Malachy's Prophecies

Malachy O'Morgair, also known as St. Malachy, died on this date in 1148.

In his time, Malachy O'Morgair was known as an able priest and administrator who restored discipline to the lazy monks at Armagh. Afterwards he traveled through Europe, visiting Innocent II in Rome and St. Bernard in Clairvaux, in whose arms he died at the age of 54.

A subsequent tradition about Malachy is that during his visit with Innocent in 1139, he was granted a vision of each of the future popes, which he set down as a list of aphoristic prophecies about each of them, which he gave to Innocent to comfort his mind about his work. In 1590, a Benedictine monk "found" the list in the Vatican archives.

Although the work has been dismissed as a forgery perpetrated by restless Jesuits, there have been some uncanny connections between the aphorisms attributed to Malachy and some actual popes. For example, for the 84th pope after Innocent, the motto is "Sydus Olorum" or "constellation of swans," and (depending on whom you count) the corresponding pope, Clement IX, apparently occupied the chamber of swans at the time of his election. The motto for the 256th pope, "Balneo Etruria," is interesting because the supposed 256th pope, Gregory XVI, was a member of an order founded by St. Romuald at Balneo in Etruria.

The motto corresponding to John XXIII was "Pastor et Nauta" ("pastor and marine"), which is said to refer to John's previous position as patriarch of Venice. John Paul II was born during a solar eclipse, and the motto corresponding to his reign is "De labore Solis," which can be translated as "labor of the Sun" or "eclipse of the Sun." Many assumed that the next pope, corresponding to the motto "Gloria Olivae" or "glory of the olives," would have been a Benedictine monk, since the olive is a prominent symbol for the Benedictines, but Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did choose the name "Benedict XVI" upon his election.

The prophecies end with one more pope after Benedict XVI, "Petrus Romanus," who will reign in extreme persecution.

St. Patrick

Don't say it too loudly -- especially not around my red-headed wife's family, all those Rays and Murphys and O'Connells and McFaddens and Donahues.

Shhh. The patron saint, nay, the symbol of Ireland . . . was a Romanized Brit.

This hardly matters to the revelers who consume thousands of gallons of beer (green-dyed and otherwise) in St. Patrick's Day celebrations -- any more than the fact that George Washington was a Brit has ever bothered any of the people who celebrate the 4th of July, or the fact that Cleopatra was a Greek has ever bothered a Hollywood casting director. Still, in the politically-charged days since the Elizabethan colonization of Ireland in 1556, it's better to whisper Patrick's ethnic origins if one is to mention them at all.

Patrick's father was a middle-class deacon and bureaucrat, which meant that Patrick could have expected to enjoy a decent education and livelihood; but at 16, Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates who attacked his father's farm in England, and he became enslaved for 6 years. During the near-starvation and other privations of his captivity, Patrick sustained himself with his faith in God, away from clerics or formal instruction.

At the end of 6 years, a mysterious voice told him that he was going home, whereupon he was either freed or he escaped from his captivity, walked 200 miles to the Irish coast, and hitched a boat back to England. There, after reuniting with his family, Patrick was visited by another divine messenger who revealed what was to become Patrick's calling: to bring Christianity back to the land of his captors, to become a civilizing voice among the Irish or vox hiberionacum.

He received rudimentary training for the priesthood (lacking a complete classical education, something which he would always regret) and returned to Ireland around 435, working principally from Armagh in the North. Although legends credit him with single-handedly converting the whole of Ireland (using the three leaves of the shamrock to explain the Trinity), in actuality his mission concerned itself with organizing his small flock into a church administration, and turning them upon the rural Irish to stamp out idolatry and sun-worship.

His two rough Latin works (a Confession, and an Epistle, in which he denounced the treatment of Irish captives by a Briton chieftain) are the earliest surviving Irish texts, revealing a humble man who was conscious of his status as an intellectual exile as well as a physical one. By a few hundred years after his death, he was credited with a number of tall miracles, including driving all of the snakes off of the island, and certainly the metaphoric significance of that tale has fueled much of the Irish nationalistic spirit with which he later became identified.

It doesn't explain the green beer, however.

Categories: Christian-History, Ireland

Joyce

"A cruel playful mind like a great soft tiger cat." -- W.B. Yeats.

