Celtic Rite

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The Celtic Rite is the name later scholars gave to the cluster of liturgical and ecclesiastical customs that distinguished early-medieval Christianity in Ireland, in parts of Britain, and in the monasteries those churches founded abroad. It was never a single fixed liturgy, and the people who practiced it would not have called it by this name; the term is a modern convenience for a set of usages that diverged, in places, from the practice spreading out of Rome. The first difficulty in describing it is therefore the label itself. There was no Celtic Church in the sense the phrase implies — no governing center, no shared service-book, no canon of distinctively Celtic doctrine — and a monk of seventh-century Iona or Bangor, asked what church he belonged to, would have answered that he was Catholic, in communion with the see of Peter, differing from the brethren over the sea only in the keeping of certain customs. The unity the name promises has to be assembled by historians out of scattered evidence; the divergence the name dramatizes was, in the end, a matter of reckoning and haircut and the discipline of penance, not of creed.

The west front of Iona Abbey, on the island where Columba’s monastery became a center of Insular Christianity. — geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The two famous divergences

The disputes that made the Insular usages notorious were narrower than the romantic label suggests, and only two of them were fought over with real heat.

The first was the calculation of Easter. The date of the central feast was not fixed in the early Church but had to be computed each year — the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, a problem in astronomy, arithmetic, and convention all at once. By the early seventh century three reckonings were in circulation in the Latin West: the table of Victorius of Aquitaine, published in 457; the nineteen-year Alexandrian cycle associated with Dionysius Exiguus, which spread from the mid-sixth century and would eventually carry the day; and an older table built on a cycle of eighty-four years, which the Insular churches had received and kept. The Irish computists called the document that contained it the latercus, and those who clung to it after others had abandoned it were styled, by their reforming countrymen, laterci sectatores — followers of the latercus. The two systems used slightly different lunar limits, so that in many years they agreed and in some they did not, and when they parted, the gap could be a full week. The consequence was not abstract. In the household of King Oswiu of Northumbria, who had been raised among the monks of Iona and kept their Easter, the queen Eanflaed had come from Kent with the Roman reckoning and a priest of her own; in years when the cycles diverged, the king feasted the Resurrection while the queen was still keeping the Lenten fast and her Palm Sunday. A kingdom could celebrate its holiest day twice, a week apart, and the scandal of it pressed toward a decision.

The second divergence was the tonsure — the way monks shaved their heads as the mark of their consecration. Medieval writers distinguished three forms: the coronal or Roman tonsure, called St Peter’s, which shaved the crown and left a ring of hair in memory of the crown of thorns; the Eastern, called St Paul’s, which shaved the whole head; and the Insular, called St John’s, which shaved the front of the head from ear to ear and left the hair long behind, a shape that from above resembled a crescent or a letter D. To the Insular monks the form carried the authority of the beloved disciple. To Roman partisans it was a provocation. Aldhelm of Malmesbury and others traced it, with no evidence beyond polemic, to Simon Magus, the sorcerer of the Acts of the Apostles, so that a haircut became a charge of heresy by association. That so much weight could rest on the line of a razor tells how the differences were experienced: as visible, daily, public signs of which family of practice a man belonged to.

The shape of the church beneath the signs

The Easter table and the tonsure were surfaces. Beneath them lay a different ordering of church life, and it is here that the Insular world was most itself.

The structures spread out of the late-Roman Mediterranean were episcopal and urban: the bishop in his city, the diocese mapped onto civil administration. Ireland had never been a Roman province and had no cities to hang dioceses on. The church that took root there organized itself instead around the monastery, and the figure of authority was less often the bishop than the abbot — sometimes a layman by ordination, often the heir of the founding saint, governing a federation of houses that could stretch across the island and overseas. Bishops there were, and were needed for ordination and consecration, but they could be monks under an abbot’s rule rather than rulers of territory. The whole weight of the church fell on the ascetic community.

That weight produced a marked ascetic and penitential intensity. The Insular monasteries cultivated severe fasting, long vigils, exile, and a literature of self-examination unmatched elsewhere in the early medieval West. Out of this came the institution that would prove the most consequential of all the rite’s features: private, repeatable confession governed by the Irish penitentials. The older discipline of the Church reserved formal penance for grave and public sin, administered once in a lifetime by the bishop, with reconciliation a single solemn event. The Irish handbooks — the penitential ascribed to Finnian in the sixth century, the rule and penitential of Columbanus that drew on it, the later penitential of Cummean — did something different. They set out tariffs: a specific satisfaction matched to each sin, graded by the gravity of the act, the rank of the sinner, and the rank of the one offended, to be performed after a confession made privately to a priest, and to be made again whenever needed. Sin was no longer a catastrophe requiring a once-only public cure but a recurring condition met by a recurring remedy. Carried to the Continent by Irish monks — Columbanus above all, who founded Luxeuil in Gaul and died at Bobbio in northern Italy in 615, and who could write to popes defending the Irish Easter while insisting on his communion with Rome — this manner of confession was adapted into Frankish handbooks and slowly became the ordinary practice of the whole Western church. The repeatable, private confession behind the modern confiteor and the later sacrament of penance descends, in its essential form, from the Insular monasteries.

What survives of the liturgy

Of the actual rites — the Mass, the offices, the rituals of baptism and the care of the sick — what survives is thin, fragmentary, and hard to read. A small group of manuscripts carries almost the whole of the direct evidence.

