Celtic Christianity

The church that grew in Ireland after Patrick became, within a few generations, one of the most intensely monastic in the Christian world — its great abbots, its desert-derived asceticism, and its wandering exiles-for-Christ are its enduring marks. Yet the popular modern image of a distinct, nature-mystical, anti-Roman “Celtic Church,” set against the Latin West, is largely a romantic invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The historical Irish church was thoroughly catholic, sacramental, and orthodox, in communion with the wider Church and differing from it only in some externals.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Celtic) / Orthodox reception

A Monastic Church

Patrick’s own mission did produce native ascetics. In the Confessio he speaks with evident wonder of “the sons of the Irish and the daughters of their chieftains” who became “monks and virgins of Christ,” some embracing virginity against the will of their families and even, in the case of slave-women, “in spite of terror and threats” (Patrick, Confessio 41–42, confessio.ie). This is the seed. But the full monastic flowering of the Irish church belongs to the generations after Patrick — the sixth and seventh centuries — and it is anachronistic to read its mature form back onto the fifth-century apostle himself.

The founders of that flowering are a remarkable company. Brigid of Kildare (traditionally d. c. 525) stands at the head of a great double monastery whose familia spread across Ireland. Finnian of Clonard (d. c. 549) was remembered as a teacher of teachers, the “tutor of the saints of Ireland,” through whose school passed many of the figures who would shape the next age. Columba — Colum Cille, “the Dove of the Church” — left Ireland for the island of Iona off the Scottish coast, founding his monastery there in 563, from which the evangelization of the northern Picts and much of the conversion of northern Britain would proceed. Comgall founded Bangor in Ulster, a house famed for the rigor of its discipline. Kevin (Cóemgen) withdrew to the valley of Glendalough, where an eremitical settlement grew into a major monastic center. And Columbanus (d. 615) carried the Irish ideal to the European continent, founding Luxeuil in Gaul and finally Bobbio in northern Italy, becoming one of the great figures of the continental mission (T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge UP, 2000).

What is distinctive here is not monasticism as such — the whole Christian world was monastic in this age — but the way the Irish church came to be organized around its monasteries. The great abbots, often heirs of the founding saint’s kin, exercised the principal authority within their federations of houses; the territorial bishop, who in the Mediterranean world was the natural center of the local church, played in Ireland a more circumscribed role. Bishops did not disappear: they remained necessary for ordination and the sacraments, and they were honored. But the structure of ecclesiastical power tilted toward the monastery and its abbot in a way that struck later observers as peculiar (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000). This is a real difference of organization — and it is the kind of difference that the popular imagination has too readily inflated into a difference of doctrine.

The Desert Inheritance

The asceticism of the Irish monks was not a native invention either. It was the asceticism of the Egyptian desert, transmitted westward. The pattern of Antony the Great and the Desert Fathers reached Ireland by way of Gaul — through the monastery of Lérins, through the writings of John Cassian (whose Conferences and Institutes carried the wisdom of the Egyptian abbas into Latin), and through the memory of Martin of Tours, the soldier-monk whose cult was deeply influential in the Celtic-speaking world. The Irish did not stumble upon their hermits’ cells; they consciously imitated the anchoresis of the Thebaid. The desert had no sand in Ireland, so the Irish made deserts of their islands and bog-edges and mountain valleys (Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology, London: Continuum, 2000).

The most famous expression of this inheritance is the Irish doctrine of the three martyrdoms, set out in the Old Irish homily preserved in a manuscript at Cambrai and usually dated to around the year 600. It distinguishes red martyrdom — the shedding of blood for Christ, in literal persecution — from two bloodless martyrdoms available to those who lived in times of peace. White martyrdom is the renunciation of all that one loves for God’s sake: the leaving of home, kin, and country, the death of self-will. Green martyrdom (Old Irish glas, a color-word whose exact hue is debated) is the labor of ascetic penance — the fasting, vigils, and tears by which the monk crucifies his own desires (the Cambrai Homily, c. 600). The doctrine is itself a deliberate appropriation of the desert tradition’s conviction that the monk is a martyr by other means, a witness who dies daily.

