The Early Irish Church. [Footnote 77]
[Footnote 77: Essays on the Origin, Doctrines, and Discipline of the Early Irish Church. By the Rev. Dr. Moran, Vice-Rector of the Irish College, Rome. Dublin, 1864. Pp. vii., 337. For sale by the Catholic Publication Society, New York.]
The early Irish Church is now the subject of a close scrutiny and deep study, that bids fair to shed upon it all the light that can be poured upon the subject by such written material as war, oppression, persecution, and penal laws have been insufficient to destroy. There are two schools, and their emulating labors will allow little to escape, both being well versed in ecclesiastical history, the Irish language, annals, and literature.
It is needless to say that there are a Catholic and a Protestant school—the latter of comparatively recent origin. The Anglican Church in Ireland, studying what it had long despised, now seeks to hold forth to the world that it is the real successor and representative of the early Irish Church; while the Catholic Church in Ireland is simply a papal continuation of the foreign church, forced on Ireland by Henry II. and Pope Adrian IV., and their respective successors. Unfortunately, however, the memory of man records not the fact that, in the sixteenth century and later, the Thirty-nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer were presented to the Irish as being the creed and liturgy of its early saints. Those who burnt the crosier of Patrick broke with the early Irish Church as effectually as they did with the romanized Irish Church of later days.
At the beginning of this century, Ledwich, following in the wake of the wild theories of Conyers Middleton, denied entirely the existence of St. Patrick, and his theory met with no little favor among those opposed to the church. Now his existence is admitted, his life studied and written, and efforts made, with no little skill, industry, and learning, to show that the Roman Catholic Church has no claim to St. Patrick or the church which he founded; a church so full of life, that its missionaries spread to other lands, and went forth with papal sanction to plant catholicity or revive fervor on the continent. It is to this curious phase of controversy that we are indebted for the volume of Essays which are here contributed by Doctor Moran, and which evince his learning and research, as well as his fitness for close historical argument.
That there should be much material for a discussion as to so early a period as the fifth century may surprise many, especially those who have always been taught to clear with a bound some ten or more centuries prior to the sixteenth. And it must be admitted that it is indeed surprising, when we consider the wholesale destruction of Irish manuscripts by the English in Ireland from the time of Henry down to the present century. From the period of the invasion to the Reformation, though invaders and invaded were alike Catholic, the English treated the Irish with such contempt that only five families or bloods were recognized as human, and even monasteries were closed to men of Irish race. The literature of the proscribed was of course slighted and despised.
From the Reformation the literary remains of earlier days were proscribed and destroyed, not only as Irish but as popish.
In this almost universal destruction, the ecclesiastical books, missals, sacramentaries, breviaries, penitentials, the canons of councils, doctrinal books, many historical and biographical treatises perished. The Irish people and their church hold by tradition to their predecessors, and claim to be direct successors of the church and converts of St. Patrick. Nor can the Anglican party which destroyed so much of Irish literature now base any argument on the silence of manuscript authority or draw any inference in their favor from the absence of proofs, for whose disappearance they are themselves accountable.
The uninterrupted adherence of the Irish nation to the Roman Church gives it the force of prescription, and it will hold good against all but the most direct and positive evidence.
No mere inferences can invalidate her claim.
The documents regarding the early Irish Church begin with the confession of Saint Patrick and his letter to Coroticus, a piratical British chief, published by Ware in 1656, from four manuscripts, and by the Bollandists from a manuscript in the Abbey of Saint Vaast.
The canons ascribed to the saint were published by the same, as well as by Spelman and Usher.
Of the lives of the saint, the least valuable of all is that by Jocelin, an English monk, who wrote soon after the conquest. This is given in the Bollandists and in Messingham's Florilegium. Earlier and better lives, four in number, were collected and published by Colgan in his Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae, a work of which we doubt the existence of a copy on this side of the Atlantic.
Among these earlier lives, one by Probus is of much value. It was printed, strangely enough, among the works of Venerable Bede, in the Basil edition of that father issued in 1563, and, apparently, the whole work was taken from manuscripts preserved at the Irish convent at Bobbio.
