Saints and Scholars

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I started to do research into this. I wanted to know what were the sums and were they right, and what was the standard of education at Glendalough,” she says. “I discovered it was extremely high. The book is advanced maths, mathematical philosophy – much more than one and one is two.” 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’.

The celebration of St Brigid’s Day on February 1 – the pagan feast of Imbolc – was probably intended as a symbolic gesture, Fr Ó Ríordáin says, noting that with this being seen as a hinge of the year, with the worst of the winter being over, it was a fitting day to celebrate somebody who represented a new beginning for Ireland. 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. Piecing the lives together from strictly historical texts and hagiographies – saints’ lives intended to provoke wonder and provide models for holy life – entails some thoughtful and creative work, Fr Ó Ríordáin continues.Springing forward a few centuries, Ireland has contributed to global knowledge of the world around us in many other areas. Robert Boyle, a Waterford man known as "the father of chemistry", was one of the first scientists in the world to suggest that matter was not made of earth, water, air and fire (as was thought at the time) but was instead made up of smaller particles, which we now know as atoms. Maud Delap, a self-taught marine biologist who studied specimens off the shoreline of Valentia in Co Kerry, made major contributions to understanding the complex life-cycles of jellyfish and other marine life. And we are likely all familiar with the story of William Rowan Hamilton who, in a moment of inspiration, inscribed his quaternion equation on Broom Bridge in Dublin – an equation which is now core to programming 3D graphics.

It was that bit more benign,” he continues. “Columbanus’ rule was tough, no questions about it, and he expected it from his monks, and wouldn’t expect anything more than he’d put up with himself.” Music and the Stars : Mathematics in Medieval Ireland is in book shops or available from fourcourtspress.ie

Welcome to Saints and Scholars!

During your visit you can visit our reconstructed Irish Celtic round tower. You will walk into and experience early Celtic monastic life, simple and solitary, given to prayer and contemplation by visiting our reconstructed Celtic ‘bee-hive’ cell as well as an early monastic cave dwelling.

I would think there was something very strongly missionary about the Irish converts to Christianity,” Fr Ó Ríordáin says. “Now, part of it would be finding a desert, a desert in the ocean, somewhere to go and say their prayers, but when they got there there’d be people living about the place and they’d reach out to them in need – the good decent thing in an Irish situation where you look after the neighbours and if you find them in need you look after them.” A family feud set Gobnait on her spiritual journey, which led her first to study with St Enda. (She was his only female student.) One story tells of how St Gobnait stopped the spread of plague by using honey as a cure; another states that she used her stave to draw a white line that prevented the plague entering her parish. I would say they are part of what we are the part of a legacy,” he says. “Liam de Paor in one of his books says that no matter what happens in Ireland today, or what people in the future do, one thing that cannot be denied or changed is that we are people who have had 1500 years of Christianity. Whether we like it or not, that’s us.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.

Curiously, though, the monastic rule by which Columbanus’ monasteries at Annegray, Luxeuil, Fontaine, Bregenz and Bobbio lived did not last into the later Middle Ages and has left little imprint in wider Christianity. Was it too rigorous, and was so rigorous a rule the norm in Celtic Christianity? The Celtic Peace Garden at the IOSAS Centre is the culmination of the Columba Community's work of reconciliation over the past 20 years. It is built near The White Oaks Centre and brings serenity and healing to visitors and to the residents of the centre. 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. 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." At a recent talk by Dr Immo Warntjes at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, I was surprised to learn the origins of Ireland's title as "the land of saints and scholars". I had thought that the beautiful artistry of manuscripts like the Book of Kells and stories of saints like Brigid were the source of this national title, but it seems this badge of pride comes, in fact, from the scientific habits of mind of our Irish monks. From the sixth to the 15th century the only science of import in western Europe was the computation of the date of Easter. As part of this science, known as "computus", algorithms had to be invented to calculate the time between Lent and Easter Sunday, which would also align with lunar cycles.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.” In addition, he says, he typically looks into a few other collections of sources, including Fr John O’Hanlon’s nine-volume 19th-Century The Lives of the Irish Saints. “That is largely hagiographical, but if I find anything there that would make an interesting little snippet I would draw on that as well,” he says. There are many stories and tales about the saints’ bold and brave deeds, including Lí Ban transforming into a mermaid, Colmcille confronting the Loch Ness Monster, Gobnait setting a swarm of bees on raiders and Ciarán’s spirit returning to smote raiders with his crozier! In Killenaule, a small town about 9km from Derrynaflan, where you can still get your groceries and a pint of draught Guinness in the same store, people will happily tell you everything you need to know about their beloved treasure island and how you can get there. Expect the lowdown to be wrapped in legendary banter and generations of folklore. But that's another cherished story for locals to tell. 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.