The Orthodox Reception

Brendan of Clonfert lived and reposed (c. 577) nearly five centuries before the schism of 1054, in the one undivided Church, and is therefore venerable to Orthodox and Catholic alike as a saint of the common patrimony; his feast falls on 16 May, the death-day kept for him in the Irish martyrologies and the later Roman calendar. This file sets out the pre-schism principle on which the Orthodox veneration of the Western saints rests, the twentieth-century recovery of that patrimony associated above all with St John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai, and the theology of ecclesial reception by which the Church glorifies the holy abbot of prayer and not the navigator of the legend — with a sober caution against the modern romanticizing of “Celtic Christianity.”

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

(1) The Pre-Schism Principle

The veneration of Brendan in Orthodoxy stands or falls with a single chronological fact: he belongs to the undivided Church. The Irish annals and the Vita tradition place his repose around the year 577, and the most cautious scholarship leaves his life wholly within the sixth century (Pádraig Ó Riain, A Dictionary of Irish Saints [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011], s.v. “Brénainn of Clonfert,” reviewing the dating and the cult). That is nearly five hundred years before the mutual excommunications of 1054 and the long estrangement that followed. In the sixth century there was no division of East and West to take a side in: there was one Church, professing one faith, in communion across the whole Christian world, and the holy men and women of Ireland, Gaul, Italy, Britain, and the islands belonged to it as fully as the monks of Egypt or the bishops of Asia Minor. The principle on which Orthodoxy venerates the Western saints is therefore not a generous concession across a confessional boundary but a recognition that the boundary did not yet exist. The saints of the pre-schism West — Patrick and Columba, Martin of Tours and Hilary of Poitiers, Benedict of Nursia, Cuthbert and Aidan of Lindisfarne, and Brendan among them — are saints of the one Church before its division, and as such they are common, the shared inheritance of all who confess the faith of that undivided communion.

This principle must be stated soberly, because it is easily inflated. It does not assert that sixth-century Ireland was “Orthodox” in any sense that opposes it to a later Catholicism, nor that the Celtic churches held some pristine Eastern faith that the Latin West afterward lost; such claims belong to the mythology, not to the history, and the sections that follow will warn against them. The pre-schism principle asserts something more exact and more defensible: that holiness recognized by the Church before the schism is recognized by the whole of that Church, and that the later division, whatever its causes and whoever its agents, cannot retroactively unmake a sanctity that the one Church had already received. A saint glorified in the undivided Church is glorified for all who stand in continuity with it. Orthodoxy, claiming that continuity, claims the pre-schism saints not as borrowed figures but as her own — and acknowledges, in the same breath, that the Roman Catholic Church may claim them on the same ground. The pre-schism saint is precisely the figure over whom the two communions need not contend, because he was glorified before there were two communions to contend.

(2) The Feast: 16 May

Brendan of Clonfert is commemorated on 16 May, the day kept for him as his feast and death-day across the Irish and Western calendars. The two great early Irish martyrologies both enter him under this date. The Martyrology of Tallaght, the metrical and prose calendar of saints compiled in the circle of the Céli Dé about the year 800 and preserved in the Book of Leinster, records Brendan of Clonfert at 16 May (Richard Irvine Best and H. J. Lawlor, eds., The Martyrology of Tallaght, Henry Bradshaw Society 68 [London, 1931], at 16 May). The Félire Óengusso, the Martyrology of Óengus the Culdee — the versified festology composed in Old Irish verse around the turn of the ninth century — likewise honours him on that day; Whitley Stokes’s edition prints the quatrain for 16 May with its scholiast’s gloss identifying Brendan and his foundation at Clonfert (Whitley Stokes, ed., Félire Óengusso Céli Dé / The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee, Henry Bradshaw Society 29 [London, 1905], at 16 May). The date passed from the native calendars into the later Western reckoning, so that the Roman Martyrology also commemorates St Brendan, abbot, on 16 May. Where his cult is kept in Orthodox practice — in the parishes and monasteries of the Western Orthodox diaspora that observe the ancient saints of the British Isles — this is the day on which he is remembered, his established feast carried over intact from the calendars that first fixed it.

