Intellectual Serfs and Ideological Masters

INTELLECTUAL SERFS AND IDEOLOGICAL MASTERS

Uses and Abuses of Celtic and Indo-European Studies

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Quia filii hujus saeculi prudentiores filiis lucis sunt - Luke, 16:8

Since the middle of the last century, Celtic Studies has been a relatively esoteric discipline.  It is of interest only to the Celts and some academics of other fields, such as mediaevalists and philologists.  Those who directly involve themselves in the study of Celitica are few.  Much scope is give to scholars of dubious credentials to make mischief as a result.

The systematic investigation of Celtic languages and literature began about 150 years ago.  The English poet Matthew Arnold and the French critic Ernest Renan were among its earliest enthusiasts.  Renan was a student of Blessed Frédèric Ozanam, but was more impressed by the latter's romanticism than by his Catholicism.  One of his best-known works is the Vie de Jésus (reading this was one of the reasons Stalin lost his faith and was expelled from seminary).

Neither Arnold nor Renan was orthodox in his religious beliefs. Their view of Celtica was based on an idealisation of the Celt.  They saw the Celt as intuitive, artistic and unfettered by reason, while they regarded the Germanic mind, though logical and industrious, as lacking creativity of any sort.  So the 19th-century precursors of the hippies looked to the Celt, on industrialised Europe's western fringe, for their new paradigm.  It is significant that neither Arnold nor Renan was burdened by the knowledge of even one Celtic language.  It made stereotyping so much easier.

The Würzburg glosses

At the same time, Johann Caspar Zeuss (1806-56) was deciphering the Würzburg glosses.  The glosses, found in manuscripts of a commentary on the Pauline epistles in Würzburg, on the Psalter in Milan and on Priscian's Latin grammar at St Gallen are as important to Celtic Studies as the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptology.  The texts are in Latin, but the margins are cluttered heavily by explanatory notation in Old Irish for the benefit of students.

Zeuss, a classical philologist, did the opposite and used the Latin to learn Old Irish.  His Grammatica Celtica is a seminal world and should establish Zeuss as the father of Celtic Studies.

St Kilian brought Christianity and classical learning to Würzburg, Milan was close to St Columbanus' Bobbio and St Gallen is named after St Gall.  And it is from these places that we derive our first knowledge of early mediaeval Ireland.  But the foundational work was grammatical and tedious - and the lay enthusiasts preferred ready-made translations and commentaries.

Nationalist fervour

The lay enthusiasts were impatient.  They had from O'Donovan's and O'Curry's ideas that the tales were historical.  The spirit of the Gaelic Renaissance and the Anglo-Irish literary revival was the spirit of Arnold and Renan.  Even the scientific scholars, such as Professor Eoin MacNéill, sought to explain away the old sagas as myths concerning the rising and setting of the suns.  Patrick Pearse had an uncommon insight into the discipline for his day, due to his competancy in French and German, but was not above manipulating this knowledge for political purposes in the latter years of his life.  It could be said that the popular presentation of Celtica contributed to the nationalist fervour which brought about the Easter Rising and subsequent events.  Militant nationalists continue to draw from this source, up to the present day.

One side-effect of the Celtic Renaissance was the publication of the lives of many early Irish saints.  These books and pamphlets, with their emphasis on monastic life and asceticism, held up a Celtic spirituality for the admiration and not for the imitation of the readers.  For who would sleep on a plank and keep those impossible fasts anyway?

The Venerable Matt Talbot did!  But when one hears of Celtic spirituality nowadays, Matt Talbot is not a name that comes to mind.

Indo-European Studies

After the First World War, Germany was still the centre of Celtic Sudies.  Scholars were now looking east, to India.  The Germans wholeheartedly embraced the study of Sanskrit.  Thus emerged the new discipline of Indo-Germanistik, rendered Indo-European Studies in most other languages.

