Brigid and the Bishops II

St Brigid Feeding the Poor by Imogen Stuart

 

We are continuing today with the relationship between Saint Brigid and the Irish bishops. Yesterday we saw that Alice Curtayne believed the relationship was one of equals, and noted the lack of tension between the saint and those in episcopal authority. She then goes on to recount some instances of miracles worked by Saint Brigid which involved bishops. The opening episode is particularly interesting as its shows her unafraid to speak her mind in the presence of senior male clerics:

Brigid is credited with an epigrammatic mode of speech and a certain imperiousness of manner, even with bishops. Once a bishop, with some companions, came to  her convent to deliver a sermon. They had come a long journey and greeted her with the news that they were hungry.“So are we hungry—for instruction,” she answered. “Go into church and speak first, and then you shall eat.”

Other miracles offer more standard hagiographical fare. The miraculous provision of plenty is one of the most common tropes found in the lives of medieval saints. These miracles testify to the faith of the saints, to their trust in God's providence and to their status as God's favoured servants. Saint Brigid's reputation in hagiography is one of generosity, as the following episode recounted by Alice Curtayne testifies:

Once seven bishops together went to visit her, and they have gone down into fame as the Seven Bishops of Cabinteely. Do you suppose that Brigid was disturbed by this invasion of the episcopacy? It would not appear so. She sent one sister to the cows that had already been milked twice that day; and another sister to a larder that was as deplenished as Mother Hubbard’s; and another sister to an ale-vat that was drained dry. Yet the bishops feasted adequately, for food was a commodity Brigid never failed to find for her guests.

 The monastic virtue of hospitality is also on display in this miracle involving Bishop Bron of Killaspugbrone, County Sligo. 

There is a charming story told of one Bishop Bron, who, journeying to Brigid with some companions, lost his way. Finding themselves stranded in a wilderness at nightfall, they were forced to sleep in the open. Then all were comforted by the same dream. They thought (as they drowsed in exhausted and chill discomfort) that through the darkness and wild weather they beheld the lights of Brigid's settlement and that, stumbling to it, they saw her come smiling to the cashel gates to lavish upon them the hospitality for which she was famous. First the feet of the footsore guests were washed and then, installed in repose, warmth, security, they were given good food in that delightful atmosphere of solicitude that was peculiarly Brigid’s. So restful was this dream, the pilgrims suffered not in the least from their night’s exposure. They were even refreshed, and with daylight they hopefully resumed their trudge. And lo! at a turn of the road, their hearts soared to see the familiar figure in white driving towards them. Brigid, having been supernaturally warned, had come out to rescue them from their plight.

 Bishop Bron featured in another miracle involving Saint Brigid, which Alice Curtayne does not recount in her book, but which you can find on the blog here.  

Alice Curtayne ends her chapter on Brigid and the Bishops with this tribute: 

Brigid’s achievements and power, when contrasted with her total lack of training, stand out most singularly. In this display of creative genius, she had plainly divine gifts.The bishops did not wait for a decree of canonisation to acclaim what was so manifest to all men. But when it was discovered that she possessed, too, a genuine discernment of souls, people began to flock to her from all sides. Not the bishops only, but all the great in the land, pagans and Christians, and the humble, too, sought her out.

Alice Curtayne, St. Brigid of Ireland (Dublin, 1933). 

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Brigid and the Bishops

 

First Edition of St Brigid of Ireland by Alice Curtayne

'Brigid and the Bishops' is the title of Chapter IV of Alice Curtayne's biography St Brigid of Ireland.  In recent years much has been made by the supporters of women's ordination of the episode in her hagiography where, receiving her profession as a nun, the bishop accidentally read the office of episcopal consecration over her. In 1934 an Australian reviewer of St Brigid of Ireland wrote 

This study of Saint Brigid is written in the new method of hagiography of which the author is one of the pioneers among the English-reading public. 

and so, I was interested to see how Alice Curtayne approached the idea of 'Brigid the Bishop'. She begins her chapter by noting:

 It was the practice of Celtic Christianity that a bishop only could receive the vows of nuns. When Brigid became a nun, then, there began her first friendship with bishops, which was to develop later into a kind of fellowship with the episcopacy—one of the most curious features of her life. Ten or twelve years before her birth, Saint Patrick had already established the Irish Hierarchy under the primacy of Armagh. That hierarchy appears to have immediately discerned Brigid and received her, without hesitation, on terms of equality. Of struggles with ecclesiastical authority— sorrowful commonplace in the lives of later saints —there is no trace in Brigid’s career...

 ... Although Patrick himself is not to be counted among the bishop preceptors, counsellors and friends who thronged about Brigid, let it be remembered that these included the Apostle’s closest friends. Brigid was intimate with Patrick's intimates, so that even though she was not personally acquainted with him, the statements in the old “Lives” representing them as of one mind and heart, still remain strictly true.

