ST. PAUL'S VISION;
OR,
THE LAST END OF THE MAN WHO LEADS A BAD LIFE.
PREFACE.
I took the following very curious account from an Irish MS. a couple of hundred years old, which had been thrown away on a loft in a farm house in the County Meath before I secured it. There are other copies of this story in the Royal Irish Academy, and a fragment in the library of University College, Dublin, but mine is the best copy I have met. There is no other version, so far as I know, of St. Paul's Vision that is at all like this. The Vision was at one time well known in Europe. It was at first, according to Tischendorf, probably composed in Greek, and there is a version of it in Syrian and another in Latin. The story is also found in old High German, in Danish, French and Slavonic. The best and longest Latin version is to be found in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, but there is not a word in it, nor in the Greek, nor in the Syrian, of the driving of the soul out of the body, or of the angel Michael's guiding St. Paul to the bedside of the dying man. As it is unlikely that some Irish Gael composed all this out of his own head, I can only surmise that it is a translation of a Latin or Greek original now lost, and that the story now survives through its translation into Irish alone.
We know that the Irish have saved for us several pieces of an apocryphal or mystic character, whose originals are now lost, such as the extraordinary piece called the "Ever-new Tongue," and the "Vision of Tundal."
This story contains a close resemblance to the "Debate between the Body and the Soul," which is usually known as the "Visio Philaberti," ascribed to Walter Mapes, or Map, or else to Walter Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and of which a kind of middle Irish version exists in the "Leabhar Breac" and was published by Atkinson in his "Passions and Homilies." Another imperfect version was published by Dottin in the "Revue Celtique," 1903. My MS. from which I have taken this Vision of St. Paul's contains an excellent copy of it also. Almost all the Irish copies ascribe it to Grosseteste.
The longest Latin version of this Vision contains 51 chapters or sections, and deals with St. Paul's account of Paradise and his other wanderings, as well as with the infernal regions.
There is a "Passion of St. Paul" in the Leabhar Breac, or Speckled Book, but there is not a word about this Vision in it. I found an account of St. Paul in another Irish MS., probably taken from some lost source. "A small, miserable-looking person was the apostle Paul. Broad shoulders he had; a white face with a sedate demeanour. His head small. Pleasant bright eyes he had. Long brows, a projecting (?) nose and a long beard with a little grey hair."
The horrid description of the soul leaving the body with such reluctance has a curious Pagan parallel in an exactly reverse sense in Lucan's Pharsalia, Book vi., 721, in the dreadful account of the sorceress conjuring back a soul into the dead body, and its reluctance to enter it. "Adspicit adstantem projecti corporis umbram Exanimes artus, invisaque claustra timentem, Carceris antiqui: pavet ire in pectus apertum, Visceraque, et ruptas letali vulnere fibras. Ah miser extremum qui mortis munus iniquae, Eripitur non posse mori, etc."