Igla: black sheep of the Kazakh film family

Moro (Viktor Tsoi) in Igla

Igla (Игла, The Needle) is a film which I found more interesting on account of its reverberations in later Kazakh cinema than on its own merits. A 1988 ‘Kazakh New Wave’ contemporary of Mest’ and Otyrardyń kúıreýi, Igla does not in the same way dwell on grand questions of fate and identity; however, it unfortunately more than makes up for that by way of pretentious art-film mannerisms and postmodernist meandering. There’s something significant in the fact that the other two films here explicitly centre Kazakh film within an East Asian ambit; tying Kazakh destiny to both historical Mongol domination and contemporary Soviet-Korean ‘lostness’. Here, musician-turned-leading-man Viktor Tsoi, himself of Soviet-Korean descent, seems to embody a part of that ‘lostness’, no matter whether he occupies a Russian or a Kazakh cultural milieu. But whereas for Chae Sungu in Mest’, his lostness carried with it shame and emasculation; Tsoi’s character here wears that same lostness as a badge of honour and masculine pride. Igla balances Tsoi’s rock-star-sized ego and prima donna on-screen presence against Nugmanov’s desire to ‘play around’ with the filmic medium, and the result is something that is a bit more than the sum of its parts. (Rather disappointing is the inexplicable lack of hedgehogs in the film, though.)

In Igla, a drifter named Moro (Viktor Tsoi) comes to Alma-Ata to collect on a debt owed to him by a small-time crook and part-time factory worker named Spartak (Aleksandr Bashirov). Not having a place to stay, he drops in on his ex-girlfriend Dina (Marina Smirnova), whom he quickly discovers is addicted to morphine. Moro decides to help Dina kick the habit with a trip to the Aral Sea, but soon finds himself on the wrong side of a drug-smuggling gang led by a hospital surgeon named Artur (Petr Mamonov), who is the one who got Dina addicted in the first place. The two plots collide with Moro in the middle.

There’s not all that much more to the story than that; it’s a short film, and much of it lingers on extended sequences in Dina’s apartment or else on the Aral Sea, which has been turned into a desert. In addition to this modern man-made desert, dingy block apartments, rusty chain-link fences and abandoned parks form the backdrop for much of the film. Nugmanov enjoys linking these extended sequences either with close-ups of a digital clock showing the time, or with white century text on black title cards. Very often radio or television programmes are playing in the background, and key events in the plot are often narrated or ‘foreshadowed’ by what the television is broadcasting at the time, adding to an almost paranoid sense of surrealism. The core message of the film – insofar as it even has one, which is somewhat doubtful – is very much anti-drug. However, it portrays morphine abuse and its effects in candid ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier Soviet cinema. Further small eccentric touches, like the occasional animated scrawls that indicate a character’s thought process (as they occasionally do in, say, James Gunn’s Super or, indeed, Baikonur and Absurdistan), add to the countercultural feel of the movie.

Also interesting is that the Soviet state is rendered a nearly-absent presence, passive and almost invisible – I say ‘almost’ because the sole representations of Soviet government apparatus or ideology present themselves through the near-ubiquitous televisions that Nugmanov either places in the frame or has playing in the background. (Igla’s ending title card is an ironic dedication to ‘Soviet television’.) They serve almost as a ‘chorus’ to the main action, which happens in a heavily-stylised, almost caricatured criminal underworld. The soundtrack is shared between these television ‘samples’, and contemporary rock music – mostly from Viktor Tsoi’s own band Kino.

Igla is really mostly about Viktor Tsoi, though, and what he represented to a generation of Russian youth. Tsoi is to Russian culture what Cui Jian 崔健 is and has been to Chinese culture. Moro, Tsoi’s alter-ego in the film, is a mullet-rocking, jeans-wearing leather-clad ‘bad boy’, a Byronic anti-hero, often seen wearing shades and with a cigarette flopping out of his mouth. He gestures with his middle finger and says ‘fuck’ a lot. He is – almost more so than any other filmic Russian protagonist I can think of, off the top of my head – instantly recognisable and sympathetic to an American audience: he is the avatar of an alienated, rebellious and cynical youth culture. He even pulled a James Dean two years later and died in an auto wreck, lending him personally (and his performance in this film particularly, which was his last) a martyrific mystique.

There are a number of comparisons that can be made here. Igla has the counterculture cult-film appeal of Repo Man and, a bit more distantly, the hapkido-filled rage of Billy Jack. It anticipates the cynical thematic sensibility of Trainspotting and the subversively genre-savvy wink-nods of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It sounds like I’m talking it up a bit too much, though, with these comparisons. Igla has its own cult-film brilliance, but it’s much more rough, experimental and protean than any of these comparisons would suggest. It took me about halfway through the film for me to figure out quite what it was up to.

