Note: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of CRUX (Vol. 61, No. 1).

The Book of Kells, a lavishly decorated gospel manuscript created around AD 800 by Celtic monks, teems with creatures of every kind: fish of the sea, birds of the air, and beasts of the earth. A number of scholars believe the Book of Kells originated in the Irish monastic community founded by Columba in Iona, an island off the coast of Scotland.¹ The monks wove animal forms into full-page illuminations and integrated them throughout the pages of text (fols 325, 326),² even transforming the letters themselves into the shapes of beasts (fols 292, 322, 323). Why did the artist-monks choose to decorate the gospels with animals? To begin to answer this, we must look at the ways in which they interpreted God’s creation and the Scripture. For Irish monks, living in the wilderness of Scotland’s wave- and wind-battered islands, surrounded by wild creatures, it appears that animal imagery was not merely a decorative convention; it also sprang from theological convictions. In this context, the animal imagery in the Book of Kells contains a spiritual depth that provides insight into the early Celtic Christians’ theology, their conception of the relationship between heaven and earth, and their spiritual life and practice. What does this spirituality mean to us today? The animal imagery in the Book of Kells is designed to be an opportunity for christological contemplation of scriptural narratives that provide the pattern for a spiritual journey that follows Christ into the wilderness and toward the new creation.

In order to understand the medieval Irish interpretation of nature and Scripture, I have drawn on a broad variety of sources, both ancient and modern. Archaeologists and linguists help give us a sense of pre-Christian Ireland through the hints left in artifacts and language, alongside monastic writings that provide retellings of ancient Celtic myths, hagiographies, and sermons. Historians of art and Christianity can help us interpret some of the visual culture, biblical interpretation, and spirituality of Christian Ireland. I have relied mainly on Irish medieval sources and those that would have been known in the Irish monasteries, but I have also turned to the desert fathers, since they had such a profound influence on Irish Christianity. Finally, I have drawn on a few authors who offer insights that are more devotional or descriptive, since the Book of Kells is first of all a work to be encountered and experienced.

The Book of Kells is an Insular³ manuscript containing Jerome’s Latin translation of the Four Gospels, with remnants of an earlier Old Latin translation. Prefacing the gospel books are canon tables (concordances of the gospel accounts), breves causae (summaries of the gospel narratives), and argumenta (characterizations of the evangelists).⁴ In the animal imagery of the Book of Kells, Byzantine, North African, and Celtic cultural influences meet.⁵ These animals can be placed in three spheres of beasts, each expressing something of Christ’s nature: animals that belong in the observable natural world of the monks, animals drawn from mythology or allegorical teachings, and animals that are symbols of the four evangelists.⁶

Animals from the Natural World

The animals that the artists would have encountered in their everyday natural world, such as chickens, mice, and cats, tend to be depicted in a more naturalistic style, bearing the closest resemblance to the animals they represent. Through this animal imagery, the artists delve into the topic of how the creaturely world relates to the spiritual reality of the Eucharist. Bernard Meehan, former archivist at Trinity College, Dublin, links the presence of mice in the Chi Rho page (fol 34r),⁷ who appear holding the eucharistic host in their mouth as they play with cats, to the prevalence of rodents in the monasteries and to the later “medieval dilemma over allowing a mouse to seize and eat a consecrated host and thus, arguably to consume Christ.”⁸ The place given to animals to interact with the host, or to symbolically depict eucharistic themes, suggests the artists saw the natural world as participating in the Eucharist. Mice in a monastery may seem like pests, but in these illuminations, they are present in the celebration of the Eucharist alongside the symbolic peacocks borrowed from Roman iconography, which appear with the eucharistic host on other folios (fol 32v). In these illuminations, the sacred reality of the Eucharist reaches beyond the spiritual life of the monastery into the natural world outside, reminding the viewer that Christ’s sacrifice encompasses all of created reality. 

