How the Irish Saved Civilization

photo of Ross Castle, County Kerry, ©A.Rutherford

Of course, this week is “Holy Week” for the Irish so I will have to be indulged for a bit of Irish history and lore.

We know that heroes come in all sizes, and that surely applies to nations too.   Otherwise, how could a small, isolated island that even the Romans weren’t interested in, in their quest to conquer the known world, have earned the reputation of having saved Western civilization during a dark period of history when the lights of learning were going out all over that world.  When the Roman empire began collapsing, great hordes of barbarians who did not value all that classical civilization had achieved for human history began to roam freely pillaging and destroying what they did not understand.  Much of what was important for the further flowering of civilization was at risk of being lost.

However, the Romans had brought Christianity to Britain, and the great Christian monasteries became centers of learning because the monks valued knowledge and truth.  In his best selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill tells us the engaging story of how Ireland became one of the last bastions of civilization because it was a tiny outpost on the edge of the world of that day, difficult to get to and viewed as not worth the trip.   

In adverse circumstances, the Irish monks, because they considered it their sacred duty to preserve Truth, diligently and sacrificially worked to copy the great literature of the Western world and preserve it for all time.    Moreover, not only did they protect it from destruction, they redeemed the monotonous work of tediously hand-copying the texts by hand by creating works of Art through their beautifully illuminated manuscripts.  They valued the work that they were doing, and so they took the time and made the effort to do that work lovingly and well.  Cahill makes the case that who knows what might have happened in subsequent human history had the Irish not been faithful to their task?

Read about illuminated manuscripts at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts






From the author Thomas Cahill:

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.

This quote by Niebuhr is placed at the beginning of How the Irish Saved Civilization as a thematic epigram.

“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

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How the Irish Saved Civilization:
The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role 
from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

"Without the mission of the Irish monks . . . the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one-

a world without books."  (page 4) 

I highly recommend all the books in the series 

The Hinges of History, by Thomas Cahill, a rich and

engaging way to refresh your understanding of history.

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