Moluag of Lismore
Our Venerable Father Moluag, Abbot and Bishop of Lismore, Enlightener of the Northern Picts
Venerable · Bishop · b. c. 510, in the territory of the Dál nAraidi in Ulster — d. 25 June 592, at Rosemarkie in Ross
Commemorated 25 June — Repose at Rosemarkie
Moluag was an Irish monk of the Dál nAraidi of Ulster, trained at Bangor under Comgall, who crossed to Alba about 562 and planted his monastery on the long limestone island of Lismore in Loch Linnhe, in the sea-lanes of Argyll — the same waters, and the same year, as Columba on Iona. From Lismore he worked north and east among the Picts, and the three churches the tradition gives him — Lismore, Rosemarkie in Ross and Mortlach in Banffshire — all became episcopal seats in the medieval Scottish Church, which is the clearest surviving measure of how large his mission was. He died at Rosemarkie on 25 June 592 and was carried back to Lismore for burial. His pastoral staff, the Bachuil Mòr, is still in the hands of the hereditary keepers on the island, one of the very few insular relics in Britain never to have left the family that has kept it. He is patron of Argyll and is commemorated on June 25.
Ulster and Bangor
He was born about 510 in the north of Ireland, of the Dál nAraidi, the Cruthin people of Antrim and Down, and his baptismal name was Lughaidh — the name that appears in the martyrologies. What Scotland and Argyll call him is the affectionate monastic form Mo-Luóc, "my Lughaidh," with the possessive prefix and the diminutive that Irish monasticism put on the names of its beloved: the same formation that turns Áedán into Mo-Áedóc and Éanna into Mo-Enna. Anglicised, it becomes Moluag, Moloug, Moluoc, and — in the north-east, at Mortlach — Murlach.
He was formed at Bangor in the Ards, under Comgall, in what was then the most rigorous monastic school in Ireland and the nursery of the peregrinatio, the voluntary exile for Christ's sake that sent Irish monks across the northern seas.
Lismore
About 562 — the tradition is firm on the near-coincidence with Columba's crossing — Moluag took ship for Alba. The island he settled on was Lismore, Lios Mòr, "the great garden": a low limestone ridge ten miles long lying in the mouth of Loch Linnhe, unusually fertile for that coast, and set exactly at the junction of the sea-roads from Argyll into the Great Glen and the Pictish north. It is a strategic choice, not a hermit's one, and everything about Moluag's later career follows from it.
There is a well-known story, first written down late, that Moluag and Columba raced for the island, and that Moluag, seeing he would lose, cut off his own little finger, threw it ashore ahead of the other boat and claimed the land where his flesh already lay. The tale is late folklore and does not belong to the earliest record; but it preserves, in the way folklore does, a real memory of two great foundations planted in the same waters in the same years, and of the rivalry of two familias of monks.
The mission to the Picts
From Lismore he worked north and east into Pictland. The Aberdeen Breviary and the Scottish tradition assign him a hundred foundations; what can be tested is the pattern of dedications, which runs up the Great Glen, across into Ross, and down into Aberdeenshire and Banffshire — Rosemarkie on the Black Isle, Mortlach in Banffshire, and churches at Tarland, Durris, Clatt, Kildrummy and Alvie, with a scatter through the Hebrides from Skye and Lewis to Tiree, Mull and Raasay, and on into the Isle of Man.
Two of those, Rosemarkie and Mortlach, became bishoprics — Rosemarkie the seat of the medieval diocese of Ross, Mortlach the predecessor of the diocese of Aberdeen — and Lismore itself became the cathedral island of the medieval diocese of Argyll, whose bishops were styled Episcopus Lismorensis. That three of a sixth-century missionary's houses should all have turned into cathedral seats is the strongest evidence there is that his mission was of the first rank, and it is the reason he is called a bishop in the Scottish tradition, though in Irish practice the abbot of such a house need not himself have held episcopal orders.
He is given the title, in the Scottish martyrologies, of the clear and brilliant, the sun of Lismore in Alba.
Repose and relics
He died at Rosemarkie in Ross on 25 June 592, and was first buried there; his body was afterwards carried back across Scotland to Lismore, where his grave was shown in the cathedral church. He had lived some eighty years.
His pastoral staff, the Bachuil Mòr — a plain blackthorn crozier about two and a half feet long, its metal casing long since stripped — has been kept on Lismore without interruption. Its hereditary keepers, the Livingstones of Bachuil, chiefs of the Clan MacLea, hold the office and the small estate that goes with it as Barons of the Bachuil, and the staff was still being used in the eighteenth century for the swearing of oaths and for driving cattle through disease. It is one of the very few Celtic insular relics still in the hands of the family charged with it, and the continuity of custody — abbatial, then baronial, unbroken — is itself a piece of evidence for the antiquity of the cult.
Feast and commemoration
June 25 (church date; New Calendar civil June 25, Old Calendar civil July 8), the day of his repose at Rosemarkie. The commemoration is a Western pre-Schism one received into Orthodox usage: it is kept by the Orthodox Church in America, and appears in North American Antiochian parish calendars beside the Byzantine commemorations of the day; it is absent from the Greek and Slavonic menaia. He is patron of Argyll, and of Lismore, and the day is kept on the island.
The day is otherwise dominated by the leavetaking of the Nativity of the Forerunner and by Febronia of Nisibis; Moluag has no proper office in any Orthodox service book.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful; with sighs from the depth thou didst bring thy labours to a hundredfold increase; and thou wast made a beacon to the whole world, shining with miracles, O Moluag our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Moluag has no ancient painted type. Where Orthodox iconographers have taken up the insular saints he is given the form proper to a missionary abbot-bishop of the Celtic west: the monastic habit with the Celtic tonsure (shaven from ear to ear across the front of the head, the hair long behind), or the phelonion and omophorion where the episcopal title is emphasised; a book of the Gospels in the left hand, and in the right his pastoral staff, which in his case is not the Byzantine crook but the plain straight bachuil of blackthorn that survives on Lismore — his one unmistakable attribute. A long low green island in the sea behind him stands for Lismore.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection, and none is likely to exist: the Scottish medieval religious art that would have carried it was destroyed at the Reformation, and the surviving relic is the staff and not a picture. The entry is listed in the the list of icons still being sought index.
Disputed questions
- His name and its forms. Lughaidh is the name; Mo-Luóc the monastic hypocorism; Moluag, Moloug, Moluoc, Murlach the anglicisations. Because Irish had many Lughaidhs and many pet-forms in Mo-, he is often confused with Molua of Clonfertmulloe (†609), a different Irish abbot with a similar name and no Scottish mission. The epithet of Lismore fixes him.
- Bishop or abbot? The Scottish tradition and the later dioceses that grew from his foundations call him bishop; the Irish evidence gives him no consecration. Both may be true — abbot of Lismore in the Irish manner, exercising an episcopal mission among the Picts. The entry carries both terms.
- The finger and the race with Columba. Late folklore; not in any early source. Retained here as folklore, and not as biography.
- The date of his death. 592 is the year the Irish annals and the Scottish tradition agree on, and 25 June the day. His feast lapsed in Scotland after the Reformation and was formally restored for the Roman Catholic diocese of Argyll and the Isles by Leo XIII in 1898, which is why some reference works date the observance from that year; the Orthodox reception of the pre-Schism Western saints has taken over the traditional day.
- A pre-Schism Western saint. Moluag died more than four centuries before the schism, and is received in the Orthodox calendar on that footing, as Columba and the other insular saints are; the commemoration appears in the OCA's calendar and in Antiochian parish listings that draw on it, and not in the Greek or Slavonic books.