While these types of naturalistic animals appear less frequently than other categories of animals in the Book of Kells, medieval art historian Shirley Brown notes they encompass the whole of material creation, including “creatures of the sea, land, and air, and the earthly and heavenly realms.”⁹ Each of the spheres of the material world is represented in the Chi-Rho page (fol 34r) through animal figures that correspond to them: the moths for the aerial sphere, the otter and fish for the aquatic sphere, and mice and cats for the earthly sphere.¹⁰ By associating them with the Eucharist and placing them in the gospel manuscript, Brown argues, they express the participation of these beasts—and their spheres of creation—in Christ’s sacrificial death and “embrace the theology of the eucharist as the Incarnate Christ himself.”¹¹ Meehan references art historian Suzanne Lewis, who suggests that “the disc in the mouths of mice is eucharistic bread in the form of a host, that the fish in the mouth of the otter represents Christ, and that the object between the moths . . . is a chrysalis, a natural symbol of rebirth and renewal. Together, these represent a cosmological entirety of Christological and eucharistic symbolism.”¹² In these illuminations, the whole of earthly and heavenly reality is nourished by Christ’s body and blood.

Mythological and Allegorical Animals

Animals with more symbolic or mythical associations, such as certain birds, snakes, and lions, convey that Christ reveals himself through the metaphors and messengers of the natural and mythological worlds. These creatures often appear in a more stylized form and likely participate in an allegorical Roman and mythological Celtic artistic tradition of animal imagery. 

Pagan Roman, Egyptian, and Celtic religions had frameworks in which animals could be understood as intermediaries between the realms of this world and the divine world.¹³ Thomas O’Rahilly, linguist of Irish dialects, notes: “It is commonplace in Irish tales to find a hero guided, or enticed, to the Otherworld by a supernatural being (whether in the shape of man or beast) whom he pursues.”¹⁴ In pagan Celtic belief, author Graydon Snyder explains, transmogrification was one of the ways in which the earthly and divine exchange took place: “For the Celts there was a very thin line between animal/human and the divine. Gods and goddesses became animals or humans. Humans could enter the divine world.”¹⁵

 Irish monks sought to demonstrate the continuity and authority of Christ within the context of their own histories and mythologies.Christians related these Celtic myths to the biblical narrative in a variety of ways, according to Mark Williams, professor of medieval literature. They sometimes conceived of pagan gods as demons, along the lines of the desert fathers (whose accounts depicted demons in the shapes of Egyptian deities);¹⁶ as angels mercifully “sent before the coming of Christianity in order to guide the Irish according to the ‘truth of nature;’” as half-fallen angels; as unfallen immortal humans (an idea that may have had Pelagian underpinnings);¹⁷ or even perhaps as allegories of Christ.¹⁸ Rather than abolishing pagan mythology and history, O’Rahilly states, Celtic monks recontextualized it through a Christian lens by means of euhemerism: “humanizing and mortalizing the divinities of pagan Ireland.”¹⁹ Seventh-century Irish writers “reimagined the island’s pre-Christian past as a local version of the Old Testament, full of scenarios and personages mirroring those of Scripture,” Williams argues.²⁰ During the period that the Book of Kells was written, Irish monks sought to demonstrate the continuity and authority of Christ within the context of their own histories and mythologies, which they saw as “pre-Christian rather than anti-Christian.”²¹

One possible argument for an adaptation of Celtic mythology in the iconography of the Book of Kells centres on the prevalence of imagery of fantastical birds that are difficult to connect to any particular species (as opposed to the clearly identifiable chickens and peacocks) and the brilliant colouring of many of the creatures. Celtic archaeologist Ann Ross argues that since birds acted as “symbols of divinity and as servants and messengers of the gods”²² in Celtic belief, they were already spiritually laden images associated with the pagan happy Otherworld, the realm of spiritual and divine beings. The birds on the Otherworld islands of the Insular goddess Cliodna were, according to archaeologist Miranda Green, “red in colour, with green heads: they laid eggs of blue and crimson. . . . Other birds, eating huge purple berries in a forest, had white bodies, purple heads, and golden beaks. The description of Cliodna’s birds makes it quite clear that they are unearthly, belonging to the divine world.”²³ Otherworld dogs in another story are glowing white with red ears. Bright, unearthly colours, like those used of many animals in the Book of Kells, were typical of Otherworld beasts in the Insular tradition²⁴ and were likely used to represent Otherworld birds in pagan Celtic and pagan Gallo-Roman iconography.²⁵

In pagan Celtic literature, Ross notes, Otherworld gods or goddesses are “possessed of by magic birds by whose singing all sorrow is forgotten, pain healed and even the dead are restored to life. The metamorphosis of this happy pagan otherworld into an equally happy Christian otherworld is an easy one.”²⁶ The song of the birds in the pagan Otherworld myth comes across the water, an image shared in the Celtic Christian literature.²⁷ Since in Celtic mythology the Otherworld was sometimes thought of as islands in the sea,²⁸ in this shared representation, birds are inhabitants and bearers of paradise. The strong textual parallelism of the bird motif in the Celtic pagan and Christian traditions lays a basis for interpreting the birds in the Book of Kells as visual parallels of the same theme.²⁹ Thus, birds in the Book of Kells might be intended to invite the reader into a world inhabited by Otherworldly creatures.

