Last night I attended a wonderful concert of Scottish folk music, performed by Julie Fowlis and her accompanying band of fiddle, guitar, and bouzouki. Ms. Fowlis plays the whistles as well as she sings. It was a glorious testimony to the creativity and endurance of the folk who live, work, and play in Scotland’s Western Isles (where I hear the whiskey is almost as good as the song).
Yesterday morning on my way to class I was reading a review in The New Republic of a new book on W. B. Yeats by R. F. Foster. As many know, Yeats had one foot in the occult and the other on planet earth. What I did not know, though I have heard various assertions about Celtic spirituality over the years, was that Yeats may have picked up an interest in the occult and supernatural from Irish Protestant culture. According to the review:
As far back as 1989, Foster was publishing arresting reflectiosn on the role of the occult in Irish Protestant culture, and this subject generatesthe most original chapter in his new book, tracking the Irish sources of Yeats’s interest in magic, secret socities, seances, and the supernatural.
“Twenty years ago,” Foster writes, “I suggested some patterns behind the atttraction of the occult for Irish Protestant writers,” ascribing that attraction in part to “Protestant insecurity and self-interrogation” in a country where elaborate Catholic and folk supernatural beliefs dominated. Foster’s chapter takes the reader on a rapid ride from stories of the supernatural to Swedenborg to the (adult) Irish fairies, establishing the theme of “a parallel world which can be entered by concentrated mental and spiritual exercise, and whose denizens engage in activities which both mirror and illuminate our own — and affect our destinies.”
So, to all of those Celtic Protestant readers out there, how much is there to this observation about Irish Protestantism? I don’t ask this to wind anyone up. When would I ever do that? I am genuinely curious and Foster’s hunch about the dominant Roman Catholic presence in Ireland makes sense. I should also mention that Foster’s book seems fairly responsible in its judgments. In Foster’s own words:
Current criticism tends to read the effusive literary productions of this era through theses such as the picaresque, or racial “othering,” or a colonized discourse which can be paralleled elsewhere in the British Empire. It might be more profitable to look at what the Irish Romantics wanted to do, what they thought they were doing, whom they admired, and how they expressed their nationalism, or sense of nationality . . . And these texts, written by Protestant Unionists determined to claim an Irish identity, were key influences on the young Yeats.
(Thus, ends my Facebook moment.)
Old Life 
Um. My first reaction is that Protestantism in the Western Isles and Protestantism in Ireland are very different beasts. Don’t have time right at the minute but will try and have a think and come back.
Btw that line on racial othering needs more attention – intriguing discussion of race in the C19th Scottish context in JL Macleod, The Second Disruption (2000).
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DG, has this question come to mind: What hath Ulster and the Hebrides to do with Cane Ridge?
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1. My mother’s parents were Presbyterians from Ulster, but she never mentioned anything like this.
2. Is this manifested in Old Life Presbyterians?
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Brad — That is an intriguing question. I have been in the OPC for several years now but was raised in a non-denominational church that had strong ties to the “Pentecostal Holiness” tradition. It’s always interesting to me to read about what drives “religious” people who place a heavy emphasis on “spiritual” experience and boisterous public shows of “power” and emotion (please forgive my excessive use of quotation marks). What I find really curious is how this type of behavior, to varying degrees, can be found across historical, cultural, and religious (Christian and non-Christian) lines.
I don’t know the answers to Dr. Hart’s questions specific to Irish Protestantism. My thought, however, is that there is some inherent human impulse to look for affirmation in the form of some physical, outward display or supposed inward manifestation of “proof” for the spiritual realities in which we believe. I would also say that, considering the noetic effects of sin, this impulse is usually a sinful one as we (I use the pronoun loosely) endeavor to fill in the gaps between doubt and the proverbial God-shaped vacuum within. Many Christians in this vein will deny any sinful aspect to this, of course, seeking to justify their beliefs and actions by appealing to biblical proof-texts. Many even condemn other Christians for disbelieving in such worship practices (à la Mark Driscoll) and new, special revelations purportedly from God (even as they so often contradict Scripture). As an outside observer now, it is overtly plain for me to see how “me-centered” this approach to worship really is. This goes a long way toward describing why the influence of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements continues to spread, and why there are so few Christians out there who are satisfied with “ordinary means of grace” churches.
