Absolutely. And I think this is a good thing. It is also what Christ and his disciples lived. 'If the world hates you ...' Hard but healthy. The margins is usually where the truth is to be found. The trick is then not to idolise the margins.
That is just the question. And it is all the more complicated and interesting, to me at least, by the fact that our culture and place in history is the secular, modern age which is uniquely the product of historical Christendom.
I think about what, for the lack of a better term, might be called postmodern traditionalism. Or even an avant-garde traditionalism. What could that look like? Arvo Part comes to mind. He started his career as a modernist; composed in 12-tone serialism, collage, and other modernist techniques. As the story goes one day he heard Gregorian Chant in a record store and then basically stopped composing for a number of years. He studied Chant and early polyphony. When he returned fully to composing he had become Orthodox. His music has come from modernism and through to the other side (via early Western Church music) to something ancient/traditional and at the same time, quite new. All kinds of people--not only Christians-- respond deeply to it. It isn't a reactionary escape to the past. Not at all. Is he merely an idiosyncratic genius, or can we learn, more broadly, to do the same?
Well musically he certainly was not idiosyncratic but part of an important trend or school, sometimes called “holy minimalism.” John Tavener (d.2013) would be another composer to mention in this context, a great one in my opinion. Englishman who became Orthodox Christian. His work became more wide-ranging as he developed. Tons of religious composers of great stature in the 20th century, I would say many of the very best. My personal favorite would be Olivier Messiaen, very avant-garde, also a devout Catholic and enthusiastic naturalist, particularly an ornithologist. I also greatly value the strange, polyvalent, mystical Alfred Schnittke (Catholic and Orthodox in a way) and the Jewish Ernest Bloch, who was greatly influenced by the natural world.
But I don’t see all that pointing to any single tradition in particular, religiously or musically. They were all so different. Artists of any kind (but maybe especially musicians and composers) are always going to be turning to religion because art and religion are really up to the same thing. Conversely, we can look in the arts for the religious consciousness we have elsewhere seemingly lost, and I would say that is where most of us get our effective religion these days if we get it at all. Is it enough? For some people it is, I guess because it has to be.
I think there is something about music that can be prophetic. Even if in an unconscious, unintended way. The classic example given is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring just before the outbreak of WWI. There was something new, and at times brutal in what Stravinsky offered. It wasn't entirely unprecedented, but it was still a different spirit. If music is prophetic in that sense, we live in a time of musical confusion (like all our other multitude of confusions). How to cut through all this noise (sometimes literal noise). Is it possible? I guess what I see in Part and not so much in Messiaen (as great as he is) is a way through modernism without becoming modernism. It is not a Hegelian synthesis of tradition and modernism (an oxymoron, I think) but a tradition that has come through the fires and madness of our times renewed, stronger, deeper. I see Part as helpful in that regard. Others may not. That so many people have found resonance in what Part offers is what is telling to me. But I don't want to fixate on Part, per se, but what he may be pointing towards. That said, I admit I am groping in the dark for something and I am probably not expressing it very well.
Hmm… Interesting. I think without a doubt Pärt is more widely appealing than Messiaen (although the latter’s range is really quite extraordinary and some of it is more accessible and timeless). I’ll have to think about what you’re saying here some more—and give Pärt another listen.
I actually started out in music (in a conservatory) but gave it up fairly quickly. I’m loath to admit it, but I tend often to think all the arts but literature, which is something of a special case and not purely an art, are stalled out at present. And even literature (where I’ve got skin in the game) is like a river lost in its delta.
I am a product of a music conservatory, as well. For that's worth! I agree with you we are in a morass regarding art. Music, no less than any other art form. There may be just too much out there for anything to land, so to speak. We are in such an unprecedented and alienated way of living, that I wonder if ANY art form can capture it meaningfully. Do we even know what we are actually trying to do? This is a very real question for me. I also admit I may be reading too much into Part, in order to fathom a way forward. I take the light where I can find it. Maybe where there is little or no light at all. The only other way I see is for art to become radically local again. To speak to a place and a time in a more conversational and intimate way. Most of us--it hardly needs to be said--are not going to be artistic Cathedral builders (can anybody be, now?). But maybe, rather, a temporary shelter to come together in dehumanizing times. If you are so inclined, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Or anyone else who would like to give their thoughts. I am certainly not on solid ground in my own way of thinking about it all.
The first Christians thought Jesus was coming right back and consequently that it would be a bad idea to marry and have kids. Not that they could keep themselves from doing that anyway. But Jesus himself said he felt bad for whoever was going to be pregnant or nursing when he returned. He also said whoever would not ditch mom and dad and the wife and kids for his sake wasn’t really doing it right.
That kind of thing isn’t really to my taste. I like women, sex, children. That whole set up does seem to be the “plan.” I think Judaism gets the family thing better, relying as it does on the Hebrew Bible. But it’s a blatant fact, as you point out, that all the major religions have ascetic traditions, and many of them are monastic. So what to make of that? I guess that, too, is part of human nature. Not everyone wants to have sex and kids.
Those timescales are slightly different from my understanding. You can see, as the New Testament is being written, that within 20/30 years they began to realise Jesus wasn't coming back immediately - Paul quite clearly changes his view between his early letters (eg 1&2 Thessalonians) and the later ones (eg Romans). They then develop an idea of being a creative minority, mostly within city societies, working to make those whole societies better - the Didache in early 2nd cent CE expresses this in a sophisticated manner. That is the role that some churches where I am (post industrial UK) are getting back to. It's another 200 years before Constantine makes the church the official religion of Empire - and, as the OP describes, the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Skellig Michael are a reaction to that. You could call it a reaction to being bought out by the Machine.
What I have just started to wonder is whether the churches that never came under the influence of Roman Christendom (or allied to the local ruler, as happened to some Orthodox at least) managed to maintain that position as a creative minority, on the side of the people and to some extent dissident from the Machine. Has any work on these lines been done on the Thomist church of southern India, which was founded very early on, and became largely cut off by the collapse of Rome and the later rise of Islam? Might they offer lessons in how to subvert the Machine without either getting seduced into becoming part of it or abandoning most of the people?
Just to add - Benedictine monasticism, what we think of as the standard model, compatible with the Roman church, also arose in the early 6th century, as a different reaction to the same events.
I’m not sure I know quite what you mean here, but Italy was a waste land in the 6th century, hardly an edifice of the Machine worth subverting or fleeing.
I think there is always going to be and always has been a tension between the Gospel and civilization, even the civilization Christianity built. It’s a productive tension, as between the monastic life and the lay life, the active and the contemplative life, the apophatic and the cataphatic ways, etc. Jeff Alexander is correct to point out there has always in Christianity, as in Buddhism, been an emphasis in favor of celibate, and usually cenobitic life. It’s certainly debatable whether that’s been for the best, or whether it’s still viable. My larger point was wondering about the significance and seeming perennial nature of the ascetic impulse across cultures. I think we see the ascetic impulse expressed in many non-religious ways today, because it’s a basic part of human nature. How it gets institutionalized is of course another matter.
