Trices Group Book Review Journal

How The Irish Saved Civilization

Cahill, Thomas

by:

Doubleday

Publisher:

Location:

1995

Marysarah Quinn, Martie Holmer

Cover:

Softcover

Type:

Lynard Barnes

reviewed by:

10/09/2003

Comment:

Highly Recommended.

To truly celebrate the achievements of a culture and its people, all one must do is place them in a historical context. The goal is easier said than done of course. Thomas Cahill, in his HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION, achieves the goal with remarkable clarity.

Cahill squarely places the fundamental issue on the table very early in the book (on page 5) when he says that “the history we read in school and refer to in later life, was largely written by Protestant Englishmen and Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans.” One result of this monopoly in the writing of history is that the context of cultures and peoples is skewed or left un-examined altogether. Toward the end of the book he turns the fundamental issue up-side-down and provides one of those rare insights which both clarifies and simplifies the mechanics of history. In discussing the difference between the historians and philosophers living in the last days of the Roman Empire and those toiling away at translating the ancient works of those historians and philosophers in the Dark Ages, he points out that the Dark Ages was “a world not of thoughts, but of images.”

It is the type of line that forces you to pause and think. You can’t help but reflect back to the last PowerPoint presentation you had to sit through. But the significance of a world of thoughts as opposed to a world of images is more than superficiality.

The lives of three men are discussed at some length in Cahill’s work on his way to explaining the contributions of the Irish to western civilization. First, there is Ausonius the poet. He is of the “static world” of Christian Rome just after the conversion. A professor of Latin, he grew to maturity in Bordeaux in the province of Gaul about a hundred years before the German migration over the Rhine. Then there is Augustine of Hippo, whom Cahill calls “almost the last great classical man”. Augustine was a Romanized African who adopted Roman Christianity and became bishop of Hippo, though his thought was shaped by Socrates and Plato. He was the first in western literature to use the term “I”. According to Cahill, “he is the father not only of autobiography but of the modern novel.” And then there is the slave, Patricius, later to become known as Saint Patrick.

Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Celts began their migration across Europe, invading the City of Rome in 390 B.C. for the last time. By 350 B.C., Celtic tribes had reached Ireland. Cahill maintains that these Gaels of Ireland were offshoots of the Iberian

HTMLBookReview

Trices Group Book Review Journal

Celts who settled the Iberian peninsula and became great sea traders. He makes this distinction based on language differences between the Celts who settled Britain and those who settled Ireland. In any event, Ireland was and is the only Celtic nation-state to survive the Germanic migrations across Europe that became a torrent after 406 A.D.. But within the flux of peoples and cultures, the young Briton, a Christian of Rome, named Patricius was captured and became a slave in Ireland. It was a condition he endured for six years before escaping back to Roman Britain.

Cahill achieves two points in the examination of Saint Patrick’s life. Patricius, in becoming the holy man later to be revered as Saint Patrick, practiced a form of Christianity that was radically different than the Christianity which spread throughout the Roman empire before its fall. That Saint Patrick was able to convert the Celtic barbarians of Ireland within his lifetime was a significant achievement. He reformed the Irish to the extent that, as Cahill says, “the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.” Even more of an achievement however was the spread of this Irish Catholicism to the barely tamed frontiers of mainland Europe. Ireland became the learning center of Europe.

The three men Cahill uses as icons of Western Civilization–Ausonius, Augustine of Hippos, and Saint Patrick (and later, following Saint Patrick, Columcille [Crimthann])–represent the trichotomous engine of Western development. Ausonius representing the qualities of obedience and observance, Augustine of Hippo representing the supremacy of thought and logic, and Saint Patrick, representing the emotive balance between the other two. Without Saint Patrick and the monasteries propagating influence of his brand of Christianity, there would have been no Martin Luther Reformation, no Adam Smith capitalism, no Thomas Paine Rights of Man grounded in gnostic mysticism. There would have been no need.

HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION is a definite read.

HTMLBookReview

Trices Group Book Review Journal