Sweet Saint Bride

 

We continue the series of posts with a Scottish view of Saint Brigid, or Saint Bride as she is called here, from 1905. I am struck by how the author (despite her archetypal Scottish name) includes a distinctly English perspective and compares Saint Brigid with the great northern English female saint, Hilda of Whitby. By making a clear distinction between 'Hilda the Teuton' and 'Bride the Gael' the writer reflects racial stereotypes of hard-headed, practical Saxons and dreamy, otherworldly Celts common at this time. The Celtic twilight fantasies of 'Fiona Macleod' also make an appearance. Since the posts in this series have all been drawn from the archives of the Australian and New Zealand press, I am surprised by the claim that Saint Brigid's Day is 'a holy day to few or none outside her own country'. On the contrary, these newspaper accounts testify to the feast of the Irish patroness being very much alive on the other side of the world:

SWEET SAINT BRIDE
By Jessie Mackay
 

Paul said, and Peter said. 

And every saint in heaven said 

That none had a fairer face 

Than sweet Saint Bride.

Thus, or all but thus, runs the legend beneath a late Academy picture in London; a picture of Saint Bridget, who was also the adored Saint Bride of Scotland, and the Isles, Saint Bride of Bothwell,  patroness of the wild Douglases: Saint Brigid or Brigitta, venerated at many shrines both in France and Germany. So much is attested by place, name, and by chronicle; and in the luxuriant maze of old Celtic tradition, Saint Bride bore higher titles yet, being called by her own people, "Mary of the Gael,'' or "Mary of Ireland"; while in medieval French  books of church service she was styled without limitation, '"Altera Maria,"' the Other Madonna. 

 Under the immense mass of legendary miracle attached to the name of St .Bridget, there lies undoubtedly the reality of a life renowned, devoted, and pure; a life which, judging by its lingering impress on time, has been called the very female flower of Celtic Christianity. It is impossible to think of her thus without a curious pathetic linking of her name with that of the later-born Hilda of Whitby, who bore the same high relation to the Teutonic Christianity of Britain. Types of race they were, in their lives of like aim, but unlike result. It is beyond doubt that Bride the Gael was the greater in her lifetime, the more widely known and revered; but it is the work of Hilda the Teuton that has come down in a clearer light of history to us. A hundred bards tuned their lyres to the lays of heaven at the voice of Bride; far and wide they bore the new songs of peace in that wild age; but they long since passed to their own, leaving but echoes melting in the nameless sea-winds of the west; whereas the one home-abiding English singer, reared in the house of the home-abiding Hilda, has made Whitby immortal; after 14 hundred years, the name of Caedmon is yet green. Loving, high-souled, mystical, the spirit of the Celt dispersed itself, not vainly, but intangibly, amid the western sea winds; the spirit of the Teuton remains, the emblem of possession.