In my reading—can’t speak for the author!—Kingsnorth’s novel Beast is a great expression of the contemporary, secular ascetic impulse desperately searching for an outlet or justification.
Funny you should mention this, but one inspiration for Beast was William Golding's novel 'Pincher Martin', about a man shipwrecked on a great Atlantic rock like Skellig Michael.
I defend monks and ascetics. I think that when any fiath, Christian or otherwise, lose or ejects them then it's all over (see the reformation.) It's not a question of that very modern vice of 'elitism': it's a question of having people as part of a tradition who are prepared to give up everything to seek truth. The fact is that the world gets in the way of that - of course it does. Most of us are in the world. But I want to know that Mount Athos is still there and functioning, because I want to know what these people have seen that I can learn from.
It is also true that this is not a Christian or even a religious impulse entirely. It has certainly always called me in some strange way.
Have you heard of Shane Claiborne's "new monasticism"? He challenges American evangelicals to move themselves into the inner cities, the "abandoned places of the Empire" he calls them, and spend their lives in service there. He does things like share tools freely to help people repair their homes, helps kids with homework, and start veggie gardens on vacant lots. I think this would be a monasticism that avoids becoming elitist. It would not bring one in touch with the natural world beyond humans very much. My husband and I lived on the edge of Trenton, NJ and tried some of this sort of thing there. It was difficult. Inner cities are truly wastelands, devoid of nearly all that is good and desirable in life.
Ray Simpson's Church of the Isles, which I reference above, advocates the same in the UK - along with the break-up of the Church of England's bureaucracy and an explicit return to the pre-Synod-of-Whitby ways - in other words, a rejection of models of society based on the Roman Empire.
"This was a faith of the edgelands; there was nothing comfortable about it." Makes me think: the period of 'rapid and extreme' change is also very deeply uncomfortable to me. What's the difference between the green martyrs discomfort and our/my current cultural discomfort? Is this difference purely fysical? Thanks for the story, looks like a great place to visit and to be visited by.
Yes, I think it's uncomfortable for everyone. It's a hard time. The martyrs chose personal discomfort in pursuit of God, which was also a conscious withdrawal from the world. In some ways, that seems like choosing a meaningful sacrifice over a powerless one. Perhaps.
The collected works of Li Po are a good place to start. Han Shan is also rather glorious. He wrote all his poems on rocks or trees for the rain to wash away.
I am no expert at all. But I have found anything translated by Red Pine is great. Also, I just bought "Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry" by Kenneth Jackson. There are truly times the Chinese and the Celtic poets really do seem to be following the same spirit.
Helen Waddell, the great Irish Latinist, published LYRICS FROM THE CHINESE which you might like. The extraordinary John CH Wu, sometime minister in the government of Chiang Kai Shek and, later, convert to Catholicism published FOUR SEASONS OF T'ANG POETRY: both well worth a look
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.
There are, however, plenty of scholars who will tell you that there is/ was no such thing as a specifically Celtic Christianity - that the ancient Irish church was as Roman as anywhere else in Europe. Nonetheless, the lyric poetry that survives from this period does suggest a very different atmosphere to that prevailing further east. Has anyone done any work on the Anglo-Saxon church to show in what ways and how much its tradition differed from the Irish, I wonder? I bet someone has!
Yes, there's a lot of debate about 'Celtic Christianity', and the phrase has been so hijacked by a kind of New Age fluff that I try to avoid it. But while the division between 'Celtic' and 'Roman' might be overblown, it seems undeniable that, before the Synod of Whitby in Britain (which was called precisely to end the divide) the British and Roman models differed. It's true that British/Irish and indeed Anglo-Saxon Christianity, in the early years, was 'wilder', more rural and less centralised. One reason the monks left the Skellig in the 12th century was that they were called to the mainland - where they could be more easily monitored by the Bishop - and called order to the order of St Benedict, which was also designed to rationalise the faith.
I need/want to do a lot more research myself, and I think I will. The monastery I worship in - the first Orthodox monastery in Ireland since the schism - celebrates by St Ciaran and St Brendan, both founding Irish saints. Some re-emergence - small shoots - is perhaps already beginning ...
This might be an interesting place to start. It’s by an Anglican minister who has an obvious dislike for Rome, but it is a great discussions of the legends (Joseph of Arimithea, etc) and his references to the Fathers are all valid. He also references some other historical works.
Also, perhaps this is just a “prejudice” of mine but I think people were in general less dishonest and more honorable back then.
On this note, the timeline at my local Greek Church marks the end of orthodoxy in the British isles concurrently with the Norman invasion. I have kept this in mind while reading The Wake. ingengas indeed ;)
Indeed. I don’t think the Roman Church was anything like what we think of today until the “papal revolution” of the late 11th century. And really the Roman Catholic Church that we know today is to a great extent the product of the Counter-Reformation.
The Greeks and the church that rose from their culture were certainly not short on cities. When Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, there were wolves prowling the streets of depopulated Rome. But very early Christianity was urban, which is why pagans are called pagan — that is, rural. But every Christian culture sank roots into the earth and developed strong rural, semi-pagan traditions, regardless of what the elites in Constantinople or Rome were up to. What mattered more than anything, I think, was language, the stuff one had access to thanks to the lingua franca—Latin or Greek.
I would also recommend Max Adams’ book “The King on the North,” which is about St Oswald and with a good deal of background on pre-Augustine British Christianity. It’s much more complimentary to Oswald than the Morris book. The introduction to Baring-Gould’s Lives of the British Saints has a great deal on the more idiosyncratic aspects of the early faith in the British isles.
Thanks for all these recommendations. I haven't read Morris' book, just saw the review -- by a scholar who is, I believe, an English Catholic. I was somewhat surprised by how hostile to Oswald it sounds like Morris is in the new book, though I probably shouldn't be, as this sort of thing comes and goes according as the trend is in or out. The book nonetheless seems important.
Urban was probably not the best choice of words. My point was that the early Christians in Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and England tended toward asceticism and monasticism, similar to the Greeks (Mt Athos, for example) and the Russians (Solovki and any number of hermitages and monasteries in the Russian North). This indicates a somewhat different spirit than the Roman model, which in the 600s sought to bring the churches of the west under Roman aegis. That’s why Gregory sent Augustine to Britain — it wasn’t to convert the British, who already had a living tradition of its their own — but to bring them in line with Roman doctrine and practice. As seen in the debates over setting the dates for Easter and monastic tonsures.
However our host is right, the whole Celtic Christianity idea has been captured by New Agers (much like Glastonbury itself).
