Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum; Or, Ireland's Ancient Schools and Scholars

by John Healy

Of course monasteries in the spiritual sense—as moral entities—have always been much the same in every country and in every age of the Church’s history. The plan of the spiritual edifice is found in the Gospel, and has been drawn for all time by Christ Himself.

The true monk is a man, as his name implies, who whether in the city or in the desert, should always strive to be alone with God. In this sense the prophets Elias and Eliseus under the Old Law, like John the Baptist at the threshold of the New Law, were monks in the most perfect sense of the word. Then, again, the monk whether living alone in the desert, or in community with others, must follow those counsels of perfection, which have been set forth by the teaching and example of the Son of God Himself. That is to say, he must renounce all worldly goods and live in poverty, in chastity, and obedience, when he has a superior. If he has no immediate superior, then he is a hermit, and God Himself, whom he seeks to please in all things, becomes his Superior. These means of perfection have been always deemed essential to the monastic character in the Church of God. One cannot conceive a married monk, nor one in the full enjoyment of his worldly fortune, nor one without a superior, except where he lives altogether alone with God, following His inspirations; and even then the bishop of the locality is always recognised by the Church as the Superior, whom he is bound to obey.

With these essential means of perfection were also combined silence, prayer and labour, whether manual or mental. Idleness is unknown to the monastic state; the monk should be always doing something pleasing to God. It may be to pray, or to read, or to work in the fields, or to take his necessary rest, but he must be always doing the work of God.

Monasticism in one sense or another always existed, and always will exist in the Church. It flourished amongst the first Christian communities at Jerusalem, who had only one heart and one soul, who sold their lands and houses, and laid the price at the feet of the Apostles to feed the poor. It existed in the catacombs during the persecutions, and took more definite shape in the deserts of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia.

At first the monk was, as his names implies, a hermit—eremites—one who lived alone in the desert in the practice of evangelical perfection. Such were St. Paul, St. Anthony, Serapion, and thousands of others who imitated their example and lived in solitary cells or rocky caves in Syria, Armenia, and Nitria on the western shores of the Nile some thirty miles from Cairo. Pachomius seems to have been the first who formed these solitaries into a community following one rule and recognising a common superior. He founded his monastery at Tabenna, on the Nile, in Lower Egypt. His sister is said to have been the first who founded a convent of nuns not far from her brother’s monastery, in order that she might have the benefit of his advice and direction. The exact date cannot be ascertained; but as he died rather young, about the year A.D. 349, it cannot have been much earlier than A.D. 340. St. Anthony had indeed already undertaken the guidance of certain solitaries, who had placed themselves under his direction. But it was Pachomius who really changed the monasteries, or rather the laura, into a ‘convent,’ in which all the members of the community dwelt within the same building,[109] were subject to the same rule, and obedient to the same Superior. This change, however, as might be expected, was not accomplished at once; it was rather very gradual, and grew out of the necessities of the time. The laura, which was a group or village of monastic cells, surrounding the oratory and cell of the abbot, under whose direction the monks assembled for their common devotions in the church and sometimes for their common meals in the refectory, was the intermediate stage of monastic development, and it continued to be, both in Egypt and in Ireland, for many centuries the prevalent form of monastic life.

From Egypt and Syria monasticism was brought to Rome about the middle of the fourth century by Athanasius, the great champion of the Divinity of Christ, by Honoratus, who founded the island monastery of Lerins, and by John Cassian, whose Institutes were a kind of manual in all the earlier monasteries of the West.

The great St. Martin of Tours, the father of monasticism in Gaul, was inspired by the writings of Athanasius, and under the influence of that inspiration founded his own monastery at Ligugé, and subsequently at Marmoutier, on the banks of the Loire, which became the cradles of monastic life in Gaul. We have already seen that St. Patrick had full opportunity of learning the discipline of Marmoutier; and of course what he learned there and elsewhere, he carried home with him to Ireland. But his life was too full of missionary labours to be given to the government or foundation of monasteries. That work was left to the rising generation; by them it was undertaken and nobly accomplished. Enda of Aran, Finnian of Clonard, Brendan of Clonfert, and their associates of the Second Order of the Irish Saints, were the men who first founded regular monasteries and monastic schools in Erin.

In trying to give a view of the general character of the monastic institutions founded by those holy and learned men, it is well to consider the subject in its various aspects; that is to say, the Buildings, the Discipline and Government, and the Work of an Irish Monastery. We have abundant materials to help us in this inquiry in the Monastic Rules, in the lives of the founders of these houses, and in the remnants of the ancient buildings themselves, which are still to be seen on our remotest shores and islands. But there is one work especially valuable in this enquiry—that is, Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba, edited by the learned Dr. Reeves, late Bishop of Down and Connor. No other work that we know of is so valuable and so indispensable to the Irish ecclesiastical historian, and none has been edited with greater learning and impartiality.

II.—The Buildings.

The various buildings connected with an Irish monastery were generally but not always surrounded by a circular or oval rampart, which was at once a protection against enemies, or wild beasts, and also a limit beyond which the brethren were not allowed to wander without permission, and within which strangers, as a rule, were not allowed to intrude. Women were in all cases excluded from the sanctuary within this boundary. The wall or rampart was composed sometimes of earth dug up from a fosse at its base, when it was called a rath or lis; sometimes of stone, when it was called a caiseal, and sometimes of earth faced with stone, and then it was known rather as a caithir than a caiseal. The name dun, according to Dr. Petrie, was indifferently applied to any of these structures. But O’Curry quotes an ancient legal tract, which proves that the dun, strictly speaking, was “an enclosure made by two walls or mounds, with water between them.” (Manners and Customs, vol. ii., p. 4.) This mur or mound was sometimes very strong and very high, fenced, too, with stakes on the top, and when necessary was double or threefold, with a deep dyke between each rampart. There was generally only one entrance, and when danger was apprehended from lawless foes, this entrance was strictly guarded night and day. It was considered sufficiently effective against the passing attacks of the native spoilers; but when the Danes began their bloody and relentless raids, the round tower was found to afford a much stronger and safer asylum.