Celtic Spirituality (review)

Celtic Spirituality. Classics of Western Spirituality. Translated and introduced by Oliver Davies, with the collaboration of Thomas O'Loughlin. Preface by James Mackey. New York: Paulist Press, 1999. 576 pp. $33.95.

For scholars and teachers of early medieval Celtic spirituality, this book may well be the best thing to happen since the publication of Nora Chadwick's classic The Age of the Saints in the Early Celtic Church in 1961. Reading Chadwick, many of us over the years were enticed to learn more about early Celtic ascetics, monks, missionaries, abbesses, abbots, and scholars. But our quest for further knowledge quickly met frustration. Many of the texts by and about these heroic saints were available only in Latin, or Irish, or Welsh. Other texts were poorly translated, or out of print, or (worse yet) bowdlerized in the interests of various contemporary agendas, whether ecological or New Age or heterodox or neo-pagan. The 1990s produced an enormous number of semi-popular studies of Celtic Christian spirituality, and more continue to appear. The best of them (such as those by Ian Bradley, Philip Sheldrake, and Esther de Waal) have been based on careful readings of the original sources, and they have inspired a new generation with a desire for deeper understanding. But until now, we have possessed no single comprehensive anthology of primary texts in English translation. Now at last we do have such a volume--thanks to Oliver Davies of the University of Wales, Lampeter, and his colleague Thomas O'Loughlin.

According to Davies, the texts selected for inclusion in Celtic Spirituality are broadly representative of Celtic Christianity in its "classical" period, from the time of Patrick in the fifth century to the Norman invasions in the twelfth. (There are, however, a few Welsh texts from the thirteenth century included here.) The range of genres is nearly encyclopedic: hagiography (lives of Patrick, Brigit, David, Beuno, and Melangell, as well as Patrick's own writings and the Voyage of Brendan); monastic penitentials and rules; generous selections of poetry; devotional texts such as litanies and invocations; liturgical texts; apocryphal writings and biblical exegesis; homilies by Columbanus and some anonymous preachers; and theological works by Pelagius and John Scottus Eriugena, along with Columba's poem "Altus Prosator" and a late Welsh tract called Food for the Soul. Nearly all the selections are presented in their entirety, with brief but informative introductions and explanatory notes. Virtually all are from either Ireland or Wales; Davies explains (60) that Adamnan's Life of Columba was too long to serve as a "Scottish" entry, and that the vernacular Breton and Cornish texts date from the later medieval period. Nor is there anything to represent the Irish mission to Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, presumably because it would need to come from an English author (i.e., Bede). Strangely enough, the cover illustration is a carpet page from the Lindisfarne Gospels, an undeniably Anglo-Saxon product, though with some Irish influence.

At 550 pages, this is one of the longer volumes in the Classics of Western Spirituality series, so one hardly dares to suggest anything else that might have been included. Nevertheless, a fully rounded picture of Celtic spirituality must make room for the sixth-century history-as-jeremiad of Gildas's Ruin of Britain, for the "Gododdin" and other poems recounting the Welsh people's bloody battles with the English, and for the fabulous sagas of Irish and Welsh heroes whose origins lie in pre-Christian oral tradition but whose deeds (often bawdy and violent ones, at that) were recorded in writing by Christian monks and scribes. Of course, these additions would not fit very well with Davies's moderately idealized vision of the "distinctiveness" of Celtic spirituality. As he freely acknowledges, there is much scholarly debate at present about the characteristic features of Celtic Christianity. Because he admits that he has intentionally chosen texts that illustrate and support his own construction of "Celtic spirituality," it is worth quoting Davies's account of...