St. Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland
A New Theory about an Old Movement
Note to the reader: I meant to write a short note today but things got out of hand; my editor didn’t have time to work through this one, and so I apologize in advance for the typos.
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The light-haired races place great value on freedom. They are bold and undaunted in battle. Daring and impetuous as they are, they consider any timidity and even a short retreat as a disgrace. They calmly despise death as they fight violently in hand-to-hand combat either on horseback or on foot…they are impetuous and undisciplined in charging, as if they were the only people in the world who are not cowards. They are disobedient to their leaders. They are not interested in anything that is at all complicated and pay little attention to external security and their own advantage. They despise good order, especially on horseback. They are easily corrupted by money, greedy as they are.
The passage here is from the Strategikon, which is a warfighting handbook from the Eastern Roman Empire. It was written in the 6th century, and the “light-haired races” thus described are the Celts.
The Celts are a people. After that solitary admission, scholarly consensus falls apart.
The Celts are, properly speaking, a family of peoples centered in (but not limited to) Europe. They share some elements of ethnicity and culture, but the main thing is they share linguistic roots. “The term Celtic,” wrote JRR Tolkein, “is a magic bag into which anything may be put.”
That about says it.
The Britons and the Picts are Celts, as are the Gauls and the Gaellici; the Galatians, who show up in the Bible, are Celts, and when Julius Caesar butchered a million foes in France and enslaved a million more, it was against the Celts he fought.
Though diverse the Celts were a frightening people. They were, according to the Roman historians, headhunters. An isolated accusation like that might pass for propaganda, but it comes up often enough in the written sources (and in the archeological evidence) that it’s hard to deny. The Celts hung human heads from their horses, nailed them to their dwellings, built skull-poles, learned embalming, and used heads as drinking cups. They were, in some legends, a people of the underworld—the Gauls in particular saw themselves as descendents of “the hidden one,” a king of Hel.
And it was among these that the Gospel spread at an astonishing rate in the 5th century.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day—this evening, a number of people from our church are coming over to hear the story, sing, and worship the Lord Jesus.
If you’re reading this post after March 17th, don’t stop. The Christianization of the Celts of Ireland is an extraordinary story; it bears on our moment in ways that continue to surprise me, and since I’ve got Celts on the brain I thought I’d share some of it with you.
Celtic Christianity is strange. For some time I’ve been hunting for a suitable analogy and I think I’ve finally found one: the Carménère grape.
Honestly.
I learned about the Carménère because I liked Carménère wines in grad school and so I can tell you that the Carménère hails from France (and maybe from Italy before that). It is an ancient and valuable grape and so when in the 19th century a phylloxera plague nearly wiped out the vine enthusiasts were dismayed. For a hundred years, the grape was essentially extinct.
Then, in 1994, a French botanist named Jean Boursiquot made a surprising discovery: On Merlot clippings from Chile, he found Carménère grapes. A further investigation revealed that the vines, which had blithely vinted Merlot wines for a century, were not Merlot vines at all: They were Carménère vines, brought to Chile before the plague, unrecognized, and thriving in exile.
Celtic Christianity is like that: It is an ancient form of Christianity that survived within the blast zone of Medieval Scholasticism and the Protestant Reformation and what came afterward. As a tradition, it is pre-Enlightenment, pre-Scholastic, and very much pre-Modern.
For that reason professionals have had a hard time diagnosing the thing.
For example: Celtic Christianity enshrines both natural theology and severe asceticism. Thus a line attributed to Pelagius, writing around the year 400, could declare:
When God pronounced that his creation was good, it was not only that his hand had fashioned every creature; it was that his breath had brought every creature to life. Look too at the great trees of the forest; look at the wild flowers and the grass in the fields; look even at your crops. God's spirit is present within all plants as well. The presence of God's spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God's eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly.
While at the same time Bede (writing much later) could say of Cuthbert:
Wading into the depths till the waves swelled up to his neck and arms, he kept his vigil through the dark with chanting voices like the sea. As the twilight of dawn drew near, he waded back up the beach, and kneeling there, again began to pray.
Celtic Christianity was, in other words, both celebratory and purgative. It was highly creative, sensuous, and visual, and also rigorous, demanding, and mortifying.
