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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