Part 12 (1/2)
According to the commonly-received opinion, St. Patrick's apostles.h.i.+p lasted thirty-three years; but, whatever may have been its real duration, certain it is that his feet traversed the whole island several times, and, at his pa.s.sing, churches and monasteries sprang up in great numbers, and remained to tell the true story of his labors when their founder had pa.s.sed away.
Nor was it with Ireland as with Rome, Carthage, Antioch, and other great cities of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Not the slaves and artisans alone filled these newly-erected Christian edifices.
Some of the first men of the nation received baptism. We have already spoken of the family of Laeghaire. In Connaught, at the first appearance of the man of G.o.d, all the inhabitants of that portion of the province now represented by the County Mayo became Christians; and the seven sons of the king of the province were baptized, together with twelve thousand of their clansmen. In Leinster, the Princes Illand and Alind were baptized in a fountain near Naas. In Munster, Aengus, the King of Cashel, with all the n.o.bility of his clan, embraced the faith.
A number of chieftains in Th.o.m.ond are also mentioned; and the whole of the Dalca.s.sian tribe, so celebrated before and after in the annals of Ireland, received, with the waters of baptism, that ardent faith which nothing has been able to tear from them to this day.
Many Druids even, by renouncing their superst.i.tions, abdicated their power over the people. We have mentioned Dubtach ; his example was followed by many others, among whom was Fingar, the son of King c.l.i.to, who is said to have suffered martyrdom in Brittany; Fiech, pupil of Dubtach, himself a poet, and belonging to the n.o.ble house of Hy-Baircha in Leinster, was raised by St.
Patrick to the episcopacy, and was the first occupant of the See of Sletty.
Fiech was a regular member of the bardic order of Druids, a poet by profession, esteemed as a learned man even before he embraced Christianity; and during his lifetime he was, as a Christian bishop, consulted by numbers and regarded as an oracle of truth and heavenly wisdom.
Nevertheless, Patrick encountered opposition. Some chieftains declared themselves against him, without daring openly to attack him. Many Druids, called in the old Irish annals _magi_, tried their utmost to estrange the Irish people from him. But he stood in danger of his life only once. It was, in fact, a war of argument. Long discussions took place, with varied success, ending generally, however, in a victory for truth.
The final result was that, in the second generation after St.
Patrick, there existed not a single pagan in the whole of Ireland; the very remembrance of paganism even seemed to have pa.s.sed away from their minds ever after; hence arises the difficulty of deciding now on the character of that paganism.
After its abolition, nothing remained in the literature of the country, which was at that time much more copious than at present--nothing was left in its monuments or in the inclinations of the people--to imperil the existence of the newly-established Christianity, or of a nature calculated to give a wrong bias to the religious wors.h.i.+p of the people, such as we have seen was the case in the rest of Europe.
May we not conclude, then, that Ireland was much better prepared for the new religion than any other country; that, when she was thus admitted by baptism into the European family, she made her entry in a way peculiar to herself, and which secured to her, once for all, her firm and undeviating attachment to truth?
She had nothing to change in her manners after having renounced the few disconnected superst.i.tions to which she had been addicted. Her songs, her bards, her festivities, her patriarchal government, her fosterage, were left to her, Christianized and consecrated by her great apostle; clans.h.i.+p even penetrated into the monasteries, and gave rise later on to some abuses. But, perhaps, the saint thought it better to allow the existence of things which might lead to abuse than violently and at once to subvert customs, rooted by age in the very nature of the people, some of which it cost England, later on, centuries of inconceivable barbarities to eradicate.
As to what exact form, if any, the paganism of the Irish Celts a.s.sumed, we have so few data to build upon that it is now next to impossible to shape a system out of them. From the pa.s.sage of the ”Confessio” already quoted, we might infer that they adored the sun; and this pa.s.sage is very remarkable as the only mention anywhere made by St. Patrick of idolatry among the people. If it was only the emblem of the Supreme Being, then would there have been nothing idolatrous in its wors.h.i.+p; and the strong terms in which the saint condemns it perhaps need only express his fear lest the superst.i.tion of the ignorant people might convert veneration into positive idolatry. At all events, there was not a statue, or a temple, or a theological system, erected to or connected with it in any shape.
The solemn forms of oaths taken and administered by the Irish kings would also lead us to infer that they paid a superst.i.tious respect to the winds and the other elements. But why should this feeling pa.s.s beyond that which even the Christian experiences when confronted by mysteries in the natural as well as the supernatural order? The awe-struck pagan saw the lightning leap, the tempest gather and break over him in majestic fury; heard the great voice of the mighty ocean which laved or lashed his sh.o.r.es: he witnessed these wonderful effects; he knew not whence the tempests or the lightnings came, or the voice of the ocean; he trembled at the unseen power which moved them --at his G.o.d.
So his imagination peopled his groves and hill-sides, his rivers and lakes, with harmless fairies; but fairy land has never become among any nation a pandemonium of cruel divinities; and we doubt much if such innocuous superst.i.tion can be rightly called even sinful error.
