Phases of Irish History

by Eoin Mac Neill

VIII. IRELAND'S GOLDEN AGE

As the conversion of Ireland to Christianity did not begin with Saint Patrick, so also he did not live to complete it. To say this is not to belittle his work or to deprive him of the honour that has been accorded to him by every generation of Irishmen since his death. No one man has ever left so strong and permanent impression of his personality on a people, with the single and eminent exception of Moses, the deliverer and lawgiver of Israel. It is curious to note that the comparison between these two men was present to the minds of our forefathers. Both had lived in captivity. Both had led the people from bondage. Some of the legends of St. Patrick were perhaps based on this comparison, especially the account of his competition with the Druids. Some of his lives go so far as to give him the years of Moses, six score years, making him live till the year 492, sixty years after the beginning of his mission. There is good evidence, however, that the earlier date of his death, 461, found in our oldest chronicle, and also in the Welsh chronicle, is the authentic date. Father Hogan, in his "Documenta Vitae S. Patricii," has drawn up a table of the acts of St. Patrick, and after this date, 461, the table is a blank. I have already alluded to the feature adopted by our early chroniclers from St. Jerome's version of Eusebius—the marking of certain epochs by giving the sum of years from a preceding epoch. We must remember that in those days the custom so familiar to us of giving an arithmetical name to every year, all in one series, was quite unknown. The first historian to use this method consistently was Bede, and it did not obtain general vogue until long after his time. In Ireland, though Bede's writings were intimately known, his method of dating by the year of the Christian era does not appear to have been taken up until the eleventh century—nearly three centuries after his time. What then was the ordinary method of dating? It was by regnal years. For example, the beginning of St. Patrick's mission is thus dated in the ancient chronicle:

"Patrick came to Ireland in the ninth year of Theodosius the younger, in the first year of the episcopate of Sixtus, forty-second bishop of the Roman Church." The Irish Nennius gives an Irish regnal date for this event—"the fifth year of King Loiguire."

It may be noted that this manner of dating lasted until our own time in the dating of the statutes of the English parliament.

Our present method of dating by a continuous era, giving each year its number in the series as its ordinary name, has this great convenience that we can calculate the space of years between two dated events by a simple subtraction. But if we find, to take an actual example from our oldest chronicle, that a certain event is dated in the ninth year of the emperor Theodosius II, and another event in the second year of the emperor Phocas, then in order to calculate the distance of years between, we must first know the length of each imperial reign from Theodosius to Phocas. The old chroniclers were constantly at the trouble of making calculations of this kind, calculations to which certain errors were incidental. Small errors accumulating become great errors, and so as a safeguard and corrective, here and there in the chronicle, at the record of some important event, we find these summaries of years. In the year 664, a very destructive plague broke out in Ireland. To the record of the event, the chronicler adds: "From the death of Patrick, 203 years." So the seventh-century chronicler knew 461 as the year of Patrick's death.

There are various things that indicate that professed paganism continued to exist in Ireland in the second half of the sixth century, i.e. for a century at least after Saint Patrick's death. By that time, however, as I have shown in the sixth lecture, a blending of the old native culture and the newly introduced Christian learning had taken place. And just as two elements in the chemical sense unite to form something that seems to have a nature and virtue all its own and not derived from the quality of either component, so this blending of two traditions in Ireland brought forth almost a new nation, with a character and an individuality that gave it distinction in that age and in the after ages.

Mr. Romilly Allen, in his book on "Celtic Art," has something to the purpose. "The great difficulty," he writes, "in understanding the evolution of Celtic art lies in the fact that, although the Celts never seem to have invented any new ideas, they professed an extraordinary aptitude for picking up ideas from the different peoples with whom war or commerce brought them into contact. And once the Celt had borrowed an idea from his neighbour, he was able to give it such a strong Celtic tinge that it soon became something so different from what it was originally as to be almost unrecognisable."

There is a mixture of truth and error in this statement that is characteristic of a great deal of modern scientific comment. For the explanation of a fact, something is offered which, upon close examination, is seen to be no more than the unexplained thing stated again in different terms. Why do masses of matter tend to approach each other? Because of the law of gravity. What do we mean by the law of gravity? We mean that masses of matter tend to approach each other.

It is to be seen from the quotation I have made that Mr. Romilly Allen starts with the idea of evolution. So does Professor Bury. His "Life of St. Patrick" is a sustained effort to prove that the singular chapter in the world's history opened by Saint Patrick's work in Ireland finds its explanation in this, that Saint Patrick was an evolved product, a resultant, a force naturally generated by the Roman Empire, of which Professor Bury is a distinguished historian. His "Life of St. Patrick" is designed to bring the singular and outstanding phenomenon of Ireland in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, into the direct series of cause and effect with which the historian's greater work has dealt. He writes, he tells us, as one of "the children of reason." But the children of reason cannot explain water as the resultant of its known physical components, oxygen and hydrogen, or salt as the resultant of chlorine and sodium. The properties of water and salt, so long as these substances remain water and salt, are not the properties of their component substances or any combination thereof. In like manner the historian or the archæologist will set himself an impossible task if he undertakes to explain every fact of history or archæology as a sort of mechanical resultant of pre-existing forces.