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 

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.

  

The National Way - Where?

THE NATIONAL WAY - WHERE?

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

WHERE do St Thomas More and Samuel Butler have nowhere in common?  Thus runs an old trick question.  The answwere is that they both wrote books entitled "Nowhere": More's Utopia is derived from the Greek ou topos (not place) and Butler's Erewhon is an anagram for nowhere.

In a collection of 14 essays entitled The National Way Forward, Justin Barrett attempts to map the path ahead for Ireland.  He reflects upon the position of our country, the so-called Celtic Tiger, in the aftermath of the X Case, the Maastricht Treaty, the divorce referendum and the Amsterdam Treaty.  He analyses Ireland from a political, economic and moral point of view and proposes some long-term solutions to what he sees as the current crisis.

I believe this is a book which the Pro-Life Campaign should have read and taken to heart prior to the March referendum.  Published well before the Protection of Human Life in Pregnancy Bill, it contains the following observation:

Surely we knew the Supreme Court was politically appointed and, if the Government were not Pro-Life, the Court could not indefinitely remain so?  Surely, we must have understood that a Pro-Life Amendment, no matter how cleverly crafted, could not survive deliberate malevolence on the part of ideologically motivated Justices?  That, plainly, constitutional prohibition on abortion could not forever resist both a hostile legislature and a hostile judiciary?

And there is the most basic question - IF WE DID NOT UNDERSTAND IT THEN, DO WE UNDERSTAND THAT NOW?

If we do not, then it is, as the saying goes, all over bar the shouting.  For new referendum or not, the forces fighting for Life will have committed the cardinal error of short-sightedness and narrow focus, which must inevitably deliver this country up to legalised and widespread abortion - and sooner rather than later.  (The National Way Forward, p. 16, emphasis in original)

So, in his examination of the X Case and its fall out, Mr Barrett seems to dismiss the practicality of any further pro-life amendment, let alone one with a specific wording.  In his analysis of recent Irish history, the X Case is pivotal to the direction the nation has taken, but his treatment of the case in the book's first essay caricatures the issue by subjecting the court to pop-psychoanalysis, and introduces a novel conspiracy theory to which the Hederman judgement can be regarded a key.  There is no doubt that all pro-lifers found the majority judgement in X to be deeply shocking.  But Mr Barrett's conclusion above is unhelpful, to say the least.

Conspiracy theory

In regard to the other meditations, it could be said that Mr Barrett's Weltanschauung is one that follows the masthead of this journal: Pro Vita, Pro Ecclesia Dei, et Pro Hibernia.  However, I do not think too many of the Brandsma Review's commentators would follow him down the roads he takes.  One can sympathise with an economic analysis that is critical of usury and the notion of money.  However, most of us would recognise the importance of both to the global economy.  For all the many faults of the present system, it would be unrealistic and a waste of energy to work on an alternative.

And peddling versions for a conspiracy theory substantially the same as that found in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Sion is not going to help either.  International finance may well have been behind the October Revolution of 1917, but as long as it remains unproved, it is at least unwise to publish the idea as established fact.

In regard to this country, Mr Barrett is right to see moral bankruptcy cutting across Irish society.  But some of his solutions are problematic.  For example, replacing the Oireachtas with a popularly elected executive president with absolute discretion to appoint a cabinet and without any formal opposition is, let us say, worrying.  Then one recalls that in the Republic, the leitmotiv is Plato's wish for a time when philosophers would be kings and kings philosophers.  Colloquially, this may be translated as "I want to be in charge".  But there the comparison between Plato and Mr Barrett ends - even if much of the latter's thought displays an idealisation of Spartan frugality, also evident in Plato.  This idealisation has appeared again and again in western thought: de Valera, whom Mr Barrett despises, was also an admirer of Sparta.

Questionable assertions

Some of Mr Barrett's historical assertions are questionable.  The idolisation of Michael Collins is not founded on wide reading of the 1916-1922 period, and the suggestion that W. T. Cosgrave ordered his shooting would require a lot more evidence than the conjecture offered.

Moving to our own times, Mr Barrett seems to think we can do business with Sinn Féin, as he doesn't think most of its supporters have much in common with the party's socialist platform.  But Sinn Féin's socialist manifesto must surely be taken absolutely seriously.  Sinn Féin have made political gains in the North, and to a lesser extent in the south, on their stated platform.  To think that one can make a deal with them on the basis of some understood alternative agenda that would be more palatable to us, is ludicrous. 

For a long time now, the bulk of the Provisional IRA members have adopted the philosophy and methodology of Marxist guerrillas; and most of the student influx into Sinn Féin has been due to the left-wing anti-establishment marketing of the party following the H-Block hunger-strike election gains.  Maybe their politics have moderated, but this process would need to go a lot further before we could have dealings with them.

Mr Barrett is very dismissive of the SDLP.  I too would criticise the SDLP's adoption of a socialist masthead, and its fruitless association with the British Labour Party and the European socialist parties at Strasbourg.  But it is wrong to dismiss the party which commands the vote of so many nationalists in Northern Ireland at local government and assembly levels.  Until Sinn Féin seriously alters its policies on socio-moral issues - especially on abortion - the SDLP must be preferred by nationalist pro-lifers.

In  regard to Mr Barrett's view on the European Union and further European integration, I have one observation.  I am a Eurosceptic; I have opposed every step toward European integration since the Single European Act of 1987 (I was far too young to vote against joining the Common Market in 1972).  But in spite of all Europe's difficulties, I would not anticipate a European analogue of the American Civil War as he does.

On constitutional matters,  I would not share Mr Barrett's admiration for America's Revolution and Constitution.  The Irish Constitution of 1937 in fact substantially follows Anglo-American democracy, with concessions to the French revolutionary tradition, to Catholic and secular schools of natural law and even with Fascism (the title An Taoiseach and the vocational compostion of Seanad Éireann) and with Communism (look very carefully at Article 43, on private property rights).

The one serious fault I would find in Bunreacht na hÉireannn is the lack of any meaningful separation of powers.  But this is the result of a strong party whip system - an accidental result of our constitution rather than something directly envisaged in it.

To return to the original point of this review: we just have to live with the fact that written constitutions are subject to creative interpretations in court.  This has even manifested itself in civil law jurisdictions.  To give a recent example, the German Supreme Court found crucifixes in Bavarian schools, hospitals and other public buildings to be repugnant to the German Constitution.  The Bavarian people successfully resisted this.

The chapter on the Church I found to be the most unhelpful, as it is very vague about the crisis in Western Catholicism and it proposes no concrete solutions whatsoever.  Mr Barrett also uses terminology such as "traditionalism" and "traditional Catholicism" without defining them.  There are many conflicting ideas about what these terms mean.

The Barrett book is part soap-box oration, part undergraduate monologue proposing solutions to the world's problems over coffee.  I have some advice for the Justin Barrett PR team: never allow your client use photographs of himself with open mouth, midstream in a stirring rally.  It looks like he's ranting.  If the media want to label Mr Barrett as Ireland's answer to Vladimir Zhiranovsky, it is inadvisable to hand them an invitation to do so.

Secondly, do not mention the Gaelic language or the inability of the populace to speak it, if the fada does not appear once in the book, and Irish words are almost uniformly spelt incorrectly.  And do not assume that either the Irish people or the media are stupid.  It tends to provoke a negative reaction.

The National Way Forward is published by the Guild Press, Longford.  194pp.  €7.55

The Brandsma Review, Issue 62, September-October 2002