It has been captured, yes. Even its preeminent philosopher, Scotus Eriugena. But there is also good work on him now. And that’s good, because he’s crucial, as there’s a direct line from Pseudo-Dionysus (Greek!) through him to Eckhart and Cusanus (and via Cusanus to Semyon L Frank) and Boehme, among others. Dermot Moran links Eriugena to Hegel… all of which is to say that the Celtic fringe of Europe is not so cut off, in some ways at least, from a fairly central stream of European thought, though it is a stream that has maybe become too polluted or convoluted and perhaps marginalized by now.
Eriugena is tough going, and his magnum opus, the Periphyseon (On Nature) has not been completely translated into English. But I hope he gets his due someday. I have never read a more brilliant explication of creation as theophany. The New Agers and “creation spirituality” folks of the 60s and 70s were not totally out of line in hitting upon various Irish and British figures as foundational for a “greener” Christianity.
Thanks - I will look at those authors. In the same way, the (non political) hippies of the sixties and seventies had a sound insight that something had gone badly wrong with consumerist, war economy culture. A lot appeared in the Deep South who just wanted to plant organic gardens and learn old folkways and crafts. I used to sell them raw milk from my cow Betsey along with eggs and the like. Those were good folks and a lot made a good transition to a rural lifestyle.
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.
In another comment here I see Alexander Norman has mentioned Helen Waddell. I can't resist jumping in to say that she was a rare gem. All her books deserve to be back in print, but none more than the one that might appeal most to folks reading here, her little collection Beasts and Saints. These are are quite short stories from Latin sources in the Christian tradition. Three sections: the Desert Fathers (so translated from Greek into Latin); medieval Europe (including Britain); and Irish saints. I especially recommend the book to anyone with children. I don't believe Waddell ever learned medieval Irish and Welsh. I wish she had, because she would have worked wonders with the literary traditions of those languages, as she did with her knowledge of medieval Latin. She was the daughter of Presbyterian (I think) missionaries in Japan, influenced by her childhood in early 20th century Japan, a rather free-spirited Christian scholar, and a damn fine writer.
Yes indeed! Her STORIES FROM HOLY WRIT is also charming, a wonderful book for children. The introduction, about a stray dog, is unforgettable. One of the many books I am planning not to write is THREE STOUT LADIES, a joint biography of Helen Waddell, Dorothy Sayers and Elizabeth Anscombe, three scandalously overlooked ragers against the machine.
Great trip, good thoughts, and the pictures are very effective.
Some many years ago I caught a BBC radio 'newsy' interview with a man returning from a longer stay, perhaps a project, on Skellig Michael. It got my attention when he said that he had the very strange feeling that if he had been told he would not leave, then that would have been fine by him. I probably have had the same feeling about a place a few times. I remember an old heather thatched croft house on the Isle of Lewis, and the first trip we made to the inner Farne when our two oldest were very small.
A few years ago I returned to thinking about Skellig Michael and turned up this account online. I hope this might be a useful further source for contemplation.
I do not consider myself a climber but I have done enough technical rock climbing in airy places to appreciate this study of some of the dry stone structures on the South Peak. I like page 51: “On the way up to this traverse one views with amazement a fragment of dry-stone wall built by someone who must have been kneeling on clouds when he placed these stones on a narrow ledge that plummets into what appears to be eternity. (Fig.44)” https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1d5nb0gb;chunk.id=0;doc.view=print
Wonderful essay. I truly miss that feeling of everything being holy. When I was a child it felt like superstition, but it grew into something more. It's gone now sadly.
I read this idea from Watchman Nee as a young woman: that if we desire the cross to work in our lives, to 'cleave flesh from spirit', we need not seek out trials. If we merely tell the Lord in prayer that we yearn for His work in us we will see Him bring the testing in due time. When it comes we must not refuse the cross. The difficulties He leads us through may be very different from those we would choose for ourselves in a monastic attempt. It seems true to me with my limited experience and understanding of theology.
I had just happened upon this book of his, The Spiritual Man, off a used book rack. Much of it is strange yet it influenced me at that time in the holiest way. Watchman Nee, or Nee To Sheng, was a Chinese christian at the dawn of Mao's regime. He died in prison but left behind a converted guard. A good biography of Nee is called Against the Tide, by Angus Kinnear.
One cinematographical aside: Skellig Islands are the setting of the final sequence of Heart of Glass - 1976 film by Werner Herzog, director who is also very "wild" and in some personal way also extatically mystical. The movie itself is unique and really really weird, probably the only film which was made while most of the cast was hypnotised and therefore also excruciatingly slow sometimes. It takes place in 18th century Bavaria is based on a story of some local folk prophet. It can be hard to endure but the opening sequence is monumental and I always found the finale very touching, especially the sentence which closes the film. You can se the finale here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arAdbEGVWOk
It’s also in a Star Wars film. One of the new ones. I try not to think about it. But it tells you something about how the numinous quality of the place breaks through even into contemporary pop culture.
for another pop culture/literary aside - in the witcher series of books by Andrzej Sapkowski, there is a region off to the west of the main continent called the Skellige Isles, which is a home of both brutal viking-style pirates and a strong pagan druidic tradition clearly inspired by celtic druidism - it's definitely the most alluring place to live to me in that whole dark and depressing world - beautifully visually realised in one of the video games based on the series.
I very deliberately did not refer to Star Wars throughout this piece!
Actually I was very relieved on my trip to see virtually no references to it in the area. I expected Skywalker-themes cafes and kids on the boat with lightsabres, but nothing of the kind, thank goodness.
Much as I hate the Disney Corporation, I wonder now if it performed an accidental service by subsconsciouly sewing the Skellig back into the underbelly of our culture. Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi is effectively living as a monk on the rock, complete with robes and holy book. Star Wars is certainly a candidate for the West's only remaining modern mythology. Interesting that it led back there.
Yeah, I shouldn’t be so hard on that film. It’s the best of the new films, by far, and Luke’s role the best part of it. Nevertheless, much of what depresses me about Star Wars and Star Trek (the latter is where I first encountered the Christian Story retold, in such a way as to include the wonder of the natural world), is how much the writing for the films has deteriorated since the 80s. But the original trilogy of Star Wars films was incredibly important to me and so many millions of others, as part of the kindling of a mythical consciousness. Fantasy is one of the last hideouts of traditional religious consciousness in Western culture. You can drive it out with a pitchfork but it always comes running back.
Well, the new Disney films are written in a way that deliberately inverts and takes apart the old mythology; because that's what the West does now. But of course like all products of post-modern culture they can't find a new mythology to put in its place, so the result is a mess.
I will say, my favorite part of watching The Last Jedi was probably the 32 oz. of high gravity beer I drank while it played. But at the end Luke sacrifices himself, right? He sort of does this astral body type of projection thing from whatever Skellig Michael is called in the film and it works to save the day but it tasks him to the last of his life force to do it. And that's in keeping with Obi-Wan's death in A New Hope, he also sacrifices himself so the heroes can escape. That whole film was trying hard to recapitulate the first trilogy. Other of the new films have not done that, which I think is significant, for a reason that's I think clear enough...