At the close of the 20th century, Joyce was measured as the century's greatest novelist, one critic going so far as to say that Joyce "published nothing but masterpieces." Some casual students of literature registered some alarm at the choice of Joyce's Ulysses as the greatest 20th century book in English by a Modern Library panel in 1998, since Ulysses is also considered one the most "challenging" (unreadable) modern classics. The book, however, does have a scarlet past, being the subject of a famous U.S. obscenity case -- and surely no one can resist a rebel's charm, whether the rebel be Ulysses or James Joyce himself.

The eldest surviving child of a large Irish family, born on this day in 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Joyce's father was a beguiling, rhetorically-gifted and usually unemployed drunkard. Joyce followed in his father's footsteps in a number of respects. He was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College and University College, spending a good deal of his time learning languages (Gaelic, Dano-Norwegian, French, Italian, German), bristling over the English rule of Ireland (Charles Parnell was a hero) and devouring "dangerous" modern literature.

Joyce developed a local reputation as a rebellious lad with a literary streak, making public shows of defending plays by such modern writers as W.B. Yeats and Henrik Ibsen against attacks by the Catholic Church and its apologists. Near the end of his educational career, while Joyce still a held a strong desire for Irish Home Rule, he avoided the paramilitary groups which trained for revolutionary conflict, regarding them a backward-looking and Church-dominated; as would be the attitude of his semi-autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus, Joyce did not want to commit to a political movement which seemed to be in search of martyrs. Instead, Joyce's ideal revolutionary was the artist-hero, the man who breaks out of the social and political conventions of his time through personal creation.

After college, he left Dublin for Paris with an introduction from Yeats in his pocket, struggled along writing book reviews for a time and eventually returned home briefly. He met and wooed a local chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, and, fleeing what he believed to be the stifling cultural environment of Ireland under siege, he took Nora with him to Trieste in 1904, leaving Ireland more or less permanently.

Alternating between teaching, drinking and publishing miscellaneous tales which later comprised the classic short story collection Dubliners (published in 1914), Joyce began work on a semi-autobiographical "essay" called Stephen Hero. The poet Ezra Pound discovered Joyce toiling in near obscurity, encouraged his reworking of the Stephen Hero material, and arranged for the serialization of the book in The Egoist magazine. The new editor of the magazine, Harriet Shaw Weaver, was captivated by the technical and stylistic innovations of Joyce's book, and settled a trust for Joyce which gave him a measure of economic security for the rest of his life.

After several unsuccessful attempts to publish Stephen Hero (now known as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) as a full novel due to publishers' fears over obscenity laws, the novel was finally published in 1916. Just after its publication Joyce suffered a severe attack of glaucoma, and by the end of his life, he was virtually blind. In 1918, however, Joyce's sequel to Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, began to be serialized in the Little Review. The book's 700 pages take place in a single day, following the interior monologues of Stephen Dedalus, a Jewish ad-canvasser named Ulysses whose wife is contemplating an affair with another man that afternoon, Ulysses' wife Molly, and so on -- with commonplace meetings turning into dramatic climaxes. When Ulysses was finally published as a novel in Paris in 1922, a number of countries immediately moved to ban it as "obscene" -- including the U.S., where the ban was finally lifted in 1933.

Joyce's last major work, Finnegan's Wake (1939), which essentially concerns a pubkeep named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, stripped away much of the constraints imposed by language (the book contains some puns and innuendo which can only be fully understood if the reader knows three or four languages), space and time (the story leaps from the pub, to nursery rhymes, to Parnell's trials, to Tristan and Isolde with impunity) and individuality (the main character metamorphoses several times and finally changes into "Tim Finnegan," the hero of an Irish song who arises at his own wake to share a drink) -- all wrapped within a plot structured to complement 18th century philosopher Giambattista Vico's theory of historical development. (And you thought Ulysses was tough!) Joyce directed his assistants, Samuel Beckett among them, to assist the public's understanding of Finnegan's Wake by producing a treatise on his work in progress in 1929. It appears that Joyce understood his own joke all too well, but critics continue to argue about whether his unbridled virtuosity with language led him to create an incomprehensible white elephant of a book, or whether his final work fundamentally expanded the horizons of literary activity.

Joyce was branded as paranoid for staying away from Ireland for most of his later years, although it has been observed that many of his revolutionary friends died early deaths there. Much of Joyce's work remains unfilmed and probably unfilmable (ironically enough, as Joyce started Ireland's first movie house in 1909) but John Huston directed a splendid version of his short story masterpiece, The Dead (1987).