After recounting Saint Brigid's close friendship with Bishop Erc of Slane, depicted in hagiography as one of Saint Patrick's earliest and most important converts, and noting that 'a great many of Brigid's chariot journeys were undertaken under Erc's direction', Curtayne then grasps the nettle of Brigid's own status:

 The importance assumed by Brigid in the eyes of the episcopacy has given rise to at least one absurd legend, which must be dismissed. It is sometimes said that Brigid “appointed” Conlaeth to Kildare, almost as though she had conferred episcopal jurisdiction upon him. Worse, it is even stated in one Irish “Life” that Brigid herself was a bishop, the anomaly being explained by the fact that at her profession the rite of episcopal consecration was read over her in mistake; it is added with circumstantial detail that Maccaille protested to Mel, saying a bishop’s order should not be conferred on a woman, and that Mel answered it was clearly the work of God in this case and should stand! 

It is true that Brigid’s chief foundation, Kildare, preserved for many centuries a double line of succession of abbesses and bishops; and it is equally true that for long the nomination of the Bishop of Kildare appeared to be subject to some extent to the Abbess’s approval. But of course Brigid was not a bishop, nor was it in her power to confer episcopal jurisdiction. What emerges from this legend is what gave rise to it: her strong-mindedness, and the deference ungrudgingly accorded her by the episcopacy. She was the admired friend and the counsellor of bishops. What more natural than that the old Irish writer should assume that she was even a bishop herself, although it happened by accident!  

Now, of course modern scholars would offer a fuller analysis of the governance of Kildare and set the story of Brigid's own episcopal claims in the context of later historical developments, such as the struggle between Kildare and Armagh for primacy in the Irish church. But Alice Curtayne was right to point out that hagiography depicts Saint Brigid as having enjoyed a friendship of equals with the bishops, even though there is no evidence that she or any other woman actually exercised the office of bishop.

 

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"What is Brigid to us, or we to Brigid, that we should seek to know her?"

 

St Brigid by Leo Whelan

Yesterday, Alice Curtayne left us with the question "What is Brigid to us, or we to Brigid, that we should seek to know her?"  It was one she posed in the 1930s but one which remains current in the 2020s and below is her answer:

But there is a whole series of surprises - so great as to be akin to shocks - awaiting those who set out on a determined rediscovery of Brigid. The first shock is suffered in finding out her triumphant, her everlasting, her placid modernity. She presents an eternal example of feminine achievement, such as to astonish the most extreme of our modern feminists. We have never approached it. For she asserted herself against a set of circumstances so formidably adverse to self-expression that the present times can provide no parallel to them. The clearer grows Brigid's story, the more splendid becomes her effort. We find that, after all, we have nothing to add to her accomplishment in the domain of human endeavour and that - in the best sense - she can still lead womankind, as she led it fifteen hundred years ago. 

 Isn't it interesting to see Saint Brigid associated with feminism and modernity in 1935? Alice Curtayne affirms here her view of the uniqueness of Saint Brigid, the woman and of her achievement. And she is not done yet:

When Brigid had overcome the adverse circumstances which would have confined her, she used her freedom in a way that will greatly surprise every student of the present day who seeks to piece together her story. Already, in that remote fifth century, we find her doing all those things which the world shouts in our ears as the discovery and boast of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With independence of mind and energy, Brigid undertook the organisation and the defence of women, and thus became the saviour of the feminine ascetic movement in Ireland. But she was much more than a mere organiser. She was a literary and a cultural inspiration. Foundress of the famous school of Kildare, she was a promotor of craftsmanship. There were artists turning out croziers, chalices and shrines, and illuminating manuscripts because of Brigid's self-emancipation. She had a circle of friends who represented that which Christian history calls a school of mystics, and which the modern world might describe as a salon. But with all this activity, she remains the patron of agricultural life, for throughout her whole career she was never disassociated from cows and sheep and the labour of the fields. In all those spheres of action where we are gropingly trying to reconstruct at the the present day, Brigid was a pioneer. 

Alice Curtayne, 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 745 (Jul., 1935), pp. 412-420. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513775  

Whilst one could certainly argue that there is a hyperbolic element in Alice Curtayne's record of Saint Brigid's achievements, nevertheless it remains quite a tribute to a woman, written by a woman in the 1930s. As a male contemporary reviewer, Aodh de Blacam, noted "Miss Curtayne's Brigid is a great nun - great in soul, great in labour, great in her achievement and influence." For me she is a much more compelling figure than the feminist goddess of our own times. 

