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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
I
A gift implies a giving and a giver distinct from the gift. But what if the giver is all giving? What if the gift and the giver is one? What if the giving alone names the giver? But surely the giver must first in some sense exist before it can be understood to act as giver (actio sequitur esse, said the old manuals that now languish in the deepest stackrooms of our libraries). But what if the esse is essentially agere, actio?
This line of inquiry has surfaced for me once again in reading Jean-Luc Marion’s book (as presented in the University of Chicago translation), resuming a meditation that had its first airing in a paper prepared for the 1990 conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. The paper was entitled ‘Celtic Creation Spirituality,’ and it tried to identify the understanding of God and creation as shown in the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael and the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 19th century, and as it remained in my memory from my own boyhood in the South-West of Ireland. I felt that the common faith of all these people could be summed up in the Johannine variant: ‘In the beginning was the gift and the gift was with God and the gift was God’. My reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliant and challenging book has pushed me towards recalling that icon of the creator that was/is at the centre of Celtic Christianity and also at the centre of Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking.
1 The Carmina Gadelica published by Oliver and Boyd (of Edinburgh) and later taken over by the Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, is a collection of hymns, invocations and prayers made by Alexander Carmichael in the later 19th century and published volume by volume between 1900 and 1960, in Gaelic with English translations. Various anthologies have been culled from Carmichael's English translation (The Sun Dances etc) and now the full text of the English translation is available from Floris books of Edinburgh with a helpful introduction by John Mclnnes of the School of Scottish Studies of Edinburgh University. A second, corrected, edition of the translation has now appeared.
2 The Month, November 1990. p. 418. See The Mountain behind the Mountain by N.D. O'Donoghue, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993.
3 All three books have been several times published in English translation, most recently as Oxford University Press paperbacks. An t'Oileánach (The Islandman) by Tomas O Criomlhain (Anglicised somewhat inaccurately as O'Crohan) first appeared 1929, Peig (An old woman remembers) in 1936, and Fiche Blian ag Fas (Twenty years a growing) in 1933. All three books carry the breath of an ancient world, not only pre–Modemist but pre–Reformation (though attempts have been made to ‘Romanise’ them), but also pre–Renaissance and pre–Enlightenment. Also pre–metaphysical, for life was all too often ‘a long, long night of cold, struggling against the sea only praying from moment to moment for the help of God’ (The Islandman ch.25).
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