Stones of Aran (10 page)

But the round towers were also refuges, invulnerable to anything less than prolonged siege or the fire that could turn them into crematorial chimneys. The Cill Éinne tower could have seen the unheralded horizoning of sails in 1334, when Aran was one of the places plundered and burned by Sir John D’Arcy, the Viceroy, working round the coast of Ireland with fifty-six ships. This was perhaps in response to the revolt of the de Burgos, the Anglo-Norman lords of Connacht who in the previous year had renounced their allegiance to the Crown and adopted Irish dress, language and titles, so that he who had been Sir William de Burgo now was the Mac William Eighter (lower), and pronounced himself Lord of Galway. The town soon disengaged itself from
this rebellion, but the O’Briens of the Clann Thaidhg, who held Aran at the time, may well have been supporters of the Mac
Williams
, and the abbey of Cill Éinne suffered for it.

Thinking now of how this invisible tower sings in the winds of history, in a spacious antiphony with those other towers—on the limestone plain of Kilmacduagh, reflected in the Shannon at Clonmacnois, floating above the rooftops of Kells—of the monasteries founded by alumni of St. Enda’s foundation, I do in imagination what I never did while living in Aran—climb down into that stone drum, lie there among the herbs, looking up at swallows darting through the vanished rooms piled above me, and try to remount the cloudy centuries, from the last known abbot of Aran back to the coming of St. Enda himself.

No names of the coarbs or successors of St. Enda, as the abbots were called, are known from a period of over two centuries before 1400, the date Roderic O’Flaherty gives for Donat ua Laigin (he Latinizes the name as Donatus O’Leyn), the last of them of whom he could find record. The silence of history may convey the
somnolence
or exhaustion of the religious impulse of Aran, which was only briefly to be reawakened by the Franciscans for a few decades before the suppression of the monasteries. The great years of Cill Éinne were much earlier. From 1167 (two years before the Norman invasion of Ireland) back to 654, the obits of the successors of Enda stand in the
Annals
of
the
Four
Masters.
Solemn
bell-strokes
, recurring with long intervals, their names:

The most recent of these, Giollagóri or Gildegorius, would have heard of, perhaps even witnessed, the assembly of kings and bishops at the consecration of Mellifont, the first Cistercian monastery in Ireland, in 1157, and the synod of Kells in 1152, at which Ireland was divided up into episcopal sees grouped into four archbishoprics—events that signalled the end of the old order in which his own title of
Comharba
Éinne
,
successor of Enda, carried such weight. The Diocese of Kilfenora, corresponding to the old territorial unit of Corcu Modruad (Corcomroe, in Clare), was amongst those brought into existence by the synod of Kells, and later documents indicate that it included Aran. Maolcolaim, the predecessor of Giollagóri, had become abbot on the death of Flann, just before another great synod presided over by the High King and the bishop of Armagh, at Ráith Bresail near Cashel in mi, at which the first division of Ireland into bishoprics had been undertaken. These three abbots, then would have been able to read the message of the horseman on the new-style high crosses being carved in their own monastery workshops, which perhaps forebode the decline of their authority.

Mace Maras is the only abbot of Cill Éinne the manner of whose death we know; the Four Masters’ entry for 1095 reads:

and Mace Maras Ua Caomáin is in the death-list.

Mace Maras probably saw the last Viking raid on Aran, in 1081 according to the
Annals
of
Inishfallen.
The long gap from his entry back to that for his predecessor Fland in 1011 (the Annals say 1010 but O’Donovan identifies this as an error) represents some loss of information, pages torn out of manuscripts, perhaps, or minds knocked out of skulls, for the Four Masters tell us of Viking raids in 1020:

while the
Annals
of
Inishfallen
record plague in Aran in 1019 and another Viking attack in 1015—one year after the Battle of Clontarf, popularly supposed to mark the end of Viking power in Ireland. The stone oratories such as Teampall Bheannáin and the oldest part of Teaghlach Éinne, and the round tower itself, may well have been raised during this violent century.

Almost another century is unrepresented in the Annals, from Fland back to the death of Eccnech, Bishop and Anchorite, in 916; what desolations, what rebuildings and replantings, what forbodings and forgettings, filled those blank decades is a field for guesswork. And it is unlikely that Aran was not raided by the Vikings in Eccnech’s time, for the ninth century saw the repeated plundering of the sea-monasteries from Iona to the Skelligs in Kerry, the bishop driven out of Armagh, a Viking king’s fleet on the Shannon, and, it is said, that king’s wife uttering pagan oracles from the high altar of Clonmacnois. Ireland was at that period a chaos of petty kingdoms warring among each other and ready on occasion to ally themselves with the Norse settlers. The dominant sept in the south were the Eoghanacht of Cashel, whose circle of influence covered Aran, while the most powerful northern line was the Uí Néill of Tara. In 908 the High King of Tara, Flann Sinna, defeated the Eoghanacht in battle, and the King-Bishop of Cashel was among the slain. Eccnech would have mourned this scholarly churchman, Cormac mac Cuilennáin, who loved Aran and had written of it:

