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Newly emerging churches nearly always recycle old, pre-Christian ideas to serve their new faith, stitching together the pagan past and the Christian present.

In the Mediterranean world, Christian philosophers reshaped neo-Platonism. In early Christian Gaul, thousands of pagan well-spring shrines were converted into Christian sites, while Pope Gregory the Great told the English church not to destroy pagan shrines but to reuse them, "changing them from the worship of devils to the service of the true God."

We see the same process in the early "Celtic" church—Christians who spoke the ancient Celtic languages: Gaelic, Welsh, and Pictish. These first Celtic Christians wove their new-found faith in Christ into their ancient languages and cultures. Columba, for example, reportedly blessed a Pictish well where a malign spirit lived and turned it into a Christian place of healing.

What was the nature of the Celtic Christianity that emerged from this enculturating process? Today many moderns long to find something different in Celtic Christianity—a beautiful spiritual tradition unlike the messy and compromised history of the larger Western tradition.

But how different was it?

"The bird which calls from the willow, / Lovely its little beak with its clear call. / Tuneful yellow bill of the firm black fellow— / A lively tune is sung, the blackbird's voice." So wrote one ninth-century poet in Gaelic. This kind of writing is one of the most instantly attractive aspects to modern admirers of Celtic Christianity.

Celtic Christians have left us some lovely poetry celebrating the natural world as God's creation. But medieval Christians in England and Europe also delighted in creation. There is nothing distinctively Celtic about the sense of God's presence in the natural world. Consider Augustine of Hippo, seeking God in and through nature's beauties: "With a great voice they cried out, 'He made us.' My question was the attention I gave to them; their response was their beauty."

Celts were also aware of the dangers of the natural world, as an eighth-century Irish prayer makes clear: "Deliver me, almighty Lord God, from all dangers of land and sea and waters, and from the phantasm of all beasts and birds and quadrupeds and serpents … from lightning, thunder, hail and snow, from rain and winds, earth's dangers."

Saints are often shown having dealings with animals, yes, but such stories are not illustrations of some Celtic ecological consciousness. More often they were meant to demonstrate how God's grace and power were present in the holy man or woman.

The early Celtic church had a strongly monastic element. From the beginning, Patrick had established primitive communities of monks and nuns, just as his contemporaries had in Gaul and Italy. By the end of the seventh century, abbots controlled monasteries and "families" of monasteries whose wealth, power, and influence were enormous. In some tellings, the picture, especially of Ireland, is of a church almost entirely composed of monks (and a handful of nuns) dedicated to work and prayer.

This view is partly a result of distorted evidence. There were no cities like those in Europe, which had powerful bishops who could support libraries and scholarship on an impressive scale. In the rural Celtic world, monasteries were the only institutions with the resources to create the manuscripts we now depend on. Small rural churches serving local lay populations left no such traces.

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