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Pearse and the ‘noble lie’ of nationalism – John Coakley

In this 1983 essay, ‘Patrick Pearse and the “Noble Lie” of Irish Nationalism’, John Coakley provides an overview of critical conceptions of the ‘nation’ as a lens through which to assess Pearse’s political philosophy and concept of the ‘Irish nation’.

Coakley casts a critical eye on the depth of Pearse’s presentation of the historicity of the ‘Irish nation’, his writings on the subject, and his understanding of the realities of the separate histories, experiences and identities of the island’s Protestant populations.

John Coakley, ‘Patrick Pearse and the “Noble Lie” of Irish Nationalism’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 286 (Summer, 1983), 119-136.
JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30090508

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‘In politics there is often much to be gained by concealing the truth from others; there is seldom any advantage in concealing it from yourself’. In thus drawing attention to the danger of falling victim to one’s own propaganda, one of the more acute analysts of Irish political life in the twentieth century put his finger on a feature of nationalist ideology that is particularly insidious in the Irish case: the tendency to be blinded to the fact that adherence to the ‘Irish nation’ is confined, by and large, to those of Catholic religious background in the face of the myth that the nation includes all the inhabitants of the island. That this fact should have gained only partial acceptance in the South, even by the academic community, is in part a product of terminological confusion, in part a consequence of failure to distinguish between empirical and normative propositions and in part a tribute to the emotional impact of the myth itself. It is the object of this article to look at the contribution of the political thought of Patrick Pearse to what ironically could be seen as an obstacle in the way of a resolution of the national question in Ireland.

The terminological issue centres around the definition of ‘nation’. For over a century historians, social scientists and others have grappled with this elusive concept. (It is, of course, the social-psychological sense of the word that has created difficulties; it is frequently used in a more precise legal sense as equivalent to ‘State’, as in the phrase ‘United Nations’). Despite disagreement among scholars, the measure of consen­sus that exists regarding the concept is such that a highly eccentric definition would have to be used if it were to be held that all of the inhabitants of Ireland constitute a single nation. It will be argued below that any acceptable definition, if used to include the bulk of the Catholic population within an ‘Irish’ nation, would necessarily exclude the bulk of the Protestants. This is not to attribute a particular signific­ance to theological divisions: religion in Ireland has constituted an ethnic label equivalent to (but less exact than) language elsewhere in Europe.

It might be suggested that reluctance to attach a precise meaning to the concept ‘nation’ may be attributed in many instances to a failure to distinguish between values and matters of fact. Arguments in favour of Irish unity are frequently justified by the claim that the people of the island constitute a single nation; if this claim is rejected, it is implied, the corner-stone of the unity argument is destroyed. It should, however, be pointed out that the aspiration towards a united Ireland is not logically incompatible with the empirical judgement that the people of Ireland do not form a single nation. This point will emerge with some force if consideration is given to the point of view of one who is seen as a founding father of Irish nationalism. Wolfe Tone’s emphasis on what he saw as a major prerequisite to Irish independence is frequently cited, but its implications are rarely explored: ‘to unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’. Tone recognized that an Irish nation (in the sense in which the word will be used in this article) did not exist: his object was to create one.

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The bulk of Pearse’s political writings (those included in his Political Writings and Speeches and the few to be found elsewhere) are occasional in content, comprising commentaries on or reactions to contemporary events. While something of Pearse’s concept of nationality may be inferred from these and from his literary output, he also dealt specific­ally with the question in a series of four essays: the last four in his Political Writings, which initially appeared between December.1915 and March 1916, and which represented Pearse’s last work on the subject.

…The four essays are interrelated. In the first, ‘Ghosts’, the author out­ lined his basic contention: that the Irish nation, like all nations, is a spiritual as well as a material entity, and that it possesses an inalienable right to freedom. In the three subsequent essays he discussed the contribution to Irish nationalism of the four ‘gospels’ of Tone, Davis, Lalor and Mitchel: in ‘The Separatist Idea’, Tone’s emphasis on the need for separation of Ireland from Britain; in ‘The Spiritual Nation’, Davis’s view of the importance of culture; and in ‘The Sovereign People’, Lalor’s insistence on the necessity of national control over physical resources and Mitchel’s advocacy of physical force as the appropriate means of winning national freedom.

The basic argument could be interpreted as follows. Nations are like persons: each possesses a body, soul and mind. Just as it is wrong for one human being to enslave another, so too is it wrong for any nation to attempt to enslave another. In the case of human slaves, while the body ‘belongs’ to another, the soul may remain free. Similarly, while a nation may be physically enslaved, its soul may remain free, this freedom reflected in its maintenance of its own distinct language and culture. Ireland, an enslaved nation, must consequently win back its complete freedom – physical and spiritual – and can only realistically do so by violent means.

