How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  * A surprisingly coherent theory, found in Martin Brennan, The Boyne Valley Vision (Portlaoise, 1980), is that the carvings on the Boyne tombs constitute an ancient sky map and calendar, predictive, like Stonehenge, of celestial events.

  * In late antiquity and through the Middle Ages, the Irish were called Scotti or Scoti in Latin, and Scotus at the end of a name denoted Irish ancestry. Ireland was called Hibernia, sometimes Scotia in Latin. Scotia Minor, the name applied to the Irish colony in northern Britain, was eventually shortened to Scotia, or Scotland.

  VII

  The End of the World

  Is There Any Hope?

  At Pentecost of 597, just days before the mighty Columcille breathed his last in his island monastery of Iona, an English king was baptized in his capital of Canterbury by a timid Roman librarian, whom Gregory the Great had sent to evangelize the English.* Though Patrick had brought the Gospel to the Irish more than a century and a half earlier and Columcille had departed to the Scots forty years previously, this is the first instance of a papal mission to the pagans. Thus begins a new chapter in the story of Britain, whose first Christian inhabitants—the Celtic Britons of Patrick’s day—had been gradually pushed westward by those marauding pagan adventurers, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who had at length settled down to call east Britain their own. By the time of Columcille’s death, these Germanic settlers were long established in southern Britain, which they now Called England, and had given their home territories new names, like Kent, Essex (East Saxony), Wessex (West Saxony), and Sussex (South Saxony). They continued to push the Celtic Britons ever westward—onto the Cornish peninsula and past the river Severn into Wales. In the far north they pressed beyond Hadrian’s Wall and as far as the river Tweed, the border of present-day Scotland, where they established the kingdom of Northumbria. Their relentless pressure was the central fact of life for their victims, the old Britons, who were both Celtic and Christian and who despised their pagan foe. The last thing these British Celts would have considered was to bring the Gospel to such beasts.

  The Irish Celts, who had not suffered at Anglo-Saxon hands, had no such inhibitions. Just as the new English invaded the old Celtic territories, the Irish monks launched a spiritual invasion of England from their island monastery of Lindisfarne in the northeast corner of Northumbria, establishing new monasteries in brisk succession. On account of this activity, Aidan, Columcille’s beloved disciple and first abbot of Lindisfarne, has far better claim than Augustine of Canterbury to the title Apostle of England, for, as the Scottish historian James Bulloch has remarked, “All England north of the Thames was indebted to the Celtic mission for its conversion.” Nor was Lindisfarne the only launching pad for the Irish monks: they were on good terms with the British Celts and began to set up bases in the western territories as well.

  But the stricter Roman Christianity of Augustine’s Canterbury was also slowly spreading north and west through the English territories, and was bound eventually to meet Celtic Christianity, marching in the opposite direction. A clash of custom and sensibility was as unavoidable as it had been between Columbanus and the Burgundian bishops. It came to a head at a synod, held in 664 at the Abbey of Whitby in Northumbria, at which the Northumbrian king ruled in favor of the “Roman” party—that is, the party who were heirs to Augustine’s papal mission.

  The main issue—as had also, by the way, been the case in the Burgundian synod—was the correct date for celebrating Easter. The Roman party thought the Celtic calculation, which differed from their own by a few days (or, in some years, weeks), tantamount to heresy. In the church’s early centuries, dominated by the subtleties of Greek thought, one needed to misunderstand the exact relationship between Christ’s divine and human natures or assert that he had more than one persona or something equally obscure in order to qualify as a proper heretic. The early Christian fathers could not have been bothered with anything as mundane as calendrical calculations. It is a mark of how simpleminded and inflexible the thought of the age had become that the issue of a calendar could have come so close to precipitating schism.

  As it happened, the Irish party gave in—with a few holdouts who came over in time. They agreed, however reluctantly, that their father in God, Columcille, whose name was invoked in all their customs, took second place to Peter, the prince of the Lord’s apostles, in whose name the Roman party made its argument. The solution, like the problem, was a simpleminded one: our relics—the bones of our founder—are holier than yours, so Rome is greater than Iona, and thus we’ve got right on our side.

