Blog
The ecological crisis and celtic Christianity
Thursday 1st February 2024
Mike Mullins
Mysticism the truth of direct experience
We intuitively know things at the heart of our being that may be at odds with what we have been taught by authority, religion and "correct theology" . Soul rewilding is about waking up to what we know in the depths of our being. That mother earth, Gaia, is sacred, as is human and all other than human life.
Plato and Jung both argued that for us to recognise truth it must be something within us, that we already know. Moments of injustice such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the loss of millions of animals in the Australian wildfires of 2019, or the murder of George Floyd that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, all resonated powerfully with us because we realised that something sacred was threatened. In these moments we wake up and connect to our souls. The trouble is, we then go back to sleep. We suffer from what the celts called "soul forgetfulness" and fall out of relationship to ourselves, the earth and one another.
This isn't about waking up to what is alien to us but waking up to an awareness that is at the heart of who we are as human beings. This is about paying attention to what is deepest in our souls, not a set of inherited fixed beliefs, or dogmas.
In Celtic legend John the Beloved lent against Jesus at the Last Supper and was said to have heard the heartbeat of God. In Celtic tradition he became a role model for the practise of listening for the heartbeat of the sacred, deep in ourselves and in the body of the earth.
Waking up to the heart beat of the earth
So how can we wake up to the sacredness at the heart of all human and other than human life?
Celtic Christian spirituality emphasises an awareness of the sacredness of all things. Part of the western Christian legacy it's a tradition that has been largely forgotten and at times suppressed. The Roman Empire, when it took on Christianity as its state religion in the early 4th Century did not want to be reminded that the earth was sacred. Such a belief had too many restrictions for a system that wanted to exploit both people and nature. So, faith was bent to imperial power.
Within Christianity there are two different narratives about what Christ's life accomplished on earth. One narrative takes as its starting point the story of the fall and the doctrine of original sin and sees Christ's work as being our salvation from sin. The other story takes a more positive view of the world and the human condition, seeing it not so much as deeply tainted by sin but rather as incomplete, immature and Christ bringing fulfilment to all of creation lifting it up to God.
Creation centred spirituality
In recent decades a creation centred spirituality has evolved which emphasises the goodness of both the natural and the human world. Celtic Christians espoused an early form of creation centred spirituality. Their God was not the "Lord of history" but rather the "Lord of creation". One who has revealed herself most fully in the wonders and splendours of the natural world.
The artwork of the Celts is full of their exuberant celebration of creation. Their illustrated scriptures are covered with intertwining patterns of fruit and foliage, beautiful drawings of animals and birds. The Celtic cross, the circle of creation, representing the earth and the sun, surrounding the cross of redemption. Celtic theology stressed the essential goodness of nature and Christ's role in completing and perfecting all of creation.
Celtic reverence for nature
The Celtic Christian celebration of the goodness of creation has three main roots.
The first was scriptural. It's impossible to read the Old Testament and not be struck by the essential goodness and preciousness of nature in the eyes of God, "and God saw that it was good".
The psalms are filled with a sense of wonder for nature. The Hebrew prophets talk of a reciprocal relationship between creation and God. For example, Isaiah's famous passage about the mountains and hills breaking forth into singing and the trees of the field clapping their hands. These themes directly inspired Celtic prayer and poetry.
The second main theme came from the Celts Pagan inheritance of druid nature mysticism. Druids (meaning oak Knowers) worshipped rivers, forests and hills as the dwelling places of spirits and divinities. Like other indigenous peoples, such as the Australian Aboriginal people and Native Americans, Celts had a deep respect for the natural world and took care to sustain it and not to unnecessarily damage it.
Celts retained this reverence and respect for nature when they became Christians. Missionaries that converted them accepted their form of panentheistic mysticism and incorporate it into Christianity. Monasteries were built on the site of sacred druid groves. Wells and springs were given saints names.
Celtic Christians also derived their sense of the goodness of creation from living so close to nature and having the time to study and contemplate its variety and beauty. They established monastic settlements in wild remote places, like the Skellig Islands and Glendalough. Love of nature for its own sake echoes through many of the writings of Celtic monks.
Nature stories of Celtic saints
The lives of the Celtic Saints paint a picture of a people deeply attached to animals and birds. Columba taught monks on Iona to show hospitality, not just to the human visitors but also to birds that flew to the island. He told one of the brothers to watch for a crane flying over from mainland Ireland. The bird was to be carried up from the shore taken to a house and fed and looked after for three days.
Kevin of Glendalough was once engaged in a prayer vigil with his arms stretched out, when a blackbird came and laid its eggs in his outstretched hand. Kevin didn't want to disturb the bird, so he maintained his uncomfortable position for several weeks until the blackbird little blue eggs had hatched.
Columbanus would summon wild animals and birds, who would come to him playing around like puppies around their master. Once twelve wolves came to him while he was reciting a psalm and stood peacefully with him listening before going away.