We also see the influence of Byzantine and North African mythologies in the Book of Kells. In Byzantium, animals had an allegorical meaning, by which Christ revealed aspects of his nature and teachings. This tradition was passed on through the Physiologus, a chronicle of animals and their meanings taken from the animal lore of many eastern Mediterranean cultures. These were later harmonized with Christian doctrine in the popular bestiaries. The Physiologus is an example of the rich cultural exchange present in early Christianity, with roots in the legends and philosophies of the pre-Christian world. Beginning with legends originating in India, Egypt, and Israel, the text then passed through the lens of classical Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, Pliny, and Herodotus, and was shaped by their texts about the natural world. It was translated into Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac, Latin, Greek, and then English and French.³⁰ Adopted by Christians, it was written in Greek “to instruct individuals in Christianity through the compelling and entertaining exempla of animals.”³¹

The Physiologus was adapted into bestiaries widely used for instruction in monasteries and schools, was translated into many languages including Latin, Old English, and Middle English, and was, according to some scholars, second to the Bible in its centuries-long and widespread distribution. It was, as Armistead puts it, “the primary source for Christian iconography.”³² In the bestiaries derived from the Physiologus, nature is treated “as a metaphor for Christianity and for God”; therefore, visible reality symbolizes invisible reality.³³ These texts reveal the idea that “nature was meant to be studied and read the way the Bible was studied and read—allegorically. . . . Nature and the animal kingdom were seen as earthly instructors of the divine and holy.”³⁴ The Book of Kells participates in this allegorical paradigm by including typical Byzantine symbolic animals, which developed from this Physiologus tradition. The lion, the peacock, and the snake (which sheds its skin) are three commonly used resurrection symbols present in the Book of Kells. Regarding the lion in the Book of Kells, Meehan writes, “In the Physiologus, known in Ireland from the etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, lion cubs were born dead, but on the third day were revived by their father’s breathing on their faces or roaring. This was a striking metaphor for the revival of Christ three days after his death.”³⁵ Byzantine eucharistic symbolism is evident in animals like the peacock, which appears frequently as a symbol of the incorruptibility of Christ. One bestiary states that Pavo the Peacock’s “flesh is so hard that it is scarcely subject to putrefaction, and it is not easily cooked.”³⁶ Due to this legend, it became a symbol in Christian art of immortality.³⁷ Through this allegorical lens, the peacock became an earthly revelation of a heavenly reality.  

Symbols of the Four Evangelists

The impact of the Byzantine paradigm is demonstrated not only by the frequency of allegorical animals but also by the unprecedented frequency of depictions of the symbols of the four evangelists.³⁸ These symbolic beasts—the man, the lion, the calf, and the eagle—originated in the prophecies of Ezekiel and Revelation; the beasts were read as allegories of the evangelists and in turn were identified by Gregory the Great in his sixth-century homily³⁹ with the “four stages of Christ’s life. . . . Christ was a man in his birth, a calf in his death, a lion in his resurrection, and an eagle in his ascending to heaven.”⁴⁰ Because of this focus on Christ, Meehan argues, the “ever fresh wonders . . . of the manuscript are those of technique and variety rather than theme, which is in essence, singular[,] . . . the fundamental message of Christianity.”⁴¹  

The symbols of the evangelists are heavily stylized in the manuscript. Although animal forms abound in Byzantine art and in the Scandinavian art brought by the Anglo-Saxons, “animal forms are comparatively rare in Late-Celtic art, and they are not interlaced,” according to early twentieth-century archaeologist J. R. Allen, demonstrating that not only was this innovation new to Christian art, it was also new to Celtic art.⁴² Allen infers that the stylization turns these symbols into simple decoration, an idea that continues to influence scholars today: “Early Christian art in this country is essentially decorative, and to a lesser extent symbolic.”⁴³ While Insular art represents a significant stylistic shift, it is possible that in the Celtic iconography adapted by monks, “ornamentation” was not merely decorative but rather was intended to function as a method of relating to God. Snyder writes, “Ornamentation was a religious experience in its own right. The one who designed and executed the spiral or interlacing experienced God in a poetic or musical way. The person who saw the intricate designs followed the lines to a spiritual experience analogous to what the artist intended.”⁴⁴ In some examples, Shirley Brown identifies this intertwined mesh of beasts “as a highly abstracted Insular version of the inhabited plant scroll, the tree of life, the symbol of Christ the true vine. The image of the ideal harmony of nature wrought through Christ is recalled here.”⁴⁵ The weaving of the symbols of the evangelists throughout the book forms a gospel-shaped eucharistic tapestry that invites the viewer into prayer and contemplation.

