St. Bridget Spreads Her Cloak over Ireland by artist Cynthia Matyi
Treasures Old and New
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
January 10, 2017
“Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Matthew 13:2)
In our 9 a.m. Forum last Sunday, we had a wonderful
discussion about St. Brigid of Kildare. The Rev. Anne Bartlett gave a wonderful
explanation of how pre-Christian beliefs, practices, and figures were taken up
by Christians and “baptized” by missionaries, whether Celt or Roman. The celebration of St. Brigid’s feast day on
February 1 was the case in point:
formerly known as Imbolc, one of the great four solar year agricultural feasts
of the Celts, it celebrated the return of light with the early beginnings of spring
and was sacred to Brigid, one of the Celts’ principal deities. This became St. Brigid’s Day on February 1,
followed by Candlemas on February 2.
One discussant raised the question of whether such “baptism”
of Celtic pagan things was a bottom-up sub rosa popular effort (like the
baptism of Native American religious practices and figures in catholic Latin
America) or was accidental over time.
The answer given in discussion was “probably a little of each.”
I wonder, though. It
seems to me that the adoption of Celtic traditional sites and practices by
Christianity was actually intentional, the result of a very enlightened and
tolerant policy put forward by the Bishop of Rome.
When Gregory the Great sent out Augustine (later Archbishop
of Canterbury) as missionary to Britain, he wrote him an astonishing letter:
“…I have decided after long deliberation … [that] the idol temples of [the English people] should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place [Christian] relics in them. For if the shrines are well built, it is essential that they should be changed from the worship of devils to the service of the true God. When this people see that their shrines are not destroyed they will be able to banish error from their hearts and be more ready to come to the places they are familiar with, but now recognizing and worshiping the true God. And because they are in the habit of slaughtering much cattle as sacrifices to devils [and eat the meat in great feasts], some solemnity ought to be given to them in exchange for this. So on the day of the dedication of the holy martyrs, whose relics are deposited there, let them make themselves huts from the branches of trees around the churches which have been converted out of the shrines, and let them celebrate the solemnity with religious feasts. Do not let them sacrifice animals to the devil, but let them slaughter animals for their own food to the praise of God, and let them give thanks to the Giver of all things for his bountiful provision. Thus while some outward rejoicings are preserved, they will be able more easily to share in inward rejoicings” (St. Bede, History of the English Church I.xxx).
There were benefits and risks in such a strategy: spreading a very thin veneer of Christianity
over the ambient paganism meant Christianity could grow, take root, and
ultimately thrive. But it also entailed
tolerating and even encouraging outright superstition on occasion, and learning
to expect that social change to Christianity would be gradual, taking hundreds
of years.
Roman Catholic priest Fr. Andrew Greeley (the sociologist
and novelist) writes: “…[T]he missionaries to the Angles and the Saxons … followed
Gregory’s model even to the extent of using the name of their spring festival
for the Christian Passover festival.
‘Easter’ comes from ‘Eastre,’ which was the feast of Eastren, the
Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn (that is, the East) and of spring and new life
(the cognate of Venus, Aphrodite, and Brigid) Three symbols which represented
her fertility were lilies, rabbits, and eggs.
… The early Irish Christians took matters one step further by clinging
to a belief in reincarnation from their pagan past: some of them decided that
Brigid was the mother of Jesus reincarnate and had actually nursed Him. Hence, when they said Brigid was the ‘Mary of
the Gael’ they meant the phrase literally, as far as it is wise to take
anything an Irish person says literally…
Perhaps the compromise with nature religion in which Catholicism engaged
was for reasons of both theory and practical necessity. Yet there is nothing in the attitude of Pope
Gregory that reveals any hint that baptizing the metaphors of paganism was
merely a pragmatic decision. Grace was
everywhere even then” (The Catholic
Imagination, pp. 12-13).
In my own experience as a priest in China, I have noticed
this. Christianity there has always
thrived when it is given in joy with no expectation that you leave behind all
the good that was in your past. It has
uniformly declined and suffered when it is given grudgingly and with the demand
that you turn your back on whatever joy you may have had before becoming a
Christian. Sharing the gospel and letting people make it
their own is indeed full of grace.
Grace and peace.
Fr. Tony+
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