Liturgy Wars in the Eighth Century

The Liturgy Wars of eighth century Ireland and Britain are largely forgotten today. Apropos of the ongoing discussions of Liturgy here recently, however, I offer some forgotten history.

The liturgy in Ireland before the ninth century had characteristics quite distinct from the Roman rite of the day.  There is no reason to think that any liturgy originated in Ireland, but abundant reason to believe that it came with the early generations of Christians in Ireland. 

As far as can be known from the few written fragments that survived the vast devastation of Cromwell, Ireland used the Gallican liturgy in pre-Norman days (before the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169).  The Gallican liturgy derived from the Gallo-Roman liturgy, the original liturgy of Gaul (France).  It had characteristics of the liturgy of Rome and also of Alexandria, the first intellectual center of Christianity.  Elements from Ephesus and Jerusalem were also incorporated into it.  In short, it was a living, breathing personification of the universality of the living, breathing, growing Catholic Church.

We often forget that before the year 741, eleven Greeks and six Syrians had occupied the Chair of Peter.  It was only natural that elements from the East would find their way into the liturgy. The proximate cause is recognized to be St. John Cassian, the father of monasticism, whose Abbey of Saint-Victor in Lérins off the coast of Marseilles was a “nursery of bishops” in those early days.  Cassian had been trained by the monks of Egypt, was ordained a deacon by St. John Chrysostom in Constantinople, and then was ordained a priest in Rome when he went to plead for Chrysostom’s re-instatement.  Bishops and priests trained at Lérins took the Gallican liturgy across the English Channel, and from thence across the Irish Sea.

The liturgy as celebrated by Irish monks and missionaries came to be known as the Cursus Scottorum, for the word “Scot” originally referred to the people who lived in Ireland.

When St. Augustine came to Kent (now known as Canterbury) in 597, he found a multiplicity of liturgies among Christians in Britain. This was not surprising, because Britain had been evangelized by Irish missionaries, as Christianity had disappeared with the departure of Rome from the island.   

Augustine wrote to Pope Gregory and asked him how to handle the situation.  The answer was to accept liturgical diversity.  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book I, Chapter 27, quotes the Pope’s response:  “If you have found anything either in the Roman or the Gaulish church or any other Church, which may be more pleasing to Almighty God, you should make a careful selection of them and sedulously teach the Church of the English, which is still new in the faith, what you have been able to gather from other churches…. Choose from every individual Church whatever things are devout, religious, and right.  And when you have collected these as it were into one bundle, see that the minds of the English grow accustomed to it.”

At the beginning, Pope Saint Gregory the Great made a virtue out of necessity and tolerated liturgical diversity in Britain.  Perhaps that was to ease the process of conversion, because soon he nonetheless started the process of supplanting local rites with those of Rome. 

Achieving conformity was a lengthy and painful process – more slowly across the Irish Sea. Augustine had told the bishops of England and Wales that if they would celebrate Easter at the proper time, perform the office of baptism, and preach the word of God to the English people, “we will tolerate all your other customs, though contrary to our own.”    But in 644, at the Council of Whitby, Rome asked Britain and Ireland to use the Roman date of Easter.  Saint Colman of Ireland argued against it, and the great abbey at Iona refused to conform.  A hundred years later in 747, there had to be yet another Council, at Cloveshoe, to get the Anglo-Saxon bishops to follow Roman liturgy. 

The church in Ireland, remember, was organized on a monastic model.  And monasteries, in the eighth century, were the most conservative (read: resistant to change) places in the world.  A document in the British Museum, known to scholars as the Ratio de Cursus, was written by an anonymous monk in the mid-eighth century to defend the traditional liturgy.  He didn’t like the innovation and standardization that were coming with the new directives from Rome, and saw no reason why Rome had the right to impose its liturgy.  

He responds to claims that Irish and Gallican liturgy were not as authentic as the liturgy in use in Rome.  His argument is that there was apostolic authority for older liturgies. 

True liturgy, he says, derives not only from the Church of St. Peter but also from the other apostles, particularly St. Mark, who founded the see of Alexandria, and St. John.  He argues that the Gallican liturgy was inherited from the earliest bishops of Gaul, Trophimus, Pothinus, and Irenaeus of Lyons, who in turn took their practice from Peter in Rome and John in Ephesus.  Those are powerful credentials: Saint Irenaeus was from Saint Polycarp’s hometown in Smyrna, in modern day Turkey – and Polycarp had been discipled by St. John the Evangelist himself.  In other words, the author of his liturgy had almost living memory of Our Lord and Savior!

Interestingly, the Ratio’s author points out that the Divine Office and the liturgy were sung:  “male and female used to sing together the Gloria, the Sanctus, the Lord’s Prayer and the Great Amen.”   Significantly, by the eighth century in Roman practice all these prayers were recited by the priest alone or with other clergy—but certainly not by the people.  In other words, the Cursus Scottorum followed the Greek custom.

The anonymous monk, of course, was very politically incorrect for his day, and on the losing side of the eighth century liturgy war.  It is amazing that his manuscript survived at all.  For centuries, scholars dismissed his argument as “outlandish”, or “fantastic”. 

Musicologist Peter Jeffery notes that “we who have lived through another era of liturgical upheaval, with its own excesses of competing and fanciful historical claims, can look back with sympathy on the anonymous writer who, in solitary defiance of the spirit of his age, sat down to pen…a final protest against an irresistible wave of Romanizing uniformity.…”  He puts it into a larger context, however:  “What really happened…was the creation of a new liturgical tradition – an amalgam of Roman and non-Roman texts and customs, forged by Frankish smiths in a Gallican workshop.  It was this new creation that, after being reintroduced into Rome itself, passed into history as the medieval Roman rite we know.”

Maybe the anonymous monk would be pleased to observe that, in the Novus Ordo, once again male and female are singing the Gloria, the Sanctus, and the Lord’s Prayer.  It may be “novus” to us, but it was “vetera” in the eighth century.

Connie Marshner is author of Monastery and High Cross: The Forgotten Eastern Roots of Irish Christianity, available from Sophia Institute Press, wherein you may find a whole chapter, including 99 footnotes, on the topic of ancient Irish liturgy: https://sophiainstitute.com/product/monastery-and-high-cross