How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  “Stop,” cried the king, and called Brigid to him. “Why do you steal your father’s property and give it away?”

  “If I had the power,” answered Brigid, “I would steal all your royal wealth, and give it to Christ’s brothers and sisters.” The king quickly declined the father’s kind offer because “your daughter is too good for me.”

  It is not surprising that, after she escaped from her father and became abbess, Brigid’s monastery was famous for its hospitality. This is the table grace associated with her name:

  I should like a great lake of finest ale

  For the King of kings.

  I should like a table of the choicest food

  For the family of heaven.

  Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith,

  And the food be forgiving love.

  I should welcome the poor to my feast,

  For they are God’s children.

  I should welcome the sick to my feast,

  For they are God’s joy.

  Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place,

  And the sick dance with the angels.

  God bless the poor,

  God bless the sick,

  And bless our human race.

  God bless our food,

  God bless our drink,

  All homes, O God, embrace.

  However unorthodox Brigid’s rule by Roman standards, it is easy to see from the tales about her how Christian faith, which was strong enough to deprive a tyrant of his sword, unman a king, and empower the powerless, impressed this warrior society. It would be reckless overstatement to claim that women possessed equality in Irish society; but their larger presence here ensured a greater stress on physical amenities (“a clean house, a big fire, and a couch without sorrow” were among the many requisites of monastic hospitality) and on the value of intimacy (Ita, a sixth-century hermit-foundress was thought to have been granted the ecstatic privilege of nursing the Christ Child at her own virgin breasts). This larger female presence also contributed to the teeming variety of Irish religious life—a variety that would have distressed the Romans, had they known of it. They would have been even more disturbed had they known of the wide-ranging activities of the high abbesses, whose hands had the power to heal, who almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass.

  Such goings-on, though of great antiquity, still have the power to shock the more piously orthodox. The Old Life of Brigid claims that Brigid was consecrated bishop “by mistake.” Another biography, written in the seventh century by the somewhat simpering Cogitosus, who seems to be trying to curry favor with his superior, omits this information, but one can read between the lines that Cogitosus knew the old story and chose to omit it, for he shows us Brigid preaching—an apostolic or priestly act—and Brigid “on God’s business” making “her pontifical way.” In his introduction, he effectively admits her to have been bishop in all but name. We know for certain that Brigid and her successor abbesses had a coadjutor bishop who reported to them; and we also know that at this period deacons, not just priests and bishops, offered Mass in parts of Gaul. So a woman bishop may not have appeared as singular as she would today.

  Respect for differences was written into the rule books of the Irish monasteries. “Different is the condition of everyone,” cautions the Rule of Saint Carthage, “and different the nature of each place.” Irish abbots suggested; they did not enforce. And though the abbacy often passed from father to son, another irregularity that would have alarmed the Romans, the Irish balanced their aristocratic preoccupation with lineage by a refreshingly democratic principle: “A man is better than his descent,” insists a law of this period, thus asserting the primacy of individual spirit over common blood. Perhaps nothing would have distressed the Romans as much as the way these monks shrugged off the great Roman virtue of Order. In an instruction to his brothers, Columbanus, whom we shall soon meet, affirmed the great Gospel virtue over all else: “Amor non tenet ordinem” (“Love has nothing to do with order”).

  The Irish also developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent. In the ancient church, confession of one’s sins—and the subsequent penance (such as appearing for years by the church door in sackcloth and ashes)—had always been public. Sin was thought to be a public matter, a crime against the church, which was the Mystical Body of Christ. Some sins were even considered unforgivable, and the forgivable ones could be forgiven only once. Penance was a once-in-a-lifetime sacrament: a second theft, a second adultery and you were “outside the church,” irreversibly excommunicated, headed for damnation. By Patrick’s day, a kind of private confession was not entirely unknown, but it was still linked to some form of public revelation (remember Patrick’s pain in this regard) and liturgical penance. The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest—and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.) This adaptation did away with public humiliation out of tenderness for the sinner’s feelings, and softened the unyielding penances of the patristic period so that the sinner would not lose heart. But it also emphasized the Irish sense that personal conscience took precedence over public opinion or church authority. The penitent was not labeled by others; he labeled himself. His sin was no one’s business but God’s.

  Though one’s confession was made to a human being, he or she was chosen by the penitent for qualities of true priestliness—holiness, wisdom, generosity, loyalty, and courage. No one could ever pry knowledge gained in confession from such a priest, who knew that every confession was sealed forever by God himself. To break that seal was to imperil one’s salvation: it was practically the only sin the Irish considered unforgivable. So one did not necessarily choose one’s “priest” from among ordained professionals: the act of confession was too personal and too important for such a limitation. One looked for an anmchara, a soul-friend, someone to be trusted over a whole lifetime. Thus, the oft-found saying “Anyone without a soul-friend is like a body without a head,” which dates from pagan times. The druids, not the monks, had been the first soul-friends.

