St. Padraig and St. Colm Cille exerted a very profound influence on Irish Christianity, which in turn has carried the Celtic spirit far and abroad, in a great variety of contexts and settings. Indeed, Irish missionary work continues to this day and continues to bring Irish Celtic values as well as Christian values to various peoples all across the world.
The pagan British, the Piets of Scotland, and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were the first to experience the missions of the Celtic Church. When Oswald, the English King of Northumbria, needed sanctuary, he took it in St. Colm’s Celtic settlement on Iona, and when he recovered his throne in 634, it was to Ireland that he turned for a bishop. They sent him Aidan, who became the founding saint of Lindisfarne. The English missionary Willibrord, who converted the Friesians to Christianity in 690, was trained in Irish monastic houses.
The early Irish monks also travelled to the continent. St. Columbanus landed in Gaul in 590 and founded a monastery at Luxeuil (which had been a pagan Celtic religious centre for many centuries), and eventually moved on to Bobbio in Italy, where he founded another abbey in 614. St. Gall died in the Alps in 612, and the monastery established around his tomb in 720 went on to become one of the most important seats of learning and scholarship in early mediaeval Europe.
The religious manuscripts of this period, predominantly Irish but also influenced by Pictish and Anglo-Saxon artistic elements, produced works of such staggering beauty that they are rightly treasured to this day. The Book of Durrow is probably the earliest of these treasures, dating from around 680. The Lindisfarne Gospels, commissioned in sacred memory of St.
Cuthbert, are attributed to Abbot Eadfrith himself, an Anglian monk and leader of the Lindisfarne community, who reputedly spent six years in training in Ireland before returning to Lindisfarne in 698. The great Book of Kells, the most famous of these works, was probably created at Iona before the Viking raid of 807 which drove the monks across the water to Ireland. It is heartbreaking to think that the Vikings may well have thrown into the fire dozens and scores of pages of work, and perhaps even some complete books, of equal beauty to the Book of Kells, or perhaps even surpassing it. Bede, who probably saw illumination work being done at the monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in his own time (673-735), said of these magnificent books:
We have known that when some persons have been bitten by serpents, the scrapings of leaves of books that were brought out of Ireland, being put into water, and given them to drink, have immediately expelled the spreading poison, and assuaged the swelling.
World History
