Brigid of Kildare

by Heather Terrell

  “In that field, under that tree, over a twenty-year period, I learned almost everything I know. Almost.”

  I was utterly perplexed.

  He continued regardless: “That is where I became a Druid.”

  The confession of his heretical background shocked me out of my silence. “You are a Druid?”

  He stopped working and stared at me. “I was a Druid priest before I became a Christian monk.”

  Although this conversation yielded a damning piece of information, I learned a critical lesson that day, brother, one that deepens the longer I am in Gael. I cannot ask direct questions of these people and expect direct answers, for they answer in riddles. By way of example, Aidan said he learned his illuminator’s trade during his Druidic training, yet I now know that Druids consider it improper to commit anything to parchment. To find what Gallienus demands, I must seek knowledge by observation and investigation, not inquiry.

  But, what of Brigid? I imagine you asking, Why does this letter contain no mention of her? After all, at my last writing, I worried about her reaction to my presence here in Cill Dara, and she is my primary objective.

  Ah, Brigid. Oh yes, I call her Brigid, at least to the other monks, who refer to the abbess as such without a title or deferential address. I see her daily: in the refectory, where she dines alongside the other monks, priests, and nuns; on the abbey’s grounds, where she tends to the Cill Dara residents’ troubles as if she were a community priest; and, of course, in the church, presiding over Mass. And my fellow scribes discuss her often (some would say overmuch), always with respect, care, even fear, but not transcendent reverence.

  Yet I have had no direct contact with Brigid. No formal introductions, no shared mealtime tables, no hallway passings that would require us to acknowledge our original encounter on the plains of Cill Dara. Or her bold stare during that initial Mass.

  So I play at the deferential monk, a refugee from the barbarians, like so many here, grateful for the sanctuary. And she remains only my abbess. For now.

  Brother,

  Pray, fast, study, work. Pray, fast, study, work. Brother, you would bristle at the daily routine of Cill Dara, at its relentless monotony, religious practice, and retirement from the secular world. But for me, after years of Roman papal bureaucracy that served as a distraction from our Lord’s labors, it satisfies.

  Particularly since the work is Godsent.

  The prayer and fasting, I need not describe, especially to you, who would shudder at the very description, despite your ostensible adherence to the Christianity of our parents. Know only that my fellow religious are a solid lot, even the Gaels: approachable, ardent in their faith, and some of them learned. But I cannot risk closeness with any, since I have not your talent—the Roman talent, you would call it—at deception. I believe I exhausted my small reserve of trickery during my initial interrogation with Ciaran. Thus, I stay quiet and respectful—not a difficult role for me, as you might guess.

  Yet of the studying and the work, I must share with you. I explained to you the abundance of manuscripts at the scriptorium. This account might not have intrigued, as you have never been a reader at heart. But, brother, even you would be amazed at the beauty and types of the manuscripts I study every morn. Psalms, letters from Jesus’s apostles and church fathers, lives of our Christian martyrs, Virgil, Horace, and lavishly decorated Gospels are my daily fare.

  Aidan prescribes these readings like a medicinal, as the necessary poultice for our work. We study them not only for their textual encouragement but also to understand their artistic mastery. These manuscripts illuminate the Word in ways I have never encountered. The circles, the spirals, the trumpets, and the figures all interlace in a never-ending golden and multicolored celebration of our Lord’s own infinity and the majesty of His Word. The artistry takes the breath away.

  I am ordered to scrutinize these texts with more diligence than the other scribes, as Aidan says I must gain familiarity with their scripts, so different from the Roman, with its even, gracefully curved capital letters. This unusual Gaelic lettering style flows from one character to the next like a great tidal wave, with each fluid letter growing successively smaller from the first in the line.

  The proper execution of both this script and the inspired decoration of the text requires more than just technical skills, or so Aidan tells me. The scribe must believe that the illumination helps direct the priest through the Gospels’ many pages to the desired text, honors the mystery of the Word of God, and, with its sublime paintings, inspires conversion even of the illiterate masses.

