The Nile Flows into the Shannon

Until recently, most scholars dismissed out of hand the idea that monks in the early Irish Church could have had any contact with the Mediterranean. This assumption perhaps was prejudiced by the image first presented by Giraldus Cambrensis, later elevated to enduring myth by Edmund Spenser, that Ireland was a wasteland populated by uneducable, barbaric aborigines. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. From the days of antiquity and late antiquity until 1179, when much of Ireland was subdued in the Anglo-Norman invasion, the little island on the western edge of Europe was in the mainstream of European culture and had a lively cultural exchange with the Mediterranean.

There are no passports from the fourth and fifth centuries, of course, but there is no other explanation for much in early Irish Christianity—except that some aspects of the early Church were crystallized, like amber, in Ireland. For the last half century or so, research has continued to provide archaeological, liturgical, and literary evidence of links between Hibernia and early Mediterranean Christianity.

Rome never tried to conquer Ireland, so when the former officially withdrew from England in 395, it didn’t make much difference to Ireland. The faith in Ireland had come directly from the Fathers by way of Gaul, which was first evangelized by Irenaeus, a student of Polycarp, who had himself heard the preaching of Saint John the Evangelist. By the time Gregory the Great sent Augustine to Canterbury in 597, Ireland was already converted, and Irish monks had been evangelizing the Anglo-Saxons for generations.

The first recorded mention of a non-Roman Christianity in Ireland came in 1622. Bishop James Ussher’s Discourse on the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish noted that the early Church in Ireland had significant differences from Roman practice. Ussher was a passionate Calvinist and a prolific anti-Catholic controversialist. His claim of course had polemical intent: to prove that the Church of Ireland was the legitimate successor to the early Church in Ireland. The same is true of Frederick Edward Warren, whose Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church first used the term “Celtic Church.” Warren states that the “history of the Celtic Church, both in these islands and on the continent, exhibits occasional proofs of its independence of, and hostility to, the claims of Rome.” Over time, this idea of tension between Ireland and Rome became received wisdom. Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples declares that the Irish Church “was not in these early decisive periods associated with the universal organization of the Papacy.” In recent times, this premise has opened the door to varied imaginings of a part-Christian, part-Druid spirituality, sometimes with even New Age drapery.

In actuality, the Church was always aware of Ireland: Saint John Chrysostom wrote in 387 about the “altars and Churches in the British Islands.” No doubt Ussher and perhaps Warren were unaware that in 431 Pope Celestine I had sent a bishop named Palladius “ad Scottos in Christum credentes,” according to Prosper of Aquitaine. But in 455 Vandals sacked Rome, so follow-up was sparse.

The Roman Church that Ussher could have seen in the seventeenth century and that Warren saw in the nineteenth bore little resemblance to what they read and analyzed from the sixth or seventh centuries. Even in Rome, the liturgy of the seventeenth century or nineteenth century would have borne little resemblance to that of the seventh. To be accurate, in late antiquity disciplinary relationships between the little island in the west and the burgeoning Roman bureaucracy to its east were tense: Ireland was based on monasteries, not dioceses; Rome’s attempt to control marriage was a hard sell, as was the idea of celibacy itself. Doctrinally, however, there was harmony between Ireland and Rome, and the primacy of Peter was not challenged.

Generations of schoolchildren were taught that Saint Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland. Indubitably, he was the first to evangelize the island in a systematic way. But he was probably not the first Christian there. Archaeological finds make it certain that there was commerce between Ireland and the Mediterranean from prehistoric times. The flourishing slave trade between Hibernia and Britain might well have brought Christian slaves from Britain to Ireland even before the youthful Patricius was captured. Christian sailors may have jumped ship in the green and pleasant land.

But the most significant Christian immigrants into Ireland before Patrick may well have been from Egypt. Alexandria, after all, had been the first center of Christian theology. By the fourth century it was torn asunder by theological dispute, and it ultimately rejected the Council of Chalcedon. Monks who believed that Jesus was true God and true Man had to find some other place to live in solitude and asceticism. Why not Ireland?

An illustrative example is Saint Olan’s Well in Aghabulloge, County Cork. The well has been there since forever; tradition says that Olan was the confessor of Saint Finbarr, who founded a monastery on the marsh that became Cork City. Near the well is an ancient vertical stone with carved lines written in Ogham. Ogham script predates Christianity and is believed to have gone out of use by the end of the fourth century. What does the stone say? “Pray for Olan the Egyptian.”

