How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  The poems of Ausonius are available in a volume of the Loeb Classical Library and his letters in another. The translations of his poetry in this chapter are mine.

  The Barbarian Kings by Lionel Casson in the Treasures of the World series (Chicago, 1982), provided me with the anecdote about Alaric.

  II: WHAT WAS LOST

  Augustine’s Confessions are available in many editions. Frank Sheed’s (London and New York, 1943) has generally been considered the best English translation, but a fresh translation has recently been made by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991). The standard life is Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown (California, 1967), and it is a masterpiece both of sympathy and historical interpretation. Brown is an offshoot of the (largely French) movement to recover the teachings of the fathers of the church, and his work is somewhat dependent on the earlier work of such scholars as Chene, Congar, and especially Courcelle, all of whom he credits amply. I believe the first analysis of Augustine’s Confessions as initiating a revolution in consciousness is to be credited to Georg Misch in his unparalleled multivolume life’s work, Geschichte der Autobiographie (Bern and Frankfurt, 1907-69). The relevant Volume 1 (in two parts) is available in English translation as The History of Autobiography in Antiquity.

  The best translation of the Aeneid in English is probably Fitzgerald’s. Mandelbaum’s is also much admired. As for Plato, Jowett’s translations (which I used) can be highly recommended, as well as Cornford’s of The Republic. The translations from Virgil and Augustine in this chapter are mine—but with an eye to the standard translations.

  On the historical evolution of the Catholic bishopric, I consulted inter alia two admirable books by Raymond E. Brown, Priest and Bishop (Paramus, 1970) and The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (New York, 1984); Patrick Granfield, “Episcopal Elections in Cyprian: Clerical and Lay Participation” (Theological Studies 37, 1976); and Alexandre Faivre, Naissance d’une hiérarchie (Paris, 1977).

  Augustine’s The City of God is available in several editions, both complete and abridged. An excellent abridged paperback edition is published by Image/Doubleday (New York, 1958).

  III: A SHIFTING WORLD OF DARKNESS

  The quotations in this chapter are largely from Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Tain (Oxford, 1970). The other quotations are from Amhairghin’s poem, translated by Proinsias MacCana in his Celtic Mythology (London, 1968) and from “The Lament for Art O’Leary” in Kings, Lords, and Commons: An Anthology from the Irish, translated by Frank O’Connor (Dublin, 1970).

  IV: GOOD NEWS FROM FAR OFF

  Alas! when it comes to Patrick, no one agrees with anyone about anything, and rare is the Patrician scholar who shows aught but scorn for anyone’s opinions but his own. There is not a datum of Patrick’s life that has not been questioned, including his existence. During the course of the twentieth century, moreover, the library of Patrician studies has grown into “a mountain of Himalayan proportions,” to quote E. A. Thompson.

  But the truth is that for our purposes much of this contentious scholarship can be bracketed because, thanks to the Confession and the Letter, we know far more about Patrick than about any other British or Irish figure of the fifth century. I have given the particulars of his story in a way that makes sense to me, but I would hardly urge that the choices I have made from among the many and convoluted theories are better than anyone else’s. No one can claim to know for certain his dates or the dates of his travels; where in Ireland he served as a slave; where the ship that he fled in set sail from or landed or what kind of cargo it carried, if any; where he studied for the priesthood; whether he himself consecrated bishops, either as contemporaries or successors (though there can be no doubt that his episcopacy was followed by others’). But none of these problems can cast any shadow on Patrick’s essential character, which shines out from his two surviving works. There is also much speculation as to the actual (as opposed to legendary) effect of his mission—though I believe that if there were some subsequent figure more responsible than Patrick for the Christianization of Ireland there would be some record of (at least) his or her name.

  I have deliberately omitted from the main text any mention of Palladius, a bishop who preceded Patrick in Ireland, because I believe he has no relevance to our story. He was sent by Pope Celestine to “the Irish who believe in Christ,” probably a small colony of Britons, and died in all likelihood within a couple of years of his commissioning. He was not a traveling missionary bishop, since there were none before Patrick—not just in Ireland but anywhere. It is sometimes claimed that Ulfilas, an Arian bishop among the Germans, was a missionary bishop. But E. A. Thompson (see below), who has probably studied the matter more deeply than anyone, insists that Ulfilas was a bishop resident among believers—quite a more domestic figure than Patrick.

  Patrick’s first biographer was Muirchu, who wrote two centuries after Patrick’s time. His Life, as well as Patrick’s Confession and Letter, is contained in A. B. E. Hood’s St Patrick: His Writings and Muirchu’s “Life” (London and Chichester, 1978). The standard Latin text of Patrick’s writings, however, is Ludwig Bieler’s Libri Epistolarum Sancti Patricii Episcopi, which first appeared in Classica et Mediaevalia, 11 (1950) and 12 (1951) and is available in reprint editions. I would also recommend R. P. C. Hanson and Cecile Blanc’s wonderfully informative French edition Saint Patrick: Confession et Lettre a Coroticus (Paris, 1978) in the magnificent series Sources Chrétiennes. The translations from Patrick’s works in the course of this chapter are mine.

