A History of Irish Thought

Thomas Duddy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134623525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Irlande

The first complete introduction to the subject ever published, A History of Irish Thought presents an inclusive survey of Irish thought and the history of Irish ideas against the backdrop of current political and social change in Ireland.
Clearly written and engaging, the survey introduces an array of philosophers, polemicists, ideologists, satirists, scientists, poets and political and social reformers, from the anonymous seventh-century monk, the Irish Augustine, and John Scottus Eriugena, to the twentieth century and W.B. Yeats and Iris Murdoch.
Thomas Duddy rediscovers the liveliest and most contested issues in the Irish past, and brings the history of Irish thought up to date. This volume will be of great value to anyone interested in Irish culture and its intellectual history.

1

INTERPRETING MARVELS

The Irish Augustine

If the predominantly oral culture of pre-Christian Celtic Ireland contained much in the way of philosophical, speculative, or abstract thought there is no evidence for it. Significantly, the rich heritage of myths, legends, and sagas transcribed by the early monastic scribes in Ireland does not contain even fragments of philosophical speculation. Despite the claims made by Herbert Moore Pim (1920) that an Irish idealist tradition originated with the druidic belief system, there is really no serious evidence of a druidic Socrates whose wise sayings might have been recorded by the same scribes who were happy to record the Celtic mythological tales. The most we can say is that the pre-Christian Celtic philosophies were ‘sacral, not Socratic’, that they were part of a tradition of knowledge that was ‘ceremonial rather than critical’ (Rankin 1996: 297). Regardless then of how impressed we are by the artistic and imaginative achievements of the pre-historic period in Ireland (as recorded in the archaeological evidence and in the transcribed literature), there is no denying that the properly historical period begins in the fifth century with the introduction of Christianity – that is, with the arrival of ‘the religion of the book’ (Richter 1995: 219). Christianity brought literacy, writing, documents – the makings of history, including intellectual history – to the island of Ireland. A history of Irish thought cannot therefore begin earlier than the introduction of Christianity and Christian literacy.

The early writings of a culture, however, are rarely philosophical or speculative. The earliest writings in Ireland were predominantly connected with the day-to-day preaching and teaching of the new Christian belief. These writings included gospel-texts, psalm-books, biblical commentaries, lives of the saints, penitentials (handbooks of penance), Latin grammars, and computistical manuals (attempts to reckon the correct date of Easter). Although biblical exegesis and commentary would in due course develop into theological analysis and speculation, most of the Irish writings from the early Christian monastic period are not the product of individual speculative genius. One of the earliest documented references to an ‘Irish’ thinker is both uncomplimentary and of doubtful accuracy, despite the fact that it was made by no less a figure than St Jerome (c. AD 370–420), best known for his Latin translation of the Bible, namely, the Vulgate. In the prologue to his Commentary on Jeremiah, written early in the fifth century, Jerome refers to an ignorant calumniator’, a most stupid fellow ‘heavy with Irish porridge’, who had the temerity to criticize the good saint's earlier commentary on the Epistles of Paul to the Ephesians. The offending party is Pelagius. Though he is not named in these recriminatory remarks, it is known that Jerome was then engaged in controversy with Pelagius, as were other leading lights of the church, including St Augustine. The name of Pelagius is associated with a heresy that ran counter to the teaching of the church fathers on original sin, baptism, freedom of the will, and the nature of divine grace. Pelagius had emphasized the freedom of the human will, the ability of human reason to know God implicitly and to act in accordance with the divinely instituted laws of nature that are inscribed in the human heart. In particular, he had argued that human beings had the ability to be without sin. This struck at the notion of original sin and also threatened the importance of divine grace. Instead of accepting the notion of the congenital sinfulness of human beings, Pelagius regarded sinfulness as a habit developed historically rather than as a necessary inheritance of fallen human nature.

Most scholars no longer accept that Pelagius was Irish. The brief allusion by Jerome to his ‘Irish’ adversary is not confirmed by other anti-Pelagian commentators, who refer to their heretical antagonist as a Briton. James Kenney thinks that Jerome's reference to his adversary's Irishness is not so much a mistake as a way of expressing opprobrium. There is little doubt that Jerome had a poor opinion of the Irish (or Scotti, as the Irish were then called). In one of his treatises Jerome reports having seen Irish people feeding on human flesh. He also observes that the Irish are sexually promiscuous and ‘take their pleasure like the beasts of the field’ (Kenney 1993: 138). Given this antipathy towards both the Irish in general and Pelagius in particular, it is perhaps no surprise that, as Kenney puts it, ‘that opprobrious term Scottus had that freedom from ethnological accuracy which characterized vituperative literature then as now’ (162). Kenney raises the possibility that Pelagius was Irish only in the sense that he belonged to one of the Irish settlements in Britain. One Pelagian scholar has concluded that all we can now say with conviction about the origins and early life of Pelagius is that he was in fact a Briton, that he was born some time in the early part of the second half of the fourth century, that he emigrated to Rome in the early eighties and was neither a monk nor a priest. The rest, he adds, is buried in the quicksand of the ‘pre-history’ of the once-maligned heresiarch (Rees 1988: xiv). This, for the purposes of this history, is how the matter stands. It is worth noting, however, that the work of Pelagius was known to the early Irish church. It has been claimed that one of his few remaining works, his Commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul, has survived only because it was preserved in the Irish schools (Kenney 1993: 163).