In fact, the only thing which could render paganism truly a danger in Ireland, as opposed to the preaching of Christianity, was the body of men intrusted with the care of religion--the Druids, the _magi_ of the chronicles. But, as we find no traces of b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices in Ireland, the Druids there probably never bore the character which they did in Gaul; they cannot be said to have been sacrificing priests; their office consisted merely in pretended divinations, or the workings of incantations or spells. They also introduced superst.i.tion into the practice of medicine, and taught the people to venerate the elements or mysterious forces of this world.
Without mentioning any of the many instances which are found in the histories of the workings of these Druidical incantations and spells, the consulting of the clouds, and the ceremonies with which they surrounded their healing art, we go straight to our main point: the ease and suddenness with which all these delusions vanished at the first preaching of the Gospel --a fact very telling on the force which they exercised over the mind of the nation. All natural customs, games, festivities, social relations.h.i.+ps, as we have seen, are preserved, many to this day; what is esteemed as their religion, and its ceremonies and superst.i.tions, is dropped at once. The entire Irish mind expanded freely and generously at the simple announcement of a G.o.d, present everywhere in the universe, and accepted it. The dogma of the Holy Spirit, not only filling all--_complens omnia_- - but dwelling in their very souls by grace, and filling them with love and fear, must have appeared natural to them. Their very superst.i.tions must have prepared the way for the truth, a change --or may we not say a more direct and tangible object taking the place of and filling their undefined yearnings--was alone requisite. Otherwise it is a hard fact to explain how, within a few years, all Druidism and magic, incantations, spells, and divinations, were replaced by pure religion, by the doctrine of celestial favors obtained through prayer, by the intercession of a host of saints in heaven, and the belief in Christian miracles and prophecies; whereas, scarcely any thing of Roman or Grecian mythology could be replaced by corresponding Christian practices, although popes did all they could in that regard. Nearly all the errors of the Irish Celts had their corresponding truths and holy practices in Christianity, which could be readily subst.i.tuted for them, and envelop them immediately with distrust or just oblivion. Hence we do not see, in the subsequent ecclesiastical history of Ireland, any thing to resemble the short sketch we have given of the many dangers arising within the young Christian Church, which had their origin in the former religion of other European nations.
In regarding philosophy and its perils in Ireland, our task will be an easy one, yet not unimportant in its bearings on subsequent considerations. The minds of nations differ as greatly as their physical characteristics; and to study the Irish mind we have only to take into consideration the inst.i.tutions which swayed it from time immemorial. They were of such a nature that they could but belong to a traditional people.
All patriarchal tribes partake of that general character; none, perhaps, so strikingly as the Celts.
People thus disposed have nothing rationalistic in their nature; they accept old facts; and, if they reason upon them, it is to find proofs to support, not motives to doubt them. They never refine their discussions to hair-splitting, synonymous almost with rejection, as seems to be the delight of what we call rationalistic races. It was among these that philosophy was born, and among them it flourishes. They may, by their acute reasoning, enlarge the human mind, open up new horizons, and, if confined within just limits, actually enrich the understanding of man. We are far from pretending that philosophy has only been productive of harm, and that it were a blessed thing had the human intellect always remained, as it were, in a dormant state, without ever striving to grasp at philosophic truth and raise itself above the common level; we hold the great names of Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and so many others, in too great respect to entertain such an opinion.
Yet it cannot be denied that the excessive study of philosophy has produced many evils among men, has often been subservient to error, has, at best, been for many minds the source of a cold and desponding skepticism.
No race of men, perhaps, has been less inclined to follow those intellectual aberrations than the Celtic, owing chiefly to its eminently traditional dispositions.
Before Christianity reached them, the intellectual labors of the Celts were chiefly confined to history and genealogy, medicine and botany, law, song, music, and artistic workings in metals and gems. This was the usual _curriculum_ of Druidic studies.
Astronomy and the physical sciences, as well as the knowledge of ”the nature of the eternal G.o.d,” were, according to Caesar, extensively studied in the Gallic schools. Some elements of those intellectual pursuits may also have occupied the attention of the Irish student during the twelve, fifteen, or twenty years of his preparation for being _ordained_ to the highest degree of ollamh. But the oldest and most reliable doc.u.ments which have been examined so far do not allow us to state positively that such was the case to any great extent.
In Christian times, however, it seems certain that astronomy was better studied in Ireland than anywhere else, as is proved by the extraordinary impulse given to that science by Virgil of Salzburg, who was undoubtedly an Irishman, and educated in his native country.
It is from the Church alone, therefore, that they received their highest intellectual training in the philosophy and theology of the Scriptures and of the Fathers. It is known that, by the introduction of the Latin and Greek tongues into their schools in addition to the vernacular, the Bible in Latin and Greek, and the writings of many Fathers in both languages, as also the most celebrated works of Roman and Greek cla.s.sical writers, became most interesting subjects of study. They reproduced those works for their own use in the _scriptoria_ of their numerous monasteries. We still possess some of those ma.n.u.scripts of the sixth and following centuries, and none more beautiful or correct can be found among those left by the English, French, or Italian monastic inst.i.tutions of the periods mentioned.