  As Aidan cautioned me at the end of his instruction, “Remember, Decius, the manuscript will not win over any souls unless the scribe works with a pious heart. To imbue the letters with spirit, one must approach the writing itself as a prayer. Only then will the Lord’s magic work its way into the Word.”

  Magic? Now, this sounds like dangerous heresy to me too, brother. Maybe Druidic, maybe Pelagian, who knows. But if you sit in the scriptorium on a bright afternoon in the company of monk-scribes all copying the Lord’s Word in this particular manner, you can see the truth in Aidan’s statements.

  Yet I say this only to you, and only in this letter.

  To Gallienus, in my unsent messages, I say that I believe that the Abbey of Cill Dara contains many manuscripts of dubious church standing. I tell him that Aidan gives me access only to the standard texts, but that I’ve heeded the whispers of two other monks, Colum and Eadfrith. I listened to them describe Gospels of which I have never heard. I tell Gallienus that I need to see these manuscripts with my own eyes to judge their contents heretical or not. And to do so, I must enter the scriptorium under cover of night, when the other religious sleep soundly in their huts under God’s own sky.

  Of that endeavor, I will now tell you.

  On my first foray, I waited until the moon waned—not until its complete disappearance, mind you. Indeed, I have come to know this abbey and its surrounding countryside well from my Sunday walks, but I needed the moon’s guiding light to navigate across the grounds.

  I steered through the huts and larger buildings easily enough. I saw no stirrings to deter me from my course, even though I had determined to stay steady regardless. Hesitancy only breeds suspicion.

  The door to the scriptorium opened without force, as I expected. The abbey has no real security other than the guards posted at the cashel’s gates; it relies on Brigid’s relationships with the local chieftains for protection and peace. Once inside, I knew the trick would be to locate and examine the more remote manuscripts—with little candlelight. Nothing would cause more alarm to a wakening monk-scribe than the sight of fire moving among the abbey’s treasured possessions.

  By touch, I worked my way to the staircase—in truth, just a ladder to the upper floor that can be lowered by a pulley. Without the need for additional light other than the moonlight, I lowered it with minimal noise and climbed up. This higher floor serves more as a wooden walkway than a proper second story, as its primary purpose is to access the manuscripts suspended in leather satchels for preservation and storage. Or so Aidan told me.

  In one of these bags lay the concealed manuscript of which the monks had whispered. Of this I was certain, because I’d watched as Colum and Eadfrith returned the manuscript they were copying not to the cupboards but to the satchels. And I’d marked the precise one in my memory.

  I squatted on the planks and reached across for the hanging bag. In the darkness, I misjudged the distance, and I teetered at the edge. But for the strap I grabbed, I would have crashed to the floor below. Instead, I fell back to safety, and the bag fell back with me.

  I seized my candle and hastened to light it, for I knew not how long I had. My hands shaking, I untied the satchel and grasped the manuscript from it. Bringing the light as near as I dared, I thumbed through the brittle document.

  Two curiosities struck me. Firstly, the pages were ancient, older than any I had seen before; and secondly, I could compre
hend the text with ease. It was not written in Gaelic script, but in a more accessible Latin lettering.

  Yet none of this compared with my reaction when I realized the precise nature of this manuscript. It purported to be the infamous Gospel of Truth.

  Could this be one of the early Christian texts condemned by Bishop Irenaeus in the second century of our Lord, writings he banned as “blasphemy … an abyss of madness”? Brother, I know that three-hundred-year-old church history is hardly your expertise; thus I will tell you that Irenaeus is one of our great church fathers. He became so concerned about the dividedness of the early Christian movement, with its many so-called sacred texts, that he determined to unify the church by means of one biblical canon comprised of four Gospels only. In so doing, he wrote the Refutation and Overthrow of the Knowledge Falsely So-Called, which systematically dismantled the legitimacy of these rogue texts and revealed them to be “evil exegeses” beyond the church’s elementary precepts. He then banned all Gospels other than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for true Christians, writing, “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the church is scattered throughout all the world, and the pillar and the ground of the church is the Gospel and the spirit of life, it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh.”