  It is a shame that private confession is one of the few Irish innovations that passed into the universal church. 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. In one of Cogitosus’s best stories, tenderhearted Brigid makes the fetus of a nun (whose womb had, “through youthful desire of pleasure, … swelled with child”) magically disappear (“without coming to birth, and without pain”), so that the nun won’t be turned out of her convent. Lucky nun, “returned … to health” and no longer pregnant. The story is reminiscent of one told in later times on the continent about a restless young nun who, having escaped her convent, lives a riotous life in the world and returns at the end of her days expecting the worst, only to find that the Virgin Mary has kindly taken her place during her long absence—and no one is the wiser. But it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine Cogitosus receiving an episcopal imprimatur for the disappearing fetus nowadays.

  Cogitosus is on firmer historical ground when he describes Brigid’s foundation of Kildare as it appeared in the mid-seventh century when he himself was a monk there and the church, built after her death to accommodate the masses of pilgrims, was the largest structure in Ireland:

  But who could convey in words the supreme beauty of her church and the countless wonders of her city, of which we would speak? “City” is the right word for it: that so many people are living there justifies the title. It is a great metropolis, within whose outskirts—which Saint Brigid marked out with a clearly defined boundary—no earthly adversary is feared, nor any incursion of enemies. For the city is the safest place of refuge among all the town
s of the whole land of the Irish, with all their fugitives. It is a place where the treasures of kings are looked after, and it is reckoned to be supreme in good order.

  And who could number the varied crowds and countless people who gather in from all territories? Some come for the abundance of festivals; others come to watch the crowds go by; others come with great gifts to the celebration of the birth into heaven of Saint Brigid who, on the First of February, falling asleep, safely laid down the burden of her flesh and followed the Lamb of God into the heavenly mansions.

  February 1 is also Imbolc, a feast dedicated to the Irish fertility goddess, also named Brigid.

  Why were the Romans unaware of these Irish developments? Were the Irish heretics without standing? The year of Columcille’s departure for Iona was 564, roughly a century after the death of Patrick, and the truth is that there were few Romans left in western Europe. The vast hordes of Vandals, Sueves, and Alans who had broken through Roman ranks and crossed the frozen Rhine in the first decade of the fifth century had spread throughout Gaul, pillaging and destroying as they went, stopping only when they reached the barrier of the Pyrenees. From there they poured east and west into the neighboring provinces; and this invasion was to be followed by many others. By the early sixth century, successive waves of German barbarians had altered the map of western Europe irrevocably. By mid-century, Salvian is writing that Trier, the center of Roman military government, has been four times laid waste, that Cologne is “overflowing with the enemy,” that Mainz is rubble. Not only are the Roman provinces gone, the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.

  The Irish did not especially mean to be deviant, but their world hardly abounded in models of Christian orthodoxy. After Patrick, they experienced an influx of anchorites and monks fleeing before the barbarian hordes, and these no doubt provided them with some finer points on eremitical and conventual life. “All the learned men on this side of the sea,” claims a note in a Leyden manuscript of this time, “took flight for transmarine places like Ireland, bringing about a great increase of learning”—and, doubtlessly, a spectacular increase in the number of books—“to the inhabitants of those regions.” But not a few of these men were bone-thin ascetics from such Roman hinterlands as Armenia, Syria, and the Egyptian desert. The Ulster monastery of Bangor, for instance, claimed in its litany to be “ex Aegypto transducta” (“translated from Egypt”); and the convention of using red dots to adorn manuscript initials, a convention that soon became a mark of Irish manuscripts, had first been glimpsed by the Irish in books that the fleeing Copts brought with them. The steely zealotry and peculiar practices of such men had already merited the suspicion of orthodox bishops on the continent, who much preferred the rule of Saint Martin of Gaul, whose foundations were all alike and readily subservient to the desires of the local bishop. Soon they would find even greater virtue in the rule of Benedict of Nursia, whose foundation at Monte Cassino would become in time the motherhouse of western monasticism, a monasticism of disciplined uniformity, enforced—through floggings, if necessary— by an autocratic abbot. Blessed by successive popes, the Rule of Saint Benedict would in the end obliterate all memory of the pluriform Irish.

  To the Irish, the pope, the bishop of Rome who was successor to Saint Peter, was a kind of high king of the church, but like the high king a distant figure whose wishes were little known and less considered. Rome was surely the ultimate pilgrim’s destination—especially because there were books there that could be brought back and copied! But if your motive was holiness:

  To go to Rome

  Is little profit, endless pain;

  The Master that you seek in Rome,

  You find at home, or seek in vain.

