The Latin Irish Lives of Ciaran | Page 2

Lives of Ciaran especially remarkable. They may well
be genuine reminiscences of the real life, or at least of the real character
of the man himself. Thus, there are a number of coincidences, clearly
undesigned (noted below, p. 104) consistently pointing to a pre-Celtic
parentage for the saint. Again, the saint's mother is represented as a
strong personality, with a decided strain of "thrawnness" in her
composition; while the saint himself is shown to us as distinguished by
a beautiful unselfishness. This, it must be confessed, is very far from
being a common character of the Irish saints, as they are represented to
us by the native hagiologists; and in any case the character-drawing of
the average Irish saint's life is so rudimentary, that when we are thus
enabled to detect well-defined traits, we are quite justified in accepting
them as based on the tradition of the actual personality of the saint. In
other words, so deep was the impression which the man made upon his
contemporaries during his short life, that his memorabilia seem to be,
on the whole, of a more definitely historic nature than are those of other
Irish saints.
There is, however, a disturbing element which must be kept in mind in
criticising the Lives of Ciaran. He was the son of a carpenter, and he
was said to have died at the age of thirty-three. It is quite clear that
these coincidences with the facts of the earthly parentage and death of

Christ were observed by the homilists--indeed the author of the Irish
Life says as much, at the end of his work. They provoked a natural and
perhaps wholly unconscious desire to draw other parallels; and if we
may use a convenient German technical term, there is a traceable
Tendenz in this direction, as is indicated in the Annotations on later
pages. It is not to be supposed that even these apparently imitative
incidents are (not to mince matters) mere pious frauds; they may well
have come into existence in the folk-consciousness automatically,
before they received their present literary form. But such a
development could hardly have centred in an unworthy subject; there
must have been a well-established tradition of a _Christ-likeness_ of
character in the man, for such parallels in detail to have taken shape.[3]
The homiletic purpose of these documents is most clearly shown in the
Irish Life. This was written to be preached as a sermon on the saint's
festival ["this day _to-day_," § 1], at Clonmacnois ["he came to this
town," § 34: "a fragment of the cask remained here till recently," § 36:
"here are the relics of Ciaran," § 41. Similarly the First Latin Life, § 35,
calls the saint "Our most holy patron"]. The actual date of the Irish
sermon is less easy to fix; the language has been modernised step by
step in the process of transmission from manuscript to manuscript, but
originally it may have been written about the eleventh century, though
incorporating fragments of earlier material. The passage just quoted,
saying that a certain relic had remained till recently, may possibly
indicate that the homily had been delivered shortly after one of the
many burnings and plunderings which the monastery suffered; in such
a calamity the relic might have perished. The prophecy put into
Ciaran's mouth, that "there would be great persecution of his city from
evil men in the end of the world" [Irish Life, § 38] seems to relate to
such an event: it is very suggestive that exactly the same exprestion
"great persecution from evil men" (_ingrem mór ó droch-daoinibh_) is
used in the Chronicon Scotorum of certain raids on the monastery
which took place in the year A.D. 1091; and that on the strength of an
old prophecy there was a belief in Ireland that the world was destined
to come to an end in the year 1096, as we learn from the Annals of the
Four Masters under that date.[4] It must, however, be remembered that
a date determined for a single incident does not necessarily date the

whole compilation containing it.
The text of the First Latin Life (here called for convenience of
reference LA) is found in an early fifteenth-century MS. in Marsh's
Library, Dublin. It has been edited, without translation, by the Rev. C.
Plummer in his most valuable Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford,
1910) vol. i, pp. 200-216. The translation given in this volume has been
made from Plummer's edition, which I have collated with the original
MS.[5]
The text of the Second Latin Life (LB) is contained in two MSS. in the
Bodleian Library (Rawl. B 485 and Rawl. B 505, here called R1 and
R2). Of these R2 is a direct copy of R1, as has been proved by
Plummer, in his description of these manuscripts.[6]