Eikon

Brigid of Kildare

Our Venerable Mother Brigid of Kildare

Venerable · b. c. 451, at Faughart near Dundalk — d. c. 525, at Kildare

Commemorated 1 February — Repose at Kildare

Brigid of Kildare (c. 451 – c. 525) is, with Patrick and Columba, one of the three patron saints of Ireland, and the most beloved of Irish women saints — honoured as the "Mary of the Gael." Born about the year 451 to a Leinster chieftain and a Christian bondwoman, she was drawn from childhood to a life of prayer and boundless charity, took the veil as a consecrated virgin, and founded at Kildare (Cill Dara, "the church of the oak") a great double monastery of women and men that became one of the chief centres of the Irish Church, where a sacred fire was kept perpetually burning in her memory. The hagiography surrounds her with miracles of compassion — food and butter and drink multiplied for the poor, her very cloak spreading to enclose the land granted her. A saint of the undivided Church, she reposed at Kildare about 525 and is kept on February 1.

Origins and early life

Brigid was born about the year 451 at Faughart, near Dundalk in the north of Leinster, in the first generation of Christian Ireland — the age of Saint Patrick, whom the later tradition loved to bring into her story. Her father, Dubthach, was a chieftain of Leinster; her mother, Brocca (Broicsech), was a Christian bondwoman of his household, and Brigid was thus born into slavery and raised, the accounts say, partly in a druid's house. From her earliest years she was marked by an overflowing charity that no rebuke could check: she gave away her father's food, his goods, and even his sword to the poor and the leper, so that her exasperated father is remembered trying in vain to be rid of so open-handed a daughter. Her freedom won, she refused every offer of marriage, resolving to give herself wholly to Christ.

The veil and the founding of Kildare

Brigid received the veil as a consecrated virgin from a bishop of the Irish Church (the tradition names Mel of Ardagh), and gathered about her the first of the women who would follow her way. About the year 480 she established her great foundation at Kildare — Cill Dara, "the church of the oak" — a double monastery of nuns and monks under her rule, an arrangement in which the abbess of Kildare held an authority famous throughout Ireland. That the monastery might have the sacraments and the episcopal ministry, Brigid invited the hermit Conleth to serve as its first bishop; and the see of Kildare, uniquely, long preserved the memory of this joint governance of abbess and bishop. Kildare grew into one of the foremost monastic cities of Ireland, a house of prayer, learning, and hospitality, and a perpetual fire was tended there in Brigid's honour, kept alight by the nuns for many centuries.

Charity, miracles, and repose

The Lives of Brigid — among the earliest in Irish hagiography — are above all a gospel of mercy, crowding her story with miracles of provision for the poor and the guest: milk and butter that multiplied in her dairy however much she gave away, water turned to milk or to ale for the sick, a single measure of food that fed multitudes, the healing of lepers and the blind. The most famous of the legends tells how, granted by the king of Leinster as much land for her monastery as her cloak would cover, she laid it on the ground and it spread miraculously across the plain until it enclosed all the fields she needed. Beneath the wonders runs the constant theme the tradition draws from her: a compassion so total that she would give away anything and everything, trusting God to provide, so that she became the very image in Ireland of the Mother of God — the "Mary of the Gael."

She reposed at Kildare about the year 525, and was buried there; a later tradition brought her relics to Downpatrick to lie beside Patrick and Columba, the three patrons of Ireland together. Her cultus spread far beyond Ireland — into Britain (where many churches of "St Bride" bear her name), and across the Continent with the Irish monks — and it has never faded.

Feast and commemoration

Brigid is commemorated on February 1 (church date; New Calendar civil February 1, Old Calendar civil February 14), the day of her repose, together with the Martyr Tryphon of Campsada and the forefeast of the Meeting of the Lord. As a saint of the undivided Church (before the schism of East and West), she is venerated across the Orthodox world among the holy fathers and mothers of the ancient West; her Eastern liturgical commemoration is kept notably by the Orthodox Church in America and in the wider revival of the pre-schism saints of the British Isles and Ireland. In the West she is one of the three patrons of Ireland and is universally kept on February 1.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8

In thee, O Mother, was the image of God preserved with exactness; for taking up thy cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore doth thy spirit rejoice with the angels, O venerable Brigid.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Brigid is depicted as an abbess — veiled and in the monastic habit, holding an abbess's staff (crozier) and often a lamp or flame (for the perpetual fire of Kildare) or a book; a cow frequently accompanies her, the emblem of her dairy-miracles and of her charity, and sometimes the oak of Kildare. In the Orthodox manner she is written as a holy mother bearing a cross or a scroll. No securely identified pre-modern Orthodox icon is stored here; the commemoration wants an icon.

Disputed questions

The historical Brigid is glimpsed only through Lives written a century and more after her death (the earliest by Cogitosus of Kildare, in the seventh century), which are hagiography rather than biography, and her figure has plainly gathered to itself older and wider associations: her feast on February 1 coincides with the ancient Irish festival of Imbolc, the beginning of spring, and some of her attributes — the fire, the abundance of milk and flocks — have been thought to echo an earlier veneration. Scholars accordingly debate how much of the received Brigid is history and how much is the Christianising of an older lore. This reference records the saint as the Church has kept her, while noting that the surviving Lives are legendary in character and that the historical core is thin.

Sources

  1. Cogitosus, Life of Saint Brigid (7th century), and the other early Irish Lives (the Vita Prima and the Old Irish Life) — the traditional narrative of her birth, her charity, the veiling, the founding of Kildare with Bishop Conleth, the perpetual fire, and the miracles of provision and the spreading cloak.
  2. The Irish martyrologies and the cult of the three patrons of Ireland (Patrick, Brigid, Columba) and the relics at Downpatrick — for the antiquity and reach of her veneration.
  3. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, February 1 (consulted live for enumeration and the Eastern commemoration of "Venerable Brigid of Ireland").
  4. On the historical questions: modern scholarship on the legendary character of the Lives and the coincidence of her feast with the festival of Imbolc, noted under Disputed questions.