Customer Reviews

The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity

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This is a fine work on Eruigena's Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John. Eruigena was deeply influenced by Neoplatonic thought and it shows in this work. Bamford does a fine job of translating it and does Eruigena's homliy justice. His prose is first rate and is a joy to read.

The book can be divided into roughly two sections. The Homily itself which constitutes about 50 pages and the rest is Bamford's take of it, which is roughly 250 pages. Bamford's hermenutics of the Homily can be skipped - it really tells the reader more about Bamford's thinking than anything else.

I must take issue with Bamford's misleading advertising he used to market his book. Like the previous reviewer I am in agreement that this work has nothing to do with Celtic Christianity unless one would equate it Greek thought. Rest assured they are not the same thing. In a sense Bamford does an injustice to both neoplatonism and Celtic Chrisitanity by doing this.

Ratings wise it gets 3 Stars. 5 stars for the Homily itself. -2 stars for misleading advertising and marketing Neoplatonic writings as a work of Celtic Christianity.

Christopher Bamford, eminent writer of wisdom traditions, has written an important yet disjointed and ultimately disappointing account of/on John Scotus Eriugena. Any lover of truth will take exception to the grotesque inaccuracies marring the introductions to Voice of the Eagle. Fraught with forced associations, Bramford propagates ad nauseam a preeminent Celtic cultural import to the philosophical theology underlying Eriugena's works. Embarrassingly, Eriugena is taken out of context (ie. Medieval sage, part of the transnational Occidental wisdom canon) and is treated to page-after-page of ethnocentric historical revisionism. Bamford's views read like a form of tribal propaganda that distorts the timeless and universal themes contained in Eriugena's works. Once beyond the distractingly prejudiced intros, Bamford does an exceptionally good job to illuminate theological issues with penetrating philosophical perspectives. The obtuse subject matter leads at times to boring digressions. However, embedded throughout are lofty theosophical insights that suprisingly redeems the work making this book a profitable read and a keeper in one's library. For the sake of salvaging a really good work, one only hopes that in future editions, Bamford tones down the trendy Celto-mania introductions and places Eriugena where he rightly belongs in the heart of Medieval Occidental Christianity.

This work presents the famous commentary on the Gospel of John by the great Celtic philosopher and theologian, Eriugena.

While Scotus was influenced by Celtic spirituality in the sense he had a very positive view of the universe, and especially in his belief the universe is one of God's primary 'theophanies' of manifestations, he drew most of his theological and philosophical thought from Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite. While Eriugena was an extremely creative innovator in many ways (especially in his emphasis on the meontic or negative aspects of Being, both human and divine) he was basically a Christian Platonist in a similar vein as Eckhart, and his intellectual formation relied on other Christian Platonists like Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine as much as it would on any Celtic wisdom. Eriugena is more of a world-class thinker and philosopher rather than someone who had a tribal or nationalistic agenda of any sort, and we should avoid anachronism when reading into the past.

While Eriugena's work is of significance and importance, I find that marketing this as Celtic Spirituality is somewhat deceptive. Eriugena lived and worked in France and his relationship to "Celtic" thought and spirituality is nowhere as strong as the influence of Greek Neoplatonism. 5 stars for Eriugena, none for Branford, hence 2.5, which can be rounded up to 3.

I really enjoyed this book, it was thought provoking and honest. Its reading required prayer and a good workout of the intellect. I recommend this book.