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Your “older posts” link at the bottom is non-functional.
THAT winds me up. 😉
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Cath is quite right to point to the totally different experiences of being protestant in Scotland (esp the Western Isles) and Ireland. But there are also totally different experiences of being protestant in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and there have been and continue to be different experiences of being protestant in what is now the Republic of Ireland at different times and places in its pre-history and history.
Historically, protestants in the southern part of Ireland have indeed displayed real anxiety about their situation as a tiny (and until very recently decreasing) minority in a country dominated by traditional and often pre-Tridentine varieties of Catholicism, and this was particularly true in the nineteenth century. JN Darby, the chief architect of dispensationalism, responded to a wave of agrarian violence in eschatological terms: “I, a conservative by birth, by education and by mind; a Protestant in Ireland into the bargain; I had been moved to the very depths of my soul on seeing that everything was going to be shaken. The testimony of God made me see and feel that all should be shaken, but … that we have a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Letters of J.N.D., ed. William Kelly (London: Stow Hill Bible and Tract Depot, n.d.), ii. 254.). Darby responded to his context via the supernaturalism of Romanticism by developing dispensationalism, while others like Stoker responded to their contexts via the supernaturalism of Romanticism by developing Gothic fiction, which is a mode that used occult themes to (among other things) construct distance between rational, industrious protestants and their medievally inclined, superstitious Catholic neighbours. Some, like Le Fanu and Yeats, went further by becoming actively interest in the occult as religious practice.
I don’t think anyone has looked at the various ways in which the hyper-supernaturalism of c19th Irish evangelicalism has impacted the wider evangelical community. Obviously dispensationalism should be part of that, but so should the kinds of “holiness” thinking associated with a man whose name I have completely forgotten but who was active in the late c19th / early c20th and who became quite influential later on – Paternoster published a book on him recently – sorry for my memory lapse. But basically I think I would argue that in terms of Irish protestant culture in the c19th it’s the same late-Romantic infused hyper-supernaturalism that drives the formation of dispensationalism and “holiness” theology on the one hand and the advance into occultism on the other.
Foster knows what he is talking about – he has a background among the Quakers in Waterford, I think – and there is something to be said for his claim.
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Brad, Leigh Schmidt has a good theory about that in Holy Fairs.
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Vermonster, only when we get the Spirit by drinking the spirits.
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CG, I knew the Irish and Scots would come through.
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Fwiw. I’m a little bit sceptical about the whole concept of Celtic spirituality, I’m afraid. The reason for citing MacLeod above was that his monograph also deals with another theme of interest to Old Life style readers, namely the C19th responses to intellectual trends against confessionalism in the Scottish Presbyterian context. Specifically there was a church split at the end of the C19th over the necessity/nature of creed subscription, where demographically the majority of people insisting on retaining the Confession were based in the Scottish Highlands and the more progressive party were predominantly in the Scottish Lowlands. The Highland/Lowland divide is (or was construed as) basically a Celtic/Anglo-Saxon divide, and MacLeod’s argument is that one of the major factors which induced the Lowland churchmen to disregard the concerns of their Highland colleagues in the controversies of the day was the then influential theory of Race and the inevitable superiority of the AngloSaxon race over the Celts. Basically then, in the C19th church context, the notion of the Celts as a race characterised by intellectual backwardness, superstition, and hostility to progress was a convenient way to empty the Highland-based critique of some of its force.