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Pearse’s understanding of the concept of nation is obviously of vital importance: on this depends the answer to the question whether all of the people of Ireland constitute a single nation. At one point the word is defined explicitly in terms of another concept, ‘nationality’. Pearse distinguishes between spiritual and intellectual aspects of a people: the former corresponds to a man’s soul, the latter to his mind. The soul of a people expresses itself through the collective mind, but, unlike the intellectual component, it is independent of the physical componnent.

The spiritual part is intangible and difficult to know but it ‘would seem to reside chiefly in language (if by language we understand literature and folklore as well as sounds and idioms), and to be preserved chiefly by language’. It expresses itself in what is presumably the intellectual part: ‘all the arts, all the institutions, all the inner life, all the actions and goings forth of the nation’. The intellectual part appears to refer to institutions of various types, and Pearse spells out the differ­ence between this concept and the spiritual one by means of examples. He suggests that the United States and England were spiritually one but were apart intellectually; the same was true of Belgian Walloons and the French, and of Austrians and Germans. Nationality refers to ‘the sum of the facts, spiritual and intellectual, which mark off one nation from another’. Freedom refers to the ‘physical’ condition: whether or not a people is self-governing. Finally, Pearse refers to two other concepts, independence and nationhood: ‘both the spiritual and intellectual fact, nationality, and the physical condition, freedom, enter into a proper definition of independence or nationhood’.

…In so far as Pearse did have a clear idea of what he meant when he used the term ‘nation’, it appears to have referred to a group of people sharing a collective ‘soul’ which manifests itself in a characteristic language, literature, culture and institutions. But even if national souls exist, how can one define the boundaries of the collectivity that possesses them? A particular collectivity defined in terms of community of language might, for instance, share cultural values and social and political institutions with other linguistic communities; it might, on the other hand, be fragmented into different cultures with distinct literary traditions and institutions. It may not be clear which of these types of manifestation is the one that corresponds to a national ‘soul’, nor is it clear whether this concept is exclusive, i.e. whether it is compatible with a relationship with other such ‘souls’.

Despite these difficulties of definition, the tradition to which Pearse belonged may easily be identified. It may be traced back to the eighteenth-century German philosopher, J.G. Herder, who was influen­tial in disseminating the view that a nation or a nationality is more than the sum of the individuals who comprise it: that it is a living organism based on community of language or culture. For Herder, a nationality has a soul analogous to the individual soul, which is manifested in various aspects of culture and in particular in language and literature, and whose life pre-dated the lives of the individuals who composed it and would outlive them. This concept may be clearly associated with Pearse’s ‘Spiritual Nation’, which he presumably absorbed from the romantic nationalist tradition of the nineteenth century.

Two aspects of Pearse’s perception of history require examination: his view of the evolution of the Irish ‘nation’ and his interpretation of the contributions of its four ‘evangelists’ – Tone, Davis, Lalor and Mitchel. The first of these aspects has been dealt with elsewhere: the notion that the Irish nation dates back to Norman or pre-Norman times cannot be sustained in terms of modern historiography. Any conclusion other than this would be astounding, in view of research over the past several decades in many countries on the phenomenon of nationalism in general. Social scientists, whatever their ideological backgrounds, see nations as being of relatively recent origin. For Marxists, nations are characteristic of the capitalist phase of development. Among non­-Marxists, the dominant view suggests that nations appear as society modernizes: as urbanization and industrialization get under way, as geographical mobility increases, as the masses are mobilized politically and as minimum degrees of literacy and political consciousness are attained. They represent less the blossoming of an innate soul than the flowering of the efforts of a dedicated, dissatisfied elite, which perceives the implications of mass political involvement.

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There can be little doubt that Pearse accepted the view that the people of Ireland constituted a single nation. His few references to the Ulster problem suggest that he shared the characteristic Irish nationalist optimism regarding the problem of inter-denominational tension. His praise of Ulster Unionists for their armed defiance of the British Parlia­ment and his suggestion that they form a provisional government for the whole country was grounded, presumably, in a belief that anyone prepared to take up arms against the British Parliament must necessarily be Irish, but today must seem naive.

