The Theology of Carmina Gadelica

Abstract

Alexander Carmichael’s compendium of Gaelic prayers, blessings, and charms, Carmina Gadelica, is one of the most remarkable Scottish art-books of its time, and a fundamental source for the Celtic Christianity movement. It is also exceptionally controversial, given that the evidence of his field notebooks suggests that during the editing process Carmichael and his circle adapted, reworked, and rewrote his originally oral sources for the printed page. Looking beyond debates over authenticity and forgery, this chapter offers broader nineteenth-century contexts in which to situate Carmichael’s magnum opus. Carmina Gadelica is clearly inspired by contemporary political, religious, and cultural developments: the controversies of the 1880s Crofters War; the project of spiritual reinvigoration envisaged by the fin de siècle ‘Celtic Renascence’ movement; and the ferocious Lowland–Highland disputes that eventually sundered the Free Church of Scotland in 1900, the year in which Carmina was eventually published. Another influence was the liturgical, devotional, and aesthetic ideals of High Church Tractarianism as mediated through Carmichael’s Episcopalian wife, Mary Frances MacBean. In Carmina Gadelica, the Oxford Movement met Catholic Hebridean piety, allowing Carmichael to delineate an alternative, pre-Reformation portrait of traditional, communal Highland religiosity as a riposte to contemporary stereotypes of intolerant evangelicalism, strict Sabbatarianism, and uncompromising biblical literalism.