BISHOP HEALY ON IRISH HISTORY.* THERE is at least one
Catholic Bishop in Ireland who thinks that the time he can spare from the administration of his
diocese may be devoted more profitably to learning than to politics,—an opinion which may not tend to enhance his popu- larity with the Nationalists, but which will not prove mistaken in the long-run. In the bulky volume before us, Dr. Healy, the Coadjutor Bishop of Clonfert, sets himself, with con- siderable success, to vindicate for Ireland the title of insula sanctorum et doctorum. There is, it must be confessed, a certain temptation to regard as mythical the highly coloured pictures of the state of Ireland in the days before the Danish invasion, and there are plenty of incidents in the history of the time which scarcely seem compatible with a high degree of holiness or of learning. The worthy Bishop's statement that "religious life in the island presented a more beautiful spectacle before men and angels than anything seen in Christendom before or since," is to the last degree hyperbolical. Still, there remains a solid substratum of fact, and a Church which can show religions leaders such as Columba and Columban, and scholars such as Scotus and Dicuil, is not trading on a fictitious reputation. In the present volume, Dr.
Healy goes over much the same ground as Professor Stokes in his Ireland and the Celtic Church, but in a different spirit.
Indeed, he is not so much a historian as a biographer and hagiologist. In the latter capacity, though less critical than he might be, he occasionally does something to dissipate popular misconceptions. For instance, he points out that St. Kevin's behaviour on a famous occasion was not quite so unconscionable as that attributed to him by Moore :-
" Coemghen was a very handsome youth, and his good looks won the affection of a beautiful girl of his own age, whose sorrow was great to find her love not only unrequited but unnoticed. On one occasion she even followed the gracious boy when he went with his brothers to the woods, and finding him alone, exerted all her blandishments to win his heart. The young saint, tormented instead of softened by ber proffered caresses, which he had tried in vain to repel, resolved to give her a lesson for the future. He had flung himself half.naked into a brake full of nettles, and now gathering a handful, he scourged the girl with the burning nettles on her face and arms. The fire without,' says the author of the saint's Life, extinguished the fire within.' Her heart was touched with the grace of penance To scourge the fair Kathleen with nettles for the good of her soul is a very different thing from flinging her into the lake."
Dr. Healy takes the chief schools in succession, and tells us all about their founders and scholars. Armagh, Kildare, Clonmacnoise, Bangor, and Glendalough, among others, are
thus dealt with. Armagh was ruled for a time by Gildas, whom Dr. Healy identifies with the Welsh scholar of that name, author of the De Excidio Britannize. Its school was frequented by so many English students, that one of the three wards of the town got the name of Than-Saxon, or the Saxon Ward. The Book of Armagh, copied in 807, and still pre- served, shows that Greek was studied in Ireland, as, indeed, also
• insula Sanetoriun et Doetorum ; or, Ireland's Ancient Schools and Scholars. By the Most Rev. John Healy, D.D., LL.D., M.R.I.A., Coadjutor Bishop of Cloatert. London: Burns and Oates. 1890. appears from an Irish scholar's unfortunate attempt to connect Tara with 13EeTeZy. Clonard, another famous school, founded by St. Finnian about 520, is said to have had no less than three thousand scholars, not so incredible a statement when we remember that most of the instruction was oral, and was imparted in the open air. The hedge-schoolmaster of the last century was only a survival from earlier times.
But the most famous school of all was Clonmacnoise. It was here that Alcuin studied, as appears from his letter to Colgu, the chief teacher of the monastery ; and here also that Dicuil, the geographer, wrote the work De Mensura Orbis Terri, which was discovered at Paris in the early part of the present century, and gives the best proof of old Irish learning. Dicuil's work was chiefly founded on the Survey of Theodosius, on Pliny the Elder, Solinns Polyhistor, and Priscian, but contains some additional information of his own. " Though," he writes, " we have never read in any book that a branch of the Nile flows into the Red Sea, yet Brother Fidelis told, in my presence, that certain clerics and laymen from Ireland, who went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, sailed up the Nile a long way "—and he goes on to give an account of Trajan's Canal, showing that it was open to use at the end of the eighth century. Not less interesting is his story how certain sailor-monks, like St. Brendan, spent six months, from February 1st to August 1st, in Iceland. Dicuil's manner of describing that it is always day there at the summer solstice, does not say much either for his own taste or his countrymen's cleanliness. It was light enough at midnight, he tells them, to hunt for fleas,—a very mild rendering of his Latin. This Irish discovery of Iceland, be it observed, was long before that effected by the Danes and Norwegians in 860. But if these are the glories of Clan- macnoise, there is another side to the picture. It was burned and plundered ten times by the Danes, and fifteen times by the Irish themselves. Felim MacCriffan, King of Cashel, plundered the monastery and slaughtered its monks on three successive occasions. Then, ten years later, he was gathered to his fathers, and described in the Chronicon Scotorum "as a scribe and an anchorite, and the best of the Scots." Dr. Todd and Professor Stokes will have him a Bishop and an Abbot as well ; but Dr. Healy will not agree to this. His description of scribe and anchorite appears to be due to the fact that he retired to a hermitage to do penance and copy manuscripts. While thus engaged, he was discovered by the angry Abbot of Clanmac- noise, who gave him a fatal wound with the sharp end of his crozier.
Dr. Healy also gives a short account of the men who carried the fame of Irish learning abroad, Columban and Virgilius of Salzburg, and John Scotus Erigena, the first scholar of Western Europe in the ninth century. He has been regarded as the founder of modern rationalism, but Dr. Healy is rather unduly anxious to minimise his departures from strict ortho- doxy. About his wit there can be less controversy. " Quid interest inter Scottum et sottum ? " Charles the Bald once asked him at table. " Tabula tantum," was the ready rejoinder.
Bulky and discursive as is Dr. Healy's book, he nowhere gives any systematic view of the condition of Irish studies in the monastic schools ; but it would seem that they covered as wide a range as Bede's. Besides the monastic schools, there was also a highly organised system of Gaelic teachers. The elaborate rules relating to it, which are found in the Brenon Laws, have been dismissed by one of the editors as the fantastic production of an antiquarian lawyer of a strong ecclesiastical bias ; but, as Dr. Healy, himself one of the Com- missioners for the publication of the Code, points out, the strange-sounding distinctions between high professors and low professors, "noble streams" and " streams," &c., may have been analogous to our University degrees. There is no record of the lay schools, such as the Lives of the saints supply for the monastic schools. The high professor was entitled to travel about with a suite of twenty-four, and all were bound to entertain him. According to the Senchus Mor, the relation of teacher and pupil was to be that of father and son. The teacher was bound to feed his pupils with stirabout, flavoured with salt butter for the sons of commoners, with fresh butter for the sons of chieftains, and with honey for the sons of Kings. Irish stirabout would seem to have become known abroad, for the opponents of Scotus denounced one of his books as " Scotorum pukes puritati fidei nauseam inferentes." Dr. Healy's book is much too long, and is not always very felicitous in style. It is, however, a work of very great learning and research, and quite free from controversial bias, though the author does not always show himself sufficiently critical in dealing with the old Irish legends.
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