An Old Irish Legend
March 17, 2020![]() |
Ernest Renan |
Ernest Renan. The
Poetry of The Celtic Races
Vol. 32, pp. 174-182 of
The Harvard Classics
(St. Patrick's Day.)
An old Irish legend
tells how, while St. Patrick was preaching about Paradise and Hell,
several of his audience begged to be allowed to investigate the
reality of these places. St. Patrick actually satisfied their
curiosity.
Without
contradiction1 the legend of St. Brandan is the most
singular product of this combination of Celtic naturalism with
Christian spiritualism. The taste of the Hibernian monks for making
maritime pilgrimages through the archipelago of the Scottish and
Irish seas, everywhere dotted with monasteries, 2 and
the memory of yet more distant voyages in Polar seas, furnished the
framework of this curious composition, so rich in local impressions.
From Pliny (IV. xxx. 3) we learn that, even in his time, the Bretons
loved to venture their lives upon the high seas, in search of unknown
isles. M. Letronne has proved that in 795, sixty-five years
consequently before the Danes, Irish monks landed in Iceland and
established themselves on the coast. In this island the Danes found
Irish books and bells; and the names of certain localities still bear
witness to the sojourn of those monks, who were known by the name
of Papæ (fathers). In the Faröe Isles, in the
Orkneys, and the Shetlands, indeed in all parts of the Northern seas,
the Scandinavians found themselves preceded by those Papæ, whose
habits contrasted so strangely with their own. 3 Did
they not have a glimpse too of that great land, the vague memory of
which seems to pursue them, and which Columbus was to discover,
following the traces of their dreams? It is only known that the
existence of an island, traversed by a great river and situated to
the west of Ireland, was, on the faith of the Irish, a dogma for
mediæval geographers.
The story went that, towards the
middle of the sixth century, a monk called Barontus, on his return
from voyaging upon the sea, came and craved hospitality at the
monastery of Clonfert. Brandan the abbot besought him to give
pleasure to the brothers by narrating the marvels of God that
he had seen on the high seas. Barontus revealed to them the
existence of an island surrounded by fogs, where he had left his
disciple Mernoc; it is the Land of Promise that God
keeps for his saints. Brandan with seventeen of his monks desired to
go in quest of this mysterious land. They set forth in a leather
boat, bearing with them as their sole provision a utensil of butter,
wherewith to grease the hides of their craft. For seven years they
lived thus in their boat, abandoning to God sail and rudder, and only
stopping on their course to celebrate the feasts of Christmas and
Easter on the back of the king of fishes, Jasconius. Every step of
this monastic Odyssey is a miracle, on every isle is a monastery,
where the wonders of a fantastical universe respond to the
extravagances of a wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of
Sheep, where these animals govern themselves according to
their own laws; elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where
the winged race lives after the fashion of monks, singing matins and
lauds at the canonical hours. Brandan and his companions celebrate
mass here with the birds, and remain with them for fifty days,
nourishing themselves with nothing but the singing of their hosts.
Elsewhere there is theIsle of Delight, the ideal of
monastic life in the midst of the seas. Here no material necessity
makes itself felt; the lamps light of themselves for the offices of
religion, and never burn out, for they shine with a spiritual light.
An absolute stillness reigns in the island; every one knows precisely
the hour of his death; one feels neither cold, nor heat, nor sadness,
nor sickness of body or soul. All this has endured since the days of
St. Patrick, who so ordained it. The Land of Promise is
more marvellous still; there an eternal day reigns; all the plants
have flowers, all the trees bear fruits. Some privileged men alone
have visited it. On their return a perfume is perceived to come from
them, which their garments keep for forty days.
In the midst of these dreams there
appears with a surprising fidelity to truth the feeling for the
picturesque in Polar voyages,—the transparency of the sea, the
aspect of bergs and islands of ice melting in the sun, the volcanic
phenomena of Iceland, the sporting of whales, the characteristic
appearance of the Norwegian fiords, the sudden fogs,
the sea calm as milk, the green isles crowned with grass which grows
down to the very verge of the waves. This fantastical nature created
expressly for another humanity, this strange topography at once
glowing with fiction and speaking of truth, make the poem of St.
