How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  Perhaps the clearest picture we possess of what it was like to be a scribal scholar is contained in a four-stanza Irish poem slipped into a ninth-century manuscript, which otherwise contains such learned material as a Latin commentary on Virgil and a list of Greek paradigms:

  I and Pangur Ban my cat,

  ’Tis a like task we are at:

  Hunting mice is his delight,

  Hunting words I sit all night.

  ’Tis a merry thing to see

  At our tasks how glad are we,

  When at home we sit and find

  Entertainment to our mind.

  ’Gainst the wall he sets his eye,

  Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

  ’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

  All my little wisdom try.

  So in peace our task we ply,

  Pangur Ban my cat and I;

  In our arts we find our bliss,

  I have mine and he has his.

  These were happy human beings, occasionally waspish, but normally filled with delight at the tasks their fate had set for them. They did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling hew culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual—glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him. No one would see their like again till James Joyce would write Ulysses.

  At the center of this new Irish universe, the “Gospel candles shine” on the “white Gospel page,” as in “The Hermit’s Song.” Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page, shining in all the little oratories of Ireland, acted as a pledge: the lonely darkness had been turned into light, and the lonely virtue of courage, sustained through all the centuries, had been transformed into hope.

  The Irish received literacy in their own way, as something to play with. The only alphabet they’d ever known was prehistoric Ogham, a cumbersome set of lines based on the Roman alphabet, which they incised laboriously into the corners of standing stones to turn them into memorials. These rune-like inscriptions, which continued to appear in the early years of the Christian period, hardly suggested what would happen next, for within a generation the Irish had mastered Latin and even Greek and, as best they could, were picking up some Hebrew. As we have seen already, they devised Irish grammars, and copied out the whole of their native oral literature. All this was fairly straightforward, too straightforward once they’d got the hang of it. They began to make up languages. The members of a far-flung secret society, formed as early as the late fifth century (barely a generation after the Irish had become literate), could write to one another in impenetrably erudite, never-before-spoken patterns of Latin, called Hisperica Famina, not unlike the dream-language of Finnegans Wake or even the languages J. R. R. Tolkien would one day make up for his hobbits and elves.

  Nothing brought out Irish playfulness more than the copying of the books themselves, a task no reader of the ancient world could entirely neglect. At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. Even at their grandest, these were simple, out-of-doors people. (As late as the ninth century an Irish annotator describes himself as writing under a greenwood tree while listening to a clear-voiced cuckoo hopping from bush to bush.) But they found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did? Could it look some other way? Was there an essential B-ness? The result of such why-is-the-sky-blue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world had ever seen.

  From its earliest manifestations literacy had a decorative aspect. How could it be otherwise, since implicit in all pictograms, hieroglyphs, and letters is some cultural esthetic, some answer to the question, What is most beautiful? The Mesoamerican answer lies in looped and bulbous rock carvings, the Chinese answer in vibrantly minimalist brush strokes, the ancient Egyptian answer in stately picture puzzles. Even alphabets, those most abstract and frozen forms of communication, embody an esthetic, which changes depending on the culture of its user. How unlike one another the carved, unyielding Roman alphabet of Augustus’s triumphal arches and the idiosyncratically homely Romano-Germanic alphabet of Gutenberg’s Bible.

  For their part, the Irish combined the stately letters of the Greek and Roman alphabets with the talismanic, spellbinding simplicity of Ogham to produce initial capitals and headings that rivet one’s eyes to the page and hold the reader in awe. As late as the twelfth century, Geraldus Cambrensis was forced to conclude that the Book of Kells was “the work of an angel, not of a man.” Even today, Nicolete Gray in A History of Lettering can say of its great “Chi-Rho” page that the three Greek characters—the monogram of Christ—are “more presences than letters.”

  For the body of the text, the Irish developed two hands, one a dignified but rounded script called Irish half-uncial, the other an easy-to-write script called Irish minuscule that was more readable, more fluid, and, well, happier than anything devised by the Romans. Recommended by its ease and readability, this second hand would be adopted by a great many scribes far beyond the borders of Ireland, becoming the common script of the Middle Ages.

  Irish majuscule or half-uncial, Book of Durrow, seventh century

  Irish minuscule in the Saint Gall manuscript of Priscian’s Grammar (c. 850)

  As decoration for the texts of their most precious books, the Irish instinctively found their models not in the crude lines of Ogham, but in their own prehistoric mathematics and their own most ancient evidence of the human spirit—the megalithic tombs of the Boyne Valley. These tombs had been constructed in Ireland about 3000 B.C. in the same eon that Stonehenge was built in Britain. Just as mysterious as Stonehenge, both for their provenance and the complexity of their engineering, these great barrow graves are Ireland’s earliest architecture and are faced by the indecipherable spirals, zigzags, and lozenges of Ireland’s earliest art. These massive tumuli, telling a story we can now only speculate on,* had long provided Irish smiths with their artistic inspiration. For in the sweeping lines of the Boyne’s intriguing carvings, we can discern the ultimate sources of the magnificent metal jewelry and other objects that were being made at the outset of the Patrician period by smiths who, in Irish society, had the status of seers.