  In this century, J. B. Bury set a high standard for Patrician scholarship with The Life of St Patrick and His Place in History (London, 1905). (It was he who came up with the theory of the “desert” being the result of the Germanic invasion of Gaul in 406–7.) He was followed by many others, including Eoin MacNeill in his admirable if overly pious St Patrick, Apostle of Ireland (London, 1934). But a paper by the legendary Patrick D. A. Binchy, “Patrick and His Biographers, Ancient and Modern” in Studia Hibernica 2 (1962), which blew holes in Bury’s (and everyone else’s) approach, is rightly considered the watershed event of modern Patrician studies. Hanson’s St Patrick: His Origins and Career (Oxford, 1968), following on Binchy, is at present the standard life. It contains, like all its predecessors, long passages of untranslated Latin. The best life of Patrick for those who read no Latin is Thompson’s entertaining Who Was Saint Patrick? (London, 1985; New York, 1986). Thompson’s The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfilas (Oxford, 1966) is also splendid.

  The translation of Patrick’s “Breastplate” was made by Whitley Stokes, John Strachan, and Kuno Meyer and is contained in Meyer’s Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (London, 1911) and in many anthologies. With an eye to other translations (and what I believe to have been the author’s meaning), I have revised their “spells of women” to read “spells of witches.”

  V: A SOLID WORLD OF LIGHT

  This is the sort of chapter that could drive a careful scholar to drink. I am going here largely on supposition and insight. Our information about what was happening in Ireland just prior to Patrick’s arrival is extremely slight, and our most solid information on Patrick’s doings comes from his own pen. Whatever he doesn’t tell us we must leave pretty much to speculation.

  We know—from Julius Caesar and other ancient witnesses and from incontrovertible archaeological evidence—that the Celts practiced human sacrifice. There is no reason to think that the Irish had stopped this practice before Patrick. Since we know that culture changed little in Ireland over many centuries, the likelihood is that human sacrifice was still being carried out in Patrick’s day. But we have no direct proof. Let’s assume for a moment that it had died out. Its memory would nonetheless be still vivid, and the frame of mind that encouraged it would hardly have vanished, given the tenaciousness of folk custom. So, even if human sacrifice had somehow been abolished, I believe my theory of how Patrick connected imaginatively with the Irish still stands.

  The information on Lindow Man come
s from Anne Ross and Don Robins, The Life and Death of a Druid Prince (London, 1989). The standard work on ancient Celtic religious practice is Stuart Piggott, The Druids (London, 1974). The definitive study of Irish mythology is by Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees in their Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London, 1961). MacCana (see above) is also very helpful.

  The translation of the hymn from Philippians is mine.

  VI: WHAT WAS FOUND

  The sources for this chapter are many and various. The best treatment I found of the overall subject was John T. McNeill (father of William), The Celtic Churches (Chicago, 1974), though he is much indebted (as am I) to the work of Kathleen Hughes, especially her unsurpassed The Church in Early Irish Society (London, 1966). Two books by Walter Horn, The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael (Berkeley, 1990) and The Plan of St. Gall (California, 1979), the second a quite formidable work in three volumes written with Ernest Born, are extraordinary explorations of individual monastic foundations. A dissertation by the Benedictine Joseph P. Fuhrmann at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., submitted in 1927 under the title Irish Medieval Monasteries on the Continent, was the only study I could find devoted exclusively to this subject. A more extensive one is sorely needed!

  Also helpful were Liam de Paor, Saint Patrick’s World (Notre Dame, 1993); Jean Decarreaux, Les Moines et la civilization (Paris, 1962); Robin Flower, The Irish Tradition (Oxford, 1947), an indispensable classic; James Westfall Thompson, The Medieval Library (Chicago, 1939); and, for the Irish penitential movement, John Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology (Oxford, 1987). Three essay collections also provided me with some useful information: The Churches, Ireland, and the Irish, edited by W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1989), especially “The Wild and Wooly West: Early Irish Christianity and Latin Orthodoxy” by Brendan Bradshaw; An Introduction to Celtic Christianity, edited by James P. Makey (Edinburgh, 1989), especially “Irish Monks on the Continent,” by Tomas Cardinal O Fiaich; and Irland und Europa, edited by Proinseas Ni Chatham and Michael Richter (Stuttgart, 1984), especially the concluding essay, “Irland und Europa: Die Kirche im Fruhmittelalter” by Richter. This last volume, the result of the second in a series of conferences between Irish and German scholars, is full of confessions about how far scholarship in this neglected area must travel before many questions of crucial historical importance can be adequately addressed.

  As for scribal and other arts, I consulted inter alia Françoise Henry’s irreplaceable three-volume work, Irish Art (Ithaca, New York, 1965); Nicolete Gray, A History of Lettering (Boston, 1986); Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (Boston, 1986); and Michael Olmert, The Smithsonian Book of Books (Washington, D.C., 1992).

