What would the modem church look like had the Synod of Whitby in 664 found that, "Rome is wrong, Jerusalem is
wrong, Antioch is wrong, indeed the whole world is wrong: only the Irish and the British know what is right?" It is
obvious that the classical literature of Greece and Rome would have been largely lost had it not been for those
wandering monks in white, beautiful codices hanging form their belts. The Moors would bring back what had been
preserved in the Eastern Empire, but that wouldn't be for another six centuries. The Irish Christians single-handedly
brought Europe back from a Dark Age of ignorance and illiteracy, only to be censured over a calendar dispute and
their longhaired tonsure. That was the best thanks the Bishops of Anglo-Saxon Canterbury could muster for
protecting Christianity a century in inaccessible monasteries like Skellig Michael. There was something more to it
than simply backward haircuts and bad record keeping.
The thing which was really hanging in the balance, had nothing to do with the form of tonsure or the dates of
celebration, but the very essence of what the Irish would inevitably restore to the continental culture, Roman law
and order. Augustine, the great betrayer of the cauldron; the bubbling mixtures of cultures and ideas gathering at
the edge of Roman civilization, champions the tyranny of order with the words, "per molestias erudito" which
translates, 'true education begins with physical abuse'. How those words would ring down through the centuries to
this day, the image of a nun and a ruler is a nightmare to most parochial school children. What horror was wrought
when, he would with the help of Saul, in proper Platonic fashion, thoroughly separate the body and spirit. Shattering
the duality which ancient cultures the world over had rightly worshipped as evidence of the connection between
humanity and divinity? Hell on Earth, that is his legacy; we all by nature of the sexual union which created us,
sham this irredeemable sin, original only in it's virulence and it's pervasiveness, like some spiritual bubonic plague.
Such is the mind of a man whose culture has begun to eat at itself in fear of the fall of that twelfth and final eagle.
What was it that the inheritors of Roman law, the Catholic hierarchy, feared so much in this Irish form of
Christianity? Was it that the Celtic inhabitants of Hibernia, were brought into the fold by a semi-literate visionary
born on the periphery of the Roman empire, who found more in common with the Irish, whose culture had changed
little since the Iron Age, than with his own ancient Roman heritage, whose roots went back to fabled Ilium? Was it
the lack of misogyny in the Irish culture, which was so rampant in the ordered societies of the Medd-Terra-nea(n),
a culture who could as easily be led by a woman as man, going back to the time of the first emperors, and perhaps
back even farther? Or can it all be laid on Patrick' s shoulder because he was the first person to speak out against
the barbarism of slavery, another lynchpin of the old Roman order? The Irish culture seems capable of combining
opposite ideas in a syncretism that borders on the mystical, as can be seen in the fact that the Irish provide no
martyrs in the conversion to Christianity. The Irish religious priesthood, the Druids, blended into the new religion
and in some instances grafted their ancient philosophy onto their indigenous form of Christianity. The confidence
of the Celtic Irish would guarantee there would be the most powerful of resistance to a contradictory religious
world-view, one which didn't adapt, as they themselves adapted. Like the perversely off-center, yet precisely
mathematical, box, the Irish indeed can be framed within the idea 'balance in imbalance'. It is as several modern-day
magicians suggest, in order to break down our own preconceived biases, we have to combine contradictory ideas to
see where our rigidity lies. The largest danger posed by the Irish was not there pantheistic belief in the immanence
of divinity, but their sexual mores. No greater threat to the cultures of patriarchal Rome or monotheistic
Judeo-Christianity could exist than the anmchara, or soul-friendship which was the basis of same-sex relationships,
and the semblance of equality which are foundational aspects of the Irish culture. The Roman Catholic Church was
not conceived in friendship but in power relations, thus it's rigid orthodoxy and hierarchical structure. The Irish
were so much closer to the message, and thus were easily accepting of the new faith for as they saw it, "greater love
that this no man has than that he should lay down his life for his friends." Or in the Latin, "Amor non tenet
ordinem," which translates 'Love has nothing to do with order'.
Here again we see a long list of firsts for the Irish culture, as well as a great debt which the entire Western culture
owes these 'pagani' who did not burn books (unlike certain popes), but saved them like friends to share with
others. The accomplishments of this 'barbaric' people that inhabit "a pimple on the chin of the world" is too great to
be discounted with such racism and cultural snobbery. To think that within a generation of literacy being
introduced, the Irish monks were literate in Latin and Greek, and learning Hebrew; something even Augustine,
who had the privilege of eleven centuries of predecessors, was repulsed at. One of the larger images of supremacy of
the Irish tradition is the molding of sacrificial Red martyrdom, into non-lethal forms: the Green, or hermetic, and
the White or monastic. It struck me as odd that the three colors that represent the 'otherworld' for the Celtic Irish
are all represented in this triplicity. The saddest thing, which galls me, even as I write this, is that the effeminate
Eastern fantasy religion of Christianity, would change the Celtic warriors to such a degree that they would be left
inefficient when the next wave of conquests washed up upon their shore. As Art 0' Leary dies, so dies the ancient
Gaelic order, even if Ireland is a Gaelic nation-state in our own time, we have lost a great deal which is unique and
precious, far beyond all the art and riches stored in the new Rome of the Vatican.
The danger that the Celtic Irish world-view would supercede the world-view of Roman Catholicism is far-fetched,
for we react more honestly when facing fear than when we encounter love. None the less, the orthodoxy found it
necessary to thwart any attempt to reclaim the Iron Age morality of Celtic Ireland, so succinctly epitomized by Dark
Eileen O'Leary in the line, "generous, handsome, and brave." You could go so far as to say that this is the message,
which Jesus brought his people, to warn them of the dangers posed by the orthodoxy of the Pharisees and the
despotism of Rome. We can only thank the Irish for their effort to save the books of classical society, but more than
that, we should thank them for being true to their own cultural values, for we have more to learn form them, than
the tyrannical attempts at theocratic imperialism. As Horace said, "Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare
current," which translates as 'they change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean.'