The Celtic Becoming: Prelude to a New Believing

Abstract

Today's ongoing colloquy of ideas about the nature of being, in which a broadening array of scientists, philosophers, and historians of religion are participating, echoes some of the keynotes of spiritual practice in a much earlier period, in the 6th and 7th centuries. That was an era when Celtic monasticism, operating on the northwest edge of Europe, developed a simple but prescient ontology that was echoed in many later periods. Aldous Huxley maintained that a unified "perennial philosophy" could be found within the base-line metaphysics of all the great axial religions. It may not be ironic that science is the draught horse now pulling truth from a new intersection of these ideas.