Navigating salvation

[ABOVE: © Espresso Addict (photographer), Sculpture commemorating St Brandon, Brandon Creek (Cuas an Bhodaigh), May 27, 2007—geograph / [CC-BY-SA 2.0] Wikimedia Commons]

About fifteen miles north of the village of Dingle, in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) region of County Kerry, Ireland, is an even tinier historic village named Cuas an Bhodaigh, or in English, Brandon Creek. It is not on the Ring of Kerry, so many tourists miss it—but it is well worth a visit. Nestled near a cove looking out into the Atlantic is a statue of a man in a currach, an ancient hide-covered boat, marking the site where, according to medieval texts, St. Brendan the Navigator put to sea.

While Brendan (c. 484–577) is usually listed as one of the most important of the early medieval Irish saints, what we actually know of him is limited. The earliest text that mentions him is Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba, written in the late seventh century, and there he is a relatively minor character, serving as a witness to Columba’s holiness. The Irish and Latin lives of Brendan—and the most famous text about the saint, the ninth-century Voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator—were written later and with agendas and cannot be relied upon for historical accuracy. (Though it is not uncommon for readers to speculate upon the scope of his voyages from the text: “I am betting that island is Iceland”—which could be historically true—or even, “I think that place is Florida”—which may be more of a stretch!)

But there are things that we can know with certainty. Brendan was a monk and priest from southwest Ireland, he established a number of monasteries around the Sacred Isle, and most important for our purposes, he represented a uniquely Celtic form of missionary endeavor that used sea lanes rather than church aisles to spread Christianity around Europe and beyond. To read his texts simply as road maps or captain’s logs is to miss the point of Brendan’s story.

AN IRISH ODYSSEY

Many writers have compared the stories of Brendan to Homer’s Odyssey, and there are indeed similarities. When one reads about Brendan’s crew returning to the same island every spring for seven years, for example, it does recall Odysseus spending seven years on Calypso’s island. But to really understand Brendan’s travels, one should look not to Greek epics, but to pre-Christian and Christian Celtic texts.

Traditional Celtic (and especially Irish) literature has entire genres of travel narratives: primarily echtrai, which reflect pre-Christian traditions, and immrama, which may have pre-Christian origins but were adapted for Christian use by Irish monks and scholars.

In echtrai a hero intentionally walks or unintentionally stumbles into the Otherworld (in Irish, Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth). This is a realm where the hero often does not even realize where he is, where time passes at a different pace than at home, and where the hero’s adventures change him forever. In one tale Oisin, the son of Finn, visits Tír na nÓg for three years (during which 300 years pass in Ireland), and when he returns, the centuries overtake him at once and age him to death.

In immrama, by contrast, the focus is not on adventuring in the Otherworld but on the act of traveling itself, filled with ever-changing seas, strange beasts, and islands with unforgettable inhabitants. This is the genre that Christian Celts adopted for the stories of Brendan. Brendan and his men sailed into the west by currach in search of the Promised Land.

On the way they met a huge fish on whose back they would celebrate Mass each Easter for seven years, an island of prophetic birds, monks who had previously set to sea, and, of all people, Judas Iscariot, whom they protected from demons (see pp. 23–25). While their ultimate destination may have been the “land of promise” in the west (which later inspired Tolkien to create the Undying Lands to which the elves sailed from Middle-earth), the focus is not on the destination, but the journey. It was the trip itself that helped the sailors to grow in holiness, to trust in God, and to spread the gospel.

SAILOR-MONKS

This ancient Celtic penchant for travel, and especially seafaring, survived well into the Christian era, but the traditional narratives were heavily adapted for the church’s use. For example while Irish monks and scholars wrote down immrama long after Ireland was Christianized (they had no qualms copying and retaining pre-Christian texts, whether from Ireland or the Continent), they frequently wove Christian themes into these texts, either by paralleling ancient Irish tales with biblical stories that, they claimed, happened at the same time or, as in the Brendan tales, by using traditional narrative styles to describe the lives of Christian saints.

This tradition of travel motivated the first Irish missionaries to set out to spread the gospel. While many Christian saints founded monasteries across the five provinces of Ireland, the quintessential Irish missionary took to the seas. It makes sense. An island-based religion needs a ship to spread.

In the mid-sixth century, for example, the previously referenced St. Columcille (Columba) sailed from Ireland to spread the gospel in Caledonia (Scotland) and its islands. He is best known for founding the Abbey on Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland that would become one of the centers of Celtic monasticism and a launching point for missionary efforts to Scotland, lower Britain, Wales, and the Continent. To this day Iona is a popular site for religious pilgrims, New Age philosophers, artists, and of course, tourists.

To be sure, Columcille’s motives for going to Scotland may not have been completely spiritual. According to one tradition, he was forced on his missionary journey as penance for his involvement in a battle in which 3,000 warriors were killed. He was to remain abroad until he converted as many souls as had died in the battle. But whatever the motive, the journey of Columcille over the seas was among the first of centuries of Celtic missionary efforts, missions that would stretch by sea from Ireland to the lands and islands of Scotland, and from there across the known world.

While Columcille was one of the first seafaring missionaries, he was not the only one. In the late sixth century, Columbanus (540–615) was a respected scholar and teacher from Bangor Abbey in County Down, but his heart was beating to cross the sea as a missionary like his near contemporary Columcille. He eventually sailed and became personally responsible for the founding of monasteries in lands that are now France, Austria, and Italy.

Why are these sailor-monks so important to the history of Christianity and Christian missions? Simply because Celtic monasticism, steeped in lore about crossing the seas to spread the gospel, was instrumental in the molding of Christianity on the Continent well into the Middle Ages. When Emperor Charlemagne in the eighth century invited Irish monks to his court to teach his children, the monks brought not only the Bible and the classics, but also centuries worth of stories about Celtic sailors, pre-Christian and Christian, who took to the seas to fulfill their destinies. St. Brendan may have sailed to the west in search of the Promised Land, but his influence and that of his fellow monks was to be felt eastward across Europe for centuries to come.

THE SHIP AS MONASTIC COMMUNITY

One final recurring theme in the Brendan literature sets these texts apart from classical epics. Namely, the ship itself was essentially a monastery.

While it is easy, as we read these texts, to focus on the distant horizon with the monks as they look toward the next destination, we must not miss that they spent their time on the ship doing what monks did in monasteries across Christendom. They observed the monastic hours of prayer (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline). The abbot priest (Brendan) celebrated Mass on a regular basis. The monks lived in obedience to the abbot. They lived their lives in relative seclusion. All of these were typical monastic customs performed in Glendalough, Iona, and at abbeys around the world.

The ship on which these sailor-monks cruised was not simply a vessel, an unremarkable means to a nautical end. It was in every sense an abbey where cloistered monks had built a monastic community. While the journey into the west may have been a sublime adventure, the very act of entering the ship was an act of monastic obedience and self-sacrifice. The daily monastic life at sea was as important to their spiritual lives as their destination.

In the centuries to come, Christian missions across the world would be inextricably tied to the sea. Whether one considers William Carey boarding a ship to India, the Twelve Apostles of Mexico sailing from Spain, or Adoniram Judson leaving Massachusetts to venture to India and Burma, one can trace a spiritual lineage to the young monk Brendan dreaming of the beckoning sea at Cuas an Bhodaigh. CH