Mid-Argyll Theme
- 6
Christianising Kingship
Kingship in the pre-Christian Gaelic world was a
well established ritual and political institution,
woven into the heart of social life. There were
kings of individual tribes or túatha,
and there were more powerful kings who had
subjected several other kingdoms to their dominion
in one way or another.
It is in this world of kingship that we see
Adomnán,
ninth abbot of Iona
and a major figure in the church history of Argyll,
attempting to invest Gaelic kingship with Christian
values.
Of course, Christian scriptures regard kingship
as natural and inevitable. One biblical king in
particular, David, was one of the great heroes of
faith and a prophetic figure of revelation, as well
as being the ancestor of Christ. But native Gaelic
kingship was both like and unlike the kind of
kingship that Christian leaders expected. So when
Christianity was absorbed into this new culture,
there was - as there always is in such encounters -
a process of negotiation in which the old
institutions and the new faith have to work out a
new way of co-habiting.
Sacred
Kingship
Native Irish kingship saw the king as a sacred
figure, having undergone an inauguration ritual,
the banfheis rígi or 'marriage of
kingship', whereby he was united to the land, to
its fertility, and to its 'sovereignty goddess'. We
don't know exactly what this ritual entailed, but
we shouldn't read the lurid account by Gerald of
Wales in the 1180s as an accurate account. This is
more of a traveller's tale, with its description of
the king having sex with a horse, killing it,
making it into a stew, and then sitting in a bath
of the stew to eat it!
Christian kingship also saw the king as a sacred
figure. Adomnán of Iona speaks of kings as
'ordained by God'. He even speaks of the sixth
century king Diarmait mac Cerbaill as 'ordained by
God as ruler of Ireland' even though Diarmait had
undergone the ancient banfheis of Tara with
all its supposedly pagan associations.
Sexual
metaphors
Actually, we shouldn't assume that the church
would object to a conjugal or sexual symbolism of
kingship. One only has to think of the ancient
Easter Vigil, in which a large phallic object (a
candle) is plunged three times into the waters of a
font, alongside prayers that the Holy Spirit might
make the font fertile (fecundet) and that
people should be born again from it into a new
infancy of innocence. Medieval bishops were
sometimes consecrated in rites which described
their new dioceses as their wives. There is nothing
fundamentally unacceptable in Christian liturgy in
the use of sexual or marital metaphor. Indeed, the
true King of Israel was God himself, whose
relationship with Israel is often described in the
Old Testament as a marital union.
Sources of
authority
Native Irish tradition held that kingship was
established by a contract between the king and the
people. So the tract Críth Gablach,
written around 700 AD, states that 'it is the
túath which ordains [or appoints,
oirdnither] the king, not the king who
ordains the people', and then goes on to describe
the king's obligations to the túath
and the túath's obligations to the
king.
While not actually denying that the people in
some sense made the king, Adomnán insists
that it is God who chooses the king - and that must
mean that the abbot of Iona, successor of God's
servant Columba, is the key figure. The right of
the abbot of Iona to make kings, and the sacred
office of those kings, is one of Adomnán's
central concerns.
Rites of
Inauguration
Adomnán created a whole series of stories
in his Life of Columba, in which the Church had a
role in the selection of kings, in the success of
kings in battle and in obtaining the right to rule.
Most dramatically of all, he describes how Columba
ordains Áedán mac Gabráin as
king of Dál
Riata in the monastery of Iona in 574. There is
some evidence that the traditional place of
inauguration for Dál Riata kings was
Dunadd, but
Áedán is ordained on Iona, the centre
of ecclesiastical, not secular, power.
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Dunadd rises sharply
from the Kilmartin valley
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Adomnán's authority probably also lies
behind the Collection of Irish Canons, which assert
a Christian version of kingship (Wasserschleben
1885, 76-82). First and foremost they insist that
the king is ordained, and that anointing with oil
is the sign of this divine choice. Some scholars
believe that Adomnán is the first European
writer to prescribe anointing for Christian kings,
modelled on Old Testament precedent - a practice
that would be adopted throughout Europe as the
ancient institution of kingship was absorbed and
transformed by the Church.
Key
References
- Anderson, Marjorie (1973), Kings and
Kingship in Early Scotland, Edinburgh
- Binchy, D.A. (1979), Críth Gablach,
Dublin
- Byrne, F.J. (1973), Irish Kings and High
Kings, London
- Charles-Edwards, Thomas (1994), 'A Contract
between King and People in Early Medieval
Ireland', Peritia 8, 107-119
- Wasserschleben, Cap. 25, pp. 76-84
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