Mary of the Gael

Irish Jesuit Province

Mary of the GaelReview by: Aodh de BlacamThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 67, No. 794 (Aug., 1939), pp. 577-586Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514580 .

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577

The World of Letters.

"Mary of the Gael"

By AODH DE BLACAM.

HEN we have written in successive months on St. VV Patrick and St. Columcille in letters, it would be

unfitting to proceed to lighter themes rithout first some notes upon the remaining patron of Ireland, St. Brigid.

? 1..

"The Mary of the Gael ", Brigid was called, not once but often, one might say always. "She is the Prophetess of Christ, she is the Queen of the South, she is the Mary of the Gael," we read in one of the medieval Gaelic Lives. The very oldest refer ence to Brigid in all literature mentions this unique title. It is found in the supposed prophecy made by a druid before the saint's birth, speaking of " a fair birth, a fair dignity . . . she will be another Mary, mother of the great Lord "'1 Though the prophecy may be fabulous, the account of it goes back to the sixth century, so that the title must have been in use soon after Brigid's death. It never left her.

Now, what precisely does it signify that the first Irish nun was called Mary of the Gael, and was compared to Our Lady? On this subject much nonsense has been written. We are told by an eminent English historian that the old Irish Church developed a hagiography of its own in which the Celtic Saints eclipsed, or at any rate attained an equal eminence with, the most exalted figures in the Old and the New Testaments. St. Patrick, for



578 THE IRISH MONTH1LY

instance, was equated with Moses and Saint Bridget (sic) with the Virgin Mary herself ".2 From such statements as this by a sceptical writer it might be thought that the old Irish gave to Brigid the particular devotion which is due to the Mother of God. Compare the contention of many Protestant authors, that olden Ireland did not reverence Our Lady as Catholics do. We behold two extremes of misreading of the evidence, by interpreters who lack Catholic tradition. The Protestant tells us that devotion to the Mother of God, which he is pleased to call Mariolatry, did not exist among the old Gaels. We refer him to the agnostic who finds such devotion abounding and lavished on a second Mary.

One critic cancels the other.

Surely, to the Catholic mind, there is no mystery. If the Pro testant's notion that olden Ireland was out of harmony with the rest of Christendom, and that the old Irish did not share the devotion which Gaul and Spain and Italy cherished-if ever this unhistorical notion entered our minds, the phrase, " Mary of the Gael ", would suffice to correct it. The words would have no meaning if there were no Catholic reverence of Our Lady to give them point. We call a very holy man Christ-like, but the epithet never would occur to us if we were unbelievers. We search language for a superlative, and the word which we choose proves us Christians; a Jew would not use it, or one of your ethical agnostics. Because we hold the Catholic faith concerning Mary and the Catholic love of Her graces, every girl is enrolled among the Children of Mary. For that identical reason, the greatest of the holy women of Ireland was entitled the Mary of the Gael. It was the highest honour that could be paid to Brigid. With the rest of the Catholic world, then, old Ireland rever

enced Our Lady's unique privileges; and when it wished to praise the greatest of Irishwomen, it found its superlative in likening her



"MARY OP THE GAEL" 579

to Mary.. To the old Irish Brigid was the exemplar, in their own land and history, of the virtues of Mary. Every nun, taking

Mary as part of her name in religion, seeks to be another Mary, however humbly; and those who called Brigid Mary of the Gael signified that she succeeded in that holy aspiration beyond all other religious women of Ireland. She, most perfect among Irishwomen of the daughters of Mary, taught this island

Christendom what Mary was and is; Mary was seen in her-she was Mary of the Gael. The intense devotion to the Mother of God which caused our people, in later times, to call Her Muire but their daughters Miire, as if Her name must be held unique; the same devotion in olden times caused them to speak and preach of her daughter and exemplar more freely than of Her. Thus came it that the Daughter of Mary bore the title that mystifies good folk, not of the Household, to whom the Catholic way of thinking is unfamiliar. The Mary of the Gael was no substitute for the Mother of God, any more than the priest, alter (Jhristus, is a substitute for Christ; rather does the dignity of the representative signify the superlative dignity of the original.

