Crazy Ass Moments in Irish Hagiography
Memorable incidents in medieval Irish saints' lives, from thieving animal monks to a musical Judas Iscariot to hagiographers’ treatment of gender and abortion.
by Abby Roberts
Hi y’all,
Congrats! You’re reading my first ever newsletter. I still have no real Author News, but as a reward for supporting me, you get to read about (trumpet fanfare) medieval Irish hagiography. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
I have some real treats lined up: from thieving animal monks to a musical Judas Iscariot to thoughts on hagiographers’ treatment of gender and abortion. Maybe you’ll learn something interesting and surprising. Or maybe you’re already an expert in Irish hagiography, in which case, carry on with your day.
[ETA: I'm correcting typos and fixing incorrect links as I find them; sorry, this is what I get for finishing this newsletter at 1 a.m. this morning.]
1. Saint Ciaran’s Shoes Get Stolen by His Monk, Who’s a Fox. Not a "Fox" As In a Sexy Human. A Literal Fox.
Ciaran of Saighir beats Patrick himself to Ireland, according to two hagiographies in the Bethada Náem nÉrenn. But Patrick still gets the credit for beefing with druids, converting the Irish people, and driving out the snakes, because all Ciaran does is start a monastery for animals:
When [Ciaran] began to dig the cemetery all by himself, he saw a wild boar coming towards him, which began to cut and root, and with this rooting it cut down the whole wood, and turned up the ground, and levelled it. Afterwards he made a hut in which to stay while engaged on that great work, the wild animal cutting and dragging the timber for him till it was finished. God gave additional monks to Ciaran, and he saw coming to them a wolf with a badger and a fox in his train, and they remained with him doing him duty and service.
Everything is cool and good until the fox monk steals Ciaran’s shoes and runs away to its burrow. “It is no fit practice for a monk to plunder and steal,” Ciaran says to the wolf and badger monks, who don’t say anything in reply because they’re animals. He doesn’t consider that he might have more reliable monks if he had ordained humans instead of woodland critters. Ciaran sends the badger to haul the fox’s perfidious ass back to the monastery.
“Fast and do penance!” Ciaran tells the fox. “For such ill conduct is no fit practice for a monk. And be sensible. If thou hast any longings, God will give to thee as thou shalt desire.” The fox presumably says ten Hail Marys, and everything is fine.
I included this episode because its absurdity sets the tone for the newsletter. It’s included in some form in both versions of the life of Ciaran included in the Bethada Náem nÉrenn, so it must have been important to how the hagiographers understood the saint. But why? Is it meant to exploit a loophole, allowing Ciaran to be the first Irish saint without stealing Patrick’s thunder? Is it meant to underscore his friendship with nature? Is it the equivalent of a fairytale or beast fable? Maybe future reading will turn something up.
Source.
2. Patrick Resurrects a Guy for an Awkward Conversation.
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, so of course I have to talk about Patrick. Originally, this newsletter was going to focus on incidents from hagiographies of Patrick, but Ciaran’s shoe-thieving animal monks had a certain je ne sais quoi about them.
This episode finds Patrick on a journey. He passes a cross by the side of the road, which he misses at first, but once he and his charioteer reach a guesthouse, the charioteer is like, “Hey, you know there was a cross back there.” Patrick hoofs it back to the cross to pray. While he’s doing that, Patrick notices a tomb.
Patrick is curious about why the dead guy died and whether he’d been a Christian, so he asks the corpse, as one does:
The dead man answered: ‘I was a pagan in life, and I was buried here. There was also a woman who lived in another province, and she had a son who died far away from her, and was buried in her absence, but after some days the mother came here in mourning, keening for the son she had lost, and in her distracted state of mind she mistook a pagan's tomb for the grave of her son and placed a cross beside a pagan.’
According to Patrick, the cross marking the grave of a non-Christian explains why he didn’t see it at first, and it also implies something or other about his miraculous power. Fine. Cool. However, I chose this episode for the newsletter because of its mundanity. We might think the hagiographers would treat miracles as rare and special events, but according to them, early medieval Ireland was lousy with mostly pointless miracles, from an otter returning Saint Coemgen’s psalter after he drops it in a lake to Ciaran heating stream water for Germanus after he complains it’s too cold to bathe in. I could easily write a listicle called The Top Five Most Boring Miracles in Irish Hagiography, and I may yet do so. Here, Patrick resurrects a dead guy just to ask him a couple of questions, and apparently, he went right back to being dead as soon as the conversation ended.
