Celtic Christianity by Timothy J. Joyce, OSB

We are coming up upon the feast of St. Patrick next week, and later this summer Margaret and I will be heading back to the Emerald Isle for a six-week visit, this one primarily in the southwest quadrant. Margaret passed along an extraordinary history, Celtic Christianity [1998], by the Benedictine monk Thomas J. Joyce. The author had good reason to undertake this research, for Ireland was something of a bulwark in the founding and development of the monastic life. I would add that this is an eminently readable text; even if history was “not your thing,” you would find this book captivating, and it still sells briskly on Amazon in its third decade.
 
Ireland did not begin with Patrick. There was a bishop in Ireland when Patrick arrived. In fact, the forces which shaped modern Ireland go back much further to the demographic populace known as “the Celts.” Joyce explains the historical emergence of “a Celtic people” through similarities to other peoples centuries before Christ. The word “Celt” comes from the Greek vocabulary, surprisingly, on its spread westward to Gaul. In his treatment of the Gallic Wars, Joyce records Julius Caesar’s depiction of the Celts as “a fierce and worthy enemy, though inevitably inferior to the military and political prowess of Ceasar and Rome.” [p. 2]
 
The Celts eventually settled the future lands of Scotland, Wales, England, and most of the Island of Ireland itself. They brought with them a way of living and thinking that distinguished them from other peoples and were quite distinct from the Roman West. For starters, Celtic culture unfolded in a curious marriage of the “fine arts” with the warrior’s strength. This is not surprising in retrospect when one considers that Celts had absorbed something of the Greek aesthetic and the Roman ars militaris. Celts were poets, story tellers, musicians, and for want of a better word, naturalists. By the same token, Celts were warriors. The Roman army in Caesar’s day wanted nothing to do with them, and in succeeding centuries the Celts settled in a variety of sites, including Scotland, Wales—and England itself—until the Angles and Saxons established a permanent beach head around the fifth century in what is now modern-day England.
 
Joyce observes that Ireland was “never taken seriously as a people of import” [p. 6] by the continental mainland. He speculates that Irish culture’s development was quite foreign to the centralized Roman Empire before and after continental Europe became “Christianized.” Celtic Irish society was tribal, small clusters of families who periodically fought each other while maintaining a unifying consciousness of a spiritual world manifested in nature and the affective side of the human experience. Their local leaders were known as Druids, who served as judges, philosophers, and teachers who maintained some concept of an immortal soul. Ireland did not develop cities or a national sense or organization until the Middle Ages.
 
Which of course leads to the question of how Ireland gained its reputation as the most Catholic country in Europe. Christianity came to Ireland from Gaul [France] through England. France accepted Christianity early, before 200 A.D., and by 400 A.D. the Christian faith was growing throughout Ireland. In fact, there seemed to be little or no struggle in the island’s conversion because the richness of the Celtic tradition meshed so well with Christian spirituality, particularly in mystical teachings on the Trinity—that God is triune—and the role of Jesus as perfect expression of the Father’s love. Celtic life, as we have seen, was already open to the mystical experience of “the other side.”
 
However, isolated as it was from Europe, Ireland was not represented nor was it prepared for the sacred councils of Nicaea [325 A.D.], Ephesus [432 A.D.], and Chalcedon [451 A.D.], the councils that formally shaped our most basic doctrines as found in the Nicene Creed [professed at every Sunday Mass].  Ireland, of course, received the Creed without objection, but its Celtic soul contributed to a different sort of reception. The Irish believed strongly that human beings were created by the Father from an excess of love, which led to a belief in the innate goodness of humanity and the need to respond in a lifestyle of love and sacrifice.
 
Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the development of monasteries as early as the sixth century. The monastery became the civil and spiritual center of Irish Christian life. This is not to say that everyone became a monk; the austerity of the monastery may have been the longing of many but only for hardy souls. Monks were known as “white martyrs” because they gave up their lives, so to speak, without spilling their blood. Monasteries were the geographic centers of the Irish Church until the early Middle Ages. Ireland had no cities to speak of, and the monasteries centered the Irish Church in place of dioceses and cathedrals in continental Europe.
 