  The western empire was scarcely a memory now. The last Latin emperor had fallen just a few years after Patrick died. And though there was still a Greek emperor in the east at Constantinople, where a small, defensible state was long established on the Bosporus, he might as well have been at Timbuktu for all his law was known in western lands. All the great continental libraries had vanished; even memory of them had been erased from the minds of those who lived in the emerging feudal societies of medieval Europe. The first three public libraries had been established at Rome under the reign of Augustus, and by the time of Constantine there were twenty-eight. By the end of the fourth century, if we are to believe one writer, Ammianus Marcellinus, who may be indulging in hyperbole, “Bibliotecis sepulcrorum ritu in perpetuum clausis” (“The libraries, like tombs, were closed forever”). By the end of the fifth century, at any rate, the profession of copyist had pretty much disappeared, and what books were copied were copied personally by the last literate nobles for their own dwindling libraries. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory established a kind of library at Rome. Gregory, the most towering continental figure of his time and rightly called “the Great,” took as dim a view of the pagan classics as Aldhelm, and could read no Greek. His library was a poor one. Even so, the resentful, illiterate mob tried to destroy its few books during a famine, for by now the Catholic bishops had become like islands in a barbarian sea. In Italy and Gaul, some book trading continued—much of it with wandering Irish monks—and by century’s end Isidore was building a real library in Seville, which consisted of about fifteen presses (or book cabinets), containing perhaps some four hundred bound codices, an amazing number for the time. The only other continental library known to us in this period was in Calabria at Cassiodorus’s monkish estate, which he called Vivarium, but the fate of this library is lost in the blood and smoke of the sixth century. Gregory of Tours wrote this sad epitaph on sixth-century literacy: “In these times when the practice of letters declines, no, rather perishes in the cities of Gaul, there has been found no scholar trained in ordered composition to present in prose or verse a picture of the things which have befallen.”

  Western Europe in the early sixth century

  Ireland, at peace and furiously copying, thus stood in the position of becoming Europe’s publisher. But the pagan Saxon settlements of southern England had cut Ireland off from easy commerce with the continent. While Rome and its ancient empire faded from memory and a new, illiterate Europe rose on its ruins, a vibrant, literary culture was blooming in secret along its Celtic fringe. It needed only one step more to close the circle, which would reconnect Europe to its own past by way of scribal Ireland.

  Columcille provided that step. By stepping into the coracle that bore him beyond the horizon, he entered the Irish pantheon of heroes who had done immortal deeds against impossible odds. As he sailed off that morning, he was doing the hardest thing an Irishman could do, a much harder thing than giving up his life: he was leaving Ireland. If the Green Martyrdom had failed, here was a martyrdom that was surely the equal of the Red; and henceforth, all who followed Columcille’s lead were called to the White Martyrdom, they who sailed into the white sky of morning, into the unknown, never to return.

  In this way, the Irish monastic tradition began to spread beyond Ireland. Already, the Irish monasteries had hosted many thousands of foreign students, who were bringing back Irish learning to their places of origin. Now, Irish monks would themselves colonize barbarized Europe, bringing their learning with them. Scotland, their first outpost, was peopled by indigenous Picts and Irish colonists who had already established themselves in Patrick’s time.* Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend their time in study, prayer, farming—and, of course, copying. So the basic plan of the Iona monastery was quickly executed: a little hut for each monk; an abbot’s hut, somewhat larger and on higher ground; a refectory and kitchen; a scriptorium and library; a smithy, a kiln, a mill, and a couple of barns; a modes
t church—and they were in business. Soon they found they needed one more building, the surprising addition of a guesthouse, for the never-ending stream of visitors had begun—Scots, Picts, Irish, Britons, even Anglo-Saxons—attracted by the reputation of the larger-than-life abbot of Iona. They began to pour into this remote island, and many of them never went home again.

  Thus, the indefatigable Columcille began to dream of opening new monasteries. Among the rugged Scots and the scary Picts, especially, Columcille’s reputation spread like wildfire. (There wasn’t, after all, much going on up that way.) He made one hundred fifty monks the cutoff number for the Iona community, and after they had exceeded that, twelve and one monks would set off to establish another foundation in a new setting. Fresh applicants kept arriving in droves. By the time of Columcille’s death in the last days of the sixth century, sixty monastic communities had been founded in his name along the jagged inlets and mountainy heights of windswept Scotland. He had long since passed his quota of three thousand and one souls saved.

  No mention of Patrick is made in Columcille’s Life, which is not so surprising when you consider that it was written by Adomnan, abbot of Iona a hundred years after Columcille’s time, when Iona, Kildare, and other early Christian establishments were hotly contending with Patrick’s Armagh for the primacy of Christian Ireland. But the personality of Columcille, which gleams through all his works and all the tales we know of him, convinces us that he is Patrick’s spiritual son and worthy successor. He is full of fellow feeling, healing the sick by his touch, casting “down into hell” the despoilers of his friend’s house, even stopping to restore a wife’s lost affection for her husband through protracted conversation and prayer. He is hard on himself, sleeping each night, like Jacob, with a rock for his pillow. He lives in easy communion with nature, speaking to forest animals and nicely managing our first recorded encounter with the Loch Ness Monster (who takes one look at Columcille’s upraised arm and makes a quick exit for the lake).