In the Book of Leinster, written in 1190 as a compilation of older literature, the Litany of Aengus Céile Dé includes an intercession for “seven Egyptian monks buried in Desert Uilaidh.” Another ancient liturgy prays for “Cerrui from Armenia.” Nobody knows who the seven monks were, but a Coptic historian believes they were sent to the island of Lérins in the fourth century.

Lérins was the gateway of desert monasticism into Europe; tradition says that Patrick studied there when he decided to become a priest. Egyptian monks sought isolation and solitude, even if it wasn’t in sand and heat. In 1910 the Onomasticon Goedelicum, a dictionary of place-names around Ireland, found five hundred instances of the word dísert (desert) across the island. That could be five hundred places where at one point in time a holy man (or woman, though fewer solitaries of the female sex are recorded) would have lived in a cave or a bothy. There would have been water nearby, and the saint’s name may have been attached to the well.

The Book of Lismore, a late-fifteenth-century manuscript compilation of saints’ lives, history, and The Travels of Marco Polo, includes a tale known as Tenga Bithnua, or “evernew tongue.” This dialogue between Saint Philip the Apostle and Hebrew sages was recently discovered to be actually based on a lost piece of Egyptian apocrypha as well as the Acts of Philip, a piece of apocrypha that is otherwise unknown in Latin Christendom.

Even more evidence for Ireland’s connection to Egypt has been uncovered recently. In 2006, a peat-digger in County Tipperary, Ireland, unearthed something odd. The words in valle lacrimarum, from the eighty-third Psalm, were just visible amidst the peat. Edward Fogarty quickly covered the gooey pile with a wet cloth—and in doing so preserved the twelve-hundred-year-old manuscript. The Faddan More Psalter, as it is now known, is the first illuminated manuscript to have been found in the last two hundred years. After four years of restoration, it is now on display in the National Museum of Ireland.

The chemistry in a peat bog is such that the cover, made from a single piece of leather, was largely intact. Inside the cover was papyrus from Egypt. To find a book that had been constructed in the same way, conservators had to go to the Nag Hammadi codices, fourth-century Gnostic gospels that had been found in 1945 in a cave in Egypt.

Dom Gregory Dix reminds us beautifully: “Right down to the eighth century, even in some measure down to the eleventh, Rome is not, properly speaking a truly ‘Western’ church . . . Rome is not only the heart of Western Christendom, but the meeting point of East and West. And its liturgy reflects the fact.” It is well to remember that eleven Greeks and six Syrians occupied the Chair of Peter before the year 741 and that Greek was the liturgical language until Saint Damasus, who was pope from 366 to 384, adopted Latin.

There is no evidence that the Divine Liturgy (it wasn’t called the Mass until the seventh century) in any language other than Latin was ever celebrated in Ireland, but the few written fragments that have survived centuries of conquest and colonization give fascinating glimpses into the vitality and diversity of the early Church.

One such fragment is the Stowe Missal, which was discovered in the eighteenth century hidden inside a castle wall. It was first published in 1893 but may have been written as early as 500. It includes text for three Masses, one of which has prayers for the emperor and the Roman army and a creed—but there was no Creed in the Roman Mass until the eleventh century.

Before the ninth century, the liturgy of Ireland seems to have been more Gallican than Roman. The oldest surviving liturgical manuscript shows that Ireland, like most of Western Europe, used the Gallican rite. This document is known as the Irish Palimpsest. A date of 650 has been assigned to it, based on the script itself and the artwork, and it is attributed to a monastery in Ireland or Northumbria. Two centuries after its first use, the seventh-century work was scraped off and new material written on. With new technology, however, the older can be read.

If only the vellum could speak! Second-century Syriac or Greek prayers written in Latin, a Syrian epiclesis, and no Roman Canon: These can be found among the fragments of thirty-one different Masses in the Palimpsest.

The Antiphonary of Bangor was written in County Down between 680 and 691 and brought to Milan’s Ambrosian Library in 1609, but forgotten until Ludovico Muratori discovered it in the eighteenth century. It’s more a hymn book than an antiphonary, and Frederick Warren deserves thanks for first putting it into English. One scholar has traced the liturgical transmission within its pages from Syria and Egypt to Visigothic Spain, and thence to Brittany, Cornwall, South Wales, and Ireland. The philologist and liturgist Carl Baumstark considered the first part of the text of one of the hymns to be an “almost verbatim translation of a Greek original of the sixth century, and of Palestinian origin.” In 1970, a new Coptic Book of the Hours was published—and it includes a Gloria with versicles that appear nowhere else but the Antiphonary of Bangor.