Igla’s influence on later Kazakh cinema, though – particularly in the crime-thriller subgenre – gives it an importance and a place of honour there which director Rashid Nugmanov had no reason to expect when he made it. Aqan Sataev’s Réketır pays explicit homage to Igla in multiple scenes; including the shell game scene and even the ambiguous ending. Gúl’shad Omarova’s Shıza also plays up the Viktor Tsoi cigarette-smoking black-leather-and-sunglasses æsthetic with its own definitively young leading man – though it does so with its tongue firmly in its cheek. If Ivan groznyi is the stately forefather of Kazakh cinema, then Igla is almost certainly the black sheep of the family. But it’s a family member that can’t be ignored.

Holy Mother Éanswíþ, Venerable Abbess of Folkestone

Saint Éanswíþ of Folkestone

Possibly the first woman (alongside her aunt, Saint Æþelburg of Lyminge) to lead a religious community in England, and the granddaughter of the saintly royal couple Æþelberht and Berhte of Kent, today the Holy Orthodox Church commemorates Saint Éanswíþ of Folkestone, the spiritual mother of Kent.

Despite his parents’ conversion, Éanswíþ’s father Éadbald was still a Teutonic heathen when he came to the throne. It would take him several years to be converted by Saint Laurence, Archbishop of Canterbury. Upon his conversion, he put aside his first wife – who was also his stepmother – and married instead Emma of Austrasia, a Frankish Christian. Éanswíþ was the first-born of this union.

From childhood, Éanswíþ desired to lead a holy life of virginity in devotion to Christ. No doubt she was influenced by the company she kept, of holy men and women – Saint Æþelburg and Saint Laurence, but also Saint Mellitus and Saint Justus. Her aunt Æþelburg had married a heathen Northumbrian prince, Éadwine; and Éadbald hoped to make a match for his own daughter of equal political advantage. Unlike Æþelburg, however, Éanswíþ did not enter willingly into such a match. Indeed, she refused to marry at all. Despite her father’s consistent entreaties, God strengthened her in her refusal. Eventually, her father relented to let her become a nun, and with his blessing and support she founded Folkestone Abbey in 630. Nowadays there is an Abbey church which bears her name, but which was then dedicated to the Apostles Peter and Paul. Folkestone Priory drew holy women from both England and Francia; they gave themselves to constant prayer and repentance, as well as songs of praise to the Lord.

Saint Éanswíþ spent all of her remaining days on Earth in this house of God together with her sisters in God, and devoted herself not only to study of Scripture and prayer and the copying of manuscripts, but also to manual labour and works of material mercy for the sick, the poor and the homeless. As with all of the early men of God who came to English shores, and in particular the holy mothers of the English Church, material aid to the needy was one of her highest priorities.

In life, Saint Éanswíþ was able to work wonders; and several such wonders are attributed to her by her hagiographers. She healed a blind woman by the power of her prayers to God; and she also healed a madman of his mental illness in the same way. When Folkestone suffered a dearth of fresh water, her prayers produced a holy spring which met all the priory’s needs; at her asking, God even made the water to flow uphill for a mile to where the abbey was. She was even able to speak with animals and birds, who listened to her. She asked the birds to stop stealing wheat from the abbey fields, and they did as she bade them.

Her life on earth was sadly short. She reposed on the thirteenth of September in the year 640, after ten years in the priory. Although her life is ill-attested in contemporary documents, it is clear that she already had a local cultus by the year 867. In that year, the heathen Danish invaders attacked the priory at Folkestone and destroyed it; however, her relics had been moved inland to protect them. The site of the original priory was claimed by the sea, and the current church was built some miles inland in 1138.

The shrine to Saint Éanswíþ was destroyed in the anti-monastic violence and persecutions of the English Reformation; however Saint Éanswíþ’s relics had been hidden in an alabaster-lined leaden reliquary in the church walls, as workmen discovered on the 17^th of June, 1885. At first, the reliquary was brought out for public veneration on the saint’s feast day, but the practice halted when several more puritan-minded parishioners complained that the rector was ‘worshipping’ the relics. Still, some of the parishioners at Saint Mary’s and Saint Eanswythe’s still offer candles and flowers for the feast, at the brass door behind which the reliquary is ensconced. An Orthodox iconographer gifted the parish church an icon (shown above) of the Holy Mother of Kent.