  The scene at Whitby has been used repeatedly, by both Anglicans and Roman Catholics, to defend their positions against each other, and it is almost impossible to read any historian of this period without getting a whiff of partisanship. For Anglicans, the clash proves that there was an indigenous “British” church that preceded Roman interference. For Catholics, the Celtic acquiescence is proof that, once the Celtic Christians thought things through, they saw that Rome was the necessary norm of orthodoxy. Far too much, I suspect, has been made of this clash—as much as anything because our source, Bede (a monk-historian in the early eighth century at the Northumbrian abbey of Jarrow, a satellite of Lindisfarne), makes so much of it. A man of his time (and a most seductive storyteller), Bede was, though a great admirer of Irish spirituality and learning, painfully impressed by the importance of uniformity. A more balanced perspective is suggested by Cummian, an Irish abbot who helped bring the Celtic party over to the Roman observance by humorously deprecating the Celtic argument: “What thing more perverse can be felt of our church than if we say, ‘Rome is wrong, Jerusalem is wrong, Antioch is wrong, the whole world is wrong: only the Irish and the Britons know what is right, these peoples who are almost at the ends of the earth, and, you might say, a pimple on the chin of the world?’” In other words, universal opinion, not some arbitrary Roman rule, should induce the Celts to change their mind.

  The trivial nature of the clash may be seen especially in the other item on Whitby’s agenda—the Irish tonsure, which unlike the Roman shaved circlet at the crown of the head was achieved by shaving the front of the head from ear to ear and letting the hair in back grow long. Even to our eyes, the Irish tonsure would have a ludicrous appearance, but to the Romans it was proof of barbarian status. How could people who looked so ridiculous mean to suggest that this absurd tonsure was a sign of consecration?

  What is far more impressive about the period as a whole—and perhaps even about what actually happened at Whitby—is the close fraternal cooperation between the Irish and the English. The Christian Saxons at all times received the Irish warmly as elder brothers and sisters in Christ, and borrowed generously from these generous elders. If Christians of different tribes had in all ages cooperated with one another as did these men and women, the world would be a very different place.

  The Saxon monasteries, often founded by Irish monks, learned from them the scribal arts and reverence for the written word. The Lindisfarne Gospels, as consummate an example of Irish scribal art as the Book of Kells, is the work of Eadfrith, successor to Aidan as abbot of Lindisfarne, the same Eadfrith to whom Aldhelm of Malmesbury had written when he was an English student in Ireland, warning him about Irish laxity in regard to pagan literature. Though the Lindisfarne Gospels, almost the only codex for which we have a scribe’s name, is the work of an Englishman, it is utterly Irish in spirit. The Saxons also absorbed the Celtic piety toward their ancestral past, and continued to tell stories of their ancient heroes. Just as the Irish did, they often reimagined these tales and gave them a Christian spin. Beowulf, the great Germano-English hero, is a pagan warrior, sure enough, but he is presented as a model of Saxon manhood—loyal, courageous, generous; and as the poet told the tale, the English Christian audience would have picked up the hints, concealed within the poet’s text, that Beowulf grappling with the monsters was a type of Christ grappling with Satan. Both the Celtic and the Saxon myths and legends were becoming, in fact, secula
r Old Testaments, histories that lacked the direct revelations of Abraham and Moses, but symbolic salvation histories nonetheless, where one could read of a people journeying, by trial and error, prophecy and instinct, toward the truth, propelled forward through darkness and death by their own innate goodness.

  The Greek approach to thought was now almost completely lost. Baptism, though it had connected the Irish to a larger world, had hardly made them Athenians. And though the Irish—and now the Saxons—succeeded in transcribing the works of ancient philosophers, they could not really understand them—nor for that matter could the few remaining Romans of the west, like Gregory the Great. The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the Dark Ages, whose apprehension of the world was simple and immediate, framed by myth and magic. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision; instead, he apprehended similarities and balances, types and paradigms, parallels and symbols. It was a world not of thoughts, but of images.