Monastic spirituality, on the other hand, inspired the religious identity and practice of Irish Catholics who were well disposed by Celtic tradition. The Irish world view was mystical and therefore embraced a more joyful cosmic picture of human nature. In addition, the development of Christianity in Ireland seems to have absorbed little, if anything, of St. Augustine until recently. On the continent, Christianity in Western Europe was strongly influenced by St. Augustine [354-430 A.D.]. The absence of Augustinian influence in Ireland is a crucial factor to remember.
 
As Catholic Frequency puts it,
 
Known as the “Doctor of Grace,” Augustine’s legacy is deeply tied to his theological explorations of grace, sin, and human nature. His articulation of original sin—that humanity inherits a flawed nature from Adam’s fall—revolutionized Christian doctrine and provided a framework for understanding the necessity of divine redemption. Works like Confessions, a raw and introspective account of his spiritual journey, resonate with readers across centuries for their honesty and psychological depth, while City of God offered a bold defense of Christianity amid the collapse of the Roman Empire, framing history as a struggle between divine and earthly cities.
 
We can add to this description that Augustine defined original sin and the essential corruption of humanity, which was hardly in sync with the Celtic Christianity of divine optimism in human creation. The labors of Irish monastic spirituality were not desperate measures to avoid hell, but what I would call “labors of love.” Ironically, our Sacrament of Penance emerged from the Irish monasteries. The monks ended each day with a “chapter of faults,” a sort of clearing the air before retiring. The abbot would then bless the community with a general forgiveness. Given the close relationship of monks and laity, this personal recognition of offenses was extended to the laity and then to the personal and confidential exchange we call “confession.” Soon the monks compiled books of sins and misdeeds which still survive in museums and reference libraries today. I reviewed a book on the penitentiaries in 2005—so long ago—and you can see how my understanding of Irish practice has evolved over a quarter century.
 
Celtic Christianity is much richer than I have described here to this point, and I encourage you to consider reading Father Timothy’s Celtic Christianity for more detail than I have provided here. As the second millennium began, outside forces of multiple varieties exercised influence on the direction of the island. The Vikings were a major intrusion with their infamous long ship raids, particularly against an island like Ireland. But eventually many Vikings stayed and settled the land. River ports took on greater importance. Cities such as Dublin and Galway began to emerge.
 
But in terms of Irish religious life, it was the papacy itself, beginning in the eleventh century, which worked to bring Ireland in line with European practice. During that century popes saw the monastic life in Europe, and consequently Ireland, as the great hope to restore Western European Catholicism. The French monk Hildebrand was elected to the papacy as [St.] Gregory VII, who among his many reforms [see here] worked to unify and purify monasticism in line with the Rule of St. Benedict, written six centuries before. Ireland’s situation prompted Gregory and his successors to strengthen the diocesan/parish structure over the longstanding rule of Irish monasteries. [Dublin, for example, built its first cathedral in the 1200’s, late by medieval standards.] Second, the Gregorian reform worked to restrict the independence of women monastics in favor of a more cloistered existence. Women’s and men’s monastery structures often physically coexisted prior to the Gregorian era. An interesting sidebar: a comparable situation regarding men/women religious arose in the early 1200’s when St. Clare and her religious sisters wished to work side by side with male Franciscan friars in Italy to help the poor, having been followers of St. Francis of Assisi. After Francis’ death, the “Poor Clares” were strictly cloistered by the pope. The male friars were not. [A fascinating read is Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance [2016] by Catherine M. Mooney.]
 
The third reform issue was more subtle but very real. By the medieval era, the Western Roman Church had embraced the old Roman organizational principle of order and society. This included adherence to philosophical/theological principles. Western Europe was solidly Augustinian in its view of man as a fallen being, cursed from the beginning by original sin. Rome believed that Irish theology was too independent and dangerously close to heresy, specifically Pelagianism, which at the very least was much less pessimistic than Augustinianism.
 
At this juncture I will need to wrap up our journey for the moment and pick it up soon with the last five hundred years of Celtic Irish Christianity—a period of tragic suffering for Catholic Ireland which included English suppression, famine, and wholesale emigration.