Move over, St Augustine, there were other saints who were here first

St Columcille (Columba) preaching to the Picts in the sixth century
Celtic faith shines
GERARD NOEL describes the difference in spirit between the Celtic form of the Christian faith in Britain and the Roman form of the Christian religion brought in by Augustine THIS SUMMER we will be celebrating the anniversary of the bringing to Britain of Roman Christianity, 14 centuries ago, by St Augustine. Next week we will be celebrating, once again, the feast of St Patrick, the Britishborn Roman citizen who brought ordered Christianity to Ireland ( thus, indirectly, to Britain) nearly two centuries before Augustine.
How stands that Faith in view of what Mary Kenny recently described in these pages as "post-Catholic Ireland"? And how is it that this same "Faith", as opposed to the Religion that came with it, has more to do with St Patrick than with St Augustine?
A distinction, in other words, must ever be borne in mind between Faith and Religion. When Religion begins to fade it by no means signifies that Faith is dead. Indeed, it has been said that there is a sense in which Religion, as a formal affair, must die before Faith as an inner conviction, begins to flourish.
Christianity was already present in Britain in the latter part of the third century. Perhaps it had been introduced, and been left behind, by the Romans. No one knows. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, however, who were our next visitors, drove the Faith out, except for the Celtic fringe. Ireland was the principal area where Christianity, first of all, survived and then, after the mission of St Patrick, flourished in a new and wondrous way.
It was this same Faith that spread through Britain and on to Europe (from Ireland) in the centuries both just before and just after the evangelizing of one part of England only (the extreme South-East) by the Roman mission of Pope Gregory's apostle, St Augustine.
Can it now be argued that in an increasingly "post Christian" world, Faith can, nevertheless, still flourish in some new and, as yet, unexplored manner? Well....
Religion it has been said — is the means whereby man speaks to God. But Faith is that most precious medium whereby God speaks to man.
Can Religion, in this essence, thus sometimes be an enemy as well as a friend to Faith? That is the key question ultimately to be asked, particularly with a backward look at Celtic versus Roman Christianity in Britain, and in order to attempt some sort of prognosis of "post -Religious Christianity", or "post-Christian Faith".
When Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory to England in 597, his historic mission was, of course, prompted by Faith. But what he actually implanted by this mission was arguably more akin to "Religion". On the other hand, when men like Columba (otherwise known as Columcille) and Aidan, and their numerous companions and successors, came to England from exactly the opposite direction by appealing to men's hearts they implanted a deep and genuine Faith.
There is little doubt that there was a very different spirit behind the Christianity which came to England from Ireland as compared to that which came to us from Rome: the same sort of difference as that which exists between Faith and Religion.
This is largely accounted for by the fact that the Latin Church, centred in Rome, had, by now, (in the 6th century), filled the void left by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and had virtually replaced it as the dominant power in Europe.
Its methods were thus highly efficient, quasi-imperial, and strongly authoritarian.
This approach, of course, contrasted as vividly with the persecuted but more "personal" Church of the first centuries as it did with the more pastoral Irish British Church of a slightly later period.
Ireland, moreover, and this point is crucial to the whole question, was never, at any time, a part of the Roman Empire.
Let us then, before losing sight of the wood for the trees, take a quick look at he overall chronology involved.
ST PATRICK'S mission to Ireland occupied the middle years of the 5th century. The mission of Columba (Columcille) to the Scots (really "Picts") and Northumbrians
began nearly a hundred years later. Columcille died in 597 — the very year in which Augustine landed in Cantebury.
Augustine and his companions were indeed evangelising enthusiastically in the years that followed. But the protection of the local king, Ethelbert, is a telling factor in their progress. One is inevitably reminded of what every "Roman" Christian well understood, namely the usefulness of such similar, strong, state protection as had put the Christian Church in the West on its first footing of real strength as the official religion of the Roman Empire, vigorously suppressing all opposition and all dissension.
Augustine's mission was very successful, but not on a national scale. For while Augustine can be called the "Apostle of Kent", it is the Irishman, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, who is entitled to be called the "Apostle of England".
It was he who made forays south from Lindisfarne, which were as spectacular, with a few years of the Augustan mission, as had been those of Columba into Scotland from Iona, whence Aidan had also orignally come. This in fact, was how Britain, as a whole, was converted.
What had been happening meanwhile on the Continent? The Romans had withdrawn from Britain soon after the year 400. Before the next (5th) century was out, their Empire in the West had fallen. Between that time and about three centuries later, darkness, in the form of barbarian invasions and migrations, overshadowed Europe.
BUT THE LIGHTS stayed on in the furthermost northwest corner of Europe, that is, in Ireland. And from there, missionaries went forth not only to Britain but to many parts of continental Europe. During this period theirs is one of the most dramatic and heroic stories in all of Christendom's history, and it centres , of course, on St Patrick.
Thus Ireland, which was never reached in the first place by the Roman legions, duly became the light of Europe in which G.K. Chesterton, in a striking phrase, described as the "midnight of the dark ages".
Switzerland, France (Gaul), Germany, perhaps even Poland, Italy — as far down as Bobbio — were only a few of the centres reached by the Irish missionaries. One of the towns then Christianised by the Irish was Maastricht!
When, after the destruction by the barbarians (Huns, Goths, Alemaniu, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, etc) had finally spent itself, Christianity did indeed revive in Europe. But by then, it had taken on a very different mould from that of its earlier and purer days. The Latin Church, as already mentioned, had filled the void left by the vanished Western Empire and became a militant force for Christianising Europe in the form, principally, of a Religion. The climax, itself the beginning of a new age, came with Charlemagne and the so called Holy Roman Empire, a European ruler with uncomfortably much in common with Napoleon and Hitler. Above all, the Irish contribution, in the form, principally of Faith, and of which Patrick was the main architect — and so remains at the bar of history — a unique and epic adventure all too easily forgotten in face of the "official history" of English Christianity, which dates its ordered beginning from the landing of St Augustine in Kent in 597.
In other words, we may rightfully give credit to St Patrick as the ultimate evangeliser not only of Ireland but of large areas of Britain and Europe as well. Among the many legends and myths about him, this much, at least, is a historical reality.