Taking apart myths--yes, I would say that's pretty much all that's left to do for mainstream entertainment. It makes me wonder, can a myth actually be inverted, like the way a Black Mass is supposedly an inversion of the Catholic Mass? I think it can be, sort of, and actually I think that's what René Girard (a Catholic who converted himself through his own academic work, like Alasdair MacIntyre) argued Christianity is, or does, it inverts or undermines the old scapegoat mythical structure, exposing the innocence of the victim and thus obviating subsequent ritual sacrifice (or the Temple sacrifice)--unless it's the sacrifice of the Mass/divine liturgy, which is understood (I believe in Orthodoxy as well as Catholicism) as in fact not distinct from the one original sacrifice on Calvary. We can now participate in that sacrifice instead of make new ones. So subverting myths isn't always a bad thing, from a certain point of view (as Obi-Wan would say).
But then you do get this extension of the sacrifice of Calvary beyond the eucharist, in the form of asceticism. I am not the one to make the theological or doctrinal case for that aspect of the imitatio Christi. But that's the justification for specifically Christian asceticism. Yes, it's for the sake of theosis/deification, but it is understood symbolically as an extension of Christ's asceticism to the point of mortification and even actual death, i.e. martyrdom. Now, we don't green-martyr ourselves anymore, but can we still receive that kind of story, as for example in The Last Jedi? I'm actually not sure we can. I think service, self-sacrifice as a value is vanishing, and that film was a kind of farewell to it, a respectful nod to the elders whom we don't really care about any more but we like to be polite occasionally. I wouldn't expect to see it invoked again any time soon. The whole thrust of the new value system or Successor Ideology, whatever we want to call it, is tribal and identitarian, which is to say self-centered, and precisely the sort of tribal world that the pre-Christian system of scapegoat sacrifice operated in.
Thank you for this reference to Herzog; the connection was emerging in the murk of my mind as I was reading this piece and I thank you for identifying it. My siblings and I just cared for my aging mother at home rather than leaving her in a facility, and I described the whole beautiful struggle as being very Fitzcarraldo, so the wildness is definitely a common thread.
You know what this actually reminds me of—and I can’t believe i didn’t mention this first—is your novel Beast.
For those who don’t know but might be interested: the narrator of that book, a contemporary man, is on a mad quest to discover some asceticism in his life. He’s absolutely desperate for it, and he does achieve it in a way, living off little more than water on some desolate moor. (Reminds me of great ascetic saints like Catherine of Siena, living off of the communion host.) What really strikes me now, even more than when I read that book, is that that Buckmaster (the narrator, and literary descendant of the Buccmaster of The Wake) had to leave behind his wife and child for his insane but visionary, sort of redemptive exile. But here you are writing about visiting the site of one of the triumphs of Christian asceticism with your family.
My very earliest living memory was of being a child in western Ireland on a day my parents took me to the beach. I remember the sun shining on the water and the darkness of the sand.
Places such as the Skellig are often referred to as 'thin places', places where the veil between the transcendent and the earthly are wafer thin and the light of some vast 'otherness' comes flooding through.
Each day now I am online looking for remote rural land in the alpine country of Australia near the city where we live. The desire for escape and simplicity and most of all...silence, is becoming so very strong.
Also, today is the feast of St. Bonaventure who wrote:
"Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stone he shares existence, with the plants he shares life, with the animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence. Thus all things are transformed in Christ since in the fullness of his nature he embraces some part of every creature."
Since St. Brendan has been mentioned let me pop in here with a book recommendation. It’s for “The Brendan Voyage” by Tim Severin. A fascinating recounting of his attempt to build a leather curragh and follow Brendan’s legendary route to the New World. Very much like the voyage of the Kon-Tiki.
This is beautiful. The wild, green, panentheistic spirit of early Christianity it evokes, is beautiful. Until recently I was averse to Christianity. My spiritual path took a similar direction to yours – for Zen Witch read Yogic Celtic Faery. I never thought of Christianity as wild but I’m beginning to see that it can be. It’s drawn me in.
The prayer and poem you quoted recalled some lines from the Katha Upanishad:
The Self is the sun shining in the sky,
The wind blowing in space; he is the fire
At the altar and in the home the guest;
He dwells in human beings, in gods, in truth,
And in the vast firmament; he is the fish
Born in water, the plant growing in the earth,
The river flowing down from the mountain.
Maybe I’m a Yogic Christian? I think not but that ancient faith will inform my yogic path from now on.
As I'm sure you know, the word YOGA simply means 'discipline'. The monks of Skellig could certainly be thought of as Yogic Christians in one way. On the other hand, the discipline of the Indian/ Tibetan etc yogi/ yogini is concerned less with the outward discipline of following a monastic rule than it is with disciplining the mind. The idea is that once the mind is brought under control, the practitioner gets to apprehend the nature of ultimate reality which, at least on the Buddhist view, is emptiness (SUNYATA). This is fundamentally opposed to the Judaeo-Christian view which holds that God created heaven and earth, that these things really exist and are not, as Buddhism holds, merely the magical play of illusion. If this is right, then Yogic Christianity in the second sense turns out to be impossible. It seems that one has to choose!
Btw, you probably know already the SONG OF AMERGIN translated by Lady Gregory (who was a major influence on Yeats)...
The yogic path I follow is about devotion (bhakti) and service (karma) to God. For me the ultimate reality is God and my sadhana is about experiencing that. I know what you mean about Buddhism, though. I've been there and tried that and had pretty much the same experience as Paul, i.e. something was missing and it was God. I am familiar with the Song of Aimhirghin, which the lines from the Katha Upanishad called to your mind. I was tempted to quote from both; they go well together.
Re bhakti and karma, my understanding of the word karma is that it means simply act, or action. So is the idea that every act ought to be an act of service or that every action already is an act of service?
Good question! It can be interpreted in a number of ways. You can perform every act - work, play, etc. - in service of God and in so doing spiritualise your daily life. I work on that as I clean up after the dog - not quite there! Or you can perform conscious acts of selfless service, like volunteering or supporting a friend in need, for example. The key is the action should be selfless; you put yourself aside and you're not concerned with the results of the action, in the sense of feeling satisfied, good or getting a pat on the head. I'm still working on that, too. As you can probably tell, the two aren't necessarily separate; I've separated them here for convenience. I hope I've answered your question.
Absolutely. And I think this is a good thing. It is also what Christ and his disciples lived. 'If the world hates you ...' Hard but healthy. The margins is usually where the truth is to be found. The trick is then not to idolise the margins.
That is just the question. And it is all the more complicated and interesting, to me at least, by the fact that our culture and place in history is the secular, modern age which is uniquely the product of historical Christendom.