Liturgical diversity did not cause Gregory the Great stress, however. When Saint Augustine wrote asking him how to handle the diversity of liturgical practice he encountered in England, Gregory replied, “If you have found any customs either in the Roman or the Gaulish church or any other church which may be more pleasing to Almighty God, you should make careful selection of them and sedulously teach the Church of the English, which is still new in the faith, what you have been able to gather from other churches. . . . Therefore choose from every individual church whatever things are devout, religious and right. And when you have collected these as it were into one bundle, see that the minds of the English grow accustomed to it.”

By the time of the English Pope Adrian IV, however, that attitude had changed. Bringing Ireland’s liturgical practice into conformity with Rome’s was one of the reasons cited in the 1155 bull Laudabiliter, with which Pope Adrian authorized Henry II of England to invade Ireland in 1171. The Irish bishops obliged him at the Synod of Cashel in 1172, adopting the Roman liturgy, at least officially.

Because the early Irish church was monastic, bishops lived in monasteries run by abbots. Monasteries were followers of tradition: Fearful of error or heresy, they accepted what their founders had given them and eschewed innovation. Monks copied manuscripts as they received them; they practiced art and architecture as they had been taught it. The earliest churches built in Ireland follow the East. The oldest were built in groups of seven, as on Mount Athos. Saint Enda’s on Inismór, one of the Aran Islands, is regarded as the first Irish monastery. The architecture of the beehive huts on Skellig Michael is matched only in the desert of Egypt.

Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare who wrote the first biography of Saint Brigid in 650, described her church as “adorned with painted pictures, and the party wall within it defining the sanctuary was decorated and painted with figures and covered with rich hangings.” What could a “party wall . . . defining the sanctuary” and “painted with figures” be other than an iconostasis?

The world today casts a cool eye on the “extreme” practices recorded in the Annals and Penitentials carefully kept by Irish monasteries (preserved because they were taken to Europe at some point). Benedict of Nursia modified the Rule of Pachomius, but Irish monasticism thrived under the original monastic rules. The goal was perfect and perpetual love of God, which comes only with forgetfulness of earthly cares. Thus, “nakedness and disdain of riches” marked Irish monasticism. Life consisted of three labors only: prayer, work, and reading, i.e., copying. “Be satisfied with small possessions of utter need,” the rule reads. “Take not of food till you are hungry, sleep not till you feel desire, speak not except on business.”

Some rules allowed no meat except on Easter. In the Rule of Columbanus, no kneeling was allowed between Easter and Pentecost, as is the custom in the Eastern churches to this day. Saint Jarlath is said to have made three hundred prostrations a night and three hundred more in the day. Another practice from the Rule of Pachomius: recitation of the Three Fifties (all one hundred fifty Psalms) was required daily in some monasteries; the Cros-figell posture (arms outstretched and body motionless) was required for prayer in others. The legend that Saint Kevin prayed so long that a bird built a nest in his outstretched hand may not be entirely fanciful.

Even quintessentially Irish artifacts such as illuminated manuscripts have their origins in the East. Significantly, the earliest surviving illuminated manuscripts were made in Ethiopia. The Madonna in the famous Book of Kells is an almost exact copy of the Hodegetria icon, an icon said to have been originally made by Saint Luke himself. And those interlaced animals that define insular art? Art historians acknowledge that the first Christian documents in Ireland came from Byzantium and Egypt and recognize that traditional Celtic design combined with influences from Egypt, Greece, Syria, Persia, and Armenia to create the amazing images in the books of Kells, Lindisfarne, Darrow, and others. An illustration in the Book of Kells, by the way, includes a flabellum, the liturgical fan now confined to the pope’s processions but still standard equipment in Byzantine liturgies.

The unique, magnificent, distinctly Irish High Crosses also had their origins in the East. After the end of the Roman empire, no monuments were erected anywhere in Western Europe. Transcaucasia, Armenia, however, has abundant fifth-century stelae carved in relief on all four faces with carved bases, rather like the High Crosses. In Yerevan, Armenia, there is a figure of Christ that is remarkably similar to a famous cross in Ruthwell, Scotland, from the eighth century. Likewise, in the Egyptian pyramids, Osiris, the god of the dead, stands with his arms crossed on his chest, a crook and a flail over his shoulders. Muiredach’s Cross at Monasterboice shows Christ standing with His arms crossed on His chest, a cross and a flowering rod over His shoulders. Other High Crosses have the same image.

So much evidence has accumulated across disciplines and over time that it seems safe to say that the earliest vision of Christianity in Ireland was monasticism modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt. To quote once more from the Bangor Antiphonary:

Domus deliciis plena
Super petram constructa
Necnon vinea vera
Ex Aegypto transducta.

House full of delight
Built on the rock
And indeed the true vine
Transplanted from Egypt.