With gladsome voices and hymns of praise
Let us extol the venerable Éanswíþ,
Who, setting aside rich princely apparel,
Gladly put on the mean and lowly habit of a nun;
And, in place of the idle pursuits of the royal court,
Set herself boldly to acquire all the virtues.
Wherefore, having pleased Christ by her charity and love,
She ever intercedeth with Him to have mercy on our souls!

Holy Hierarch and Confessor Ailbe of Emly

St Ailbe’s Church, Emly, Ireland

Today in the Orthodox Church, the twelfth of September, we commemorate another very early Irish missionary bishop who also preached in Wales: Saint Ailbe of Emly. A contemporary, friend and fellow-worker in the vineyard of Saint Padrig, Saint Ailbe is also intimately associated with the patron saints of Wales, Non and her son Dewi.

Saint Ailbe [also Ailbhe, in Welsh Eilfyw, in Latin Albeus and in English Elvis] was said to have been the illegitimate child of a thrall in the household of the Irish prince of Munster. Much like Œdipus in Greek lore, the unwanted Ailbe was left exposed on the slope of a hillside on the prince’s orders – and like the founders of the city of Rome, he was found by a she-wolf who cared for him, protected him and nursed him in his infancy. Later, when the she-wolf who nursed him was fleeing from hunters, she fled into his church and rested her head on his lap; and thereafter he protected her and her cubs, and allowed them to eat from his stores of bread. Although this accords with the common theme among Celtic saints that they were close to nature and often befriended wild animals, these are very likely later interpolations and hagiographical flourishes, though we may accept it as read that Saint Ailbe was of mean birth.

When he was yet a youth he encountered and was baptised by British missionaries who were then serving in Ireland – one of these may have been Saint Palladius. He studied under them, and they, impressed by Ailbe’s quick mind and ease with which he took in knowledge, ordained him a priest. He thereafter made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was consecrated a bishop. He made his way back to Ireland to find Saint Padrig there evangelising the Irish people. Saint Ailbe had no objections whatever to the presence of this British bishop, and indeed became Padrig’s obedient disciple. Padrig placed him in authority over Emly in Munster, though this diocæse was soon relocated to Cashel.

Saint Ailbe was a vigorous and energetic missionary, both preaching the word of truth in a language that ordinary people could understand, and working wonders by the power of his prayers delivered in a spirit of true humility. He lived in accordance with the commandments of God, prayed and fasted and gave openly to all who asked of him. By means of his preaching and teaching under Christ’s and Saint Padrig’s authority, he not only brought multitudes of Irish in the southwest of the island to Christ, but also by his own example of life inspired them to the pursuit of virtue. It is said that he made of ordinary heathen not only Christians but saints.

Ailbe was given the isles of Aran in Galway by Óengus mac Nad Froích, which in turn sound as the foundation of the monastery of Saint Éanna. Ailbe also set out a strictly ascetic rule for monks which was followed on Aran for many generations afterward. His own ascetic discipline included constant inward prayer, an early model in the West for the hesychasm and prayers of the heart which would come to be common in the East.

Saint Ailbe did not stay his whole life in Emly; like many Celtic missionaries, he was itinerant for much of his career. He ventured into the home country of his spiritual father, and was active in Dyfed. In Wales he is known as Eilfyw Sant, and he was taken by Bishop Rhygyfarch to have been the missionary hierarch who baptised Saint David. If this is true, then he would likely also have been the preacher who was silenced in the presence of Saint Non, and who prophesied the greatness of the unborn baby she carried in her womb. He returned to Ireland to continue his work in Emly, though at the end of his life he took a desire to visit the island of Thule far to the north. The king of Munster, in order to prevent his flight, stationed guards at every port and had them watch for the saint. And so Saint Ailbe reposed in the Lord in Munster as he was going about his duties as bishop.

Today in Emly there exists a holy well and a stone cross dedicated to Saint Ailbe, both of which are still there and are still visited by pilgrims. There is also a parish dedicated to St Elvis in Dyfed, and of course Saint Eilfyw is associated with the baptism of Dewi Sant and thus with the holy wells that still exist in Dyfed dedicated to Dewi and his mother Saint Non. Saint Ailbe is therefore an important saint both in Wales and in Ireland. Holy father Ailbe, blessed bishop and tutor of monastics, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

When Ireland’s Enlightener returned to his native land,
He found thee, O holy Ailbe, preaching the Faith at Emly,
Where at the bidding of an angel thou hadst built a church.
O wise shepherd of souls and glorious ascetic,
O friend of animals, and fellow missionary with the illustrious Padrig,
Pray to Christ our God that we might also become bastions of Orthodoxy
And a shining example to our fellow countrymen,
Drawing them away from ignorance and error
And into the true Faith that all our souls may be saved.