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Rediscovering Saint Brigid

St Brigid by P.J. Tuohy 1924-25

 

I am staying today with Alice Curtayne's 1935 article on 'Rediscovering Saint Brigid'. I find this paper particularly intriguing as I struggled to appreciate her perception that the memory of Saint Brigid had faded. Saint Brigid was very much a part of the nineteenth/early twentieth century Celtic Revival's rediscovery of the Irish saints as a whole. Canon O'Hanlon, for example, had published a substantial biography of her in 1877 under the title Life of St. Brigid, Virgin: First abbess of Kildare, Special Patroness of Kildare Diocese, and General Patroness of Ireland. Thirty years later Augustinian Father J.A. Knowles published his Saint Brigid, a work running to almost 300 pages. In addition, Cardinal Moran, who had obtained a relic of Saint Brigid's tooth from Cologne for the Brigidine sisters in the 1880s, included her in a series of pamphlets on all three of the Irish patrons published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society in 1905. There are many other examples of poems, articles and stories from the popular religious and secular press which might also be cited. So, I think it is fair to say that in the fifty years before Alice Curtayne's article appeared Saint Brigid had not been overlooked or forgotten. Now in fairness, as we saw in yesterday's extract, she begins by saying 'I do not say that Ireland had forgotten her, but we were very ignorant of her, and very unconcerned about our ignorance'. She goes on to say:

Saint Brigid! To the majority of our people she is still only a name: a beautiful name, because it is musical and has antiquity.There is a vague notion current that it connotes strength of some kind, so it is cheerfully passed on to children and the donors are content. To others, that name resounding like a knell from our remotest past, is backed by some vague abstraction suggested by the artist: Saint Brigid is a shadowy personage (garbed in red Tuohy supposed!), grasping a crozier, or holding a miniature model of a church, and gazing serenely into vacancy....

 As Curtayne sees it, the deficiencies in iconography are only a part of the problem:

The person of Saint Brigid is still obscured from view in the mists of ancient history, and it is really only by an extreme effort of mind that people can believe there is reality behind that name: that Brigid really "lived, moved and had her being," that she had a distinctive personality with which it is highly important we should restore communion. It is important to us a nation. Sometimes it seems that our only way of survival lies through this restoration of the Celtic Christian mind.

They err who imagine that this personage of our early history cannot bring us any enlightenment in our modern complexities. It is supposed that, whatever her reality may have been, she is now too remote from us, too severed by the gulf of centuries and the vicissitudes of history, to hold any practical guidance for us in our present welter. The general attitude, never expressed - naturally- but quite clearly implied, is: "What is Brigid to us, or we to Brigid, that we should seek to know her?"  

 Alice Curtayne, 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 745 (Jul., 1935), pp. 412-420. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513775 

So, it seems that for Alice Curtayne it was not that the name of Saint Brigid had been forgotten, rather it was the reality behind that name. In tomorrow's posting we will look at some of the answers the writer offered to the questions she has posed here.

  

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Saint Brigid's Day Holiday

 

Today in Ireland is the official Saint Brigid's Day holiday as former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was only too pleased to remind us in a tweet made here on January 30, 2026:

I signed the order establishing this new public holiday. It clearly states that it is both St Brigid's Day and Imbolc venerating both an Irish christian saint and our own ancient new year when we had our own gods and godesses (sic). National identity doesn't have to be monotone or singular. It can be multi-layered and pluralistic. In fact, that's more authentic to who we are and who she was as a saint godess (sic). Éire ildaite.

 This extraordinary statement perfectly illustrates the culture war around Saint Brigid which seems to have taken on a sharper edge this year. I first started blogging back in 2009 and am conscious of a real sea-change of late. Back then the notion that Saint Brigid was really a Celtic goddess whom the Church had hijacked was confidently asserted as established and unquestioned fact. It wasn't until I started to investigate the evidence on which these claims rested for myself that I realised just how dubious the foundations actually were. I have been aware over the last few years that female academics have begun to challenge the goddess, I even heard one say in a radio interview that we had been 'sold a pup' about Saint Brigid's supposed identification with a goddess. Yet Mr Varadkar seems to be totally unaware of the recent advances made in the understanding of early medieval Christianity and of the re-examination of the historical saint Brigid, instead claiming that the 'saint goddess' is the more authentic. I find it interesting that 'progressive' people, supposedly wanting female voices to be heard and taken seriously, prefer to ignore the scholarship of modern Irish women academics and instead cling to discredited Victorian thinking about goddesses.  

