The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore | Page 2

seemingly to overbalance the
faculty of distinguishing fact from fancy. Of St. Bridget we are gravely
told that to dry her wet cloak she hung in out on a sunbeam! Another
Saint sailed away to a foreign land on a sod from his native hillside!
More than once we find a flagstone turned into a raft to bear a
missionary band beyond the seas! St. Fursey exchanged diseases with
his friend Magnentius, and, stranger still, the exchange was arranged
and effected by correspondence! To the saints moreover are ascribed
lives of incredible duration--to Mochta, Ibar, Seachnal, and Brendan,
for instance, three hundred years each; St. Mochaemog is credited with
a life of four hundred and thirteen years, and so on!
Clan, or tribe, rivalry was doubtless one of the things which made for
the invention and multiplication of miracles. If the patron of the Decies
is credited with a miracle, the tribesmen of Ossory must go one better
and attribute to their tribal saint a marvel more striking still. The

hagiographers of Decies retort for their patron by a claim of yet another
miracle and so on. It is to be feared too that occasionally a less worthy
motive than tribal honour prompted the imagination of our Irish
hagiographers--the desire to exploit the saint and his honour for
worldly gain.
The "Lives" of the Irish Saints contain an immense quantity of material
of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church.
Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact
which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is
otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on
ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often
intricate operations of the Celtic mind.
By "Lives" are here meant the old MS. biographies which have come
down to us from ages before the invention of printing. Sometimes these
"Lives" are styled "Acts." Generally we have only one standard "Life"
of a saint and of this there are usually several copies, scattered in
various libraries and collections. Occasionally a second Life is found
differing essentially from the first, but, as a rule, the different copies are
only recensions of a single original. Some of the MSS. are parchment
but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely fragments
and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been entirely lost.
Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the meagre details
supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional reference to
them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the memory of
hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in place
names or is entirely lost.
There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"--possibly one
hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have
Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the
saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter--one in
Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and
of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and
one of these is in two recensions.
The surviving Lives naturally divide themselves into two great
classes-- the Latin Lives and the Irish,--written in Latin and Irish
respectively. We have a Latin Life only of some saints, and Irish Life

only of others, and of others again we have a Latin Life and an Irish. It
may be necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin
by Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives.
Whether the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives
or the Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a large
extent, an open question. Plummer ("Vitae SSm. Hib.," Introd.) seems
to favour the Latin Lives as the originals. His reasoning here however
leaves one rather unconvinced. This is not the place to go into the
matter at length, but a new bit of evidence which makes against the
theory of Latin originals may be quoted; it is furnished by the well
known collection of Latin Lives known as the Codex Salmanticensis, to
which are appended brief marginal notes in mixed middle Irish and
Latin. One such note to the Life of St. Cuangus of Lismore (recte
Liathmore) requests a prayer for him who has translated the Life out of
the Irish into Latin. If one of the Lives, and this a typical or
characteristic Life, be a translation, we may perhaps assume that the
others, or most of them, are translations also. In any case we may
assume as certain that there were original