I think about what, for the lack of a better term, might be called postmodern traditionalism. Or even an avant-garde traditionalism. What could that look like? Arvo Part comes to mind. He started his career as a modernist; composed in 12-tone serialism, collage, and other modernist techniques. As the story goes one day he heard Gregorian Chant in a record store and then basically stopped composing for a number of years. He studied Chant and early polyphony. When he returned fully to composing he had become Orthodox. His music has come from modernism and through to the other side (via early Western Church music) to something ancient/traditional and at the same time, quite new. All kinds of people--not only Christians-- respond deeply to it. It isn't a reactionary escape to the past. Not at all. Is he merely an idiosyncratic genius, or can we learn, more broadly, to do the same?
Well musically he certainly was not idiosyncratic but part of an important trend or school, sometimes called “holy minimalism.” John Tavener (d.2013) would be another composer to mention in this context, a great one in my opinion. Englishman who became Orthodox Christian. His work became more wide-ranging as he developed. Tons of religious composers of great stature in the 20th century, I would say many of the very best. My personal favorite would be Olivier Messiaen, very avant-garde, also a devout Catholic and enthusiastic naturalist, particularly an ornithologist. I also greatly value the strange, polyvalent, mystical Alfred Schnittke (Catholic and Orthodox in a way) and the Jewish Ernest Bloch, who was greatly influenced by the natural world.
But I don’t see all that pointing to any single tradition in particular, religiously or musically. They were all so different. Artists of any kind (but maybe especially musicians and composers) are always going to be turning to religion because art and religion are really up to the same thing. Conversely, we can look in the arts for the religious consciousness we have elsewhere seemingly lost, and I would say that is where most of us get our effective religion these days if we get it at all. Is it enough? For some people it is, I guess because it has to be.
I think there is something about music that can be prophetic. Even if in an unconscious, unintended way. The classic example given is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring just before the outbreak of WWI. There was something new, and at times brutal in what Stravinsky offered. It wasn't entirely unprecedented, but it was still a different spirit. If music is prophetic in that sense, we live in a time of musical confusion (like all our other multitude of confusions). How to cut through all this noise (sometimes literal noise). Is it possible? I guess what I see in Part and not so much in Messiaen (as great as he is) is a way through modernism without becoming modernism. It is not a Hegelian synthesis of tradition and modernism (an oxymoron, I think) but a tradition that has come through the fires and madness of our times renewed, stronger, deeper. I see Part as helpful in that regard. Others may not. That so many people have found resonance in what Part offers is what is telling to me. But I don't want to fixate on Part, per se, but what he may be pointing towards. That said, I admit I am groping in the dark for something and I am probably not expressing it very well.
Hmm… Interesting. I think without a doubt Pärt is more widely appealing than Messiaen (although the latter’s range is really quite extraordinary and some of it is more accessible and timeless). I’ll have to think about what you’re saying here some more—and give Pärt another listen.
I actually started out in music (in a conservatory) but gave it up fairly quickly. I’m loath to admit it, but I tend often to think all the arts but literature, which is something of a special case and not purely an art, are stalled out at present. And even literature (where I’ve got skin in the game) is like a river lost in its delta.
I am a product of a music conservatory, as well. For that's worth! I agree with you we are in a morass regarding art. Music, no less than any other art form. There may be just too much out there for anything to land, so to speak. We are in such an unprecedented and alienated way of living, that I wonder if ANY art form can capture it meaningfully. Do we even know what we are actually trying to do? This is a very real question for me. I also admit I may be reading too much into Part, in order to fathom a way forward. I take the light where I can find it. Maybe where there is little or no light at all. The only other way I see is for art to become radically local again. To speak to a place and a time in a more conversational and intimate way. Most of us--it hardly needs to be said--are not going to be artistic Cathedral builders (can anybody be, now?). But maybe, rather, a temporary shelter to come together in dehumanizing times. If you are so inclined, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Or anyone else who would like to give their thoughts. I am certainly not on solid ground in my own way of thinking about it all.
Exactly the question! Which is up to us to answer ...
The first Christians thought Jesus was coming right back and consequently that it would be a bad idea to marry and have kids. Not that they could keep themselves from doing that anyway. But Jesus himself said he felt bad for whoever was going to be pregnant or nursing when he returned. He also said whoever would not ditch mom and dad and the wife and kids for his sake wasn’t really doing it right.
That kind of thing isn’t really to my taste. I like women, sex, children. That whole set up does seem to be the “plan.” I think Judaism gets the family thing better, relying as it does on the Hebrew Bible. But it’s a blatant fact, as you point out, that all the major religions have ascetic traditions, and many of them are monastic. So what to make of that? I guess that, too, is part of human nature. Not everyone wants to have sex and kids.
Those timescales are slightly different from my understanding. You can see, as the New Testament is being written, that within 20/30 years they began to realise Jesus wasn't coming back immediately - Paul quite clearly changes his view between his early letters (eg 1&2 Thessalonians) and the later ones (eg Romans). They then develop an idea of being a creative minority, mostly within city societies, working to make those whole societies better - the Didache in early 2nd cent CE expresses this in a sophisticated manner. That is the role that some churches where I am (post industrial UK) are getting back to. It's another 200 years before Constantine makes the church the official religion of Empire - and, as the OP describes, the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Skellig Michael are a reaction to that. You could call it a reaction to being bought out by the Machine.
What I have just started to wonder is whether the churches that never came under the influence of Roman Christendom (or allied to the local ruler, as happened to some Orthodox at least) managed to maintain that position as a creative minority, on the side of the people and to some extent dissident from the Machine. Has any work on these lines been done on the Thomist church of southern India, which was founded very early on, and became largely cut off by the collapse of Rome and the later rise of Islam? Might they offer lessons in how to subvert the Machine without either getting seduced into becoming part of it or abandoning most of the people?
Just to add - Benedictine monasticism, what we think of as the standard model, compatible with the Roman church, also arose in the early 6th century, as a different reaction to the same events.
I’m not sure I know quite what you mean here, but Italy was a waste land in the 6th century, hardly an edifice of the Machine worth subverting or fleeing.
I think there is always going to be and always has been a tension between the Gospel and civilization, even the civilization Christianity built. It’s a productive tension, as between the monastic life and the lay life, the active and the contemplative life, the apophatic and the cataphatic ways, etc. Jeff Alexander is correct to point out there has always in Christianity, as in Buddhism, been an emphasis in favor of celibate, and usually cenobitic life. It’s certainly debatable whether that’s been for the best, or whether it’s still viable. My larger point was wondering about the significance and seeming perennial nature of the ascetic impulse across cultures. I think we see the ascetic impulse expressed in many non-religious ways today, because it’s a basic part of human nature. How it gets institutionalized is of course another matter.
In my reading—can’t speak for the author!—Kingsnorth’s novel Beast is a great expression of the contemporary, secular ascetic impulse desperately searching for an outlet or justification.
Funny you should mention this, but one inspiration for Beast was William Golding's novel 'Pincher Martin', about a man shipwrecked on a great Atlantic rock like Skellig Michael.
