Celtic spirituality was about sacraments, not tree-hugging, says Richard Barrett

Journeys on the Edges: The Celtic Tradition by Thomas O'Loughlin, Darton, Longman & Todd £8.95.
FOR MOST people, Celtic spirituality is a recent discovery to which they are e4osed on retreat when asked to hug trees on the sides of Welsh mountains. There has been an explosion of Celtic spirituality in these Isles of late, but much of it ferlds a modem myth.
O'Loughlin gives us the real deal on Celtic spirituality. The best line of the book must be, "Many who search for the Celtic Church are disappointed to find that it had bishops, teaching authorities, organised ritual and a distinct fondness for canon law". In fact, so successful is O'Loughlin's exposure of the turf that overlays the Celtic past that one is left wondering "where now?" for all those gurus that sold us a very different product.
This book certainly kills not one but several sacred cows — the idea, for instance, that the Celtic Church was a melange of pagan and Christian themes. So, too, the idea that the Celtic Church was without the episcopal or clerical structures that "imprisoned" the spirit in the Roman version of Christianity.
Anyway, as if by a strange alchemy, we have a Merlin among us who can shed authoritative light on the mists surrounding this period. O'Loughlin is a senior lecturer in theology at the University of Wales at Lampeter and is well versed, unlike so many modern apostles of Celtic spirituality, in the manuscript sources of the Isles.
The first valuable point he makes is methodological: that the past is a foreign country. We cannot visit it with modern concerns with out doing damage to it. In fact, given the ravages of the Vikings, Normans and the Reformation, today we have to re-assemble the jigsawpuzzle of the past with just a few pieces, often mediated over generations and heavily interpolated.
Secondly, the spirituality of Celtic Christians had nothing in common with the comfortable wind-chimes and oozing wicca worship found among its flabby proponents today on the A303 near Stonehenge: it was a savage appropriation of the Gospel that echoed the practices of the desert fathers of Egypt. Why Egypt? Much Celtic artwork shows connections with Coptic art and we know that it was this semitic quality that gave both Gaelic and Celtic monasticism their distinctive flavour when it came in from the cold at Whitby at the request of the Roman mission to Britannia.
Maybe the fact that Caledonia and Hibernia were never conquered by the Romans gives us the reason why Christianity developed slightly differently in the Western Isles. Iona, Bangor and Clonard were the chief centres before the arrival of the Gregorian mission to the Angles and Saxons in 597.
0 'LOUGHLIN performs a great service when he manages to track down the real inspirations behind the Celts in the spiritual works of Augustine, Eucherius and John Cassian. These writers inspired countless monks to develop a twotier view of the world, a sacramental vision of life and an ascetic approach to Christianity — and all of this from the spirituality of the desert.
AlI in all, Journeys on the Edges is a timely book, in which O'Loughlin offers us a fine reconstructed picture of Celtic spirituality.