ENTER, THE IRISH AUGUSTINE

The first extant work by an Irish hand to have an explicitly interpretative, argumentative, and modestly philosophical content is De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae (On the Marvels of Sacred Scripture), a Hiberno-Latin treatise which has been dated, on the basis of internal evidence, to 655. The anonymous author is thought to be Irish because of direct references to Ireland in the text and because of other references – to tidal data, for example – which are consistent with Irish topography (see MacGinty 1985). He is called the Irish Augustine because his treatise was for some time believed to be part of the corpus of St Augustine of Hippo and was even included in early printed editions of St Augustine's writings. The reason for the erroneous attribution lies in the prologue to the treatise itself, in the opening sentence of which the author represents himself as Augustinus and proceeds to dedicate his treatise to the bishops and priests of Carthage. While some scholars suggest a deliberate attempt at forgery, possibly by a third party (Esposito 1919), others suggest that the use of the name Augustinus is a playful and harmless jeu d'esprit (Grosjean 1955), while yet others go so far as to argue for a Hiberno-Latin tradition of pseudonymous authorship that ‘had as much to do with erudite games as the concealment of identity or the enhancement of authority’ (Herren 1996: 131). The most generous scholars simply take the name Augustinus to be a patristic pen name and leave it at that (Richter 1988; Ó Cróinín 1995). Perhaps the wisest conclusion to come to at this distance from the original events is to say with Kenney: ‘Either the author adopted the Latin form “Augustinus” or some later scribe, with or without intent to deceive, modified the name into that of the famous Father of the Church’ (1993: 276).

While it can be read as a contribution to biblical exegesis and commentary, with particular reference to the miracles described in both the Old and New Testaments, the De mirabilibus also contains an attempt to make sense of the miracles in the light of a more or less naturalistic conception of divine creation. This in itself is a surprising feature of the text. Why should the anonymous author – almost certainly a monk -have a difficulty with the miracles, especially those recounted in the Bible? After all, other early writers, especially the hagiographers, did not hesitate to attribute miracles to their saintly subjects. If the early Christians generally did not have a difficulty with miracles why should the Irish Augustine wish to make an issue of them? We are not surprised that later philosophers, such as the empiricists and rationalists of the eighteenth century, should have a difficulty with the very idea of a miracle. Hume's essay ‘Of Miracles’, contained in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), is essentially an essay in applied empiricism, and is, moreover, a sophisticated piece of reasoning that has behind it a millennium of philosophical analysis and exploration. But why should a member of an early monastic Christian community wish to rationalize miracles and seek to make them fit in with a naturalistic understanding of creation?

One possible answer is that the Irish Augustine saw miracles as too close to the magical elements in the pagan beliefs which the early Christians were striving to supplant. In this regard, he may be registering the influence of his mentor, St Augustine of Hippo, who remonstrated at length with the pagan beliefs of his contemporaries. In other words, he may be responding to the strong undercurrents of pagan belief prevalent in early Christian Ireland. While it is true that the early Irish missionaries sometimes accommodated themselves to existing pagan practices – by, for example, turning pagan sacred sites into Christian holy places – they nevertheless needed to put down clear markers in key areas of belief and doctrine. The pagan magicians were reputed to be able to control nature by appealing to the pantheon of gods and spirits who inhabited the natural world. The Christians, on the other hand, wished to show that their belief system was a substantively different one, that there was only one magician or wonder-worker, namely, God, and that he worked miracles that were in harmony with nature – that were in harmony, that is, with his own original creation. It is arguable that the Irish Augustine was anxious to make a fundamental distinction between a magical pagan conception of nature and a monotheistic Christian conception. His aim was not to deny the possibility of Christian miracles but to show that these miracles, when they occur, are always consistent with the laws of nature – laws of nature that are, first and foremost, God's own laws. The Irish Augustine is not a precursor of the rationalist or humanist seeking to square revelation with reason. He does not have a difficulty with revelation, or with arguments from authority. Neither does he question the veracity of the Bible as far as the reporting of miracles is concerned. At the same time, however, he possesses an independent, questioning mind, and is slow to defer to existing authorities. His reasoning may be securely bounded by the parameters of his religious faith but it is nonetheless reasoning of a sufficiently critical and reflective kind to be considered theological or philosophical.

