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The Wild and Woolly West: Early Irish Christianity and Latin Orthodoxy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Brendan Bradshaw
Brendan Bradshaw*
Affiliation:
Queens’ College, Cambridge
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Extract

In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 25: The Churches, Ireland and the Irish , 1989 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Richard Sharpe for much useful comment on this paper, not all of which, unfortunately, I felt able to take to heart.

References

1 Ussher, James, A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British (London, 1631)Google Scholar. Ussher’s thesis, expressed in the dedicatory epistle, is that ‘the religion professed by the ancient bishops, priests, monks and other Christians in this land, was for substance the very same with that which now by public authority is maintained therein against the foreign doctrine brought thither in latter times by the bishop of Rome’s followers’.

2 For a recent example in this tradition see Corish, P. J., The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin, 1985)Google Scholar. Corish provides an admirable survey which, however, is written on the assumption that the history of the ‘Irish Catholic experience’ is equivalent to the history of the Irish Christian experience with the history of Irish Protestantism left out. As an example of the work of the previous generation of Catholic scholars see John Ryan, ‘The Early Irish Church and The Holy See’, Studies 49 (1960), pp. 1-16; 50 (1961), pp. 165-74.

3 A good-humoured exercise in revisionism is provided in Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Visionary Cele The Construction of an Ethnic Preconception’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 11 (1986), pp. 71—96. Similar concerns inform two recent collections of essays, though not all of the contributors adopt the revisionist perspective: ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamund McKit-terick and David Dumville, Ireland in Early Medieval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge, 1982), here in after cited as Hughes Studies; Proinsías Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter, Irland una Europa, die Kirche im Frühmittelalter (Stuttgart, 1984). That the romantic tradition continues to flourish is evident from a number of the contributions to Peter O’Driscoll (ed.). The Celtic Consciousness (Portlaoise and Edinburgh, 1982).

4 See for instance the foreword in Hughes Studies pp. 1-8 at p. 2.

5 The institutional development of the Early Irish Church was unravelled in Kathleen Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society, London, 1066, esp. caps 5-8. For a survey of the long quest for the European source of Celtic Ireland’s monastic ecclesiastical structure see Edward James, ‘Ireland and Western Gaul in the Merovingian Period’ in Hughes Studies, pp. 362-86. The discussion remains highly speculative and inconclusive. It seems that more progress is likely to be made by starting the search elsewhere, namely with the socio-political structures of Early Irish society—which was, of course, the starring point which Kathleen Hughes adopted, e.g. her remark on the ecclesiastical legislation of the Early Irish Church: ‘The job of the seventh-century “Irish” canonists was to apply the native law to the Church. In so doing they produced an Irish Church with a unique constitution’, Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the Sources (London, 1972), pp. 67—80 at p. 77.

6 Venerabilis Bedae Historiae Ecclesiasticae Gentis Anglorum, III, iiii: ‘Habere autem solet ipsa insula lona rectorem semper abbatem presbyterum, cuius iuri et omnis provincia et ipsi etiam episcopi ordine inusitato debeant esse subiecti, iuxta exemplum primi doctorisillius, qui non episcopus sed presbyter et monachus.’ The sixteenth-century English version by Thomas Stapleton reinforces the sense of shock by translating ordine inusitato as ‘strange and unaccustomed order’, ed. Philip Hereford, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London, 1935).

7 For die Patrician texts, i.e. the Confession and die Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus see A. B. E. Hood (ed. and transl.), St. Patrick: His Writings and Muirchú’s Life (London, 1978); for the early hagiography see Ludwig Bieler (ed. and transl.), The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, Institute for Advanced Studies 1979); Whidey Stokes (ed. and transl.), Vita Tripartita, 2 vols, RS (1887); for commentary see Hughes, Sources, pp. 219—47; Eoin MacNeill, Saint Patrick, ed. John Ryan (Dublin 1964); D. A Binchy, ‘Patrick and his Biographers Ancient and Modern’, Studia Hihernica, 2 (1962), pp. 7-173; D. O’Donoghue, ‘The Spirituality of St. Patrick’, Studies, 50 (1961), pp. 152-64; for an interesting parallel with the Hellenic oudook of St Patrick see the remarks on Gregory of Tours in Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1985), pp. 224-9.

