The Book That Turns Darkness Into Light

“I have lived through many ages, through the eyes of salmon, deer, and wolf. I have seen the Northmen invading Ireland, destroying all in search of gold. I have seen suffering in the darkness. Yet I have seen beauty thrive in the most fragile of places. I have seen the book – the book that turns darkness into light.”

The Secret of Kells (2009)

Thus whispers Aisling the fairy by way of a prologue to the story. We see her green eyes peer at us through the leaves of the forest. We see the shadows of the Northmen with their horned helmets;¹ we see an old man and a white cat huddled in a rowing boat on a storm-tossed sea as a building blazes with fire on a tiny island behind them. The animation in this film is extraordinary: lavishly stylised, pulsing with jewel-bright colours, and disarmingly flat – I mean, of course all hand-drawn animation is two-dimensional, but The Secret of Kells really leans into that necessity and turns it into a feature. In short, the whole thing looks like a storybook, like a proper, beautiful, fantastical, rather naïve storybook. As I understand it, that’s pretty much what the creators of the film were going for. The plot revolves around the Book of Kells, which is a ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the four gospels in Latin, and so the animation is deliberately designed to imitate the style of that book’s illuminations. As an artistic choice, this was a stroke of genius. Not only does it represent a genuine innovation in animation style – and 2D animation is an art form that needs innovation if it is to survive alongside CGI going forward – but it also binds the film to its subject-matter in a really compelling way. The style feels foreign, surreal, but exactly right and authentic as a medium for the story at hand. In The Secret of Kells, Cartoon Saloon hasn’t just made a film about a manuscript; it’s brought a manuscript to life.²

The old man we saw escaping by sea – need I warn you of impending spoilers? – turns out to be a master illuminator called Aidan, and the burning building behind him the monastery of Iona. Brother Aidan arrives at the Abbey of Kells, where our protagonist Brendan is a novice monk and his stern Uncle Cellach the Abbot, carrying an unfinished manuscript that he managed to save from Iona when the Northmen came. He sets himself up in the scriptorium at Kells to continue working on his great project. “The book is a beacon in these dark days of the Northmen,” he says. He calls it the book that turns darkness into light.

 

The chi-rho page - the one Brother Aidan said would be the most beautiful of all.

Abbot Cellach has no time for manuscripts. He is too busy overseeing the building of an enormous wall around the abbey, which he intends will prevent it from meeting the same fate as Iona and so many others. Brendan, on the other hand, is enchanted by the book, and soon becomes Aidan’s apprentice. An ongoing struggle ensues in which Cellach increasingly restricts Brendan’s permission to work with Brother Aidan on the book, and Brendan increasingly defies him.

It’s a straightforward case of clashing priorities, really. Abbot Cellach wants to keep the people of Kells safe. He thinks the best way to do that is for everyone to drop everything else and work on finishing the wall, and to stay inside it at all times except if they have his express permission to leave. He also thinks that if he can successfully defend Kells against heathen enemies, that’ll convince them of the power of God. “Pagans, Crom worshippers … it is with the strength of our walls that they will come to trust the strength of our faith,” he remarks at one point. He can’t see the point of wasting time writing a manuscript when the Northmen might show up at any moment. For Brendan, on the other hand, the book is so spectacular that it’s worth making finishing it his top priority, Northmen or no Northmen. He risks his uncle’s chastisement and his own personal safety in order to achieve that aim.

Brendan’s prioritising of the book over his own safety is especially clear in one memorable scene where he goes toe-to-toe with Crom Cruach, an old death-god who lives in the forest, because he needs a magnifying glass to successfully execute more detailed illuminations, and the only way he knows to get hold of one is by stealing Crom Cruach’s eye. Brendan had caught sight of Crom Cruach’s eye earlier in the film, when he stumbled across the god’s lair while exploring the forest with his new friend Aisling, the fairy. She pleaded with him to come away because it was a place of suffering; he asked her what she meant by that.

“It is the cave of the dark one,” Aisling explained.

“Crom Cruach?” said Brendan disbelievingly, at which Aisling nodded. “But Crom Cruach’s only a story for children,” he continued, patting Aisling on the head as if she too were merely a child. “The abbot of Kells says that you shouldn’t be afraid of imaginary things.”

Aisling is clearly distressed. “It’s not imagined,” she insists, going after Brendan as he strides towards the cave. “It’s waiting in the darkness, waiting for someone to awaken it.”

“Aisling, you’re only scaring yourself,” Brendan tells her as she huddles with her arms round herself. “The abbot says that that’s all pagan nonsense. There’s no such thing as Crom Cruach.”

It promptly emerges, however, that there is such a thing as Crom Cruach, seeping out of the cave in fronds of darkness and attempting to seize them both. They get away that time, but you wouldn’t have imagined that Brendan would be in any hurry to go back to the place. When he does go back a second time to retrieve the eye, Aisling pleads with him again: “Crom Cruach took my people. It took my mother. You will die.”

No sunny denials of the dark one’s existence from Brendan this time. Instead: “Aisling, if I don’t try, the book will never be complete.” That’s it. That’s his whole justification. The book is worth the possibility of dying. Now contrast the other two attitudes we’ve seen to Crom Cruach. The abbot only isn’t afraid of it because he thinks it’s not real; he’s plenty afraid of things he thinks are real, like Northmen. Aisling, on the other hand, is terrified of it, reluctant even to speak its name, and not without reason. But Brendan, Brendan can face the dark one, because he has something that’s worth the risk. He enters the cave.

