Enda of Aran

Saint Enda (Éanna, Éinne, Endeus) of Aran was an Irish warrior turned monk, called the "patriarch of Irish monasticism". He died in old age around 530 and is commemorated on 21 March. Almost all the great saints of Ireland had some connection with the Aran Islands, where around 484 he founded the first Irish monastery, at Killeaney on Inis Mór.

The converted warrior

According to the Martyrology of Oengus, Enda was the son of Conall Derg of Oriel in Ulster. Legend says that when his father died he succeeded him as king and went out to fight his enemies. His sister, Saint Fanchea, an abbess, tried to persuade him to lay down his arms. He agreed on condition that she give him as wife a young girl of her convent, renouncing his dreams of conquest. The girl promised had just died, and Fanchea made him look on her lifeless body, so that he would understand that he too would face death and judgment. Shaken, and moved by his sister's urging, Enda chose to prepare for the priesthood. He studied first at Saint Ailbe's monastery at Emly, then, sent by Fanchea, at Rosnat in Britain, a great monastic centre, where he took monastic vows and was ordained. The stories of his and his sister's early life are unhistorical; more trustworthy Lives survive at Tighlaghearny on Inishmore, where he was buried.

The monastic school of Aran

Returning to Ireland, he built a church at Drogheda. Around 484 his brother-⁠in-⁠law Aengus, king of Munster (of Cashel), gave him land in the Aran Islands. They are three limestone islands, Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer, lying across the mouth of Galway Bay like a natural breakwater against the Atlantic. The largest, Inishmore, is about nine miles long and in many places quite barren; water percolates through the stone, and peat for fires had to be brought from Galway.

Enda's monks imitated the asceticism and simplicity of the earliest hermits of Egypt. He founded at Killeaney the monastery of Enda, regarded as the first Irish monastery. He also established a monastery in the Boyne valley and others across the island, and with Finnian of Clonard he is known as the father of Irish monasticism. The island was divided in two: half for the monastery of Killeaney, and the western half for disciples who wished to build permanent holy houses; later it was divided into eight parts, in each of which he built a "place of refuge".

Life was frugal and austere, with fixed periods for prayer, labour and the study of Scripture. Each community had its own church and its village of stone cells, in which the monks slept on the bare ground or on a bundle of straw covered with a rug, always in their day clothes. They gathered for prayer in the church and ate in silence in a common refectory, with no fire in their cells, however cold the weather or wild the sea. They earned their own food and clothing: some fished, others grew oats or barley between the rocks, others ground grain and baked bread. They wove their garments from the undyed wool of their own sheep. They had no fruit, drank neither wine nor mead, and ate no meat, except a little for the sick. According to the Annals of the Four Masters, Saint Nem of Aran was later abbot of the monastery founded by Enda. The monastery flourished until Viking times.