Celtic Christianity

The Celtic Cross in Knock, Ireland.

Celtic Christianity or Insular Christianity refers broadly to the Christianity of Britain and Ireland before and during the sub-Roman period of the Early Middle Ages, when the Roman withdrawal and the Anglo-Saxon invasion reduced contact with Continental Europe. It may be distinguished by its organisation around monasteries rather than dioceses and by traditions differing from those of the greater Christian world, most notably with respect to the monastic tonsure and the date of Easter. Its rituals are now almost completely lost, though two books, the Bobbio and the Stowe Missals, contain the Irish Ordinary of a daily Mass in late, Romanized form.

The term "Celtic Church" is deprecated by many historians as it implies a unified and identifiable entity entirely separate from the mainstream of Western Christendom. Others prefer the term "Insular Christianity". As Patrick Wormald explained, “One of the common misconceptions is that there was a ‘Roman Church’ to which the ‘Celtic’ was nationally opposed.” Celtic-speaking areas were part of Latin Christendom as a whole at a time in which there was significant regional variation of liturgy and structure with a general collective veneration of the Bishop of Rome that was no less intense in Celtic areas.

Nonetheless, it is possible to talk about the development and spread of distinctive traditions, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries. Some elements may have been introduced to Ireland by the Briton St. Patrick, later others spread from Ireland to Britain with the Irish mission system of Saint Columba. The histories of the Irish, Welsh, Scots, Breton, Cornish, and Manx Churches diverge significantly after the eighth century (resulting in a great difference between even rival Irish traditions).

History

Britain

Christianity reached Britain by the third century of the Christian era, the first recorded martyrs in Britain being St. Alban and Aaron and Julius, citizens of Carlisle, during the reign of Diocletian. Gildas dated the faith's arrival to the latter part of the reign of Tiberius.

Christianisation intensified with the legalization of the religion under Constantine in the early 4th century and its promotion by subsequent Christian emperors, but in 407 the Empire withdrew its legions from the province to defend Italy from Visigothic attacks in which the city of Rome would be sacked in 410. The legions did not permanently return to Britain, Roman tax and army influence ended on the isle and, with the decline of Roman imperial political influence, Insular Christianity retained distinct traditions and practices through the era of Church Councils. Clerics such as Germanus of Auxerre accused some British bishops of the heresy of Pelagianism and sought their removal from office.

According to hagiographies written some centuries later, Illtud and his pupils David, Gildas, Paul Aurelian, Samson and Deiniol from the next generation, were leading figures in sixth-century Britain. Some of them were also active in Brittany. Others who influenced the development of British Christianity include Dubricius, Cadoc, Petroc, Piran, Ia and Kentigern (also known as Mungo).

A monastery-centred establishment seems to have grown up in sixth-century Britain, though our knowledge of this period there is limited. There may have been interaction with Ireland at this time, perhaps partly brought about by a very severe plague in Ireland in 548/9, only a few years after the extreme weather events of 535–536. However, Bede speaks of "the monastery of Bangor, in which, it is said, there was so great a number of monks, that the monastery being divided into seven parts, with a superior set over each, none of those parts contained less than three hundred men, who all lived by the labour of their hands."

Saint John, evangelist portrait from the Book of Mulling, Irish, late 8th century

At the end of the 6th century, the face of Christianity in Britain was forever changed by the Gregorian mission. In this endeavor, Pope Gregory I sent a group of clerics headed by the monk Augustine to covert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and to establish new churches and dioceses in their territory. Gregory intended for Augustine to become the metropolitan archbishop over all of southern Britain, including over the bishops already serving among the Britons. Augustine met British bishops in a series of conferences in which he attempted to assert his authority and persuade them to abandon certain customs that conflicted with Roman practice. However, these conferences failed to reach any agreement.

The only surviving account of Augustine's meetings with the British clergy is that in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum of the Northumbrian writer Bede. According to Bede, some bishops and other representatives of the nearest province of the Britons met Augustine at a location at the border of the Kingdom of Kent, which was thereafter known as Augustine's Oak. Augustine tried to convince the delegates to join his proselytizing efforts, and to reform certain of their customs, particularly their Easter computus. Though impressed with the newcomer, the Britons asserted that they could not agree to his demands without conferring with their people. They then withdrew until a fuller assembly could be arranged.

