The organisation of the early Irish Church

Abstract

In a celebrated passage of his Ecclesiastical History Bede described the position of Iona within the Church as follows: This island, however, is accustomed to have an abbot in priest's orders as its head, so that both the entire province and also the bishops themselves are required, by an unusual ordering of affairs, to be subject to his authority. This is in accordance with the example of Iona's first teacher, who was not a bishop but a priest and a monk. This short description is one of the principal sources of the idea that the early Irish Church, as a whole, was peculiarly monastic. Yet Bede himself was writing about a particular province to which Iona belonged; and by ‘province’ he usually meant a kingdom or major segment of a kingdom. It would certainly not be a plausible interpretation of his words to say that by ‘province’ he meant the entire island of Ireland together with those parts of Britain colonised by the Irish. Still more unreasonable would be the notion that Bede's description applied to the British Church as well as to the Irish, and that it constitutes a central piece of evidence for that entity – beloved of modern sectarians and romantics, but unknown to the early Middle Ages – ‘the Celtic Church’.