From Volume 4, Number 2 1997

The Spiritual Heritage of the Celtic Church

by The Rev'd Ernest Seddon

Celtic Christianity is more Eastern than Western in its origins. The Eastern church arose in Antioch in Syria, Alexandria in Egypt, and of course in Jerusalem. It is from these three churches that the  basic rites of Eastern Christianity developed into the Orthodox , Coptic and Ethiopian Churches. The faith spread as far as India. More significant from the point of view of Celtic Christianity is the distinctive  spiritual attitude which developed within the Eastern Christian milieu. One of the main differences between Eastern and Western Churches was that the Eastern Church did not impose either a centralized ecclesiastical  system or a liturgical language (which in the West was Latin). The Church in the East developed according to its own ethnic and cultural exigencies and directed its attention to the local church as the prime reality  of Christian life. In the West, by contrast, the centrality of the church in Rome became the norm for the whole of the Roman Catholic World.

Devotional attitudes within the Eastern Church also differed from those in the Western church. The Western Church emphasized the moral aspects of sacramental and spiritual life and saw in them  strength to aid the pilgrimage toward final perfection. Grace was a principle of meritorious action restoring to man the capacity for works of merit. On the other hand the Eastern Church saw man as an imperfect  similitude of God able to be perfected by grace. Life is a progressive transfiguration into the likeness of God. Merit, satisfaction and works of supererogation are less important than the process of what we might  call divinization or transfiguration õ the transforming of man back into the image in which he was created.

A further emphasis of the Western Church absent from the Eastern attitude was that of the universality of worship. The Western Church claimed (not entirely accidentally) that wherever one went within  the Western Church the liturgy and ritual would be the same. As Robert F. Taft, S.J. says "Wherever a catholic goes he will feel at home when he enters a Catholic church because there he will find the familiar  mass celebrated in the common language of the church" (Eastern Rite Catholicism, Paulist Press). Of course, this was said before the Roman Catholic Church began in relatively recent years to celebrate the mass  in the vernacular. The Eastern church had done this substantially from the beginning.

In this sense also the Celtic Church is more Eastern than Western as the liturgies frequently were localized and were celebrated mainly in the language of the people. While there was a core of  orthodox faith and teaching, the manner of expression could vary widely from place to place. This arose out of the emphasis on local autonomy and on the role of the local bishops which gave Eastern Christianity a  greater flexibility than that of the West, and which in the framework of western Europe made the Celtic Church unique. The Western Church emphasized the moral aspects of the sacramental and spiritual life, and the  East the spiritual or mystical aspects of the sacramental life. This promoted a diversity of liturgical expression — the word liturgy derives from the Greek leitourgia meaning the work of the people. A liturgy is  not so much a written form of worship as the act of worship itself, which, both for the Celts and for other branches of the Church did eventually become formalized. Because of the local nature of the church then the  relationship between the laity and the clergy was much more casual than in the Western Church. Many of the laity held minor orders in the Church. This applies even with the Eastern Catholic church today which has  married clergy, and laity functioning as cantors, subdeacons, and deacons. However, the main difference in the expression of the Eastern and Western church is in the attitude toward the liturgy or spiritual life.  Within the framework of the Eastern church the liturgy is not a requirement of spiritual duty, but a central expression of life in God. The purpose of God's saving revelation is to enable man to be capable of the  life of God; the liturgy is the ground on which this encounter with God takes place. It is where man is introduced into the divine life here on earth. While the Church in the West developed into a spiritual  approximation of the Roman Empire with the intent to conquer the world for Christ, the Eastern Church evolved a vertical relationship in which the life of the Church was seen as "Paradise on earth." In  other words God is coming down vertically into the world. The Eastern Church saw the life of the Church as transfiguration, changing the world not by its militancy but by its light.

Worship for the Celtic Christians in this basic Eastern background was not something done for its own sake. We still tend to speak of going to worship, as if worship was a place to be or an act in  which to become engaged. For the Celts worship was an experience, not an act. The prime expression of that experience was the presence of the Resurrected Christ. It is interesting that the name given to the Basilica  that covers Golgotha and the Tomb of Christ is known as the Holy Sepulcher in the West, but in the East it is known as the Anastasis (The Resurrection). Within the Western church the mass was seen as a performed act  which was pleasing to God. When the worshiper comes, as Taft has said "The Western Catholic unites his suffering to the sacrifice of Christ. Even when receiving Communion he is conscious of the positive aspects  of doing a good act pleasing to God." (Taft. Ibid) However in the Eastern Church the emphasis is less in giving than in receiving. The Eastern Christian did not offer his sufferings as a sacrifice united to  that of Christ, he left them behind and is carried beyond them into heaven to receive the food of angels for the nourishment of his soul. So too, while the Western Church was seeing itself as a spiritual counterpart  of the Roman Empire and 'fighting the good fight' and going forth to conquer in the Name of Christ, the Eastern Church saw itself more as the means by which the very life of God became part of the experience of the  Christian, and this life was then infused into the World. This probably helps to account for the success of the Celtic missionary bishops who had this understanding of the mystery of the Spirit, and who went out not  to conquer but to change by the infusion of the Love of Christ; to attract people into the Kingdom, not to force them into the Kingdom; to bring Christ to them, rather than forcing them to go to Christ.

It is a sad reflection on the history of the Western Church that these Celtic Christians were so fully and cruelly subjected to the point where 1,200 or more ministers of the Celtic Church in Britain  were massacred because they would not conform to what was considered to be the correct form of Western Christianity. While there were martyrs within the Celtic Church, there is no evidence that the Celtic Church  martyred anyone in defense of their views of Christianity. However, we are fortunate enough to be Christians in a time when there is a return to some aspects of Celtic Spirituality, not to take away from one's  spiritual experience and heritage, but to add a further aspect and depth to what one already possesses. The main wave of Celtic Christian thought is that the whole of Creation is an expression of the life of God,  and that the life of God can be infused into it and seen from it. It is this that gives Celtic Christianity its attitude toward the wholeness of life. Every aspect of life is seen as a relationship with God in which  God's own life can be expressed and through which we can experience that life, even in the most mundane aspects of life. This provides within the living of our life a sense of purpose and usefulness in the overall  work and life of God in the world.