08 — East and West
Brendan in the wider communion of the undivided Church: the Irish peregrinatio pro Christo by sea as a Western transposition of the Eastern desert ideal — the monk who, like Abraham, leaves his country for a place God will show him, but whose “desert in the ocean” is a curragh on the open sea; and the Orthodox reception of Brendan as a pre-schism Celtic saint, commemorated on 16 May, within the Church’s recovery of the holy ones of the Western lands.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic)
Brendan is unintelligible apart from the monastic theology that produced him, and that theology is Eastern in origin. The Irish monastic movement drank from the wells of the Egyptian and Palestinian desert — through Cassian, through Athanasius’s Life of Antony, through the Sayings — and the peculiarly Irish form it took, the peregrinatio pro Christo, the exile-pilgrimage for Christ’s sake, was the desert ascesis recast for a people whose wilderness was the sea. This section places Brendan in that East–West frame. The first file traces the sea-pilgrimage as a transposition of the desert ideal and links it to Cassian and the Continental Irish mission. The second file treats the Orthodox reception of Brendan: a saint of the undivided Church, received without controversy as a holy abbot, his feast kept on 16 May, his place secure among the pre-schism Western saints the Orthodox tradition has recovered and venerates.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Monastic Sea-Pilgrimage | Peregrinatio pro Christo by sea; the Eastern desert ideal (Antony, the Apophthegmata, Cassian) transposed to the ocean; the “desert in the ocean” and the curragh as cell; the link to Columba, Columbanus, and the Continental Irish mission. |
| The Orthodox Reception | Brendan as a pre-schism Celtic saint received in the Orthodox calendar; the feast of 16 May; the theology of ecclesial reception of the Western saints; the place of the Celtic monastic witness in the Orthodox memory of the undivided Church. |
See Also
- The Monastic Founder — the Irish monastic world Brendan founded within
- Reading the Navigatio — the Navigatio as a monastic text
- St. John Cassian — the conduit of the desert ideal to the Latin West
- St. Columbanus — the peregrinatio carried to the Continent
- Orthodoxy: Monasticism — the monastic tradition East and West
- Orthodoxy: The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of which Brendan is a saint
References
- Cassian, John. The Conferences and The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. New York: Newman Press, 1997, 2000.
- Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (On peregrinatio.)
- Clancy, Thomas Owen. “The Real St Ninian.” The Innes Review 52 (2001). (On Irish peregrinatio and the sea.)
- O’Loughlin, Thomas. Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish Writings. London: Continuum, 2000.