April 5, 1995

Who Saved Civilization? The Irish, That's Who!

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Books of the Times

atrick slept soundly and soberly," says Thomas Cahill in this charming and poetic disquisition, which describes what he calls Ireland's "one moment of unblemished glory" when, according to our author, the Irish saved classical civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire. The phrase, wry and pithy at the same time, is as good a way as any of suggesting Mr. Cahill's thesis.

The Patrick in question was a former Celtic slave brought to Ireland from Roman-era Britain. His name was originally Patricius, but he came to be known to later generations as St. Patrick. Mr. Cahill's theory about him goes something like this:

The Ireland of the early fifth century was a brooding, dank island whose inhabitants, while carefree and warlike on the outside, lived in "quaking fear" within, their terror of shape-changing monsters, of sudden death and the insubstantiality of their world so acute that they drank themselves into an insensate stupor in order to sleep.

Patrick, however, provided "a living alternative." He was a serene man who slept well without drink, a man "in whom the sharp fear of death has been smoothed away." The Christianity he proposed to the Irish succeeded because it took away the dread from the magical world that was Ireland. And once they were Christianized, the Irish founded the monastic movement, copying the books being destroyed elsewhere by Germanic invaders, eventually bringing them back to the places from which the books had come.

"And that," Mr. Cahill concludes with typically wry unabashedness, "is how the Irish saved civilization."

The founder of the Cahill & Company Catalogue and the director of religious publishing at Doubleday, Mr. Cahill is a man of learning himself, and his writing is in the great Irish tradition he describes: lyrical, playful, penetrating and serious, but never too serious. And even when his conclusions are not entirely persuasive -- they do in places hang on rather slender reeds of evidence -- they are always plausible and certainly interesting.

"How the Irish Saved Civilization" begins with a mission: to correct the standard history of European civilization, which, Mr. Cahill says, has unfairly portrayed the Irish as wild, not civilized. Along his often picaresque route, Mr. Cahill provides a personal and selective appreciation of the great events and the dramatis personae of the period when the Roman Empire ended and the Dark Ages began, beginning with an account of the reasons for the fall of Rome itself. While far from Gibbonesque in scope or tone, Mr. Cahill's book strikes some Gibbonesque themes, especially that of spiritual decay, the gradual loss of vigor, the onset of a static, effete, imitative and self-satisfied Roman world.

Mr. Cahill's technique in this is to focus on some figure who marks the era. The poet and professor Ausonius, who lived in Bordeaux in the fourth century, is his representative of Rome's slide into emptiness and decay. Contrasting with him is Augustine of Hippo, the St. Augustine of history, whose remarkable codification of the early Christian orthodoxy made him "almost the last great classical man -- and very nearly the first medieval man."

Mr. Cahill uses Augustine as a lens for viewing the great question he poses early on: "What was lost when the Roman Empire fell?" Augustine was a man whose blood boiled, who felt life in a way utterly foreign to the calculating Ausonius. But in the end, he settled on a rigid doctrine. "Augustine, father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition," Mr. Cahill writes. With his triumph in the Roman world, the spirit of classical civilization was defeated, and would have been defeated forever, Mr. Cahill argues, had it not been for those wild men in a faraway land that had never fallen under Roman rule and had never heard of Augustine: Ireland.

There are other characters in Mr. Cahill's history, the most important of them clearly being Patrick, one of his heroes, a man of less intellectual refinement than Augustine but of greater humanity. Mr. Cahill credits him with being "the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery." There are several swashbuckling men and women of pre-Christian Ireland, like the sexually frank Queen Medb and her rival, the warrior Cuchulainn, both representatives of Irish "barbaric splendor." And there are the monkish scribes and the founders of monasteries, like the sixth-century Columcille, responsible, in Mr. Cahill's theory, for making possible a European world of books.

Is Mr. Cahill's theory correct? One senses a touch of hyperbole when he says that the Irish "singlehandedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent." There is a good deal of speculation in much of this. How, for example, do we really know if Patrick slept well or badly, especially since, as Mr. Cahill notes, we know very little about Patrick at all? There is also a certain vagueness about the central assertion Mr. Cahill makes about the extent of the Irish contribution.

Mr. Cahill does in the end allow, for example, that Greek literature might have been preserved elsewhere even without the Irish, which makes their achievement seem less single-handed than Mr. Cahill elsewhere claimed it to be. The Hebrew and Greek Bibles survived independently of them. "Latin literature," he concludes, "would almost surely have been lost without the Irish," and he further asserts, but without much argument, that the national literatures of Europe might not have emerged had the Irish not forged the first great vernacular literature of Europe.

Scholars, perhaps, will now evaluate these claims. But whatever they may find, Mr. Cahills' book will remain an entirely engaging, delectable voyage into the distant past, a small treasure.