"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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