  Even the “Romans” at Whitby presented their point of view in the new way. They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond them. They held up pictures for the mind—one set of bones versus another. Indeed, the Northumbrian king, who ruled in favor of the Roman party, did so because he imagined that Peter, Rome’s supposed first bishop, to whom Jesus had, in a metaphorical phrase, given “the keys to the kingdom of heaven,” would use those keys to lock the king out of heaven if he ruled against Rome.

  Nor did the “Romans” even trouble to draw up an extended list of charges, as would once have been the case in the church’s great councils. After all, the Irish had many peculiar customs, encouraged diversity, enjoyed pagan literature far more than was good for them, were unconcerned about uniformity of monastic rule, and, perhaps worst of all, sometimes allowed a woman to rule over them. But the synod was held at Whitby, a double monastery of the Celtic style, dependent on Lindisfarne and ruled by the great abbess Hilda! The Roman party wisely confined its objections to the two matters it found most irksome because they were most visible. By the mid-seventh century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.

  Another reason that these provincial practitioners of Romanità were far more circumspect than they might once have been was that the collapse of the empire and the rise of the barbarian fiefdoms had slowed communication considerably. Without the efficient communications system of the Roman Imperium, uniformity was necessarily in peril. For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been, so far as we can tell, no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there ever been any between Rome and Ireland—which is why the Celts were still keeping Easter according to calculations that had been twice superseded at Rome. On these marginal islands, who could know for sure what was in, what was out in Rome, let alone in the other ancient centers of Christianity? It was a great moment for diversity, and the Irish continued to thrive.

  By the second half of the seventh century the Irish missionary impulse was at high tide, supplemented in its force by fresh waves of English missionaries, who in imitation of their elder brothers burst upon the Germanic lands whence their ancestors had once come. Wilfrid, the leader of the winning party at Whitby, turned his zeal on Frisia. Willibrord founded the monastery of Echternach in Luxembourg (whence the Echternach Gospels, spectacular companion to the Lindisfarne Gospels, would spring), and he and Boniface established sees at Utrecht, Würzburg, Erfurt, Eichstadt, and Passau. Boniface founded the great abbey at Fulda, established other monasteries at Disbodenburg, Amoenaburg, Fritzlar, Buraburg, and Heidenheim, and restored the see of Mainz, of which Boniface became archbishop. By the middle of the eighth century most of Frisia, Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, and part of Denmark had received the Gospel.

  To many of these new foundations came the books of the insular scribes. Boniface and Alcuin (the Northumbrian monk at Charlemagne’s court who in 782 took over direction of the Palatine School, which would one day turn into the University of Paris) could never find the books they needed on the continent and were always sending urgent requests to British foundations for basic works. In truth, the art of the scriptorium was virtually unknown in the indigenous monasteries of Italy and Gaul. Monastic manuscript art had traveled from the workshops of Syria and Egypt by way of Ireland and Britain and, at last, to the continent of Europe. But now, the depleted store of continental codices rose steadily. By the middle of the eighth century, Fulda, for instance, was employing forty full-time scribes.

  The Irish connections of these English monks were not incidental. Besides having profited substantially from the intellectual atmosphere that the Irish foundations had established in Britain, many had studied in Ireland (Willibrord had spent twelve years there) or were assisted in their labors by Irish monks (such as Kilian and his eleven companions, who evangelized Franconia and Thuringia). Alcuin’s first master, Colgu, had been Irish, as was his best friend, Joseph, who accompanied him to France and died beside him; and he was succeeded at the court school by the Irish scholar Clement Scotus.

