Rome, the Paschal Question, and the Wider Church

The early Irish church is often imagined as an isolated, anti-Roman “Celtic Church” — independent, mystical, and at odds with the papacy. The historical reality is otherwise: the Irish belonged to the one catholic Church of the first millennium, and the famous Easter controversy that set them apart from Rome was a disciplinary and calendrical disagreement within that Church, never a schism or a difference of faith. Patrick himself, in his own writings, looks outward to the wider Church — to Gaul, to the brethren, to the common Nicene creed he confesses.

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

The Romantic Myth and the Historical Reality

Few images in popular church history are as durable, or as misleading, as that of the “Celtic Church”: a free, anti-Roman, proto-Protestant communion of poets and hermits, separated from the corruptions of Rome and preserving a purer, more native Christianity. The picture is largely a construction of later centuries — sharpened in the Protestant Reformation, when polemicists were eager to find an ancient British Christianity untainted by the papacy, and again romanticized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does not correspond to the sources. As T. M. Charles-Edwards and Thomas O’Loughlin have both insisted, there was no single institution called “the Celtic Church” standing over against “the Roman Church”; there was one Church, catholic and orthodox, of which the Christians of Ireland and Britain were a part (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000; O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology, 2000).

The Irish church was sacramental, episcopal, and creedal. It baptized, ordained, celebrated the Eucharist, and confessed the faith of Nicaea. Its monks copied the Latin Fathers and the Latin Scriptures. Its scholars corresponded with churchmen in Gaul, Rome, and the East over questions of computus and discipline. Where it differed from the practice of the contemporary Latin West, it differed in matters of custom — chiefly the dating of Easter and the shape of the monastic tonsure — not in doctrine, sacrament, or the substance of communion.

The Easter Controversy: A Question of Computus

The single greatest point of friction was the calculation of the date of Easter — the computus paschalis. Easter, by ancient rule, is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox; but reducing that rule to a fixed, repeatable table required choosing a length for the lunar-solar cycle and a date for the equinox, and on these points different traditions had made different choices.

The Irish and the Britons retained an older Paschal table built on an 84-year cycle — the so-called Celtic-84 or latercus. Curiously, this was not a native Irish invention but an inheritance: the 84-year table had itself come from Gaul in the early fifth century, the very period of Patrick’s own formation, and so represented an older Western usage that Ireland preserved after the Continent had moved on (McCarthy, on the latercus; cf. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, ch. 9). Meanwhile the rest of the Latin West adopted newer cycles. Victorius of Aquitaine produced a 532-year cycle in the mid-fifth century, adopted by the Church of Gaul in the sixth; and Dionysius Exiguus, working in Rome around 525, transmitted the Alexandrian 19-year cycle to the West in order to bring Latin practice into line with the great see of Alexandria and the Eastern usage. It was this Dionysian-Alexandrian reckoning that eventually prevailed.

Because the cycles differed, the Easters they yielded sometimes fell on different Sundays. This was not an abstract problem. Bede records its sharpest consequence at the Northumbrian court, where the royal household kept two Easters at once: the king, following the Roman reckoning he had learned, would be celebrating the feast of the Resurrection while the queen and her household, following the Irish reckoning of Iona, were still keeping the fast of Holy Week (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica III.25). For a Church for which Easter governs the whole rhythm of fast and feast, such divergence within a single court was a genuine pastoral scandal. To this calendrical difference was joined a second, lesser one: a difference in the form of the monastic tonsure, the Irish and British cutting the hair in a manner the Romanizing party regarded as irregular.

The Synod of Whitby, 664

The dispute came to its decisive moment in Northumbria. In 664, King Oswiu convened a synod at Whitby — at the double monastery governed by Abbess Hilda — to settle which Easter his kingdom would keep. The case for the Ionan and Irish reckoning was put by Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne, who appealed to the authority of Columba and, behind him, to the tradition of the Apostle John. The case for the Roman reckoning was put by Wilfrid, who appealed to the universal practice of the Church and to the authority of the Apostle Peter. Bede reports that Oswiu, asked whether it was truly to Peter that the Lord had given the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and being assured that it was, decided for the Roman Easter — unwilling, as he is said to have remarked, to fall out with the keeper of the keys (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica III.25).