Brandan one of the most extraordinary creations of the human mind,
and perhaps the completest expression of the Celtic ideal. All is
lovely, pure, and innocent; never has a gaze so benevolent and so
gentle been cast upon the earth; there is not a single cruel idea,
not a trace of frailty or repentance. It is the world seen through
the crystal of a stainless conscience, one might almost say a human
nature, as Pelagius wished it, that has never sinned. The very
animals participate in this universal mildness. Evil appears under
the form of monsters wandering on the deep, or of Cyclops confined in
volcanic islands; but God causes them to destroy one another, and
does not permit them to do hurt to the good.
We have just seen
how, around the legend of a monk the Irish imagination grouped a
whole cycle of physical and maritime myths. The Purgatory of
St. Patrick became the framework of another series of
fables, embodying the Celtic ideas concerning the other life and its
different conditions. 4 Perhaps the profoundest
instinct of the Celtic peoples is their desire to penetrate the
unknown. With the sea before them, they wish to know what lies
beyond; they dream of a Promised Land. In the face of the unknown
that lies beyond the tomb, they dream of that great journey which the
pen of Dante has celebrated. The legend tells how, while St. Patrick
was preaching about Paradise and Hell to the Irish, they confessed
that they would feel more assured of the reality of these places, if
he would allow one of them to descend there, and then come back with
information. St. Patrick consented. A pit was dug, by which an
Irishman set out upon the subterranean journey. Others wished to
attempt the journey after him. With the consent of the abbot of the
neighbouring monastery, they descended into the shaft, they passed
through the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and then each told of
what he had seen. Some did not emerge again; those who did laughed no
more, and were henceforth unable to join in any gaiety. Knight Owen
made a descent in 1153, and gave a narrative of his travels which had
a prodigious success.
Other legends related that when St.
Patrick drove the goblins out of Ireland, he was greatly tormented in
this place for forty days by legions of black birds. The Irish betook
themselves to the spot, and experienced the same assaults which gave
them an immunity from Purgatory. According to the narrative of
Giraldus Cambrensis, the isle which served as the theatre of this
strange, superstition was divided into two parts. One belonged to the
monks, the other was occupied by evil spirits, who celebrated
religious rites in their own manner, with an infernal uproar. Some
people, for the expiation of their sins, voluntarily exposed
themselves to the fury of those demons. There were nine ditches in
which they lay for a night, tormented in a thousand different ways.
To make the descent it was necessary to obtain the permission of the
bishop. His duty it was to dissuade the penitent from attempting the
adventure, and to point out to him how many people had gone in who
had never come out again. If the devotee persisted, he was
ceremoniously conducted to the shaft. He was lowered down by means of
a rope, with a loaf and a vessel of water to strengthen him in the
combat against the fiend which he proposed to wage. On the following
morning the sacristan offered the rope anew to the sufferer. If he
mounted to the surface again, they brought him back to the church,
bearing the cross and chanting psalms. If he were not to be found,
the sacristan closed the door and departed. In more modern times
pilgrims to the sacred isles spent nine days there. They passed over
to them in a boat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree. Once a day
they drank of the water of the lake; processions and stations were
performed in the beds or cells of the
saints. Upon the ninth day the penitents entered into the
shaft. Sermons were preached to them warning them of the danger they
were about to run, and they were told of terrible examples. They
forgave their enemies and took farewell of one another, as though
they were at their last agony. According to contemporary accounts,
the shaft was a low and narrow kiln, into which nine entered at a
time, and in which the penitents passed a day and a night, huddled
and tightly pressed against one another. Popular belief imagined an
abyss underneath, to swallow up the unworthy and the unbelieving. On
emerging from the pit they went and bathed in the lake, and so their
Purgatory was accomplished. It would appear from the accounts of
eye-witnesses that, to this day, things happen very nearly after the
same fashion.
