How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  What is really lost when a civilization wearies and grows small is confidence, a confidence built on the order and balance that leisure makes possible. Again, Clark: “Civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers…. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.”

  Whether insoluble political realities or inner spiritual sickness is more to blame for the fall of classical civilization is, finally, beside the point. The life behind the works we have been studying—the passionate nobility of Virgil, the cool rationality of Cicero, the celestial meditativeness of Plato—this flame of civilization is about to be extinguished. The works themselves will miraculously escape destruction. But they will enter the new world of the Middle Ages as things so strange they might as well have been left behind by interstellar aliens. One example will suffice to illustrate the strangeness of books to medieval men. The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as “glamour.” In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.

  So the living civilization died, to be reassembled and assessed by scholars of later ages from the texts preserved miraculously in the pages of its books. There is, however, one classical tradition that survived the transition—the still-living tradition of Roman law.

  We have encountered Roman law already—as a dead letter, promulgated by the emperor and circumvented, first by the powerful, then increasingly by anyone who could get away with it. As the emperor’s laws become weaker, the ceremony surrounding them becomes more baroque. In the last days, the Divine One’s edict is written in gold on purple paper, received with covered hands in the fashion of a priest handling sacred vessels, held aloft for adoration by the assembled throng, who prostrate themselves before the law—and then ignore it.

  But this picture alone would be misleading. Just as we found earlier that the ancients had far greater respect than we for practical, public discourse, so they had far greater fear of chaos. The Britons, the Gauls, the Africans, the Slavs who long ago had flocked to the Roman standard, forsaking their petty tribal loyalties and becoming Roman citizens, gained greatly. By exchanging tribal identity for the penumbra of citizenship, they won the protection of the Pax Romana—and its predictability. With the decline of sudden and unexpected violence of all kinds, they could look forward, in a way they had never been able to do before: they could plan, they could prosper, they could expect to live a normal life span.

  As Roman culture died out and was replaced by vibrant new barbarian growths, people forgot many things—how to read, how to think, how to build magnificently—but they remembered and they mourned the lost peace. Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law. There was, moreover, one office that survived intact from the classical to the medieval polis: the office of Catholic bishop.

  In late antiquity, as municipal and provincial governments disintegrated and imperial appointees abandoned their posts, there was one official who could be counted on to stay with his people, even to death: the episkopos (say it quickly and you will hear where the English word bishop came from), a Greek word meaning “overseer” or “superintendent.” In the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, bishops are mentioned occasionally as church functionaries, hardly distinguishable from priests (from the Greekpresbyteroi, or elders). Most early Christian congregations seem to have been run by some combination of bishops and priests, local men—and, in the first stages of development, women as well—who were chosen by the congregants for specified terms to take care of practical matters. With the deaths of the apostles (apostoloi, or envoys), who had been the chief conveyors of Jesus’s message, the role of the bishop grew; and by the beginning of the second century we find him being treated in a more exalted manner—as a successor to the dead apostles and symbol of unity for the local congregation—but still the appointee of his congregation. As its symbol of unity, he was duty-bound to consult his congregation in all important matters. “From the beginning of my episcopacy,” the aristocratic Cyprian of Carthage, monumental bishop of third-century Africa, confided to his clergy, “I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people.”

  By the end of Augustine’s life, such consultation was becoming the exception. Democracy depends on a well-informed electorate; and bishops could no longer rely on the opinion of their flocks—increasingly, uninformed and harried illiterates—nor, in all likelihood, were they averse to seeing their own power grow at the expense of the people. In many districts, they were already the sole authority left, the last vestige of Roman law and order. They began to appoint one another; and thus was born—five centuries after the death of Jesus—the self-perpetuating hierarchy that rules the Catholic church to this day.

  The Roman polis had always depended more upon living men than written laws. Laws had to be interpreted and executed; and men of property and standing were allowed much leeway in interpreting the laws. Now, bishops, along with the petty kings and princes of the New World Order, would become the only men of property and standing left. The “king” or local chief was likely to be a barbarian with peculiar notions of justice and few whatever of order. It would become the task of the bishop—often the only man who still had books of any kind and, save for his scribes, the only man who could read and write—to “civilize” the ruler, to introduce to him diplomatically some elementary principles of justice and good government. Thus did the power of the bishop, sometimes himself the only “prince” in sight, continue to wax.

