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Saints and Scholars

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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’. Music and the Stars : Mathematics in Medieval Ireland is in book shops or available from fourcourtspress.ie But the fact Ireland escaped the grip of the Roman Empire served to set it apart as a centre of learning and spirituality from all other European countries. But what's especially interesting about Derrynaflan is the priceless buried treasure likely left here by the monks. Discovered just a few decades ago, it changed Irish law and turned out to be one of the most exciting archaeological finds in the history of Irish art. His relevance is really the heart of the Christian message, namely a personal relationship with Christ as distinct from knowing about Christ,” he says, noting that Irish as a language points to different levels of knowledge, where ‘aithne’ means a basic familiarity, but ‘eolas’ and ‘fios’ point to a deeper understanding and an actual relationship.

Their iterary output in the Middle Ages wasn’t very great, in terms of how their commentaries on the Bible were utterly boring” 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. The seventh miracle occurred, apparently, when St Féichín raised a two-tonne stone doorway lintel into place by the power of prayer in the 10 th century – when he had been dead some time. Despite the time travel issues, the lintel remains in place to this day. Other idiosyncratic features include a hermit’s cell and a fine cloister arcade built later as part of a Benedictine priory by landlord Hugh De Lacy, who also constructed Trim Castle (a setting for the movie Braveheart) about 20 miles away. A marked trail around Fore covers most of the sights, and it is a remarkably beautiful setting. In Fore village is something else that hasn’t changed in a while – the Seven Wonders Pub. Things had reached a very constricted pitch in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Centuries in terms of how you had one opportunity of repenting after baptism, and if you blew that you were gone,” he says. “The Irish come along then, when they’re going to the continent, and they had this notion of the ‘anam cara’, the soul friend or spiritual director, and they would hear, if you like, the confession of a fellow monk, people admitting their faults and failings, and then gradually the tradition coming in of letting it go, and going ahead and living your life. There is, of course, an abundance of books out there about ‘Celtic spirituality’ that owe rather more to the ‘New Age’ beliefs and practices than the historical Church in these islands, but Fr Ó Ríordáin says it’s important to focus on the Christian character of the Irish saints. FocusHagiography is fascinating, especially Irish hagiography, in particular the lives of early Irish saints. This ancient literary genre was an important way of recording the extraordinary lives of saints and the miracles and incredible feats attributed to them.

Ancient manuscripts show that Ireland was a major centre for the study of mathematics centuries ago. We had some of the foremost practitioners of the fine art of Computus, the difficult business of calculating the date of Easter far into the future. Following the Roman Empire’s collapse in the 5th century, Europe was in a state of serious intellectual and social decay as its institutions crumbled. We can deny it all we want, but that’s who we are and that’s what we’ve come from: 1500 years of Christian living.”

was a trailblazer. Leaving home at 16 on a donkey, bringing her younger sister Fíona with her, she set up a monastic school at Killeedy (Cell Íde) and later became the foster mother of the saints of Ireland. She was a mentor to St Brendan. 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.

But the manuscripts, along with later archaeological discoveries, also show the Irish in the eighth century AD were adept engineers, making improvements in technologies used for metal-working and agriculture, and we even had a reputation as boat-builders. 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!”

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It is during this period Ireland earned the title Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum, the Island of Saints and Scholars. That prominent holy people should have become associated with older stories linked with pagan forerunners seems, in fairness, far more likely than folk becoming confused and thinking pagan deities were really Christian monks and nuns. One is reminded of how C.S. Lewis asked a friend who had recently read G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man whether he had got it into his head that the ancients had brains every bit as good as ours. Celebration The affection for this 6th-Century monk can be striking, he says, citing how a year or so ago he was talking to a woman at a parish in the Midlands. “She was talking about Colmcille and had I not known it I’d have got the impression that he had emigrated a few weeks ago,” he says. They were popularly canonised in the early church, where a person who was recognised as walking with God was a saint, but that kind of transferred in the later Middle Ages into being a more formal thing, namely something that had to go to the bishop or go to the Pope,” he says.

Many of Yeats’s life milestones happened here: he became a father, a politician, won the Nobel prize for literature and published poetry collection The Tower. The Winding Stair, which followed in 1933, is named after the moon-shaped stone steps that curve their way to the top of the keep. His friend (and the co-founder of Dublin’s Gaiety theatre) Augusta Gregory lived nearby at Coole Park, where he signed the Autograph Tree along with JM Synge, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey. Yeats also mounted a plaque on the castle walls for posterity with the words: “I, the poet William Yeats/With old mill boards and sea-green slates/And smithy work from the Gort forge/Restored this tower for my wife George;/And may these characters remain/When all is ruin once again.” While in the area, don’t miss Kilmacduagh, an impressive monastic ruin with the highest round tower in the world, which, some say, leans more acutely than Pisa’s. If you’re staying, drop by for mussels at Moran’s on the Weir. Somehow along the way to modern times, however, we released our grip on this expertise, allowing others to make the breakthroughs and take the lead on the advance of mathematics, science and engineering. Moninne was a powerful force and was instrumental in the development of the great monastic movement, founding churches in Ireland and Scotland. These saints were similar in their determination to help and enrich the lives of others, whether through healing or sharing their faith. Would their actions and powers of healing have been interpreted in the same way in a different time or place, for example, Salem, Massachusetts or Mistley, Essex? Thankfully, none of these inspirational women were burned at the stake or thrown into water to see if they would sink or float. Instead, their miracles and deeds were recognised and they were venerated as saints. I was always impressed by the borrowing of technology from the Romans,” he says. “From the time Romans conquered Britain, and from the first century AD, the Irish borrowed a lot of technology. We see this in the artefacts but also in the words that were taken into Irish from Latin.” 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."After decades of industrial peat-cutting to fuel Ireland's stoves, the bog was no longer nature's healthy blanket of saturated spongy moss it once was. But, several years since harvesting ended (due to green policies), it was encouraging to see flora gaining confidence over a largely drab landscape. The third member of Ireland’s trio of patron saints is, of course, St Colmcille, sometimes known as Columba, who Fr Ó Ríordáin describes as “one of those magnetic figures that kind of transcends time”. After the 8th Century the Church here went into a period of decline that lasted up to about the 12th Century, which was a natural decline because if you have the early Irish Church pumping energy for hundreds of years, you’re bound to run out of steam sooner or later,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says.

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