I struggle with how to put it in English, but my understanding of the mind-spirit unity goes beyond the idea of panentheism. The Celts, I believe, held to something deeper when we infer from them a spirit-mind unity. For one thing, it also has to include the body, as well as nature. Before the more modern Celtic languages evolved there was no word for “soul.” The word was “nuirt” (English transliteration), a word that almost defies interpretation into English. The closest that I can come to it, is “indivisible unity,” in that it is impossible to experience as aspect apart from experiencing all parts simultaneously.

In some mystical way the “nuirt” includes the divine, but in someway more than the traditional divine image concept. Panentheism, I think doesn’t far enough, because we still separating God and things. Yet, it is not pantheism in that the divine doesn’t become the thing. It is more like the thing becomes divine, yet not divine. Maybe this is what Peter was writing about when he refers to us as “little Gods.” I’ve been working on a theology of incarnation where the Incarnation becomes more than the mere birth of Jesus as the LOGOS. It is more along the lines that the cosmos – and all that which is within – both sings the Incarnation and is in some way the Incarnation. I think this closer to the Celtic idea of the “nuirt,” if we keep the definition of Incarnation to the coming of the LOGOS, Breath of the divine into the cosmos at the birth of the cosmos. The ancient Celtic myth of creation is that the Divine Breath (Masculine energy) of God and Divine Nurture (Feminine energy as depicted by water) recreated themselves in creation. Again, hard to grasp in our modern understanding of masculine/feminine as gender, not a unified energy. (Quantum Theory goes along here of making sense of this Celtic concept, as well as that of the cosmos being simultaneously both a song and being sung.)

From a Celtic theological perspective this is along the lines of the thinking of the Celtic Latin John Scottus Eriugena and from Franciscan theological perspective, that of Teilhard de Chardin. [Both have been accused of being either a pantheist or a panentheist. I think that comes from misunderstanding their ideas.]

Frank A. Mills
March 9, 2024
Sheffield Lake, OH