These are the more important material for the life of the apostle of Ireland, together with unpublished matter in some very ancient Irish manuscripts, codices known for centuries, such as the Book of Armagh, a manuscript of the eighth or ninth century, which contains a life of Saint Patrick by Muirchu-Maccu-Mactheni; the Leabhar Breac, considered the most valuable Irish manuscript on ecclesiastical matters; the Tripartite Life in the British Museum, the early national annals, etc.
As to the antiquity and value of these ancient codices Westwood in his Palaeographia Sacra Pictoria (London, 1843-5) may be consulted.
For the liturgy of the early Irish Church, we have a missal preserved at Stowe, in England, and ascribed to the sixth century, but which unfortunately has never been fully and completely published; a missal preserved in the monastery founded by Saint Columbanus at Bobbio, and printed by Mabillon in his Iter Italicum; the Antiphonarium Benchorense; the Exposition of the Ceremonies of the Mass preserved in the Leabhar Breac and a treatise on the Mass Vestments in the same volume, as well as the Liber Hymnorum, and various separate hymns.
The lives of the Irish saints, many of which have been published by Colgan, Messingham, the Bollandists, as well as the meagre Irish secular annals, throw much light on the social and religious life of the ancient Irish.
Such is, in brief, the documentary array to be appealed to in the controversy, as to the origin and character of the Irish Church.
And surely what has come down in fragments shows a church which the Anglican Church could not but condemn. The warmest advocate of the identity of the Anglican Church in Ireland with the early Irish Church, would find the old Irish mass, as preserved in the Stowe or the Bobbio missal, a very objectionable worship; the monks and nuns unsuited to our age; and the prayers, penitentiary, and belief in miraculous powers in the church utterly inconsistent with Protestant ideas; while the Catholic Irish would find the mass, if said in one of their churches, so like that they daily hear, that it would excite scarce a word of comment; monks and nuns would certainly excite less; and the prayers of that early day still circulate with the commendation of the actual head of the Catholic Church, the successor of Celestine.
The position having been abandoned that St. Patrick never existed, national pride, which from the days of Jocelin has bent its energies to prove that he was a Briton of the island of Great Britain and born in Scotland, now would prove that he was a genuine Englishman in his total renunciation of papal authority.
In the recent life of St. Patrick by Dr. Todd, this, though treated lightly as a matter of slight import, is really the marrow of the book.
The mission of St. Patrick has been uniformly attributed to Pope St. Celestine, who held the chair of Peter from 422 to 432; and is intimately connected with a previous one of the deacon of Celestine, St. Palladius, who made an unsuccessful attempt to christianize Ireland; and the mission of St. Palladius grew out, it would seem, of a deputation of Gallic bishops to Britain to check the progress of Pelagianism.
Todd endeavors ingeniously to break up these connected facts. He seeks to show that Palladius was a deacon not of St. Celestine, but of St. Germain, Bishop of Auxerre; that the history of Palladius and Patrick have been confounded; and that Patrick was not sent to Ireland till 440, and consequently could not have been sent by St. Celestine. This would, to some extent, deliver the early Irish Church from the terrible responsibility of having received its origin from Rome.
Dr. Moran's work is made up of three essays: "On the Origin of the Irish Church and its Connection with Rome;" "On the teaching of the Irish Church concerning the Blessed Eucharist;" and, on "Devotion to the Blessed Virgin in the Ancient Church of Ireland."
In the first of these essays he meets the arguments of the Senior Fellow of Trinity by a careful and close examination, showing that both Palladius and Patrick owed their mission to Rome and to St. Celestine, and settles conclusively the date of St. Patrick's landing in Ireland.
He discusses at length the mission of Palladius; sketches the life of St. Patrick, and his connection with St. Germain; and states briefly the proofs of his Roman mission. He then refutes the array of modern theories in regard to the great apostle from Ledwich to Todd, and accumulates evidence to show how the early Irish Church regarded the holy see.
