But somehow, the Christian Church in the Celtic Isles did not adopt this symbol, or rather this form of it. It took what is called the Celtic Cross: the Cross, which is matter, with the Circle, which is Spirit, imposed over the upper part of it. Now if you brought a man from India, or China, or anywhere, who knew nothing about European history or Christianity, but understood the ancient science of symbolism; and showed him these two crosses, the Celtic and the Latin; he would tell you at once that the one, the Latin, stood for a movement wholly unspiritual; and that the other, the Celtic, stood for a movement with some spiritual light in it. How much, I am not prepared to say.
One of the chief formative forces in Christian theology was Saint Augustine of Hippo, born in 354, died in 430. He taught that man was Originally sinful, naturally depraved; and that no effort of his own will could make him otherwise: all depended on the Grace of God, something from without, absolutely beyond control of volition. Then rose up a Welshman by the name of Morgan,—or he may have been an Irishman; some say so; only Morgan is a Welsh, not an Irish name; and evidence is lacking that there were Irish Christians at that time; he was a Celt, 'whatever';—and went to Rome, teaching and preaching. His doctrine was that man is not originally sinful and naturally depraved; he had the temerity to declare that pagans, especially those who had never heard of Christianity, were not by God's ineffable mercy damned to everlasting hell; that unbaptized infants were not destined to frizzle eternally; that what a man ought to do, that he had the power, within his own being, to do; and that his salvation lay in his own hands. They translated his Welsh name (which means 'Sea-born') into the Greek—Pelagius; and dubbed his damnable heresy 'Pelagianism'; and it was a heresy that flourished a good deal in the Celtic Isles;—his writings came down in Ireland. The incident is not much in itself; but something. Not that the Celtic Church of David and Patrick was Pelagian; it was not. In the matter of doctrine it is impossible to distinguish it from the Church on the continent. But Pelagianism may suggest that there were in Britain relics of an elder light.
Did some echo of ancient wisdom, Druidic, survive in Britain from Pre-roman days? It is a question that has been much fought over; and one that, nowadays, the learned among my countrymen answer very rabidly in the negative. You have but to propound it in a whisper, to make them foam heartily at the mouth. Bless you, they know that it didn't, and can prove it over and over; because—because—it couldn't have, and you are a fool for thinking it could. Here is the position taken by modern scholarship (as a rule): we know nothing about the philosophy of the Druids, and do not believe they had one. They could not have had one; and the classical writers who said they had simply knew nothing about it. It may be useful to quote what some of these classical writers say.
"They (the Druids) speak the language of the Gods," says Diodorus Siculus (v, 31, 4); who describes them also as "exhorting combatants to peace, and taming them like wild beasts by enchantment" (v, 31, 5). They taught men, says Diogenes Laertius, "to worship the Gods, to do no evil, and to exercise courage" (6). They taught "many things regarding the stars and their motions, the extent of the universe and the earth, and the nature of things, and the power and might of the immortal Gods," says Caesar (iv, 14.); and Strabo speaks of their teaching in moral science (iv, 4, 4). "And ye, ye Druids," says Lucan, "to you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the Gods and the powers of heaven. . . . From you we learn that the borne of man's ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch below." (i, 451 sq,) "The Druids wish to impress this in particular: that souls do not perish, but pass from one to another after death." (Caesar, iv, 14) Diodorus testifies that "among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevailed, that the souls of men are immortal, and after completing their term of existence, live again, the soul passing into another body" (v, 28). Says Valerius Maximus: "They would fain make us believe that the souls of men are immortal. I would be tempted to call these breeches-warers fools, if their doctrine were not the same as that of the mantle-clad Pythagoras"; and he goes on to speak of the Celtic custom of lending money to be repaid in a future life (vi, 6, 10). Timagenes, Strabo, and mela also bear witness to their teaching the immortality of the soul.
I may say at once that I copy all these quotations from a book written largely to prove that the Druids were savage medicine-men with no philosophy at all: it is, The Religion of the Ancient Celts, by Canon MacCulloch. The argument used by this learned divine is very simple. The Druids were savage medicine-men, and could have known nothing about Pythagoras' teachings or Pythagoras himself. Therefore they didn't. All the classical writers were exaggerating, or inventing, or copying from one another.—It never occurs to our Canon to remember Iamblichus' statement that the Druids did not borrow or learn from Pythagoras, but Pythagoras from them. He quotes with no sign of doubt the things said by the classical writers about barbaric Druid rites; never dreaming that in respect to these there may have been invention, exaggeration, or copying one from another— and that other chiefly the gentle Julius who—but I have mentioned his exploit before.
Holding to such firm preconceptions as these,—and being in total ignorance of the fact that the Esoteric Wisdom was once universal, and therefore naturally the same with Pythagoras as with anyone else who had not lost it, whether he and the Druids had ever heard of each other or not,—it becomes quite easy for my learned countryment to scout the idea that any such doctrine or system could have survived among the Britons until the fifth century, and revived then. Yet Nennius, by the way, asserts that Vortigern (the king who called in the Saxons) had 'Magi' with him; which word in the Irish text appears as 'Druids': and Canon MacCulloch himself speaks of this as evidence of a recrudescence of Druidism at that time.
With those quotations from the classical writers in view—if with nothing else,—I think we may call Reincarnation…. the characteristic doctrine of Druidism. It so appeared to the Romans; it was that doctrine, which with themselves had been obscured by skepticism, worldliness, and the outwornness of their spiritual perceptions, that struck them as the most noteworthy, most surprising thing in Druidic teaching. It stood in sharp contrast, too, with the beliefs of Christianity; so that, supposing it, and the system that taught it, had died during the Roman occupation of Britain, there really was nowhere from which it might have been regained. Wales has been, until very recently, extraordinarily cut off from the currents of civilization and world-thought. She has dwelt aloof among her mountains, satisfied with an interesting but exceedingly narrow little culture of her own. You might almost say that from the time the Romans left Britain there was no channel through which ideas might flow in to her; and this idea, especially, was hardly in Europe to flow in. And yet this idea has curiously persisted in Wales, as a tradition among the unlettered, even to our own day. Dr. Evans-Wentz, of Berkeley, Oxford, and Rennes Universities, in this present twentieth century, found old people among the peasantry who knew something about it, had heard of it from their elders; there was nothing new or unfamiliar about it to them; and this though nearly all Welsh folklore, even belief in the fairies, almost suffered extinction during the Religious Revivals of the eighteenth century and since. They say the chapels frightened the fairies out of Wales; it is not quite true; but you can understand how wave after wave of fervid Calvinism would have dealt with a tradition like that of Reincarnation. And yet echoes of it linger, and Dr. Wentz found them. I myself remember hearing of a servant-girl from the mountains to whom her mistress (from whom I heard it) introduced the subject. The girl expressed no surprise whatever: indeed to goodness she shouldn' wonder, so there; her father was a druid, miss, indeed and had told her about it when she was a child.
We have collateral evidence,—in Nennius, I believe,—for the existence of several famed poets among the Welsh at that time; and Tallesin' is one of the names mentioned. Seventy-seven poems come down ascribed to him: I quoted some lines from one of them; here now are some line from another. The child Taliesin is discovered in the court of Maelgwr Gwynedd, where he has confounded the bards with his magic; and is called forth to explain himself. He does so in the following verses:
Primary Chief Bard am I to Elphin,
And my original country is the Region of the Summer Stars;
Idno and Heinin called me Merddin;
At length every being shall call me Taliesin.
I was with my Lord in the highest sphere
When Lucifer fell into the depths of hell;
I have borne a banner before Alexander;
I know the names of the stars from north to south.