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 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 exiles, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books.”

Cahill views the Irish monastics' role in copying and preserving classical knowledge through the lens of mission. This mission started with Patrick and continued under his heirs who transported it and, thus, learning to Britain and Continental Europe, where they established countless religious houses. The monastic institutions became centers of learning and sites of further knowledge preservation. Cahill believes that were it not for these religious men and women’s efforts, the world’s history would be very different, and books would have entirely vanished. Of course, this claim is exaggerated, as Cahill equates the existence of books with classical texts in Christianized Europe and does not acknowledge manuscripts that existed in Asia, for example, or in Muslim Spain.

“They were the barbari—to the Romans and undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with—non-Romans.”

The Greeks were the first to use the term barbarian, in reference to their inability to understand the languages of others. To the Greeks, the languages sounded like “bar, bar, bar.” The Romans inherited this Greek perspective, which held that barbarians were inferior.

“What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening.”

Scholars have written numerous volumes on the reasons for the Roman Empire’s “fall.” Cahill acknowledges that this “fall” was not sudden but happened slowly because of multiple factors, including internal problems and external threats. Nevertheless, he centers the role that unkempt “barbarian” masses from the outside played in Rome’s fall.

“The citizens of the city of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates.”

Cahill argues that many Romans lived under the delusion that their empire could never collapse. This delusion means that when the Visigothic king Alaric and his people arrived in Rome in 410, the Romans were shocked that such an event could happen. Though the Visigoths plundered the city, they caused relatively little damage or loss of life. After departing from Rome, the Visigoths trooped down Italy’s peninsula, and Alaric died along the way. The Romans allowed the Visigoths to settle in the province of Gaul. Eventually, they crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, where they created one of the early Germanic kingdoms of medieval Europe. Though the citizens of Rome survived the sack of 410, their empire never recovered.

“Augustine was among the last of the classically educated men.”

St. Augustine of Hippo, Cahill believes, was one of the last Romans to be educated under the classical system. He lived on the cusp of Rome’s collapse, after which the Roman educational structure vanished. He credits the Irish clergy with reviving education in the West, thus “saving” the vestiges of Roman “civilization.”

“The struggle for existence and the struggle with fear now gain the ascendency once more, and what remains of classical civilization will be henceforth found not in life but between the covers of books.”

When the Roman Empire fell, Europe plunged into disorder. Germanic hordes wreaked havoc and colonized former Roman provinces. The classical world was gone, but some of its texts survived and were eventually revived by the Irish church.

“Now, bishops, along with the petty kings and princes of the New World Order, would become the only men of property and standing left.”

New overlords gained control over vast lands, so that the old Roman middle class disappeared. Bishops also filled the power vacuum left when Rome fell. They acted as both religious administrators and local officials in early medieval Europe.

“Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.”

Though Cahill sees the pre-Christian Irish as “uncivilized” due to their paganism and dearth of classical education, he admires their creative literary tradition. The Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) is one of the best examples of this rich literary tradition that embodies Irish values like courage and loyalty. These are values Patrick respected, thus making his Christian mission in Ireland a success.

“These are all women who, in life and death, exhibit the power of their will and the strength of their passion.”

Women in early Irish literature are not depicted as passive or scorned women of classical literature, such as the Aeneid’s Dido. Powerful women like Medb from the Irish epic The Cattle Raid on Cooley are not anomalies but represent typical images of Irish women in the earliest traditions.

“The three adjectives—‘generous, handsome, brave’—used to describe the murdered man are a summation of the Iron Age moral code, a code that shines out clearly in all early literature (whether Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Tain) and that mysteriously survived in Ireland long after its oblivion in more sophisticated civilizations—and that endures to some extent even to this day.”

Cahill identifies three values enshrined in the Irish “moral code” that are common across Iron Age peoples but which he believes disappeared from most of Europe, except Ireland, by the early Middle Ages. Patrick respected these values and incorporated them into his Christian mission that transformed a violent warrior society into a peaceful one.

“But Patricius is no longer a carefree Roman teenager. Hardened physically and psychologically by unsharable experiences, hopelessly behind his peers in education, he cannot settle down.”

According to Patrick’s Confessio, after his enslavement and return to Britain, he was disconnected from his Romano-Briton brethren, since his experience in Ireland permanently transformed him into a man of God. His restlessness and a divine vision called Patrick back to Ireland as an apostle.

“Among simple, straightforward people, who could unreservedly appreciate his core of decency, the success of his mission was assured.”

Cahill views Patrick as a virtuous man who earned the respect of the pagan Irish. Based on his reading of Patrick’s Confessio, Cahill concludes that his personality was fundamental to his ability to missionize to the Irish and successfully convert most of the country within his lifetime.

“Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination—making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.”

Rather than fight Irish values or pagan beliefs, Patrick drew on these pre-Christian ideas to transform Irish religion. He reimagined their “magical” pagan world as the holy world of Christianity that was created by a compassionate deity who sought no appeasement but promised believers a better future in the afterlife.

“For as the Roman lands went from peace to chaos, the land of Ireland was rushing even more rapidly from chaos to peace.”

As the Roman Empire crumbled, life in the former Western Roman provinces became chaotic and unenlightened. Ireland reached a pinnacle at the same time due to Patrick’s Christian mission, which brought a "civilizing" force to the illiterate warrior Celts in Cahill's view.

“Patrick held out to these warrior children, in his own person, a living alternative.”

Patrick showed his pagan converts that they did not need to appease frightening and fickle deities with human sacrifices. He provided an alternative path to salvation that he embodied in his everyday life.

“None of this should be surprising if we assume that there were characteristic aspects of Irish civilization that Patrick had taken to heart and on which he chose to build his new Christianity.”

Though Patrick’s mission changed Irish society in multiple ways, he did not find success in shifting their “sexual mores.” Cahill finds this fact unsurprising because of Patrick’s willingness to adapt Christianity to Irish culture and meet the needs of his adopted homeland.

“Patrick’s gift to the Irish was his Christianity—the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculcated itself into the Irish scene.”

Though the Irish church was disconnected from Roman influence, it is not the only un-Roman form of Christianity. Early Christian sects in the eastern half of the Roman empire were unorthodox. For example, the gnostic Christians of Egypt and Syria held beliefs that differed from the gospel canon. Indeed, their form of Christianity was distinctly Eastern in character and bore striking similarities to Buddhism, as Elaine Pagels, a prominent academic and popular historian of early Christianity, points out in her book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

“Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which they tended to wink at and enjoy.”

Christianity, from its inception, adapted to pagan traditions. Thus, what the Irish church did was not as unique as Cahill would have his readers believe. Early Christian depictions of both Christ and the Virgin Mary, for example, are modeled on pagan representations of the Greco-Roman sun god, Apollo, and the Egyptian mother goddess, Isis. Moreover, when Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries from Rome to convert the Angles and Saxons in England, he instructed his missionaries not to destroy all elements of pagan traditions but to adapt Christianity to them as a strategy that supported conversion. Clerics in Ireland may have followed a similar line of thinking, albeit independent of Rome’s influence.

“Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.”

Cahill, who was Irish American, inserts comic relief into his analysis of the persistence and determination of Irish people. He traces what he describes as the Irish spirit from the medieval era through the 20th century.

“The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution, which they called the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red Martyrdom by blood.”

The Roman state persecuted early Christians before the emperor Constantine’s conversion in the 300s. Christians were tortured and violently executed, turning them into martyrs for their faith in imitation of Christ’s suffering when the Romans crucified him in the first century CE. Irish Christians, however, faced no such circumstances and could not experience martyrdom by blood, the ultimate form of Christian sacrifice that they believed brought believers closer to Christ himself. They turned, therefore, to the “Green Martyrdom” in which they retreated to the harsh landscapes of mountainsides, islands, or forests; they sought isolation there, and their bodies experienced suffering under harsher elements. This “Green Martyrdom” paved the way for Irish monasticism, because some of these hermits attracted students and, thus, formed religious houses.

“These were happy human beings, occasionally waspish, but normally filled with delight at the tasks their fate had set for them.”

The Irish monks who copied and preserved classical and Celtic literature enjoyed their work, which they saw as Christian service. The manuscripts they produced reflect their engagement with the texts they copied, to which they added Irish poems at times. The Irish not only preserved existing knowledge but also added to it.

“How different might Catholicism be today if it had taken over the easy Irish sympathy between churchmen and laymen and the easy Irish attitudes toward diversity, authority, the role of women, and the relative unimportance of sexual mores.”

Cahill laments the decline of a distinct medieval Irish Christianity in which clerics respected differences, were unconcerned with placing severe restrictions on sexual habits, and allowed women to hold important positions of authority. If Irish Christianity had triumphed at the Synod of Whitby in 664 and the Viking raids had been less destructive, today’s Catholic Church would be very different, according to Cahill.

“But what they knew—the Bible and the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Ireland—we know, because they passed these things on to us.”

Though the original buildings of some of these Irish monasteries are long vanished, and only a fraction of the manuscripts they produced survive, medieval Irish monasticism is historically significant. It resulted in the conservation of Christian and classical writings that may have otherwise disappeared and that Westerners inherited.