Thomas Cahill. How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Summarized by John Teevan, May 2003
Cahill is well known for writing engaging books with clear themes supported by stories and insights.
1. Rome’s Last Days
Rome defined the world, and Ireland was not part of Rome; it was not worth conquering. Ireland missed the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as well. But the Romans were conquered by the barbarians who, hungry, finally crossed the Rhine during a rare freeze that solidified the wide river flowing from the Alps to the North Sea. Pagan Rome thought this was the revenge of the pagan gods displaced by Constantine’s Christianity. Not so, said Augustine in his City of God; it was paganism’s old vices that brought Rome down. Later, Gibbon said immoderate greatness undid Rome.
The crisis was the hungry barbarians; the process was softness and weakness covered with spiffy armor, stylish hair, elaborate culture, and disdain for the riffraff east of the Rhine. The barbarians were not starving; their agriculture led to population growth, and so they sought even more land for farming. They crossed in 406; in 410, Alaric sacked Rome; and in 430, Augustine died with the Vandals literally at the gate of Hippo in North Africa, adjacent to Rome’s breadbasket.
2. Augustine
In 401, Augustine wrote his introspective Confessions; the first person to say I in literature; one man not writing as Man as had the classical writers. He knew the classics (Cicero’s rhetorical tricks and logical devastations; Virgil’s language and style; Plato’s ideals and Aristotle’s methods), but he knew a life of sordid wealth. He was not satisfied with Plato’s shadows nor with his equating knowledge with virtue. He sought truth in Manichaeism’s dualism, but gave it up as weak. His mother, Monica, scolded; it was not her voice that said, “Take up and read,” which changed his life. He was a classical man with a new Christian faith. He wrote with the energy and confidence of the classics, but his topics were entirely Christian. He explained Christianity not only to the Christians but to Rome in terms they understood. After him, that is, after Rome, reading would become so rare that grammar would be reworked to become glamour. Reading, energy, and confidence were soon lost.
The other Roman value was order as opposed to chaos; order was set in law, though ignored by the elite. For the masses, order as citizens of Rome was better than tribal identity. As Rome faded, only the church’s symbol of order, the bishop, remained. He was focused on his congregation rather than on Rome until his flock became barbarian and he shifted his focus.
3. The Ancient Irish
There were many fathers in the East; the West had only Augustine, who explained the Trinity from Constantine’s day and gave us the doctrines of sin (original, personal, and nearly sexual) and grace (freely given merit from Christ, but take the sacraments). He fought the weak Arianism that kept Jesus from being God (like Mohammed is not Allah). He fought against the fat Pelagius, who held that man can accomplish anything God requires. He also fought the African Donatists, who said the sacraments have value only if the priest is virtuous (did not recant in the persecutions). As he aged, Augustine became more fierce, institutionally focused, disdainful of women, and focused on hell.
Ireland was an emotional, mystical place where nature and women had a value unseen by Augustine. Irish Queen Medb in the Táin sports with and dominates her king Cethern in an earthy and candid tale. The Irish revere generosity, handsomeness, and bravery. If knowledge was virtue to the Greeks, loyalty was the central virtue to the Irish. The Irish know that life is joyful and to be enjoyed, but in the end, it will break your heart.
4. Patrick
Barbarians in Ireland raided England’s shores to get children as slaves; Patrick was one. He was ripped away from a real civilization to become a shepherd, the lowest rung of life. Exile, slavery, and hunger taught him to pray, and after six years he became a holy man who feared God and no other power on earth. He returned to a city in Britain, but longed for the rural, even city-less, Irish; the first missionary passion in over 300 years. He went back to Ireland, leaving order for chaos; a missionary to barbarians with the gospel and a humane view of life.
Patrick was the opposite of Augustine in every way. He taught his people to value loyalty, courage, and generosity; he taught them to love nature and to love life. He opposed slavery (rare!) and urged the British to regard the Irish as human beings; he was fully Irish. While Augustine looked deep in his own heart and found dark sin, Patrick took an emotional view of the Irish and nature and found so many converts that he saw the bright side of grace. New life was not only in baptism but was also found everywhere God was.
Patrick served the Irish for 37 years; as Europe descended into chaos, Ireland ascended into peace. In Europe, being a Christian was a nominal obligation; in Ireland, it meant a changed life. Europe saw faith as a stepping stone to a better life; the Irish wanted only to raise their status and dignity. The Irish wanted to pursue their aspirations free from the ancient fears of their terrorizing Druid gods, who were the opposite of the sleek Apollos of Greece. After all, their bravery was just at the edge of fear, a fluid existence matched by their fluid and fearsome gods. Patrick saw magic (what we would call providence) everywhere, keeping life free from the dull and desperate. His confidence was evident in his belief that God was among us, not far away. He saw the world as holy, just as he saw God’s word and God’s son.
Augustine may have brilliantly synthesized the Roman and Christian attitudes that dominated thinking for 1100 years, but Patrick’s Christianity was something entirely new: e.g., for Augustine, the body was probably bad and nature unholy (Platonic), but for Patrick, the body and nature were alive and good as God’s creations. Patrick trusted his sensory perceptions and never spoke of temptations.