  Augustine died as the Vandals besieged the gates of the city he served as bishop, so he didn’t live quite long enough to experience the disorderly tempests of this New World Order at their most ripping. Still, his last years were crammed with stress and controversy. Following his conversion, he had hoped to continue in the quiet pursuit of Truth in a philosophical community of like-minded friends. But the stiffness of his backbone, which in a more peaceful age would have retarded his ecclesiastical progress, gave him the appearance of a ready-made bishop—a shepherd of courage, who would not desert his vulnerable flock—and it was only a matter of time before some church drafted him. In the event, it was Hippo, second city of Roman Africa.

  If the ancient eastern (or Greek) church has many “fathers”—theologians who articulated the classical formulations of faith to the Greco-Roman world—the ancient western (or Latin) church has only one worth speaking of: Augustine. Out of his interior dialogues with Plato and Paul, he formulated the doctrine of original sin—the sin of Adam and Eve, passed from generation to generation in the fleshly act of generativity. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”: Augustine interprets these words of Paul as description of the necessary solidarity of the human race, both in falling hopelessly into sin and rising by grace to redemption. He formulates the doctrine of grace—the gift of God, freely given to men who cannot merit it. He even formulates an explanation of the Trinity. God is One—as in the “Old” Testament, the scripture of the Jews—but at the very heart of reality is relation, the relatedness of friends: for God the One is Three, the Father Who loves the Son, the Son begotten of the Father’s love from all eternity, and the holy Spirit—the love of Father and Son, so strong that it forms a third “person” in this divine Trinity.

  In 410, Rome, the Eternal City, fe
ll to Alaric the Goth. The moral accusations against the Christian majority by the shrinking pagan community then rose to a final crescendo. Augustine could little appreciate how beside-the-point the pagan criticisms would soon appear. He summons all his powers to write his final masterpiece, The City of God, in which human reality is divided in two: Babylon, the City of Man, which necessarily ends in corruption and death, and the New Jerusalem, the City of God, which flourishes eternally beyond all strife. Rome, though better than most human political establishments, is doomed to perish, like all things in the corruptible sphere.

  Augustine’s enemies are many. He crosses swords with Pelagius, an egregiously fat British monk who posits that God’s grace is not always needed, that men, unassisted, can do good with the aid of their rational minds and their goodwill. Pelagius is a sort of Norman Vincent Peale, who thinks everyone who really wants to can pull himself up by his bootstraps. It is a case of Pelagius’s “Be all you can be!” versus Augustine’s “Just as I am without one plea.” Pelagius is also an elitist who believes that some men—the nice, educated ones—are better than others. Augustine smells the Platonic fallacy, the equation of knowledge with virtue, and attacks mercilessly. He scores an easy win.

  He is surrounded, as are all the African Catholic bishops of his day, by Donatists, heretics who deny that the grace of the sacraments can be conferred through the offices of an unworthy priest, but in all other respects resemble their Catholic brethren. For Augustine, the sacraments of the church are profoundly necessary: without their aid all men would in their inevitable weakness succumb to evil. Sacramental efficacy simply cannot hinge on the character of the administering priest. Augustine aligns himself with the civil arm to persecute the Donatists and bring them forcibly within the walls of Catholicism. He subsequently writes the first Catholic justification for state persecution of those in error: error has no rights; to disbelieve in forced conversions is to deny the power of God; and God must whip the son he receives—“per molestias eruditio” (“true education begins with physical abuse”). This from the man who condemned the “punishments and cruel threats” of his childhood classroom. Augustine, the last great man of Roman antiquity, is going over the edge. The doctrine he has enunciated will echo down the ages in the cruelest infamies, executed with the highest justification. Augustine, father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition.

  In his old age, Augustine is challenged by Julian of Eclanum, a young, aristocratically educated, married bishop, a species of Pelagian, who finds distasteful Augustine’s theories of original sin—or at least some of their implications. Augustine, who, as we saw, believed that God had predestined each of us from all eternity, therefore finds it necessary to assume that God will condemn to hellfire all the unbaptized—even infants who die without the sacrament. Augustine justifies God’s justice as inscrutable. Julian counters that Augustine’s God is a cruel tyrant. Augustine assumes that original sin is passed along in the very fluids of procreation and that sexual intercourse, because it involves a loss of rational control, is always at least venially sinful—and should be indulged in as little as possible. (Remember how important control—the opposite of chaos—was to the ancients: Augustine’s is an argument that could have been made by a Stoic or Buddhist as well as a Christian.) Julian informs Augustine that he has sex with his wife whenever and wherever he feels like it. Augustine explodes:

  “Really, really: is that your experience? So you would not have married couples restrain that evil—I refer of course to your favorite good? So you would have them jump into bed whenever they like, whenever they feel tickled by desire. Far be it from them to postpose this itch till bedtime: let’s have your ‘legitimate union of bodies’ ‘whenever your natural good’ is excited. If this is the sort of married life you lead, don’t drag up your experience in debate!”