Meaningful justice requires hierarchy of values

One of the things I find I have diminishing patience for – either in online discourse or in any other public forum – is the lazy equalisation of values that comes from reductive readings of history and a certain lack of education in philosophy. Indeed, this was one of the reasons I wrote that piece late last month on how a right attitude toward the family is necessary to combat nationalism. The Good (and the Beautiful, and the True) may be ontologically one, but it presents itself to us humans in a dizzyingly-vast array of discrete goods necessary to our flourishing, and part of the real work of striving for the good is sorting through these goods in an attempt to properly place them. Even if we assert that justice and the Good at its base requires some form of real equality for people (something which, even as a leftist, I’m not 100% convinced is possible), that very same equality of being requires a hard inequality of values – with differing ranks and degrees of importance being ascribed to each.

It strikes me after reading several pieces that both the Anglo-American tradition of liberal conservatism, and the Continental tradition of national conservatism, have both been losing the plot rather badly in this most essential of conservative endeavours (at least according to Russell Kirk, for whom the transcendent moral order and hierarchies of value were of paramount importance) for about the past two hundred years or so. This point was driven home rather strongly by several articles I read recently, one of which being a Rod Dreher gush piece over Orbán Viktor (the interesting but for various reasons rather troubling Prime Minister of Hungary), and the other being the New York Times review of George Will’s latest book, which appears to be nothing short of a liberal-conservative manifesto in an age where such beliefs seem, to put it politely, quaint.

Both Dreher and Will seem to be in not-quite-equivalent measures guilty of ignoring Kirk, because both of them dangerously collapse the entire project of the transcendent social order in ways which mirror – as Dreher notes with one of his increasingly-sporadic flashes of self-awareness – the Ahmari-French debate at the Catholic University of America, which is in itself a rehash of a theopolitical debate which has been rollicking the English-speaking Catholic world for some time and which does not leave us Orthodox types unscathed.

If we were to take this debate at face value, at its core is the question of whether the state can or should take an interest in substantive questions of justice – including on pelvic issues – to the extent that it should be willing to bring the force of law to bear on them. For French, conservative goals can be best advanced by preserving in the state as much of a neutral arbiter as possible on questions of cultural value, and preserving as much private space as possible for conservative options to be pursued, through the pluralism of a marketplace of ideas. For Ahmari, by contrast, the state cannot be neutral. It is always already an expression of the values implicit in a culture; and the culture war must be fought in order to win a just state, which can be used to pursue both public and private goods.

The confusion of means and ends on both sides of this debate is all too readily apparent, unfortunately. French’s defence of pluralism clearly does not extend to the international sphere; and he is all too willing to use the full coercive strength of the state to force another sovereign people to adopt an entirely different way of life and an entirely different laundry-list of social goods, as seen in his repeated, intellectually-odious defences of the Iraq War (which was indeed a war on truth itself). French’s variant of ‘classical liberalism’, precisely as a comprehensive doctrine of justice replete with its own priests and zealots, justly earned its obsolescence through this very war – along with the prior one in Yugoslavia, and the subsequent one in Libya. For Ahmari’s part, his embrace of Trumpism reeks of the very same sort of ‘sincere irrationality’ that he derides in French. Ahmari derides French for cutting deals with the devils of sexual licence and other forms of cultural progressivism in his pursuit of a level cultural playing field. However, he shows himself all too willing to cut deals with the philosophical devil of post-modernism in his practical political choices.

These are not hypocrisies specific to these two gentlemen or to this specific debate: they point straight to the problems with both ‘classical liberalism’ and Catholic intégrisme. Though both claim to combat progressivism, both are in fact guilty of accommodating progressive arguments about the nature of political reality. Classical liberalism always hides the comprehensive (and, at base, non-Christian) nature of its own truth claims behind various guises of ‘neutrality’ in state and market, precisely because any hint of the specificity of its value-claims undermine its claims to universality. On the opposite side, intégrisme – which in its original instance as now arose as a deliberate counter-narrative to liberal conceptions of politics – has never been as pious as it pretends to be. Maurras was an agnostic. The creative force behind Action française came from the anti-Dreyfusards. From the start, the intégriste project had only a positivist and instrumentalist conception of faith.

