How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  To readers of a later, more punitive age, this would sound suspiciously like pantheism, the heresy that God is not just in all things but is all things—that is, that there is no distinction between God and creation. The further they read, the more unorthodox this Irishman’s philosophy would appear. He boldly opposed reason to authority: “Every authority that is not confirmed by true reason seems to be weak, whereas true reason does not need to be supported by any authority.” And this bit of sententiousness he dared apply to the fathers of the church! More than this, he took the perfectly orthodox statement of Paul that in the end “God will be all in all” and used it not only to prop up his pantheism but to suggest that at the end of time everyone—even the devils—will be saved! In 1225, almost four centuries after it was written, Pope Honorius III ordered all copies of De Divisione Naturae to be burned. Some, obviously, escaped the bonfire.

  But in the age of John Scotus Eriugena, Christian churchmen did not burn books. Only barbarians did that.

  Even as John Scotus was crossing to the continent from Ireland, Ireland was under siege. The Viking terrorists had discovered its peaceful monasteries, now rich in precious objects. The monks built round towers without ground-floor entrances and hauled their plate up rope ladders, which they then pulled up after themselves. But such towers were no match for Vikings, nor were the monks, by this time growing sleek and tame. Nor apparently were the warriors, many of whom had turned into relatively peaceful, even erudite, laymen. The illiterate Vikings often destroyed books by ripping off bejeweled covers for booty. The constant fear of the monks is well illustrated in this four-line gloss:

  Bitter is the wind this night

  Which tosses up the ocean’s hair so white.

  Merciless men I need not fear

  Who cross from Lothland on an ocean clear.

  The merciless men from Lothland—Norway—could not land in a storm, which soon became the only protection left to the coastal monks of Ireland and Britain. Attacks on magical Lindisfarne, which had become the constant source of the most exquisite of the insular codices, began in the last decade of the eighth century, as we read in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 793: “On the sixth of the Ides of June the ravaging of the heathen men lamentably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.” Monks were stripped and tortured; and the raiders came again in 801 to set the buildings afire, in 806 to kill scores of monks, in 867 to burn the rebuilt abbey. In 875 the harried survivors left Lindisfarne for good. In the first decade of the ninth century came the turn of Columcille’s Iona, where “a great number of layfolks and clerics were massacred” in repeated raids. The great foundation had at last to be abandoned. Inis Murray was destroyed in 802, never to rise again. Even remote Skellig Michael was raided repeatedly, its harmless abbot Etgal carried off for ransom but dying “of hunger on their hands,” as we read in The Annals of Inis-fallen. Glendalough was pillaged on countless occasions and, between 775 and 1071, destroyed by fire at least nine times. Bangor, Moville, Clonfert, Clonmacnois, Brigid’s Kildare—each was laid waste in turn. In 840, even the extensive buildings of Patrick’s Armagh were burned to their foundations.

  As one by one the great monastic civitates fell before the implacable Vikings, precious books and metalware were buried in haste or sent inland to some place thought to be—temporarily, at least—more secure. In this way, the greatest of all surviving Gospel codices, the Book of Kells, is thought to have been brought from imperiled Lindisfarne to the inland foundation of Kells. In modern times, and still today, a farmer’s spade will occasionally uncover some lost treasure, like the Ardagh Chalice; or some noble family, reduced even to peasant status by Ireland’s subsequent woeful history, will be found to have preserved through all the centuries a weathered codex as fantastic as the Cathach of Columcille.*

  To Irish eyes, the Vikings had little to recommend them. They did establish Ireland’s first genuine cities, places like Limerick, Cork, Wexford, Waterford, and Dublin. But they interrupted something that could never be resumed. When the Vikings were vanquished in the early eleventh century, Irish society recovered, in the sense that the normal business of life sprang back in expectable patterns. But Ireland would never recover its cultural leadership of European civilization. It had been marginalized once more. Nevertheless, the Irish way had already become the leaven of medieval civilization, the unidentified ingredient that suffused the bread of Europe, enabling it to breathe and grow—and escape the humorless confines of Roman uniformity and classical pessimism.

  Ireland’s next invasion—by Normans in the twelfth century—changed little, for the Irish Normans adopted Irish customs far more eagerly than the English Normans married with indigenous Saxon culture. The Normans became, in the famous phrase, “Hibernis Hiberniores,” “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” Subsequent invaders were not so appreciative. In the sixteenth century, the colonizing Elizabethans cut down the Irish forests (to get at the impenitent dispossessed, who harried them guerrilla-style) and contemplated genocide, after the gentle recommendation of the poet Spenser. In the seventeenth century, the Calvinist Cromwellians came close to implementing this poetic recommendation. In the eighteenth century, the spirit-crushing Penal Laws denied Catholics the rights of citizens. But it took the famines of the nineteenth century—the Great Hunger—to finish the Irish off. Nearly one million Irish people died of hunger and its consequences between 1845 and 1851, while her majesty’s government sat on its hands, and another million and a half emigrated during the same period, many of these dying during the difficult passage to North America or Australia. By 1914 an additional four million had emigrated, reducing Ireland’s population of 1845 by a third—to less than four and a half million. That such a fertile land should have become incapable of nourishing its beloved children is indication of the economic rape it had suffered for so many centuries. For by this time, Ireland had long been England’s first colony, a Third World country at the edge of Europe. It would take the Irish cultural and political movements of the twentieth century to give back to this devastated population a semblance of its self-respect.*

