Saints and Scholars

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It was certainly quite common in the Celtic world,” says Fr Ó Ríordáin. “What happened to the Columban rule is that it was too strict for the continentals, with the result that they moved towards the Benedictine rule, which was more benign. As a result nearly all the Columban monasteries on the continent became Benedictine abbeys. It is during this period Ireland earned the title Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum, the Island of Saints and Scholars. I’m eternally working in a kind of multidisciplinary world where I’m drawing on resources from all kinds of sources, whether it be history or theology or hagiography or a whole range of other things. So, I would set out to find out first of all what do we know historically, and very often I would dip into Thesaurus Paleohibernicus, which is kind of a collection of primary sources,” he says. The Irish never took too much to that, in the sense that even as I sit here in the monastery garden now I’m looking down at the graveyard and I know several fellows who I pray to as saints but there’d be no question of them ever being canonised,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says, before adding with a laugh: “Whereas if they were in Italy they’d probably be universally known at this stage!” Christianity first came to Ireland between the 3rd and 5th Centuries and while much of Europe was plunging into the Dark Ages, Ireland provided a beacon of light.

Insulated on the western shores of Europe, Ireland’s institutions could continue to prosper and evolve without interruption leading to a period of intellectual, religious, and artistic superiority that has been called ‘Ireland’s Golden Age’. He kind of transcends all the centuries and that affection is there and has been there all the centuries,” he continues. “I can’t explain it otherwise, except that it is what it is. I suppose the whole thing of going into exile, with our most recent history of emigration has a lot of meaning for them.” I think that’s important – when you reflect on that it makes total sense, because you’re establishing a new tradition,” he says, recalling Chesterton’s line that pagans were wiser than paganism, which was why they became Christian. It strikes him as plausible too, he adds, that Brigid may have deliberately Christianised an earlier pagan shrine, as St Gregory the Great would later advise St Augustine to do in his mission to the English.

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This was Ireland's Golden Era as it became a burgeoning land of art and literature, culture and Christianity, and many of Ireland's most famous saints were plying their trade during this time.

Increasingly, of course, even those saints who remain housegold names are little more than names, so an obvious question is why the Irish of today, and especially the young Irish of today, should care about them. You always have to keep a focus on where does Christ fit into the picture, and the Christian way of life, so I would be looking out for anything that would be pointing in that direction, from whatever century is might be,” he says. “The ‘New Age’ stuff doesn’t do a lot for me, and I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to it. I know it goes on and it’s available and so on, but I don’t delve much into that world.” The Celtic Prayer Garden is Ireland’s only such garden and is set in six acres of natural bog land, approximately 10 minutes out of the city centre of Derry. The book explains how the monks here were well connected to earlier thinkers, for example the sixth-century philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius and his pivotal work De Institutione Arithmetica – De Institutione Musica. "There is a very lively engagement with mathematics between Ireland and Britain; it is high- level mathematics." Born in County Donegal in the 5th Century, Saint Columba/Columcille was descended from great Irish nobility, tracing his ancestry to Niall of the Nine Hostages, the legendary Irish High King.