The Celtic Church and Rome

Columbanus is one of the best witnesses we have to the relationship between the Celtic churches and Rome in the generations before the Synod of Whitby (664) settled the Easter question for the English. His letters show a church in full communion with Rome and reverencing the see of Peter, yet attached to its own ancient customs — the 84-year Easter, the monastic ordering of authority — and resistant to having those customs overridden. This file sets out what he reveals, and the live scholarly debate over how far the “Celtic church” was really independent, with both sides and named scholars.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; missionary to the Continent)

The Pre-Whitby Question

For the English church, the conflict between Celtic and Roman usage — above all over Easter, but also over the monastic tonsure and other customs — was resolved at the Synod of Whitby in 664, where King Oswiu of Northumbria decided for the Roman Easter, and the Ionan tradition in England gave way (the synod is reported by Bede, Ecclesiastical History 3.25). Columbanus, who died in 615, belongs to the world before that settlement, and his letters are among the fullest evidence for how a Celtic churchman thought about Rome and custom in that earlier, unsettled period (Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018). What he reveals can be stated in four points, all drawn from the ecclesiology of his letters (see Rome and the Celtic Churches):

  1. Communion with Rome was unquestioned. Columbanus regarded himself and the Irish as in full communion with the see of Peter, which he honoured as the head of the churches and the touchstone of the catholic faith (Columbanus, Epistula 5; Walker 1957).
  2. Reverence for Rome was real and warm. His praise of Peter’s chair is unfeigned; he appeals to the pope as judge and arbiter (Columbanus, Epistulae 1, 5; Walker 1957).
  3. Custom remained the church’s own. He held that the unity of faith did not require uniformity of custom, and so kept the Irish Easter against Roman and Gallic usage without any sense of breaking communion (Columbanus, Epistula 2; Charles-Edwards 2000).
  4. Authority was ordered around the monastery. In the Irish system the abbot, not the diocesan bishop, was the centre of practical authority, and Columbanus expected his houses to be governed by their rule and abbot, not absorbed into the Frankish diocesan order (Charles-Edwards 2000; Wood 2001).

How Independent Was the “Celtic Church”? — The Debate

How to characterize this configuration is genuinely contested, and the debate has a long and sometimes polemical history that METHODOLOGY §4 requires be set out from both sides.

The older “Celtic Church” thesis — popular especially in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, and taken up variously by Protestant, nationalist, and some Orthodox and “Celtic Christianity” authors — held that the early Irish and British churches formed a distinct, largely independent church, organized differently from Rome (monastic rather than diocesan), keeping its own customs, and only gradually and reluctantly brought under Roman conformity. On this view Columbanus exemplifies a Celtic Christianity that was catholic but not Roman in the later sense — a church that owed Rome honour but not jurisdiction (this thesis is reflected in much older and popular literature, and the texts of Columbanus’s letters genuinely support a strong attachment to local custom).

The revisionist scholarly correction — represented by historians such as Kathleen Hughes (who came to doubt the very category) and elaborated by T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wendy Davies, and others — has argued that the idea of a single, self-conscious, organized “Celtic Church” over against Rome is a later construct, even a myth; that the Irish and British churches were varied, were in their own minds fully part of the one catholic Church, shared Rome’s faith and sacraments, and differed in customs (Easter computus, tonsure) rather than in ecclesiology of communion; and that to speak of an independent “Celtic Church” imports a unity and an opposition that did not exist (Charles-Edwards 2000; the critique associated with Hughes and Davies). On this view Columbanus is not the representative of a rival church but a catholic monk whose church kept some old customs Rome had dropped — and who, tellingly, appealed to Rome rather than repudiating it.

The two positions are not as far apart as the polemics suggest, and the careful conclusion holds elements of both. There was a real difference of custom and of church-order — the monastic centring of authority and the 84-year Easter were genuine and were felt as such by the Franks who attacked Columbanus. There was not a self-conscious “Celtic Church” understanding itself as separate from or opposed to Rome; Columbanus’s whole stance presupposes communion with Rome and even appeals to it. The honest formula is communion-in-faith with diversity-in-custom: the Celtic churches were fully part of the one Church, differing in usages that Rome and Gaul had changed, and Columbanus is the clearest single witness to how that combination actually worked in practice (Charles-Edwards 2000; Stancliffe 2018; see Rome and the Celtic Churches).

Why Columbanus Is the Test Case

Columbanus is uniquely valuable for this question because, unlike most Celtic saints, he left writings that state his ecclesiology directly rather than leaving us to infer it from hagiography. We do not have to reconstruct the pre-Whitby Celtic mind from legend; we can read a Celtic abbot arguing, in his own Latin, with popes and synods about exactly these questions (Walker 1957; Stancliffe 2018). And what he shows is a man for whom honour to Rome and fidelity to Irish custom were not in tension — a configuration that the later schism, hardening the alternatives, would make almost unintelligible, but which in his own undivided world was simply the way a faithful churchman lived. That is why he matters so much for the larger East–West question, and why the next file turns to his specifically Orthodox reception (see The Orthodox Reception).

See Also

References

  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The Irish churches’ relation to Rome; the critique of the “Celtic Church” construct; Easter and custom.)
  • Stancliffe, Clare. “Columbanus’s Letters to the Popes.” In Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe, ed. Alexander O’Hara. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (Columbanus’s communion-with-independence and the anachronism warning.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The monastic ordering of Irish church authority; the conflict with the Frankish diocesan order.)
  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People 3.25. (The Synod of Whitby, 664, for the later settlement of the Easter question.)