How the Irish Christians Saved Civilization

   
At the turn of the fifth century A.D., human sacrifice was practiced in Ireland. Inauguration ceremonies for some clan leaders involved public bestiality^.[1] People believed in a practice called “shape-shifting,” whereby they could morph into animals such as hawks and oxen and physical objects such as waves of the sea.^[2] As for their pagan idols,

“[T]here are few . . . retrieved from barrow or bog that would not give a child nightmares and an adult the willies. No smooth-skinned, well-proportioned Apollos and Aphrodites here.”^[3]

Yet Thomas Cahill’s book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, gives these people credit for rescuing Europe from the barbarians. Clearly, something dramatic had to happen to make that possible—and it did, in the form of St. Patrick’s missionary work.
In his youth, the Scottish-born Patrick was seized by Irish marauders, who sold him into slavery. For six years, young Patrick toiled for his masters, and then he escaped to England, taking with him a vibrant prayer life and mastery of the Celtic tongue. Both were indispensable to his future ministry in Ireland, to which he returned in c. 432.
Patrick led the people away from their Druid ceremonies and away from the worship of such goddesses as Morrigan and Medb (pronounced “mayv”)^[4] to Christianity. He gave them, instead, such lyrical prayers as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” which begins
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same
Three in one and one in three.^[5]
He persuaded the Irish that human sacrifice was no longer necessary, since Christ had laid down His life, once for all time.^[6] And Patrick started monasteries.
The Irish monks were a different sort from those found on the continent. The Romans had never made it that far west, so no Irish believers had been thrown to the lions or crucified for their faith. But though there were no “Red Martyrs,” who had been bloodied by their persecutors, many chose to be “Green Martyrs,” ascetics who left

“behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island . . . there to study the scriptures and commune with God.”^[7]

These Green Martyrs had no history of conflict with Roman power, so they felt no automatic revulsion toward Roman culture. They “brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on,”^[8] including Latin works by Virgil, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero, and they copied them, along with Scripture.^[9] In an age when barbarians and Roman Christians alike were ignoring or suppressing secular classics throughout Europe, the Irish treasured these works: in monasteries for

“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.”^[10]

The work of these Green Martyrs was superseded by the efforts of White Martyrs, those who sacrificed the comforts of their homeland to reintroduce Christian literacy to Europe. In the 560s, Columcille (also called Columba) left Ireland for the Island of Iona, from which he launched his mission to Scotland.^[11] Other White Martyrs pressed on to York, Paris, and Vienna, where Christian forces turned back the Muslim invaders in the seventeenth century, thus saving the West. For all this, one justly thanks the Irish—but more precisely, the Irish Christians.
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[1] Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 135-136.
[2] Ibid., 128-129, cf. 81.
[3] Ibid., 126.
[4] Ibid., 127.
[5] Written in 1889, this is a metric rendering of Patrick’s variously-translated prayer, which is familiar from the 7th century.
[6] Ibid., 140.
[7] Ibid., 151.
[8] Ibid., 158.
[9] The illuminated manuscripts known as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells are outstanding examples of their artistry as copyists.
[10] Kenneth Clark, quoted in Cahill, 171. Cahill goes on to explain, “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 . . . the Irish monks had reconnected barbarized Europe to the traditions of Christian literacy.”
[11] In those days, Ireland was known as Hibernia, but also as Scotia in Latin. The Irish colony in northern Britain came to be known as Scotia Minor, but that was shortened to Scotia, from which comes the name Scotland. (Cahill, 184)