Saint Brendan
The Navigator
Join me today as we encounter Saint Brendan, a fiery young abbot who went on a voyage and found something entirely unexpected.
Name: Brendan (with many variations in spelling), Brendan of Clonfert, Brendan the Navigator
Life: c. 482 - c. 577
Status: Saint
Feast: May 16
The most famous story about Brendan the Navigator is his encounter with Jasconius. The abbot and future saint is at sea in a small boat with a few of his monks. They arrive at a strange island. It’s strange because the shore doesn’t have any plants or sand on it. But they’re in the middle of the ocean and there aren’t any other options. A group of monks hike inland for a couple of miles. For some reason, the abbot Brendan decides to stay on the boat.
The night passes. In the morning, some of the priests say mass on shore, and Brendan says it on the boat. Then the monks who had hiked inland decide it’s time for breakfast. They heap some wood - apparently there is driftwood lying around on the strange island - under their big kettle and light a fire. The island begins to rock back and forth. The monks, terrified, run as fast as they can for the two miles back to the boat. By now the island is sinking into the water. With the water rising around their legs, they form a human chain to pull one another into the boat, then they hack off the rope they used to tie the boat to the island and push off.
In all of this, the only person who isn’t concerned, is Brendan. Once they had rowed to what they thought was a safe distance, Brendan calmly asks them whether they want to know what has happened.
Yes, father,” said they: “we wondered, and were seized with a great fear.”
“Fear not, my children,” said the saint, “for God has last night revealed to me the mystery of all this. It was not an island you were on, but a fish, the largest of all that swim in the ocean. Its name is Iasconius.” (Siân Echard translation)
I have to admit that the first time I read the Voyage of Brendan, this story made me laugh. It doesn’t seem very nice of Brendan to let the monks go all that way without a warning. But over the course of the voyage, we see this is a lesson. He is trying to teach his monks to trust God, who can - if He wills it - provide for their safety against even the biggest or most fearsome creatures. They’ll see Jasconius again. They’ll even get their kettle back. And as Brendan teaches his monks this lesson, he’s learning too - although in his case the lesson is quite different, and to understand what it is, we are going to have to go back to the beginning.
Brendan was born around 482 AD on the West coast of the modern Republic of Ireland. He grew up near the sea, a few miles West of the town of Tralee. Brendan was born too late to meet the great Saint Patrick, but would have been raised by Irish Christians who had would have known him.
Brendan was an important figure in the Irish church even before he was born. In the Book of Leinster we read that Brendan’s pregnant mother had a vision in which a solid gold bar dropped into her lap, signifying the great worth of the child she would bear. She mentioned it to her husband, Findlugh, who mentioned it to his friend the Bishop Erc, the future Saint Erc of Slane. Bishop Erc came to investigate in the evening, and from a distance he thought the house was on fire. But when he got closer he realized he was seeing a column of shining angels guarding the place.
The Book of Lismore tells a story from the time Saint Brendan was a young man, being mentored by Bishop Erc. They are travelling together, and come across a man being chased by seven murderers. The man seems done for, but Brendan tells him to go lie down in the shadow of an ancient standing stone. Brendan prays that God will work a miracle and save the man’s life. When the seven murderers arrive, they experience a strange illusion. They see the stone as their enemy, and they stab it and hack at it, eventually breaking off a chunk which they take to be the man’s head. They leave in triumph, only to run into Bishop Erc, and then guilt sets in. So the would-be murderers confess, and the man is saved. And young Brendan has shown God’s absolute power over the standing stones, which only a very powerful druid would dare to defile in this way.
The druids, of course, were the pagan competition to the early Irish Christians. A man had to train for twenty years to become a druid. So it’s not surprising that the stories about Brendan emphasize his lengthy education. It began when he was very young, with a nun, Ita, another future saint, who ran something like a boarding school for future clerics. Eventually he went to study with Bishop Erc, mastering the scriptures. Then it was back to Ita, this time as an adult, to learn the history of previous saints. Then Brendan wandered on his own until his education was supplemented by an angel, who gave him the 69-part Rule of Saint Brendan, used in Irish monasteries for some time afterward, though it has been lost to time. And only after all this learning and wandering was he able to become a priest.
So here we have Brendan, a young man clearly destined for something extraordinary in the church, now at last a priest and able to act on his own. He decided to draw away from the world, finding a spot on the top of a mountain that looked out to sea. He began as a hermit, but soon a religious community formed around him. The young abbot confidently shaped this community with the rule he had been given, and the community grew and prayed, watching the sea and the weather systems moving over it, and every night a new and glorious sunset.
