St. Brendan's Day

Fire of Liberty

While a lot of people will don the green and celebrate St. Patrick's day with great merriment and a few pints of Guinness, few will pay any attention to St. Brendan. Well, John J. Miller has a very insightful piece over @ Opinion Journal's Taste section on this interesting figure of Christianity. Miller notes that while it's true that St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and holds a special bond with Irish people, he really doesn't embody the true nature of the Irish-American spirit. He notes that Brendan is a better because he wasn't scared to venture into distant and alien land to start a new life. St. Brendan's lack of fear from venturing to a strange and distant world is also an quality that is shared by the various Irish immigrants who staked out on a quest of coming to the New World. Miller's argument for making St. Brendan a point of interest next week is best told by the writer himself, so check it out below.

In the year 486, about a generation after Patrick's death, Brendan was born near Tralee, on the southwest coast of Ireland. Few hard facts are known about his life except that he founded a monastery at Clonfert and established several other enclaves around the British Isles--making him one of the fellows who laid the groundwork for Irish monks to "save civilization," as Thomas Cahill's best-selling account has it, when the rest of Europe was losing its heritage.

But that's not what makes Brendan special for Irish-Americans. His connection to them comes from the legends surrounding his other feats, which became popular tales in the Middle Ages. "The Voyage of St. Brendan" describes our hero leading a group of monks on a seven-year quest in search of a promised land that supposedly lay across the vast western sea.

The story features plenty of fantastic elements, such as fire-breathing sea monsters, an encounter with Judas Iscariot and a friendly whale who lets the pilgrims hold a Mass on his back at Easter. Several literary types have labeled the "Voyage" a Christian version of the "Odyssey," and it certainly includes adventures rivaling those in Homer's classic.

It is plainly a work of imaginative fiction. But does it also contain any kernels of truth? There is no doubt that Brendan was an extraordinary traveler. For Catholics, he is a patron saint of sailors. What is more, Irish monks are perhaps history's greatest unheralded seafarers. Many of them craved geographic isolation, where they could lead simple lives of prayer. This drove them to seek places so far off the beaten path that nobody else had been there before. (Or at least no other Europeans.)

For more on St. Brendan see here, and here.