Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson Read Free Book Online Page A

nothing: the 600-foot drop, pure air, and the Atlantic beyond it.
    It is as tautened a space as you will ever find. On this tiny scale, a straightforward progression, a sermon in stone, develops from west to east across the precinct: from dwelling, to drinking (water cisterns tucked inside the stone walls), to prayer, to burial, to the cliff-edge, its space and the wide slow rolling of the great Atlantic waters. I looked at the
Auk tar
below, her grey, stripped decks, her taking of the swells and her dipping after them, and read from her, and from my position up here, the power of smallness, of how much more this meant than any giant, gilt-encrusted church or palace could do. Skellig was a concentrate of beauty and meaning, like powder paint still in the jar, an essence long distilled.
    ‘It’s full of voices,’ Claire said, ‘full of silent voices.’ She had been down below one evening years ago in one of the guides’ huts that are on the lighthouse road, after the last of the tourists had left, and decided shemight come up here to the monastery. It was a misty evening and the last of the sun was shining in spokes through the murk. Needless to say, like all islands, Skellig is a place for visions and as she climbed the long worn steps, she thought she heard something like plainchant coming down to her through the mist. As she climbed and the mist thickened, the sound grew clearer, until by the time she came to the gateway into the precinct, the voices were strong and distinct. They were in the oratory itself. Hymns were pouring out through the low doorway, the whole perfect corbelled stone box humming with the music of singing voices. She approached the opening and inside saw only the hems of black robes, bare feet and sandals. ‘I thought I had died and gone to Heaven,’ she said. She stood there and the singing stopped. Six Greek Orthodox monks had stayed on after the last boat had left. She left them and made her way down the long stairway listening to their chanted prayers floating down through the mist that lay in scarves around her.
    This monastery is the City of God, founded on the dream of domination. It represents a wholly powerful colonisation of an utterly wild place by an utterly powerful Christian civilisation. Ed Bourke, anotherIrish archaeologist who has studied Skellig Michael and for many years worked here on the Irish state restoration project, told me to remember that Christianity has a deeply ambivalent attitude to nature. ‘It sees nature both as a reflection of the divine and as an embodiment of the not-divine. And that is evident here. Everything you see is clearly a response to the gob-smackingly gorgeous nature of the place. But it is also holding it at bay, and disciplining it.’
    That balance and that coherence is what the early monastic tradition is about. Its aim was not madness, in the way of modern cults, but a kind of harmony. An island, particularly of this kind, distils and intensifies both what is good and what is difficult about the natural world. An island is both perfect and horrible. It is nature at its best and its worst, its most pure and its most hostile. Feelings of threat and of worship cluster here more closely than in any other form of landscape. The drive to satisfy that double impulse, in its most extreme forms, is what shaped the monastery on Skellig.
    This early monastic search for understanding was in the end profoundly humane. In AD 305 the great St Antony, founder of the monastic idea, emerged aftertwenty years’ solitude, walled up in a ruined Roman fort in the Egyptian desert. Bread had occasionally been lowered into a hole for him and groans of spiritual agony had at intervals emerged. His followers, clustered outside, waited in trepidation. What would a man look like after such travail?
    Antony, as from a shrine, came forth initiated in the mysteries and filled with the Spirit of God. Then for the first time he was seen outside the fort by those who came to