The Monastic Sea-Pilgrimage

The Irish ascetic ideal of peregrinatio pro Christo — voluntary exile from the homeland for Christ’s sake — is the Eastern desert transposed into a Western, maritime key: where the Egyptian monk fled into the eremos, the Irish monk, having no desert, made a wilderness of the open sea. This file traces that transposition from its desert root through John Cassian’s mediation of Egyptian monasticism to the Latin West, into the rudderless sea-pilgrimage that the Navigatio raises to spiritual epic and the Continental Irish mission carries across Europe. Read so, the Celtic sea-pilgrimage is not a curiosity of one island’s piety but one form of the single monasticism of the undivided Church — the same flight from the world to God that drove Antony into the sands.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic)

(1) Peregrinatio pro Christo: Exile as Ascesis

The governing word of Irish monastic spirituality, and the key to Brendan’s whole tradition, is peregrinatio — pilgrimage understood not as a journey to a shrine and back but as a permanent state of being a stranger, a deliberate, lifelong exile from one’s own country undertaken for the love of God. The Latin peregrinus means precisely a foreigner, one living away from his patria; the Old Irish ailithre (literally “other-land-ing”) and the verbal noun deorad Dé, “God’s exile,” name the same condition. For the Irish, attachment to homeland and kin was not a minor good to be ranked below others but the strongest tie binding the soul to the world, because Irish society was organized through kindred, túath, and the rights and protections that came of belonging to a place. To renounce that — to become a person of no kindred, with no claim and no standing, a stranger dependent wholly on God and on the charity of others — was therefore among the costliest renunciations available, and exactly for that reason it became the highest ascesis. T. M. Charles-Edwards’s classic study set the practice in this social frame, showing that the peregrinus surrendered the legal personality that kinship conferred and accepted the status of an outsider as a self-imposed martyrdom of the will (Charles-Edwards, “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio,” Celtica 11 [1976]: 43–59; and Early Christian Ireland [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], chs. 6–7).

This logic the Irish tradition articulated in its own distinctive schema of the three martyrdoms. The Old Irish Cambrai Homily — one of the earliest surviving pieces of continuous Irish prose, preserved in a manuscript at Cambrai and edited in the Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (ed. Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, vol. 2 [Cambridge, 1903], 244–47) — distinguishes white, blue (or green), and red martyrdom (bánmartre, glasmartre, dercmartre). Red martyrdom is the shedding of blood, the death of the persecuted witness. Blue or green martyrdom is the martyrdom of penance and fasting, the daily mortification of desire. White martyrdom — bánmartre — is, in the homilist’s words, the parting from everything one loves for the sake of God, the renunciation that bleeds without bloodshed: pre-eminently the abandonment of home and kin in exile. Peregrinatio is thus classed by the Irish themselves as a species of martyrdom, a bloodless dying-to-self enacted not in a single hour on a scaffold but stretched across a whole life of homelessness. To leave the patria is to die to the world while still living in it.

The pattern is biblical before it is Irish, and the tradition knew its types exactly. The archetype is Abraham, commanded, “Go forth from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1) — a call to leave the named and the known for a destination God alone holds, and to walk by faith toward it. The Irish peregrinus is Abraham’s imitator: he goes out not knowing whither he goes (cf. Hebrews 11:8). Over this stands the word of Christ himself, who promised that everyone who has left houses or brethren or father or mother or lands for his name’s sake shall receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life (Matthew 19:29), and who answered those who would follow him only after burying a father or bidding farewell at home that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head and that no one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:57–62). The peregrinatio is the literal taking-up of that homelessness: to have, like the Lord, nowhere to lay one’s head, and never to look back toward the country left behind. Its goal was named in a phrase the sources love — to seek the place of one’s resurrection, the foreign ground where God wills the exile to die and await the rising of the dead. The pilgrim does not travel to come home; he travels to find the grave that grace appoints.

(2) The Eastern Desert Root

This Irish ideal did not arise from nothing on the western edge of the world; it is a transposition of the monasticism of the Egyptian desert, received and reworked. At its source stands Antony the Great, whose withdrawal Athanasius made the founding narrative of the whole movement. In the Life of Antony, Antony hears in church the Gospel word — “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor… and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21) — takes it as spoken to himself, distributes his inheritance, and departs first to the edge of his village, then deeper, and at last across the Nile into the inner desert, the eremos, to seek God in solitude and to do battle with the demons in the place stripped of every human comfort (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3, 8–13; trans. Robert C. Gregg [New York: Paulist Press, 1980]; also NPNF² vol. 4). The desert is no mere backdrop. It is the chosen ground of the monastic life: the wilderness of withdrawal (anachoresis), of spiritual combat, of unceasing prayer, and of the unmediated encounter with God that the inhabited world’s distractions forbid. The sayings of the Desert Fathers gathered in the Apophthegmata Patrum turn endlessly on this: the cell that teaches everything, the flight from the company of men, the labor of attention in solitude. To go to the desert is to go where God may be found because all else has been left behind.