The juxtaposition of Arnold's and Renan's "Far West" (the Celtic fringe) with the orient did not go unnoticed.  Irish scholars, having devoured the new Sanskrit grammars, presented Ireland and India as the ultimate peripheries of the Indo-European domain; and therefore, if one could isolate the ancient customs both had in common, one could reconstruct the mores which prevailed in Europe and much of Asia at the dawn of history.  Gandhi borrowed the hunger strike from Terence McSwiney and each believe they were following a tradition known in Ireland and India in primeval times, and therefore practised everywhere between the two.

Aryan brothers

The Germans were more interested by parallels between their own peoples and the Indians.  This too found popular expression.  The National Socialists thought the idea fascinating.  It is no mere coincidence that the Hakenkreuz is an Indian symbol and that the Aryans were a prehistoric race who occupied the region between India and Persia.  Iran and Aryan are derived from the same word.  The Nazis' enthusiasm for Indo-Germanistik is not so extraordinary when one sees it provided them with an origin myth conveniently devoid of the perfidious Jew, and perfectly consistent with Mr Darwin's theory.

It was highly embarrassing to the Indian Congress Party leadership - particularly Nehru - that some of their members swallowed the Indo-European myth.  Thus for many Indian nationalists, Hitler was a hero, and the Nazis their Aryan brothers.  Gandhi (not unlike de Valera) had good reasons for keeping the Congress aloof from India's war effort.

Faulty analysis

The look to the East received a more sophisticated veneer after the war.  Suddenly structuralism, functionalism and formalism - or any combination of these - were the buzz-words.  Georges Dumézil provided a new set of theories, substantially based on the functions of a member of any given Hindu caste.

He had two willing disciples in the Rees brothers, whose book Celtic Heritage* is something of a classic.  Personally, I would warmly recommend Celtic Heritage to any novice, provided they concentrate on the narrative to the old Irish and Welsh tales and ignore the analysis of them.  The Dumézillians seem to have forgotten that India was a highly developed, urban and literate society for some millennia before Christ, while the Celtic and Germanic peoples remained rural and illiterate until they were evangelised.  It makes a difference.

At present, there is a tendency among some professional Celtic scholars to regard the Irish and Welsh sagas as mediaeval Christian literature.  As such, they owe as much to Christian sources as they do to allegedly extensive pagan lore in the Celtic regions prior to their christianisation.  Of course, it is easier to see the Christian influence when the extant material is compared with classica, patristic and apocryphal sources, not to mention Scripture itself.  The existence of this school of thought is a well-kept secret.

Ideology or ideolatry?

Just as scholars are coming to a new appreciation of the Christianity of Celtica, the pseudo-scholars are using it to construct a neo-paganism.  In appealing to the archaic, they seek to give legitimacy to new philosophies such as feminism and New Ageism.  These speak of a matriarchal society in which the earth was worshiped and humankind was at one with nature.  Women, naturally, held sway.

This is not the first time that scholarship is being twisted to serve ideology.  And where an obscure discipline such as Celtic Studies is thus abused, what would one expect of something like history or theology?

I wonder if ideology is the right word to describe feminism or Marxist-Leninism or any of the other philosophies that accommodate themselves so well to the Zeitgeist.  Ideology suggests discussion of an idea; and these fundamentalisms admit no dissension in any form, but rather involve worship of the idea - equivalent of the worship we would give to God, and probably contrary to the First Commandment.

Would the word ideolatry not be more appropriate?  And are the adherents of an ideolatry not ideolaters?

* A. and B. Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition of Ireland and Wales, 1961

The Brandsma Review, Issue 36, April-May 1998

Art for Anti-clericalism's Sake

ART FOR ANTI-CLERICALISM'S SAKE

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

THE DAY Napoleon escaped from Elba, the headline in Le Monde read "Renegade Leaves Elba".  When he arrived in France, the headline ran "Napoleon Lands at Cannes".  And when he approached the capital, the headline was "His Imperial Majesty to enter Paris".  With this exercise in Realpolitik, the editor exercised the standard of objectivity we expect from today's print and electronic media.