? 2.

'This argument is difficult because it grapples with mental con fusion; but it is necessary, because many volumes lhave come out of that confusion to hold high rank in English letters. It is sur prising how many books offer nothing better, to illuiminate old Irish history, than the un-Catholic portrayal of Catholic things.

We find the Catholic past mirrored in a cracked glass. The world of English print is dominated by prejudices, false assumptions, misunderstandings and wild guesses. Brigid has been a spetcial victim for the reason that a nun's life affords few bold, exterior events, which history can record. St. Patrick was disguised long enough, though his life-story has been clarified in recent years by



580 THE IRISH MONTHLY

trustworthy authors such as Rev. Dr. Ryan, S.J.; Dr. Eoin MacNeill, and Dr. Helena Concannon; and yet even to-day the unsympathetic bias of such writers as Todd and Bury weighs against a just estimate in your non-Catholic histories and encyclo padias. St. Brigid suffers far more gravely than Patrick. With due respect to some homely, devotional works, and to incidental passages in some authoritative historians, we may say that very few books give a just, Catholic-proportioned, scholarly estimate of Mary of the Gael, in the light of modern Irish learning. It is surprising how many otherwise good writers are weak when they deal with Brigid. Even the learned Dr. Kenney, one of our three chief authorities for early Irish ecclesiastical history, makes the lamentable statement that " Brigit is one of the Irish saints as to whose relationship with a pagan divinity there can be little doubt ",3-a dictum. which so bristles with false assumptions of the modernistic evolutionary kind, that it would need a long essay to refute it.

Two books which give us the real Brigid are Irish Monasticism, by Rev. John Ryan, S.J., and Saint Brigid of Ireland, by Miss Alice Curtayne. The former deals only briefly

with Brigid, but with exceptional weight. The latter is as long and full and satisfying a work upon its subject as is likely ever to be written.

? 8.

In Miss Curtayne's book you may find a model of how a true historian works, bringing to the task all that scholarship has dis covered, and interpreting it in the light of tradition, that light which lives in the Catholic mind. The author wastes no space (as perhaps we have done) in justifying Brigid's Gaelic title; or, rather, the whole book tacitly justifies it. Nor is Miss Curtayne



" MARY OF THE GAEL " 581

concerned to explain away those supposed connections between Saint Brigid, patroness of Ireland, and Brigit, the.fiery and fabulous goddess of the poets in the pagan days, which appear to have impressed Dr. Kenney. She simply takes the half-dozen documents in Latin and Irish, those Lives of the saint which were cherished in olden Ireland, reads them as a good traditional Irish Catholic judgment directs, and then pieces together the story, as it seems most likely to her to have been in the far-off reality.

Here we must note a difficulty which besets writers of to-day, .who take up the story of Brigid after centuries of interruption in

our literary tradition. The old Lives, on which they must build, happen to be sermons-devotional writings on Brigid which were composed for people who did not need to be told the material

facts of her career, since those were thrice familiar to them. An

historian. Instead of statistics about convents founded and of events-how many convents a Teresa founds. A preacher of a sermon assumes that his hearers know the material facts, and he dwells upon the Saint's interior life, the virtues, the com

munion with God. Our old generations were aware that Brigid founded convents and reformed the state of women in Ireland;

what they wanted to hear from the altar was how this remarkable woman prayed. Nothing is more common in the Lives of the Irish Saints than this failure to tell or assess their achievements in the world; for the writers of the Lives were interested in higher aspects of the soul than those which are the concern of the secular historian. Instead of statistics about convents founded and nuns professed, therefore, our modem writer finds his material in anecdotes told to illustrate the Saint's character. The Lives teem with tales that make queer reading for the modern man; queer in part because they come from a remote, transitional, pastoral age, and queer in part by reason of modes of speech, of which the twentieth-century, English-speaking city-man has lost the




key. The unsympathetic historians, who have held sway so long, take the strange old fables and exotic diction au pied de la lettre, and tell us that Brigid was a myth. They are looking for a goddess, instead of for a woman, and any exaggerative word suits their book. Our Catholic biographer proceeds from different assumptions.