Bede relates an anecdote that the British bishops consulted a wise hermit as to how to respond to Augustine when he arrived for the second council. The hermit replied that they should make the decision based on Augustine's own conduct. If he should rise to greet them at the council, they would know him as a humble servant of Christ and should submit to him, but if he arrogantly kept his seat, they should reject him. As it happened, Augustine did not rise at the council, causing outrage. Augustine offered to allow the Britons to maintain most of their customs if they made three concessions: they should adopt the Roman method of calculating Easter's date, reform their baptismal rite, and join the missionary efforts among the Saxons. The Britons rejected all of these, and, adds Bede, refused to recognize Augustine's authority over them. Bede reports that Augustine is said to have then delivered a prophecy that the British church's failure to proselytize the Saxons would bring them war and death at their hands. He gives the Battle of Chester in 616, at which two hundred or more British clergy were said to have been killed by the pagan King Æthelfrith of Northumbria, as the fulfillment of this prophecy.

Thereafter, "Celtic" customs were often seen as conflicting with the Roman customs adopted in most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The most significant contention was over the Easter dating, which of all the points of disagreement would have produced the most obvious signs of disunity for observers. Under the two systems Easter did not generally coincide, and as such it would be matter of course for Christians following one system to be solemnly observing Lent while others were celebrating the feast of the Resurrection. Indeed, this is noted as occurring in the household of King Oswiu of Northumbria, whose kingdom had been evangelized by both Irish and Roman missionaries. The other custom that consistently drew the ire of adherents to Roman custom was the Celtic tonsure. There is no indication that Augustine himself raised this issue, but it does appear in several other sources, which invariably connect it to the Celtic dating for Easter. John Edward Lloyd suggests that the primary reason for the British bishops' rejection of Augustine, and especially his call for them to join his missionary effort, may have been his claim to sovereignty over them. It may have been difficult for them to accept the supremacy of a see so deeply entwined with the power of Anglo-Saxon Kent.

A sense of the independent apostolic succession of the British church endured in the Norman era as the claim that Christianity in Britain had been founded by Saint Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury and that King Arthur, supposedly buried in Glastonbury Abbey, had been the sole upholder of the faith after the fall of Rome. The legend that Jesus himself visited Britain is referred to in "And did those feet in ancient time," by William Blake in 1804, and in the hymn "Jerusalem", with music written by C. Hubert H. Parry in 1916. Such ideas were used by mediaeval anti-Roman movements such as the Lollards and followers of John Wyclif.

Ireland

St. Patrick, Apostle to the Irish

See also: Christianity in Ireland

By the early fifth century the religion had spread to Ireland, which had never been part of the Roman Empire, establishing a unique organization around monasteries rather than episcopal dioceses. The highly successful 5th century mission of Saint Patrick established churches in conjunction with civitates like his own in Armagh; small enclosures in which groups of Christians, often of both sexes and including the married, lived together, served in various roles and ministered to the local population.

Irish society had no history of literacy until the introduction of Christianity, yet within a few generations of the arrival of the first missionaries the monastic and clerical class of the isle had become fully integrated with the culture of Latin letters. Besides Latin, Irish ecclesiastics developed a written form of Old Irish. During the late 5th and 6th centuries true monasteries became the most important centres: in Patrick's own see of Armagh the change seems to have happened before the end of the 5th century, thereafter the bishop was the abbot also. Finnian of Clonard is said to have trained the Twelve Apostles of Ireland at Clonard Abbey.

In the sixth and seventh centuries, Irish monks established monastic institutions in parts of modern-day Scotland (especially Columba, also known as Colmcille or, in Old Irish, Colum Cille), and on the continent, particularly in Gaul (especially Columbanus). Monks from Iona under St. Aidan founded the See of Lindisfarne in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria in 635, whence Celtic practice heavily influenced northern England.

The achievements of insular art, in illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells, high crosses, and metalwork like the Ardagh Chalice remain very well-known, and in the case of manuscript decoration had a profound influence on Western medieval art. The manuscripts were certainly produced by and for monasteries, and the evidence suggests that metalwork was produced in both monastic and royal workshops, perhaps as well as secular commercial ones. Irish monks also founded monasteries across the continent, exerting influence greater than many more ancient continental centres. The first issuance of a papal privilege granting a monastery freedom from episcopal oversight was that of Pope Honorius I to Bobbio Abbey, one of Columbanus's institutions.

