St. John, Celtic Spirituality, and the Heart Sense

Readings for the Feast of the Christ Mass

• Isaiah 52:7-10
• Hebrews 1:1-4,(5-12)
• John 1:1-14
• Psalm 98

This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka for the Christmas Day service on Sunday December 25, 2023. 

Merry Christmas! In the ninth century, the brilliant Celtic theologian John Scotus Eriugena (815–877) wrote a homily on the Gospel we just heard read, a homily that has been called “The Heart of Celtic Christianity.”[1] John Scotus was inspired by the traditional understanding of the fourth evangelist as the eagle[2] and began his homily by saying, “The voice of the spiritual eagle resounds in the ears of the church. May our external senses grasp its sounds and our heart receive its message.”[3] Eriugena describes the evangelist as the blessed theologian to whom has been given[4] the capacity to not only penetrate hidden mysteries but also to reveal them “to the human heart and all our senses.”[5] He then returns to that favourite Celtic image of John leaning on the bosom of the Lord, which he understands as a symbol for contemplative prayer. In this contemplation, Eriugena invites us to listen to the heartbeat of God pulsate within our own hearts, sensing that the divine is the ground and source of every beat and breath, throbbing in the heart of all creation. In this contemplation, we learn that God is our being; we are not God’s being, but we participate in God’s being through the grace of our existence; and it is through belief in the One who is divine by nature that we can participate in divinity and in the ultimate restoration of the earth, the cosmos, and all the celestial hierarchies.[6]

The Celtic Christian understanding of John invites us to connect especially with our heart sense and it is the ancient Celtic portrayals of the apostle himself that offer us guidance on how to get in touch with this powerful sense. The Lindisfarne Gospels as well as the coffin of St Cuthbert both portray St John holding his right hand on his heart.[7] It is by simply placing one’s hand on one’s heart that the heart sense can be accessed and activated. By doing so, we can practice receiving each heartbeat as a gift from the divine who infuses all of creation with the gratuitous gift of existence and who invites us to participate in the restoration of all things by abiding in this love. This is the invitation of the Incarnation. This is the invitation of Christmas.

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[1] John Scotus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity: Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John, translated by Christopher Bamford (Hudson NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1990).

[2] The symbols of the four evangelists are associated with the four living creatures described in Ezekiel 1: 5–10 and Revelation 4: 6–8. The man/angel represents St Matthew, the lion St Mark, the ox St Luke, and the eagle St John. Irenaeus, who was a student of Polycarp, who was believed to be a student of John the Apostle, was the first to correlate the four living creatures with the four evangelists; however, he connected St John with the lion and St Mark with the eagle (Adversus Haeresus 3.11.8). Jerome’s correlations became the most dominant (Commentary on Matthew Preface 3).

[3] John Scotus Eriugena, “Homily on the Prologue to The Gospel of John,” in Celtic Spirituality, Oliver Davies (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1999), 411.

[4] John Scotus explains that the Hebrew name John when translated into Greek means “to whom is given.” Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle, 22.

[5] Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle, 22.

[6] For Eriugena, this final restoration, or apokatastasis, includes the restoration of fallen angels, even the devil himself. See John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon on the Division of Nature (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011).

[7] Susan Cremin, “St. John and the bosom of the Lord in Patristic and Insular tradition,” in The Beauty of God’s Presence in the Fathers of the Church: The Proceedings of the Eighth International Patristic Conference, Maynooth, 2012, ed. Janet Elaine Rutherford (Portland OR: Four Courts Press, 2014), 199, 204.