Because these symbols of the evangelists are heavily stylized, they communicate more within Celtic culture. The animal that most sources agree is a lion is stylized to the point that it is recognizable only as a quadruped, generalizing the form to communicate to a diverse audience. In doing so, it takes on dog-like characteristics.⁴⁶ This would be more understandable to a Celtic audience because the dog figured heavily in pagan belief as a companion of gods and was associated with the connection between this world and the Otherworld.⁴⁷ Dog figures were often found in worship sites at wells, river-mouths, and springs, which were believed to be openings flowing from the Otherworld and access points to the divine,⁴⁸ a tradition that may have had some continuity in Christian contexts, as Williams explains: “Wells and springs formerly associated with pagan gods were widely used by missionaries as sites of baptism . . . thus consecrating the sites via the rites of the new religion.”⁴⁹ The source of all wisdom was sometimes portrayed in pagan Celtic religion as the Otherworld Well of Segais and in multiple regions as an omniscient deity of the Otherworld (appearing under various names in different regions) that was polymorphic, assuming animal shapes including a bull, eagle, dog, and salmon⁵⁰ (intriguingly similar to the ox, eagle, and lion/dog symbols of the four evangelists). Perhaps the Book of Kells uses some of these themes and motifs to recontextualize a Byzantine symbol of Christ into language familiar to Celtic mythology. 

Scriptural Backgrounds

The artists of the Book of Kells illuminate a Christology that emphasizes that Christ’s sacrifice, revelation, and presence encompass all of creation. Yet they do so in a deliberately stylized and obscured visual language. Pre-Christian Celtic art largely avoided the human figure (perhaps for religious reasons), and early Christian Celtic art also apparently resisted representational images of Christ. Instead, a symbolic pictorial language that drew on the earliest Christian art was preferred in Celtic Christianity until about AD 630.⁵¹ Letter combinations such as the Chi Rho or simple images like the fish became symbols that functioned like pictograms or word puzzles representing Christ.⁵² An image like the fish would also call to mind a library of biblical references from the Old and New Testaments that might represent Jonah (a type of Christ) or the loaves and fish in the feeding of the five thousand.⁵³ Letter combinations such as the Chi Rho or simple images like the fish became symbols that functioned like pictograms or word puzzles representing Christ.The Chi, Chi Rho, and the abstracted cross, for example, are symbols used repeatedly in the Book of Kells, even while this manuscript also makes use of the heavily abstracted human figure.⁵⁴ The influence of early Christian art in the Book of Kells suggests that even the simplest image might similarly have been “read” with scriptural depth and complexity. If so, what constituted the Celtic monks’ library of biblical references? What typological biblical narratives shaped their Christology, and how did these provide the models for their own spirituality? 

Daniel in the Lion’s Den

Although the story of Daniel is not portrayed directly in the Book of Kells, it would not be long before the monk who opened it would start to feel like he was in a pit of lions, with so many of them sprawled across its pages. Daniel was a type of Christ in Celtic theology that informed much of its iconography. High crosses—ornately carved stone crosses portraying biblical narratives and other motifs—often portray this scene and help illuminate the role it might play in the background of the Book of Kells.

Éamonn Ó Carragáin, professor of Old and Middle English and scholar of Celtic art and liturgy, suggests that the biblical imagery on the eighth-century Insular cross of Kildare, including figures wrapped in a snake representing Adam and Eve, Daniel in the lion’s den, Abraham and Isaac’s sacrifice, and Christ’s crucifixion, teaches the gospel message through typology. The fall of humanity, in which Adam and Eve sinned and were brought into conflict with a beast (the serpent), was reversed through Christ’s crucifixion. The crucifixion is prefigured by Abraham and Isaac, in which atonement was offered through a sacrificial beast (the ram), and Daniel in the lion’s den, in which the wild beasts are tamed and reconciled.⁵⁵ This typology is expressed in the design of the cross. Daniel is portrayed in the orans prayer posture, “prefiguring” the crucifixion on the opposite face of the cross. He is flanked by four lions in an arrangement like the Maiestas Domini—“Christ in Majesty”—images of the scene in Revelation of Christ surrounded by the four living creatures who ceaselessly worship around his throne.⁵⁶ In this design, “Daniel is presented both as a prefiguration of Christ’s Passion, and also of his second coming in glory,” ⁵⁷ in which the tamed lions become the signs of his glorification. 