St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne emerged from the freezing North Sea after a long prayer vigil to find two otters following him onto the beach and then lying before him and licking his feet to keep them warm. Before then drying him with their fur.
St Kieran was helped to dig a cemetery at Saighir, by a wild boar, using its tusks to clear and level the ground. The boar stayed on to become his servant and was joined by a badger, a deer and a fox which carried his psalter for him. Mochua, disciple of Columba, lived as a hermit. His only companions were a mouse, a fly and a cock. Each helped him with his work, the cock crowing at midnight to wake him for matins. The mouse nibbling his ear to wake him up in time for the first office. The fly walking along each line as he read from his psalter.
On the last day of the life of Saint Columba a white horse, that carried milk for the monastery, sensed that he was dying and put his head on the chest of the elderly Columba and "like a human being let tears fall freely on the lap of the Saint".
The urgent need for humility
Underlying this affinity for and love of nature was a deep sense of the sacredness of the earth itself and its closeness to humanity. The Hebrew word Adam has the same roots as the word for earth "adama". In English the word humility comes from "humus" the Latin for soil. For Celts to be Christian was to walk humbly and to be mindful of the close ties that bind us to our mother earth.
The Celts have much to teach us today about their relationship with the rest of creation. The idea of domination taken from an erroneous interpretation of Genesis 12:8 was alien to them. They preferred Christ's injunction.
"In as much as you have done it to the least of my brothers and sisters you have done it to me".
and they applied it to animals, insects and birds, the most vulnerable of God's creatures. This compassion sprang from their deep belief that the natural world, just as much as the human, is charged with sparks of the divine presence and reflects the glory of the cosmic Christ.
_There is no plant in the ground
But is full of his virtue
There is no form in the strand
But is full of his blessing
There is no life in the sea
There is no creature in a river
There is nought in the firmament
But proclaims his goodness
There is no bird on the wing
There is no star in the sky there is nothing beneath the sun
But proclaims his goodness_
Carmina Gadelica
According to Saint Ninian of Whitehorn the fruit of all study is to perceive the eternal word of God reflected in every plant, insect, bird, animal, every man and woman. Saint Columbanus said:
"Understand the creation if you would wish to know the creator. For those who wish to know the great deep, must first review the natural world".
God may be all in all
The Celts believed in a universal salvation in which all things would return to God through Christ St. Paul's letters to the Corinthians 15:28 "that God may be All in all".
The Celts didn't use the harsh language of the courtroom to describe the atonement. Words like "ransom", "advocate", "justification" and "propitiation". Words that were alien to how they saw Christ and his saving work. Rather they saw him as a "liberator", an "emancipator", "victor", who had done battle with the devil and won. Christ's sacrifice was not viewed in pagan terms as the propitiation of an angry God, nor as a ransom paid for sin. For them it wasn't just Jesus that had suffered on the cross but God himself. For Celts the cross was a glorious mystery which pointed to the fact that life comes out of death and progress out of suffering.
Every sentient being, every object, is a flash of the divine
John Scotus Erigena was born in the early 9th century in Ireland. He denied the objective existence of hell. He found the idea logically and morally indefensible. God by her nature could only want what was good and it could not conceivably be part of any of her purpose that some should suffer eternal torment. Erigena was also concerned with all nature and wanted to counter the damaging dualism that split God away from her creation and suggested that the material world was somehow profane and inferior to the spiritual. He used philosophy to express the Celts sense of the immanence of God in creation. Holding fast to the Greek idea that the material world was essentially good and that the natural destiny of all creation, including human beings, was to ascend to God through Christ.
For Erigena every sentient being, every object, was a flash of the divine. God had not only made the world but to some extent, she was the world. Not just the creator but the essence of all things. For Erigena "making" was the same as "being". Erigena wrote:
"We ought not to understand God and the creatures as two things, distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting himself in a marvellous and ineffable manner, creates himself in creatures".
Erigena was a panentheist, seeing God in all things but also having an existence outside of it.
"Gyring in a gyre the spirit goes forth and then comes back to its own place."
For Erigena creation wasn't an event that occurred once in time. There was a continual ongoing process in which God is ever active, creating new life. Perfecting and calling us back to him. The symbol of the Celtic knot, with its constantly intertwining ribbons and spirals, gives this sense of continual movement and of new creation and everything returning to its source.
Western theology has separated the material from the spiritual
The tragedy of western theology is that under the influence of Augustine, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon and Newton it has separated the material from the spiritual, to distance humans from the rest of creation and to remove God from his creation. The results of that dualism has been to produce an unhealthy over concentration on sin and guilt and to create a lack of respect towards the natural world which has encouraged reckless exploitation and pollution.
"The historical roots of our ecologic crisis" Lynn White Jr
"Celtic spirituality" Ian Bradley
"Sacred earth sacred soul" John Philip Newell