How the Irish Saved Civilization Read online

  OVERLEAF

  LEFT: LINDISFARNE GOSPELS

  The beginning of the Christmas story in Matthew’s Gospel, as contained in the Lindisfarne Gospels, completed in 698. Note the two languages: in red letters at the top of the page, we read the Latin, “Incipit evangelium secundum Mattheum” (“Here begins the Gospel according to Matthew”); above the Latin, in small, dark brown letters, a scribe has added a translation in early English, “Onginneth Godspell …” The rigidity of the subsequent letters derives from the example of Ogham, a primitive Irish form of the Latin alphabet, but the riot of stylized animals and other interlocking forms has its origins in prehistoric Irish art forms.

  RIGHT: BOOK OF KELLS

  This decorative page lists the genealogy of Jesus as found in Luke’s Gospel. The scribe has left us a jaunty picture of himself—with palette and brush (and, as if to illustrate the theme of generation, his own modest erection)—in the bottom right corner.

  International acclaim for THOMAS CAHILL’s

  How the Irish Saved Civilization

  “Engagingly provocative…. Illuminating…. Cahill … is an impressive, even lyrical prose stylist who seems incapable of a slack sentence or a tired description.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Lively, readable…. Cahill possesses the fabled Irish gift of storytelling.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Quite fascinating…. An erudite, charming and flamboyant romp through one of the more obscure interstices of history…. Cahill tells a terrific story…. Enthralling.”

  —The Globe & Mail

  “Wonderfully audacious…. Scholarly, compassionate and humane.”

  —The Indianapolis Star

  “An utterly absorbing and entertaining chronicle of a virtually neglected episode in the annals of Western civilization.”

  —Booklist

  “Elegant…. Cahill’s sweepingly confident overview … is surely more entertainingly told than in any previous account.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  The hinges of history

  We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

  In this series, THE HINGES OF HISTORY, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people that we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, finally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

  —THOMAS CAHILL

  THE HINGES OF HISTORY

  VOLUME I

  HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION

  THE UNTOLD STORY OF IRELAND’S HEROIC ROLE FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE RISE OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

  This introductory volume presents the reader with a new way of looking at history. Its time period—the end of the classical period and the beginning of the medieval period—enables us to look back to our ancient roots and forward to the making of the modern world.

  VOLUME II

  THE GIFTS OF THE JEWS

  HOW A TRIBE OF DESERT NOMADS

  CHANGED THE WAY EVERYONE THINKS AND FEELS

  This is the first of three volumes on the creation of the Western world in ancient times. It is first because its subject matter takes us back to the earliest blossoming of Western sensibility, there being no West before the Jews.

  VOLUME III

  DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS

  THE WORLD BEFORE AND AFTER JESUS

  This volume, which takes as its subject Jesus and the first Christians, comes directly after The Gifts of the Jews, because Christianity grows directly out of the unique culture of ancient Judaism.

  VOLUME IV

  SAILING THE WINE-DARK SEA

  WHY THE GREEKS MATTER

  The Greek contribution to our Western heritage comes to us largely through the cultural conduit of the Romans (who, though they do not have a volume of their own, are a presence in Volumes I, III, and IV). The Greek contribution, older than Christianity, nevertheless continues past the time of Jesus and his early followers and brings us to the medieval period. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea concludes our study of the making of the ancient world.

  VOLUMES V, VI & VII

  These three volumes, to be published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, will investigate the making of the modern world and the impact of its cultural innovations on the sensibility of the West.

  The series may be read in whatever order you like, since each volume is substantially complete in itself. In addition to the obvious order—starting with Volume I and continuing in numerical sequence—the author suggests that those who began with Volume II may find it convenient to continue with Volumes III and IV before reading Volume I.

  TO SUSIE

  … first and fairest … best and dearest:

  Thine be ilka joy and treasure,

  Peace, Enjoyment, Love, and Pleasure

  Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

  —REINHOLD NIEBUHR

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION:

  How Real Is History?

  I: THE END OF THE WORLD:

  How Rome Fell—and Why

  II: WHAT WAS LOST:

  The Complexities of the Classical Tradition

  III: A SHIFTING WORLD OF DARKNESS:

  Unholy Ireland

  IV: GOOD NEWS FROM FAR OFF:

  The First Missionary

  V: A SOLID WORLD OF LIGHT:

  Holy Ireland

  VI: WHAT WAS FOUND:

  How the Irish Saved Civilization

  VII: THE END OF THE WORLD:

  Is There Any Hope?

  Pronunciation Guide to Key Irish Words

  Bibliographical Sources

  Chronology

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  How Real Is History?

  The word Irish is seldom coupled with the word civilization. When we think of peoples as civilized or civilizing, the Egyptians and the Greeks, the Italians and the French, the Chinese and the Jews may all come to mind. The Irish are wild, feckless, and charming, or morose, repressed, and corrupt, but not especially civilized. If we strain to think of “Irish civilization,” no image appears, no Fertile Crescent or Indus Valley, no brooding bust of Beethoven. The simplest Greek auto mechanic will name his establishment “Parthenon,” thus linking himself to an imagined ancestral culture. A semiliterate restaurateur of Sicilian origin will give pride of place to his plaster copy of Michelangelo’s David, and so assert his presumed Renaissance
ties. But an Irish businessman is far more likely to name his concern “The Breffni Bar” or “Kelly’s Movers,” announcing a merely local or personal connection, unburdened by the resonances of history or civilization.

  And yet … Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment—in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture—had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly re-founded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.