Late Moderns don’t know what to do with that. We want traditions to be either creative or iconoclastic, cerebral or incarnate, and so on. Jesus doesn’t acknowledge those poles. If you examine other early forms of Christianity you’ll find something resembling Celtic Christianity. The Orthodox get it, to a certain degree, as do the Byzantine Catholics, as does the self-described dinosaur CS Lewis, who wrote in The Screwtape Letters:
The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents — or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long rún, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own.
Here is the point: Celtic Christianity seems to be an authentic expression of ancient Christianity, and it’s for that reason Late Moderns cannot come to terms with the thing. It just doesn’t fit our categories.
But it does have a lot to teach us, not because it’s a cultural isolate, but because it isn’t: Celtic Christianity can resource the West because it is an ancient form of Christianity that grew up in and for a long time survived in the West.
A word of warning: I mentioned some of what follows to my friend
at church yesterday and he said it would take a book to explore the propositions here. I’m not going to write that book; I’m writing something else. But I did want to point out four elements of Celtic Christianity that could, with God’s help, resuscitate some local churches today.So let’s get to it.
I. Celtic Christianity was Loving
God is a community of self-offering love and to follow Him is to be drawn up into that love. Examine the Church in the first three centuries and you’ll see that the witness of the martyrs is a witness of extraordinary love. Before Perpetua and Felicity were killed together in AD 203, their small church held a final love feast in prison, proclaiming the good news of Jesus to their captors. More significantly, Perpetua, an elite, and Felicity, a slave, died holding one another as beloved sisters.
Patrick and his team were like that; they loved the Irish. Love pulses in the Confession of Patrick, which says:
If I had been given the same chance as other people, I would not be silent, whatever the reward. If I seem to some to be too forward, with my lack of knowledge and my even slower tongue, still it is written: 'Stammering tongues will quickly learn to speak peace.' How much more should we want to do this, who are, as it is said, a saving letter of Christ even to the ends of the earth.
It is right to spread abroad the name of God faithfully and without fear, so that even after my death I may leave something of value to the many thousands of my brothers and sisters—the children whom I baptised in the Lord.
Under tremendous pressure Patrick said he would do it all again, and he would do it for the sake of his brothers and sisters in Christ; more piercing still, Patrick saw them as his children.
You see that love in other places, too, such as Patrick’s treatment of women, the way his mission entrusted leadership to the locals, the way he opposed violence and welcomed guests. To be sure, though every part of Patrick’s life and work is scrutinized (and criticized) by secular scholars, the testimony of Patrick’s love comes through again and again.
Worldly power cannot do what Patrick and his team did. Only love can. And what they did was this:
We believe there were some Christians, perhaps Christian slaves or traders and their families, already living in Ireland by A.D. 432, but there was no indigenous Irish Christian movement before Patrick. Patrick and his people launched a movement. They baptized "many thousands" of people, probably tens of thousands. Tirechan refers, usually by name, to at least fifty-five churches that Patrick's team planted essentially in the one province of Connacht. The tradition has Patrick engaging in substantial ministry in northern, central, and eastern Ireland, with some forays beyond. An ancient document called the "Annals of the Four Masters" reports that Patrick's mission planted about 700 churches, and that Patrick ordained perhaps 1000 priests. Within his lifetime, 30 to 40 (or more) of Ireland's 150 tribes became substantially Christian.
That’s from The Celtic Way of Evangelism, and the question is, where do you get a love like that?
You follow Jesus.
As you become like him—deliberately, over time—you become a person of love.
That said, it helps to ask. Ask for love for your city. Ask for love for your neighbor. Ask for love for your family. We cannot as individuals muster the sentiments required; we must be plugged into the star-kindling furnace that is God’s interior life. There is no mission, no worship, no nothing without love.
II. Celtic Christianity was Mystical
Gosh was it. For the Celts, God was primordial, powerful, and present. The Scottish theologian John Macquarrie described the Celt’s felt sense of God’s presence this way:
At the very centre of this type of spirituality was an intense sense of presence. The Celt was very much a God-intoxicated man whose life was embraced on all sides by the divine Being. But this presence was always mediated through some finite this-world reality, such that it will be difficult to imagine a spirituality more down-to-earth than this one.
That is remarkable but we can say more. Celtic monasteries, for example, were built to reflect sacred geography. Power evangelism, a go-to for the apostles, was a dominant strategy. When the Christians arrived in a new town, they’d ask, “Anybody sick? Anybody possessed? Any local religious leader interested in a showdown?”