Both Frenchian classical-liberalism-via-neoconservatism and Ahmarian intégrisme make the fatal error – fatal, that is, from the temperamental conservative, Burke-and-Kirk perspective – of collapsing necessary distinctions-of-kind within the moral order. These collapses lead each to have a deficient or disordered understanding of the proper rôle of the state. Classical liberalism conflates the limited, procedural state and the negative liberties it safeguards with higher orders of goods, such that it cannot conceive of any potential discrete social or political good or moral priority which that state might sacrifice its neutrality to pursue. In essence, for liberalism, negative liberty becomes a sort of god.

On the other hand, intégrisme in its too-close, ostensibly-religious pursuit of these discrete social and political goods, expounds a religion which smells a bit too much like a state. It arrogates to the religious sphere the responsibility of crafting political projects, and in so doing instrumentalises the religious. Even the innocuous-sounding ‘integralism in three sentences’ makes the Grand Inquisitor’s mistake. Our intégristes think spiritual and temporal goods possess only differences in degree, but belong to the same category. The problem with this, of course, is that it undermines actual religious witness on spiritual goods which don’t rightly belong to the same kind as the temporal ends of politics. Christ did not come to deliver us bread; He came to be our bread and drink and to deliver us from the very need for bread.

Which brings us back to Dreher and Will. Although Dreher seems closer to the truth than Will to me, I must be harder on Dreher here because he should know better than to embrace Orbán and his quasi-intégriste project with both arms open. If Dreher had any interest or even idle curiosity about the religious tradition to which he has attached himself – which also happens to be mine – he would know very well that neither side of this debate is particularly friendly to Orthodox Christians. He would know that neither side appreciates the precarious witness we bear on the theopolitical question, nor the tragic witness we bear on the question of nationalism. These witnesses, both tied to the material and political legacy of Eastern Rome, are not unrelated to each other.

Please do not mistake this for an appeal to false moderation. It’s an appeal to maximalism. In fact, my position here is pure Leont’ev, pure Pobedonostsev. Like both of these great Russians, we should not concede the slightest ground here; nay, neither to classical liberalism nor to the resurgence of nationalisme intégral. An approach which preserves the hierarchy of values in a transcendent moral order, indeed, must be particularly careful not to conflate the different kinds of loyalties which are due in different proportion to different loci of our social context, because to do otherwise would be to risk effeminacy and vulgarisation. However, given the state of our national climate of mutual fear and loathing, I fear that both effeminacy and vulgarisation lie inescapably in our path.

In America, I fear, the way out will be long and difficult. It will involve passing through a protracted period of barbarism. (Partially contra Fallows, though it may not be as bad as advertised, it will still be no cake-walk.) It will involve the near-insurmountable task of building and living out different modes of loyalty to each other than those being presented to us in our political, cultural or social lives. Our bad national habits of embracing bumper-sticker patriotism, totemic brand consumption and other forms of sacrifice-free virtue-signalling voluntaristic affinity that calls for no level of sacrifice, simply won’t cut it anymore.

Holy Hierarch Deiniol Wyn, Bishop of Bangor

Saint Deiniol of Bangor

The eleventh of September in the Orthodox Church is the feast day of the great Welsh bishop, Saint Deiniol of Bangor [also Daniel or Denoual]. The grandson of Saint Pabo Post Prydain, son of Dynod Bwr and cousin of Saint Asa, Deiniol was the founder of two major monasteries in sub-Roman Wales, and a key figure in the struggle against the Pelagian heresy in Britain.

Deiniol’s family was from Yr Hen Ogledd – that is to say, Strathclyde – in the British North. His grandfather, the ‘Pillar of Britain’, had long held and defended the north against Pictish invasions. However, after his grandfather’s retirement to a hermitage, the old northern kingdom splintered. Dynod Bwr ended up having to take his family – Deiniol included – into Powys, where they were given a minor holding.

Deiniol was sent to study with Saint Cadog Ddoeth, where he learned the love of Christ and the spiritual wisdom of the Welsh hermits. He himself chose to become a hermit himself, and left Powys for Gwynedd to the north. He met with Maelgwn King of Gwynedd, who was impressed enough with the young hermit that he granted him enough land for a small enclosure on the Menai Strait. This would become the monastery, later cathedral, of Bangor Fawr.

Saint Deiniol’s hagiography has it that when he was an abbot, some thieves stole oxen from a local ploughman, leaving the monks without the means to plough the fields. At Saint Deiniol’s behest, wild stags emerged from the woods and allowed themselves to be yoked to the plough, and they turned the fields for the ploughman. This story is remarkably similar to one which appears in the Life of Saint Neot of Cornwall.

