CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
March 2001, Vol. 43, No. 3
If your last name is McNamera or O'Toole, or your first name is Colleen or Patrick, or if you have ever mentioned your Celtic heritage to me, then you probably have already received my personal invitation to read and enjoy How the Irish Saved Civilization. How fortunate we are to have Thomas Cahill as our keynote speaker on April 4th at the CLA Annual Conference.
Let there be no mistake. Nary a drop of Irish blood flows in my veins. The sons and daughters of Ireland have earned my respect and affection through their heroic service to Western civilization, not through the accident of shared ancestry. We modern Westerners owe the Irish, as well as the medieval Arabs and Byzantines, much of our classical heritage. For, these peoples recognized the treasures of ancient Greece and Rome, and preserved that cultural heritage at a time when our illiterate European forebears struggled to survive the violence, chaos, and ignorance of the "dark ages."
You need not be of Irish descent or a student of Western civilization to appreciate How the Irish Saved Civilization. Thomas Cahill is a gifted story-teller, with stories big and small. He catches our attention with his tales of real men and women. He retells traditional legends and helps us understand the societies which authored them. Before we know it, he has educated us in the themes and trends of history's "big picture." He has done the "heavy-lifting," the research, the thinking, and the synthesizing for us lucky readers.
The St. Patrick we Americans know is our March 17th excuse for over-indulging in corned beef and cabbage served with Guiness ale. Green-clad Irish-Americans celebrate the Saint's day as a time of ethnic pride. The more spiritual among us recall that Patrick earned his canonization by miraculously converting the Celts of Ireland to Christianity. Everyone who has ever been startled by a reptile in the garden knows that Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. But Cahill transforms Patrick from a magical, mythical, legendary figure into a truly heroic, but real human being.
"Patricius" was the son of a prosperous family of fifth century Roman Britain. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the wilds of Ireland. Through personal strength, spiritual faith, and cunning intelligence, he survived great hardship, escaped from his captors, and returned to Britain. Instead of turning his back on the land of his captivity, Patrick determined to go back to Ireland, to devote himself to enlightening and improving the life of the pagan Celts who lived there.
One may well ask, "What does St. Patrick have to do with saving civilization?" Patrick brought to the Irish a rugged brand of Christianity that could take root in the rocky soil of Ireland and in the tough warrior hearts of the Celts. Without Patrick, the Irish would not have Christianity. Without Christianity, and its ties to Rome, the Irish would not have been able to fathom, preserve, and transmit classical culture back to Europe through their monasteries and missionaries. Cahill always carefully sets the stage for his readers. Before presenting Patrick to us, he introduced us to Augustine of Hippo so that we could appreciate the Christian culture of the later Roman Empire. He then whisked us off to pre-Christian Ireland. There he entertained us with tales from the epic Tain Bo Cuailnge and the hero Cuchulainn. We readily understood that pagan Ireland was a vastly different place than the sophisticated, though threatened, world of St. Augustine.
How the Irish Saved Civilization became the first of a projected seven-book series on Western civilization called "The Hinges of History." While the first title is my favorite, I can report that the strengths Cahill demonstrated in the original are very well displayed in each of the other two series titles that he has completed. Let me take a moment to thank Mr. Cahill for one insight from each of those two books.
In The Gifts of the Jews, Cahill observes that the Jews gave humanity something that we now take for granted, the concept of historical development. Unlike other societies which saw events as cyclical and fixed, the Jews gave history direction. They saw their present day as the result of past events. Humans making good decisions could bring about a better future.
In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Cahill presents Jesus and his followers in the times in which they lived. I have long viewed the Greek-educated St. Paul as coldly intellectual, someone quite removed from the gritty earthiness of Jesus' teachings. Cahill's portrait is more sympathetic. Paul was torn between the Jewish tradition of his birth on one hand and the Greco-Roman values of his education on the other. It took a providential fall from a horse to help Paul reconcile those conflicting demands.
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