Abstract
Research into a wide range of early Irish literature has yielded a
large number of texts in which nature and the Sacred are clearly
linked in some way. By comparing and contrasting these various nature
texts with each other and with attitudes to nature in the Bible and
elsewhere, it is possible to arrive at a basic understanding of the
religious significance of nature in early Irish Christianity and, to
some extent, in pre-christian Irish religion.
The primal religions of Ireland and early Israel had many
features in common. Both saw the land, water, trees, sun, fire and
other aspects of nature as potentially revealing the presence and
activity of the Divine. The term 'sacramental universe' is appropriate
to both, and neither distinguished sharply between the spiritual and
the physical. How did they come by this integrated world-view? There
are of course theories of symbolism and sacramentology which one might
p
call upon in an attempt to explain the experience but such abstract
conceptions belong to a different time and place. To say that they
used their primal imagination is also to import ideas from another
world, but at least they are ideas which have been formed in dialogue
with surviving primal religions. Exactly what primal imagination is
(as distinct from what it believes) and how it operates is another
matter.
It is none the less an important question. Did the people who
approached the Divine in and through nature, address an external
reality, or a projection, or a delusion or what? We asked similar
questions in relation to the girls #10 claimed to have seen the fairywoman on Knockainy, but the answers are far from clear. What is clear
however, is that in Ireland as in Israel, the life-giving energy of
nature was seen as having a supernatural source or sources, upon which
human beings were ultimately dependent. This was a cause of wonder and
also of fear. Both cultures sometimes expressed a deep ambivalence
towards the Divine.
Yahweh and the deities of pre-christian Ireland represent very
different conceptions of God and the cosmos. However, the primal
imagination which we have seen at work in parts of the Hebrew Bible,
together with the wealth of nature imagery found throughout the Bible
as a whole, may have helped the early Irish Christians to retain some
of their own traditional attitudes towards nature, as they made the
transition from a primal to a more universal faith.