  Brooches, boxes, discs, scabbards, clips, and horse trappings of the time all proclaim their devotion to the models of the Boyne Valley carvings. But this intricate riot of metalwork, allowing for subtleties impossible in stone, is like a series of riffs on the original theme. What was that theme? Balance in imbalance. Take, for instance, the witty cover on the bronze box that is part of the Somerset Hoard from Galway: precisely mathematical yet deliberately (one might almost say perversely) off-center, forged by a smith of expert compass and twinkling eye. It is endlessly fascinating because, as a riff on circularity, it has no end. It seems to say, with the spirals of Newgrange, “There is no circle; there is only the spiral, the endlessly reconfigurable spiral. There are no straight lines, only curved ones.” Or, to recall the most characteristic of all Irish responses when faced with the demand for a plain, unequivocal answer: “Well, it is, and it isn’t.” “She does, and she doesn’t.” “You will, and you won’t.”

  This sense of balance in imbalance, of riotous complexity moving swi
ftly within a basic unity, would now find its most extravagant expression in Irish Christian art—in the monumental high crosses, in miraculous liturgical vessels such as the Ardagh Chalice, and, most delicately of all, in the art of the Irish codex.

  Codex was used orginally to distinguish a book, as we know it today, from its ancestor, the scroll. By Patrick’s time the codex had almost universally displaced the scroll, because a codex was so much easier to dip into and peruse than a cumbersome scroll, which had the distinct disadvantage of snapping back into a roll the moment one became too absorbed in the text. The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts. (The “white Gospel page” of “The Hermit’s Song” is undoubtedly vellum.) It is interesting to consider that the shape of the modern book, taller than wide, was determined by the dimensions of a sheepskin, which could most economically be cut into double pages that yield our modern book shape when folded. The scribe transcribed the text onto pages gathered into a booklet called a quire, later stitched with other quires into a larger volume, which was then sometimes bound between protecting covers. Books and pamphlets of less consequence were often left unbound. Thus, a form of the “cheap paperback” was known even in the fifth century.

  The most famous Irish codex is the Book of Kells, kept in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, but dozens of others survive, their names—the Book of Echternach, for instance, or the Book of Maihingen—sometimes giving us an idea of how far they traveled from the Irish scriptoria that were their primeval source. Astonishingly decorated Irish manuscripts of the early medieval period are today the great jewels of libraries in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and even Russia. How did they get there? The answer lies with the greatest Irish figure after Patrick, Columcille, prince of Clan Conaill, born in the royal enclosure of Gartan, on December 7, 521, less than ninety years after Patrick’s arrival as bishop.

  Though he could have been a king, maybe even high king, Columcille chose to become a monk. His real name, Crimthann, or Fox, holds an echo of the ancient mythology, and he was probably red-haired. The name Columcille, or Dove of the Church, was his later monastic nickname. This may be ironic, as we shall soon see (and it was, in any case, Romanized as Columba, the name under which he usually appears in accounts written outside Ireland). Educated in the bardic traditions of his ancestors and then—under Bishop Finian of Clonard—in the new tradition of Christian learning, he journeyed as far as Gaul to visit the tomb of Saint Martin of Tours, whose sensible monastic rule was finding favor on the continent not only with bishops who feared the movement of single-minded, wild-eyed anchorites, but with men who wished to escape the increasing uncertainties of an age of upheaval. Returning to Ireland, the energetic Columcille began founding monasteries with a will—at Durrow, Kells, and many other places—so that, by the time he reached the age of forty-one, forty-one Irish foundations could claim him as their royal patron.

  An intense man, Columcille loved beautiful things, the heritage no doubt of his privileged childhood, and was especially sensitive to the genius loci of Derry—“angel-haunted Derry,” he called it—where he founded his first monastery (even before his pilgrimage to Tours) and of which he sang in sensuous poetry that can stand beside any in the early Irish canon. But if Columcille loved anything more than his native place, he loved books, especially beautifully designed manuscripts. As a student, he had fallen in love with his master’s psalter, a uniquely decorated book of great price. He resolved to make his own copy by stealth, and so we find him sitting in Finian’s church at Moville, hunched over the coveted psalter, copying it in the dark. According to legend, he had no candle, but the five fingers of his left hand shone like so many lights while his right hand assiduously copied. The legend is embellished with many such details; but the sum and substance of it is that Columcille was found out and brought before King Diarmait, who issued his famous decision: “To every cow her calf; to every book its copy.” It was history’s first copyright case.

  Columcille, forced to return the copy to Finian, was too much the aristocratic pagan to forget his humiliation. (Remember, it was his own Clan Conaill that continued to mate a new king with a mare.) When, sometime later, one of Columcille’s followers was killed on Diarmait’s orders, the princely monk seized his opportunity. God, he claimed, who protected all monks, had to be avenged. Mobilizing his powerful kinsmen, he took the field against Diarmait’s forces and beat them decisively. When the clash of battle had subsided, three thousand and one lay dead, only one of them on princely Columcille’s side. The contested psalter, which, needless to say, came to Columcille among the spoils of victory, was ever after called the Cathach, or Warrior.

