Pangur bán, meaning something like “Whitey” in Old Irish, or perhaps “Super-White” or “Snowball,” was the name of the pet white cat made famous by an unknown monastic scribe toward the end of the first millennium. For him and his brethren the name would have had mystical associations to which no modern detergent ad could aspire. For them it recalled the shekinah, the visible sign of the presence of the Lord, of Moses and then Jesus on the Mountain, a spiritual radiance and a whiteness “that no fuller on earth could achieve.” (Mark 9:2).
Reichenau, the small island in Lake Constance in southern Germany where the cat and the scribe lived out their companionate lives, was the site of a Benedictine monastery that became an important center of learning in Carolingian times. The subject of the ancient and most unusual poem “Pangur bán” is a comparison of a mouser cat in its stealthy pursuit of mice and a scriptural exegete in his arduous search for the hidden meaning of a biblical text. It is a delightful jeu d’ésprit composed and recorded not in Latin but in the vernacular language of his distant native land. Its unique character has made it one of the best known examples of Old Irish lyric poetry, of which there are unfortunately few surviving models. I append the full text of the poem in the translation of one of the most distinguished of recent Irish poets.
In turning to what some may regard as an obscure subject (monastic cats) I meant consciously to seek refuge from the exhausting political scene that has been preoccupying me and so many others. But of course there is no escape to be found. The topic had barely forced its way to the periphery of my mental landscape when an exhumed years-old insult directed at childless “cat ladies” by J. D. Vance, Trump’s hand-picked running mate, forced itself on my attention.
We happily housed a couple of cats for many years, but when they in the natural cycle of things expired, we did not replace them. Our only current pets are turtles. So I am not a “cat person”. I do claim to be a “monk person,” however, having spent many years studying forms of Christian religious life in the Middle Ages. It is understandable that most of the (few) people who have written about the poem “Pangur bán” have been most interested in the cat part. But as a scholar I am more interested in the monk part. The monk, after all, is the one who wrote the poem, and its subject is monastic scholarship, for which he wittily finds a surprising analogue in a cat’s mouse-hunting.
Mr. Vance is a fairly recent convert to Roman Catholicism. I have read that while he was preparing to enter the Church he chose from among the saints Augustine of Hippo as a special spiritual inspiration. I myself am a great admirer of Augustine, and have spent many years reading and thinking about his writings, especially as they touch upon linguistic, moral, and social issues. Without beating about the bush, I will say the silent part out loud. Quite by accident, I know a great deal more about Augustine, his thought, and his writings than Mr. Vance is ever likely to learn on purpose. Ordinarily the quality of an American political candidate’s Augustinianism is not a pressing issue, but Mr. Vance has made it one by declaring that childless women among our citizens necessarily lack a vital connection with the fate of the nation. "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable…. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC--the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children." I cannot say with certainty that no American politician dependent upon popular election for his position has ever uttered such a gratuitously stupid remark, but I must say I doubt it.
Augustine, though not quite so fanatical about celibacy as some of the other early Church leaders, does make it clear in dozens of places, including two whole books explicitly devoted to the subject of marriage, that wedlock is an inferior state, its redeeming virtue being that it turns to a socially useful good (the continuity of the human race) an intrinsically evil phenomenon (the irrational supremacy of sensuality in the sexual act). Much of the comedy of Chaucer’s brilliant presentation of the Woman from Bath is recreated from the rich controversial literature (mostly deeply misogynist) created by unconvincing clerical cheerleaders for celibacy over several centuries.
But I will leave Senator Vance to wander alone and with unsure foot through the landscape of verbal pitfalls of his own digging. He is a man who has talked a lot, often volubly and vehemently, and an army of Democratic Party gnomes are even now busy picking their way through a sizeable mountain of his careless obiter dicta. There are bound to be many more remarks of the “cat lady” variety. My own eccentric interest as a medievalist is with the feline-loving scribe of Reichenau a thousand years ago. We do not know his name or his age. That he wrote in Irish makes it virtually certain that he was an Irishman. The text of his poem strongly suggests his amiability, self-effacement, cleverness, and studiousness. His type should be well known to us from the sweet pages of a great book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, by the late French monk Jean Leclercq, a Benedictine scholar in the still living medieval tradition himself. The phrase “opus Dei,” the Work of God or the Divine Task, is probably most familiar to most readers, if known to them at all, in reference to a controversial society within the contemporary Roman Church. But its main meaning in earlier centuries was the wholeness of the life lived by the black monks, usually referred to today as Benedictines. It was a carefully organized life of regular, scheduled prayer and work, the work including the manufacture and study of books by scribes and scholars. These were the men who did the heavy lifting of passing on the cultural history of ancient Greece and Rome through the centuries of the formation of Europe to the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance. Many of these cultural heroes are known to us not at all, many others only by a name or a date in a necrology. Concerning this particular monastic “cat man” we do not even know these things. We know only that he must have been a lovely fellow, a friend to feline and man alike, and that he led a life of gentle, unostentatious utility, the kind of life that makes the world a better place.
Pangur Bán and I at work,
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.
More than loud acclaim, I love
Books, silence, thought, my alcove.
Happy for me, Pangur Bán
Child-plays round some mouse’s den.
Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.
Next thing an unwary mouse
Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.
Next thing lines that held and held
Meaning back begin to yield.
All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.
With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.
So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains,
Kindred spirits, veterans.
Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark. (trans. Seamus Heaney)