The Christians of the middle ages were not composed of a few learned tricksters, deceiving a community of fools. Our ancestors

were not all knaves and dotards. Yet, only on the assumption that they were, and that wisdom and honesty were born with us, can we accept the modernist's ridiculous notion that the arch bishops, bishops, priests and book-writers of olden time foisted a heathen goddess on the faithful. The Catholic historian thinks of a priest in the fifteenth century, preaching to his people, just as he thinks of a priest to-day preaching to a modern audience. In the Leabhar Breac of that century, there is a story of Brigid hanging her cloak on a sunbeam to dry. If it was told then, it was no more credible than a similar story, if it were told to-day of Mother Mary McAuley, the Brigid of the nineteenth century. It was just some flourish of speech, some metaphor to which we have lot the key, some way of saying that the ever-resourceful

Mother Brigid made the weather wait on her, or the like. The incident occurs in an account of Brigid's meeting with

St. Brendan; and while your unimaginative, or too-imaginative, non-Catholic writer fastens on the fabulous phrase to make Brigid into a sun-goddess, Miss Curtayne passes over to the serious part of the narrative. Brendan tells how he thinks of God at every seventh ridge; Brigid tells that her mind never is withdrawn from

Him. The passage, in the Catholic writer's commonsense inter pretation, is just an exchange of spiritual experience between two mystical souls, as if Santa Teresa talked with St. John of the Cross; and that is precisely what makes sense of the Leabhar



"' MARY OF THE GAEL" 588

Breac, and the pains of the learned scribes to record that meeting of the saints. In a word, the Catholic interpretation- flows from common-sense. Every fable is stripped of its accidents of language; its simplest explanation is taken, and behold! -the life of Brigid stands clear and credible and convincing. It is as if two persons viewed the conventional pictures of the saint in our church windows; and one said: " Ha ! the Irish imagine that Brigid used to lift up a stone church in one hand ", while the other, being Catholic and no stranger to church symbolism, replied mildly: " This is simply the artist's highly effective way of saying that Brigid built churches-how else could he say it so neatly in a picture?"

? 4.

Miss Curtayne's Brigid is a great nun-great in soul, great in labour, great in her achievement and influence. The stories concur in contributing to this plain picture. They never diverge from it. Her character is consistent throughout. She is always the lavish giver, the protector of the poor, the lover of hospitality and of good cheer in season. She defies convention, the stiff and cruel convention which had ruled a slave-owning, aristocratic society; for she was half royal and half slave by birth, and had precisely the indignation against injustice which comes of such an heredity, neither all servile nor all ascendant. Her strength of person, her homeliness, her masterful will and her good temper

-her anger is recorded only once, and then against a pair of nuns who were priggish-these are characteristics which are so distinctive that we realise how clearly she stood in the memories of the olden writers. She was not irascible like Patrick, haughty like Columcille; she had a character of her own. In other words, she was real. She was history, not myth.




Her part was to rescue womanhood in Ireland from the pagan subjection, and thereby to establish the reverence for the home, for motherhood and for chastity, which remained conspicuous as long as Ireland was the most faithful nation. Before her, there

were many religious women in Ireland, like those of whom Patrick in his dying Confession wrote as the glory of his mission; but, as Patrick tells, they lived in their parents' homes, often in the homnes of pagan parents, or sometimes in priests' households.