Looking out at the water, Abbot Brendan began to think about sailing out onto the sea, in search of... what exactly? Our earliest sources give all sorts of explanations for Brendan’s voyage. The Book of Lismore suggests that he was looking for a place of greater solitude. Another possibility is that Brendan wanted to evangelize those living on the islands. According to a 14th century Low German version of the story, Brendan scoffed at some travelers’ tales and angered God - who is after all the source of wonders - and so God sent him out to experience the wonders of the ocean for himself.
But the best known answer is that Brendan was searching for the island of Paradise. In this version, he had met another abbot from a coastal monastery. This man had found his way through a wall of cloud to an island just off the coast. He had wandered through the land, feeling neither hunger nor thirst nor exhaustion until he came to a river, where a man who shone like the sun had approached him. The island, said the shining man, was the original creation.
It has been exactly like this, from the beginning of the world. ... If men had not transgressed the commandment of God, they would have lived in this land of delights forever.
Time passes differently in the other world, and when the abbot got back to his monastery he found he had been away for a year. And he still had clinging to him the unmistakable and lovely smell of eternity.
The moral, said the abbot, is that he and Brendan were living “at the very gates of Paradise.” As we will soon find, it’s not only heaven but also hell which is just over the horizon. If you are looking for an invitation to read the Voyage of Brendan as an allegory, it’s not going to get much clearer than that.
So Brendan builds a boat. He builds it in the Irish tradition, as a coracle: a wooden frame with animal skins stretched over it.
Then Brendan asks his monks who is willing to go with him. In some versions of the story, there are 60 monks on the expedition. But I’m partial to the Latin version in which it’s only one boat and just 18 men: Brendan, plus 14 chosen monks, plus 3 latecomers who beg to come along. Brendan recognizes that among the three latecomer monks are two sinners and one saint, and that they have very strange fates awaiting them.
Tradition has it they set out on the 22 of March.
Then Brendan, son of Finlugh, sailed over the loud-voiced waves of the rough-crested sea, and over the billows of the greenish tide, and over the abysses of the wonderful, terrible, relentless ocean, where they saw in its depths the red-mouthed monsters of the sea and many great sea-whales. (Book of Lismore, Denis O’Donoghue translation)
Brendan doesn’t have a destination in mind, so he usually lets the coracle go where the wind blows it. Over the course of the journey, Brendan and the monks encounter trials and temptations. They find an island with treasures everywhere, and Brendan realizes these are a test. This is where the first of the three latecomer monks meets his end. He steals a valuable necklace, but when Brendan realizes what he has done, the monk repents. Brendan prays for him, and the monk dies in Christ. Down to just 17, the coracle sets sail again.
By now it is Holy Week. The monks see an island and row for shore. There are flocks of sheep on the island, the biggest and healthiest sheep they’ve ever seen. Then a man arrives, and recognizes Brendan, or at least that he is an abbot, bowing three times and saying:
“Oh, precious pearl of God, how have I deserved this, that you should take food at this holy season from the labour of my hands.”
Brendan, raising him up from the ground, said, “My Son, our Lord Jesus Christ has provided for us a suitable place where we may celebrate His holy resurrection.”
Brendan enters this conversation rather confidently. He’s an abbot, after all, and over the course of his whole life he’s been a star of Irish Christianity. But his confidence is slightly shaken when the shepherd, who never gets a name in the story beyond being called ‘the steward’, confidently speaks of where Brendan is going to be next. It turns out that Brendan’s voyage has predetermined steps, and many of the people and creatures he will meet know where he is headed. Being a practical man, Brendan also can’t resist getting the steward’s tips for sheep raising. For any interested farmers, the trick is a warm climate, plenty of food, and not milking the sheep.
It’s after they leave the island of the sheep that Brendan and his men first end up on the back of Jasconius, the greatest fish in the ocean. The story of sailors who land on a great fish appears in other immrama, Irish Christian travel stories like Brendan’s. By the middle ages, that sort of story had become a trope. One bestiary even provides the moral: the great fish symbolizes the devil. The false beaches on which we draw in the ships of our lives are the material comforts of this world. We feel we’ve finally arrived at comfort and security, but just when we start the fire and put our feet up, the fish begins to sink under the water. In the same way, the devil drags our souls to hell.
Brendan has already learned this lesson, since he knows what the fish Jasconius is from the start. As it happens, it is Holy Saturday when the monks scramble off Jasconius, and as night falls they find another island, on which is a single tree, wide but not high, and all over the tree are perched white birds. It was an old Irish idea that a soul took the form of a bird. Again, Brendan suspects these birds are more than birds, but he isn’t sure what they are.
Brendan prays, and asks God to reveal the nature of the tree to him. At that, one of the birds flies over to the boat, in the words of the Latin version, “perching on the prow, the bird spread out its wings as a sign of joy, and looked placidly towards Brendan.”