Saint Deiniol spent the rest of his life as an abbot; he was later consecrated as a bishop by Saint Dyfrig of Caerleon. Deiniol also reconsecrated a monastery that had been founded by his father Dynod at Bangor-is-y-coed on the River Dee. Under Saint Deiniol’s rule, the monastery at Bangor Fawr grew to become the largest spiritual centre in Wales, home to over two thousand monks. Saint Deiniol, alongside Saints Dyfrig and Dewi, attended the Synod of Llandewi Brefi in 545, where the heresy of Pelagius was again condemned and where the penitential rules and discipline for monks were firmly established. His presence at this Synod indicates the high esteem in which he was held by the Church.

Saint Deiniol reposed in the Lord on the eleventh of September, 584. He was buried on the isle of Bardsey, the ‘Isle of 20,000 Saints’. Saint Deiniol’s cultus has been particularly pronounced in northern Wales. Holy bishop Deiniol, confessor and founder of monasteries, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

By thy teaching and pious life
Thou didst shine forth in the age of Saints, O Hierarch Deiniol,
And becoming Bangor’s first bishop
Thou wast an instrument of God's grace, leading many to salvation.
Pray, O Saint, that we may be led
Into the Way of Truth that our souls may be saved.

Bangor Cathedral, Gwynedd

Holy Mothers Wulfþrýð of Wilton and Wulfhild of Barking

This week in the Holy Orthodox Church we venerate two noble kinswomen of late Old England, Wulfþrýð of Wilton and Wulfhild of Barking, who also became venerable abbesses. Their feast dates are also quite close, as they both reposed within a few days of each other in September in the Year of our Lord 1000. Wulfhild is commemorated today on the ninth of September, and Wulfþrýð both today and on the thirteenth).

a sæcular illustration of Saint Wulfþrýð of Wilton


Icon of the Synaxis of the Saints of Barking; Saint Wulfhild is on the far left

Wulfþrýð was the elder of the two cousins, having been born in the year 937. She was educated at Wilton Abbey, and lived there with the nuns. At the age of twenty-three, when she was either a novice or a nun, she was kidnaped by (or willingly eloped with) the then-not-so-saintly Saint Éadgár King of Wessex.

First, however, Éadgár seems to have been hard in pursuit of her younger cousin, Saint Wulfhild (born c. 940). Wulfhild, however, was then also already a novice at Wilton and dead-set in her determination to become a nun. Éadgár contrived to have her aunt, Abbess Wenflæd of Wherwell, invite her to her own abbey. It was, however, a trap: Wenflæd had already made a deal with Éadgár to deliver Wulfhild into the hands of his men, and he kept her at Wherwell under guard. However, Wulfhild managed to escape through the drains. Éadgár pursued her back to Wilton and found her there, but she had already sought sanctuary in the altar, and the amorous young prince was forced to relinquish his claim on her.

But Éadgár found in her elder kinswoman Wulfþrýð, who was as stated before also at Wilton, an equally-fair and far more willing lover. He took her to his manor at Kemsing in the North Downs where she became his kept woman. The affaire resulted in Wulfþrýð’s pregnancy, and while she was still in Kent she gave birth to a daughter, Éadg‎ýð. Soon after their daughter’s birth, Wulfþrýð – stricken with compunction for the souls of herself, her husband and daughter – returned willingly to Wilton. It appears she remained good friends with Éadgár even after her return to the monastic life. Éadgár – who also seems to have repented – acknowledged Éadgýð as a legitimate daughter and penned a charter to Wulfþrýð for her support; he also willingly undertook seven years of fasting penance for having seduced her, during which time he also would not wear or even touch his own crown. Later, when Wulfþrýð had become Abbess of Wilton, she successfully pled before her former lover for clemency on behalf of a thief pursued by his bailiff, who had sought sanctuary within the abbey.

Both women were the beneficiaries of Éadgár’s public penance. Saints Wulfþrýð and Éadgýð both were well cared-for at Wilton, which received generous support and endowments from Éadgár King for the rest of his life. Holy Mother Wulfþrýð cared deeply for their daughter, who in turn embraced the monastic life, complete with its prayer and abstinence and radical kenotic giving, with both arms. Saint Éadgýð is commemorated next week so I will treat her in greater depth then; but suffice it to say that despite her death at a tragically young age, she is nevertheless one of England’s great ‘social justice’ saints, with her emphasis on caring for the poor and needy. Wulfhild, who was then a nun at Horton in Dorset, was made abbess – with Éadgár’s blessing and more likely than not at his insistence – of the newly-renovated Abbey at Barking to which Saint Dúnstán had contributed so much. In her pursuit of holiness she joined such venerable abbesses and holy mothers of the Church as Saint Hildalíþ and Saint Æþelburg sister of Saint Eorcenwald.