(Sidebar: it's total BS that an Irish person who followed a polytheist tradition would self-identify as a pagan, a word made up by Christian theologians to make fun of followers of non-Christian traditions. Do not, by any means, take hagiographers as accurate sources on pre-Christian traditions.)
Source.
3. Saint Abban Changes the King’s Daughter Into the King’s Son.
This is less of a Crazy Ass Moment in Irish hagiography and more of an Interesting one. Abban, a saint who spends much of his career confronting various monsters and quietly banishing them to places where they won’t bother anyone, like the roommate you call to remove spiders in a cup, is summoned by the king:
Now the king was old at this time, and he had no heir except a daughter whom his wife bore that very night. And he requested Abban to baptize her. And he perceived the sadness of the king at having no heir. ‘If God pleases,’ said Abban, ‘thou shalt have an heir.’ ‘Nay,’ said the king, ‘that is impossible for me owing to my age.’ Abban took the infant in his hands, and prayed earnestly to God that the king might have an heir; and the girl that he immersed in the font he took out as a boy and laid it in the king's bosom. ‘Here is thy son,’ said he.
To be extremely clear, a person’s gender changing is not inherently absurd. Rather, I’ve included this episode because, in our current time, many people believe one's gender assigned at birth to be immutable. Often these people justify these beliefs in certain interpretations of Christianity. This anecdote seems to indicate that the medieval Irish didn’t see things this way, despite being rather big on Christianity, as you may have already guessed they were. This doesn’t mean that the medieval Irish were enlightened on gender; it just means they were different.
Note that the child’s gender identity or bodily autonomy is never considered. The king needs a suitable heir and doesn’t have one; Abban steps into his role as a guy who wanders Ireland fixing people’s problems and provides the king a son. (Women in early medieval Ireland could inherit, but this was still a patriarchal society, and male heirs were preferred.) Also, note that the child is a newborn baby with no role in society except to be the king’s potential heir. As I continue reading hagiography, it will be interesting to see if I come across instances of male-to-female as well as female-to-male transitions, transitions among older children or adults, or transitions that seem more clearly to be outcomes of personal choice.
Source.
4. Saint Brendan Meets the Devil, Sees Hell, Talks to Judas.
In an incident that almost made this newsletter but got cut, a bunch of guys known as the Twelve Apostles of Erin receive a ridiculous visitation from an “indescribably large flower” that gives them a quest to seek the Land of Promise across the sea. With some reluctance, the younger Saint Brendan (there are two Brendans and also two Ciarans and Columbas; the medieval Irish loved this kind of confusion) is the one to go.
Brendan and his crew embark in a coracle, which isn’t the type of boat I would want to cross the ocean in, but I’m not a saint with the power of God on my side. They celebrate Easter on the back of a whale and continue sailing. After that, the Devil appears to Brendan, and Brendan asks, sensibly, what the Devil is doing outside of Hell.
The Devil says, “Wanna see something cool?”
Then the devil showed the door of hell to Brendan, and then Brendan saw the hard dark prison, full of stench, full of flame, full of filth, full of camps of poisonous devils, full of weeping, and shrieking and woe, of wretched cries and loud lamentations, of mourning and wringing of hands by the sinful people, and the life of grief and sorrow in the heart of pain, in fiery prisons, in currents of ever-blazing streams, in the cup of lasting sorrow and of never-ending unceasing death, in dark sloughs, in seats of fierce flame, in abounding grief and death, and tortures, and chains, and heavy helpless struggles, amid the horrible screams of the poisonous demons, in the night ever dark, ever cold, ever fetid, ever foul, ever melancholy, ever rough, ever long, ever stifling, fatal, destructive, gloomy, bristling with fire, of the lower freezing hideous hell; on slopes of ever-fiery hills, without rest or stay, but hosts of demons haling the sinners into prison heavy, strong, hot, fiery, dark, deep, lonely, futile, base, black, idle, foul, lengthy, enchanted, ever stinking, ever full of strife, and quarrel and weariness, ever dying, ever living.