  If the Vikings lost Ireland its leadership role, the Penal Laws very nearly destroyed its identity. These crushing, anti-Catholic statutes ensured that virtually all the remaining native nobility would flee their ancestral land. By the end of the eighteenth century, the flight was complete. Art O’Leary was one of the last noblemen to continue to maintain a home in Ireland—and we saw in Chapter 3 what happened to him. Ireland’s loss was other nations’ gain: names like Hennessy (the cognac people), Lally, MacMahon, and Walsh in France; Murphy, Kindelan, Mahoney, and O’Brien in Spain; Taafe and Hegerty in Austria; O’Neill in Portugal; O’Rorke in Russia; O’Higgins in Chile; and O’Farrill and Quinn in Mexico give some indication of where these Wild Geese (as they were called) fled. For the impoverished peasants who remained behind, the ruined woods and despoiled castles of Ireland were elegiac reminders of a glorious past, now peopled by aristocratic ghosts, as in the anonymous “Kilcash”:

  What shall we do for timber?

  The last of the woods is down.

  Kilcash and the house of its glory

  And the bell of the house are gone,

  The spot where that lady waited

  Who shamed all women for grace

  When earls came sailing to greet her

  And Mass was said in the place.

  My grief and my affliction

  Your gates are taken away,

  Your avenue needs attention,

  Goats in the garden stray.

  The courtyard’s filled with water

  And the great earls where are they?

  The earls, the lady, the people

  Beaten into the clay.

  But we cannot leave the Irish beaten into the clay. In all disasters, Patrick would insist, there is ground for hope. Kilcash, whose ruined tower still stands against the Tipperary sky, was a castle of the Anglo-Norman Butler family, whose descendant William Butler Yeats would one
day bring such honor to Ireland as the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Our greatest novelist, James Joyce, was reared in Dublin, Viking stronghold and provincial British capital.

  Even at their lowest point, the Irish kept the candle of hope burning. In 1843, just before the famines began, a smug German traveler was startled to find evidence of learning in peasant Ireland:

  I have already mentioned the somewhat antiquated learning, even of the lower classes of the people of Kerry; and now I met with a remarkable instance of it. In the bow of the boat sat a Kerryman, reading an old manuscript, which was written in the Irish language, and in the Celtic character….

  Some, the man told me, he had added himself; some he had inherited from his father and grandfather; and some had, in all probability, been in his family long before then. I asked him what were its contents. “They are,” he answered, “the most beautiful old Irish poems, histories of wonderful events, and treatises of antiquity; for instance, the translation of a treatise by Aristotle on some subject of natural history.”

  I don’t know what it does to you, dear Reader, but the unlikely survival of an Irish codex in the gnarled hands of a Kerry farmer sends shivers up my spine.

  As we, the people of the First World, the Romans of the twentieth century, look out across our Earth, we see some signs for hope, many more for despair. Technology proceeds apace, delivering the marvels that knit our world together—the conquering of diseases that plagued every age but ours and the consequent lowering of mortality rates, revolutions in crop yields that continue to feed expanding populations, the contemplated “information highway” that will soon enable all of us to retrieve information and communicate with one another in ways so instant and complete that they would dazzle those who built the Roman roads, the first great information system.

  But that road system became impassable rubble, as the empire was overwhelmed by population explosions beyond its borders. So will ours. Rome’s demise instructs us in what inevitably happens when impoverished and rapidly expanding populations, whose ways and values are only dimly understood, press up against a rich and ordered society. More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world’s population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine. If the world’s population, which has doubled in our lifetime, doubles again by the middle of the next century, how could anyone hope to escape the catastrophic consequences—the wrath to come? But we turn our backs on such unpleasantness and contemplate the happier prospects of our technological dreams.

  What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other—a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easygoing French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somalia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York prison—in some unheralded corner where a greathearted human being is committed to loving outcasts in an extraordinary way.

  Perhaps history is always divided into Romans and Catholics—or, better, catholics. The Romans are the rich and powerful who run things their way and must always accrue more because they instinctively believe that there will never be enough to go around; the catholics, as their name implies, are universalists who instinctively believe that all humanity makes one family, that every human being is an equal child of God, and that God will provide. The twenty-first century, prophesied Malraux, will be spiritual or it will not be. If our civilization is to be saved—forget about our civilization, which, as Patrick would say, may pass “in a moment like a cloud or smoke that is scattered by the wind”—if we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints.

  * The casual Roman attitude toward slavery, in contradistinction to Patrick’s, is well illustrated by the famous anecdote about Pope Gregory the Great’s first encounter with Englishmen. He notices them on sale while passing through the Roman market and, taken by their blond beauty, asks what manner of men they are.