I defend monks and ascetics. I think that when any fiath, Christian or otherwise, lose or ejects them then it's all over (see the reformation.) It's not a question of that very modern vice of 'elitism': it's a question of having people as part of a tradition who are prepared to give up everything to seek truth. The fact is that the world gets in the way of that - of course it does. Most of us are in the world. But I want to know that Mount Athos is still there and functioning, because I want to know what these people have seen that I can learn from.
It is also true that this is not a Christian or even a religious impulse entirely. It has certainly always called me in some strange way.
Have you heard of Shane Claiborne's "new monasticism"? He challenges American evangelicals to move themselves into the inner cities, the "abandoned places of the Empire" he calls them, and spend their lives in service there. He does things like share tools freely to help people repair their homes, helps kids with homework, and start veggie gardens on vacant lots. I think this would be a monasticism that avoids becoming elitist. It would not bring one in touch with the natural world beyond humans very much. My husband and I lived on the edge of Trenton, NJ and tried some of this sort of thing there. It was difficult. Inner cities are truly wastelands, devoid of nearly all that is good and desirable in life.
Ray Simpson's Church of the Isles, which I reference above, advocates the same in the UK - along with the break-up of the Church of England's bureaucracy and an explicit return to the pre-Synod-of-Whitby ways - in other words, a rejection of models of society based on the Roman Empire.
"This was a faith of the edgelands; there was nothing comfortable about it." Makes me think: the period of 'rapid and extreme' change is also very deeply uncomfortable to me. What's the difference between the green martyrs discomfort and our/my current cultural discomfort? Is this difference purely fysical? Thanks for the story, looks like a great place to visit and to be visited by.
Yes, I think it's uncomfortable for everyone. It's a hard time. The martyrs chose personal discomfort in pursuit of God, which was also a conscious withdrawal from the world. In some ways, that seems like choosing a meaningful sacrifice over a powerless one. Perhaps.
Looks wonderful. Do you have any recommendations for ancient Chinese poetry by any chance? Thank you.
The collected works of Li Po are a good place to start. Han Shan is also rather glorious. He wrote all his poems on rocks or trees for the rain to wash away.
Thank you. Greatly appreciated.
I am no expert at all. But I have found anything translated by Red Pine is great. Also, I just bought "Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry" by Kenneth Jackson. There are truly times the Chinese and the Celtic poets really do seem to be following the same spirit.
Also, Ezra Pound translated, brilliantly, a collection from ancient China called 'Cathay.'
Helen Waddell, the great Irish Latinist, published LYRICS FROM THE CHINESE which you might like. The extraordinary John CH Wu, sometime minister in the government of Chiang Kai Shek and, later, convert to Catholicism published FOUR SEASONS OF T'ANG POETRY: both well worth a look
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.
There are, however, plenty of scholars who will tell you that there is/ was no such thing as a specifically Celtic Christianity - that the ancient Irish church was as Roman as anywhere else in Europe. Nonetheless, the lyric poetry that survives from this period does suggest a very different atmosphere to that prevailing further east. Has anyone done any work on the Anglo-Saxon church to show in what ways and how much its tradition differed from the Irish, I wonder? I bet someone has!
Yes, there's a lot of debate about 'Celtic Christianity', and the phrase has been so hijacked by a kind of New Age fluff that I try to avoid it. But while the division between 'Celtic' and 'Roman' might be overblown, it seems undeniable that, before the Synod of Whitby in Britain (which was called precisely to end the divide) the British and Roman models differed. It's true that British/Irish and indeed Anglo-Saxon Christianity, in the early years, was 'wilder', more rural and less centralised. One reason the monks left the Skellig in the 12th century was that they were called to the mainland - where they could be more easily monitored by the Bishop - and called order to the order of St Benedict, which was also designed to rationalise the faith.
I need/want to do a lot more research myself, and I think I will. The monastery I worship in - the first Orthodox monastery in Ireland since the schism - celebrates by St Ciaran and St Brendan, both founding Irish saints. Some re-emergence - small shoots - is perhaps already beginning ...
This might be an interesting place to start. It’s by an Anglican minister who has an obvious dislike for Rome, but it is a great discussions of the legends (Joseph of Arimithea, etc) and his references to the Fathers are all valid. He also references some other historical works.
Also, perhaps this is just a “prejudice” of mine but I think people were in general less dishonest and more honorable back then.
https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Early-History-Christianity-Britain/dp/0934666431
On this note, the timeline at my local Greek Church marks the end of orthodoxy in the British isles concurrently with the Norman invasion. I have kept this in mind while reading The Wake. ingengas indeed ;)
Indeed. I don’t think the Roman Church was anything like what we think of today until the “papal revolution” of the late 11th century. And really the Roman Catholic Church that we know today is to a great extent the product of the Counter-Reformation.
The Greeks and the church that rose from their culture were certainly not short on cities. When Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, there were wolves prowling the streets of depopulated Rome. But very early Christianity was urban, which is why pagans are called pagan — that is, rural. But every Christian culture sank roots into the earth and developed strong rural, semi-pagan traditions, regardless of what the elites in Constantinople or Rome were up to. What mattered more than anything, I think, was language, the stuff one had access to thanks to the lingua franca—Latin or Greek.
I don’t know of a well researched work devoted entirely to comparing English and Irish early Christianity, but I just saw this review the other day which might be of interest. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/07/the-making-of-christian-england
I would also recommend Max Adams’ book “The King on the North,” which is about St Oswald and with a good deal of background on pre-Augustine British Christianity. It’s much more complimentary to Oswald than the Morris book. The introduction to Baring-Gould’s Lives of the British Saints has a great deal on the more idiosyncratic aspects of the early faith in the British isles.
Thanks for all these recommendations. I haven't read Morris' book, just saw the review -- by a scholar who is, I believe, an English Catholic. I was somewhat surprised by how hostile to Oswald it sounds like Morris is in the new book, though I probably shouldn't be, as this sort of thing comes and goes according as the trend is in or out. The book nonetheless seems important.
Urban was probably not the best choice of words. My point was that the early Christians in Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and England tended toward asceticism and monasticism, similar to the Greeks (Mt Athos, for example) and the Russians (Solovki and any number of hermitages and monasteries in the Russian North). This indicates a somewhat different spirit than the Roman model, which in the 600s sought to bring the churches of the west under Roman aegis. That’s why Gregory sent Augustine to Britain — it wasn’t to convert the British, who already had a living tradition of its their own — but to bring them in line with Roman doctrine and practice. As seen in the debates over setting the dates for Easter and monastic tonsures.
However our host is right, the whole Celtic Christianity idea has been captured by New Agers (much like Glastonbury itself).