There must have been substance to this vision of Aran, despite the Annals’ catalogue of disasters. Each winter, armouring the islands with breakers, must have offered months of security from marauders, and in any case the storms of swordsmen probably swept through Aran only once or twice in each abbatical reign. There were occasional summers of angels’ breath playing around the islands, as there are still, and long uninterrupted sequences of the annual cycle of the liturgy. But anything that was easily portable, precious, or fragile of the material product of those pious and laborious times in Aran is gone, and lies unfound in Viking graves or unidentified in museum cases, or was smashed or burned or lost at sea. The elusive playful mystery of crosses and circles on a few grave-slabs alone remains. Of all the millions of words spoken or written out of the passionate meditations of generations of monks, almost none but that mysterious one, cut into stone on Teampall Bheannáin:
CARI
, to the beloved.

But perhaps King-Bishop Cormac was warming his hands at a residual fervour from earlier centuries, for to these men the church in Ireland was already immensely old, and even before the Viking invasions it had been in decline for a slothful, greedy, contentious, century. Maoltuile, the Abbot of Inis Oírr who died in 865, having seen a previous High King of Tara taking hostages from the island in a campaign against the Eoghanacht in 856, had perhaps been brought up in the reforming generation of the Céli Dé, the servants of God, who looked back to and sought to emulate the exorbitant spirituality and asceticism of the founder saints. In a famous manuscript called the
Martyrology
of
Tallaght
,
written in the Céli Dé monastery of Tallaght in about 800 (before the Dublin that now includes Tallaght had been founded by the Norsemen), Maoltuile could have read what for us is the first and remarkably early mention of St. Enda, and which to him would have been a rehearsal of things deep in the past.

The names of just two abbots of Aran, Gaimdibla and St. Nem, have to cover the eighth and the seventh century, and that originary radiance behind them is as full of darkness as the empty summer sky when one stares up into it. If Nem died in 654, and if, as the medieval
Vita
St.
Endei
states, Enda got permission to settle in Aran from a king of Cashel who died in 491, then there were “successors of Enda” before Nem, who are today unknown and likely to remain so for ever. The majestic tower of history tapers into nothingness, leaving the earliest lifetimes of the monastery lost like stars in the day sky somewhere above the vertex of its roof. Was there in fact a St. Enda? In what space of the mind are we to site his miraculous life?

Let us first listen to the story, calling like a matins bell in a dawn of astringent simplicity, before reconsidering it in this
complicated
age, so long after Cill Éinne has had its day.

So begins the Latin
Life
of
St.
Enda
compiled by John Colgan from much earlier manuscripts and published at Louvain in 1645. It goes on to detail the saint’s ancestry: his father was Conall Dearg (red) the son of Daimen, Lord of Oriel (a territory comprising the present counties of Louth, Armagh and Monaghan, in Ulster), and his mother was Briga, the daughter of Anmir the chief of Ard Ciannachta (now called Ferrard, in Louth). Of his four sisters, three were saints—Fanchea, Lochein and Cairech—
and the fourth, Darenia, married a king, Oengus mac Nadfroích of Cashel. On the death of his father Enda became leader of his people; he was still very young, and, having grown “like a rose among thorns,” was ignorant of the ways of the flesh.

The immediate task of this “new athlete of Christ” was to raise defences around his sister’s nunnery, digging the earth with his bare hands. Then he turned to the first of his many future
foundations
, a monastery called “Killaine” (which is perhaps
Killanny
in Monaghan). While he was at work on it he nearly fell from grace; some robbers attacked the place, and he seized a timber from the construction to help his people defend it. Fanchea rebuked him severely for this and ordered him to leave his
country
and become a humble disciple in the monastery of Rosnat (probably the famous Whithorn or “Candida Casa” in Galloway, Scotland). Enda asked how long he should remain there, and she answered, “Until your good fame shall have reached us.” So Enda left Ireland, and after a time at Rosnat went to Rome to be
ordained
, and founded a monastery called Latium somewhere in Italy. Eventually Fanchea heard an account of her brother from pilgrims coming from Rome, and she set out with three of her virgins to see him, sailing on her mantle spread on the sea. And she said to him, “When you come to Ireland, do not first enter your native land but seek an island in Ireland’s western sea, the name of which is Aran. There you will serve your God faithfully.” (The
Life
here gives an interpretation of the name “Aran” that has become traditional: The island is called Aran, that is “kidney,” because it is like the kidney in an animal, being narrow in the middle and wide at the ends.)

