An Irish Precursor of Dante. Charles Stuart Boswell
has attempted to combine two different accounts of the circumstances which brought about Adamnán’s action, while he has added a quantity of other legislative reforms, more or less connected with the subject, but only a part of which, if any, can be due to Adamnán himself. Here, as in the case of the Boruma, it is left for the most part to our subjective views of probability to determine what amount of reliance is to be placed upon the historical facts which form the main subject of the treatise. Despite the crudity of the work, perhaps the evidence in favour is rather stronger in this case, for not only is it natural to assume that the statements of a legal nature would be tolerably in accordance with the facts, which must have been known to many of the readers, but the ascription of the reform to Adamnán—under the alternative name of the lex innocentium—appears to have been accepted without hesitation by several independent authorities, including the Annals of Ulster and the Fis Adamnáin.
The last action of Adamnán recorded by the annals, and one that seems fairly well authenticated, is a sentence of excommunication pronounced by him at Tara upon one Irgalach for murder. One of the annalistic fragments preserves a report that Adamnán, at the close of his life, was expelled from Iona by his own monks on account of his action in the Easter controversy; this, however, appears to be without foundation, for the fact of his death and burial at Iona seems certain. Another rumour was that grief at the recalcitrance of his monks, for the same reason, had brought about his death, for which no other explanation seems needed than his seventy-seven years, mostly spent in strenuous toil, though, of course, any vexation or distress of mind might well be the immediate cause of death.
Our available information concerning Adamnán does not set a very vivid picture of him before us. His own writings are of a somewhat impersonal character, while the Irish annalists seldom bring to their portrayal of historical persons that power of characterisation and description constantly apparent in the romances. We have already seen Bede’s testimony to Adamnán’s learning and high character; the Four Masters, in their notice of Adamnán’s death (which they place in 703) refer to that passage, and add that he was ‘tearful, penitent, given to prayer, diligent, ascetic, temperate; for he never used to eat excepting on Sunday and Thursday only; he made a slave of himself to these virtues; and, moreover, he was wise and learned in the clear understanding of the Holy Scriptures of God.’ And a few scattered notices of the kind appear to comprise all that we have in the way of direct description. Nevertheless, the authentic record of his actions, combined with the more doubtful evidence of later annalists—which, at the very least, serve to show what notion of him survived, and was transmitted to posterity—may enable us to trace with tolerable accuracy the more salient outlines of his character. That his was a striking and commanding personality there is no doubt: he appears to have been fashioned after the same type as so many of the leading Churchmen of the Middle Ages, from Ambrose down; a type which combined a great proficiency in learning, and a devotion to the virtues of the cloister, with a strenuous activity which asserted itself alike in the diligent administration of their ecclesiastical office, and in the exercise of their influence upon secular affairs. In these last, their intervention commonly made for righteousness, and aimed at putting a conscience into politics, never a superfluous task. They often stood forward as the champions of the wronged and oppressed, and in this cause, and, even more, in defence of the claims and immunities of the Church, never feared to encounter the temporal power; rather otherwise, in fact. This side of Adamnán’s character appears in his mission to Northumbria on behalf of the kidnapped Irishmen, and his alleged defence against Finnachta of the privileges of his own order; above all, in his amelioration of the lot of women—possibly, too, of students and children—the records whereof, whatever the amount of historical fact which they contain, reveal the estimation in which Adamnán was held. At the same time, if the incident of the Boruma be either true in fact, or true to his character, it is evident that he was as liable as any of his great compeers, foreign or Irish—Colm Cille and Ruadán, for instance—to allow his zeal to be enlisted in the cause of party interest or personal sympathies, to the great public detriment. He enjoyed a traditional reputation for filial piety, and, at least, tribal patriotism. His recorded asceticism, however severe, does not appear, save in some of the least credible passages of the Cáin, to have been carried by him to the same lengths of self-torture, worthy of a solitary of the Thebaid, or an Indian yogi, as it was by many of the Irish saints. Indeed, his was mainly a life of action, and even the learning for which he was famous is more apparent in the quality of his work than in the quantity of it. The part of his career which left the most enduring mark upon his Church and his country was the mainly successful struggle which he carried on as the leading Irish champion of Catholicism in the long contest, begun before his time, and only finished by Malachi and Gelasius in the middle of the twelfth century, between the respective partisans of national and of general usages in the ritual of the Irish Church. That portion of his work which he left unfinished, the submission of his own order, was completed within a quarter of a century after his death, and the ties between the Churches of Ireland and other countries of the West were drawn tighter by the removal of the chief cause of separation.
The Vision which has come down to us under the name of Adamnán is not to be included among his own works. The language and style, which belong to a much later period, are conclusive as to this; while several allusions in it, as that to the donation of Constantine, also point to a later date. Dr. Whitley Stokes, indeed, considers that ‘it is not older than the eleventh century,’ but Professor Windisch, in the preface to his edition, demurs to this conclusion, and holds that it was written in the tenth century, possibly even in the ninth (Irische Texte, i. 167 sqq.). Nevertheless, it is not to be classed among the literary forgeries with which the Middle Ages teem, composed sometimes animo fraudandi, sometimes, in the loose views then prevailing as to literary property and literary fame, in order to secure the prestige of a great name. The present work, however, never professes to be Adamnán’s own composition. It invariably speaks of him in the third person, terming him the ‘High Scholar of the Western World,’ and refers to his legislation at the Mórdáil, where he is said to have first received his Vision, and to his subsequent preaching as matters of past history. It remains, then, to be considered how this Vision came to be associated with his name. We have seen that he had become the hero of a saga-cycle, into which fiction had made an entrance: whether we must class the doubtful episodes as historical romance merely, or as facts set off by the aid of fiction. This, however, brings us little further, for it is certain that this popular reputation was earned by his actual achievements: again, therefore, we are faced with the question how to distinguish fact from fiction. It may be that the true author sought for his own teaching the authority of so famous a saint; or he may have had before him an anonymous work, and inserted the name of Adamnán from a like motive, or from a belief in the fact; or, again, the work may be what it professes to be, and may have for its basis a more or less accurate tradition of Adamnán’s own teaching. A tradition, I venture to think, should be allowed a certain weight where it is in conflict neither with ascertained fact nor with probability; and here the probabilities appear to be rather favourable than otherwise, which, perhaps, in the absence of further evidence, is the nearest approach to a conclusion we can hope to make. It is not a forgery; it is not a polemical work, where the author might wish to shoot forth his darts from under the shield of some Ajax of controversy. Neither is it a mere floating legend, ready to be tacked on to any name indifferently; on the contrary, it is written with great care, and with a literary and constructive skill rare at that day. It makes no profession, and betrays no purpose, save to give the substance of the Vision which Adamnán related to the Mórdáil, and of his subsequent preaching. The fashion of the day renders it highly probable that Adamnán’s teaching or preaching may have assumed this form. Then his fame and authority, at the most active period of Irish letters, might avail to preserve a work, thus widely published, for a longer time than the 150 or 250 years which intervened between his death and the composition of the Vision, even in its present form, while if the reasons adduced in a later place (Part 11. Sec. 5, post) for supposing it to be of a composite character be correct, it follows that the latest author must have had before him—as in any case he probably had—materials of an earlier date.
Thus the Fis and the Cáin appear to institute an exact parallel. We have as the basis of the extant work, in the one case, a law enacted, in the other, a Vision recited, by the saint, which a later writer