Although I have reservations about some aspects of MacLeod’s argument, his case is strong enough to make me rather uneasy about letting sweeping generalisations about the Celtic psyche go unchallenged. If it was mainly Highlanders in the C19th who continued to assert the divine origin of Scripture, the infallibility of Scripture, the necessity of adhering to the Westminster Confession, the unadvisability of new evangelistic techniques like mass meetings singing sentimental hymns late into the night before making the C19th equivalent of an altar call — how does this really square with the romantic (or, racist) notion of a wild and barbarous tribe incapable of rational thought and more concerned about superstitiously communing with nature and faeries than the finer points of Augustinian and Calvinistic theology.
This all applies to the Scottish Highlands and I’m inclined to say nothing at all about the Irish situation except to point back to what Crawford Gribben has said! The only thing that I’m tempted to add is that the easy collocation of “Ulster and Hebrides” is only about as meaningful as lumping together Canada and Hawaii, particularly in the present context, since the protestants in Ulster were ethnically Scots (or English), not Celts.
Couple of further thoughts. One, I’m not sure to what extent the church in the Highlands (and am clueless about the church in Ireland) tolerated much interest in magic/fairies etc. I’d be inclined to think that having been Delivered from Bondage to Pagan Superstition by the arrival of the gospel and Shorter Catechism, people were only too ready to abandon folk beliefs and folk practices which granted too much of a prominence to pagan spirits etc. Ie, superstition became more something to scoff at and rejoice in emancipation from (in the minds of Highland Christians) than to take much of a serious interest in.
On the other hand, there must be some distinction between “people who happen to have been brought up in a social context where the prevailing doctrines are Westminster” and “people who seriously believe and practice Westminster” – ie between cultural protestantism and personal religion. Again without intruding into the territory of Irish Protestantism, I think it would be true to say that in Scottish Protestantism, the people who were the best and brightest novelists, poets, contributors to the arts in general, belonged more to the first category than the second. Ie, there has been an uneasy relationship between the church and the arts, or maybe more accurately the church and nationalistic cultural expression, in the sense that presbyterian-by-upbringing novelists of the C19-20th have tended to write not so much in sympathy with the doctrines and practice of the church but rather in the context of rejecting their religious upbringing to one extent or another. It’s vastly more plausible to show that Yeats (or John Buchan) borrowed from ancient Celtic mythology for the purposes of their craft, than to say that any putative “Celtic” brand of pagan or occult “spirituality” fed into Shorter Catechism-inspired Highland religion in any significant way.
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Well, I know very little about Ireland, but in the spirit of what it means to have blogs, I’m going to comment anyway.
First, I agree with Lane that Pentecostalism in particular lends itself to interest in the occult. Pentecostals are just as interested in learning about demons as they are about angels and spirits of all kinds. Just take a casual browse of your local christian bookstore to verify that for yourself.
Second, I’d be very skeptical that Irish Protestants are any more likely to become interested in the occult than Irish Catholics. I’d like to see some evidence that that’s the case before I accept the notion. But even then, I might argue that perhaps there’s enough mysticism in the Catholic church to satisfy Irish appetites so that they don’t need to look to the occult for satisfaction, whereas in the Protestant churches, the mysticism and over-emphasis on the supernatural is absent.
Third, I might wonder why RF Foster thinks this is an important argument to make. Is he trying to say that there’s some flaw in Protestantism that makes us second guess ourselves, eventually driving us to the occult? Since we don’t bow the knee to the Pope are we lacking some source of assurance?
I just don’t buy it. I smell a rat here somewhere.
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Thanks, Cath. What you say makes sense. But I do recall even Carl Trueman, who married a Scot from one of the islands and who spent time in the Free Church, say that the Highlanders’ spirituality ran toward mystical. I am not sure you can’t be a bit of a mystic and love the Shorter Catechism.
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Right. It’s just one of these things that everybody “knows”: Highland religion is full of mysticism. What anybody really means by mysticism, where the idea came from, and what purpose the allegation serves in the wider context, are all quite separate issues.
What kind of mysticism would be consistent with the Shorter Catechism?
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