At least in Ireland, the monastic system became increasingly secularised from the 8th century, as close ties between ruling families and monasteries became apparent. The major monasteries were now wealthy in land and had political importance. On occasion they made war either upon each other or took part in secular wars - a battle in 764 is supposed to have killed 200 from Durrow Abbey when they were defeated by Clonmacnoise. From early periods the kin nature of many monasteries had meant that some married men were part of the community, supplying labour and with some rights, including in the election of abbots (but obliged to abstain from sex during fasting periods). Some abbacies passed from father to son, and then even grandsons. A revival of the ascetic tradition came in the second half of the century, with the culdee or "clients (vassals) of God" movement founding new monasteries detached from family groupings.

Others who influenced the development of Christianity in Ireland include Brigid and Moluag.

Unification

Saxon connections with the greater Latin West led to papal preferment and brought the Celtic-speaking peoples into closer contact with the orthodoxy of the councils. The customs and traditions particular to Insular Christianity became a matter of dispute, especially the matter of the proper calculation of Easter. Synods were held in Ireland, Gaul, and England (e.g. the Synod of Whitby) but a degree of variation continued in Britain after the Ionan church accepted the Roman date.

The Easter question was settled at various times in different places. The following dates are derived from Haddan and Stubbs: South Ireland, 626-8; North Ireland, 692; Northumbria (converted by Celtic missions), 664; East Devon and Somerset, the Celts under Wessex, 705; the Picts, 710; Iona, 716-8; Strathclyde, 721; North Wales, 768; South Wales, 777. Cornwall held out the longest of any, perhaps even, in parts, to the time of Bishop Aedwulf of Crediton (909).

A uniquely Irish penitential system was eventually adopted as a universal practice of the Church by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

Distinctive traditions

Because Celtic Christianity is a broad term, it is difficult to define precisely which practices diverged from the remainder of the Latin West except in a general sense. In any specific area there will be exceptions to the list that follows.

Episcopal structure

By the seventh century, the established ecclesiastical structure for Catholicism on the Continent consisted of one bishop for each diocese. The bishop would reside in a “see”, or a city able to support a cathedral. This structure was in part based on the secular administrative organisation of the Roman Empire, which had subdivided provinces into “dioceses” (see Roman province).

It was after Christianity had spread throughout the Empire, and especially after the advent of the Christian Emperor Constantine I, that dioceses had acquired an administrative function within the Church. Most of the Celtic world, however, had never been part of the Roman Empire, and even the exceptions of Wales, Devon, and Cornwall were nonetheless without developed cities.

What emerged was a structure based on monastic networks ruled by abbots. These abbots were usually descended from one of the many Irish royal families, and the founding regulations of the abbey sometimes specified that the abbacy should if possible be kept within one family lineage. The nobility who ruled over different tribes, and whose sources of power were rural estates, integrated the monastic institutions they established into their royal houses and domains. Abbots were monastic, and thus were not necessarily ordained (i.e. they were not necessarily priests or bishops). Bishops were still needed, since certain sacramental functions were reserved only for the ordained; however, unlike on the Continent, these bishops had little authority within Celtic ecclesiastical structure; there were also non-monastic bishops, mostly attached to a royal household, but these usually had no authority over monasteries in their diocese. In the 12th century, the Irish monastic system was reorganised, with papal authority establishing four archbishoprics.

Rule of Columbanus

The monasteries of the Irish missions, and many at home, adopted the Rule of Saint Columbanus, which was stricter than the Rule of Saint Benedict, the main alternative in the West. In particular there was more fasting and an emphasis on corporal punishment. For some generations monks trained by Irish missionaries continued to use the Rule and to found new monasteries using it, but most converted to the Benedictine Rule over the 8th and 9th centuries.

Liturgical and ritual practices

After the Protestant Reformation authors such as George Buchanan are suggested to have supplied “the initial propaganda for the makers of the Scottish Kirk” by inventing the notion of a national “Celtic” Church opposed to a “Roman” one, a notion completely rejected by Catholic scholars. Patrick Wormald has further stated that “what Protestant Confessionalism did for the idea of a ‘Celtic’ church until the 1960s is now being done by ‘new age’ paganism”.

Easter calculation

A distinguishing mark of Celtic Christianity was its distinct conservatism, even archaism. One example is their method of calculating Easter. Calculating the proper date of Easter was (and is) a complicated process involving a lunisolar calendar. Various tables were produced in antiquity that attempted to calculate Easter for a series of years. Insular Christianity used a calculation table (Celtic-84) that was similar to one approved by St. Jerome. However, by the sixth and seventh centuries it had become obsolete and had been replaced by those of Victorius of Aquitaine and, more accurately, those of Dionysius Exiguus. As the Celtic world established renewed contact with the Continent it became aware of the divergence; the first clash over the matter came in Gaul in 602, when Columbanus resisted pressure from the local bishops to conform. Most groups, like the southern Irish, accepted the updated tables with relatively little difficulty, with the last significant objectors being the monks from the monastery of Iona and its many satellite institutions. For example, the southern Irish accepted the common Easter calculation at the Synod of Mag Léne around 630, as did the northern Irish at the Council of Birr around 697, and Northumbria with the Synod of Whitby in 664. Nonetheless, in 716 Iona converted its practice.