The period when Saint Palladius and Saint Patrick successively proceeded to Ireland, was not one of obscurity. The church was full of vitality, and met Nestorius in the east, Pelagius in the west, the Manichees in Africa, with the power and might of a divine institution. It was the day of St. Augustine, St. Germain, of Vincent of Lerins, of Cassian, Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Jerome. St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Athanasius, even, and St. Anthony were still fresh in the memory of those who had heard the words of life from their lips, or gazed on them in reverence. The Council of Ephesus was actually in session defining the honor due to the Mother of God. The canon of Holy Scripture had been settled thirty-five years before, in the Council of Carthage, and St. Jerome's version was gradually supplanting the Vetus Itala in the hands of the faithful.
The monastic life, a vigorous tree planted at Rome by Athanasius, had already spread over the Latin Church, in its multiform activity and zeal. It grew under the mighty hand of Augustine, was nurtured by that St. Martin of Tours, whose reputation was so widespread. It gave a Lerins, with its school of bishops, writers, and saints; the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles, where Cassian prayed and wrote.
But if this was a great age of the church, the Roman empire showed no such signs of vitality. It was tottering to its fall. Along its whole western territory, stretching from Italy to Caledonia, the pagan barbarians of Germany were pressing with relentless power, threatening destruction to Roman, romanized Briton, and romanized Gaul—for all of whom the German had but one name, still preserved by the race, the Anglo-Saxon terming the descendants of the Britons Welsh, as the Fleming does the French or the south of Germany the Italian. A little later this German race, last in Europe to embrace the faith and first to revolt from it, overran Britain, establishing the Saxon monarchy, making Gaul the land of Franks, and giving Spain and Italy Gothic sovereigns.
Before this torrent burst, the church in Italy, Britain, and Gaul was closely united. Heresies appeared and gained ground in Britain. To meet this Pelagian enemy, the insular bishops appealed for aid to Gaul. The bishops of that country in council, selected St. Germain and St. Lupus to go to Britain; and Prosper, in his chronicle, assures us that, through the instrumentality of Palladius the deacon, Pope Celestine in 426 sent Germain in his own stead to root out heresy there, and direct the Britons to the Catholic faith.
But this was not the only work. To recover what was straying was well; but a new island was yet to be conquered to the faith, one in which the Roman eagle had never flashed, but which seems to the eye of faith a field white for the reaper.
Attached to Germain by ties of which there is no doubt, was a man of Roman-British race, whose whole associations were with the church of Gaul, who had been a slave for several years in Ireland, and yearned to return to it as a herald of the Gospel. He is stated, in the earliest lives, to have been recommended by Saint Germain to Pope Celestine, as one fitted for such a work. The pope, however, either to give greater dignity to the new mission, or to leave no doubt of the Roman character of the work, chose in 431 Palladius, deacon of the Roman Church, already mentioned, to be the first apostle to the Scots, as the Irish were then termed. Saint Germain and Saint Lupus went to Britain in 429, and labored with zeal and success there during that year and the next. The ancient Irish writer, who wrote a commentary on a hymn in honor of Saint Patrick by St. Fiacc, and who is cited by Irish scholars as scholiast on Saint Fiacc's hymn, states that Saint Patrick accompanied the Gallic bishops to Britain. In itself it would be probable. The intimate relations between the Bishop of Auxerre and the British priest, would naturally lead that prelate to choose him as a companion. That Palladius, who had been the pope's agent in the matter, accompanied them, also, would seem natural. His selection for the Irish mission after Saint Germain's return in 430, would follow as naturally.
He was made bishop, and sent to the Scots (Irish) in 431; and that Saint Patrick was in some manner appointed by the pope to the same work, or connected with the mission with a degree of authority, is evident from the fact that, when Saint Palladius, after an ineffectual attempt to establish a mission in Wicklow, was driven from the country, and died, as some say, in Scotland, his Roman companions at once hastened to Saint Patrick, to notify him as one who possessed some jurisdiction in the matter; and all accounts agree that on this intelligence, Saint Patrick at once proceeded to obtain the episcopal consecration, and sailed to Ireland.