  Here is Augustine at his Ciceronian worst, arguing without regard to fairness or truth, arguing to win—by the most scurrilous kind of argument, the ad hominem. We should not forget that the ancient world, both western and eastern, often found sexual passion—especially in women—an object of mockery and even of contempt. Augustine goes further, and by the end of his life the reformed profligate deems a woman’s embraces “sordid, filthy, and horrible.” Julian is proposing a new approach, based on his own experience. But he is a rational man, who will not receive his justification till the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

  Augustine, the feeling man, here shows the limits of feeling when mind has shut down to all that opposes its already established propositions. Augustine lived before the time of crucifixes, confessionals, and statues of the Virgin Mary, but one can imagine that he would have approved of them all. The bloody corpus is Augustine himself, splayed like Christ between heaven and earth. The shadows of the confessional would have given him the perfect outlet for his exquisite sympathy toward sinners: against Pelagius’s prissy claim that a man is responsible for his every action, Augustine had insisted that “many sins … are committed by men weeping and groaning in their distress.” Mary, mother of celibate clerics who have turned their back on human love, would have presented Augustine with the perfect heavenly projection of his own domineering mother.

  Augustine, for all his greatness, has become in old age the type of the evil cleric, full of mercy for those who fear him, full of seething contempt for those who dare oppose him, scheming to make common cause with Babylon and whatever statesponsored cruelty will, in the name of Order, suppress his opposition. There is not a country in the world today that does not still possess a few examples of the type.

  Meanwhile, on an island off the Atlantic coast that had never heard of Augustine or his battles …

  * The moon has set and the Pleiades: it is the middle of the night, and time passes, yes passes—and I lie alone.

  * I think it is the second. The first I find is in Jerome’s Latin translation of Paul’s second letter to Timothy: “Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consumavi, fidem servavi” (“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept my word”). But, rather than being deliberate, this rhyme may have appeared simply unavoidable to Jerome.

  III

  A Shifting World of Oarkness

  Unholy Ireland

  There is a plain in northwest Ireland called Rathcroghan,* the medieval word rath indicating that a notable—and fortified—dwelling once stood there. In the centuries of Ireland’s prehistory—before the written word—this place was called Cruachan Ai, and here stood the royal palace from which the province of Connacht was ruled. It was a primitive building, built by local craftsmen from local materials, and yet it was a place that might please our contemporary eye: round, light, two-storied, and held aloft by carved wooden pillars that created a small maze of well-constructed rooms, paneled in red yew, and at its center the royal hall and bedroom—“guarded by screens of copper with bars of silver and gold birds on the screens, and precious jewels in the birds’ heads for eyes” (as such a palace was anciently described). Incredibly enough, we have a sort of record of a conversation that once took place in this bedroom. It is as if we can listen in on an exchange that is roughly two millennia old.

  The royal bed is laid, and two large figures are reclining there, conversing playfully amid the pillows, as might any man and woman when day is done. Ailil, the king, is musing:

  “It is true what they say, love: it is well for the wife of a wealthy man.”

  “True enough,” replies Medb, the queen. “What put that in your mind?”

  “It struck me how much better off you are today than the day I married you.”

  “I was well enough off without you.”

  “Then your wealth was something I didn’t know or hear much about—except for your woman’s things, and the neighboring enemies making off with loot and plunder.”

  Medb doesn’t care for the direction the conversation is taking, and reminding Ailil that her father was high king of Ireland—Eochaid Feidlech the Stead
fast—she gives him a quick tour of her genealogy, in case he’d forgotten. Of Eochaid’s six daughters, Medb was “highest and haughtiest”:

  “I outdid them in grace and giving and battle and warlike combat. I had fifteen hundred soldiers in my royal pay, all exiles’ sons, and the same number of freeborn native men, and for every paid soldier I had ten more men, and nine more, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And that was only our ordinary household!”

  Clearly stung, she barrels on, letting Ailil know who let whom into this bed:

  “My father gave me a whole province of Ireland, this province ruled from Cruachan, which is why I am called ‘Medb of Cruachan.’” Medb recounts her wooing by the kings of Ireland—“and I wouldn’t go. For I asked a harder wedding gift than any woman ever asked before from a man in Ireland—the absence of meanness and jealousy and fear.” She had decided Ailil had these qualities and settled on him. “When we were promised, I brought you the best wedding gift a bride can bring: apparel enough for a dozen men, a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids, the width of your face of red gold and the weight of your left arm of light gold. So, if anyone causes you shame or upset or trouble, the right to compensation is mine, for you’re a kept man.”