The key intuition of the Irish Augustine, reiterated throughout his treatise, is that God governs the world without substantively adding to it or amending it, or doing anything that is inconsistent with the completeness of his original act of creation. This intuition turns on a distinction between creation (creatio) and governance or government (gubematio). As far as creation is concerned, there is nothing new under the sun. All of nature was created over the six-day period described in the first chapters of the first book of the Bible. On the sixth day God perfected his creation of the diversity of natures and species, and on the seventh day he rested from this work of creation – but he did not rest from the work of government or ‘management’. While Genesis highlights the original foundational work of divine creativity, it may be assumed that God did not abandon his creation but has continued to oversee and govern it, sometimes directly intervening to uncover or develop its hidden potentials. God should be understood therefore as governor as well as creator, but acts of governance should not be confused with acts of creation. Even if we should see something new or exceptional appear before us, we should not assume that this is a new creation or an addition to creation. The sorts of marvels reported in the Bible may give the impression that God continues to create new natures or realities but this is a mistaken impression. What the creator does is to bring forth from nature what was contained or hidden within it since the beginning of created time. Although terms like potency or potentiality are not used by the Irish Augustine, the concept is implicit in his thinking.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE FLOOD

In some of the early chapters of the first book of his treatise, the Irish Augustine discusses a number of problems that seem to arise around the biblical account of the flood (Gen. 6–8). There is, first, the question of why only land animals were destroyed in the flood. If God wished to destroy all living creatures, with the exception of those brought by Noah within the safety of the ark, why were the aquatic creatures spared from divine retribution? Why did God not also curse the waters when he cursed Adam and all earthly species? The Irish Augustine's solution is that when Adam sinned by eating the forbidden fruit he did so by eating the fruit of the earth, not the fruit of the sea. The earth and its fruits, therefore, are condemned by association with the original sin of Adam, while the sea and its species remain innocent. The divine privileging of water is also indicated by the fact that water is used sacramentally in baptism; the privileging of aquatic life itself is suggested by the fact that the Lord ‘did not eat the flesh of land but of aquatic animals, when, to confirm his resurrection in the presence of his disciples, he took and ate a piece of broiled fish and a comb of honey’ (1971: 21; all references to De mirabilibus are to the 1971 MacGinty translation).

A more specific – and more difficult – conundrum is posed by the amphibian creatures. Since the amphibians can live neither on land alone nor in the water alone, how did they escape the flood? If they were shut up in the ark, they would have been unable to live without the aid of water, and so would not have survived; but if they had remained outside the ark they would have had no place to rest, sleep, or breed, and so would not have survived. But at least some amphibian creatures are still with us, so they must have survived somehow. The Irish Augustine will not allow a miraculous solution. It will not do to say that God used his miraculous power to alter either side of the already God-given nature of the amphibians – not because God couldn't work such a miracle but because attributing such a miracle to him in this case would mean attributing an inconsistency or an imperfection to him. For, ‘how could he wish to keep these by miraculous power, who did not wish to preserve Noe and his household by miracle, but by the ark?’ (22). To avoid attributing an ad-hoc miracle to the creator, the Irish Augustine suggests that some resting place may have been available to the amphibian creatures on the roof of the ark itself. The roof of the ark could have provided the equivalent of a ‘dry land’ space to enable them to move safely to and from the waters of the flood (23).

