THE IRISH ILLUMINATION


We put 420 for a date to the Southern Renaissance in China, and
410 to the age that became Arthurian in Wales. The next thing in
China is 527, and the coming of Bodhidharma; the next thing in
Celtdom is 520, and the coming of Findian.

He was an Irishman, and had been studying in Wales; where,
certainly, there was great activity in churchly circles in those
days. Get a map of that country, and note all the place-names
beginning with _Llan,_--and you will see. There are countless
thousands of them. 'Llan' means 'the holy place of,' and the rest
of the name will be that of the saint who taught or preached
there: of whom, I believe, only David appears in the Catholic
calendar. They were most of them active in the fifth and
sixth centuries.

Findian, according to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ had come
under the influence of three of the foremost of them: David,
Gildas, and Catwg the Wise; who were perhaps great men, if
we may judge by the results of their teaching, as Findian
transmitted it to those that came after him. We have seen that
Patrick opened no kind of golden age in Ireland, gave no impulse
to civilization or letters. The church he founded had fallen on
rather evil days since his death; and now Findian came to reform
things in the light of what he had learned in Wales. He began by
founding at Clonard a monastery on the Welsh plan. That was some
twenty-two years before Geoffrey's date for the passing of
Arthur. By the time Camlan had been fought, and the Crest-Wave
had left Wales, Findian had made a channel through which it
might flow into Ireland, and in the five-forties the Irish
illumination began.

We must say a word or two as to the kind of institution he
founded. There were several of them in Wales,--to be called
colleges, or even universities, as rightly as monasteries:--one
at Bangor in the north; two or three in Glamorgan; one at Saint
Davids. Students flocked to them by the thousands; there was
strict discipline, the ascetic life,--and also serious study,
religious and secular. It was all beautifully simple: each
student lived in his own hut,

"of clay and wattles made,"

--or, where stone might be plentiful, as it is in most parts of
Wales, of stone. Like a military camp, the whole place would be
surrounded with fosse and vallum. They grew their own corn and
vegetables, milked their own cows, fished in the streams, and
supported themselves. The sky roofed their lecture-halls; of
which the walls, if there were any, were the trees and the
mountains. But these places were real centers of learning, the
best there were in Europe in those days; and you needed not to
be a monk to attend them.
 

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