It happened over and over again, and it’s interesting that we’ve been talking about warfare here on this ‘stack, because offensive spiritual warfare was an unmistakable element in Patrick’s missionary strategy. You don’t always get that in the autobiographies but it comes through in the tradition: In the Bethu Phátraic Patrick is attacked by a flock of black demonic birds; in the end he sends them to the hollow of demons with a bell (more on that some other time). In another story Patrick struggles with a chaos serpent called Caorthannach. In another story Patrick tells a miserly innkeeper that her sin is feeding a demon who lives in the cellar, fat on greed. She reforms and the demon eventually flees.
Some other time we may talk about the hermeneutics of legends; for now, it is enough to say that Patrick’s way of doing church was preserved and transmitted in stylized accounts that point to real practices.
(Note: I mean, if you can’t see the spiritual undertones of that “driving the snakes out of Ireland” story I don’t know what to say.)
What you see in those accounts is that Patrick’s missionary movement took warfare seriously and that they stayed on the offensive.
But it’s not just warfare. It’s primarily about an encounter with the Living God.
The ascetic practices, the fasts, the nights standing in salt water, the extraordinary prayers, the feasts, the art, the trades, all of it only makes sense if the world is charged with the power of a God you can encounter.
It was just so different. The druids kept their practices secret; the ogham stones were for the elect; kings went down into the burial mounds alone.
Not so with the Lord Jesus. Discipleship was and is for everyone. In the 5th century God’s presence in and care for the ordinary hit the Irish like an acetylene torch hitting a haystack.
III. Celtic Christianity was Incarnational
The mystical and the incarnational are two sides of the same coin, because the physical world is sustained by and a channel of God’s supernatural power and so embodied practices are a means of spiritual grace. In fact, as Christianity becomes more mystical, it also becomes more incarnational. Of the Celts, the scholar Thomas O’Loughlin writes:
Running through a number of texts is the awareness of the body as the focus of human existence, not subordinate to the mind in a tortuous relation of subjection and culpability, but thematized as the locus of penance, where penance itself is not self-inflicted mutilation but the reception of new life and the beginning of the transformation that leads to glory.
That sounds a lot like incarnational discipleship, and it went beyond the body. The Celts built monasteries, and in those monasteries they made art, copied books, maintained workshops, kept gardens, chanted the Psalms, wrote songs, cut stone and in a thousand ways modeled a spirit-empowered life. It is just so physical.
I mean, look at the findings: Ian Bradley—criticizing his own earlier work on Celtic Christianity—notes that among the sources on Celtic Christianity we can find the Ardagh Chalice, the Athlone Crucifix, the Tara brooch, the Derrynaflan hoard, the Cathach of St. Columba, the Book of Durrow, the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, various masses, prayers, poems, and stories (too many to include here), as well as monastic rules and penitential guides.
Do you see the point? The Celtic Christians left behind artifacts that bear upon every part of human life: the trades, worship, history, time, space, all of it. In fact, one thing that makes Celtic Christianity look so much like other ancient forms of Christianity is that it offers a tangible alternative vision for human life.
By the way, they made that alternative vision explicit. The Alphabet of Devotion, attributed to Colmán and hailing from the seventh century, describes Christian life this way:
Faith with action, desire with constancy, calmness with devotion, chastity with humility, fasting with moderation, poverty with generosity, silence with discussion, distribution with equality, endurance without grievance, abstinence with exposure, zeal without severity, gentleness with justice, confidence without neglect, fear without despair, poverty without pride, confession without excuse, teaching with practice, progress without slipping, lowliness towards the haughty, smoothness towards the rough, work without grumbling, simpleness with wisdom; humility without partiality.
(Note: One interesting sign that affirms a tangible alternative vision for human life is the presence of female converts, including some Irish gentry who made waves when they became nuns. When Christianity incarnates an alternative lifestyle, it attracts women. In fact, whether or not women want to join your church has always been a kind of Christian acid test. In many places Celtic Christianity passed that test: it honored women.)
IV. Celtic Christianity was Demanding
If St. Patrick or any of his descendants—Aidan, say, or Columba—rolled into your town tomorrow, they would have a go-for-broke plan to transform your city. For the Celts, as for many other forms of Christianity, faith in Jesus was a public faith: it made definite claims on the organization of life, including corporate life.
For that reason, Patrick and his team would go straight for the king or the ollam or some other thought leader. They’d have a conversation or a debate or an outright test of spiritual power—those confrontations appear again and again in the record. Whether or not that person surrendered to Jesus, Patrick and his team would have a plan to set up shop. They’d establish a center of operations—in the best cases, a monastery, at bare minimum, a house—and they’d have plans to create a church.