  “Angli” (Angles or Englishmen), comes the reply. Witty Gregory indulges himself in a pun, saying they are aptly named for they look like angeli, angels. He goes on to make two more puns and resolves to see that the English are evangelized. But he leaves the captives to be sold.

  Johannes Scotus, or John the Irishman; but since in this period many Scoti were born in Irish settlements outside Ireland, his name is qualified by Eriugena, or Irish-born. He is not to be confused with Duns Scotus, a Scottish theologian of a later period.

  * The Ardagh Chalice was discovered in 1868 (along with four brooches and a bronze cup by a Limerick boy digging potatoes in the rath, or prehistoric fort, of Ardagh. The objects had been concealed under a stone slab within the roots of a thorn bush. We cannot know whether these were hidden during the Viking invasions or during Penal times, when liturgical vessels were outlawed by the British. The Cathach of Columcille was kept in the O’Donnell family, brought to France after the Treaty of Limerick by a fleeing O’Donnell, and returned to Ireland in the nineteenth century. Though the O’Donnells never descended to peasant status, other books were certainly preserved in such families, who sometimes valued them more for their supposed curative properties than for their antiquarian importance. One seventeenth-century traveler reports staring in horror as the priceless Book of Durrow was dipped in water by farmers who used it, as needed, to flavor a tonic for sick cows.

  * The Irish have been called “Queen Victoria’s most loyal subjects,” because in modern times they have sometimes been—paradoxically, given their earlier history—associated with prudishness and sexual repression. This new behavior grew, I think, from the understandable anxiety of dispossessed peasants for respectability, an anxiety that surfaced, according to Frank O’Connor, “the moment English became the accepted language.” Languages bring values with them, and the English that the Irish finally learned was the little queen’s. But, says O’Connor, wherever the Irish language held strong, both men and women continued to regard “sexual relations as the most entertaining subject for general conversation.” (The fertility festival, for instance, which was mentioned in Chapter 6, continued to be held throughout Victoria’s reign in Irish-speaking Kilorglin, County Kerry.) Anyone who has visited Ireland in recent years will have noticed that the Irish are reverting to their ancient ways.

  Pronunciation Guide to Key Irish Words

  Though Irish today is commonly written with accents (to distinguish long from short vowels), I have omitted these for simplicity’s sake. The pronunciations that follow are only approximations. Ch in Irish has a guttural sound, as in German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. In this guide, it is shown as h. Gh is also guttural, but softer—so soft that for our purposes it can be sounded simply as h.

  Ailil ahl-il

  Amhairghin av-ar-hin

  anmchara an-m-a-ra

  Armagh ar-mah

  Cathach ka-ha

  Columbanus koll-m-bah-nus

  Columcille koll-m-kill

  Conaill konn-l

  Conchobor konn-r

  Connacht konn-aht, or konn-it

  Cruachan Ai kroo-ah-han ee

  Cuailnge kool-ee

  Cuchulainn koo-ool-n

  Derdriu dare-dru, or deer-dr

  Emain Macha ev-n ma-a

  Leinster lehn-ster

  Medb methv, or mayv

  Noisiu noy-shoo

  Rathcroghan rath-cro-han

  Samain sow-n (first syllable

  Tain Bo Cuailnge toyn boe kool-ee

  Uisliu, Uisnech ish-lu, ush-ne

  Bibliographical Sources

  I find myself dissatisfied with most bibliographies, because I often can’t figure out which of the many b
ooks an author lists were important to him, and which were not. So, rather than list every book I consulted, I’d prefer to tell you about the ones I found especially valuable. Of course, some of the most deeply held things are sourceless—or, rather, one can no longer remember where one first learned them. They are like the radiation left over from the Big Bang—general, constant, and unplaceable.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Betjeman allusion is to his poem “Sunday in Ireland”: “Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds, / Where a Stone Age people breeds / The last of Europe’s stone age race.” Newman’s story of the Lion and the Man is from Lecture I of his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851).

  I: THE END OF THE WORLD

  In English, the principal contemporary commentators on late antiquity are Peter Brown and Henry Chadwick. Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971) and Chadwick’s The Early Church (Harmondsworth and New York, 1967; in the Pelican History of the Church series) both proved helpful. Sometimes better for my purposes—because so detailed—were studies by the turn-of-the-century Irish historian Sir Samuel Dill, especially Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (London and New York, 1906). It is instructive to observe how little the general shape of historical interpretation has changed since Dill’s time and how much contemporary historians remain in his debt.

  Gibbon can be fun, at least in Book I of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (available in many editions)—after which he huffs and puffs a great deal. But every reader owes it to himself to read at least Gibbon’s scandalous Chapters 15 and 16 on the rise of Christianity. Great Issues of Western Civilization, edited by Brian Tierney, Donald Kagan, and L. Pearce Williams (New York, 1992), has a unit called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (previously published as a separate pamphlet, New York, 1967), which gives an admirably compact overview of current theories. Whenever large historical movements are at issue, I find myself wanting to consult The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community by William McNeill (Chicago, 1963), whose interpretation of events I invariably find illuminating.