John O’Donohue was a former Catholic priest who turned wide reading imbued with a Celtic spirit into volumes of poetry and philosophy, resonating far beyond the “mind body and spirit” shelves. After Conamara Blues (2000) and Eternal Echoes (1998), the latter subtitled Exploring Our Hunger to Belong, his international audience continued with the masterly exploration of human creativity in Divine Beauty (2003).

As he said, "in this post-modern world the hunger to belong has rarely been more intense, more urgent. With many of the ancient, traditional shelters now in ruins, it is as if society has lost the art of fostering community. Consumerism propels us towards an ever-more lonely and isolated existence - although technology pretends to unite us, more often than not all it delivers are simulated images that distance us from our lives”.

O’Donohue was born in 1956. He was rooted in the limestone of County Clare, where his father, a stonemason, gave him to understand that “a human life should be a continual pilgrimage of discovery”. As Divine Beauty notes, “limestone is a living stone. Everywhere light conspires to invest these stone shapes with nuance. When rain comes, the whole stonescape turns blue-black. Rain has artistic permissions here that it could enjoy in no other landscape”. Inside, as he later wrote in a poem for his mother, Josie, about goose feathers : “Often during sweeping, / A ray of light / Through the window / Would reveal / How empty air / Could hold a wall / Of drunken dust.”

By his teens, untruculent thoughts about man’s place in the landscape evolved into a priestly calling. After boarding school (there also contemplating medicine), he entered Maynooth seminary, a place which fostered the relish of learning which would pervade his books. This passion co-existed with the quotidian demands upon a parish priest in the northern Burren soon after he had returned home: “when I walked into the kitchen my father looked up at me and I saw something in his gaze that I had never seen before. Some finality had entered his looking. . . His countenance had become more luminous and his natural gentleness was being claimed by a new silence. As we held each other for a moment in that gaze I knew death had picked his name out.”

That moment, a “strange beauty of sadness” haunted him, fuelling a hunger for study: come 1986, at Tübingen University, he learnt German for a PhD about Hegel (published as Person Als Vermittlung). Back home in 1990 he joined the Burren Action Group whose decade-long campaign, which risked prison, stopped the government from wrecking treasured Mullach Mór with an “interpretation centre”.

O’Donohue came into conflict with the Church. Uneasy with its decrees on Eros, it also left him insufficient time for writing. He resigned, wrote, and in the late Nineties came the bestselling Anam Cara, Gaelic for “Soul Friend”, a study of the Celtic tradition. That was followed by the longer Eternal Echoes. Again, the reader feels in easy, vigorous conversation with a man whose synthesis of the Celtic and Catholic draws upon much else — with passing reference to “the radical novelty” of David Hume — for a series of meditations which, within a few pages, can allude to Raymond Carver, Robert Frost and Leibniz.

Ever pragmatic, his eye as much on the landscape as the bookshelves, O’Donohue notes, “we are forever being stoned by dead sounds. It is interesting in terms of architecture that one of the key bulding materials now is mass concrete. When you strike mass concrete with a hammer, the sound is muffled and dead and swallows itself. When you strike a stone an echo leaps from it; the stone is like an anvil; the music of the stone leaps out.” This is echoed in Divine Beauty, where “the blindness of property development creates rooms, buildings and suburbs which lack grace and mystery. Socially, this influences the atmosphere in the workplace, the schoolroom, the boardroom and the community.”

No ascetic, he enjoyed cinema and whisky, while his poems could as readily link the Conamara landscape with Roland Kirk’s saxophone as they could chronicle Christ’s life in a sequence which includes His very birth (“a face deciphers itself from water”). Equal in range is Divine Beauty’s study of the human imagination: from the nature of colour to human attraction, O'Donohue’s easy style never shirks hard thought, drawing out the best in readers.

Although based in an Irish cottage, he travelled in China, South Africa, America (holding an annual retreat in Oregon) and died in France soon after publishing Benedictus: A Book of Blessings while writing upon the mystic Meister Eckhart.

He is survived by his mother, two brothers and a sister.

John O’Donohue, Irish poet and philosopher, was born on January 1, 1956. He died in his sleep on January 3, 2008, aged 52