Many other biblical marvels are accommodated in a similar manner, though not always conclusively. The onset and retreat of the great flood itself present the Irish Augustine with a particular problem, leading him to discuss several different accounts of the matter without giving greater authority to one over another. We are, he says, ‘held back by the littleness of our knowledge from resolving the difficulty of this matter with a definite opinion’ (23). The particular difficulty here is caused by the exceptional and unprecedented nature of the flood. If the flood is not a wholly new phenomenon – either a new creation or an ad-hoc addition to creation – then how can such an exceptional event be explained in terms consistent with the completion of creation at the end of the six days? Where did so much water come from, and where did it go? What capacities of nature made such an unprecedented event possible? The Bible account identifies the two obvious sources for the waters that constituted the flood, namely, the ‘springs of the great abyss’ and ‘the floodgates of heaven’. The Irish Augustine finds that the experts or ‘masters’ disagree on the precise nature of the springs of the abyss (or the deep) and also on the location of the floodgates. They do not agree on whether the springs existed from creation, or were brought into being on the occasion of the flood. Nor do they agree on whether the increase of water from the abyss is to be understood as ‘unwonted flooding’ – an unusually massive swelling or expansion of the volume of water – or simply a redistribution of an already existing and constant body of water. If the water burst forth from the springs as a result of expansion, then the receding of the same could be explained as shrinkage, while also allowing for a certain amount of absorption by the soil. On the other hand, if the deluge was effected by redistribution, then its retreat from the land can be explained quite mechanically, as the return of the water to whatever spaces or cavities it vacated when it flowed up out of the abyss. There is disagreement too over the nature of the heavenly floodgates. For some authorities the floodgates are understood to have been located in the clouds – the same clouds from which we receive normal rainfall – but for others they were situated in the highest firmament, ‘which God made in the beginning to divide the waters from the waters’ (26). Rather than choose between these competing theories, the Irish Augustine remains undecided, even emphasizing the mystery that still surrounds the everyday ebbing and flowing of the ocean tides. Given the mystery of the ordinary tidal movements, it follows that an even greater mystery must continue to surround the extraordinary ebbing and flowing that was the great flood. We have some knowledge in these matters, he concedes – and goes on to make observations about the relationship between the moon and the tides, including the neap tides and spring tides – but there is always so much more to be known that we cannot hope to achieve complete wisdom until we arrive at the everlasting kingdom where there is no ignorance.

Before he concludes his speculative musings about the flood the Irish Augustine reiterates his point – which is the only point he wants to make – that this particular marvel was not, despite its apparent uniqueness, contrary to nature. We do not need to understand fully how it was done in order to appreciate that it was done, and that it was done, moreover, within the limits of the first creation. Regardless of which theory one might opt for, each theory is consistent with the natural order of the original creation. The expansion or ‘swelling-forth’ of the waters in the abyss might look like a more marvellous eventuality than mere mechanical upsurge, but in fact there is a precedent for such expansiveness in nature, ‘for it is not contrary to custom that we see even small things grow into greater’ (31). The seas themselves give witness to this reality when they rise beyond their ancient boundaries, thereby creating new islands. He makes the interesting scientific observation that the wild animals which inhabit islands are proven to have been found there at the time of the separation of the islands from the neighbouring land and not brought there by human effort’ (32). He adds that this was how such animals as wolves, deer, foxes, badgers, hares, and squirrels came to be in Ireland in the aftermath of the flood, implicitly rejecting St Augustine's hypothesis (briefly stated in his City of God, 1998: XVI, 7) that animals on remote islands might have sprung up from the earth itself as they sprang up in the beginning when God said: ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature’. An explanation of the kind suggested by the Irish Augustine or by St Augustine himself was necessary in order to account for the reappearance of wild animals on islands so far from the mainland that they could not have swum there from the mainland, given the assumption that the ark would have released its menagerie of saved animals on to some part of the mainland.

THE THEOLOGY OF MARVELS

While it is difficult to extrapolate clear principles of explanation from the Irish Augustine's answers to his opening questions about land animals and amphibians, it could be argued that his approach to the problem of the receding flood is based on what might be dubbed ‘a principle of accelerated increase’. On this putative principle, the biblical flood can be understood as an example of the abnormal (but not unnatural) enlargement of an already existing natural phenomenon, even if the mechanism involved remains unknown to us. The same principle of accelerated increase is implicitly used to explain the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt (Gen. 19: 26) and the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Luke 9: 12–17). There is evidence that small amounts of salt are already present in the human body. All that happens in the case of Lot's unfortunate wife when she turns to take a last backward glance at the city of corruption is that her whole body is rapidly converted into the substance of a small part it. While it remains true that what happened was marvellous and required the intervention of ‘the powerful Governor’, nevertheless no new substance or principle is needed to explain what happened. In the case of the multiplication of loaves and fishes there is also a principle of increase at work, albeit in a different sense. All natural, living things have been commanded to increase and multiply, and this they do in the normal course of events over a period of time. God, through his creation of a fruitful earth, has been feeding multitudes of human beings since the beginning o...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Interpreting Marvels: The Irish Augustine
• 2 The Philosophy of Creation: John Scottus Eriugena
• 3 Nature Observed: Robert Boyle, William Molyneux, and the New Learning
• 4 John Toland and the Ascendancy of Reason
• 5 Wonderfully Mending the World: George Berkeley and Jonathan Swift
• 6 Against the Selfish Philosophers: Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, and James Usher
• 7 Peripheral Visions (1): Irish Thought in the Nineteenth Century
• 8 Peripheral Visions (2): Irish Thought in the Nineteenth Century
• 9 Between Extremities: Irish Thought in the Twentieth Century
• Bibliography
• Index