And falls into a strange not-quite-physical realm where Crom Cruach is found in the form of a gigantic snake, coiling and knotting around over itself as it makes to devour Brendan. He flees; he falls; he seems to be at its mercy – but then he seizes a piece of chalk. And the lines he draws, Crom Cruach can’t pass. (I told you the animation was disarmingly flat.) He marks out a circle around the death-god, trapping it, and seizes its eye. Blinded, Crom Cruach begins to devour itself. Brendan’s circle has turned it into an ouroboros – the serpent that eats its own tail.

 

An illustration of an ouroboros from a late-medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript, just to continue our manuscript theme.

Brendan risked his life because of his devotion to the book, and then in a way, it was the book – ‘the book’ as a general concept, the power of making marks on a surface to convey meaning, the power of graphē,³ as it were – that saved his life. What he decided was important enough to be worth facing the danger was what carried him through the danger – and, furthermore, won him his reward.

But Abbot Cellach doesn’t see things like that. He only sees Brendan putting himself in harm’s way because the book is so important to him, and so he bans him from working on it and ultimately imprisons him in the name of keeping him safe. Upon the abbot’s issuing the ban, Brendan quietly protests: “I can’t do that. I can’t give up the book, Uncle.” And he begs him: “If you looked at just one page, you’d see why. You’ve forgotten how important it is. All you want for us is this wall.”

And the worst of it is, the wall doesn’t work. When the Northmen eventually arrive, they breach it. Kells gets burned and pillaged just like Iona or anywhere else. The thing in which the abbot placed all his hope failed him.

But Aidan and Brendan manage to get away with the book. And over the next few years, they finish it. They perfect the book that turns darkness into light. Aidan commissions his apprentice: “The book was never meant to be hidden away behind a wall, locked away from the world which inspired its creation. Brendan, you must take the book to the people, so that they may have hope. Let it light the way in these dark days of the Northmen.”

Now, obviously the film could have ramped up its Christian content a lot harder than it did: the Book of Kells is a gospel manuscript, after all. But I liked that it was subtle about it; it gives me and my little blog room to come in and connect up some of the dots the way I think they should go.

I love the way Brendan pleads with his uncle over the book: if you could just see it, if you’d just look at a single page, you’d understand, you’d remember what matters. It’s not strong worldly defences that will prove the worth of the Christian faith to outsiders; it’s the revelation of who God is. And the most concrete form in which we have that revelation is the scriptures – the book that turns darkness into light. There’s some cool stuff to be found in the Bible about what God says being light: start with “your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” in Psalm 119.⁴ And also consider the following chunk of 2 Corinthians:

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.⁵

We don’t proclaim ourselves. We’re not trying to convince people of the validity of our faith by showing off that we’re stronger than them; chances are we’re not, not when we depend on worldly ways of doing things – walls, as it were, things like slick apologetics and charismatic preachers and celebrity endorsements – and beyond that, that’s not what they need to see, that we can succeed on their terms. On the contrary, they need to see the light of the gospel. So we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord. So we take them the book and open it and explain why it means hope in dark times. And the burden is on God to reveal himself, not on us to come across as convincing.

If we’re taking this approach, we don’t need to be scared of anything. In dark times and dark places, we have no cause to cower like Aisling, because we have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, and so we know that he purposes all things for the good of those who love him. Plus, we also don’t need the darkness not to be real in order not to fear it, like the abbot. I mean, sure, there are some things the world fears that we might think genuinely aren’t real (ancient snakey death-gods being a strong example) – but we don’t need them not to be real. We don’t need anything not to be real, because whatever it is, it isn’t so great as to rival our God, and so if he’s for us, who can be against us?⁶ If pursuing the light calls us to confront the darkness, then we can face it like Brendan did, secure in the knowledge that the light is worth it – and that when we decide he’s important enough to be worth the difficulty, our light, our great magnificent Light of the World,⁷ will certainly carry us through the darkness, and win us the reward we’re seeking.

So let’s not look in fear at the Northmen or the Crom Cruachs of the world. Let’s not look to walls, worldly defences, to prove the worth of our faith. Let’s look instead at the book that turns darkness into light. Let’s behold the Light of the World as he has been revealed to us and trust that he is greater than every darkness. And let’s do our best to take the light of the gospel to the people, that they might have hope.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, I know they didn’t really have horned helmets. It’s called artistic licence. Deal.

² Some kind human has uploaded the whole thing to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qydF6WU9YEY. Weirdly enough, though, I had an easier time finding Spanish, German, and Gaelic versions than I did the English one.

³ The Greek term is usually translated ‘writing’, but can just as happily mean ‘drawing’; at its most fundamental, the idea is one of scratching a mark into a surface: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=grafh&la=greek#lexicon.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+119&version=ESVUK. This time I don’t blame you if you don’t read the whole thing.

⁵ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+cor+4&version=ESVUK.

⁶ You’ll have spotted my couple of allusions to Romans 8. One of my musical obsessions at the moment is a Hebrew-language worship song that’s basically just extracts of Romans 8 set to a melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp1JJpAipBU. Why don’t we have this in English?

⁷ That’s Jesus. Obvs. John 8 if you weren’t sure: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8&version=ESVUK.