I remember reading Mgr Michael Nolan's thesis some time ago in the Irish Catholic that people do not read newspaper's to inform themselves but to reinforce their prejudices.  He gave an illustration of this some years previously when several respectable news outlets repeating the old canard that St Thomas Aquinas said woman was merely a defective male.  Mgr Nolan is an expert on Aristotelian biology and it did not take him long to correct this.  He could quote the Angelic Doctor's own refutation of the charge, but found it very difficult to find a publisher.  Not even the Dominican Doctrine and Life would take it.  So he continued until the Daily Telegraph carried it.  Then he found another problem.  Clergy were unwilling to purchase the Daily Telegraph because of its anti-Irish bias but seemed to have no problem buying the Irish Times in spite of that paper's well-documented attitudes towards Catholicism.

Obscure painter

You think I'm joking?  Sometimes I wonder am I too harsh on the grey denizens of D'Olier St.  But just when I think it may be safe to look once again at the newspaper rack, they give me something which reaffirms my original position.  And on November 2, 2002, this came in the arts supplement.  So how could the discovery of a painting by an unknown 19th century Irish artist in Edinburgh, and the publication of a collection of verse by a forgotten Irish poet of the same century, illustrate the anti-Catholic vitriol I attribute to Ireland's most influential newspaper?

Aloysius O'Kelly was an obscure painter who would have remained obscure but for the fact his Mass in a Connemara Cabin showed up in an Edinburgh drawing room this summer.  This is a picture of a young priest giving the final blessing at a station Mass in a Connemara cabin and it is quite attractive.  The table is laid for Mass with the altar cards, candlesticks, crucifix, missal and chalice.  The priest's white vestments are depicted with detail; even the maniple can be seen on his left wrist.  And the Spartan furnishings of the cabin - basic, but maintained neatly and not without some pride.  The congregation are devout in their demeanour.  One pious old woman is nearly prostrate.  There is a solemn dignity about these tenant farmers and farm labourers and their families.

Three Redemptorists

Of course D'Olier St has to interpret this for us.  They did so by providing a commentary by Dr Niamh O'Sullivan who teaches art history at the National College of Art and Design.  Dr O'Sullivan allows three Redemptorist priests in Edinburgh do most of the talking.  One, Father Richard Reid (a young priest), sees a prefiguration of the Second Vatican Council - an emphasis on the Eucharist and the sanctification of daily life.  I wonder is ecclesiastical history taught so badly that a young priest would attribute this to Vatican II? Has he no knowledge of eucharistic piety stretching back to apostolic times in both East and West?  Has he not heard the maxim of the English recusants: "It is the Mass that matters"?  And in regard to labour and its sanctifying nature, any study of devotion to St Joseph, promoted by Pope Leo XIII, for example (who was Pope when this painting was exhibited in 1883) would fill in many gaps in Fr Reid's theological education.

Dr O'Sullivan gives more column space to the more subversive Father Hamish Swanston, Professor Emeritus of Theology at Kent University.  Father Swanston sees anticlericalism in the picture.  The laity are oppressed.  Maybe they were, but by whom?  By the clergy or by the largely Protestant ascendancy (unmentioned in this article)?  And if by the latter, the second question is who provided leadership to the oppressed Irish labourers?  The clergy or the Fenians?  It is that last question that makes the painting interesting.  Aloysius O'Kelly's bother James was a member of Parliament in Parnell's party and also a leading Fenian.  So, if there is a hint of anticlericalism in the picture, it should be very obvious it had its origin in Fenian bitterness.

Following the debacle surrounding the Fenian raid on Chester castle in 1867, Mgr David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, famously announced: "Hell is not hot enough nor eternity long enough to punish those who have led these young men astray."   The Fenians for their part held they took their religion from Rome and their politics from hell.  It is true that the painting reflects Ireland at the time of the Land War
Outmoded aspirations
Dr O'Sullivan draws a parallel between the founding of the Land League and the apparition at Knock in 1879.  No authentic Marian apparition takes place in an historical vacuum.  To give other examples: the Rue de Bac apparitions which gave the Church the Miraculous Medal took place within weeks of the overthrowing of the Most Christian King, Charles X of France and Navarre, in 1830; Pontmain in Brittany occurred at the height of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; and Fatima happened as the First World War was in its third year.  The timing of the apparition at Knock in 1879 summoned the country's attention to the efficacy of the Mass and the Communion of Saints when more immediate solutions to Ireland's problems were considered - solutions which could lead to more problems.  To see oppression in this particular painting is no reflection on the Irish Church in the 1880s, but rather the outmoded aspirations of a class of theologian either stuck in the 1960s or narrowly focused on some contemporary Latin American experiences.