8 LudwigBieler, (ed.), LibriEpistolarumSanctiPatriciiEpiscopi (Dublin, 1952)Google Scholar, Confessio, 11,‘Quanto magis nos ad pe tere debeamus, qui sumus, inquit, epistola Christiinsalutem usque ad ultimum terrae.’

9 For a comprehensive account of the emergence of Christianity from Judaism and its development within the cultural and intellectual framework of the Greco-Roman world see W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (London, 1984); for the assimilation of the notion of providence from Stoic philosophy see Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1966), esp. cap. 4; for an exposition of St Augustine’s highly influential ideas on the subject see Markus, R. A., Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, 1970).Google Scholar

10 On St Augustine’s Confession see Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo: a biography (London, 1969), pp. 158–81 Google Scholar. For the affinity noted between Patrick and Augustine see Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, pp. 14—15.

11 See above, note 7.

12 e.g. Breffny, Brian de, In the Steps of St. Patrick (London, 1982), pp. 71–110 Google Scholar. Cf.Bieler, Ludwig, The Life and Legend of St. Patrick (Dublin, 1948), pp. 92–125.Google Scholar

13 The distinction between the priestly and the prophetic traditions of judaism is often made in situating Jesus in the context of Old Testament religion by associating him with the latter tradition.

14 Benedict almost certainly derived his classification, as he derived much else, from Cassian: in this case from Conference xviii, ‘On the Three Sorts of Monks’. The aditional ‘fourth sort’, not provided by the Egyptian Father, is that of the gyrovagus. Although the date at which the Benedictine rule took final form is uncertain there is no doubt that the fourfold typology was part of the original sixth-century version and was central to the Benedictine conception of stability and discipline. While it is true that a number of alternatives to the Benedictine rule were in operation in Gaul in the seventh century what is significant for present purposes is the successful promotion of Benedictinism as the form of monasticism peculiarly associated with the Roman see, most specially through the public approbation accorded to St. Benedict by Pope Gregory the Great in his Dialogue 11. Cassian’s Conference xviii and The Rule of St. Benedict are reproduced in translation in Owen Chadwick, Weslem Asceticism (The Library of Christian Classics 12, London, 1958).

15 The theme is especially prominent in Columban hagiography: the Irish Life opens with an excursus designed to ground the ideal in scripture, Whitley Stokes (ed. and transl.), Lives of lhe Saints from the Book of Lismore (Oxford, 1890), lines 655-1119. See also Hughes, Kathleen, ‘An Irish Litany of Pilgrim Saints compiled c. 800’, An Bol, 77 (1959), p. 321 Google Scholar; idem, ‘The changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage’, JEH 11 (1960), pp. 143-5ÜE. G.Bowen, ‘The Irish Sea in the Age of Saints’, Studia Celtica, 4 (1960), pp. 56-71; T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Social Background to Irish Peregrinado’, Celtica, 11 (1976), pp. 43-59.

16 Quoted in Hughes, ‘Irish Pilgrimage’, p. 143.

17 A sketch of the Celtic itinerant apostolate in action is provided by Bede in his account of St Aidan’s apostolate in the north of England, Ecclesiastical History, 111. v.

18 For a general discussion of pilgrimage see Catholic Encyclopaedia.

19 e.g. Regula Monachorum in Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. and transi. G. S. M. Walker (Dublin, 1957) PP- 122-42;‘Rule of Ailbe’, ed.J. O’Neill, Eriú, 3 (1907), pp. 92-115;‘The Teaching of Máel-Ruain’, ed. E.J. Gwynn, Hermatliena, 44 (2nd supp. vol., 1927), pp. 1-63; ‘Rule of the Celi De’ in ibid., pp. 64-87; John Ryan, Irish Monasticism (Dublin, 1931), section III, passim. Apropos Hughes comments: ‘Irish monasticism had diverged from the common stock before the Benedictine rule spread, and it is more enlightening to compare it with the very early monasticism of the desert, its asceticism, variety of practice and absence of clear legislation are all similar’, Sources, p. 90.