A small textual point illustrates how these calendars work and is worth registering. Pádraig Ó Riain’s studies of the Irish martyrologies show that a single saint can attract notices on more than one day, and that the apparatus of the Félire and the Tallaght calendar accumulated glosses and secondary commemorations over time; the historian must read the principal entry against this layering (Ó Riain, A Dictionary of Irish Saints, s.v. “Brénainn,” and his Feastdays of the Saints: A History of Irish Martyrologies, Subsidia Hagiographica 86 [Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2006]). For Brendan of Clonfert, however, the principal and stable commemoration is 16 May, agreed across the sources, and it is that day the cult keeps. [Disputed: the martyrologies also carry notices for other saints named Brénainn — pre-eminently Brendan of Birr (commemorated 29 November) — and the name’s commonness has at times confused the two; the 16 May feast belongs specifically to Brendan of Clonfert, “the Navigator.”]

(3) The Orthodox Recovery of the Western Saints

That an Irish abbot of the sixth century should be commemorated in Orthodox churches at all is the fruit of a deliberate twentieth-century recovery. For most of the second millennium the saints of the pre-schism West were, in practice, remembered only in the West; the Orthodox East, geographically and culturally distant from Ireland and Northumbria, had little occasion to keep their feasts, and many of their names dropped from living Orthodox memory not because they were rejected but because they were never encountered. The change came with the establishment of Orthodox communities in Western Europe and the British Isles in the twentieth century, and with a conscious theological decision on the part of certain hierarchs and writers to reclaim the local pre-schism saints as the proper patrimony of Orthodoxy in those lands.

The figure most closely associated with this recovery is St John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco (1896–1966). As a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia ruling in Western Europe in the 1950s, St John took up the cause of the ancient Western saints directly: he investigated their lives, insisted that the local saints of Gaul and the British Isles and the West generally be commemorated liturgically, and had their names entered into the diptychs and services of his churches, on the explicit ground that these were Orthodox saints of the one Church whom Orthodoxy in the West ought never to have forgotten. His biographers record this as one of the marks of his episcopate in Europe — the recovery of saints such as Alban, the protomartyr of Britain, and the whole company of the pre-schism West — and Orthodox accounts of his life present it as a characteristic instance of his pastoral mind: that wherever the Church plants herself, she takes up the holy ones of that soil (see the standard hagiographic biographies of St John of Shanghai). The same impulse animated a generation of Orthodox writers in Britain who set themselves to gather and re-present the lives of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints for an Orthodox readership, with Brendan among the figures so recovered. The work was framed, rightly, not as the adoption of foreign saints but as the Church recovering her own — turning back to a patrimony that had always been hers and that the accidents of history had let lapse from her active memory in the East.

This recovery has its own dangers, which honest accounts acknowledge, and they are taken up in the final section: the enthusiasm that restores forgotten saints can shade into an uncritical idealization of the world those saints inhabited. But the core act — the entering of pre-schism Western names into the Orthodox calendar — is well grounded in the pre-schism principle of the first section. If the saints of the undivided Church are the common patrimony of all who continue that Church, then Orthodoxy in the West does not invent a devotion when it commemorates Brendan; it remembers one.

(4) The Theology of Reception: What the Church Glorifies

To say that the Church “receives” a saint is to make a precise theological claim, and it is essential to grasp what it is and is not. The reception of a saint is not the certification of a biography. The Church, in numbering a man among the saints or in keeping his feast, does not vouch for the historical accuracy of every episode told of him, nor does she stake her authority on the events of a Life. What she ratifies is a holiness — a sanctity made manifest in and attested by the cult, the living veneration of the faithful, the witness of those who knew the saint or were healed at his tomb or formed by his memory. The hagiographic Vita serves this veneration; it does not found it. This distinction is the discipline of the whole hagiography-versus-history question, and it is set out at length for Brendan in Section 06 (see The Historical Core); here it bears directly on what reception means.

For Brendan the distinction is unusually sharp, because his fame rests on a text that is frankly imaginative. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, the eighth- or ninth-century voyage tale that made Brendan a figure of European literature, is not a chronicle of voyages but a spiritual epic — an allegory of the soul’s pilgrimage across the wilderness of the sea to the Promised Land of the Saints (John J. O’Meara, trans., The Voyage of Saint Brendan [Mountrath: Colin Smythe, 1991], introduction). The Church does not receive Brendan on the strength of the Navigatio, and her veneration would stand untouched if every marvel in it were shown to be invention. What she receives is the man behind and before the legend: a holy abbot of the undivided Church, the founder of Clonfert and other monastic houses, a master of the ascetic life and of prayer who stood within the great Irish current of monasticism and drew souls after him into it. The Navigatio is the imaginative flowering of his cult — the proof of how deeply his sanctity had impressed the Christian imagination, that it could bear so vast a legend — but it is the consequence of the veneration, not its ground. The Church glorifies the man of prayer and the founder; she does not glorify the navigator of the tale. To confuse the two — to suppose that Orthodoxy commemorates Brendan because he is thought to have sailed to a paradise in the western ocean — is to mistake the order of things entirely. The voyage is venerated because the abbot is holy; the abbot is not holy because of the voyage. Reception fastens on the sanctity, and lets the legend be what it is: the radiance the sanctity threw across the centuries.