  In 367, Irenaeus’s proclamation was affirmed by Bishop Athanasius when he approved of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament—including the four Gospels—and rejected all the rest as “apocryphal books … filled with myths, empty and polluted.” While I have heard rumors that manuscripts excluded by Irenaeus and Athanasius surface from time to time, I have never met any person, religious or otherwise, who has actually seen one.

  I looked back down at the ancient text in my lap. It bore the same title as a particular text Irenaeus had specifically banished from the canon. Could this be that very work, the Gospel of Truth, not seen for centuries? Did one of the outcast religious here smuggle it to Cill Dara on his or her back, making the Cill Dara refugees not from the barbarians but the true church?

  Brother, I scanned the Gospel of Truth as quickly as the dim light would allow. Beginning with the line “The gospel of truth is joy …,” on first glance, the text appears to be a sermon on the saving knowledge of God. According to it, the Word is our Savior, Jesus Christ. This is not objectionable in itself, yet it also hints that what we see in Jesus Christ depends on what we need to see and what we are capable of seeing. It does not describe His divine essence as a constant; thus, I can see the reason for Irenaeus’s condemnation.

  I began grabbing the other satchels and looking at their contents. I discovered a trove of other writings purporting to be gospels: the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Philip, to name but a few. Some titles I recollect from Iranaeus’s rantings, and some I have never heard mentioned. Surely, their age cannot be questioned; the very feel of the vellum tells me that they are indeed archaic.

  I know I will return to read them every night the moon permits. I could lie to you and say I am drawn to them only so I can report back to Gallienus on the presence of heretical documents here at the abbey. So I can inform him that the abbey not only collects these profane works but actively copies them, presumably for dissemination. But I cannot lie to you or God, brother. I am fascinated by them for their own sake, for what oddities or truths they might contain. Let us hope and pray to our Lord that their attraction does not overtake my godly mission. More and more, I wonder if this is the “temptation” to which Lucius alluded.

  Brother,

  My hand trembles—nay, shivers—as I write these words. I pray that they will stop shaking, as I pray that God will give me a second chance. Yet my hands refuse my entreaties, and perhaps He does as well.

  The Lord knows I have given Him cause enough to deny my request. I have not offered Him any reason to think me steadfast in my mission to rout out sacrilege in this hinterland. To the contrary, I have spent night after night in the darkness of the scriptorium, gobbling up the words of secret texts like a child with honey.

  Oh, my brother, you should see what I found hanging from the ceiling of the scriptorium in this remote island abbey. I discovered sumptuous renderings of our Latin literature—Virgil, Plato, Horace—in which even you would delight. I unwrapped gilded copies of letters from church founders that would move even a stone to tears. Yet what continues to draw me are those banned Gospels.

  Should I even dub them Gospels, though they call themselves such? None is in our canon. None of these have I ever seen before. Are they the writings of “madmen,” as Irenaeus said, or are they truths? I know I should stop my speculations, for I came to excise this heresy.

  Yet the Secret Book of John only feeds these conjectures. Purporting to offer a description of the events after Jesus ascended into heaven, the apostle John states that “the twelve disciples were all sitting together and recalling what the Savior had said to each one of them, either secretly or openly, and putting it into books, and I was writing what is in my book.” If these words are indeed John’s, can there be truth in these banned Gospels? Might they contain words from Jesus Christ’s own mouth—recorded by His disciples—that we are prohibited from reading? As soon as these thoughts come into my mind, I try to cast them out, for I know them to be the fuel of Satan’s heretical fire. Yet I find that I cannot purge them entirely; they have become like an opiate to me.

