In the ruins of the Abbey of Monasterboice, County Louth, Ireland, are three Celtic High Crosses. On the southernmost of these crosses is an inscription that reads, “ÓR DO MUIREDACH LAS NDERNAD IN CHROS,” or in English, “A prayer for Muiredach who had this cross made.”

Who was Muiredach? We don’t know for sure. Two abbots at the monastery and a local king had that name in the late ninth to early tenth century when the cross was carved, so we cannot determine his identity definitively. What is more important is the cross itself and what it signified.

The Origin of Celtic High Crosses

The story begins thousands of years before the first Celtic High Crosses was erected. The ancient inhabitants of Europe erected menhirs, enormous standing stones, particularly in Ireland, Britain, and Brittany in France. These stones date back six to seven thousand years, placing them in the Neolithic period. No one knows what their original purpose was, but as Celtic peoples migrated into the areas over the millennia, they became pagan holy sites.

When Ireland was Christianized in the fifth century, Irish monks began to go on missionary journeys to spread the Gospel. One of the most important was Columba, who established a monastery on the island of Iona off the Scottish coast. From there, he and his monks evangelized much of Scotland and pushed south into Northumbria.

The Irish seem to have set up large wooden crosses in their monasteries. Someone at Iona got the idea to set up a stone cross, presumably as a Christian version of the standing stones that were still in use as pagan holy sites. Unfortunately, the first of these, known as the St. John Cross, broke: the stone could not handle the weight of the horizontal arms of the cross. (The broken pieces of the St. John Cross are on display in the museum on Iona today.)

From Sun Cross to Celtic Cross

The cross pointed to four cardinal directions, with east on the left, south on top, west on the right, and north on the bottom. The vertical line represented the “world tree” (Yggdrasil in Norse mythology), which tied the worlds together. The roots were anchored in the underworld, the realm of the dead, and the top reached to heaven, the realm of the gods. The horizontal line represented this world, or “middle earth” between the lower and upper worlds. All that exists was thus symbolically represented in the diagram.

Along with the underworld, the roots of the tree connected to ancestral wisdom and tradition, while the branches of the tree in the heavens represented divine wisdom. The sources of knowledge were thus also included in the symbol.

Time is also represented by the diagram. The left side (east) represents dawn; the top (south, where the sun is the strongest), noon; the right (west), dusk; the bottom (north, where the sun is weakest), midnight. The same directions also represent the cycle of the seasons: the left, spring; the top, summer; the right, autumn; the bottom, winter. Along with chronological time, they also represent the seasons of human life: the left, birth; the top, youth; the right, maturity; the bottom, old age. The circle that encloses the cross points to the circle of time, an endless cycle of day turning to day, year to year, and human life passing to the next generation. The sun cross thus represented far more than the sun: it pointed to all of space and time and all of the knowledge and wisdom in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth.

The monks of Iona took this well-known symbol and transformed it from its pagan origins into a very powerful symbol for the Gospel. They superimposed over the ancient mandala the cross of Christ (using the Latin cross as their model) to create what we know today as the Celtic cross.

In its cultural context, this cross proclaims Christ as Lord of space and time and the fount of all wisdom and knowledge, ruling over all things from the cross, the true World Tree that unites Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld. It is a profound picture of the Irish saints’ vision of the Gospel of the kingdom of God and of Jesus’ authority over all places and times and every moment of our lives.

Further, just as the Celtic cross represented a reinterpretation and Christianization of the sun cross, so the Celtic High Crosses are visible images of the triumph of Christianity over paganism: the pagan standing stones were now replaced as sacred sites by the High Crosses in the monasteries across the Irish world. To use a popular metaphor in the middle ages, just as the Israelites plundered the wealth of the Egyptians in the Exodus, so the Irish monks were plundering the wealth of their pagan forbearers in the creation of the High Crosses.

Muiredach’s Cross

The crosses themselves are beautifully decorated, with biblical scenes, geometric patterns, and images from nature carved onto all the faces. All are unique, and all anonymous; only Muiredach’s has a name attached to it, and that is the patron’s, not the artist’s. All are worth studying, but here we’ll just focus on the imagery from Muiredach’s Cross.

On the west side, most of the images come from Jesus’s passion and resurrection: Gethsemane is at the bottom; the crucifixion is at the center within the circle, with Christ portrayed not as suffering, but triumphant; the resurrection is on the right arm; Jesus appearing to Thomas and the commissioning of Peter and Paul are also shown. At the very top, carved from a separate piece of stone to resemble a reliquary (i.e. a container for relics), is Moses praying, with Aaron and Hur supporting his arms at the Battle of Rephidim (Ex. 17:8-16).

On the east side, the focus shifts to a cosmic vision of history, emphasizing typology and the connections between sin, redemptive history, Irish monasticism, and judgment. At the base, we see Adam and Eve and the Fall in the Garden of Eden, along with Cain’s murder of Abel. Next, we see David and Goliath. David was the ancestor of Jesus and the author of many of the Psalms, the backbone of Irish spirituality. We then move to Moses drawing water from the rock, which was understood to be a type of Christ giving living water to his people.

Just below the circle, we have the adoration of the magi (four of them). Within the central circle is Christ seated in judgment, sending the damned to Hell and the saved to Heaven; David is seated at his right side, playing the harp. At the top, we find Sts. Anthony and Paul of Thebes, the first monk and the first hermit, the twin inspirations of much of Celtic monasticism.

The cross is thus more than a simple statement of the triumph of Christianity over paganism or a worldview statement about the Lordship of Christ. Its imagery contains a rich theology, connecting the Old Testament to the New and showing the sweep of history from Fall through redemption and our eternal fate.

Muiredach’s cross reveals a world changed by the Gospel and shows the passion and zeal of the Irish Christians who themselves changed their world through their scholarship and their missionary activity. In a nearly perfect melding of art and the biblical worldview, they proclaim loudly and clearly Jesus as Lord of time and space, the source of wisdom, and the transformer of culture.

©Glenn Sunshine, 2020