The theme of Christ taming the beasts was paralleled by early Christians in the iconography of Orpheus, who in Greek myth charmed and pacified wild animals by masterfully playing music with the lyre.⁵⁸ Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius both compared Christ to Orpheus. Clement wrote that while Orpheus was a deceiver “who, under the pretence of poetry” enticed men to idols, Christ’s song 

has come to loose . . . the bitter bondage of tyrannizing demons; and leading us back to the mild and loving yoke of piety, recalls to heaven those that had been cast prostrate to the earth. It alone has tamed men, the most intractable of animals; the frivolous among them answering to the fowls of the air, deceivers to reptiles, the irascible to lions, the voluptuous to swine, the rapacious to wolves.⁵⁹

Orpheus’s taming of the beasts came to be an analogy for Christ’s “taming” of the human soul, as reflected in the art of the early Christian period.⁶⁰ The same iconography is found in Celtic art and literature in Roman Britain. In two fourth-century villas in Withington and Woodchester, Orpheus mosaics are reproduced with tame animals that are often found in Christian iconography: the peacock, the dove, and the cantharus, which likely identify them as christianized versions of the Orpheus iconography.⁶¹ These mosaics evoke the Maiestas Domini imagery: where Christ holds a book on his left knee, the Orpheus figure holds a lyre; where Christ is surrounded by the four living creatures, Orpheus is surrounded by a host of beasts of many kinds. 

This taming of the soul took shape in the monastic life. The previously mentioned cross of Kildare also includes scenes of the temptation of Saint Anthony (flanked by two beasts and appearing above a depiction of a six-headed beast), and Saints Paul and Anthony receiving bread from a raven. These scenes of saints with beasts in the wilderness, first as devils “in form of divers beasts wild and savage,”⁶² and then as ministers of God’s provision in the wilderness, present the Daniel-Christ pattern as the pattern of monastic life. 

St. Cuthbert’s spirituality followed this Daniel pattern, according to a brother who witnessed his harmonious encounter with two otters. The image of the otter on the Chi-Rho page of the Book of Kells might allude to this legend recorded in Bede’s The Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert.⁶³ In the Anglo-Saxon historian’s account, a brother follows Cuthbert to the beach and witnesses him praying, submerged to his neck in the ocean all night. After Cuthbert emerges from the water, “two quadrupeds, called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet and wiped them with their hair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element.” According to sister Benedicta Ward, historian of early spirituality, Bede’s account of this story indicates that this moment is transfigurative, revealing Cuthbert, like Daniel, to be a type of Christ:

Cuthbert was Daniel, thrown into danger of lust, as Daniel was thrown into the den of lions; and Cuthbert, like Daniel, was ministered to by the animals. For the fathers of the church, Daniel was . . . Christ, who “thought it not robbery to be equal with God but emptied himself” and came down into this animal den of the world.⁶⁵

For the Irish illuminators who painted creatures of all varieties, the monks’ lives among all the wild beasts participated in the pattern of ongoing reconciliation portrayed by Daniel as a type of Christ. Stories from The Life of St. Brigid by the Irish monk Cogitosus, written in the mid-seventh century, emphasize how wild beasts were tamed in her presence because “she praised the Creator of all things greatly, to whom all life is subject, and for the service of whom . . . all life is given.”⁶⁶ When a wild boar fleeing a hunt settled among her herd of pigs, Cogitosus wrote, “See how brute beasts and animals could oppose neither her bidding nor her wish, but served her tamely and humbly.”⁶⁷ The Daniel-Christ motif of wild beasts becoming tame and humble servants is repeated throughout Irish literature and art, which emphasizes the subjection and reconciliation of all creatures to Christ (and thereby to his saints). 

Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness

In the Book of Kells, one of the few illustrations of gospel stories depicts the temptation of Christ in the wilderness (fol 202v). This illustration is also a typological⁶⁸ interpretation of the text, “a schematic figure (plan or diagram) of the Communion of Saints,” according to art historian Michelle Brown:⁶⁹

In accordance with this theological doctrine, Christ is literally the head of the body of the church (from which his bust appears to grow) and is joined by the Church Triumphant (the angels who hover above his head), the Church Militant (the apostles and believers who stand alongside watching), and the Church Expectant (those who have died and are awaiting resurrection, symbolized by the figures beneath the church.⁷⁰

In depicting the temptation of Christ as typological, the illuminators assert that Christ’s authority over Satan in the wilderness to offer a new, peaceful relationship with all creatures is a model for the life of the whole church. Ó Carragáin gives an analysis of the way the story of Christ in the wilderness figured in the iconography of the Irish cross at Bewcastle:

It has long been recognized that the panel of “Christ acclaimed by the beasts” adapts the iconography of Psalm 90:13, “thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk: and thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon.” But the Bewcastle sculptors have converted their beasts from evil to good: their inner paws (now worn by rain), still touch; it is likely that, originally, they crossed to form an “X” pattern . . . if so, the crossed paws alluded to the Chi symbol, the initial letter of the messianic title, “Christos" . . . The two creatures cannot be identified as asps, basilisks, lions, or dragons: they are simply living beings, animals.⁷¹

In this image, Christ’s dominion and taming of the beasts in the wilderness is the sign of his victory over evil and death and the sign that he is Christ, Lord over all creation.

The temptation of Christ, like the Daniel story, provides the model for the monastic journey of sanctification.The temptation of Christ, like the Daniel story, provides the model for the monastic journey of sanctification. Athanasius writes of St. Anthony: “The demons fled and the wild beasts, as it is written, made peace with him,”⁷² an authority given by God: “Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy.”⁷³ This monastic journey is exemplified in the life of Jerome, later recorded in The Golden Legend, a medieval hagiography by archbishop of Genoa Jacobus De Voragine. In this account, Jerome, “when he had learned of him the holy Scripture and holy letters, he went into desert” to battle with lechery, pride, and lust. There, he says, “I laid my dried bones on the bare earth” and “was oft fellow unto scorpions and wild beasts,” and in his struggle with the lusts of the flesh, he “passed alone through the sharp and thick deserts. And as our Lord is witness, after many weepings and tears, it seemed to me that I was among the company of angels.”⁷⁴ After his time in the desert, the account continues, “he returned to the town of Bethlehem, where as a wise and a prudent beast he offered himself to abide by the crib of our Lord.” In Bethlehem, he spent fifty-five years and six months translating the Scriptures and fasting until evening, remaining a virgin until his death. During this time, he had a famous encounter with a lion:

On a day towards even Jerome sat with his brethren for to hear the holy lesson, and a lion came halting suddenly in to the monastery, and when the brethren saw him, anon they fled, and Jerome came against him as he should come against his guest, and then the lion showed to him his foot being hurt. Then he called his brethren, and commanded them to wash his feet and diligently to seek and search for the wound. And that done, the plant of the foot of the lion was sore hurt and pricked with a thorn. Then this holy man put thereto diligent cure, and healed him, and he abode ever after as a tame beast with them.⁷⁵

In this story, Jerome becomes a sign of the new creation: after confronting the beast of sin and humbling himself as a beast before Christ, he welcomes and tends a wild beast in need.

***

Many stories of Irish saints share similar themes of hospitality to wild creatures, at once an act of humility and dominion. These include the account of patroness saint of Ireland Brigid of Kildare and the “miserable hungry hound” whom she welcomed and fed two pieces of precious bacon to as a hospitable act to the poor and humble beast,⁷⁶ and the account of St. Columba and the crane, by Adamnan, abbot of Iona, in his Life of St. Columba, in which a battered and weary crane is welcomed, fed, and tended to by Columba and his monks as a “stranger guest” and sent along its journey.⁷⁷ Like the beasts ministered to Christ in the wilderness, the monks tamed their sinful natures to become servants of Christ, ministering to the beasts under their care.

