Moling of Ferns
Our Venerable Father Moling, Bishop of Ferns and Abbot of Tech Moling
Venerable · Bishop · b. c. 614 — d. 697
Commemorated 17 June — Repose at Tech Moling on the Barrow
An Irish monk of the seventh century — reckoned among the four prophets of Ireland — who founded the monastery of Tech Moling on the river Barrow, the place that still bears his name as St Mullins in County Carlow, and who became the second bishop of Ferns after Máedóc. He is remembered for two things above all: for talking the high king Finnachta out of the Bórama, the ruinous cattle-tribute laid on Leinster by the kings of Tara, by a play on words that the Irish have relished for thirteen centuries; and for the Book of Mulling, the little pocket gospel-book that bears his name and preserves, on its last page, a plan of his own monastery — the earliest such plan to survive from anywhere in the Celtic world. He died in 697.
Origins
Moling was born about 614, by tradition in the wild country of Sliabh Luachra on the borders of Kerry and Cork — from which he is called Moling Luachra — though his family and his whole later career belong to Leinster and specifically to the Uí Dego of the south-east. His name in its usual form is an affectionate one: Mo-Ling, "my Ling," the mo- of endearment the Irish put before the names of their saints. He was formed as a monk in the great Leinster houses, and is associated in the tradition with Glendalough and with the school of Máedóc (Aidan) of Ferns.
Tech Moling
His own foundation was made on the river Barrow, at a bend where the river runs under wooded hills in what is now south County Carlow: Tech Moling, "the house of Moling," today St Mullins. The site is one of the most complete early Irish monastic landscapes left in Ireland — the enclosure, the church sites, the holy well, and the high cross.
Two things about his rule there are transmitted. The first is his labour: he is remembered as having dug the mill-race for the monastery with his own hands, working at it for years, and the detail is remembered because it was not what abbots of great houses did. The second is his hospitality to the outcast, and above all to the leprous and the mad; the Irish material returns to it repeatedly, and it is the ground of the most famous literary connection of his name.
Suibhne Geilt
In Buile Shuibhne, "the Frenzy of Sweeney," the great Middle Irish tale of the king driven mad at the battle of Mag Rath and condemned to live as a bird among the trees, it is to Moling's church that Suibhne comes at the end of his wandering. Moling receives him, orders that he be fed each evening by the cook, and sets himself to write down the poems the madman speaks — and when Suibhne is speared by the cook's jealous husband, it is Moling who gives him the last rites and buries him. The tale is literature and not a Life; but the choice of Moling, out of all the saints of Ireland, as the one who would take in the mad king, feed him, write his poetry down and bury him with honour, is itself a statement of what Ireland thought Moling had been.
The Bórama
The Bórama (Boruma) was the cattle-tribute which the high kings at Tara claimed from the kings of Leinster — by the tradition, in reparation for an ancient wrong — and which had been the cause of war between north and south for centuries. Its remission is the public act for which Moling is remembered, and the Bórama tract, one of the tales of the Book of Leinster, tells it at length.
Moling went to the high king Finnachta Fledach and asked him to remit the tribute. Finnachta, pressed, agreed to remit it "until Monday" (co Luan). Moling then made plain that the word he had used, Luan, is also the word in "the Monday of Judgement" — Luan brátha, Doomsday. The king, having given his word, was held to it, and the Bórama was ended.
It is a saint's trick, and the tale enjoys it as such; but its substance is serious. A churchman with no army stopped a hereditary war between two provinces by holding a king to the exact sense of his own promise — the same instrument, the binding word, that Irish law itself ran on.
The Book of Mulling
The Book of Mulling (Trinity College Dublin, MS 60) is a small pocket gospel-book of the later eighth century, written for private use and carried in a shrine. The colophon claims it as the work of Moling himself, which the palaeography does not allow — it is a century too late — but it was certainly written at, and kept at, Tech Moling, and it descended in the hands of the hereditary keepers of the saint's relics until modern times.
Its last page carries the feature that makes it famous: a diagram of a monastic enclosure, two concentric circles with crosses named and set about them. Whatever its exact purpose — a plan of Tech Moling, or a scheme of protective crosses, or both — it is the earliest surviving plan of a Celtic monastery, and nearly everything visual that is known about the layout of such a place is inferred from it.
Ferns, repose, and cult
Moling became bishop of Ferns, the see founded by Máedóc, in succession to him — holding, as Irish practice allowed, the bishopric and his own abbacy together. He died in 697, the year the annals give, and was buried at Tech Moling.
He is counted in the Irish tradition among the four prophets of Ireland, with Colum Cille, Bearchán and Ultan, and a body of prophetic verse circulated under his name. His cult at St Mullins never lapsed: the pattern is still kept there, the holy well is still visited, and the site remained a place of pilgrimage through the penal centuries — in the plague year of 1348 the annals record crowds wading into the water at St Mullins to beg deliverance.
Feast and commemoration
June 17 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 30) — kept at St Mullins and in the diocese of Ferns, and in Western-rite Orthodox usage. The feast falls within the window of the Apostles' Fast in most years, though not in all — the fast has no fixed beginning.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and with sighs from the depths thou didst bring forth fruit a hundredfold in labours; thou becamest a beacon shining upon the world by thy wonders, O Moling our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Moling is shown in the Irish manner: an abbot-bishop in a plain habit with the crozier of the Irish form — the short bachall with its crook bent close — and a book, which in his case is understood as the gospel-book of his own name. Where the modern Irish glass and relief carving treat him, he is given the river and a mill-wheel, from the race he dug; a stag or a bird in allusion to the Suibhne tale; and occasionally the cattle of the Bórama at his feet, the tribute he lifted. A relief of the saint stands in the church of St Mary and St Michael at New Ross.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection. The Book of Mulling, which is the oldest object associated with him, contains evangelist portraits and the monastic plan, but no portrait of Moling.
Disputed questions
- Authorship of the Book of Mulling. The manuscript's own colophon ascribes it to the saint; the script places it a century after his death. The corpus follows the palaeography and records the ascription as the tradition of his house.
- Sliabh Luachra. The birth in the Kerry–Cork borderland and the epithet Luachra sit oddly beside a career wholly in Leinster; some accounts make the epithet a reference to a period of ascetic exile rather than to his birth. Neither can be settled.
- The Bórama. The tract is a literary composition of the eleventh or twelfth century working over much older material, and the annals do not record the remission in the terms the tale gives. Something happened between Finnachta and the Leinster church in the 690s; the pun is the tradition's memory of it.
- Orthodox attestation. A pre-schism Western saint, kept in Western-rite Orthodox and Irish Orthodox usage and listed for June 17 in the Orthodox day-enumerations of the Western saints. He is not in the Greek Menaion or the Slavonic books; the OCA's own June 17 page does not carry him, although it carries four other Western saints of the day. The corpus records the June 17 commemoration and notes its basis.