How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  CELTIC SANCTUARY

  The skull niches in the remains of a prehistoric sanctuary at Bouches-du-Rhône are evidence of the centrality of human sacrifice in Celtic religion.

  CLONFERT CATHEDRAL

  The impassive heads above the doorway of eleventh-century Clonfert Cathedral are a kind of reprise of the display of severed heads at Bouches-du-Rhône and other prehistoric Celtic sanctuaries. As cathedrals go, Clonfert is tiny—even by Irish standards—and built in the middle of nowhere, thus suggesting that this place was chosen for its ancient druidic associations.

  GUNDESTRUP CAULDRON

  The gigantic cook-god on the inner left panel is dropping the human into a boiling vat.

  GUNDESTRUP CAULDRON, INNER PANEL

  The “Cernunnos” figure with animals and plants. The torque in the figure’s right hand is similar to the torque that the Dying Gaul wears around his neck.

  GALLARUS

  This Kerry oratory, shaped like an upturned boat, is typical of early Irish Christian architecture. In the wall opposite the door, a window faces east and provides light for a small altar, around which barely a dozen people could congregate. The drystone walls have—without any suggestion of mortar—maintained their delicate proportions for some fourteen centuries. Drystone technique, which depends on choosing just the right stone at the right place to achieve a permanent balance, was the same technique that the monks often used to build their individual cells, shaped like beehives.

  OGHAM

  Stones like this one were used as grave memorials in prehistoric and early Christian Ireland. The lines down one edge represent a man’s name. A single line to the left represents B; two lines to the left, L; a single line to the right, H; a slanted line across the edge, M; and so forth. Hardly a swift form of communication.

  NEWGRANGE

  A vast tumulus, built in the Boyne Valley in the third millennium B.C., contains numerous mysterious rock carvings, such as this one at the entrance.

  SOMERSET BOX

  A prehistoric bronze box, both mathematical and playful, found in Galway.

  BOOK OF KELLS, “CHI-RHO” PAGE

  The intricate interlacings at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel are full of surprises for those who take the time to examine them—such as the scene to the lower left of the Rho in which two mice play tug-of-war over a piece of bread, observed by two cats, each surmounted by a mouse. The great letters are the Greek monogram for Christ: Chi, Rho (i.e., X, P in Greek—the sounds ch and r in English), followed by I. “Chr(ist)i”—meaning “Of Christ”—is the word with which Matthew’s Gospel begins.

  ARDAGH CHALICE

  The acme of Irish Christian metallurgy, seventh-eighth century. Even the underside of the base, right, is richly ornamented.

  And so the first Irish Christians also became the first Irish literates.

  Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. There are no Irish martyrs (at least not till Elizabeth I began to create them eleven centuries after Patrick). And this lack of martyrdom troubled the Irish, to whom a glorious death by violence presented such an exciting finale. If all Ireland had received Christianity without a fight, the Irish would just have to think up some new form of martyrdom—something even more interesting than the wonderfully grisly stories they had begun to learn in the simple continental collections, called “martyrologies,” from which Patrick and his successors taught them to read.

  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 Green Martyrs were those who, leaving behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island—to one of the green no-man’s-lands outside tribal jurisdictions—there to study the scriptures and commune with God. For among the story collections Patrick gave them they found the examples of the anchorites of the Egyptian desert, who, also lacking the purification rite of persecution, had lately devised a new form of holiness by living alone in isolated hermitages, braving all kinds of physical and psychological adversity, and imposing on themselves the most heroic fasts and penances, all for the sake of drawing nearer to God.

  There is a charming poem in Irish, attributed to one of Patrick’s converts, Saint Manchan of Offaly, in which we can almost trace the history of this movement of the Green Martyrs. In it, the would-be martyr enumerates his simple needs, the first being a lonely hermitage:

  Grant me sweet Christ the grace to find—

  Son of the living God!—

  A small hut in a lonesome spot

  To make it my abode.

  But the saintly recluse does not intend to wall himself off from holy intercourse with his fellow humans. A little out of the way, he will still be available to those who walk the extra mile to find insight, instruction, and baptism. Thus, the second stanza—and request number 2:

  A little pool but very clear

  To stand beside the place

  Where all men’s sins are washed away

  By sanctifying grace.

  The hermit now turns his attention to his eremitical environment, which results in these further requests:

  A pleasant woodland all about

  To shield it [the hut] from the wind,

  And make a home for singing birds

  Before it and behind.

  A southern aspect for the heat

  A stream along its foot,

  A smooth green lawn with rich top soil

  Propitious to all fruit.

  Having established himself as local guru, the typical hermit was soon joined by like-minded seekers, who wished to build their own huts and sit at the master’s feet. Thus, the “hermit” continues with his list of godly requests:

  My choice of men to live with me

  And pray to God as well;

  Quiet men of humble mind—

  Their number I shall tell.

