Friday, September 10, 2010

IONA, LINDISFARNE AND THE FADING OF CHRIST’S LIGHT

Jerry Harkins


All things by immortal power,

Near or far,

Hiddenly

To each other link-ed are,

That thou canst not stir a flower

Without troubling of a star;

—Francis Thompson
The Mistress of Vision


Iona is a tiny island about nine hundred yards off the southwest coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. Lindisfarne is a somewhat larger tidal island in the North Sea just off the coast of Northumbria. As the crow flies, they are less than 200 miles apart but it is a wearing six hour drive across Scotland. In the year 635, it was a very long walk for a handful of monks from Iona who came at the invitation of King Oswald to bring the gospel to his people. The king gave the monks the island of Lindisfarne and their leader, Aidan, became its first abbot and bishop. It is a modest link but the story that played out between these two islands became a pivotal point in the history of Western Christianity and its effects have done much to define the culture of Europe and the quality of its peoples’ lives ever since.

As is obvious from the diversity of belief among his modern followers, Jesus Christ taught a spirituality rich in metaphor, symbol and ambiguity and lacking in much that might easily be codified into orthodoxy. The Nicene Creed was agreed to in 325 but there are still major differences about what it means. A single word, filioque, added in 589, became and remains the root cause of the Great Schism between East and West. Still, the gospel spread rapidly in the wake of the Roman army and Constantine’s Edict of Milan of 313. But less than a hundred years later, in the words of Saint Jerome, “The city which had conquered the whole world was itself conquered.” The Visigoths sacked Rome and destroyed its economy. The emperors moved to Constantinople and the legions were withdrawn from the provinces. Paganism returned to Europe with unseemly haste. Literacy, art, engineering, commerce and Christianity itself disappeared into the Dark Ages. Except among the Celts in Ireland and western Britain. In those outposts, far from the political and military upheavals of the continent, Christianity and learning continued to thrive.  Not the Christianity or the learning of Greece and Rome but that of the Celts and of an Irishman man named Pelagius.

It is not known exactly when or how the gospel arrived in Ireland but it certainly was imported from Britain and it had certainly established a beachhead long before Saint Patrick arrived sometime around 441. By then, it had developed beliefs and practices consistent with the gospels but quite different from those coming to dominate thinking in Rome and Constantinople. For the sake of simplicity, we may say that by the middle of the fifth century there were two main strains of Christianity in the West, one based on the rigorous theology of Augustine of Hippo, the other on a more relaxed, less dogmatic way of life associated with Pelagius.   Rome, following Augustine, preached an austere, pessimistic view of the relationship between God and creation based entirely on his doctrine of original sin which, in turn, derived from his youthful adherence to the Manichean belief that evil is the default condition of the universe. Pelagius, influenced perhaps by his Druidical forebears, could not abide such hopelessness which he saw as a mechanism for centralizing wealth and power in the hands of a few hierarchs. His Christianity was unique. It was an overlay on the nature religion that had been practiced by the Celts for millennia. He was horrified by what he saw when he visited Rome and he contended mightily with Augustine and Jerome who led the effort to have him declared a heretic. But, in fact, the issue was moot. Rome was in full retreat and Ireland was left alone to evolve as it might.

Evolve it did, producing in the fifth and sixth centuries a remarkable cohort of saints and scholars who gave rise to a vibrant brand of Christian spirituality based on the gospel of love. Hundreds of saints, among them Bridgit of Kildare, Finbar, Finan and the two Finians, Brendan the Navigator, Enda of Aran, Gall, Ultan and his brothers Fursa and Foillan. And, of course, Columcille—Columba in Latin—an O’Neill poet, warrior, monk and scholar, a great great grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages.

Columcille was something of a berserker and was often in trouble with Brehon law. Finally, he became an exile whether by dint of authority or of his own volition. He and twelve followers came to the isle of Iona and founded a monastery there in 563. From Iona, he sent missionaries to restore the faith—his Celtic faith which was all he knew—to Europe. They were spectacularly successful, bringing literacy, art and science as well as Christianity back to major centers in Scotland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. Columcille died in 597 but Iona continued to flourish producing, among other treasures, the eighth century Book of Kells.

