CONCERNING SAINT DOMANGART, BISHOP IN IRELAND.
SIXTH CENTURY
CommentaryDomangart or Douengard, Bishop in Ireland (S.)
[1] As certain as the veneration of this Saint among the Irish is, so uncertain are all the things which the memory of that nation has preserved concerning him: for these are entangled with parachronisms and other errors; but of the veneration, a distinguished testimony is rendered by the Tripartite Life of S. Patrick, part 3, chapters 63 and 64, where the birth of S. Domangart, and the events concerning both his parents, S. Patrick against the tyrant Eochodius. while he was still enclosed in the womb, are narrated as follows: The King of Ulster in the time of Patrick was Eochodius, son of Muredach, a man illustrious by birth, sprung indeed from the distinguished and very ancient family of the Dalriada; who nevertheless by his own crimes brought rather a stain than an increase to the splendor of his lineage: for he refused to believe in the true God, and persecuted those who believed. He also commanded two devoted virgins, who had consecrated their virginity to the Son of God, to be bound in iron and given to the waves of the Ocean to be drowned, because they refused at his insistence to be bound by an earthly marriage or to worship idols. Hearing this, however, the holy man, moved in the bowels of piety, went to the King and interceded for the release of the Brides of Christ. But after multiplied prayers, he could accomplish nothing with the inexorable tyrant: who had further gone so far in unbridled madness that he struck his own brother, Carillus by name, who was giving good counsel, with the staff he carried in his hand.
[2] Because of these things, therefore, the blessed man, justly indignant, hurled upon him a most deserved sentence of malediction, He cursed him, imprecating and in imprecating certainly predicting that no one of his posterity would ever hold the scepter of the kingdom, and that they would not be in such numbers as to be able, in days of war or at a place of public assembly, to form any band of men or force of soldiers; but that they would be always scattered and dispersed through distant places, and that he himself would be stripped of kingdom and life within a short time, and extinguished by an evil death. Then turning his face to his brother Carellus, a pious and devout prince who obeyed the counsels of the man of God in all things, God revealing his own preordination, he said: Upon he blesses his son Domangart. this your brother and his progeny, who was obedient to God and to me, the scepter of your kingdom shall be transferred: and his posterity shall rule over your seed, and shall hold the throne of the Kingdom of Ulster from generation to generation. But the wife of Eochodius, understanding the crimes of her husband and the curse upon the seed in the parent, bathed in tears, begged pardon from the man of God, and asked that she and the offspring she carried in her womb be spared, and that the crimes of her husband not be imputed. The man of God assented, and blessed her together with the offspring not yet born. This offspring was that most holy Domangart, afterwards most celebrated among the Saints of Ireland, and a disciple of Saint Patrick: whose death is reckoned uncertain, and hence he is reckoned as living perpetually.
[3] Jocelin narrates the same things more briefly in number 112, and to the Patrician blessing he adds, as also predicted with a prophetic spirit, that the offspring which the Queen was about to bear would be most holy, Much concerning him uncertain or fabulous: whose death would be ambiguous and whose tomb undiscoverable: then he adds: For this man was most distinguished in holiness and miracles, concerning whom many and great wonders are reported by the Irish. As to his age, from the native Annals and the Acts of S. Patrick, Colgan has consistently determined that he who was born posthumously to his father after the year 460 while still living, and who was distinguished by the episcopal grade and famous for the great praise of virtue, could not have died in the year 506, as some have written: nor could he have been raised from the dead by S. Patrick while the latter was at the Roman Curia, as is read in the prayer taken from the proper Office. Would that that Office and the Acts (which Colgan was told exist) had ceased to be hidden, The Acts are hidden: we would perhaps have found in them the solution of certain difficulties concerning this Saint. For the claim that he was the brother of S. Muran (he who composed the Acts of S. Columba in verse) from the same mother he is believed to be the brother of S. Muran, is not so clear as to be beyond suspicion of falsity: nor can it stand with truth, unless the truth of the Irish Genealogy is denied (as we saw on March 12, when we treated of Muran), which removes Muran's father Feradach five degrees from Eugenius, son of Niell, and thus makes him born only around the middle of the sixth century. The death of Eochodius also would have to be deferred to the last years of Patrick beyond the year 455 from the birth of Christ, and it would have to be said that his wife was left so young that she who had borne this first offspring to Eochodius in Ulidia, would thence after forty or more years, carried off to the peninsula of Eugenius by a second marriage, to Feradach, at most a grandson, not (as the Genealogical series has it) a great-great-grandson, of the aforesaid Eugenius, would have borne both other sons and S. Muran: who, at an advanced age, at the hundredth year or near it, would have written about S. Columba at the beginning of the seventh century.
