Welsh Journals

This book is to be welcomed as breaking new ground, both because it attempts to trace the stages by which our accepted moral standards have emerged by degrees out of a remote pagan antiquity, and also because it attempts to identify certain religious and philosophical concepts as constant and distinctive elements in the Welsh tradition. Such studies may have far-reaching implications for the history of thought, since they reveal something of the processes by which each generation selects what is to be retained and what rejected of the legacy of the past. RACHEL BROMWICH University College, Cambridge THE CHURCH IN EARLY IRISH SOCIETY. By Kathleen Hughes. London, Methuen, 1966. Pp. xii, 303, 16 pis., 1 map. 50s. Even Protestant Saeson can appreciate the enthusiasm of the Irish and of their fellow Celts for the early Irish church. Its literature has passages that, in the words of Miss Hughes, 'go directly to the heart of the Christian faith in emphasizing God's love for men and man's response'. The extremer forms of asceticism and the association of savage physical punishment with penitence nowadays repel, but the physical courage and the mystical union with God achieved by some of the great ascetics compel us to admire them. The earliest Christian scholars, whose motto could well have been colliquere fragmenta ne pereant, earn unqualified admira- tion for their zeal (often in the most difficult material circumstances) if not always for their judgement. The originality and technical accomplish- ment of their artists evoke an even more generous response; and the Irish resistance to the demand for uniformity in the practice of the Western Church has a very contemporary appeal, even when the criticized practice was clearly an outmoded one. The way in which the new learned class inherited the prestige and the responsibilities of its pagan predecessors, the implications of this mingling of traditions for both the ecclesiastical and secular literary genres, have often been described-probably never better than by the late Robin Flower. The corresponding history of the structure and organization of the Irish church has been much less studied and usually, particularly for the pre-Viking period, with scant regard for chronology. This state of affairs is not difficult to account for. The amount of direct evidence is very small; the indirect evidence is not so very much greater and often difficult to interpret satisfactorily. In the pre-Viking period, very few texts can be precisely dated; almost all of them are available in later versions in which adaptation and modification are either certain or can be suspected; and, finally, the history of the church from the fifth to the eleventh centuries cannot really be written without a knowledge of the early vernacular sources and an understanding of the