The conduit by which this Egyptian teaching reached the Latin and Insular West, and so reached Ireland, was above all John Cassian. Having lived among the monks of Egypt and absorbed their discipline at first hand, Cassian settled at Marseilles and there composed, in Latin and for Gallic readers, the two works that became the West’s primer of the desert: the Institutes, on the external ordering of the monastic life — the habit, the canonical prayers, and the eight principal vices and their remedies — and the Conferences, the Collationes, recording the discourses of the great Egyptian abbas on the interior life, on the goal of the monk (purity of heart, leading to the kingdom of God), on discernment, unceasing prayer, and the renunciations the monk must make (John Cassian, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey [New York: Newman Press, 2000], esp. Books 1–4; The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey [New York: Newman Press, 1997], esp. Conferences 1, 3, and 9–10). The first Conference, with Abba Moses, sets the whole programme on the distinction between the monk’s immediate aim — purity of heart — and his final end, the kingdom of heaven; the third, with Abba Paphnutius, anatomizes the threefold renunciation: of wealth and the world’s goods, of the soul’s former vices, and finally of all visible things to fix the mind on the invisible. The Irish read Cassian intensely and early; his works stand among the foundational texts of Irish monastic formation, cited in the penitentials and presupposed by the whole shape of Irish ascesis. When Columbanus on the Continent built his houses, it was Cassian’s desert that he reproduced. The Egyptian desert thus reached the Irish not as rumor but as a written rule of life — and the Irish, schooled by Cassian, set out to live the desert where no desert was.

(3) A Desert in the Ocean

Here is the decisive transposition. Ireland and its seaboard had no literal desert — no waste of sand into which a man could vanish from the world. So the Irish made the sea their wilderness. The ocean, trackless and perilous and empty of every human comfort, became the eremos; the island skerry became the cell; the hide-covered curragh became the anchorite’s hut carried out upon the deep; and the voyage itself — the surrender of the body to wind and current — became the ascetic life. The hermitages the Irish founded on the bare rocks and lonely islands of the Atlantic are precisely “deserts in the ocean”: Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of stone eight miles off the Kerry coast where monks built dry-stone beehive cells above a thousand-foot drop into the sea; the lonely settlements of the Faroes; and the papar, the Irish anchorites whom the Norse found already dwelling in Iceland when they came, named in the Íslendingabók as the papar who had been there before the settlement and departed rather than live among heathen. These men sought in the northern ocean exactly what Antony sought in the southern desert: solitude, hardship, and God. The wilderness was found not by walking inland but by sailing out.

The purest emblem of this sea-desert is the rudderless voyage — the pilgrim who puts to sea with no destination, letting God steer. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 891, records the arrival at the court of King Alfred of three Irishmen who had come from Ireland in a boat without any oars, “because they wished for the love of God to be in a state of pilgrimage (on elþeodignesse), they recked not where.” They had taken provisions for seven days and committed the vessel to the sea, abandoning the very means of steering, and were carried to Cornwall (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 891). The detail of the missing oars is the whole theology in a single image: the peregrinatio is a discipline of surrender, and to ship the oars is to renounce the last shred of self-direction and commit the journey wholly to providence — they recked not where, because where is God’s to decide, not the pilgrim’s. The body afloat with no power to steer is the soul that has let go of its own will; the open sea is the wilderness in which, exactly because nothing of one’s own remains to grip, God’s hand alone is felt. Kathleen Hughes traced how this older, radical conception of pilgrimage as permanent exile stood behind and gradually gave way to the later medieval pattern of the round-trip to a shrine, but the early Irish ideal was unmistakably the former: not a visit but a vanishing, not a route but a relinquishing (Kathleen Hughes, “The Changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 11 [1960]: 143–51).

(4) The Navigatio as the Ideal’s Flowering

What the three rudderless Irishmen of 891 enacted in life, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis raises to literature. The voyage of Brendan is the peregrinatio made into a spiritual epic — the monastic sea-pilgrimage given narrative shape and theological depth, the soul’s pilgrimage across the wilderness of the sea to the homeland that is heaven. Brendan and his monks do not sail to discover a coast; they sail as exiles seeking the Promised Land of the Saints, the Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum, the luminous country of perpetual day that is the eschatological paradise and the true patria toward which every Christian pilgrimage tends (Navigatio, c. 28; trans. John J. O’Meara, The Voyage of Saint Brendan [Mountrath: Colin Smythe, 1991]). The whole apparatus of the peregrinatio is present and intensified. The monks repeatedly cease rowing and let God carry the boat: when the wind fails or the course is uncertain, they ship their oars and commit the curragh to the will of God, who steers it where he wills (Navigatio, e.g. cc. 6–7). This abandonment of control is not narrative filler; it is the heart of the spiritual teaching — trust in providence over against the management of one’s own course, the very gesture of the oarless boat at Alfred’s court. The curragh, frail and hide-bound and sustained from outside itself, is the monastic body and the Church afloat; the seven-year round, ordered by the liturgical calendar, is the ascetic life lived out to its appointed term; and the unfailing steward who provisions the company at station after station is providence personified, the host who meets the pilgrim at every turn. The detailed reading of the Navigatio as allegory of the soul’s peregrinatio belongs to Section 06 (see Reading the Navigatio); the point here is that the text is the literary flowering of the sea-pilgrimage ideal — the desert in the ocean given a story, and the story given to the Church for its formation.

