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The Elder of Vicksburg's avatar

Paul, what a great piece. There is of course a school of thought that the ancient Irish and British Christianity is the same faith as practiced in the East that eventually became Orthodoxy, and the arrival of the mission of Augustine represented the capture of the ole faith by Rome. (There is a book called The History of Early Christianity in Britain, written around the turn of the 20th century, that makes this case from original documents and the Fathers). The Orthodox of course recognize all early British saints pre-schism; my church has icons of Cuthbert and Aidan of Lindisfarne and David of Wales, among others. I think it’s a valid argument; early British Christianity was more contemplative, monastic and rural vs the more urban tendencies of Rome. Dmitri Lapa writes good pieces on the British saints at OrthoChristian, and I should also recommend Sabine Baring-Gould’s lives of the British Saints, available from Llanerch Press in eight volumes. He does a great job of working through the existing documents, much of which were lost during the Saxon invasions. And there are all the Northumbrian saints, including Oswald, on whom Tolkien based Aragorn. It is indeed “good” for the Orthodox in the west to have this tradition, another that needs wholesacale rediscovery.

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Jonathan Geltner's avatar

Beautiful. You have succeeded in making a pilgrimage that I have tried and failed to make several times, once due to bad weather that almost drowned us. That wasn’t even the only time I’ve almost drowned off the coast of Ireland. The number of times that has happened is surprisingly high, given the limited amount of time I’ve spent in the place, and yet I love it still.

The story of the Christianization of the British Isles, and the way that the Christian religion evolved in and with and through the cultures of the British Isles, has long fascinated me. It is a rather green story, so to speak, at least in my reading of it, and it is not a story that is finished yet. But it is good to look back towards origins. I’ll be interested to see what you turn up in your researches into early British and Irish Christianity. If asceticism is a way forward, then the fierce and daring asceticism (and cenobitism) of early Christian Ireland and Britain is still important.

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