Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- A note on pronunciation
- A note on the Chronicle of Ireland
- Introduction
- 1 Ireland in the seventh century: a tour
- 2 Irish society c. 700: I. Communities
- 3 Irish society c. 700: II Social distinctions and moral values
- 4 Ireland and Rome
- 5 Conversion to Christianity
- 6 The organisation of the early Irish Church
- 7 Columba, Iona and Lindisfarne
- 8 Columbanus and his disciples
- 9 The Paschal controversy
- 10 The primatial claims of Armagh, Kildare and Canterbury
- 11 The origins and rise of the Uí Néill
- 12 The kingship of Tara
- 13 The powers of kings
- 14 Conclusion
- Appendix: genealogies and king-lists
- Glossary: Irish and Latin
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The organisation of the early Irish Church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- A note on pronunciation
- A note on the Chronicle of Ireland
- Introduction
- 1 Ireland in the seventh century: a tour
- 2 Irish society c. 700: I. Communities
- 3 Irish society c. 700: II Social distinctions and moral values
- 4 Ireland and Rome
- 5 Conversion to Christianity
- 6 The organisation of the early Irish Church
- 7 Columba, Iona and Lindisfarne
- 8 Columbanus and his disciples
- 9 The Paschal controversy
- 10 The primatial claims of Armagh, Kildare and Canterbury
- 11 The origins and rise of the Uí Néill
- 12 The kingship of Tara
- 13 The powers of kings
- 14 Conclusion
- Appendix: genealogies and king-lists
- Glossary: Irish and Latin
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In a celebrated passage of his Ecclesiastical History Bede described the position of Iona within the Church as follows:
This island, however, is accustomed to have an abbot in priest's orders as its head, so that both the entire province and also the bishops themselves are required, by an unusual ordering of affairs, to be subject to his authority. This is in accordance with the example of Iona's first teacher, who was not a bishop but a priest and a monk.
This short description is one of the principal sources of the idea that the early Irish Church, as a whole, was peculiarly monastic. Yet Bede himself was writing about a particular province to which Iona belonged; and by ‘province’ he usually meant a kingdom or major segment of a kingdom. It would certainly not be a plausible interpretation of his words to say that by ‘province’ he meant the entire island of Ireland together with those parts of Britain colonised by the Irish. Still more unreasonable would be the notion that Bede's description applied to the British Church as well as to the Irish, and that it constitutes a central piece of
evidence for that entity – beloved of modern sectarians and romantics, but unknown to the early Middle Ages – ‘the Celtic Church’.
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- Early Christian Ireland , pp. 241 - 281Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000