Monastic tonsure

The "Roman" tonsure, in the shape of a crown, differing from the Irish tradition, where the hair above the forehead was shaved

All monks of the period, and apparently most or all clergy, kept a distinct tonsure, or method of cutting one's hair, to distinguish their social identity as men of the cloth. In Ireland men otherwise wore longish hair, and a shaved head was worn by slaves.

The prevailing "Roman" custom was to shave a circle at the top of the head, leaving a halo of hair or corona; this was eventually associated with the imagery of Christ's Crown of Thorns. The early material referring to the Celtic tonsure emphasizes its distinctiveness from the Roman alternative and invariably connects its use to the Celtic dating of Easter. Those preferring the Roman tonsure considered the Celtic custom extremely unorthodox, and associated it with the form of tonsure worn by the heresiarch Simon Magus.

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia British monks shaved their heads in front of a line drawn from ear to ear. This was nicknamed tonsura magorum ("Magus" was accepted as equivalent to druid, and to this day the Magoi of Matthew 2, are druidhean in the Scottish Gaelic Bible). Later, the Roman party jeered at it as the tonsura Simonis Magi, in contradistinction to their "tonsure of St. Peter". This appears in a 672 letter from Saint Aldhelm to King Geraint of Dumnonia, but it may have been circulating since the Synod of Whitby. The tonsure is also mentioned in a passage, probably of the 7th century but attributed wrongly to Gildas; "Britones toti mundo contrarii, moribus Romanis inimici, non solum in misa sed in tonsura etiam" ("Britons are contrary to the whole world, enemies of Roman customs, not only in the Mass but also in regard to the tonsure").

The exact shape of the Irish tonsure is unclear from the early sources, although they agree that the hair was in some way shorn over the head from ear to ear. In 1639 James Ussher suggested a semi-circular shape, rounded in the front and culminating at a line between the ears. This suggestion was accepted by many subsequent writers, but in 1703, Jean Mabillon put forth a new hypothesis, claiming that the entire forehead was shaven back to the ears. Mabillon's version was widely accepted, but contradicts the early sources. In 2003 Daniel McCarthy suggested a triangular shape, with one side between the ears and a vertex towards the front of the head. The Collectio canonum Hibernensis cites the authority of Saint Patrick as indicating that the custom originated with the swineherd of Lóegaire mac Néill, the king who opposed Patrick.

Penitentials

In Ireland a distinctive form of penance developed, where confession was made privately to a priest, under the seal of secrecy, and where penance was given privately and ordinarily performed privately as well. Certain handbooks were made, called “penitentials”, designed as a guide for confessors and as a means of regularising the penance given for each particular sin.

In antiquity, penance had been a public ritual. Penitents were divided into a separate part of the church during liturgical worship, and they came to mass wearing sackcloth and ashes in a process known as exomologesis that often involved some form of general confession. There is evidence that this public penance was preceded by a private confession to a bishop or priest (sacerdos), and it seems that, for some sins, private penance was allowed instead. Nonetheless, penance and reconciliation was prevailingly a public rite (sometimes unrepeatable), which included absolution at its conclusion.

The Irish penitential practice spread throughout the continent, where the form of public penance had fallen into disuse. St. Columbanus was credited with introducing the medicamenta paentitentiae, the “medicines of penance”, to Gaul at a time when they had come to be neglected. Though the process met some resistance, by 1215 the practice had become established as the norm, with the Fourth Lateran Council establishing a canonical statute requiring confession at a minimum of once per year.

Reform

The lengthy reform process of assimilating the Celtic churches into the European mainstream was caused in part by the slow reform of the Papacy itself over many years, but it quickened after the Gregorian Reforms (1150-80). In Britain the Synod of Whitby is considered important, and in Ireland the Synod of Rathbreasail in 1111 established modern dioceses.

See also

• Christianity in Ireland
• Celtic Christian traditions in Gwynedd until 1100
• Celtic Rite
• Culdee
• Gregorian Reform
• Immram
• Papar
• Pelagianism
• Quartodecimanism
• Sarum Rite

Bibliography

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