“The term ‘Celtic’ is a magic bag into which anything can be put, and out of which almost anything can come…. Anything is possible in the Celtic twilight which is not so much the twilight of the gods as of reason.” J.R.R. Tolkien

Searching for Celtic Christianity

The idea of a distinctly Celtic form of Christianity has caught people’s imagination repeatedly over the years, and people have consistently read their own interests into the Celtic past. Ian Bradley traces six such revivals of interest in Christianity in his Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams.

In its most recent form, the Celtic church has been presented as a kinder, gentler form of Christianity that lived in community, emphasized personal relationships in the form of soul-friends (anam cara), was vitally connected to the natural world, and, in some tellings, carried over a great deal from paganism.

But is There Such a Thing?

Recently, scholars have challenged just about everything on this list. We can start with which Celts are we talking about? Irish? Picts? Welsh? Bretons? There are differences between these groups, and just because they belong to related linguistic families does not mean they share a common culture.

Then there’s the idea of distinctiveness. While recognizing that local variations in Christian practice exist, Celtic Christians would have been horrified at the thought that their Christianity was different from that of the rest of the church. They saw themselves as being part of the single universal church that Christ died to save. And in fact, from what we can tell from the scant surviving writings, much of what we think of as distinctive in the Celtic churches was common to early medieval Christianity in general. In other words, it is distinct from us, not from the rest of the church in its day.

Misconceptions

Kinder and gentler? A look at the penitential manuals of the period, the monastic rules, and the physical disciplines of the monks—a hundred genuflections at the beginning of the day and at Matins (Morning Prayer) for example—should disabuse us of any notion that this was a gentle approach to the faith.

Communal and soul-friends? Yes, but that’s largely because almost all of our sources come from monasteries. We know little about what lay spirituality looked like. There is also the problem that the few sources we have come from both different geographic regions and different centuries, so they may not be describing a consistent approach to spirituality. And soul-friends were more spiritual mentors than soul mates, unlike popular uses of the term today.

Eco-friendly? In the prayers of the Irish saints, the natural world was seen as dangerous. The prayers often ask for protection from storms and other dangers. At the same time, the creation does have spiritual significance because it was viewed sacramentally—it pointed beyond itself to spiritual realities. The point is that the Celtic saints believed that nature pointed to supernature, an idea they shared with Christians throughout the world and that they got from writers like Augustine, Cassian, and Eucherius of Lyon.

As far as pagan influences go, we know very little about Celtic paganism, and where there is on-going cultural influence, it isn’t in the places people usually claim to find it. And the Irish saints would have been outraged at the claim that they were in any way maintaining pagan ideas or practices.

So What’s Left?

Still, there are some things that are distinctive about the Irish church that we can identify.

One is its approach to confession of sin and penance, practices which were eventually adopted by the western churches. Related to this is the idea of the soul-friend as a spiritual mentor and confessor.

A second distinctive is the effort it put into learning and scholarship. This was in part a holdover from Irish paganism, which believed priests should be supremely well educated. But it was also a practical necessity, given that the Irish had only a rarely used and very basic form of writing and did not speak Latin or any of the biblical languages.

Another holdover from paganism is the poetic sensibilities in Celtic prayers. Their practice of singing the Psalms also influenced this.

Still another unique element in Irish Christianity is peregrinatio, pilgrimage. This was unlike any other approaches to pilgrimage before or since.

And though it wasn’t unique to them, their sacramental vision of the world is also worth rediscovering, given our disenchanted worldviews and the dangers of dark approaches to reenchantment.

I’ll be looking at these and other elements of Celtic and specifically Irish spirituality in upcoming posts.