P.P.
INTRODUCTION—GENERAL
A most distinctive class of ancient Irish literature, and probably the class that is least popularly familiar, is the hagiographical. It is, the present writer ventures to submit, as valuable as it is distinctive and as well worthy of study as it is neglected. While annals, tales and poetry have found editors the Lives of Irish Saints have remained largely a mine unworked. Into the causes of this strange neglect it is not the purpose of the present introduction to enter. Suffice it to glance in passing at one of the reasons which has been alleged in explanation, scil.:—that the "Lives" are uncritical and romantic, that they abound in wild legends, chronological impossibilities and all sorts of incredible stories, and, finally, that miracles are multiplied till the miraculous becomes the ordinary, and that marvels are magnified till the narrative borders on the ludicrous. The Saint as he is sketched is sometimes a positively repulsive being—arrogant, venomous, and cruel; he demands two eyes or more for one, and, pucklike, fairly revels in mischief! As painted he is in fact more a pagan deity than a Christian man.
The foregoing charges may, or must, be admitted partially or in full, but such admission implies no denial of the historical value of the Lives. All archaic literature, be it remembered, is in a greater or less degree uncritical, and it must be read in the light of the writer's times and surroundings. That imagination should sometimes run riot and the pen be carried beyond the boundary line of the strictly literal is perhaps nothing much to be marvelled at in the case of the supernatural minded Celt with religion for his theme. Did the scribe believe what he wrote when he recounted the multiplied marvels of his holy patron's life? Doubtless he did—and why not! To the unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural. If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as composed the mind of the tenth century biographers of Declan and Mochuda. Dreamers and visionaries were of as frequent occurrence in Erin of ages ago as they are to-day. Then as now the supernatural and marvellous had a wondrous fascination for the Celtic mind. Sometimes the attraction becomes so strong as seemingly to overbalance the faculty of distinguishing fact from fancy. Of St. Bridget we are gravely told that to dry her wet cloak she hung in out on a sunbeam! Another Saint sailed away to a foreign land on a sod from his native hillside! More than once we find a flagstone turned into a raft to bear a missionary band beyond the seas! St. Fursey exchanged diseases with his friend Magnentius, and, stranger still, the exchange was arranged and effected by correspondence! To the saints moreover are ascribed lives of incredible duration—to Mochta, Ibar, Seachnal, and Brendan, for instance, three hundred years each; St. Mochaemog is credited with a life of four hundred and thirteen years, and so on!
Clan, or tribe, rivalry was doubtless one of the things which made for the invention and multiplication of miracles. If the patron of the Decies is credited with a miracle, the tribesmen of Ossory must go one better and attribute to their tribal saint a marvel more striking still. The hagiographers of Decies retort for their patron by a claim of yet another miracle and so on. It is to be feared too that occasionally a less worthy motive than tribal honour prompted the imagination of our Irish hagiographers—the desire to exploit the saint and his honour for worldly gain.
The "Lives" of the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church. Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often intricate operations of the Celtic mind.
By "Lives" are here meant the old MS. biographies which have come down to us from ages before the invention of printing. Sometimes these "Lives" are styled "Acts." Generally we have only one standard "Life" of a saint and of this there are usually several copies, scattered in various libraries and collections. Occasionally a second Life is found differing essentially from the first, but, as a rule, the different copies are only recensions of a single original. Some of the MSS. are parchment but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely fragments and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in place names or is entirely lost.
There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"—possibly one hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter—one in Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions. There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and one of these is in two recensions.
The surviving Lives naturally divide themselves into two great classes— the Latin Lives and the Irish,—written in Latin and Irish respectively. We have a Latin Life only of some saints, and Irish Life only of others, and of others again we have a Latin Life and an Irish. It may be necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin by Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives. Whether the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives or the Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a large extent, an open question. Plummer ("Vitae SSm. Hib.," Introd.) seems to favour the Latin Lives as the originals. His reasoning here however leaves one rather unconvinced. This is not the place to go into the matter at length, but a new bit of evidence which makes against the theory of Latin originals may be quoted; it is furnished by the well known collection of Latin Lives known as the Codex Salmanticensis, to which are appended brief marginal notes in mixed middle Irish and Latin. One such note to the Life of St. Cuangus of Lismore (recte Liathmore) requests a prayer for him who has translated the Life out of the Irish into Latin. If one of the Lives, and this a typical or characteristic Life, be a translation, we may perhaps assume that the others, or most of them, are translations also. In any case we may assume as certain that there were original Irish materials or data from which the formal Lives (Irish or Latin) were compiled.
The Latin Lives are contained mainly in four great collections. The first and probably the most important of these is in the Royal Library at Brussels, included chiefly in a large MS. known as 'Codex Salmanticensis' from the fact that it belonged in the seventeenth century to the Irish College of Salamanca. The second collection is in Marsh's Library, Dublin, and the third in Trinity College Library. The two latter may for practical purposes be regarded as one, for they are sister MSS.—copied from the same original. The Marsh's Library collection is almost certainly, teste Plummer, the document referred to by Colgan as Codex Kilkenniensis and it is quite certainly the Codex Ardmachanus of Fleming. The fourth collection (or the third, if we take as one the two last mentioned,) is in the Bodleian at Oxford amongst what are known as the Rawlinson MSS. Of minor importance, for one reason or another, are the collections of the Franciscan Library, Merchants' Quay, Dublin, and in Maynooth College respectively. The first of the enumerated collections was published 'in extenso,' about twenty-five years since, by the Marquis of Bute, while recently the gist of all the Latin collections has been edited with rare scholarship by Rev. Charles Plummer of Oxford. Incidentally may be noted the one defect in Mr. Plummer's great work—its author's almost irritating insistence on pagan origins, nature myths, and heathen survivals. Besides the Marquis of Bute and Plummer, Colgan and the Bollandists have published some Latin Lives, and a few isolated "Lives" have been published from time to time by other more or less competent editors.