20 However, a recent study convincingly discerns a basic pattern beneath the apparent jumble: Michael Herrity, ‘The layout of Irish early Christian monasteries’, Irland und Europa, pp. 105-116.

21 Sancti Columbani Opera, p. 34 l. 33 (Epistola 111).

22 Martin McNamara, ‘Tradition and Creativity in Early Irish Psalter Study’, Irland und Europa, pp. 338-89;Joseph F. Kelly, ‘Pelagius, Pelagianism and the Early Christian Irish’, Mediaevalia, 6 (1978), 99-124; idem. ‘The Hiberno-Larin Study of the Gospel of Luke’, in Martin McNamara (ed.), Biblical Studies: The Medieval Irish Contribution, pp. 10-29; Brian Grogan, ‘Eschatological Teaching of the Early Irish Church’, in ibid., pp. 46-58.

23 Kelly, ‘Pelagius, Pelagianism and the Early Christian Irish’ which stresses the non-theological nature of the Irish interest in Pelagius. Despite his different concerns Kelly’s findings seem to corroborate die view expressed here of the source of Irish interest in Pelagius. His analysis highlights the idiosyncrasy of the Early Irish exegerical tradition in relation to the Latin mainstream, arising significantly, in part from a preference for St Matthew and the Catholic episdes over against St Paul, Kelly, ‘Hiberno-Larin Theology’, in Heinz Löwe (ed.), Die Iren und Europa in frühen Mittelalter, 2 (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 549-67. For Eriugena see John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Dublin, 1969); ed. John J. O’Meara and Ludwig Bieler, The Mind of Eriugena (Dublin, 1973).

24 Above, note 9. In the formation of a Hellenic-Christian ideal of holiness the spiritual teaching of the early third century Fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, was especially influential, on whom see Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, pp. 31-94.

25 Reeves, W. (ed.). The Life of St. Columba (Dublin, 1857)Google Scholar, Bk. 111, passim.

26 Ibid., Bk.III, cap.23.

27 For examples of the hagiography see Stokes, Whitley (ed.), Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore (Oxford, 1890)Google Scholar; ed. Plummer, C., Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, 2 vols (Oxford, 1910)Google Scholar; ed. Heist, W. W., Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Brussels, 1965)Google Scholar. For commentary see Flower, Robin, The Irish Tradition (Oxford, 1947), pp. 24–66 Google Scholar; Hughes, Sources, pp. 219-47. A recent writer suggests that the stress on radical austerity does not enter the hagiography until the eleventh and twelfth centuries: Peter O’Dwyer, Céli Dé: Spiritual Reform in Ireland 750-900 (Dublin, 1981), p. 60. This is simply not in accordance with the facts. It is, indeed, the case that one tradition within the ‘culdee’ movement of reform represents a reaction against severe asceticism but the evidence points at the same time to a tradition within the reform movement which endorses the radical ascetic ideal, ibid., pp. 68-80, 108-11. Cf. Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, ‘The Spirituality of die Céilí Dé’, in Michael Maher (ed.), Irish Spirituality (Dublin, 1982), pp. 22-32. On the asceticism of the Christian East see Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1982), pp. 103-52,166-95 (the phrase‘ritual of desolidarizarion’occurs on p. 181). On the moderating influence of Hellenism on (eastern) biblical asceticism—a process in which the teaching of Clement of Alexandria and Origen is once more vital—see J. A. McGuckin, ‘Christian Asceticism and the Early School of Alexandria’, SCH 22 (1985), pp. 25-39; for an illuminating case-study of the conflict between Celtic and Hellenic ascetic ideals in the context of a conflict between Celtic and Benedictine monasticism see Julia M. H. Smith, ‘Celtic Asceticism and Carolingian Authority in Early medieval Brittany’, SCH 22, pp. 53-63. On the opposition of Orthodoxy to Eastern asceticism see Frend, The Rise of Christianity, pp. 252-6.

28 Above, pp. 9-10.

29 Godel, W., ‘Irisches Beten im frühen Mittelalten’, Zeitschrift für katolische Theologie, 85 (1963), pp. 61–321, 389–439 Google Scholar; in English translation in Milltown Studies, 4. (1979), 60-99.