[4] Since these things are quite forced, I would easily go over to the opinion of one who would deny that Muran and Domangart had the same mother; and would believe the cause of the fiction to have been given from the fact that which is more plausibly denied.
Muran's mother had two husbands: of whom the other, much younger than the father of Domangart, bore the same name Eochodius; and perhaps whose son the Tamlacht and Marian Martyrology numbers among the Saints on this very day, Lugadius of Cluain-Laoigh or Cluain-laodh in Tirconnell: which Eochodius the Genealogical Sanctilogium cited by Colgan, Appendix 4 to the Acts of S. Columba, chapter 9, number 74, makes the son of Islandus, son of the often-named Eugenius. But if these things are said, nothing will compel us to defer the birth of Domangart beyond the year 455, his death beyond 530; or to give Muran more than a hundred years of life, at the end of which he would have written about Columba around the year 600: but he could have been born around the middle of the sixth century, and in the very flower of his age committed to writing concerning S. Columba those metrical compositions which are cited.
[5] But setting aside these matters, which are everywhere uncertain, let us bring forward concerning his veneration from Colgan what, by his testimony, can be held as sufficiently certain: first, Veneration from churches, that there exist in the region of Iveagh and the diocese of Dromore two churches consecrated to him: one at the foot of a very high mountain, overlooking the sea to the east, anciently called Rath-murbhuilg, today Machaire-Ratha; the other on the summit of that very lofty mountain, far from all human habitation; which nevertheless, even during the raging and cruel persecution of the heretics, has been accustomed to be frequented with a great concourse of people and continual pilgrimages in honor of this marvelous servant of God, who shines there with many signs and miracles. Whence that mountain, called by ancient writers Sliabh-Slainge from a certain hero named Slainge, Proven by Relics and Records: the son of Bartholanus (who is imagined to be one of the first inhabitants of Ireland), is today commonly called from this saint Sliabh-Domhangaird, that is, the mountain of Domangart; as Giraldus Cambrensis also observed in his Topography of Ireland, distinction 3, chapter 2, more than 470 years ago. Second, that in the already mentioned Church of Machaire-Ratha, in place of precious Relics, a bell is preserved in great veneration, which once belonged to this Saint, commonly called Glunan, and one of his shoes, encased in a precious covering of gold and silver. Third, that his feast is celebrated festively each year in the aforesaid Churches on this day, March 24, as the domestic Hagiologies everywhere record, His father resisted both Patrick and S. Maccarthenus: the Tamlacht, that of Marian Gorman, and the Cashel Calendar, which may be seen in Colgan: this one thing being disapproved by us, that he necessarily thinks the Eochodius, father of Domangart, to be different from the one whom he had mentioned when treating of S. Maccarthenus on this very day from a fragment of our Salamanca Codex: in which it is said that Maccarthenus governed the Church of Clogher at the time when Eochodius held the scepter of the kingdom, and was afflicted by him with many troubles and injuries. For why should we say that Eochodius, King of Ulidia, was hostile to Patrick, but to Maccarthenus another, not a King, but a private magnate of the same kingdom? since neither in time, place, name, nor in the very evil will of impeding the Gospel is any distinction found, and the King is designated in a similar phrase in both cases.