The Wolf and the Lamb   

Depictions of peacemaking among natural predators and prey is a sign of the future peace of all creation promised in Isaiah 11:6–9. The Book of Kells seems to depict Isaiah’s prophecy with calves, lions, panthers, oxen, snakes, birds, moths, chickens, fish and monsters of the deep, hares, dogs, horses, cats, and mice all playing together among the words on the pages (fols 48r, 50v, 52v, 55r, 55v, 60r, 63r, 67r, 70v, 76v, 81r, 83r, 89r, 250v). The scale of the creatures overturns the natural predator-prey relationship. In one scene of cats and mice, the mouse has been enlarged to the size of the cat (fol 48r), while in another, they play peacefully together. It is certainly possible that cat-sized rodents inhabited the monastery at Iona, but perhaps it is also an intentional choice by the artists to equalize animals that naturally have predatory relationships.

While mice are enlarged, dragons and sea monsters are often diminished to the scale of fish or birds, making them appear as harmless as worms (as in fols 56v, 72r). When compared with the scale of beasts in Celtic mythologies, the harmless monsters in the Book of Kells seem all the more surprising! Huge monsters are depicted on Celtic pre-Christian artifacts, such as coins or stone sculptures, including a wolf apparently swallowing up the sun and moon, a huge horse-riding bird, or a giant serpent-legged figure of the underworld opposing the sun-god. These beasts seem to be associated with death and rebirth.⁷⁸ The miniature monsters in the Book of Kells overturn this mythological order of things and put the monsters in their place as creatures made by God and under his dominion.

The monastic composition Voyage of Bran, composed between the seventh and eighth centuries, alludes to this prophecy of Isaiah. In it, Manannán mac Lir, a man riding a chariot across the ocean, meets the sea voyager Bran.⁷⁹ Manannán mac Lir is likely based on a pagan Celtic sea-god who was associated with the sun and who rides a horse that circles the world travelling over land and sea.⁸⁰ This sea-god was reinterpreted by Cormac mac Cuilennáin, king and bishop of Munster, in 908 as “a skillful navigator who lived on the Isle of Man and who was afterwards deified by the Irish and Welsh.”⁸¹ In the Voyage of Bran, he might have been an allegory of Christ.⁸² Manannán mac Lir speaks a poem to Bran expressing how he sees the world with his omniscient Otherworldly vision. From this perspective, the ocean is solid land and “speckled salmon leap out of it, from the womb, from the white sea on which you look; they are calves, they are lovely-coloured lambs at peace, without mutual slaying.”⁸³ Speckled salmon were creatures who, in the legendary Well of Segais, the source of all knowledge, had consumed “bubbles of inspiration” created when the nuts of nine hazel trees encircling the well dropped into its waters. The salmon’s spots represented the bubbles of Otherworldly wisdom they had consumed.⁸⁴ In the poem, the salmon possessing Otherworldly knowledge are shown to be the signs of the peace of new creation, like the “lambs and calves at peace without mutual slaying,” when beasts shall not kill or destroy because “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9, NKJV). For both the Celtic and biblical creatures, it is their possession of knowledge of the divine that makes them signs of new creation. In a sermon by the Irish monk Columbanus, he offers these fish as an example for spiritual life: 

The Author of life is the fountain of life, the Creator of light, the fountain of glory. Therefore, spurning the things that are seen, journeying through the world, let us seek the fountain of glory, the fountain of life, the fountain of living water, in the upper regions of the heavens, like rational and most wise fishes, that there we may drink the living water which springs up to eternal life.⁸⁵

In this sermon, Columbanus urges the monks, like the fish, to hunger and thirst for the knowledge of Christ (who is compared to the Well of Sagais) so that they, too, may become creatures of the new creation.

Christ Enthroned

While the hierarchy between creaturely beings in the Book of Kells is upturned, Christ’s exaltation over all creation is emphasized. In the image of Christ enthroned, he is seated in a pose reminiscent of the Maiestas Domini and flanked by two sets of angels and two peacocks marked with hosts and standing on bowls of grapevines, while his feet rest on two stylized Celtic crosses (fol 32).⁸⁶ The peacocks and vines replace the traditional symbols of the evangelists, emphasizing Christ’s sacrificial enthronement on the cross for all creation and linking his glorification closely to the Eucharist. In the same way that God’s presence was enthroned between two cherubim on the ark of the covenant, or Christ was enthroned on Good Friday between two thieves, in Irish high crosses and illuminated manuscripts, flanking creatures were like doorposts that signalled Christ’s exaltation and revelation.⁸⁷ For example, in a depiction of the loaves and fish referencing Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, the bread and fish are flanked by “strange stylized animals, with baton-like bodies and dogs’ heads. . . . The two flanking animals hint that in the bread . . . Christ is here to be known ‘between two living creatures,’” from a verse in Habakkuk 3:2 that was read in the canticle on Good Friday.⁸⁸ The pattern of a central Christ, flanked by two or four animals, cherubim, or humans, reminiscent of Maiestas Domini iconography,⁸⁹ appears in every surviving full-page image where Christ or his gospel is depicted (fol 7v, fol 114r, fol 202v, fol 32v). These patterns of symmetrical flanking beasts around the central Christ in the Book of Kells emphasize that Christ is enthroned between the cherubim and over all created things.