Brandon receives an exhaustive tour of the Horrors and is a bit freaked out.
Then Brendan sees a rock amid the infernal sea. Waves of black-red fire break upon the front of the rock, alternating with waves of icy cold breaking upon it from behind. And upon this literally godforsaken rock, Brendan meets a single, wretched man:
Brendan asked him who he was. “I am Judas Iscariot,” said he, “and it was I that sold my Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, for silver, and the despicable useless riches of the world. And vast,” said he, “is the greatness of my strange torments; and I shall be as thou seest from now till the day of doom.” Then Brendan wept for the greatness of the misery in which he saw Judas to be.
IMO, it’s a nice addition that Brendan weeps for Judas’ torment. Perhaps in gratitude, Judas improvises a song on the spot:
And then as a memorial for Brendan, Judas made these little verses:
I am Judas Iscariot today,
On the waves of the mighty ocean;
Wretched is my perilous dark life,
Tortured as I am in hell.
(Tossed) from a wave of fire to a cold wave,
From a cold wave to every mighty wave:
From every quarter am I tortured;
Sad is the report of my torment.
It goes on like this for another fifty or so lines. I like to imagine that the translator mangled it, and it sounds much better in Irish than in English. I also like to imagine that Judas’ vocals are accompanied by cheerful showtune music. Perhaps he does a bit of choreography, too, on his rock, beaten by alternating waves of fire and cold, surrounded by an infernal ocean, in Hell. TBH, mood. Are we not all, like Judas, singing in Hell?
When Judas finishes his ditty, I assume Brendan claps politely and continues his journey, eventually reaching the Land of Promise. But the narrative cuts off abruptly at this point.
Source.
5. Saint Ciaran Performs an Abortion.
We’ve come back to Saint Ciaran of Saighir. (The other Ciaran isn’t covered in the Bethada Náem nÉrenn, while our boy is there twice.) As with the episode involving Abban above, this is less of a Crazy Ass Moment and more of an Interesting one.
Before we dig into it, I must provide a content warning for mention of rape. The description isn’t graphic, but it leads to the circumstances that cause Ciaran to perform an abortion.
When Ciaran isn’t giving penance to foxes, he visits his mother, Liadain, and her foster daughter, Bruinech. When Bruinech is kidnapped and raped by the king of Cined Fiachna, Ciaran goes after her, and God commands the king to let Bruinech go.
He released the maiden (to go) with Ciaran after that, and she was pregnant. Ciaran then made the sign of the Divine Cross over her, and it (the foetus) vanished immediately without being perceived.
Again: in our modern era, many people believe that life begins at conception and justify their belief in certain interpretations of Christianity. So it’s interesting that the hagiographic narrative considers Bruinech’s pregnancy by rape an injustice, rather than a punishment for having a uterus, and that God works through Ciaran to miraculously remedy it. The text says Bruinech had “dedicated her virginity to God,” and perhaps that’s some explanation for the treatment she receives. However, the twelfth-century theologian and saint Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, did not consider fetuses to be human but merely potentially human, so it’s possible, even likely, that Irish hagiographers thought the same.
Source.
I could go on. I haven’t gotten to half the incidents I want to talk about, and the ones here aren’t even those I found by looking very hard, as they come from just a handful of texts. As I keep reading, I’m sure I’ll come across more Crazy Ass or Interesting Moments. I’ll do more newsletters about them if there’s enough interest, and even if there’s not.
Most of the episodes are taken from the Bethada Náem nÉrenn, or Lives of Irish Saints, translated into English by Charles Plummer. The one involving Patrick comes from Muirchú’s Life of Patrick, translated by Ludwig Bieler; a similar incident occurs in Tírechán’s Collectanea, also translated by Bieler. You can read more texts from medieval and modern Ireland via the CELT database, a project of University College Cork.
That’s all, folks.
Minuscule Script is the newsletter of author Abby Roberts. I really appreciate your support at this early stage of what I hope will become a career.
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