  All the more so because the substance of these manuscripts so entices. This very eve, I found myself with moonlight enough to reach the scriptorium safely. I was eager to return to my reading of the Gospel of Thomas, with its inviting first line: “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” Who could resist this invitation to immortality? Particularly when Thomas says that the kingdom of God is already here, and not a cataclysmic event or otherworldly place foretold for the future: “the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” He dares to go further, proclaiming that we may find this kingdom by “knowing ourselves,” by looking within to the “image of God” within us all.

  Brother, with all this talk of images, you can see how these Gospels, true or not, heresy or not, transfixed me. I was sitting in a blackened corner of the second floor, the Gospel of Thomas in one hand and a candle in the other, when I heard the noise. It sounded like a rustle, and I strained to discern its origin. No swish, no crackle followed, so I attributed it to the wind in the trees.

  Since my dark cocoon had begun to brighten with the onset of daylight, I clambered down the ladder. I slid it back to its designated place and settled at one of the tables, with lit candle still in hand. Pulling out a piece of parchment and a quill, I began to list the sacrilegious works I had uncovered, for these books contain certain heresy far beyond even that of Pelagius’s creed or Arianism. I owed this much to Gallienus. Why I did not wait until I returned to my hut to create this report? I do not know—guilt over my interest in the texts, perhaps.

  I heard the rustle again. I looked up and scanned the vast room. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, I returned to my writing.

  “Cannot wait until morning to labor for our Lord, Brother Decius?”

  I turned; behind me stood a figure draped in white. I dropped to my knees and said, “Abbess, my apologies.”

  “Please rise. Why offer apologies if your work is for His greater glory?”

  Recall, brother, I told you these Gaels speak in puzzles and multiple layers of meaning and innuendo. How could I answer her without stepping into one trap or another? My work was indeed for His greater glory, as defined by Gallienus and the Roman Church, though certainly not by Brigid if she knew my true motives. I said the only thing I could: “Abbess, I request forgiveness if my work disturbed your rest.”

  She walked around the scriptorium in a graceful per
ambulation—or the slow stalking of a predator; I could not be certain. “Oh, Brother Decius, I do not rest. Therefore, you could not have disturbed it.”

  I seized upon this statement. “Then, Abbess, you and I are alike in that regard. Restlessness brings me here to the scriptorium.”

  “Restlessness brings you out of your hut so late at night, does it?” Though her words challenged, her tone was even, bearing no trace of skepticism. I determined to take her words at their most benign.

  “Yes, Abbess.”

  “Please call me Brigid. If Jesus Christ did not stand on ceremony, then how dare I?”

  “Thank you, Abb—” I stopped myself. “Brigid.”

  “How are you finding the Abbey of Kild—” I saw a glint of her white teeth as she smiled to herself in the dark. “Cill Dara?”

  This tease was Brigid’s first reference to our initial meeting. I wondered if I should mention our encounter and offer further apologies for mistaking her for a common village girl on those plains. And for insulting the learnedness of the Gaels. But my situation was precarious, so I maintained the course of our conversation.

  “I find Cill Dara and its people to be a wondrous gift.”

  “‘A wondrous gift’…” The tenor of her voice shifted just a grade; how I should interpret it, I did not know. Did she mock me? “High praise indeed, Brother Decius. How is Cill Dara ‘a wondrous gift’?”

  “To be so welcomed when I was so outcast is a miracle unto itself. To have the further opportunity to work here in the scriptorium is a double blessing. Cill Dara is so much more than I expected or deserve.”

  Brigid grew quiet. In the growing light, I began to make out the details of her face: her strong jaw and cheekbones, her fiercely intelligent green eyes, and the unexpected, almost unwilling softness of her mouth. Brother, you would not find her beautiful in the Roman sense, but her looks arrest. Even more so when her strong character surfaces.