  With the advent of Charlemagne as king of the Franks and (after his surprise coronation by the pope on Christmas Day 800) Holy Roman Emperor, we can begin to speak of France, in preference to Gaul. Charlemagne presided over medieval Europe’s first Renaissance, a short-lived cultural flowering that barely outlasted his reign. His enduring influence lay in the gradual revival of literacy, for he repeatedly urged (and supported) the raising of standards in the few poor continental schools that remained. That he himself was an illiterate, who late in life laboriously learned to decipher some simple texts but could never get the hang of writing, is proof enough of the standards of the age. Without the previous (and continuing) influx of Irish codices, the Carolingian Renaissance would have been impossible. For this reason, as Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard tells us, Charlemagne “amabat peregrinos” (“loved the wandering monks”).

  They seemed, indeed, to be everywhere. When Charlemagne found himself puzzling over what a solar eclipse might be, Dungal, an Irish recluse at Saint Denis, was invited to instruct the king in these abstruse matters, which he did in a letter we still possess. Another resident at the Frankish court was the Irishman Dicuil, the first medieval geographer, whose cold-eyed skepticism and wry asides in his Measurement of the Globe still make entertaining reading. Yet another Irish courtier was Sedulius Scotus, a diverting Ciceronian who advised the emperor on statecraft and whose verses the Empress Ermingarde worked as samplers. Sedulius copied out three manuscripts that we still possess: a Greek psalter in the Arsenal Library at Paris, an interlinear Greek/Latin version of the Gospels at Saint Gall, and the Codex Boernerianus at Dresden, which is an interlinear version of Paul’s Epistles—and which contains the little Irish poem about the unprofitability of pilgrimage to Rome, written obviously by Sedulius himself. In addition to these, either Sedulius or someone of his circle is responsible for the Saint Gall Priscian, authored by the Latin grammarian and full of juicy Irish glosses, and the Codex Bernensis, containing Horace’s Odes, Servius’s commentary on Virgil, and some of Augustine’s early “how-to” books, written for his rhetoric students.

  The most splendid blossom of this continental spring was an Irishman, John Scotus Eriugena, born about 810, who crossed to France in his early thirties and took a position at the Palatine School, then under the patronage of Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald. John Scotus, who was probably a layman, is the first philosopher of the Middle Ages, the first truly Christian philosopher since the death of Augustine in 430, the first European philosopher since the execution of Boethius in 524, the first man in three hundred years who was able to think. He also had a vicious sense of humor, penning this two-liner on the death of the anti-Irish Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims:

  Hic jacet Hincmarus, cleptes vehementer avarus,

&n
bsp; Hoc solum gessit nobile: quod periit.

  Here lies Hincmar, crook. But savage greed aside,

  He did one truly noble thing: he died.

  His wine-soaked dinners with the emperor were full of parrying wit. “Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?” (“What separates a fool from an Irishman?”) asked the emperor playfully.

  “Tabula tantum” (“Only the table”), came Eriugena’s reply. No wonder there is a legend that his students finally stabbed him to death with their pens.

  In his day, he was one of only two residents of western Europe known to be fluent in Greek. The other, the papal librarian Anastasius, was incredulous that “a barbarian” like Scotus Eriugena should know so much Greek. But know it he did. To read his De Divisione Naturae (The Division of Nature) after immersion in the folk literature we have been reading is a shocking experience: one is back in the world of Plato. Here is a mind that could grasp the most rarefied distinctions of the Greek philosophical tradition and, far more important, could elaborate a new system of thought, one that is balanced and internally consistent. It has more than a soupçon of Celticity in it, however, for John Scotus’s favorite word is Nature, a word beloved of the Irish but one that never failed to raise the hackles of both Platonists and Roman Christians. In John Scotus’s system Nature is a virtual synonym for Reality—all of reality, our natural world as well as the reality of God. In Scotus there is no useful distinction between natural and supernatural. Though the system is both subtle and elaborate, one sees immediately his debt to Patrick’s simple worldview. Reality is a continuum, and all God’s creatures are theophanies of God himself, for God speaks in them and through them.