After what I like to imagine is a bit of hesitation, maybe even trepidation in case the bird turns out to be just a bird, Brendan tries talking to it. The bird answers him, explaining that it and all the others are fallen angels - well, partially fallen angels. They approved of Lucifer’s rebellion, but didn’t fully join. As a result they stay in this middle place, viewing the glory of God from afar, doing the work God gives them, and gathering in the tree on holy days to form an ersatz angelic choir and sing as they once did. Brendan and his monks join in with them to sing the offices.
The somewhat fallen angel who has the shape of a bird also tells Brendan what is going to happen next. According to the angel, Brendan will search for paradise for seven years. The pattern he has set so far will repeat every year. Maundy Thursday will be spent with the steward on the island of the sheep. Then Jasconius will rise from the deep and the monks will spend time on his back, until in the dark of the Easter vigil they will come to the island of the birds. There is also an island for Christmas, as Brendan will soon discover.
In between the great feasts of Easter and Christmas, Brendan’s little coracle wanders on the face of the sea. In the Irish version in the Book of Lismore, Brendan encounters a sort of giant mermaid. In fact the monks find her dead body, and Brendan prays and she is restored to life. His immediate instinct is to evangelize and then baptize her. Christians sometimes wonder what we should think about Christianity if it turns out there are intelligent beings on other planets. I’ve met some who say their faith would be shaken by this. Christians of an earlier time would have thought the answer was simple. Baptize them, obviously.
At Christmas, the coracle comes to an island where there is a monastery of Saint Ailbe. And there, for the first time, Brendan is confronted with the truth: these monks have surpassed him in every way. Except for prayers and singing, they live in silence. Their food appears miraculously, and their candles burn with a strange spiritual light. When Brendan speaks privately to the abbot, he discovers the monks have stopped aging. They no longer grow sick. And finally Brendan, the child of promise, the great Irish abbot, begins to learn. He has set out to teach the islanders, but it is the islanders who are teaching him. He asks the abbot if he can join his monastery. The abbot says no. Brendan has a different path ahead of him.
And so the cycle continues for the next six years. Christmas is spent at St Ailbe. Maundy Thursday will see them with the steward, then the Easter Vigil is spent on the back of the fish Jasconius. The kettle is just where they had left it. Eastertide is celebrated with the choir of semifallen angels, and then they are back at sea.
The sea, of course, teems with monsters. On one occasion, a huge sea monster arises and chases the the boat. Brendan prays, and God sends an even bigger monster to tear it apart. The monks find a few pieces, and it’s enough to feed them for months.
On another occasion, a sea monster is about to be devoured by an even bigger creature, and to Brendan’s surprise it begins to pray. It asks God to spare it for the sake of Brendan, but the other monster keeps approaching. Then it asks God to spare it for the sake of Saint Patrick. The other beast keeps coming. Finally it asks for the sake of Brigid the nun, and the other beast turns away. Another lesson for Brendan to consider.
Eventually Brendan’s crew loses another monk. The second of the three extra monks who joined the crew stays on an island of mystics whose prayers are so powerful that the island pulses with light. Only one of the travelers is found worthy to stay, and it isn’t Brendan.
“Pray for us,” says Brendan as they sail away.
Brendan and the monks sail through stormy seas and clear seas. Sometimes the water is like crystal, and they can see the great beasts of the sea beneath them. But Brendan tells his little flock that it is unreasonable to be afraid of these or any creatures. He and his monks live and die at God’s will. When the monks are afraid, Brendan celebrates mass on board, and when he lifts up the body of Christ, the creatures silently circle the boat as if watching, and then swim away when mass is over.
The years pass, and soon Brendan has been at sea for six years. In the seventh year, he comes across the islands of hell. The first of these is the island of the smiths. Even out on the water, the monks hear the clanging of thousands of hammers on anvils. As they draw close, they see that the island has been fully converted into forges - the island is fully industrialized, we might say today. Every islander is a smith, constantly sweating and hammering out items, even though since everyone is a smith there can’t possibly be a use for them. It’s a vision of hell in which the inhabitants are active participants. When Brendan tries to sail close to the island, the islanders fling molten metal at the boat. They don’t want to learn anything else.
Near the smiths is an island consisting of a single smoking volcano, and as they sail past it the last of the extra monks to join the expedition dives out of the boat. The last monk is, it seems, an unrepentant sinner, and though he fights with all his strength hell reels him in. Demons carry the burning and screaming monk away into the mouth of the volcano. The boat sails on.