The painting was discovered in Edinburgh's Cowgate district, a notorious Irish slum area in the 19th Century.  James Connolly was born here in 1868.  But for all the misery, it was here that the Edinburgh soccer club, Hibernians, had its origin, just as Glasgow Celtic emerged from the Gorbals.

If this were not enough, the arts editor of the Irish Times also ran a review of Selected Poems of James Henry.  James Henry (1798-1876) abandoned his career in medicine on receiving an inheritance in 1846 and chose to wander around Italy instead.  On foot.  So it is hardly surprising his wife died in 1849.  The reviewer applauds Dr Henry as a fearless free thinker.  Yet anyone reading the review would see the poet-surgeon in fact failed to grow out of his adolescence and was most at home with the irresponsibility of an undergraduate.  The reviewer doesn't point out that the Church at which most of the bile in Dr Henry's work is directed is most likely the Established Church of the time - the Church of Ireland.  The reviewer describes Dr Henry as the scourge of humbug.  I wonder?  Some of the absurdities in his work were themselves humbug.  A colleague of mine once told me his father advised him not to be a socialist unless he could afford it.  Dr Henry appears to me to be in a category something like this.  He could afford to versify his whims - and no one really cared until the poems were reissued recently.  And the Irish Times deigned to draw them to our attention.

It is quite typical that the Irish Times should try to re-interpret 19th Century Irish art, literature and history through the spectacles with which it views the turn-of-the millennium period we are now enjoying.  One asks oneself: how far is D'Olier St prepared to take its anticlericalism?

The Brandsma Review, Issue 63, November-December 2002

Smashing the Celtic Delusion

SMASHING THE CELTIC DELUSION
By PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

The Quest for Celtic Christianity, Donald E. Meek, The Handsel Press, Edinburgh, 2000, 282 pp

CELTIC TIGER MAY BE DEAD, but the Celtic brand still attracts. Seven nations are unequivocally Celtic: Ireland; Scotland; the Isle of Man; Wales; Cornwall; Brittany; and Galicia. One can argue that the basic ethnic stock of northern Portugal; northern Spain; France; Belgium; Switzerland; southern Germany; northern Italy; Austria; the Czech Republic; western Hungary and south-western Poland is Celtic. Evidence for this is seen in artefacts, place names and classical writings. St Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is addressed to the descendants of Alexander the Great’s Celtic mercenaries who settled in Asia Minor. In Christ’s day, these people spoke a Celtic language.

Two millennia later a trip to a religious bookshop will turn up any number of titles offering Celtic spirituality, Celtic Christianity or the like. I can name David Adam, Esther de Waal and John O’Donoghue among many. Donald Meek addresses this phenomenon in this book.

My own background is in Celtic Studies; and I see academic Celtic scholars avoid popularised Celtica with good reason. Professor Meek is an exception. He is Professor Emeritus of Celtic in the University of Aberdeen; and is a native speaker of Scots Gaelic from the island of Tiree where his father served as a Baptist minister. His commitment to evangelical Christianity is clear, which adds power to many of his points more. One must commend his patience in carefully reading purported Celtic material written by people with limited, if any, understanding of the Celtic tongues.
Celtic Christianity…therapeutic spirituality
Professor Meek begins with the proliferation of books on Celtic Christianity remarkably compatible with popular therapeutic spirituality. He compares it to other outsider presentation of ethnic spiritualties, quoting reactions of real members of these communities: many Native Americans are not impressed at their depiction in such books. Ireland is the main Celtic country which buys into this, where he cites the late John O’Donoghue. Father O’Donoghue spoke Irish and studied philosophy and theology at advanced levels, but he has not shown much evidence of study of literature in Irish. The market for these
works is strongest in metropolitan England and the United States.