It has been captured, yes. Even its preeminent philosopher, Scotus Eriugena. But there is also good work on him now. And that’s good, because he’s crucial, as there’s a direct line from Pseudo-Dionysus (Greek!) through him to Eckhart and Cusanus (and via Cusanus to Semyon L Frank) and Boehme, among others. Dermot Moran links Eriugena to Hegel… all of which is to say that the Celtic fringe of Europe is not so cut off, in some ways at least, from a fairly central stream of European thought, though it is a stream that has maybe become too polluted or convoluted and perhaps marginalized by now.
Eriugena is tough going, and his magnum opus, the Periphyseon (On Nature) has not been completely translated into English. But I hope he gets his due someday. I have never read a more brilliant explication of creation as theophany. The New Agers and “creation spirituality” folks of the 60s and 70s were not totally out of line in hitting upon various Irish and British figures as foundational for a “greener” Christianity.
Thanks - I will look at those authors. In the same way, the (non political) hippies of the sixties and seventies had a sound insight that something had gone badly wrong with consumerist, war economy culture. A lot appeared in the Deep South who just wanted to plant organic gardens and learn old folkways and crafts. I used to sell them raw milk from my cow Betsey along with eggs and the like. Those were good folks and a lot made a good transition to a rural lifestyle.
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.
In another comment here I see Alexander Norman has mentioned Helen Waddell. I can't resist jumping in to say that she was a rare gem. All her books deserve to be back in print, but none more than the one that might appeal most to folks reading here, her little collection Beasts and Saints. These are are quite short stories from Latin sources in the Christian tradition. Three sections: the Desert Fathers (so translated from Greek into Latin); medieval Europe (including Britain); and Irish saints. I especially recommend the book to anyone with children. I don't believe Waddell ever learned medieval Irish and Welsh. I wish she had, because she would have worked wonders with the literary traditions of those languages, as she did with her knowledge of medieval Latin. She was the daughter of Presbyterian (I think) missionaries in Japan, influenced by her childhood in early 20th century Japan, a rather free-spirited Christian scholar, and a damn fine writer.
Yes indeed! Her STORIES FROM HOLY WRIT is also charming, a wonderful book for children. The introduction, about a stray dog, is unforgettable. One of the many books I am planning not to write is THREE STOUT LADIES, a joint biography of Helen Waddell, Dorothy Sayers and Elizabeth Anscombe, three scandalously overlooked ragers against the machine.
Great trip, good thoughts, and the pictures are very effective.
Some many years ago I caught a BBC radio 'newsy' interview with a man returning from a longer stay, perhaps a project, on Skellig Michael. It got my attention when he said that he had the very strange feeling that if he had been told he would not leave, then that would have been fine by him. I probably have had the same feeling about a place a few times. I remember an old heather thatched croft house on the Isle of Lewis, and the first trip we made to the inner Farne when our two oldest were very small.
A few years ago I returned to thinking about Skellig Michael and turned up this account online. I hope this might be a useful further source for contemplation.
I do not consider myself a climber but I have done enough technical rock climbing in airy places to appreciate this study of some of the dry stone structures on the South Peak. I like page 51: “On the way up to this traverse one views with amazement a fragment of dry-stone wall built by someone who must have been kneeling on clouds when he placed these stones on a narrow ledge that plummets into what appears to be eternity. (Fig.44)” https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1d5nb0gb;chunk.id=0;doc.view=print
best wishes for the continuing journey
Phil H
Wonderful essay. I truly miss that feeling of everything being holy. When I was a child it felt like superstition, but it grew into something more. It's gone now sadly.
I read this idea from Watchman Nee as a young woman: that if we desire the cross to work in our lives, to 'cleave flesh from spirit', we need not seek out trials. If we merely tell the Lord in prayer that we yearn for His work in us we will see Him bring the testing in due time. When it comes we must not refuse the cross. The difficulties He leads us through may be very different from those we would choose for ourselves in a monastic attempt. It seems true to me with my limited experience and understanding of theology.
I had just happened upon this book of his, The Spiritual Man, off a used book rack. Much of it is strange yet it influenced me at that time in the holiest way. Watchman Nee, or Nee To Sheng, was a Chinese christian at the dawn of Mao's regime. He died in prison but left behind a converted guard. A good biography of Nee is called Against the Tide, by Angus Kinnear.
One cinematographical aside: Skellig Islands are the setting of the final sequence of Heart of Glass - 1976 film by Werner Herzog, director who is also very "wild" and in some personal way also extatically mystical. The movie itself is unique and really really weird, probably the only film which was made while most of the cast was hypnotised and therefore also excruciatingly slow sometimes. It takes place in 18th century Bavaria is based on a story of some local folk prophet. It can be hard to endure but the opening sequence is monumental and I always found the finale very touching, especially the sentence which closes the film. You can se the finale here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arAdbEGVWOk
It’s also in a Star Wars film. One of the new ones. I try not to think about it. But it tells you something about how the numinous quality of the place breaks through even into contemporary pop culture.
for another pop culture/literary aside - in the witcher series of books by Andrzej Sapkowski, there is a region off to the west of the main continent called the Skellige Isles, which is a home of both brutal viking-style pirates and a strong pagan druidic tradition clearly inspired by celtic druidism - it's definitely the most alluring place to live to me in that whole dark and depressing world - beautifully visually realised in one of the video games based on the series.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-01-11-the-irishness-of-the-witcher-3s-skellige - interesting article about the game depiction
I very deliberately did not refer to Star Wars throughout this piece!
Actually I was very relieved on my trip to see virtually no references to it in the area. I expected Skywalker-themes cafes and kids on the boat with lightsabres, but nothing of the kind, thank goodness.
Much as I hate the Disney Corporation, I wonder now if it performed an accidental service by subsconsciouly sewing the Skellig back into the underbelly of our culture. Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi is effectively living as a monk on the rock, complete with robes and holy book. Star Wars is certainly a candidate for the West's only remaining modern mythology. Interesting that it led back there.
Yeah, I shouldn’t be so hard on that film. It’s the best of the new films, by far, and Luke’s role the best part of it. Nevertheless, much of what depresses me about Star Wars and Star Trek (the latter is where I first encountered the Christian Story retold, in such a way as to include the wonder of the natural world), is how much the writing for the films has deteriorated since the 80s. But the original trilogy of Star Wars films was incredibly important to me and so many millions of others, as part of the kindling of a mythical consciousness. Fantasy is one of the last hideouts of traditional religious consciousness in Western culture. You can drive it out with a pitchfork but it always comes running back.
Well, the new Disney films are written in a way that deliberately inverts and takes apart the old mythology; because that's what the West does now. But of course like all products of post-modern culture they can't find a new mythology to put in its place, so the result is a mess.
I will say, my favorite part of watching The Last Jedi was probably the 32 oz. of high gravity beer I drank while it played. But at the end Luke sacrifices himself, right? He sort of does this astral body type of projection thing from whatever Skellig Michael is called in the film and it works to save the day but it tasks him to the last of his life force to do it. And that's in keeping with Obi-Wan's death in A New Hope, he also sacrifices himself so the heroes can escape. That whole film was trying hard to recapitulate the first trilogy. Other of the new films have not done that, which I think is significant, for a reason that's I think clear enough...
