From: Ceri 
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 >.... Continued from last post

The mainstream Churches, Catholic and Protestant, on both sides of the 
water, have embraced Celtic "heritage", however dimly understood, with 
equal enthusiasm and often for similar reasons. It sounds vaguely 
anti-colonial - always a good thing. For them, too, it means anything 
positive, liberated, a tad "alternative", or just plain wholesome.

Going to churches in Gaelic-speaking Scotland, or in Welsh Wales, I 
rarely found much sign of a particular interest in herbal healing, 
Mother Nature, feminism, or "alternative" sexual lifestyles. But this is 
what the modern, manufactured, Celtic revivalists have insisted on. A 
ceaseless flow of books spreads the idea that "the Celts" - usually 
taken as a homogenised lump - once professed a superior brand of 
Christianity that conveniently anticipated modern Western society's 
relaxed attitudes to sex and its interest in alternative medicine, 
wildlife, conservation, gender equality, and so on. The Celtic churches, 
so this narrative runs, were in touch with nature, proto-feminist and 
anti-hierarchical.

One book that I picked up on my journey, called the /Celtic 
Alternative/, which was fairly typical of a whole genre, suggested the 
Celtic Church had more in common with Buddhism than, say, institutional 
Catholicism. A "church without martyrs", it was at peace with nature, 
feminist and concerned with "celebrating life" - not death. A similar 
book, /Celtic Heart/, said the "old Celt understood the sanctity of life 
and the sacred interconnectedness of everything". A third book, /Celtic 
Sexuality/, advanced a bolder claim - that in the Celtic world, women 
"dispensed favours as they saw fit", adding: "Men and women were not 
ashamed of the urges of their bodies and recognised them as natural, 
pleasurable and even religious."

Wandering around Iona, now a pilgrimage centre for modern Celtic 
wannabees, I wondered how much the celebration of "urges" and "sacred 
interconnectedness" would actually have meant to the sixth-century 
missionaries who founded the monastery there. Probably neither the 
spiritual values nor the character traits now so widely assumed to be 
Celtic would have struck much of a chord.

There is no real evidence that those old evangelists were any more 
touchy-feely, herb-friendly, animal-loving, or easygoing about sex than 
the Anglo-Saxons who replaced them in much of Britain. We cannot know, 
of course. Those saints and their world were long gone even when the 
Normans arrived, which is why those flinty Norman bishops so casually 
prettified the legends of their Celtic predecessors, attributing any 
amount of fabulous detail to their lives in the hope that it would add 
value and prestige to their cathedrals or abbeys.

If the Celts were out of reach, even then, how much more so now, when 
the non-anglophone, non-anglicised cultures on these islands (not 
including recent immigrants) have shrunk to a porous Gaeltacht in the 
west of Ireland, a clutch of islands in north-west Scotland and a 
patchwork of lands in Wales that are increasingly disconnected from one 
another physically and shot through with wads of English second-home 
owners?

All one can say with certainty is that in the nineteenth century, before 
the non-English-speaking cultures of Britain and Ireland crumbled, the 
people of those lands tended with a certain uniformity to opt for the 
most doctrinally rigid, most austere and sexually unliberated brand of 
Christianity that was available.

What traditional Irish Catholicism, the Calvinism of the Highlands and 
the Calvinist Methodism of Wales shared, at least until recently, was a 
set of values that would have most modern Celtic revivalists shuddering, 
namely a keen interest in theological nitpicking, spiritual severity, 
and a fairly hard and unforgiving attitude towards the flesh.

It was the English, with their cut-and-paste national creed, who first 
cornered the market in "touchy-feely" religion - Anglicanism being not 
much more than what Elizabeth I felt comfortable doing, seeing or 
hearing in her chapel. It was the Celts, the real Celts, who have always 
provided the hard, uncomfortable ideological edges in British or Irish 
religion, and the Anglo-Saxons who have added the fudge. It might sound 
like the words of a spoilsport, but  there is no need to brave Highland 
gales - or Gaels - searching for the home of the values that most of the 
Celtic revivalists have long attributed to the Celts. Their real home is 
right here, in England.

/Marcus Tanner's/ The Last of the Celts/ is published by Yale University 
Press.

(C) The Tablet Publishing Company



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