Certain facts, however, seem authenticated in the life of this remarkable woman. She was born, it appears, about the year 453, very shortly after the landing of the English in Kent. Her father was one of the petty princes of Ulster. During that century, Ireland was converted to Christianity by the preaching of the Scottish-born Patrick, who requited a youth of slavery in pagan Ireland by a life of strenuous mission work in that country. In the transition time Bride was born, and as a child threw her whole heart into the new faith; it is said she was but 14 when she took the monastic vow — for already the corrosion of asceticism was eating into Continental Christianity, and was borrowed into the Celtic faith. Yet one cannot imagine that it was by austerity and seclusion that the girl won so complete an ascendancy over her own people, and moreover made her name a lamp of light throughout Western Europe. "Bridget" means, it will be remembered, the Bright Shining One. Rather let us suppose Bride a winsome leader, a tireless toiler in the vineyard, replete with all that unaging charm that still renders the women of her country the most enduringly fascinating women on earth. That fervent oratory, that winning address, that personal magnetism must have been hers in fullest measure, backed up by a power of organisation at least as great as that of Hilda of Whit by. No less than four religious houses for women were founded by her, the earliest of these, the famous Kil-Dara, or Kildare, being the first of its kind in Ireland. Here, as in the others, Bride must have wrought hard as teacher, leader, expounder of all good and gentle crafts and manners of living. Well did she succeed among the wild clan-folk, for in succeeding years, when Ireland, uplifted, among nations in her golden age of fervid faith and peaceful learning, was the Insula Sacra of the west, Bride was counted, with; Patrick and Columba, one of the three supreme saints of the Sacred Isle. Moreover, if Bride visited a little of the shrines called by her name in England, Scotland, and the Continent, she must have been a famous traveller. Unfortunately, her most famous English shrine, St. Bride's Well, of Fleet street, was degraded into a women's prison during Tudor times; hence "bridewell," a female reformatory. In Galloway her name remained long as the adopted saint of the fierce Douglases, kings of Galloway. One of the small islands of the Hebrides was called Brigidiani after her, and she had yet another famous shrine at Abernethi, said to be the old Pictish capital of the Highlands. Here relics of her were displayed after her death; Ireland was not permitted to retain the ashes of this her most famous daughter; the head of Saint Bride was said to be kept in the chapel of the Jesuits at Lisbon. Giraldus Gambriensis asserts, however, that up to 1185 her body lay in a vault at Dourepatrick, also the last resting place of Saint Patrick himself. Her death, after about 70 years of strenuous labour, took place in 523, about the time when Arthur was fighting his 12 battles.

The miracles attributed to her made her special shrine of Kildare famous for many centuries; there also burned her sacred fire, which was only put out so late as 1220. These signs, however, are now known to be the transferred remains of the heathen cult of Ceredwen, the Celtic Ceres, whose shrine was at Kildare. Moreover, Fiona Macleod infers, doubtless on authority, that there may have been some confusion between the attributes of Bridget and those of Brighid, a kind of Gaelic muse invoked in Druidic times.

In view of the strenuous, noble, selfless life which alone could have left such lasting and apostolic; warfare against heathenism, it is difficult to listen with patience to the puerilities manufactured about her by priestly miracle-mongers in after days. One homely tradition, indeed, gives her the very earthly credit, of obtaining from Saint Patrick, on behalf of her sex, the privilege of proposing in Leap Year! Nor does it neglect to add that she followed up the concession by an immediate offer of her own hand, which Patrick dutifully declined.

But the love of the Celtic heart, and fertility of the Celtic imagination invested Bride of Kildare with every grace and power of supreme sainthood, and did not hesitate to sweep away the bonds of time and space to hail her as the foster mother of Christ in Bethlehem. Some 10 years ago Fiona Macleod embodied these floating myths in a strange fantasy, dreamy, quaint, and tender, called "Mary of the Gael."' In it she tells how Brighid, herself a creature of miraculous and holy birth, was reared by her reputed father in exile at Iona, than a Druid sanctuary, and how she beheld beforehand in a crystal pool the figure of the Virgin Mary. As in a kaleidoscope, the scene shifts and shimmers, now in Scotland, now in Palestine; and so it chances that Brighid, alone of humankind, succours the wandering Joseph and Mary, and takes in her aims the new-born King, wrapped in her own mantle; which action gave her one of her Scottish titles, Brighid of the Mantle. In that supreme hour the old Druidic High Priest of Iona was granted sight of the new-born Saviour in the arms of Brighid, and fell dead in an ecstacy, calling to his acolytes, 

Bridget Bride upon her knee, 

The king of the elements asleep upon her breast!

These legends might be multiplied ad infinitum; but enough has been said to show the real ascendancy of Bride of Kildare in the Irish Golden Age, itself one of the veritable romances of history. And if her own appointed festival, the first of February, is now a holy day to few or none outside her own country, we Scottish Gaels do not well utterly to forget a woman of our race whose life was undoubtedly a beacon lamp in a dark and stormy world.

SWEET SAINT BRIDE Otago Witness, Issue 2662, 22 March 1905.

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