  Four files of three or three of four

  To give the psalter forth;

  Six to pray by the south church wall

  And six along the north.

  Two by two my dozen friends—

  To tell the number right—

  Praying with me to move the King

  Who gives the sun its light.

  The Irish, who had always been fascinated by numbers and their magical properties, thought twelve, the biblical number that signifies completeness, to be the right count for a religious community, so imitating the arrangement of Christ and his Twelve Apostles. The humble hermit, who began by asking for so little, is now the abbot of a monastery of men who live in small beehive-shaped huts, surrounding a conventual church. As abbot, father to his flock, standing in the place of Christ himself, the former hermit must of course begin to think of his exalted role and of the proper dignity of his church. Thus, a further request:

  A lovely church, a home for God

  Bedecked with linen fine,

  Where over the white Gospel page

  The Gospel candles shine.

  Having come this far, the “hermit” perceives the need for a common dwelling, ample enough to house the diverse functions of a large, well-established monastery. But the poet still manages to imagine this edifice as diminutive in this request:

  A little house where all may dwell

  And body’s care be sought,

  Where none shows lust or arrogance,

  None thinks an evil thought.

  In the poet’s final items, we almost catch a glimpse of monastic culture in full swing, the bustling, wealthy—and untaxed—center of a new Irish civilization, where solitude and quiet may be relatively rare:

  And all I ask for housekeeping

  I get and pay no fees,

  Leeks from the garden, poultry, game,

  Salmon and trout and bees.

  My share of clothing and of food

  From the King of fa
irest face,

  And I to sit at times alone

  And pray in every place.

  The change in tone and content from the bloodletting of the Tain to the quiet delights of “The Hermit’s Song” is worthy of consideration. Humor is abundant in both literatures, but the harsh humor of the mythological cycle has been transmuted into a kind of self-deprecatory, monastic mirth. And even though the gentle rhythm of self-deprecation cannot entirely suppress the clang of heroic egotism (for the poet surely thinks quite highly of himself), the characteristic size of men and their possessions has decreased: everything about Cuchulainn was outsized; everything about the hermit is endearingly small. Whereas the colors of the Tain were gleaming metals and inconstant shadows, the world of the hermit shines with a light that bathes each object, so that all items stand out distinctly and substantially in their own rich colors, like miniature pictures in an early Gospel book. Brightness is the central experience here, and such concepts as clarity, cleanliness, illumination, and fairness suffuse the poem.

  So the wished-for extremes of the Green Martyrdom were largely—and quickly—abandoned in favor of monasticism, a movement which, though it could support and even nurture oddity and eccentricity, subjected such tendencies to a social contract. Since Ireland had no cities, these monastic establishments grew rapidly into the first population centers, hubs of unprecedented prosperity, art, and learning.

  Ireland was still Ireland, so we should not overemphasize the new unity of its culture. There was still plenty of tribal warfare: sometimes even monasteries took the field against one another. Tales of solitary ecstatics and madmen remained as abundant as ever, whether of Sweeney, the king who thought he was a bird and lived his life in treetops, or of Kevin of Glendalough, a sixth-century hermit who lived in a hole in the rock wall of a cliff, emerging in winter to stand for hours stark naked in the icy waters of the lough* or in summer to hurl himself—again naked—into a bush of poisonous nettles.

  PLAN OF AN EARLY IRISH MONASTERY

  But even Kevin eventually gave in and allowed a monastic community to form around him. They couldn’t all fit into the hole in the cliff (which may still be seen today, four feet wide, seven feet deep, three feet high), so Kevin agreed reluctantly to move to the level shore, where his disciples built a tiny church and for their master a drystone hut shaped like a beehive, a wonder of intuitive Irish engineering that stands to this day, and for themselves daub and wattle huts that have long since disappeared. Though they lived singly, they gathered together to chant the Psalms at the appointed monastic hours, rising twice each night and trundling along to the chapel in the cold and dark to sing their office. This picture of the monks’ devotion is preserved for us because one of them used it as his example to explain some archaic words in an Irish grammar he was copying:

  The wind over the Hog’s Back moans,

  It takes the trees and lays them low,

  And shivering monks o’er frozen stones

  To the twain hours of nighttime go.

  Soon enough, even the level shore of the Upper Lake proved inadequate to Kevin’s community, for people began to come from all over Ireland to sit at the feet of the monks and learn all they had to teach. On a plain to the east of the Lower Lake, the monks built what would become in time a kind of university city, to which came thousands of hopeful students first from all over Ireland, then from England, and at last from everywhere in Europe. Never forgetting the prehistoric Irish virtue of heroic hospitality, the monks turned no one away, as is confirmed in this description of a typical university city, given to us by the Venerable Bede, first historian of the newly emergent English* people:

  Many of the nobles of the English nation and lesser men also had set out thither, forsaking their native island either for the grace of sacred learning or a more austere life. And some of them indeed soon dedicated themselves faithfully to the monastic life, others rejoiced rather to give themselves to learning, going about from one master’s cell to another. All these the Irish willingly received, and saw to it to supply them with food day by day without cost, and books for their studies, and teaching, free of charge.