In the meantime, Patrick and his team would serve unto cultural renewal. Christianity has always had an eye on the redemption of the trades and so it is no accident that Christianity birthed both the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. The Celtic Christians—together with their early Christian counterparts—saw ordinary life as a legitimate domain for spiritual transformation. One place you can see that is in the famous Carmina Gadelica, the prayer book collected by Alexander Carmichael. The Carmina is chock-full of ordinary prayers: prayers for lighting the fire, doing the chores, leaving on a journey, welcoming guests. It’s the Every Moment Holy of Celtic Christianity, and in it you see a remarkable conviction: There is no domain too small to consecrate.
At the same time, the Celtic monastic rule of life was—there is no other word—extreme.
The penances were brutal, the fasts were long, the hair-shirts were itchy, flagellations were a thing. A lot of that goes too far and it is foolish to argue otherwise.
At the same time, it is a fact that insipid Christianity changes no one. When it comes to moves of God; love-motivated consecration is the name of the game and if you study history you will see a reliable intensity in the life of every miracle-working and impactful person. Martin Luther, for example. was known to pray three hours a day. And he didn’t mess around—of his prayers his friend Viet Detrich made the following report:
One time l had the opportunity to hear him praying. Good God, what spirit, what faith was in his words! He prayed for things with such reverence — as befits God — and with such hope and faith that he seemed to be holding a conversation with a father or a friend. "I know," he said, "that you are our Father and God. Therefore I am sure that you will destroy the persecutors of your children. If you do not do this, the result will be disaster for us. The whole affair is yours. We are constrained to implore you for this. Therefore, defend us, and so on." I was standing nearby and heard him praying in a clear voice using words to that effect. My soul was set on fire with such a singular passion to hear him speak with God in such a friendly, serious, and reverent manner. And throughout the prayer he interjected psalms, so that he was quite certain that everything for which he prayed would come about.
You can find the same thing with any great mover or shaker or reformer.
According to Adomnán, Columba ‘could not spend even a single hour without attending to prayer or reading or writing.’ Patrick wrote in his autobiographical Confessio that in one day he would say around a hundred prayers and nearly the same number during the night and that ‘come hail, rain or snow, I was up before dawn to pray’...Rhigyfarch's Life of David portrays the monks in David's monastery spending three hours every evening after their meal in ‘vigils, prayers and genuflections. Rising at cockcrow, they apply themselves to prayer and genuflections and spend the rest of the night till morning without sleep.’
Together with their early Christian—and passionately Christian—counterparts, the Celts were demanding in the extreme not because they had lost the plotline but because they are loving and mystical and incarnational. Jealous love demands a loving response and Christianity isn’t brunch; this is war, baby.
By the way, that doesn’t mean there’s no space for gentleness. To the contrary, it means that gentleness leads a person, little by little, into a life of consecration for which there are clear and alluring examples. Isn’t it the kindness of God that leads to repentance?
We could continue down this road but by now I hope you see the takeaways:
1. In a time of virulent hatred we are called to cultivate uncompromising enemy love by anchoring our lives in the Jesus who is Love.
2. In a time of re-enchantment we are called to cultivate a specifically Jesus-centered mystical vision.
3. In a time of deincarnation, AI, and transhumanism, we are called to cultivate incarnational discipleship.
4. In a time of apathy and apostasy, where the ranking economic and social doctrine is “easy everywhere” we are called to something hard; we are called, moreover, to compete, directly and on purpose, for the destiny of our city.
In that work we have a clear example: the Church, everywhere She is healthy, every time She stewards Her commission, in every place Christ is King.
Including among the Celts.
Behold the Lightener of the stars
On the crests of the clouds,
And the choralists of the sky
Lauding Him.
Coming down with acclaim
From the Father above,
Harp and lyre of song
Sounding to Him.
Christ, Thou refuge of my love,
Why should not I raise Thy fame!
Angels and saints melodious
Singing to Thee.
Thou Son of the Mary of graces,
Of exceeding white purity of beauty,
Joy were it to me to be in the fields
Of Thy riches.
Christ my beloved,
O Christ of the Holy Blood,
By day and by night
I praise Thee.
“The Lightener of the Stars,” from the Carmina Gadelica
Amen
Loved this.