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The Cambrai Homily is the earliest known Irish homily, dating to the 7th or early 8th century, and housed in the Médiathèque d'agglomération de Cambrai. It is evidence that a written vernacular encouraged by the Christian Church had already been established alongside Latin by the 7th century in Ireland. The homily is also the oldest single example of an extended prose passage in Old Irish. The text is incomplete, and Latin and Irish are mixed. Quotations from the Bible and Church Fathers sources are in Latin, with the explication in Irish. It is a significant document for the study of Celtic languages and for understanding sermons as they might have existed in the 7th-century Irish church. The homily also contains the earliest examples in written Irish of triads, a form of expression characteristic of early Irish literature, though the text taken as a whole is not composed in triads.
The homily expounds on with a selection from the Homilia in Evangelia by Pope Gregory I, and an explanation of the three degrees of martyrdom, designated by the colors red martyr, blue (or green, Irish glas), and white martyr.
Christ is to be regarded as a model not only of meaningful suffering, but of relations to others: "everyone's sickness was sickness to him, offence to anyone was offence to him, everyone's infirmity was infirmity to him."Quoted in John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 46 online.
St. Jerome had used the term "white martyr" for those such as desert who aspired to the condition of martyrdom through strict asceticism.Kristine Edmondson Haney, "The 'Christ and the Beasts' Panel on the Ruthwell Cross," in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 222 online. Jerome explores this new ideal in his Life of St. Paul the Hermit ( Vita S. Pauli). See also Desert Fathers. The Cambrai homilist elaborates also on a distinction made by Gregory between inward and outward martyrdom.Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, p. 315. White martyrdom ( bánmartre), he says, is separation from all that one loves, perhaps on a peregrinatio pro Christo or "pilgrimage on behalf of Christ" that might be extended permanently; blue (or green) martyrdom ( glasmartre) involves the denial of desires, as through fasting and penitent labors, without necessarily implying a journey or complete withdrawal from life; Issi in bánmartre du duiniu intain scaras ar Dea fri cach réet caris, cé rucésa áini nú laubir n-oco. issi ind glasmartre dó intain scaras fria thola leó vel césas sáithor i ppennit ocus aithrigi: text from Herren and Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity, p. 147, note 37 online. red martyrdom ( dercmartre) requires torture or death.English translation of the passage in Céli Dé in Ireland, p. 54 online. The Irish color word glas for the third way of martyrdom can be translated as either ""blue or green"". Its symbolism in regard to martyrdom has been explained variously but not definitively. Glas has a figurative meaning of "fresh, raw, sharp" (in regard to weather) and "harsh" (morally); it also applies to complexion ("wan") or the discoloration of a corpse as "bluish, livid." The Irish treatise De arreis prescribes "fearsome penances" such as spending the night immersed in water or on nettles or nutshells or in the presence of a corpse. In one 12th-century Irish poem, the speaker Suibne Geilt, a dweller in the wilderness, says "My feet are wounded; my cheek is glas." In a much-referenced analysis of the Irish colors of martyrdom, Clare Stancliffe presented comparative textual evidence to suggest that glas martyrdom was so called because its austerity produced a sickly pale complexion.Clare Stancliffe, "Red, White and Blue Martyrdom," in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe. Studies in memory of Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge University Press, 1982), passim, especially pp. 29, 35 and 41. The Latin equivalent of glas, Stancliffe argues, is iacinthus or hyacinthus; this is a somewhat unorthodox view. Hyacinthus is a problematic color word, in ancient Greek meaning either "blue-black, purplish black" or "orange, saffron"; see M. Eleanor Irwin, "Odysseus' 'Hyacinthine Hair' in Odyssey 6.231," Phoenix 44.3 (1990) 205-218 (where it is argued that in context the word means "curled").
One of the primary means of achieving glas martyrdom is fasting, a common penance which gained special significance from the practice of fasting as codified in early Irish law. A person with an unanswered claim against a social superior might threaten or enact a hunger strike ( trocsad) against him, taking up a position outside his residence and potentially polluting his house and family with the responsibility of the faster's death. Irish saints fasted not only to mortify the flesh, but to coerce secular authorities and even to convince God himself. According to the Betha Adamnáin and some Irish annals, for instance, St. Adomnán fasted and immersed himself every night in the River Boyne as a protest against the kingship of Írgalach mac Conaing. D.A. Binchy has argued that the trocsad, a term that came into use also for hagiography, had a distinctively Irish character,Binchy, "A Pre-Christian Survival in Mediaeval Irish Hagiography," in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe, pp. 168ff, especially 176–177, with notes 34 and 35 detailing sources on Adomnán. leading perhaps to the use of the Celtic color word.According to Pliny ( Historia naturalis 22.2), glastum was a Gaulish word ( glaston) for the plant dye (most often identified as woad) used by the ancient Britons to tint their bodies blue or blue-black for sacred rites. See Xavier Delamarre, “Glaston, glasson,” in Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise (Éditions Errance, 2003) p. 180, and Gillian Carr, "Woad, and Identity in Later Iron Age and Early Roman Britain," Oxford Journal of Archaeology 24 (2005) 273–292, especially pp. 278–279, though Carr says that glastum is not woad. Julius Caesar ( Bellum Gallicum 5.4) calls this coloration vitrum, a usual Latin word for "glass." Old Irish is etymologically related to the English word , Old English glæs, and to Latin glaesum, "amber", also called electrum (the latter word sometimes meaning "electrum"). According to the Acta Sanctorum, William of Gellone emulated Christ's mortification and "then went to the sacred altar purer than electrum and clearer than glass"; see Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 198 online. The use of the color word glas by the Cambrai homilist to denote a kind of martyrdom may convey a range of sacred connotations, and the complexity of this word grouping may indicate some confusion of color and substance.
The Irish triad appears with a Latin fragment at the end of the Cambrai text: castitas in iuventute, continentia in habundantia. This fragment corresponds to a triad in the Prebiarum de multorum exemplaribus, a Didacticism florilegium of 93 questions. The Prebiarum supplies the missing third element as largitas in paupertate: "What are the types of martyrdom other than death? That is, three. Self-control in abundance, generosity in poverty, chastity in youth." Later examples of similar triads also exist.Charles Darwin Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 33, 60–61, and 74 online.
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