History
The Lily of Éire. Eamonn Lynskey explores the legend and legacy of St Dymphna Dymphna is an Irish saint whose early history is as short on hard evidence as was Philomena’s but who has kept her status.
Fascinated by what he had read about the ancient city of Troy, the young Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) declared to his father that, if such a great city had once existed, then its vast walls must still remain hidden under the dust of ages. His father disagreed. The consensus of the time generally regarded Troy as a place Homer had invented in order to spin his great yarn of the Greek war involving the abduction of the beautiful Helen. Years later, Heinrich unearthed the treasures of Homer’s fabled city near the modern Turkish town of Hissarlik. The science of archaeology had shown that an ancient tradition, long considered merely legendary, had firm roots in history. So it is that traditional accounts of events veiled in the mists of antiquity should not be too readily dismissed. On the other hand, it is true that many legends and apocryphal accounts have been exposed as fanciful. When Pope John XXIII in 1961 set in motion the work of assessing the validity of sainthoods conferred by the early Church some revered names were found wanting in the hard evidence necessary for canonization. Some like Saint Philomena – a ‘virgin martyr’ long supposed to have resisted the advances of the Emperor Diocletian – did not survive close scrutiny. Her ‘demotion’ caused distress for many Catholics at the time due to her popularity as a devotional figure. Witness the wide use of her name in baptisms. Dymphna is an Irish saint whose early history is as short on hard evidence as was Philomena’s but who has kept her status. Devotion to her is of early date and a church is consecrated in her name in the town of Geel in Belgium.
An Irish saint venerated in Belgium? Was she one of those holy people like Gallus and Columbanus who journeyed from Ireland to spread God’s word again in a benighted Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire?
No. Dymphna did indeed journey to Europe, but her motivation was very different from the founders of the great monasteries of Bobbio and Luxeuil. Her story was first set down in 1247 in an investigation by a canon of the Church of St. Aubert at Cambray, France, commissioned by the Bishop of Cambray. The writer admits that the details he gives of Dympna’s life cannot be shown to be historically accurate but are recorded according to the oral traditions which he collected.
These accounts tell that she lived in Ireland about the beginning of the seventh century and was the daughter of a Viking King who had married an Irish woman who she was was a devout Christian. She had her daughter Dymphna secretly baptised at the age of 14. The mother died shortly afterwards, to the inconsolable grief of her husband. His mental state began to be seriously disturbed and, unable to find a woman as beautiful as his late wife, he began to desire his daughter who resembled her remarkably. To escape him she fled to the continent, accompanied by her confessor Father Gerebernus, and took refuge in the town of Geel in Belgium. Eventually she was discovered by her father’s agents and when he came to recover her, Father Gerebernus was put to death and Dymphna, when she refused to return to Ireland, was beheaded by her father. These traditional accounts rely on an accumulation of oral sources; no ‘hard evidence’ has ever come to light about the saint. The ecclesiastical historian Johann Peter Kirsch (1861-1941) wrote that the narrative of Dymphna ‘is without any historical foundation, being merely a variation of the story of the king who wanted to marry his own daughter, a motif which appears frequently in popular legend’. If matters had rested there, Dymphna may well have suffered the fate of Philomena for lack of saintly credentials. However, it seems that, from the time that the 1247 account was written – and indeed long before that – her fame as a source of healing, particularly of mental disorders, had spread. A church was built in Geel in 1349 to house her remains and
Senior Times l January - February 2022 l www.seniortimes.ie 55
