![]() ![]() It was taken to the monastery of Kells in Ireland when a new wave of barbarians, the Vikings, repeatedly raided the island. The Book of Kells, considered one of the finest gospel books, is believed to have been begun on Iona around AD 800. (They seemed to go together for this artwork) Well…the Celtic monks were over the top in this area! Whole pages decorate the beginning of each gospel, and decorated letters are everywhere! They made fantastic designs of tangled knots, wheel patterns, interlaced ribbons, and unfolding spirals, as well as animals knotted or woven together. I’m sure you all have seen the decorated letters that sometimes begin chapters in books. Unlike illustration, which pictures what is going on in the book, illumination decorates the words themselves, and the monks drew on a rich heritage of Celtic metal working for their designs. Gospel books contain Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in Latin, and many highly decorated pages such as the cross page shown above. They believed that making God’s word beautiful was a form of worship. Eventually Benedictine monasticism took over most of these, but this early Celtic evangelizing and preservation of learning helped Europe emerge from the chaos following the fall of Rome.īooks, especially the Gospels, were considered crucial to their work, so a scriptorium for copying and decorating these was a part of every Irish monastery. They evangelized much of Scotland, and their history even contains the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness monster! From Iona, monks established a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, to evangelize northern England.įor the next couple centuries Irish and Irish-trained English missionaries founded monasteries to spread the gospel throughout France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. One named Columba led a group of 12 monks to an island called Iona off the west coast of Scotland. In the next century the Irish monks began to take the gospel to other lands. While England slipped back into paganism, in Ireland a literate Christian society emerged from pagan darkness. They instructed converts in the faith and taught handicrafts, languages, and methods of explaining the Bible to others. ![]() In these communities some conducted worship, some went out as preachers, and others worked with their hands. ![]() The Irish soon embraced monasticism, and in that mostly rural land, monasteries became centers for education and further evangelism. By the time he died in 463, he had evangelized much of Ireland, planting many churches and baptizing thousands. But there he had a dream that the Irish were calling him back to tell them about Christ, and he returned to Ireland in 432. God helped him escape, and after some amazing incidents involving ships and wolfhounds, and wanderings in France, Patrick finally made it home. In those years of cold, hunger, and loneliness Patrick remembered his family’s Christian faith and learned to pray and trust God. Raiders captured him as a teen and sold him into slavery in Ireland. In the 400s it was above the high tide mark of the Germanic invasions, but it was almost completely pagan, so what happened?Ī few years before the legions left Britain, a boy, later named Patrick, was born into a native British family. To see how the work began, we need to look to Ireland. With God’s help they accomplished this miracle, and by the end of the Middle Ages, most of Europe was Christianized. But after the collapse of Rome, Christians faced an immense task of evangelizing the incoming tribes.Ī page from an early gospel book shows a tiny central cross surrounded and threatened by an immense black area filled with interlaced beasts, illustrating how overwhelming the task must have seemed. In the previous centuries the empire’s safe roads, common language, and mostly literate population had helped Christians evangelize much of the Roman Empire, and by 313 persecution ended with the legalization of the faith. (A little more than usual to help explain this art, which is over 1000 years old!) In England the native British, many of them Christians, struggled to stem the Saxon tide, but just as the lighthouses went out, so did the light of the gospel in many parts of England and the continent. Historians call these next centuries the Age of Migration, and like the incoming tide on a beach, each migrating wave lapped farther into the empire as the tribes fought Rome and each other to carve out kingdoms for themselves. They were no longer strong enough to hold back the invading Germanic people. The legionnaires who had for 300 years trudged up the stone stairways to keep great bonfires lit were abandoning Britain. The year was AD 410, and the Roman lighthouses, or pharos, along Britain’s Channel coast went dark. ![]()
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