Sadly for England, Éadgár remarried. The third wife he chose, Ælfþrýð, was blessed with Wulfþrýð’s outward fairness but all too little of her inward beauty, for she had the heart of a venomous snake. She bore to him the future king Æþelræd Unrǽd. However, she also connived to have Éadgár’s elder son Saint Éadweard murdered. She also bore a certain spiteful jealousy toward Éadgár’s former wife and her kinswoman. She connived with several unscrupulous nuns of Barking to have Saint Wulfhild was stripped of her abbacy and thrown out of the house of God. Wulfhild spent the next twenty years at Horton, and would later be reinstated as abbess of Barking by Æþelræd King. The final seven years of her life, Saint Wulfhild served as abbess of both Barking and Horton.

As for the older cousin, Wulfþrýð, she served as Abbess of Wilton until her death, several years after her saintly daughter’s. Éadgýð, for the wonders she wrought in life and for the visions of her which the nuns of Wilton received, quickly was recognised as a saint and became the patroness of Wilton; she was publicly venerated and her cultus promoted by several kings starting with Æþelræd Unrǽd. Wulfþrýð herself continued her daughter’s work and managed the affairs of Wilton with great success. She too was venerated as a saint after her death, and was buried in front of the altar inside the Wilton Abbey Church.

Holy mothers Wulfþrýð and Wulfhild, you who rejected worldly power and ease for lives of devotion, for the sake of us your wayward children, pray unto Christ our God to save our souls!

Saint Mary’s Church in Wilton


Barking Abbey in London

Our father among the saints Ciarán of Clonmacnoise

Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise

The ninth of September in the Orthodox Church is the feast day of Saint Ciarán ‘the Younger’ of Clonmacnoise, the sixth-century Irish monastic whose holy life and scholarly witness made him an important forefather of holy hermits like Saint Cóemgen of Glendalough and missionaries like Saint Comgall of Bangor. This alone would make him worthy of veneration among the saints of Great Britain as well, but there is also the connexion several historians and hagiographers have made between him and the Cornish Saint Piran of Perranzabuloe.

The younger Saint Ciarán [also Kieran] was born in Fuerty in County Roscommon around the year 512, being the son of an itinerant carpenter and wheelwright named Beoit and his wife Darerca. He is still the patron saint of Connacht, the historical region which contains Roscommon. Ciarán was one of eight children, and one of two of their children who embraced a celibate religious vocation, and he was baptised and taught in Christianity by a presbyter of the Church whose name was Justus. Ciarán was content in any manner of work – he did take well to his studies, but he spent much of his time working as a cowherd to support his family, who were common-born and not well off. In those days a cowherd would have to use their voices and the mysteries of music to build a relationship with their animals, and thus it should come as no surprise that even this early on in his life, Ciarán demonstrated a care and a special affinity for animals both wild and domestic.

Justus it may have been, who recommended him to Saint Fionnán of Clonard, who took the youngling Ciarán as his Padawan – or rather, a novice monk at his monastery. There Saint Ciarán distinguished himself with zeal and care in his studies, as well as advancing in the ascetic disciplines. Among Saint Fionnán’s students, Ciarán became known as a worker of wonders. One of Fionnán’s students and Ciarán’s friends was Saint Ninnidh ‘Laobh Dearc’, who came to class one day without a Bible. Saint Ciarán lent him his when he was asked. Saint Fionnán tested his class on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, and poor Ciarán only knew half the answers. The other students teased him and called him ‘Ciarán half-Matthew’, but Saint Fionnán rebuked them and said: ‘Call him rather Ciarán half-Ireland, for he will have half the country and leave the rest to us!’

He later also studied under Saint Éanna of Inishmore in the small archipelago of Aran. However, he received a vision from God of a great tree growing in the midst of a verdant island, spreading its branches over every shore, giving off beautiful blossoms and sweet fruits for the nourishment of its people, with birds plucking off some and carrying it to other lands. He recounted this vision to his spiritual father. Saint Éanna interpreted the vision as being a sign that Ciarán himself must return to Ireland and found a monastery in the centre of the Irish land – Ciarán himself was the tree that must bring the light of Christ to the whole of the island.

Ciarán returned to Ireland and lived for some time with his brothers Odhrán and Luachaill at a place named Isel. Ciarán was so generous and open-handed with everyone who came to visit there, that his brothers asked him at length to leave them. They told him: ‘Leave us, brother. We cannot live in the same place with you and feed and keep our brethren for God, because of your unbounded lavishness!’