  The reference at the beginning of the chapter to naked riders in nineteenth-century Clare originates in a wonderful talk I heard in 1970 at the Merriman Summer School given by Dr. Alf MacLochlainn, then librarian at the National Library. The assertion that the Irish halted their international slave trade is not meant to imply that there were no slaves in Ireland after Christianity took hold. The Irish, like other medievals, kept serfs. See Nerys Patterson, Cattle Lords and Clansmen: The Social Structure of Early Ireland (Notre Dame, 1994). And though the Irish never resumed slave raiding, we know that during the medieval period some landholders did resume the practice of purchasing slaves from Britain, a practice that the twelfth-century Irish bishops believed brought on Ireland the divine retribution of the Norman Invasion. But this judgment implies that, even at their worst, the Christian Irish possessed a moral frame of reference superior to that of their pagan ancestors. See Donneha O Corrain, Ireland Before the Normans (Dublin, 1972) in the most useful Gill History of Ireland series.

  VII: THE END OF THE WORLD

  My sources for this chapter are, by and large, the same as for the last chapter. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is available in many editions. For my brief treatment of the Irish influence on the shaping and preservation of early Anglo-Saxon literature I am indebted to Charles Donahue, who was in his turn indebted to the magisterial pioneering work of J. R. R. Tolkien on the great poem Beowulf. Donahue’s essay “Beowulf and Christian Tradition: A Reconsideration from a Celtic Stance” in Traditio 21 (1965), Fordham University’s journal of “Studies in Ancient and Medieval Thought and Religion,” is so discerning and generous that one hastens to recommend it as a model to those who would raise the tone and enlarge the substance of scholarship in our day.

  Chronology

  This is not a complete chronology, but only a list of dates relevant to historical episodes referred to in the main text. The Patrician dates are approximations.

  c. 3000 B.C.

  Stone Age settlers begin to construct elaborate Irish passage-graves such as Newgrange.

  900s

  In Greece, Homer composes Iliad and Odyssey.

  753

  Founding of the City of Rome.

  400–300

  Greece’s Golden Age: the flowering of Athenian democracy under Pericles; the time of Sophocles, Phidias, Socrates, Plato, et al.

  390

  Celts invade the City of Rome for the first and last time.

  c. 350

  Celtic tribes cross to Ireland and settle there, displacing earlier inhabitants.

  70 B.C.–A.D. 14

  Rome’s Golden Age: the time of Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, et al.

  31 B.C.

  Octavian becomes first Roman emperor and takes the name Caesar Augustus.

  c. A.D. 100

  Medb is queen of Connacht in Ireland.

  370

  The teenaged Augustine goes to Carthage.

  c. 395

  Death of Ausonius.

  401

  Patricius is taken into slavery; Augustine publishes his Confessions.

  406–7

  Largest Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire.

  409

  Roman garrison abandons Britain.

  410

  Alaric the Goth sacks the City of Rome.

  430

  Death of Augustine at Hippo.

  432

  Bishop Patrick arrives in Ireland.

  461

  Death of Patrick.

  475–76

  Reign of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor, who is deposed by the barbarian Odoacer; end of the Roman Empire in the west.

  c. 500

  Brigid founds Kildare.

  557

  Columcille leaves Ireland for Iona.

  c. 590

  Columbanus leaves for Gaul.

  597

  Death of Columcille; Augustine, the papal librarian, baptizes the English king of Kent at Canterbury.

  615

  Columbanus dies at Bobbio.

  635

  Aidan founds Lindisfarne.

  664

  Synod of Whitby.

  782

  Alcuin takes over direction of Charlemagne’s Palatine School.

  793

  First Viking attack on Lindisfarne.

  c. 845

  John Scotus Eriugena arrives at the court of Charles the Bald.

  875

  The monks abandon Lindisfarne for the last time.

  1014

  Vikings are defeated decisively by the forces of Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf.

  1170

  Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland.

  1556

  Elizabethan plantation of Ireland begins.

  1649

  Cromwell arrives in Ireland and begins his massacres of Catholics.

  1690

  Battle of the Boyne: the Catholic (and Stuart) cause is decisively lost to the victorious William of Orange; the flight of the Wild Geese, the Irish nobility, begins soon after.

  1692

  Catholics are excluded from office for the first time.

  1695

  Penal Laws are enacted, depriving Catholics of civil rights.

  1829


  Daniel O’Connell, “the Liberator” and masterful Irish politician, forces Catholic Emancipation on the British Parliament.

  1845

  Famine. Massive emigrations begin.

  1893

  Douglas Hyde founds Gaelic League to revive Irish culture.

  1904

  William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory found the Abbey Theatre. James Joyce leaves Ireland.

  1916

  Easter Rising. Irish Republic proclaimed.

  1919–21

  Irish War of Independence.

  1922

  Britain and Ireland sign treaty establishing the Irish Free State, but excluding the six counties of Northern Ireland still under British rule. Ulysses published.