Looking at the whole action of the pope in regard to the checking of Pelagianism in Britain, and the conversion of Ireland, this theory, first suggested by Dr. Lanigan, answers every requirement. It contravenes no fact given by any early author, and is in perfect harmony with every part. The Rome-appointed subordinates of Palladius reported to Patrick as a recognized superior, and it is utterly impossible that between him, the disciple of Germain and Palladius, the Roman delegate to Germain, there could have been diversity of faith or ecclesiastical discipline. The appointment of Patrick to the Irish mission was simultaneous with that of Palladius, to whom the priority was given. On the death of Palladius he succeeded, and required but the episcopal consecration to begin his labors as a bishop in Ireland.
This would make the Roman origin of the Irish Church too clear for Dr. Todd to accept it without a struggle. With what might almost be termed unfairness, he ignores the statement of a perfect catena of Irish writers as to the character of Palladius, in order to make him a deacon, not of the pope, but of Saint Germain.
Later lives of Saint Patrick, written long after the death of the saint, by introducing vague traditions, have doubtless embarrassed the question. That some took his appointment by, Celestine to have required his visiting Rome after the death of Palladius, was natural; but he would really have been appointed by Celestine, even though consecrated in Gaul after the death of that pope, if this was done in pursuance of previous orders of the holy see. It would not be strange to Catholic ideas that Saint Patrick had what would be now termed his bulls unacted upon, either from humility or some other motive; and the history of the church contains many examples where bulls have been so held, to be acted on ultimately only when the necessity of the church made the candidate feel it a duty to assume the burden from which he shrank.
Dr. Moran proves that Patrick drew his mission from Rome by a solid array of authorities, which embrace some of the most ancient Irish manuscripts extant. The Book of Armagh contains two tracts, one the Dicta Sancti Patricii, expressing his wish that his disciple should be "ut Christiani ita et Romani;" the other the annals of Tirechan, written about the middle of the seventh century, stating absolutely that in the thirteenth year of the Emperor Theodosius the Bishop Patrick was sent by Celestine, bishop and pope of Rome, to instruct the Irish.
The Leabhar Breac, styled by Petrie "the oldest and best Irish manuscript relating to church history now preserved," furnishes us evidence no less clear and decisive. The second Life of Saint Patrick, ascribed to Saint Eleran, (ob. 664;) the scholiast on Saint Fiacc, the Life by Probus, are all equally explicit, showing it to have been a recognized fact in Ireland within two centuries after the apostle's own day.
Dr. Moran, besides these, accumulates other authority of a later period, some hitherto uncited, and due to the researches of German scholars among the manuscripts still extant, due to the hands of the early Irish apostles of their land.
One argument of Dr. Todd was based on the silence of Muirchu Maccu Mactheni in the Book of Armagh; but Dr. Moran answers this fully by showing that part of that early writer's work is missing; and that, as the Life of Saint Probus follows, word for word, the parts extant, we may assume that Saint Probus followed him in other parts; and in regard to Saint Patrick's mission, Saint Probus is clear and plain.
The church in Ireland, then, was the spiritual child of Rome and Gaul. Her great missionary, a Breton, came from the schools of Gaul, with authority from Rome, and the church which he founded was in harmony with the church in Britain, Gaul, and Italy. What the faith of the church in those countries was, admits of no doubt; and were there no monuments extant to give explicit evidence of the faith of the Irish Church, this would give us implicit evidence sufficient, in the absence of any contradictory authority, to decide what its faith, doctrines, and liturgy were.
The vice-rector of the Irish College marshals his authorities again and shows that the church founded by an envoy from Rome retained its connection with the holy see and its reverence for the See of Peter. He adduces hymns of the Irish Church, various writings of successive ages, express canonical enactments regarding Rome, and finally the pilgrimages to the holy city, in itself an irrefragable proof of the veneration entertained for Rome; but he crowns all this by adducing the many extant cases in which Irish bishops and clergy appealed to Rome.
But it may be thought that the terrible changes caused by the invasion of the barbarians which in a manner isolated Ireland may have led insensibly to differences of faith or practice in that island, cut off from the centre of unity by the pagan England that had succeeded Christian Britain, and the pagan France that replaced Christian Gaul.