  Not for a thousand years—not since the Spartan Legion had perished at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae—had western civilization been put to such a test or faced such odds, nor would it again face extinction till in this century it devised the means of extinguishing all life. As our story opens at the beginning of the fifth century, no one could foresee the coming collapse. But to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their time, the end was no longer in doubt: their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Ausonius, retire to one’s villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable. It never occurred to them that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it, by men so strange they lived in little huts on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills and nettle baths. As Kenneth Clark said, “Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.”

  Clark, who began his Civilisation with a chapter (called “The Skin of Our Teeth”) on the precarious transition from classical to medieval, is an exception in that he gives full weight to the Irish contribution. Many historians fail to mention it entirely, and few advert to the breathtaking drama of this cultural cliffhanger. This is probably because it is easier to describe stasis (classical, then medieval) than movement (classical to medieval). It is also true that historians are generally expert in one period or the other, so that analysis of the transition falls outside their—and everyone’s?—competence. At all events, I know of no single book now in print that is devoted to the subject of the transition, nor even one in which this subject plays a substantial part.

  In looking to remedy this omission, we may as well ask ourselves the big question: How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup, so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable? Is it true, as Emil Cioran has remarked, that history proves nothing because it contains everything? Is not the reverse side of this that history can be made to say whatever we wish it to?

  I think, rather, that every age writes history anew, reviewing deeds and texts of other ages from its own vantage point. Our history, the history we read in school and refer to in later life, was largely written by Protestant Englishmen and Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. Just as certain contemporary historians have been discovering that such redactors are not always reliable when it comes to the contributions of, say, women or African Americans, we should not be surprised to find that such storytellers have overlooked a tremendous contribution in the distant past that was both Celtic and Catholic, a contribution without which European civilization would have been impossible.

  To an educated Englishman of the last century, for instance, the Irish were by their very nature incapable of civilization. “The Irish,” proclaimed Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s beloved prime minister, “hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion [Disraeli’s father had abandoned Judaism for the Church of England]. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry [i.e., Catholicism]. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry [!] and blood.” The venomous racism and knuckle-headed prejudice of this characterization may be evident to us, but in the days of “dear old Dizzy,” as the queen called the man who had presented her with India, it simply passed for indisputable truth.

  Occasionally, of course, even the smug colonists of the little queen’s empire would experience a momentary qualm: Could the conquerors possibly be responsible for the state of the colonized? But they quickly suppressed any doubt and wrapped themselves in their impervious superiority, as in this response by the historian Charles Kingsley to the famine-induced destitution he witnessed in Victorian Ireland: “I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault [emphasis mine]. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.”

  Nor can we comfort ourselves that such thinking passed long ago from the scene. As the distinguished Princeton historian Anthony Grafton wrote recently in The New York Review of Books of history departments at the better American universities: “Catholic culture—like most Catholics—was usually disdained, as the province of lesser breeds fit only for the legendary parochial schools where nuns told their charges never to order ravioli on a date, lest their boy friends be reminded of pillows. Stereotypes and prejudices of this kind, as nasty as anything fastened upon Jews, persisted in American universities until an uncomfortably recent date.”

  That date may be only the day before yesterday. Yet this is not to accuse any historian of deliberate falsification. No, the problem is more subtle than deception—and artfully described by John Henry Newman in his fable of the Man and the Lion:

  The Man once invited the Lion to be his guest, and received him with princely hospitality. The Lion had the run of a magnificent palace, in which there were a vast many things to admire. There were large saloons and long corridors, richly furnished and decorated, and filled with a profusion of fine specimens of sculpture and painting, the works of the first masters in either art. The subjects represented were various; but the most prominent of them had an especial interest for the noble animal who stalked by them. It was that of the Lion himself; and as the owner of the mansion led him from one apartment into another, he did not fail to direct his attention to the indirect homage which these various groups and tableaux paid to the importance of the lion tribe.

  There was, however, one remarkable feature in all of them, to which the host, silent as he was from politeness, seemed not at all insensible; that diverse as were these representations, in one point they all agreed, that the man was always victorious, and the lion was always overcome.

  It is not that the Lion has been excluded from the history of art, but rather that he has been presented badly—and he never wins. When the Lion had finished his tour of the mansion, continues Newman, “his entertainer asked him what he thought of the splendours it contained; and he in reply did full justice to the riches of its owner and the skill of its decorators, but he added, ‘Lions would have
fared better, had lions been the artists.’”

  In the course of this history, we shall meet many entertainers, persons of substance who have their story to tell, some of whom may believe that their story is all there is to tell. We shall be gracious and give them a hearing without disparagement. We shall even attempt to see things from their point of view. But every once in a while we shall find ourselves entertaining lions. At which moments, it will be every reader for himself.

  We begin, however, not in the land of lions, but in the orderly, predictable world of Rome. For in order to appreciate the significance of the Irish contribution, we need first to take an inventory of the civilized empire of late antiquity.

  I

  The End of the World

  How Rome Fell—and Why

  On the last, cold day of December in the dying year we count as 406, the river Rhine froze solid, providing the natural bridge that hundreds of thousands of hungry men, women, and children had been waiting for. They were the barbari—to the Romans an undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with—non-Romans. To themselves they were, presumably, something more, but as the illiterate leave few records, we can only surmise their opinion of themselves.

  Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.

  Ascending heavenward like the Roman eagle, we can view the Rhine, widest river in Europe, rising out of Lake Constance in the northern Alps, bending and bowing north, then northwest, till after 820 miles of travel it reaches the coast of continental Europe and empties into the North Sea just opposite the Thames estuary. Returning to our Alpine heights, we can spot another river, rising from a smaller lake just north of Constance and coursing east for more than twice the length of the Rhine till it spends itself in the Black Sea. This is the Danube, Europe’s longest river (after the Volga). To the north and east of these two Alpine rivers live the barbarians. To the south and west lies Romania, in its time the vastest and most powerful empire in human history.