And yet even in hell, mercy is on display. The monks come across a man shivering on a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic. They ask him who he is, and he says he is Judas. Most of the time, Judas explains, he burns like molten lead in the heart of the volcano, but on Sundays and during the feasts he is allowed some reprieve.
“While I sit here, I seem to myself to be in a paradise of delights, considering the agony of the torments that are in store for me afterwards”
Judas begs Brendan to pray for him that he might have a little extra time. And so the boat spends the night there by the rock, Brendan speaking with Judas, until in the morning he must return to his punishment and Brendan must sail on.
As the final Easter approaches, the monks come to an island on which there is an old hermit, one of Saint Patrick’s first converts. The man lives alone, naked, with his hair and beard grown so long that they provide him some protection against cold. But Brendan is learning the humility that he seems to be missing at the beginning of the story. Where others might see a mass of matted hair, Brendan recognizes an echo of Eden: the hermit lives naked without shame. Where previously Brendan might have greeted the hermit as a spiritual father, he now sees things differently. He says to the hermit:
“Woe is me, a poor sinner, who wear a monk’s habit, and who rule over many monks, when I see here a man of angelic condition, dwelling still in the flesh, yet unmolested by the vices of the flesh.”
The hermit, though, points out something that Brendan has missed. Over the last seven years, Brendan’s life too is echoing Eden.
“I say to you, that you are greater than any monk, for the monk is fed and clothed by the labour of his own hands, while God has fed and clothed you and all your brethren for seven years in His own mysterious ways.”
Brendan is still thinking about this encounter as they enter Holy Week. The steward helps them to prepare. This time Jasconius himself swims over to the island of the birds to drop them off - much to the distress of the monks who think that this time he’s going to drown them for sure. And then, the steward reveals that he has known the way to the island of Paradise all along. Now Brendan and his companions are ready to make the journey.
The steward guides them to the island and through the cloud cover. At long last, Brendan and his monks are able to walk through the lands of Paradise, in light that is never dimmed. They wander through it until they too come to the river, and they too meet the shining man who gently tells them that they are not yet ready to cross. It is time to go home.
And so they do.
Many people have looked for Brendan’s island. It appears on many old maps, and there have even been tales of travelers who claim to have found it. So far as I know, the last expedition went in search of it in 1721. Others speculate that he arrived in North America, though as a North American I’m not sure one would easily mistake this continent for Paradise.
Brendan is often depicted as an old man, leading his monks on this great voyage. But that can’t be right. The dating of Brendan’s life doesn’t work if you assume he went late. And besides, exploration is a young man’s game. I think that can help us understand the story. Brendan is a manly saint, a fearless explorer and a leader of men. His monks need to learn to trust God the way Brendan does. He’s way ahead of them. So far ahead that when he first sets out, it sort of seems as if Brendan thinks he’s there to teach the world. But out on the islands, he’s the student again. Brendan learns humility.
That is also why the story of his voyage is the beginning, and not the end of his tale. Brendan would go on to found monasteries all over Ireland. On one occasion his careless words cause the death of a monk, and he would publicly repent, becoming a pilgrim for a long time. He would advise kings, heal the sick, raise the dead, make peace, free slaves, tame wild beasts who were terrorizing the countryside, found a town and bless the lands and rivers of Ireland. When he saw his death coming, Brendan wanted to be buried in Clonfert. This proved tricky, because the locals wanted to bury him where he died. But this was Saint Brendan, dramatic to the end, and as he predicted, his death set into effect a veritable Rube Goldberg machine of cause and effect involving a one eyed man, a plot to take power, a nugget of gold found at just the right time and a prophetic revelation, at the end of which his body ended up, where he wanted it, in Clonfert.
But that was all in the future. Once he was back on land, one of the first things Brendan did was look up the nun, Brigid. He wanted to understand why even the monsters of the sea knew her name. He asked her to “confess in what degree she had the love of God” (Denis O’Donoghue version).
Brigid asked him to speak first. Brendan, the child of promise, wasn’t shy.
“From the day I entered upon a devout life I never went over seven furrows without my mind being on God.”
That would mean that Brendan thought of God every few steps. Brigid said she thought that was good. But as for her:
“From the hour I set my mind on God, I never took it from Him for a moment.”
Ah. Brendan understood. His voyage was, in many ways, the last part of his education.
His education had not ended with the revelation of the Rule of Brendan by the angel. It ended with the humbling realization that there are many holy men and women quietly walking with God, completely unobserved. It ended with the hope that even Judas might find mercy and that some fallen angels might fall only so far as earth. Perhaps it even ended with the realization that the most interesting character in the whole story is the steward, whose name we never even learn, who appears as a servant, who happens to be a good shepherd, and just happens to know the path to paradise. In other words, Brendan’s voyage ends where an education should end, in humility and wonder.
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