From Fifth Avenue to Dorchester Heights, this St. Patrick’s Day will feature traditional Uilleann pipers and Irish dancers; in Chicago, the river will be dyed green, and in Washington DC, the Taoiseach will present the President with a Waterford crystal filled with clovers. We’ll also see more kitschy pairings, from “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirts to grown adults dressing up as leprechauns.
Clergy have expressed concern that secular revelry obscures the religious significance of what is, after all, a holy day. Father Ryan Jones, an Episcopal priest at the Eucharistic Church of San Francisco, wrote last year that although he had long dismissed the holiday as “an excuse for people to rant about green beer or talk about leprechauns and four-leaf clovers,” he came to view St. Patrick’s Day as a “powerful way to embody the Gospel.” For Jones, his appreciation for the saint was instilled in the community of which he is a member, an ecumenical brotherhood named after a two-kilometre-long island, with a population of just over a hundred, located in the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of the island. Scotland.
Iona is the true navel of Celtic Christianity. With its rocky coasts and small green hills clustered within its small interior, the island of Iona was where the Irish abbot St. Columba established his monastery in the 6th century, a community for monks who produced illuminated manuscripts in their scriptorium to the rhythm of the daily liturgy, living a life of prayer and contemplation before being buried under the many stone Celtic crosses that still line the banks. Columba never met the more famous Patrick, but the founding of Iona testifies to the latter’s piety.
Ironically, it was Columba’s grandfather, the pagan king Nial, who was responsible for Patrick’s kidnapping, an event that marked the beginning of the saint’s ministry in Ireland. Today, both Patrick and Columba are among Ireland’s dozen canonized disciples, although beyond even this honorary title, both are remembered as exemplars of “Celtic Christianity”, a version of faith drawn towards the natural, the mystical, the eternal. Meditating on the lapping of the icy Irish sea against the black rocks of Iona, Columba imagined a community dwelling in the midst of the ineffable, dedicated to the “unbegotten/who were without origin”, as the monk wrote in the one of the two existing poems, “at the beginning and the foundation/which is and will be in infinity/of ages of ages.
Where Latin Christianity was hierarchical, Celtic Christianity was individualistic; since the former preached dominion over creation, the latter saw humanity as integrated In nature; when the first was abjectly patriarchal, the second was resolutely oriented towards the divine feminine. An anticlerical Christianity which favors not priests, but parishioners. Since 1938, the ecumenical community of Iona has held retreats at the restored abbey, devoting themselves to the values embodied by Columba.
West of Presbyterian Scotland, north of Methodist Wales and east of Catholic Ireland, Iona was believed to be the birthplace of a different type of Christianity: an egalitarian, progressive and visionary faith in opposition to religion as it evolved. In The Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, J. Phillip Newell movingly writes that this is a tradition that has “important contributions to make today”, where there can be spiritual renewal based on the “relationship of this ancient faith to the Bottom of Life, He from whom all things come. .” The only problem is that there is no historical evidence before the contemporary era of a movement called Celtic Christianity that was distinct from the Roman Church. Yet whether Celtic Christianity is “real” or not does not mean that it has nothing to teach us.
Caitlin Corning explains in Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church that, although at one time historians may have had a romantic attachment to the idea, more recently “scholars have abandoned the term Celtic Church, believing that it was too closely associated with inaccurate ideas”. However, as his study makes clear, the general public is in no way allergic to this constructed story given that “a quick Internet search produces an abundance of links to Celtic spirituality seminars, sites detailing “the ‘history’ of the Celtic Church and Celtic Christian denominations. Among the general public there is an enthusiasm for a so-called Celtic Church and the belief that at some time in the distant past – perhaps when Patrick evangelized the tribes of Erin – there was the possibility of a radically different form of faith from that which many have come to know.
Regardless of the evidence, there has been a tendency to understand medieval Celtic Christianity as more mystical, more open-minded, more contemplative; to examine the complex knots and colorful illustrations of the luminescent Book of Kells or to think of Patrick’s prayer in which “I rise today/By the strength of heaven” is perhaps to encounter a faith that seems naturally distinct from the dry scholasticism and harsh rules of orthodoxy, even if this faith is more imaginary than real.