Pearse overlooked the obvious paradox that Unionists armed because they felt more British than the British; like later European settlers in Algeria and Rhodesia, they were, ironically, prepared to fight the motherland in order to maintain what they believed to be its way of life. Pearse’s offer
to the Unionists is as unconvincing as black African cheers for the Smith government’s unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia in 1965. This blind spot of Pearse’s is confirmed in his following quotation of Davis, which he accepts without qualification:

He who fancies some intrinsic objection to our nationality to lie in the co­ existence of two languages, three or four great sects, and a dozen different races in lreland, will learn that in Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium and America, different languages, creeds and races flourish kindly side by side, and he will seek in English intrigues the real well of the bitter woes of Ireland (p. 318).

In so far as Pearse hinted at the existence of any barriers to national integrity, he appears to have de-emphasized the contemporary confessional cleavage, referring instead to vaguer medieval divisions. This is to be seen in his paraphrase of Tone, when he suggested that, as a means of attaining national unity, ‘we substitute for the denomina­tions Gael, Gall and Gall-Gael the common name of Irishman’. Pearse, after Davis, clearly underestimated the potential for divisive­ness that lay in cultural differences. The Hungary of Davis’s time is perhaps the clearest case in point: the different linguistic communities there (Magyars, Romanians, Slovaks and others) certainly did not ‘flourish kindly side by side’, and as the nineteenth century progressed relations between them deteriorated steadily, resulting ultimately in the dismemberment of historic Hungary.

The same tendency has been apparent in Belgium: Walloons do not feel French any more than Flemings feel Dutch, but the sense of Belgian identity that has held the two sides together has been rather tenuous. Belgians’ primary allegiance tends to be to their linguistic community; and it is not Belgian national­ism but practical politics that has thus far prevented a clear-cut, two­ way partition of the country. In America national unity was achieved with the assistance of a process of linguistic assimilation. Where the linguistic melting pot has been less effective, as in French-speaking Canada, national integrity continues to be threatened. Only in Switzerland were language differences transcended by a wider sense of national identity, and there for special reasons: a deep religious cleavage cut across language divisions, and cantonal patriotism eroded the attrac­tiveness of identification with a linguistic community.

A Swiss national identity based on a common history and perception of shared interests could, consequently, flourish. In Ireland, however, language did not set apart distinct communities as it did elsewhere in Europe. The majority of English-speakers (Catholic) looked with some sympathy on Irish as the ancestral language; the minority (Protestant) were not alarmed, though they may have been irritated, by attempts to revive a language that was on its death-bed.

That Pearse was in error in assuming the existence or a united Irish nation was affirmed rather boldly at the beginning of this essay; that viewpoint now requires justification. Exponents of the ‘one-nation’ argument have tended to rest their case on attempted proof by assertion rather than on a willingness to examine and apply concepts like that of ‘nation’. They have been challenged sporadically by a ‘two-nation’ theory, characterized by a more analytical approach, depending on concepts of nation ranging from the orthodox ‘subjective’ type, as used by Conservatives like W.F. Monypenny at the beginning of the present century, to the Stalinist type, used by the Irish Communist Organization in the late 1960s. It will be argued here that the ‘one­-nation’ view is untenable, but that this does not entail acceptance of the ‘two-nation’ theory…

A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others – which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of them­
selves, exclusively.

This definition has not been substantially added to since the time of Mill. Among later writers are to be found echoes of Mill’s emphasis on the crucial role of community of identity, based frequently on community of language or religion, but virtually always on ‘possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past’. Nothing could be more strikingly absent from the Irish tradition than ‘collective pride and humiliation’. The glorious victories of one section of the population (such as Benburb and the war of 1919-1921 on the one hand, and Aughrim and the Siege of Derry on the other) are in most cases perceived as defeats by the other; two distinct sets of folk heroes co-exist, as do two myths of history; different festivals are honoured and different vocabularies are used in certain sensitive areas. Not alone are the two versions of history essen­tially the stories of two distinct communities; the two versions conflict, in that the gods of one are the antichrists of the other. Attempts have, of course, been made to outline a version of Irish history that would emphasize the unity of the whole people, and the necessarily selective nature of history-writing facilitates this; but the sociological reality is that no such interpretation of Irish history could compete with the two deeply-held current myths.

The ‘one-nation’ view must consequently be discarded; are there then two nations on the island? That at least one ‘Irish’ nation exists is undoubted; the ‘nationalist’ section of the population of the island, which is by and large Catholic, appears to share a strong sense of national identity and to possess the other characteristics of nationhood. Does the remainder of the population constitute a second nation, or is it part of the ‘British’ nation, if such exists? This question cannot be as definitely answered. The cultural basis of an Ulster Protestant nation is undoubtedly present; but the sense of identity of this group has not been reinforced by the creation of a coherent, positive version of the history of the Protestant people of Ulster or by provision of a national political programme. Survey and other evidence indicate confusion among Protestants regarding their identity and disagreement as to basic constitutional objectives. Protestant Ulster has not been given the ‘great past’ with which all nations endow themselves; yet the materials for the creation of such a myth exist in abundance. It is ironic that Pearse, who did so much to propagate the cult of Cuchulainn, should have entirely missed his hero’s potential significance as the great ances­tral figure of Ulster nationalism: Cuchulainn gave his life defending the road to Ulster against ‘the men of Ireland’.