Bede is our principal source for Whitby, writing some two generations later, around 731, and plainly a partisan of the Roman side; his account is a literary set-piece as much as a transcript, and a second, earlier account survives in the Life of Wilfrid. But the outcome is not in doubt: Northumbria conformed. Colmán, unwilling to abandon the tradition he had received, withdrew with those who shared his mind, eventually back toward Iona and Ireland.

Whitby, it should be stressed, was a local synod settling the practice of one kingdom; it did not impose a universal ruling, and the conformity of the wider Irish world was gradual and uneven. The southern Irish had already largely conformed in the 630s, after correspondence on the question that includes the famous letter of Cummian (c. 632), which argued — with an array of computistical and patristic authorities — that Ireland ought not to set its private reckoning against the consensus of the whole world. The northern Irish, and Iona itself, held to the old reckoning longer; Iona finally adopted the Roman Easter around 716, under the influence of the English monk Egbert. Over roughly a century, then, the divergence was resolved not by force or by anathema but by persuasion, correspondence, and the slow weight of common practice.

A Disagreement Within One Church

The crucial point, easily lost in the drama of Whitby, is what the controversy was not. It was not a schism. It was not a doctrinal rift. No one on either side questioned the faith of the other, the validity of the other’s baptism or orders, or the unity of the Church. The Irish who kept the old Easter were not heretics or separatists; they were Christians holding, in good conscience, to an older custom they had received. The whole debate presupposes a single communion within which the question of right practice could be argued at all — for one does not hold a synod to persuade those one regards as outside the Church. The Irish church was catholic, orthodox, and in communion with the wider Church throughout (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000; O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology, 2000).

Patrick and the Wider Church

This catholic outwardness is already visible in Patrick himself, in his own authentic writings, three centuries before Whitby. Patrick writes in Latin, the language of the Western Church. The creed he sets out near the opening of his Confessio is simply the common Nicene faith of the universal Church, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Confessio 4). He is conscious of a Christendom larger than his Irish mission field: he speaks of Gaul and of the brethren there, and confesses his longing to revisit his homeland of Britain and to go on to Gaul to see the brethren (Confessio 43). His horizon is not insular separatism but the fellowship of a wider Church to which he knows himself to belong.

What Patrick does not do is claim a Roman commission. Nowhere in the Confessio or the Letter to Coroticus does he say that he was sent by the Pope, consecrated at Rome, or commissioned by any Roman authority; his sense of being sent is throughout a sense of being sent by God to the Irish.

[Disputed:] The later tradition that Patrick was commissioned by Rome, journeyed to Rome, or was consecrated by the Pope is a development of the hagiographic Lives — Muirchú and the later tradition — and finds no support in Patrick’s own writings; it should be flagged as legend, not asserted as history (O’Loughlin, Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works, 1999).

Pre-Schism, Therefore Receivable

For an Orthodox reading, the decisive fact is chronological and ecclesial at once. Because the Irish church belonged to the undivided Church of the first millennium — the one Church of East and West before the schism of 1054 — its saints stand on the near side of that division. Patrick, Brigid, and Columba are pre-schism saints of the one catholic Church, and as such are receivable within Orthodoxy without difficulty. The Easter controversy, far from compromising this, confirms it: it shows the Irish arguing as members of the one Church about the right keeping of its common feast, not as a separate body defining itself against it (see The Pre-Schism Church).

See Also

References

  • Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) III.25, c. 731; trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
  • T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chs. 8–9 on the Paschal controversy.
  • Thomas O’Loughlin, Saint Patrick: The Man and His Works (London: SPCK, 1999).
  • Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish Writings (London: Continuum, 2000).
  • Patrick, Confessio, sections 4 and 43; Latin text and translation at confessio.ie.
  • Cummian, De controversia paschali (Letter on the Paschal Controversy), c. 632.
  • Daniel McCarthy, on the latercus / Celtic-84 Paschal table and its Gaulish origin.