Taking apart myths--yes, I would say that's pretty much all that's left to do for mainstream entertainment. It makes me wonder, can a myth actually be inverted, like the way a Black Mass is supposedly an inversion of the Catholic Mass? I think it can be, sort of, and actually I think that's what René Girard (a Catholic who converted himself through his own academic work, like Alasdair MacIntyre) argued Christianity is, or does, it inverts or undermines the old scapegoat mythical structure, exposing the innocence of the victim and thus obviating subsequent ritual sacrifice (or the Temple sacrifice)--unless it's the sacrifice of the Mass/divine liturgy, which is understood (I believe in Orthodoxy as well as Catholicism) as in fact not distinct from the one original sacrifice on Calvary. We can now participate in that sacrifice instead of make new ones. So subverting myths isn't always a bad thing, from a certain point of view (as Obi-Wan would say).
But then you do get this extension of the sacrifice of Calvary beyond the eucharist, in the form of asceticism. I am not the one to make the theological or doctrinal case for that aspect of the imitatio Christi. But that's the justification for specifically Christian asceticism. Yes, it's for the sake of theosis/deification, but it is understood symbolically as an extension of Christ's asceticism to the point of mortification and even actual death, i.e. martyrdom. Now, we don't green-martyr ourselves anymore, but can we still receive that kind of story, as for example in The Last Jedi? I'm actually not sure we can. I think service, self-sacrifice as a value is vanishing, and that film was a kind of farewell to it, a respectful nod to the elders whom we don't really care about any more but we like to be polite occasionally. I wouldn't expect to see it invoked again any time soon. The whole thrust of the new value system or Successor Ideology, whatever we want to call it, is tribal and identitarian, which is to say self-centered, and precisely the sort of tribal world that the pre-Christian system of scapegoat sacrifice operated in.
Thank you for this reference to Herzog; the connection was emerging in the murk of my mind as I was reading this piece and I thank you for identifying it. My siblings and I just cared for my aging mother at home rather than leaving her in a facility, and I described the whole beautiful struggle as being very Fitzcarraldo, so the wildness is definitely a common thread.
You know what this actually reminds me of—and I can’t believe i didn’t mention this first—is your novel Beast.
For those who don’t know but might be interested: the narrator of that book, a contemporary man, is on a mad quest to discover some asceticism in his life. He’s absolutely desperate for it, and he does achieve it in a way, living off little more than water on some desolate moor. (Reminds me of great ascetic saints like Catherine of Siena, living off of the communion host.) What really strikes me now, even more than when I read that book, is that that Buckmaster (the narrator, and literary descendant of the Buccmaster of The Wake) had to leave behind his wife and child for his insane but visionary, sort of redemptive exile. But here you are writing about visiting the site of one of the triumphs of Christian asceticism with your family.
My very earliest living memory was of being a child in western Ireland on a day my parents took me to the beach. I remember the sun shining on the water and the darkness of the sand.
Places such as the Skellig are often referred to as 'thin places', places where the veil between the transcendent and the earthly are wafer thin and the light of some vast 'otherness' comes flooding through.
Each day now I am online looking for remote rural land in the alpine country of Australia near the city where we live. The desire for escape and simplicity and most of all...silence, is becoming so very strong.
Also, today is the feast of St. Bonaventure who wrote:
"Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stone he shares existence, with the plants he shares life, with the animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence. Thus all things are transformed in Christ since in the fullness of his nature he embraces some part of every creature."
The divine permeates all creation.
Since St. Brendan has been mentioned let me pop in here with a book recommendation. It’s for “The Brendan Voyage” by Tim Severin. A fascinating recounting of his attempt to build a leather curragh and follow Brendan’s legendary route to the New World. Very much like the voyage of the Kon-Tiki.
Am I allowed to mention Christie Moore's delightful ST BRENDAN'S VOYAGE (on the album WHERE I COME FROM)?
Actually, I remember the better version is on ORDINARY MAN
This is beautiful. The wild, green, panentheistic spirit of early Christianity it evokes, is beautiful. Until recently I was averse to Christianity. My spiritual path took a similar direction to yours – for Zen Witch read Yogic Celtic Faery. I never thought of Christianity as wild but I’m beginning to see that it can be. It’s drawn me in.
The prayer and poem you quoted recalled some lines from the Katha Upanishad:
The Self is the sun shining in the sky,
The wind blowing in space; he is the fire
At the altar and in the home the guest;
He dwells in human beings, in gods, in truth,
And in the vast firmament; he is the fish
Born in water, the plant growing in the earth,
The river flowing down from the mountain.
Maybe I’m a Yogic Christian? I think not but that ancient faith will inform my yogic path from now on.
As I'm sure you know, the word YOGA simply means 'discipline'. The monks of Skellig could certainly be thought of as Yogic Christians in one way. On the other hand, the discipline of the Indian/ Tibetan etc yogi/ yogini is concerned less with the outward discipline of following a monastic rule than it is with disciplining the mind. The idea is that once the mind is brought under control, the practitioner gets to apprehend the nature of ultimate reality which, at least on the Buddhist view, is emptiness (SUNYATA). This is fundamentally opposed to the Judaeo-Christian view which holds that God created heaven and earth, that these things really exist and are not, as Buddhism holds, merely the magical play of illusion. If this is right, then Yogic Christianity in the second sense turns out to be impossible. It seems that one has to choose!
Btw, you probably know already the SONG OF AMERGIN translated by Lady Gregory (who was a major influence on Yeats)...
Hi Alexander,
The yogic path I follow is about devotion (bhakti) and service (karma) to God. For me the ultimate reality is God and my sadhana is about experiencing that. I know what you mean about Buddhism, though. I've been there and tried that and had pretty much the same experience as Paul, i.e. something was missing and it was God. I am familiar with the Song of Aimhirghin, which the lines from the Katha Upanishad called to your mind. I was tempted to quote from both; they go well together.
Thank you for your comment.
Hello Lynn,
Yes, I agree they do both go well together...
Re bhakti and karma, my understanding of the word karma is that it means simply act, or action. So is the idea that every act ought to be an act of service or that every action already is an act of service?
Good question! It can be interpreted in a number of ways. You can perform every act - work, play, etc. - in service of God and in so doing spiritualise your daily life. I work on that as I clean up after the dog - not quite there! Or you can perform conscious acts of selfless service, like volunteering or supporting a friend in need, for example. The key is the action should be selfless; you put yourself aside and you're not concerned with the results of the action, in the sense of feeling satisfied, good or getting a pat on the head. I'm still working on that, too. As you can probably tell, the two aren't necessarily separate; I've separated them here for convenience. I hope I've answered your question.
Interesting, thank you. Puts me in mind of that wonderful little book, RGE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD, by Brother Lawrence. I'm sure you know it.