The idea though that Saint Brigid deserved a public holiday in her honour predates our modern culture wars. Indeed, it was something writer Alice Curtayne was aware of in the early 1930s. In her article 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', published in the Irish Monthly she wrote of the various ways in which interest in our national patroness had been reawakened:

..in recent years there has been a curiously spontaneous revival of the cult of Saint Brigid. I do not say that Ireland had forgotten her, but we were very ignorant of her and very unconcerned about out ignorance. Then it was as though our national consciousness became suddenly uneasy. Articles, poems, plays and even books about Brigid began to blossom out here and there.She was painted by two of our artists  and their different conceptions provoked a welcome discussion. Her relic was solemnly brought back from Portugal and enshrined in a church dedicated to her near the capital city. The demand arose on all sides to have her feast-day declared a national holiday, like that of Saint Patrick. 

Alice Curtayne, 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 745 (Jul., 1935), pp. 412-420. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513775

How sad to see that now that this demand has finally been met, it is to honour a quite different 'Brigid'  than the historical saint, loved and venerated by the Irish people over many centuries. 

 

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Saint Brigid of Ireland: "She stood in splendid isolation, without prototype, without peer."

 I am marking Lá Fhéile Bríde, the feast day of Saint Brigid, in 2026 with a wonderful tribute by writer Alice Curtayne from her 1934 study Saint Brigid of Ireland. In the extract below, taken from the opening chapter, the writer emphasizes both Saint Brigid's presence in the Irish landscape and the uniqueness of her presence in early Irish Christianity as a whole. The majority of our early medieval Irish female saints are shadowy, elusive figures, but not Brigid. Wishing everyone the blessings of the feast! 

 

Saint Brigid, one of the Great Three, standing between Patrick and Columcille, arose in that period where certainty first begins in Irish record. She is at that boundary on which abut all our history, literature, art, architecture and topography. The strength of Irish devotion to her is known if only because our Kilbrides, Tubberbrides and Kilbreedys so insistently speak of it. Not even the unbeliever who has the smallest acquaintance with Ireland can miss it, so enormously is that name written across the landscape. The ancients affixed it to permanent things like running water, townlands, capes, that should witness to her forever. It was as though her contemporaries re-named every landmark,re-cast the whole description of the island in order to commemorate her. That devotion is distinguished too by a certain freshness of enthusiasm. There is still preserved in its texture an element of surprise, a delight, such as men might experience on beholding dawn for the first time. Her name has never become an ordinary name, but still vibrates in the ear like the blast of a trumpet. All this is universally known but it is not in the least understood. It is not understood because with the passage of time we have lost sight of the shining singularity of Brigid. It would not be exaggeration to say that her appearance was like a new revelation of Christianity..... 

The great fact to bear in mind about Brigid and the women of 450 is her difference from them. She stood in splendid isolation, without prototype, without peer. When she arose it was as though with a decisive movement she pulled back a heavy curtain shrouding the sordid scene. And at that gesture all the other actors on the stage spring to their feet to gaze, transfigured, at a dazzling landscape where they beheld for the first time Freedom and, beyond it, Vision.

 

Alice Curtayne,  Saint Brigid of Ireland, (Dublin, 1934). 

 

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Alice Curtayne and Saint Brigid

As we approach the feast of Saint Brigid, 2026, I have been re-reading the work of Irish Catholic writer Alice Curtayne, born in County Kerry on November 6, the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland, 1901. She died on August 9, 1981, in Saint Brigid's own county of Kildare. Over the course of her eighty years Alice Curtayne produced a number of books on the Irish saints, including individual titles on all three of our Irish patrons plus two volumes on Irish saints for children. I intend over the coming days to share extracts from three of her writings on Saint Brigid, all published in the 1930s:

 (1) Saint Brigid of Ireland - a 1934 book on Saint Brigid's life and cultus 

(2) The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid - a 1935 article published in The Irish Monthly 

 (3) Saint Brigid- The Mary of Ireland - a 1936 pamphlet published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society. 

 Ninety years on I find her work charming, still fresh and often thought-provoking. As Ireland in 2026 appears to find the unattested claims of a fictional flame-haired feminist goddess more compelling than the documented cultus of our national patroness, I am cheering on Alice Curtayne as she writes: 

It is easy to point to the affinity between certain of the heathen legends and episodes in the life of Brigid, but that affinity does not alone suffice to destroy Brigid’s historical truth. As a matter of fact the vitality of the Christian saint annihilates the dim concept of the pagan divinity. The abstraction fades before the brightness of the concrete. The warm humanity of Brigid that shines through the gossiping legends, that flaming humanity, alternately vehement, angry, tolerant, benign, completes before the eye of the mind a living personality that is the direct antithesis of the druids’ cold and unconsoling myth.

Alice Curtayne, St Brigid of Ireland (revised edition, Dublin, 1955), 104. 

I am sure she would have been heartened to know that the current generation of scholars have comprehensively undermined the foundations on which the claims of Brigid the goddess rest, even if popular enthusiasm for the pagan divinity remains unaffected. I look forward to sharing some more of Alice Curtayne's reflections on Brigid the saint each day until the octave of her feast. 

 

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