Not till Brigid's day, in the generation after Patrick, were religious communities of women possible, with the weakening of the pagan environment and the rise of the mighty leadership of Brigid. She filled Leinster with nunneries, and her convents, whether ruled by her or just inspired by her, achieved that exalta tion of womanhood, that establishment of the virtues of Mary in Irish Christendom, which exalted the Irish Church, and so

made possible the mighty Irish missions. Such is the image which was in old writers' and old preachers' minds, familiar like wise to their people, and needing no explicit and laborious delineation. Only when the living tradition was broken did the real Brigid fade from memory and need to be pieced together in learned essays and to be visualised anew.

? 5.

This interpretation of Brigid is developed by Miss Curtayne more fully than is possible here, and more convincingly than these weak paragraphs can achieve. It is plausible; it explains all. 'The immense cult of Brigid throughout the world that the Irish

missions converted, though the recorded events of her life are almost as few as those of Our Lady's life, becomes intelligible.

Mighty nuns, like Santa Teresa or Ste. Therese, do their work within walls, in uneventful days of tremendous spiritual action,



" MARY OF THE GAEL" 9 585

yet they sway nations and influence the world; and it was so with the Nun of Kildare. Brigid completed Patrick's work in the transformation of Ireland, and she did it while she looked after a convent and a flock of sheep. After-generations were naturally hungry for anecdotes about so great a woman; it is the human way; yet few would be gathered from a life that was so largely enclosed, and the few were embroidered. Not on the anecdotes, but on the soul of her, did Brigid's mighty power rest. Irish priests, wrestling with the rough congregations that were theirs in Roman cities captured by barbarians, and in pastoral valleys over which

war had swept and re-swept with savage violence, would tell their

turbulent people of the good Irish nun. " Be like Sancta Brigitta !-she's the one that would be a fit example for you!" Thus spread her cult. Her spirit was with the sons of Ireland, her example often on their tongues, and they invoked her when they sat to copy out a holy book, writing Adjuva Brigitta! at the head. All this is clear, clear as the life of Santa Teresa, to the Catholic mind. We know how Spanish missionaries in America wrote the name of the nun of Avila on the pagan map. Yet wd have historians of weight to ask us to believe that it was a mythical fire-goddess who was in the mind of Ireland's missionaries, and

was made patroness of innumerable churches in the lands that they subdued to Christian faith and discipline.

Miss Curtayne's book must rank as one of the most precious in an Irish library, wonderful in its lightly-carried learning and concision-merits beyond praise, and only to be discovered by close study, which finds fresh cause of admiration in every page.

Well for us it will be when all our island past is visualised and interpreted in the same manner; for then will we recover in full the mind of those former generations whose faith was so strong and realistic and orthodox. Hail, St. Brigid, Mary of the Gael, in whom we behold the Irish likeness of Our Lady, the teacher




of Her graces to our forefathers, Brigid, daughter of Mary, and first of the holy nuns of Ireland!

A Bhrigid scar ds mw chionn Do bhrat fionn dom anacal!

Norms.

This essay is based mainly on Saint Brigid of Ireland, by Alice Curtayne (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 2nd edition, 3/6 net), which we add to our books on the Saints, in our growing list of the Hundred Best Books.

iBid ala-Maire mar-Choimded Mathair.-See Notes to the Old Irish Life of St. Brigid, by Dr. M. A. O'Brien, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4.

SArnold 3. Toynbee, A Study of History Vol. :I, p. 326. Dr. Toynbee's authority is Dom Gougaud, O.S.B., but he iays a wrong stress on dicta of the Benedictine scholar.

SKenney, Sources for the Early History of Ireland, Vol 1, p. 357.

POSTSCRIPT.

By culpable oversight, I have done injustice to another good book-St. Brigid, Patroness of Ireland, by Rev. J. A. Knowles, O.S.A. (Browne and Nolan)-a work written before recent Gaelic scholarship had yielded its aid to biographers, but abound ing in interest and charm.



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Mary of the Gael