In fact on his return Enda landed in Meath at the mouth of the Boyne, with a hundred and fifty disciples, and founded a number of churches on either bank of the river. Then he went to Cashel in Munster, where his brother-in-law Oengus mac
Nadfroích
was king:

There were some pagans in the island at that time, of the race of Corcu Modruad (Corcomroe, in the east of the Burren); they fled from Enda “like darkness when daylight appears.” But their leader Corban, “a second Pharoah hardened in evil,” remained and set a trap for Enda, whom he took to be a magician until he saw the saint shut himself in the cleft of a rock, and said to himself, “That magician is no human being with a body, but has a body made of air.” When Enda asked Corban to grant him the island, the pagan agreed to retire to Corcomroe for forty days. After he had gone, the saint saw Corban’s horses grazing in a place called Ard na gCaorach, the height of the sheep, and drove them into the sea; they swam to the middle island and landed at the place called Trá na nEach (nowadays called Trácht Each), the strand of the horses; and then they swam on to the place of the same name in the third island. Meanwhile Corban, on the mainland, ordered a barrel to be made and filled with seed-corn, and said, “If that God whom Enda preaches wishes him to possess that island, let him send this barrel to him.” And by the ministry of angels that barrel sailed to Aran (as I have already told in my first volume), leaving in its wake a path of perpetual calm.

Then St. Enda established ten monasteries in the island, each with its superior, his own monastery being at what is now called Cill Éinne, the church of Enda. Half the island he gave to his own monastery, and the rest was divided among the others. The other superiors thought this arrangement was unjust, and they fasted for six days, that the Lord might show them what to do in the matter. Their prayer was heard, and on the conclusion of the fast an angel appeared to St. Enda bearing two gifts from God, a book of the four Gospels, and a
“casula
of priestly ministry”—perhaps a chasuble is meant—implying that he was worthy above the others of the double honour of teaching and governing.

There is another version of this last story, which Colgan gives
although he remarks that it appears to be apocryphal. In this
version
, three Irish monks, Helueus, Pupeus and Enda, went to Rome after a period in Rosnat, and while they were there the Pope died, and a wonderful white dove alighted on Pupeus as a sign that he would be a worthy successor. But Pupeus declined the honour and a St. Hilarius was chosen in his place. When the three Irishmen set off for home, Hilarius blessed them and gave them a gift of vestments. But they had not gone far when, to test their obedience, he sent a messenger after them demanding the return of the vestments. Helueus and Pupeus were angry at this, but Enda said, “Let us thank God for the time they were give to us, and likewise we should thank God when they are taken back from us”—which example of saintliness persuaded the others to accept him as their superior. They then proceeded to the island granted to Enda by heaven. On their arrival, Enda and his one hundred and fifty monks fasted for three days, until God sent a fish big enough to feed them all into “the spring of Leamhchoill” (Roderic O’Flaherty argues that this is an error for Eochaill, Leamhchoill being on the mainland), and a wonderful cow, the legend of which I gave in
Pilgrimage.
Seeing these miracles, the people together with all the saints gathered together to choose a chieftain over the island. Enda proposed Pupeus, but he said that he was old and feeble and had only come there on pilgrimage, and that if, having spurned the headship of the universal Church he should now hold sway over the worldly, he would only make a fool of himself. So three monks, Jarlath, Maccrethe and Finnian the younger, were sent off to Rome to get a decision on the
question
. The Pope sent them back again with instructions to gather all the people together to receive God’s judgment. And when all were gathered, three white birds came flying from the east; one of them carried in its beak the Gospel of Christ and laid it in Enda’s lap; the others brought a most precious casula and placed it at his feet. Then, flying three times round the island, they disappeared. And all accepted Enda as their abbot.

The next miracle is that of the angel who cleft the channel into
the harbour at Cill Éinne, as told in
Pilgrimage.
There follows an account of St. Ciarán’s seven years of service under St. Enda, which I will retail when we come to Mainistir, the site of his
labours
, and of an excursion with Ciarán to places around Loch Corrib, where various miracles were performed. Finally, Ciarán leaves Aran for his great work of the founding of Clonmacnois. They all go down to the shore to see him off, and return weeping bitterly.

A word on the context and transmission of this strange
document
. Medieval Ireland was prolific in the writing of saints’ Lives, both in Latin and Irish. Over a hundred Latin Lives, treating of about sixty saints, are still extant, and there are about fifty in Irish, of about forty saints; some saints are celebrated in both languages. Other sources include nearly a hundred and twenty short tracts and anecdotes, and a number of martyrologies, lists
of saints’ names and genealogies. Local oral traditions celebrate many hundreds of saints unrecognized by the written word. Of St. Enda, there is no Irish Life, and one Latin Life. This is
preserved
in two manuscript collections of saints’ Lives in the
Bodleian
Library at Oxford, one of which is a copy of the other, and the printed version edited by John Colgan, who worked from a
transcript
made on his behalf of the second of the two manuscripts now in Oxford; that transcript is also still extant, in the hands of the Franciscan House of Studies in Killiney. Thus it seems that the story of St. Enda comes down to us through a single channel and might very easily have been irrecoverably lost, for not a single medieval Irish library has been preserved as a whole, and the
survival
of such fragments as we still have of the corpus of Irish
hagiography
is due to a few scholars whose hands remained steady through dangerous times.