The Christianization of Political Discourse: Reflections on the Irish Evidence

Abstract

A wealth of political writings survives from early Christian Ireland. While traditionally this material has been understood in terms of a dichotomy between "pagan" and "Christian," recent scholarship has borrowed the category of the "secular" from late antique studies to make sense of early Irish intellectual culture and its political discourses. This article builds on this trend to reveal, through close examination of seventh-century Irish writings, a multitude of differently Christianized discourses existing simultaneously, sometimes even within a single text. Just as the boundary between the "pagan" and the "secular" was not fixed, so too the boundary between the "Christian" and the "secular," giving rise to many different ways late antique Christians (in Ireland and elsewhere) could speak about politics.Much late antique scholarship on the "secular" assumes it was a passing phase ending in Christianization, but this research argues that "secularity" retained its importance in societies where Christians constantly debated and disagreed over where the boundaries of the "Christian" lay.Ireland does not often feature in late antique studies. 1 This is a gap for which many reasons exist: the tendency for late antiquity to be defined in terms of the late Roman empire or the eastern Mediterranean necessarily limits the significance of Irish evidence, itself often very difficult to access and analyse; this is further exacerbated by a regrettable tendency (by scholars of both Ireland and late antiquity) to treat early Irish history as separate from the European mainstream. Despite a long tradition of interest in the great peregrini (Columbanus in particular tends to be seen as a European figure), unfortunate circumstances led to Ireland's marginal role in the ground-breaking Transformation of the Roman World project 1 For a recent shift in the scholarship see below n. 22.