(5) The Continental Irish Mission

The same impulse that sent Brendan to sea and the three peregrini to Alfred’s Cornwall drove a great movement of Irish monks out of Ireland and across the known world, and Brendan belongs squarely within it. The peregrinatio was an exile, but it was an exile that evangelized as it wandered — the monk who left home for the love of God carried the Gospel with him to wherever providence set him down, so that the inward ascesis of self-banishment became, almost incidentally, one of the great missionary energies of the early medieval West. Columba — Colum Cille — left Ireland with twelve companions and settled on Iona, the small island off the Scottish coast that became the mother-house of a whole northern mission, founding monasteries and carrying Christianity among the Picts; his departure was itself a peregrinatio, an exile from the Ireland he is said never to have wished to look upon again. Columbanus carried the same fire to the Continent: leaving Bangor for Gaul about the year 590, he founded Luxeuil and Fontaines in the Burgundian forests, came into conflict with kings and bishops, was driven into further exile, and ended by founding Bobbio in the Italian Apennines — his whole career a peregrinatio prolonged into a chain of foundations, his Rule and penitential carrying Cassian’s desert into Frankish and Lombard lands (see St. Columbanus). Behind and around these named figures moved the anonymous Irish peregrini whose names cluster across the map of Europe — scholars, hermits, and founders scattered from the Rhineland to the Alps to northern Italy. Thomas O’Loughlin sets this missionary outflow within the larger theology of Irish exile and pilgrimage, showing how the ascetic flight and the evangelizing mission were one motion, not two (Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology [London: Continuum, 2000], esp. the chapters on pilgrimage and the Navigatio; and the essays gathered in Jonathan M. Wooding, ed., The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000]). Brendan’s voyage, whatever its historical core, is the maritime instance of this single impulse: the exile for Christ that wanders, and in wandering, brings the world to God.

(6) The East-West Convergence

It remains to name the deepest point, which is that all of this is one monasticism. The Egyptian desert and the Irish ocean are not two pieties but two forms of the same thing: the ascetic flight from the world to God, the leaving of all to follow Christ into a wilderness where he alone may be found. Antony crossing the Nile into the inner desert and Brendan committing his oarless curragh to the Atlantic are doing the identical thing in different elements — emptying the self of the world’s supports and casting it upon God in a place stripped bare. Cassian is the visible seam that joins them: it is demonstrably the desert teaching he carried from Egypt to Gaul that the Irish received and translated into their own idiom and geography (see St. John Cassian). The eremos of the Apophthegmata and the desertum in oceano of the Irish hermits are the same wilderness under two skies. An Orthodox reading, which knows the Egyptian desert as the wellspring of all monasticism and reveres the Desert Fathers as the Church’s common patrimony before any division of East and West, sees in the Celtic sea-pilgrimage neither an oddity nor a Western departure but the Eastern monastic ideal faithfully kept in a maritime key — the same renunciation, the same trust in providence, the same seeking of God in solitude, carried out upon the northern sea by men who had read Antony and Cassian and had no desert but the deep. The undivided Church’s monasticism flowered on the Nile and on the Skelligs alike, and the sea-pilgrimage of Brendan is its Western, oceanic blossom.

References

Athanasius. The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Translated by Robert C. Gregg. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Also NPNF², vol. 4.)
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Entry for the year 891 (the three Irish peregrini who came to King Alfred in a boat without oars, “on elþeodignesse”).
John Cassian. The Conferences. Translated by Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Newman Press, 1997.
John Cassian. The Institutes. Translated by Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.
The Cambrai Homily. In Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, edited by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, vol. 2, 244–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. (The schema of white, blue/green, and red martyrdom.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio.” Celtica 11 (1976): 43–59.
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hughes, Kathleen. “The Changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 11 (1960): 143–51.
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis / The Voyage of Saint Brendan. Translated by John J. O’Meara. Mountrath: Colin Smythe, 1991.
O’Loughlin, Thomas. Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish Writings. London: Continuum, 2000.
Wooding, Jonathan M., ed. The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
Scripture: Genesis 12:1; Matthew 19:21, 29; Luke 9:57–62; Hebrews 11:8.