The New Adam

The abundant animal imagery in the Book of Kells depicts the restoration of Edenic harmony, emphasizing the role of Christ as the new Adam. Like the desert fathers, such as St. Anthony who displays an Adamic dominion and authority over the wild beasts in peaceful encounters with crocodiles, wild beasts, and hyenas,⁹⁰ the monastic community of Iona sought to follow the model of Christ as the second Adam. According to Malcolm Lambert, professor of medieval history and theology, at “the monastery on the island of Iona . . . as Adomnan conveys in his picture of the relationship between Columba and the animals, the harmony of creation in the garden of Eden was restored.”⁹¹ Monks were mediators between the heavenly and earthly realms. This was particularly true of the life of a hermit: “The hermit had deliberately chosen to live at the limits of existence, a human person containing both heaven and earth, with the angels and with the beasts, a mediator of all creation.”⁹² The monks who created these books . . . did this labor as an act of service, prayer, and meditation.The making of an illuminated manuscript was part of this work of mediation, as Michelle Brown explains: “Like St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne . . . who spent part of his time in prayer as a hermit on the harsh rock of the nearby island of Inner Farne, the scribe entered the desert of the book to undertake the gruelling act of physical labour and focused meditation.”⁹³ The monks who created these books, like the hermits, did this labour as an act of service, prayer, and meditation, and the imagery they chose is part of their prayerful mediation between heaven and earth. 

In the story of the Anglo-Saxon hermit St. Guthlac of Crowland, recorded by the monk Felix in the eighth century, the saint expounds on his role as a new Adam. Felix writes, “Not only were the birds subject to him, but also the fishes and wild beasts of the wilderness all obeyed him, and he daily gave them food from his own hand, as suited their kind.”⁹⁴ In this passage, Guthlac is portrayed as faithfully carrying out his Adamic role. A visitor observes two swallows come and rest on Guthlac’s shoulders and sing: “When Wilfrith had long wondering beheld the birds, he asked him wherefore the wild birds of the wide waste so submissively sat upon him.”⁹⁵ Guthlac answered his visitor, “Hast thou never learnt, brother Wilfrith, in holy writ, that he that hath led his life after God’s will, the wild beasts and the wild birds have become more intimate with him. And the man who would pass his life apart from worldly men, to him the angels approach nearer.”⁹⁶ For Guthlac, as for the Irish hermits, a life in communion with God led to a life of care and dominion of creation, near to beasts and angels, just as Christ, the new Adam, mediates between heaven and earth.

Conclusion

As ninth-century Irish philosopher John Scotus Eriugena writes in “The Voice of the Eagle,” his sermon on the prologue to the Gospel of John, “Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things, and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only he who made them, outside of whom you have nothing to contemplate.”⁹⁷ The animal imagery in the Book of Kells is not just a masterwork of visual intricacy but an opportunity for just such christological reflection. As Christian motifs and themes interact with Celtic, Byzantine, and North African mythologies and traditions, a visual Christology drawn from Scripture is contextualized in allegory and mythology. Here is Christ, the maker and source of the salmon’s wisdom, the swan’s loveliness, and the dragon’s fierceness. Here is the Christ who rules and freely traverses all realms of creation: sky, sea, and land, the Otherworld, this world, and the Underworld, and who binds together heaven and earth in the eucharistic offering of his body and blood. Here is Christ who embodies both the power of the lion and the meekness of the calf, trampling the beasts of sin and death and taming men and beasts in the peace of his new creation. This is the Christ the readers and illuminators of the Book of Kells followed into the wilderness to become creatures of the new creation.

Author’s Note: I would like to thank Sarah Williams, Professor at Regent College, for her feedback, inspiration, and teaching in church history and Christian art history; and Rebecca Prichard, Professor of Celtic Spirituality at New Theological Seminary of the West, for her valuable feedback, comments, and expertise in the scholarly conversation in this field.