30 See Clare Stancliffe, ‘Red, White and Blue Martyrdom’, in Hughes Studies, pp. 21-46. Stancliffe convincingly elucidates the tricolour typology as a distinctively Irish development, which drew upon Patristic ascetic theology. The author makes out a good case for translating the third of the colour terms, glas, as blue in this instance rather than the more usual green. A good case can also be made out for grey but the word seems strictly untranslateable.

31 Bieler, L. (ed. and transl.), The Irish Penitentials (Dublin, 1063)Google Scholar; ed. D. Binchy, ‘The Old-Irish Table of Penitential Commutations’, Ériu, 19 (1962), 47-72. For commentary see Hughes, Sources, pp. 82-9.

32 Quoted Hughes, Sources, p. 84.

33 Ibid., pp. 82-9; O’Dwyer, Céli Dé, pp. 90-5; Ó Fiannachta, ‘The Spirituality of the Céili Dé’, pp. 22-32 at pp. 27-9.

34 Hughes, Sources, pp. 226-9, 232-4. The poem is reproduced in Murphy, Gerard (ed. and transl.). Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford, 1957), pp. 26–9 Google Scholar; O’Dwyer, Peter, Devotion to Mary in Ireland, 700-1100 (Dublin, 1976).Google Scholar

35 Flower, The Irish Tradition, pp. 42-66; O’Dwyer, Célí Dé, pp. 184-91; Myles Dillon, ‘Early Lyric Poetry’ in James Carney (ed.), Early Irish Poetry (Dublin, 1969); Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, pp. xiii-xx.

36 Flower, The Irish Tradition, pp. 63—7.

37 Hughes, Sources, pp. 210-16; Myles Dillon and Nora K. Chadwick. The Celtic Realms (London, 1967)1 PP. 188-96. The most famous example of the genre is, of course, Navigano Sancti Brendani Abbatis, ed. C. Selmer (Notre Dame, 1959).

38 The subject has been illuminatingly analysed from the perspective of religious anthropology in two works by Brown, Peter, The Cult of the Saints (London, 1981)Google Scholar; idem, Society and the Holy in Lale Antiquity (London, 1982). What follows is much indebted to these works.

39 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, pp. 69-85. A fascinating sidelight on the situation depicted by Brown is provided by the early history of the monastery of Redon on the Breton border to which the dissertation of Caroline Brett has recently drawn attention. ‘The Monks of Redon in Ninth Century Brittany: Gesta Sanctorum Rotonensium and Vita Conuuoionis’ (Cambridge PhD. thesis, 1986). The prize relic procured by the monastery was the body of St Marcellinus, pope and martyr, about whose life nothing was then or is now known!

40 Brown, Society and the Holy, pp. 166-95, esp. ‘78 seq. The effect of the arrival of the relics of Pope Marcellinus at Redon was to oust the cult of Bishop Hypotemius, whose body had earlier been stolen by the monks from his patronal church at Angers. Commenting on both episodes Dr Brett remarks on Redon’s ‘lack of confidence in the native saints of Brittany’, p. 387.

41 The advent of Marcellinus at Redon highlights the pervasiveness not only of the cult of relics but specifically the cult of the Roman martyrs. The rise of the relic cult in Late Antique Gaul is analysed in Van Dam, Leadership and Community, pt IV.

42 It is clear that while Ireland was influenced by the relic cult as it pertained to local saints, the cult of the Roman martyrs made very little impact. Dr Richard Sharpe has analysed what looks to have been the crucial episode in the attempt to introduce the classic cult ot the Roman martyrs to Ireland, i.e. as a strategy for promoting the jurisidictional hegemony of the church that possessed the martyrs’ relics. He shows that the attempt to assert a metropolitan primacy for Armagh by the introduction of Roman relics late in the seventh century was abortive. Armagh soon reverted to the traditional claim of a Patrician paruchia comprehending all Ireland, i.e. a claim based on a special assocition with the career of St Patrick rather than on the possession of relics. In fact Armagh did not possess the relics of St Patrick; its claims to a Patrician paruchia were based on tradition: Sharpe, ‘Armagh and Rome in the Seventh Century”, Irland und Europa, pp. 58-72. Cf. Charles Doherty, ‘The use of Relics in Early Christian Ireland’, ibid., pp. 89-101.

