Mayo Theme -
6
Emergence of Christianity
According to the Chronicle of Prosper of
Aquitaine, Pope Celestine sent Palladius in 431 AD
to minister to the wayward Irish, 'to those of the
Irish who believed in Christ'. We have no idea of
how successful Palladius was but it would seem that
Ireland was a place of some Christian activity
before the arrival of Patrick, Ireland's patron
saint. It is interesting that the authorities in
Gaul appointed both men. Whatever the level of
success of Palladius, it is generally regarded that
it is to Patrick that the achievement of the
bloodless and enduring conversion of the Irish
people belongs. But this should not mislead us into
thinking that it was just one man's success. The
propagation of the cult of Patrick was an invention
of later biographers who created a heroic narrative
to convey the almost single handed assault on
paganism in Ireland by the saint. This promotional
activity was part of a wider strategy within the
ecclesiastical and secular politics of the seventh
century whereby the supporters of Patrick and Colm
Cille were vying for supremacy over the whole of
the Celtic Christian community.
Patrick had arrived to Irish shores in 432 AD
and north of a line from Wexford to Galway seems to
have vigorously founded many churches. This
evangelising work was not a quick or easy task and
was filled with many dangers as the saint reveals
in his own words when he claims in his Confessio
that he 'baptised thousands, ordained clerics
everywhere, gave presents to kings, was put in
irons, lived daily with the danger of murder,
treachery or captivity and journeyed in dangers
everywhere even to the farthest places beyond where
lived nobody'.
The stories surrounding this work show that
Patrick was aware of the ancient traditions of the
Irish and he took full advantage of these natural
and pagan rituals to weave them into the fabric of
the Christian message. The annual pilgrimage to
Croagh Patrick is a Christian adaptation of the
pagan festival of Lughnasa, the celebration of the
Celtic god Lugh. According to one of the authors of
the Book of Armagh, Tirechan, Patrick proceeded to
the summit after burying his charioteer Totmael
(The Bald One) at Murrisk.
There he spent 40 days and 40 nights fasting and
praying. This gesture of grafting Christian symbols
onto the traditional customs and beliefs rather
than trying to obliterate them was perhaps a
significant element in the strategy of the
conversion.
The over printing of pagan landscapes by the
Christian evangelists is a motif that finds
expression in many examples such as wells, trees
and the tumuli of the gods. The countless springs,
where animistic worship had taken place over
millennia, were sometimes reinterpreted as the holy
wells of the saints. The seventh century tales of
Tirechan often involved Patrick arriving at a well
to find druids nearby, thus, indicating that these
places already had some sacred significance.
The system of church that Patrick introduced
would have been the episcopal one that he knew from
Britain and Gaul but he also introduced the
monastic life into Ireland. Embraced by great
numbers of converts the trend towards monasticism
was unusual in most of western Europe but it seems
to have suited the Irish temperament and their
impulse towards an ascetic way of life. Early
churches and monastic buildings were made of wood
or wattles, instead of a communal residence the
monks all lived in individual cells. Where wood was
scarce they built using stone and these are the
extant examples we see today. The sacral space
would have been surrounded by a rampart similar
those enclosing the homes of local farmers.
Strong personalities and independent operations
seemed to have been the hallmark of the early
church whereby local ruling families had by the
eight century assumed the power through kinship, of
the larger monasteries. Indeed some monasteries
became so important economically that their abbots
were in effect as important as the local
kings.
The inward momentum of Christianity soon found
expression in a desire by Irish monks, at a time
when Europe was being plunged into the 'Dark Ages'
to renounce home and family as a form of
mortification and self sacrifice and to spread the
faith to other countries. Colm Cille's journey to
Iona in 563 AD
was essentially little different from the one
undertaken by Enda to Aran a generation before.
The Irish form of Christianity grew within the
social order of a Celtic world claiming no martyrs
and absorbing older beliefs. It was unique in that
its centres of life were the great monasteries and
not the urban model of Rome, which endowed Bishops
with great seats of power. Instead, there was a
hereditary retention of autonomy and the Celtic
tradition survived in administration as in art and
architecture. It was not until the arrival of the
Vikings and the
upsurge in pagan cults that the Irish church was
reformed along the diocesan model with St Patrick's
Church at Armagh attaining the primacy of Ireland
in the eleventh century.
|
This
project has been supported by the EU as part of the Culture
2000 programme.