tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3296177530584981444.post759447382602022036..comments2022-02-26T14:19:09.154-08:00Comments on The Celtic Monk: The Rule of ColumbaAndy Dahlburghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14663586140546439327noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3296177530584981444.post-72028792353503065612010-12-03T12:48:43.607-08:002010-12-03T12:48:43.607-08:00The Celts were no fundamentalists. Indeed. I'm...The Celts were no fundamentalists. Indeed. I'm glad you drew that lesson from the Rule. It is, perhaps, one of their most attractive features. Lord knows, they took the Bible and the dogmas of the Christian Faith at least as seriously as anybody else: the surviving record demonstrates that amply. But fundamentalists are poor creatures who feel threatened by reality and therefore make a small box, a carefully predetermined matrix, to force all of reality to conform to. Our Celtic spiritual ancestors were free enough to trust the Faith, to believe it to be true even when contact with reality confused them. Their stories show us, over and over, that the real world always fit their Faith, even though they didn't have to squeeze reality to make the fit. <br /><br />I am reminded of the dictionary for bards published in Ireland. (My source for information about it is John Minahane's book _The Christian Druids_, but it has, inexplicably, no index, so it will not be an easy matter for me to find the references I want to quote them.) This dictionary provides definitions and etymologies for Irish words to be used in constructing poems. The fun and liberating thing about it is that it will give, for example, one definition of a word based on its Hebrew origin, another based on its old Irish root, and something quite different if one wants to derive it from Latin. (He tells of poems which can be read in several different ways, depending on which definitions and derivations are assumed. One poem he mentioned could be heard as praise of a patron or as a withering satire of his cheapness.) Quite unscientific etymology, of course, guaranteed to give any modern lexicographer heartburn, if not a heart attack. But the underlying attitude is so refreshing. The world is bigger than your boxes! Truth does not fit out matrices. It is not reality's job to conform to us, it is our job to describe it adequately. <br /><br />None of this is your vocabulary, or Bamford's, or St. Columba's, but I think the ideas are compatible.Sean+https://www.blogger.com/profile/00599016727518791787noreply@blogger.com