The Stowe Missal, copied in the later eighth century at or near Lorrha in Ireland though its core Mass-text is older, is the only complete order of the Insular Mass to survive. The Antiphonary of Bangor, written about 680 at the great monastery of Bangor in the north of Ireland and carried abroad to Bobbio before reaching the Ambrosian Library in Milan where it rests, is the oldest securely datable witness to the Insular liturgy — a book of hymns, collects, canticles, and antiphons, among them the ancient communion hymn Sancti venite. The Book of Mulling and the Book of Dimma preserve orders for the communion of the sick. From these and a handful of others the rite must be reconstructed, and the reconstruction yields a clear and sobering result. The texts are not a pure, self-standing tradition descended in isolation. They are a patchwork. The underlying frame is the common Western shape; the Stowe Mass uses a Gelasian-type Canon shared with Rome; over and through it run Gallican and Spanish elements, a few phrases with parallels as far afield as the Eastern churches, and a good deal of local Irish composition, copied and recombined from house to house. There was variety within the islands themselves; no two witnesses agree in every particular. What the manuscripts show is not one rite but a regional manner of doing the common Western liturgy, drawing freely on several sources, never standardized — which is exactly why the singular name misleads.

The opening page (folio 1r) of the Stowe Missal, the only complete order of the Insular Mass to survive, copied in the later eighth century near Lorrha in Ireland. — Royal Irish Academy MS D ii 3, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The label and its makers

The picture of a self-standing Celtic Church, ancient and pure and set against Rome, is in large part a later construction, and a central task in reading the evidence is to see who built it and why. The early communities, as their own witnesses show, understood themselves as Catholic and differed in custom, not in faith. The image of an independent national church, holding an older and purer Christianity until Rome imposed conformity, was sharpened in much later periods when such a church was a useful idea — by Reformation-era polemicists seeking a pre-papal English or Irish Christianity to claim as ancestor, and by later nationalist writers for whom an indigenous church resisting a foreign see made a serviceable myth. Modern scholarship has dismantled the unity the phrase asserts: Kathleen Hughes asked outright whether “the Celtic Church” was even a valid concept, Wendy Davies wrote of the myth of the Celtic Church, and a line of historians has insisted that the Insular customs were a family of regional variations within Latin Christendom, not a separate confession. The thing the name points to is real — a recognizable cluster of Insular usages — but the church the name conjures, monolithic and oppositional, is a thing made after the fact.

Whitby and the close of the disputes

The conflicts were settled by conformity, not by schism, and the decisive moment came in Northumbria. In 664, at the double monastery of Streanaeshalch — later Whitby — under its abbess Hild, King Oswiu convened a gathering to resolve the Easter question that had split his own household. Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne, argued the Ionan case, resting it on the authority of Columba and, behind him, the apostle John. Wilfrid, abbot of Ripon, argued for the Roman reckoning and rested it on Peter, to whom Christ had given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Oswiu asked whether Columba or Peter held those keys; when Colman granted that they were Peter’s, the king ruled that he would not contend with the keeper of the door, and Northumbria adopted the Roman Easter and tonsure. Colman, unwilling to conform, withdrew with his monks to Iona and then to Ireland. The chief account is Bede’s, written some seventy years later, and he tells it as the triumph of the universal church over a provincial custom; the narrative shape is his, and the drama of the keys may owe as much to his art as to the day. Over the following centuries the Insular usages — the eighty-four-year table, the tonsure, the local liturgical forms — were abandoned across Britain and Ireland in favor of the wider Western practice. Iona itself gave up the old Easter in 716. The divergences that had defined the rite were, one by one, reckoned away.

The ruins of Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, on the site of the double monastery where the synod of 664 settled the Easter question for Northumbria. — geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The discipline that outlasted the rite

When the service-books were conformed and the tonsure regrown to the Roman shape, much of what had been distinctive simply vanished into the common usage of the medieval West, leaving the historian to piece a rite together from fragments. But one creation of the Insular church did not vanish — it generalized. The private, repeatable confession of the Irish penitentials, spread by the peregrini who left home for exile as a form of devotion, did not survive as a curiosity; it became the ordinary way the whole Latin Church handled sin, the seed of the confessional that would stand in every parish for a thousand years. The Insular monasteries are remembered too in their high crosses and their illuminated gospel-books, in the discipline of pilgrimage for its own sake, and in the line of Irish learning that fed the Continent. The rite as a rite was absorbed; the way of penance it invented absorbed everything else.

Muiredach’s High Cross at Monasterboice, County Louth, a tenth-century example of the carved high crosses by which the Insular monasteries are remembered. — geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Scholarship and the surviving texts

The foundational modern study is F. E. Warren’s The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church (Oxford, 1881), which gathered and edited the surviving Insular liturgical texts and remains the indispensable compendium; it was reissued in 1987 with a long introduction by Jane Stevenson that updates and qualifies Warren’s reconstruction in light of a century of further work. The historical setting is now best read in T. M. Charles-Edwards’s Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), which treats the paschal controversy, the monastic structure of the church, and the penitential tradition with full command of the sources. The critique of the unifying label was made decisively by Kathleen Hughes in “The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?” (Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 1981) and by Wendy Davies in “The Myth of the Celtic Church.” The primary witnesses — the Antiphonary of Bangor of about 680, the Stowe Missal of the later eighth century, and the smaller books of the sick-rite — are the texts against which every account must finally be measured, and the rediscovery in 1984 of the long-lost Irish eighty-four-year Easter table, edited by Daniel McCarthy and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, restored to scholarship the very computus over which Whitby was fought. The narrative frame, for all that it must be read critically, comes above all from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of 731. Within Latin Christendom the Insular usages belong beside the other regional families of the Western liturgy — the later English Use of Sarum, the see-bound Aquileian Rite, and the Roman Rite that in the end absorbed them all — and its sacramental life touched the same acts those rites shaped, from the admission of the catechumen to the rites of Christian burial, throughout the long Middle Ages.

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