Another lost work, to which we have already referred, was the Book of Ua Chongbhail. It was extant in the time of Keating, who quotes it as one of his authorities, but it has since been unfortunately lost, and nothing is now known of its contents.
II.—Sedulius.
It is said, however, that there were not only pagan writers and scholars, like Cormac Mac Art, in Ireland before the time of St. Patrick, but that several celebrated Christian writers, who flourished before the advent of our national Apostle, were of Irish birth or parentage. And this is the opinion, not merely of superficial writers, but of grave and learned men like Colgan, Usher, and Lanigan; and what is more, it has been admitted by foreigners as well as by our native authorities. These authorities have claimed for Ireland the great glory of having given birth to the celebrated Sedulius, the Christian Virgil, as he has been most appropriately called. The more doubtful honour of producing Caelestius, the associate of the heresiarch Pelagius, has been also claimed for Ireland; and according to others Pelagius himself was at least of Irish extraction. We propose to examine at some length the history of these writers, and especially to examine the evidence in favour of their alleged Irish origin. In the first place we shall give a full account, so far as it is now possible to ascertain his history, of the celebrated poet Sedulius.
In the best MSS. the name given is always “Caelius Sedulius,” and although the praenomen savours of Latin origin, and the nomen itself was not quite unknown in Rome,[34] still the name Sedulius gives decided indications of his Irish birth. At least two other distinguished Irishmen bore the same name. The first is that Sedulius of Irish origin, the Bishop of Britain, as he describes himself,[35] who subscribed the Acts of the Council of Rome held under Gregory II., in A.D. 721. The other, known as Sedulius the Younger, flourished in the first quarter of the ninth century, wrote a Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistles, and, as we shall see, has been frequently confounded with his more celebrated namesake, the poet. The old form of the name in Irish was Siadhal, or Siadhel, now pronounced Shiel. But in these older forms of the language the letters were not mortified in pronunciation; and thus Sedulius is naturally the latinized form of the Irish name. From the dawn of our history it was a name celebrated in Irish literature, especially in the department of medicine. Colgan refers to eight distinguished Irishmen who bore the family name of Siadhal, amongst others to Siadhal, son of Luath, Bishop of Dubhlinn, whose death on the 12th of February, 785, is recorded in the Martyrology of Donegal. The Danes, indeed, had not arrived in Dublin so early as A.D. 785, nor is there any satisfactory evidence of a diocese of Dublin at that time. He may, however, have been an abbot in the place, with episcopal orders.
The oldest writer[36] who distinctly asserts that the poet Sedulius was an Irishman is John of Tritenheim, or Trithemius, as he is more generally called.[37] This Trithemius, Benedictine abbot of Spanheim, flourished towards the end of the fifteenth century, and was certainly a very learned man. In some of the statements, however, made in this paragraph, he is not supported by any ancient authority that we know of. It is, moreover, evident from the list of the writings of Sedulius which he gives, that he confounds the poet with the commentator on St. Paul and St. Matthew, who, as all admit, was an Irishman, but flourished nearly four centuries later than the poet. Colgan, Usher, Ware, and a host of other writers at home and abroad, have followed Trithemius, and made the poet an Irishman.
It is, however, certain that, although there is some evidence that he was of Irish birth, there is absolutely no evidence that he was a native of any other country. It was, indeed, said that the poet was a Spaniard, and Bishop of the Oretani, but Faustinus Arevalus, himself a Spaniard, and author of a very able dissertation on Sedulius, prefixed to his splendid edition of the Christian Poets of the Fourth Century, published at Rome in A.D. 1794, declares that love of truth compels him to admit that the story of his preaching at Toledo, and of his Spanish episcopacy, is fabulous.[38]
Let us now try to ascertain what is known with certainty of this great Christian poet, whether Irishman or not.
In the “Palatine” Codex of the Vatican Library, No. 242, there is a paragraph which states that “Sedulius was a Gentile, but learned philosophy in Italy, was afterwards converted to the Lord, and baptized by the priest Macedonius, then came to Arcadia, or according to other MSS., Achaia, where he composed this book,” that is his Carmen Paschale.
In the Vatican Codex, No. 333, probably of the eleventh century, it is added that “St. Jerome, in his Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers, says that Sedulius was at first a layman, learned philosophy in Italy, and afterwards, by the advice of Macedonius, taught heroic and other kinds of metre in Achaia; he wrote his books in the time of Valentinian and Theodosius,” etc. Substantially the same statement is found in nearly all the twelve MSS. in the Vatican.
The scribe attributes to St. Jerome, who died in A.D. 420, that continuation of Jerome’s great Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers, which was really the work of Gennadius of Marseilles, who flourished in A.D. 495—the very time, as we shall see, that the writings of Sedulius were published. We find no statement of this kind about Sedulius in Gennadius’ Catalogue, as actually published, but Sirmond declares that he himself saw in some copies of Gennadius, that Sedulius died during the reign of Valentinian and Theodosius the Younger, to the latter of whom, as he alleges, he had dedicated his work.