Gift of Celtic Sight, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1998 by Phillips, Jennifer M

In the arena of sexuality, practitioners of the Roman church's morality were scandalized by the Celt's comfortableness with the body and its desires. A fifteenth-century Welsh poet writes to a woman who "has with loving made me pine":

Mary, with these beads have done,

This monkish Rome religion!

Don't be a nun-Spring's at hand,

And cloister's worse than woodland.

Your faith, my fairest truelove,

Goes quite contrary to love.

Worthier is the ordaining

Of mantle, green robe, and ring.

Come to cathedral birch, to

Worship with trees and cuckoo

(There we shall not be chided)

To win heaven in the glade.

Remember the book of Ovid,

Cease from this excess of faith.

We'll obtain in the vinetrees

Round the hillside, the soul's peace.

God loves with blameless welcome,

With his saints to pardon love.... 9

Even earlier, in the fourteenth century, the bard Dafydd ap Gwilym caught the war of theologies in these lines about a poet in love going to confess to a friar who says,

Not for a poet's ode

God ransomed man on rood,

Minstrel, for in your song

Mere vanities belong,

Incitings unto sin,

Falsehood, women and men!

The body's not praised well

If the soul's damned in hell.

To which the poet responds:

I answered to his face

Word for word, the friar's case:

"God's not so fierce, my friend,

As you old men pretend,

Nor would damn the soul

For woman loved, or girl..."10

The literature of the Celtic Christians was early and quickly influenced by the monastic asceticism of the Church of the Continent, and in particular the desert eremitism of North Africa, and yet its old optimistic piety retained place. Penitence was deep and central, along with the accepting of bodily deprivation for the sake of God. But far more than in other parts of Western Christendom, the joys of the body, along with its sorrows and even its betrayals, are accepted as a potential source of blessing, to point the soul back toward God. It would be hard to imagine a non-Celtic western Christian praying:

Bless to me O God, Each thing my eye sees;

Bless to me O God, Each sound my ear hears;

Bless to me O God, Each odour that goes to my nostrils....

and continuing in the same breath,

Bless to me O God...Each thing that I pursue.

Each lure that tempts my will.11

A Scottish highlander prayed, similarly,

Cleanse heart, faith confirm, sanctify my soul,

Circle my body, and keep my mind whole;

Begin my doing and my love inspire,

my weakness strengthen, enfold my desire.12

Comfort with the body extends, in Celtic literature and in ancient Church tradition, to a comfort with gender difference quite strikingly at odds with the rest of the Church of the Dark and Middle Ages. A sixth-century letter to the Irish missionaries rebukes:

Through a report made by the venerable Sparatus, we have learned that you continually carry around from one of your fellow countrymen's huts to another, certain tables upon which you celebrate the divine sacrifice of the Mass, assisted by women whom you call conhospitae; and while you distribute the eucharist, they take the chalice and administer the blood of Christ to the people. This is an innovation, an unheard-of superstition.... We beg you to renounce immediately upon receipt of this letter, these abuses of the table.... We appeal to your charity, not only to restrain these little women from staining the holy sacraments by administering them illicitly, but also not to admit to live under your roof any woman who is not your grandmother, your mother, your sister, or your niece.l3