The immense
reputation of the Purgatory of St. Patrick filled the whole of the
Middle Ages. Preachers made appeal to the public notoriety of this
great fact, to controvert those who had their doubts regarding
Purgatory. In the year 1358 Edward III. gave to a Hungarian of noble
birth, who had come from Hungary expressly to visit the sacred well,
letters patent attesting that he had undergone his Purgatory.
Narratives of those travels beyond the tomb became a very fashionable
form of literature; and it is important for us to remark the wholly
mythological, and as wholly Celtic, characteristics dominant in them.
It is in fact evident that we are dealing with a mystery or local
cult, anterior to Christianity, and probably based upon the physical
appearance of the country. The idea of Purgatory, in its final and
concrete form, fared specially well amongst the Bretons and the
Irish. Bede is one of the first to speak of it in a descriptive
manner, and the learned Mr. Wright very justly observes that nearly
all the descriptions of Purgatory come from Irishmen, or from
Anglo-Saxons who have resided in Ireland, such as St. Fursey,
Tundale, the Northumbrian Dryhthelm, and Knight Owen. It is likewise
a remarkable thing that only the Irish were able to behold the
marvels of their Purgatory. A canon from Hemstede in Holland, who
descended in 1494, saw nothing at all. Evidently this idea of travels
in the other world and its infernal categories, as the Middle Ages
accepted it, is Celtic. The belief in the three circles of existence
is again to be found in the Triads, 5 under
an aspect which does not permit one to see any Christian
interpolation.
The
soul’s peregrinations after death are also the favourite theme of
the most ancient Armorican poetry. Among the features by which the
Celtic races most impressed the Romans were the precision of their
ideas upon the future life, their inclination to suicide, and the
loans and contracts which they signed with the other world in view.
The more frivolous peoples of the South saw with awe in this
assurance the fact of a mysterious race, having an understanding of
the future and the secret of death. Through the whole of classical
antiquity runs the tradition of an Isle of Shadows, situated on the
confines of Brittany, and of a folk devoted to the passage of souls,
which lives upon the neighbouring coast. In the night they hear dead
men prowling about their cabin, and knocking at the door. Then they
rise up; their craft is laden with invisible beings; on their return
it is lighter. Several of these features reproduced by Plutarch,
Claudian, Procopius, 6 and Tzetzes, 7would
incline one to believe that the renown of the Irish myths made its
way into classical antiquity about the first or second century.
Plutarch, for example, relates, concerning the Cronian Sea, fables
identical with those which fill the legend of St. Malo. Procopius,
describing the sacred Island of Brittia, which consists of two parts
separated by the sea, one delightful, the other given over to evil
spirits, seems to have read in advance the description of
the Purgatory of St. Patrick, which Giraldus
Cambrensis was to give seven centuries later. It cannot be doubted
for a moment, after the able researches of Messrs. Ozanam, Labitte,
and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes which Europe owes
to the genius of the Celts, is to be added the framework of the
Divine Comedy.
One can understand how greatly this
invincible attraction to fables must have discredited the Celtic race
in the eyes of nationalities that believed themselves to be more
serious. It is in truth a strange thing, that the whole of the
mediæval epoch, whilst submitting to the influence of the Celtic
imagination, and borrowing from Brittany and Ireland at least half of
its poetical subjects, believed itself obliged, for the saving of its
own honour, to slight and satirise the people to which it owed them.
Even Chrétien de Troyes, for example, who passed his life in
exploiting the Breton romances for his own purposes, originated the
saying—
“Les Gallois sont
tous par nature
Plus sots que bêtes
de pâture.”
Some English chronicler, I know not
who, imagined he was making a charming play upon words when he
described those beautiful creations, the whole world of which
deserved to live, as “the childish nonsense with which
those brutes of Bretons amuse
themselves.” The Bollandists 8 found it incumber to
exclude from their collection, as apocryphal extravagances, those
admirable religious legends, with which no Church has anything to
compare. The decided leaning of the Celtic race towards the ideal,
its sadness, its fidelity, its good faith, caused it to be regarded
by its neighbours as dull, foolish, and superstitious. They could not
understand its delicacy and refined manner of feeling. They mistook
for awkwardness the embarrassment experienced by sincere and open
natures in the presence of more artificial natures. The contrast
between French frivolity and Breton stubbornness above all led, after
the fourteenth century, to most deplorable conflicts, whence the
Bretons ever emerged with a reputation for wrong-headedness.
