when it is now longer politic for Fénius and his kin to remain in Egypt, so they embark on a journey which brings them through the North African desert over 40 years and than through Spain, before they come to rest in Ireland.  Of course, they have to displace the peoples who were there before them, which they have no problem in doing.

 Place of natural law

A nice story, but the monks had to back it up.  They appealed to St Paul, who in Romans 2:14-15, implies a Natural Law written into creation by God.  The Irish were quite diligent in there observance of natural law (recht aicnid), according to the scribes.  Natural law was seen as a very important judicial concept; aand one presumes it remained so until Chief Justice Hamilton enlightened us on the the topic in the judgement on the constitutionality of the Abortion Information Act a few years ago.  Wherever they could point out a coincidence with the Law of Moses (recht litre - written law, they did; the most striking example being in relation to heiresses.

In the fullness of time, the Irish received the Law of Moses and with it, the Prophets and the New Testament.  This would naturally single St Patrick out as somewhat special.  The monks depicted him as a Moses-Elias figure.  Whereas the St Patrick of the Confessio and the Epistola is a simple and zealous missionary (methinks he doth protest too much - both writings are a lot more sophisticated than they appear to the naked eye), the various biographers of the saint give us the picture of either of the greatest figures of the Old Testament.

 Not merely hagiographical

Again and again, incidents are related which are similar to the lives of Moses and Elias.  In his various confrontations with the druids, we see retellings of the stand-off between Moses and Pharoah's magicians or between Elias and the priests of Baal.

It is all too simple to dismiss the Lives of St Patrick in the light of his own literary legacy.  Too simple, and based on an uncritical reading of both.  It should be remembered that St Patrick must have been a very impressive figure to silence the whole court of the High King and pave the way for the Christianisation of the entire country.

One of the Lives contains a very frank details: though the saint makes a great impression of King Lóegaire Ua Néill, the king remains a heathen.  This would hardly appear in a text which was merely hagiographical.

As Moses and Elias (foreshadowing Our Lord) fast 40 days and nights, so does St Patrick.  Finally, as the 12 Apostles are given the authority to judge the 12 Tribes of Israel, (St Matthew 19:28), Muirchú's Life assigns the same task to St Patrick, as he had been an apostle to us.  This is as close as the monks came to claiming status as a lost tribe.

 Judgement for sins

One could go into great detail about other efforts to associate Early Ireland with the peoples of the Old and New Testament, whether in lawa or customs, in origins ( though Japheth was the father of the Europeans, most Irish genealogies were traced through Shem), or personal contact.  (At least one Irish jurist went the wrong way on leaving Egypt and wandered with the Israelites for 40 years, receiving the Law from Moses.  And three Irish nobles were said to have become Christian before St Patrick came - Conchobar mac Nessa and Cormac mac Airt are the best known.)

The matter did not rest there.  At a much later time, during Plantations and Penal Laws, Irish writers and scholars returned to the same theme.  This time the literati were largely in exile on the continent, especially in Louvain.  The Elizabethan and Cromwellian terrors were fresh memories and it seemed one anti-Catholic pogrom followed another.  The writers went back to the Old Testament view of the Babylonian captivity and the conquest of the Promised Land by the Gentiles.  It was the judgement of God on Ireland for the sins of the Irish.

 Slavery and idols

Mgr Ó Doibhlin returns to the same theme this century.  Behind all the allusion to Exodus and Lebor Gabála, despite how archaic and remote all the characters and themes appear, one cannot help but believe he is referring to our own day.  Slavery and idols, though they come in different shapes and sizes, are still present; and little is so destructive as the slavery or seductive comforts, especially after enduring the more obvious slavery for so long.

Ireland has changed a lot since the 1960s, and the delusion of the Celtic Tiger within a new European superstate suggests that our present affluence may be a new form of enslavement.  If I draw my own parallel with the Old Testament in 1 Macchabees 1:11-16, we see the description of the apostasy of the Jews.

It is a depressing portrait of a race who throw off their distinctive beliefs and customs, given them by the true God, for the peace and prosperity of a pagan empire: an apostasy before the coming of Christ, which prefigures the apostasy before His Second Coming: Quo vadis, Hibernia?

There are many similarities between the Irish and the Jews, and the comparison is a lot more instructive than ideas about common links between Ireland and India (links which do exist but are buried in the mists of prehistory).  Unfortunately this resemblance is not a matter for self-congratulation; it is, rather, a cross to be carried.

Nations, like individuals, have their own vocations, their own specific missions.  Has Ireland, insula sanctorum et scholarum, made good use of the graces God has conferred on her?  And does she continue to do so in our own day?

* Breandán Ó Doibhlin, Néal Maidine agus Tine Oíche, Foilseacháin Náisiúnta Teoranta, 1964

 The Brandsma Review, Issue 39, October-November 1998 

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