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September 2001
Parish History Episode 5
CELTIC CHRISTIANITYChristianity, as we were reminded last month, came to us, like Mithraism, from out of the East. But, unlike Mithraism, the origins of Christianity were firmly rooted in place (Israel) and time (the thirtieth year of Augustus, Emperor), and the new Faith was mediated to other lands and later generations through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, through a fixed, written canon of Scriptures, and through an organised Church. But yet the flavour, if not the essence, of the Faith did tend to vary from land to land, culture to culture, and age to age.
The Church was born in a bilingual situation. The preaching of Jesus, and of His first followers, such as Peter and John in Jerusalem, was in Aramaic, but the written Scriptures were all in Greek. Even in the Acts of the Apostles, we read (in Chapter Six, for instance) of misunderstandings, even the germs of hostility, between “Grecians” and “Hebrews”, and within a century the ethos of Greek and of Semitic churches was very different - and it still is, as can be discovered by attending worship in Greece and in the Lebanon. By A.D. 200, strong Latin-speaking churches were emerging in the West, and Coptic-speaking churches in Egypt, and the Church spoke not only in four different languages, but with four different styles. The Church even spread beyond the Empire. In 301, the Kingdom of Armenia adopted Christianity as its national faith, producing an established Church there a dozen years before Constantine did the same for the Roman Empire. The seventeen hundredth anniversary of this event will be celebrated this month (September, 2001).
Christianity spread also as far as, and beyond, the Western borders of the Empire, and during the Fourth Century, distinct versions of Christian practice began to emerge among such people as the Berbers (in North Africa), the Basques, the Goths, and the Celts. Most of the Berber nation went into schism with the Imperial Church, through adopting an extremely puritanical discipline, that of the Donatists. The Basques tended to assume that the Church should be concerned with problems of social justice, and got mixed up in peasant revolts by enthusiasts known as Bagaudae. The Goths attempted to simplify Trinitarian Christology, and ended up in what was judged to be the Arian heresy.
The Celts, with whom we are more concerned, did not get so involved in movements judged schismatic or heretical. But they certainly put their own stamp on the Christian Faith which they received.
The Church as it existed in Fourth-Century Roman Britain was not really a Celtic Church, in the sense we use here, though it did eventually, just before the collapse of Roman power in Britain, evolve its own special heresy, Pelagianism, which defended Human Free-Will against Augustinian doctrines of Original Sin and Predestination, and did also incline towards views on Social Justice that brought it close to the Bagaudae and the Donatists.
However, the main roots of Celtic Christianity seem to lie not in these islands but on the European mainland, at Tours, in France. A former army officer by the name of Martin had been made Bishop of this city in about 370. Martin may or may not have cut his cloak in half, and given one portion to a beggar, but, when the great emperor Constantine died, in 337, and civil war broke out between his sons, Constans and Constantine II, and they marched their armies against each other, Martin did refuse to fight, on the surprising grounds that it was wrong for Christians to kill one another. He was discharged from the army, and later wandered through the Empire, staying at the incipient monasteries to which Christians, disillusioned with what they perceived to be the inadequacy of the allegedly ethical policies adopted by the newly Christian empire, and bereft of the possibility of martyrdom, were fleeing. These establishments were appearing in the Mediterranean provinces of the Empire, but had not then appeared in Northern Europe. But Martin moved North, and he was elected as Bishop of Tours. Here he set out to practice something of what he had learned in warmer climes.
There were churches within the city of Tours, but the diocese was a large one in area, and the Gospel was hardly preached to the peasants who dwelt in the villages around the city. Martin formed communities of monks, men who did not seek primarily their own salvation through prayer and fasting, but the evangelisation of the peasantry of the countryside, and he himself lived as a monk, and frequently joined in these missionary forays into the surrounding countryside. Soon, some of his monks began to go further afield, even to the Isle of Britain. And then, in 397 (two cen-turies before Augustine landed in Kent, to begin “the Conversion of the English”), Ninian, one of Martin’s monks, sailed to Whithorn in Galloway, beyond the rule of Roman Law, and founded there what might be seen as the first distinctly Celtic Church, with traditions that differed from those of Rome and of the Eastern origins of Christianity.
The most distinctive aspect of the Christianity associated with Martin and with Ninian was that it was monastic: it did not attempt to build cathedrals, or even to form parishes, but relied on the work of wandering monks who moved from place to place, and who sustained the peasantry in their belief, preached to them, and baptised them; and communicated them and absolved them, at least when the monk was also a priest (and by no means all monks were priests). In these practices, the Celtic Church was more akin to some branches of Buddhism than to other forms of Chris-tianity. Jesus founded no monastic orders, but Gautama, the Lord Buddha, did, and the Sangha, Buddhist monasticism, seems always to have been essential to Buddhism, while, except in the Celtic Church of the Dark Ages, it has always been somewhat peripheral to Christianity, however valuable it may have been at times.
In recent years, the fostering of Celtic Spirituality has become a great growth industry, and numerous books on the subject can be found in any good bookshop. Celtic Christianity, we learn from these books, stood for Protecting the Environment, Peace and Justice, Equality between the Sexes, Kindness to Animals, Healthy Living with Plenty of Exercise, and of course No Smoking. This has become the religion of those movements which call themselves “New Age”, and they tend to mix what they perceive as Celtic Christianity in with Eastern religious movements (Yoga, Trans-cendental Meditation, Sufiism, Zen Buddhism) and with astrology and space travel, until they have a religion ideally tailored to their own needs.
But it is not the sort of religion which the Celtic saints would recognise.
Ninian may have been the pioneer, but other missionary monks began to adopt Martin’s methods to evangelise the Christian countryside; then Patrick, one lad so evangelised, carried the Faith across the sea to Ireland; Another such lad, David, tramped through the mountains of what would later be called Wales in order to carry the Word into every last valley; then Irishmen, and Irishwomen, taught by disciples of David, of Patrick, or of Patrick’s friend Brigid, carried the Faith into Scotland, where Columba established himself, on the Isle of Iona, in the middle of the Sixth Century; and from Iona, as we will shortly tell, the Faith moved back into what had by then become England, an ex-Christian land which had reverted to paganism.
Dick Toy