It was still worse, when the nation
that most prides itself on its practical good sense found confronting
it the people that, to its own misfortune, is least provided with
that gift. Poor Ireland, with her ancient mythology, with her
Purgatory of St. Patrick, and her fantastic travels of St. Brandan,
was not destined to find grace in the eyes of English puritanism. One
ought to observe the disdain of English critics for these fables, and
their superb pity for the Church which dallies with Paganism, so far
as to keep up usages which are notoriously derived from it. Assuredly
we have here a praiseworthy zeal, arising from natural goodness; and
yet, even if these flights of imagination did no more than render a
little more supportable many sufferings which are said to have no
remedy, that after all would be something. Who shall dare to say
where, here on earth, is the boundary between reason and dreaming?
Which is worth more, the imaginative instinct of man, or the narrow
orthodoxy that pretends to remain rational, when speaking of things
divine? For my own part, I prefer the frank mythology, with all its
vagaries, to a theology so paltry, so vulgar, and so colourless, that
it would be wronging God to believe that, after having made the
visible world so beautiful he should have made the invisible world so
prosaically reasonable.
In presence of the ever-encroaching
progress of a civilisation which is of no country, and can receive no
name, other than that or modern of European, it would be puerile to
hope that the Celtic race is in the future to succeed in obtaining
isolated expression of its originality. And yet we are far from
believing that this race has said its last word. After having put in
practice all chivalries, devout and worldly, gone with Peredur in
quest of the Holy Grail and fair ladies, and dreamed with St. Brandan
of mystical Atlantides, who knows what it would produce in the domain
of intellect, if it hardened itself to an entrance into the world,
and subjected its rich and profound nature to the conditions of
modern thought? It appears to me that there would result from this
combination, productions of high originality, a subtle and discreet
manner of taking life, a singular union of strength and weakness, of
rude simplicity and mildness. Few races have had so complete a poetic
childhood as the Celtic; mythology, lyric poetry, epic, romantic
imagination, religious enthusiasm—none of these failed them; why
should reflection fail them? Germany, which commenced with science
and criticism, has come to poetry; why should not the Celtic races,
which began with poetry, finish with criticism? There is not so great
a distance from one to the other as is supposed; the poetical races
are the philosophic races, and at bottom philosophy is only a manner
of poetry. When one considers how Germany, less than a century ago,
had her genius revealed to her, how a multitude of national
individualities, to all appearance effaced, have suddenly risen again
in our own days, more instinct with life than ever, one feels
persuaded that it is a rash thing to lay down any law on the
intermittence and awakening of nations; and that modern civilisation,
which appeared to be made to absorb them, may perhaps be nothing more
than their united fruition.
Note 1. In his History of the Conquest. The objections raised by M. Varin and some other scholars to M. Thierry’s narrative only affect some secondary details, which were rectified in the edition published after the illustrious historian’s death.
Note 2. The
Irish saints literally covered the Western seas. A very considerable
number of the saints of Brittany, St. Tenenan, St. Renan, etc., were
emigrants from Ireland. The Breton legends of St. Malo, St. David,
and of St. Pol of Léon are replete with similar stories of voyages
to the distant isles of the West.
Note 3. On
this point see the careful researches of Humboldt in his History of
the Geography of the New Continent, vol. ii.
Note 4. See
Thomas Wright’s excellent dissertation, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory
(London, 1844), and Calderon’s The Well of Saint Patrick.
Note 5. A
series of aphorisms under the form of triplets, which give us, with
numerous interpolations, the ancient teaching of the bards, and that
traditional wisdom which, according to the testimony of the ancients,
was transmitted by means of mnemonic verses in the schools of the
Druids.
Note 6. A
Byzantine historian of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Note 7. A
Greek poet and grammarian of the twelfth century.
Note 8. A
group of Jesuits who issued a collection of Lives of the Saints. The
first five volumes were edited by John Bolland.
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