The superstitious Irish had a long history of human sacrifices; Patrick said they were no longer needed because of Christ. Patrick had united God’s pleasure and man’s; earth is shot through with flashes of heaven, and the chalice has replaced the Druid cup. The Irish people were transformed in sharp contrast to the European people; incarnational Christianity had found a place in both high and low religion. (Patrick again on pages 183–187.)
5. Irish Monasteries
This first de-Romanized Christianity had won the barbarians to Christ, but they felt the pain inflicted by the new barbarians: the Viking invaders. The Irish could get along without Roman ways, but not without Roman literacy, which the Vikings were extinguishing. Without a Red Martyrdom (blood), the Irish sought a Green Martyrdom (retreat to the woods as hermits), which failed; the Irish were too social to isolate themselves and call it vital Christianity. Meanwhile, the Vikings emptied Europe of its literate people, who fled to less Viking-infested Ireland. Books arrived.
Patrick led the Irish into monasteries where they were fascinated by the routine and became captivated with copying the Greek, Latin, and even Hebrew books brought by the refugees. They loved the fancy scripts and even the shapes of letters, leading them to create elaborate first letters for chapters. They made it an art, riveting the eye to the page as a thing of beauty. They developed the Irish half-uncial and the Irish minuscule and started copying everything in sight. And just in time, as the libraries of Europe were vanishing, like tombs closing forever. Even Pope Gregory the Great had little use for books and could not read Greek. The church in Europe was becoming a series of islands in a barbaric sea.
Columcille followed Patrick a century later (mid-late 500s); he established the copyists on the Island of Iona and sent the books around Europe, where they became treasures. He founded 41 monasteries in Scotland and filled them with copyists. The Irish, having no cities, did not need bishops, but they needed abbots to run the monasteries. They would have offended Augustine with abbesses and order, but they sought other virtues. Benedict’s order later won the Pope’s attention and eventually obliterated the Irish monastic ideals.
The Irish church did not follow the Roman practice of public confession of sin, but introduced the private confessional. They did not create a class or stately distance between clergy and laymen; they got along as brothers. They did not revere Rome, saying, “To go to Rome / Is little profit, endless pain / The Master that you seek in Rome / You find at home, or seek in vain.”
Columbanus was the chief figure in the White Martyrdom that led Irish monks to leave Ireland for Europe after 590. These redeemed warriors demonstrated Irish manhood by going off on glorious and heroic exile for the sake of Christ. They took their books to an illiterate, bookless Europe, first to France and Italy. He was deported from Chalon-sur-Saône, in Burgundy; a comrade left him in Italy, but both places had Celtic monasteries. These monasteries reintroduced classical learning to Europe. The Jews preserved their literature, and others helped preserve Greek, but Latin literature would have been lost without the Irish. That is how they saved civilization and, as missionary Christians, stopped the creeping animism of the barbarians. They followed this feat by founding dozens of missionary monasteries along a straight line from Scotland, southeast to Rome. This was the last missionary movement until the 1700s. And they wrote over half of all the commentaries between 650 and 850 AD.
6. After Patrick
Europe was ready for Charlemagne (and his teacher Alcuin), whose coronation on Christmas Day in 800 marked a new, fully integrated Christian culture in Europe with the proper separation of church and state. This, though bumpy, lasted until 1050, when Pope Gregory VII usurped state power, launched the building of symbols of ultimate church power (the cathedrals), and embarked on a campaign to demonstrate the church’s temporal power (the disastrous crusades). The church spun out of control by playing on the people’s desire for eternal life (escaping the judgment), using Augustine’s view of coercion (the Inquisition), and Constantine’s blending of church and state with an elite clergy class (indulgences and other ways of getting money and power).
The Irish got cities from the Vikings but exported their greatness to Europe’s missionary monasteries. The British crushed them under Cromwell (1650), then with the Penal Laws (Catholics cannot be citizens in the 1700s). Daniel O’Connell won a place for the Irish in Britain in the 1820s. But the Irish were finished off by the Great Hunger that killed a million in the late 1840s and caused 1.5 million to emigrate immediately, with 4.5 million to follow by 1914, reducing Ireland to a country of 4.5 million people. W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Frank McCourt can sing the lament of the soul of the Irish, but the Irish Republic, with its Easter uprising in 1916 and endless civil war, has doomed Ireland’s political future. Ironically, the tech world has flourished on Ireland’s cheap labor, creating an economic boom as the Irish Tiger was an island of hot growth in a mediocre Europe in the 1990s.
Rome gave us a lesson on what happens when a growing population hits the society of the rich (the U.S. consumes half the world’s…cocaine). It is not pretty, but the wrath of the hordes is coming; they will march into Europe and spread their diseases across the oceans. The Frenchman André Malraux (d. 1976) said that the history of the 21st century would be spiritual, or there would no longer be history. The Romans cannot help, but the missionary and fully integrated Christian spirit of Patrick can. “If we are to be saved, it will not be by the Romans, but by the saints.”