Fire in the Head: Paganism in Irish Christianity | Fr. Conor McDonough, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

The handout for the lecture may be found here: https://tinyurl.com/3fd6hsvh This lecture was given on January 26, 2023, at Trinity College Dublin. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Conor McDonough, O.P., is a Dominican friar from Galway. He studied science and theology at the University of Cambridge and taught theology at secondary school before joining the Order of Preachers in 2009. He was ordained a priest in 2016 and undertook further studies in theology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), focusing on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. He is currently based in Dublin where he teaches theology to the students at the Dominican House of Studies in Dublin.

Transcript

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0:38.8	because it matters what you think.
0:40.8	The bulk of my training is in theology rather than in history or Irish language and literature.
0:58.0	So I'm an amateur when it comes to the study of medieval Irish culture.
1:02.1	But I've been careful in preparing this lecture to rely only on the best of scholarship.
1:07.4	And on your handout, you'll find a list of the main works that I'm relying on here.
1:12.6	That said, I did spend some time here in Trinity studying Old Irish, and I often experience
1:17.8	something on campus that must really bug those of you who are here for four years or more,
1:23.1	and that is tourists looking for directions to the book of health.
1:27.3	But I'm fairly sure that none of you
1:30.0	has ever been asked for directions to this book, the book of Leinster. It was written in the 12th century,
1:36.7	so it's about 300 years younger than the book of Kells. And its decoration is nothing like
1:41.7	as lavish as the book of Kells or the book of Durro and so on,
1:45.1	but it's no less fascinating. It was compiled and written largely by one man, Aith Macrithan,
1:51.5	the lector of the community of Terry Glass in County Tipperary in that monastery. So what's in
1:57.3	this book? Plenty of material that is explicitly Christian.
2:01.7	Stories about St. Will Ruin of Tala, of St. Mulling, anecdotes about clerical students and their cats,
2:08.3	and a brilliant 8th century poem on the glory of Brigid and Kildare, over against the fading glory of the hill of Alan.
2:16.8	There'll be a video on that poem to feature shortly on the Dominican YouTube channel,
	...

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