All went well until Oswy, Oswald’s brother and successor, married Eanflæd of Kent, a Christian of the Roman persuasion. Oswy decided that it would be desirable for everyone in his kingdom to follow the same religious practices and, to that end, he convened a great synod at the monastery of Hilda in Whitby. The two sides debated for a week in 664, the Romans represented mainly by Wilfrid, Abbot and Bishop of Ripon, the Ionians by Colman, Abbot and Bishop of Lindisfarne. It was a thorough and sometimes raucous debate that turned on the method for determining the date of Easter and the proper style of a monk’s tonsure. In the end, Oswy decided for the Romans and Colman withdrew to Iona with some of his followers. Eata, a Saxon, became the fourth abbot at Lindisfarne. Substantively the synod was unimportant, the issues trivial. But it represented a significant victory for papal primacy and it could not have come at a more opportune time. Following the death of Pope Gregory I—Gregory the Great—in 604, the church suffered a succession of ineffective leaders, including several who were scoundrels, heretics or both. They were thoroughly dominated by the Eastern Emperors who either ignored them or told them what to think. Pope Vitalian (r. 657-672), himself an Easterner, was somewhat better than most which was fortunate because he had to contend with a major heresy and a major schism. In both cases, the Emperor Constans II supported his enemies. He also had to cope with the emerging forces of Islam which had already conquered much of the Byzantine Empire in the Middle East and North Africa. The victory at Whitby gave him undisputed supremacy over at least one national church and he was able to appoint his own man, the distinguished monk Theodore of Tarsus, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore, who spoke none of the languages of the British isles, had been driven from Tarsus in 637 by some of the earliest Islamic jihadists.

Celtic Christianity lingered on in Ireland for five hundred years until the Synod of Cashel in 1172. It remained a monastery-oriented church with men and women, often married, serving as priests. It was not Utopian. There were disagreements, notably between the abbots of Columcille’s Durrow Abbey and the archbishops of Patrick’s Armagh. But it was also not institutional. Religion was a natural and intimate part of life. God was a nearby friend whom the clergy addressed on behalf of the community. Beyond the ancient Celtic belief that all Gods are one God, there was little in the way of theology or dogma. No one paid much attention to Ireland as Rome re-imposed its harsh spiritual and temporal regimen on virtually all of Western Europe. Most of the popes were more concerned about their temporal power and the wealth it brought them. Abuse became rampant. The gospel of love gave way to institutional criminality on a vast scale. When finally Pope John Paul II led his “Day of Pardon” Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on March 12, 2000, he did not go into specifics about what he was seeking pardon for. Perhaps his list included the Cathar genocide of the early thirteenth century, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the periodic witch hunts, anti-Semitism, the nineteenth century attack on modernism and liberalism and the pedophilia crisis of the twentieth century. Maybe he was thinking of the Great Schism and the mutual anathemas the Eastern and Western churches pronounced on each other in 1054. Surely he included the venality of simony, nepotism, bribery and the selling of indulgences that led to the Protestant Reformation and, hopefully, he remembered the terrible religious wars that followed. He must have regretted the church’s longstanding support for and participation in the slave trade. On the evidence, though, he probably did not include the church’s historical misogyny and the perverted teachings on human sexuality it still derives from its antipathy toward women.

Certainly the church has done much good and good people have served it well over the centuries. But it is equally true that since Whitby the church has been in moral decline. In thought and deed, the Christian enterprise has grown progressively farther away from the beatitudes, from John’s declaration that God is love (1 John 4:8), and from Jesus’ admonition to his disciples at the Last Supper, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:35)

It is perhaps too late to wonder how things might have turned out had Oswy made a better decision. Had Rome lost England a thousand years before it did, had it been forced to respond to a more empathetic, less imperious competitive theology, had it remained too weak to absorb the lion’s share of Europe’s wealth, the course of history would have been different and it is hard to imagine that it could have been worse. Augustine was not wrong to think that there is evil in the world, only to think that a loving God designed or somehow willed it that way. That single error, enveloped in the doctrine of original sin, has been the source of a great deal of human misery. For a brief moment, the world had a chance to reject it.

Iona and Lindisfarne today bear little evidence of their seventh century encounter. There are graves and ruins and, impressive though they are, they date from several hundred years after Whitby. Much was lost to the Norse raiders in the eighth century and again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the “dissolutions” of Henry VIII and the iconoclasm of Oliver Cromwell. But places retain a sense of their own history which explains why pilgrimage is such a universal and fundamental undertaking. Iona was considered sacred ground from the beginning and became the traditional burial place for kings of Scotland and Ireland including Kenneth MacAlpin, the first King of the Scots who died in 858 and the eleventh century kings Macbeth and Duncan.

As you stand where these remarkable saints stood you can sense—be overwhelmed by—the loss of the alternative history they represent. It is hard to resist the feeling that these islands were the real Camelot where once upon a time the spiritual and material worlds coexisted seamlessly and where the gospel of love still sleeps, the once and perhaps future light of the world.