The Celts
Celtic Christianity
How could a pagan culture that once practised human sacrifice adopt a new faith with such passion and leave such a lasting legacy? For the answers we have to look to Ireland. The Romans never conquered those shores, but the religion they brought flowered there in a unique way that has come to be called ‘Celtic Christianity’.
St Patrick
In ancient Ireland, a distinctive ‘Celtic’ spirit remained after the Romans left – not inward but outward looking, exchanging influences via the busiest highway in the world at that time. For more than 2,000 years, the Celts had been linked by the sea, so that the Celtic community stretched from Ireland to mainland Europe, including modern Portugal, Spain and France.
Simply made of a timber frame and animal skins, the tiny boat called a currach (also known as a coracle) has been in use in Britain and Ireland for centuries. Julius Caesar mentioned it in his writings, and it is even said that the 6th-century Irish monk St Brendan may have sailed to America in one. These sturdy little boats were sailing the western approaches of the British Isles at the same time as the brochs in Scotland were being built. In Celtic society, they were used for everything from fishing to spreading the Gospel.
When the Romans withdrew from Britain in about AD 410, Christianity was flourishing, but invasions of pagan Anglo-Saxons from the Continent soon snuffed it out. St Patrick was a Briton taken captive by Irish raiders in the 5th century. Sold into slavery in Ireland, he escaped, but returned to bring the Gospel to all who had followed the pagan Druid cults.
Skellig Michael
The early Christian fathers went to the deserts of Egypt to contemplate their god without distraction. The Irish Celts had no deserts to retreat to, so they settled for the watery vastness of the ocean and the bleakest islands off their coasts.
Eight miles out into the north Atlantic, off the west coast of Ireland is one of the most spectacular sites of Celtic Christianity. When the first Irish monks sailed to the island of Skellig Michael, they knew that they had found their desert. It is a sterile crag rising vertically 700 feet (213 metres) out of the sea, its top reached by an awesome ‘stairway to heaven’ of 600 stone steps. Built in about AD 600, the tiny monastery clings like a limpet to the rock.
For two centuries, the beehive-like huts comprised the permanent home for a Stone-Age community of 12 monks. With no drinkable water supply, they had to use all their ingenuity and resourcefulness to survive. Their devotion to the contemplation of the spiritual world didn’t mean that they overlooked the basics – one of the dry-stone buildings was the necessarium, the monks’ toilet.
Did Christianity take hold so easily among the Celts because there were so many similarities between the new religion and the older faith? Pre-Christian Druids also went to solitary places, and according to Skellig Michael guide Claire O’Hallorhan, ‘At the time of these early monks in Ireland, there was a belief about a magical land to the west. This was almost directly influenced by pre-Christian myths of the land of promise, where people were forever young, where no one suffered.’
The Book of Kells
Travelling the high seas in their flimsy currachs, the Irish brought Christianity back to north-west Europe, crossing the narrow strait of the Irish Sea to Scotland and beyond. In 563, St Columba set himself adrift from his native Ireland in a boat with neither sails nor oars, leaving his destination to the whim of the sea and the will of his God. The place where he landed was to become a powerhouse of Celtic Christianity: the island of Iona.
Iona was regarded as a sacred place even in prehistoric times – before the arrival of St Columba, there may even have been a Druidic school there. And in AD 800, it was on Iona that the most remarkable icon of the Celtic world was created.
The Book of Kells, which contains the Gospels, features page after page of lavish illumination and decoration. But it is more than that. It also demonstrates the ability of the Celts to embrace ideas from everywhere and make them their own. And it hides in its pages secret clues to the Celts’ long pre-Christian legacy.
According to Michelle Brown of the British Library, ‘The Book of Kells was made by a team of at least eight artists and scribes, possibly as many as 12. They took turns at the benches in the scriptorium to create something that was supposed to celebrate the founder of their monastery, St Columba.
‘When you look at the mixture of ornament and symbol in the Book of Kells, you can begin to see an incredibly complex world coming alive. The chi-rho – a symbol combining the letters X and P, which are the first in the word ‘Christ’ in Greek – may be a clue to an ancient Celtic connection with the Greek world. But when you look into the arms of the X, you will see the interlace work that goes right back to La Tène and to the Iron-Age ornament that we traditionally associate with Celtic culture.
‘Some of the designs were already 1,000 years old when inscribed into the manuscript, and the book is layered with all sorts of other symbols, too,’ continues Michelle Brown. ‘For example, we’ve got a little human head at the end of the passage about the birth of Christ, when Christ becomes human. And at the foot, we’ve got a fascinating detail – two fat cats pinning down two little mice by their tails. It’s a bit like the kids’ book Where’s Wally?’
Reinvention
The Book of Kells is an icon of what we now call Celtic art, yet how much of it is actually Celtic? ‘I think some of the symbols in it that people think of as Celtic are misunderstood,’ says Michelle Brown. ‘For example, the “Celtic knot” isn’t actually a Celtic design – it goes back to the Germanic world and to its relationship with the Roman army. It’s only after all the different peoples of Britain and Ireland have pooled their designs and experiences that you get these things growing out. Then, of course, they’re appropriated as Celtic ...’
So the Celtic world was doing what it has always done – taking in new ideas and reinventing them. The Book of Kells is a compilation of a long Celtic past and all the cultures with which it came into contact – everything from the Greek and Roman world to the Anglo-Saxons.
What was it about the Celtic world that enabled it to take to Christianity so passionately and make such an impact? There was a lot in pagan religion that lent itself well to Christianity. The idea of water as the source of life and of rebirth would lead straight to the idea of baptism, for example. The concept of a hero who would sacrifice everything on behalf of his people also appealed to the gods and warriors of pagan mythology.
The Celts made symbolic links between blood and wine sacrifice, and both Druids and Christians believed in the idea of self-sacrifice. Perhaps, for the Celtic world, Christianity was more of a continuum, rather than a break with the past.
The Celtic world, long reviled by the Greeks and Romans, preserved the knowledge of the classical world and exported it back to Europe via Christian missionaries. The Celtic Church would be the vital link between the Dark Ages and the medieval world that would succeed them.
