Williams on the "nonsense . . . written about 'Celtic Christianity'"

"A great deal of nonsense has been written about 'Celtic Christianity', as if this were an intelligible designation for some self-contained variant of Catholic orthodoxy in the early Middle Ages, a variant more attuned to the sacredness of nature and less obsessed with institutional discipline.  Historically, the churches of those regions where Celtic languages were spoken never thought of themselves as part of a network other than that of the Western Catholic Church.  They wrote and spoke Latin, they looked to Rome as the focus of their ecclesial life (Welsh kings as well as English spent their final years in Rome) and they accepted the creeds and canons of the Catholic Church.  The irony is that Bede's concern to show them as mysteriously and suspiciously 'other' to the Roman norm is one of the roots of modern mythologies about a Celtic Christianity that is somehow deeper and more spiritually comprehensive than the orthodox mainstream.  His vague and general allegation that the British were specially susceptible to heresy, and the more specific mention of the prevelance of Pelagianism in the fifth century are part of building up a picture of a disturbingly different style of Christianity.  And even when he is underlining the difference in a positive way — the contrast between the humility and simplicity of the Irish-trained monks and the self-advertising and arrogance of others, past and present — he is reinforcing what modern fantasy has turned into a contrast between institutional 'Roman' Christianity and native Wordsworthian innocence and mystical insight."

     Rowan Williams, "Chosen people:  Bede's three-dimensional view of the past endures, because it celebrates as much as it argues," Times literary supplement, July 6, 2012, p. 15 (pp. 13-15).  The irony lies in the fact that Bede, who "does not let the clear ideological thrust of his narrative simply distort what is before him" (p. 14), did not, unlike our modern mythologists, approve of "the divergences of . . . the British or Irish Churches", such as they were (which is to say "minor") (p. 13).  Cf. this.

"'Democratic primitivism is . . . the moral template . . . operative in the historical consciousness for most of Northern Europe'.  It created a Gothic myth for the Swedes, a Gaulish myth for France, in England the myth of 'the Norman yoke' and the ancient liberties of Anglo-Saxons:  the last, however, challenged by the Celtic myth of 'the gay, harmonious culture of the ancient Gaels' crushed under the iron heels of Saxon, Viking and English oppressors.  The ethnotypes survive; they arguably poison political relations to this day.
     "It is important accordingly to realize their more than dubious basis.  No ancient author ever located Celts in Britain or Ireland:  the idea is George Buchanan's from 1582".

     Tom Shippey citing Joanne Parker in The harp and the constitution:  myths of Celtic and Gothic origin, ed. Joanne Parker (Leiden:  Brill, 2016).  "Celticities," Times literary supplement (March 18, 2016):  7.
     Cf. also Fintan O'Toole, "Celtic myths," Times literary supplement, March 7, 2019, pp. 29-30:  "the dark secret revealed by scholars in recent decades [is] that the Celtic identity of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh is a very recent invention"; "neither Old Irish nor Old Welsh has any word equivalent to 'Celt' or 'Celtic'"; "it was equally possible for individuals in Western Europe to claim a Celtic identity.  But there is no evidence that the inhabitants of the Atlantic islands ever did so.  In fact, right up to the modern period, the Irish—now the most 'Celtic' of peoples—went to great lengths to avoid any such identity; their medieval pseudohistories insisted that they were Iberians in origin, or even Scythians"; "What is not in doubt is that the Gaelic language of Ireland and Scotland is very closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, and that all of them are in turn related to the group of languages that were once widespread in Atlantic Europe:  Gaulish in France, Lepontic in northern Italy, Hispano-Celtic languages in Iberia, even Galatian as far east as Turkey" (29); "there is no evidence that [this high-end weaponry and art] made them fell 'Celtic.'  It certainly didn't make them Celts—any more than building a Bauhaus villa in California makes you German or driving a Lamborghini in New York makes you Italian"; "insular Celticism is essentially a phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth century" (30).
     Cf. also Marcus Tanner, The last of the Celts (Yale University Press), at least as reviewed by Loren Wilkinson in The Christian century, July 12, 2005, pp. 39-40.