Professor Meek starts in the Highlands. Fifteen years after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, James Macpherson presented his “translation” of Ossian’s (Oisín) poems concerning his father Fingal (Fionn MacCumhaill). Macpherson may have used existing Gaelic poetry here, but no Gaelic original has been found and the work is considered Macpherson’s own, even with Hebridean influence. But as fraudulent we might see this, the Ossian cycle was enormously influential across Enlightened and Romantic Europe. Ossian left an impact on two critics: Ernest Renan (1823-92) and Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Renan and Arnold popularised Celtica, but neither understood any Celtic language. As such, they could not consider Ossian was Macpherson’s original work. While Renan and Arnold were active, there was solid academic work in progress particularly in Germany and early Irish and Welsh works were edited, translated and studied. Serious scholars like Kuno Meyer (1858-1919) and Douglas Hyde (1860-1949) did not distance themselves from the Celtic Twilight. In the Irish case, this study gave impetus to political nationalism, felt in other Celtic countries too.

Celtica moved on in the 1900s, but romanticism remained as it was. In the early twenty-first, Professor Meeks writes to separate the two. Anyone who visiting Glendalough could hear the Roman Church superseded the Celtic Church in the 12th century.  This partly reflects Reformation polemics, but the Celtic Church must be taken on its own terms. It was adamant it belonged to the Great Church. Its liturgy and scripture were Latin and it appealed to the See of Rome. This Church’s features: monasticism; relics; penance, were not proto-Protestant. If there was an eastern connexion, even with Egypt, it was because many early practices common to East and West survived in Celtic regions while declining elsewhere. Irish monks were very conservative regarding the date of Easter as Rome sought uniformity. As St Benedict defined western monasticism, Irish and British (Welsh, Cornish and Bretons) monks retained older models. The term anamchara literally means “soul friend”, was used to mean confessor and Professor Meek believes private confession was a Celtic development. The Hildebrandine reform was driven by Celts themselves in the Celtic nations.
Not unique to Celts
The romanticists emphasise the poetic Celts. But this separates the Celts from contemporary peoples. There are Anglo-Saxon literary visions and dreams.  Celtic Studies is tragically isolated from Mediaeval Studies and cognate disciplines. Many issues the Irish Church dealt with relating to marriage laws and other heathen survivals were encountered elsewhere. Most mediaeval European histories focus on England, France and the Holy Roman Empire rather than fringe nations. Yet the Norman occupation of Ireland, Wales and Sicily; the Teutonic Order’s crusade in the Baltic region; the Reconquista in Spain; and Norman expansion into Scotland offer newer perspectives which might lead us to think Celtic history less unique.

Professor Meek cites many working Celtic scholars; I will refer to three. Cork’s Donnchadh Ó Corráin often states what should be obvious. Celtic popularisers believe monastic hermits waxed lyrical on nature in verse, Professor Ó Corráin pointed out those who chose penitential life in wilderness were unlikely to notice natural beauty, and busy monastic scribes, writing in isolation from nature, were more likely composers. Maynooth’s Kim McCone made the case for reading early Irish literature as Christian work in Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature. Professor McCone refers to analogous studies in other areas (Icelandic sagas come to mind), to back up his thesis. Cambridge’s Patrick Sims-Williams has analysised philosophy and ideology behind Celtic Studies. I find Professor Sims-Williams’ ability to step back and compare trends here to other ideologies fascinating.

As stated above, Professor Meek is a practicing evangelical Protestant concerned with contemporary issues.He writes movingly of the importance of the Celtic saints to Protestantism and how steeped these figures were in Scripture. Much of the material he critiques is used in Protestant services. These are poor substitutes for the Bible. This is balm for the rat race, but is woefully inadequate for inner city underprivileged. Evangelisation is required and ancient saints would not have shirked this challenge; a reality check we have to learn from.

It has been a long time since I read a book on Celtica I enjoyed, as most of what I have reviewed is the dodgy material named and shamed in The Brandsma Review. But Professor Meek is not writing for Celtic Scholars. This is by far the best book on the topic I have read for non-specialists written by a specialist.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 132, May-June 2014