Bound up with white martyrdom is the practice that more than any other defines Irish monasticism: peregrinatio pro Christo, pilgrimage or exile for Christ. To leave Ireland — to set out, sometimes in a rudderless boat, abandoning the security of kin and the honor of place, never to return — was understood as an ascetic discipline of the highest order, a self-imposed homelessness in imitation of Abraham’s going-out and of Christ’s own having “nowhere to lay his head.” Columba’s departure for Iona and Columbanus’s long journey across the continent were both peregrinationes in this sense: not missionary strategy first of all, but ascetic self-exile, from which mission flowed as a consequence (O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology, 2000; Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000). The root of the whole impulse runs back to the deserts of Egypt and to St. Antony, who first went out from the inhabited world to do battle with himself and with the enemy in the solitude.

“Celtic Christianity” as a Modern Construct

[Disputed:] The popular notion of a distinct “Celtic Church” — a unified, eco-spiritual, woman-friendly, anti-authoritarian, quasi-Protestant alternative to “Roman” Christianity, native to the Celtic peoples and suppressed only by later Romanizers — is not a finding of historical scholarship but a romantic construction of the modern age, and it should be firmly rejected as a description of the actual fifth- to eighth-century church.

Its roots lie in the nineteenth-century Celtic Revival, with its idealization of the Celt as spiritual, poetic, and close to nature; it was elaborated through Protestant polemic that found in an imagined independent Celtic Church a usable ancestor for anti-Roman sentiment; and it flowered again in the late-twentieth-century spirituality market, where “Celtic Christianity” became a brand promising creation-centered, gender-egalitarian, institution-free religion. Donald E. Meek subjected this whole apparatus to a sustained critique in The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 2000), exposing the gap between the popular construct — anti-authoritarian, eco-friendly, woman-friendly, “alternative” — and what the sources actually attest. Gilbert Márkus and Thomas O’Loughlin have argued to the same effect: the “Celtic Christianity” of the bookshops is, to a striking degree, a mirror in which modern readers see their own preferences (Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity, 2000; O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology, 2000).

The historical reality is otherwise. The Irish church was Latin in its liturgy and learning, sacramental in its life, monastic in its organization, and orthodox in its faith. It venerated Rome and the wider Church; its scholars cited the same Fathers and the same councils as the rest of the Latin West; its missionaries — Columbanus above all — carried the catholic faith abroad, not a sectarian one. Its genuine peculiarities were real but limited and, with one partial exception, disciplinary rather than doctrinal: a distinctive method of computus for calculating the date of Easter, a distinctive form of the monastic tonsure, and a distinctive and historically important system of private, repeatable penance set out in the Irish penitentials. None of these touched the substance of the faith. When the differences became a source of friction — most famously over the dating of Easter — they were resolved not as a clash of two churches but as a question of discipline within one Church; that controversy and its settlement are treated in the companion file, Rome, the Paschal Question, and the Wider Church, and are not repeated here.

Patrick himself is the worst possible witness for the “Celtic alternative” thesis. He was a Romano-Briton, a citizen of the Roman world by birth and culture, and his faith — as his own creed in the Confessio makes plain — was the Nicene faith of the catholic Church, confessed in unmistakably Roman and Trinitarian terms: one God the Father unbegotten, his Son Jesus Christ “begotten before all beginning,” and the Holy Spirit, “the gift and pledge of immortality” (Patrick, Confessio 4, confessio.ie; see Thomas O’Loughlin, Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works, 1999). To enlist Patrick as a champion of a proto-Protestant, anti-Roman Celticism is to invert the man. The church his mission helped to seed was, like him, part of the one undivided Church — monastic in its genius and ascetic in its ideals, but catholic and orthodox to the core.

See Also

References

  • Patrick, Confessio, sections 4, 41–42. Text and translation at confessio.ie (Royal Irish Academy).
  • T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  • Donald E. Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 2000).
  • Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology (London: Continuum, 2000).
  • Thomas O’Loughlin, Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works (London: SPCK, 1999).
  • The Cambrai Homily (Old Irish, c. 600), on the three martyrdoms — red, white, and green.