Have we aught to prove what the Irish Church believed and taught; at what worship the faithful knelt; how they were received into the body of believers; what rites consoled them in death? Fortunately there is much to console us here, as well as to convince us. One of the most important parts of the work we are discussing is the clear and distinct manner in which he proves the Irish character of the missal found at Bobbio, and reproduced by Mabillon in his Iter Italicum. Having, by what light we possessed, come to the conclusion that it was in no sense Irish, we examined this portion with interest, and must admit that the proof is clear. Bobbio was a monastery founded by St. Columbanus, and its rich library gave much to the early printers, and yet much still remains in the Ambrosian library at Milan. This missal has no distinctive Irish offices, and its containing an office of St. Sigebert, King of Burgundy, seemed to refute any idea of its being Irish. Yet we know that St. Columbanus founded a monastery at Luxeu before proceeding to Bobbio, and in both places retained his Irish office. The adding of a local Mass would not be strange. In itself this missal corresponds with that Irish missal preserved at Stowe in many essential points, and with no other known missal; the orthography and writing are undoubtedly Irish; the liturgy in itself is not that of Gaul; it resembles it in many respects, but the canon is that of Rome. This striking feature appears in the Stowe missal. Mabillon, from its antiquity, himself infers that Saint Columbanus brought it from Luxeu, and it is as probable that he brought it from Ireland.
It gives us the Mass of the ancient Irish Church, and Curry gives in his lectures a translation of an "Exposition of the Ceremonies of the Mass" from the Irish in the Leabhar Breac. The Mass and the exposition place beyond a doubt the belief of the Irish Church in the Real Presence. The exposition is as distinct as if written to meet any opposition. "Another division of that pledge, which has been left with the church to comfort her, is the body of Christ and his blood, which are offered upon the altars of the Christians; the body even which was born of Mary the Immaculate Virgin, without destruction of her virginity, without opening of the womb, without the presence of man; and which was crucified by the unbelieving Jews out of spite and envy; and which arose after three days from death, and sits upon the right hand of God the Father in heaven." (Curry's Lectures, p. 307.)
The words of the Mass are no less explicit, and the Bobbio missal contains these words: "Cujus carne a te ipso sanctificata, dum pascimur, roboramur, et sanguine dum potamur, abluimur." The whole early literature, the lives of the saints, and other monuments teem with allusions to the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood, and the saying of Mass is not unfrequently expressed by the term "conficere Corpus Domini."
The proofs adduced by Dr. Moran on this point extend to sixty pages, showing the most exact research and learning, and accumulating evidence on evidence, meeting and refuting objections of every kind.
The sacrament of penance and its use is no less apparent; nor is the devotion to the blessed Virgin and the saints a point on which the slightest doubt is left.
Dr. Moran's work is certainly, since the appearance of Lanigan's Ecclesiastical History, (4 vols. Dublin, 1822,) the most valuable treatise on the early Irish Church, and completely sets at rest the theories set up by W. G. Todd, in A History of the Ancient Church in Ireland, London, 1845; and with great learning and skill by James H. Todd, in his Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland: A Memoir of his Life and Mission, Dublin, 1864.
We need now a popular treatise embracing the result of his labor, in a small volume, like the work of W. G. Todd, and a volume containing the Bobbio missal, (that at Stowe is probably sealed,) with the treatise on the Mass and vestments from the Leabhar Breac, and a selection of the prayers and hymns of the early church that have come down to us. With these common in the hands of the clergy, to familiarize them with what remains of the church of their fathers, we may hope to see the old Irish Mass, the "Cursus Scottorum" or Mass of the early Irish Church, chanted by the cardinal archbishop of Dublin on the great patronal feast, as the Mozarabic liturgy is in Spain, or the Ambrosian at Milan. It would be a living proof that, if the Irish and other churches laid aside their peculiar liturgies to adopt exclusively that of Rome, it was not that the former were objectionable; but that unity was too desirable to be postponed.