Why Finnian and the Seven Mountains? Yes, there were some monasteries on them that made a sword constellation, but why were the monasteries built on the mountain? In fact, why are many churches, and were many ancient temples, including the Israelite temple from the Bible, built on mountains?
One of the most common assumptions I have found in speaking with people about God, faith or religion, especially when it comes to the specific convergence of these three in the act of worship, is that it is simply arbitrary. This is not even necessarily assumed with any malice toward God, faith, religion or worship, but is simply the natural consequence of everything else being presented as the result of some random coincidence. Aside from the implications that reduce all of these things, including God Himself, to simply a manifestation of power, as if that is all God is, there is also the human response to worship that this assumption creates. If worship is simply an arbitrary command by God that we must follow, then it will only ever feel unnatural and burdensome. Anyone who has ever dealt with a young adult, and plenty of adult-adults, can tell you how unnatural and burdensome worship feels to the modern person who assumes that the only reason for it is “because God says so” with God just an arbitrary substitute for some human authority.
One example from the natural world to show how worship has always been similarly considered natural to humans is actually through the sacred mountain. This is not simply an example of “finding God in nature” at the expense of the Church or satisfying the innate human sense of worship through a self-satisfactory Sunday morning hike (although, the reason why you have probably heard that as an alternative probably stems from somewhere). Every mythology that most of us can think of depicts the residence of the gods, especially the most important one, on some high point, which is almost always a mountain. Not surprisingly, when people would build temples to a god it would also almost always be, as much as possible, on a mountain.
Christians generally followed this same practice. This of course was not to be pagan, as the early missionaries would have simultaneously been denouncing much of that community’s pagan predecessor, but to be human. It is the natural virtue of humility that allowed early man to see himself in relation to the transcendent and to recognize that transcendent as above him. It would have been this same humility in man that would have allowed him to recognize he could not bridge this gap to transcendence on his own. Enter the earth-born step-stool to the heavens.
In the mountain we see the world itself allowing us the means of an opportunity to meet the gods in the heavens, but still requiring our willful participation in the climb. It’s like God was implanting in our nature the seeds to understanding the relationship between grace and nature, but that’s for another post. So, the sacred mountain develops. This is not only present in paganism, but in the Chosen People as well. Biblical scholars always point to the water flowing out of Eden as indication it is raised above Creation (Genesis 2:10). This would make sense as it was the place of pre-Fallen union between God and humanity. The renewal of Creation after the Flood is established on Mt. Ararat as well (Genesis 8:4, 20). Abraham offered Isaac on Mt. Moriah (Genesis 22:2). Moses was called by God and revealed God’s name at Mt. Horeb (Exodus 3:1). He received the Ten Commandments from God and ratified the Covenant with God on Mt. Sinai (I know, generally considered to be the same as Mt. Horeb by many; Exodus 19; 24). David, the Old Testament priest-king, built his palace on Mt. Zion (2 Samuel 5:7-9). Finally, though this is not the last example in the Old Testament, King Solomon, by God’s instruction, builds God’s Temple on Mt. Moriah (2 Chronicles 3:1). What all of these examples show is that the mountain has long been considered the place for the Israelites as the meeting place with their, and our, God.
Though a physical walk through the Holy Land would illustrate this better, one needn’t strain too hard to see the presence of mountains in the Life, Death, Resurrection (and beyond) of Jesus. Everyone knows it as the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 5. Jesus revealed his glory on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mark 9:2). He fulfilled his sacrifice and our redemption first in the upper room on Mt. Zion at the Last Supper and then completed the Passover sacrifice on the Hill of Calvary (some have speculated that Golgotha came from gol goatha, which means “mount of execution”). His ascension was on Mt. Bethany (Luke 24:50; Matthew 28:16) and he sent his Holy Spirit to that same upper room of Mt. Zion on Pentecost (Acts 1:13). Again, we have only scratched the surface to show that in both the Old Testament and the New, in God’s Revelation he sought to draw us up the mountain so that he could unite us to him, even if this meant purification.
If it has not been made clear this connection between mountains and union with God is not accidental, but natural in every sense of the word and essential to our Christian purification and worship. Not only would we humans build our altars on mountains, but the mountains themselves proved to be “God-made altars” upon which humans were to make sacrifice and worship. This becomes all the more significant when Christians consider that Jesus ascended the hill of Calvary before his Crucifixion, but that he too ascended Mt. Bethany to ascend up to the Father, similar to the way the Passover lamb would not only be sacrificed in the Temple (on Mt. Moriah), but that it would be burned up so that the smoke could rise to God.
This is because Jesus, the new Temple according to John 2:21, is the “ladder” or staircase by which we ascend to God (John 1:51). Dante Aligheri, in his foundational work of Western literature, The Divine Comedy, recognized the importance of the mountain when it comes to purification and worship better than anyone not inspired by God when he made his entire section devoted to the purification of the soul from sin, Purgatorio, take place on a mountain. Fittingly, the top of his Mt. Purgatory is the garden of Eden, the height of earthly, though not heavenly, paradise.
The missionaries who built churches and the monks who founded the monasteries, as well as the Saints who discerned their vocations often through purification, recognized this same natural theological reality about the mountain. Many small towns especially one can see the highest point being the local, often Catholic, church. Many religious communities resemble that “city set on a hill” (Matthew 5:14) that Jesus calls the Church in his mounted sermon. This was not simply practical, but theological. I mentioned how mountains were “God-made altars,” but one could emphasize the inverse of this as well. One could say we built Temples to be ‘man-made mountains” and altars to be “mini man-made mountains” because of the importance of elevation, sacrifice, and offering, all in the service of worship and union with Transcendence Itself.
Mike Schramm teaches theology and philosophy at the high school and college level in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He earned his MA in theology from St. Joseph's College in Maine and an MA in philosophy from Holy Apostles College. He co-hosts the Voyage Podcast with Jacob Klatte.