He took his leave of them, with his books in a saddlebag on his back. A helpful stag walked alongside him, and allowed Saint Ciarán to burden it with his books. He settled on Lough Ree in Shannon, where he placed himself under the discipline of Saint Senán of Iniscathy. He spent this time of his life founding oratories and monastic cells on various lake-islands in central Ireland, and may have spent some time on Hare Island. One hagiographical story to Saint Ciarán’s account is that a monk under his discipline once lost a Gospel book of his in the lake, and grieved greatly over his negligence. Later that summer when a cow went down to the lake to drink, the strap on the binding of the Gospel caught on the cow’s hoof, and the cow brought it ashore when it finished drinking. When Saint Ciarán recovered the book, it was discovered that the water had not damaged the book at all – not one page was damaged and not one letter was blotted or missing.

Around the year 544, Saint Ciarán took nine companions and settled with them in Offaly on the banks of the Shannon, where he founded the great monastic complex of Clonmacnoise. Again, the saint was led here by a vision he had, that Clonmacnoise would be the place where many souls would ascend from earth to heaven; and that it would be a site of pilgrimage much favoured by those who love the Lord. According to another tale, Saint Ciarán was led to a more beautiful place, but he chose Clonmacnoise instead because the subtler beauties of that place would prove less distracting to his monastic brothers. The hagiographies have it that he was assisted in building this monastery by the future high king of Ireland, Diarmait mac Cerbaill.

Clonmacnoise followed a discipline of strict asceticism under Saint Ciarán. This rule was apparently quite popular; just as Saint Fionnán had predicted in the saint’s youth, fully half of the monasteries in Ireland submitted to the rule of Saint Ciarán. And they did this because Ciarán himself was sincere in following his own rule, and never imposed upon his brothers anything he was unwilling to take on himself. He prayed and fasted; he did heavy menial labour alongside his brothers; he studied the Scriptures; and he gave generously to the poor with the same abandon that had caused his brothers to dismiss him. He also advocated for the kinless and rootless in courts of law where they had no other to speak for them.

The closeness that the Celtic holy men had with nature is fully evident with Saint Ciarán, as we can tell even from the above account. When he was at school he used to take written tasks from his spiritual father from the mouth of a tame fox. There was a dun cow that accompanied the saint throughout his entire life, from his youth as a cowherd for his father. This cow provided the monastery at Clonmacnoise with milk sufficient to satisfy all the brothers. After this cow died a natural death, it was said that its skin was used to make the binding for a unique and precious mediæval text containing a history of the Britons, several poetic works and a life of Saint Colum Cille: The Book of the Dun Cow, a fragment of which still exists and was placed in the care of the Royal Irish Academy in 1844.

Saint Ciarán himself did not live much longer after he founded the monastery at Clonmacnoise. A plague was then sweeping through Ireland, carrying off many souls. Saint Ciarán was among those who reposed in 545, having been abbot at Clonmacnoise for several months. Before he died, he gave instruction to his nine disciples not to bury him, but instead to leave his bones exposed on a hilltop, the same as would be done for a deer. Despite his short abbacy, he was proclaimed as one of the greatest of the Irish saints by his contemporaries and friends, including by Saint Colum Cille and Saint Cóemgen. Certainly Clonmacnoise, which started merely from the cells of Ciarán’s nine students, grew into one of the largest monastic complexes in Ireland – a veritable city of saints housing as many as 2,000 monks at one time, which continued unbroken from the sixth century until the sixteenth, when it was vandalised and destroyed under the orders of the English king Henry VIII. It was not only a centre for ascetical pursuits, but also for fine art and craftsmanship. Clonmacnoise became known for the quality of its illuminated manuscripts; its masonry; and its fine works in silver, bronze and iron. It boasted a monastic school and instruction in the seven liberal arts which went largely unmatched in Ireland throughout the mediæval period, and rivalled the best schools in the rest of Western Europe. Many kings of Tara and Connaught chose to be buried within the pale at Clonmacnoise – the dwelling of an ordinary cowherd with extraordinary gifts of humility and generosity. Holy father Ciarán, blessed teacher of the Irish nation, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

From childhood thy life was resplendent with miracles, O Father Ciarán,
Showing forth thy boundless love for God
By loving and caring for His creation, both men and animals.
Leaving thy carpenter father, thou didst seek training
In the ascetical life from Ireland’s spiritual giants
Before founding the great monastery of Clonmacnoise,
Whence the Lord, in His great mercy, called thee to Himself in thy thirty-third year.
Wherefore, O venerable one, intercede with Christ our God
That we too may be found worthy of His mercy.

Ruins of Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, Ireland