(5) The Celtic Witness in Orthodox Memory

What, then, do the Celtic saints offer Orthodoxy today, that the Church should trouble to recover them? The answer lies in what their tradition embodies, soberly assessed. The Irish monasticism in which Brendan stood is, at its root, the monasticism of the Egyptian desert received and reworked in a Western, maritime key — the same flight from the world to God, the same ascetic renunciation, mediated to the West through John Cassian and lived out by men who had no desert and so made a wilderness of the open sea. The ideal of peregrinatio pro Christo, the lifelong exile from homeland for the love of God, is the Eastern anachoresis transposed; the rudderless voyage of the Navigatio is its purest emblem, the soul’s surrender of its own will, letting God steer. This continuity is the substance of the companion file (see The Monastic Sea-Pilgrimage), and it is precisely what makes the Celtic saints intelligible and valuable to Orthodox eyes: not an exotic alternative Christianity, but the one ascetic tradition of the undivided Church flowering in a new soil. The Celtic witness offers Orthodoxy the desert ideal in a Western voice, an integration of rigorous asceticism with a tender and unsentimental love of creation, and in Brendan above all an emblem of the soul’s pilgrimage toward God — the Christian as deorad Dé, God’s exile, a stranger on the earth seeking the homeland that is heaven.

This must be received without romance, and here a real caution is owed. The late twentieth century saw the rise of a popular “Celtic Christianity” — a construct that imagines the early Irish and British churches as nature-mystical, anti-institutional, gender-egalitarian, and free of the supposed harshness of Roman or Augustinian religion, a green and gentle faith conveniently answering the spiritual appetites of the modern age. Scholars of the period have dismantled this image with some severity, showing it to be very largely a projection, assembled from selective reading and outright anachronism rather than from the sources. Ian Bradley, who had himself contributed to the popular enthusiasm, turned to chart and criticize it in Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), tracing how each age has remade “Celtic Christianity” in its own image; and Donald Meek, in The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 2000), demonstrated from the Gaelic and Latin sources how far the popular construct departs from the actual texts and practices of the early Celtic churches — which were, in fact, ascetically severe, deeply penitential, doctrinally orthodox, and entirely within the catholic order of their day. An Orthodox veneration of the Celtic saints that fell into this romance would betray the very tradition it means to honour, sentimentalizing into nature-piety the hard ascetic discipline that was its actual marrow. The Celtic saints are worth recovering precisely because they are not the gentle pantheists of the modern fancy but men and women of the desert ideal — fasters, exiles, watchers in cold cells on bare islands, who loved creation because they had first renounced it. Brendan kept in Orthodox memory is the praying abbot and the exile for Christ, sober and demanding; the legend of the navigator is the beauty his sanctity earned, not a charter for the imagination to make of him what it likes.

References

Best, Richard Irvine, and H. J. Lawlor, eds. The Martyrology of Tallaght. Henry Bradshaw Society 68. London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1931. (Brendan of Clonfert at 16 May.)
Bradley, Ian. Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Meek, Donald E. The Quest for Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 2000.
O’Meara, John J., trans. The Voyage of Saint Brendan: Journey to the Promised Land (Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis). Mountrath: Colin Smythe, 1991.
Ó Riain, Pádraig. A Dictionary of Irish Saints. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011. (s.v. “Brénainn of Clonfert.”)
Ó Riain, Pádraig. Feastdays of the Saints: A History of Irish Martyrologies. Subsidia Hagiographica 86. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2006.
Stokes, Whitley, ed. Félire Óengusso Céli Dé / The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee. Henry Bradshaw Society 29. London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1905. (Brendan at 16 May.)
On the Orthodox recovery of the Western saints and the role of St John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco: the standard hagiographic biographies of St John, which record his commemoration of the ancient saints of Western Europe during his episcopate there.