43 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, pp. 86-104.

44 Ibid., pp. 23-49.

45 Ibid., pp. 86-127. Cf. Van Dam, Leadership and Community, pp. 230-55.

46 Above pp. 6-9.

47 Above pp. 9-13.

48 Above pp. 14-17.

49 Above pp. 2-6.

50 Above pp. 3-5.

51 Above pp. 14-17.

52 Brown, Cult of the Saints, pp. 113-27.

53 Henry, Françoise, Irish Art in the Early Christian Period to AD 800 (London, 1965)Google Scholar, idem, Irish Art during the Viking invasions, 800-1020 AD (London, 1967); idem, Irish Art in the Romanesque Period, 1020-1170 AD (London, 1970); Hughes, Sources, pp. 259-63.

54 O’Neill, Timothy, The Irish Hand, Scribes and their Manuscripts from the Earliest Times to the Seventeenth Century (Portlaoise, 1984)Google Scholar.

55 Carney, James, ‘The Impact of Christianity’, in Dillon, Myles (ed.), Early Irish Society (Dublin, 1054), pp. 66–78 Google Scholar; M. A. O’Brien, ‘Irish Origin-Legends’, ibid., pp. 36-51; Binchey, D. A., ‘The Background of Early Irish Literature’, Studies, 50 (1961), pp. 1–18 Google Scholar. Cf. Máire Herbert, ‘The Irish Sex Aetates Mundi: First Editions’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 11 (1986), pp. 97-112.

56 Hughes, Sources, pp. 210-16, 219-47. See also n. 37 above. An incidental illustration of the strength of the vernacular is provided by the increasing use of Irish in monastic chronicles over the early medieval period to an extent that substantially anticipates the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which has been regarded as a unique specimen of vernacular usage in Western Europe: David Dumville, ‘Latin and Irish in the Annals of Ulster, AD 431-1050’, Hughes Studies, pp. 320-41.

57 Above, note 35.

58 Hughes, Sources, pp. 77-8, 165-6.

59 Above pp. 9-10.

60 On Eriugena see above, note 23. The assessment of Eriugena’s significance is in O’Meara, Eriugena, p. vii.

61 This is incidentally illustrated by the omission of any discussion of philosophical or theological activities from even the most competent surveys of Early Irish Christian scholarship, e.g. Brian Ó Cuív (ed.), Seven Centuries of Irish Learning, 1000-17000 (Cork, 1971); Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society, cap. 21; idem. Sources, passim. One recent scholar does indeed speak of a tradition of‘Hiberno-Latin theology’ but the reference is to the cultivation of biblical studies:Joseph F. Kelly, ‘Hiberno-Latin Theology’, in Heinz Löwe (ed.), Die Iren und Europa im fröhen Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 549-67. Kelly, in fact, characterizes the approach of the Irish monastic schools to biblical exegesis as ‘non-speculative’. Elsewhere it is characterized as ‘imaginative’: Robert E. McNally, ‘The Imagination and Early Irish Biblical Exegesis’, Annuale Mediaevalia, 10 (1969), pp. 5-27. The juxtaposition of ‘non-speculative’ and ‘imaginative’ highlights an important quality of the cast of mind reflected in the intellectual tradition of Early Christian Ireland.

62 For a devastating critique of the two-tier model as a basis for the interpretation of the religious culture of Christianity see Brown, The Cult of the Saints, pp. 12-22; idem, Society and the Holy, caps 1-3.

63 It may be added that the Judaeo-Christian scriptures for the most part reflect the same cast of thought.

64 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, pp. 119-27 and passim. Brown’s case is strengthened by recent work which demonstrates substantial continuity between the culture of Latin Late Antiquity and that of (barbaric) Early Medieval Europe: Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West, transl. J. J. Contreni (Columbia, South Carolina, 1976).

65 MacNiocaill, Gearóid, Ireland before the Vikings (Dublin, 1972)Google Scholar, caps 1-4; M. A. O’Brien, ‘Irish Origin-Legends’.

66 Brown, The Cult oflhe Saints, cap. 1 and passim; idem, Society ana the Holy, esp. caps 1, 6, 8.