The non-existence of an Irish nation does not entail the non-existence of Irish nationalists. It is a necessary condition of nationhood as defined by Mill that the population-group concerned receive the primary loyalty of the great bulk of the individuals within it. Nation­hood, then, is a matter of degree, not an absolute condition. The answer to the question whether a particular population group constitutes a nation depends on the proportion of its members who direct their loyalty towards that group, and on the intensity of this loyalty at individual level. The people of Ireland do not constitute a nation not only because most Protestants do not give their loyalty to this group but, in particular, because most Catholics do not give their primary loyalty to this group either.

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Lexical shortcomings have, as mentioned, served further to confuse the Irish position. Lack of an agreed English term to describe the ‘Hibernian’ nation has led to usurpation of the terms ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’ both informally and unconsciously by Catholics in general and officially and deliberately by the southern Irish state. The usurpation has, by undermining the broader concepts of ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’, forced many northern Protestants to deny their Irishriess. This is an irony on which few southern Irish people pause to ponder when they criticize Loyalist appropriation of the term ‘Ulster’; yet the latter usage arises from a similar lexical deficiency.

Pearse’s writings suggest that his nationality was Hibernian rather than pan-Irish. His concern was overwhelmingly with one tradition; he shows little awareness of or interest in Protestant Ulster. Unlike Gavan Duffy, there is little evidence that he made the transition from the narrower to the broader type of nationalism by learning what was arguably the most valuable of the lessons of his second evangelist:

When I knew him first … I was a strong nationalist, but a nationalist of the school of Roger O’Moore; who burned with desire to set up again the Celtic race and the Catholic church. Davis it was who induced me to aim, ever after, to bring all Irishmen, of whatever stock, into the confederacy to make Ireland a nation.

If political leaders consider it useful to deceive their followers regarding the facts of a situation for the sake of some ultimate good, on the model of Plato’s ‘noble lie’, they must, as was remarked at the beginn­ing of this article, be careful not to be so successful as to deceive themselves as well. The conclusion of Pearse’s most authoritative biographer was, essentially, that Pearse, as a consequence of his own peculiar psychological make-up (in which personal inadequacies were compensated for by ambition to achieve greatness) and the political context of the time, found himself committed to a hopeless rebellion in 1916. His last four political essays, the core of his contribution to the philosophy of Irish nationalism, were hurriedly written to provide a rational justification for a decision made on emotional grounds. They served the dual purpose of easing their author’s conscience and pro­viding a ‘book of law for Irish nationalists’, but, instead of being left a scholarly study, the Irish people ‘were bequeathed a conundrum over which they could argue for generations’. Pearse, then, helped to reinforce the national tendency towards self-deception with regard to the Ulster problem.

It may seem unfair to attack the political views of a person who, for whatever motivation, was prepared to face death for his ideals. It might be added that as his later political writings had a very specific purpose, that of justifying armed rebellion by an appeal to history and to the writings of earlier nationalists, it is unfair to assess them in terms of broader criteria. Pearse has, however, been hailed as much more than a figure who enjoyed a brief moment in history; his status as messiah or prophet of Irish nationalism invites a more critical approach to the content of his political philosophy. By his example and through his followers’ exploitation of his writings, he was remarkably successful in stirring the Hibernian nation to its roots and in assisting the achieve­ment of the break with Britain. For all his contempt of lawyers, his own ‘book of law’ was to continue to mobilize subsequent generations.

His marshaling of the facts indeed bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the lawyer’s pragmatic use of history. As one scholar described the lawyer’s approach, ‘his history may be fiction, from the standpoint of the scholarly historian, but if it produces victory it has served its purpose’. The myth propagated by Pearse achieved victory in 1922, but at a high price even in its own terms: unity was sacrificed to independence, mobilization of Hibernian nationalism having contributed to a further undermining of pan-Irish sentiment.

…That Pearse should be considered one of the leading spokesmen of Hibernian nationalism is, then, a token of its intellectual poverty: its case could have been based at least as effectively on selectively-presented fact as on selectively-presented fantasy.

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