And yet, despite some expected variations between Celtic Christianity and the rest of European Christianity, there is no substantial theological difference between the Roman Catholic Church of the time and its Irish, Scottish, and Welsh believers. Until the Synod of Whitby in 664, the biggest divide in Christianity between how it was practiced in the Atlantic Archipelago (what most call the British Isles) and in Rome concerned the calculation of the date of Easter ( the first timed it with Passover, as the Orthodox say). do again). There were other differences as well, including the style of tonsure, or haircut, worn by Irish monks, but otherwise the faith as Christians in northwest Europe believed was essentially the same as that promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the same Christianity as that of Rome.
The idea that Celtic Christianity was uniquely different from, perhaps even in opposition to, Roman Christianity has an enduring and sometimes contradictory history. Ironically, one of the earliest examples of this phrase comes from George Buchanan, a 16th-century conservative Scottish Presbyterian minister who argued that the separate existence of a historic Celtic Church invalidated papal supremacy in those countries, even though it would be no doubt dismayed. how is the term today most often associated with druidic quasi-pagans or fans of Enya.
The 20th century novelist James Joyce, a critic of colonialism and nationalism who would no doubt be scorned by someone like Buchanan, also alluded to the need for a separate and muscular Celtic Christianity, distinct from the Irish Catholic Church conservative, describing his native land in Ulysses as being “the servant of two masters…(the) British Imperial State…(and) the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church”. More recently, as evidenced by the vibrant community of Iona, Celtic Christianity has provided an ecumenical framework that allows its followers to transcend often bloody sectarian differences, to move beyond the categories of Catholicism and Protestantism.
Ian Bradley in Celtic Christianity: Creating Myths and Pursuing Dreams explains that today the myth of a Celtic Church attracts “New Agers, post-modernists, liberals, feminists and (and) environmentalists”. While it is true that many of these groups’ stories about their own origins are mythical – as with any religion, faith or sect – the mythic has always had a purpose: to generate a usable story, a useful fiction. While Arnold J. Toynbee in the second volume of his historical work A study of history describes an “abortive Christianity in the Far West of the “Celtic fringe””, it is more accurate to speak of a alternate Christianity, an idea more mythical than reality.
Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity persists in many forms, from a community like Iona to the shelves of New Age bookstores. Bradley argues that while the idea of a historic Celtic Church may be an exercise in “wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all sorts of dreams about what should and could be”, it is also a “vehicle for through which people pursued their dreams.” …of a deeper spirituality, of a gentler and “greener” Christianity and of simpler and more open ecclesial structures. The point therefore is not that there is little evidence for the existence of a schismatic Celtic Church in the past, but much more importantly: that there is a Celtic church now whose values go against the patriarchal, colonialist and essentialist style of Christianity so widespread throughout the world.
Bradley’s observation is instructive, as contemporary believers in Celtic Christianity are interested in what “should and could be.” Whether or not historiography records a Celtic Church in the past, the faithful can build a Celtic Church in the future, where the work of establishing such a community can continue. Questioning his students about what draws them to the idea of a Celtic church, Bradley reports that such an idea offers them a sense of ecological stewardship and place, a respect for creation and nature, an embrace of completeness and mystery, and a “rather poetic atmosphere”. than a rational approach to faith.
With this in mind then, perhaps today we do not need doxologies and theologies, beliefs and canons, but rather sentiments, sentiments and perspectives. Some poetry. Consider this apocryphal story of Saint Patrick preaching to the chiefs and druids of Ireland, first told by Caleb Threlkeld in 1727, in which it was said that “by this three-leaved herb he emblematically expounded to them the mystery of the Holy Trinity. » There is no doubt that Patrick’s reasons were entirely orthodox, but the act itself – in its vaguely pagan commitment to tradition, community and nature – was pure poetry. It is a parable that still has much to teach contemporary Christians.
