“Neve quis ignoret, speciem crucis esse colendam,
Quæ Dominum portavit ovans, ratione, potenti
Quattuor inde plagas quadrati colligit orbis.
Splendidus auctoris de vertice fulget Eous,
Occiduo sacræ lambuntur sidere plantæ
Arcton dextra tenet, medium læva erigit axem.”
The influence of this remarkable epic, read as it was in all the Irish (and all the Christian) schools on the Continent and in Britain, must have been immense. The systematic adoption by its author of rhyme, assonant and consonant, and of alliteration, must have moulded the forms of subsequent literary production in all the nascent languages of Europe, north and south, as it taught them the art of alliteration, of assonant, and of consonant rhymes.
The influence of St. Brendan was not less vast. If the tale of his voyage to the West, and his arrival in a land of fair birds and great rivers be true, he discovered America a thousand years before Columbus. In any case, this voyage to the Land of the Blessed stimulated the imagination of generations. It has been termed a prelude to the “Divina Commedia,” and, taken with other mystical visions, which, starting from Ireland, circulated over the Continent, it doubtless helped to direct the great genius of Dante. In a similar manner an Irish visionary tale of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, transferred into the Continental languages, gave origin to one of Calderon’s Spanish dramas.
This voyage of Brendan was influential in another direction—in the discovery of America. Columbus studied the narrative. Hrafn of Limerick, the Norse voyager, thoroughly knew it, as did others of his nation, such as Leif and his friends. But there is direct proof of its coercive power. As you sail into Bristol, you must pass under a high hill which is known to this day as St. Brendan’s Hill.[7] There was a little chapel to St. Brendan on its summit, because of the reverence which all seamen, whether Norse, Saxon, or Celt, professed for the sailor-saint. Now, in 1480 two British merchants equipped two ships to sail to the Isle of Brasylle in the west of Ireland, but after nine weeks’ vain voyaging they put into an Irish port. The Bristol men (who were largely of Norse blood) were not discouraged. In 1498, the Spaniard De Ayala informed his sovereign that for seven years they had every year sent out two, three, or four light ships in search of the Island of Brazil (i.e., the Irish “Hy-Breasail”) and the Seven Cities. The adventure was under the direction of Cabot, the Genoese, who discovered the northern shore of America a year before Columbus reached its more inviting isles. Thus, either St. Brendan’s voyage is a fact, and then he was the true First Discoverer; or it is a fiction, and then it was the direct cause of that discovery. This were a remarkable result of the power of the imaginative literature of the ancient Irish. No other people on earth can claim the discovery of a Continent as the result of a romance.
Whilst some of the early Christians deprecated the study of the pagan classics, the Irish held large and more liberal views. This was peculiarly true of St. Columbanus. Authoritative, inflexible, a daring missionary, his royal mind embraced the wide domain of letters. His eloquence is confessed. His monastic maxims are described as fit for a brotherhood of philosophers, whilst his wit is shown in his lighter poems, his culture in the adoption of old Greek metre, and his Irish training in the terminal rhymes in the alliteration of many of his verses. The following show both final rhymes and concordant initials:
“Dilexerunt tenebras tetras magis quam lucem,
Imitari contemnunt vitæ Dominum ducem:
Velut in somnis regnent una hora lætantur,
Sed æterna tormenta adhuc illius parantur.”[8]
His national characteristics were impressed on the great School of Bobbio, which he created, in which he died, and whence his influence long radiated over Italy and the North.
Entering the old Cathedral of Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle, you will be shown the great marble chair in which, cold as the marble, Charlemagne sat enthroned, sceptre in hand, robed in imperial purple, and with diadem on brow, dead. So he sate when, a century and a half later, Otho and his riotous courtiers broke open the vault and stood sobered and appalled before the majesty of death. On that same chair he sate, in similar apparel, but with the light of life in his eyes, the new Augustus of a new Empire, when two Irish wanderers were brought before him. In the streets of the city in which he hoped to revive the glory of Athens and the greatness of Rome, they had been heard to cry out: “Whoso wants wisdom, let him come to us and receive it, for we have it for sale.” Their terms were not onerous—food and raiment. Their claims stood the test. One, Albinus, was sped to Pavia in Italy; the other, Clement, had the high honour of superseding the learned Anglo-Saxon Alcuin in the Palatine school of the Imperial city. Here, he taught the trivium and quadrivium—grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy—the seven arts. In his school sate Charlemagne under the school-name of David, the members of his family each under an academic name, and with these the members of the cortége, the Palatins or Paladins, destined to power and feats of fame. The teaching of the Irish professors here must have had considerable influence on the literature (e.g., the Chansons de Geste) which afterwards took its heroes from their scholars. Their authority was enhanced by the fact that Charlemagne himself worked with his Irish professors at a revision of the Gospels on the Greek and on the Syriac text.[9]
In the crash and chaos which followed soon after his death, when feudal vassals, strong as their nominal suzerain, lived an isolated war-like life and forgot letters, in the confusion caused by the shifting about of nations from the east and north—partly a rebound from imperial coercion—certain Irish names shine with especial splendour. The first is that of Johannes Scotus Erigena. Of unquestioned learning, versed in Greek, he was the founder of Scholastic Philosophy. This affects us still, for in Scholasticism, as in a forge, the intellect of the Middle Ages was fired, tempered, and made supple, keen, and trenchant. Hence, with all its powers awakened and under alert control, it was rendered fit for the production of the new sciences of modern times. Nor should it be forgotten that Fearghal the Geometer had but recently died, whose daring scientific speculations as to the Antipodes had shocked the stiff-minded Saxon Boniface. Dicuil brought exact science to bear on a cognate subject, in his work on the measurement of the earth—a work which has been republished in several foreign countries, but never in his native land.
The multitudes of students who flocked to Paris to hear Erigena, contented with couches of straw in the Rue de la Fouarre and old halls of the University, were not the last who invaded it to hear an eloquent Irishman. Four hundred years later, in the very beginning of the fourteenth century, another, and perhaps a still more illustrious, representative of Irish thought, in the person of Duns Scotus the Subtle Doctor, throned it over the minds of men. So great was his renown that when in 1308 he came to Cologne the city accorded him a triumphal entry, more splendid than a king’s.