How the Irish Saved Civilization

How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. Anchor Books.

In 406 A.D the Rhine River froze solid – and the barbarians crossed this temporary bridge to strike one of the final blows to a lazy, corrupt, and aging empire. When Alaric, king of the Visigoths, showed up at Rome’s gates in 410 A.D., the citizens still didn’t know the end was at hand. Unable to defend themselves – it was a lot of effort after all – they negotiated a “sack” to spare the city from bloodshed:

“So they kept their lives, most of them. But sooner or later they or their progeny lost almost everything else: titles, prosperity, way of life, learning: especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries are maintained. It is not the world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned.”

While working through Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for my nightstand reading, I realized I needed a shorter “boost” to keep going, so I decided to reread Thomas Cahill’s much heralded work that shows the disappearance of learning, scholarship, and culture from the European Continent from the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne. All the great works of western civilization might have been lost were it not for the fact that as the Continent became illiterate, one small “unconquered people” at the edge of the Empire were just learning to read and write – with gusto. As peaceful Rome turned to chaos, chaotic Ireland grew more peaceful – the key word being more. Following the lead of their eclectic and passionately spiritual patron saint, St. Patrick, and his spiritual son, Columcille, they built centers of learning that not only drew visitors from the Continent, but sent a wave of missionaries that restored and returned the Greek, Roman, Christian and even “pagan” classic literature to Europe.

Just a fun note or two on Patrick. He was not actually Irish. He was a Briton – “almost Roman” – that was captured, enslaved and brutally mistreated by the Irish as a young boy. Following a vision from God – like King David he was a shepherd and solitude and deprivation turned his thoughts toward God – he escaped Ireland and received a seminary education. But his heart beat for Ireland. In one of history’s unique footnotes, he became the first missionary since the Apostolic Age.

Also, he didn’t drive snakes out of Ireland, but he did curb the Irish passion for violence. Curbing the Irish passions for hard drink and, um, ah, for a liberated sense of sexuality, perhaps didn’t go quite as well for Patrick. One of the reasons Patricus was so well received by his one-time tormentors was that he may have been the only man to stand up to the Irish of his century and say, “I am not afraid of you, I fear only God.” That they liked and respected.

I’m only one in a long line of many to recommend Cahill’s short, poetic, sometimes rambling, but always charming narrative that brings history to life.