  But Columcille’s victory had less pleasant consequences for him. For a time he was excommunicated, the customary punishment for a monk who takes up arms, and his penance was permanent exile from his beloved Ireland: he must now reach heaven by a voyage of no return, and in his exile he must save as many souls as perished in the battle he precipitated. Columcille set out with twelve doughty companions, sailing north beyond the horizon and finally reaching the island of Iona, off the west coast of the land we call Scotland—just far enough north so that (as Columcille insisted) there is never a view of Ireland. As Columcille makes his journey, which would forever change the course of western history, let us pause for a moment to reflect on the world he leaves behind and the world that he and his disciples are sailing toward.

  The Green Martyrdom had been a failure, both because of the apparently unquenchable Irish tendency to sociability and, perhaps even more important, because of the natural fertility of Ireland itself, which possessed nothing resembling an Egyptian desert and almost no place that did not, with a little foresight, abound in “leeks from the garden, poultry, game, salmon and trout and bees.” In the early days, soon after the time of Patrick, the anarchistic anchorites sought out rocky islands for their hermitages, places like Inis Murray and Skellig Michael off the western coast. “It is hard to believe,” wrote Kenneth Clark, “that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.” (The hundred years of which he speaks stretch from the late fifth century, after Patrick’s death, to the late sixth century, by which time, as we shall see, the Irish monks had reconnected barbarized Europe to the traditions of Christian literacy,) But the anchorites survived only too well, even in this rocky terrain, by dining on seabirds and cultivating small, rich gardens, fertilized by seaweed. They added to their numbers, built their beehive huts, copied their books, and thrived—as did, at least in these far-flung Irish places, western Christianity.

  Soon enough, cityless Ireland altered, without quite meaning to, the political structure of Christianity, which had been based on bishoprics that had mimicked Roman urban administrative units, called dioceses. Lacking cities, Ireland didn’t quite see the point of bishops, and gradually these were replaced in importance by abbots and—in a development that would make any self-respecting Roman’s blood run cold—abbesses. Though our sources are imperfect and incomplete, there is little doubt that bishops turned into something like chaplains to various royal families, whose own power in the new Christian dispensation was somewhat on the wane, while abbots and abbesses came to rule over increasingly large and powerful monastic communities. The power of the druids, who had lived and worshiped in sacred groves, had been easily handed over to the Green Martyrs, who also lived and worshiped in sacred groves. But the access of the new, literate druids (the monastic successors of the Green Martyrs) to the books of the Greco-Roman library—that is, to the whole of the classical sciences and the wisdom of the a
ncients—gradually created new centers of knowledge and wealth such as Ireland had never known.

  In these new monastic city-states, a woman could reign as Medb had once done over Connacht. Brigid of Kildare, a convert of Patrick’s (and, perhaps, the noblewoman he describes as “pulcherrima”), ruled as high abbess of an immense double monastery—that is, a foundation that admitted both men and women, another irregularity that would have deeply offended Roman Catholic sensibility, which to this day imagines rule by a woman over men as a perversion of the natural order. Brigid’s druidical associations would also have been troubling to such a sensibility. She is reputed to have taken the veil on the Hill of Uisnech, Ireland’s primeval navel and the mythical center of its cosmic mandala. Her monastery began as a sort of Green Martyrdom under a huge oak, the sacred tree of the druids—thus, Kildare, which means “Church of the Oak.”

  As with Columcille, much of the material surrounding Brigid is too suffused with miraculous happenings to be mistaken for history (she is said, for instance, to have been able to hang her cloak from a sunbeam), but a personality comes through as palpable as Medb’s. She even delivers her lines with Maevian pithiness. When, for example, her charioteer, attempting a shortcut, overturns their vehicle, poker-faced Brigid rises from the wreck, dusts herself off, and remarks only: “Shortcuts make broken bones.”

  Following her conversion, her father, an extremely wealthy man, was appalled to find his beautiful daughter giving away his stores to beggars. Quite out of control, he threw Brigid into the back of his chariot, screaming: “It is neither out of kindness nor honor that I take you for a ride: I am going to sell you to the King of Leinster to grind his corn.” Arriving at the king’s enclosure, the father “unbuckled his sword, leaving it in the chariot beside Brigid, so that—out of respect—he could approach the king unarmed.” No sooner had the father gone off than a leper appeared, begging Brigid for her help. Since the only thing handy was her father’s sword, she gave it to him. Meanwhile, the father was making his offer to the king, who must have smelled something fishy, and insisted on meeting the girl before accepting. When king and father came out to the chariot, the father noticed immediately that his sword was missing and demanded to know where it was. When Brigid told him, “he flew into a wild rage” and began to beat her.