  From the careful Bede we learn, therefore, that the Irish monastic universities accepted commoners as well as noblemen and those who wished for learning but not the cloister.

  Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas. As unconcerned about orthodoxy of thought as they were about uniformity of monastic practice, they brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on. They were resolved to shut out nothing. Not for them the scruples of Saint Jerome, who feared he might burn in hell for reading Cicero. Once they had learned to read the Gospels and the other books of the Holy Bible, the lives of the martyrs and ascetics, and the sermons and commentaries of the fathers of the church, they began to devour all of the old Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way. In their unrestrained catholicity, they shocked conventional churchmen, who had been trained to value Christian literature principally and give a wide berth to the dubious morality of the pagan classics. A learned British ecclesiastic, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, who had himself been educated by the Irish (and so knew whereof he spoke), wrote to warn a young Saxon student against the “ancient fables” and other temptations of an Irish education: “What advantage does it bring to the sacrament of the orthodox faith to sweat over reading and studying the polluted lewdness of Proserpine, or Hermione, the wanton offspring of Menelaus and Helen, or the Lupercalia and the votaries of Priapus?” Aldhelm—you can almost hear the sniffy intake of breath—had learned his lessons well and could still, apparently, break out in a sweat when one of the racier classical tales danced through his monkish head.

  It was not that the Irish were uncritical, just that they saw no value in self-imposed censorship. They could have said with Terence, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” (“I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me”). To John T. McNeill, that most balanced of all church historians, it was precisely “the breadth and richness of Irish monastic learning, derived from the classical … authors” that was about to give Ireland its “unique role in the history of Western culture.”

  Though the timeworn tales of Greece and Rome were fresh and fascinating to them, the Irish monks could occasionally take a dimmer view of their own literature, which we have only because they copied it down, either from childhood memories or from the performance of wandering bards. In the Book of Leinster, which contains a florid version of the Tain, the epic ends with a monastic “Amen,” after which the scribe wrote down in Irish the earlier oral culture’s bardic formula: “A blessing on everyone who will memorize the Tain faithfully in this form, and not put any other form on it.” Just after this in Latin the same scribe left this succinct critique: “I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.”

  So, though he disapproved of its contents, he copied out the Tain. It is thanks to such scribes, however cranky their glosses may sometimes be, that we have the rich trove of early Irish literature, the earliest vernacular literature of Europe to survive—because it was taken seriously enough to be written down. Though these early Irish literates were intensely interested in the worlds opened up to them by the three sacred languages of Greek, Latin, and—in a rudimentary form—Hebrew, they loved their own tongue too much ever to stop using it. Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was a game—and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery.

  Here and there in the surviving manuscripts—at the tail end of a convoluted Latin translation of a Pauline letter, in the margins of an impenetrable Greek commentary on scripture—we find the bored scribblings of the Irish s
cribes, who kept themselves awake by writing out a verse or two of a beloved Irish lyric—and so, by accumulation, left for our enjoyment a whole literature that would otherwise be unknown. Sometimes the scribe may be composing his own lyric, for all we know; and often enough he is likely to have been a student—not always, given the character of his daydreams, a boy headed for a monastic vocation. “The son of the King of Moy,” writes one scribbler,

  Found a girl in the greenwood in Midsummer.

  She gave him lapfuls of blackberries.

  She gave him armfuls of strawberries.

  Another is even more direct:

  He is a heart,

  An acorn from the oakwood:

  He is young.

  Kiss him!

  And a third is in real danger of failing to complete his studies:

  All are keen

  To know who’ll sleep with blond Aideen.

  All Aideen herself will own

  Is that she will not sleep alone.

  One scribe will complain of the backbreaking work of book-copying, another of a sloppy fellow scribe: “It is easy to spot Gabrial’s work here” is written in a beautiful hand at the margin of an undistinguished page. A third will grind his teeth about the difficulty of the tortured ancient Greek that he is copying: “There’s an end to that—and seven curses with it!”

  But for the most part they enjoy their work and find themselves engrossed in the stories they are copying. Beneath a description of the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy, one scribe, completely absorbed in the words he is copying, has written most sincerely: “I am greatly grieved at the above-mentioned death.” Another, measuring the endurance of his beloved art against his own brief life span, concludes: “Sad it is, little parti-colored white book, for a day will surely come when someone will say over your page: ‘The hand that wrote this is no more.’”